Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  Nice work, Doug. Or as Linwood Barclay’s wife would say, “You twit.”

  A sad Ottawa story for all book-lovers. Before the 2012 Writers’ Trust dinner I walked down Sussex Drive to the site of the old Nicholas Hoare bookshop. Before its shameless landlord — the National Capital Commission! — raised the rent and put it out of business, it used to be a fine, elegant store, so well-placed opposite the glass glory of the National Gallery and so spacious that I selected it regularly for launch parties and readings for books by important Ottawa authors like Jeffrey Simpson and Graham Fraser and Eddie Goldenberg. On my retirement Jane and I even held a farewell soiree there for our literary friends, with the help of the manager, David Dollin. I, like thousands of book-lovers, was devastated when the store closed.

  By happy contrast to this Ottawa disaster on Sussex Drive there is the thriving bookstore in little Arnprior. The morning after my time swanning around the Château Laurier as an honoured guest at Politics and the Pen, I was picked up at the hotel (after admiring the lobby’s Karsh photograph of Leacock in his garden in Orillia) and whisked an hour northwest to Arnprior. The whiskers were my old friends David Lewis Stein and his wife, Alison. Dave is famous as an author (whom I’m proud to have published), as an early Writers’ Union chair, and as a Toronto Star columnist who dressed like a Damon Runyon character, a fedora always perched on his “Stop the presses!” head. He was also famous as a man who really knew Toronto city politics, inside out, and was the ultimate street-wise, gravel-voiced, big-city guy. And now he has retired to Arnprior, a little town of about 8,000 in the Ottawa Valley, where Alison’s family has ancient links.

  How are they doing? Very well indeed, to judge from my happy stay with them at the big Victorian house that stands a three-minute stroll away from the distinctive Arnprior Museum, where Alison puts in volunteer time. Another fifty paces down the main street stands Gwen Storie’s inspiring bookstore. That evening the amazing Gwen and her staff rearranged the store to accommodate forty paying customers (fifteen dollars, which included a delicious snack in the bakery next door!) and I gave my show. We sold twenty copies! If you walk down the street in Arnprior, the odds that the first person you meet on the street has a copy of my book at home are pretty good.

  The more serious message here is that a good local bookstore can act as an important community centre — and I’m always glad to do whatever I can to help the Gwen Stories of this world, even avoiding puns to do it well.

  The morning after the Arnprior show, Dave and Alison fed me kippers, then took me on a sentimental journey to Renfrew. This was the town, eighty kilometres northwest of Ottawa, where Robertson Davies, born in 1913, spent what W.O. Mitchell called “the litmus years,” from 1919 to 1925. The town, a little larger than Arnprior, its rival to the east, had a huge influence on Davies during these formative years. As Judith Skelton Grant shows in her expert biography, Davies did not enjoy Renfrew, and he got his revenge with the picture he painted of Blairlogie in 1985’s What’s Bred in the Bone. I note in the paperback edition of my own book that R.D. wrote to his New York editor that he was finding the writing of the Blairlogie scenes “heavy and exhausting work. It has roots in my own childhood — in the emotions, not in the actualities — and it is painful to drag out of the past.” Even at the age of seventy, his feelings about Renfrew were so strong that he felt that he had to write “to get it out of my system.”

  In the novel he says, “It thought of itself as a thriving town, and for its inhabitants the navel of the universe.” (The physical metaphor could, I suppose, have been much worse.) He wrote about the town’s proud ignorance, and its exclusivity where newcomers were concerned. He commented specifically on the three-layer cake of its inhabitants, with the Scots on top, above the French, then with the newer, Polish immigrants at the bottom. I got a whiff of this on our Renfrew tour.

  We began with a visit to the McDougall Mill Museum, kindly opened up for us by the very knowledgeable Mr. Gilchrist. The museum itself is sturdily impressive, a thick-set stone building set beside a fast section of the Bonnechere River. Since Renfrew was at the heart of the timber trade, the museum is rich in examples of the tools involved in “hurling down the pine.” There are also many photographs of the local bands that must have entertained young Robbie Davies, and posters for the O’Brien Opera House, which we know he attended. For What’s Bred in the Bone he turned Senator O’Brien (who was in fact an important figure in the lumber trade that built London’s offices and houses, and in the development of hockey, since he was the man behind the Renfrew Millionaires) into “Senator McRory.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995)

  We noticed that the photos of the sports teams from the pre–First World War years all featured Scottish and Irish names. By the 1950s there was a fair sprinkling of Polish names on the teams. But I didn’t see any Batterinskis, like Felix, the Ottawa Valley hero of Roy MacGregor’s fine 1983 hockey novel, The Last Season.

  We tried to trace the three Davies houses in Renfrew. Of the first house Judith Skelton Grant writes that “the Davieses were dismayed to find that the house … arranged for them was in the Polish section of town.” We found the house on Cross Avenue, and I wandered around outside, taking in the stark brick exterior. As if on cue a young man came out to check the mailbox (with a Polish name) just by the front door. I greeted him with my usual charm. “Hi there! Did you know that a famous author once lived in this house?”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, his name was Robertson Davies, a famous Canadian writer. He lived right here when he was a boy, about a hundred years ago.”

  If I’d told him that birds sometimes landed on his roof his ­shrugging reaction would have been the same: “Whauuh,” followed by a determined return to the house and a loud, final slamming of the door.

  We found the old site of the Renfrew Mercury office, where young Robbie sometimes helped his father; at the age of nine he even wrote a review of a local event, where a lady performer must have been relieved to find that she had sung “very acceptably.” The newspaper office that made the Davies family prosperous is now a sporting goods store, right next door to the grand central post office on Raglan Street. We failed to find the second house, but did cross the dramatically swaying suspension bridge over the Bonnechere River that Robbie crossed every morning to get to school. And we did find the dramatic final Davies house (now a doctor’s surgery) in the best part of town, marking the rise of the Davies family throughout those Renfrew years.

  We didn’t knock on the doctor’s door. Although the friendly woman who runs the sporting goods store had heard of him.

  For eleven years the little Ottawa Valley town of Eganville has played host to the Bonnechere Authors Festival. The moving spirit (there is always a moving spirit for these things) is a Force of Nature called Doyne Ahearn. She contacts you, tells you just how remote her festival is (about five hours from Toronto) and how they can’t really afford to pay anything, but you can stay with her and Frank in their big log house and get to know the Ottawa Valley, including nearby Foymount, the highest inhabited town in Ontario.

  How can you say no?

  Well, I tried, just as others such as Nino Ricci before me had tried (until Doyne somehow arranged for a police driver to bring him from Toronto), but Doyne wore me down. Too busy for the summer of 2012? OK, we’ll put you down for 2013.

  So Jane and I planned an anti-clockwise sweep, first up to Peterborough, then to Marmora and the gold-rush country near Madoc, then via Bannockburn (in the summer of 2014 I was involved in organizing a 700th anniversary symposium in Toronto about this admirable battle) up to Bancroft, then sidling north and east to Cormac, near Eganville.

  Our arrival at the famous log cabin coincided with the descent of amazingly thick clouds of flies, but Doyne and Frank were there to greet us. Doyne is an imposing figure, as you’d expect, but her husband, Frank, is built along the lines of a butterfly, and se
emed in danger of being carried away by the swarms of insects. We were soon to learn that neither Doyne nor Frank should be considered a lightweight. They introduced us to the joys of “bug suits,” and we were able to go swimming off a raft moored in the bug-free middle of a lake, Lake Doyne. The raft, by the way, was reached by means of a circulating rope ferry system, the rope pulled by Jane or me as keen, bug-suited Charons.

  A fine dinner was followed by a tour of the Valley, far from the county seat of Renfrew. In Eganville we learned about “the Catholic side” of town, as it was in the old days (and as late as the 1920s Orange-Catholic hostilities were so fierce that the military came in “with cannon,” we were told, to keep the opponents to their own side of the Bonnechere River that divides the town, both physically and religiously). In these saner times we toured the fine old museum, and the library, which the Authors Festival helps to maintain.

  Late in the day “extreme weather” took over. Rain fell in sheets, thunder rolled, and lightning flashed. The pre-show dinner at the best restaurant in town was shaping up well, with our mouth-watering orders taken by the friendly waitress, when everything went black. The power was off.

  It stayed off, and dinner was cancelled, and we groped our way out. Showtime was approaching. Since my show was due to take place in a windowless church basement, the lack of power was fatal. For safety reasons we would not be allowed in the dark basement.

  With thirty minutes left before the show, it was time for plan B. I suggested that with the thunderstorm rain now gone we could bring chairs out to the parking lot and I could do the show there, in the open air. We had started to bring the chairs out, and then, ta-da, the lights went on … and, after some heart-stopping flickers, they stayed on.

  And the show went on! We all had fun, and a few books were sold. Doyne told me that we attracted the very first standing ovation the festival had seen in its eleven years; I could get to like the experience, especially when the reluctant Jane joins in. And I was very pleased to receive a fine original painting, entitled “The Storyteller”! Local delicacies made up a very welcome “gift pack.”

  When we got back to Doyne and Frank’s big log cabin, the power was off there, so we went quietly to bed. And the next day, after a lavish breakfast, we set off for the long ride through Algonquin Park, armed with Frank’s fascinating book on the subject, Algonquin Park: Through Time and Space. What a revelation! It turned out that our modest, self-effacing host, quietly supporting his wife as she ran the literary festival in fine style with lots of local help, was a PhD in astrophysics. Even better, he had turned his telescope upside down, and observed the world from space. Specifically, he became a world leader in adapting satellite images from space into a useful source of on-the-ground information. Looking at these Algonquin Park images, you’d like to see exactly where the hardwood trees are? OK, no problem. Here’s how. And so on. Amazing.

  As my father’s son, who grew up around sawmills, I found the Algonquin Park Logging Museum a constant delight. And then, after leaving the park, via Huntsville, Rosseau, and Foot’s Bay, we were back at beloved Loon Island, the cottage on Lake Joseph owned by our good friends Hope and Phil, who live next door. After four days of swimming (why do they put the navigation buoy we swim around farther out in the lake each year?), canoeing, rowing the skiff, cruising the lake admiring the moon and stars, and gathering buckets (oh, all right, cups) of the world’s best blueberries, it was time to head south to Barrie and Toronto, after almost 900 Ontario kilometres.

  On this occasion we didn’t head west to continue our tour of Ontario libraries, although later we had fun in Thornbury, and Collingwood, and even, thanks to our friends Barry Penhale and his Jane Gibson, on “the roof of Ontario” at Flesherton. But as usual, after Barrie we headed south down Highway 400, across the Holland Marsh.

  I thought of two things while crossing the Marsh. First, the phone call I took as I was sending Betty Kennedy’s 1979 book, Hurricane Hazel, to the printer. The man at the other end had a story that was, I said dismissively, simply too late to fit into the book … until he told me about being a kid in Holland Marsh when the hurricane raised the water so that his house floated away. In pitch darkness he and his parents and brothers and sisters spent hours squealing in terror as their house spun and whirled around, dipping and creaking, until finally it ran aground, miles away. I took his story down over the phone, and you’ll find it in the book.

  The second story is in the name, which has nothing to do with sturdy Dutch farmers, as most people suppose. I can’t go across the Holland Marsh without thinking of how it’s named after the surveyor general from 200 years ago, our old friend from the Niagara frontier, Samuel Johannes Holland. You’ll recall that his son fought a duel in Montreal to defend the family honour, and died with the duelling pistol presented to his family by General Wolfe falling from his hand.

  Fascinating history is all around us.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  GOOD TIMES IN THE MARITIMES

  Halifax, Warden of the North … From HMCS Sackville to Sackville … Three Cheers for Donald Jack … Acadian Adventures in Wolfville … From the Blomidon Inn to Blomidon … The MacLeods Are Everywhere … To Port Medway, and Beyond … Ernest Buckler and the Spine of Nova Scotia … Dancing on the Annapolis Basin Shore … Only One Adjective for Grand Manan … Across David Adams Richards’s New Brunswick … Stories of PEI, and Will of Green Gables … A Spring Tour of Universities … A Brian Mulroney Diversion … Silver Donald Is Solid Gold … Moncton and Northrop Frye

  * * *

  I once sailed into Halifax Harbour off the Atlantic Ocean on a bright sunny morning. Our Adventure Canada ship had just cruised out of the Arctic, all the way down the dramatic Labrador coast, with a side slip into some Newfoundland ports of call. As we moved west towards Halifax I was alone on deck, thinking about the millions of immigrants who first saw Canada, just like this, on their way to Pier 21, or to even earlier arrival points on this historic waterfront.

  As I was thinking these serious thoughts, the sky went dark. I whirled around, baffled by this change on a calm, sunny morning. The Queen Mary 2 had just glided to the east of us, blocking out the sun as she moved her ten-storey bulk swiftly past, to take her place as the biggest structure in the port of Halifax. The twice-yearly visit of the giant cruise ship is, in every sense, a huge event for Halifax. And I had just been an astounded witness to her smooth, silent arrival on the waterfront.

  Halifax was always built around its harbour. It was, for most of its life, a British naval base with a city attached. My authors Hugh MacLennan and Charles Ritchie have both written about their native city’s strange relationship with Britain, which made London seem closer than “Upper Canada.” Charles Stewart Almon Ritchie, the diplomat and diarist, knew all this in his bones; in a 2014 visit to the ancient central St. Paul’s Church I was pleased to discover the memorial plaque that was devoted to his Almon great-grandfather, a respected medical man in Halifax around 1800. And it was no accident that Hugh MacLennan, the author of Barometer Rising, chose to have his most famous author photo taken at the Citadel, looking down over the city and its harbour.

  I had visited Halifax many, many times, and on my 2011 promotional book tour I gave my show at the theatre in the lower level of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia on a Saturday night. The audience included the veteran publisher Jim Lorimer, who chuckled his way through my tales of publishing disasters. Along with his future wife, Ree, in the centre of the audience of fifty people sat none other than John Houston, the filmmaker son of my old igloo-dwelling friend James. You can imagine what it’s like to speak affectionately about an old friend, now gone, when his son is in the audience. But John knows how I feel: in the documentary he made about his father, he tricked me by asking, on camera, how I felt on hearing about his father’s death — and then played the endless seconds of silence as my face grew ever bleaker, in wordless sor
row.

  The next day I went down to the Halifax waterfront, admiring the historic corvette HMCS Sackville that’s tied up alongside as a floating museum. It’s a fine memorial to the Battle of the Atlantic, which was largely fought out of Halifax and St. John’s. The ship always draws me to it, reminding me that these U-boat hunters were surprisingly small, and in mid-Atlantic storms they “rolled like pigs,” but they won their part of the war, escorting the convoys through, and keeping Britain fed and supplied as she stood alone against Hitler.

  Another reason for being on the waterfront is that it was the location for Halifax’s Word on the Street Festival. I roamed around the tented areas, visiting publishers’ booths and meeting old friends like Goose Lane’s Suzanne Alexander and Lesley Choyce of Pottersfield Press, who now publishes Harold Horwood’s classic, Dancing on the Shore (1987). But my main role was to be the host/interviewer for two author events. I’m always glad to help out at any festival I attend, in any useful role — swabbing the decks, trimming the sails, or acting as the host or interviewer. In this case we were right out on a pier, and so close to a large luxury cruiser that we all had to speak up above the hum of the power link that kept the boat’s heart beating, and that, apparently, could not be silenced.

  This meant that the interviews (first with Nova Scotia’s Ami McKay, author of The Birth House and The Virgin Cure, and later with Marina Endicott from Alberta, whose most recent novels are The Little Shadows and Good to a Fault) had us arching like gospel singers at stand-up mikes at opposite sides of the stage. But they are both fine writers and impressive performers. And in both cases, our time on stage flew by, and I was able to escort them to long book-signing lineups right on schedule.