Born Naked: The Early Adventures of the Author of Never Cry Wolf, Page 3

One particularly irate farmer, who had been to school with Angus, shouted, “Thought you was supposed to be a sailor, Mowat! What in hell are you doin’ driving a god-damn tractor?”

  The completely uncharacteristic way Angus endured this barrage leads me to believe the bridge master was correct. Nary a sharp rejoinder crossed my father’s lips as, calmly and unhurriedly, he took the boat-hook and worked the vessel free. Then, almost gaily, he leapt ashore on the rocky rip-rap with a line in his hand and hauled Stout Fella out of the gap, clearing the way for the M. Sicken, whose safety valve seemed about to pop. Only then did my father respond to his tormentors.

  “That’s right, Johnny. I should have stuck to sail. Won’t make that mistake again.” And he smiled sunnily up at the crowd as its constituent parts began to head back to their vehicles.

  He was still smiling as he turned to me and said, “All right, Bunje-boy. You can tell your mother it’s safe to come on deck again.”

  THAT WINTER ANGUS rigged Stout Fella as a ketch and thereafter we sailed her almost every spring, summer, and autumn weekend, and for as much intervening holiday time as Angus could squeeze out of the library board. Since the board included three other dedicated sailors, it was generous in this regard. It was less so with money, of which in truth it had only a pittance to dispense. But we happily made do on an income which by current standards would be well below the poverty line.

  We led a good life, no small part of which was lived afloat at little cost. Although we did use the “bullgine” occasionally to get us out of difficulties (it never again failed us, be it noted), for the most part the wind provided free fuel. Food was to be had for the taking (fish from the bay), or the asking (vegetables, milk, cream, butter, and eggs from the many farms along the shores). Farm wives would often give my mother fresh-made bread and pies, jars of preserves and pickles, bottles of maple syrup, a chicken or a ham, or a cut of fresh meat if an animal had been slaughtered recently.

  These people would have indignantly refused money in recompense but Angus was able to reciprocate in his own way. Although most of the county farmers were passionately fond of reading, books were always in short supply, so Angus began surreptitiously lending them volumes from the Trenton Library. Stout Fella became a kind of forerunner to the Travelling Library trucks which now serve rural regions.

  There were scores of sheltered coves and anchorages around the bay and Stout Fella came to know them all. I came to know their people: dairy men, apple growers, commercial fishermen, family farmers, poachers, pot hunters, village merchants, even one or two moonshiners. For the most part they were United Empire Loyalist stock—people of Dutch and English ancestry who had fled north from the Thirteen Colonies as refugees from the American Revolution. They were people of conviction, of enduring loyalties, and of great generosity.

  ONE OF OUR favourite haunts was Prinyer’s Cove, a tree-shaded slit in the Prince Edward County shore where we would lie lazily at anchor through days of summer content. Usually we had this hidden place to ourselves. The glittering, snarling hordes of mass-produced floating automobiles which now roil the placid waters of the bay were, as yet, unknown.

  It was my job to row ashore early each morning through a dawn mist and pad barefoot up the dusty track to a nearby farm to collect a can of milk still warm from the cow. Generally I would also scoff a preliminary breakfast with the farmer’s wife and her three daughters. Back aboard Stout Fella, I would have my second breakfast: oatmeal porridge slathered in creamy milk and drenched with maple syrup or mounded with brown sugar. Everyone knew sailors had to have hearty meals, and diabetes was not something we worried about.

  At some of our “ports of call,” we would moor alongside a wharf or jetty, as at Rednersville, a village consisting of three houses, one general store, and a rambling canning factory thrusting a skinny iron chimney high into the air. At harvest time, which began when the first field peas were ripe, this chimney would spout a great plume of sulphurous coal smoke, the signal for scores of wagons and old trucks laden with canning crops to converge on the plant.

  Many farm kids would come along for the ride and they made festival about the dock, from which one could dive to a cool, dark depth of ten feet or more. They were frankly envious of me and “my” boat, and once a boy of about my own age offered an ancient penny (which he claimed was pirate gold) if I would let him stow away aboard Stout Fella.

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS through our voyages that I really came to know the local world of waters, my baptism as a water baby had taken place shortly after my birth.

  The summer of 1921 had been exceedingly hot and dry. So Angus’s old friend, Norman Kidd, who had a cottage on the south shore of the bay not far from the mouth of the Murray Canal, invited us to come and stay with them in what was to be the first of many visits spanning several years.

  The Kidd cottage was a cavernous, roughly built, almost windowless, frame structure originally constructed by Norman’s father as a duck-hunting camp. Its walls were plastered with enormous, highly coloured posters depicting ducks, geese, bears, moose, et cetera, being slaughtered by intrepid sportsmen. Even as a very young child I felt the chill of death in this gloomy space. Fortunately, we three had to enter it only to have our meals. We slept in a screened-in, canvas-roofed cabin where we benefited from whatever breeze might waft in off the bay.

  The wayward little cluster of shacks and cabins composing “Kidds’ Cottage” included a fine ice-house. In the days before rural electrification, almost every family around the bay had one of these to supply the kitchen ice-box. Every winter tons of ice blocks were hand-sawed out of the frozen bay, hauled ashore in horse-drawn sleighs, and stored between layers of sawdust in garage-sized structures whose walls and ceilings were also thickly insulated with sawdust.

  Ice-houses were a special summer domain of children. During the blistering heat of August days, we youngsters would spend hours cooling our bottoms and our bare feet in the wet sawdust while the crickets whirred outside. The Kidds’ ice-house was a chill, dark sanctuary where the imagination was free to create worlds of one’s own. Sometimes the place would become a polar bear’s den and we the bear cubs. Sometimes it was an Eskimo igloo. Once it came perilously close to becoming a tomb.

  The thick, insulated door latched on the outside. One day when four or five of us children were inside, someone slammed the door and we were locked in. The only illumination was a wan ray of light from a small ventilation shaft in the roof, which did little to lighten the clammy, chilly gloom.

  For a time we were excited by our predicament, seeing it as a novel adventure. But when nobody let us out and the cold began seeping through our thin summer clothing, we grew frightened.

  At seven years of age, Jack Kidd was the eldest. He drew us together in a shivering cluster just under the ventilation shaft and led us in a cry for help that soon degenerated into tearful howls. Although we yelled and cried ourselves hoarse, no one came. Nobody heard us because of the thick insulation in the ice-house walls.

  We huddled tightly together in the damp sawdust and the cold bit deeper into our bodies. For the first time in my life I felt terror. One of the little girls had buried her face in my neck and was sobbing bitterly. I was probably weeping too. I know that some of the nightmares which followed upon this incident (and did not cease until I was in my teens) made me cry so despairingly that I would wake with my face drenched in tears.

  By the greatest of good fortune, someone from a neighbouring cottage came by to get some ice, and released us. It was none too soon. One little boy had to be attended to by Dr. Farncombe for what would doubtless now be called hypothermia. I suffered no lasting ill effects but to this day grow uneasy in cold, dark places.

  I don’t think I went swimming during my first visit to the Kidds’ but a photograph taken in the summer of 1922 shows me sitting in the landwash up to my naked navel. By the time I was four, I could dog-paddle well enough to swim with the ot
her children, unsupervised by any adult. We spent hours every day mucking about in the warm waters, chasing frogs, water snakes and crayfish. We did not mind when, in late August, the bay became awash with a floating green slush called Dog Days—an explosive “bloom” of green algae. I remember the joy of diving under and surfacing through it to emerge shrouded and streaked with tendrils of green slime like a water demon.

  Norman Kidd provided a little skiff for us. By the age of four I could row it handily. At five I rowed, all on my own, a half-mile offshore to Indian Island3—while Angus proudly cheered me on and Helen wrung her hands and bravely refrained from calling me back.

  Indian Island had earlier been known as Massacre Island in memory of a party of Hurons reputedly killed on it in the eighteenth century by an Iroquois raiding party. It was a place of delicious possibilities. I found bones (possibly human) washed out along its shores, and crayfish could be caught by flipping over the slippery flat stones in the surrounding shallows. Freshwater clams lurked in waters shoal enough for us to reach them and sometimes contained tiny “seed” pearls.

  Half- or altogether naked, I lived the life of a water baby during those halcyon days. In my father’s time, people who messed about by and in the waters of the bay proudly called themselves Bay of Quinte Bullfrogs. Regardless of where life was to later lead me, I believe I am at least entitled to style myself a Bay of Quinte Tadpole.

  2Inspired by a popular drinking song, “Little Brown Jug, oh I love thee.”

  3the very same Indian Island under whose lee, according to Angus, I had been conceived. Was my conception calling to me?

  3

  TRENTON HAD BEEN A MAJOR port during the days of the timber trade and continued to prosper into the early twentieth century, shipping barley across Lake Ontario in big sailing vessels. However, by the 1920s the schooners were all gone, and only a few colliers still called, together with the occasional steam packet carrying freight and passengers between Toronto and Kingston.

  Sometimes when one of the packets puffed into harbour, Angus would take me aboard her. I was allowed to clamber around freely, both above and below decks, while he gabbed with officers and crew, some of whom he had known since his own childhood. Although I never felt any urge to become a sailor, my visits to the old vessels gave me an admiration for working ships and their people which still endures.

  On one occasion Angus and I shipped aboard the tug M. Sicken as guests of Captain Ben Bowen on a run from Trenton to Belleville. As we approached the Belleville bridge, I was the one who pulled the whistle lanyard to summon the bridge master to his appointed task. Small and shabby, for she was more than half a century old, the M. Sicken spewed black coal smoke like a volcano, coating herself and everything around her with gritty dust and ashes. But to me she was Leviathan.

  The M. Sicken may have been responsible for my first appearance in print. Having become enamoured of the Pooh books, I wrote a letter to Christopher Robin, enclosing a picture of myself dressed in a sailor’s suit standing on the M. Sicken’s bridge. To everyone’s astonishment but mine, Christopher Robin replied. He had been much impressed by the M. Sicken, which he seems to have thought was my personal yacht. Our two letters were reprinted in the Trenton Courier, thereby giving me an early taste of literary notoriety.

  The west side of the harbour was dominated by the massive bulk of the cold storage plant whose four-square, windowless limestone walls towered like those of a mediaeval fortress. Built in the mid-nineteenth century to store apples and other perishable farm products awaiting onward shipment by water, the vast stone vault was by now largely abandoned and had acquired a forbidding air of decrepitude which irresistibly attracted youngsters. Exploring its dank recesses was as good as exploring the dungeons of a haunted castle.

  It also attracted the town drunks and ne’er-do-wells who used it as their club. Lolling at ease on piles of old sawdust, they consumed (when they couldn’t get anything less lethal) a solidified form of alcohol called Canned Heat. We children were allowed to consort with these ragamuffins, and I especially remember a lanky redhead called Bunny-Boy who had once worked in a circus and could juggle half a dozen tins of Canned Heat at a time. These men also carved toy boats for us and showed us how to catch catfish on trotlines. If they posed any sort of threat, sexual or otherwise, we never knew it.

  We fished whenever and wherever, but nowhere more assiduously than from the harbour wharves. Our catch was mainly perch, rock bass, and sunfish—“panfish”—which Angus encouraged me to bring home as my contribution to the family’s larder. However, Helen, who had to clean and scale the bony little creatures, discouraged me. I think this was my first experience of being caught in the middle of the battle of the sexes. I compromised. I would bring home half my catch and give the other half to the neighbourhood cats.

  Many fishermen still made a livelihood on the bay working single-handed from small open boats. Their rickety wharves and spindle-shaped net-drying racks seemed to be everywhere along the shores. A crony of my father’s by the name of Milt fished out of Onderdonk’s Cove and occasionally took me with him when he hauled his nets and lines or lifted his fish traps. Like most of his ilk he was a “general purpose” fisherman, catching lake trout, white fish, black bass, pickerel, pike, eel, smelt, and something called a sheepshead. This was a large and coarse-scaled fish chiefly remarkable for its voice. While sitting silently with Milt in his boat, I would sometimes hear loud grunting sounds from the depths below. “That’s old man sheepshead talkin’ to his woman,” Milt would say.

  Of course I did not spend all my childhood hours on or near the water. In winter we would go trundling noisily around the countryside in Henry, visiting the farms to which Angus brought the benison of books.

  We were rewarded with gargantuan farm meals and with sleigh and cutter rides across frozen marshes and ice-bound ponds into the deep recesses of cedar swamps and hardwood forests. Here I saw deer, snowshoe rabbits, ruffed grouse, and foxes. On one occasion we encountered a lynx which paused in the deep snow fifty feet away to stare through slit, green eyes at half a dozen human beings staring back at it over the steaming back of a big Clydesdale. Experiences like this fuelled the fascination I was beginning to feel for animals.

  A favourite visitation of mine was to Charlie Haultain’s fox “ranch,” which consisted of half an acre of waste land on the edge of a swamp. It was surrounded by an eight-foot fence roughly made of sawmill slabs set on end. This stockade enclosed a dozen fox pens together with the shanty where Charlie lived. In one corner of the enclosure stood a tower of peeled poles about thirty feet high supporting a tiny cabin reached by a rickety ladder from which I could observe the foxes unseen by them. It was like having a window into their secret lives and I was happy to spend hours watching them eating, at play, and making love.

  The establishment may have been a “ranch” in Charlie’s eyes—the imagery of the Far West loomed large to young men in those days—but for me it was more like one of the fur trader’s forts portrayed in a picture book about the old-time voyageurs which I had unearthed in the library. Charlie fit the picture. He was swarthy, swift of movement, and familiar with everything that lived in the fields, woods, and waters. He would have been perfectly at ease clothed in buckskin with feathers in his hair.

  In fact, he was generally clothed in the powerful aroma of dog-fox, which is similar to skunk. It permeated his cabin, and his garments, which he did not often change. I thought the aroma rather marvellous (it smelled to me then, and still does, like the essence of wilderness) but most Trentonians preferred to keep Charlie at a discreet distance. He and Angus also took me snowshoeing in the woods, and Charlie declared that, given time, he would make a real woodsman out of me. Unhappily, when I was six he lost interest in fox ranching and went off prospecting for gold in the far north.

  Another of my father’s cronies was Vic Bongard, who was so dead keen about sailing that he sai
led summer and winter. Vic owned an iceboat—a cross-shaped hickory frame about twenty feet long by twelve wide, fitted with large skate blades at each extremity. Driven by a disproportionately large sail, this contraption could skim over the surface of the frozen bay at forty miles an hour.

  One brisk Sunday afternoon in February, Vic and Angus somehow persuaded Helen to join them on a little run across the bay. I went too, and we had a splendid sail to Rednersville where we went ashore to visit a farm family. The farm children and I drank sweet cider while our elders drank the real stuff, to such effect that they were persuaded to stay for a goose dinner which lasted until nearly midnight.

  By then the weather had changed and snow was beginning to fall. When we set out for home we could no longer see the lights of Trenton some seven miles away, but a glimmer of moonlight was still filtering through the clouds so off we sailed, my mother and I well bundled up in an ancient buffalo robe. The snow began to fall more and more thickly and the darkness deepened, but the breeze held steady and on we skimmed, the blades swishing with the sound of giant scythes.

  Then we stopped. To be more accurate, the iceboat stopped. We four continued on like hockey pucks vigorously propelled over new ice. Clinging to each other and half smothered by the robe, Helen and I must have slid a hundred yards before we managed to gain our feet. I was wildly exhilarated. Helen was as mad as I had ever seen her.

  “Oh, you fools!” she shrieked at Vic and Angus as they emerged through the thickening murk. “You absolute idiots could have drowned us all!” She strained for the right epithet. “You… you MEN!”

  It was no use pointing out to her, as Angus tried to do, that there was a yard of solid ice beneath us. That only made her madder. She stamped her foot. “Oh, what’s the difference! If Farley and I had hit a tree we’d have been as good as drowned!”