Canadians Read online

  He told a long story about working a log jam with an older man called Earle Molten and how their pointer boat somehow got turned in the current and swept over the rocks, the long boat splitting in two when it crashed on the rocks below. Each man was still in his half of the boat, and when the fractured vessel slipped off the rocks and into the current, Molten jumped into the water and began swimming to safety. It was a tragic decision: another log came over the chute behind them and crushed Molten’s head into one of the logs already caught in the swirl. Clarence stayed with his half of the pointer and made land safely nearly a mile downstream. By the time he got back, the other men had already picked Molten’s body from the water.

  “He had no kin to send him back to,” said Clarence. “They took off his boots, wrapped him in a blanket, and put him in a hole underneath a pine tree. Then they took a couple of six-inch spikes and hammered his boots to the tree. That was his tombstone.”

  All the long afternoon the stories poured out. He worked lumber camps and gold mines, always quitting and moving on the moment his inability to read was about to be discovered. His wife, Angela, knew and covered for him, but they kept the secret from their four daughters. He became president of a local political party and she served as secretary. He headed up the local farmers’ union and she kept the notes and handled the correspondence. He pushed his girls to get good educations and they did, all of them eventually moving away from the family home outside Timmins, where Clarence and Angela Brazier retired and began growing old together, Clarence’s secret now safe, he figured, for the rest of his life.

  But then, one day, he no longer had his crutch. “I learned to read,” he told me, “all because I lost my wife.”

  Clarence Brazier learned out of necessity, and perhaps this is something to consider when trying to fix that nail to the national jelly. Perhaps it’s not so much about inferiority or smugness or about whether we’re grappling with victimhood or hiding behind self-deprecation or even about not being American, but rather that the real Canadian character seems to have an endless capacity to make do.

  The radio show may have had it right all along: “As Canadian as … possible, under the circumstances.”

  Circumstances such as Clarence encountered when his beloved Angela died and he no longer had his reader. Circumstances such as what so many Canadians before have encountered and somehow overcome simply out of necessity.

  I think, for example, of Francis Wharton. When Peter Newman was researching his brilliant three-book saga of the Hudson’s Bay Company he came across the tale of this British Columbia trapper who lost his dentures while deep in the bush. According to the story Newman was told, Wharton simply went out, shot a deer, pulled out the molars, glued them together, stuck them in his mouth, “and then ate the animal with its own teeth.”

  Or, if you find that one a bit of a stretch, think if you will of Cecil Harris, who was tilling his fields near Saskatchewan’s Bad Hills on June 8, 1948, when his tractor flipped on him. Harris was trapped underneath, one of the wheel lugs piercing his leg. Certain he would bleed to death before anyone noticed him missing and came looking, Harris pulled out his penknife and scratched a quick message into the fender of the tractor: “In case I die in this mess, I leave all to the wife, Cecil Geo. Harris.”

  The family found him dead under the tractor. The will, however, stood up in court.

  And for those who might think this one a bit of a stretch too, that fender and Cecil Harris’s penknife can still be seen today in the law library at the University of Saskatchewan. A reminder to us all that resourcefulness may well be the defining Canadian characteristic.

  Clarence Brazier was ninety-three years old and on his own when necessity came into play. He had to eat but didn’t even know how to shop. He took knife and scissors and cut labels off boxes from the pantry and went down to the store and tried to match colours and symbols, but that proved only frustrating and embarrassing. “I had used tricks my whole life to get by,” he said.

  And now the tricks were failing him. His hearing was also beginning to fail. He’d always kept up with the news through the radio, and later television, but increasingly he was finding it harder to hear. The only solution, he finally concluded, was to learn how to read.

  “I started with the junk mail they delivered to my house,” he said. The mail would come and he’d spend hours out on the farmhouse stoop trying to pronounce words he knew were on the flyers. He knew the Canadian Tire symbol and tried to work through the letters to see how the word formed. He knew “pizza” and “hamburger” and “fries” from the pictures and memorized those letters. Rug cleaning, snow plowing, real estate listings, grocery specials.

  Knowing her father was now alone, Doris, a retired schoolteacher, asked if he’d like to move down south. Clarence agreed, even though he was perfectly capable of caring for himself, shopping excepted. He was still working his woodlot, cutting, splitting, and selling a hundred cords of wood each winter.

  Doris Villemaire couldn’t help noticing how her father was picking through the newspaper for the flyers. She saw him tracing over words, his mouth moving as he worked on their meaning. She asked him if he’d accept some help. She was volunteering for the local literacy council and had access to material. She brought home some primary readers, grade-one level, and together they worked through the alphabet and words so simple he laughed to recall them. “C-A-T, cat! R-A-T, rat! They were not very interesting.”

  But Doris found him to be an enthusiastic student: “His eyes would actually sparkle when he’d recognize a word. It was just as I’d seen with my students, but it was also kind of funny, too. I was seeing this same thing in my father—and he was acting just like the children I’d taught.”

  From junk mail he moved to primary readers, and from primary readers to children’s books and then into youth novels. From fiction he headed into nonfiction, and now sits surrounded by books on mining, logging, and Canadian history. He reads at least two hours a day. Often, at night, he will wake and read himself back to sleep. “Had I not learned to read,” he says, “I believe I would have slowly become isolated from the world beyond my home. I had to learn. I had no choice.”

  We can all learn, and at any age—even journalists well into their fifties. I was on the road again, heading down Highway 11 from Sprucedale, back to Huntsville and eventually out to the lake where I like to hide away when it came to me that I had it backward.

  The question has never been “What is a Canadian?” Nor should the response begin “A Canadian is …”

  The answer has always been that Clarence Brazier is a Canadian. With thirty-two million-plus other correct answers to follow.

  Three

  The Midway Mirror

  IT HAS OFTEN STRUCK ME that Canadians are more comfortable in their own skin when they’re outside their own country.

  I was in Torino, Italy, in February 2006 for the XXth Winter Games. The smaller Olympics, the Cold Olympics, had taken on what has, in recent years, become the usual rhythm for Canadians: high predictions, early panic, pleasant surprises, satisfactory outcome. The defending gold-medal-champion men’s hockey team had landed in Torino full of the usual bravado, but had turned out to be a disaster. The team sent over was too old and too slow, naively coached by those who believed the secret to success lay in sticking to the North American game on the larger European ice surface. The strategy had been such a failure that the embarrassed Canadians had been beaten—hell, shut out—by unheralded Switzerland while failing even to reach the medal round.

  The end of the world lasted about half an hour.

  The men’s hockey debacle was more than compensated for by the women’s gold-medal-winning hockey team, the delightful men curlers, the valiant cross-country skiers, and the irrepressible Cindy Klassen, whose five medals in speed-skating set a new Olympic standard for the country. The Canadian Olympic Committee had brazenly predicted twenty-five medals—and one week into the Games had been soundly slammed for such a pr
ediction—yet the final count was seven gold, ten silver, and seven bronze for a total of twenty-four. Had the men’s 2002 gold-medal hockey team flopped only to third instead of seventh, its worst finish ever, the total would have been exactly twenty-five.

  In a single Winter Games, the image of Canadian success had switched from the clichéd gap-toothed smile of hockey players to a long line of young and incredibly alive women skiers and skaters, their teeth seemingly as large and white as the snow-capped mountains surrounding Torino.

  On that final Sunday of the XXth Winter Games, a number of Canadian journalists found themselves settling down to penne and pizza in a restaurant in the small town of Grugliasco, not far from one of the media villages where many of us had been billeted for the past three weeks. Most of us had been assigned months before—on the presumption of Canada’s involvement—to cover the gold-medal hockey game that had been played earlier that afternoon between Sweden and Finland, skilled Sweden triumphing over the valiant but overmatched Finns. We’d attended the game and quickly filed our understandably shortened stories. Because of event overlap and transportation timetables, however, several of us had elected to pass on the Closing Ceremonies, where many of our colleagues were at this moment sitting, shivering, in the open stadium while trying to mesh together an account of the spectacle in front of them with a sober evaluation of Canada’s own moving performance now behind them.

  The restaurant—a centuries-old building with a large, heated tent built out from the back—was showing those Closing Ceremonies on a big-screen television at one end of the tent. At the other end, an equally large television screen was carrying the soccer match, with local heroes Juventus against dreaded archrivals from nearby Milan.

  The place was packed with families: a couple of hundred Italians gathered to spend three or four hours over a meal most Canadians would wolf down in three or four minutes. The men were almost entirely turned in the direction of the soccer match, the women mostly staring straight ahead at the women they were talking to, and the Canadians and assorted others staring in the direction of the televised Olympic ceremonies. The sound was turned up for the Olympic finale, turned down for the soccer.

  It made for a fascinating scene. Every once in a while the sombre Closing Ceremonies music would be interrupted by a burst of cheering for a good rush by the home side, a collective groan over a missed opportunity, or periodic jeering and whistling at Milan. Soundtrack and audience could not have been a greater mismatch.

  All through the soccer game the Olympic wrap-up was simply ignored by the vast majority of those in the large, heated tent—except for a moment no one saw coming.

  It happened during the handing over of the Olympic flag. The familiar banner with the Olympic rings had been given to Torino at the last Winter Games, in Salt Lake City, and was now being passed on to Vancouver–Whistler, site of the next Winter Games, in 2010. The carefully folded cloth was formally passed from Italian hands to Canadian. The camera then switched to big Ben Heppner, who is one of those rare Canadians—as befits a professional anthem singer—who knows all the words to “O Canada.”

  Heppner’s thick chest heaved in, then out, and he began singing in that remarkable voice that, had we all been born with such lungs, might have prevented the invention of the telegraph and telephone.

  The Juventus–Milan game was still on, but suddenly the entire restaurant went silent. You could almost hear the male vertebrae crack and squeak as previously locked-in heads turned from one television screen to the other. No more cheering, no more jeering. Just silence from the crowd and the soundtrack of an anthem belonging to a country an ocean and a minimum four-and-a-half time zones away.

  As Heppner moved into the second verse—I’d quote here but, being Canadian, am never quite sure of the words—a single man on the far side of the restaurant took to his feet, standing at attention.

  Slim, bespectacled, and grey-haired, it was Bertrand Raymond, long-time sports columnist of Le Journal de Montréal and an icon in the small world of Canadian sports reporting. Honoured by the Hockey Hall of Fame and revered by his colleagues, both French and English, Raymond is a force in Quebec society unmatched by any Anglo sports reporter in any other part of the country. Sports is far more political in Quebec—many believe that the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and even the sovereignty movement itself grew out of a single act of defiance by the legendary Maurice “Rocket” Richard back in 1955, a story I’ll be returning to in a subsequent chapter. Some of the fiercest indépendentistes are sports personalities, which makes Raymond’s standing at attention in that Italian restaurant in Grugliasco all the more compelling.

  Bert Raymond stood, shoulders squared, arms straight, and he stared hard enough to make the wine boil at a distant table holding Anglo sports reporters. He stared until we squirmed, and then, awkwardly, somewhat embarrassedly, I stood and The Globe and Mail ’s Dave Naylor stood and finally the whole table got to its collective feet until Ben Heppner wound down to the final line that, mercifully, every single person in the country does know by heart:

  “… we stand on guard for theeeeeeeeee …”

  Bert Raymond, distinguished, still at attention, gave the thumbs up to those standing across the room. We signalled back.

  And then, before any of the proud, if slightly self-conscious, visitors from Canada could sit back down, something swept through the entire restaurant that took us completely by surprise.

  Loud, prolonged applause from the Italians.

  THIS RUSH OF CANADIANISM by Canadians no longer in Canada never emerges quite so vividly as during the Olympic Winter Games. It is here where Canada, which is normally thought of, if at all, as a reserved country—“almost incoherently polite,” travel writer Jan Morris once said—shows a most distinctive swagger.

  The Winter Games provide uniforms for fans as well as athletes, which makes the bonding easier and the strutting more noticeable. It hardly matters whether the souvenir gear is supplied by Roots or HBC; the effect is always the same: red and white, head to toe, invariably with a red maple leaf tattooed on a cheek, painted on a bare chest or, at times, carved into a head of dyed electric-blue hair.

  The official Canadian gear in Torino—mukluks, thick vests, knitted toques with ear flaps and chin ties and crown bobs—was semi-trapper, quasi-voyageur, moderately goofy, and ubiquitous. The over-the-top clothing was purchased, invariably, in a rush of patriotism usually unfamiliar to Canadians, the sort of mad impulse that explains those red-faced Easterners you see walking through the Toronto airport holding, but not daring to wear, the white Stetson they picked up in the Calgary airport. Like the Mexican straw hat and the loud Hawaiian shirt, such items always seem like a good idea at the time. At the time. You realize only in the hours that follow that you’d never be caught dead actually wearing that cowboy hat anywhere but the shop in the Calgary airport, just as you’d be laughed off the street if you ever walked down Yonge or Ste-Catherine or Robson or stood at the corner of Portage and Main in the full red-and-white explosion of the official Canadian Olympic regalia.

  In Nagano, eight years before Torino, a Canadian woman turned up at a hockey game wearing a hockey helmet and not much else. She had two tiny, strategically placed Canadian flags on her breasts and a red maple leaf painted on her bare back as she danced wildly about the Big Hat arena, periodically stopping to scream incoherently in the general direction of the ice surface. To the Japanese, whose idea of Canada had been shaped by Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne books, this exuberant young woman—who did not appear to have any freckles at all, anywhere—was as baffling as Japanese toilet seats, heated and capable of taking blood pressure readings, were to the Canadian visitors.

  The Strutting Canadian, seen only periodically and usually at sporting events, seems more to delight than offend. The reserved Japanese might have been stunned by the loud and colourful Canadians in Nagano but they were also oddly attracted to them, the Japanese fans increasingly outfitting themselves in Canadian paraphernal
ia and begging for Canadian pins. When the “U!-S!-A!” cheer went up in Big Hat it was solely American; when “Ca-Na-Da!” was the cheer it had as much Japanese behind it as Canadian.

  Canadians are themselves delighted with these once-every-four-year personality shifts, as if to suggest that only in acting out of character do they reveal their real character. When curler Paul Savage dropped his pants in Nagano to prove to photographers that he did indeed have an Olympic tattoo on his butt, women’s curler Joan McCusker was quick to point out that this represented an illegal reproduction of the Olympic rings. He’d better be careful, she warned, or “they’ll sue your ass off.”

  In Torino eight years later I went down to the Medals Plaza at Piazza Castella with Globe columnist Christie Blatchford to watch the men’s curling team—four Newfoundlanders and a middle-aged ringer from Ontario—receive their gold medals. With a small crowd, we stood at attention while the Canadian flag went up and “O Canada” played. It was a glorious moment, with tears shed and shivers felt throughout the gathering. When the official ceremony was over, Mike Adam, the team’s alternative member, bounded off the stage, walked over to us, and lifted his gold medal up so that it almost touched his nose. “Jeez,” he said, “if they’d only put a magnet on the back, I could put ’er on me fridge.”

  And curling, they say, is boring. Boring as Canadians are supposed to be. Boring as Canada—what British journalists like to call “The Great White Waste of Time”—is supposed to be.

  At Nagano the Australians, of all people, complained about the Canadian partiers, claiming they were unable to sleep for all the carousing going on in the Canadian section of the village. “How do you know they were the Canadians?” I asked one of the Aussies riding the media bus. The man turned in his seat and sighed as if explaining to a child. “When they’re carrying a big Canadian flag and yelling at Americans to get off,” he said, “what do you think they’d be?”