Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  In 1989 Graham brought out a comprehensive, nationwide look at a Canadian election, entitled Playing for Keeps: The Making of the Prime Minister, 1988. It began with a MacLennan-inspired swoop across the country, as the helicopter-borne camera seemed to pan across the leaders’ constituencies, from Baie Comeau to Oshawa all the way to John Turner’s Vancouver. The book on the election was a fine, prompt, thoughtful piece of work, but it didn’t succeed as well as it deserved. The market had moved on beyond reflective books on political events, in favour of fast, up-to-the-minute reporting … and hold the reflection.

  The acknowledgements shed some light on how books begin:

  This book had its origin in a chat with Doug Gibson and [Globe reporter] Hugh Winsor in the fall of 1986, when I expounded at some length on the degree of insanity that was involved in writing a book, and how I felt cured of that particular disease. Almost from that moment forward, I was infected, once again, with the bacteria. My wife began finding scribbled ideas and odd notes, like the hints of an illicit affair . . .

  In 2006, with my truly enthusiastic backing, Graham wrote the book that he had been intended by the God of Authors to write: Sorry, I Don’t Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis that Won’t Go Away. I edited it in a state of jubilation, aware that it was answering every question that observers on all sides might ask. It was hugely suc­cessful, and very influential, not least in Graham’s own life. The position of Commissioner of Official Languages came open in the same year. When Graham and I discussed his idea of applying for the job I joked that he had already completed a 90,000-word application.

  He got the job. And he’s done well in it ever since, confronting “the Canadian crisis that won’t go away,” but doing his best, anyway.

  The centre of the Eastern Townships is Sherbrooke, the third largest city in Quebec. In 1967’s The Colour of Canada Hugh wrote that “Sherbrooke, once centred on an English garrison (when Lord Palmerston became Colonial Secretary his first order was to strengthen it against American invasion), is now largely French-speaking.” A much more interesting fact about “Old Pam,” who went on to become prime minister, is that he “died in his eighty-second year of a heart attack while engaged in a sex act with a young parlour maid on his billiard table” (as Karl Shaw records in Five People Who Died During Sex). He was a much-loved leader. And our Canadian history books are much too dull.

  The town was named after Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, yet another military man who served with Wellington. It sprang up where the Magog River runs down to join the St. Francis. Roaming around, Jane and I found that King Street (surely the steepest main street in Canada) runs parallel to the falling river, which powered the many textile mills that attracted Quebec workers. Inevitably, the main downtown cross street is named Wellington.

  It was on historic Wellington Street that our friend Linda Morra, a professor at Bishop’s University in nearby Lennoxville, took us for a celebration dinner after I gave my show in the small, distinctive English-speaking university. Lennoxville (named to honour the family of the unfortunate Duke of Richmond, bitten, you’ll recall, by his pet fox) is the centre of English culture in the region, with Bishop’s front and centre. In literary terms, it’s renowned for its association with teachers such as Ralph Gustafson, and students such as Michael Ondaatje, who met his first wife, the multi-talented Kim, while he was a young student there, and she was a professor’s wife.

  Michael always was a handsome devil. Although he has been happily partnered with Linda Spalding for many years, ten years or so ago, when we were both well into our sixties (he’s a couple of months older than I am), I saw the almost magnetic attraction that he has for women. In my publisher role, I once attended a summer reading that he gave outdoors in the courtyard at Hart House in the University of Toronto. I listened to the cadence of his low, softly accented voice and saw the hair, the colour of wood-smoke, rising above his tanned, striking face. Surveying the women around me, who were leaning forward, with parted lips, it was clear that they fell into two groups — those who had fallen in love with him, and those who were heading that way.

  Michael Ondaatje (1943– )

  Bishop’s has always enjoyed an enviable reputation as a very convivial university, where the undergraduates have a very good time “on the mighty Massawippi shore,” as the school fight song has it. Special pride is taken in the brave deeds of the small school’s mighty football team. To this day my old newspaper friends Norman Webster and Michael Goldbloom, the current principal, live or die on fall weekends according to the fortunes of the gallant “Gaiters.”

  I worked with Michael Goldbloom, when he headed the Montreal Gazette, to bring out The Ice Storm by Mark Abley in 1998. Now, many years later, Michael recalls a much earlier literary incident in which his father, Victor, as a student at Lower Canada College, published something written by one of his teachers in his school magazine, thus becoming “Hugh MacLennan’s first publisher.” Michael kindly turned out to join the audience for my show, a model for university leaders across the country.

  But then, Bishop’s, founded by Bishop Jehoshaphat Mountain (Jehoshaphat!), has tended to have interesting leaders. It was once headed by my friend C.L.O. (“Oggie”) Glass, who as a young Navy officer fighting U-boats during the war got so plastered that when he was formally introduced to the Admiral at a dinner in Londonderry — a major moment in a young officer’s career — he leered winningly at him and asked, “May I have the pleashure of thish dansh?” before being hustled away.

  Ah, Bishop’s.

  Moving west from his beloved Eastern Townships, in Rivers of Canada Hugh discussed the Ottawa River, and the wolves that prowled the Quebec bank, in the Laurentians. Close to Ottawa! He even interviewed a guide who was hunted, with his fishing party, by a hungry pack, in August “within a hundred and twenty-five miles of Ottawa.”

  He went on, “It was like being hunted in a war, the way they came seemed so organized. I don’t mind saying I took them more seriously than my party did. How many there were I don’t know, but there were enough to have torn us to pieces. They were closing in.”

  He and his group of hunters kept their tractor going down the trail as fast as it could go. The wolves “were getting confident when we came around a bend in the trail and there was a light in an Indian’s cabin. I figure that light saved us, for they faded out.”

  “If I hadn’t had my rifle,” the man said after another such wolf encounter beside the Ottawa, “I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

  Impossible, you say. Well-read wolves know that academics agree that they never attack people. I discussed this recently with Harold Johnson, my Cree friend from Moose Jaw, who was raised and now lives much farther north, near La Ronge. Harold is one of the few people raised on a trapline who got a law degree from Harvard. He now works as a Crown prosecutor, when he’s not writing novels. And he knows about dogs. Growing up with them in the bush he knew that it was risky even to work with dogs when you were sick, and thus less of an alpha male. And he knows about wolves.

  Once, as a young man, he was walking alone in the bush in the early morning. The hair rose on the back of his neck, and he turned quickly and looked around. Nothing. He walked on, but the extra sense continued to prickle his neck. He whirled around and saw a wolf, flattened to the ground, stalking him. It was very big, and very close, and this was not an accidental encounter.

  Harold found himself engaged in a fight with the wolf, which made many darting attacks. Because of his work with dogs, he knew that fear was his greatest enemy, and anger the weapon he had to channel. So he raged and threw things and leaped at the wolf, but without effect. He tells me that it was only when he got so angry that he really decided that he was going to kill this damned wolf, and hurled a rock designed to do it, that the wolf got the message, magically, and abandoned its attack, and disappeared.

  I once wrote that every successful Canadian non-fiction boo
k must involve stories about bears, wolves, hockey players, and bush pilots. I enjoyed helping Bobby Orr sign books for his fans, with full, friendly eye contact. And the national mourning for Jean Béliveau sent me back to the copy of his autobiography signed to me, and reminded me how he once interrupted a Montreal Salon du Livre signing session to get up from his desk and cross the aisle to greet his delighted and honoured friend Doug.

  Three out of four so far. Watch this space.

  I’ve called this chapter “Hugh MacLennan’s Country” because Hugh wanted to take the country as his canvas. He loved to write about the whole country, and many Canadians enjoyed his essayist’s blend of history and geography and landscape and people. Naturally, enterprising publishers took advantage of that fact. For Centennial Year he was asked to write the text for the heavily illustrated (with superb photographs by John de Visser) The Colour of Canada. It sold so well that it was reprinted many times. Hundreds of thousands of copies of this classic book stand on Canadian bookshelves, possibly in yours.

  The same impulse produced a request for Hugh to write Rivers of Canada, which I’ve dipped into so often here. Hugh took its national scope so seriously that he travelled far and wide. In B.C., for example, he wandered beside the fearsome Fraser, its “furious frothing water scandalously yellow against the green,” on its lush banks. “It roars like an ocean storm, but ocean storms blow themselves out, while the Fraser’s roar is forever.” He stands on the bridge at Lytton, where the very large Thompson River meets the Fraser. “The Fraser,” he notes in amazement, “swallows the Thompson in less than a hundred yards.”

  To cover the country from sea to sea to sea he took a trip down the Mackenzie to the Beaufort Sea, conscious always of his great advance man, Alexander Mackenzie, the Nor’Wester who found his way to two great oceans. Hugh spent many days sailing on the Mackenzie, a river system so huge that “in flow it ranks seventh in the world. And in the western hemisphere is exceeded only by those mighty waterways, the Amazon and the Mississippi.” He recalls seeing the phenomenon of the Liard joining the main Mackenzie stream. He could see “the Liard’s brown water flowing alongside the left bank while the clean water keeps to the right. The two streams are distinguishable side by side for nearly two hundred miles below Fort Simpson.”

  This is the land where the bush pilot is important, but where the winter is king. And here, as promised, is a bush pilot story, one you will not soon forget. In Hugh’s words:

  When winter comes to this region, it does not come slowly, it strikes with a crack. I met a veteran of many years on the Mackenzie who told me that he once escaped having to spend an entire long winter in Aklavik by a matter of a minute. His was the last plane out, and as he stood on one of its pontoons filling his tank with gas, he suddenly noticed ice forming on the water. He threw the can away, jumped into the pilot’s seat without even taking the time to screw on the cap of the gas tank, gunned the plane, and took off. The thin ice was crackling about the pontoons before he became airborne, and as he made his circle to head south he saw the pack ice thrusting in, and the lagoon from which he had risen turn opaque as though the frost had cast a wand over it.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  IN THE MIDDLE OF CANADA

  Finding Ontario … Underground to Windsor … Alistair MacLeod’s City … A Sad Winter … Paul Martin on the Border … Nino Ricci’s Leamington … As Far South as California, a Little Chat … Sarnia Surprises … Dudley George and the Dark Legacy of Ipperwash … London, Our London … John Galt’s Guelph … The Convenient Tom King … The Niagara Frontier … St. Catharines and Richard B. Wright … Port Colborne Offers Canada’s Best

  * * *

  “As a publisher, what makes you decide to publish a manuscript that you read?” “Where is Canadian publishing heading?” “What’s it like, being married to Margaret Atwood?” And even, “What is your philosophy of life?”

  These are just a few of the questions that have been fired at me as I’ve roamed around Ontario promoting my book, and my travels have given me a rare chance to really get to know Ontario. The first lesson, of course, is that you can’t really get to know it. The province is so big, physically (with more than a million square kilometres of land, and countless shorelines, one of them fronting salt water), and its population (at over thirteen million) is so huge, that it’s best to regard it as more like a country than a province, and perhaps more like a continent than a country.

  The people in the province (few of whom use the word “Ontarian” with any real enthusiasm, unlike, for example, their “Albertan” cousins) are so varied in every way, including their lifestyle and living conditions, that nothing can safely be described as typical. It’s like trying to find something typical about Europe, where the variety in geography, in architecture, in language, and in lifestyle makes typical a needle hard to find in a haystack that includes the fiords of Norway, the boulevards of Paris, and the beaches of Crete.

  In earlier chapters I’ve dealt with downtown Toronto (and how typical is that of Ontario?), Northwestern Ontario, as represented by Thunder Bay and the Lake of the Woods country (where the same question applies), and Alice Munro Country, and its approaches. Now, in the next two chapters, in my tour of what I’ll call Central Ontario, I think you’ll find lots of fascinating people and places, some surprising history and geography, and some great books, authors, and stories. But typical?

  Consider this. How typical is Windsor, with its view across the Detroit River to the American towers to the north? How typical is Lakefield, with its ice-cream-licking tourists and cottagers swelling the little lakeside town every summer weekend? Or London, with its sober yellow-brick houses lining well-treed streets that contain a major university, in an old business centre with half a million people? Or, by way of contrast, how about the very modern Brock University, perched high on the Niagara Escarpment, above St. Catharines? Or Eganville, close to Foymount, the highest community in Eastern Ontario, with its amazing view up the Ottawa Valley and across the river into Quebec? Or low-lying but wealthy Burlington, placed right beside Lake Ontario at a point that makes it a suburb of Hamilton, or of Toronto, according to taste and commuter choices. Or Ottawa, or Uxbridge, or Kingston, or Barrie, or Flesherton, or Sarnia, or Thornbury, where the Beaver River flows into Georgian Bay? Ontario, a country all its own. And anything but typical.

  Jane and I drove on a fine fall day down Alistair MacLeod’s 401 (“If you are true to it, it will be true to you . . .”). We ticked off the literary references as we passed the turnoffs to Kitchener-Waterloo (and Alice Munro Country), and to Dutton (the setting for John Kenneth Galbraith’s farm memoir, The Scotch, including the famous line that dampened his teenage ardour, “Well, it’s your cow”), or to Thamesville, the boyhood home of Robertson Davies, and the setting for the early scenes in Fifth Business (before the plot snowballs to include the First World War and Dunstan Ramsay’s teaching career at Toronto’s “Colborne College”).

  Beyond Chatham we drive through rich, placid farmlands that might lead the lazy observer to think that nothing much happened here. But the place name North Buxton reminds us that this peaceful country was directly linked to a world of horror. For this was the end of the Underground Railroad.

  We all know that it wasn’t a conventional railroad. To keep everything secret they used a railroad code, although “the passengers” were actually runaway slaves. They were running away from the American Southern states where slavery was legal. “The passengers” were helped along their way by “conductors,” who were men or women, black or white (often Quakers or Methodists), but were united in the belief that slavery was evil, and were willing to take great risks to help people run away to freedom.

  It was a very risky business. The runaways spent every second of every hour under threat, hiding by day and stumbling through dark woods by night, avoiding farms and towns (dogs!), sheltering only in the safe barns and
houses that were pointed out to them. All this, for hundreds of miles, crossing rivers and swamps and hills and mountains, avoiding well-travelled roads all the way.

  To modern minds, it seems almost unbelievable that their travels had to be so secret, and were so dangerous. But to the Southern slave-owners it was an outrage that these valuable pieces of property took it into their heads to run away — in effect, to steal themselves — and this meant that the forces of law and order were on the owners’ side.

  So much money was involved — and the dangers to slave-owning plantations were so clear if slaves got away with running away — that the slave-owners set their whip-cracking overseers, or bounty hunters (and their bloodhounds), to pursue the runaways and bring them back. Not gently. And these rough men with whips and guns who were busy reclaiming “stolen property” were unlikely to be gentle with anyone they encountered by night assisting in this “theft.”

  Between 1840 and 1860 roughly 30,000 slaves — men, women, and children — took “the railroad” north to Canada, the Promised Land, where they would be free. In 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. in his Massey Lectures told his Canadian audience that slaves

  knew that far to the north a land existed where a fugitive slave, if he survived the horrors of the journey, could find freedom. The legendary underground railroad started in the south and ended in Canada. The freedom road links us together. Our spirituals, now so widely admired around the world, were often codes. We sang of “heaven” that awaited us and the slave masters listened in innocence, not realizing that we were not speaking of the hereafter. Heaven was the word for Canada and the Negro sang of the hope that his escape on the underground railroad would carry him there. One of our spirituals, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” in its disguised lyrics contained directions for escape. The gourd was the big dipper, and the North Star to which its handle pointed gave the celestial map that directed the flight to the Canadian border.