Arctic Twilight: Leornard Budgell and Canada's Changing North

From April 1981 until June 1984, I was a Fine Arts student at Queen’s University in Kingston. Len is writing from St. Boniface Hospital, St. Boniface, Manitoba.

April 5, 1981

Dear Claudia,

I was touched by your call, but there again is something you would do and the lump in my throat wasn’t hospital food.

As Mark Twain said, The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. The Grim Reaper didn’t pay a visit.

I don’t know what happened. I was painting a ceiling at home, got down from the ladder feeling fine, and suddenly got a pain, not hard, in my chest. Felt a bit disoriented, and irritable. Muriel took my pulse and as it was not regular she called Dr. Bartlett who told me to go to emergency just in case.

So I came here and had more people fussing around. I felt like a chicken on the assembly line. I expected to see Colonel Sanders with his herbs and spices any minute. Forgot that he was already gone where all the chickens went, well not all the way either. He never would have qualified. At his age, more the boiling type, I’d guess.

By the time I was all trussed up, I was feeling as well as always, but I was shot up into intensive care, put on a monitor which had a little TV sort of screen with dinky little bleeps dashing backwards and forward which squealed (the machine, not the bleeps) every time I moved and if it squealed too often, the nurse came in.

After a few days they told me that I had not had a heart attack but I’d had an accelerated beat for some reason. So now I’m in another ward all disconnected from my TV (never even got to see MASH) and waiting for the results of tests. They have taken a lot of my old and rare blood for the tests which will make the Red Cross mad because I promised them some this very day, April 5.

Today I was slated for a stress test to see if the problem was caused by exertion (how dumb can they get). From what I’m told, I stand on a treadmill and run, like a squirrel in a cage, till they decide, acorns, nuts and pine cones gratefully accepted, also unbuttered popcorn. By the way, my writing is not the result of illness. This table wiggles if I breathe. It was supplied, so a label informs me, by Eaton’s Contract sales, and whoever would expect an Eaton’s table to stand still for an HBC writer.

When I was young, I had my tonsils abducted. Nurses were older people (could that be because I was only ten?) and they wore white things that crackled, especially in the night. One in particular had a face of vinegar, a heart of gold, and the voice of an angel. She also whistled like a spring lark which damaged the angel image for some people, because in them days angels didn’t whistle.

Nurses don’t rustle any more. They are nylon and polyester, which makes them seem a little different shaped to Miss Austin. They are also very, very young (could that be because I’m a little older now?), and they are incredibly patient and compassionate and their faces are tender and concerned especially when they are working with some of the really sick and elderly people.

Muriel comes every day and spends what must be a boring time, but I tell her that she’ll get her reward in Heaven unless she decides to follow me in the other direction. My daughters come every day and relay messages from all over, including Kingston. Miss Preston¹ and Mrs. McKillop² sent a card. My steno keeps in touch with my home and will come when she can.

I’m wondering how the word got to you. I intended to write as soon as I was liberated from the green-screen. I expect that you must have heard from Miss Preston. There are a lot of nice people around.

From where I sit, I can see across two rivers and there is Hudson’s Bay House, with a tattered corporate flag on the south end. I try to be The Bay’s conscience in this regard. I would like to see that all HBC flags are taken down at night and put up again in the morning and are always clean and tidy. Anyhow, at present we are sporting a tattered flag. Perhaps an irate letter from a St. Boniface patient would do the trick.

I see that it is time for stress test. If you don’t hear from me later, you’ll know I failed it and have gone wherever they send weary squirrels.

Back from Stressville. I went with some apprehension because everyone told me it would be terribly hard. There was a lovely elderly nun there, and I knew from her face that it wouldn’t be so bad and it wasn’t. I went the full course, and passed. The doctor told me everything was negative and while it indicates the old ticker to be in, as the Old Book Collector says, fair or better condition, we still don’t know why I am here.

All this hullabaloo on the eve of Moosonee³ is a bit wearing. I hope to be away on time, but if not, I’ll bring Ellsworth and Cal here and we’ll talk about it.

Did I tell you my Maureen is now senior systems analyst for Hydro and some of the men in the division won’t speak to her, but they have to listen and that’s what counts. The male sex can be a mite tetchy when their pride is disturbed, bless them.

The first day I was here I saw five lonely geese plodding north against the wind, and it was about sixty kilometres per hour at the time. Guess they just came by to say hello and remind me that these things too, shall pass.

Much later and on a more stable table, well, you know what I mean. I fell asleep over a recent Manitoba Nature magazine and woke to see Dr. Miller standing there reading my magazine and waiting for me to awaken. He said he was letting me go home with a twenty-four-hour tape recorder to monitor my ticker for a while. Kids who go to visit at farms hear strange things. That night, after I had told Mrs. Lowe⁴ on the phone about the monitor, she was telling her husband about it. Young Adam, who will be five, heard part at least, and some time later he asked why Uncle Budgell had to have a tape worm for twenty-four hours.

The rest you know. I’m home and feeling fine, and I realize that while I knew about all the nice people in my world, I didn’t really know how nice they all were.

So, 73’s⁵

Len

Written from Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Budgells’ home base when Len was not in Moosonee.

December 4, 1981

Dear Claudia,

Just a note to say I should have put a note in the little parcel of Moosonee high bush cranberry jelly I posted a day or so ago. I hope a little on your Christmas turkey will be what’s needed to get you headed that way next summer.

I’m listening to the Messiah and writing. I remember so many years ago I heard it in Notre Dame in Montreal. That was the first time I’d ever seen as well as heard it, and it left a great impression. A war had just ended and I’d returned from a rather hard time at Repulse Bay where the only music we had was an ancient recording of the Messiah, which old Father Henry used to play for me. He is described in De Poncins’ book⁶ as a saint, and if I have ever been privileged to meet one, I will call Father Henry that man.

He used to start the incredibly old phonograph and reverently sit with his hands pointed like a steeple against his chin, and he hardly moved except to change the records. I don’t think I knew what reverence was till I met Father Henry. For sure I never before met a clergyman who lived his religion quite so completely. Perhaps I cannot believe as he did, but I can admire and respect someone who can believe so completely and who can live a life of poverty and hardship in such enfolding faith.

We spent a very hard winter together. There was no food to be had except what we got from the land and not much of that. There was hunger. People died. There was no air relief in those days. One day I helped the father and a young boy lay a poor old lady to her rest in the usual tomb of stones. She had been ill a long time and no doubt would have died, but I saw her in an igloo which was completely unheated the night before. I had no means of heating my own place but I was young, healthy and not suffering. I knew that far to the south, the Canadian army was spending untold money on Operation Musk Ox,⁷ using ground and air equipment without heed to cost or quantity, and I was frustrated and furious that this small group of people must suffer so through no fault of their own.

And the father, while he agonized for them and had given them every comfort he had, and while he wept at every death, had a serene belief it was the will of his God and that good would come.

When I was at Repulse Bay there was a wonderful old man. He was still in good shape but his legs were failing and he could not see himself getting slower and slower and finally sitting around an igloo or in front of a tent for the rest of his time.

One day he came to see me. He had his winter’s catch of fur, mostly white fox, beautifully cleaned and dressed, even though it was a bad year and we had no fuel. He paid a small debt he owed the Company and he bought a few things. He left a balance on the books, and said when the ship came in summer, I was to see his wife got a new tent. That didn’t sound right, so I asked him if he was going away, perhaps to hunt for a long period. He said only, I will walk. Claudia, he took the things he had bought and dropped them off at his igloo, and walked out into a dreadful storm, straight across Repulse Bay. His wife, much younger, sat in the igloo and said never a word. He knew and she knew that she could stay alive, she could easily re-marry. She didn’t want him to go but she would not try to prevent him. The priest, too, he knew, and he prayed to his god, but he never condemned the old man to hell for suicide. It took tremendous courage on all sides, terrible cold courage, magnificent courage.

When the storm died, we went out hunting for him but it was weeks later that he was found, many miles away. He had found a piece of pressure ice about waist high and he had rested his arms on it and waited for the enemy that he had tested so often to come to him. And when he came and the old man could no longer hold his head up, he threw his hood off and laid his face on the hard ice and died there, fully aware all the time that what he did was for the better good. One less mouth to feed in a starvation camp, one less man that would soon be unable to sustain himself. In all his concern, this was the one thing he could not face, having someone support him, being a burden.

When they brought him in, Father Henry was there with me and he laid his hand on the old man’s sightless eyes in a gesture of simple love. He said no words but they were not needed. He welcomed him home. The old man had been one of his flock, and even in the priest’s strict code, he would not have it that the man had sinned. Does it not say Greater love hath no man.

Father Henry is dead, buried in the barren country he worked in most of his life. I hope his mission saw fit to mark his grave with Well Done.

I talk too much. Today I got up before daylight and drove up to the Shoal Lake area. The water birds have all gone but I sat near a huge windrow of trees that have been slashed in a land clearing operation. There are hundreds of snowshoe rabbits there enjoying the shelter and the food. They are white as snow, though there is no snow on the ground, so they sit there with complete faith in their invisibility while rough-legged hawks circle above…

There were two eagles, golden adult birds, and four or five hawks. The air boundaries seemed to be definitely defined, each bird barely intersecting but never overlapping the other, the hawks perhaps a hundred feet higher than the others.

The eagles banked gracefully and aloofly away. They looked as though they were not moving a muscle, just gliding around, but with binoculars I could see the minute adjustments of wing and tail feathers which formed the perfect air foil, and all the while their heads turned and their lovely fierce eyes searched the ground.

One reason I went to Shoal Lake was to see deer. The hunting season was just over and they are very shy, but at sunrise two came out of the trees and stood perhaps a hundred yards away. The frost from their night breathing had coated the long guard hairs on their backs and they stood between me and the sun in a most delicate halo. Have you ever seen how they can activate each and every muscle separately? They stood there missing the warmth they had enjoyed from one another while they rested, and I could see the little shudderings and could almost feel the delicious content they were feeling in the warm sun. Then a ray hit the lens of my binoculars and they were gone, leaping high over the stumps and windfalls but more in high spirits than panic.

I found their beds still warm and steaming, and in the crushed swamp grass I could smell that attractive musk that jumping deer have.

When I was young I spent days watching wildlife in the most beautiful valley I ever knew, Tororak, in North Labrador. There was so much land, so much space, and thank God, that space still exists there. But a day here shows how the space here is shrinking, and soon there will be an ugly aluminium smelter near Shoal Lake. There will be cars and people and bottles and cans, and the church will not be allowed to die quietly. There will be paved roads and fences and the eagles and mink and deer will be forced to move farther north so the people will have prosperity and will take their children to see deer and eagles in the zoo.

And the old and cranky people like me will be ungrateful and perverse and not see that it is good.

Later:

After my time in the woods, I got an axe and split a bunch of firewood. It was a bit frosty, and wood splits easily when it’s cold. There is not much to do with one’s head but think, and watching white wood split cleanly easily brings all sorts of thoughts crowding around. I like to split wood. In my time I must have split several thousand or more. I wonder how close I got to a million at a time when a million was a top number, because no one counted split hunks of wood, or capelin, or smelts, herring even. I’ll never know.

One nice old man used to count a lot of things, like the number of times he’d jig a hook up and down, the number of oar strokes to go from his fishing station to Rigolet. Once he counted our strokes from North West River to Rigolet. He and Hannah, his wife, rowed it, ninety miles. Couldn’t add it up because he could barely read and write, so he counted one hundred for every finger on his right hand, and made a mark on the thwart. Then his left hand and same thing in a tally, like so, 11. When he’d gone around five times, he had 11111, which of course equalled five hundred, but he couldn’t count that far. So he rowed and marked and marked and rowed for ninety miles, and when he got to Rigolet, he had one of the Eskimo boys figure it out, but it was no good because he had absolutely no conception of the final figure. Too bad. Old Uncle Tom Blake was a great old man. Another time he tallied the loaves of bread his wife baked in a year…

Len is in Montreal at a Hudson’s Bay board meeting. O’Halloran is the leprechaun Len has given to me.

January 18, 1982

Dear Claudia,

I’m on the twenty-sixth floor of the Hyatt Regency and my room looks south and west. The snow has stopped and the lights are all spread out for me as far as I can see. I am happy. There are ways I could be happier, but these you’ll get to see.

To begin at the start, it was a good day. I think you and O’Halloran were there in two of the empty chairs in that big boardroom that looks over the St. Lawrence and the Seaway and the docks from thirty-eight storeys up. Makes it hard to attend to the business at hand, but one must. We have had an exceptional year and it was nice to listen to congratulations and hear the figures come off the accountant’s tongue. Mr. Bell, who likes to jest, asked me how I felt, getting the company involved in a profit tax situation, so I said I’d never been criticized for that before and put it down to inexperience.

I told him, too, that I had had very adequate help and the Queen’s picture is always a nice reward. I had asked for a bonus for the boys who don’t get overtime, and at Christmas they got an extra $2000 to add to the first $3000, so no one is unhappy. I was very pleased that all my requests were given the green light. I’m not sure till Arctic gets their wage recommendation in exactly what increase the boys will be getting, but it will be over 10 percent. That brings my men up to, even a bit beyond, the oil country people and that’s what I have been shooting for. Also got money to revamp a trailer for a recreation area for them, and a TV and possibly electronic games. We’ll also have water and sewer and showers etc. and if there is room, we’ll move our coffee shack over.

They have agreed to confirm Jackie⁸ in her job at a man’s wage. Makes us the first equal opportunity employer in Moosonee. The accountant said, Are you sure that’s wise? and I said, Tell me why not. If I gave the job to a man, he’d get equal wages with the other men and possibly wouldn’t be of much use to me. He said he got my point, but I know he still wonders.

I also asked that all accounts payable be handled out of Moosonee and they agreed. Another job for Jackie which will make her happy.

I left the place pretty well satisfied when Mr. Bell suggested that since Cal and Ellsworth are key men and vital to the operation, that we pay them the winter retainer. I probably looked like the cat that had cream on its face at the end of the session. What do I gotta do in return? Just promise to be around a while longer, which I had planned anyway. Oh yes, and take a young executive to Moosonee as required, to show him a bit about the business.

Back in Winnipeg:

Seen from the air, you have a lovely white carpet in your country,⁹ which complements the dark water. The water shows all sorts of interesting patterns of small ice looking like they are clustering together to keep warm. Lake Ontario looks big and severe and impersonal from way up high, but it’s only a pretence because as the plane moves along, the sun skips across the water creating a smile Lake Ontario wide. I was sorry for a minute when we lost the lake and headed up toward Sudbury, but the trees were nice, all dressed up in brand new snow. I could imagine them on the hills and in the valleys modestly trying to keep their skirts down against the winter wind that blusters around and really is too careless about the prim little trees. The little streams, a lot of them still unfrozen, slip quietly along in their twisty paths and now and then two come together and hold hands. It’s nice to see them snuggle down quietly when you know it’s only a matter of time when nature will take away the white blanket and they’ll laugh and tickle one another through another long warm summer.

But Claudia, in the dark of winter even, it’s possible to follow a brook and listen as you go. After a while you’ll hear a subdued gurgle away under the snow, and it’s so nice and companionable to stand there in a completely silent world and hear that little chuckle away down deep in her chest. You feel she knows you are there and is playing hide and seek and giggling because you can’t find her, never dreaming that you don’t want to, that all you need is her voice that contrasts so sweetly with the cold silence above.

I like white on trees, on the ice, in contrast to the black leafless skeletons of the poplars and birches, dressing and accentuating the green conifers. Yes, white is nice. White is a feminine colour: white dress, chubby knees of a four year old, little knees that are scratched and marked but exquisite, on a pretty girl in warm summer, on my lovely old Aunt Bella, covering a long black dress, a snowy apron. Aunt Bella of the smooth apple cheeks and soft lips, who was always there when I was little, who helped me through so many childhood heartbreaks which are funny and poignant now, who was there to smile when I brought home my first goose, who held my hands in her tiny cool ones when I left home and made me realize that no matter what, she and my mother would always be there. I haven’t gone back for many years, but they are there, Claudia, waiting.

I used to love being in the office at Rigolet when they were making up mail to go by boat or dog team to the far ends of the earth as far as I was concerned. St. John’s mostly, but now and then Winnipeg or London, England, and every letter had a drop of red sealing wax on the flap and it was pressed with a round stamp with the Company’s coat of arms.

I would be given a pile of envelopes and a box of Sea Dog Matches (made in Sweden and showing a sea dog on the box which looked like a tuskless walrus, while the brightly printed cards in every huge wood case showed a parrot—he had a match in his beak, and for many years I wondered about the connection). I’d spread out the envelopes and drop the hot wax on them and take care to get a good impression on each one.

That wax had an incredible smell. Very infrequently now, in a lawyer’s office perhaps, I see the hot wax drop on a document and smell that odour. I just need to close my eyes and I’m back in that office with my father and his clerks, feel the heat of the big iron box stove and the faint scent of smoke and deerskin and newly dried fur, tobacco, and birch wood, and over it all the exotic smell of the hot wax.

I’d come in after bringing wood for the office stove, and because I was small, I could squeeze in between the desks with my back to the stove to do my stamping. It got so hot there it’s a wonder I didn’t catch fire or melt to a little spot of grease on the floor. The thought used to come that if I did melt one day, all that would be left would be buttons, my big bone-handled pocket knife, and the brass HBC stamp.

It was good to be there just helping and enjoying that particular time of day when the store had closed. It was dark outside and the clerks would stand around the stove and warm up after a day in an unheated store and talk. They nearly all smoked pipes and I’d watch the different ways they prepared the pipe and how they smoked it. I probably had lungs black as Satan’s Sunday boots early in life.

They used to make dog harness and make and repair nets while waiting for the supper bell. I learned very early from Will, the foreman, to splice rope, and usually it was an art the clerks didn’t have. So any splicing got tossed over to me, and I’d work so hard to get it exactly right so that neither my dad nor Will could pick up an item and say, Who thought he spliced this? Every evening after school I had all the pups to feed and put in their shed for the night, kindling to get for the house stoves and wood for the office, so old James, the cooper, would have all he wanted for the night. Then I’d go to all my favourite places. Out to the dog food house where Edgar and Fred were cooking the huge cauldrons of meal and fish or meat over the open fire while fifty or sixty tired and hungry dogs lay with their noses on their paws outside waiting. Then to the net loft where Will, and whoever his helper was, were repairing the huge salmon nets against next year’s fishery.

They each had a big kerosene lantern on a nail, and they would reach up, never looking, and unhook the lantern as they moved along and hook it up on another nail near the work. They used two fingers to lift the nets so that the light fell on any small rents, which they’d cut into a three lead and repair in seconds. They were so deft and so sure and the lantern would not have stopped swinging, when it was unhooked and moved again.

Will had wonderfully even, white teeth and they’d gleam in the soft light as he looked at me and smiled. He was strong and gentle and a master with tools or machinery. He was mostly, I guess, Eskimo, and one of the most handsome people I ever saw. When Peter worked there, he was black and silent and hook-nosed, and always had a big crooked stem pipe clamped in his teeth, nearly always unlit. He’d smile but hardly ever speak, and when he did it was a rumble away down deep. Our Newfoundland dog always growled when she heard Peter speaking. I’m sure she understood his growls. Will did too. I didn’t.

Last of all I’d go see James in the cooperage. No workshop anywhere could have more for a boy than a cooperage. Then to the office to stay with my dad and the boys till Mrs. Flowers started the huge brass bell clanging and everyone went to supper. I would like to sit you down in those days to see and smell and finally sit at the crowded table. After my dad muttered the grace, which I never did understand, we could eat. The little fellow near the end of the oval table that sat twelve or fourteen, with the red flushed face, stained hands and broken nails, that’s me.

My mother would frown at the way I managed to destroy clothes, but she knew how I loved everything about that magic place and she never came down hard on me. Sometimes I’d have to wash my hands a second time, that’s all. I think I must have been an odd-ball kid.

Written from Moosonee. I was planning to visit Moosonee later in the summer.

April 1982

Dear Claudia,

This pad had forty pages of instructions for Bob Brydges who will relieve me when I leave on holiday. If you get detailed instructions on how to make a payroll for Mike Blueboy and Robbie Koosees and others, don’t worry. One way or another they’ll get paid.

Robbie is someone special. He has a dozen or so words of English and a most heart-warming grin. He is five foot and a little, almost the same wide, and is exactly what the traders used to look for in canoe-men: strong, tireless, and good tempered. He works steadily at whatever he is given to do and leaves nothing unfinished. When the geese come in the fall, his soul hears them and he has to be away out there on the mud flats. Robbie could have free board and lodging in Loblaw’s but he’d still have to go goose hunting. You’ll like Robbie, I promise. Jimmy Sack too, he likes birds and knows where the robins’ nests are.

Speaking of birds, and your sandpiper-like one with the funny walk? Was he a yellow legs? Did he have a long bill and a curious bobbing walk? We’ll find one here and you’ll tell me. I hope we can see our osprey take his thrilling dive into the water and come up holding a fish. We have a few nests here but they rear fewer and fewer young birds. The DDT they get in the fish down south in the winter makes the egg shells paper thin and they won’t stand the weight of the bird. It would only mean a few more mosquito bites for tourists and we could still have our ospreys.

A pair nested for thirty years where my father could see them from his office window, and it was worth a stinging rebuke to go too close during nesting time. Many times I have seen him sitting watching a graceful form gliding slowly back and forth over the cove, then suddenly the wings would fold and the bird would hurtle to the water and it was rare indeed that he missed. My dad would clear his throat and maybe wipe his eyes and go back to his work. I knew that each descent was like a fierce untamed hand on his heart, creating a desire to be one with that wonderful free being in the sky.

The nest was in the top of a big tamarack, and over the years they had laid layer after layer of sticks and grass till it was about six feet high. One spring someone carelessly let a huge sheet of brown paper (that used to line the inside of sugar casks) fly away in a wind and it became entangled in the branches near the nest. The birds hadn’t laid their eggs yet but they had returned. My dad worried and worried so I said I’d try to go up and clear it away.

He went with me and we paddled across and landed just in front of the tree. It was huge and the bottom branches were twenty or more feet up. The trunk was too massive for me to reach around but we had a light line and by tying a rock to the end we managed to get it over a limb and I climbed up. Once in the lower branches it was easy going and I soon reached the nest.

As I said, it was six feet high and built in a fork of the tree. It was more a platform than a nest, about eight feet in diameter and secure from any predator except an eagle. There were literally hundreds of fish skeletons there. I guess the parents could pick up and drop off a fish any time, so the youngsters never had a worry about food. There were also fair-sized stones that must have been brought there by the birds, I can’t think why unless for the young ones to sharpen or wear away the beaks if they grew too fast. There was a thin sliver of wood which said HBC–UI–Outfit 260, which delighted my dad when I told him. I asked if he wanted it and I know he did but he said don’t disturb a thing.

I gathered the paper up and rolled it into a ball, threw it down, and was carefully climbing back out of the nest, when I saw a shadow and there was the osprey. He was balancing on a current of air, hardly moving, but I could see the minute adjustments of wings and feathers. He’d side-slip a bit and the lower feathers would become erect and hold him. It was exquisite. And his eyes, wide and yellow and unblinking; he just stared at me. I was in his territory and for a moment I thought he might strike. His big, partly exposed claws looked dangerous, as did his savage curved beak, but he meant me no harm. He just hung there while his mate circled a hundred feet away. Such a lovely sleek bird, the epitome of power and grace. Soon, if we don’t help, they’ll be gone and I’ll have an ache where there should be joy. There are lots of lovely things left but it’s human to mourn the things we have lost by our own carelessness. Must go, someone at the door.

And I never did explain 73’s. It’s a symbol used by radio operators, meant to be sent all in one. (Operators don’t say dot and dash, they say dit and dat.) The symbol goes dat, dat, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dat, dat. Say it fast, it has a swing, looks long but can be sent in a second. Broken down it can be -- ... (7) ... -- (3), so we send the symbol when we talk on a key and write 73’s when we write a letter. What does it mean? I think the best word is regards, but if you know your friend, it’s a comfortable, friendly way to end a conversation or a letter. 73’s (See what I mean?),

Len

June 4, 1982

Dear Claudia,

Did I tell you we were going up into Quebec? Now Montreal tells me the plan is to leave here Monday, go to Rupert’s House, where Mr. Radisson wintered so many years ago, then to Paint Hills, then Fort George, then back here, to start all over again and go back as far as Rupert’s, East main and Paint Hills. At least the weather has warmed up again.

The breakfast dishes are looking reproachful so I’ll be away. The weatherman says you are going to have a nice weekend. Enjoy it with your family, spend two minutes listening to a tree grow. They talk all their lives even as long as they stand as masts in a ship. They do, honest. I knew a lovely old ship, the Saladdin.

Can I tell you a little bit about the Saladdin? I won’t take long, I promise. She’s always been special, since I was five or six when I saw her first.

We were travelling on North Labrador on a little ship, a steamer, called the Senef, and my brother George was born on board. We ran short on coal and were anchored at a place called Turnavik Islands. It’s a corruption of a delightful Eskimo word.

There wasn’t a lot of space on the Senef and my parents were busy with the new baby and my two little sisters, so I didn’t get out on deck as much as I’d have liked. Then one calm sunny day my dad came down and asked me if I wanted to see a square-rigged ship come in.

The Saladdin (I wonder about the spelling too) was coming to bring salt to the fishermen and load dry fish for Spain. When we got on deck, I could see her four tall masts over a low island but couldn’t see her hull yet. There was absolutely no wind on the water but a bit aloft, and she was moving slowly with all her lower sails clewed up and only topsails and royals drawing.

I could see the crew away up in the masts and on the yards waiting to clew the upper canvas when she came to anchor. Captain Burgess of the Senef said to me, There’s a Cartet for you if you can name the sails she has down. Cartet was a huge raisin and dark chocolate bar from England. I could reel the names off instantly, after all, she only had the uppers on, and it was like the names of car parts to a modern kid. I got my bar.

And, Claudia, I can still feel the joy that was in me when her hull came around the island. She was partly loaded with salt. Moving so gracefully and without a sound, she turned and came slowly towards us, and as she came abreast her topsail yards were level with the top of the Senef’s bridge.

There was a sailor standing casually on the foot rope at the end of the royal yard and leaning against the huge spar. He was filling his pipe and gave me a wink and a smile as he passed. Perhaps I never envied anyone as I did that man, standing on a thin rope hooked under the heels of his leather sea boots and filling his pipe as though he was standing on solid ground, not forty feet of thin air to the next yard.

She was a clipper ship and her steep and lovely bow was complimented by her long bow-sprit. She had only one jib up, and as she turned it fluttered like a bird’s wing. She was salt-stained and tired-looking, all the way across the miles of water from Cadiz, but she was lovely. At one time she had been a grain ship from Australia to the Continent and got into the salt trade when steamships took over the grain.

As she came closer and closer, her bow-sprit came almost on board of the Senef, and there, on its very end, was the tail of a shark, nailed there on her maiden voyage years before for good luck. That was sixty years ago come August, and if I had your gift I could draw from memory every detail of that dry, shrunken object. I’d heard so many yarns about shark’s tails on bow-sprits but had never seen one. Now I had, and one more memory was put safely away.

Her figurehead was a dignified Eastern potentate with folded arms. He ignored the sooty little Senef but I think his lip may have curved in a smile at the little boy almost breathless with joy hanging on to the bridge sail. I never forgot that ship.

Years later, when I was on another ship and we went into St. Anthony, there by the wharf was the Saladdin. She was old and run-down, hauling the most unlovely of cargos, coal, but her lines were still beautiful. She was waiting to sail and no one was around when I went on board. Her rigging was ragged and uncared for, her bright work was scarred and bruised, her decks were splintered and covered with coal dust, her sails were poorly furled and the reef points had cows’ tails in them. Her spars were innocent of paint or dressing. I climbed up and walked out on the same tall bow-sprit that had filled me with joy and saw the big wrought nail heads that had held the shark’s tail. It was gone, probably into the uncaring sea some dark night as she battled along under low canvas.

She was dying, Claudia. I stood by her tall, straight main mast and put my ear near the fife rail and I could hear her suffering. There is sound in all sail ships; the little noises that tell you she’s sound and strong and the comforting squeaks and creakings that let you know she is elastic and can give to the sea and survive any storm. But there are sounds too that tell you her heart is broken, that she has lost the will to fight, and the Saladdin had those sounds.

I stood there and remembered when I first saw her, and when her sails were white and her masts and spars were trim and beautiful, and I knew they had killed her with heavy loads of coal because it was war time and any bottom could get cargo. The faster steamships got the clean goods and went in convoys, the wind ships took the coal and ore and sailed alone. I knew she would not last much longer and I hated the people that had brought her to that state and who, when it suited them, would abandon her on a smelly mud flat some place to rot.

All the little sounds told me she would soon die. That’s what I mean when I say a tree talks all its days, whether as a straight spar or a curved plank deep in a hull.

A few days later in Halifax the papers said that the coaster Saladdin had gone down off the Newfoundland coast in a storm. I was glad she didn’t have to suffer the indignity of a wrecker’s yard. I phoned the radio station and asked them to say the "clipper Saladdin" if they repeated the broadcast and an understanding man promised they would. Some beautiful things live forever—some die.

June 8, 1982

Dear Claudia,

Spent a lovely morning wandering around. Mr. Radisson might be surprised at what has happened to his Fort Charles. The Quebec government, via the Hydro, has spent eight million dollars on a settlement of perhaps 1500 people in two years and is still spending. The result is a horrible scar on the landscape.

It’s a planned development for people who don’t really want it and who don’t know how to live with it, where garbage disposal is out the door or window. When they were nomads or semi-nomads that worked because there were only a few tents in each group and they weren’t in one place long and they didn’t have the tin can. Can you imagine a street paved with tin cans? They have the money and we saw people waiting in line to buy soft drinks by the case at a buck a can.

When I first saw Rupert’s, a number of years ago, it was a tidy little settlement, mostly HBC buildings with a few tents on the river bank. Most of the population lived out on the land and made their own living. Now no one is on the land and the settlement lives on relief and Hydro compensation. I’d like to know how anyone can justify what’s happened.

We got back around 7 p.m. or later. Old Ash Cutler, our cook, had two steaks ready and when we got back to the trailer, they were in the pan, so all’s well that ends well.

The bay is full of ice, a lot of it broken up into the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle. It was calm and clear and we were at fifteen hundred feet which is a bit lower than Air Canada’s average. There was the odd seal lying in the sun on his piece of puzzle and perhaps wondering how to put it all back together. Or maybe he wasn’t and was sleeping quietly while the world went to pieces all around him, which I suppose brings him up, or maybe down, to a level with some humans.

Anyway we had a lovely day. Didn’t accomplish much but found that a small puppy had arrived at the trailer, captivated old Ash, and was warm, sleeping on the porch on what looked to be a pair of Bill’s coveralls. He looked as though he had found his niche and was prepared to stay on. Ash gave me a long, acted-out story, of how the pore little feller almost crawled up to the door, and with an expiring breath, scratched weakly on the step and barked feebly for help. He could have been telling the truth too, but I’ll have to say that the pup made a remarkable recovery on that one meal. Ash looks like Uriah Heep but isn’t a bit ’umble. He is a great mess hall cook, though. You’ll eat one of his meals when you come. He feels that no part of a plate should be visible when he serves a meal. You know the plate has to be there. Your job is to shovel the grub away and find it. Now I think of it, Ash looks more like Punch than Uriah Heep, but you’ll like him.

He told me last night the boys play so many tricks on him that I’ll go right off my eid, but he loves every minute of it and the boys would massacre anyone who tried to take advantage of Ash.

Looking forward to your visit. Take care, have fun. See, I can leave a few lines blank…

Len is in Winnipeg to complete paperwork for his retirement. I had visited Moosonee and returned to Kingston. His birthday is on August 7.

August 6,