The Alberta-B.C. border is also a spectacular watershed. South of Banff, rain or snow that falls on the eastern slopes will flow into rivers like Andy Russell’s Oldman, merge with the South Saskatchewan, then the Nelson, to end up in Hudson Bay. Some sun-seeking snowflakes will melt to flow southeast in Alberta into the Milk River, and from there south to join the Mississippi system, to end up in the Gulf of Mexico. Isn’t our geography exciting?
The western slopes send their rain and snow into the Pacific, and I once was a thrilled participant in the process. In the 1980s I took off from teaching the art of publishing at Banff to ride a white-water raft down the Kicking Horse River into Golden, B.C. I was part of a group of strangers who paid money, got into life jackets, and pushed off in a big rubber raft clutching paddles. The guys in charge were experts. They rehearsed us on what to do if we fell out into the churning white-water. Even better, they managed to convince us that the safety of the raft depended on each one of us digging hard with our paddles as we hit the white-water stretch, and fought our way through.
I was in the bow at one side, and when we plunged into the white stuff, SWAAASH, I was hit in the face by bucketfuls of icy water that took my breath away. But through all the roar and the bucking, foaming spray I kept paddling fiercely, blinking through the icy spray, because the safety of the raft depended on it. Soon the roaring died away, the water levelled out and turned dark again, and we had made it. When we reached the bank and staggered out we whooped and embraced our fellow survivors. We had come through this together!
After they dropped us off in Banff the rafting crew presumably went off, yawn, to pick up the next group of tourists, and to impress on them how important it was for each of them to paddle hard, if the raft was to survive. I went back to the publishing workshop and was so enthusiastic that several others signed up for the white-water trip. I have a tendency to let my enthusiasms show, as you may have noticed. And most writers, and editors, will do well to remember to “just keep paddling.”
But what has all this to do with being an editor? Within a couple of years I was editing Don Starkell’s book, with passages such as this: “As we approached the rapids, we cut through some large standing waves and roared downhill into the V of the flow. Orellana shot through the water like an orange missile . . .” Experience helps editors. Experiences, too.
I wish I’d been able to take D.M. Thomas with me in the summer of 2014, when Jane and I flew southwest of Calgary to Castlegar. This was in the middle of the Stampede, and at the Calgary airport even the most dapper Air Canada agent was required to wear a Stetson and yee-haw his way through the workday. Our flight south on Central Mountain Air took us down to the foothills, then west through the Selkirks. It is an amazing stretch of mountain country, Crowsnest Pass territory, then the Kootenays. The sudden swoop down through the jostle of mountains to land at Castlegar caught our attention. It was a little like landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
The novelist Anne DeGrace (a friend from the Writers’ Union AGM in St. John’s) met us and took us along winding roads past the rivers that would flow south into the United States as the mighty Columbia River. Soon we were in Nelson.
For a few years now Nelson has hosted the Elephant Mountain Literary Festival, and I’m delighted to report that, led by Lynn Krause, they bring in worthy authors like, well, me … not to mention Gail Bowen, Eleanor Wachtel, Angie Abdou, and others, including Sid Marty. My old friend Sid, the big, burly folksinger, poet, and author of non-fiction classics like Men for the Mountains (1978) and The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek (2008), lives in Lundbreck, in the foothills, about as close as you can get in Alberta to Nelson. How long did the drive into the Kootenay country take him? Six hours.
For me, to stumble across Nelson was a piece of amazing good luck, since it’s a very unusual place. First (and second and third) there’s the setting. Elephant Mountain (“See, that’s the trunk!”) lies across the west arm of Kootenay Lake, and the town climbs steeply up from the lakeshore opposite the mountain. About 10,000 people live in the town, but it’s in the centre of the Kootenays, so that many thousands of others flock in to do their shopping and other community things there, always surrounded by mountains.
There are about forty (count them) restaurants in town, and I can report that the local co-op store has a wide range of environmentally friendly products that you’d have trouble finding anywhere else in Canada. A reason for that is the Nelson background as a favourite destination for idealistic draft-evaders during the Vietnam War years. There is also a thriving “underground economy”: a grandmotherly figure at a festival event told me about the details of the homegrown marijuana business (with “two light” setups for grow-ops being really small-scale, but “ten lights” being impressive). Apparently the town is full of amiable professionals who will help you to manage your crop, and when they send in someone to “bud” the plants, it’s likely to be your friendly Sunday-school teacher tapping at the door.
Anne DeGrace is a calm, understated, middle-aged woman now, but she told us an amazing story about Nelson neighbourly help. In “hippy” days, when she first came to the town from Ottawa, she was a young, pregnant woman on her own, and she started a book and record store called “Packrat Annie’s.” When the baby came, two local Quaker women showed up out of the blue, with sleeping bags, and told her that they would run the store until she was able to return. Total strangers, and as good as their word. Anne still says that they changed her view of human nature. Now she works at the Nelson Library, has published four novels, has found a good husband, and quietly gives a great tour of the town.
You may know Nelson without being aware of it. The Steve Martin movie Roxanne was set here, and gives a hint of the delights of the old mining town, which boomed in the 1890s. We were there in midsummer, at the time of the full moon, which had a supernatural appearance, rising over the encircling mountains. Strangers stopped in the street to gape at it, chat, and speculate if it was the biggest moon ever.
Certainly, July 2014 saw some of the hottest weather ever recorded in the B.C. Interior. At the festival, after Gail Bowen and Eleanor Wachtel had given successful Friday evening talks, with Sid Marty, Donna Morissey, and Angie Abdou to come later, I was due to give my show on Saturday afternoon in the Civic Theatre. The weather was scorching, and the town beach on the lake was a major counter-attraction. The Nelson Star warned its readers about the record-breaking heat, “with afternoon temperatures from the mid-30s to 40 degrees.” But we were comforted by the news that air conditioning at the Civic Theatre was due to be installed.
No such luck. The gallant audience sat fanning themselves as I did my stuff on the stage. In the wings the heroic Jane slaved in the airless dark over red-hot electronic appliances. After the ninety-minute show, when I took off my blazer-and-tie “publisher’s uniform” back in our hotel room, Jane complained that my shirt was so sweat-soaked she could wring it out. The heat was something we remembered with head-shaking affection a few months later when my December show in Collingwood, Ontario, at the foot of the Blue Mountain ski hill, was interrupted by the roar of a snow-making machine. Local hazards. Ah, the life of a literary troubadour!
But also, ah, Nelson. Unforgettable, all the way from Gyro Park with its lookout over the lake (and great Saskatoon berries!) to the Japanese garden near the old train station at the other end of town, where in the early days the whole population used to show up to see who had rolled into the booming town.
The next day we were driven to Castlegar to pick up our car, which we drove west — and up and down — through some of the most beautiful country in Canada. Our car crawled over ear-popping high mountain passes, then raced down, down, down to the next river bridge, then coasted along beside farm fields before the next groaning climb. It was always fascinating (“Wait a minute! This is where the Doukhobors settled!” “Big White! I used to ski here!”) as we drove to stay with Jane’s brother Peter and his wi
fe, Heather, in Kelowna.
That’s a special city for us. Peter and Heather lost their home there in the great fire of 2003, when 27,000 people were evacuated with no jammed roads, no looting, and no panic. In my role as publisher of M&S I was very pleased to be able to combine forces with the local Kelowna paper to produce Firestorm: The Summer B.C. Burned, a big, illustrated book that sold very well. It raised lots of money for reclamation projects, although it was nothing compared to the estimated 250 million trees lost in the fire. (I remember being flown across the Kelowna fire scene in a small plane when the pilot showed us one house, where his buddy’s “outdoor thermometer had stuck at sixty-nine degrees Celsius.” The house survived, although far more than 200 in Kelowna did not.)
After Nelson, when I dropped in to visit Mosaic Books in Kelowna, it was great to be warmly remembered as “the fire storm guy.”
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CHAPTER 5
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THE COASTS OF B.C.
The Vancouver International Writers Festival … Unconventional Memories of Carol Shields … Bill Richardson Sets Me Dancing … Almost Exposed at the Improv Theatre … A Pitch for Alan Twigg … Jack Hodgins’s Island … Sir Francis Drake and Comox … The Delights of Denman Island … Sunshine Sketches of a Little Coast … At Home with Andreas Schroeder … On to Haida Gwaii … A Mile in James Houston’s Waders
* * *
Hal Wake has had a huge impact on Canadian writers and readers. For many years he was the man on the book beat at Morningside, which meant that after surveying scores of books he decided Peter Gzowski should talk with this new author and not that, or that, or that one. Often the chat with a young poet named Lorna Crozier or a new novelist called Jane Urquhart or Nino Ricci (to take just three examples out of many) changed their lives and affected hundreds of thousands of readers. I know very well just how immediate and massive the impact on book sales was in Peter’s heyday. In my role as publisher I received many phone calls from booksellers pleading to be told when an author would be featured on Morningside (so that they could stock up on the book in question).
But all good things come to an end and in 1990 Hal Wake, the big, curly-haired guy originally from Ottawa, left his Toronto home to take his family back west to Vancouver. Soon he was no longer in the studio backrooms. As CBC Radio’s morning man he was wakening farmers in the Fraser Valley, hailing sailors at Tsawwassen, and soothing commuters stuck on the Lions Gate Bridge on their way downtown through Stanley Park, where joggers around the seawall were listening to him on their iPods. Hal’s friendly, level voice was a constant reassurance, even when the day’s news, and the interviews he conducted, revealed that not all was right with the world, even in the Vancouver he loved.
One of the reasons that he loved his new Vancouver home was the writers’ festival that had been set up there in 1988 by a Scottish whirlwind named Alma Lee, who had previously herded the cats of the Writers’ Union of Canada. Year by year the festival had got better and better, attracting a loyal local audience, including lots of excited kids, and producing a spreading international reputation among major authors everywhere. (Once, they even roped me in as a host of a reading involving Jack Whyte and Diana Gabaldon, so they had very high standards.) Then Alma decided to retire. Hal, a long-time supporter and former board member, applied for the job, and got it, starting in 2007.
Once again, he was fully immersed in the world of books. To my delight he asked me, in the fall of 2011, to bring my show to Vancouver Writers Fest. The previous year I had played an offstage part in the festival’s celebration of Alice Munro. When all of the international cast of writers there to pay tribute were assembled by Hal in a fine Indian restaurant it was my happy duty to thank them all on Alice’s behalf. In answer to a question about my editorial role I shrugged and said that my main role was to tell Alice to stop rewriting and polishing the manuscript endlessly, and to grab it from her. At this there was an explosion from the quiet man sitting beside me. “Ah,” said Alistair MacLeod to the group. “He’s very good at that!”
When Jane and I flew in from Banff we were whisked to the Granville Island Hotel, the centre of the festival. We were in time to attend the opening night gala dinner, a Bollywood-themed extravaganza. I watched the energetic Indian dancing, marvelling that people the world over have managed to arrive at folk dancing styles that have so much in common.
I was very pleased to be seated at a table alongside Anne Giardini. A lawyer by training, she is a remarkable combination of a major business tycoon (she runs the Canadian branch of the giant West Coast lumber company, Weyerhaeuser) and an enthusiastic patron of the literary arts, as she was proving that night in her role as the chair of the board of the Vancouver International Writers Festival. (She is also a board member of PEN Canada.) But she comes by her interest honestly. She is the author of two novels, and she is the daughter of Donald and Carol Shields.
I knew — and even published — Carol Shields. In 1982 we brought out her fourth novel, A Fairly Conventional Woman. The plot centres on a middle-aged woman attending a conference, where the possibilities of romance intrude. I know all about this from my own life, and how our society has come to terms with special rules. When Jane and I met, like two fire-engines colliding, at the Couchiching Conference, a friend who is an experienced political operative — and who may wish to remain anonymous here — was appalled by my swift plans: “Doug, this was at a conference — you don’t have to marry her!”
Carol Shields (1935–2003)
Interestingly, while Carol dealt with the matter much more sensitively in her novel than my laddish friend, the theme seemed to matter to her. Happenstance (1980), which was cleverly packaged with A Fairly Conventional Woman in 1994, offers another perspective on the novels’ central marriage — that of the middle-aged historian husband, whose anxiety about the book he is trying to write reaches a crisis while his wife is off at the convention. Like Larry’s Party (1979) it’s the perfect demonstration that Carol was able to write convincingly from a male point of view.
That’s fascinating, because she’s famous for the perfect pitch that she had for the ears of her female readers. As evidence I’d present the Dropped Threads book projects that were so deservedly popular with women’s book clubs. Carol told an interviewer that she and Marjorie Anderson, her co-editor, felt “that women are so busy protecting themselves and other people that they still feel that they have to keep quiet about some subjects.” The usually hidden subjects included work, menopause, childbirth, a husband’s terminal illness, the loss of a child, getting old, the power of sexual feeling, and much else. Dropped Threads went into several editions, topped the bestseller lists, and spoke to millions of women.
It also revealed a surprising side of Carol Shields. In her afterword in the first edition, she revealed that at her college graduation ceremony in high summer “under our black academic gowns my girl friends and I wore, by previous agreement, nothing. Nothing at all. This was considered high daring in those days, 1957.”
It raises eyebrows even today.
Almost as surprising is the fact that Carol’s supportive husband, Donald, read her works for the first time only when they appeared in the bookstore. The families of writers develop coping systems that make life simpler for them.
Carol’s 1982 novel for us was full of quiet virtues, with not a hair out of place, and the plot and dialogue were smoothly polished. It’s interesting, I think, that she once wrote a book for Penguin on Jane Austen, noting the significance of “glances” in her heroine’s understated work. I greatly enjoyed all of my publishing encounters with this friendly, lady-like Winnipegger with a gentle overbite who managed to combine writing with teaching and raising five children (including Anne, the future lumber baron). In her low-key way she was cheerful, and straightforward, and blessed with a lively sense of humour. (Naked under her graduation gown?)
Yet A Fairly Conventional Woman managed only modest
sales, and she moved on, without rancour, to publish her books elsewhere. And other, wiser publishers, went on to publish her next books, leading (just eleven years later) to The Stone Diaries. That book won the 1993 Governor General’s Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, in light of Carol’s Chicago birth, the Pulitzer Prize.
Another one that got away.
Carol was of an age with Alice Munro, and they became very good friends. I know that after 1999 Alice would visit Carol at her home in Victoria, and that she stayed in close, affectionate touch during the long fight against breast cancer that finally took Carol away in 2003.
Our MC that evening at the Vancouver Writers Fest Gala was the unique Bill Richardson. A former Winnipegger (theme alert!), he has gone on to an enviable career as a CBC Radio star, hosting programs like Richardson’s Roundup. He is also the author of half a dozen books, including the Stephen Leacock Award winner Bachelor Brothers’ Bed & Breakfast (1993), and a similar number of books for lucky children. “Playful” is the precise adjective here; I suspect that he is the only person in Canadian Who’s Who ever to list his hobbies as “polo, juggling, and playing the cello.”
He also has a flourishing sub-career as an MC at events such as our Vancouver gala, and that night he and I laughed recalling an earlier encounter when he ran a Toronto Libris Award night, a sort of untelevized, unglamorous Oscar night for the Canadian book world.
Early in that Toronto evening Scott McIntyre had bounded with typical energy onto the stage to receive from Bill’s hands an award for Douglas & McIntyre. But something was wrong. Pointing in distress at his throat Scott croaked that he had such bad laryngitis that he really couldn’t speak. For the voluble Scott, this must have been as frustrating as a symphony conductor strapped into a straitjacket. Bill responded very creatively: “But surely, Scott, this is why Interpretive Dance was invented?”
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