Born Naked

by Farley Mowat

  Angus was an excellent carpenter, and he fitted out the vessel’s interior with skill and cunning. The trim little galley boasted a small ice-box, a gasoline camp stove, and a tiny sink. There were two main berths in the afterquarters. A smaller, folding, pipe berth, slung across the stem, was my rookery. Built-in bookshelves, lockers, a table, and a settee completed the furnishings. The whole was made bright and airy during daylight hours by six large ports, and at night by two brass oil lamps set in gimbals. The windows—sorry, ports—were fitted with red and white striped awnings which could be demurely lowered when the vessel was at anchor.

  Angus painted his new vessel green and christened her Rolling Home; but she was better known as Angus’s Ark which, being difficult to say, was shortened to the Ark.

  On Saturday morning, August 5, 1933, the Ark set sail on her maiden voyage—a trial run, as it were—to Oakville, from whence we would take our eventual departure for Saskatchewan.

  The omens were not propitious. When only a few miles on our way, the unwieldy vessel (which, because she had four wheels, tended to sheer wildly from side to side) escaped my father’s control and ricocheted off a curb, knocking several of the wooden spokes out of a front wheel. Angus had to drive Eardlie back to Walkerville and search out a new wheel, leaving Helen and me to explain to a crowd of the curious what the Ark was and what she was supposed to be doing. The reaction was one of incredulity.

  “She’ll never make it!” said an onlooker. “Nope. You’d best haul her onto the nearest bit of ground, Missis, and plant some flowers out in front, and settle down right here.”

  Helen might have been content to do just that but Angus returned with a new wheel, repairs were effected, and we continued to our first destination, Port Stanley on Lake Erie. We moored for the night alongside a friend’s cottage and I went happily off to swim in the lake, while Helen cautiously cooked our first meal en passage. This consisted of scrambled eggs on toast, coffee (milk for me), more toast, and honey. As time wore on, she became somewhat more adept at coping with the galley stove which, if not carefully watched, tended to flare up and incinerate the cook.

  The captain wrote in his log next morning: “A pretty sleepless night. In the next cottage, a party from Detroit made merry until 5:00 a.m. and Farleigh was seasick during the night and vomited over the side of his bunk into mine.”7

  I was not seasick. It was simply that the excitement of our departure had got to my stomach which was notoriously “delicate”—a condition which my grandmother Thomson blamed on “all those soda biscuits and honey the poor lamb had to eat when he was small.”

  The following day we reached Oakville, where we remained for two weeks with Angus’s parents. They were then in their seventies and gloomily viewed our departure for the Far West as a final separation. Grandfather Gill numbed his sorrow with the contents of a bottle of rye which was Angus’s parting gift. Grandmother Mary withdrew to her bedroom after having frigidly stigmatized the removal as “more foolish nonsense of the sort that has distinguished the Mowat men for generations.”

  We “hauled anchor” on the morning of August 21. Angus had used some of the intervening time to adjust the tow bar so that the Ark no longer sheered about like an unbroken stallion on a slack tether. Nevertheless, she did not tamely follow Eardlie, and the Captain still had problems with the helm. “Going through London we found the narrow streets and fool street-cars a distinct nuisance,” he noted angrily. I hesitate to think what the streetcar drivers must have felt about us. Certainly we must have been a trial to motorists on the open highways for they had to dawdle along behind, sometimes for miles, before finding a stretch where they might safely pass our lurching behemoth.

  Because the rumble seat was packed full of luggage, I began the voyage crowded between my parents on Eardlie’s narrow front seat. All of us soon grew dissatisfied with this arrangement and, after a few days of querulous discomfort, Angus asked me if I would like to ride inside the Ark itself.

  What a question! Would I have liked to skipper the Queen Mary? Would I have liked to pilot the Graf Zeppelin?

  The upshot was that I travelled most of the way to Saskatoon in command of a vehicle which adopted as many guises as my imagination willed. One of these was a World War I Vimy bomber. Crouched on my pipe berth in the stern, I kept my Lewis gun (actually a Daisy air rifle) swinging from side to side as I waited for pursuing Spads or Fokkers to fly into my sights. I would insult pursuing enemy pilots with such gestures of disdain as wagging my fingers in my ears, sticking out my tongue and, yes, even thumbing my nose, before pouring a burst of machine-gun fire into their vitals.

  My parents were baffled by the hostility displayed by some overtaking motorists who shook their fists at Eardlie, yelled insults, and on one memorable occasion flung a hot-dog with such accuracy that it splattered mustard all over Rolling Home’s bluff bows.

  Angus would bare his teeth at such displays of incivility and fling pungent epithets back while Helen, who hated displays of raw emotion, cringed in the seat beside him.

  In 1933 one could not drive east and west across Canada because no road yet spanned the great hump of granite and spruce forests north of Lake Superior. Consequently, we had to cross into Michigan in order to make our way westward. This we did by taking a ferry across the St. Clair River from Sarnia to Port Huron.

  Since Eardlie’s best speed never exceeded twenty-five miles an hour our progress was leisurely. On a good day we might run a hundred and twenty miles. We made fairly good time on pavement but gravel roads, which became the norm the farther west we went, were our bane. Poor Eardlie could not seem to get a good grip on gravel, and slithered and slid about with abandon. Nevertheless he was always game and the log is filled with entries attesting to his fortitude. “This day Eardlie hauled Rolling Home over a steady succession of fairly high hills on the way to Grand Rapids, and did it without even a wheeze or a cough, though he did drink an extra quart of oil.” It is notable that Angus always referred to Eardlie as male, and in terms which more nearly applied to a horse than an automobile. But Rolling Home was female, as a ship must be. It seems not to have occurred to him that the idea of a horse hauling a ship across the continent was somewhat bizarre.

  Many of the people we met along the way certainly thought we were a bit odd; yet, for the most part, they were kindly and well-disposed. On one occasion we parked the Ark in a munici­pal tourist camp but the day was too hot for Helen to do any cooking so we drove to a roadside café for dinner. At a cost of forty cents apiece, we had southern fried chicken with all the trimmings, and apple pie and ice cream. The proprietor was friendly, but too inquisitive for Angus’s taste. He wanted to know where we had come from, where we were going and, in both instances, why.

  “I told him,” Angus noted, “that we were sailing a prairie schooner to the west for a cargo of buffalo robes. The fellow looked out the window at Eardlie sitting there with his top down and replied thoughtfully, ‘Sun gets powerful strong in these parts. Lotsa folks been known to git sun stroke!’”

  The route we were following required us to take a ferry across Lake Michigan, but when we arrived at the docks on the eastern side of the lake it was to find that Rolling Home was too high to clear the vessel’s doors. We were told our only hope was to try loading her on a railroad ferry which sailed from Ludington, another port well to the north. It seemed a slim chance but the alternative—to drive all the way south around Lake Michigan through Chicago and its environs (inhabited mainly by Al Capone’s ruffians, so we believed) was not attractive. We headed north.

  The men servicing the huge railroad ferry, Père Marquette, were amused but helpful. “We might put that thing [the Ark] on a flat car and ship ’er over as cargo but then she’d be too high to go through our loading doors. Nope, that won’t do. But we’ve got a train to load aboard and if there’s room behind the caboose we might be able to roll that thing on too.”

  Which
is what they did. Ten men manhandled the Ark onto the rails and aboard the ferry where they lashed her tight against the caboose with Eardlie nosing up to her stern. We went on deck but Helen was concerned about our Ark.

  “Whatever will the poor thing think? One minute she’s a caravan, then a prairie schooner, and now a freight car. I do hope she doesn’t get confused.”

  The crossing to the Wisconsin side of the lake took six hours and was one long delight. I was especially thrilled when the second engineer took Angus and me below and showed us the engine room. I was barefoot, having lost one shoe the day before, and Angus was in flannels.8 We were sights to behold when we emerged on deck again but what a spectacle those huge steam engines were, all brass and gleaming motion and spurts of vapour.

  We then showed some of the crew through Rolling Home, in return for which the first mate asked us to the pilot house where we spent a fascinating hour amongst the radios, compasses, and other instruments, and I was allowed to put my hands on the great mahogany steering wheel. Later, at dinner in the saloon, we met a couple from Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, on their way home by train. They talked “west” with my parents and told us a good deal about the drought and the dust storms which awaited us.

  Driving on from Manitowoc the next day, we reached Lake Winnebago, near which we anchored for the night, and Rolling Home became the recipient of considerable attention and admiration from the inhabitants of the nearby town. I wonder now. Was our visit the seminal factor which would one day unleash thundering hordes of Winnebago motor-homes to prowl all over North America? I devoutly hope we were not responsible for that.

  Saturday, August 27 was notable because we had a strong tail wind with whose help Eardlie occasionally got up to thirty miles per hour and ran off a record passage of one hundred and seventy miles, consuming fourteen gallons of gasoline and three quarts of oil in the doing. Reaching the town of Hudson on the St. Croix River just before dusk, we anchored in the local tourist park. This dispirited acre of burned-out grass offered a superb view of the river valley, and some of the dirtiest toilets we had yet encountered. I went looking for birds while Helen went shopping at a nearby general store and Angus picked up a twenty-pound block of ice.

  In the Thirties every town and most villages had a public tourist park which provided, usually free-of-charge, outhouses, running water (cold), fireplaces, and sometimes firewood. These refuges were much used by migrants moving about the country in search of work. One such family was in the park when we arrived. It consisted of an aged, extraordinarily tall, thin, dirty, stockingless man; three boys from ten to fourteen in tattered overalls; two girls, quite comely in men’s trousers; and a baby a few months old. What the relationship between them all was, heaven knows. They were travelling in a hopelessly dilapidated car, towing a broken-down trailer in which they carried a tattered tent and their camping gear. The girls seemed to do all the work while the old man slept. According to what one of the boys told me, they originally hailed from Texas, and had been on the road since March and were heading north to hoe potatoes.

  Although sympathetic with their plight, Angus thought these people shiftless. Helen was a little frightened by them. I found them interesting and became chummy with the boys, who much admired my air rifle, but I thought them greedy for the way they devoured a plateful of cookies Helen offered them.

  Much later, while reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, I would remember the cookie incident with a pang of shame, but at the time I had no comprehension of the miseries and degradation to which that family and several millions like them were being subjected. For them, the economic collapse of 1929 had not been a “depression” but a bottomless pit into which they had been plunged with small hope of escape. Most of the people with whom we shared the municipal “tourist” parks were, in fact, Depression refugees, desperately seeking work of whatever kind wherever they could find it. Although most seemed a cut above the family we met at Hudson, they were all enduring adversity of a severity hardly credible to most of us today.

  On September 1 we were approaching Fargo, North Dakota, when, with astonishing abruptness, we found ourselves on the prairie. “Hell’s bells!” cried Angus as we stared across a world with no apparent horizon. “We’re at sea!”

  We headed due west, into the blue, and it was goodbye pavement, goodbye hills, goodbye trees and shade and sparkling brooks. We drew our first deep breath of prairie dust. Eardlie squared his shoulders and his engine took on a deeper hum. On every hand, threshing machines were at work. Straw stacks were burning, sending blue smoke plumes into a bluer sky. Horsemen trotted across vast reaches of virgin sod where cattle grazed. Gophers popped up and down on every hand and rattlesnakes slithered into the ditches. We passed lonely, treeless, unpainted houses from which ragged children poured out to gape and wave at our swaying green house on wheels. Late in the day we stopped on top of a little hill. As far as we could judge from the road map, we could see forty miles across the prairie in every direction. It was awe-inspiring, for it seemed to be a never-ending vista.

  The fascination of it for me was intensified by the stupendous numbers and varieties of animals. There were no buffalo, but gophers (ground squirrels) of several species seemed to be everywhere. Ducks by the tens of thousands clustered noisily in the few ponds and lakes (sloughs,9 we would learn to call them) that still held water. Huge hawks hung in the pale air or perched on telephone poles along the road, eyeing us balefully as we trundled by raising a cloud of dust behind us. Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds flowered like tropical exotics in roadside ditches; western meadowlarks sang loud and clear from the fence posts, and coveys of partridges and prairie chickens shot out of the wheat stubble like miniature rockets.

  We camped near Minot and, with my trusty Daisy in hand, I took my first walk on the prairie in palpitating fear/hope that I might meet a coyote. And I did. But he was dead—long dead and desiccated from sun and wind. His lips were drawn back over white teeth in the dry rictus of a snarl, and one hind leg was firmly clamped in the grip of a rusty steel trap.

  The next day I saw a live coyote slip like an ochre shadow into the tumbleweed in a coulee, but the dead coyote looms larger in memory.

  We were then driving north within a day’s journey of Canada. The heat was fearful and the world burned brown. We passed a sign that read “swiming 21 mi,” and our hopes rose. But when we got there it was to find a miserable little alkali lake and a ramshackle and seemingly abandoned dance hall set in the bleakest, most desolate situation that could be imagined. The lake was almost literally alive with thousands of mallard ducks which were not so much “swiming” as wading about in the muck. We did not disturb them.

  On September 4 we crossed the border at Portal, North Dakota. Helen and even Angus were appalled by our first view of Saskatchewan. It looked like a desert in the making. Nothing green to be seen. Rough little valleys cut through low brown hills with not a drop of water in them. Here and there in the valley banks were the mole-like black holes where people had been digging for coal but we saw no people, no cattle, not even any gophers.

  Seeking a tourist camp, we got lost and ended up in an abandoned village where gaunt, grey wooden buildings leaned against each other on an empty “main street.” We headed for Estevan, the nearest town shown on our map, but, before reaching it, encountered a few poplars still sporting some green leaves. There was a weathered farm-house not far away so Angus went to ask permission to camp in the grove. Mr. and Mrs. Gent graciously gave it, but pressed us to park the Ark in their farmyard instead. Angus wrote of them:

  The Gents and their farm seemed to us rather a pathetic spectacle. They are English immigrants who have been 24 years here and raised a family, all of whom have had to leave the farm. The old couple—they were not really old although both looked it—were no farther ahead than when they landed in Canada. Yet, in spite of poor crops, drought and having to board coal-miners to stay alive, they rema
ined cheerful and optimistic. Yes, there had been three years of arid drought, but next year it might rain. They had sowed 250 bushels of wheat this year, and harvested 500. But next year things might be better!

  They have two cows and a little milk route in Estevan, nine miles away. They sell a hog or two each year and some fowl, and so: ‘we have managed to keep off Government relief, and that is something these days.’

  Because of the drought they have to cart their drinking water from Estevan. Washing water comes in a ditch from the nearest coal mine and is black as tar. They were most insistent that we stay with them next day, which was sunday, for a chicken dinner and seemed deeply disappointed when we had to refuse. Having heard me complain that I did not like American tobacco, Mr. Gent pressed a package of old chum on me and would accept no payment. I don’t know why the almighty couldn’t let such folks have a little rain occasionally.

  Next morning Saskatchewan showed another face. We woke in a chill grey dawn so cold we had to run the Coleman stove to heat up the cabin. We washed in cold coal water and then bade adieu to the kindly Gents and rolled out across the prairies bound north and west for Saskatoon.

  But not before Mrs. Gent, cautioning me to secrecy, had slipped a fifty-cent silver piece into my pocket. I did not tell my parents about this until much later in the day. They concluded that this may well have been the only “cash money” the Gents had in hand but, after a great deal of discussion, decided not to send it back for fear of mortally offending them. Angus kept the money “in trust” for me, but not many weeks after taking over his new job, he began shipping library books to the Gents, who had mentioned that they could seldom find anything to read.

  From this beginning, Angus eventually developed a travelling library scheme by means of which the Saskatoon Public Library circulated thousands of volumes to remote parts of the province where people had no other access to books. It was his contribution to easing the miseries of the Depression and it was no mean one either. Before we left Saskatoon, the library had accumulated a fat file of letters from people who wrote that the books they had received had meant as much to them as food.