Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  Myrna Kostash (1944– )

  As you’d expect, the crisis (with tricky issues like “appropriation of voice” given an airing, and words like “racist” thrown around) was a very difficult time for the Writers’ Union. But thanks to Myrna’s steady hand, it’s now regarded as an important milestone for the Union, which goes marching on, glory hallelujah, with Myrna still on at least one committee.

  The list of committees that Myrna has worried her way through is almost as impressive as the prizes she has won, the most recent of which was the 2010 Matt Cohen Award. (I was delighted to see her at the party before the ceremony and hailed her: “Myrna! What brings you to Toronto?” The prize was supposed to be kept a secret, so she hedged, very uncharacteristically. All was soon made clear, and I was delighted for my old friend.)

  Did you notice my phrase “worried her way through”? Myrna is a serious person, engaged in lots of serious work, on dozens of committees, with a worried frown on her face, which might alarm a stranger impressed by her credentials. What you need to know is that this serious, hard-working person needs to be teased, and will soon be chuckling, and even giggling. I like her a lot and am glad to pay this tribute to her. And I look forward to finding her in Edmonton some day.

  Alberta is split in every way between Edmonton, the provincial capital, and Calgary, the commercial capital to the south. During my time as a publisher, Calgary was not only where W.O. Mitchell lived, it was the centre of a flourishing literary scene. It had two terrific bookstores — Sandpiper Books, near W.O.’s home, and Pages, the Kensington shop owned first by Peter Oliva, before he became a writer, then by Cathy MacKay. When Cathy died, I flew to Calgary to speak at the funeral of my old M&S friend. The university had a lively faculty, including the novelist Aritha van Herk, and a huge budget to spend in acquiring the papers of Canadian authors. It had a lively literary festival (held in Calgary and Banff) headed by my friend Anne Greene. In Stories About Storytellers I tell the tale of the time I stepped in to chair a festival session for 400 kids, where I introduced James Houston as the man who created the towering sculpture at the entrance to the nearby Glenbow Museum. Jim then stepped forward and went on to steal the show.

  And above all, at the Calgary Herald, it had Ken McGoogan.

  From 1982 until he resigned in 1999, Ken put Calgary on the Canadian literary map. When we penny-pinching publishers were planning promotional tours across the country, we would weigh the cost of a stop in this city as opposed to that one, and carefully consider the publicity that each city would provide. With Ken on the job, Calgary became an essential stopover. We knew that we could count on him to produce a thoughtful, lively interview with each author, and publish it in time to promote any local public author event. Because the publicity was so good, crowds turned out for the readings, and because the crowds were so good, other events were held, and because of all this, every author would try to come to Calgary for a chat with Ken. A virtuous circle. Then a bitter strike at the Herald turned into a lockout (I paid a sad visit to the picket line), and when the dust settled, Ken was gone.

  The result was depressing evidence that one man can indeed make a difference to a city’s literary culture, and Calgary suffered from his absence, even if Canada benefitted from his transformation into an author of books about the North, and the fine book that contains a kind final shoutout to me, How the Scots Invented Canada. Fortunately, we have a record of Ken’s work in those Calgary days, including many author profiles, in his 1991 book, Canada’s Undeclared War: Fighting Words from the Literary Trenches. There he argues passionately that what our authors do really matters, since what we have here is “a culture — a way of thinking and being, a nation-wide set of values and preoccupations — worth defending.” He deals with themes I know all too well, about the constant pressure exerted by the big international distributors, whether of movies or books, and the uphill fight faced by Canadians in those areas.

  Ken is also a great storyteller, and the book is full of Calgary encounters with visiting major authors. Try this one:

  “The strangest thing happened to Leonard Cohen in Calgary in 1984. He was sitting in an obscure little restaurant talking to an interviewer when a waitress slipped him a note. ‘Dearest Leonard,’ it began. Cohen stood up, went over to the waitress and asked her who had sent it. The woman was gone.”

  Ken was the interviewer, so he got the whole story. One of the most famous Cohen songs is “Sisters of Mercy,” about two young women he knew in 1966. In Ken’s words, “The note Cohen received was written by one of the original Sisters of Mercy — who now lives in Calgary and who somehow ended up in Flix at precisely the same time as Cohen.”

  Leonard was amazed. “What a coincidence! Why didn’t she come over to our table? Maybe she didn’t want to intrude. Delicacy! What incredible delicacy!”

  Most people don’t know that Alistair MacLeod, the soul of Nova Scotia, was born in Saskatchewan and raised in Alberta. The reason lies deep in the roots of the Cape Breton way of life. His father was a miner, and went to where the jobs were.

  In his fine book This Is My Country, What’s Yours? Noah Richler quotes him about that experience:

  I started school in a place called Mercoal, Alberta. It was one of those typical company towns. We lived in company houses that were built on stilts, and when the price of coal dropped, the town went away.

  I remember, a number of years ago, driving from Banff to where Mercoal was, and there was absolutely nothing there. I drove into this little clearing and I said to my children, “This is where I started school.” And they all laughed. They thought, “Here is Dad being funny.” They were thinking, “Well, where’s the school?”

  He concludes the story: “We had come from a place that was very rooted, and here was this very different kind of place. There are people who come from there who cannot find where they were born, because it was a company town that just vanished.”

  Alistair’s father brought the family back to Nova Scotia as often as possible, but there was a spell when the teenaged Alistair worked as a milkman in Edmonton. His employer, a kindly man, worked hard to persuade him that he had a good future in the milk delivery business. Alistair decided to try something else.

  I once travelled on the Yellowhead Highway in Anne Stevens’s M&S car with Alistair from Edmonton to Jasper, where we both spoke to the Alberta Library Conference at Jasper Park Lodge. The Yellowhead has its hazards, as Jane’s brother, Peter Brenneman, knows only too well. On a mid-winter night he got an emergency call at home in Grande Cache. One of his workers had just hit a wild horse on the Yellowhead and was in hospital in Edson. Peter jumped in the car and drove east. At one point, the snowy night landscape became dreamlike, full of moving shapes. He realized that a ghostly herd of wild horses was racing along beside him. Then — bang — a horse was on his hood and through his windshield. Peter jammed on the brakes, and the horse dropped off and disappeared. Peter had to inch the rest of the way into the hissing sub-zero winds with no windshield. After he made it to Edson and reported the accident, the police found no evidence of the horse. In Alberta, even the wild horses are tough.

  There’s a link with Alistair MacLeod here. Do you know where these wild horses came from? There used to be scores of horses at work in the Alberta coal mines. When the companies closed the mines, they turned the horses loose, to fend for themselves. To this day their descendants roam the mountain country like ghosts.

  Alistair MacLeod has a very funny W.O. story from his time in Banff. I sometimes had to coax it out of him, as I did at the Eden Mills Festival near Guelph in 2012. He and W.O. taught writing together each summer at the Banff Centre. The famous centre, perched just above downtown Banff, a celebrated tourist town surrounded by mountains, has played a huge part in developing Canadian artists of all sorts, from musicians to ballet dancers all the way to ambitious young creative writers. It was at its peak in the summer, and I spent at least
a week there, teaching at the Banff Publishing Workshop, every summer from 1981 to 1988. You may even find the remains of a tepee built in the woods there by my daughters.

  But Alistair’s story concerns a winter ride that he and W.O. took from the Calgary airport to Banff, to discuss major policy issues with the Centre people. When Alistair flew in late in the evening he thought that he and W.O. would stay overnight in Calgary. But W.O. was impatient to get to Banff, only ninety minutes away to the west. So they hailed a cab, got into the back seat, and gave the driver directions to Banff.

  Unfortunately, the driver was new to Calgary, and to Canada, and did not know the way. Alistair had to direct him through Calgary towards this mysterious place called “Banff.”

  Even more unfortunately, it began to snow. Heavily. Very heavily. The driver, who had grown up in a much warmer climate, was clearly not used to snow. Soon they were driving along the Trans-Canada at a walking pace. W.O., who was dozing in the back seat, would look up occasionally and growl, “For Crissake, what the hell is going on?” and Alistair would continue to urge the driver onward. The poor man was appalled by the fact that whenever the snow cleared briefly, there were no lights or houses visible. Alistair would assure him that, yes, up ahead lay Banff, a town with lights and buildings and everything. Beside Alistair, W.O. dozed on.

  Suddenly, out of the storm a large animal reared up before them. The driver turned the wheel, the elk disappeared, and the car hit a patch of ice and began to spin. Alistair, mindful of the instructions for an emergency like this in those days before seatbelts, put his arms around W.O. in a protective hug, and tried to wrestle him down to the safety of the floor.

  W.O., roused from sleep by a hugging assault from the man he thought a platonic friend, came awake, struggling and snorting, “What the hell … !” He was not pleased.

  The car spun to a stop, still on the highway. The driver began to cry. “Oh, gentlemen,” he wailed. “I do not believe there is a Banff!”

  Alistair, leaning forward encouragingly, talked him onward. There was a bad moment when they reached the edge of the park and the official entrance, which was full of “Banff” signs but was dark and unattended in the middle of the night. This revived the driver’s despairing belief that “there is no Banff!” But they made it eventually, and all three survived to tell very different tales. And “Mitchell’s Messy Method” of teaching writing continued to inspire and inform many more writers down through the years at Banff.

  You’ll notice that an elk played a part, even if it was only a trot-on part, in that story. When I taught at the Banff Publishing Workshop, the drifting herds of elk were a prominent part of the campus, and in rutting season (October, and thus writers’ festival season) there were many problems. I remember Roddy Doyle complaining to the audience that he had experienced a lot, touring the world to promote his books, but, as he put it in his worried North Dublin accent, this was the first time he had been in danger “of being focked by an elk.”

  Another elk story will follow soon. In Banff, my own WordFest event was introduced, to my delight, by my old friend Fred Stenson (author of The Trade and many others), who was famously another successful product of Alberta’s Search for a New Novelist. Since I had just told the story of my notoriously unsuccessful attempt to interrupt a Mavis Gallant reading, at the end Fred came onstage to interrupt me, crouching, hands protecting his head, terrified by his role. It was very funny. And I did stop.

  Later, in the same splendid new centre building that has replaced the old Donald Cameron Dining Hall, I had fun chairing the final session (featuring the fiction quintet of Germany’s Thomas Pletzinger, my old friend Madeleine Thien, Scotland’s Stuart MacBride, and our own Helen Humphreys and David Bezmozgis). Earlier we heard from Guy Vanderhaeghe. Guy’s Saturday night reading from A Good Man was the high point at Banff, where he alluded to “an elk story,” without elaborating. I know the story, and can reveal it here.

  Some years ago (possibly even before Roddy Doyle’s complaint), Guy was staying at the centre during rutting season. After breakfast with his friend Robert Kroetsch in Donald Cameron Hall, Guy came out of the hall alone and noticed that a herd of elk had drifted across to block his path back up to his residence, with the male looking aggressive. So he prudently waited at the foot of the stairs, which provide a sort of a barrier to any elk that lacks Fred Astaire training on staircases. A confident young woman came out from breakfast, and Guy politely suggested that it might be best to wait for ten minutes until the elk moved on. She took this suggestion badly.

  “I will walk wherever I please!” she announced, and strode towards the herd.

  The male elk had not read the proper consciousness-raising books. So she ended up behind a tree, yelling for help. Guy modestly describes what happened next, in a scene starring the fine Western novelist and teacher Robert Kroetsch: “That’s when Kroetsch arrived on the scene and took charge. He tore off his jacket, advanced on the elk roaring like the Bull of Bashan, beating clouds of dust out of the ground with his windbreaker. It was a truly impressive, primal sight. I followed along in an entirely cowardly support role, tooting in my high tenor voice, and feebly waving my jacket the way the Scarlet Pimpernel fanned the air with his lace handkerchief. When Kroetsch succeeded in driving off the elk, he got no thanks from the young woman.” Guy ends with the words “she simply fled for the residences, sobbing.”

  And the woman did not seek out Guy, the Scarlet Pimpernel, to thank him.

  Another wildlife encounter, this time near Jasper. Once, when I was staying at my cousin Graeme and his wife, Ann’s cabin in August, I did a very foolish thing. I knew that the old fur-trade route to the Pacific ran west on the Athabasca River, then up the Whirlpool. Then the portage route went alongside the Whirlpool all the way to the watershed, and into British Columbia. This was sacred fur-trade territory, and I planned to hike part of the way along it.

  I set off alone, stupidly not telling anyone where I was going. As I walked along beside the well-named Whirlpool it was such a beautiful, peaceful August day and I was so far from anyone else that it seemed a noisy intrusion to keep ringing my bear bell. I silenced it, and drifted peacefully along the trail, enjoying the rich crop of raspberries. I came around a corner, and there in front of me was a great pile of bear scat, still steaming. There was no bear in sight.

  But when I walked past the spot, now ringing my warning bear bell very energetically, I felt sure that he was somewhere just off the trail, watching me through the thick bush. The hair rising on the back of my neck told me that we have primitive senses that lie dormant, except in emergencies. My hike, now loud with the sound of the bear bell rung by my sweaty hand, was spoiled by the prospect of passing that spot again, and by my realization that if there had been an incident, days could have passed before help arrived.

  If I had been confronted by the bear, I hope I would have been able to remember Andy Russell’s advice. Andy, the author of Grizzly Country (which I did not edit) and Memoirs of a Mountain Man (which I did), was a grizzled old outfitter, guide, and rancher from the foothills country down near Pincher Creek, and a great friend. To prepare for his book on the despised Oldman River Dam (The Life of a River) Andy and I once followed the river all the way from its start as a little stream in the Rockies to “The Gap,” where it swirls on to the prairie, then to the dam site itself (supply your own “not by a dam site” joke here), where we scrambled through the protective fencing around the dam, unchallenged by man or bear. The life of an editor contains many surprises.

  Andy, a craggy, lean, wind-burned guy in a buckskin jacket and under a Stetson, was not a boastful man, but when I asked him about grizzly bear attacks, he told me that in the course of all his years in the foothills and the Rockies he had “stopped” more than twenty grizzly charges.

  “Stopped?” I quavered. “How do you stop a grizzly charge, Andy?”

  “Well, first you stand your groun
d.” (I suspect this may be the hardest part … but running is not a good tactic against an animal that can run faster than you, and can casually kill you with one swipe to the back of the neck.) “Then,” he said, “you talk to them.”

  “Talk to them? What … what do you say?”

  “It’s not that important. I’ll say something like ‘I’m Andy Russell, and I know that you live here and want to get from where you are to over here, so I’m not going to face you down but just sort of step aside here, like this, and let you through … ’ and that usually works.”

  More than twenty times it did work. On reflection, maybe the key line is “I’m Andy Russell.”

  I’ve called this chapter “Alberta and the Mountains,” so I feel able to move us west of Banff. I remember once, as a favour, escorting the English author D.M. Thomas from the Calgary WordFest to the Banff part of the moveable feast. I took him (theme alert!) to see a herd of elk at the Banff golf course, then up to the top of Sulphur Mountain. As the author of The White Hotel and other books, he was obviously an intelligent man. But when from the Sulphur lookout I showed him the scores of snowy mountains marching off to the horizon in the west, he had real trouble accepting my assurance that these mountain ranges, split by valleys, ran for hundreds of miles to the west. For a man grounded in green Cornwall, all this wasteful, rocky Canadian space was almost literally unimaginable.

  Not far west of Banff, along the Trans-Canada Highway, you come to the border with British Columbia. Physically, it’s not very dramatic right there. But it is, in fact, one of the most astounding borders anywhere in the world. Heading almost due north/south, the border runs along the summits of the highest peaks in the Rockies. No foot has ever trod along that border for huge stretches, and none ever will. Thanks to the invention of planes we can now fly across it, look down, and marvel.