Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  At this point two voices began arguing in my brain. One said this guy is getting hypothermic lying in this icy melt water. Move him! The other voice said never move someone with a spinal injury. He had fallen at least 50 feet.

  So Mr. Belt-and-Suspenders booted up his GPS and got out his cell phone for a 911 call. When I reached dispatch and explained the situation the operator asked me at what intersection we were. Now, if you’ve paddling for miles along a cliff hundreds of feet high you have no idea what’s above you. You can’t see anything but rim of the bluff and the sky. I gave them our location, latitude and longitude, in degrees, minutes and seconds. The GPS was probably accurate to within 50 feet.

  “What’s that? What are those stupid numbers?” The emergency operators and dispatchers didn’t have a clue what they meant. So here we were, basically in the midst of a city of several millions, but we may as well have been on Baffin Island. As usual, the government was behind the curve. So a lot of precious time was wasted while I instructed them to find someone with a topo map so our “intersection” could be located. Unsurprisingly, it was my buddies at the fire department who figured it out first. They went to Doris McCarthy’s property and attempted to climb down the steep gully slope beside it. The combination of the thaw and the clay meant that the slope may as well have been greased. They had to go back and fetch some ropes. Eventually they were able to lower a guy with a backboard down the slope. By the time he got to us our biker in the creek was turning blue.

  With time a police boat appeared offshore but couldn’t get in because of the beach shallows. Then a chopper arrived and managed to land in the gully bottom. By now enough firemen had descended on the ropes to get our guy onto the backboard and into the helicopter. It took off for the trauma centre at Sunnybrook Hospital.

  All this activity had generated a lot of radio chatter. The press and television news people picked up on a good story and soon figured out that we were in the Bellamy Ravine, accessible from Kingston Road. Soon there were cops and cameras everywhere.

  One of the officers told the score of media people that I had photographed the whole drama with my underwater Nikon. They closed in on me. Everyone wanted the pictures. Now here’s where Mr. Belt-and-Suspenders turned out to be just another dumb guy.

  When I looked at the circle of pleading media people all I saw was the blonde from the Toronto Sun newspaper. She was bursting out of her strategically unzipped parka. I fell for it. After explaining that I was a professional photographer and had other personal pictures on the same roll of film, I said I wanted some money, a photo credit and the film returned after processing and printing. She charmingly agreed. I surrendered the film.

  The subsequent extensive media coverage of the rescue was quite interesting. All the papers did stories about it. They emphasized how strange and lucky it had been that a couple of crazy guys had been kayaking by in February. The television coverage was quite different. They all focused on the technology, the fact that I’d had a GPS unit and a cell phone. What’s more the cell phone had continued to work down in the gully while the VHF and fancy 900 megahertz radios carried by the firemen, EMS and the law did not. The steep ravine walls blocked their signals. The whole rescue was coordinated from my phone. I ended up with a huge bill.

  For me this rescue was not over for many months. First there was the issue of the Toronto Sun. They made hay with my pictures, splashing one across the whole front page and then more on a double-page spread inside. I then asked for my film back. I asked to be paid. Nobody returned my calls for days. When they finally did they couldn’t find the film. Finally, weeks later, they announced they’d found the film and would compensate me handsomely. A package duly arrived with my roll and the compensation — five more rolls of film — short ones.

  So the camera business was a bust but the cell phone proved more generous. Bell called me and said they had a special program called the Cellular Samaritan. I had been chosen as one of the finalists for a prize. To receive it all I had to do was turn up with Epp at a lunch for the finalists at Toronto’s Metro Hall. Premier Mike Harris would present something to all the finalists. I said I would go as long as I didn’t have to shake his hand. That would have been like hugging Stephen Harper or Donald Trump. No deal. They phoned me back and said all was clear, his buddy Ernie Eves would come instead. Clearly I was not a great negotiator.

  We did go to the lunch. I met the other Samaritans: they’d done amazing things like save people from burning buildings, car crashes, robberies. However, I won the grand prize. It included a year of free cell phone service, a handsome leather travel bag which my wife promptly confiscated and later, when I got it back, Sheila subsequently did too. I was left with a diamond-shaped Plexiglas trophy that for years I used to scrape ice off my van windscreen, as well as framed and signed certificate from Premier Mike Harris saying that Ontario was a better place to live because of heroes like me. For years I kept it beside the toilet in my studio. People would come out of the bathroom asking if that funny framed document was actually real.

  A year later a TV network calls me. They want to do a retrospective piece on the rescue. I reluctantly agreed to meet them at the end of Meadowcliffe Drive where Doris McCarthy’s house and studio, Fool’s Paradise, is situated. Gate’s Gully, scene of the event a year earlier, is behind her place. I knock on Doris’s door to ask permission to trespass. She opens it, cries out and give me a big hug. Tears ran down her cheeks. It was the last time I saw her. She died in November 2010, several months into her 101st year.

  Twelve

  Just Desserts

  “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.”

  James Thurber

  “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

  Groucho Marx

  2005

  I had decided to read two sections about my father. A month earlier I had published The Molly Fire, a memoir occasioned by the death of my parents. Until the last months of their lives I had seen little of them for years. I lived in the east while they had retreated to Vancouver Island and the city of my father’s birth. After my father’s stroke I began to visit often, flying across the country every couple of weeks and spending days with my mother sitting by my father’s hospital bed, talking. He couldn’t participate. He was practically a vegetable.

  Then suddenly he was gone and my mother only few short months after. The inherited scrapbooks, paintings and boxes of documents that traced their families’ lives back to the early 18th century and beyond had suddenly made making sense of it all quite urgent. I’d written the book in a white heat over many months. It got published: it wasn’t ignored. Many good books are but I had been fortunate. The Globe and Mail’s full-page review led off the weekend book section. It was a finalist for various prizes including the Governor General’s. I started to get wonderful letters. I still get some.

  So now I was on a plane to the west for my first book tour. The publisher had managed to kite up a ticket from his many stressed credit cards — people don’t understand how marginal much of the book business is. I left on a discount ticket following days of rushing about trying to put all my jobs to bed so that I could go. I boarded the flight semi exhausted and endured the takeoffs and landings that slowly moved me farther west. After a stopover in Kelowna I had just one more before reaching Victoria where I stumbled off the plane at suppertime. My loopy friend Michelle picked me up in her latest jalopy to rush me across town to the first reading.

  Bolen’s is one of the county’s largest independent bookstores. It’s in a shopping mall. Because this is Victoria and it was a few minutes after six when I arrived the whole mall was shut down for the night. Bolen’s, however, was still open. I went in, found the manager and introduced myself. He in turn took me to the back of the store to meet the B.C. novelist Audrey Thomas who would also read. Thomas, much more experienced at this than
me, seemed nervous. She asked me to go first and I agreed.

  Four or five-dozen chairs have been set up in one of the mall’s empty hallways. There’s a small stage and a mic. I read a section in which my parents sell everything they have in the east, buy a pickup and trailer and take off on a long looping trip across North America on their way to Victoria where they’ve bought a small apartment building.

  The section culminates with my father being harassed and humiliated by a band of punks in a campground. He’s forced to confront his aging, his loss of control and authority. He never recovered from it.

  The little full house for this reading in a hallway is elderly but totally attentive and awake. I can really feel that they are with me so I segue into another section in which the Empress of Canada grounds while creeping through fog into Victoria Harbour during the fall of 1929. My 11-year-old father goes with his, an engineer, to see the huge ship driven high up on the shore. It may well have been the moment when he decided he would go to sea.

  The audience is even more attentive on this one. I’ve slipped some quite subtle asides into the text and there’s somebody in the back row who’s getting them all. I can’t see her but I can hear her laugh and see a flash of pink pantsuit. I decide to quit while I’m ahead and turn the stage over to Audrey. I sit on the sidelines while she reads and then get up to go. Michelle and her older friend really want to get home.

  However Bolen’s asks me to stay. Two small tables are set up at the back, each with a pile of books. Audrey is well known and local. Immediately a score of people lines up to buy her book and get it signed. To my surprise a handful of people line up for me. They are all retired ladies. Each one has family papers and pictures. Each one wants to talk about writing memoir.

  As I work through this lineup I’m conscious of the woman at the very end of my line. She bobs from side to side with a grin on her face. It’s the pink pantsuit from the back row. Her face is familiar, probably an old friend of my mother’s, but I can’t place her as I’m really too tired to think. Finally she’s in front of me. She too is writing a memoir and wants to talk about the process. Yet another one, I think. Everyone wants to tell their story. And they all indeed have one but at this late hour I can barely respond. I say a few things about how I’d written the book and then excuse myself as I can see that my friends are weary and restless. As we follow the lady in pink and Audrey out the door Pinky turns to me and says I should read her book. Her tone when she gave me its title betrays some irritation. I say I will and then promptly forget about it. We go home to bed and I fall into a deep sleep.

  At three in the morning I’m shocked awake with a vision of a pink pantsuit and the book she’d told me to read. I had done just that only a week before. “Oh shit!” I gasped. I had ended my very first reading by telling Alice Munro how to write a book.

  Over the next couple of days I manage to rationalize it all away. It hadn’t been Alice, just some other vaguely familiar face. I screw up my courage and do a half-dozen more readings around B.C. It’s a terribly grim business. The last one in a Vancouver Indigo is attended by five people. They were buying greeting cards and cookbooks. They are tired people taking advantage of a free seat. I fly home.

  Back in Toronto I wryly tell my publisher and editor about my Alice Munro fantasy and confusion. They laugh and we all go on with life. Some days later I go to a literary launch in the wonderful Victorian mansion kitty-corner from the Art Gallery of Ontario where the Italians have their consulate. The first person I stumble into past the door is the manager of Bolen Books who’s in town for the week. He greets me enthusiastically. “Michael, wasn’t that totally great at your reading? That’s the only time Alice Munro has ever attended one of ours. It was so exciting — she’d read your book and bought another copy.”

  Patrick Watson, former co-host of This Hour Has Seven Days and future chair of the CBC, and I are sharing a stage at the Ontario Science Centre. However, we’re not sharing much else. I’ve just shown several hundred high school media literacy teachers a series of paired photographs recording famous historical events. I’d ended with Joe Rosenthal’s iconic Second World War image of the victorious flag-raising on Iwo Jima. Then I’d shown what the actual event looked like — scrubby, messy, confusing. I’d explained that since Rosenthal’s original image of the actual moment was so devoid of heroic drama he’d some hours later recruited some all-American soldiers, sourced a crisp new stars and stripes and restaged the event on a dramatic small rise — the perfect plinth for a war memorial, as indeed it later became. Many audience members seemed stunned to see the contrast between fact and fable, reality and myth. While I too could enjoy the theatricality of Rosenthal’s famous image I strongly disliked its message — the glorification of war and American military might. What it sanitized and mythologized was ugly. But to Watson it made better TV. We argued.

  In 1962 the John Ford movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was released. In it the Jimmy Stewart character makes a late-in-life confession to a reporter that, although it made him famous and a senator, he was not actually the man who shot Valance. It was the John Wayne character hiding in the shadows. The reporter had taken careful notes but when the confession was complete he theatrically tore them up.

  “You’re not going to use the story?” Stewart asks the reporter incredulously.

  “No, sir. This is the West, sir. And when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  1979

  An assignment for Art magazine has sent me down to 299 Queen West to make a portrait of Michael Snow. Once the Ryerson Press building and now the studios of CityTV, it had become a somewhat dilapidated mixed-use building in the ’70s. Snow’s studio was on one of the upper floors, the fifth comes to mind but I’m not so sure. I hollow-walk down a dusty corridor of the largely vacant floor looking for his room number. The door is open a crack: I knock and Michael invites me in. At the time Snow was probably the best-known contemporary artist in the country and certainly one of the few with a presence beyond, especially in New York. I was looking forward to seeing this inventive artist’s big, well set-up studio. Instead I walk into a little office.

  The beige room has a cot against one wall. Snow’s trumpet glows on the bedspread. I remember a chair and small table by the single sash window. Beyond these meagre objects I recall only a traditional easel supporting a canvas four or five feet square. Snow had painted a large, bent grid in imitation of the barrel distortion generated by a simple lens. A conventional painter would have laid down the ground of the painting prior to executing the image — in this case the grid — on top. Michael was working backwards. Now that his warped grid was in place he was laboriously painting the ground in the interstices between the grid rules. Wonky. This is what always made his thought process interesting.

  We make a portrait in the hallway, Snow leaning against a door jamb as the hallway of empty doors and rooms receded behind him. It makes an acceptable cover for the magazine but I can’t say it was my most brilliant performance. However, it is the beginning of something for me as I was to get to know him much better in subsequent years. He was always generous in his comments about my later work. And I remain grateful for the lesson I learned that day, one that has since been reinforced for me many times as numerous self-declared artists I have known have fussed for years over the creation of the perfect working space. That is: the bigger the studio, the smaller the artist.

  1982

  Sitting in a corner, under the stairs, in the former David Mirvish Gallery on Toronto’s Markham Street I’m with a very old man. The gallery is having a brief career as The Canadian Centre for Photography. Over the course of a couple of hours the photographer André Kertész and I talk and watch people who have come into the building to view a survey exhibition of his life’s work. Kertész, who began photographing in his native Hungary in 1912 and publishing five years later, had his first gallery exhibition in 1927. A year later he was one of the earl
iest adopters of the 35mm Leica. At 88 he is still photographing but with a battered Canon AE-1. Periodically viewers of the exhibition, unaware of his presence, will unwittingly arrange themselves into a perfect Kertész photograph. André will stop talking and lift his camera — very slowly. His hands shake, his eyes rheumy. You can see him fighting his old body and it hurts me to watch. He misses every single photograph but he still keeps trying. Between attempts he tells me of his life regrets. There are many including having been “seduced” into handing over his estate to his Canadian dealer. “I shouldn’t have trusted her. The book she did was awful. I was a foolish old man.”

  2011

  We are four, driving from Courbières, a tiny hamlet near Najac at the top of the Tarn, toward Toulouse and beyond. I’m at the wheel, Sheila beside me, photographer Arnaud Maggs and artist Spring Hurlbut are spooning in the back. Arnaud has been in my life for over 40 years. Now neither of us is young but Arnaud walks nearly two decades ahead of me. Despite the disciplined clarity and austerity of his art, his life has never been simple. After various relationships he has found final happiness with Spring. They are usually quietly comfortable together but on this French trip Spring fusses and flutters about Arnaud like a small pale bird. He doesn’t protest so I’m puzzled. Something is amiss.

  We take several breaks on the drive. At each Arnaud leaves the car and does tai chi under a tree. He still cuts a classy figure — skinny black jeans, black-and-white striped sailor’s jersey, wide-brimmed black hat — despite being well into his 80s. He has to be the most elegant Canadian man alive. My older artist friends — Arnaud, John Gutmann, David Heath– and Michael Snow — are my models of how to live a creative life right to the end. They’re heroes.