Born Naked (8 page)

In the Thirties every town and most villages had a public tourist park which provided, usually free-of-charge, outhouses, running water (cold), fireplaces, and sometimes firewood. These refuges were much used by migrants moving about the country in search of work. One such family was in the park when we arrived. It consisted of an aged, extraordinarily tall, thin, dirty, stockingless man; three boys from ten to fourteen in tattered overalls; two girls, quite comely in men's trousers; and a baby a few months old. What the relationship between them all was, heaven knows. They were travelling in a hopelessly dilapidated car, towing a broken-down trailer in which they carried a tattered tent and their camping gear. The girls seemed to do all the work while the old man slept. According to what one of the boys told me, they originally hailed from Texas, and had been on the road since March and were heading north to hoe potatoes.

Although sympathetic with their plight, Angus thought these people shiftless. Helen was a little frightened by them. I found them interesting and became chummy with the boys, who much admired my air rifle, but I thought them greedy for the way they devoured a plateful of cookies Helen offered them.

Much later, while reading Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath,
I would remember the cookie incident with a pang of shame, but at the time I had no comprehension of the miseries and degradation to which that family and several millions like them were being subjected. For them, the economic collapse of 1929 had not been a “depression” but a bottomless pit into which they had been plunged with small hope of escape. Most of the people with whom we shared the municipal “tourist” parks were, in fact, Depression refugees, desperately seeking work of whatever kind wherever they could find it. Although most seemed a cut above the family we met at Hudson, they were all enduring adversity of a severity hardly credible to most of us today.

On September 1 we were approaching Fargo, North Dakota, when, with astonishing abruptness, we found ourselves on the prairie. “Hell's bells!” cried Angus as we stared across a world with no apparent horizon. “We're at sea!”

We headed due west, into the blue, and it was goodbye pavement, goodbye hills, goodbye trees and shade and sparkling brooks. We drew our first deep breath of prairie dust. Eardlie squared his shoulders and his engine took on a deeper hum. On every hand, threshing machines were at work. Straw stacks were burning, sending blue smoke plumes into a bluer sky. Horsemen trotted across vast reaches of virgin sod where cattle grazed. Gophers popped up and down on every hand and rattlesnakes slithered into the ditches. We passed lonely, treeless, unpainted houses from which ragged children poured out to gape and wave at our swaying green house on wheels. Late in the day we stopped on top of a little hill. As far as we could judge from the road map, we could see forty miles across the prairie in every direction. It was awe-inspiring, for it seemed to be a never-ending vista.

The fascination of it for me was intensified by the stupendous numbers and varieties of animals. There were no buffalo, but gophers (ground squirrels) of several species seemed to be everywhere. Ducks by the tens of thousands clustered noisily in the few ponds and lakes (sloughs,
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we would learn to call them) that still held water. Huge hawks hung in the pale air or perched on telephone poles along the road, eyeing us balefully as we trundled by raising a cloud of dust behind us. Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds flowered like tropical exotics in roadside ditches; western meadowlarks sang loud and clear from the fence posts, and coveys of partridges and prairie chickens shot out of the wheat stubble like miniature rockets.

We camped near Minot and, with my trusty Daisy in hand, I took my first walk on the prairie in palpitating fear/hope that I might meet a coyote. And I did. But he was dead—long dead and desiccated from sun and wind. His lips were drawn back over white teeth in the dry rictus of a snarl, and one hind leg was firmly clamped in the grip of a rusty steel trap.

The next day I saw a live coyote slip like an ochre shadow into the tumbleweed in a coulee, but the dead coyote looms larger in memory.

We were then driving north within a day's journey of Canada. The heat was fearful and the world burned brown. We passed a sign that read “swiming 21 mi,” and our hopes rose. But when we got there it was to find a miserable little alkali lake and a ramshackle and seemingly abandoned dance hall set in the bleakest, most desolate situation that could be imagined. The lake was almost literally alive with thousands of mallard ducks which were not so much “swiming” as wading about in the muck. We did not disturb them.

On September 4 we crossed the border at Portal, North Dakota. Helen and even Angus were appalled by our first view of Saskatchewan. It looked like a desert in the making. Nothing green to be seen. Rough little valleys cut through low brown hills with not a drop of water in them. Here and there in the valley banks were the mole-like black holes where people had been digging for coal but we saw no people, no cattle, not even any gophers.

Seeking a tourist camp, we got lost and ended up in an abandoned village where gaunt, grey wooden buildings leaned against each other on an empty “main street.” We headed for Estevan, the nearest town shown on our map, but, before reaching it, encountered a few poplars still sporting some green leaves. There was a weathered farm-house not far away so Angus went to ask permission to camp in the grove. Mr. and Mrs. Gent graciously gave it, but pressed us to park the Ark in their farmyard instead. Angus wrote of them:

 

The Gents and their farm seemed to us rather a pathetic spectacle. They are English immigrants who have been 24 years here and raised a family, all of whom have had to leave the farm. The old couple—they were not really old although both looked it—were no farther ahead than when they landed in Canada. Yet, in spite of poor crops, drought and having to board coal-miners to stay alive, they remained cheerful and optimistic. Yes, there had been three years of arid drought, but next year it might rain. They had sowed 250 bushels of wheat this year, and harvested 500. But next year things might be better!

They have two cows and a little milk route in Estevan, nine miles away. They sell a hog or two each year and some fowl, and so: ‘we have managed to keep off Government relief, and that is something these days.'

Because of the drought they have to cart their drinking water from Estevan. Washing water comes in a ditch from the nearest coal mine and is black as tar. They were most insistent that we stay with them next day, which was sunday, for a chicken dinner and seemed deeply disappointed when we had to refuse. Having heard me complain that I did not like American tobacco, Mr. Gent pressed a package of old chum on me and would accept no payment. I don't know why the almighty couldn't let such folks have a little rain occasionally.

 

Next morning Saskatchewan showed another face. We woke in a chill grey dawn so cold we had to run the Coleman stove to heat up the cabin. We washed in cold coal water and then bade adieu to the kindly Gents and rolled out across the prairies bound north and west for Saskatoon.

But not before Mrs. Gent, cautioning me to secrecy, had slipped a fifty-cent silver piece into my pocket. I did not tell my parents about this until much later in the day. They concluded that this may well have been the only “cash money” the Gents had in hand but, after a great deal of discussion, decided not to send it back for fear of mortally offending them. Angus kept the money “in trust” for me, but not many weeks after taking over his new job, he began shipping library books to the Gents, who had mentioned that they could seldom find anything to read.

From this beginning, Angus eventually developed a travelling library scheme by means of which the Saskatoon Public Library circulated thousands of volumes to remote parts of the province where people had no other access to books. It was his contribution to easing the miseries of the Depression and it was no mean one either. Before we left Saskatoon, the library had accumulated a fat file of letters from people who wrote that the books they had received had meant as much to them as food.

Angus and Helen remained in touch with the Gents for several years. I shall not forget them. They were of the enduring quality that distinguishes people of adversity. I was to find many more like them in Saskatchewan.

 

 

 

8

 

 

SASKATOON STILL LAY SOME FOUR
hundred miles to the north-west. As we slowly made our way towards it over dusty clay and gravel roads under a brilliantly clear autumnal sky, the face of the land began to assume a friendlier guise. Although these prairies were also drought-stricken, they had not been so desperately ravaged as those in the south. The saffron-coloured wheat fields rolling away on every hand were at least yielding something in the way of crops to the men, horses, and machines that crawled across them. There were fewer abandoned farms. Although surrounded by glaring white pans of alkali, many of the larger sloughs still held central pools of water which were crowded with ducks. As we approached Regina, we began to pass small groves of aspens and poplars.
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These “bluffs,” as such groves are called in the west, grew increasingly numerous, dotting the country to give it the semblance of one vast parkland. The weather held calm, cool, and crisp, and none of the dreaded dust storms we had heard so much about rose to bedevil us.

Late on a mid-September afternoon we came in sight of our new home port. Straddling the broad and muddy South Saskatchewan River, Saskatoon's church spires, grain elevators, and taller buildings loomed on the horizon like the masts and funnels of a distant fleet immobilized on a golden ocean.

Founded three decades earlier as a Methodist temperance colony, Saskatoon quickly outgrew its natal influences. By the time of our arrival, it had burgeoned into a city of thirty thousand people embracing the beliefs and customs of half the countries of the western world. Many of these, especially the Doukhobors, Mennonites, Galicians, and Hutterites, would prove to be mystery distilled in the eyes of a twelve-year-old from the staid Anglo-Saxon province of Ontario.

While Angus searched for a house to rent, we lived aboard
Rolling Home
in the municipal tourist park which was attached to the city's exhibition grounds and zoo. There were no other “tourists” so we had the place to ourselves except for two camels, an ancient buffalo bull, and a pair of elk who, together, made up the population of the zoo. I was delighted with these creatures whose like I had never seen before and was convinced by their presences that Saskatoon was truly the gateway to a wilderness world.

Angus was also pleased with his first taste of our new home, but Helen had her reservations. “The place all looked so
new
and, well,
temporary,
as if it had been thrown up yesterday and might all blow away tomorrow. All those boxy little bungalows covered with grey stucco and those great, wide streets with numbers instead of names, and the wind whistling down them from the North Pole in winter and up from the desert in the summer. It didn't look like Heaven to me.”

It looked a good deal more like hell when, a week later, a dust storm struck. Soon after noon an oppressive darkness began to overshadow the city. Within an hour the sun had been obliterated and it seemed as if Saskatoon must suffer the same fate. Rising in the new deserts of the south-west and lifting high on the autumnal winds, the desiccated soil of the prairies drove over us. Helen lit the oil lamps in
Rolling Home
but so much dust was suspended in the air that the lamplight was diffused into an eerie glow. Everything we ate or drank that day, that night, and most of the next day tasted of the earth. It was an awesome experience.

Our rented house, when we finally found one, turned out to be one of the “boxy little bungalows.” It was small and poky, and its only claim to distinction was that it belonged to a player from the Saskatoon Quakers, a hockey team of some eminence in western Canada.

As soon as we were more or less settled, I was sent off to Victoria School (the second of that name for me), and I seized upon this God-given opportunity to rid myself of my Christian name by registering as William McGill Mowat. My parents were somewhat bewildered when they discovered what I had done but permitted the sobriquet to stand. Billy Mowat I remained throughout most of my time in Saskatoon.

Apart from school I had little to do with my peers that first winter in the west. Most of the neighbourhood boys skated and played hockey at every opportunity. I did neither. Furthermore, I was not prepared either to learn to skate or swing a stick, since I knew I would certainly make a fool of
myself if I tried. When pressed by the physical training teacher
at Victoria to turn out for hockey, I asked to be excused on the grounds that I suffered from a condition of the inner ear which so disturbed my equilibrium that, if I moved rapidly or turned sharply, I was liable to faint and/or throw up. He believed me because, I suppose, it would never have occurred to him or anyone else in Saskatoon that there was a boy alive who wasn't mad crazy to become a hockey star.

Although my refusal to play hockey put me outside the pale, I did get to know one boy on our block. The relationship was short-lived. One Saturday afternoon down in our cellar, he introduced me to bestiality, onanism, and homosexuality all in one fell swoop by first masturbating his dog, then himself, and finally me. He was successful with himself and the dog but gave up on me and then delivered the shattering opinion that my dick wouldn't work because it was too small. The truth was that I was terrified of discovery, for my mother was in the kitchen overhead and might have descended the cellar stairs at any moment in order to attend to our fractious furnace.

Coal was the universal heating fuel in Saskatoon and was of an inferior variety mined mostly at Drumheller, Alberta. Keeping the home furnace going was a skill that had to be acquired by men, women, and older children as a matter of survival. The proper adjustment of the two control chains which led from a panel on the baseboard of one of the main-floor rooms down to the reluctant dragon in the cellar was a fine art. One chain controlled the draft on the furnace door and the other a damper in the pipe leading to the chimney. Both had to be perfectly adjusted, and both were skittishly responsive to a score of fluctuating factors including wind, outside-versus-inside temperature, the amount of ashes in the grate, and fuel in the fire box. Any one of these, if out of synchronization with the others, could upset the whole delicate balance and result in a dead fire and a frozen house. Keeping the dragon's maw stuffed with coal, and shovelling out and carrying away its ashy excretions could also only be neglected with dire consequences.

Especially when the outside temperature plummeted to 50° below zero Fahrenheit.
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That first season was a truly chilling revelation of what a western winter could be and do. All through January and February, the thermometer remained below zero—usually twenty to forty degrees below! The cold seemed paralytic at first. It caused Helen intense pain by inflaming her chronic neuralgia whenever she ventured out. This was an affliction with which she had to bear throughout our years in Saskatoon.

Angus and I reacted to the ferocious cold with an excitement that escalated as the mercury dropped. We began romanticizing about being in the Arctic. He read all the books written by polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, while I buried myself in stories about the Hudson's Bay Company and the exploits of the intrepid Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the Far North. The high point of the winter for us was the day the thermometer fell to 52° F below zero.

Little or no wind accompanied these periods of excessive cold and the air became so still it seemed frozen into a crystalline solid, marbled by luminous blue columns of coal smoke and condensation slowly rising from heated buildings. Most automobiles would not function at such temperatures but horses could and did. By mid-winter Saskatoon had become a horse town and frozen horse balls abounded, to the great delight of boys who used them as pucks for street hockey and as projectiles against any suitable target, including the fancy fur hats affected by affluent businessmen.

The onset of spring was heralded not so much by the arrival of robins as by the reappearance of private automobiles from winter hibernation in garages and sheds where they had slept, jacked up on wooden blocks to preserve their tires. Eardlie was one of the first to emerge in 1934 and, seized by exploration fever, Angus set out in our little flivver to explore the world beyond the city. Mother and I went along on the initial trips but she opted out after our first encounter with gumbo.

The deep, rich prairie soil could and did (when conditions were right) produce bumper wheat crops, but when the frost came out it turned into a glutinous substance resembling the contents of the La Brea Tarpits. This was gumbo, and most Saskatchewan roads became gumbo quagmires every spring.

It took Angus a remarkably long time to realize that only horses and things with wings could deal with gumbo. On one occasion he got Eardlie so deeply mired it required four big percherons to extricate him, and they almost pulled the little car apart in the process.

Although I did not find many chums of my own species during that first winter, I was not without companionship. My parents got to know a professor of biology at the University of Saskatchewan who, recognizing my interest in animals, presented me with a pair of white rats.

I found these creatures so captivating that I gave them the freedom of my room. We happily shared the space until the day Helen discovered the female rat nursing eight or nine naked ratlets in a nest constructed inside one of my pillows.

The rats were banished to the cellar but my fascination with them continued unabated. In January of 1934 I wrote a letter to my paternal grandparents. “I suppose you have heard of my White Rat Company. It is progressing well and all orders for young ones will be accepted. I have never heard of such rapid breeders. Whew! I am told by a professor that if one pair of rats and their youngsters and theirs etc all breed, they will produce a total at the end of the year from 1500 to 2000.”

Not everyone shared my high regard for the little rodents. Most of our neighbours believed all rats—white, black, or varicoloured—were vermin and ought to be exterminated. When rumours about our cellar tenants got around, threats were made to report us to “the Public Health.” My father was annoyed at what he took to be an infringement on our privacy. I was indignant at what I regarded as rampant prejudice, if not racism, and began my first public crusade for animal rights. The following appeared in the “Victoria School Record” early in 1934.

 

If you were to ask me to name an interesting pet that can be kept in a small house I would immediately reply “the White Rat”. This small animal has helped mankind more than we can guess. When Pasteur was attempting to find a cure for rabies the rat played perhaps the most important role of all.

It was this little creature that took the deadly injections of dried rabbit brains by whichPasteur was able to determine whether his cure was effective… Most hospitals now have a room set aside for breeding White Rats for medicine. They give their lives that ours might be saved and although you could hardly call them heroic, their great service to mankind will never be forgotten.

Not only are they useful but they are very amazing as pets. They are exceedingly loving toward each other and when a male and female are separated for a few days they show every possible affection when re-united… almost everybody who comes into contact with White Rats in a very short time becomes keenly interested and warmly affectionate toward them.

Billy Mowat

 

By March my rats had demonstrated their affection for one another so successfully that the consequent population explosion was making our basement smell like a barn. When I could find no takers for the new generations (either by sale or gift), Angus reluctantly lowered the boom and my rat friends were exiled to the biology building at the university. I missed them very much for a time but, as spring exploded, found new interests to distract me.

No house in Saskatoon was more than a few blocks distant from the open prairie. When I stepped off the sidewalk at the end of 9th Street, I walked into a world not yet totally subjugated by Man and the Machine. Although most of the aboriginal short-grass plains had been replaced by wheat fields, enough remained, together with bluffs and sloughs, to sustain an astonishing array of natural life.

This life reached a peak of abundance in spring. Ducks and geese of a dozen species crowded the sloughs in such numbers that the roar when a big flock took wing was like the thunder of an express train. Mudbars on the river became so packed with sandpipers and plovers en route to their Arctic nesting grounds that, when they took off en masse, it looked as if the bar itself was lifting into the air. The poplar bluffs, redolent with the scent of balsam from sticky buds, and frothed with the transparent green of budding leaves, were metropolises of bird and animal life. Crows, magpies, hawks, and owls busied themselves building their nests amongst the stouter branches of the aspens while kaleidoscopic mobs of migrating warblers scoured the limbs and twigs for insects. Blackbirds, shrikes, and catbirds contested for nesting territories in the wolf willows surrounding the bluffs, and meadow voles, thirteen-striped gophers, and Franklin's ground squirrels rustled and whuffled through the cottonwood “snow” which lightly coated the floor in each of these separate little forests.

The open fields, whether composed of last year's stubble, ploughed land, or summer fallow, seemed equally alive with common gophers,
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garter snakes, meadowlarks, pipits, grey partridge, and sharp-tailed grouse. Insects were also having their heyday and prairie crocuses bloomed everywhere.

This was a world so thoroughly and vibrantly alive that I could hardly have avoided becoming enamoured of it even had I entered into it as a total ignoramus. As it happened, I found a guide who introduced me to many of its marvels.