A WALK WITH FARLEY
Like that magical line where a fog bank meets the incandescent brilliance of a summer day, the Strait of Canso divides elementally different worlds: mainland Nova Scotia and the rugged island of Cape Breton. In days gone by, as you approached Cape Porcupine—half its enormous rock face blasted away for the 10 million tonnes of granite that built the causeway—there was a toll booth and a modest wait before crossing to the other side. But the link to Cape Breton has long since been paid for and the toll booths have disappeared. Now you drive unimpeded across the green swing bridge on the island side, with the words “Welcome to Cape Breton” painted in yellow on one of the crossbeams. The only delay might be an amber flashing light, signalling that the bridge is about to swing open so that a sailboat, its mast rising surrealistically above the girders, can glide silently through.
It is said that the Canso Causeway is the deepest and among the longest in the world. But like all great feats of engineering, it has had unintended consequences. The tourists came, but the herring and lobster left, cut off from their traditional migration routes by the causeway. No one had thought to ask the fishermen their opinion of a structure that would forever seal off a large part of the strait from the open ocean. The lobster traps are no longer on the ocean floor in the old places, but fastened to the roof racks of cars from Ontario and Quebec—tourists headed home with a memento of their visit.
The last time I passed over that bridge was in the late summer of 2009. I was on my way to St. Anthony Daniel Church in Sydney to attend the funeral of a remarkable person, Donald Marshall Jr. I had written my first book, Justice Denied, about his wrongful imprisonment of eleven years for a murder he had not committed. The case of the young Mi’kmaq Indian became a national cause célèbre, a black mark against the courts and police, and a reminder that Canada had its own version of racism to worry about. It was also my personal schooling in the fact that everything that can go wrong in the justice system sometimes does go wrong. Marshall had been so confused at his one-day murder trial, he later told me he couldn’t tell the difference between his own lawyers and the prosecutors. Since then I have never discounted a story, however improbable, without looking into it.
A few years after the publication of the Marshall book, a young waiter, Shane Earle, told me about the decades-old cover-up of sexual and physical abuse of boys at Newfoundland’s Mount Cashel Orphanage. He had read an editorial I had written in The Sunday Express1 entitled “Justice for All” and asked why there had been none for the boys of Mount Cashel. The scandal was not that no one had known about it; it was that many powerful people officially covered up the story because it involved a lay order of the Roman Catholic Church. Earle’s story, told barely above a whisper, became my next book, Unholy Orders. When I found myself explaining the tragedy of Mount Cashel on Oprah with Shane beside me, I was thinking of the lesson Donald Marshall Jr., had taught me: listen to everyone, lift every rock, because you never know where the truth might be hiding.
And I learned one other thing. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things, no matter what personal torments or travesties they have endured. Years after his release from prison, remarkably unbroken by his ordeal, Marshall was charged with catching and selling 220 kilograms of eels out of season and without a licence. On Maliseet and Mi’kmaq reserves, where unemployment stands at 85 percent, making an extra $787.10 from illegal fishing, as Marshall did, is an attractive proposition. Donald Marshall Jr., the shy and unlikely icon of indomitable survival, was headed back to court, but this time with a very different result. In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada brought down a landmark decision that held that Marshall had the right to fish under a 1761 treaty the British had signed with the Mi’kmaq. The boy who had been sent to prison at seventeen for something he hadn’t done, and came out as a graduate of Dorchester Penitentiary at twenty-nine, had successfully extended native fishing and treaty rights for an entire people.
But this day I was not headed to Marshall’s home reserve, Membertou, a journey I had made so many times while working on his story. My destination was not Sydney, but a place where I had never been, River Bourgeois, to interview a man I had never met, though he was very famous: Farley Mowat. Yes, I wanted to interview Farley Mowat for a book about Canadian politics, Mowat the ninety-two-year-old author. Over the years, I have observed that official sources, party spokespeople, and now computer-assisted journalism, have left a hole in the telling of our national story. Where were all the other people in the newspaper articles and on television: the non-experts, the non-insiders, the thinkers, the painters, the eccentrics?
Writing a book about the Harper government carried its imperatives to be sure—talking to a great many people in politics and public service, and gathering as many documents, secret or otherwise, as one could. But to me, it also meant listening to different voices with a unique point of view: an eighty-year-old former student of Stephen Harper’s grandfather; a Stockwell Day delegate who claimed the Harper team had cheated at the convention that chose Harper to be leader of the Canadian Alliance party; a girl who went to university with Harper and has never forgotten that cold, blue stare.
And then there was “Dennis.” He did not make his living writing about politics. But he was still an expert on the prime minister in a totally original way, for Dennis was Stephen Harper’s hairstylist. His recollections ran from the banal to the hilarious. Starting with the banal, it takes half an hour to cut the prime minister’s hair, which Dennis does every three to four weeks. Sometimes this special customer only wants it thinned. Although Opposition leader Harper used to come to Rinaldo’s, the elegant salon on George Street in Ottawa’s Byward Market, Dennis now travels to 24 Sussex Drive and cuts the PM’s hair in an alcove under the stairs on the ground floor.
One day, Dennis forgot his barber’s cape. The prime minister whipped the cloth off the breakfast table, threw it around his shoulders, and Dennis was back in business. “I was shocked at how shabby the table was when he took the table cloth off. It was shocking to see cracks in the baseboards that didn’t seem to get fixed,” he told me. Only once in their working relationship did Harper ever make a special request—a haircut on a Saturday. The rest of the time, it was early mornings, right after the PM had breakfast with the children. When Harper was in Opposition, Dennis had told him that one day he would be prime minister. “Harper liked that,” Dennis remembered. “A lot of people hate Stephen Harper, but I think he’s a smart guy.” Dennis also noted another important thing about his famous client: Stephen Harper was apparently a good tipper.
Dennis also cuts Laureen Harper’s hair. According to the stylist who has a cleaning business on the side, the prime minister’s wife never asks for a particular style, is most comfortable in blue jeans and a T-shirt (like her husband), and is unpretentious. When he asked her where she was going for her vacation when Parliament rose, she replied, “Into the woods.”2
Finally, the improbable and hilarious. As Dennis explained to me in the salon, cutting the hair of powerful people has its unexpected benefits. Margaret Trudeau arranged for Dennis to meet President Jimmy Carter—and even Fidel Castro on his secret trip to Canada to attend Pierre Trudeau’s funeral. “Fidel Castro’s security detail really impressed me—female, Russian, and the meanestlooking people I ever saw.”
The only person guarding Farley Mowat this August day was his handyman, Mark, the maintenance chief at the local fish-plant. Mark explained how to get to Farley’s place, but contrived to show up a little later to make sure that the local legend was not being pestered by unwanted camp followers from the mainland. The Mowat homestead sits on 80 hectares of unspoiled wilderness overlooking the ocean, a fitting location for the writer of forty-four books and Mother Nature’s first, big-time, Canadian bodyguard. He calls the property the Mowat Research Institute. Hyperbole is his first instinct, winning a laugh from you, his highest pleasure. I had been told to arrive at a certain hour and not to interfere with his needed rest. Don’t come too early and don’t stay too late. In the end, I was invited to stay overnight, an invitation I foolishly declined.
I drove down the long lane to the farmhouse, which he later claimed “was rotting from the top down”—Farley’s explanation of how the ants got in. The famous writer was standing there with his hands on his hips, wearing Bermuda shorts and looking like a boy dressed up as an old man for Halloween. The expression on his face was a mixture of delight and canny curiosity. I could see the skinny kid who so worried his librarian-mother when, at age ten, the “Shrimp” barely looked six. I could also see the shrewd assessor.
I passed his sniff test and was offered a tour of the Mowat Research Institute. He showed me how he had rigged up a water system from two ponds—which he called the White and the Blue Nile. The ponds were not spring-fed, but depended entirely on rainfall. I noticed that there were frogs in Farley’s drinking water. He laughed: “They have a language with just one word in it—harrrumph. That one-word language can keep you awake all night.”
Back down the lane was the guest house, which Farley had once used to shelter a “fugitive from injustice,” his friend Paul Watson. The anti-whaling, direct-action environmentalist has faced two “red alerts”—international arrest warrants issued by Interpol— over allegedly obstructing Japanese whaling vessels. Farley claimed that Watson’s only crimes were stopping the Japanese from whaling in designated sanctuaries. “No one in Canada knows this, but I entertained Paul recently when the authorities didn’t officially know where he was. Those same authorities used to listen to my phone calls. I was one of the Friends of Cuba and a known “left-wing rebel.” I just laughed about it and said ‘good morning chaps’ to the listeners when I used my phone.”
From the crest of the hill where the white frame house sits, no other domicile or building is visible—just the unspoiled land, a crescent beach below, and the ocean stretching all the way to the horizon. As we passed a well-chewed tennis ball, Farley stopped and said, “My old dog, Chester, died last year. The night before we were about to head back to Port Hope, he crawled in his bed and went to sleep. He didn’t want to go back to Ontario.”
The boyish old man talked for a moment about his latest crusade—keeping oil rigs out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He saw the gulf as the last, vital internal body of salt water on the East Coast that could support the restoration of endangered species. And if that happened, it could also support traditional human activities. But he was well aware of the potential cost to him. “I am doing this against my will in a way, getting involved at this time in life, when I might get the Big Call tomorrow. But the bastards who have set this thing in motion are taking a perverse pleasure in doing it and must be opposed . . . to exploit what’s left of the gulf will be the dagger driven into the corpse.”
If a Deepwater Horizon–type of event were to take place in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the results could be catastrophic.3 The channels and straits that make up the gulf move in a counterclockwise direction, which means that the vast area is only flushed into the wider ocean once a year. Spilled oil would ride the mostly landlocked gulf currents for a long time. Worse, the site of the proposed development is the Laurentian Channel, the deep main artery in and out of the gulf for 2,200 marine species.
Listening to Farley talk, I am surprised at the discouragement in that clear, quick voice, stating and restating his thoughts until the words were just right. His heart told him that drilling for oil in the Gulf of St. Lawrence was wrong; his head said it would almost certainly happen. His convictions told him that environmentalists were doing Gaia’s work, but his head understood that the forces lined up against them were all but invincible. Farley was profoundly worried. “We don’t elect pacifists. We admire the killer instinct in leaders. It’s genetic. It is inevitable that people in high positions like Harper reach out for a bloody stick or sword. The people who run the world today are psychopaths. Everybody can see it, so why are we so obedient? All they care about is the economy because that means money. A virus is sweeping through the human race. At the top, all over the world, we are rotting away as a species from the top down. The leaders have gone beyond greed to the sheer amassing of power. There is no effective morality, just power.”
Farley leads me to his swimming hole, a secluded second pond surrounded by gorse and thicket so dense it can’t be seen from the laneway. There is a wooden plank extending out into the water, though so small that only a child—or a child-sized man, could use it. It was a good place to skinny-dip, he assured me. I ask him his thoughts on the country. “Canada is a fermentation process that has gone wrong,” he replies. “Instead of wine, we got vinegar. ‘We create the reality,’ those in power say. Every dictator the world has ever seen operates like that.” He stops to nibble the green shoot of something plucked from the side of the pond.
Farley explains that governments worldwide, including Canada’s, are doing their best to diminish nature because of the fundamental collision between the environment and resource development. It is, of course, his great subject. “Under the current system,” he says, “the environment and resource development cannot be reconciled. The ones in power just don’t think the right way. It’s as if we are being governed by an alien species. It’s as if something in the miasma of the Ottawa River rises and affects them all. They become zombies. People don’t understand that a biosphere either lives or dies. They’re finding it out in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Writers go in and out of favour like the width of lapels and the height of hemlines. Pierre Trudeau was a big fan of Farley Mowat, a natural enough affinity since both loved the wilderness with a passion. When Farley and his wife, Claire, were living on the Magdalen Islands, the prime minister showed up with Margaret for a visit with one of his favourite Canadian writers. “Trudeau was travelling quietly when he came to visit us. He arrived on an icebreaker and helicoptered into our place with a pregnant wife and one security officer. Margaret was pregnant with Justin. It turned out they were in the market for a dog. So our dog, a black Lab and water dog mixture, was pregnant and we offered them a puppy. That’s how Farley Trudeau got to join the Trudeau household. But he got banished to British Columbia shortly after his arrival for pissing on Trudeau’s Tibetan prayer rug.”
These days there are not many invitations to go to Rideau Hall and none to 24 Sussex Drive. I ask him about Margaret Atwood’s comment that Stephen Harper’s modus operandi was “Stalinist.” “Stalin had small balls compared to this guy. Stephen Harper is probably the most dangerous human being ever elevated to power in Canada. How the population has acquiesced in following this son of a bitch, and to let him take over their lives, I’ll never know. You have to create warrior nations, they are not born. They have to be made. It is the preliminary step of a tyrant. And this son of a bitch incited Canada into becoming a warrior nation.”
Unlike Stephen Harper, Farley Mowat has been a real warrior, and written about it in one of his books. There is a part of him that tries to make a joke of everything—even the Second World War: “I don’t feel guilty about anything from the war. I was such a bad shot that whenever I aimed at a German, I missed.” But the levity is mostly for show. His face darkens as he remembers calling in the heavy artillery on a German counter-attack around Casino, in Italy. The carnage was stupefying. “Three days later, I had the chance to go back up the road they were on when the bombardment started,” he says. “I didn’t go because I didn’t want to be haunted by what I might see.”
Back in the house, Farley’s wife, Claire, author of six of her own books, grants permission for a glass of otherwise forbidden Chardonnay. Farley has lined up his medications on the table like toy soldiers and explains that wine wars with his army of prescriptions. There are pink peonies on the table from the bee-filled gardens and a quiche set off with greens from the Mowats’ fenced vegetable patch. I ask Farley which of his books he liked best. “If you mean the one that was the most important, it would be Sea of Slaughter. If you mean my favourite, it would be And No Birds Sang.” The war book.
Over dinner, Farley returns to politics. He remarks that the parliamentary system is no longer working in Canada and what we have now is the imitation of Parliament. “We took Parliament for granted, but, like the environment, it turns out that it is an incredibly delicate and fragile structure. Harper has smothered MPs and is destroying Parliament. Elizabeth May is our one ray of hope, the only light in that vast, dark institution, our flickering little candle.” It is not for nothing that Farley Mowat is godfather of the Green Party leader’s daughter, Victoria Cate. Summer and Christmas holidays, the Mowats and the Mays come together like family.
With a five-hour drive ahead of me, I start to say my goodbyes half an hour before I know I will be allowed to leave. With Farley, there is always one more story, all of them filling in some part of his extraordinary life. With a chill in the Cape Breton air, and the sun sinking, I rise to go.
“You should stay you know. Come in here a minute.”
It is Farley’s writing room, and there on the desk sits his old Underwood. The typewriter is so big it looks as though Farley could ride it. I stop in front of a work hanging on the wall; it is a picture of Farley that his publisher Jack McClelland had done up as a Wanted poster. “Jack thought it would be a good idea because I had been stopped trying to enter the US on a book tour. I wrote about my discovery of America. I wrote it in three weeks—fastest book I ever did.”
I thanked Farley for letting a fellow writer into his inner sanctum and started to leave. “Care for some reading material?” he asked, leading me to a closet door in his study. Inside were all his books, carefully laid out on shelves. I chose And No Birds Sang, his memoir of the Second World War, with a stylized crow taking up most of the cover. Its beak was open and black except the bloodred, protruding tongue. Even to its author, the subject matter was next to unbearable: “. . . a bloody awful thing it was,” he wrote of the war. “So awful that through three decades I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cottonwool of protective forgetfulness. . . .” Farley took the book from my hands and inscribed it. We walked to the door and then down to my pickup. His face clouded over and he lowered his voice. “About the country and our future. It is like an aura that seems to have gone wrong. I have the sound of old cannon fired in 1812 in my ears. It is the sound of war again. War is coming back. There is an inevitable sense about it. I’m pretty pessimistic.”
I was told to come back and spend a weekend in the guest house in September, which I promised to do. But I was a prisoner of words that summer and did not make it back. My new promise, made in a letter, was to come next summer when the book was done. “Sure, you could camp in the sacred precincts of the Mowat Environmental Inst. Overnight,” he wrote back. “No cockroaches! See you at Brock Point next summer. I bloody well hope. IF the Seapuss let’s [sic] us come back. The Seapuss gets us all in the end!”
The ocean came in and went out again, the Seapuss intervened, and Farley was gone before that next summer. Drilling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence has since been approved, but the bullfrogs still harrumph in the Blue Nile, and the battle goes on for the soul of the nation, as Farley had surely known it would, no matter how powerful the enemy, or how depleted the ranks of those who love the land.