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.