Born Naked (7 page)

She knew for a fact that the prairies were in the grip of a devastating drought, one of whose manifestations was cyclonic dust storms which whirled the topsoil off eroding farms and left their owners destitute. She had also gathered from the newspapers that the Depression was laying an even heavier hand on the prairies than on Ontario. All in all it was beyond her comprehension why anyone would want to go to Saskatchewan.

However, Angus was determined to make the move, and I backed him up. Our motives were essentially the same. We were men, and Adventure was calling.

My own image of Saskatchewan was of an enormous green plain rolling to an unimaginably distant horizon, inundated by black hordes of buffalo and inhabited by Indian tribes who rode their horses as if they were one with their steeds. My twelve-year-old's imagination assured me that the world of the Wild West was still alive.

Although I did not take part in the discussions which ensued between my parents, I was well aware of them. I knew by my mother's air of gloom and bouts of tears that she was fighting a losing battle. I was glad of it because, as each day passed, I wanted ever more desperately to go west. I closed my mind to her travail. It was not until many years later that she told me how she had felt at the time.

“You see, Farley, what Angus was asking me to do was give up not just the world I knew but most of the people who were part of my life. I would be cut off from all those I treasured most, after you and Angus. Perhaps it was very selfish of me but I wanted to stay where I felt I belonged. Going adventuring into the unknown does not attract most women, you know. It frightens most of us, or so it did me.”

At the end of January, Angus tendered his resignation to the Windsor library board, to take effect on June 30. We were committed to one of the great adventures of my life.

 

 

 

7

 

 

ONE OF HELEN'S MOST POTENT
arguments in her struggle to dissuade Angus from going to Saskatoon was that he would be leaving behind the world of waters and boats which had always been so much a part of him. No more cruising on the bay. No more voyaging on Lake Ontario. Saskatchewan was a “dust bowl,” a semi-desert, and Angus must surely despair of such a place.

The argument was sound but it did not take into account my father's capacity for self-delusion, with which he now set about manufacturing the illusion of a maritime world in the distant West.

To begin with, he determined that we would not make the journey by train, as sensible migrants of that era did. No, we would become as one with the early pioneers and head out in a covered wagon. Although (in order to enlist my mother's romantic instincts) he initially described the proposed vehicle as a “kind of gypsy caravan,” what he actually had in mind was a
prairie schooner,
one which he would design, build, and pilot himself. As captain of his own ship, with Helen and me as crew, he proposed to make the passage to Saskatoon in nautical fashion.

Through the good graces of another of his high-flying friends, Angus got free use of a heated building at the Corby Distillery in Walkerville. Here, in early February, he began constructing his vessel.

There were those amongst my parents' acquaintances who thought and freely said that the choice of this locale for such an endeavour was inspired. “If Angus wasn't drunk when he got that crazy idea, he will be before he gets very far along with it,” was the opinion of Alex Bradshaw, our neighbour in the next apartment. But Alex was wrong. Although my father drank whenever conditions were right he was no alcoholic. He was a man so dedicated to his dreams that not even the proximity of tens of thousands of gallons of whisky could seduce him from his purpose.

During the next six months he spent most of his week-ends and holidays building a ship's cabin about eight feet wide and fifteen long, mounted on the four-wheeled frame of a Model T Ford truck. Uncompromisingly square both fore and aft, it had a cambered deck high enough to provide headroom for a tall man. Angus framed his vessel with steamed, white oak ribs and sheathed her with tongue-and-groove cedar planking, over which he stretched an outer skin of marine canvas. “Ought to be able to stand up to a hurricane,” opined one of those who came to see her growing. “Yep, but it'll take a locomotive to shift her,” another concluded. Angus kept his peace. He knew, with the assurance of perfect faith, that Eardlie would be up to the task of hauling our prairie schooner half-way across the continent.

I shared his faith and helped him at work as far as I could—which wasn't very far. Although I loved fiddling with tools and wood, I could not then and still can't measure things with anything like the accuracy required of a craftsman. One day when I had made a cut half an inch short in a piece of wood for the caravan's frame, he said to me, quite unkindly, “Bunje, my lad, you are without doubt the roughest carpenter one man ever told another about. Why don't you take up knitting or finger-painting?”

Angus was an excellent carpenter, and he fitted out the vessel's interior with skill and cunning. The trim little galley boasted a small ice-box, a gasoline camp stove, and a tiny sink. There were two main berths in the afterquarters. A smaller, folding, pipe berth, slung across the stem, was my rookery. Built-in bookshelves, lockers, a table, and a settee completed the furnishings. The whole was made bright and airy during daylight hours by six large ports, and at night by two brass oil lamps set in gimbals. The windows—sorry, ports—were fitted with red and white striped awnings which could be demurely lowered when the vessel was at anchor.

Angus painted his new vessel green and christened her
Rolling Home;
but she was better known as Angus's Ark which, being difficult to say, was shortened to the Ark.

On Saturday morning, August 5, 1933, the Ark set sail on her maiden voyage—a trial run, as it were—to Oakville, from whence we would take our eventual departure for Saskatchewan.

The omens were not propitious. When only a few miles on our way, the unwieldy vessel (which, because she had four wheels, tended to sheer wildly from side to side) escaped my father's control and ricocheted off a curb, knocking several of the wooden spokes out of a front wheel. Angus had to drive Eardlie back to Walkerville and search out a new wheel, leaving Helen and me to explain to a crowd of the curious what the Ark was and what she was supposed to be doing. The reaction was one of incredulity.

“She'll never make it!” said an onlooker. “Nope. You'd best haul her onto the nearest bit of ground, Missis, and plant some flowers out in front, and settle down right here.”

Helen might have been content to do just that but Angus returned with a new wheel, repairs were effected, and we continued to our first destination, Port Stanley on Lake Erie. We moored for the night alongside a friend's cottage and I went happily off to swim in the lake, while Helen cautiously cooked our first meal
en passage.
This consisted of scrambled eggs on toast, coffee (milk for me), more toast, and honey. As time wore on, she became somewhat more adept at coping with the galley stove which, if not carefully watched, tended to flare up and incinerate the cook.

The captain wrote in his log next morning: “A pretty sleepless night. In the next cottage, a party from Detroit made merry until 5:00 a.m. and Farleigh was seasick during the night and vomited over the side of his bunk into mine.”
7

I was
not
seasick. It was simply that the excitement of our departure had got to my stomach which was notoriously “delicate”—a condition which my grandmother Thomson blamed on “all those soda biscuits and honey the poor lamb had to eat when he was small.”

The following day we reached Oakville, where we remained for two weeks with Angus's parents. They were then in their seventies and gloomily viewed our departure for the Far West as a final separation. Grandfather Gill numbed his sorrow with the contents of a bottle of rye which was Angus's parting gift. Grandmother Mary withdrew to her bedroom after having frigidly stigmatized the removal as “more foolish nonsense of the sort that has distinguished the Mowat men for generations.”

We “hauled anchor” on the morning of August 21. Angus had used some of the intervening time to adjust the tow bar so that the Ark no longer sheered about like an unbroken stallion on a slack tether. Nevertheless, she did not tamely follow Eardlie, and the Captain still had problems with the helm. “Going through London we found the narrow streets and fool street-cars a distinct nuisance,” he noted angrily. I hesitate to think what the streetcar drivers must have felt about us. Certainly we must have been a trial to motorists on the open highways for they had to dawdle along behind, sometimes for miles, before finding a stretch where they might safely pass our lurching behemoth.

Because the rumble seat was packed full of luggage, I began the voyage crowded between my parents on Eardlie's narrow front seat. All of us soon grew dissatisfied with this arrangement and, after a few days of querulous discomfort, Angus asked me if I would like to ride inside the Ark itself.

What a question! Would I have liked to skipper the
Queen Mary
? Would I have liked to pilot the
Graf Zeppelin
?

The upshot was that I travelled most of the way to Saskatoon in command of a vehicle which adopted as many guises as my imagination willed. One of these was a World War
I
Vimy bomber. Crouched on my pipe berth in the stern, I kept my Lewis gun (actually a Daisy air rifle) swinging from side to side as I waited for pursuing Spads or Fokkers to fly into my sights. I would insult pursuing enemy pilots with such gestures of disdain as wagging my fingers in my ears, sticking out my tongue and, yes, even thumbing my nose, before pouring a burst of machine-gun fire into their vitals.

My parents were baffled by the hostility displayed by some overtaking motorists who shook their fists at Eardlie, yelled insults, and on one memorable occasion flung a hot-dog with such accuracy that it splattered mustard all over
Rolling Home
's bluff bows.

Angus would bare his teeth at such displays of incivility and fling pungent epithets back while Helen, who hated displays of raw emotion, cringed in the seat beside him.

In 1933 one could not drive east and west across Canada because no road yet spanned the great hump of granite and spruce forests north of Lake Superior. Consequently, we had to cross into Michigan in order to make our way westward. This we did by taking a ferry across the St. Clair River from Sarnia to Port Huron.

Since Eardlie's best speed never exceeded twenty-five miles an hour our progress was leisurely. On a good day we might run a hundred and twenty miles. We made fairly good time on pavement but gravel roads, which became the norm the farther west we went, were our bane. Poor Eardlie could not seem to get a good grip on gravel, and slithered and slid about with abandon. Nevertheless he was always game and the log is filled with entries attesting to his fortitude. “This day Eardlie hauled
Rolling Home
over a steady succession of fairly high hills on the way to Grand Rapids, and did it without even a wheeze or a cough, though he did drink an extra quart of oil.” It is notable that Angus always referred to Eardlie as male, and in terms which more nearly applied to a horse than an automobile. But
Rolling Home
was
female,
as a ship must be. It seems not to have occurred to him that the idea of a horse hauling a ship across the continent was somewhat bizarre.

Many of the people we met along the way certainly thought we were a bit odd; yet, for the most part, they were kindly and well-disposed. On one occasion we parked the Ark in a munici­pal tourist camp but the day was too hot for Helen to do any cooking so we drove to a roadside café for dinner. At a cost of forty cents apiece, we had southern fried chicken with all the trimmings, and apple pie and ice cream. The proprietor was friendly, but too inquisitive for Angus's taste. He wanted to know where we had come from, where we were going and, in both instances, why.

“I told him,” Angus noted, “that we were sailing a prairie schooner to the west for a cargo of buffalo robes. The fellow looked out the window at Eardlie sitting there with his top down and replied thoughtfully, ‘Sun gets powerful strong in these parts. Lotsa folks been known to git sun stroke!'”

The route we were following required us to take a ferry across Lake Michigan, but when we arrived at the docks on the eastern side of the lake it was to find that
Rolling Home
was too high to clear the vessel's doors. We were told our only hope was to try loading her on a railroad ferry which sailed from Ludington, another port well to the north. It seemed a slim chance but the alternative—to drive all the way south around Lake Michigan through Chicago and its environs (inhabited mainly by Al Capone's ruffians, so we believed) was not attractive. We headed north.

The men servicing the huge railroad ferry,
Père Marquette,
were amused but helpful. “We
might
put that thing [the Ark] on a flat car and ship 'er over as cargo but then she'd be too high to go through
our
loading doors. Nope, that won't do. But we've got a train to load aboard and if there's room behind the caboose we might be able to roll that thing on too.”

Which is what they did. Ten men manhandled the Ark onto the rails and aboard the ferry where they lashed her tight against the caboose with Eardlie nosing up to her stern. We went on deck but Helen was concerned about our Ark.

“Whatever will the poor thing think? One minute she's a caravan, then a prairie schooner, and now a freight car. I do hope she doesn't get confused.”

The crossing to the Wisconsin side of the lake took six hours and was one long delight. I was especially thrilled when the second engineer took Angus and me below and showed us the engine room. I was barefoot, having lost one shoe the day before, and Angus was in flannels.
8
We were sights to behold when we emerged on deck again but what a spectacle those huge steam engines were, all brass and gleaming motion and spurts of vapour.

We then showed some of the crew through
Rolling Home,
in return for which the first mate asked us to the pilot house where we spent a fascinating hour amongst the radios, compasses, and other instruments, and I was allowed to put my hands on the great mahogany steering wheel. Later, at dinner in the saloon, we met a couple from Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, on their way home by train. They talked “west” with my parents and told us a good deal about the drought and the dust storms which awaited us.

Driving on from Manitowoc the next day, we reached Lake Winnebago, near which we anchored for the night, and
Rolling Home
became the recipient of considerable attention and admiration from the inhabitants of the nearby town. I wonder now. Was our visit the seminal factor which would one day unleash thundering hordes of Winnebago motor-homes to prowl all over North America? I devoutly hope we were not responsible for that.

Saturday, August 27 was notable because we had a strong tail wind with whose help Eardlie occasionally got up to thirty miles per hour and ran off a record passage of one hundred and seventy miles, consuming fourteen gallons of gasoline and three quarts of oil in the doing. Reaching the town of Hudson on the St. Croix River just before dusk, we anchored in the local tourist park. This dispirited acre of burned-out grass offered a superb view of the river valley, and some of the dirtiest toilets we had yet encountered. I went looking for birds while Helen went shopping at a nearby general store and Angus picked up a twenty-pound block of ice.