Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  Not content with that remarkable piece of public service, as I write, Philip is now the head of PEN Canada, demonstrating the legal mind at work as he summarizes situations very crisply and briefly. We’re lucky to have Philip in charge of this important group defending our rights to read and write in freedom, without, as one recent minister of justice, Vic Toews, scolded us, “being on the side of the child pornographers.” Alarmingly, Mr. Toews has since been appointed as a judge. Standing on guard for all of us, PEN Canada’s role is not just a formal one. I’m proud to be a member.

  Driving straight down to Port Medway reminded us yet again that somewhere along the line, the people planning Nova Scotia’s highways had made a bargain with the devil. “All right,” Old Nick said, “you’ve got a beautiful province, with lots of attractive little roads curling slowly around the coastline. If you really want to move people fast around the province, I’ll let you cut main highways straight through the bush, with nothing to see. Only when they get off the highways will drivers come across fine views, and houses, and towns, and real, live people. The highways will be people-moving tunnels, fast and ugly. OK?”

  So they made the bargain. The result is fast, boring driving on many of the highways, where the view of endless trees contrasts with the instant delight of the little roads as soon as you turn off, into the land of real Nova Scotians, the people who live in idyllic places like Chester and Mahone Bay and Lunenburg, and on and on.

  We drove across the LaHave River, until we could turn left off Highway 103 towards the ocean, and to downtown Port Medway. The village population now is only around 200, but the harbour recalls the days when it was such a big port for shipping timber that it boasted a customs house, for Heaven’s sake, and you could take a passage from Port Medway directly to Europe. As instructed, we took a right turn and drifted along the shore road, Long Cove Road, looking in vain for the street number for the cottage that was to be ours. We overshot and were heading back when we stopped to talk to a man wandering along the road that was full of late-afternoon sun, and blackberries, and the drowsy sound of bees in the salt air. He was a short, lively fellow in his seventies, and he wasn’t surprised to see us. In fact, he was just heading in to see Philip and Cynthia, at this place right here, and looking forward to meeting the visiting Gibsons.

  He was (it turned out) the famous American writer Calvin Trillin. Or “Bud,” as he became, as we mingled with Philip and Cynthia and the gang, including my old pals Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle (South Africa meets South Shore). Bud kept us intrigued by his theories about the eventual onset in men of the dreaded “DTS” — Diminishing Tush Syndrome — which seems to be, to hear him tell it, altering the medical landscape. Can cosmetic implants be far behind? And behind whom?

  Shrewd editors in New York had recently employed him to test the new “self-parking” car. As he told it, he had stopped the talented car next to a tight Manhattan parking spot, then barked out the magic word “Park!” Nothing happened. “Um, no, it takes a little more than that,” they had explained, and he was still disappointed by the car’s feeble response.

  We spent a blissful night in our private cottage (the distinguished food writer Cynthia’s genius as a hostess showed in a well-stocked kitchen that included — yes! — Solomon Gundy, local South Shore herring snacks for my breakfast), then went to check out the church where I was to give the show. The Old Meeting House dates from 1832, and is happily preserved by the income from the reading series. In the front entranceway we saw the photographs of visiting authors, like Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Lisa Moore, and George Elliott Clarke, plus husband-and-wife teams like Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding. While we were prowling around, our local contact, Bob Whitelaw, a casually dressed guy in his sixties, showed up by chance (“I saw the car, and thought that maybe it might be you”), and we made the technical plans for the evening show, where he would introduce me.

  It’s literally an old church, a meeting house with a high pulpit and a central aisle splitting the rows of pews stacked up to face each other. Instead of orating from on high, I decided to put the screen near the pulpit, and put myself right down on the floor, pacing the centre aisle. Risky, since at every moment I’d have my back to half of the audience, until (talking all the time) I made the slow climb up to the pulpit to tell my final W.O. Mitchell story. Would this work? I was very worried.

  But they were a notably friendly group, pleased to have me greet them at the door (“Hey, we should ask all our authors to do this!”), and as the show went on, with me pacing the centre aisle, turning constantly, it was clear that these village people in a little Nova Scotia church beside the salt water were genuinely interested in the stories of Canada’s best authors.

  The slow climb up to the pulpit, when it came time to speak about W.O. Mitchell, was a revelation. Every child raised in a church-going family wonders what it must be like to be the preacher, up there in the pulpit. (In fact, my very first public-speaking event was when I was selected from the Sunday School to read the Christmas Lesson. In true Presbyterian style, Dr. Bain introduced the ten-year-old me, and then cut me down to size by adding “And I hope he speaks up!”) Now, in the Old Meeting House, I was in the ancient pulpit, and all of the congregation’s faces were turned up towards me. Ah, so this is what it’s like! From this position you’re allowed — no, expected — to tell people how to live their lives.

  Later, at the volunteer fire hall across the way, while sandwiches were consumed, I got to chat with many in the congregation/audience as I signed their copies. Even better, at the end the delighted bookseller told me that I had sold more copies than any other speaker not named Gibson. Apparently, over the years of signings by all the distinguished readers, my total sales had been equalled only by my fellow clansman, Graeme Gibson. I was pleased.

  The next stop was Bridgewater, with a side trip to a party at Lunenburg given by my friend Kiloran German, whose father, Tony, wrote for me the history of the Canadian Navy, The Sea Is at Our Gates (1990). Lunenburg is one of my favourite towns. In Storytellers I recount a previous tour of the inner harbour by kayak during which I came upon the skulking Bluenose undergoing repairs, and gave her hull an encouraging prod with my paddle. It doesn’t seem to have worked, and the bills keep mounting.

  Sadly, the Houston Art Gallery, selling Inuit art, has now closed down. And our Bridgewater friend, Stephanie Tompkins, continues to scoff about how much worse the weather always is in misty Lunenburg. But, my goodness, it is a handsome little town, and it shelters one of Canada’s best investigative writers, my friend Michael Harris, who gave us the true story of the death of the cod fishery in his 1998 classic, Lament for an Ocean. (I told him, “What happened here is a great crime. We need a fine crime writer to explain it.” And Michael certainly delivered. In 2014, he delivered Party of One, an equally scathing look at Stephen Harper in power.)

  Our visit was hosted by the Bridgewater Public Library, and they had hoped that I could give the show in the new library building. But the usual construction delays occurred, so Jeff Mercer had to scramble to find a new venue. Fortunately, St. Mark’s Place, a richly converted church right on the river at Middle LaHave, proved to be a perfect location, where old friends from all over unexpectedly showed up. One had driven all the way from Cape Breton and another, fresh from Halifax, was the great Gaelic bard Lewis MacKinnon, a short, smiling fellow, shaped like a barrel of the best Scotch whisky.

  Here’s something that you perhaps didn’t know about literary Nova Scotia — the best Gaelic poetry in the world is being written there, today. For proof just look at my friend Lewis, the only man from outside Scotland ever to win the Scottish national literary “Mod” competition there. He’s a friend, and a former house guest of ours in Toronto when he won the award as “Canada’s Scot of the Year” in 2013 in recognition of his international Gaelic feat. A remarkable man representing a remarkable culture.r />
  That sunny evening in the former church they let me toll the bell, for fun (remembering Thomas Hood’s pun “They went and told the sexton, and / The sexton toll’d the bell”), and I hoped that the ringing bell might attract curious locals to the converted church. We did get a great crowd, but as I gave the show I had the heretical thought that the fine, airy space in the former church was perhaps working against me. The beauty of the redecorated spacious setting tended to draw the thoughts of the audience upward, away from my very earthly show. Just possibly these old church architects knew what they were doing. In any case, all of the attracted visitors helped to swell the attendance, and to swell the Bridgewater Library’s funds. No pirates made a threatening appearance up the LaHave River, so the treasure chest remained unburied.

  The next day, crossing the province, we angled from Bridgewater to the Annapolis Valley, via Highway 8 (and Maitland Bridge!), passing Kejimkujik National Park to come swooping down South Mountain into the Valley near Annapolis Royal. This is Ernest Buckler territory, of course: he lived in a farmhouse in Centrelea, just outside Bridgetown. Although I never knew him, I was well aware of the importance of The Mountain and the Valley (1952).

  I knew, too, of the unusual link between W.O Mitchell (1914–1998) and Buckler (1908–1984), his Nova Scotian counterpart and near contemporary. Bill Mitchell’s 1948 novel of the West, Who Has Seen the Wind, followed young Brian O’Connell growing up on the edge of the prairies, becoming aware of his family and friends and the Prairie people around them. The Mountain and the Valley follows the boy David Canaan as he turns into an articulate young man growing up in a close rural family. He feels different from his Annapolis Valley neighbours, yet wants to write about them, “the best people in the whole world.”

  Bill Mitchell, another small-town kid who, like Buckler, went on to do well at university studying philosophy, seemed to sense what the Dalhousie graduate was trying to do in his writing. So in his role as fiction editor at Maclean’s magazine he corresponded encouragingly with Buckler back on the Valley farm, taking on some of his short stories, and dispensing lots of friendly advice. His support was so strong, in fact, that the 2005 biography Mitchell says: “Bill continued promoting Buckler at Atlantic Monthly Press, and Buckler was ‘grateful’ as he wrote to a connection at Curtis Brown [literary agency] ‘to that wonderful guy and expert writer, W.O. Mitchell, who keeps up a sort of unobtrusive press-agentry for me whenever he gets a chance.’” After Mitchell told the editor Dudley Cloud about Buckler’s novel-in-progress, The Mountain and the Valley, “they made an offer for an option of $250.”

  Who knew that in the Annapolis Valley I would feel so close to my crackly voiced old friend, and to Weyburn and the flat, open prairie, otherwise so different in every way from the nearby mountains and enclosed valley near salt water? Is it fanciful to see Buckler’s novel as the eastern equivalent of Who Has Seen the Wind? Maybe, but its greatness was recognized proudly close to home. It was New Brunswick’s Alden Nowlan who called it simply “one of the great novels of the English language.”

  There are other similarities. Buckler thought that you could find the important things in life anywhere. He told Silver Donald Cameron, in Conversations with Canadian Novelists, that far from feeling out of the world, “I think in the Nova Scotia country, almost specifically in the country where I live, you get the universals more than you do almost anywhere else. I’ve found this a great sustenance. … You don’t need to budge from here to get the whole story.” Mitchell would have agreed.

  Buckler may have been shy, while Mitchell was certainly not, and towards the end of his life, according to his friend Greg Cook, he spent many days alone. But like any author he also loved recounting great reactions from his readers. Like this: “When The Mountain and the Valley came out I used to get letters saying, ‘This thing has meant a great deal to me,’ and of course that is the only kind of reward that you have. I think the nicest letter — well, the most amusing one — I ever had was from somebody in Cape Breton. Talk about succinctness: he wrote me, and he said, ‘I enjoyed your book very much. It was such clear print. Sincerely.’”

  “Annapolis, Annapolis! Oh yes, Annapolis must be defended: to be sure, Annapolis should be defended … Pray, where is Annapolis?” That’s the prime minister of Great Britain, the noble Duke of Newcastle, in 1758, showing his level of familiarity with London’s far-flung possessions overseas in Nova Scotia, even those named after a queen.

  In Annapolis Royal we roamed around the historic little town for old times’ sake (how many bookstores do you know where your friends also sold furs?) before heading south past the elegant old white-painted fort named after Queen Anne. Then we drove along the shore of the basin towards Digby. We had a dinner date with Harold Horwood’s family.

  Harold Horwood (1923–2006)

  In Founding the Writers’ Union of Canada, Andreas Schroeder ­marvels at Harold Horwood, who was “a phenomenon . . . He had this voice that cut, a really sharp voice that he made no effort to de-emphasize. When Harold talked, it always sounded as if you were being accused or your death sentence was being read.” In my chapter on Harold Horwood — the “neglected genius” — and in my show, I urge people to read his last book, Dancing on the Shore, about the natural world of the Annapolis Basin. At Upper Clements, right opposite Champlain’s original fort at Port Royal (you remember “The Order of Good Cheer,” and all that), Harold and his family bought the land, and by judicious planting and spreading natural fertilizers, and hard, imaginative work, transformed it into a sort of local Garden of Eden, bursting with healthy trees and shrubs and berry bushes, loud with the song of hundreds of birds, and blessed by the feet of visiting four-legged friends, while the warm waters of the basin teemed with schools of fish, and the graceful willets danced on the shore.

  I was looking forward to seeing how everything had developed since Harold’s death in 2006, and had been delighted to accept his widow Corky’s invitation to dinner, to join her and their son Andrew. I was amused to learn that Leah (the daughter of the man I had described as “a Viking”) had moved to Norway.

  But as I turned down off the road at Upper Clements, the lane seemed very narrow, the evergreen trees surprisingly thick. So thick that they seemed to crowd in on the car. Were we in the right driveway? We found the house, of course, and climbed out, eager to be shown around the Eden that I remembered.

  And it became clear that the last laugh belonged to Nature.

  Everything in the well-planted and well-fertilized ground had grown up. The old views were blocked, the sun no longer reached this garden, the trees here had overwhelmed this fence.

  Harold had written lovingly about “the great spruces that line the shore,” and told us about the aspens, maples, larches, hawthorns and birches that he tended. Even better, he listed the fruits provided by his apple trees and peach trees and so on, and the summer-long parade of pin cherries, black cherries, and chokecherries. Best of all, he wrote about the serviceberries on his land. “How much better is the Newfoundland name chuckly pear! Serviceberry indeed! And how much uglier the American name, shadbush. But whatever you call them, their blooming is a high point of the year. … I have never seen any forest anywhere more beautiful with bloom than the Annapolis woodlands in May during the brief flowering of the chuckly pears.”

  Whether you call them serviceberries, or juneberries, or (my preference) saskatoonberries, if you know the sweet purple fruit with the nutty little seed, you’ll understand Harold’s statement, “The chuckly pears were one of the attractions that brought us to Annapolis Basin.” (He even made wine out of the purple berries.) Now, on our visit in August, there is no sign of them. That was possibly just a seasonal matter. But, much worse, it was clear that everything was hopelessly overgrown, the crowded undergrowth turning brown for lack of sunlight.

  Corky, well into her eighties, was still an amazingly nimble guide as we roamed the steeply sloping prope
rty with Andrew, but it was clear that it was now too big a job for the two of them to keep this rampant growth in check. And everything was quiet. We were on the lookout, and the listen-out, for the birds that used to live there in such numbers. But all was very still. And Andrew sadly confirmed that the willets no longer came to enjoy dancing on the shore — or, as Harold put it, “dancing not only on the short salt grass that is covered monthly by the tide, but dancing in air, like butterflies, or salamanders wrapped in flame.”

  Harry Bruce has led a wonderfully productive life writing about his Maritime roots. He has done much more, of course, as his classic 2009 book for me, Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers, demonstrates, as it reveals the superstitious ways writers throughout time have worked to keep the magic supply of words coming. But the 1977 book he produced, Lifeline (on the ferries that ply the Maritimes shores), shows that he realizes just how central these ferries are to life in this part of the world. Yarmouth, its ferry to Bar Harbour temporarily suspended, learns this, in painful daily lessons. By contrast, Digby, at the entrance to the Annapolis Basin, is a prosperous port town, thanks to the ferry right across the Bay of Fundy to Saint John.