In Praise of Books and Birch

Perhaps it only seemed as though we were embarked on forty days and forty nights of rain. But with the rain barrels in constant overflow, legions of mushrooms erupting off the cabin deck, sunshine but a distant memory, the mind wandered to Noah and idle thoughts about life aboard the Ark. When not entirely invisible, Kelly’s Mountain was shrouded in mist and fog. Rain banged on the cabin’s tin roof, drowning out the barred owls of the mountain. Sodden shirts and socks hung from the drying rack over the Drolet, disassembled boots and insoles crowded at its base. I lack the vocabulary needed to describe the importance of the stored light and warmth supplied by the birch burning in the woodstove. I felt enhanced gratitude to find unread books on the cabin’s library shelves.

After a month of so-so weather I had read sixteen books, one every couple of days. I happily stumbled on undiscovered territory. Thanks to the books-for-sale rack at the treasured North Sydney library, I discovered a great Canadian novelist, Fred Stenson. I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of Fred ‘til I found a copy of The Great Karoo available for a buck.  My eye was caught by an image on the dust jacket of mounted Boer War-era soldiers, and a blurb from David Adams Richards, a gloomily great Canadian novelist I do know. “A truly magnificent novel”, Richards asserts, “by one of Canada’s greatest living writers”. Resistance was futile. I read Karoo in a go and was—to resort to cliché—blown away. The novel tells a compelling story of Canadian soldiers—and their horses—ensnared in the South African war at the turn of the 20^th Century. That bit of serendipity led to another, then another. The Florence library branch had a copy of The Trade, a saga of the Canadian fur trade era, 1821-1850. The Trade proved equally compelling, so I asked the lovely ladies at the North Sydney branch to fetch me another Stenson, Who by Fire. It is set in more modern times and relates another gripping story, of an Alberta family ransacked by the gas-extraction industry. Instantly a literary hero of mine, it is hard to imagine after Who By Fire that Stenson, himself a loyal Albertan, is much loved by oil patch executives.

Having journeyed to 1900-era South Africa and the time of the fur trade, I next traveled to the crazed days of the Klondike gold rush. Drifting Home and Klondike were two of the not-yet-read books on the cabin shelves, by irrepressible Pierre Berton. Drifting Home describes two pilgrimages, one the account of Berton’s 1972 expedition down the Yukon River with his family; the other a journey in time to Berton’s boyhood in Dawson City with recollections of his remarkable father. Klondike delivers a cast of hundreds of cheechakos and sourdoughs caught up in the 1898 gold frenzy, a cast reflecting the full spectrum of human triumph and folly.

I sometime walk out of the North Sydney library with twenty pounds of books that may have cost me all of five or ten dollars. At some point in recent years I had found a stash of books by Ronald Wright I had not got round to reading. The silver lining of rainy days at Bigador is that the omission is now remedied. Henderson’s Spear is a terrific read, about a daughter’s search for a father, a Korean War fighter pilot who disappeared in the South Seas in 1953. That led to A Scientific Romance, a novel that delivers the astonished reader on a journey five hundred years into the future to a world devastated by human-induced climate change. Finally I moved on to Wright’s A Short History of Progress, a survey of ancient civilizations brought to ruin by their own blunders, a cautionary account of what needs doing if modern civilization is to avoid the greatest of calamities.

Of course not every hour can be spent reading in front of the warming Drolet. To limber decrepit knees and sore back, I install raingear and head out in the drizzle for Dalem Lake, keeping a lookout for a bird or rain-dappled flower to photograph. Walking my potholed road I needn’t strain my neck to check for birds overhead—I can see what’s there in the mirrors availed by the still puddles along the way. The forecast calls for several more rainy days. What happens when a fella runs out of books?

[This post written July 3.]