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This full-length article appeared in Canadian Geographic magazine, Dec. 1987/Jan. 1988, by freelance writer Charles Wilkins, a former Deep Riverite then living in Dundas, Ont. Photo credits: Bill Montaigne, Betty Carpick and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.

When Doug Breckon was fresh out of engineering school in Toronto in 1946, he caught wind of a job opportunity at a mysterious, fledgling plant somewhere on the upper reaches of the Ottawa River. He traveled to Montreal for a job interview, and even after he was hired he was not told what kind of a plant he would be working in. "Or anything much about anything," he says. "It was all extremely secretive. The only reason I took the job was that a house was provided with it; I was on the verge of getting married."

When Doug and his wife Marion reached the job locale that October, they were introduced to the newly created town of Deep River, Ont., where they would be living, 210 kilometres northwest of Ottawa. Doug would be working at Chalk River, 11 kilometres downstream. At the time, both places were patrolled by armed guards, and entry to Deep River could be gained only through a military checkpoint off Highway 17. Movement between town and plant was accomplished in converted tractor trailers initially, and then in former air force buses.

If the young engineer was surprised at the nature of his new employment, he does not admit to it today. In fact, he gives the impression that it was all just a job, a way of making ends meet. Without knowing it, however, he had signed on as part of the most daring and controversial science experiment in history -- the splitting of the atom.

Security at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories has loosened up considerably since the late 1940's, and the soldiers and guardhouse are long gone from the town of Deep River. Today, in fact, Deep River's nuclear connection is more a thing of pride than of secrecy. The names of the town's public buildings -- Mackenzie High School, the W. B. Lewis Library, Keys and Cockcroft elementary schools -- read like a who's who of Canada's early nuclear establishment. The town swim club is called the Candus; the square dance ensemble, the Nuclear Spinners. Blimke's Laurentian View dairy sells an "Atomic Special" sundae, and whereas many communities have an Oddfellow's Hall oir a Masonic Temple, Deep River has an Atomic Lodge. A stylized atom appears not only on the town and high-school crests, but as a gleaming sculpture within view of where the guardhouse once stood. Local annals record that there was once a band called Phil Rowe and his Atomic Five and a men's basketball team called the Neutrons. Deep River street names include Newton, Faraday and Rutherford.

For the visitor, it all creates the sense of a kind of continuous atomic festival. If there are nuclear opponents in this community of 5,000, they're keeping very quiet about it.

"Actually," says Hal Tracey, public affairs officer at the nuclear laboratories, "we did have an anti-nuclear demonstration here five or six years ago." The protest took place in the town shopping area, and Tracey is quick to point out that the agitators were not "Deep River people" but "five or six" antagonists from nearby Killaloe. "Nobody paid any attention to them," he says.

This is not to say that Deep River is generally insensitive about its nuclear role and image. In an era when even the word 'atomic' can induce visions of deformed humanity, when world wide demonstrations draw millions of anti-nuclear protestors, the town can't afford to be smug or self-satisfied. In fact, wounded by severe government cutbacks to the nuclear industry in 1985, Deep River has been forced to work hard just to maintain its morale, not to mention its solvency and its hopes for the future. As one resident joked, "We've always been able to take atoms apart in this town -- the trick now is to see if we can put them back together."

* * *

The nuclear laboratories at Chalk River and the town of Deep River were created in 1944 as a result of Winston Churchill's decision that Canada should be the site of the Commonwealth's contribution to the U.S. Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. By the time the war ended, however, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had convinced the Canadian nuclear industry that its only justifiable goal was the peaceful application of atomic power. Foes of the industry have sometimes claimed that Chalk River produced plutonium for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, but the truth is that there was no nuclear activity in Chalk River until after the war.

But there was certainly activity. Research scientists poured in from the corners of the globe -- and, with them, a battalion of engineers, technicians and service people. The town of Deep River, built to house the plant's professional staff -- professional staff only, thank you -- rapidly became one of Canada's most remarkable communities. It was young, it was cocky, and it was smart -- oh, it was smart. Almost the entire working population was university educated, many prodigiously so. During the mid-1950's, with the town's population at just over 4,000, there were some 200 residents with PhDs. They were the avant garde of science, the Right Stuff if you will, as yet unmarked by the anti-nuclear crusades that would eventually erode the status of the industry.

"In many ways 'heroes' is not too big a word for those early scientists," says Deep River's mayor, Lyall Smith. "What they were doing was incredibly creative and risky. They did some things that would shock us today -- they just didn't have the sophisticated equipment for measurement and safety. They had to use their imaginations and to improvise."

Doug Breckon remembers the night in July 1947 when the NRX reactor went critical. (To go 'critical' is the industry term for going into service -- or, more technically, for being able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.) "We sat there at six in the morning, waiting for the first neutrons to show up on the charts; and, to tell the truth, it wouldn't have surprised any of us if it hadn't worked."

But it did work. The atom -- once thought to be indivisible -- had been split by a nuclear reactor for only the third or fourth time in history.

Sometimes Deep River was too smart for its own good. Marion Breckon recalls her young son Mark coming home one day in the early 1950's and asking, "What's a PhD, Mom?"

"He'd been playing with some neighbourhood kids," Mrs. Breckon remembers, "and a woman came up to him and said, 'Is your father a PhD?' Mark said he didn't think so, and the woman said, 'Well, be off with you then. My children only play with the children of PhDs.'"

In spite of the occasional outcrop of snobbishness, there was also something impressively egalitarian about Deep River. Until 1955, there was no private ownership in the town; the government built the houses, rented them out and maintained them -- all according to a rigorous code: white paint for the bedrooms, off-white for bathrooms, etc. When schools and churches and shopping facilities were needed, the government provided them grants. Everyone worked according to the same salary scale, and there was no unemployment, no property tax, no poverty. In the earliest days, no one had to lift a finger to acquire necessities such as furnace fuel or, for those with iceboxes, ice. A phone call to the town office would produce a load of coal or a block of ice within hours. If transportation to the train station was needed (there was only a handful of cars in Deep River in the years following the war), the town manager dispatched a station wagon for the purpose. Every Thursday, a bus took the wives of plant employees to Pembroke for shopping. A truck followed the bus, carrying the baby carriages that would be needed by the young mothers during the excursion. With the average age of the adult population hovering just above 30 during the late 1940s and early '50s, Deep River had the highest birthrate of any community in Canada.

To compensate for the town's isolation, the government showered it with recreational facilities: yacht club, bowling alley, movie theatre, golf course, playgrounds, tennis courts, curling club, ski runs, arena, funding for the arts -- and for practically anything else the town wanted. Although Deep River became independent of Big Brother in 1959, and although the government has gradually divested itself of its holdings in the town (the last of the government-owned houses went on sale to residents in 1984), the recreational "good life" has never abated. "I've always thought of Deep River as the little town that has just about everything," says Lorna Evans, assistant to the general manager at the nuclear laboratories. "Well, it doesn't have fancy restaurants -- it's not big city life. But in its own way it's very complete. Certainly the cultural life, the drama and music and so on, is on a par with that of a much bigger centre. There's so much talent and energy here."

Deep River is undoubtedly the smallest town in the country to support a symphony orchestra. Hal Tracey plays cello in the 30-piece orchestra and says that he has a far better opportunity to play his music in Deep River than he would in, say, Toronto, "where it's all pro and semi-pro".

At last count, there were 76 clubs or organizations in town. "Plus we have the advantages of a wonderful outdoor life," says Lorna Evans.

Indeed. Of all the town's features and amenities, the greatest has always been its physical beauty, which ahs newcomers fumbling for adjectives equal to the scenery. Built on the site of an ancient Algonquin campground, the town spills down from a ridge of land along Highway 17 to the tawny sands of the Ottawa River. From almost any prospect, the horizon is a deep green band of white pine and spruce. Across the river, the Canadian Shield casts its ancient reflection on the water. "Before they built Deep River, they considered another site by a lake near Chalk River," says Hal Tracey. "But Sir John Cockcroft (the English physicist who headed the infant atomic project) wanted to be by the Ottawa River."

The town takes its name from the French term, 'la rivi¸re creuse' or "deep river", which, for the voyageurs, designated the deep-flowing stretch of the Ottawa between the Des-Joachims rapids near present-day Rolphton, Ont., and Ile des Allumettes, Que., 32 kilometres downstream.

When land clearing began at Deep River, it was with the help of German prisoners of war brought in for the purpose. The PoWs lived in dorm-like buildings, one of which still stands and houses the Deep River cub and scout packs.

The plant site itself was chosen with a number of factors in mind. It had to be isolated, both for secrecy and for safety in the event of an explosion or radioactive leak. It had to have plenty of electric power and an ample supply of cooling water for the reactors. Proximity to the Armed Forces base 20 kilometres east at Petawawa was considered a security advantage.

Although the surrounding communities have never been threatened by atomic activity, the plant has been the scene of two serious nuclear accidents. The first, in 1952, involved the plant's first major reactor, NRX (National Research Experimental), and resulted in radioactive cooling water flooding the basement of the reactor building to a depth of one metre. "The entire building was contaminated," says Doug Breckon. American nuclear scientists advised that the site be buried and abandoned, which might have meant the end of Deep River. But for cost reasons the Chalk River authorities decided to clean up, and hundreds of plant employees worked around the clock, in 30-second shifts, to mop up the contamination. (An American Armed Forces team which assisted with the clean-up included a young naval officer named Jimmy Carter from Plains, Ga.) The 4.5 million litres of water in the basement were pumped a half-kilometre to a disposal area on an isolated stretch of the plant's 4,000-hectare (10,000-acre) site; the area has been closely monitored ever since.

On May 24, 1958, a uranium fuel rod broke and fell while being extracted from the plant's second major reactor, NRU (National Research Universal). The uranium caught fire, and the spread of radioactivity resulted in a lengthy reactor shutdown. No life was lost during either accident.

With minor exceptions, the plant today looks much as it did in the 1950's -- a loose aggregation of brick- and asbestos-0covered buildings, perhaps 40 in all, nestled by the river and surrounded on three sides by dense forest. The four operating reactors are used for research only; none produces electrical power. Reactor attendants go about their business in white coveralls, red underwear and yellow safety shoes with steel-capped toes the size of tennis balls. According to guide Diane Cox, the red underwear reminds employees not to leave the plant without putting them, along with the rest of their potentially contaminated work clothes, in the plant laundry. If and when laundry becomes radioactive to the point where it cannot be redeemed -- even micro-doses of radiation are taken very seriously -- it is placed in an isolated disposal dump.

* * *

Like the nuclear plant, the town of Deep River has not had an entirely positive coming of age. Not all residents have taken to the town's Utopian charms and amenities. The story is told of a Deep River couple who, believing their children would grow up with an impaired notion of reality, took them on a tour of the Toronto slums. And during the early years of the town, physicist Gordon Ferris penned the lines:

Deep River is a model town:
I hate it.
For living here has got me down:
I hate it.
Although the town is trim and neat
With cosy homes on every street,
Though saying so is not discreet,
I hate it.

Others have developed an aversion to the isolation, or to the area's long, brutal winters, which can send temperatures as low as -40°C.

According to some residents, Deep River's predominant intellectuality and the general striving for excellence in the scientific community foster a pervasive, sometimes gnawing competitiveness among many townspeople. "You get it in everything from biking and sailboarding to gardening," says one mother of two. "It's practically a way of life here; everybody wants to excel.

"It gets passed on to the kids, too. For instance, there's extreme competition to get into the school enrichment program, which starts in Grade 3. And there's a certain stigma attached to not being in it. The kids themselves may not be aggressive about it, but they know where they stand."

"In the high school," says Hal Tracey, "you get a fairly sharp division between the whiz kids whose parents are scientists, and those from the surrounding area, who are just ordinary kids."

"The 'bushies' they used to call the kids from the country," says Mary Fehrenbach, vice-principal at Mackenzie High School. "But a lot of town people have moved out into the country in recent years, and vice versa, so the distinction between town and country kids isn't nearly as sharp as it was."

The halls of Mackenzie High are festooned with photographs of scholarship winners, and in 1986 half of the school's 44 graduates were Ontario Scholars, with averages of 80 percent or better. The fact remains, however, that Deep River, a one-industry town, offers little to its young people beyond high school. Asked recently what Deep River teenagers did when they finished high school, a 17-year-old girl replied, "They get out of here as fast as they can."

"But it's still a great place to grow up," says teenager Brian Fehrenbach. "The mayor and the municipality do a lot for the kids -- and when there's nothing to do, we're forced to create our own activity."

* * *

With the growing public bias against the nuclear industry, and the federal government's current antipathy toward scientific research, Deep River's adult population too may soon have to create its own activity if it is to transcend its dependence on the Chalk River laboratories. The town received a rude jolt in 1985 when the federal government reduced the laboratories' annual operating grant from $200 million to $100 million over five years.

"Some politicians seem to think they could take away all the plant's funding and the people of Canada wouldn't care," says Lyall Smith. "The sad thing is, they may be right. People see that we're 'nuclear' laboratories, and they think Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Hiroshima. They forget that cancer radiation units were developed here. It's fine for the people of Vancouver to say they're a nuclear-0free zone, but do they realize that the cancer unit that operates in their hospitals use irradiated Cobalt from Candu reactors that were developed here?"

Smith is particularly incensed because local constituents were led to believe that the federal government would support the nuclear industry. "The prime minister was in our riding in 1984 and said he believed in what we were doing. He made a promise to us -- more jobs, more funding."

Although budget reduction has not created direct layoffs at the Chalk River plant, the staff has been reduced from 2,600 to 2,100 through attrition and an early-retirement program. "People say, 'Isn't it wonderful, everyone's accommodated,'" says Smith. "And maybe that's true in the short term. But when you take 500 jobs out of an area, it's going to have a long-term effect."

In the months following the cutback, enough people left Deep River that several businesses were forced to close, including the Strand Theatre, which had been operating since 1954. Several dozen houses went up for sale. "For a while everybody tightened right up," says Howard Cuming, owner of Cuming's Jewelry Store. "Our business was certainly down, and still is."

As a measure of the town's resilience, however, it is worth noting that just before Christmas 1985, when community morale was lowest, two store managers, Vern Furtney of Stedman's department store and Ian McArthur of Canadian Tire, took it upon themselves to light up the town, both figuratively and literally. "These two guys saw what was happening," says Lyall Smith, "and they wanted to do something about it. So they made a deal with a Christmas light manufacturer and brought in strings of lights by the turckload. They handed them out to all the school kids, and to teachers and policemen and firemen. Then they gave them to the local hydro authority and asked them if they'd light up the hydro poles along Highway 17. Everybody got busy, and by Christmas Eve the town was ablaze -- miles and miles of outdoor lights."

The spectacle not only raised community spirit but attracted national attention via CTV and CBC television. "They both aired their stories on Christmas Eve," says Smith. "It was a wonderful night for Deep River -- we were all very proud."

The following year, several projects were initiated to lessen Deep River's dependence on the nuclear industry. One limited but exemplary effort was the creation of the Deep River Science Academy, a summer school for exceptional high-school students from across the country. The school employs university students as tutors and, among other things, introduces its pupils to practical research at the Chalk River laboratories. "It doesn't produce a lot of income for Deep River," says academy chairman John Hardy, a nuclear physicist, "but it makes use of the available resources, and it broadens the base of scientific culture. We're hoping it will become a year-round thing."

As a complement to the science academy, the local symphony orchestra recently founded the Deep River Festival of Music, another summer program for elite students. Last summer the business community organized a Chamber of Commerce for the express purpose of bringing new business to town.

"And yet we've still got a problem," says Lorna Evans. "Some of our people, especially the pure scientists, simply haven't shifted their attitude toward diversifying. They still think this is the Mecca of science in Canada, and they carry on oblivious to what's happening."

"The science community is a bit like grazing gazelles," says Lyall Smith. "They have their heads down, and when one of their own gets shot, what do they do? They raise their heads for a moment, then lower them again and keep on grazing."

Because of the budget cuts, the nuclear laboratories have reduced their activity and veered from pure research towards commercially applicable projects. "We're trying to sell technology and services that apply not only to the nuclear industry but to other fields," says Hal Tracey.

One example is a contract recently awarded to the laboratories to test the O-ring seals -- cause of the 1986 Challenger accident -- to be used on NASA's next space shuttle launch. The Chalk River labs have developed similar sealing devices for Candu nuclear reactors.

The plant's reduced programs still include a limited amount of pure research in physics and chemistry and a variety of applied research projects in biology, environmental studies, materials science, waste management and electronics, among other things. Radio-isotopes used in cancer treatment are produced on the site, and a major cancer research project was recently undertaken.

To help sell technology as a byproduct of the nuclear field, Deep River citizens have formed a committee called DRIVE (Deep River Investment Ventures and Enterprises). "The town isn't likely to attract a branch plant from some outside industry," says Lyall Smith, "so we have to work with what's here. I preach the gospel and hope others will follow. It's all character building. I think we'll survive."