I still didn’t have a car at the time so Marty loaned me his Volkswagen beetle. This model had a propane heater that you lit with a match which was absolutely terrifying. Marty was working as a journalist at the Windsor Star and couldn’t afford much time off. I was going to start the tour myself and meet up with him later. He would fly in half way through the tour and we’d finish together. I drove the VW from Erin to Sudbury, the first stop.
‘I knew the poet Robert Dickson who lived there. I was invited to his house and spent the night. I slept on a mattress in the basement. There was a giant granite rock rising up through the cement floor, part of the Laurentian Shield. Ten tons of unusual northern interior architecture.
‘The next morning I drove west toward Sault Ste. Marie but not that far. I stopped at a motel. I was nervous about lighting the propane heater in the morning and it was very cold. I did two readings before I drove to a place called Thessalon, then north about 170 miles through the bush to Chapleau where I was to meet Marty. The weather was dippy. The leaden grey clouds were moving in.
‘I phoned the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) in the Sault and asked them what they thought about the prospects of me driving that afternoon from the place where I was to Chapleau. The constable on the phone wouldn’t recommend it but if I was going to do it and if I dumped the car, I should not try to walk out but stay with the vehicle because they patrol that road every day. All I had to do was to survive for 24 hours. That unnerved me a bit but I set off. I didn’t have much choice. A couple miles up, this blacktop ended and I came to a large highway sign that said, ‘Caution, no civilization next 120 km., and the cloud bank was getting closer and snow flurries started coming down.
‘It was a hairy drive on what was an old logging road. Chapleau is totally in the middle of the bush. The town is there because it is on the old Canadian Pacific Railway line and was a way station where they switched locomotives. I checked into the motel and would pick up Marty at the airport early that evening about 7 o’clock. It was very dark. The airport was half the size of a small train station. Two dozen plastic chairs, one employee in his early 60s, and me. He was on the radio telephone in contact with the pilot of the plane which was a Twin Otter out of the Sault. The attendant knows who I am, who I am waiting for because he said he had heard us on the CBC radio talking about our upcoming tour of the Near North. The station attendant says, “You’re the poet. Your friend is on the plane. He’ll be a little late.” Silence. “I know a little poetry.” he said, and recited from memory The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert Service. All 600 lines. It was memorable.
‘The Otter finally came in sight. It was a dicey landing because the snow banks on either side of the runway were about 14ft. high and only a couple of feet wider than the wingspan of the plane. The pilot put the plane down spot on the money.
‘We spent the night in Chapleau before driving to Cochrane, then west across the north shore. We did a reading in Hearst before returning. The next
morning we got on the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee. In the summer it is a tourist train full of white people from Cochrane. In the winter it runs much less frequently, every third day. This 250 mile run straight north to the bottom of James Bay is on Arctic tide waters as they say.
‘The railway car was full. 120 people. Marty and I were the only white people. The others were Cree. I never felt racially different in Ontario before. I did that morning. The train starts to move. The tracks aren’t very good. The speed limit was barely faster than you could run beside it. Then this one fairly heavy, maybe 300 lb, 5’11” significantly drunk Cree Indian wearing a red and black checkered lumberjack shirt came weaving down the aisle brandishing a very large hunting knife in the general direction of my head and taking exception to the colour of my white skin.
‘Fortunately we were traveling with John Flood, who taught at Northern College. He knew this particular Cree with the knife and his grandmother by name and was able to tell the native to put the knife down in his native language. He told the Cree that his grandmother wouldn’t like it if she knew he was drunk this early in the morning. More than I could have done. I thought that if he had taken a swipe at my head I might have dodged it but in theory I didn’t want to test him. He said he didn’t want us on his rail car. It runs in the winter for the benefit of the Cree who are the indigenous population here and we were intruding. The train continued slowly through the bush and getting off in the middle of February was not an option.
We arrived in the afternoon and were invited to do a poetry reading at the James Bay Educational Centre, the high school, the following day which was Friday. In the evening we went by the principal’s home and I asked what kind of performance or show he wanted. He said, “Whatever would be fine. One hour is about good.” We were flexible so Marty and I planned the hour.
‘The next morning I did ten minutes and then Marty did his bit. I noticed as I sat down, the male natives, all Cree, were getting restless very noticeably. Gervais was now reading his poem so wasn’t paying a lot of attention. We got to the 18 minute mark and I noticed some of the teenagers started pulling hunting knives out of their desk drawers and laying them noticeably on top of their desks. This was a subtle hint that the program was over. So I signaled my friend that…forget it, we are out of here. Subsequently we found out the typical class is 20 minutes. The attention span of a Cree teenager is 18 minutes. At 20 you are pushing it. At 22 you can get hurt.
‘The previous evening at the principal’s house we were introduced to a young Cree woman. She asked if we wanted to go on a tour of Moosonee. We agreed to do that on the Friday afternoon. It was already dark. The temperature was about -35 c. We were wearing heavy parkas with hoods and toques. We stepped outside and started gasping for oxygen. She showed up at the hotel on her skidoo wearing a t-shirt. She took us for a half hour drive around the town as fast as her machine would go. She didn’t find it particularly uncomfortable.
‘Another thing happened that same Friday night. We were invited to do a reading at radio station C-R-E-E, the voice of James Bay. It’s a one story building like a portable school classroom, but had glass walls. Not very big but there was not a lot of competition in the area. We could read our poems on the air to whatever audience there was. I had a bunch of poems I had written about working on the railway which I thought would be appropriate. I’m reading the poems and interspersing them with Johnny Cash songs like, I walk the Line and Orange Blossom Special.
Tim recites;
After the sun is low
enough at least to cast fence-post
shadows the breadth of a country
road, there is a man
who will wait for a train
'We were having a great time entertaining ourselves.
‘Moosonee is north of the tree line. All you see is snow…forever, like all the way to the North Pole. Through the glass wall, way in the distance we saw a little spot of people on the snow and ice coming toward the radio station. As the knot of people got closer we saw there were seven young girls about 12 or13 year’s old carrying cases of beer, 12 packs. When they got up close to the plate glass windows where we were in the broadcast booth, they put the beer down in the snow, took out the full bottles and began pitching them at the plate glass windows which broke and glass was flying everywhere. They were upset because normally at this particular time on the Friday evening there was request hour and they didn’t want to hear any poems.
‘The poetry tour was funded by the Ontario Arts Council who require you write a report after the fact. I did. I told them the dangers of travelling in a rail car in the dead of winter. I told them the expected duration of a poetry reading at James Bay Educational Centre and of replacing Friday evening request hour on radio station C-R-E-E. My report never got a response.
