That autumn, I enrolled in a creative writing class.
On Thursday afternoon, I’d make the long drive into the city with my briefcase full of dog-eared foolscap. The class took place at the University of Manitoba, in a gothic old hulk called the Tier Building. Walking into the Tier Building made me feel sheepish. I was the prodigal son, crawling back home as they always do.
If the highway was slippery I’d get to class a bit late, with snowflakes in my hair and the reek of woodsmoke on my sweater. “Oh good,” my classmate Sandra Birdsell would announce, “our token wilderness writer is here.”
Some writers feel that you can’t learn to write in a classroom. And in truth, the very notion of studying ‘creative writing’ seems to verge on the cornpone, like studying guitar by the Mel Bay Method. But our instructor was Robert Kroetsch, a man who wrote novels and had actually won a Governor General’s Award, so I thought I might learn something. At the very least, I’d meet some other writers.
The bearded, frowning Kroetsch was a patient teacher. He listened to our stories and suggested approaches we might take to improve our technique. As soon as he made a suggestion, I usually realized he was right. And that structural problem, or error of syntax, or whatever it was, joined the list of mistakes I resolved to never make again. Just like playing a violin, writing requires arduous work, and it was exciting to learn new tricks.
When class was over, everyone adjourned to the campus pub, except for me. It was a three-hour drive home, and I didn’t feel up to tackling a slippery highway after half a dozen beers. This habit of leaving at the end of class turned me, undeservedly, into a man of mystery, and I almost enjoyed teasing my classmates by refusing their invitations. “Can’t you come for just one beer?” Kroetsch would ask, scowling with fatherly concern. “Gotta run,” I’d say with a smile, lifting my glove in farewell. “Miles to go before I sleep.”
I was working on a story called ‘Two Yellow Pails’, a tale about a doomed romance between a white schoolteacher and a young native woman on the reserve north of Minaki. My classmates made some good suggestions for this story and I reworked it, then sent it off to a Toronto literary magazine called Descant. A few months later, I got a note in the mail. To my shock, they said they wanted to publish it, and furthermore, they’d pay me $85. It was my first publication, and in fact the first publication in our class. And since it was really my classmates’ analysis that had made the story publishable, I went to the bar that night and picked up the tab, which with this hard-partying crew turned out to be more than I was getting paid for the story.
That night in the bar, I sat next to one of the married women in the class. We’d become quite a friendly and close-knit group, and perhaps out of sisterly empathy, she proposed to ‘fix me up’ with one of her friends. This never works out, of course, but my datebook wasn’t exactly filled with engagements so I agreed. On our first meeting, at a dinner party at my friend’s house, my blind date, whose name was Mandy, didn’t show up. She turned out to be sick, and I was glad she was. I knew she wouldn’t like me and I wouldn’t like her. I’d been on only a couple of blind dates in my life but they’d worked effectively as aversion therapy. During the dinner, my friend did the hard sell, told me what an attractive woman Mandy was. She said Mandy was a divorcee, who before her divorce had lived with her husband in a lovely antique farmhouse near Riding Mountain. “She’s very interested in the fact that you live in a houseboat.”
The next time, it was my turn to stand Mandy up. My van broke down and I was unable to drive to the city. Then spring came, the class ended, we all moved on with our lives. That summer, I worked again as a guide and spent a lot of time doing renovations on the houseboat. Renovations usually fall into one of two categories – maintenance or improvements. These definitely weren’t improvements. They weren’t even maintenance. They were last-ditch efforts to keep the place floating. Five or six years of freeze-ups and violent thaws had played hell with my flotation. The sixteen oil drums upon which the houseboat rested – substandard flotation at the best of times – had rusted, cracked, and shipped water. The floor was now only a few inches above the waterline, and the whole building heeled over alarmingly when I walked from one side to the other. I tried pushing long billets of Styrofoam under the deck, but each billet had about eight hundred pounds of flotation force, and it required a lot of planning to get one under the building.
I went to the pub and enlisted the help of four or five buddies. They jammed the nose of the billet under the building and then stood on the foam, trying to weigh it down, gripping each other by the waist, looking like nervous bachelors in a conga line, while I backed off with the boat and gently charged the billet, butting it repeatedly, forcing it under a few inches at a time. This method worked pretty well until the foam billet fetched up against a half-flooded drum. When I butted the billet, it slewed sideways. In slow motion my helpers waved their arms, rolled their eyes, grabbed at each other, then keeled over into the water.
Some of them suggested that I needed to remove the goddamn drums before inserting the foam. The drums still contained enough air to make such removal problematic, so I tried punching holes in them by hand. This was cold and difficult work. Climbing into the cold water, crawling around in the lily pads, I banged on the greasy steel with a hammer and chisel. But the holes didn’t do much good if they were above the waterline, and hammering under water is a mug’s game. Furthermore, some of the barrels were hidden under the floor, and for these, I had no choice but to blast holes in them with a .308 rifle, fired right through the floor. It wasn’t the first time that I was forced to tackle some tricky repair problem with firearms, and although it may sound entertaining, it’s actually fairly unpleasant work which calls for a thick towel around the head to preserve the old eardrums.
Attracted by loud gunfire, which even in Minaki was unusual in the middle of town, Larry Willot showed up in the OPP boat and asked me what in god’s name I was doing. After I explained the problem, he offered to help out, and drifted down the side of the houseboat and blasted away at the rusty drums with his .38 revolver. Still, the barrels were slow to die. Some of them wallowed free, barely afloat, and I rolled them ashore. In the vacant spaces under the houseboat I jammed in blocks of foam, sawing them to fit. It was a makeshift repair, and by the time September arrived, the water became too cold to work in, and the houseboat was more waterlogged than ever.
I had a vague notion that freeze-up would solve everything. Once the houseboat was locked into the ice, I’d pry it up with hydraulic jacks, lay timbers under it, and lower it onto a fresh new foundation constructed of special marine foam and pressure-treated lumber. Once spring came, the houseboat would descend through the melting ice, and I’d get a few more years out of it.
Eventually I’d build a real house. That was my long-term scheme. You can’t live in the backwoods without a scheme. Eventually, I planned to build a log house, which this time would be a real pleasure dome. I’d even selected the property: a handsome peninsula with access by bush road. I’d found out that you could get a government permit to harvest your own beautiful white pine logs. My house would have a huge stone fireplace, big windows overlooking the lake, and a log-buttressed cathedral ceiling with iron chandeliers. I wanted to have stained-glass windows in the bathroom, and I wanted to make them myself. If you lived in a place like that, the girl of your dreams would turn up. She would materialize automatically, as in a science project. Just visualize the scene – a stunning log home with cedar-shingled roof and a wide veranda, a nicely restored red 1956 Chevy pick-up truck in the driveway, a vintage wooden boat, and a Piper Cub float plane tied up at the dock. Now try to imagine the guy who lives in that place not having a great girlfriend. It’s just not imaginable. I was quite sure that once I got started on the house, all kinds of chips would fall into place. But before I bought the property and built the house, I needed to raise some money. And I couldn’t concentrate on raising money as long as I was dealing with petty day-to-day annoyances like my house going to the bottom of the lake.
My friend Kelly owned a skidder, which is a large insectoid tractor used for hauling logs out of the bush. A skidder is an impressive machine. With its huge wheels and steel claws it will plough through any forest, no matter how dense. The skidder used big inner tubes in its tires. Kelly suggested that I go to Winnipeg and buy some tubes, which could be had for about $25 apiece. Each one of them would float several thousand pounds. “Put one under each corner of the deck,” he said. “Pump them up with an air compressor, and Bob’s your mother’s brother.”
This was a perfect Minaki solution: cheap and temporary. I went to Winnipeg on the Thanksgiving weekend, bought some patched-up skidder tubes, and visited my parents. As always, my father wanted to know if I’d seen anything on the way, meaning wildlife. As always, my mother did my laundry and fed me great helpings of roast chicken and mashed potatoes, followed by tea and lemon meringue pie, my favourite. It was always pleasant to come home, eat a hot meal, and pretend to be fourteen years old again, and I’m sure my mother would have been happy if I’d just announced that I was moving back into my old bedroom. But my houseboat was sinking. So I bid them adieu and carried on.
On the way out of town I stopped to see my old friend Douglas. He told me he was going to a party. It was a serious party, with a bluegrass band, and he urged me to come. I wanted to keep moving and get back to Minaki, but I decided to follow the old tried-and-true rule – if there’s a party, attend it. The party was at a large fancy house along the river, and there were lots of interesting people there. I ended up staying until two in the morning. When I left, I encountered a solitary woman in the front yard, smoking a cigarette. “Going home already?” she asked, in a deadpan tone.
I said something in return, and we fell into conversation. It was a chilly night, with a big moon above the treetops. She wore fine black leather gloves and some kind of dark woollen cape that made her look like she was on her way to a festival of witches. She had long dark hair and intelligent eyes. When I asked her why she was out here alone, she said she was in a foul mood because it was a full moon, and she missed her home in the country. It turned out, of course, that she was Mandy. And after we had a few chuckles about meeting at last, she grilled me about the houseboat, the country around Minaki, and where she could buy a copy of Descant.
After talking at length about Nature, music, wild creatures, the moon, and the effect of coincidence on human affairs, I accompanied her to her car, which was a respectable-looking Volvo four-door with a blue jay feather suspended from the rear view mirror. She climbed in and sat for a moment with the engine running, looking at me through the open window.
I leaned against the car. “Would you like to come and visit me at the lake?”
“When?”
“I don’t know, tomorrow?”
“Where would we stay?”
“In my houseboat.”
“Hmm…” She pretended to tighten her gloves. She wore a pensive smile, as if considering a smart crack. She was the sort of woman who enjoyed a bit of fencing. “Could we have a fire before bed?”
“We can do whatever we want.”
She gave me a direct look. “What time are you picking me up?”