The fine and famous festival has been held in Moose Jaw for almost twenty years now, but 2012 was the first year that I was able to attend. Right away I saw why my authors had always reported that they enjoyed it so much. Invited authors/performers are housed at the downtown spa hotel, built around some natural hot springs full of healing waters. We found that every day had to involve at least one wallow in the soothingly warm pool on the top floor, where people sunbathe then swim, drink cool water, then repeat the dose. I was right at home, because the little café beside the pool was named the Morningside Room, recognizing the fact that Peter Gzowski (a proudly sentimental graduate of the Moose Jaw Times Herald, just down the street) chose to stage his last Morningside broadcast from the hotel, and a photo of my friend Peter hangs on the café wall.
The festival itself is set a short walk away, in the library and art gallery on the edge of Crescent Park. This is Moose Jaw’s central park (and indeed its Central Park) and is a fine blend of beauty and endless activity, which we explored every day.
I gave three readings, adapting my chosen excerpt to fit with my co-reader. For example, matched with Harold Johnson, a truly impressive Cree-speaker who is a Crown prosecutor in Laronge and has a master’s Law degree from Harvard, not to mention a long, single braid down his back, I chose to read about Saskatchewan’s own R.D. Symons, my very first author, who had also mastered Cree. I was so impressed by Harold that I bought a copy of his novel, Charlie Muskrat. The trouble with literary festivals is that you hear so many fine readings that you end up buying lots of books. An occupational hazard. And Harold has become a friend.
The second reading teamed me with John Vaillant, the superb Vancouver-based writer. It was a natural fit for me to read about James Houston, since that chapter leads to my visit to Jim’s place at Haida Gwaii, and has a mention of the famous Golden Spruce tree there, which allowed me to regret in print that I had not been given the chance to publish John’s superb prize-winning book The Golden Spruce (2005). It was a neat introduction to … John Vaillant!
And if you’re looking for thrilling stories, consider John’s two books of non-fiction. The Golden Spruce tells the story of a freak of nature, a giant spruce tree that was bright gold. It stood out in the Haida Gwaii forest (which John portrays brilliantly) so that it was a revered object to the Haida people, and a source of wonder to visitors to the island. Then a crazy (or deeply eccentric) logger, a man of remarkable physical powers, decided to make a statement about the great trees that were being lost. He swam in at night, towing a chainsaw, and cut the tree down. Faced with a furious Haida nation, he chose to risk a kayak ride across Hecate Strait from the mainland to attend his court case. He never made it.
As for John’s second book, The Tiger (2010), I can only advise you not to read it at night. It tells the true story of a Siberian tiger in the Kamchatka Peninsula in the very east of Russia that started to hunt down the hunters who had hurt it in the past, apparently ignoring other humans it came across on its trail of vengeance. As we follow the tiger’s progress, and the Russian game officer hunting it, the story is hypnotically exciting.
For my final reading in Moose Jaw, I saw no obvious link to my fellow reader. This was a very good thing. Jalal Barzanji’s book The Man in Blue Pyjamas is a prison memoir of his days in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, before he and his family finally managed to make it to Canada. Happily, I had no similar stories to write about. So after praising the PEN Canada help that brought Jamal to Edmonton, I simply chose to honour Saskatchewan’s own W.O. Mitchell, from Weyburn, just east of Moose Jaw. Any reading that includes a selection of stories about the unforgettable W.O. is bound to be popular. This selection from my chapter on W.O. Mitchell was no exception.
People love to hear about this remarkable “Character, and Creator of Characters.” In his fine 2010 book, How the Scots Invented Canada (now there’s a title!), Ken McGoogan recalls seeing more than 1,000 people in Calgary give W.O. a standing ovation, “and in the audience I found myself asking, How does he do it? … getting this whole crowd laughing at what many of them would normally denounce as crude, vulgar, indecent, and even blasphemous.” Ken goes on to give a shrewd answer:
Mitchell the stand-up comedian was also a man of serious purpose. In book after book, while wielding his humour like a broadsword, attacking everything uptight and straitlaced with the ferocity of a born satirist, he took special aim at the puritanical moralism that Canada had imported from Scotland, and which, decades ago, had threatened to stifle his boyhood. By cursing and swearing, caricaturing and gesticulating and making people laugh, W.O. Mitchell was celebrating his regional identity — this could be nowhere but the Canadian prairies — while waging a one-man war against the vestiges of Presbyterianism.
We were going to look for those vestiges soon, in his hometown of Weyburn, after my big show.
Saturday was a busy day for me, climaxing with my show at the Mae Wilson Theatre on Moose Jaw’s Main Street. This is a grand old Edwardian theatre, with all the elaborate plaster trimmings, where touring music hall stars like Scotland’s Sir Harry Lauder have appeared through the ages. I did my show against a truly massive screen, perhaps fifteen feet by thirty feet, which meant that the author caricatures were clear to everyone in the 300-person audience. While I waited nervously in the wings (“This is the biggest crowd I’ve had so far!”) that audience was set up by a very generous introduction by the fine local author Bob Currie.
One new part of the show was a special surprise for my good friend Terry Fallis (author of The Best Laid Plans, The High Road, and now Up and Down and No Relation). Tony Jenkins had kindly provided a new caricature of Terry, since I knew that he would be in the audience at Moose Jaw, although he had seen my show before. (Terry is that kind of friend.) I gave his picture the subtitle “Saint, Little Red Hen, and Prizewinner,” and explained each part of the subtitle as Terry gurgled and blushed in the audience at his unexpected appearance. The poor man had just explained to his seatmate that, no, he was not part of Doug’s show, when his picture appeared onscreen.
If you’re after amazing stories, consider Terry’s career launch. He and his wife, Nancy (a former colleague of Jane’s), are such good friends of ours that we often have dinner parties together. But when Terry started to try writing a novel, he never once traded on our friendship. He never once asked me to “take a look at” his novel. Not even when he couldn’t get any agent or publisher to even read this political satire set in — oh, no! — Ottawa.
Terry published the book himself, it won the Stephen Leacock Award, and I belatedly came along to publish it, as it went on to fame and fortune, winning the Canada Reads competition in 2011. So far, this despised and rejected manuscript that nobody would even look at has sold far more than 100,000 copies. And thanks to Terry’s tireless promotion, and the publication of his other fine books — which led the Canadian Booksellers to make him Author of the Year in 2013 — the Terry Fallis market continues to grow. As they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Once, I was given a private tour behind the scenes in Parliament by Erik Spicer, the former parliamentary librarian. On another occasion James Houston took me and some others through a special exhibition of Inuit art, recalling when he watched this piece being sculpted, and what his sculptor friend was chatting about as he worked on that other piece over there. You have the same “behind the scenes” feeling when you set out with Trevor Herriot to look at birds in Saskatchewan. Trevor is a superb writer about nature. Prairie readers know his book about the Qu’Appelle Valley, River in a Dry Land, which almost won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2000. It inspired Sharon Butala to write that “this impassioned wide-ranging book carries me back to my Saskatchewan childhood, to the grass and the sky and the exhilarating smell of the wild that was always there on the wind.” There, and in Grass, Sky, and Song (2009), also nominated for the award, and in The Road Is How (2014), which Margaret Atwoo
d called “a profound and moving journey over our wild, fragile planet,” Trevor writes about everything: minerals, pioneers, politicians, and birds. Beautifully.
Trevor Herriot (1958– )
If you don’t know his work, try this early April scene, from his first book. “An elm tree east of me, longing for colour, reaches up and snags a piece of sky. I have seen this before: turn to the wind, fold wings once, twice, then sing. Sing the wild notes a mountain bluebird always sings on a day like this. Softly, to the hillside.”
Trevor is an expert birdwatcher, so good that he has hosted a CBC Regina radio show that helped callers to identify birds they saw in their yard with, for example, a yellow stripe at the back.
His own keen ears can identify different types of sparrow chirps at a hundred paces, and his long-range camera skills are remarkable. I knew this because a couple of years earlier he took me out from Regina to do some birding near Last Mountain Lake, and it proved to be a very memorable morning. That was R.D. Symons territory, and Trevor had been inspired by Bob’s work.
So he encouraged us, after our stay in Moose Jaw, to explore Silton, in search of memories of Bob Symons (whose own memories of his boyhood home in Sussex included a visit by Rudyard Kipling — “a good listener”). Our Silton trip was pleasant, but not very successful. The man at the store (always ask at the store!) remembered Bob and his wife, Hope, but confirmed that their house had been knocked down, with only the garage remaining, which we looked at, unimpressed.
Our search for Meadow Lark Cottage near the lakeshore at Pelican Point was no more productive. But a photograph of Bob’s painting of the old cottage reveals that it was an ancient cottage even fifty years ago, in 1962, when it was painted, and must be unrecognizable now. That painting is one of many contained in a marvellous tribute, Robert David Symons, Countryman, Artist, Writer, Naturalist, Rancher by Terry Fenton, published in 2013. The lavishly illustrated book reminds us that as a child Bob once sat on the knee of John Singer Sargent, the American who became, in the words of Chambers’s Encyclopedia, “the most fashionable and elegant portrait painter” in late Victorian England. Even better, as a young man in the West Bob actually met the great cowboy artist Charles Russell. The new book about Bob, who was not your average cowboy, has an introduction by none other than Trevor Herriot.
At one point Trevor talks about Bob Symons and his love of his adopted land: “His life was nothing else if not an example of the colonizer’s struggle to stop colonizing and start living as though he belongs.” Later Trevor tells a story, from the botanist George Ledingham, “of the night when Symons demonstrated his knowledge of prairie places. They were together at a slide presentation of landscapes from around the province, and Symons, to the amazement of all in attendance, provided exact locations for each photograph, right down to details as to where the photographer was standing . . .”
Jane and I were not disappointed by our time roaming around in Symons Country, and were glad to share our stories when we arrived in Regina to stay with Trevor and Karen and the family.
When Trevor suggested that Jane and I (eating their super-fresh garden raspberries for breakfast) head south with him and his birding friend Bob Luterbach to see what we could find en route to Weyburn, we were thrilled. It is as if the word spreads through the bird community that “Hey, Trevor Herriot’s here!” and they flock (so to speak) to see and be seen by this great celebrity birdwatcher. If you think that’s unlikely, look at the list of birds we saw that morning (sorry, another wild Gibson enthusiasm is coming up!), which was enhanced by the fact that a lush Prairie summer had lured uncommon visitors north from the parched American Plains states. We saw a white-faced ibis (as in Egyptian pyramid art), perky burrowing owls (now endangered), black terns at the sloughs (and one angry Forster’s tern), Baird’s sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, lark buntings, bobolinks (with a yellow neck at the back), chestnut-collared longspurs, and an amazing range of exhibitionist bitterns, normally heard but never seen. All of these were first-time sightings for Jane and me.
Of course we also enjoyed watching Swainson’s and red-tailed hawks, not to mention lots of mallards and eared grebes on the sloughs, the usual gangs of redwinged blackbirds and cedar waxwings, and a lone upland sandpiper. Wonderful!
Later, after all of this birding excitement, Jane and I made a Mitchell pilgrimage to Weyburn. Armed with information provided by Kam and Megan at the library, we walked the streets of the little town, which now has roughly 10,000 people. As everyone who has read Who Has Seen the Wind knows, when W.O. was a boy the open prairie lay just a couple of blocks north of his house, which now stands close to the centre of town. The second page of the 1947 novel catches the prairie setting:
Just before the town the river took a wide loop as though in search of some variation in the prairie’s flat surface, found it in a deep-cut coulée ragged with underbrush, and entered the town at its eastern edge. A clotting of frame houses inhabited by some eighteen hundred souls, the town had grown up on either side of the river from the seed of one homesteader’s sod hut built in the spring of eighteen-seventy-five.
Now it was made up largely of frame buildings with high, peaked roofs, each with an expanse of lawn in front and a garden in the back; they lined avenues with prairie names: Bison, Riel, Qu’Appelle, Blackfoot, Fort. Cement walks extended from First or Main Street to Bison Avenue which crossed Sixth Street at MacTaggart’s corner; from that point to the prairie a boardwalk ran.
W.O. Mitchell (1914–1998)
Thanks to the library’s leaflet we found the Mitchell residence at 319 Sixth Street. Nobody was at home, so we took photos and were just giving up and leaving when a car stopped outside. It was Jamieson, the son of the household, who kindly invited us in and showed us around the ground floor. It was exactly as we had hoped — all maroon furniture against a background of old oak panels — befitting a grand old house that was perhaps the best in town in 1903. Even the bevelled glass windows and doors in the book cases, and the Art Nouveau metal light fixtures, spoke to the careful standard of excellence from that time.
We also saw the Knox Presbyterian Church that the Mitchells attended (and we thought of Ken McGoogan!), but we did not get to see the inside stained glass, “all grapes and bloody.” We peeked in at the ancient Royal Hotel (once opposite the now gone railway station, although Railway Avenue remains), and visited Bill’s father’s grave in the cemetery just south of town. I must confess that there was no sign of the cheeky gopher at the edge of the tombstone (“O.S. Mitchell. Loved by all who knew him”) that so offended young Brian/Bill when the family solemnly visited the grave.
The Weyburn Museum (the “Soo Line Museum”) contained many photos of the town from W.O.’s boyhood days and one of his father, and of his pharmacy. We roamed the banks of the Little Souris River, in search of the famous swimming hole where W.O. and the other boys swam naked. We even saw some descendants of the cattails that provoked such naughty behaviour from some of Sadie Rossdance’s girls.
In the evening, having walked the streets to absorb W.O.’s Weyburn (and please note that all of the “Prairie names” that he quotes as street names have already occurred, quite naturally, in this book), I gave my show in the public library to about fifteen appreciative local people, including one smiling author, my friend Joanne Bannatyne-Cugnet (A Prairie Alphabet). As usual, my show ended with a heartfelt tribute to W.O., and in Weyburn that seemed just right.
* * *
CHAPTER 4
* * *
ALBERTA AND THE MOUNTAINS
Edmonton’s Magic Carpet … The Mighty Peace … Alberta’s Search for a New Novelist … Pauline Gedge and Ancient Egypt … Myrna Kostash and Creative Non-Fiction … Calgary’s Ken McGoogan, and a Leonard Cohen Moment … Alistair MacLeod in Alberta … More About W.O … Elk Stories to Ponder … Facing Grizzly Charges with Andy Russell … Into B.C. … Saying Yes to the Kootenays, and Elephant Mountain … Hot Times
in Kelowna
* * *
There are many Albertas, and Edmonton is just one of them — and a very atypical one, at that. For a start, in contrast with Calgary, the mountains are far away, hours along the road to Jasper. In Calgary, like so much of the province, the foothills and the mountains are the constant edge of the frame on the West, and provide an inspiring target as you drive into the setting sun.
Flying into Edmonton, however, the landscape is prairie turning into industrial machinery parks (“Cranes for rent”), then becoming suburban sprawl. Apart from the odd glimpse of a grain elevator or a nodding horsehead well, the only real point of interest is the deep North Saskatchewan Valley that separates downtown from the south side. The river, of course, was the setting for the original Fort Edmonton in the fur trade days (here he goes again!), and one of my best Edmonton memories involves walking through the construction site mud, the smell of new pine poles filling the air as men with hammers built the new Fort Edmonton tourist site along traditional lines. Down by the river it was a muddy, noisy, smelly, authentic eighteenth-century Western experience, and my Edmonton cousin, Graeme Young, and I half-expected the factor to come roaring out of the big house to chase us away from his fort with a musket.
Across Canada by Story Page 10