Otherwise (4 page)

Our first day’s travel ended abruptly about a hundred miles south of Saskatoon when both of the caravan’s wooden-spoked wheels disintegrated, dropping it onto the gravel road as heavily as if it had been felled by a bullet through its heart.

Angus unhitched the Dodge and drove back to Saskatoon for a new set of wheels, leaving the rest of us to amuse ourselves watching legions of gophers at play in the rippling sea of newly sprouted wheat surrounding us.

There was little evidence of human life except for a grain elevator looming on the distant horizon. Usually two or three of those stark wooden structures presided over a one-room railway station, a shabby false-front café, a garage-cum-blacksmith’s shop, a general store, a farm implement agent, and a few unpainted, weather-worn wooden houses that together formed one of the forlorn little hamlets scattered disconsolately across the immensity of the Great Plains.

Next day Angus returned with new wheels, and we set off again. Since no Trans-Canada Highway then existed we had to make a huge semicirclular sweep through the northern tier of the United States, swinging back into Canada at Sault Ste. Marie. The roads were mostly gravel-or dirt-surfaced so we seldom managed to cover even as much as a hundred miles a day. Each evening we would camp, preferably beside a lake or river. Angus and I would erect a bell tent for Annie and Mutt. Sometimes the two women cooked supper on the caravan’s kerosene stove; more often they did so over an open fire.

Since no hordes of summer trippers clogged roads and campsites in those times, we seldom had human neighbours. We did, however, encounter many of the Others. Deer, black bears, skunks, and foxes checked out our camps, as did innumerable birds, squirrels, gophers, and rabbits. Once an inquisitive coyote snuffled his way through the door flap of the tent and gave Annie ”conniptions,” until he was chased off by Mutt.

Unable to resist the lure of the road least travelled, Angus was forever taking shortcuts. These sometimes stranded us miles from anywhere until a friendly farmer with a team of Percherons or, rarely, a tractor might come along to haul us out of a ditch or a pothole in the road.

Our passage through the United States was enlivened by sequences of advertising signs nailed to roadside fence posts at intervals of three or four hundred yards. Their message was delivered one line at a time. Thus:

BURMA SHAVE

WON’T MAKE YOU RICH

BUT BURMA SHAVE

WON’T MAKE YOU ITCH

Angus was inspired by these to compose a jingle that he proposed to offer to the manufacturers of a health drink called Ovaltine. Alas, he never got around to sending it to them. Had he done so Ovaltine might have become the Viagra of its time and the Mowats might have become filthy rich.

UNCLE JAMES

AND AUNTIE MABLE

FAINTED AT

THE BREAKFAST TABLE

[
long
linear pause – at least a thousand yards]

BUT OVALTINE

SOON PUT THEM RIGHT

NOW THEY DO IT

NOON AND NIGHT

After re-entering Canada, we headed directly for our penultimate destination: my maternal grandparents’ summer cottage in Quebec. The route took us to Sudbury and North Bay then southeastward to the Ottawa River, over which we
made a precarious crossing on a wooden ferry barely capable of carrying two cars at a time. Having reached the Quebec side, Angus embarked on another of his shortcuts – this one across the forested mountains separating the Ottawa and Gatineau river valleys. The dirt road quickly degenerated into a muddy creek bed that eventually became a beaver pond in which the immobilized Dodge and caravan became two small islands.

It seemed we would have to swim for it, but we were rescued by a jovial group of lumberjacks who, having carried the ”women and children” to safety on their broad backs, hauled our vehicles out with a snorting tractor. Then they pulled car and caravan ten miles over a bush trail to a navigable road running beside the Gatineau River.

This adventure made my father happy as a clam.

”Splendid ending to a voyage!” he crowed. ”Almost as good as if these fine chaps were
coureurs de bois
from Champlain’s time!”

Helen’s aside to me was cogent.

”Your father’s
such
a
hopeless
romantic,” she whispered in my ear. ”Do try and
not
grow up like him.”

My grandparents’ cottage was on Hawk Lake not far from the village of Kazabazua – a name that, before I saw the place, conjured up visions of Africa or somewhere equally exotic. Hawk Lake was shrouded by forests, its shores still virginal except for the Thomson cottage, a barely weatherproof wooden shell redolent with the aroma of pine, and bereft of indoor plumbing, electricity, or telephone.

My parents’ plan was that Mutt, Helen, Annie, and I would remain here while Angus drove to Toronto, his new
workplace, to find a house for us to live in – one that my mother hoped might be the first home we had ever actually owned.

Angus intended that we be settled in Toronto before school reopened that autumn. This was not to be. A heat wave in early August drove multitudes of Toronto children to public swimming pools, triggering an outbreak of polio. So many children and young adults became infected that panic gripped the city. Parents able to do so sent their offspring out of town, and children already away at camps or cottages were kept there until the epidemic subsided. I was among those blessed in this way and greatly appreciated the extra month’s holiday, which I used to canoe adjacent lakes and rivers and to roam obscure trails through the surrounding forests, getting to know the local inhabitants, human and otherwise.

Among them were French-speaking
habitants
living in snug little log cabins set in small clearings in the ”bush.” For generations these people had made their livings felling logs, hunting, trapping, and fishing. Hospitable to a fault, they seemed little different from the prairie settlers who had made me feel at home in Saskatchewan. They were my sort of people. They were also Annie’s. Within a week of our arrival she had discovered (and been discovered by) a strapping young man who proved to be everything I wasn’t. Before long Annie became pregnant and engaged and, as the ancient Norse saga men were prone to say, ”was out of our story.”

This was a wonderful time for my mother. Her western exile lay behind her and she was home with her own family. Her father, Harry (Hal) Thomson, who had been a bank manager until ”given early retirement” for refusing to foreclose on hapless debtors, was a storyteller par excellence who
also played a ukulele. He sang narrative songs, one of which was an exciting ballad about a young and amorous but short-sighted whale who unwisely tried to make love to a submarine and got himself torpedoed.

Hal was a fine companion but his wife, George (Georgina), intimidated me, as she did most people. Rangy and raunchy, she brooked no nonsense from lesser beings. At seventy, and despite the fact she had never driven a car, she decided to buy one. She acquired a second-hand Packard and after impatiently undergoing three or four days of instruction set off without benefit of either a companion (Hal wisely chose to stay home) or a licence, to drive from Montreal to Florida. Having miraculously avoided any serious disasters en route, she then went on to make a solo tour of much of the southern United States.

When, upon her return to Canada, my father complimented her on this achievement, she replied nonchalantly:

”Poof, my dear boy. It was as easy as filing off a lug.”

George was famous for her malapropisms and inscrutable aphorisms.

At that time Toronto was only the
second
largest city in Canada; however, on the wet October day in 1937 when we drove into its outskirts I knew it was too big for me. My distress mounted as we threaded through miles and miles of crowded streets to our new residence – a crabbed little rental at 90 Lonsdale Avenue. Our woeful expressions on first seeing the place prompted Angus to explain that this was only a stopgap until he could find and buy a real home for us.

Although deeply disappointed not to have the house she yearned for, my mother was pleased to be in Toronto,
which was familiar turf for her. For me, it was as alien as any place I could imagine. The day after our arrival, I was sent off to register at North Toronto Collegiate Institute, a huge education factory where I knew nobody and nobody knew me. The indifferent woman who took my ”particulars” dourly informed me that, though I had apparently graduated into Grade 11 in Saskatoon, I would have to repeat Grade 10 in Toronto because Saskatchewan’s educational standards were inferior to those of Ontario. So I found myself sentenced to a dismal repetition of all the Latin, algebra, geometry, physics, and chemistry that had bored me silly the previous year.

The one ray of light in Toronto’s gloom was cast by Frank Farley who had provided me with a written introduction to Jim Baillie, assistant curator of the department of ornithology at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. With some trepidation, I mailed Baillie the letter, and he responded by inviting me to visit him. One grey Saturday in mid-November I rode the Yonge Street trolley south to the museum, made my way to a cluttered little office, and diffidently introduced myself.

Baillie, a fair-haired youngish man, beckoned me to a chair. ”Aha!” he said. ”The prairie meadowlark comes to the big city. Tell me about yourself.”

This was the friendliest greeting anyone in Toronto had yet given me. Baillie improved upon it by offering to ”take me under his wing” (a big wink to make sure I got the joke), which he subsequently did by enlisting me in the Toronto Ornithological Field Group.

The formidable-sounding
TOFG
consisted of about a dozen boys and three girls, all more or less my own age and
all ardent birdwatchers. This little group provided what I then needed most – a tribe of my own kind. Andy Lawrie, ”Duke” Boisseneau, Alan Helmsley, and Doug Millar were chiefly responsible for introducing me to the surprising variety of Others who co-existed and even thrived in Toronto’s urban sprawl. Mutt and I eventually became familiar with almost every wooded ravine, golf course, municipal park, cemetery, and piece of so-called wasteland in and around the city – places where foxes pranced, owls hooted, fish swam, snakes slithered, frogs shrilled, and birds sang.

On weekends, come rain or shine, we of the
TOFG
would be abroad, equipped with battered old binoculars, field glasses, and even brass telescopes, searching for the wild ones. When travelling through regions occupied principally by human beings, we used streetcars or bicycles. Elsewhere we went on foot. We thought nothing of trekking ten or fifteen miles to prime localities like Ashbridges Bay to the eastward, Sunnyside and High Park to the west, Thornhill to the north, and Toronto Island to the south.

My journals record that between January 1 and May 7, 1938, alone or with other members of the
TOFG
, I made eighteen day-long birding excursions, plus fourteen shorter ones. On one February day Andy Lawrie, Mutt, and I covered twenty-six miles – twelve by streetcar (in those times dogs were allowed on public transit) and the rest on foot – and spotted twenty-six species of birds during ten hours ”in the field.”

I am astonished now by the latitude our parents allowed us. Not only were we permitted to go as far afield as we could manage, we were free to investigate the underbelly of the city. We could and did explore deserted factories, the railroad yards, junk-filled ravines, ruined wharves, bosky swamps – even hobo jungles. Our elders evidently assumed we were competent to look after ourselves and, for the most part, so we were.

In Saskatchewan I had spent my Christmas and Easter holidays as far from town as I could get. Now, in Toronto, I preached the virtues of such excursions to the mostly city-bred members of the
TOFG
.

They were receptive. As Christmas of 1937 approached, Andy Lawrie, Al Helmsley, and Elgin Annette agreed to accompany me on a week-long expedition to the wilderness of Holland Marsh some thirty miles north of Toronto. Elgin even talked his father into driving us to the edge of this great swamp, where we camped in a dilapidated shack used in the spring for making maple syrup. It had a roof, glass in its one window, a door of sorts, and a huge stove backed by a small mountain of firewood. We spent the next six days here and in the vicinity snowshoeing through frosted woods and across frozen swamps searching for the Others.

One day while we were wandering deep in the swamps we were caught in a blinding blizzard and would have been in trouble had not Mutt led us out of the white maze and back to the shack. That night we were too exhausted to stay awake and stoke the fire, which consequently burned itself out. The temperature inside the cabin fell so low our pail of
water turned to ice and my hair froze to the wall while I was trying to sleep. On succeeding nights we zealously kept the big stove roaring and crouched around it, sleeping bags pulled about our shoulders, keeping ourselves awake by telling stories.

Although surrounded by Toronto, I never became enmeshed in it. At the end of each school day I would jump on my bike and pedal home as fast as possible. I would be greeted by Mutt and, regardless of what the weather might be, the pair of us would set off to spend time with the Others.

A favourite haunt was the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a vast and well-wooded burying ground relatively unencumbered by living human beings. Here I would commune with birds while Mutt checked out the Others.

One spring afternoon in the cemetery I heard an unfamiliar bird song and stopped to search for its owner. Mutt, who had found an interesting trail to follow, raced off among the headstones, his white rump flashing. I assumed he was after a rabbit and in no danger of getting into trouble until, to my dismay, I saw a cluster of soberly clad people directly ahead of him. Urgently I called him back but he paid me no heed.