A bit of Quesnel history

It's mid August, and the sky is pink with forest fire smoke as West Quesnel, on the other side of the Fraser, waits under evacuation alert. Opened in 1929, this footbridge once accommodated horses, wagons, and the occasional car, and served the area until 1970. As we trotted across the wooden planking, making the expected noise, I kept expecting a voice to cry out from below, "Who is walking across my bridge?" like in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Across the street stands the Hudson's Bay store, opened in 1867. Nearby lies an old boiler from the first steamboat to serve the Upper Fraser, the S.S. Enterprise. Another Heritage Corner artifact is a Cornish water wheel used in the Gold Rush.  The Collins cairn marks the successful overland telegraphic connection of Quesnel with New Westminster in 1865. The telegraph arrived in Barkerville three years, but it took until 1907 to reach the Yukon.

 

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

What happens to the emotional life of young Nathaniel when his mother, due to the secret exigencies of war, must seek to protect him and his sister by leaving them and staying away, entrusting them to the care of strangers?

When in spite of maternal vigilance at a distance, the boy and his sister are grabbed and chloroformed, how does he react? This violent incident results in a reunion of sorts with his mother, but she gives no explanation for her absence. Does he then evolve into "someone not intent on knowing himself but preoccupied with others?"

His father's elaborately explained departure preceded his mother's going. During her absence, a mysterious woman ethnographer suggests that the individual story is "not the important one," and the self "is not the principal thing."

Meanwhile, he grows fond of The Darter, a man who uses Anderson shelters to stash his illegally imported and possibly stolen greyhounds to sell to racetracks. With his protector, Nathaniel travels through "warlight" on the dim backwaters of the Thames. The Darter also finds the boy a summer job, where he falls into his first love affair.

As a young man, Nathaniel attributes his invitation to apply for an intelligence post in the Foreign Office to class, nepotism, and "the possibly inherited quality of secrecy." Taking up his job, he discovers that "with the arrival of peace, a determined, almost apocalyptic censorship had taken place." This is exemplified by the runaway fire in the Baker Street Offices of the Special Operations Executive, presumably set by the "burning officers" who operated worldwide, incinerating all the documents governments wanted to forget.

His late mother, Nathaniel learns, was involved before D-Day in the creation of "Thirty-two aerodromes, along with decoy airfields to confuse the enemy...built almost overnight in Suffolk." These "would never exist on a map," and "would vanish by war's end." Recalling his teen years "living in two worlds as well as two eras," he broods on his youth, when he was buffeted by conflicting stories and experiences.

In his anonymous office in London, while the higher echelons with more knowledge and power are housed above his low floor, Rose's son uncovers as much of her vanished life as he can. He learns that the man who has recruited her, whom she's "tethered to," is someone she met in childhood. Once a young thatcher who fell from her family's roof and broke his hip, Marsh Felon transformed himself into a BBC nature broadcaster and a Gatherer who recruits talent for the secret service -- "among the semi-criminal world or among specialists."

Nathaniel then uses the bits he has gleaned about his mother to imagine her life. Firmly tied to Felon, Rose questions their role, opining that "we are little better than terrorists now." After a long-ago promise kept, and a long lunch of champagne and oysters, Rose slips Felon's leash in Paris to walk the city alone. Returning to the hotel, she reflects that though he has "shown her over the years the great vistas she desired...perhaps the truth of what is before you is clear only to those who lack certainty."

Like his mother after her retirement, Nathaniel finds himself "once more back in a small repeating universe that included few outsiders." Men who once protected him, The Moth and The Darter, have receded to the "ravine of childhood," and after being recruited "almost innocently," he has spent most of his adult life "in a government building, attempting to trace" his mother's career.

In the end, he observes, those who remain in the Service continue to abide "by the secrecy of their roles," even after the war. Years later, these loyal people receive no more than "a quiet sentence in an obituary" mentioning that they "had 'served with distinction in the Foreign Office.'"

In a final effort to redeem his missing past, Nathaniel seeks out the Darter, whom he had abandoned long ago. To his disappointment, he finds not answers, but something quite unexpected. Thinking of the time he has lived through, and recalling how he watched a girl he knew "loosen a ribbon from her hair in order to dive into a forest pool where bouncing bombs had once been conceived and tested," he feels himself to be implicated in "sutras of cause and effect."

"We order our lives," thinks Nathaniel, "with barely held stories," gathering the invisible and unspoken and "sewing it all together in order to survive." Our fates are intertwined like those of the sea pea: "on those mined beaches during the war," this endangered vegetable rebounded from near-extinction, "thanks to the lack of human traffic," to become a "happy vegetable of peace."

The subtle glimmer of ideas and the elusive liminal images suggested in this book will stay with me for a long time. As in earlier works, Michael Ondaatje's luminous prose reflects his poetic bent.

Beautiful BC is burning -- again

Our intention was to return from a family wedding in Quesnel via Highway 1, then turn off at Hat Creek Ranch to go down through Lillooet and return by way of Whistler. Instead, we had to divert south of 100 Mile House because of road closures due to mudslides from Clinton south to Cache Creek. Passing through Kamloops, we saw the sun as a faded orb through a shroud of forest fire smoke. Below, beyond ghostly islands, the far shore of Lac La Hache is completely obscured by smoke, and a heavy haze hangs over the Coquihalla Highway. Eeerily similar to last year.

The Communist's Daughter by Dennis Bock

Image from Audible

Road trips require stories. This absorbing tale about Norman Bethune by Dennis Bock kept me occupied from Edmonton to Kamloops.

As his imagined Bethune writes to a daughter he's never met, Bock convincingly portrays the conflicting emotions of guilt and pride, sadness and joy, self-sacrifice and self-justification. As the doctor reflects on the people in his life, he acknowledges, "I cut my teeth on their sores, injuries, illness, and deaths," confiding that, "This life you hold before you is built upon the broken lives of thousands...in dark moments I see no more than an assemblage of their parts."

For this, he does not condemn himself, although "there is a sadness there. Any truthful man of medicine or science will tell you the same...how indebted we are to misfortune, upheaval and disaster...in the pursuit of science." It is "through tragedy and misfortune" that scientific facts are revealed to us. "Mastery and manipulation" are the goals of the scientist, and human suffering is "but carrion for the vultures of progress such as myself."

In real life, Bethune was well-traveled. He lectured internationally, lived in several countries, and spent his early married life running a medical practice for the rich in Detroit. In America, the narrator comments, "you can never rest, never appreciate, only aspire. It's like a war." Initially determined to become rich himself, he is instead drawn to "the underclass who have come for the American dream but will never have it." He soon finds himself treating the poor, whose only means of survival is "luck, guile, theft, or a combination of the three." The real Bethune visited the Soviet Union, and inspired by the idea of medicine practiced not for profit, became an early proponent of socialized medicine in Canada.

The conditions during the Spanish Civil War are brought vividly alive through telling details. On arriving in Madrid, Bethune soon concludes that to avoid suspicion and unpleasant encounters, he must shave his moustache and exchange his good quality clothing for the partisan's more humble garb. In the street, he observes a statue of Alfonso "in his suit of sandbags," and in a bar, he notices a republican who "smoked Ideales, the labourers' brand." Revealing a certain cynicism that lies behind his humanitarian drive, Bethune imagines the questioner of a suspected spy as he "waits with his hand on his gun for the preferred response."

Bethune is much more than a doctor. An amateur artist, he paints a portrait of a young girl to pass the time on the long ocean crossing from Vancouver to Hong Kong. He invents medical devices and systems, and writes a stream of articles for international newspapers and medical journals. He also produces a documentary film and tours widely to raise money for his medical cause. A man with poetic side, he describes the total darkness of northern China after the Japanese fighter planes have passed over: "the night in her mercy erases all traces of man."

In my years as an ESL instructor, I was told repeatedly by Chinese students how Bethune is revered in China, where he devoted his medical inventiveness and expertise to saving the lives of wounded soldiers during the Japanese occupation early in WWII. He met Mao Tse Tung in person, and they conversed about their Internationalist and Communist ideals through a long night.

What drew me to the title was a recent reminder of Bock's protagonist. A musical tour of China with fellow choristers in the spring took us through Shijiazhuang, where Norman Bethune is buried in the Martyrs' Memorial park. After the doctor's premature death from an infected cut on his finger, Mao wrote an essay in memory of Bethune. This was widely read in Chinese schools, and is still well-known.

Other memorials to Bethune are located in his birthplace of Gravenhurst, Ontario, and in Montreal, where he worked as a researcher at the Royal Victoria Hospital and is remembered at the McCord Museum. This year MDCM Candidate Christian Dabrowski presented a thesis on Bethune at McGill University. During his lifetime, Bethune's open communism was disapproved and his achievements downplayed in his homeland. In 2014, his alma mater celebrated his achievements and unveiled a statue in his honour.

Bethune has been a figure of admiration and controversy, widely discussed and written about. Former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson gives an interview about him, and Donald Sutherland portrayed him in one of the many films make about this fascinating man.

Dennis Bock's work, well researched and faithful to real history, takes us back to a time long gone, channeling a voice that is completely believable as that of the real Norman Bethune. It is a tragic voice, one that looks back over a lonely life with the courageous wish to face flaws and failures. This only makes the narrator more compelling. A sample can be read here.