He arranged to meet the board of the church. They thought he was coming to talk to them about the organ.
“I wasn’t sure why I asked to see them,” he said. “I was in a bit of a fog. And then halfway through the meeting I just blurted it out. I asked them if they would be interested in selling me the theatre.”
They laughed.
“We wouldn’t sell this theatre for a million dollars.”
And that was when MacDougall said, “A million dollars seems like a fair price to me.”
He offered them a dollar as a down payment. They threw him out.
But as luck would have it, the board had a constitutional obligation to take any offer of sale to the congregation. The following week the pastor announced that an unemployed taxi driver had offered to buy their church for a million dollars.
The congregation erupted. No one wanted the building sold. It was, after all, the place where many of them had been baptised and married, and where they had said goodbye to their beloved deceased.
More to get the meeting under the control than anything, the pastor suggested they seek a sign from God. They would pass the following Saturday in fast and prayer and seek God’s direction.
That Friday, Jack MacDougall went to the pastor and asked what a sign from God looked like. The pastor said he wasn’t sure, but he would know one if he saw one.
“Do you think,” asked MacDougall, “I can raise a million dollars in a year?”
“That,” said the pastor, “would be a bloody miracle.”
“Then,” said MacDougall, “take my dollar and give me a year. If I can raise the million, that will be your sign.”
“Who do you represent?” asked the pastor.
MacDougall, who didn’t represent anyone, and would have been on a date if Susan Bate hadn’t leaned on him, said he represented certain business interests.
He gathered up a collection of his friends, got them to put on their best suits, which in many cases meant their only suit, and had them show up at the next meeting. The deal was done. The congregation agreed to place the matter in God’s hands.
One of the people on MacDougall’s committee was a single mother. A woman on welfare. When they hatched a fundraising scheme to sell brass plaques for $1000 each, she said more than anything she would love to have a plaque with her daughter’s name on it. Sadly, she said, she didn’t have $1000.
“You don’t have to have a thousand dollars,” said Jack MacDougall. “You can raise it.”
And she did. In three weeks. She sold buttons for $5 each at the market. And somewhere on the back of a seat in the Imperial Theatre you can find a plaque that reads, To my daughter, Christa, love Mom. It was the first plaque sold. Within a year, they had sold four hundred more.
“It was that first plaque that got things going,” said MacDougall. “We figured if a single mom on welfare could raise a thousand dollars, the rest of us could raise a million.”
And that is more or less the way it went. One day a professor from the university, Joe Pocks, wandered into their committee room saying he would like to raise $100,000.
“I am going to run a raffle,” he said. “I’ll get a thousand prizes and sell a hundred thousand tickets for a dollar each.”
They told him it couldn’t be done. They only had a year. He would have to get three prizes donated every day for a year to get a thousand prizes. It was impossible.
Professor Pocks came back three months later with 350 prizes. He had women in old people’s homes all over town knitting sweaters. Within the year he sold seventy thousand tickets for a dollar a piece.
When their year was up, the committee had raised more than $1 million. They bought the theatre from the church. It took another decade and more than $10 million to complete the renovation.
“All sorts of people moved in and out of the project over that decade,” said MacDougall. “It was like a relay race. Lots of people carried the baton over the years.”
They made it to the finish line, and like I said, the Imperial is now one great theatre.
And I will never stand on its stage again without thinking of Susan Bate and Jack MacDougall, and what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it.
4 May 2003
BIKING
ACROSS CANADA
In 1997, Cal Lane, who was living on a boat and working as a welder in Victoria, British Columbia, was accepted into the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design. This meant Cal had to cross the country somehow, and she thought that bicycle would be as good a way as any, and a lot cheaper than most. Seven flat tires and 6078 kilometres in seventy-seven days didn’t change her mind.
“I’d do it again,” she said. “In fact, I’ve been thinking about it.”
And then she smiled and said, “So many memories.”
I made tea.
“Tell me some of them,” I said.
“Saskatchewan was the hardest,” said Cal.
This might surprise some, Saskatchewan being the heart of the prairies and largely flat. I wasn’t surprised. I haven’t biked in Saskatchewan myself, but I have biked in Holland, so I guessed what she was talking about. Fighting a stiff wind across flat land can grind you down in a way that, well, in a way that I imagine even the Rocky Mountains wouldn’t.
“That’s right,” said Cal. “Going up those mountains wasn’t nearly as hard as I anticipated. Coming down them was harder than you’d think. You have to keep squeezing the brakes for hours on end. That can get tiring.”
Cal said she biked eighty to one hundred and forty-five kilometres a day. At night, she said she and her friend Mike, who biked with her, slept wherever they were.
“We slept beside the train tracks, and once in a churchyard, and another time in a ball field behind a bar.”
Cal said they got good at hiding their tent. If they felt unsure about where they were, they would set it up in a hedge where no one could see them.
“By the end,” said Cal, “we were like little animals.”
Sometimes, she said, she could hear deer around the tent at night. Hear them breathing and snorting. It scared her at first.
“Because I didn’t know what it was,” said Cal.
One night she saw fireflies for the first time.
“I was lying in the tent without the fly,” she said, smiling. She thought they were stars until they started moving around. She couldn’t believe her eyes.
She said the train engineers used to wave.
“They’d blow the horn and wave.”
The people they met were generous.
“They gave us water and food,” she said. “Even restaurants.”
There was a chip wagon in Ontario where they wouldn’t let Cal and Mike pay. “And it wasn’t the only restaurant like that,” she said.
Although Cal and Mike were travelling together, she told me they hardly talked all day. Sometimes Mike would call out and ask if she was okay, and she would squeak her dinosaur horn to say she was fine.
“Mostly,” said Cal, “we just pedalled.”
It was like meditation. They pedalled and pedalled. Every day that’s all it was, the pedals going around and around. The pedals and the repetition of the road and the trees.
“We had no worries,” said Cal. “We didn’t have anything to focus on except keep pedalling.”
She picked up her teacup and then put it down without drinking any. She stared at the cup for the longest time. Then she smiled and said, “It was so amazing to see the country like that. To see how the landscape changes. It was as if I had run my hand across the entire country like you would on a piano. I feel as if I touched it from one side to the other.”
She said when she and Mike finally arrived in Halifax, they just looked at each other.
“We didn’t know what to do,” she said.
All they knew was how to bike. They had pedalled everywhere. They had pedalled to the store and then to their campsite.
The only injury she got on the whole trip was the day aft
er she finished.
“I got shin splints,” she said. “Because I wasn’t used to walking.”
When I asked her what she remembered most about her trip, Cal didn’t hesitate. “The birds,” she said.
“Every day you heard the same song. Over and over. It was very calming.”
“It wouldn’t change for weeks and weeks,” she said, “and you would memorize the song. And then one day you would notice a new melody joining in and slowly, as the species changed, the new tune would take over and you would forget the old one. It was lovely.”
Cal isn’t the first person I know who has biked across the country and come back talking about birds. When my friend Noel told me about his bike trip across Canada, the first story he wanted to tell me was his eagle story.
Like Cal, Noel was biking from west to east. One day, around the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, he met a man who was walking in the opposite direction.
Noel pulled over to the side of the road, which, of course, you never would do if you were in a car and you saw someone walking along the highway but is the only thing you can do if you are on a bike.
The hiker, who happened to be an Aboriginal, told Noel he had left his home in Ontario and was walking to Alberta to visit his brother. He said he had been walking for two months. He said he had lost forty pounds.
The two of them, the white cyclist from Whistler, B.C., and the Aboriginal hiker from Ontario, stood on the shoulder and bonded.
“When you drive,” said Noel, “you miss the details.”
“Like the caterpillars,” said the hiker, “and frogs and lupins and brooks and streams.”
Noel told the man that one early morning a deer had bounded through the forest, running beside him for more than a kilometre.
The man said, “Deer are important.”
And then Noel told him that he had passed a dead eagle that very morning, and the man got excited and made him tell him exactly where the eagle was, so he wouldn’t miss it on his way by.
Many people would think you were crazy to walk from Ontario to Alberta. But for Cal, and Noel, and that walking man, it was the point of their trips. They would tell you the best trips are the ones where you move slowly.
30 July 2006
BRIDGE WALKING
There are many reasons to celebrate bridges. Often just their scale is enough. A grand bridge, stretching across some impossible chasm, like a freight train suspended across a prairie landscape, is worthy of praise; but so, too, are all the little country bridges. The ones that make you want to pull over and climb out of your car and hang on the railing a spell.
Bridges can be beautiful for their largeness or their smallness, but also for their straightness. Or, better, their curves. For when it is a bridge as hard as steel that is swooping and bending and rolling before your eyes, what could be more beautiful than that?
Bridges bring things together that are apart. This bank and that bank. This side and that. And that is a noble aspiration. A bridge is, above all else, a conciliator. Bridges like it when things are joined up. They favour gatherings over solitudes.
So for all these things, and of course, because almost always, there is water involved, I am in favour of bridges.
And with these things in mind, I wanted to tip my hat to the International Bridge that joins Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. For its beautiful curved arch trusses, and for the way it swoops and sags, and for the way they let you ride your bike from one side to the other right along with the cars. And because it has a steel railing that allows you to see the water, and because it spans the busiest shipping locks in the world—70 percent of the raw material that feeds the North American auto industry, in the form of iron ore, passes below it. This is a serious bridge.
And this June, for the twenty-third year in a row, officials are closing the bridge for an hour so that anyone who wants can walk across it. And the only reason they have for doing that is that it is a beautiful walk. Almost five kilometres long, and high enough so you can see fish in the St. Mary’s River below. And a lot of other things you can’t see when you are behind the wheel of a car.
So here is to the beauty of bridges. And, more to the point, to the wisdom of the bridge operators in Sault Ste. Marie, who believe in beauty and understand the importance of taking the time, from time to time, to pause and appreciate it.
28 June 2009
GETTING TO
SWIFT CURRENT
At midnight, last Tuesday, after we had finished packing up the show in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, we agreed to meet in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock the next morning for the five-hour drive to Swift Current. We, being the touring cast of The Vinyl Cafe show: horn player Chris Whiteley, pianist John Sheard, vocalist Lisa Lindo and myself.
We assembled, a little blearily, for our complimentary hotel breakfast, packed the van and headed off—it was Day Three of the Western Tour.
Before we left Yorkton, we stopped so Chris could buy a new cable for his electric guitar. He’d left his old cable on stage in Winnipeg. We had been told McLaren’s on Broadway Street should have one. So that’s where we headed.
Small-town businesspeople are often called upon to use more imagination than their big-city counterparts to stay afloat. McLaren’s turned out to be a monument to small-town ingenuity, a combination music store, trophy outlet and supplier of medical provisions. We could have walked out of McLaren’s with an upright piano, a surgical syringe and a silver-plated bowling trophy. We settled for the amp chord and a handful of guitar picks. And we left town.
We were almost immediately onto the prairie, floating along a highway that was so straight and empty that John, who was driving, could have tied off the steering wheel to the rear-view mirror and done his morning crossword.
We rolled by kilometres of empty fields under a sky so low and grey that it felt like snow. At this time of year, the prairie landscape is drawn from a pallet of beige and browns—a beautiful and contemplative vista.
I was in the back of the van, with my head down, clicking away at my laptop, answering emails, when a train whistle split the air. John whooped.
“I waved at the guy,” he said, “and he blew the whistle.”
He was still beaming a few minutes later.
“He blew the whistle for me,” he repeated.
We were all smiling now. The freight, so elemental to the prairie that it seemed part of the natural world, was still rocking along beside us. What is it about trains that turn us into children?
An hour and three freights later, we passed a field of wheat stubble inundated with black-and-white birds. Thousands and thousands of birds. There were more birds in the field than I had ever seen in one place in my life. They might have been magpies; they were too far away for me to identify.
Maybe I had been in the van too long. Or maybe it was my turn to touch my childhood. Whatever. I barked at John to pull over.
The van was a kilometre and a half down the road before John understood I was serious. When he realized I was, he turned around, and we backtracked that kilometre and a half and parked on the gravel shoulder. The birds were maybe a half-kilometre from the highway. Unable to get anyone to join me, I slipped alone under the strand of barbed wire that bordered the road, and I began to lope across the prairie like a dog. I wanted to make it into the middle of the flock before the birds took off. I wanted to feel the surge of their wings all around me. I thought the sound would be incredible.
I didn’t even get close before a skittish character squawked into the sky and took everyone else with him. The birds rose into the air like a shook carpet. I returned to the van, disappointed.
Our next stop was at a gas station in the Qu’Appelle River Valley, which like all river valleys in Saskatchewan appears dramatically and, seemingly, out of nowhere. You think it is flat forever when suddenly the land folds, and opens, and there is water, and hills, and stands of trees.
Saskatchewan river valleys make me think of the times
before Europeans arrived. I imagine First Nations people moving through the landscape.
We stopped a while later in Enfold, looking for gas and coffee, and realized we weren’t going to find either. We climbed out of the van and saw all the businesses in the small country town had been long abandoned, and that many of the clapboard houses were empty too—another farming community on its way to becoming a ghost town. As the farms get bigger, the towns get smaller. The wind was blowing. We stood there, looking around.
Someone said, “All this is going to blow away one day.”
We climbed back into the van and headed off again onto the highway with Swift Current in our sights.
28 November 1999
PRAIRIE WIND
Art Grenville farms bison about an hour to the north and east of Rosebud, Alberta, in a part of the country where you can feel as if you’re standing close to history just about anywhere you are.
On my way to his place, I pulled over and walked through a roadside graveyard. Standing among the tombstones and dwarfed by the flat-bottomed thunderclouds ranging the edge of the sky, I felt as if I was standing in a painting by William Kurelek. It was good to be back in a part of the country where the view allowed thunderclouds and blue sky to share the same horizon—on the very edge of the prairie, the place where the earth opens and the Canadian Badlands begin. The topography is almost biblical, and brings to mind the cradle of creation.
Before I left, I had checked a book to clear up the difference between a buffalo and a bison. A buffalo is a water buffalo. We don’t have those. We might be used to calling what we do have “buffalo,” but the horned and heavy-humped animals that roamed North America in impossible numbers before Europeans arrived to slaughter them into almost extinction are, correctly, bison.
When I arrived at his bison farm, Art suggested we take the tractor out to the pasture, where he keeps part of his herd.
There is something quite indescribable about finding yourself standing on a prairie hill surrounded by bison. It could be all the movies I’ve seen, or maybe the pictures in the history books, or maybe I’m just a romantic, but a herd of bison seems to fit into the landscape in an organic way that a herd of cattle doesn’t. The bison seem to be of the land rather than just on it. Standing amid them made me feel as if I were of the land too.
The Vinyl Café Notebooks Page 17
