THE SUMMER OF 1979 WAS UNFORGETTABLE.
Mom and I both wanted to write a book during five months at their cottage. In those days "going to the country" could mean leaving all city comforts behind, if one chose. We didn't. Nor did we imagine the interactions with local residents we would have there.
The cottage was one of four at the mouth of a creek flowing into the lake. A wooden A-frame three-bedroom, it was the largest, on one acre. The four were in a development of 350 along Lower Buckhorn Lake's north shore.
The original owner added a kitchen which served as entrance and mud-room. He had a well drilled and a pump delivering water to it and to a bathroom on the bedroom level. He installed a hot water tank and brought in electricity for it, for lighting and cooking. A separate pump drew water from the creek for gardening and car-washing. A large propane gas unit in the living-dining area quickly heated it and the bedrooms. A sort of basement with separate entrance provided lots of storage space.
After Mom and Dad bought the place in 1969 they replaced the few steps up to the kitchen door with a wide deck across the front. I paid for installation of a telephone because the first time they made a day-trip there in Winter they were almost stranded by a blizzard and the extremely steep hill in the final mile.
At first we had a "party line" with one other customer somewhere. Their signal was one long ring, ours was two short. (Canadians have never paid per call. The etiquette of party lines was that conversations were kept short and one did not eavesdrop on the other line(s); in rural areas there could be eight or more parties on a line. As teenagers in the city, friends and I ignored both rules -- until we were caught and punished by being forbidden to use the phone for a while.)
Four neighbours without wells used our manual pump beside the driveway to fill carboys. Two occasionally used our phone. A young couple who owned the smallest of the four cottages lived there year-round without electricity, telephone, or water, using our pump often enough that it never had to be primed.
Mom and I would not be "roughing it in the bush" as Susannah Moodie did in the 19th Century, and the young couple did in the 20th.
In 1979 my parents were 70, leasing their house while they tested condominium ownership by renting an apartment in northeastern Toronto. Dad whole-heartedly approved our summer projects. Mom prepared him for her absence by teaching him how to boil his breakfast eggs. He ate lunch, his main meal, in a favourite Polish restaurant near his workplace on weekdays, and his suppers year-round were cold smorgasbord style. He usually joined us on weekends. A professional cleaner already came weekly.
I left the agency on the last day of April. Then Mom, who no longer drove a car, and I made the 90-minute trip northeast from Toronto in my Dodge Dart Swinger . It replaced the unique Valiant, damaged beyond repair by winter road salt.
Both Mom and I had typewriters. Hers was an enormous electric Olympia with a Polish keyboard, used at Expo67. I had replaced my standard with a portable Smith-Corona Electra 110. The chatty man servicing my machines since the 1969 move from Montreal insisted my electric have a manual return. Mom's, which he also tended, had a powered return which made the machine jump so violently that after typing a dozen lines she had to pick it up and set it back where it belonged.
Her manuscript was about Edgar Cayce, an American photographer with psychic powers who died in 1945. Among all the books about him she found no simple biography. She would write one in Polish, to share his extraordinary life with family and friends in Poland, perhaps even find a publisher there.
She and Dad visited the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where Cayce lived. It maintains a complex archive, and researchers answer questions about his predictions. After she outlined her plans for a biography, A.R.E.'s director said Mom was welcome to write one, submit it, and publication would either be permitted or not.
That meant she needed an English version, so I would translate as she wrote.
My project was also a translation from Polish to English. After moving to Montreal in 1962 I recalled countless anecdotes I'd heard about the 18 months my parents and I spent as refugees from Poland during World War II, struggling to reach a job waiting for Dad at The de Havilland Aircraft of Canada in Toronto. But I wasn't sure of the sequence of events because I was only three and four when they happened.
After a week in Toronto with a tape recorder I had 16 hours of reminiscences in Polish by Mom and Dad separately and together. Back in Montreal I typed verbatim on canary newsprint. At the cottage almost 15 years later, I would do a straight translation to see how it read, then edit. My working title was Refugees.
As I struggled along each day, searching for appropriate English words, using Roget's Thesaurus and Mom's excellent grasp of English vocabulary, it became more and more fascinating, a truly fabulous tale. It was romantic in the broadest sense of the word. The range of our experiences in eight countries was fascinating.
A bonus was that typing it slowly, thoughtfully, introduced my parental unit to my adult Self, like a handbook containing their lessons about Life. During those months in 1939-41 they had practised all the principles and attitudes they passed on to me while I was growing up.
Mom and I enjoyed regular rest breaks for interactions with the critters and permanent human residents of the area. I'll deal with them in Chapter 53. Here I'll just sum up the results of our banging on typewriters.
My translation of Mom's MS, Psychic, was mailed back to her by A.R.E. so fast that we believed no one read it. "Not approved", without explanation. Because of their world-wide copyright on Cayce materials in English Mom couldn't offer it to a publisher, but she mailed it to her sister in Poland, who circulated it. The communist censors didn't object to its subject matter, so passing it around was safe and Mom welcomed opinions from family and friends. A year later, Lech Walesa jumped over a shipyard fence in Gdansk and we all had to live with Fear for another decade.
Before May ended, Mom's handyman and his wife inspired me to write humorous fiction about country living and married life. I wrote three short stories and offered them to one of Toronto's two remaining dailies (John Bassett had killed the Tely in 1971), then the other, proposing a weekly series running until Canadian Thanksgiving in October. Both editors mailed back the samples with rejection slips.
I sent a couple of longer articles to magazines. One was about how the weekend activities and noise that most cottagers made prevented them from enjoying the teeming wildlife we saw on weekdays. In the other I argued that aside from the few things we must learn to avoid in Canada's wilderness, its abundant flora and fauna deserve patient, careful study. Editors responded that these did not "suit their schedule".
In Kingston in 1960, I'd met a woman determined to get something published somewhere. She had almost 400 rejection slips, was papering the walls of her kitchen with them. Mom wanted all the walls in the cottage left as they were.
Refugees was accepted that Fall by Dean Cooke at his start-up Virgo Press. He phoned one day to say he had to re-finance, did I want to leave the MS with him until such time as...or did I want it back? That spooked me. Does failed re-financing mean "seized assets"? I didn't know anyone who could advise me on what to do so I took it back. Re-reading the 800 double-spaced pages I saw it needed a lot of work. But I had to concentrate on earning a living.
I never offered Refugees to anyone else. Today Mr. Cooke's agency represents award-winning authors, and stories about refugees come at us from all sides. I try not to think about the fact that my book would have been the first of them had I not let Fear govern a decision.
CHAPTER 52 of GLIMPSES -- 30
YOU ARE READING
GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.
Non-FictionDuring the first 30 years of my journalistic career in the second half of the 20th century, good jobs of all kinds were available all over Canada. Those of us born in the 1930s and early '40s were in great demand because our generation was very smal...
