His life began normally enough in Winnipeg, although he and the education system did not always play well together. After a spell of this and that, this man who would gain fame for jousting gallantly with the law fell afoul of it. He was jailed in Flin Flon for — brace yourself — selling encyclopedias without a license. Soon he was working as a nineteen-year-old journalist at the Winnipeg Tribune. According to Martin O’Malley, a colleague there who watched him with admiring amazement, “he regarded journalism as a respectable way to run off with the circus.” He devoured books, serious books, by serious thinkers. “Hunter read the way most of us breathed,” said O’Malley. And he wrote, too. In 1968 he brought out his first novel, Erebus, with M&S in Canada and Grove Press in the U.S., and a promising career as a novelist beckoned.
But by this time Bob had moved to Vancouver, where — besides introducing blue jeans to the Vancouver Sun newsroom — he was astounding solid citizens as the first counterculture newspaper columnist in the country. Three times a week Sun readers were exposed to his column, headed by his outrageously long-haired photo. But in addition to peace and love and other hippie staples, he was able to introduce really subversive new ideas, including the belief that the air and the water and the land around us are important and deserve to be protected. “Bob Hunter Writes as If Your Life Depended on It” ran one full-page Sun ad.
Given that approach, Bob took a dim view of the U.S. government’s 1971 plan to explode a nuclear bomb at Amchitka Island in Alaska, which is — as the tsunami rolls — only a short distance from the British Columbia coast. In the wake of the 1964 Alaska earthquake, many B.C. citizens were alarmed by the planned explosion, and some even formed a “Don’t Make a Wave Committee.” As things developed, the group, including citizens like Jim and Marie Bohlen, Irving and Dorothy Stowe, and Ben and Dorothy Metcalfe, decided that it would be a good idea to head off the nuclear explosion by sailing a ship into the test zone.
With money raised by a concert featuring James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Phil Ochs (hey, this was big stuff), the fishing boat Phyllis Cormack was leased, and set sail from Vancouver in September. That ship would later get a more familiar name: the Greenpeace.
And among the twelve men on board was the Vancouver Sun’s Bob Hunter, writing up a storm.
The U.S. authorities made sure that the boat never got near the test, but the publicity generated by the grand gesture created such a storm of protest that the nuclear testing program at Amchitka was abandoned.
Now Bob had the bit between his teeth. He could see how wit and daring — and publicity — could allow protestors to confront and beat the authorities, and in due course Greenpeace was formed, with Bob as the founding member and first president. Nobody in the organization was taking notes about who thought of this idea first, or invented that policy, and since success has many fathers, there are differing accounts of the early years at Greenpeace. I like the simple tribute paid by Paul Watson on Bob’s death in 2005: “Without Bob there would have been no Greenpeace.”
That would be the Paul Watson, skipper of the Sea Shepherd who in the famous photograph is standing on an ice floe with Bob Hunter, shoulder to shoulder, hand in gloved hand, their backs turned to the sealing ship charging straight at them, confident, like the lone Chinese protester facing down the tank, that they can will it to stop. They did.
Nowadays, of course, Greenpeace is a huge international organization. Its German arm, for example, is housed in a $35 million building. As Bobbi Hunter, Bob’s widow (who, he boasted, was descended from Vikings) recalls, this is a little different from the $50 rent that they paid in the early days in Vancouver, long before there were even salaries. But any time Greenpeace does something brave or clever or media-attracting (and deciding to put their nimble zodiacs between the whales and the harpoons of the whaling ships is all three), I hope that they remember that the policy was established by a laughing guy from Canada with a great sense of mischief.
I first got to know Bob in 1986, long after he moved on from the Greenpeace presidency in 1977. I’m surprised that it took us so long to meet, because as a publisher I was a sucker for tales of intrepid travellers, and you don’t get much braver than sailing towards a nuclear explosion. But I have had fun publishing people like Fiona McCall and Paul Howard, who built a boat in their Toronto backyard, and then sailed it around the world, with four-year-old Peter and big sister Penny completing the crew, as described in All in the Same Boat (1988) and in Still in the Same Boat (1990). More recently there’s the saga of Silver Donald Cameron, who with Marjorie sailed their little boat all the way down the Atlantic coast from Cape Breton to Florida, then on to the Bahamas; the title, Sailing Away From Winter, catches the spirit very nicely.
Above all, if you want intrepid, there’s Winnipeg’s own Don Starkell, whose 1987 book Paddle to the Amazon takes the reader — in an open canoe — all the way from Winnipeg, down the Mississippi system to the Gulf of Mexico, up the Orinoco to the headwaters of the Amazon, and all the way to Belem, on the Atlantic. I later had the fun of recreating the start of the 12,000-mile trip, paddling in the bow of Orellana as we headed south on the Red River. I was relieved when Don turned us around; I wanted no part of the seas in the Gulf that swamped them with such regularity that one of his teenage sons — the sensible one — quit and headed home, leaving the other to complete the trip with his dad.
That book was a great success, leaving Don desperate to come up with a new voyage. To my horror — and I tried to talk him out of it — he came up with Paddle to the Arctic, where he would take a kayak from Churchill (at the base of Hudson Bay) all the way through the Northwest Passage, dragging the kayak when the sea froze.
“But, Don,” I argued, yelling down the phone, “this will be worse than encountering alligators, and Sandinistas in war zones. There’ll be no possibility of help, no friendly villagers to feed you, and the only creatures that’ll be glad to see you will be hungry polar bears!”
But he went. And he almost made it. Just thirty miles from Tuktoyaktuk, his destination, the freeze-up he had been racing settled around him. For thirty-three hours he was trapped offshore in the kayak, the frozen sea too solid for him to make any progress, and too soft to bear his weight when he tried to roll out and stagger ashore. Eventually he did, and a rescue helicopter from Tuk found him and rushed him to hospital, technically dead. He recalls that the nurse kept taking and retaking his vital signs, unable to believe that he was still talking. Later he called me from the hospital to tell me that we had a hell of a story. I told him to get well.
He lost a number of finger and toe joints to frostbite. But years later I was roaming around the Red River, trying to get the rising sun framed in the west window of St. Boniface Cathedral, when I saw a movement in the willows at the river’s edge. A kayak, in Winnipeg, at 7:30 in the morning? It had to be Don. A shouted conversation (“Doug Gibson of McClelland & Stewart?” he called, incredulously) took me down to the Corot-like willow-shaded scene, where we bumped elbows. Then he, late for an appointment on the Assiniboine, was able to demonstrate that even with his short fingers he was able to paddle his own kayak, and glided away. A remarkable man.
The first book Bob Hunter and I published together was a total disgrace. That is, if you believe his political opponents, who dragged it out in the middle of an election campaign that involved him
running in an Ontario provincial by-election in 2001 as a Liberal, because of his belief that the party was serious about its green policies. Certainly, from the title onward, On the Sky: Zen and the Art of International Freeloading was not, let’s say, a typical VOTE FOR ME campaign document. Instead the 1988 book was a hilarious, gonzo journalist’s not-totally-reliable-account of Bob’s adventures posing as a travel writer. There his buddy Gaz (a real travel writer) teaches him the sacred text Thou Shalt Not Pay, and Bob sets out to have selfish, shameless fun, staggering around in foreign parts at other people’s expense.
&nbs
p; In the Bahamas, stoned out of his mind, he finds himself representing the white race in a grudge game of pool against a black giant backed by the locals (with Gaz bringing him to his senses just in time to lose). In Germany, fuelled by excellent free beer, he defies the guide with “teeny-weeny sieg heils.” In atheistic Cuba, whenever the guide (note the theme here) uses the wearying phrase “Our Glorious Leader,” he crosses himself ostentatiously. Then there’s a duel with boats on a narrow, sky-high French aqueduct, and the crazy business of running with the bulls through the streets of Pamplona; you knew we’d get to that. And the religion? Well, he really liked the fun job of marrying people.
The book was a modest — wrong word — a moderate success and regarded with awe by middle-aged men stuck in the nine to five routine, who dared to dream. And Bob and I spent much of our editorial time together laughing.
Physically, he was tall, a six-footer, and slim and erect, with a dark beard that ebbed and flowed, and a perennial neat ponytail. His posture concealed a bad back (that damned parachute jump!) that got him into trouble in airport corridors, as he strolled along, carrying a newspaper, while tiny Bobbi struggled beside him with a mountain of bags as big as herself. He recalled: “In Calgary once, a guy in a Stetson said to me: ‘Someone oughta kick yore ass, ya goddamn pimp.’” Bob bore it manfully.
I remember especially one evening when I visited the New Westminster farm where he and Bobbi were raising Will and young Emily, and he claimed that though we were less than an hour east of downtown Vancouver, you could fly in a straight line to the North Pole and never pass over another dwelling. Much more important, he showed me the sweat lodge that some local Natives had sought permission to build on his property. He was, he said, becoming more and more interested in Native issues, having been made an honorary Kwakiutl for his work as a media adviser with them.
His interest in the injustices done to Native Canadians, past and present, survived the family’s move to Toronto in 1988. One thing led to another in our discussions, and soon, with the editorial assistance of Pat Kennedy, we were able to publish Occupied Canada by Robert Hunter and Robert Calihoo. This true story of how the government cheated his family out of their Alberta reserve comes from Bob’s friend Calihoo, who learned the history as he studied it in jail. Thanks to Bob’s inspired writing, the book is a thought-provoking retelling of Canadian history from the Native point of view. And it won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 1991.
I like to think that I was a natural publisher for Occupied Canada. I once made a complete break from an author — as late as the 1970s — who insisted on using the word “redskin” to describe the Natives clashing with the NWMP. Stupid stuff. (Although I note that when white guy Bob took his first, exhilarating session in “his” sweat lodge, the steam’s impact on his pale skin produced many politically incorrect redskin jokes from his Native pals.) Much more important, I became involved very early in my career with what was then called “the Indian problem.” In 1970 I edited and published How a People Die by Alan Fry. I described it as “a documentary novel about the tragedy of the North American Indian,” and it was searingly honest about the social breakdown on some reserves. At one point a frustrated white official asks, “How do you talk to a man who doesn’t share your notions about work or money or wife or kids or sanitation or what the hell he’s going to live on tomorrow or next year and reach him where he’s really alive inside and he can reach you back?”
At another point a character describes the Indians he works with as “the hardest god-damned people on earth to help.”
Obviously, this was dynamite. What made it even more explosive was the fact that Alan Fry had worked, in the field, with the Department of Indian Affairs since 1954, and had been a district superintendent dealing with the people in a number of reserves since 1958. When the book came out he was working on Quadra Island, just off Campbell River. His meetings with the local band leaders gained their acceptance of the book, which they agreed was tough but honest. Yet when the book became a Canadian bestseller, in his own wry words (in the second edition of this classic book, published thirty years later), “A considerable fuss followed.” Pressure came on him from angry Native leaders from elsewhere, and his job was saved by the leaders of the local band telling outsiders to back off, making it clear “that my future in the service was their business only.” In the end, he resigned in frustration with the department bureaucracy four years later.
It’s too bad that the protesters didn’t read the excellent reviews that How a People Die received. N. Scott Momaday, the highly respected American-Indian author, wrote in the New York Times, “This small book is one of the most sensitive and incisive statements on the subject of human alienation that I have seen.”
The Saturday Review was equally enthusiastic: “Fry tells of what he sees, and what he sees is bound to shock the comfortable novitiate in the business of cultural survival . . . it evinces a concerned passion for just solutions to the manifold problems of a neglected minority. Read it soon.”
Sadly, thirty years later the book’s tough account of the problem continued to be relevant, not ancient history about the bad old days. So relevant, in fact, that my friend Howard White reissued it through his company, Harbour Publishing.
And Alan Fry, the grandson of Roger Fry of Bloomsbury fame? He went on to write Come a Long Journey, a novel about a white guy and his old Indian friend canoeing together down the Yukon River that the Winnipeg Free Press described as “an epic of human relationships.” And later, in The Revenge of Annie Charlie, he dealt playfully with white-aboriginal relations in the B.C. interior.
But his resignation left him in a financial fix. He solved it with his axe. Growing up near Williams Lake (as described, before my day, in his first book, The Ranch on the Cariboo) he had learned how to fell trees and turn them into cabins. So that’s what he did on his property at Quadra, where his only asset was his house, and the big second growth Douglas fir that grew around it. He felled enough trees to produce a two-storey log cabin, a thing of beauty that I visited. Now, after the expenditure of a few dollars for chainsaw gas and nails, he had not one, but two houses to sell.
With the proceeds he set off for the Yukon — and, remember, I’m following all this with fascination, in my downtown Toronto office — and set up a tepee on the shores of Lake Laberge. There he lived year round, enduring winters so harsh that manufacturers of outdoor camping gear would send him free samples of things like sleeping bags for testing in extreme conditions (“stark blessed naked at forty below,” he recalls), and writing for me a how-to book, Survival in the Wilderness.
Then this widower met a woman, and for some reason she preferred to live in a house in Whitehorse, not in the tepee. I’m still in touch with Alan by phone. Some years ago he gave me a pair of moosehide mitts, made with his own hands. They are much too grand to wear, but I look at them hanging in my den, and dream.
Over the years, sensitized by my early experience with Alan, I was proud to publish many books about our aboriginal situation, such as those by Native authors like Basil Johnson, and Louise Halfe, and the many authors in the anthology All My Relations. I think, too, of books like Strangers Devour the Land by Boyce Richardson, Michael Harris’s Justice Denied (about the Donald Marshall case), and Gordon Sinclair’s Cowboys and Indians, about the shooting of the native leader J.J. Harper on the Winnipeg street location that Gordon showed me one night. And of course there have recently been the three books I worked on with James Bartleman, the first aboriginal Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario. Of these, Raisin Wine: A Boyhood in a Different Muskoka (2007) is to my mind the most powerful.
Other contacts with the Native world were more personal. Once in Saskatoon I was walking west, getting to know the city on foot. I slowly realized that Saskatoon is unusual, in that the tough part of the city is in the west end. The number of cheque cashing outlets and pawnbrokers was increasing, so I decided it would be sm
art to cross the street and head back into town. As I did so, a pair of western-style swing doors at a tough-looking bar crashed open, and a big guy came out at a run, headed straight towards me. He was huge, an Indian, maybe six-foot-three and 220 pounds, and he stopped his charge and fell into step beside me.
“Heading into town?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay if I walk along with you?”
“Sure.”
There was a long pause. Stride, stride, stride.
Then he said, “See these boots?”
He indicated his Swedish-style wooden-soled boots. I nodded, not sure that I liked where this was going.
“Are these women’s boots?”
Now I pride myself on being honest, but if he had been wearing stiletto heels, with red pom-poms, I’m pretty sure I would have found some overriding macho qualities to them. As it was, I was able to assure him that, no, they were not women’s boots. I didn’t try the word “unisex.”
“Ah, that’s good,” he said, “’cause I just kicked the shit out of a guy in that bar for saying they were — and, you know, I wouldn’t like to think I did that, and he was, you know, right.”
I assured him that he had acted justly, with the full backing of the fashion authorities (not my exact words), and we walked happily together into Saskatoon. It turned out he was from the Yukon (no, he didn’t know Alan Fry) where he had just been part of a big strike (I forget if it was in gold, or in diamonds) and was using his share to drive across Canada for the first time. He was giving a big party at his motel that evening, and it would be great if I was free to come.
I apologized, saying that I had plans for dinner with Guy Vanderhaeghe (who has written scenes of white-native conflict on the Prairies, notably the Cypress Hills massacre in The Last Crossing, better than anyone). I’ve published Guy’s work right from the start with Man Descending (1982), which I came to Saskatoon to launch, and he is a good friend as well as a great novelist. When I told him and Margaret over dinner about my encounter, he loved the story, but felt I had made the wrong choice for the evening.
Stories About Storytellers Page 31