Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  Then came December 13, 1979. That day I had lunch in the parliamentary restaurant with Don Mazankowski, then minister of Transport and a man widely respected for his unshakeable good nature and personal integrity. Mazankowski told me the government was heading for a vote that night on Finance Minister John Crosbie’s budget. This short-lived document was an early effort at deficit-reduction and might have saved Canadians considerable misery in future years, but it was hugely unpopular. If he wanted to, Maz said, Clark could dodge the confidence vote, but the government intended to allow itself to be defeated. I was dumbfounded. The Liberals were running high in the polls in Quebec and Ontario and the Conservatives’ gambit seemed suicidal. Maz appeared to doubt the wisdom of the decision, but he was nothing if not loyal. Clark’s brain trust apparently judged the polls wrongly and believed they could beat the Liberals and win a solid majority.

  That night they were defeated on a budget vote in a raucous Commons session. Clark’s many detractors claimed he lost because he couldn’t count, but it was worse than that. Clark and his circle knew they would go down and they let it happen. Ironically, one of the least arrogant men I ever met in politics was defeated by his own hubris.

  Equally ironic were the repercussions for the country, for without the Conservatives’ miscalculation, Trudeau would never have had a chance to return to power. Most people forget that Trudeau had announced his resignation as leader and had no intention of returning. After the Commons defeat of the Conservatives, Keith Davey went to Trudeau on bended knee and begged him to stay on as leader for one more trip to the polls.

  I spent every moment of the 1980 campaign with Clark, a heartbreaking exercise that went from bad to worse. The reporters travelling with him, including me, taunted him unmercifully. Certain of Clark’s qualities had become fixations in the minds of his travelling press, and we sought out comments or situations that fitted those and made for an easily understandable story. Unfortunately, he helped us out. We all had a field day when he made a speech in Prince Edward Island—“Spud Island”— about “potato power.” Small errors or gaffes that would have been ignored elsewhere were magnified and given far more space in the narrative than they deserved. Meantime, Trudeau’s return to the field was warmly welcomed and on his plane a largely adoring press crowd allowed him a comparatively free ride. It didn’t hurt that some of Trudeau’s key aides were literally in bed with principal reporters.

  As the Clark campaign gradually slid off the rails, an ugly mood took hold. Near the end, on one late-night flight from Halifax to Vancouver, the press corps bottomed out. We had loaded up with lobsters and wine before leaving, and within a few hours everyone was roaring drunk. The floor of the plane was littered with empty bottles and lobster shells crunched under foot. At one point, a reporter forced his attentions on an airline hostess in her compartment in the back. Two of us had to drag him off the distraught woman. She was allowed to leave the campaign plane crew, but no one ever disciplined the journalist.

  In an all-too-familiar example of Tory infighting, even Clark’s allies in the provinces turned against him. On a visit to the Ontario premier, Bill Davis, Clark’s aides tried desperately to persuade us that the two leaders were equals. But one of the premier’s top aides had been assigned to tell us privately in what low esteem Clark was actually held by the Conservative government of the country’s largest province. They would, he indicated, even welcome a return of the Liberals to power. I spent a whole night drinking with Southam News columnist Charles Lynch and the New Brunswick premier, Dick Hatfield. Hatfield regaled us with stories of how the party intended to “put Clark on the cross and crucify him” after he lost the election.

  The nadir was Clark’s interview in Vancouver with the redoubtable talk-show host Jack Webster. In his rough Scottish brogue, Webster started the interview by stating flatly, “Yer finished, Joe Clark. Yer finished and ya know it.” It was, in a sense, a moment of truth. Anyone on the bus who might have been uncertain about the election outcome was uncertain no longer. From then on, the accepted wisdom was that we were travelling with the loser.

  On the morning of February 18, the last event of the Clark campaign took place on top of the CN Tower in Toronto. As a magnificent sun rose over Lake Ontario, a girl sang the most popular song from the musical Annie. The words were perfect: “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow ...” Maureen McTeer began to cry, Joe Clark’s eyes were wet, and most of their hard-core supporters were choked with emotion. We flew that day to Clark’s Alberta riding for the election night results. I told our viewers that Clark had been graceful in defeat. More than that, I had never seen him display bitterness or anger or self-pity throughout the whole ordeal.

  I did my best to cover Joe Clark and his short-lived government carefully and fairly. But thanks to my well-known Liberal connections, it became a delicate matter for me to be critical of Joe without the appearance of bias. My canoe tripping with Trudeau the summer before had drawn attention from the press gallery and among political insiders, and even though I would have had a front-row seat with the new administration, my credibility with viewers had been compromised. Following the 1980 election, Don Cameron, who had returned as the undisputed czar of CTV’s news department, and I agreed that I should move to Washington for a period of political delousing. My exile lasted almost a decade.

  Before leaving Canada, I wanted to make a trip back to Prince Rupert to see Mom. During our brief visit near the end of the 1980 election campaign, she had seemed unsettled, but there was no time to investigate. In fact, it was worse than I had imagined. Her beloved Cliff, the only man she had ever loved, had left her for a younger woman. They lived nearby, so Mom could not avoid them and every encounter broke her heart a little more. His abandonment reinforced her already-low self-esteem, and she sought comfort in the bottle.

  On the telephone, Mom’s distress was clear. At times her conversation was almost incoherent or interrupted by long pauses. Sometimes I would hear a dish or a glass break. She lied about drinking, claiming only to be tired.

  Cliff had sold the taxi business that Mom built up over twenty-five years, and their home as well. She received only a small share of the house proceeds and nothing from the sale of their business. I was furious and wanted her to take him to court. Even after he left town, she said she couldn’t do it; she loved him still.

  Mom took a job running a seedy motel on the edge of town, the Totem Lodge, where she stripped the beds, did the cleaning, and worked the front desk day and night for a rough clientele. She kept a small .22 calibre Harrington & Richardson revolver in the desk drawer. More than once when a rowdy gang of road workers was tearing a room apart, Mom found comfort in knowing the revolver was handy. She turned the motel into a money-making operation for the owners, who had the decency to give her a large cash settlement when she left the place a decade later.

  Throughout these years she sank into depression more easily and drank more heavily. She had only short-lived romantic liaisons and must have suffered terrible loneliness, but she would not let on, nor would she leave Rupert. A thousand times she assured me she was okay and promised to stay on the wagon. I knew better, but it was what I wanted to believe.

  4

  INTO THE CANOES

  In 1973, friends in the Yukon had invited me to join them in a month-long expedition along the Trail of ’98 on the seventy-fifth anniversary of that famous trek. The route took us hiking across the Coast Mountains along the historic Gold Rush Trail, over the Chilkoot Pass, and then north by canoe from Lake Bennett at the headwaters of the Yukon River to Dawson, the city of gold. The paddling on this slow-moving river was relatively easy for the novices in the party, of which I was one.

  At Hootalinqua, a camp spot along the river, I slept in the open under a canopy of stars so dazzling I might have been gazing through an observatory telescope. It seemed every star in the cosmos was suspended overhead, clear and distinct, a sight to send the spirit soaring. The expanding universe must be one of hum
ankind’s most profound discoveries. If the universe is not static, then how did it begin? And does not everything that is set in motion have to come to an end? As these thoughts played out in my mind, some lighting man in the sky switched on the northern lights, aurora borealis. Better than Oscar Night in Los Angeles, they were nature’s searchlights, criss-crossing each other and beaming up into the infinity of the heavens.

  The experience of that trip was transcendent, and so powerful that it started a network of friends and me on a lifetime of wilderness travel by canoe. I relished the escape from the weight of workday routine and was lured into unknown terrain where the outcome of the journey could never be fully predicted. Over three decades, we ventured out to some of the most remote places on the continent, paddling sections of every major watershed from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Drawn ever farther north while we grew in skill and experience, we were eventually stopped only by the end of open water at the top of the world. We made the first descents in modern times of seven Arctic rivers, including the Ruggles on Ellesmere Island, said to be the world’s most northerly navigable river. In Alaska we shot down the Noatak, the last major watercourse before the continent ends. Other years we paddled through swimming herds of migrating caribou and alongside pods of whales and curious grey seals, their heads bobbing up from the waves to look us over. All this we did before the recent boom in ecotourism and before magazines like Outside and Canadian Geographic made such adventures popular and commonplace.

  These journeys lay in the future when I returned to Toronto from the exhilaration of the Yukon in August 1973. I soon found a kindred spirit in CBC executive producer Tim Kotcheff. Though I had moved to CTV, making us professional competitors, we remained good friends. Tim was a fisherman and experienced camper, neither of which I could claim to be, but we had both read about the then remote and much-fabled Nahanni River and we agreed to canoe it together. We trained hard, devoting months to canoeing and map-reading courses and practising on the French and Magnetawan rivers in Ontario. We would run the rapids, then drag our canoes back upriver to run them again, dumping on purpose until we were no longer terrified of the churning currents. In 1974, we set out for the Northwest Territories and the Nahanni.

  Nowadays, much of the Nahanni River is a National Park Reserve, and so heavily travelled that camp spots must be booked in advance. But when Tim and I first visited, it was the wildest of untouched rivers. The Nahanni rises in the Mackenzie Mountains near the border between the Northwest Territories and the Yukon in an area never flattened by the ancient glaciers. The river has worn into the rock for thousands of years, forming canyon walls that in places tower 1200 metres straight up and justify the reputation of that part of the river’s course as the Grand Canyon of Canada. As it races southeast toward its confluence with the Laird River, the Nahanni picks up speed and volume. Just past the halfway point, it crashes over spectacular Victoria Falls, twice the height of Niagara.

  Legend had rendered the Nahanni full of mystery, with tales of the notorious Headless Valley and warnings of dangerous, thick mists that shrouded its limestone canyons. We decided to paddle the lower stretch where the river was fast and cold with a few rapids that were tricky dumpers. We were frankly nervous about doing it alone. Grizzlies abounded, and the RCMP detachment in Watson Lake advised us to take a weapon when we checked in with them in advance of our expedition.

  Before breaking camp one morning, Tim and I decided to see if we could actually hit anything with my old Colt .45 revolver. We blasted away for a while with practice shots, and then packed up hurriedly as a heavy rain rolled in. Rather than stow the revolver with my gear in the bottom of our canoe as usual, I shoved it into a holster under my waterproof poncho. Tim and I wasted no time in hitting the fast current.

  Late that afternoon, we were surprised to see a wisp of smoke in the distance and a prospectors’ tent pitched just above the riverbank. Two dishevelled and rather rough-looking figures waved to get our attention. They introduced themselves as prospectors, searching for the reputed lost gold seam that Indians claimed lay waiting up the Flat River, a tributary of the Nahanni. They were almost out of food, they told us. We had plenty; in fact, we were very clearly overloaded with supplies. I spotted a shotgun by the tent belonging to the prospectors and thought they should be able to hunt at least, but we handed over a five-pound can of chicken. The bald, talkative one gave us a wide grin that revealed a missing tooth. The other spoke little, but stared hard at our high-detail aerial survey maps. They had never seen charts like these. It occurred to me that the maps might arouse suspicion that we too were gold seekers.

  Tim and I were about to take our leave when the bald fellow invited us to see the remains of a cabin built by R.M. Patterson, author of the classic work on the South Nahanni, The Dangerous River. They said it was only a short walk into the bush. After twenty minutes of trudging through the rain-soaked, murky forest, I began to feel uneasy. I have always had an overactive imagination, so perhaps I was mistaken that every time I tried to drop back to the end of the line, one of the men found a pretense to wait me out. Both carried large sheath knives. As the walk continued, we all fell silent, stomping through the thick bush. I put my hands under my poncho for warmth and unexpectedly found the pistol grip.

  Finally the leader stopped and turned toward us. So did the one behind me. For a few seconds no one moved or spoke, yet in that moment of suspended time, I felt a frisson of genuine fear. I slipped my finger inside the trigger guard. Then the tension suddenly broke as one of the fellows pointed to a pile of logs, the remains of Patterson’s cabin. I felt ridiculous about it later; as a rule, I am repelled by confrontation or violence. Yet I knew for certain I would have shot the first one who pulled a knife. Were the poor fellows showing a courtesy to unexpected visitors or did they change their murderous minds at the last minute? I’m still not sure.

  Over the course of this trip and others, Tim and I learned our strengths and weaknesses as a paddling duo. Chiefly we learned that when the course of the river dropped out of sight, as if falling off the end of the earth, the rapids ahead had to be approached with respect. Some close calls brought on the slow realization that to paddle as a twosome was foolhardy: No help would be available if we capsized in those icy waters. Moreover, forced into such close company for weeks on end, we sometimes grew testy. Arguments were few but inevitable. There was no one else to mediate, no one else with whom we could blow off steam.

  This was never more apparent than during a long duet down the Pelly River in the Yukon in 1975. After surviving a confusing rapid, Tim and I disagreed loudly over who was to blame for almost wrapping our canoe around a rock. Anger collapsed into sullen silence. Making camp by a desolate, muddy, and mosquito-infested riverbank, I rejected Tim’s suggestion that the boat be brought up fifty yards into our campsite. I retain an image of Tim looking like Humphrey Bogart in a scene from The African Queen as, knee-deep in mud and with the bow rope wrapped around his shoulder, he dragged the leaden canoe up an incline into camp while I sat sipping a glass of overproof rum.

  The silence continued on the river the next day and was finally broken when Tim spoke up. “You know what?”

  I was glad the dispute seemed behind us and replied, “No, what?”

  “You are an asshole,” he announced, “and more than that, everyone in Toronto thinks so.” Our work lives and the big city thousands of miles away had intruded. I was forced to consider that every time I walked down Queen Street or Jarvis, all the passersby held me in secret contempt.

  All such bickering faded when Tim and I focused on the more immediate perils of our expeditions. Once we had acknowledged that travelling such remote cold-water rivers on our own was too risky, we opted for safety in numbers by founding a larger canoe group. As a nod to my new Ottawa address, we named ourselves the “Rideau Canal and Arctic Canoe Club” and began to recruit members.

  In the years following, some fifteen other men joined us on one or more trips, with a hard core of
eight who seldom missed a season. The job of official inviter and social convener fell to me, although the veterans had a limited right of veto over new candidates. Some who joined our little company of adventurers in spite of the objections of existing members are now the closest friends of the protesters. I will never tell.

  Weaving together a team for an expedition does require serious planning. The logistics of food and transportation are critical, as is the choice of river and prior study of its hazards. We never took a guide, though I would have welcomed a Sherpa more than once. Every trip can absorb one relative beginner if the rest of the crew are seasoned wilderness paddlers. Those who savour travel by canoe are often loners by nature, but the dangers of paddling in remote places make the support of companions essential. There is always a tension between individual and group interests, and often the self has to be sublimated to the needs of the state.

  Vanity and ego make unwelcome travelling companions in life and on rivers. Everyone must agree on common goals as the only way to prevent disputes and maintain even tempers when the going gets tough. (I recall one canoeist who literally foamed at the mouth, yelling at the group to end the trip rather than face what he was convinced would be certain death by drowning downriver.) After a good-natured personality, the next priority is compatibility. People who share similar interests and a like-minded view of the world are obviously the easiest to spend time with in close company. If sharp disagreements occur and tempers rise, there is nowhere to go.