Chapter 23

    At that point in the family history, my wife's parents were still living on Sixteenth Avenue West, the house where Shawn had lived when we were courting. In her basement room, three weeks after we had experienced our first conclusive encounters, I had fallen in love with Nelson, from browsing through her scrapbook. That Friday evening there were no student parties, no interesting movies we had not already seen: there was nothing to do but look into this - as it turned out - fascinating record of not only her past, but the history of her time in the town she grew up in.
    By this time I was stunningly - and gratefully - aware that I had never in my life met a woman who had such a deep and profound - and of course, God given - appreciation of the best and the most colorful in her fellow human beings. Her cross-section of friends, her student clubs and associations, her appreciation of faculty and all the culture they stood for, was utterly remarkable. That was the lesson of my first three weeks or so of knowing her well. Then, on that Friday evening with the scrapbook I saw that power of empathy and gratitude at work again, this time for the community that had raised her.
    Now I was about to see that very town, and what had become for me its very heartbeat - or so I thought - the little Catholic university, just a decade in being; and it was just after mid-day that I caught the Greyhound bus for Nelson. In those days the run took longer, as in the daylight the bus travelled from Osoyoos to Rossland through northern Washington state, while at night, on the Canadian side, it twisted over a wonderfully scenic but necessarily slow, mountain dirt road. When I came back four years later, for good, the provincial department of highways had built the paved highway route from Christina Lake to Castlegar known as the Blueberry-Paulsen, and the bus run was something like four hours shorter.
    I must confess that throughout the trip I was utterly delighted to be travelling toward Nelson: my heart was as full of hope as Ulysses', when he knew he was finally on his way to Ithaca, and I rather doubt that I was in any way convinced that my hopes for a college post, teaching English, were about to be dashed against the rocks. I had spent a full year appreciating the wisdom of the Summa Theologica, almost that long reading the Ascent of Mount Carmel because God had made its study as necessary as it was totally satisfying and purposeful, and I had also assumed a quite respectable relationship with the English and American Catholic writers and thinkers of the past - at that time - hundred years. I also knew that I was a writer, perhaps not yet published beyond the columns of the student papers and the daily press of a major city, but still someone with a talent that would one day - as the Lord many years later would say to me - rest among the English greats. After all, someone would eventually have to deal with those four hundred years of Anglican eccentricity, and regardless of whether or not I had any original, creative, ability, I had by then enough analytical experience, from the genuine scholastic standpoint, to understand that the Tudor and Stuart follies had cut England off from the necessary genius of the Counter-Reformation, and especially from the necessary genius of the three incredible Spaniards: Ignatius, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross. I loved English literature, but I knew its defects, and I knew the deeper sources where the souls of the young could feed with deeper adventure and absolute security and purpose.
    There was a point on the bus trip, too, where my cause appeared to be proclaimed by the circumstances of Providence. It was close to midnight, perhaps after the witching hour, when we stopped in some small Interior town, where through the windows of the bus open to the night air I heard the voices of two Grade Twelve boys, both thoughtful lads, talking about the end of the school year and their hopes for further education. It seemed to be a good sign. I really did feel that I would like to be a teacher - I had not always - and I felt prepared. And the night certainly seemed full of poetry, full of the smells of late spring in the country, and the markedly individual sounds of the hour, as well as of the musings of two young men upon their future.
    I sleep well on buses, but there was a moon in the clear sky that night, shining on the still snow-capped peaks and our twisting mountain road, and once we were east of Osoyoos I was in a part of our province I had never seen before. Also, our nine months on an island less than three miles long had reminded acutely how fond I was of an expansive geography and the means of getting about in it. I felt myself to be entering a land I would be very happy to live in forever, and I wanted to be aware of all the moments of our first encounter. Landscape has always been a member of my immediate family, and that of the Kootenays was to be no exception.
    By the time we descended into Trail, it was full light. I bought a copy of the local paper, the Daily Times, and read it quickly so as not to miss more of the passing countryside that I could help. But the paper too was part of the local flavour: I had not picked it up because I was anxious about world events; perhaps I was nothing but confident in my upcoming pitch to the president of the college, and I thought I should settle into studying local issues and interests as soon as possible. I was not to see Trail for five years after that fateful journey, when Shawn and I would be part of a quite wonderful folk music concert in the smelter workers union hall.
    Certainly part of my severe feeling of disappointment in failing to land a post, as it was to turn out, was the landscape. The bus rolled along between mountains, beside the Columbia River, even, in the area of Birchbank golf course, past the spot where my grandfather, just after the First World War, had operated a small truck farm, from which he had sold butter and eggs to Selwyn Blaylock, the manager of the smelter. My father had told me a story of watching the family horse drop dead in the field, from eating the grass poisoned by fumes from the chemical rendering of the silver, lead, zinc, and gold, and of the general slaughter of the area's deciduous trees, but then had come the electrolysis attack on the problem, after the famous law suit by the Wenatchee farmers, downstream Americans, the conversion of trouble into fertilizer, and once again the hills of the valley were green.
    At Castlegar, we encountered the Kootenay River system - some of which I had seen from the air and the to[ of a dyke in 1956, when I was a Vancouver Sun reporter - turned right, and aimed straight for Nelson. In the Kootenay valley, the hills were even greener, and the succession of dams and pools and stretches of turbulent river was quite unlike anything I had seen before, and that here lay a history I had not much, heretofore, thought about. I gazed and gazed at the passing countryside of well-kept houses resting in the midst of fields and large garden plots, alternation with stretches of evergreen timber, and found myself wondering if there could be a more idyllic area to live in. All this rural, or semi-rural, ambiance, with the forest at the back door! What could be more wonderful? In the '58-69 winter I had had a vision of the Kootenay-Columbia river system while watching a television study on the question of the new dams on the Columbia, and now I was within that vision! Of such well-arranged coincidences, or providential occurrences, are myths and legends made! My heart, my soul, could do nothing other than expand.
    The scene was the same, wonderfully the same, all the thirty miles into Nelson, with the simple. and even more attractive, exception that close to that little city, the small farm clearings, shining green in the morning sun, held their spaces hundreds of feet above the river. The hanging gardens of Babylon could have been nothing like. In earlier days, I was later to learn, many of these emerald pastures had been dairy farms.
    As my chat with the President was scheduled, I think, for the late morning, I arrived in Nelson well in advance. The bus station in those days stood at the corner of Baker and Hall, the south-west corner. I ate a leisurely breakfast of bacon and eggs in the station restaurant, asked directions to the campus and then started off on a mile walk. Since those times Greyhound has twice relocated their bus depot, but the corner, except for a respectable period as a Salvation Army thrift store, has usually had to do with food and coffee. In its latest persona, it was taken over by a family of some of our closest friends. And for the past couple of years it has been one of the two or three watering holes where I infallibly get the grace to write a few lines of the big poem while I sip my morning beverage. Although the first sketches of the epic were wrought in the silence of this study, all subsequent production has so far only been possible in a cafe, first thing in a morning, while my fellow citizens are gearing up for their day's work. The Muse insists on this condition, perhaps because He thinks I will be best fed by participating in their hopeful expectations of the day ahead.
    There is an interesting coincidence. The man I was about to try to discuss my future with belonged to a religious order whose headquarters were in the New York area. As I write, it is a week since that city was so severely damaged by the passenger jet suicide flights into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.
    In those days, in the 'Sixties, Islamic fundamentalists were not a threat to our part of the world. The enemy then was Communism, and it was not much of a threat either, in the Diocese of Nelson, but certain Catholic clergy were to use this supposed menace, and its sometime supposed ally, trade unionism, as the paper tiger against which they could exercise their own supposed virtue in order to cover their actual vices. I suspect that our region was not alone in this convenient exercise in smoke and mirrors. Patriotism is sometimes the first refuge of a scoundrel, and it was to be better than twenty years before the justice system charged and convicted at least the priests who preyed on children. Sadly, it has been able to do little to the clergy in authority, who, because they were intemperate themselves. colluded in keeping the pedophiles in their positions.
    In a story of the spiritual life, which is fundamentally about the encounters of a soul - and its associates - with God, how much space does one give to a villain? Certain critics have suggested that in writing Paradise Lost the poet John Milton gave too much attention to the Devil, and I suspect that I might agree with them, because I certainly never found in that lengthy epic the same clarity and usefulness, on the same subject, as I discovered in John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, as well as other doctors of the Church. So how much effort do we put out for such as the Reverend Aquinas Thomas, S.A.? Well, even naming such a fellow requires a certain setting aside of human preference. It would be more pleasant to ignore his appellation, and simply pass him off as "The President", or, even more consoling, to be able to ignore his destructive vices and comment only on some lasting contribution to education, especially theological education, in our part of the province.
    Yet an artist must be honest, and a theologian must recollect the villains of Holy Scripture. Was not Saul a fool to be envious of David, the saviour of his kingdom> And this wretched cleric, following in the tradition, would eventually run into the problem of the musician, the singer, who also had the Word of God on his mind.
    But this was in the future. In the present of 1960, there was simply the friar of some forty years, in his robe and his sandals and his office in an utterly autonomous Catholic college, on one side of desk and a twenty-four year old layman convert young husband on the other.
    Although I told Father Aquinas I was a mystic, I did not tell him about the spiritual apprehensions of having to someday come to Nelson. I think my entire focus during the interview had to do with my own capacities to teach English literature as an introduction to the Scriptures and Saint Thomas, and I was equally concerned to evaluate just how much of a Thomist this priest was.
    He did not challenge my claim to a special relationship with God, but he did startle me by asking me how well acquainted I was with John Dewey, the American philosopher - so called - of education. In retrospect, I have to say that it was, up to that point, the stupidest question I had ever had from a Catholic priest, a wonderfully irrelevant reference to the work at hand, for I had by that time read a fair bit of Gerald Vann, the Dominican educator, and I knew that Dewey was about as far from his wisdom as a thinker could get. Nonetheless, when I got back to Vancouver I did lay hands on a copy of Dewey, dutifully read it, and was at a total loss to know why Father Aquinas had asked if I knew his thinking.
    No, he would not hire me. The lack of a degree made a job at the college impossible. But my wife had a degree, did she? He might be interested in her, he said, but I was certain this was not our road. Shawn was not only about to be a mother, but our time in the schools of Alert Bay had proved that she was not fascinated by a lifetime of teaching, whereas I was obviously getting more and more anxious to whale the tar out of a blackboard, somewhere.
    Given the enormous appeal of the original visions of life in the Kootenays, I was understandably cast down by this decision, and puzzled as to why I had been so inspired to come in the first place. But I did not fuss: ever since the dark night of the intellect in my days in the UBC faculty of law I had become something of a veteran of contradiction. I knew that God must have had a reason for my journey. But I did feel the disappointment, especially when I took a walk along the forest road about the college, beside the creek and toward the Great Northern Railroad tracks that my father-in-law had once been responsible for. To someone like myself, with such a combined affection for theological study and the wilderness - I mean real wilderness as opposed to the tamer pleasantries of a city park - I could not think of a more ideal location for living and working and creating, and I must admit that I felt the meaning of sacrifice. I may even have shed a tear or two.
    I was taking the stroll to kill time as well as to sort out my feelings. Father Aquinas had kindly invited me to stay for lunch in the campus cafeteria and it was still half-an-hour before noon. When I came back from my walk, thoroughly satisfied with the geography, and reconciled to my not being able to move to it immediately, I rejoined my host, at the faculty table, and sat directly across from him.
    Half-way through the meal, fate - or Providence - struck with a vengeance. A very attractive young woman, eighteen or so, suddenly disengaged herself from one of the student tables and came over to speak to our monk. She stood close to him, so that she could speak quietly, and I did not hear what she had to say. I was neither introduced nor included in the conversation, which was rather brief anyway and apparently none of my business. I would have taken no further notice of the event except for one small contingency: Father Aquinas blushed. Not only that, but he realized that I say him blush.
    You cannot hang a man, of course, because he blushes. It is generally understood, as well, that a good soul can blush for the indiscretions of a bad one. But I was not a little stunned, and never forgot the incident, although it was to be almost forty years before I was given the evidence that explained it. Not having the evidence at the time, I was left puzzled, and, mindful of the words of the Lord: "Thou shalt not judge.", I was reluctant to jump to conclusions. I finished my lunch, said thank you and goodbye, walked back down the slope to the bus station and caught my ride back to the Coast. The eastern part of the route lay first to the south, to the American border, and then over Highway Twenty, in northern Washington, to the Okanagan River. I remember blazing blue skies and fields and fields of hay, and perhaps winter wheat. I had a seat to myself all the way for that part of the journey, and somewhere along it I really did break down and cry for a couple of minutes or so.