by Tony Taylor
I started to think about Ecclesiastes. I was not relig-ious and never paid much attention to the Bible as a child, but rivers tend to make one think back and I do remember being impressed by the verse that reads: ‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.’ That bit obviously got to me. I have been thinking about it ever since. The river I was standing by today was flowing so forcibly it was difficult not to imagine the sea filling right up and flooding the land completely. Yet I knew it would not happen.
Weather systems are crucial to the health of our planet and I was helping to screw them up by flying to Canada to show my grandson how to fish. Why, I thought, couldn’t he buy fish in a shop like everybody else? Why was I beginning to doubt? I was sabotaging the project from the beginning. A fisherman has to be an optimist; perhaps this is more important than catching fish.
Eventually I reached the canyon. The water moved with such force here I was sure the granite was starting to tremble, and again my mind wandered into regions I didn’t necessarily want it to go. I thought of childhood games like rock, paper, scissors and various old Chinese sayings I had come across over the years. What were they called? Were they koans? Wasn’t there something in Chinese philosophy about nothing being harder than water? It was a long time since I had read anything by Lao Tzu but I had a feeling as I stood on the trembling rock at the edge of the surge that he must have experienced something similar to this. In the struggle between rock and water there was a riddle that appeared to have no logical solution so I decided that was enough for the day. I climbed off the shuddering rocks and gave up fishing. I realised that although rock was harder than water, according to the Mohs scale of hardness, if you added time to the equation water wore rock away.
Wandering along any river always opens the mind. I hadn’t thought about ancient Chinese philosophers for a long time and I knew little about them. But the brain, although very different from a radio or a television, often works like they do and suddenly changes the channel. Somehow or another the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius came into my mind. He was the first modern thinker to become aware of the industrial revolution’s effect on the atmosphere, in 1896. Somehow he pushed Lao Tzu to the back of my thoughts.
I first became aware of man’s power to change a whole planet in 1939 when my new geography teacher G. A. German told us about the work of his friend Guy Stewart Callendar at Cambridge the year before. Callendar predicted that carbon dioxide produced by industry would gradually make the planet too warm to support life. ‘Gag’, as we called our beloved teacher, whose real mission in life seemed to be to make us all love maps, told us the Earth could eventually become as hot as our sister planet Venus where the temperature at the surface was more than 400 degrees Celsius. We thought about this for an instant, but put the whole thing on the back burner because the immediate threat was a man called Adolph Hitler. The extreme temperature mentioned by my teacher does not seem scientifically likely now, nearly seventy years later, but there is no doubt that the Earth is getting hotter because of the blanket of carbon dioxide.Callendar’s prediction on that was correct.
I walked back to the cabin along the old river road. I hoped to find the logging trail where I had left the car. Then it would be just a short walk to the cabin. I could have gone back the way I came but I had had enough of the river for a while. It wasn’t paying off in the way I had planned and it would probably not be possible for my grandson to fish. If I was having difficulty getting my fly near to the bottom, where there was only a slim chance of a fish taking it, in conditions like this how could I expect an eight-year-old to have any success? He could depend on luck, but no good fisherman likes to do this.
Walking back along the forest road, perhaps a kilometre away from the river, I spotted a small lake. It looked tempting. But, despite the conditions, I would start Ned casting on the river where he would learn first about the difficulties of fast water, and also perhaps to avoid trees when casting. Then if the river didn’t improve in a day or so we would fish the lake.
I got back to the cabin about dusk. I lit the fire and an oil lamp, cooked up a bit of grub and sat down to the table to eat. I propped up a book to read as I was eating. It was the fifth edition of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, first published in 1676. This edition contains a new section on fly fishing added by his adopted son, Charles Cotton. Walton mainly fished with natural bait, so for fishermen attempting to fish with an artificial fly this edition is the best.
I gave up trying to read by the light of the lamp. All sorts of memories were flowing; there was a lot I wanted to pass on to my grandson when he arrived. Again I didn’t bother to use any of the dozen or so bunks and on my second night in the cabin I slept on the primitive couch in front of the fire.
5
Living in Meade’s Cabin
Back in 1968, I enjoyed my stay in Meade’s cabin because it gave me a chance to think. The place was incredibly beautiful; to the west everywhere was still wilderness. It was mine, and the land was so rich it begged to be written about. I wasn’t sure if my writing could save the area from the chainsaws for, having been trained as a scientist, my writing skills were few and I had no idea of how it could be done. I had written some accounts of mountaineering in the past, encouraged by the poet-mountaineer Michael Roberts, but I was not a practised writer. Only one thing was certain: the best writing in the world could never do this forest justice.
I thought back to the days at the end of the war when I used to eat smoked salmon when visiting the house in Chelsea that belonged to Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. The magnificent mansion was the former home of Lord Nelson’s mistress Lady Hamilton and there was a full sized replica of the Elgin Marbles around the upper part of the wall of the huge drawing room. Roberts and his wife used to have the most wonderful literary gatherings there, and people like T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas sometimes visited. In fact anybody who was anybody in the literary world used to gather there about once a month, and I met most of the poets and writers of that time. The poet I wanted to meet the most was W. B. Yeats—I didn’t know he was dead.
The only reason a callow youth like me got invited was that I was a mountaineer. I climbed in the Alps with Roberts until his death in 1948. The main thing I remember about these parties was that only some of the visitors were mountaineers; most were poets or writers of one kind or another and many of them fished and liked to talk about it.
Every day living in the old cabin brought something new. Clouds over the mountains, sunshine, a bear on the beach, swallows in the spring, rain in the fall and heavy snow in winter. I chopped firewood and milled some lumber. I built a flat-bottomed skiff and a sledge, made an outhouse and built some bookcases to store my books. When I was not busy around the cabin I made expeditions into the woods or paddled my canoe.
Unlike the boat, which I built myself, the canoe, I bought from the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was made in New Brunswick of light white cedar, covered with lightweight canvas and painted green. It weighed eighteen kilograms and was built over a proper canoe mould. It travelled across the country covered in sacking and full of straw. Cost, including the rail transport, was sixty dollars, or about three dollars a kilogram. To build a canoe I would have had to have used the heavier western red cedar, made a mould first and covered it with metal to turn and bend the copper nails. I couldn’t have done it for the money.
During the next two years I fished the various rivers around the lake and wrote a weekly column in the local newspaper. I called it Out and About with Tarka. The column was ostensibly about fishing and hunting, but it also emphasised conservation, which in those days was a dirty word. I chose Tarka as a pen-name because I had loved the book Tarka the Otter as a boy. I had no idea when I started writing that Henry Williamson, the author of that wonderful book, was still alive in Devon. I thought about what I was going to write for my column most of the week, then I produced a detailed drawing in
Indian ink, and in the last couple of hours or so before the paper went to press, I scribbled off my story. The editor paid me well, but part of the deal was that he kept the drawings.
I started writing when I first went to the lake because I was appalled by the destruction of the great forest that was happening all around me. I wanted to persuade people that there was a better way. We needed to live with nature, not change it. In the end I aroused the wrath of the British Columbia government by criticising the planned dam on the Peace River. The minister in charge used huge amounts of column space criticising my comments. I think I might have suggested the minister was stupid and he accused me of being a coward because I was hiding behind a pen-name. I also failed to persuade most of the locals, although in the end I did succeed in helping get a large area to the west of the lake preserved as what is now known as the Pacific Rim National Park.
One day I was sitting at my typewriter with the door of the cabin open so I could look out at the lake when suddenly a logger appeared in the doorway. I would like to say as it says in the song, I knew he was a logger ‘and not just a common bum, for no one but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb’, but it was late afternoon and the coffee pot was empty. He was wearing what all the loggers wore: a heavy, grey wool button-neck vest, stagged wool pants (shortened so as not to catch on the logs) held up by colourful suspenders and caulked boots. He was acutely aware of the spikes in his boots and didn’t enter because he knew he would wreck the floor, but he probably would have trodden on my face with them if we had got into a fight.
‘Doing a bit of writing?’ he asked.
I was cautious as I didn’t want anyone to know I was Tarka so I made light of the typewriter saying I was far from familiar with it (which was true) and that I used it mainly for letters (which was not).
‘Thought for a minute you might be that guy that writes that rubbish in the paper,’ he said, ‘but looking at you I can see you’re not a proper writer, although a real writer did live in this cabin once.’
I asked him who it was and he told me it was Negley Farson.
‘He didn’t know what he was talking about either so we ran him out of town,’ he said. We talked a little more and then he left. I had been warned.
Negley Farson wrote for the Daily Mail in England and was a favourite of my father’s. So after the logger had gone I wrote an excited letter to my dad. I couldn’t believe it, I was living in a cabin where a man who was his hero had once lived. Dad liked Farson because he wrote sensitively about nature and adventure and he was a conservationist. My father was retired but had been harbourmaster of the port of London during the war. Like me, he wrote in a small way. His stuff was mainly about the history of sail on his beloved Thames and he published short pieces in various nautical magazines. He didn’t make much money out of writing; but he once made four guineas for an article on ships in wartime London. That piece, published in London, was republished without his knowledge in the Calcutta Times. But when he received that big cheque from the editor, Dad forgave him.
Farson was also a role model for Hemingway who worked under him in Toronto. Somewhere or other I read that Farson was the only one left standing when they drank together. My father wrote back telling me he had heard that Farson had recently died. Apparently he had been living in Devon for years. His nearest neighbour was Henry Williamson and they were very good friends. I was beginning to wonder if some kind of heavenly puppetry had been going on, but in the end I decided life could be much stranger than I could possibly imagine.
The much-travelled Farson came to Cowichan Lake twice and wrote two books about it. The first time was on his honeymoon in the early twenties—he married Dick Stoker’s niece, Eve. That visit produced a depressing novel published in 1938 and called The Story of a Lake. It was this book that antagonised the locals. He described them all in so much detail they were easy to recognise and he hardly bothered to change most of the names. It is the story of a drunk living alone in a cabin, like Meade. Yet during the winter Farson and his wife probably stayed in the log bungalow at Marble Bay when Doctor Stoker stayed in Duncan. Always playful with names, Farson called his wife’s uncle Feathers because the old doctor was always tying new fishing flies. Eve Stoker, it was said, loved the wildness even more than her husband did, but quite what happened to her and their marriage I have been unable to find out.
Farson returned to the lake, I think alone, and wrote what has been described as one of the greatest books on fishing ever written. Going Fishing was published in October 1942 and is kept by most anglers on their shelves next to Izaak Walton.
For the last year or two a British angling magazine has been encouraging its readers to write in every month to list and comment on their six favourite fishing books. Farson and a follower of his, Hugh Falkus, now both long dead, are still two of the most popular authors. Falkus read Going Fishing in 1943 when he was a prisoner of war in Germany. How the book got there he does not explain but I imagine some sympathetic person put it in one of the comfort-parcels that were sent from neutral countries to British prisoners of war. If I remember correctly only things like warm clothing and socks were allowed. I like to think that the German guard who inspected the parcel was an angler too and passed it on to Falkus to get some help with translating the English text. Perhaps talking about fishing made them good friends and they went fishing together when the war was over.
Although he considered himself an Englishman, and had been a pilot in Britain’s air force during the first world war, James Scott Negley Farson was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1890. His unmarried mother died in childbirth, and the orphan was adopted and raised by an eccentric American Civil War veteran known as ‘General’. His name was James Negley and he had no family of his own so he added Negley to Farson’s name, apparently to make him his heir, and Farson called the old man Grandfather. Unfortunately for Farson, when the old man died, the big house was repossessed because there was no money to cover his debts.
Reading between the lines of The Story of a Lake, it seems to me that Farson poured much of himself plus plenty of whisky into the chief character in the book, and that may have been another reason for its failure. He did, however, become perhaps one of the world’s most popular travel writers in the years before the second world war. Although he wrote at least half a dozen successful travel books, sadly, except for Going Fishing, all have been forgotten.
Because of my writing about the Peace River Dam—the disastrous new plan to flood the Rocky Mountain Trench for a hydro-electric scheme—I met Raymond Patterson. His book The Dangerous River first appeared in England and Canada in 1954 and has been reprinted two or three times and translated into Spanish, Dutch and other languages. I found the book fascinating because it was about the northern part of the Coast Range Batholith and in it Patterson described his adventures in the great canyon of the Nahanni River. This little-known river with its narrow gorge more than a thousand metres deep is more spectacular than the Grand Canyon, and the huge falls halfway up are similar to those on the Niagara River. Patterson travelled up this river in a wood–canvas prospector’s canoe like mine, and we found we had a lot in common. He was a brilliant canoeist and a clever fisherman, and from him I learned how to travel standing up and pole a canoe, a technique frowned upon by qualified canoe instructors. But sometimes it is the only safe way to navigate tricky water in real wilderness as it enables the canoeist to see more detail in the rapids ahead, and the pole is useful as a brake.
Mostly we talked about techniques for travelling through this wild country. Like me, he marvelled at the variety and profusion of living things on the great granite batholith and wondered why this great wilderness was so well endowed.
Besides being a fine writer Patterson could spin a yarn. I visited him in Victoria and told him about meeting the wolverine on Bald Mountain. He told me that about ten days before Christmas 1929 when he was living in his cabin in the Headless Valley a wolverine had got into his cache and shat all over his
supplies. He shot the animal and made it into a stew. Using a couple of enamel plates he put portions of the stew on the roof of the cabin to freeze and continued doing this until he had ten frozen slabs. He then put his bedroll, rifle and axe on his narrow toboggan and set off to walk more than three hundred kilometres down the frozen river to meet Gordon Matthews at the Hudson Bay Post for Christmas. Every night he cut down a dead jack pine, made a huge fire and melted a slab of stew. The trip took him exactly ten days and the temperature, as far as he could tell, stayed well below zero. When I asked him how the wolverine tasted he gave a wry grin and said, ‘I sort of reckon I invented TV dinners.’
One of the things we talked about a lot and made us allies was the damming of the Peace River at Hudson’s Hope. The government proudly called it ‘the biggest dammed lake in the world’, and said it would be able to be seen from the surface of the moon. I was very much against the dam and the hydro-electric power plant for I had seen the disastrous effects of the much smaller Australian Snowy Mountains Scheme. The Canadian plan was to flood the valleys of the Peace, the Finlay and the Parsnip rivers, and in our opinion that would be a mistake.
Occasionally we talked about writing. We both agreed it was not easy and the only way was to continue struggling until one got it right. He said that when writing a book one was always very much alone. I don’t think we ever discussed Farson or any of the other writers connected with Vancouver Island. Nearly all our conversations were about animals, canoeing and ways of catching fish. I learned a lot about the outdoors from this old bushman. I remember he always carried a mousetrap in his pack. He set it at the end of a portage overnight and nearly always caught mice for bait. Although he was a fly fisherman he also like to eat char, like bull trout or Dolly Varden, which are easier to catch on bait.