Tag Archives: Canada

A Noun and a Verb

To examine Elizabeth Hay’s wonderful book called All Things Consoled is to gaze at the nature of the word itself. Anyone facing grief, or dealing with the difficulties of aging parents, or struggling with the reconciliation of old beefs, and the nature of letting go, will understand that grief is massively challenging. Caring friends may ask us how we are progressing. We will always come up blank. We can try to find peace, to achieve closure, to move on in our lives, but just when we feel we are making some headway, the past circles back, and there we are crying in the car when a sad song comes on the radio. We don’t get over things. At least, that is my experience. As I learned on the long canoe trips of my youth, the pack you portage gets a little lighter every day. That best describes my progress or lack thereof.

All Things Consoled, reads like a diary of the journey. It felt as if I was in her family with her, and I could see it all as clear as a bell. It is the great joy of my life to have so many experiences, so many connections, and so many travels all taking place within the bounds of my quite elastic imagination. A recent class with Margaret Atwood asked me to consider how to evoke emotions in the reader. Her statement landed like a direct hit. That is the trick of it.

Elizabeth Hay managed to evoke memories of all the irritating moments where you want to scream, but know that would be very unwise. By using her considerable skill to put me in her mother’s kitchen, I was transported back to the fifties when as a young girl, I experienced first hand, the holdover of the depression years, and the need not to waste food. Two characters, named willful and woeful were given little dishes covered in wax paper and then saran wrap before it found its cling, two measly bites that must be saved, less “Willful waste brings woeful want.” In my mother’s case, the sensibility only applied to food, a contradiction we often pointed out. Hay’s mother’s endearing obsession had me thinking back with great affection to my mother’s old pink fridge at our summer cottage on Lake Joseph in Ontario.

As for the father, although they were vastly different kinds of men, there were similarities there too. Punishment, as meted out to children in our time, could be harsh. Micheal Ondaatje in Warlight wrote that to write a memoir is to be an orphan. Surely there are great hurdles. One wants to get close to the truth, but one loathes to tell it. Idealize the whole family and write a rosy tale where all skeletons are swept dutifully under the carpet, does not come off as believable. To reveal all is sometimes too painful for anyone to read. How to get it just right must be the greatest challenge ever. It is not uncommon for some to write more than one memoir, because side stories and different issues keep popping up.
They will keep on coming too because the heart of the story, the telling of it, is a journey. In the case of All Things Consoled, the reader comes away with great respect for the author. She found the right note, and she managed to achieve a balance with her parent’s foibles and her own. We, too, can relate to their struggles and feel compassion for them as the frailty of old age crept in. Memorable characters, evocatively brought to light, makes this a great read.

From Page 233:

“The instinct to make art had abandoned her, but not the instinct to save food. She could not pass the communal fruit bowl in the lobby without her hand reaching out like a raccoon’s for apples and oranges, which she slipped into the basket of her walker and wheeled to her room. We took to calling her the fruit tree, self-grafting, everbearing. Her little fridge groaned with what she salted away. Every few days I emptied it into a canvas bag, assuring her that nothing would go to waste. Then I would stop by the kitchen on my way out of the building and put the food in the garbage and the napkins into the laundry bag and the plates on the counter. I stopped at the famous fruit bowl and returned apples and oranges.”

How this passage makes me anxious! I think of my parents with great affection at Christmas time. We were so lucky to not know real want, a fact my Mom pointed out constantly. Elizabeth Hay helped to console me, for I will always miss them. As we always gave books as gifts, and Boxing Day meant cracking open a great new read, with a personal inscription on the title page, I still have bits of them with me in my library. As for the living room, I have their console tables too.

Still Dreaming

When was the last time you liked a book so much that you read it twice? Dreaming Sally by James Fitzgerald has captivated my imagination. A true story, it outlines the tale of a life cut short, and of the two men who loved and lost, and struggled in the aftermath. By his heavenly powers of description, it is as if the author peeled back the veil, and re-created a lively young woman who seemed beautifully natural and full of fun. Seeing her through the eyes of a teenage male in love with her, but not able to win her heart, gives the story an extra portion of poignancy. Coupling the tale with Sally’s betrothed who also lost her, made me feel for both of them in this love story cut short by death.

The power of the author’s skill made me feel like a mad teenager again, searching the mean streets of the city for the next thrill. I could hear the music, taste the wine, feel the pressures upon us, and fail to understand my parent’s generation all over again. It takes amazing courage to penetrate to the heart of the story, and give over to honest self- examination. The settings, the dialogue, and the story remain vivid and are still creeping into my thoughts by the hour. It is a litmus test of sorts, to see how long the words linger. This book is one I will never forget. How impossible is it to bring the dead back to life? Yet it is Sally’s vitality that leaps from the page. That she was right on the cusp of change, the time when human history made a huge leap, the era where birth control set women free to explore their sexuality, and the time when collectively, the female of the species declared that the old norms of the patriarchy would never do. Many of us can identify with Sally and can imagine how her life would have unfolded. I see all the makings of a matriarch who would have created a fine family. She was about to begin nursing school and would have emerged with an even stronger sense of herself. Romantic, nostalgic and all too real, the book has left me in greater awe of master story-teller James Fitzgerald.

Something Old, Something New

James Fitzgerald has given us a fantastic gift. In compiling stories spanning decades, he has created a national treasure of personal accounts and anecdotes of the men who attended Upper Canada College in Toronto. For those of us, who, like me, had a boyfriend, a father, a grandfather, uncles, cousins and a brother at the school, I gained much insight into a culture that played a significant role in shaping the history of our family. The book describes what a same-sex education has to offer privileged males who run on pure competition. Win or lose, sink or swim: it is a game of Darwin’s social contract brought to the playing fields. What Fitzgerald brought to the project is an almost impossible feat: asking males to describe what they felt about things. Spoken as one who spent years asking the same questions, and for the most part, only ending up with precious few answers, I am in awe of this work.

An all-male academy, complete with cadet training and church parades, how they dazzled us in their uniforms. We delighted us to see the Old Boys come out, fathers and grandfathers, all headed to St. Paul’s Cathedral in the springtime. Church was a part of the curriculum, but it seems after reading this book, that something was lost in the translation. Ceaseless, relentless, ruthless bullying went on from faculty to student, to the weakest and most vulnerable among them, the little boys in the prep. It was a gut-wrenching read at times, but I could not put the book down. I barely slept; it was as if I was handcuffed to it. I appreciated the honesty with which these former students described the joys and sorrows of being enrolled at U.C.C. Obviously, a contributor might fear to speak out against a system that favored corporal punishment and lots of it. It would be considered a sign of weakness to many; I can imagine the collective bird this book caused among the old guard, but that is all well and good. Violence foisted from the strong to the weak, from those in authority to those in their charge, should and ought to be discussed because the repercussions can go down through the generations. The stranglehold on one’s psyche can be crushing. I have witnessed casualties. Tribalism can be without mercy; the consequences of which can be hideous. Parts of the book read like a horror story. Since I lived it and saw it close at hand, I know the toll all too well.

No institution, no matter how revered, can afford to be seen only through the prism of nostalgia. I applaud James Fitzgerald, whose family goes all the way back to the beginning of the school, for speaking truth to power. Are we as a society so steeped in materialism, social connections, and avenues of success, that we stand back in silence and watch the warping of men’s souls? If training warriors is the intended goal, then they must be lead by the strongest and wisest of men, true heroes that boys look up to in worship. The sadness I felt on page after page, had to do with opportunities lost. Jesuit education, for instance, seeks to enrich body, soul, and mind. It is a mistake for any colony to be ruled by hanging on to traditions of peoples who have long since assimilated and adapted.

It is my great hope that this book will help many who still feel the sting. My fondest wish is that in the future, the school ponies up, finds great teachers and leaders, pays them well beyond the going rate and develops an accurate model of leadership. To do any less short-changes the future.

Four generations of old boys from Upper Canada College in the Smythe family.

An Inspiring Leader Takes the Stage

Justin Trudeau, now Prime Minister of Canada, found inspiration on an early morning paddle on the Bow River in Calgary before the debate.

I am filled with hope today. Why? I feel inspired.
What exactly is inspiration? I started to think about this when an old friend signed a note to me by saying, stay inspired. It is a daily quest, to be sure. Without going out and looking for it, I can come up empty. The blank page, now the white screen, gets the better of me, and no work gets done on either my novel in progress, Four Stanley Cups and a Funeral, or on my website. When this happens, I have not let anyone down, save myself. However, without self-respect where are we?

Inspiration seems to be gaining in popularity if you look at my Facebook page. Twitter runs hot and cold, but there are no shortages of inspirational tidbits there too. There are days when no platitudes seem to work, and I have to try harder. Others, like today, see me out in the thick woods marveling at the fall colors and circling ravens of Windy Bay. Why is there a spring in my step? Good news and glad tidings are sweeping down like a clean, north wind from Canada.

Whether you missed the election drama, or followed it day by day, last night, a victory occurred for a political party with a dynamic young leader. However, that is not all that took place. A contentious battle veered down the dark alley of the politics of discrimination. Divide and conquer was the failed strategy of the ruling, Conservative Party. Canadians rejected it soundly. That gives me hope.

We all know better. We all had grandmothers who taught us good manners. We all had grandfathers who introduced us to right and wrong. We know what is called hate speech when we hear it. So why do we keep sinking into this abyss? It is the advice of political strategists. They feel it works. I am hopeful today that some may feel that it does not. It could backfire. It could come back to bite you

My grandfather told me that his father raised him on one simple statement from the Bible: “Yea as you sew, so shall ye reap.”
It is that simple. The man dispensing this advice was a new-age poet and journalist about one hundred years ahead of his time. He taught yoga classes and was a vegetarian. He believed in peace, and he worked to move his country beyond narrow-minded Victorian divisions to a model “free from discrimination of race, class, color or creed.” John Oliver said that the pervasive feeling in Canada of an election lasting seventy-eight days being way too long, was “absolutely adorable.” In this country, we still have a long, long way to go. What becomes tedious is not the exchange of ideas, it is what my grandmother would have called the unpleasantness. Do we really need this as part of the fabric of democracy, or is it rather a stain on our collective soul? Should we not look to leaders who provide inspiration? I am not all that interested in a person’s fears. Why would I even want to hear about them? Why should I be afraid? Why should I cast a vote because of my fears?

I looked up antonyms for the word inspire: Bore, deaden, depress, discourage, dishearten, and here is the best one of all- lull. Lull into a stupor comes to mind.

According to Webster’s, inspiration drives us to create. That is why it is worth seeking. That is why it is a hallmark of true leadership.

The sky is a bright blue today. The sun is glistening in the bay. The leaves are shimmering on the trees. Inspiration is everywhere. When our time to vote comes at last, I want to feel a sense of hope. I want to feel as if we have turned a corner. I want to feel that we are serving the better angels of our nature. We still have a long way to go. It will be a tough portage.

Enduring Love

Just in time to take the boats out of the water, Roy MacGregor’s Canoe Country: The Making of Canada, arrived on my doorstep. The glorious fall we have enjoyed on Windy Bay is more lovely than ever. Rain, sweet, heavenly rain, has made our parched woods practically sing with joy. Sitting on our deck with the last rays of summer keeping me warm, I was deliriously happy reading one of my favorite authors. Since there is so much to do this time of year in the garden, I had to ration my reading time, but the book got the better of me, and I took to picking it up at every break. Thanks to Roy MacGregor, my Christmas shopping is going to be a snap. Every canoe lover on my list will unwrap this treasure. Books written about canoes are few and far between, but we tend to see the same ones in homes of our friends.

The book, infused with passion, also carries a wealth of historical information.
From the back cover:

“The canoe made Canada. No canoe, no exploration of this second-largest country on earth. No canoe, no fur trade to open up the colony-then-country to commerce and settlement. No dugout, no birchbark canoe, no kayak, no umiak, then perhaps no survival for the for the various Aboriginal peoples who first inhabited this largely inhospitable and often frozen territory.”

Since I was lucky enough to spend my summers canoeing, and traveling on long canoe trips, I can attest to how utterly bonded the traveler becomes with his craft. When you think of the simplicity of the vessel, the adaptability of the voyageur, the mastery of the skills required to endure the journey, it is a wonder. The canoe is much more than a means to an end; it is a thing of inestimable beauty.

MacGregor writes of the transition from birchbark to cedar strip with chilling accuracy. It was gratifying to me to read that his research was thorough, and all credit due was given to David Thompson. As in all inventions, necessity brought us this development. As Thompson traveled west, he found birchbark to be scarce. Hence the cedar strip which while disputed seems to have been created out here in the northwest.

From Page 194:

“Thompson’s assignment from his superiors at the North West Trading Company, fourteen years later, was to cross the Continental Divide and establish trade with native tribes west of the Rockies. He and his party passed the winter of 1807 to 1808 at “Kootenae House,” the trading post they had built by a creek that ran into the Columbia.”

From Thompson’s journals, edited by Sean T. Peake and featured on page 204:

“We had to turn out thoughts to some other material, and Cedar wood being the lightest and most pliable for a canoe, we split out thin boards of Cedar wood of about six inches in breadth and builded a Canoe of twenty-five feet in length by fifty inches in breadth, of the same form of a common Canoe, which proved to be equally light and much stronger than Birch Rind.”

Beyond the practical and natural, there is also something mystical about a journey by canoe. I am not making preposterous claims alone here; I have heard this voiced so many times and have read enough accounts to consider it a common experience. It begins as a child when you set off in high spirits and boundless enthusiasm only to hit a wall in about say, twenty minutes, where you suddenly feel that old, are we there yet, impatience. There is a bit of a breakdown that occurs. You can’t get out, you can’t get comfortable, your knees hurt, you are hungry, and you are thirsty, and we have to do this for the next eight hours? One has to learn patience, and one has to learn to be calm, and one has to pass the time in silly conversations or find a song where everyone knows the words, or surely you think you will run mad. After time, the canoe becomes quiet. Words are not needed now, and only the next bend, the next portage or thoughts of a warm fire and a good meal are all that seem to be on your mind. What happened to all the cares, the concerns, the endless thought patterns? They start to slip away, and the contemplation of whirlpools around the dip of your paddle take center stage.

From Page 93 where the journals of Susanna Moodie are quoted:

“She claims to have felt a magic spell upon our spirits. Every object was new to us. We felt as if we were the first discoverers of every beautiful flower and stately tree that attracted our attention, and we gave names to fantastic rocks and fairy isles.”

What used to transport me into the stratosphere of my highly excitable teen years was the knowledge that I had everything I needed. By the second week of canoeing, I did not want to return to civilization. I reveled in the simplicity of our world, and I could not get enough of exploration. I have been a happy wanderer, and I hope Canadians and Americans who love the outdoors will cherish this book.

Pictured below is the author on a canoe trip in Ontario, Canada.

How Did I Get Here?

Do you ever ask yourself that question? This query need not be existential in theory; I refer rather to one’s geographical location. Windy Bay, Lake Coeur d’Alene is our present home.

When I reached the age of seven, I was sent Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, Ontario to attend summer camp for the month of July. I had been waiting desperately for the big event. My older siblings had all gone off ahead of me, and I could not wait for my turn. While my mother fretted about me being so young my father had utmost confidence in me. As a camper in training, I swam my three hundred yard requirement with him in the cold waters of Lake Joseph where we kept our summer home. On my first day at camp, I dove in confidently, assuring everyone in sundry that I could do it. In fact, I had already done it that morning at the crack of dawn. I took to camp like a duck to water and loved every minute. The first night, the camp director’s husband, Dr. Harry Ebbs, came to talk to us, and give us a bedtime story. He wanted to tell us about trees. He took us out- a little gaggle of girls in baby doll pajamas with flannel robes wrapped around us and flip flops on our feet, for a brief walk in the woods. He had something to show us. We looked at a beautiful assortment of saplings of birch and fir, protected by buildings on three sides. Next, we walked the length of the island to see an amazing pine jutting straight out over the water with roots clutching to the bare rock. Which trees had the greatest chance of survival, he asked? We thought the protected ones would fare the best, and all chimed in that the trees behind the lodge would have the best chance. He surprised us all by telling us that we were wrong. The dramatic pine, bent by storms and seeming to be facing the greatest of challenges would fare the best. Why? He told us that the saplings were vulnerable because of their protection. They did not have to develop deep roots. A squall could topple them, but the tree that fought for every square inch of its territory had developed the roots to endure. He then added that our parents had sent us to camp in order to develop our roots.

A few nights later we trooped into the lodge, a great building designed for dramatic events, to see a film about the voyageurs, the hearty fur traders who explored the lakes and rivers of Canada. My hair stood on end. They sang as they paddled, and this old film re-enacting their journeys featured a map showing us how far they traveled. The next day we went out to learn how to weave, and I endeavored to make a voyageur belt, a long affair that wrapped around the waist twice and ended in a fringe. Perhaps it was the sight of me in that belt that I would not take off, or perhaps it was my love of camp, or perhaps it was something in my nature that led my dad to call me la fille du bois. We did not speak French in our home, so he explained that it meant girl of the woods.

Years later, when living in Sacramento, California and contemplating our future, we planned a trip north to visit relatives in British Colombia. I had often begged to drive through Idaho as I had been curious after reading Ernest Hemingway. A more direct route was always favored until a fortuitous offer of free accommodation near Rathdrum changed the route. Looking at a map in my father-in-law’s fantastic atlas, I saw the French names of the lakes in North Idaho. That prickly, funny feeling crept across my scalp and into my heart. I knew there could only be one reason: the voyageurs. So we drove up with our kids in the backseat of the old Subaru station wagon full of excitement. We were heading north from Moscow when I saw a sign depicting a boat launch.

“Turn!” I yelled. “Turn! This must be Lake Coeur d’Alene!” We drove down to Sun Up Bay. “It’s great!” I screamed. When we got back in the car, we carried along the upper part of the road until we came to a stop sign. We could not proceed, due to its designation as private. We stopped to admire the view which by the strangest of all co-incidences, is where we live right now.

More years later, I took an interesting journey with ancestry.com following the line of my paternal grandfather, James Gaudette, a man I never had the privilege of knowing. I was astounded to learn that records kept leading me back in time all the way to 1635 when the family arrived in Port Royal, the first settlement in Acadia, now Nova Scotia.

This summer I read Peter Stark’s, Astoria. Once again, I thrilled over tales of the voyageurs. Peter Stark maintains that many of them had been trapping all through the eighteenth century, originating from Port Royal. Sources of the River, Tracking David Thompson Across North America, by Jack Nisbet, is another excellent tale of unbelievable tenacity in the face of boundless wilderness. It was on that first trip to North Idaho that I read a roadside marker depicting Thompson’s journey. Perplexed, I thought, this can’t be the same David Thompson. I knew him from the old camp movie, for it was he who first mapped Canoe Lake and Lake Joseph in Ontario. Yet it was. I often tell people that it is possible to travel from Montreal to Lake Coeur d’ Alene by canoe and portage. I get a very blank and confused expression in return. David Hackett Fischer’s, Champlain’s Dream, is a detailed and masterfully written book depicting the founding of French Canada. He, too, was a great explorer. In reading Astoria, I learned of John Jacob Astor’s failed attempt at founding a colony in the Pacific Northwest. The idea was to establish a sea route from New York, to Hawaii, to Astoria, in what is now Oregon, to China and from there to London, and again to New York. The overland route from New York to Astoria would be established through the United States. The grand scheme became an epic and legendary disaster. Why do some colonies flourish while others fail? What was the difference between Port Royal, and Jamestown or Astoria? It is a fascinating question well worth exploring. In Astoria, terrible decisions were made on the overland route. The leaders kept going back to Astor’s dictates while the men of the Northwest Trading Company, the voyageurs used their instincts and ability to rely on the wisdom of the ages. Gleaned from the natives who had been here since time immemorial, they learned established canoe routes, and questioned dictates to boldly go where no man had gone before.

How did I get here? Perhaps I followed my heart. I could have followed it right to Lake Coeur d’ Alene. Was it my destiny? That I cannot answer. I do know this, however. I have never been sorry. Not for one single minute. Our children grew to love and cherish this land. Every time I call the Coeur d’ Alene Casino, I am greeted with these words: Welcome Home.

Elizabeth Smythe Brinton

Author: The Craft of Writing, The Business of Writing, and the Literary Life.