Working on Hideaway had made me aware of the special nature of the Queen Charlottes, or Haida Gwaii, as it now is. With their basic food source provided by the plentiful salmon, the Haida had developed a reputation as great, fierce travellers, “the Vikings of the Pacific.” Braving open seas in open war canoes, they had raided as far down the coast as California, and the slaves they brought back had allowed them to create a leisure society — a little like slave-based Athens — where there was time to develop great art. The art was both literary (in sagas brilliantly translated in recent years by Robert Bringhurst) and representational, as in their argillite carvings, or in the totem poles in the traditional distinctive designs popularized by Bill Reid (whose work hangs in our kitchen). And anyone who has ever strolled along the tangled driftwood-strewn beaches or the Emily Carr–inspiring deep woods will know where the inspiration for artistic shapes and the distinctive “ovoid curves” came from.
The fine museum in the Carr-totemed town of Skidegate (where Jim once took me to a community event), revealed much of this to us, with the introductory lecture for tourists given by another Scottish rolling stone, a former classmate of mine at St. Andrews.
Visiting Barbara and Noel Wotten we saw sandhill cranes dancing sedately down by the river, and visited the tree house (as in, “house carved out of the interior of a tree”) that Jim’s ten-year-old-boy spirit liked so much. . . . Jim Hawkins would have liked it, too. And Noel, who chainsawed a path to the tree for tourists, directed us to the site of the famous Golden Spruce, which we found lying, rotting and grey, in dark water. The tale of this sacred Haida tree — uniquely, a golden-coloured spruce — and the bizarre logging crusader/vandal who felled it, then disappeared in Hecate Strait before his trial date exposed him to public rage, is brilliantly told by John Vaillant in The Golden Spruce, a book that I wish I’d published. One That Got Away.
Whenever we encountered locals they remembered Jim fondly and asked about Alice, urging us to persuade her to come back for a visit. We’re still working on it. But we almost didn’t survive our own visit. It was a full moon in September, and the tides on the Tlell, just twenty paces outside our window, were up to twenty-three feet. We planned our epic kayak trip the mile or so down river to Hecate Strait with great care, going down at the end of the ebb tide. That was fine, easy paddling. Ten minutes from the ocean we felt the tide turn, and had to fight our kayaks through white water at the river mouth, before reaching ocean swells. We exulted in the view of mountains as we paddled north to the old beached wreck that Jim had told me about. Then Jane wisely suggested that with these giant tides, perhaps we should get back.
By the time we reached the river mouth, the white water was gone, submerged beneath many feet of salt water charging inland. Surfing in up the river was like riding on the back of a stampeding elephant. It was fun, of course, but when we reached Bridge Cottage, the landing beach had disappeared (along with Richard’s fine Wellington boots, which I had left high and dry out of the water when we took off).
Landing, and getting out of the kayak without being swept sideways up the river a great distance was a problem that I solved by half-landing and then deliberately dumping myself and the kayak. That way I was able to drag the boat ashore and help Jane to land. Since I was already soaked it seemed the sensible thing (think ten-year-old boy) to strip off and try swimming in the current, just to see what it felt like. Jane, who has never been a ten-year-old boy, but has been a lifeguard, was not amused. There were no Great Helmsman swimming jokes from her.
Replacing the swept-away boots (we had half a miracle when one was swept back the next day, but half a miracle won’t allow you to walk in — let alone on — water) took us on a memorable trip to Queen Charlotte City, and the fishing supply store named “The Best Little Lure House in the Charlottes.” A trip to the local bookstore introduced us to the proprietor’s parrot, which was able to produce uncanny imitations of visitors, and very alarming ones of deceased friends. It could even mimic phone calls, including a “Goodbye!” followed by a hang-up click and a realistic dial tone.
The Queen Charlottes/Haida Gwaii is that sort of place. Courtesy of Richard and Nancy, who have lovingly preserved aspects of the place like Jim’s little writing cabin, while adding new marvels like commissioned totem poles, we were able to see why Jim and Alice spent so much of their life there.
Visiting Houston territory on the West Coast was one vivid reminder of Jim. Visits by Alice, John, and Sam to our Toronto home have been others. But a visit to Jim’s Arctic was the best treat of all. I had never been North, except in my imagination, when I worked on Jim’s books or on Don Starkell’s Paddle to the Arctic. You can imagine my delight when, at John’s suggestion, I was invited by Adventure Canada to join a cruise that was intended to follow the travels of James Houston.
We learned that John (an experienced filmmaker, and one of the best Inuktitut-English translators in the country) would be making a documentary about his father in the course of the voyage. My role — for which I would receive free passage — was to be a working member of the expedition crew and a lecturer on the Jim Houston I knew. It was a perfect circle: working on books about the Arctic with Jim now allowed me to see the Arctic and talk about my memories of Jim.
So in September 2008 Jane and I and roughly 100 other excited southerners flew north from Ottawa to Iqualuit. The clamming was so good that day that there was a bus driver problem.
“OK, Doug, you can get your bus on its way.”
“All right, driver, we’re all set. Let’s go!”
“Uh, where to?” The driver was a last-minute replacement for a man gone clamming.
Even the commissioner of Nunavut, Jim’s longtime friend (and actress in The White Dawn) Ann Meekitjuk Hanson mentioned the great clamming she was missing when she gave us a formal welcome to our tour of the town.
I should explain that Matthew Swan’s excellent Adventure Canada cruises are for people for whom bingo-playing cruises hold no appeal. A cruise with them is above all a learning experience, full of fun, of course, but also lectures by anthropologists, biologists, art historians, and even people like me, giving useful background to what we are likely to see ashore.
And we rubbed shoulders with celebrities like the legendary Kenojuak Ashevak, the most famous Inuit artist of all, a beaming, tiny elder whom I got to know despite a language barrier. On our last morning aboard ship I suggested that we swap our Adventure Canada nametags. She laughed happily at the idea, and the swap was made — I suspect that she has not kept mine as carefully as I have kept hers, beside one of her magnificent prints; it’s like having a calling card from Claude Monet.
Another northern celebrity aboard our ship meant a lot to me. A couple of days after Jim Houston’s death in April 2005, Cape Dorset’s Jimmy Manning joined me on Shelagh Rogers’ CBC morning radio show, sharing our memories of Jim and passing on our condolences to John when he joined us by phone — a stumbling moment for me, in front of a million ears. So meeting Jimmy was a powerful experience for me, and we soon became friends, with Jane and I even visiting his Cape Dorset home, along with Alice.
We soon got into the cruise routine of sailing by night, and each day ferrying everyone ashore by Zodiac to visit Inuit communities along Hudson Strait. Wherever we visited we were instant celebrities — especially John and Sam (whose Inuktitut was a little rusty as he was embraced by former babysitters) and Alice, who had met many of our hosts before. Some of them sat quietly with her, crying over her loss; it became obvious that Jim’s passing was their loss, too. The local people always met us warmly and entertained us, usually in the local school’s gym. Naturally, local artists were not shy about showing their wares, and many sales were made.
When we landed at Ivujivik, on the Quebec side of Hudson Strait, right at the northeast corner of Hudson Bay, there was no welcoming committee.
Crisis!
“Doug, could you take over
and get the guests to the Community Hall? I’m going back to the boat, to find out what’s gone wrong with our contacts.”
“Sure. No problem.”
So in an Inuit community in Quebec (did they speak Inuktitut, or French, or English?) I led our trusting, camera-slung guests up a deserted main street. Not a curtain twitched.
Then off to the right I glimpsed a woman in a traditional long-tailed costume, heading away from us. She must be going to receive us in the mysterious hall.
“This way, everyone,” I announced, and my hunch was right. When we reached a group of formally dressed women outside a large building, I went forward. Not only did I shake hands with them, I did the traditional eyebrow-raising thing (in the bundled-up North, you don’t smile in greeting, you raise your eyebrows in a friendly fashion). And I got to say the words, grandly indicating the parka-clad group straggling behind me: “I’m Doug Gibson . . . and these are my people!”
Later, while looking after the loading of our returning Zodiacs, I had the chance to chat with the leading elder of the community, who had made a truncated speech of welcome.
“You mentioned Henry Hudson briefly in your speech back there,” I said, “but I think you had more to say.”
“Yes,” he replied, glad to tell the tale. He was a large, solid man with a dark, squarish face, and his English was good.
“Henry Hudson came by here in 1610, with lots of beads to trade with our people, I guess for water and food. Now we still get some of our food in the traditional way, gathering eggs from seabirds’ nests, high on the cliffs. And in our way of doing things, when you take an egg, you thank the bird by putting something in its place, like a little stone, okay? And it’s kind of interesting, but to this day . . .”
My ears pricked up.
“To this day when our people put their hand in a nest, they sometimes find a Henry Hudson bead, put there a long time ago.”
“To this day?” I said, stunned. “You’re finding beads brought here in 1610?”
“Yes,” he said, and at that point I was torn away, the last man to join the last boat back to the ship. Later I told this story to Margaret Macmillan, the famous historian, and she shared my astonishment that European trade goods from four centuries ago were still cropping up in the Arctic.
Back across Hudson Strait we went, in our beloved little red ship (I was to feel a real sense of loss when she sank in the southern Atlantic a couple of years later, with no loss of life) to Cape Dorset, the place that had been Jim Houston’s home for so many years. It was an emotional return for Alice and Sam, and especially for John. Along with the little boy’s mother, Heather, he had brought his five-year-old son Dorset on his first visit to the place he was named for. It was wonderful to see him being greeted with smiles and long hugs by the local elders who knew his grandfather well.
Thanks to the historic collaboration between Jim and the local Inuit, Cape Dorset is now a community based around the production of art. Strangely, in the same week I found myself visiting Cape Dorset, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Stratford, three very different Canadian communities based economically on art and culture. As you stroll the hilly Cape Dorset streets, the sound of carving drills comes from many backyards and sheds. The constant artistic ferment caused one witty visitor from New York, Robert Graff, to compare it to Greenwich Village; not an obvious visual comparison.
The famous Cape Dorset Co-op was still there, in an expanded version of Jim’s original building. And there we watched Kenojuak take off her coat and get right down to drawing what would be a new print, before our very eyes.
Later, when I saw John’s film about his father, I was fascinated to see Jim talk about the fast, confident way Kenojuak’s left hand moves as she draws. Jim asked her about that, and she told him that she just follows “a little blue line” ahead of her pen.
“A little blue line!” Jim snorts. “I wish I had a little blue line that would do that for me!”
To make his film, John took people like me out “on the land” and filmed us. I struggled to answer his questions about how the Arctic landscape met my expectations, and I talked, as we all did on the ship, about the extraordinary light in the north. More usefully, I spoke about what a “noticing” person his father was, as shown both in his art and his writing.
Later, on our last Cape Dorset day, our James Houston Memorial Cruise turned solemn when we assembled at the base of some striking red cliffs just outside the little town, to scatter half of his ashes, while the rest remained in Stonington. Scores of local people attended, some of the elders limping heavily across the rough ground in order to deliver their affectionate tribute to their friend Saumik, while some distance away young Dorset created his own Inukshuk from a little heap of rocks. After the family, and the elders like Kenojuak had taken their turn, among other friends I had a hand in scattering Jim’s ashes in that quiet place.
Later, John brought his film crew to our house in Toronto (perhaps in the hope that I’d get it right this time). We sat in the front room, surrounded by James Houston memorabilia — books, a glass shorebird sculpture, some of the northern drawings he was always giving to lucky friends like me, and work by artists he had discovered. At the end of our filmed talk he used a shrewd filmmaking technique, asking me without warning what I felt like when I heard the news of Jim’s death.
Other people in the film rose to that challenge with rare eloquence. I was wordless. What John chose to include in the film was my silent, bleak look, my face a gash of sorrow at the loss of a dear friend.
The prize-winning film, by the way, is widely available on DVD, and well worth watching. And its title is James Houston: The Most Interesting Group of People You Will Ever Meet.
Charles Ritchie should have been a spy.
By day, he worked as a diplomat: dispassionate, discreet, and diligent (apart, of course, from those afternoons when he slipped out to the movies). In his diplomatic role — in the words of the old Elizabethan joke, as “a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country” — he was very effective at producing shrewd dispatches, as one of those legendary external affairs men whose sheer skill and dedicated professionalism allowed Canada to punch well above its weight in the international ring. By night — even when he was our ambassador to JFK and LBJ’s Washington, or to Bonn, or to London — he emerged from his dark-suited carapace to become a wildly indiscreet diarist, a role that allowed him to be a gossip, a boulevardier, a ladies’ man, and a gifted writer with a novelist’s eye and ear, and an insatiable appetite for life.
After he retired in 1971, full of years and honours, he was persuaded to publish some of the daily diaries that he had kept all his life (far beyond the January 15 cut-off familiar to the rest of us). It appeared, certainly from the brilliantly written diaries, that in his life he did much of his best work in the bedroom. He was sixty-six when The Siren Years, an account of his life as a Canadian diplomat in London during the Second World War (including, as the title implied, the years of the Blitz), appeared in book form, to the astonished pleasure of reviewers and ordinary readers on both sides of the Atlantic. C.P. Snow (the distinguished British physicist, civil servant, and novelist, who knew something about diverse talents) hailed the 1974 book as “a brilliant discovery” and pronounced Ritchie “a natural-born diarist.” Comparisons were made, perhaps inevitably, to Samuel Pepys.
In Canada, to the chagrin of ink-stained professional writers in garrets across the land, this retired civil servant’s apparently effortless recycling of his late-night diaries won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 1974.
My path first crossed his in that year, before the book was published. Within hours (it seemed) of joining Macmillan, in the unfortunate absence of all the company’s leaders who knew Charles and had read his book, I was assigned the task of taking the distinguished visiting author to dinner. I was ignorant of the book’s irreverent style, and of Ritchie’s his
tory of enjoying sparkling dinner companions (Nehru, for example, who ran in and out of the room, which also contained Lord and Lady Mountbatten, whom the Indian statesman knew very well indeed, or in Paris Greta Garbo, looking Garbo-like, and restricting her conversation to the husky words “Pass the salt”), so I played it all wrong. Like some earnest graduate student (oh, yes, I must remember to order wine for him) I plied “Mr. Ritchie,” or “Sir,” with questions about serious political issues such as the current unpleasantness in Northern Ireland. To which the beaky, horn-rimmed face gave politely measured responses. I shudder to think what his diary entry for that day must contain. But I fear that if his young dinner companion was described at all, such words as “earnest,” “dull,” and even “boring” must be at the core.
Charles Ritchie — and I’m glad to say that as I came to know him and his writing, and help him bring out his next book, An Appetite for Life, he soon became “Charles” — was never boring. In fact when in 1948, during his years in Paris, he once confessed to feeling ignored, a group of friends organized Ritchie Week, “a week of non-stop parties, dinners, even a ball in Ritchie’s honour. . . . Old and new friends showered us with invitations. Whenever we appeared, a special anthem was played to signal our entrance. Verses were addressed to us — on the walls of the houses on our street someone had by night chalked up in giant letters the slogan ‘Remember Ritchie.’” He tells us that a clutch of coloured balloons inscribed “Ritchie Week” were even let loose over Paris.
There is a great mystery at the heart of these memorable celebrations, one that challenged Allan Gotlieb, a disciple of Ritchie’s who had a fine diplomatic career (and who took his advice to keep a diary). They were being put on for a man that the baffled Gotlieb, trying to plumb the depths of the mystery, calls “only a mid-level diplomat.” Beyond that, Ritchie was a man without any obvious physical attractions, being in his own words, “beak-nosed and narrow-chested.” Yet the Paris celebrations were organized for this skinny, mid-level Canadian by people who were, as Gotlieb put it, “at the centre of one of Europe’s most sophisticated scenes.” In fact, the moving spirit was Lady Diana Cooper, “the extraordinarily beautiful, aristocratic wife of the British Ambassador to Paris, Duff Cooper,” and her chief accomplice was none other than the novelist-socialite Nancy Mitford.
Stories About Storytellers Page 21