Eastern Passage

by Farley Mowat

  As if for emphasis, one of the Geiger counters suddenly emitted a series of clicks, eerily reminiscent of the warning given by a rattlesnake about to strike.

  I hastened to reply.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but we’ve actually got no radioactive stuff here. Never have had.”

  “What about the signs?” the spokesman demanded sternly.

  “Ah, yes. Well, as anyone reasonably conversant with the English language might conclude, they mean that if you walk around here naked on a sunny day you’re likely to get a bad sunburn.”

  A heavy silence followed. Then:

  “Don’t you get flip with us, Mister! We’ll investigate, and if you’re hiding anything, you’ll find yourself in very serious trouble!”

  Where upon they headed off into our swamp, the scientists out front swinging their Geiger counters suspiciously from side to side.

  When they returned an hour later, they trudged past our house without giving it or us a glance and climbed into their Buick without a word. However, as the driver spun the machine in a tight circle that left ruts in our bit of lawn, he shouted out his window:

  “Stupid punk! You’ll pay for this!”

  But we heard nothing more of the matter, and as summer drew on I noted in my journal:

  We’re having a mammoth berry crop. Have already picked and preserved gallons of wild raspberries, thimbleberries and tame strawberries. Can’t keep up with the garden, even with Murray to help. [Murray Biloki, a ward of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society, lived on a nearby farm.] New root cellar is going to be damn near full of potatoes, squash, onions, carrots, parsnips, cabbages, and Brussels sprouts, plus a couple of barrels of apples we’ve scrounged from abandoned orchards. We’ve already trucked about 30 pounds of shelled peas, cut-up green beans, and a dozen home-grown chickens to Orangeville to store in a rented freezer locker. And we’ve bottled God knows how many sealers of shelled peas, sliced beets, cucumber pickles, and jams and jellies. For sure we won’t starve but I’m getting bloody well tired of being a field slave.

  By the end of September, I was ready to exchange servitude to the soil for the tyranny of the typewriter, and not before time. McClelland & Stewart and the book committee of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regimental Association were becoming impatient with my lack of progress. On our part, we were running out of ready cash, and my relations with my U.S. publisher and agent were becoming strained. Max Wilkinson sent me a somewhat plaintive if philosophical note about this.

  If you insist on refusing to listen to what your [U.S.] publishers tell you, you must expect a spanking, together with a reduction in your income. Dudley and Little, Brown know what their market is. You must give heed. I suppose you can commit hari-kari if you want but please give a thought to your unfortunate agent. Listen, won’t you?

  I did not tell Max that I was, in fact, listening, but to an inner voice that was stubbornly insisting I close my ears to the siren song of fame and fortune south of the border. I wrote in my journal:

  I’m fed up to the teeth with the lackey line, that the way to make it big is to suck up to Uncle Sam. Seems like half the people I meet, especially in Toronto, tell me I should move to the U.S. of A., or at least go there in spirit. They claim New York, Hollywood, etc., will fill my pockets if only I become a Yankee turncoat. Well, screw that! This buck-toothed little beaver ain’t a-going to play that tawdry game.

  Christmas (never my favourite season) came and went and by the turn of the year it seemed a new ice age was upon us. January and February of 1954 brought a succession of storms that snowed us under while the thermometer in my weather station plunged to Siberian depths. Albion Township’s only snowplough was nowhere to be seen. It was rumoured to have skunked off to Florida. Lulu Belle and I became local heroes because, in a precaution dictated by Fran’s pregnancy, I had bought a blade-type snowplough for the little vehicle, with which I was able to ferry pregnant women, an elderly man who had attempted suicide, a colic-stricken child, and sundry other unfortunates out to the highway.

  Despite the weather, Fran and I and our unborn enjoyed this winter. The fireplace roared defiance at the blizzards. We ate like kings and queens for we were both competent cooks. We were healthy, and for almost the first time since we had been married Fran seemed at peace with herself. Indeed, she was in such excellent psychic condition that, early in the new year, when Angus wrote to ask if there was any chance I might be able to accompany him on a voyage to Halifax in Scotch Bonnet in June, Fran’s response was entirely positive.

  “Of course you must go,” she said firmly. “Your father’s only got one good arm and he’s not young. Our baby will have been born by then and my parents are really anxious to come out and help for as long as we need them. Tell Angus yes.”

  Thus was the die cast – and neither Fran nor I had any inkling of the consequences.

  7

  SAILING TO THE SEA

  On the night of March 31, 1954, there came a very hard frost. The roads had become mud wallows and sinkholes from the spring melt. Since Fran’s delivery date was almost upon us, I decided to make a run for it. Lulu rose to the challenge, and that night Fran lay in a hospital bed where, on April 4, Robert Alexander (Sandy) Mowat was born.

  I was unable to bring Sandy and his mother home for two long weeks because spring rains made the 30th side road impassable to anything without wings or webbed feet.

  Sandy was a hale and hearty child, and no more demanding than any other but his arrival on the scene made me take my responsibilities more seriously. As soon as the earth was fit to till I began, with Murray’s help, to enlarge the vegetable garden again, expand the orchard, plant a raspberry and an asparagus patch, and set out three thousand more wildwood saplings.

  One day while we were planting the trees I casually asked Murray if he would like to come along on a voyage down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean.

  “My father will be the captain – it’s his boat,” I explained. “And I’ll be the mate. You’d be the dogsbody – kind of a cabin boy and general factotum, if you know what that is. If you don’t, well, you’ll find out … but wait a minute … can you swim?”

  Murray shook his head.

  “Damn.… Well, you can learn. We won’t be leaving for a few weeks so I’ll teach you in the pond.”

  Murray was so confounded by the whole proposal that he hurried off to the Finnerty farm (which had been his home and his world for the last fourteen of his sixteen years) looking as stunned as if kicked in the head by one of the Finnerty heifers. But at six o’clock next morning when I opened the door to let the dog out, he was there.

  “Mr. Farley,” he said, “I’m coming! See, here’s me bathing suit! Aunt Jane made it up for me last night and gave me a new rosary to go with it. But she says I got to learn to swim or I can’t go.”

  Learn he did, in a froggish sort of a way. Since the pond was only four feet deep, the temptation to put his feet on bottom was more than he could resist. However, when I certified to Jane Finnerty that he could stay afloat (no matter how briefly) she reluctantly allowed her ward to embark on his first sortie into the big world beyond the Albion Hills.

  On June 1 Fran’s parents arrived from Toronto, their car loaded with baby gear, food, and presents for their new grandchild. They had reproachful looks for me. Perhaps they felt I was frivolously abandoning my parental duties. Nevertheless, they assured me things would be well looked after during my absence.

  Three days later, Fran drove Murray and me to Malton Airport to board a twin-engined plane for his first flight – a noisy, bumpy one to Montreal where Angus and Scotch Bonnet awaited us.

  —–

  Scotch Bonnet was the realization of my father’s enduring dream. Having been an avid sailor since childhood on Ontario’s Bay of Quinte, he had ever since kept an eye peeled for the ideal vessel in which someday to sail the deep and briny ocean. In 1937, just after he turned forty-two, he found his Dream Ship lying at a mooring in Montreal. A Norw
egian double-ender, she was thirty-six feet long, ketch-rigged, and fitted with an auxiliary engine. Called a redning-skoite in her native country, she had been designed and built to serve as a pilot boat on the North Sea, one of the world’s most demanding and unpredictable bodies of water.

  Neglected, with peeling paint and an abandoned air, she was not very prepossessing – but she was for sale. My father fell instantly in love. He later wrote:

  “She was my Dark Lady … down at heel, lonely, but so beautiful. In my mind’s eye I could see her resurrected, garbed in glistening ebony with a golden waterline, her red sails straining as she and I drove through a foaming gap in the coral ring surrounding some South Sea atoll.… There was never a moment’s hesitation. I had to have her come hell or high water! I didn’t tell your mother, Farley. And I didn’t tell you either. I just went ahead and bought her … freed her from servitude … and that was that.”

  He named her after a naked rock jutting out of Lake Ontario some miles off Presqu’ile Point. Although now inhabited only by gulls and cormorants, Scotch Bonnet Island was home in my father’s youth to a light-keeper’s family who had a girl of Angus’s own age. When the weather was propitious, Angus sometimes sailed his little catboat out to the rock to visit her. Had she not died of typhus shortly before the onset of the First Great War, he might well have married her.

  Memories of my own first summer aboard Scotch Bonnet (I was just Murray’s age at the time) are full of happy sounds, images, and smells: the reassuring rattle of the anchor chain paying out at a mooring in Prinyer’s Cove; the rich smell of glutinous mud on the “hook” when the anchor was hoisted aboard again; the snap and crackle of Bonnet’s heavy canvas as she reached before strong winds off Point Peter; spray whipping across my face as a stiff gust laid her over on her side. But most of all I feel the vibrancy of her passage through wind and water while I brace myself at her helm, both arms straining to keep the oak tiller steady so the little ship will hold her destined course.

  Scotch Bonnet became a part of me during the short time before the war began in 1939. When I went overseas to “do or die,” Angus used her to bolster my spirits. As the dreadful massacre mounted to a crescendo, he promised she would be mine to sail anywhere I might choose – when I returned home again. He was throwing me a lifeline, and I seized it. The little ship became my talisman.

  However, once the war was over and I was safely back in Canada, Angus said nothing more about her becoming mine. He never again raised the subject and I, in my pride, let the matter lie. When he invited me to join him on a voyage to Halifax where he was to give a speech at a national library conference, I thought he might be trying to make amends. It did not matter. The truth was I could not possibly have rejected such an invitation.

  Murray caught his first sight of Scotch Bonnet as she lay at anchor in the basin of the Royal Montreal Yacht Club, her ebony-black hull contrasting sharply with the gleaming white yachts anchored all around her. Heavily built and broad of beam, she seemed as out of place as a water buffalo amongst a herd of gazelles, but I thought she looked as ready for whatever might come as one of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s Hearts of Oak. Murray did not share my confidence.

  “Jeez!” he pleaded after staring at her for a long minute. “Are we supposed to go out on the ocean in that?”

  “Buck up. That will take you to hell and gone. And get a move on, will you? The captain’s rowing the dinghy in to pick us up.”

  Obediently Murray followed me out on the club dock, but muttering to himself, “To hell and gone? To hell and gone? …”

  “Welcome aboard, both of you,” my father said briskly as he brought the dinghy alongside Scotch Bonnet and we clambered up on her deck. “And you, my lad,” he added for Murray’s benefit, “wipe the manure off your boots and put on this bonnet. It’s a scotch bonnet, ye ken? You’ll wear it whenever you’re on deck, to show the world you belong to a seagoing vessel, not some rich stockbroker’s toy. Come below now and we’ll have a drink on it.”

  Sitting at the cabin table, Angus and I polished off a noggin and discussed his plans while Murray tentatively, like a cat in a new house, explored the little ship that would be our home for nearly a month.

  She was well prepared. A huge war-surplus Carley Life Float of the kind carried aboard merchant ships during the war was lashed to the topside of the cabin. And about a dozen cork life preservers were inside, some serving as cushions on the cabin benches, others as pillows in Bonnet’s four bunks or cluttering up the tiny head. They were a damned nuisance, but they did seem to give Murray confidence. Food, including canned beef and hardtack biscuits of Nelson’s era, was everywhere: under the benches, in the clothes lockers, in the bilges, above and below the bunks; and a bag of potatoes was sprouting in the Carley Float.

  By 8:00 a.m. next day, we were in the entrance lock of the St. Lawrence Seaway on our way to the Atlantic Ocean. The gods were kind – allowing us to pass without incident through a formidable concrete canyon able to contain a twenty-thousand-ton ship. But the second lock became a fearsome ordeal when Bonnet found herself behind two large freighters. The great lock doors closed, and we were swirled about in an enormous box with two huge ships, either of which could have crushed our little vessel against the walls as easily as a man might crush a cockroach.

  Escaping with pounding hearts, we skittered under innumerable bridges into the industrial heart of Montreal where the locks began again. Their walls towered far above Bonnet’s mastheads as Niagaras of whitewater poured down upon us through holes in the massive walls, and the huge, half-submerged propellers of freighters turned within yards of our bowsprit.

  We sidled and crept through six terrifying locks in all. Murray acquitted himself well despite having to deal with frantic and often conflicting orders issued in the strange argot of the sea. But as we were spat out of the final lock, he grimaced and muttered, “Ain’t never going on no boat again when I get out of this one! Them jeezly locks scare the shit clear out of me!”

  By the time we were released, we had been in the toils of the canal for seven hours.

  Free at last, we “steamed” at full throttle – a deceptive term in the Bonnet equalling about six knots. This took us past the eastern outskirts of Montreal into the relative calm of the St. Lawrence River meandering between low, lush, and shallow banks. The ship channel contained a steady flow of big vessels upward or downward bound so we kept Bonnet as close as possible to the black buoys at the edge of the channel, not venturing out of it for fear we would run aground and be swamped by the wash from the big ships. Our tension was eased briefly by a flock of about a hundred of the small geese called brant nonchalantly swimming about in mid-channel, stuffing themselves with crane flies and blissfully ignoring the mighty behemoths bearing down on them from east and west.

  By early evening, we were abeam of the shipbuilding town of Sorrel and, exhausted, decided to spend the night there. We steered Bonnet into the town’s small-boat basin, where a conspicuous sign on a hotdog stand ashore announced that this was the CLUB DE YACHT DE SORREL. The club’s sole employee seemed surprised to see us, but filled our gas tank and sold us a nylon fleur-de-lys, which we hoisted to our forestay as required by nautical tradition.

  Angus spread his sleeping bag on deck to dry. Earlier that afternoon, he had been snoozing in the forepeak when we were passed by a fast French freighter whose bow wave came boiling down through Bonnet’s fore hatch, almost washing Angus and his bed into the scuppers.

  Sorrel seemed to have a properly Gallic character, with outside staircases, abundant ornamental iron work, useful-looking little shops, and a lot of pretty girls. So Angus and Murray went sightseeing while I tried to find parts for our twenty-five-year-old engine. Although its externals had been cleaned and even polished regularly, its innards did not appear to have been touched or, perhaps, even looked at since the engine’s birth. My immediate concern was that the generator would not charge the batteries and that one of the engine’s four cylinders had
gone on strike. But although Sorrel’s shipyards could and did build icebreakers, giant tankers, naval vessels, and freighters, they were unable to produce the humble parts I needed.

  Bonnet lay moored to the breakwater, and there, in the calm of a lovely summer evening, we had a drink or two to toast our first day on the Great River. According to our patent log (a brass cylinder that we towed behind Bonnet to record distance travelled through the water), we were now fifty-five miles closer to the sea. Since we still had some twelve hundred miles to go, this was a trifling accomplishment, but we celebrated anyway. After a dinner of canned spaghetti garnished with canned sardines, Angus got out his venerable banjo and we sat on deck serenading passing ships out on the river with seamen’s shanties from the old days of sail.

  We left Sorrel soon after dawn to thread the tortuous channel through Lac Saint-Pierre, a vast shallow basin stretching out of sight to the northeast. Clinging as close as we dared to the edge of the buoyed channel again, and still under power because there was no wind to fill our sails, we puttered along through flocks of brant fattening up on crane flies for the rest of their journey from South America to high arctic breeding grounds.

  Then the engine – the bullgine, Angus always called it – failed, leaving Bonnet adrift. Angus and I frantically tried to make repairs while Murray, alone on deck, clutched the useless tiller and watched apprehensively as block-long grain carriers from the upper Great Lakes, and massive ocean freighters from as far away as Ceylon, bore implacably down upon us. We must have been a trial to the river pilots at the helms of those big vessels as they tried to avoid converting us into minced meat and our little vessel into kindling. We diagnosed the bullgine’s problem as a plugged fuel line that we eventually cleared by blowing (sometimes sucking) the dirt out and got underway again.