Born Naked (9 page)

One Saturday late in May, I emerged from a bluff to be confronted by a tall, unshaven man with a hawkish face. He was wearing a brilliant crimson shirt and loudly singing the refrain from a Scots musical comedy while briskly keeping time with a huge butterfly net.

I could not have been more surprised. In my small experience, “bug catchers,” because they were generally mocked by right-thinking people, were unobtrusive and self-effacing to the vanishing point. Yet here was one who strode across the land as if he were lord of all he surveyed. He stopped abruptly and stood arms akimbo while he took my measure. He noted the shiny brass tubes of the venerable (Boer War vintage) field glasses that hung by a cord around my neck, then he introduced himself.

“Alisdair McPherson at ye'r service, laddie! But ye may call me Tom. Tell me now, what rare creatures have ye spied the day?”

Tom's father had been a ghillie on one of the vast high-land shooting estates, making his living guiding the gentry in their slaughter of red deer and grouse. But Tom and the gentry had not taken to each other so he had come out to Canada, where he served an apprenticeship as a baker in Toronto, before getting married and travelling on to Saskatoon in pursuit of the chimera of “the wide open spaces.” Barely a year after I met him, he and his little family moved on but in the meantime I was his grateful acolyte.

He was a self-taught naturalist who collected butterflies, moths, and other insects, not to add to the repositories of scientific minutiae but to gain insight into their lives. He did not know their Latin names but he had an amazing understanding of their ways and habits. It was the same with birds. Although he collected birds' eggs (“Ye may take one of each kind, mark ye laddie, and nae mair!”), it was the living birds that fascinated him and he knew them with an intimacy that stemmed from empathy and not from books.

Tom worked the night shift at the biggest bakery in town and spent most of the daylight hours roaming the prairies in any kind of weather. I don't know when he slept or what sort of a family life he had but I know where his primary allegiance lay. It was with the world of the Others, and he took me with him into that world.

 

BY EARLY JUNE
the few showers that had enlivened the spring had ended. Day after day the pallid skies remained unmarred by the slightest trace of cloud. The West was facing yet another year of drought and, although Saskatoon was somewhat to the north of the Dust Bowl (as the devastated southern plains were now being called), the prospects for the months ahead looked grimly arid.

What people wanted—what they craved—was water. Not just drinking and washing water which, God knows, was scarce enough, but
visual
water. The very sight of a significant body of water, even if it was no more than a slough filled with an alkaline slurry so bitter it made one gag, brought solace to the spirit. People dreamed they were dying in a desert and, when they woke to the burning desiccation of a Saskatchewan summer day, yearned for the sight of water with such passion that they almost became unhinged. Everyone was an aquaphile and those who had it in their power to do so fled the city for whatever body of water they could find. Having reached it, they would build or rent shacks or shanties which, for the most part, were mere shelters from the baleful glare of the sun.

Even before school ended we had joined this weekend exodus. Because we owned a
mobile
shanty, we were able to visit and assess all the available watering holes. Most of these lost their allure on close acquaintance. We tried Pike Lake and found it to be a glorified slough so weedy that only a pike could have lived in it. Watrous turned out to be an even bigger slough whose water was so salty—
Epsom
salts, mind—that one actually could not sink in it. Wakaw was tolerable, except that swimming in it gave us scabies. Jackfish Lake was so shallow one could walk three-quarters of the way across it, and it felt and looked like warm soup.

We three were not unaccompanied on these excursions. Shortly after my thirteenth birthday we had acquired a dog. His name was Mutt. Since I have already written an entire book about him, it will here suffice to say that he became an integral if not dominant member of the family. However, getting to know central Saskatchewan was only part of the exper­ience of that year. Getting to know Mutt was an even more important part. Until his death, he was to loom as large in my life as any other being ever did.

 

 

 

9

 

 

FAR FROM BEING SATIATED BY
the voyage to Saskatoon, Angus's appetite for distant venturing seemed only to have been whetted. During our first winter in the west, he began putting things in train for an even more adventurous expedition.

How he managed it I do not know, but he was one of the most persuasive human beings ever born, and after only a few months at his new job he managed to con the sage and elder members of the library board into granting him six weeks' holiday with pay, the same to begin in mid-July. Angus intended to use this time to make a pilgrimage to the largest body of water in the world—the Pacific Ocean.

Originally he had planned to make the voyage in
Rolling Home
but a middle-aged bachelor named Don Chisholm, with whom we had become friends, talked him out of it. Chisholm was a divisional superintendent with Canadian National Railways and had once supervised the section of the main line which crawls precariously over the Rocky Mountains.

“Angoos,” he said—his accent was still strong—“ye'll no haul yon caboose out 0' the foothills. But think, mon, if ye did manage to drag it awa' up into they mountains ye'd likely end up, the lot of ye, tipped into the bottom of aye canyon a thousand feet doon, sprouting wings afore ye'r time.”

Angus was not noted for heeding advice but this time he did so. We left the Ark behind.

 

IN CONSEQUENCE EARDLIE
was appallingly burdened. None of your glass-and-chrome showcases of today could have carried that load a single mile. The cargo included a large umbrella tent and three folding wooden cots tied to the front mudguards. A huge wooden box was fitted on each running board (the running board was an invaluable invention long since sacrificed to the obesity of modern cars) and filled with, amongst other things, pots and pans, suitcases, blankets, and a gunny sack containing shreds of cloth which, in her spare time, Helen worked into hooked rugs.

The roads were tunnels of dust as we drove south and west, and it became so thick that we three human travellers had to wear motorcyclist's goggles. One evening Angus decided this was favouritism and Mutt should have the same protection. We were then entering the outskirts of Elbow, a typical prairie village with an unpaved main street almost as wide as the average Ontario farm, and two rows of plank-fronted buildings facing one another distantly across an arid emptiness.

Angus, Mutt, and I entered one of the shops together and when an aged clerk finally appeared from the back premises, Angus asked him for driving goggles. The old fellow searched for a long time and finally brought out a pair which had been manufactured during the first years of the automobile era. They seemed serviceable, so without more ado Angus tried them on Mutt.

Happening to glance up while this was going on, I caught the clerk's gaze. He was transfixed. His leathery face had sagged like a wet chamois cloth and his tobacco-stained stubs seemed ready to fall from his lower jaw. Angus missed this preliminary display but was treated to an even better show a moment later as he got briskly to his feet holding the goggles.

“These will do. How much are they?” And then, remembering he had forgotten to pack his shaving kit, he added, “We'll need a shaving brush, soap, and a safety razor too.”

The old man had retreated behind his counter where he pawed the air with an emaciated hand for several seconds before replying.

“Oh, Gawd!” he wailed, and it was a real prayer. “Don't you tell me that dawg shaves, too!”

Our second night on the road was spent at Swift Current, well into the Dust Bowl country. The place had a lean and hungry look. We were very hot, very tired, and very dusty as we drove through it seeking the municipal tourist camp which, we hoped, would provide running water. Since motels and tourist cabins did not yet exist, there was no alternative to camping out unless one rented a tiny cubicle in one of the wooden crematoria that passed as hotels in these small towns.

Swift Current was proud of its tourist camp, which was located in a brave but pathetic attempt at a park beside an artificial slough. We contemplated going for a swim but changed our minds when we discovered a dead dog—a
very
dead dog—floating amongst the weeds.

Only a drizzle of tepid water could be tempted from the single faucet which was intended to supply the needs of tourists, so we went to bed unbathed and uncooled. We had to keep the tent buttoned up tight because the mosquitoes rising from Dead Dog Slough were numerous and hungry enough to have drained the blood from a cow. Mutt refused to sleep outside so the four of us tossed and muttered all night long in mutual misery. Camping on the prairies that summer was not a thing of joy forever.

The remainder of our journey across the scorched plains was a monotony of mounting fatigue and tempers strained by the long pall of dust hanging over a yellowing wasteland of dying wheat. Poplar bluffs were few and far between and their parched leaves rustled stiffly as if already dead. The sloughs were almost totally dry. Here and there a puddle of muck still lingered but these pot-holes had become death traps for innumerable ducks because botulism throve in the stagnant slime. The ducks died in their thousands and their bodies did not rot but withered as mummies do. It was a grim passage and Angus drove Eardlie hard, heedless of the little car's boiling radiator and labouring engine.

 

THEN ONE MORNING
brought a change. The sky that had been dust-hazed for so long grew clear, and ahead of us we saw the violet shadows of the Rocky Mountains hanging between land and air.

We camped early that night and were in high spirits at the promise of escape from drought and desert. When the little gasoline stove had hissed into life and Helen was busy preparing supper, Mutt and I went off to explore this new land. Magpies rose ahead of us, their long tails iridescent in the light of the setting sun. Pipits climbed towards the high, white clouds and sang their intense little songs. Prairie chickens rocketed, chuckling, from behind a trim farmhouse. We walked through a woods whose leaves flickered and whispered as live leaves should.

By evening of the next day we were climbing into the foothills. The ground seemed to be swelling under Eardlie's singing tires like great oceanic combers lifting us towards a distant coast of soaring peaks. This was a new kind of prairie: undulating, cut with valleys and ravines, green and alive, and dotted with small herds of cattle. It lifted all our hearts with expectation of what might lie ahead.

In the last week of July we began the passage of the mountains, having chosen the northern route which, at that time, offered no easy path even for a Model A. The roads were narrow, precipitous, and surfaced with loose gravel. Often there were no guardrails and we would periodically find ourselves staring over the naked edge of a great gorge while Eardlie's wheels kicked stones into an echoing abyss. The mountains frightened me. I felt dwarfed to the vanishing point and hypnotized by the sheer bulk and majesty of these mighty eruptions of the flat earth I had previously known.

I think all four of us were a bit on edge, anticipating the possibility of some horrendous happenstance. And something horrible did happen. Not long after we had begun a cautious descent of the Selkirk Range on a road that was hardly more than a narrow shelf cut into the side of a mountain, we were overtaken and closely passed at great speed by a big touring car with its top down. Gaily dressed young men and women waved bottles at us, laughing and shrieking with delight as they plunged down the switch-back road. Shaken, Angus cursed them and braked to a halt on the narrow verge, but my eyes were glued to the careening car ahead. There was a blur of movement, as of a bird taking wing, and the big car vanished.

I don't know what got into me. I may have thought that somehow I could help. I jumped out of the rumble seat and set off down the steep gradient at a run. Angus and Helen yelled at me to stop, to come back, but I ran on with Mutt pounding along beside me. As I neared the point where the car had disappeared I began to lose heart. I went the last little way in slow motion. And then I was looking over the edge.

The car had landed upside down on a ledge of rock a hundred feet below the road. Its wheels were still turning. A little coil of smoke was rising from it. But there was not a sound! Not a whisper of a human voice… nothing but the purl of an unseen stream in the distant bottom of the gorge.

By the time Angus and Helen reached me I was being sick to my stomach. Then a truck full of wardens from a nearby national park pulled to a halt. Men piled out, stared into the canyon for a moment, then some of them began trying to find a way down. Their leader came over to us. He spoke kindly.

“Mister, you'd better take the kid outta here. It ain't goin' to be a pretty sight. When you get down to Revelstoke tell the police whatever you saw happen.”

What we had seen happen, as we were to discover later, was seven people reduced to mush in the space of a few seconds. This dreadful incident, echoing as it did Don Chisholm's dire warning, increased my fear of the great mountains almost to the point of terror. I was glad when we left the shadows of the brooding peaks to descend into the Okanagan Valley where we hoped (and I expected) to see the Ogo Pogo, the legendary monster of Lake Okanagan. Unfortunately, the dragon proved reluctant. We solaced ourselves by gorging on the magnificent fruits for which the valley is also famous.

 

TO OUR SURPRISE,
Mutt shared our appetite and for three days ate nothing but fruit. He preferred peaches, muskmelon, and cherries. Cherries were his undoubted favourites. At first, he had trouble with the pits but soon perfected a rather disquieting ability to squirt them out between his front teeth. Not everyone appreciated this. I recall the baleful look directed at him by a woman passenger on the little ferry in which we crossed the Okanagan River. Mutt was certainly a vision to give one pause as he sat in the rumble seat, goggles pushed high up on his forehead, eating cherries out of a six-quart basket. After each cherry he would raise his muzzle, point it overside, and nonchalantly spit the pit into the green torrent of the river.

My most cherished images of the mountain country were not of the forbidding peaks but of the animals. There was very little human traffic on the recently constructed roads but the Others had been quick to make use of these new pathways. Several times we had to yield the right of way to herds of elk; twice to parties of mountain goats (who stared at us with a haughty golden glare); and once to a grizzly sow with her offspring—she rose up on her hind legs in the middle of the road and looked
down
upon us as we crouched apologetically in our little car. In addition, we saw scores of black bears; a lithe shadow slinking into a stand of lodgepole pines—I was convinced it was a cougar; my first-ever wolves (a family seen distantly as they crossed an alpine meadow in single file); and innumerable smaller creatures including rabbit-like rock conies, chipmunks, and squirrels of kinds I had not met before.

Then there were the birds. That spring Angus had bought me a field guide and with its help I identified forty species that were new to me, ranging from the minute miracle of a rufous hummingbird to golden eagles soaring both below and above us as Eardlie nervously negotiated cliff-clinging roads. I did not know how extraordinarily lucky I was to be seeing the living world of the high rock country in an abundance of numbers and variety of kinds almost as great as had existed before the arrival of European man. Happily, I could not know how terribly they would be diminished within the span of my own lifetime.

In due course we reached Vancouver and saw the sea, but did not
meet
it until we came to rest on a strip of beach on the coast of Vancouver Island.

We camped on Rathtrevor Beach for three weeks and I discovered another new world. This one was dominated not by mountains but by the mysterious comings and goings of the tides; of huge translucent swells bursting upon offshore reefs; of flotsam and jetsam ranging from the trunks of ancient trees ten feet in diameter to baseball-sized, green glass Japanese fishing floats which had drifted across the almost unimaginable width of the Pacific.

In short, I entered into the world of ocean. It and its denizens absorbed me so completely it is a wonder I did not begin to grow gills. At low tide I burrowed in sand and mud flats in pursuit of marine worms, clams, and a hundred other creatures of bizarre form and colour. At high tide I was a beachcomber pausing to stare seaward through my field glasses at the flashing fins of what were probably killer whales, and at the bewhiskered faces of seals, who stared right back. Sea birds abounded, and so did land birds in the lush rainforest behind the beach, which seemed tropical to me. I was in seventh heaven. As Helen recalled my state of being:

“We almost never saw you, and I'm sure
you
never saw
us
at all. Half-naked or wholly so, you scampered about like a water sprite, paying no attention to anything except your precious crabs and shells and birds. We thought we might have to tie you up to make you leave.”

Indeed, leaving Rathtrevor and the ocean was an enormous wrench. I ought to have been born beside the sea—any sea—and I have a strong suspicion that this inclination is present in all human beings. The ocean calls us for it is the ancient and original home, not only of mankind but of all life.

 

WHEN THE DREAD
time came for our departure, I determined to take as much of the sea world with me as I could. My booty included clams, mussels, giant whelks, and shellfish of all kinds; starfish; crabs; anemones; sponges; even seaweeds. Some of these I packed into a carton which was stowed under my feet in the rumble seat, but many others I hid away in nooks and crannies of Eardlie's interior to avoid Angus's dictum that I could add only a token amount to our already heavily overladen car.