A good joke, and the theme came up again that evening. Then, thanks to Alice Munro, I found myself invited to the podium to receive an award. Alice had learned about the environmental advantages of printing books on recycled paper, which was more expensive. Greedy publishers like me knew that it was totally inappropriate (“More expensive?”) for big, bestselling books like Alice’s forthcoming 2001 collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. The shrewd environmental campaigners, however, saw Alice as a promising target, and reached her, and persuaded her. When Alice in turn persuaded me, kicking and screaming, to use the paper on her book, recycled paper suddenly became the norm. Alice’s polite but firm stance changed the whole picture of printing in the Canadian book trade, forever.
Now, out of the blue, Bill Richardson was summoning me to the stage to receive an environmental award for good works.
I was speechless. So I said, “Interpretive dance, eh, Bill?”
And the astonished audience saw me miming elaborate gratitude to the great big sun up there, and demonstrating my love of all the little birds and other lovely things that make our world so beautiful and leave a sensitive person like me wanting to clasp them all to my bosom. It was disgusting, and must have been physically painful to watch.
I did manage to mention Alice’s role, in words, before the appalled Bill thanked me and waved me off, noting that generations of stern Caledonian ancestors were now rolling over in their graves — and not, I suspect, in a well-choreographed way.
Hal Wake had set my show for Tuesday evening at the Improv Theatre on Granville Island. There was a fine, bare stage, with an array of café-style tables in front. Paul Whitney, the distinguished librarian, was all set to introduce me. What could possibly go wrong?
With five minutes before showtime, in the Green Room I told my kind volunteer handler that I should visit the washroom. “Not that one,” she said, “it doesn’t flush. The one down the corridor.” Nobody added the words: “But don’t close the door, or you’ll be trapped inside.”
You can imagine the rest, including the two-fisted beating on the door until the stage manager finally came (“Didn’t anyone warn you about the door?”) and released me, panting, just in time.
After Paul gave me a very nice introduction, Jane’s jaw dropped as I strode manfully onto the stage with my zipper at half mast. She thought, for a moment, that nobody would notice, but she caught Janet’s eye, and her friend nodded mournfully. For the next seventy-five minutes I paced around the front of the bare stage, unaware that many eyes were following, not me, but my zipper’s dramatic progress. All part of the excitement of an unscripted show.
In September 1967, I came to Canada on the ferry from Seattle to Victoria. Since then, I always try to arrange to arrive in Victoria by ferry. This time it was by bus and ferry from Tsawwassen, with the usual delight in the birds (“Pigeon guillemots!”), then the swing through Active Pass and the bus trip from Sidney that landed us downtown at the Victoria bus station, to be met by Jack Hodgins, in accordance with tradition. Hotel hospitality suites are fine in their way, but there’s nothing to beat staying at the home of old friends like Jack and Dianne. The whole house was one big hospitality suite, and we also got to check on whether the deer were still getting into the garden.
A fine, relaxing day, in fact, until it was time for the evening show at Bolen’s bookstore. Munro’s Books (started in 1963 by a young couple — the wife, Alice, went on to a career as a writer, while the husband, Jim, was awarded the Order of Canada in 2014 for his years of dedicated service to Victorian book-lovers) and Bolen’s, farther out from downtown, are two of the best bookstores in the country. At Bolen’s that evening my simple request “Which of these authors in my book would you like to hear about?” worked well. The only person who didn’t seem to enjoy it was Jack, who hates public appearances, even as part of the audience, so much so that I tried to persuade him to go off and buy a book. But a large part of his agony came from the fact that I might be asked to talk about him, which I’m always pleased to do, but which embarrasses him. He got off lightly that evening.
In the small crowd in Bolen’s were people from my past, including my old friend, Ralph Hancox, whom I got to know well when we were working together on the committee that created the Simon Fraser Publishing Studies program. Ralph, the former head of Reader’s Digest in Canada, was a colleague and friend of Robertson Davies in his Peterborough Examiner days. It was Ralph who passed on to me R.D.’s confession to him that Fifth Business was a different, much franker book than its predecessors because his parents were dead when he wrote it.
Working with Ralph on that SFU committee put me in touch with many people who have since become good friends, notably Rowland Lorimer, who has made the Master of Publishing program (with its convivial-sounding degree, the MPub) a great success. But I should also mention the remarkable Alan Twigg. He is best-known as the editor of B.C. BookWorld, the quarterly magazine he started in 1987. That alone has proved to be a great contribution to the world of books. But Alan is so energetic that he has also been the man behind the B.C. Book Awards, and the author of several books documenting and celebrating local writers, among his many other activities … which, I’m happy to say, led to his becoming an honoured member of the Order of Canada in 2014, the same year bookselling Jim Munro made the list.
Best of all (I speak selfishly here) he has written a book for me about his great non-literary enthusiasm, playing soccer. Full Time: A Soccer Story (2008) recounts his adventures — as an old guy born in 1952 — with other keen Vancouver men no longer in the first flush of youth, who play for the sheer love of the sport. In the book the team heads off to Spain, and the tour is a great success everywhere except the official score sheet. (In the summer of 2013, however, Alan and his buddies on Vancouver United went to Italy and won the championship for their Over 50 age category in the World Masters Games, held every four years, like the Olympics, and open to teams from around the globe. They won seven games in seven days in Turin to do it. World champions! And off the pitch, in real life, they ranged from brain surgeons all the way down to simple literary magazine editors.)
I once watched one of their Sunday morning games (regretfully turning down the chance to take the place of the missing referee) and was impressed by how ubiquitous the youthful, curly-haired Alan seemed to be. It’s the same in the book world. At my unzipped performance in Vancouver, my friend Alan was sitting quietly at the back of the audience, ready to play defence.
One of my greatest strokes of luck was to be given the chance to publish Jack Hodgins. In my chapter about Jack in Stories About Storytellers I talk about my pleasure in having Jack and Dianne as friends. I also talk about how wonderful it was to be introduced to the magical world of his island, Vancouver Island.
Jack Hodgins (1938– )
Over the years I have got to know the island well. I’ve described roaming around it as the equivalent of travelling through a dozen little European countries, each with their own geography, climate, and culture. From the bookshop-rich city of Victoria, with its sea view south across the Juan de Fuca Strait to the snow-capped Olympic mountains, I’ve headed west to Sooke and taken the famous Sooke Harbour House Hotel chef’s tour where you wander through the gardens eating the flowers. Beyond that, I’ve stayed at Point No Point, and watched the surfers at the very non-biblical Jordan River, on my way to Port Renfrew. Warnings of cougars in the parks lent a spice of danger to my solitary walks there.
Just north of Victoria, where I once spent a happy hour banding hummingbirds (yes!), lies Goldstream Park where my author Cam Finlay and I once saw a little bird, an American dipper, hitch a ride on the back of a salmon moving upstream. In turn, from the capital city I like to move upstream all the way north up the east coast of the island. That scenic route, with magical place names like Chemainus (say it aloud, then again), always provides surprise after surprise.
Th
e Saanich Peninsula, for instance, contains not only rich farms and gardens (like the one Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane used to own, and which Patrick showed me around with gruff pride) but also the Victoria Airport, with reliable skylarks on the perimeter, and, more surprisingly, clusters of lollygagging sea lions on the beach just to the west. When the road climbs over the Malahat, you’re in high California-style country, full of arbutus trees. Eric Nicol, the superb Vancouver-based humourist I used to love to publish, once described the impact of a bright orange, peeling arbutus tree set against a line of sober green firs and cedars as “looking like a stripper in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”
The road north takes us to Duncan, the scene of a superb logging museum, a reminder that the whole island was built on the backs of loggers, men who lived and died in that dangerous harvest of wood. You get a sense of what the early loggers faced, with their puny little axes and handsaws, if you head west to Port Alberni. Near Coombs (with its famous “goats on the roof” market — you’ll see what I mean), you come on the Cathedral Grove of 800-year-old massive trees, preserved for us to ponder. West of Port Alberni, where the Gibson family once sailed on The Lady Rose to Ucluelet, is the road across the mountains of the Vancouver Island Ranges. In winter, I can attest, the snow lies deep beside the ploughed road — and then you hit the coast near Tofino, and people are surfing!
For some years I timed my trips west to allow me to walk the Pacific Rim beaches near Tofino in March, big storm season, so that I could see the armies of waves crashing in from Japan. Once, near Wickaninnish, I crunched across a beach covered with giant hailstones and looked west. After a spell there, I almost came to believe that the giant Fuji-shaped waves on the horizon were a real range of mountains. Time to head home.
Logging and fishing were the staples of life everywhere on the Island. In Nanaimo there was something else. Robert Dunsmuir, a Scot from just outside Kilmarnock, was born in 1825, around the same time as my scary (“It says here you broke your leg!”) Kilmarnock great-grandfather, Robert. Who knows what they put in the water there in those days (although the town did produce Johnny Walker whisky). But we have fatherless Robert Gibson creating a tweed mill, and Robert Dunsmuir, a miner, coming to Vancouver Island, discovering a coal seam north of Nanaimo and creating a mining empire. He was another scary man. In the restrained words of The Canadian Encyclopedia: “His disregard for safety, and his employment of cheap Asian labour and disallowance of unions made him unpopular with labour.” The coal tradition lingers in Nanaimo with colourful place names like “Jingle Pot Road.”
North of the city of Nanaimo, the list of interesting coastal towns goes on past Jack Hodgins’s boyhood home of Merville, all the way to Campbell River, with Quadra Island nearby. That was where a visit to my author Alan Fry in 1972 saw us launching a canoe amid (unbanded) hummingbirds; five minutes later we were gliding just beneath disdainful bald eagles.
In 2014, however, I skipped the constant pleasures of the drive through the coastal towns, which are expanding greatly as retirees across the country come to realize the joys of life in temperate B.C. I flew in to Comox, rented a car, and drove through town, remembering the visit I once paid to Alice Munro in the local emergency ward. Alice used to winter in Comox, which avoided the rigours of snow-belt Clinton and offered her husband, Gerry, the pleasures of skiing on nearby Mount Washington. Our dinner plans were prevented by Alice’s trip to the hospital, but when the doctor arrived to interrupt our chat I was smart enough not to ask him to take special care of this special patient. That would have offended Alice’s sturdy democratic values. So as she lay there, I clapped her on the ankle, and left.
Comox has an astonishing history. Way back in 1580, when Shakespeare was a sixteen-year-old boy in Stratford, Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world. He kept the details of his voyage a state secret (away from evil Spanish eyes) but the bold B.C. historian Samuel Bawlf in 2003 brought out The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, 1577–1580, revealing that Drake had sailed up the West Coast as far as modern Alaska, then turned south in search of the perfect spot to establish a Pacific base for England, a new centre to be called “Nova Albion.”
Bawlf is satisfied that Drake’s description makes it clear that the chosen location was on what we now call Vancouver Island just north of Denman Island, in “the bay of small ships,” the canoe-filled harbour of what is now — ta-da! — Comox.
Of course, it took roughly 400 years for this English-speaking centre to spring up, in a small way. But locals proud of this early brush with heroic history may choose to overlook the fact that a sixteenth-century map reference to this point locates it on “the backside of Canada.”
South of Comox, the summer of 2014, my first destination was Nanoose Bay, where I spent three idyllic days with my Dunlop-raised cousin Graeme Young (later of Avison-Young, at the start of our lives my tricycling companion) and his wife, Ann, gazing across the Strait of Georgia at the Sunshine Coast opposite. I planned to phone Andreas Schroeder out of the blue to tell him to look out of his window to see a giant cruise ship heading north to Alaska. Such a phone call from his Toronto-based friend would have caused considerable surprise, but the timing never quite worked. A good mischievous idea, though.
We were just south of Parksville, very near the superb Rathtrevor Beach. As a birder I was sorry we missed the annual spring Brant Festival, where the town celebrates the return of the little duck-sized geese. (Once, in Connecticut, with my binoculars fixed to my face I was rejoicing in the arrival of the first Brants with my irreverent friend, James Houston. The old Arctic hand dismissed my romantic enthusiasm with the laconic words, “Very good eating.”) But we were able to see the annual Canadian Sand Sculpture Competition. Who knew? Professional sand artists (might the proper word be carvers or sculptors, rather than sandcastle makers?) come from all over, including countries like Holland and Mexico. Each of them is given equal area, on which a set amount of pre-sifted sand is dumped. They have a total of twenty-four hours to create a sand sculpture of their choice (this year’s theme was music) using all of the sand.
The results, I can report, are astounding, with thin sand towers ascending taller than me, and elaborate shoulder-high sand bridges winding through ancient towns where every shutter and rooftile is detailed. The miniature worlds that result are almost beyond belief, and the rich prizes well deserved. It’s appropriate to remember that this is happening in Jack Hodgins territory: The Invention of the World, indeed.
Ferries are central to B.C. coastal life. The pull of the last ferry ends parties and events as efficiently as any siren, and the internalized rhythm of ferry folk is as silent but as strong as the pull of the tides. Jack Hodgins knows this. That’s one reason why The Invention of the World (1977) opens with the man “waving your car down the ramp onto the government ferry.” Then we follow him home, after “the two-hour trip across the Strait of Georgia, while the long backbone ridge of the Island’s mountains sharpens into blue and ragged shades of green, and the coastline shadows shape themselves into rocky cliffs and driftwood-cluttered bays.”
The ferry across from Buckley Bay to Denman Island is a much smaller operation, and the trip takes only ten minutes. Then the whole heartbeat of the island quickens as the cars and bikes pour off the ferry and jostle their way uphill to the Denman village centre (the words “downtown Denman” resist my typing fingers since the island’s population is just over 1,000). Roughly half the cars race off southeast across the island to reach the ferry to Hornby Island. The Hornby people, of course, I’m assured, are very different, practically a different species.
Somehow tiny Denman has created a nationally famous, very successful Readers & Writers Festival, which has been running for several years now. The range of major authors is astounding. In July 2014 I was brought in along with people like Angie Abdou, Caroline Adderson, Maude Barlow (whom I used to publish), Pauline Holdstock, the spoken-word poet Zaccheus Jackson, Derek Lundy (who told
me fascinating stories about “the red hand of Ulster,” where a Viking chief won the race to be the first to touch the coast by cutting off his left hand and throwing it ashore), the outspoken Chris Turner (not on Stephen Harper’s Christmas card list), Rita Wong, and the novelist Richard Wagamese. We went to each other’s readings, and gave workshops. My own workshop group of ten local would-be writers was remarkable. As we went around the group, hearing their introductions and hopes, we were all fascinated by the range of life stories assembled in that small room in the local school.
All the visiting authors wandered around the village centre, dropping into the post office, the general store (founded in 1908), and Abraxis Books (well-stocked with my book, and with charming tales like the quiet visit some winters ago by Alice Munro: when she was asked “Are you who I think you are?” she replied, “Well, I’m certainly not Margaret Atwood!”). We all dropped into some of the many studios, and the craft and pottery shops — and basically got swallowed up in the life of the village.
That’s when we weren’t giving our individual readings on the main stage (where there were nice meals in the Back Hall), or in the Seniors Hall (right beside the old museum, with its records of the earliest European settlers in the 1870s, some of them Orkney settlers with names like Isbister, who must have been abashed by the trees they found everywhere). My big moment came at the main stage on Friday night. The audience of Denmanites (and the odd Hornby visitor) provided a warm, lively response that was very kind, and we all had a good time.
A large part of the pleasure in all this comes from the kindness of the organizers, led by the delightful Debbie Frketich, who made everything run smoothly, and left us all feeling welcome at all times. One memory: I was sitting chatting in the sun outside the Activity Centre with Richard Wagamese and his friend when an older woman shyly asked us for advice about how best to absorb a little baby of Native heritage into her family. I shut up, while Richard, who can be a man of great eloquence, simply told this worried great-grandmother, “Love her. Just love her.”
Across Canada by Story Page 14