Cigar Box Banjo (25 page)

WOODY POINT is on the west coast of Newfoundland, north of Corner Brook. It’s located in Gros Morne National Park, but as you look around, you have absolutely no idea where you’re situated on the planet. You could be on the Irish coast, you could be cruising Scandinavian fjords. Gros Morne itself is a huge red rock, the name meaning something along the lines of “the Great Loneliness.” Near it lie the Tablelands, one of a handful of places where the mantle has pushed its way through the crust. The Tablelands are so riddled with minerals that they refuse to support almost all plant life. So not only are you unclear about where on the planet you’re situated, you’re not entirely sure you’re even on the Third Stone from the Sun.

I had been invited to the Woody Point Festival, held each August, by Stephen Brunt, one of Canada’s great sportswriters. (One of Canada’s great writers, really, his bailiwick being sports.) Stephen had been invited to the region himself a decade earlier. He fell resolutely in love with it, and now summers there with his wife and children. Six years ago, he and Alison Gzowski started the festival.

One thing Stephen and I have in common is a love of angling. Indeed, I would say that Brunt and I are amongst the most besotted of a very besotted tribe. Our enthusiasm is unrivalled. Our enthusiasm is certainly unrivalled by our talent, which is why I was disappointed when the one morning Stephen and I could arrange for fly-fishing brought gale-force winds. We were standing in the ocean, and there was very little that could hang up my backcast. Indeed, my backcast was straightening out very nicely. But you know, after all I’ve been through, I would be better looking at the bright side. So this paragraph is just my way of saying thanks to Brunt.

This wasn’t a Porkbelly Futures gig. I had received the invitation to Woody Point as Paul Quarrington, novelist and non-fiction writer. But I knew that it was a music and literary festival, so I took my guitar with me and announced from the stage my intention to tell a story (recite from memory, which is to say,
perform
the thing) whilst accompanying myself on the guitar. Yes, at the same time.

If you want to see “getting out the village” in action, there is no better place to start than Woody Point, Newfoundland. For one thing, the actual village gets out. There are perhaps four hundred residents, and the festival events are standing room only. The venue is the Woody Point Heritage Theatre, which was formerly the Lord Nelson Orange Lodge. The reappointing was done by Charlie Payne, who is as fine a button accordion player as I’ve ever heard.

I’m not sure I buy this entirely, but I’ve heard that there is a type of traditional Newfoundland song called a “come-all-ye.” The name apparently stems from the fact that so many songs begin with the entreaty, “Come all ye” whatever, lovely ladies or grizzled fishermen. The call often seems specifically for musicians: “Come all ye fiddlers and accordionists and flautists and, oh yeah, we could use a guitar or two.” Every night at Woody Point, after a few literary offerings, the musicians would herd themselves onstage. Someone would toss out the title of a tune; someone else might suggest another. These guys weren’t bickering. Often they were seeking a good pairing. “Aunt Martha’s Sheep,” for instance, might go nicely with “Pat Murphy’s Meadow.” Thereupon would follow a musical discussion about the prospective songs. The musicians would name the fiddlers they had first heard play the songs. They would mention a little descent to the relative minor that had hitherto been unexampled. Whereas with blues or jazz, one guy might snap out a tempo to start, the Newfoundland musicians looked at each other briefly—“You all right then? Everyone got a beer?”—and then launched themselves with reinforced-steel-toed synchronicity.

Some of the musicians I encountered at Woody Point included the aforementioned Charlie Payne, Sandy Morris, Duane Andrews, and Des Walsh. Duane Andrews was interesting, as his personal style was very European, heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt. But like many a musician from the Island, he was comfortable sticking a violin under his chin and asking, “Where did you learn ‘Concerning Charlie Horse’?” Des Walsh is something of a renaissance man, a writer and a musician. He was grand fun and someone I liked very much. Des tipped me off to one of the great advantages of Newfoundland culture. I am not good at remembering names. I’m not even going to bring up the lame “I’m good with faces” corollary, which to my mind only serves to illustrate how bad you are with names. I.e., here is a face you’ve seen before (perhaps you were even married to the face, maybe even for years), yet the memory banks offer up nothing by way of label or identification. Well, Des pointed out that his usual greeting is “Hello, my son.” “Excellent!” I enthused, and I immediately introduced “Hello, my son” into my limited repertoire of hails. “Hello, my son.” “Hello, my son.”

“Hold on,” I asked Des. “What if it’s a woman I want to be saying hello to?”

“Hello, my love.”

“Excellent.”

WOODY POINT is built on a little crest overlooking Bonne Bay, so the walk from my lovely B&B necessitated a certain amount of upward mobility, usually carting a guitar case.
This
necessitated a lot of huff, puff, and rest. Likewise at the B&B itself. The staircase from the ground floor to the guest rooms seemed to be a riser or two too long, and when I sum-mited I immediately went into the bathroom to sit down and catch my breath. Being me, I usually had other business to conduct. Still, this was worrying, because I knew the really hard work lay ahead.

Let me catch you up in this way. Here’s what my doctors demanded, over and over again: “You’re going
where?
”

“Well, we board the ship in Kuujjuaq. But then we’re heading for some places that are pretty remote.”

What my doctors and I were discussing was another of my plans, something billed as the Walrus Arts Float, a voyage down the east coast of Labrador and the west coast of Newfoundland (with a stop scheduled at my new favourite place, Woody Point). Passengers with an artistic bent would be encouraged by various invited guests to write, paint, and make music on the cruise. The ship was flying the colours, at least figuratively, of
Walrus
magazine and its publisher, Shelley Ambrose.

Various medical objections were raised. For example, my condition made me susceptible to hypercoagulation, which meant that, for example, on the plane to Nunavut I could develop a blood clot and then subsequently throw an embolism and then subsequently die. But I was adamant about my desire to go on the trip.
²

Much fun was had aboard the
Clipper Adventurer.
I was there mainly as a musician,
³
and most nights I would play in the forward lounge, part of a group consisting of myself, singer-songwriter/rocker Tom Barlow, fiddler/button accordionist Daniel Payne, and David, a man who emerged from the crowd of passengers, sat down behind the piano, and began playing with practised dexterity, singing along in a piercing falsetto. We were augmented frequently by Dave Marshak, also a member of the onboard artists’ collective Drawn Onward. As a group of musicians, we were distinguished— this is just me talking, but still—by the diversity of our backgrounds and training. David was a choirmaster, so he was used to pulling at the roots of things and adding the appropriate musical tendrils. Barlow not only wrote great songs, but he knew thousands, and once we’d discovered our mutual favourites—“Blinded by the Light” was one, with the line “wracked up like a deuce” or whatever the hell it is—so we quickly had the basis of an evening’s entertainment. I favoured sweet soul music, encouraging the crowd to respond to me—“If you don’t know me by now . . .”—then trying to throw them off with my hectoring Teddy Pendergrass vocalizations. And there was Daniel Obediah Payne, hailing from Cow Head, Newfoundland. Tall, flaming-haired, and genetically fearsome (you could imagine him, or some ancestor, hacking off heads with practised ease), Daniel played the button accordion and the fiddle, as I said, but often the most beautiful sounds he produced occurred when he laid those instruments aside and sang a cappella. Over the course of the ten-day cruise, I tried to learn from Daniel as many traditional songs as I could. I had limited success.

At one point Daniel called for “Queen Anne’s Lace.”

“Do I know that one?” I asked.

“Well,” he answered, “you played it a few nights back.”

Even if the physical benefits of singing with lung cancer are negligible, the emotional—spiritual—benefits I calculate to be enormous. Our little combo, the Clippertones, led the passengers in some pretty rousing singalongs, and although it tended to be a little discordant, it was communion. Indeed, within a day or two, the people aboard the ship were as unified, as community-minded, as any congregation anywhere. Glad tidings and laughter abounded.

There is an educational component to every Adventure Canada expedition, which this was, and we would put ashore and have things explained to us by experts in various sciences and disciplines. The Torngat Mountains, at the tip of Labrador’s eastern coast, are almost four billion years old, we learned. They rise out of the water with enchanted austerity. Sitting well above the tree line, the Torngats are stark naked and making no apology about it. “Torngat” is an Inuk-titut word meaning “place of spirits.” The mountaintops are usually shrouded in cloud, and it’s easy enough to imagine the spirits assembling there, going through the itinerary for another year. (“All righty! We have some squamous sessile tumours to give out!”) I had no desire to climb the Torngat Mountains; just looking at them took what little breath I had away from me. Again the thought occurred that I was on another planet, and that’s when I realized, no, I’m on
this
one. It has been my home for fifty-six years, but I have spent much of it confined in the settlements. I was very glad, in the broadest, most spiritual sense, to be exploring. If life is beautiful— not a decision I laboured over, by the way, more a certainty that seemed unassailable—why shouldn’t one year be as full of beauty and grace as forty?

THE MONTHS that followed the arts float were lively and, I’ll admit, a wee bit strenuous. I worked on a solo CD, I worked on a new Porkbelly Futures album. I pecked away at the keyboard, redrafting this book and writing a television series with my friend John L’Ecuyer. I even managed to write a screenplay,
Vulnerable,
which is set in the world of competitive bridge. (Do I know anything about competitive bridge? Of course not! What’s more, the screenplay concerns young people, and it seems to me these days that I know less about youth than I do about competitive bridge. However, there’s a remote possibility that I learned a thing or two about both subjects in the process.)

In the late fall, Porkbelly Futures booked f lights to Alberta. The plan was, we’d spend three days in and around Calgary, entertaining the crowds, or at least the enthusiastic clutches. Then we were going to Banff for a little rest and relaxation. I wanted to eat a couple of cows and spend some time at the hot springs. “Taking the waters” has a long and venerable history, even if there’s no evidence that it has done anybody any tangible good.

Our mini-tour started off well enough, although I really should back up a day. On the morning before our departure from Toronto, I went to the hospital for a top-up of the chemicals designed to push the “pause” button on the tumour. This was part of my first round of chemotherapy. The week previous I had gone for the “long day,” and this was supposed to be the “short day.” Six hours into it, I wondered why it was called that.

“Yeah,” one of the nurses mused, “we really shouldn’t call it the short day. It’s not much shorter than the long day.”

I agreed they really
shouldn’t
call it the short day, especially as I was going to be late for an appointment that earlier had seemed eminently make-able. As noted, in the summer months I spend as much time as I can on my houseboat, living amongst a wonderful group of people, the residents of “C” Basin at the Toronto Island Marina. On this day in early November, my boat was scheduled to come out of the water. I’d asked my friend Charles to help me pilot the thing; I’d arranged for the boat to be sheathed in white plastic wrap. The operation was scheduled for 3:00 PM, and I didn’t see how I was going to make it down to the waterfront and across to the island in time, especially since I was hooked up intravenously. “The doctor is worried about your hydration,” a nurse advised, and I hit upon a cunning bargain. “Put as much of that stuff in as you can in the next twenty minutes,” I said. “Then I gotta go.”

I was there to witness the boat being hauled out of the water. My emotions were conflicted, because according to Dr. Li and her statistics, I won’t be around for the relaunch. But there was something sufficiently ritualistic about the affair—the final cruise through the falling leaves, the lukewarm champagne in Styrofoam cups—that filled me with optimism. “Damned right I’m going to be on that boat again,” I announced, and it was in that state—full of hope but on the road to dehydration—that I flew out to Alberta.

Our first gig, on the Friday night, was at a place called the Bearberry Community Hall, northwest of Calgary in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It went pretty well, even though I complained of “severe heartburn”—a phrase very stupid people employ when their hearts have gone wonky. For the next two days I experienced a shortness of breath. I was already experiencing a shortness of breath, of course, but this was kind of like, walk two steps across the hotel lobby and then sit down for half an hour. The upshot was that on Monday, sometime around eight o’clock in the morning, two very tall and unreasonably attractive female paramedics put me into an ambulance and carried me off to the Peter Lougheed Centre. The paramedics were sufficiently tall and attractive that afterwards it all seemed rather dreamlike, the kind of thing I might well have imagined. Their existence was confirmed by Marty, however, who stayed with me throughout my fun time in Calgary. Here’s how much fun I had: a seizure, kidney failure, and a heart attack.