Writing in the Rain

by White, Howard; Broadfoot, Barry

• ISBN13: 9781550170108
• ISBN10: 1550170104
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1990-01-01
• Publisher: Harbour

Summary

Raincoast Chronicles, Spilsbury's Coast, The Accidental Airline, A Hard Man to Beat, The Men There Were Then. . . and now another one to top off the list. Writing in the Rain features the same fascination with British Columbia and the same ability to bring its stories to life that have brought Howard White numerous awards and accolades, including the Canadian Media Club Award for best feature and the Canadian Historical Association Award for Regional History. Here, among others, are stories about the magic of the tides; about Minstrel Island, one-time logging hub turned ghost village; the perils of roaring down the Sunshine Coast Highway in a decrepit Volvo, and of navigating the same highway in a dumptruck full of fish guts, all told with Howard White's wit, intelligence and insight.

Author Biography

Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat (bio), The Men There Were Then (poems), Spilsbury's Coast (bio), The Accidental Airline (bio), Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens'), Writing in the Rain (anthology) and The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon. Barry Broadfoot was born in Winnipeg in 1926, and died in Nanaimo, British Columbia, in 2003. After editing the University of Manitoba student newspaper, Broadfoot worked at papers in Winnipeg and Edmonton, and at the Vancouver Sun, where he was a reporter, editor and troublemaker for 17 years, starting in 1955. That ended in 1972, when Broadfoot chucked his daily job, got into his old Volkswagen with an upright typewriter, and drove across the country, collecting the stories that became his first book, Ten Lost Years. His other books include The Pioneer Years, Next Year Country and The Immigrant Years. Broadfoot received the Order of Canada in 1987.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface: Writing in the Rain Oolachon Grease (poem)

Morts Tiresias II (poem)

The Bomb that Mooed

The Day Joey Came Tides William Duncan and the Miracle of Metlakatla

The Handkercief Angle (poem)

Minstrel Has Anyone Seen the Working Class? (poem)

The Cadborosaurus Meets Hubert Evans Bill Sinclair at 90 For the Birds (poem)

Small Victories (poem)

How It Was with Trucks

The Men There Were Then (poem)

The Tird Stiff (poem)

Those Bloody Fishermen (poem)

What a Way to Go (poem)

I Kill Myself and Maim Myself (poem)

My Experience with Greatness Codfish and Cappuccino

The Yellowhead

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

MY EXPERIENCE WITH GREATNESS

When I was a kid I wanted to be great. A great man. Didn't matter at what, my ideas changed daily on that score, but I just had this very sure feeling I'd be great at it, whatever it was.

As it turned out, I was right. I did get to be great at a number of things, or at least pretty great. But there are a lot of problems with greatness I never suspected as a kid, and the main one grew out of that fuzziness about the chosen field, or perhaps more accurately unchosen field, you get to play your greatness out in.

I guess the lesson greatness has taught me can be summed up in two simple points, two things they don't tell you about greatness in school that when you found out about them tend to turn the whole thing into a kind of hollow victory. Number one is that greatness is a lot more common than they would have you think. Number two is, the process of selecting outstanding people for public celebration is rigged against the vast majority of people who do truly brilliant, herculean, heroic things. There are all sorts of people locked in obscure struggle whose ultimate triumph we will never read about, who but for fate, might have demonstrated the same mettle on the world stage amid international acclaim.

Take me.

I'm a really unfortunate case, in that even my peers ignore my accomplishments because they're in fields where I'm the only guy there. For instance I am the undisputed world champion at catching the Langdale ferry from Pender Harbour in forty-seven minutes in a 1973 Volvo with no brakes and eight cases of books in the back. I proved this last Thursday.

The distance from Pender Harbour to Langdale is forty-eight miles so I must have averaged a touch under sixty, which isn't a qualifying speed at the Indy, but I'd give a lot to A.J. Foyt try and duplicate my feat. For one thing, the stretch from Pender to Halfmoon Bay follows an old logging road. I know the guy who pushed it in, Art Shaw. He had one of these weird cats with the controls up ahead of the engine and a blade that lifted right up over the cab, and old Art was kind of a passive resister when it came to obstacles like rock knobs, skunk cabbage patches or big stumps -his strategy was to go around. A lot of the skunk cabbage patches have dried up and a lot of the stumps have since rotted down, but Art's loops are still there, immortalized in six inches of cracking asphalt. They have loops at Indy too, but I doubt they have reverse banks, changes of radius midway through and sixinch breaks in the pavement like the Sunshine Coast Highway does north of Halfmoon Bay. Most Pender Harbourites give themselves an hour-and-a-quarter to an hour-and-a-half for the Langdale run, and the all-time record, as far as I know, is forty-one minutes. But that was set in a new Porsche.

The thing about a 1973 Volvo is, this story takes place in 1984. Volvos are good cars. I've had two of them now. One '62 fastback that I bought off Walter They for four hundred dollars in 1971, and this 1973 wagon I bought off Edith Daly two years ago. But there's one thing you have to keep in mind about a Volvo, and that is they're only built to last eleven years. The ads all say get a Volvo and it'll last eleven years, and that's true. But what the ads don't tell you is that immediately on its eleventh birthday a Volvo gives up like the one-hoss shay and becomes a deadly risk to anyone attempting to run a further mile.

I'd had a driveshaft out of this Volvo once and I'd replaced the clutch once and put a new set of used rotors and calipers on the front axle, but apart from some rattles and clatters and flakingaway fenders, it kept going pretty steady. But last January it had its eleventh birthday. The first clue was it abruptly started using a quart of oil a day. I noticed a black puddle underneath it the size of a medium pizza and traced the trouble to a loose tappet cover. I buttoned that up and it stopped using oil for about three days, when I found a puddle under it the size of an extralarge pizza. This time it was a front main bearing seal. Still not realizing what the car was trying to tell me, I spent a very unhappy day and a half installing a new seal. A few fill-ups went by without my needing to add oil, then I brought it home with the tappets clacking like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and found the oil level right off the stick. I looked underneath, but there was no puddle.

Actually the first thing that should have tipped me off was the rear wiper conking out. The older Volvo wagons were famous for that deliciously luxurious rear window wiper -it had a lot to do with my buying one - and I had always been impressed at the way this frivolous extra kept stiffly wiping, long after other unessentials like the radio, heater, trunk latch and emergency brake had corroded into oblivion. Blind Bob Wolpert, who runs an illegal junk yard up by the Spinnaker Road subdivision and is something of a purveyor of the new urban mythology, told me a Volvo is no good once that wiper stops and should be immediately abandoned on the roadside, but I have never been able to admit the supernatural into my real life decision-making process.

Anyway, one day after the extra-large oil puddle I got tired of driving without rear vision and remembered to turn the hose on the now completely socked-in rear window. The water from the hose didn't have the slightest effect on it. I took a close look and discovered the entire back end of the car was coated with a tarry amalgam of black crankcase oil and dust about three-eighths of an inch thick. I had to use a paint scraper and gasoline to cut a peephole. The next time I took it out, with clear vision of the road behind me for the first time in a month, it all came home to me. The road behind me appeared clouded in a bluish mist, where the road ahead was bright and clear. It was hard on the twists and dips around Pender to see more than a car-length behind, but going up the mile-long straight stretch outside Halfmoon Bay, the bluish mist became an inky smog completely obscuring the Peninsula Transport semi I'd passed seconds earlier. Thwarted from leaking her vital fluids away onto the ground, the old girl was now spewing it out of the exhaust with the emphasis of a sick whale spouting blood. I knew it was over then.

Having realized this, I also realized it would be a waste of time to fix any of the innumerable things that started now going wrong at the rate of one or two a trip -a strange lumpiness in the rear brakes, a half-turn or so of slack somewhere in the drive chain so it jolted like a coal train every time you touched the gas, a buck in the motor that would express itself going up hills and act on the drive chain lurch in a most alarming way -I knew I was going to have to get it up to the car dump while it would still make the trip under its own power, but I kept waiting for something good in the eight-hundred-dollar range to show up in the Coast News want ads, and kept thinking I could get one more little trip out of the Volvo.

This was how matters stood at 9:30 the morning of March 11, 1984, when Jake Willett woke me up with a phone call wanting to know how come I wasn't in Horseshoe Bay to meet him for our work poetry reading tour of Vancouver Island pulp mills. I had been supposed to take the 8:30 ferry from Langdale, meet him in Horseshoe Bay at 9:15, then take the 11:30 ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver Island and drive up to start our tour in Gold River that evening.

"Jake, you wouldn't believe this, but I just slept through the alarm." This was a fair enough lie considering it was the first thing I said that day, but it wasn't so good considering we have kids who wake up at 7 and go to school at 8:30, which Jake knew. The truth was I'd forgotten about our rendezvous, and about the entire four-day reading tour, and had been sleeping in quite determinedly with a pillow over my head.

"There's another ferry at 10:30. Can you make that?"

Jake is perhaps the most organized and reliable person on the Pacific Slope of Western America, at least among the work poets. He would be constitutionally incapable of missing a ferry. My only hope was that, as a labour writer of middle-class origin, he would understand what a workingclass thing this was I'd done.

"Sure Jake. No prob," I said. "See you at. . . " I made my voice sound convincingly alert, I thought, but it was still too early in the day to add 10:30 and 1.

"11:30," he said firmly. "Don't forget the books."

"Right."

In a way it was lucky I didn't have any time to think, or speak to my wife. It probably would have ended in bloodshed. This wasn't the first time I'd done something like this, just perhaps the worst time. I stuffed a spare shirt and toothbrush into my briefcase and bolted for the door patting down my hair. Mary stopped me with my wallet and watch, and a look made up of equal parts of pity and fury, not safe to kiss.

On the front porch I halted with a realization that this rather typical screwup had just taken on a truly horrifying dimension. There before me in the yard hunched my blighted Volvo. The sight chilled me. A poem I planned to read later that day, about the death of a logger, came into my mind:

events
in themselves ordinary,
in combination deadly . . .

Not only was I about to attempt the twisty morning run to Langdale in a completely unrealistic time, I was going to try it in a disintegrating elevenyear-old Volvo that was unsafe to sit in let alone drive, and not only was I going to ask God to forgive me this temptation to fate, I was going to load the car up with eight heavy cases of books. I couldn't take my wife's good little Toyota, because I had to leave it parked four days at the Langdale terminal and her constitution couldn't support life for over thirty minutes without her Toyota.

The logical solution was to have her drive me and I could sense she was just waiting for me to fall to my knees and ask, but somehow the trial presented by the Volvo, with its risk of almost certain death, seemed easier to face.

Going over the first hill I discovered the lumpy rear wheel brakes had now totally given up, leaving me with brakes only on one front wheel, which not only failed to much alter the car's forward momentum, but almost ripped the steering wheel out of my hands and pitched me into a granite bluff. So now in addition to making the hour-long Langdale run in an unsafe wreck overloaded with books, I was going to do it with only one locking front wheel for brakes.

I recognized that this was going to be one of the greatest tests I'd ever faced, one that demanded every ounce of concentration, of heroic nerve, that a person could ever be expected to muster. I snuck up carefully on the big hills, coasting over their crests at a near stall, nursing my shred of braking capacity along as far as I dared test that shrieking, shuddering let front wheel, then letting the old beast fly sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour, making up the time I lost bucking up the grades at the head of my ever-thickening black storm cloud of oil smoke.

I stopped religiously every ten miles to throw another quart or two of oil into the smoking hot motor, no doubt setting the world speed record for pouring two quarts of oil too, and kept my ear so attuned to every new rattle and throb I was able to just keep the motor on the edge where I was getting everything it had left without giving it the excuse it desperately wanted to pack up totally. Talk about living on the edge, no Edmund Hillary inching along a Himalayan ice shelf was ever so exposed and vulnerable as I was streaking through the intersection at the bottom of the Norwest Bay hill in that smoking pounding missile of rust, grease and steam. And yet I was on top of the problem. Nothing caught me by surprise. When an elderly woman in a fifteen-miles-anhour Pinto pulled out in front of me on a corner with a car in the oncoming lane, I just cranked it for the shoulder and streaked past, skidding in the gravel. If I had given in to the instinct to even touch the brake, that left wheel would have jerked me into the oncoming car so fast no one would ever have known what happened. There were a hundred factors, all matters of life and death, which I had to keep juggling in my mind, never missing a one. I even remembered to slow down at the speed trap outside Sechelt, letting the Pinto overtake me and get nailed. Does an astronaut at his bank of blinking controls have so much to keep track of? No, all his equipment is forgiving and reliable and all his decisions neat and simple. Gus Grissom would never have made it past the hairpin at Silver Sands. But I made it to the ferry with thirty seconds to spare.

As it happened, there was a two-sailing wait and cars were lined up for a mile, but after what I'd been through nothing the BC Ferry Corp could throw at me could give me even a moment's pause. I just pulled into the oncoming lane, leaned on the horn and streaked through the lineup, yelling at the fluorescent-gloved attendant, "Emergency work - poetry mercy run! Gangway!", drove up in front of the baggage van and had six boxes moved before the fat lady from the toll booth had time to come puffing down.

"What do you think you're doing! You get back to the end of the line!" she barked. I smiled sweetly.

"Just loading baggage, ma'am."

Her buggy eyes followed the boxes from the drooping, dripping, hissing Volvo to the otherwise completely baggage van.

"That's not baggage! That van is reserved for hand baggage!"

"Are you telling me there's no room, ma'am?" I was done anyway. Her bosom was heaving under the blue Ferry Corp blazer as she struggled to contain her outrage, and before she could think up another institutional imperative to fling at me, I was into the car and gone back up the road. I just ran the old heap into the brush outside the compound and left the keys in it. Then I made for the ferry at a dead run.

It wasn't until I was leaning over the rail as the boat pulled away, watching the toll booth lady still waving her arms and regaling the man with orange gloves, that I let go. Waves of relief washed over me. I beamed at the luminous prop wash, the pale blue terminal buildings, the left-behind lines of cars, the dark slopes of Mount Elphinstone behind. And I just felt - great.


From "THE BOMB THAT MOOED":

The cow's great caper was the time it ate the dynamite. Dad was a bit sensitive about the dynamite because by law it was supposed to be kept locked up in a special airtight magazine built out of six-inch by six-inch timbers, while he had it stashed in a flimsy open lean-to just up the road from the shop. On top of this, you were supposed to destroy dynamite after a certain date because it becomes unstable and dangerous to handle, but he could never bring himself to just burn dynamite he'd paid good money for. Eventually ours got so old and cranky they were all afraid to go within a hundred feet of the magazine, let alone use the stuff.
This was when Mrs. Henry's cow was discovered standing by the road chewing away on a stick of twenty-percent stumping powder as contentedly as Fidel Castro munching a Havana cigar. Closer inspection revealed that the beast had been living for some days in the magazine stomping boxes open and eating case after case of dynamite, evidently enjoying the piquant taste of saltpeter and nitroglycerine-soaked sawdust.

"Holy jumped-up bald-headed, bare-assed, black-balled Mexican Christ!" my father shouted, twisting his cap round on his head as the implications of the discovery sunk in.
"Nobody touch that cow!"

"One hiccup and we're goners," observed Jack Spence, the sardonic foreman. "Can you imagine what a time the cops would have trying to figure it out? Just a crater full of guts, hooves and hardhats."

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Excerpted from Writing in the Rain by Howard White
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.