Therefore I know the boys and girls of the classroom have a great duty—like a writer or a politician; a grave duty to help those who have been denied access in whatever way to the classroom itself. Shame on us if we do not recognize the obligation. But shame on us, too, if we ever think a labourer as that young man was is less than a professor.
I remember when I was a boy, my first time in Toronto, and I saw in a restaurant a group of students from Osgoode Hall making fun of a waitress who did not understand their big words. Nothing showed less kindness or understanding of responsibility to the human heart than that. There are two things detrimental to the human soul: ignorance coupled with arrogance, and knowledge without compassion.
It would be fine if those who have knowledge always made a point of understanding compassion. Years ago children who had nowhere to go in summer lined up to put their names down with my friend Helena Waye, a teacher at their elementary school, hoping for a chance to go to summer camp, where my son worked.
Some had never been to a place where they could canoe or swim. And because the list was so long, many were not picked. And every day from April to June they would ask her, “Am I going to go, too?”
* * *
—
Dickens wrote a story about workhouses and pickpockets in the spring of 1837. If it had been just a story about that time and place, it would have had little to say to a boy in the spring of 1965, and less to us in the spring of 2018. But in a way it sanctified them, made us realize they were a part of us, now and forever. Hopefully we take this with us, no matter where our authors come from or our individual education demands; hopefully we take this, then, no matter what part in life we play, and realize that the greatest part is to be both generous and noble, the greatest part is never to leave others out, or behind, but to realize as they are loved and sanctified we are loved and sanctified, too.
2018
WE TOLD THEM THEY WERE BUILDING A DREAM
A FRIEND OF MINE VISITED FROM THE MIRAMICHI TWO DAYS ago, bringing Christmas presents for the kids. He is up here, in Toronto, working a shutdown. That is to say, he’s a man who goes into a plant when it closes for repairs and does repairs, a travelling troubleshooter of sorts for industry—in this case, American industry, Chrysler or Ford.
He has been doing this now for twenty-five years: away from home, seasonally, for a generation. He has raised his family this way. The copper-zinc mine he used to have a steady job at, on the Miramichi River, closed years ago, when he was much younger and far wilder. Well, he can still be wild. Enough to make many turn pale. Yes, they’ll never take that away. But I often wonder if he ever thinks of the cards life has dealt him. His marriage is over, in part because of his travels—yet he needed those jobs to pay the bills.
The fishing is gone on my river, the mines, too, and the lumber industry has been hit blows that would stagger Jake LaMotta. Another mill has gone down this month—UPM from Finland; six hundred more men. It becomes, after a while, just another statistic.
My friend is just one of the hundreds of men (and women) from Miramichi, New Brunswick—home of my great river—doing this now: travelling for dignity. In a real way, as clandestine as it seems to people who might not know, these men from all parts of our country are still the backbone of the nation. You meet them in places they never thought they would have to go. You can tell by their eyes, in a second, that they are the ones to keep Canada going. They have worked shutdowns and drilling operations and pipelines; in the woods and on the water; have repaired everything from heavy equipment to sewers to hydro, and travelled to Quebec during the ice storm, or to British Columbia during the fires, and helped keep people alive.
To say these men didn’t have proper life skills or training—which might be said by some—is as silly as saying executive management of the nineties should have known a company was going to be downsized; or a professor was silly because he wasn’t offered tenure, even though he was as capable as anyone in his field.
The Miramichiers believed, too, in the industry they were trained for.
They are millwrights and boilermakers and mechanics, lumbermen and heavy-equipment operators. They married and had dreams, and kids and houses and jobs. There was nothing wrong then or now with the skills they acquired. They simply need to travel farther from where they belong to use the skills they have. And now they’re growing old.
They leave their families behind in order to send money home. They spend months in single rooms, sleeping and working, and keeping children’s birthday promises and spouse’s anniversary dates by email or cellphone. So the problems with substance abuse and broken lives won’t be mentioned here.
The real secret is the damn mill was never ours anyway. That is Canada’s true tragedy, which goes beyond my region.
This time, the company was Finnish. It could have been from anywhere. But whoever owned it, they were dealing with people they didn’t know, or ever feel obligated to. Our natural resource was all that mattered. The sanctity and security of our life didn’t matter too much. In fact, the Finns are still cutting the wood as I write this. They will just ship it to other places for processing. That is a cynicism and disrespect to our people, not only by the Finnish company (in the end, who gives a fig about them?) but by our own government. Come to think of it, it is never morally justifiable to lay all the blame on outsiders.
So the people of the Miramichi are kept afloat by the Alberta tar sands. The men I know, many old school friends of mine, and their sons, have gone out. This is what keeps our towns and villages going this Christmas Eve. For the entire substrata of our economy, the shops and stores and appliance dealers and property owners, depend on a world that has crumbled beneath them. The men have gone away—and send money home to keep the region alive.
It’s been almost fifty years since the great Escuminac fishing disaster. On June 19, 1959, thirty-five men, drifting for salmon in Miramichi Bay, were drowned in the most violent storm to ever hit our water. On that desperate night, men gave their lives for their friends; boys no older than fifteen made sure their little brothers and fathers were saved before themselves; small boats turned back into the teeth of the storm, and refused to abandon those in trouble.
When asked about it, one fisherman said, “What in hell else could we do?”
I am sure the men leaving everything they have known to provide for those they love say the same thing now.
2007
NORTHERN NEW BRUNSWICK
HERE WE ARE A NATION, A SMALL ONE TO BE SURE. BUT THAT IS not surprising.
Our ancestors. They are the ones who are buried here, in graveyards that look toward a sea.
There are no bathers on the grey stone beach today—our majesty isn’t found in the hot sun or burning wind, though both do come. On a beach as grand as any, the sand dunes are swept and the yellow grass stings and cries.
Berries look adolescent most of the summer and ripen suddenly. Our men pick with the women.
Few rent houses. When a young couple get married, they build their own. There are many fine and modest houses, but there are curious-looking ones, also, sometimes propped on logs, sometimes finished only long after the family has moved in—when a family builds its own house, friends help with a neighbour.
There is always a road, a highway. We live beside it.
So our beauty is rough. It has shades like the soul. There are always fishing boats. There are always fishing men, lobster boats, drifters, trawlers. And the sea. It has become a part of the Acadian language, this water, the occupation.
When Acadians say goodbye, they reflect their heritage poignantly What they are really saying is:
“I’ll hope for you.”
In English towns the small United, Presbyterian and Baptist churches lie white and smooth in the afternoon, reflecting the heat and the sun on their windows. In the white pines that tower above them you hear the trees talking to e
ach other. Here there are gods.
One only has to breathe the air to appreciate them. No wonder the Micmac thought us blasphemers.
Twilight reflects a gothic world in the woods where the roads have been beaten back and water trickles into the shade.
To youngsters who have grown up here there is always the sense of wonderment just before dark.
“The Browning” the Acadians say.
In the summer, I grew up where the night came as solid as a stone. It had the blackness of a full tide in the dark.
Only a few small cottages gave off their light, and far away a buoy or now and then a beacon from across the bay, that was seen only at night.
There are distances that are mysterious and primeval to the young. The smell of water, the spruce are stunted by the salt wind, the grass turns white and curls inward like hair, close to the bay, and inland barns can be forgotten for a generation, only to be discovered, explored and claimed by the young. The sun burns on their salty backs, and their eyes reflect the icy waters.
Fishermen don’t sunbathe or carry radios and blankets to the sand, nor for that matter oil themselves with suntan lotion. Many can’t swim, and never have. They don’t think of the summer for beaches or brown tans. For the fisherman there is always something akin to deceit in that form of supplication.
When they drift for salmon, they are gone all night. There are always legends. And when I was young, I heard the sea all night and knew what those legends were.
I would not hear the sea now as I did then—for the gift only comes to the young and stays only as long as he is willing to remain under the spell.
Here our triumph—and tragedy—is living in a land that contains so much power. It is not the tragedy of Greece or Rome, or Arabian nights. Theirs, as Camus has said, is beauty. Theirs is also its pints of gold, its sheer tragic need to be happy.
Under a blanket listening to the night sea the young never feel the need to be happy. Our stories are not of genies found in a bottle on a beach shining with emeraldic power in a land that is both distant and sad to the tale teller. We are too young for such legends. Ours have human blood: animals known to us by touch.
Water that we’ve seen.
Our bay is blue-green, and I’m often reminded of my early years when I smell tar. For there was tar on all our wharfs.
When the sunbather was on the beach, he was safe—he was afforded a respect. There was no quarrel with him. Let him lie upon a blanket and soak up the sun, and worship it as he would. Take radios if he would.
The very young never lie on the beach for more than a moment. The very old have no use for it, either.
It is only for the idle and, in respect to so many things about the sea, the idolatrous. Let sun worshippers cringe when I say this.
I don’t imagine the sunbathers happy, for I’ve seen greatness in the fisherman’s eyes. This is a personal observation, one that comes with the territory.
When the worshipping is over and the sunbather invades the wharf, then he loses his advantage. He is a sorry spectacle, out of place amid the true mirth. He becomes at once in his bathing suit and sandals, a derelict. No one intends this. It is universal law.
When the sea spoils and rises against itself, there are no swimmers. There are no windsurfers. There are fishing boats.
“The poor fisherman.”
“The ignorant fisherman…”
I’ve heard jokes like this about them, so I mention it now. It shows the soul of the joker. There is always cowardice in their reflection.
As a sunbather cannot see beyond the first buoy, so he cannot know the sea.
“I’ll hope for you,” the wives and loved ones say.
That is, I’ll hope not for your catch so much as for your return.
Though I’m sure there are some, I’ve never met a fisherman who didn’t care for the cleanliness of his boat, or his house; who didn’t keep things in order, and order within reach.
I’ve heard the stories. There were those who didn’t come back. There have been boats found running and no one aboard. Everything was in place. The boat cut the water silently. All had the quiet of the swells, and the faint dimension of death.
It might be observed that no one thinks of fishermen dying until they do. Strange. It’s as if they went to an office in the morning.
I know a man who lost two uncles to this bay and owns his own boat. He leaves land at five in the morning and his wife expects him at five in the evening.
I’ve never once seen fearless eyes except in those who have faced danger. To lose fear, a philosopher might tell you, is to have faith.
No one is prepared to die. To die for someone else, shows that you understand, even in terrifying circumstances, mirth and spontaneity. Not that you are mirthful, but that you have been.
There are gods in the wind, too, in the salt air. They are here in the middle of the summer, anointing those who can sense them.
Thirty-five didn’t come home one night. The storm has been assimilated into our thought, and I mention it only briefly.
Men in the water having been tossed lifelines handed them to their brothers. It took one man half the night to reach land, and yet no sooner was he safe than he turned his boat back into the storm to help a friend whose boat had floundered.
A man tied his son to the mast, and then before he could tie himself was swept overboard and disappeared.
Boats—and you must realize how small a drifter can be in waves of seventy-five to eighty feet in height—refused to leave other boats in trouble and time after time threw lifelines, and shouted encouragement and kept watch.
So until the end.
These men have a genius for deflating their own heroics. They can do it by exhaling smoke from a cigarette and looking away from you quickly. So one must not intrude upon their thought.
Our gifts, our legends are as in every responsible nation—our own. We have breathed them into our blood.
They are physical presences in a room.
We meet them on the stairs.
1983
THE SHANNON: A SHORT STORY
Thirty-five men and boys were lost the night of the Escuminac disaster, June 19, 1959. This is a fictional story about a fictional family. But the heroics of that night can never be adequately recounted.
THERE WAS NO THOUGHT OF THE STORM WHEN THEY WENT OUT from the timbered wharf, starting the Shannon’s engine, an old Chevy that he and his father had refitted, putting new rings and gaskets in, an engine his father had bought second-hand from the Lorrie Jane—therefore as the older brother said had seen much of the bay’s salt water wash over it already, across the gunnels in a spray. The older brother had never seen his father get a deal (except winning a Saturday-night bingo once).
The older brother had been the boy his mother had relied upon. People said he was the reason they had to marry.
The older brother had always worried about his dad. He walked out in a blizzard one night when he was ten, looking for him because he didn’t come home. The only reason he had found him was that he had noticed the red woollen bob on the top of his father’s old woollen hat sticking up from the snowdrift. He dug his father out of the snow tears freezing on his face.
“Dad,” he said. “Dad—please, Dad—wake up, Dad. Dad, please.”
The older boy had been the one to try to find the money his father had won at bingo but had left in a shed at the wharf. It was a lot of money for them—seventy-eight dollars. The older boy never found it.
Sometimes his mother would say she was going away. The younger boy would hang on to her suitcase crying.
“Mom,” the younger boy would beg. “Mom—please, Mom.”
Besides, she had no money to go.
His father and mother always relied upon the older brother. He cut wood, banked the house, fixed the water pump and gave his savings
to his dad, to refit the Shannon because his mom had asked. They were reduced to eating lobster, putting cardboard over the windows so no one would know. It was said that the older brother had saved money from haying and drifting for three years. He was going to go to university in Chatham.
Still, without the Shannon what would his father do? Then what might happen to his mother and his younger brother if he just left them like that?
“Think of him,” she whispered, like she was praying. “Your dad is a good dad—I know he will prove it to you someday.”
There were very good men here, men the older brother sometimes helped with their nets—men who kept their lives and their boats in order. His father had been in Korea in 1951, where he was hit in the head with shrapnel. His father never spoke about it to anyone.
The older brother counted on his fingers the money he might have left if he helped with the engine. His lips moved silently as his mother watched him.
“Someday you will know—I promise,” she said. “He is a good man.”
“I know, Mom. I know,” he said. “Okay, Mom—okay—yes!”
She patted his hand. She seemed worn out by life.
It is not at all remarkable to those who know life that when the older boy thought of his father, his heart still filled with love.
If anyone recalled, the older brother was a thin young man, pale as a ghost most of the time. His smile was somewhat hopeful, as if he longed to fit in. He had black hair to offset such pale white skin, and people noticed—especially the girls—that he wore the same jacket and boots three winters in a row, and his hair was so black that it looked as if he wore a splash of tar on his head. Sometimes people would see him late at night, walking alone in the cold because his father had gotten angry and put him out of the house. Very late after his dad had finally fallen asleep, he would make his way home.
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