Chapter 17

    One of the fascinating aspects of education I can think of is the fact that we first learn the great epics of our culture at an age when - a few youthful martyrs excepted - we have absolutely no capacity for imitation, except within the power of imagination. By the time I was ten I knew about Hercules, Jason, Odysseus, King Arthur and his knights, explorers and the couer-de-bois, Ali Baba, the hard riding gunslingers of Zane Grey, and of course the cinema's imitations of all these and their literary descendants. As I have said before, and see no reason not to say again and again gratefully, I was a constant reader and the happy possessor of a belief in the power of the myths of literature. Every encounter with a new hero was the discovery of another continent. (I have left out of my list, shamefully, Robin Hood, introduced to me in grade two by the spirited reading of a male teacher some of us were occasionally sent off to from our regular classroom schedule. The reading was carried out in some pitiful cubby-hole of a room, but the story was none the worse received for that, at least not by myself; and I can remember thinking that the tale was more wonderful than I dared to believe, although I was at first somewhat puzzled by the fact that the hero was also a breaker of laws.)
    The child is realistic, of course. He knows he is not a real Hercules, nor a Robin Hood. Yet he can pretend, build the castles and battlefields and distressed maidens of fantasy, and wait until he grows up. And at the same time, he can also be immensely contented, in between volumes of adult daring-do, with stories about children, in which, if there are any heroics, they are rather more withing the realm of a child's possibilities, and this seems to bring a different kind of glow to the adventure of reading. In fact, for all that I could also be overwhelmingly happy to come across a tale about someone more or less my own size, ability, and passions, and from time to time I seemed to bathe in a minor ecstasy of gratitude that some writer would take the time to make such a story-telling effort on behalf of a small and possibly insignificant person like myself. To read of a child simply being a child - and the child did not have to be a boy - in a city, on a lake, beside a stream, in the woods, with other children, sometimes evoked in me a belief that the Earth really was a paradise, no matter how badly things might seem to be going in the world around me.
    This is not to say that, as a child, I suffered any undue amount of abuse or privation. Even with my father's absence during the war I was well looked after by others - my mother had a watchful eye - and other family members or good adults when my mother was away - but childhood, like any other stage of life, has its scrapes and confusions, and in the midst of these, story books were always the might pull - and we need to feel for the Heaven that exceeds our grasp - of the saga.
    By the time I was ten, I'd had, I think it fair to say, some pretty nice adventures, according to the normal scales of boyhood. For one thing, I'd been able to travel a lot, due to the war moving my father and mother about the country; by the time I was seven I'd swum in both the Atlantic and the Pacific; by the end of grade five I had been taught in eleven different schools; I'd lived in quite a variety of pleasant, interesting situations other than the usual company of just Mom and Dad in the family home. But I had never been personally involved, as far as I could see, in any kind of epic tale. The war was an epic, of course, but I was not fighting it, and I was certainly not suffering in the way that thousands upon thousands of other children were. I had never gone without a meal, a jacket, a roof, or a bed, and I remember only three occasions in which I even came close to fear for my own life from the war. Two blackouts - one in Vancouver, one in Halifax - and a news report of V-2 rocket attacks on London.
    But reading the stories that I did, I knew that the sagas had to be out there, and I knew that eventually I had to find one for myself. The movies were no doubt an influence toward this line of thinking also, but the principal influence, especially in the way of creating the optimum setting and mood, was the written word. As a matter of course, films simply do not - with a few exceptions - create a genuinely literary mood, which in my dictionary is a metaphysical mood, the mood of the intuition of being from often the humblest of causes, and I knew that authors were my guides, my teachers, my infinitely inimitable prophets.
    Especially authors who could write well about the woods, the fields, the lakes, the streams, the beaches, the mountains, and the animals - and humbly respectful people, boys, girls, and adults - who populated them. I was not against cities: in a relative's house in Springfield, Ontario - or rather, in a farmhouse somewhat less than a mile outside the town - I fell into and thoroughly enjoyed the tale of one Little Maida, who rode up and down a mighty elevator in, I think I remember, Chicago. And by that time I had my own adventures, worthy of recall, from Vancouver, Toronto, and Halifax. But the primary instinct was for the bush, as the place where genuine sagas were bound to unfold.
    Experiences accrue, and even more unquestionably, so does the capacity to appreciate and understand experiences. And all things are wonderful to a child, especially the first time round. What was a little boy to think, for example, at his first sight of the huge, original, conifers of Burnaby's Central Park? This might stand of timber lay directly between the homes of my grandparents, the houses most constant to my first awakening, and thus I was born in the land of the Paul Bunyans who had cut down the Douglas Firs which had not been preserved by legislation. And going about on steamers and trains also seem a pretty epic undertaking. Moreover, if you lived where I did, you were aware of a very special feature, in the order of the outsize, known as the Interurban, a giant form of streetcar, running on real railroad tracks, between Vancouver and New Westminster - for my purposes - and then beyond New Westminster well out into the Fraser Valley, for the use of other souls, especially farmers shipping into Vancouver, so I have been told. This creature was as tall as a railroad boxcar, and, running as a single or double unit, powered by an overhead wire connected to the engines by a trolley, it could accelerate to great speeds in the twinkling of a transfer. Our neighbourhood was plainly serviced by power beyond the ordinary.
    So, walking under the trees of Central Park was an adventure, and riding the mighty interurban was an adventure. But I had done nothing to create these interesting features of my childhood landscape. Someone else had made the story of which I was such a minor part. Yet, I registered impressions; I thought; I speculated; I read.
    Then, in the spring of 1942, after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour and the ensuing fears of a Japanese invasion of British Columbia, my mother, my baby brother, and I all moved to the interior of the province, to the North Okanagan. As far as I knew, we were the only family to make such a move voluntarily - thousands of Japanese-Canadians, of course, were forced to take up residence away from the Coast - because my father, far away in England manning the ack-ack guns, could not bear the thought of his wife and children being victimized by the same unpleasantries as the citizens of mainland China and Hong Kong. His father knew a farmer, and it was arranged that we could stay on the farm.
    Now things were taking on more of an epic quality. There was an entire train ride, of some few hundreds of miles, overnight in a berth, with a layover in the historic station at Sicamous, and my first view of the dry belt of the upper Fraser and Thompson Rivers. I had a great sense of adventure leaving Vancouver, and in the morning , my first sight of the hop fields and that loftiest of deciduous trees, the Lombardy poplar. I was entering upon a new kind of landscape, and no doubt felt something of a kinship with Genghis Khan out on a conquest of a new country. The delight in these different natural features continued as we approached our new home and I could be sure that I had arrived in a kind of genuine cowboy country. There were no big cattle ranches at hand, but there were cows and horses and sheep, and though the ground was well timbered where it had not been cleared, the woods more much more open than at the rain forest Coast. There were steep, rocky, hills to climb, the parkland timber to easily explore, and running through the centre of the narrow valley, something I had never had a chance to deal with before, a clear, meandering, stream. The day we arrived at the farm where we were to live for a month - I think the month of April - the oldest son brought in a string of trout. I was sure I had come to Paradise.
    According to the original schedule, we were simply going to stay at the farm until the threat of a Japanese invasion was over. But my mother, by no means a country girl, and never the sort of person to take comfort in solitude with a bagful of fat novels, found this first setting unsuitable, and we were to spend the months of May and June in Falkland, hardly a city, but a least enough of a village to give her a little of the kind of social exchange that she was used to. It was to be in Falkland, one sunny Saturday morning, that I encountered the epic experience I wanted to introduce here, and I jump around a bit - we'll go back to the farm shortly - because it seem pertinent to publicly regret - largely with tongue-in-cheek - that I wish I'd know at six that I was going to be a writer, so I could have kept a journal. I've always been somewhat nagged by not knowing the right sequence of events in my pretty wonderful North Okanagan sojourn: there was a motel episode in there somewhere; did it come before or after the month at the farm? The motel was right beside the creek, my first creek, and of course an item of water much less significant - except to Falklanders - than my own English Bay and the Gulf of Georgia - but I can remember hanging over the little bridge and being utterly fascinated and absorbed by the movement of the water.
    Did we stay at the motel, for some reason, before we went on to the farm? Or did we have cause to pause at the motel before we moved into the place in town? It really doesn't matter one way or the other, but I've always been slightly bothered at not having the events in clear order, which I suppose in itself indicates the power of their impression on my youthful spirit. In recollection, it seems that I spent a lot of time looking at that creek, enraptured by the movement and by the sound of the rushing water, and some of that time carried the additional charm, for me, of it happening as the evening came on. There was a great magic in being by the creek as the light faded.
    I remember also that the people who kept the motel also kept a peacock. That was a first for me too, but the long-tailed bird with the amazingly ugly screech was nowhere as fascinating as the lively little stream.
    If we were not staying at the motel while waiting a day or two to go to the farm, we were there on standby until we could move into our new quarters in the town of Falkland itself, a back room in a comfortable little house on the edge of the community. I remember a very genial older couple, the husband of which I think worked for the department of highways. It is important to say that the house was on the east side of town, because the epic event in which I would become, if only a spectator, at least a very proximate spectator, occurred while some people were trying to get to the west side, where lay the rodeo grounds.
    It was a Saturday morning, or perhaps - ah, the missing journal - it was the morning of the Twenty-fourth of May, the Queen's birthday holiday. At any rate, I was out of school and the sun was shining. I don't think I was aware that there was anything special happening, I just knew that it was a lovely morning in a lovely world and I should be out and about. I think I also remember a bit of a struggle with my cautious Mom, to be allowed to go rambling, and if so, I can only say that my guardian angel must have been on my side, for I did get to go.
    I think also that my guardian angel must have put me into a literary mood - whatever that meant in a lad of six-and-a-half - even before I saw the horses, for I remember that I was thoroughly enjoying everything around me: the dirt road, the trees and grass and spring flowers, the sheer balmy air with the sun filtering through it; and I was especially pleased to be full up with the leisure to take it all in. Just being out and free to ramble was adventure and intoxication enough. I doubt very much that I was even looking for any excitement beyond what was already present in my wonderfully pastoral little town.
    And I must have been rambling, because our new home was not far from the road which was both highway and main street, as I remember them, yet I was coming back up to the main road from some location to the south, perhaps the railroad tracks.
    I think I felt the horses before I heard or saw them. I was no more than half-a-block from the intersection in question, and the ground under my feet was rumbling. I looked up, hearing, of course, the sudden thunder of hooves, and beheld perhaps thirty or more saddle horses, neighing, rearing, kicking up a mighty cloud of dust, being herded one on top of the other by a band of native cowboys: yelling, waving sombreros, crowding horse flank to horse flank themselves as they guided the broncs around a tight corner. It was all very fast, very noisy, the grandest vision of organized confusion I had ever seen, right out of a movie, and yet unforgettably real.
    It was also different than a film in that the cowboys were not whites, but native Indians, probably Shushwaps, and that was the second part of the amazement. Aside from the absence of a six-gun, they were quite as gallant and expert as any white cowboy I'd seen in the movies.
The remuda hurtled forward as directed, and much more quickly than my little legs would take me there, were safely herded safely into the pens at the rodeo grounds.
    I was allowed to go to the rodeo, later in the day, of course - who could have resisted the wide-eyed ecstasy that came flying in from the streets?- and viewed the whole thing with some of my knowledgeable schoolmates. I furthermore adopted a young native rider as my hero, and then had to suffer the sorrow of watching him break his arm when his bronc threw him, but the drama of individual riders and ropers going up against individual horses and steers and calves did not quite equal that first vision, of the thundering explosive, herd and its ki-ing, dark-skinned drovers.
    I'd had my first experience of the epic, that is, outside a book, a movie, or a comic strip, and I knew it.