Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  My dad and I had a routine. When we sat down at the dinette for dinner, I’d say to him, “What have you got to tell me today?” He’d have to come up with something to explain to me: how volcanoes were created, for example, or the order of the planets, or how in World War I soldiers had to pee in their handkerchiefs and then breathe through them to survive poison gas attacks. He was pretty good at it. I remember only once or twice when he seemed too tired to get into it. He did it anyway, though: he told me about being twelve and seeing a boy on a bicycle get hit by a truck. The vehicle ran over the boy’s head, causing it to split open like a melon. He told me about history, and about Greek mythology. That would have been my first invitation to consider the possible interaction between the Divine and the human day-to-day.

  I was fed some Bible-derived stuff too, pretty much in the same tone as that in which the Greek myths were presented. Mom and Dad were trying hard to be believers, I think he more than she. The grandmothers, especially my dad’s mom, Mayme, and her sister Margaret, aka Auntie, were serious devotees of the United Church of Canada. So we went sometimes.

  Somehow I missed being baptized. It wasn’t till after my brother Don was born that they got around to that.

  Another humiliation and cause for resentment: me, in the summer I was five, having to walk the length of the church aisle at Southminster United next to my squalling infant brother, to have done to me what they did to babies! If I’d been braver, these outrages would surely have driven me to a life of crime.

  During those preschool years I had a recurring dream in which a seagull flew into our apartment. It did nothing but be a big white bird flying around, but it was utterly terrifying. I woke up screaming and sweating from that one every time. Of course, there were also monsters under the bed. I always slept with my little black tin revolver and a rubber knife under my pillow.

  I found it impossible to hide embarrassment or guilt. I had a face that would turn red at the slightest provocation. Whenever I was active, it would glow in a way that prompted Grandma to offer an aside to Mom: “Poor Bruce.” She figured I had high blood pressure at the age of four or five, but I didn’t. I was, however, born with a mild case of spina bifida, resulting in a right leg that was an inch and a half shorter than the left, as well as a deformed pelvis and hammertoes on the corresponding foot.

  For a brief period I wore metal braces on my lower legs. The difference in leg length was minor and no one else seemed to notice, but I have always been acutely aware of it—especially as a kid, and particularly when wearing the braces. I maintain a vivid memory of walking along Second Avenue in Ottawa wearing short pants and being very self-conscious of the braces, metal devices with leather around the top and bottom that clamped onto my legs, holding my ankles straight. Later my parents told me it was a false memory—that I was made to wear a brace only on the right leg, and only when I went to bed at night—but the picture remains. My aunt Jean, Dad’s sister-in-law, remembers me going around in the daytime with a brace on each leg.

  My left foot grew to be almost two sizes larger than my right, which I could see very well, right down to the bones, through the fluoroscope on visits to the shoe store. Radiation was popular in the fifties. One hundred roentgens per minute was a small price to pay for an accurate fit. (Some fluoroscopes reportedly delivered more than 350 roentgens per minute.) Dad was a radiologist, so he probably kept us from spending too much time on the fluoroscope.

  Aside: There’s a good chance he was one of the few people in North America who read the 1949 paper on fluoroscopes by Louis Hempelmann, M.D. Hempelmann had previously worked with the health division of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. In his paper, he said the unsupervised use of low-voltage fluoroscopes would most likely result in the malformation of children’s feet, as well as skin damage in adults and damage to blood-forming tissues of store employees. What scientists hadn’t yet discovered is that the fluoroscope also contributed significantly to breast cancer, as mothers hovered near children who gleefully pushed the button over and over to repeat the exposure.

  Back then the Ottawa River ran wide with enormous log booms. Lumbermen in spiked boots skipped across the bobbing trunks, jabbing them with long pikes to keep them from jamming. The E. B. Eddy Paper Co. sat suspended in spray on an island in the rapids between Ontario and Quebec, and now and then, when the wind was right, the Ottawa air reeked with sulphur fumes from the pulp mills downriver at Thurso. During the hot summers people packed popular swimming beaches on the Ontario side, at Britannia and Norway Bay, but we seldom went to them. Mom and Dad preferred a spot on the Rideau River near Carleton University, a place called Hog’s Back that offered a series of pools above a narrow gorge through which the river churned and foamed. A trip there was always accompanied by admonishments to stay away from the outflow of the pools.

  Big Timber has thrived along the Ottawa River for centuries—ever since Canada began supplying logs to Great Britain during England’s twenty-two-year war against France, which ended with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. The logging industry is still huge in Canada, which holds 10 percent of the world’s forests, and clear-cutting remains the rage.

  According to National Geographic, Canada is home to “the largest intact forest on earth. [The forest] supports 25 percent of the world’s wetlands, as well as millions of pristine lakes and thousands of free-flowing rivers. It contains 197 million acres of surface fresh water, an area twice the size of California. It harbors more surface area of fresh, clean water than any other ecosystem on earth.” All of which remains true, for now. Canada’s national and provincial governments have not shown much propensity for protecting increasingly important resources. Our 1.2 million square miles of bush have been allowed to become a net contributor to climate-altering greenhouse gasses.

  Of course, when I was a child, “climate change” meant that the first nip of fall was drifting down from Hudson Bay, or spring buds were blinking from the seasonally bare sugar maples and magnificent elms near our home. Our elders believed the forest to be so vast that it would last forever. Mom’s father, Arthur Graham, was, in the terms of the day, a protector of the forest. He served as district fire inspector for the Canadian Pacific Railway between Montreal and Ottawa during the early twentieth century, and later became chief fire inspector for the Lower Ottawa Forest Protective Association. The idea was to guard forests against fire so they could later be cut down for industrial uses. In 1915 the Commission of Conservation/Committee on Forests issued a report, Forest Protection in Canada, with such chapters as “Financial Losses by Forest Fires” and “Great Loss of Stumpage Values,” in which Grandpa’s efforts were commended.

  Seventy-three years later, in Toronto, I wrote “If a Tree Falls,” a lament for forest loss worldwide. The song is mostly focused on the rapid destruction of tropical rain forests, but it was clear by then that temperate and boreal forests—in Canada and around the world—were also falling at rates that might be described as biblical. In a 2008 interview the great Canadian scholar and environmental activist David Suzuki said that “If a Tree Falls” was one of his two favourite songs; he cried when he heard it. (The other was “Beds Are Burning,” by Midnight Oil. Good company.)

  I wonder what Grandpa Graham would think of my tree song. Would he lament or applaud the current conditions of North American forests? When he retired, Grandpa and my grandmother, Eleanor, moved onto a farm near Chelsea, Quebec, just beyond what was then the outskirts of Ottawa/Hull, where they raised much of their own food and produced maple syrup and soap. But it wasn’t long before the agency charged with overseeing relations between the federal government and the City of Ottawa expropriated the farm as part of a forward-looking but poorly planned scheme to create a greenbelt around the city. My grandparents had their farm taken from them in an act of eminent domain.

  They loved that farm. It was their dream to retire there. I was nine years old, I think, when they were forced out, and I remember the event as sad and a
little confusing. The place left a big impression on me: Grandma in the kitchen doing something at the sink; the cats meowing and rubbing themselves on her legs, which caused groans from my mother, who was always nervous about cats; Tom the Hired Man collecting eggs in the henhouse; Grandpa plowing the field with his Massey Ferguson tractor. I can still see someone milking Daisy Mae the cow, white froth splashing into a pail below pumping fists; Dad and Grandpa going to work repairing the little dam that created a trout pond in the creek flowing between the barnyard and the bush. In high summer Grandpa took me walking through the woods, and I got lessons in how to tell a red pine from a white pine or jack pine by the number of needles in a cluster.

  In a favourite memory it’s early spring and Dot, the big black horse, is hitched to the sleigh. We plod through deep snow, collecting sap from buckets hung on spigots hammered into the sugar maples. The jugs of sap are hauled to the sap house, a small structure in the bush behind the main house, where it gets poured into an oversized fire-heated vat. The pale brown sap bubbles and darkens, morphing into that most Canadian of condiments, maple syrup. (No offense to Vermont’s maple syrup producers.) Grandma Graham would sometimes bake us a maple syrup pie.

  Halfway through my kindergarten year we moved again, to the Westboro neighbourhood. Our house, at 483 Highland Avenue, was a two-storey brick structure built in, I’m guessing, the twenties. There was a room in the basement that had been a coal cellar, and another small cement-walled space that had seen service as a cold storage, which I got to set up as a “hideout.” The house stood on a double lot, the other half of which was lawn, with two or three tall spruces and a pergola with seats, mostly hidden from the street by the trees. We were less than a mile from the river, which from there flowed southeast to the St. Lawrence and the work in progress that was the St. Lawrence Seaway.

  The Ottawa forms the boundary between the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and between the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau, which until recently was known as Hull. Just north of the urban zone, which today holds more than one million souls, the landscape transforms quickly into the largely unpopulated Canadian Shield, or Laurentian Plateau, a vast expanse of forest and rock that surrounds Hudson Bay and extends into the northeastern United States. As a child and teenager I enjoyed many adventures in this wildland. My parents had a cottage on Grand Lake, north of town, which was one lake over—in a land of thousands of lakes—from the cottage my grandparents had acquired on MacGregor Lake, which took the place of their expropriated farm.

  For several years I attended a month-long summer camp in Algonquin Park, about a hundred miles from Ottawa, with as much as two weeks of it spent canoeing through a wilderness of rock, water, and evergreens. We kept the company of bears and otters, raccoons, deer, chipmunks, bass and sunfish, bloodsuckers, woodpeckers, raptors, and ravens. It was in Canadian Shield country that I learned to love the peace and expansiveness of the world as it was made. I have lived a mostly urban life, but the nearby wilderness fixed itself in my brain as the essence of how things should be. When I think of “nature,” I think of the Canadian Shield, which returns me to a sense of freedom of spirit. When I am confronted by the degradation of our surroundings, I feel that freedom being threatened, eroded.

  Love of the wilderness, love of knowledge . . . there was never much talk about love of each other. My dad, Doug, and my mom, Lois, expressed very little deep feeling while raising me and my younger brothers, Don and John, other than what could come through laughter. Love was present, certainly, but was never stated and rarely shown. My parents expressed the normal amount of anger at inappropriate behaviour on our part, but never at one another. They never kissed in front of us, not more than a peck anyway, and never embraced. When my grandfather, Arthur, died in 1961, my dad hugged my mom. She then ran upstairs crying. That was the most emotion I saw out of either of my parents growing up.

  Aside: I don’t remember hearing the word “love” in a family context until I was nineteen, and then only through circumstance. I was in music school in Boston. I met a friend of a roommate, recently back from the war in Vietnam, who was planning on spending the summer running guns from Central America to Cuba. He needed someone to watch his back and offered me the job. I thought about it. I think he became interested in me because the roommate told him I was in the habit of going for long walks late at night, haunting the alleys with the rats and the other skulkers, armed with a bayonet in case of trouble. My lack of training in anything martial was on a par with the would-be gunrunner’s lousy judgment. I declined. When my dad came to Boston to drive me home for summer break, I told him about the job. He was shocked to hear of the offer and appalled that I would consider accepting it. “What do you care what I do?” I said, filled with both indignation and anger—emotions with which I was on intimate terms. Dad stared forward and faltered, stumbling on his words. “A father loves his son,” he said. Never had he uttered anything like this in my hearing. He didn’t even know how to say it. I was stunned. I had no way to express how deeply moved I was, how bittersweet the feeling. We drove on in silence.

  Ours was a secular household, in spite of the exposure we all had to the surface ideals and imagery of Christianity. We went to church on the Sundays when we weren’t at the cottage or skiing, because that’s what was expected of us. This was the fifties. There was a need to observe the social norms to keep people from calling you a Communist. Canada didn’t suffer the same problems as the United States did—lives and careers ruined, friends and family ratting each other out even when no actual rat was to be found—but similar sentiments infiltrated our culture. We had no counterpart for the McCarthy witch hunts, but it was not wise to be different. We went to church partly out of concern for that convention, but also because Auntie would have been upset if we didn’t attend. It was a conservative time.

  Most church experiences during my youth were simply endured. My parents provided crayons and paper to keep me quiet during sermons. Some years later—I may have been ten or eleven years old—I voluntarily eschewed the crayons and actually listened to the sermon, and a lightbulb went on. What’s this? Something interesting? I don’t remember what the minister was saying, but he was nailing something. For the first time I realized that they actually talked about real stuff during the sermons. This newfound interest, however, was brief. It wasn’t long before I was a preteen joining other kids spending our collection money on candy at the corner store instead of depositing it into the plate.

  Southminster United Church was part of the United Church of Canada, which was created in 1925 out of three Protestant denominations: Methodist, Congregationalist, and two-thirds of the existing Presbyterian churches. This “amalgamation” was officially sanctified by an act of Parliament, a union of church and state that our southern neighbours—except, of course, America’s growing class of reactionary fundamentalists—might frown upon. Today the United Church of Canada is the largest Protestant denomination in the country, though these days attendance is down about 50 percent from a high of 1.1 million in 1965. In those years the United Church accentuated the “protest” in Protestant, and today the church continues to pursue programs that address several critical social and environmental issues, including resource extraction, Indian residential schools, and globalization.

  Of course these concerns were absent, from the public radar at least, in 1950, when at the age of five I was finally baptized. What did happen that year was that the United Church of Canada became the first major denomination to eschew the “doctrine of inherent immortality.” No longer would parishioners be required to exile nonbelievers to a place of “eternal torture and punishment” for their “failure to accept Christ.” Thank God! That day, though, when I was marched down the aisle along with my infant brother, Don, I felt thoroughly tortured and punished. I didn’t like attention anyway, except on my own terms. I still don’t. Even positive attention can be oppressive. Early in my solo music career, I had to affect a disdain for audiences in order to make mysel
f get up onstage and perform without being overcome with nerves. Fortunately, this dance between alienation and the need to be loved in order to connect with my audience only lasted about thirty years.

  When we moved to Ottawa we settled into an apartment on Sunnyside Avenue, in the area called Ottawa South. Halfway through my kindergarten year we moved again, to the west end, and I had to switch schools, which meant reliving the feeling of alienation I’d had a half-year earlier. I remained an outsider, the shy kid with a lopsided walk. Though it probably wasn’t true, I felt like everyone was always staring at me. I was among strangers in a strange place, a gnawing discomfort I have never shaken. Throughout my young childhood, though I played with other kids, I remained mostly a loner, an introvert. School report cards contained observations like “Bruce would be a good student if he would just stop daydreaming.” I had a gift for constructing alternate realities: one that dealt with the external world, and another that was all my own. They became so sharply divided that often my day-to-day self didn’t know what my inner self was doing. Even so, the world in my head was vivid to me, despite, or perhaps because of, its hidden chambers and secret stairways.

  Music continued to creep in. In grade three the school held involuntary auditions for the choir. The woman in charge of the choir program visited every classroom. She and my teacher, Miss Beauchamp, walked up and down the aisles while the class sang, stopping next to each of us to listen and judge whether we qualified for the job. I sang terribly on purpose. No way was I going to be in that choir. I guess I overdid it. My deliberately out-of-tune voice took on a caterwauling tone reminiscent of Jerry Lewis. That got me in trouble, and I had to write lines. At least I was off the hook. (A greater lesson I learned from Miss Beauchamp was that a “radical” is a person who addresses social problems at their root, and she cited Pete Seeger as one of North America’s great radicals. More than fifty years later, in 2009, I would be honoured to sing at Seeger’s ninetieth birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in New York.)