Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  Another interruption out there left me with an extraordinary river moment. When the salmon are running, as they are now, all eyes are on the surface of the river, looking for the circle in the water that may precede a silver leap. Standing up to watch them, I was like an eager dog on point as I saw five or six circles appear. Five or six fish! Then the entire surface of the water was pocked with hundreds of such circles, a miracle of teeming fish … until I realized that the storm clouds had just opened, and that these circles came courtesy of raindrops from above, not fish from below.

  I wonder what the fish make of it all, when the ceiling of their world turns black, and full of noise, and of fresh, cold water.

  Clearly, I had learned one of the great lessons of sitting at a writer’s desk. When you are there, you are in the same surrounding world as he was. And if you are open to distraction, your distractions will be the same as his.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  ALICE MUNRO COUNTRY

  Alice’s Ancestors … Playing Host to Swedish Filmmakers … The Novelist and the Tiger-Killer … Onto the Mennonite World … 100 Years of Edna Staebler … Across the Maitland River, and into Wingham … The Spirit of Blyth … I’ve Never Been Proud of Coming from Clinton, Before This … I Turn into Ingmar Bergman, En Route to Goderich … Bayfield, and the Man Who Mapped the Great Lakes

  * * *

  You will find, ladies and gentlemen, that Alice Munro Country begins surprisingly close to Toronto. As you head west on the 401, approaching Milton, the horizon fills with the Niagara Escarpment, the long barrier of hills and cliffs that runs right across Ontario, all the way from the Falls to where Georgian Bay meets Lake Huron. But today, before you tackle the low gap through the barrier, you take the major decision to leave the 401. It has been a notable literary thoroughfare ever since Alistair MacLeod in No Great Mischief called it “Ontario’s main highway” and assured us that “it will be true to you if you are true to it. And you will never, never, ever become lost.”

  But you, daringly, take exit 320 for Halton Hills, the area to which Alice Munro’s ancestors, the Laidlaws, came in 1818, all the way from their home in the Ettrick Valley in the Scottish Borders.

  “In those days they came usually by boat.” That’s the famous sentence that opens Donald Creighton’s epic biography of Sir John A. Macdonald. The Macdonald family arrived in Canada in 1820, just two years after the Laidlaws. Both groups had endured the howling trials of the transatlantic voyage, then the trip up the St. Lawrence against the current, then the battle through the rapids west of Montreal, before the comparatively smooth waters of Lake Ontario allowed them to choose which part of “The Front” they wished to arrive at “by boat.”

  We know that the Laidlaws arrived at York (now Toronto), presumably tumbling gratefully off the boat to stretch their legs. We know, too, that they spent some time in the little port before heading west to the Halton Hills to take up their land in Esquising Township. This was a very Scottish area, with part of it actually called “The Scotch Block.” In fact our destination (and from route 25 North we turn right on the James Snow Parkway, then right again until we find Boston Church Road) is named the Boston Presbyterian Church. This Boston, please note, has nothing to do with beans or Bruins or Cabots or cod. It’s named after Thomas Boston, a famous Scot, the eighteenth-century minister in Ettrick who was so admired that the people who came to settle in this part of Canada named their pioneer church after him. Alice Munro has written sympathetically about him in a story, “Men of Ettrick,” from The View from Castle Rock.

  When you drive north along the quiet maple-shaded road, the houses fall away until the church appears on your right. As you walk up towards it, head for the front corner on the left. There, among the old gravestones, you will find many that remember generations of the Laidlaw family. Among them is James Laidlaw, the man who brought his family here, although he was almost sixty, a late time in life for a pioneer to start carving out a farm. His relative, the Scottish writer James Hogg, wrote about his decision to leave Ettrick for “America” (which in common speech included Canada): “For a number of years bygone he talked and read about America till he grew perfectly unhappy, and at last, when approaching his sixtieth year, actually set off to seek a temporary home and a grave in the new world.”

  Two fine, grim Scottish touches there. The phrase “perfectly unhappy” reverses the usual formula, while the words “and a grave” speak for themselves. The grave is right here, in the Boston Church graveyard, in memory of James Laidlaw, who died in 1829.

  Alice Munro’s great-great-great-grandfather.

  I found myself back at the Boston Church in October 2013, acting as tour guide to a Swedish TV crew that was about to make a documentary film about new Nobel Laureate Alice Munro for SVT, the national broadcaster. In my new role as Assistant Director/ Transport Manager/Script Assistant/Actor/ Interviewee (and possibly even Best Boy) I spent a fascinating day with Lena Jordebo, the producer, and Sven-Ake Visen, the cameraman.

  We stopped first at the Boston Church (built, by the way, on land given by Andrew Laidlaw, the son of old James), where I talked to the camera about the importance of these ordinary Scottish settlers for Alice and her work. Then it was back to the faithful 401, passing through the Escarpment gap with only a slight pressure on the accelerator, in contrast with the hard work and cracking whips that took the oxcarts up the hill to spread west into the thickly forested land beyond. It was said that the trees were so thick that an agile and ambitious squirrel could travel for hundreds of miles without ever descending to the ground.

  The superb historian Desmond Morton, in A Short History of Canada (which I was proud to republish), has written about how

  for pioneers in a harsh and unfamiliar land, survival was a preoccupation, to be achieved only through relentless, back-breaking labour. The forest was the enemy. Huge first-growth trees resisted the puny axes and saws of settlers struggling to clear fields or merely to break through the overhanging gloom to the sun. The forest accentuated loneliness. Loneliness reduced pioneers to an unsmiling grimness. Women often faced life and even the terrors of childbirth without even a neighbour to help. A single careless blow with an axe could cripple a man or leave him to die in the stench and agony of gangrene.

  Literature rules the world. If you find that truth hard to believe, consider this: the part of Canada now known as “Alice Munro Country” was founded by a novelist. John Galt was Scotland’s most famous novelist after Sir Walter Scott, thanks to novels like Annals of the Parish. Yet he gave up the life of a successful, stay-at-home, pen-scratching creator of stories to run the Canada Company, and settle huge tracts of Upper Canada with mostly Scottish settlers. He and his explorer on the ground, “Tiger” Dunlop (in India he used to throw snuff in the faces of the tigers, he said, before shooting them), first founded Guelph, then cut a road to Waterloo, then on to Stratford, and then west into Huron County. There they established the county seat at Goderich, where Tiger’s grave lies, overlooking the town. And they brought in many, many settlers, most of them Scots.

  As John and Monica Ladell record in their 1979 book on century farms, Inheritance, they cut “a trail from Waterloo to Goderich, via what is now Stratford. … In the eleven years between 1829 and 1840 the Canada Company settled over six thousand people in the Huron Tract.” All of the settlers lived hardscrabble lives, with survival among the trees the main aim; Galt’s earlier literary life must have seemed almost unbelievable to them, since, as we’ll see, books were not needed (“Nobody wants them”). Later, the Huron Tract settlers included the Laidlaw family.

  But now on the 401 at Cambridge, incorporating Jane’s hometown of, yes, Galt, it’s time for you to take the turn off to Highway 8, leading to Kitchener and Waterloo. After you make the turn, ladies and gentlemen, please look to the right to see a ski hill. No, lower down … yes, that little bump is the Chicopee Ski Hill, wh
ich was big enough to hook the teenaged Jane on skiing. So firmly was this athletic girl from Galt hooked, in fact, that after her first university year at Western, she took a year off to become a ski bum in Switzerland! Morning and evening she worked as a cook/waitress. During the day, she skied. My respectable wife, “Nana” to our grandchildren! Clearly, it has all been downhill since then.

  As you approach Kitchener and Waterloo, you have a choice of route. You can take the Tiger Dunlop southern route to Stratford via Shakespeare. (Don’t miss the elderberry pie!) From Stratford you’d head northwest on the Old Huron Road, Highway 8. I know it so well from many visits to see Alice that I can happily reel off the names of the towns. Sebringville (one long main street, a thin snake of a town); Mitchell (once the home of my old friend Orlo Miller, who wrote The Donnellys Must Die, about the murders in nearby Lucan); Dublin (with its Liffey Drain, a triumph of realism over sentimentality); Seaforth (home of Lloyd Eisler, the skating star); then Clinton (home of a not-bad short story writer); and beyond that, on the lake, the county town of Goderich (named for the least memorable and least successful British prime minister of all time — a bold claim, I know, but Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary records that after Goderich succeeded Canning “his weak leadership was soon exposed and he resigned willingly before meeting Parliament as Prime Minister [1827–28], the only premier to do so”).

  But with the Swedish film crew, instead I chose to take the northerly route along Highway 86, direct to Wingham, where Alice Laidlaw grew up. As we skirted Waterloo and headed west into the country towards Listowel, my Swedish friends were especially struck by three things. The richness of the very flat farmland. The large barns, designed on the two-storey principle, where the groaning haywagons came up a ramp to the upper level from which, all winter long, the hay could simply be forked down (call it the “gravity feed” principle) to the cattle housed in the lower storey. (If this detail seems excessive to you, I’m a country boy, and, hey, this is a book about stories!)

  But what especially interested them was evidence that this was Old Order Mennonite country. I explained about the horse-drawn buggies that many traditional farmers still use, avoiding devilish machinery like cars. (Jane, a proud member of the Mennonite Brenneman family, had a grandfather who chose to break with the church in order to be a railroad engineer, in Stratford.) I was able to talk about the continuing marks of distinction in dress, with the women in kerchiefs and bonnets, and the men wearing black hats and choosing beard styles that reveal their marital status.

  More important, I talked about how the Mennonites came north from Pennsylvania around 1800 and found the best land. They knew that black walnut trees grew only in rich, deep soil. So in their Conestoga wagons they followed “the trail of the black walnut,” moving, almost literally, from tree to tree. As a result they found the very best land, and put down their own roots there, where they could produce the fine, hearty food for which they are renowned. Which brings us to Edna Staebler.

  Edna was born in Berlin in 1906, the granddaughter of the very first Mennonite settler in Woolwich Township. She got a degree from the University of Toronto at a time when girls were not expected to turn into career women, and certainly not career writers. Edna’s husband didn’t support her writing ambitions, and in time they divorced. But magazines like Chatelaine and Maclean’s and Reader’s Digest were supportive. They admired Edna’s system of immersing herself in the lives of her subjects, living for months in a Cape Breton fishing community, or with an Italian immigrant family adapting to life in Toronto, or with Old Order Mennonite friends and neighbours.

  Her life changed in 1968 when she decided to write about the hearty traditional food that her Mennonite friends cooked. Her cookbook — daringly entitled Food That Really Schmecks — went on to become the bestselling hardcover cookbook in Canadian publishing history. In 1979, M&S brought out a second volume, More Food That Really Schmecks (the second title seemed much less daring), and again the sales went through the roof, making Edna rich and modestly famous. But to the alarm of her friends like Pierre Berton and Harold Horwood she went on living quietly by herself in a remote cottage beside Sunfish Lake near Waterloo. Her friends were appalled by this little old lady sometimes being visited by the paroled prisoners she was charitably assisting.

  Edna Staebler (1906–2006)

  I was not on parole, but our paths crossed at some point, and I was charmed by this apple-cheeked old woman. I got to know her better when in 1986 M&S decided to bring out a third book in the “Schmecks” series. Because I then had an arm’s-length relationship with the company, I felt able to enter the internal competition for a new title, and I won with Schmecks Appeal.

  The prize was a home-cooked meal by Edna Staebler herself. Since my mother (the former Jenny Maitland) was visiting from Scotland (from tiger-free Dunlop, to be precise), and since she was the storyteller in our family, I thought that lunch with Edna at Sunfish Lake would be too good a treat for her to miss. And indeed the two ancient women got on well as we sat looking out at the lake and enjoying the delicious smell curling around us from the kitchen.

  Edna invited us to the table, and excused herself to go into the kitchen. There were domestic sounds, and then a very un-­Mennonite hissed, “Shit!”

  “Is everything all right, Edna?” I called. “Can I help?”

  She reluctantly agreed. When I walked into the sacred kitchen I found Edna trapped against the stove. Somehow, in removing a quiche from the oven, she had got the top of the quiche wedged vertically against the oven rack. She was crouched there, holding the fragile quiche in place with just enough pressure to stop it from collapsing in a yellow, eggy mess on the floor. I was able to slip a plate underneath, and the quiche was saved. It tasted wonderful. But the “celebrity chef” shows on television never seem to involve such high drama.

  My next encounter with Edna was in business discussions when we and McGraw-Hill joined forces to bring out all of her recipes in a series of Schmecks books, on Soups, or Desserts, and so on — divided as a matter of course, you might say. And here Edna proved to be an apple-cheeked Granny from Hell, smilingly demanding outrageous terms for the contract. It almost worked, too. Everyone else in the room was scandalized as I rudely resisted the sweet requests made oh-so-gently by this little lady in her late eighties.

  That side of Edna was on full display when in 1997 she delivered the prestigious Margaret Laurence Lecture at the Writers’ Union Conference. At the end of a long publishing day I drove to Kingston to support good old Edna. She chose to take the audience through her career as an author, book by book. When she came to the first book published by M&S, she said: “Now I see Doug Gibson in the audience, and Doug, I have to say that when it came to promoting More Food That Really Schmecks, I was really disappointed by the job that M&S did. Really disappointed.”

  The audience of writers — not all of whom believed that their own publishers had promoted their own books ideally, successfully attracting every possible reader — was loudly delighted.

  It got worse. Every book that we had published, it seemed, had been badly promoted, although each time Edna was “sorry to have to say this, Doug.” Eventually I sat there in the middle of the audience (my neighbours drawing away from me) with my hands clasped protectively over my head. It was an admission that I was being publicly beaten up, from the stage, by a sweet little lady, now aged ninety-one, but still kicking.

  Late in her life Edna instituted an award in her name for Creative Non-Fiction Writing, administered by Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. In 1996 I was pleased to attend the ceremony honouring George Blackburn, a fine Second World War veteran who had written his memoirs of those days, The Guns of Normandy, in a continuous present tense in the second person (“You go along the trench,” etc.) At the award ceremony, I was unexpectedly asked to “say a few words.” With Edna and George on the platform I said: “I’ve attended hundreds of book award events ov
er the years, but this is the first one when the combined ages of the donor, Edna (born in 1906), and the recipient, George (born in 1917), exceeds 170 years.”

  Edna shook her fist at me, but she did it playfully, and I think she was pleased; in my experience — and my mother died at ninety-nine — over ninety a lady doesn’t mind her age being mentioned. At her 100th birthday party, organized by her friends at Wilfrid Laurier, Edna seemed glad to shake my hand and smile at me. She died a few months later.

  When you leave Mennonite Country and get closer to Wingham, the country becomes less lush. Now the main feature is the Maitland River, which loops and meanders throughout Alice Munro country, all the way to where it pours into the lake at Goderich. Given that Maitland is my middle name (which, as a touch of home, was a comfort to Alice when we started to work together in the mid-’70s), I was interested to learn more about the man who gave the river his name.

  Sir Peregrine Maitland (and there are no Peregrines in my mother’s immediate family) was a British soldier who was lucky enough to serve with Wellington at Waterloo. That set him up for life, producing a string of appointments like becoming the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada in 1818, a post he held for ten years before moving laterally to run Nova Scotia. One story about Maitland must have intrigued the romantic, young Alice Laidlaw, growing up beside the Maitland River. The stolid soldier eloped with the daughter of the Duke of Richmond. The father was not pleased. This proved to be a bad career move when the duke was made Governor in Chief of Canada, and thus Maitland’s boss, but the all-powerful Duke of Wellington managed to patch things up between them.