Fathom

Tim Bowling grew up in a fisher family along the tidewater flats of the Fraser River in Vancouver and although he has since moved across the continental divide that is the Rocky Mountains to reside in Edmonton he finds it impossible to get the salt water and fish scales out of his blood. That an authour writes what he knows is a truism that indeed holds with Bowling’s writing. One can picture that little boy struggling to keep a bike too big for him balanced as he peddles to collect papers from a bullying agent among the older boys in The Paperboy’s Winter. He writes about the salmon fishery and the death of his father in previous books of poetry and prose. In Fathom he again returns to his fisherman roots.

One gains the impression that although fishing was Bowling’s birth rite; he did not inherit a particular knack for the trade and although he does not say so in so many words; one also gets the feeling that even if he had been good at it the fishery no longer supports the number of boats it once did. My impression that it takes an unhappy childhood and a mal-adjusted adult to make a good writer and a poet in particular still holds. Lest anyone think I’m insulting the authour in writing this I hasten to add that after nearly sixty years of living I have no idea what a normal childhood or adulthood would be; what writer’s bring to living is a heightened self-awareness and the ability to articulate those emotions in words.

Writing these notes brings to the fore in my mind what it is about Bowling’s writing that appeals to me as a reader. My father’s cousins were fishermen as well; though of the inshore variety on Canada’s East coast. My cousin Carl suffered the ignominy of becoming sea sick as soon as he lost sight of land—every time; he never gained his “sea legs.” My mother’s cousin Iris lost her father when his ship returned to Lunenburg Harbour with its flag at half mast as its captain was lost at sea. My own family lived 20 miles inland and try as I might I’ll never get that red farmer’s soil out from under my fingernails. I have lived to see Cod sell for over $20.00 a pound but when one learns what the men who risk their lives to catch it get for a pound of fish one receives a rude awakening to the fact that the money is not in the harvest but rather in the marketing of the fruits of the ocean. The men who catch it barely earn enough to pay for their marine diesel—few indeed can put even a small dent in the capital cost of financing the half-million dollar capital cost that is their boat. My cousins owned a boat but not a car. Farming suffers a similar fate these days. Why would anyone with half a million dollars to invest tie it up in land for the meager and risky returns that farming provide? Even the land I grew up on is now worth over $1000 an acre. Farming and fishing are in one’s blood and are a way of life—few that ply either trade get rich doing so.

Selected Poems-Derek Walcott

It has been said that you can never go home. When you grow up black on a small Caribbean Island and have to leave it for another to further your education; then leave that island as well to live in predominantly white America you suffer both dislocation and discrimination. The very process of education creates a gulf between the intellectual and people back home with whom you grew up. The price you pay is being left with a feeling of dislocation that leaves one uncomfortable in both worlds. To the people back home you are an object of admiration but they’ll never understand you; to the people in your new-found world you’ll always be that upstart who will never quite fit in. These are the themes that inform the poetry of Derek Walcott. I should mention that the authour also provided the art work on the cover.

No matter where a writer goes he must draw upon what he knows and the most deeply engrained memories are those created during a writer’s formative years. Therefore Walcott writes about his home in the islands but infuses his poems with literary illusions he has learned since leaving. One of the banes of a writer’s life are the book tours publishers insist on mounting to promote their products and Walcott writes candidly about the experience. It is an irony that to make a living writers must engage in a process that is counter-productive to their work. Racial prejudice is an experience no person of colour can ignore and for Walcott it is augmented by the added stigma of having risen about his station in life as apprehended by Black America. In his later poems Walcott confronts the universal theme of his mortality and exhibits resignation with his own death.

BUTTER DOWN THE WELL

“Reflections of a Canadian Childhood”

[This edition is illustrated by Len Gibbs.]

Robert Collins grew up in Shamrock, Saskatchewan in the Dirty Thirties, served in WW#2, and went on to become a much-published Journalist. His WW#1 vet father took on a rather non-productive acreage despite lingering war disabilities, married the local school marm, and attempted unsuccessfully to make a living as a wheat farmer in spite of his lack of agricultural skills.

This was an era when anything you needed could be ordered by mail from the T. Eaton Catalogue including a kit for building a home. Nobody had any money so even the school marm was paid in kind, though she was provided with a dwelling attached the school—the teacherage. This is territory covered by Max Braithwaite in Why Shoot the Teacher? and W. O. Mitchell in books such as Jake and the Kid but neither tell it quite so candidly in the first person as Collins does here.

Living as we do in an era where only 15% of Canadians reside in rural areas most cannot understand what it meant to live 10 miles from your nearest neighbour, use a 20-party telephone line, and go shopping once or twice a month—less in winter. Liking and getting along with your neighbours was not optional; in an emergency they were the only people you had to depend on. If something broke down you repaired it, if someone got sick or injured they were patched up, animals either lived or died—who could afford a vet?

Visitors of any kind were a major event that served to break the monotony of a world before TV or even radio. Entertainment was wherever you could find it and generally self-invented. Needs were simple and gifts often created by the giver. Flour and sugar came in hundred-pound patterned bags which became pillow cases, clothing, curtains. Hand-me-downs were the rule and clothing was worn until it could no longer be patched at which point fabric that was still viable got used to hook rugs or make quilts.

In spite of the fact that I was born a quarter-century later and half a continent away I too began school in a one-roomer, walked to church and school, tilled the earth, and counted a visit to grampa’s a major treat. It would seem the experience of growing up on a mixed subsistence farm translates worldwide.