The Long Trail: My Life in the West Read Free

she kept her thoughts and feelings pretty much to herself. She had four siblings, a couple of whom were alcoholics, and as a result my mom didn’t drink. Unlike my dad, she was pretty severe; she didn’t approve of “loose morals” at all. She was always there for me over the years, but poor Mother lived a pretty dour life.
    She had fully bought into Presbyterian doctrine, and at Christmas and Easter she’d drag Jean and me to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, a big brick building on the corner of Douglas and Broughton streets in downtown Victoria. I hated going there and really disliked the music — it was terrible. That poor organ at St. Andrew’s suffered great musical indignities in the cause of Presbyterianism. I would have much preferred it if Mother had hauled us to a Baptist or Pentecostal church, where the music was more rockin.’
    The first house Jean and I lived in was a bungalow on Dufferin Avenue, just west of Cattle Point. Our house was surrounded by big open fields, little oak trees and scotch broom — beautiful country, almost like range. The green meadows stretched right down to the ocean. It felt like we were out in the country, yet the Uplands just north of our place was furnished with paved roads connecting the houses, lit by ornate cast iron lampposts just like you’d find in a city. It was a lovely arrangement, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since. That entire area is now completely developed, but back then the suburbanization of Victoria, a civil-service town of old brick and wooden buildings, was only just beginning.
    People living there when I was a kid liked to pretend they were British; they thought of their city as a bastion of the British Empire, strong and loyal. My earliest memory is of bonfires burning all along the rocky coastline of Cattle Point in 1939 as people eagerly awaited the arrival of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, whose steamship was to come up the coast and into Victoria Harbour. There the royal party would mingle with their loyal subjects. I was five at the time, and I seem to remember people waving little Union Jacks as they waited for the ocean liner, a surreal scene that plays like an old movie in my mind.
    In addition to the anglophile culture, a whole other class of people thrived on the island. Immigrants — Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Irish — drove the economy, working as loggers, fishermen and miners. And as you went north up Vancouver Island, the pretensions of mock empire rapidly gave way to a working-class ethic that attracted me even asa little boy. Those guys were out in the fresh air doing hard labour, and it seemed like a lot more fun than working in a stuffy downtown office as a civil servant. Of course, as a kid I didn’t realize just how hard their manual labour was.
    Even in the depths of the Great Depression, the feeling on Vancouver Island was one of optimism. There would never be an end to the big timber. The salmon and other fishing stocks were inexhaustible. The natural resources would last forever. A strong man would always find work. This was not the Dust Bowl.
    My old man managed the Monarch Life Assurance Company’s Victoria branch, which sold life insurance to loggers. That wasn’t a bad idea, since those guys were always getting killed in spectacular accidents. He’d go up the coast on a little steamer to Port Alberni and Port Renfrew to do business. When he was home, he was always busy, a hyper banty rooster of a man. He wasn’t that big — five foot eight — and had black hair very much in the style of the 1930s, like British-American actor Cary Grant’s. He was very proud of his hair.
    When Jean and I were really young, Dad used to take us up to Smugglers Cove, on Ten Mile Point, a peninsula that sticks out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We’d all stand on the rocks and watch the killer whales going north in their spring migration as seabirds wheeled overhead. The old man would bring along some