The Long Trail: My Life in the West Read Free Page A

glittery jewellery he had bought at Woolworth’s, which he’d bury in the sand. Then he’d tell Jean and me that if we dug deep enough we might find treasure. That memory has stayed with me; I wrote a song about it (“Smugglers Cove”) more than six decades later:
    Father took me by the hand
Down through the rocks and driftwood
And pirate gold from the five and dime
He caused me to discover
All in a morning’s wonder
    The old man never came to church with Mom, Jean and me. His church was the great outdoors.
    We’re pretty similar, the old man and I. He approached life in a very visceral, non-intellectual way, always living in the moment and having fun. He loved fishing and riding horses, though he wasn’t very good at either. He was certainly no horseman. I haven’t a clue how he got into horses — he might have learned when he went to boarding school on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea — but his idea of riding was simply to hop on and go fast. He didn’t know anything about a horse’s mind.
    When I was about six, the rodeo came to Vancouver and my dad took me on the ferry over to the mainland to see it. I met my first cowboy at that rodeo — a Native, dark as mahogany. He was wearing a purple satin shirt, and when he lifted me up and stuck me on the saddle, I said to myself,
This is it
. That saddle was where I was meant to be.
    My dad usually kept two or three ponies of his own — mostly cayuses (low-quality horses) — for playing polo on. Dad was always scuffling around looking for pasture for his polo horses, and I remember them being tethered around the open fields surrounding our house.
    I was scared to death the first time a horse broke into alope while I was being ponied by my dad. When you’re a little kid, it feels like you’re way up in the sky on that saddle. Some people give up altogether after a scare like that, just as some people give up on hockey the first time they’re checked into the boards. Not me. I got back on.

    Me at nine
. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)
    The old man was always on the lookout for a cheap horse, and I encountered more Native cowboys on trips up into the British Columbia interior with him. We’d head off to Clinton or 100 Mile House and stay at dude ranches and reservations. The cowboy culture in British Columbia those days was heavily Native, and the colourful characters fascinated me. Their demeanour was so different from the suits in Victoria, and they also worked with their handslike the labourers I admired. The Natives would cowboy in the summer and in the winter they’d work as loggers. That Native cowboy culture I knew as a kid is now gone, completely gone.
    Some people are born to live with horses and others aren’t. I believe that with my whole heart and soul. I know ranch families in which one kid can’t wait to be a cowboy and the other kid is counting the minutes until he can get the hell off that ranch and never come back. They’re both growing up in the same environment, but one kid is born to be with horses and the other isn’t. In my family, Jean had a passing interest in horses, but I was the one born to live with them. It’s in my genetic makeup. Simple as that.
    As kids, Jean and I spent our summers at my maternal grandmother’s three-storey summer home on a small farm at Cadboro Bay — the same place my mom was staying when she first met my dad — a few miles up the coast from our place. (My mom’s siblings had all left Victoria by then, which meant we were the only ones around to borrow the house.)
    It was a wonderful place for a kid. My room, on the second floor, opened to the sea through a large half-moon aperture covered only by fly screening. The floor was corrugated tin that had warped considerably down through the years. Walking on it created a cacophony of metal sounds and rumblings, probably very much like an old ship. When I climbed into bed, I would fall asleep listening to the soft waves lapping on the shore of Cadboro Bay. The sound