That day, of all days, they forgot the camera on the camp porch, and I ran up the road to give it to them, but they had gone. I did not hear the truck again for almost four hours.
Anton, I want to tell you something. Crossing the river at B&L is not too tough most of the time, but in high water it can be. When you cross a river, it is always the boulders one does not see that will tangle you. Sometimes they are right in front of you, but the swirl below you is at times as black as tar, capped by white spray rushing by. So I wondered if the crossing would be easy or tough. This is what I thought of when I sat there. I knew every inch of that pool, too, and wondered how they would fish it. Where John would step into it, and how he would work his way down.
Then I went for a walk back upriver. I ate my lunch staring at the water, and smelled smoke from a forest fire I hoped (and actually prayed) was not close.
But all things work out. I give you my word. Now, I did not see my oldest boy catch his first fish. But he caught it using a green machine our friend Dave Savage had tied. John crossed the river of my youth at the same age I had, and fished the same pool. But it wasn’t the pool where he got the fish. It was the run 250 yards below the pool—a run my friend and your godfather—and one of the finest of woodsmen, Peter McGrath—had discovered back in those early days years ago. The run we would fish once a day for three weeks every year. My brother had told John to go and try it. So John walked down to it. He put on new leader and tied a blood knot. He stepped into the water, and waded halfway across the river before he cast. And he was beginning to cast well. On the fourth cast, Anton, his line tightened, and a young salmon, the same size as the fish I caught forty years ago, almost to the day, jumped high in the splendid morning air.
“Bill,” he called, “I’m not sure, but I think I have a fish on.”
And so he had.
Anyway, we drove home later. It was mild. There was the smell from a fire in Quebec, a hazy smoke all across the river where I have spent so much of my life. Peg was at the door, smiling like that girl who ran the Bartibog with me thirty-eight years ago.
Your mom’s gentle smile made me realize that all things are possible. My son, there is nothing ever to fear.
I will get to B&L again. Roo and I will clamour down the banks of the great river together. Me with a rod in my hand, she stopping to wait as we make our way.
I believe that’s the way it will be.
Someday, soon.
2015
KNOWING CANADA: A RURAL PERSPECTIVE
THE NATION HAS CHANGED SINCE THE TIME I WAS A CHILD. I DO not know if it is for the better, but there is no doubt it attempts to be for the better. We are no longer a rural world, and for some reason that is looked upon as good. But in some sense we must realize that not being rural always was looked upon as being good, even when most of us were rural. That sophistication could only be seen in urban centres. And even when Toronto would have blushed to have called itself “a world class city.” Even then—or I might say, even more so then—those in the rural world were always preached at in a certain way. Told in subtle ways that they had to smarten up, to become party to the great ideas, and that the great ideas were only the urban-centric ones. And even though some rural people were smart enough to realize that so much of sophistication relies upon a lack of nobility in the soul, we were still told we should strive for it. What I noticed was that if we did not adopt these ideas, we were part of the problem and not the solution.
The ideas that filter through to those of us in the supposed hinterland have always been slightly high-handed, the values slightly different, the wordlings who write in papers remarkably colloquial by pretending to understand and to know the hallmarks of success and to define Canada’s role in it. That is, the first thing so many urbanites trade in for sophistication is common sense.
A thousand times I waited for the CBC to evoke the mystery in the Canadian man and woman that makes us great. Most of the time when I was growing up, they fed us with uninspired tributes to urban life, urban writers, feeding us sympathy for catchy and trendy ideas that came from south of the border.
But so much of Canada gives itself away—teeters on the brink of euphoria if mentioned by Hollywood, or in a New York paper, while at the same time pretending to scoff. Canada hates to be viewed poorly by its southern cousins. Therefore Canada tries—or at least tried when I was a boy to hide its real self from Hollywood, New York. There was little we could celebrate in rural Canada, unless it was the First Nations. We can’t be seen to be rural, uncouth people—we have to know—yes, and know in the exact way others supposedly know. This was a problem for me when I was coming to age and waiting for some sign that defined not who I was but defined how those speaking to us knew who we were.
But they so often defined us by ignoring whole sections of the country they did not know, and worried us rurals would show them up. I remember a professor of economics from Calgary asking me blithely in 1990 whether or not I could fly from Toronto to New Brunswick—astonished that New Brunswick (home of the man who, as minister of aircraft production in the Second World War, oversaw the manufacture of six thousand Spitfires in four months) had an airport. I remember a young man from Vancouver, with the required love beads and long hair and almost all the in-vogue sayings, being dumbfounded to discover that I, who had met him in Spain and travelled with him, was actually a hick from New Brunswick, who could outclass him in history and literature and world affairs when I was nineteen years old.
“Really—New Brunswick—my God!”
It is no longer that way today, people assure me. Though I am not entirely sure. Nor should I be.
When I was younger, this inexperienced presumption afforded a most amazingly silly trait: that of watching how my sophisticate brothers from more cultured provinces longed to be defined by things.
Like a chimpanzee collecting hats and cigars to look the part.
That is, the things half of ordinary Canada wanted to define themselves by and show pride in were never ours to begin with. Game shows, television series, even fast-food restaurants.
The Price is Right, Let’s Make a Deal—that’s what I heard about when I was younger by people coming from Ontario to New Brunswick in the summer, who relaxed in cottages by our bay.
“We have Arby’s where I come from—you should try my Arby’s,” someone from Ontario once told me with great glee when I was fifteen.
Of course Arby’s, like McDonald’s or anything else, was neither his nor Canadian. That he did not know this, or did and tried to keep it from both of us, seems a continual refrain by many Canadians who live in a world where they simply accept the premise that it is always good or better to be someone else.
I remember that when I was very little, I had great faith in our country. Or I should say, a different kind of faith—one that rested on the precept that if I did not know my country, it might, just might, know me. That is, I still believed I was welcomed in it. I do not think that as much now. That does not mean I do not love Canada—I do. It does, however, mean that Canada’s major sentiments toward much of what I love have diminished over the years, so the country is now another country, its concerns, concerns I do not share and sometimes oppose. The sentiments Canada has aren’t declared, set in stone—and millions of people like me do not share them. But you see, there is a feeling that in order to be proper Canadians, we should share them. Laughter at hicks and rednecks is always celebrated, and so we should laugh at those people we loved and grew up beside, who for the most part are as energetic, intelligent and as worthy of respect as anyone else I have come to know. But there are those we are not allowed to laugh at, satire or ridicule even at their most absurd. And most of us know who they are.
Back then it was different.
We were Maritimers, of course, and New Brunswickers to boot—but we were, at least for an identifiable moment in my childhood, back in those days of the fifties
, Canadians first. There are very few times I now think of myself as Canadian first—Canada has tried by its culture and much of its literature to silence most of what I care about.
I love my country. So this is not meant to be seditious. However, I thought I was a Canadian for a little while. At five years of age, I had the big picture. We fought in a war, and way over in Korea—which I was informed was not quite a war, though many families had sons or husbands who’d bled and died in it. And we were all diehard fans of a hockey team: Montreal for me, and Toronto for my friends. But if this hockey team was Detroit, Gordon Howe knew where he came from; if Chicago, so, too, did Bobby Hull—and every other player who plied away in a foreign country for the glory of our national sport. (Americans still cannot seem to fathom the idea that someone from Canada could be a lifelong Detroit Red Wings fan, not knowing that every player playing for them up until the early eighties came from places like Thunder Bay)
Though New Brunswick did not have an NHL team, nor ever would, our national sport was played out in arenas all across the province by men who, though not quite NHL calibre, had the hard edge of the great sport in their blood.
We were also back then a lumbering and fishing and mining community in a nation of such communities, and we belonged to a people still demonstrably rural.
Rural and in relative solitude—our provincial capital, which was just a speck on a map in the larger scheme of things, 120 miles away through woods and across the tributaries of at least two great rivers. The roadways had been built by lumbering companies well over a century before, and had become King’s Highways over time. All evoking a kind of innocence and romance, I suppose no more innocent or romantic than anything else. Now there is nothing left of that. Our towns are ghosts of what they once were. Our rivers are closed in part to fishing. Forestry is depleted; the mining is gone. Car dealerships and fast-food chains dot our landscape. Our televisions beam in programs from other nations. And unless we leave, we are alone.
It has been said that two things kept our country together: CN Rail and CBC Radio. To say this means certain things to me. One is that we had no formal internal traditions that captured the imagination of the entire country, no real defining moment, and therefore searched for one, and found it in a symbol as prosaic as our national railway; which is good enough, when complemented by a radio service that went to the ends of our domain. But this concept allowed the idea of self-inflicted isolation—snow blowing over the diesel engines and a radio playing in some remote hamlet in the North. That is fine by me, if those on the radio really knew the people walking the tracks.
I suppose the idea that the CBC went to the ends of our domain, to igloos in the North and some lonely lighthouse on the east coast—when internalized was itself special, and evoked a kind of sweet hubris. But that hubris failed me over time, for over time I realized that three-quarters of the people who promoted this identity did not at all embrace what they said this identity held. That is, it did not hold or understand Canada, except with an asterisk. Many who rejoiced in these emblematic symbols hadn’t been east of Montreal, and many used their limited knowledge of Canada in a way to promote themselves as truer Canadians. An Ontarian was a truer Canadian that those from my province, certainly. Quebeckers were, as well.
That has been the feeling since I was ten or more—and it is a legitimate one—that those in cities felt that they had the goods on how to be a citizen. And whether it was Quebec joie de vivre or Ontario Orange, it seemed exclusive and more than a tad smug. For the most part a connectedness in Upper Canada was based upon a shared economy and a moral disapproval of America.
We fit in on the periphery—we were mentioned by our urban brothers in passing. I suppose we had the rail and the radio to keep us together in all of this.
This threadbare connectedness showed our patriotic limitations, and both institutions, the rail and the radio, in a serious way were outmoded by the time I was ten. The radio hung on, and did so in a way in which its very dawdling, its very preciousness and prescribed sense of itself as a righteous opposite to TV—its issue-orientated talk shows with the same left-of-centre issues discussed—kept it alive and gave it a track record that is admirable—like NPR radio is admirable to millions. It is where the country that had no voice in film or movies got to listen to Canadian filmmakers vying eternally for a few dollars, where Canadians who always believed (as everyone) that a movie version somehow validated a book got to listen to writers who often pretended they didn’t want their books made into films.
In my childhood passenger trains came in three times a day, and once when I was very little, I caught the midnight train to Montreal. On that train I drank a drink called 7up, and met an elderly black man who spoke French. I remember being assured of my provincial status when we came to a town not much bigger than my own. I revelled in the fact that we were now in Montreal—and grabbing my cardboard suitcase headed toward the door. This caused general amusement at the boy’s expense. But the train back then held many country bumpkins just like myself.
The CBC was listened to when we were away from town and could not get our own station, called CKMR back then and managed by the father of a friend, and which had a range and a radius of so many tiny miles.
Listening to the CBC when we went fishing along Church River on Victoria Day weekend leaves me with a slightly abstract and conflicted feeling about the solitude, about the sense of isolation. It seemed isolation always had something to do with strained classical music and a report from the wheat board, and the rather austere moralizing and august voices about such things. The moralizing traits of these somewhat Social Credit voices, voices that often missed the point, confusing middle-class activism with moral justice, swelled the CBC ranks by the time I was twenty years of age, so I found it more and more difficult to listen. It might be a leap to say—but not a great one—that by the time I was writing my early novels, I realized many at the CBC felt that one couldn’t believe in social progress unless they knew something about fine white wine and delicate cheese. The trouble is many even now wouldn’t notice this as an affectation.
Back when I was a child there’d be patches of snow still in the woods, kids lining in a row to toss small lines hoping for big fish under the black rushing water of spring, with the scent of lilacs and the promise of sunshine up behind those still-turbulent, northern storm-tossed clouds. We might hear from the car on the bank where my friend’s father sat watching us the sounds of mid-afternoon Mendelssohn coming down the path toward us, skipping along in notes, while the announcer with his practised English accent told us (I always believed) that we weren’t quite up to snuff.
That is, the music did not quite fit; while the wheat board had as much to do with us, it seemed, as the end-of-the-day stock report, filed out to children, with spring trout in their hands, holding them up for a black-and-white picture against the backdrop of old spruce.
I think of this when I think of my home—whenever I am driving from Toronto back down through Quebec, with its solitude and its large farms, onto Highway 185, which is the worst highway in the country (so I’ve been told) and through the dark spruces of the Plaster Rock Highway, where I’ve seen men stranded in the middle of the night and truckers unhitching their loads in solitude to make the iced-over hills in bitter cold. These were men I grew up with, a part of me, and characters for my novels—greatness to me could never be middle-class comfort, and could never be feminist angst—but it could/would always be both men and women. I thought Canada understood that, and in some ways the best of Canada did. On the home front our writers/journalists became obsessed not by rights of man but by attaining privileges for the privileged, and did not seem to know the difference…so great novels were called “bleak,” and novels about middle-class society—novels of comfortable victimization that always proved a point for contented readers—were called “radical.” Most of the men women writers wrote about back in the seventies and eighties weren�
�t men I recognized; they did, however, fill a convenient slot in these progressive books, and in some way they must have been the talented men these women came to know as Canadian men. But their stance in the world was so often small and diminished by the books written.
Yet I realized as I got older that Canada wanted to be diminished. It wanted to lessen its role in the world, its obligation to the world, while still maintaining a voice in the world. One just might say this was the coward’s way out. In this diminishing from 1960 forward, Canada lost much of its moral right, while shouting from the higher moral ground, usually against our nearest neighbour, the United States—and of course against British imperialism. I realized in a true way we existed at the pleasure of United States after 1964—and yet we thought we were morally above them most of the time.
Then Quebec’s voice for independence came along when I was a young man.
So my country’s focus changed almost 360 degrees. On a national scale after I was nineteen the trendiest needs were those of Quebec. I came to believe by 1972 that Quebec was in many ways a self-traumatized, self-obsessed adolescent, trying to hide at least a little bit of racist acne.
What I remember when I listened to the debates of the late sixties onward was the sham of it all—and the shame. The posturing of politicians showed that lack of subtlety in hauling the wool over our own eyes. This happened in two ways: English Canada must be sensitive to what French Quebec had suffered, while Quebec continually exhibited an intolerant ideological unawareness toward the rest of Canada that was not only accepted but supposedly understood.
And since the intellectuals formed their own class and not only framed the argument but were the only class of people who seemed to be allowed to discuss Canada, it became a one-sided dressing down of people who never had any say. Suddenly, by the time I was twenty those millions of us, who never had a say one way or the other, were told we no longer had a say. It was the first time I heard the name rednecks and bigots recklessly used against people I generally respected, and in the way those words were perceived were neither bigots nor rednecks.
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