Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  My other problem was that this former minister of finance in Brian Mulroney’s government (and of frugal Scottish heritage) soon proved to be full of free-spending ideas for getting rid of M&S’s money, in promoting and publicizing his book. I turned down expensive ideas from him by letter, by fax, and eventually even by phone.

  Once the conversation went like this:

  “John, I know that you have relatives in Fredericton, and I’m sure they’d be delighted to see you again, but Fredericton’s a very small book market, and you’ve already been there once to promote your book, so, no, we just can’t afford to send you there again.”

  There was a heavy sigh. Then the Right Honourable John C. Crosbie, more in sorrow than in anger, gave me the benefit of The Full Newfoundland Rebuke.

  “You goddam poblishers. Yer so toight with a dollar . . . when you walk across a nickel on the soidwalk . . . yer arse starts snappin’!”

  I was deeply shocked, of course. But when John’s book won the Book of the Year Award from the nation’s booksellers at the ceremony in Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, I was able to repeat the story, word for word, from the stage, and the grey walls of the elegant symphony hall trembled only slightly.

  How does a Newfoundlander survive outside Newfoundland? Harold decided to find out. In 1979, with his wife Corky, and Andrew (age five) and Leah (age two), he left the Rock that had been home to his family for three centuries and moved to Nova Scotia. Their chosen spot was Upper Clements, just south of Annapolis Royal, on the way to Digby. They were attracted by “the beauty of the land, the fruitfulness of the soil, the gentleness of the climate, the variety of plant and animal life, the closeness of great forests and clear waters, the presence of the sea without its storms.”

  The Annapolis Basin is a blessed place, just off the Bay of Fundy, but so sheltered that peach trees and melons grow there in the surprising micro-climate that resembles Connecticut, which lies much farther south. Champlain spotted its possibilities, and established his “Habitation” there in 1605, and it turned out to be, as Harold wrote in Dancing on the Shore: A Celebration of Life at Annapolis Basin (1987) “the best site for a colony in eastern Canada, indeed, the only place where an early colony succeeded without support from Europe.”

  The Horwood family literally pitched their tents right across the basin from Champlain’s finely reproduced timber “Habitation” (and the Parks Canada site is well worth a visit), and set about building their home. It was a sprawling, interesting building of passive solar design, with lean-to greenhouses and many Horwoodian touches.

  Equally exciting was what they did with the six hectares of land that sloped from the road all the way down to the shore, where the willets danced. What Harold did — planting trees, restoring meadows to attract wildlife from butterflies to martens, harvesting seaweed as fertilizer for their fruits and vegetables, and encouraging and savouring the great dance of nature — is brilliantly told in his book.

  Dancing on the Shore is worth quoting in its entirety, whether Harold is describing blue herons fencing in a courtship battle, or discussing how worms “remember” to curl into a ball to preserve moisture, or writing about finches, shrimps, stars, seaweed, beech trees, ponds, garter snakes, or squirrels hiding cookies all over the unconventional house. But let me give you just a taste, as he begins the chapter entitled “Water of Life.”

  For most of its length — at least for that part of it that you can navigate in a boat — the Annapolis River is slow and tidal, snaking its way between banks of mud and grass through a long succession of farms that have been tilled for three and a half centuries. The streams that feed the river have quite a different character. Roaring cascades, they come down the slopes of South Mountain, tumbling over granite boulders, pausing in ponds and lakes whose currents swirl like the winds of cyclones, rushing through cool stands of spruce and pine and hemlock, shouting as they go — until they collapse suddenly into the flat valley, directly from mountain to river bottom, where they wind sedately through muddy creek beds, being tamed and controlled by the tides until they join the Annapolis River itself, sedate and middle-aged, all shouting and laughter left behind.

  Those streams are my kind of river, useless for trade but leaping with trout and dragonfly and kingfisher, home to the eagle and the goshawk, land of the marten and the mink.

  The setting is obviously far from the Prairies (especially when Harold looks down from his green canoe and sees “the red fronds of the seaweed reach upward toward the bottom of the boat, the round blue domes of the mussels climb the towers of the rocks, the coralline algae grow like the trees of some forest in a Celtic myth”) but the spirit is clearly the same as in Silton Seasons, the book set on the dry Saskatchewan prairie by R.D. Symons that I published twenty-five years earlier.

  When I started my Douglas Gibson Books editorial imprint at M&S in 1986, one of the major pleasures was that I could avoid the usual round of office meetings, and simply find authors I would like to work with, and then turn them loose on a great project. It’s amazing how cutting out meetings leaves you lots of time to roam around.

  My visits to Nova Scotia, for example, produced a haul of remarkable authors and books, including Silver Donald Cameron (Sailing Away From Winter), and Harry Bruce (Page Fright). It was my first visit to the little Eden that Harold had created down beside the Annapolis Basin that inspired me to challenge him to write a Walden-like book about it.

  Obviously, I’m glad that I issued the challenge to write about his tiny, infinite universe, and that Harold rose to it. And I’m very glad that I added the ingredient of the wonderful, detailed woodcuts of nature by the Ontario artist G. Brender à Brandis. Harold was, too. In researching this book I found that in his clear, unhesitating hand he inscribed my copy with the words, “For Doug, who was the moving spirit behind the finest production I’ve ever had the pleasure to enjoy.”

  In the fall of 2005, I was on one of my Halifax raids when I heard that Harold was dying. It was time for another visit to the Annapolis Basin. I rented a car and set out on a drive that took me through a landscape of Canadian history that intertwined with my personal and my publishing memories.

  First, I drove west towards Windsor. Further west in that direction would take me, in time, to Cumberland County, at the head of the Bay of Fundy. In Stephen Harper — and the Future of Canada, a biography with a shrewd subtitle that seemed rash when I published it in spring 2005, William Johnson had revealed that Harper’s ancestor made a big mistake settling there in 1774. In the American Revolution, Cumberland County took the American side. As a loyal settler from Yorkshire (ironically on a government-sponsored plan to settle the confiscated Acadian lands) poor Christopher Harper was “much frightened” by midnight threats from his neighbours, and was eventually burned out, settling a little further west in New Brunswick and seeking government compensation.

  New Brunswick set me thinking, as I drove through the fall sunlight, about my life as an Acadian. After a wedding visit to Sackville, I once spent a happy day at Shediac, on that province’s north shore. It was Festival du Homard time, and I obediently ate lobster on the elegant outdoor patio of a grand Confederation-era hotel, while live Acadian fiddle music filled and overflowed the neighbouring park, setting even the trees dancing. That experience was enough to turn me into an Acadian, a process that was reinforced when I published Clive Doucet’s infectious account of the joys of rediscovering his Acadian roots, Notes from Exile.

  Across Northumberland Strait from Shediac, of course, lies Prince Edward Island, a reassuring place to any publisher, since its economy owes so much to an author. When the Gibson family toured the Maritimes a quarter of a century ago, my elder daughter, Meg, was in thrall to Lucy Maud Montgomery, and we had to visit Green Gables so that she could drift about in a ten-year-old’s romantic mist, while her younger sister, Katie, now a lawyer, denounced her “soppy” behaviour. Similar behaviour every year brings in t
housands of literary tourists from around the world with a yen to see the province.

  Now my drive was taking me into the heart of the Annapolis Valley, through a string of pretty little towns. Noting how well maintained all the clapboard houses were, Allan Fotheringham once joked that he planned to live his life next time around as a paint salesman in the Annapolis Valley. To make things even better for me, in September the apple-picking season was at its height, and when I opened the car windows the car filled with the smell of apples, as if the back seat had been covered with them. That gave me an idea. I stopped at a roadside stand and asked for apples that I could never buy in Ontario. No problem. There was a choice, and I loaded up a basket, which I inhaled the rest of the way.

  But first there was a stop near Wolfville, at the Grand Pré museum that remembers the Acadian deportation. During the family visit twenty-five years ago I became obsessively interested in the Acadian dyking systems that allowed these settlers from Northwest France to wall off waterlogged salty marshes beside the sea. Using a one-way valve system, they would drain the marsh, turning it into rich pasture land, literally for centuries.

  My fascination with this system (shared by Harold, who described the creation of the dykes as “an awesome feat” that allowed the Acadian settlers “not just to wrest a living from their former salt marshes, but to flourish, to become prosperous, to raise large families, to increase from a few hundred immigrants to a population numbering tens of thousands”) led me to drive my long-suffering family down a single-track road where you could park close to the Minas Basin dyke system. At the end of the road was a parked Volvo, with a middle-aged man leaning against it. We exchanged greetings, then moved off, so that Dad could survey the ancient dykes.

  When we returned, the man was still there. Questions revealed that he was a professor at nearby Acadia University, and he was there with a carload of interesting artefacts to give an on-the-spot lecture about this part of the Bay of Fundy, which he knew very well. His audience was supposed to be a busload of major international scientists who were attending a conference in Halifax. But their bus had failed to show, leaving him high and dry on the dyke. “Yes,” he lamented, “the bus hasn’t arrived, and here I am with all of this stuff to show them.”

  “Well,” I said, “We’re here, and it would be great to hear your lecture.”

  So out of the Volvo he pulled exhibits like ancient oyster shells the size of coffee tables and pointed to half-submerged stumps that were unbelievably old, and held enthralled an audience of two visitors from Toronto, and their little girls aged ten and eight. And the bus full of VIPs never did arrive.

  More than twenty years later I was in the Arctic, on the Adventure Canada cruise that followed in James Houston’s wake, along the south coast of Baffin Island. The cruise rules meant that as a lecturer and ship’s crew member, I was expected to host a table full of guests at dinner — presumably guests who had drawn the short straw when it came to dining at The Captain’s Table. When we were all seated, I went around the table, learning my new companions’ names, and encountered a nice, older man named Sherman.

  “And where are you from, Sherman?”

  “Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said enthusiastically, and launched into the tale of my fascination with Acadian dykes. The table listened with polite interest as I told the story of the memorable encounter with this professor who gave his lecture to us instead of the Halifax scientists.

  Sherman waited until I had finished.

  “That was me,” he said. “I was the one who gave your family that lecture.”

  A hush fell over the table. If my tablemates had been politely interested before, now they were fascinated to be present at an unfolding coincidence like this, more than twenty years and many hundreds of miles away from the original encounter. It was, yes, eerie, and I could see that some people shuddered slightly. For me, it helped to put in context the conversations I used to have with Robertson Davies about the role of coincidence in fictional plots and in real life.

  Now, after the drive south had taken me through the ancient streets of Annapolis Royal, it was time to get serious, and to steel myself for real life, in the form of the dying Harold. Just before I reached his place at Upper Clements, I passed the park building where we held the launch party for Dancing on the Shore. So many wild apples grew around the building then that it was possible to stand at the party, chatting while picking different apple varieties with your right and your left hand. It was, in short, a launch party, among Harold’s friends and neighbours, that was a touch different from the usual fancy-pants Toronto book launch, where people you talk to are likely to be looking over your shoulder, scanning the room for bigger fish. Bigger apples, that’s fine!

  Harold’s property looked beautiful as I drove in and breathed deeply: apples, sea, and flowers. The distinctive house was just as I remembered it, and we went upstairs to sprawl in comfortable chairs and chat, while Corky sat watchfully nearby.

  Harold was not much changed, and made my visit easier by being pleased to see me, yet puzzled that I would take the trouble to drive all this way, just to see him. Ah, well, I explained, it was a drive through my past, too, and I had had a wonderful day.

  The fact that my day had to end at a dinner party in Halifax gave him the excuse to speed me on my way, as I stumblingly tried to tell him how proud I was of having worked with him. I wasn’t very good at saying it — I hope it comes through now — and he wasn’t very good at receiving it. An interesting man: on the one hand, in the book’s dedication to his daughter, he could refer to himself as “an Ancient Prophet.” On the other, he would shrug off praise in person — especially if he had the excuse of hustling me back, for the dinner party, with a notably firm handshake.

  I made it back in time, no longer dawdling through the Valley, and that evening we ate the apples I had brought, while I thought about Harold. He died the following spring, at eighty-two. His many lives had run out. But his spirit was still dancing on the shore.

  “What the hell.” If Barry Broadfoot hadn’t specified that he wanted neither a funeral nor a tombstone, those are the words that should have been carved as his epitaph. The phrase came up all the time in his conversation and could be said to summarize a philosophy of life, one that led him to shrug and underplay his own importance as a man who changed the way Canadians saw their history.

  He was the original hard-bitten “seen-it-all” newspaper guy. Before that, he was born and raised in Winnipeg, in what his autobiography, My Own Years, describes as a “modest but loving” home. As a teenager he acquired “two prominent gold teeth thanks to a hockey puck I did not see” and bad eyes thanks to an unquenchable love of reading. But as a kid growing up in the Depression, those eyes noticed things going on around him. Here is one of the stories from his 1973 book, Ten Lost Years, 1929–1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression:

  There was this family named Thompson across the street and the father died. They hung a black wreath on the front door and, well, that sure impressed the kids in the neighbourhood.

  The day of the funeral, in fact when nobody was at home because they were all at the funeral, some of us kids saw a man go up the walk of the Thompson house and stand there. He was pretending to ring the doorbell, I guess, and then we saw him slip that wreath under his coat and walk away. We followed him on our bikes, just kind of goofing along, and he went around the corner and over a couple of blocks and into a house and then he came out and hung the wreath on his own door. I told my dad and he checked and found out the man’s wife had died the night before.

  (That was one of two stories, among the hundreds in the book, that I happen to know were Barry’s own.)

  In 1943, with Canada’s Depression over (courtesy of Adolf Hitler), he got his first job, working for the Winnipeg Tribune. As a general reporter and the low man on the totem pole, he soon d
rew “the casualty list.” This meant visiting the houses of young men who had just been killed in the war, trying to get their shattered families to give him precious photographs of their dead son to enliven the Tribune’s pages. Sometimes when he arrived with his list in a taxi, walked up and knocked on the door, the mother would misunderstand. Joyful tears that their boy had been found alive after all would flow, and seventeen-year-old Barry would try to explain the situation, and try to get his photo.

  Joining the army seemed an easier option.

  He served as a “poor bloody infantryman” in Europe, mostly working on camp newspapers. Later, when we worked together on Six War Years 1939–1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad, he was more animated than I ever saw him (far from his usual relaxed, “what the hell” attitude) when he insisted that in promoting the book I stay far away from implying that his two years of army service, 1944–45, had been in any way heroic.

  After the war, thanks to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, he went to the University of Manitoba. Those were the years when kids straight out of high school were rubbing shoulders in class with former bomber pilots, when professors were being put on the spot by questions from quiet men who had commanded ships off the D-Day beaches, and when getting into disputes in food lineups with little guys who had been commandos was strongly discouraged. Barry wrote about these times of generational change in The Veteran’s Years: Coming Home From the War (1985), and himself benefitted from the veterans’ effect on the University of Manitoba, where he became the editor of the student newspaper. That was his proudest memory of those college years — along with the column he ran, unchallenged, under the name “C.A. Daver.” Not to mention the fact that while he was “informally engaged” to one girl, he was “on good speaking terms with two others.” Sadly, they compared notes, and Barry was “labelled a pariah,” and retreated to the bar.