The Beaver Has Landed

There’s much talk these days about Canada’s “Cool North” providing a sort of escape valve for Americans overwhelmed by climate change, world events, off-kilter right-wing presidents, and their nation’s divided self. I could sense this “warming up” to the cool northern neighbour happening as early as 1967, when the Vietnam War sent many young men slipping across the forty-ninth parallel, and again in 1998, when I was invited to be the Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University in Bellingham, on the West Coast twenty minutes south of the border. I quickly accepted the invitation but assured them that “Extinguished Professor” would have been a more appropriate title.

The university president’s original residence, a modest bungalow, now called Canada House, contained the offices of the program director and a secretary, as well as meeting spaces for faculty devoted to things Canadian. Several of my colleagues turned out to be former Canadians; others had studied in Canada; and the remainder listened to CBC Radio and were devotees of Thomas King’s political send‑up, The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour.

I did not get as warm a welcome, however, during my first few border crossings. When I presented my J‑1 visa to the American border guard at the Peace Arch on the way south, he noticed I was teaching at WWU and asked about my subject. I explained that I would be teaching Canadian literature.

“Seriously?”

“Sure,” I replied. “Are you surprised we have a literature of our own?” I was not expecting the answer I received.

“Yes,” he said, without a hint of irony, and handed me back my documents.

On my way through the border the following week, the same scene was replayed, this time with a different customs officer. “Surely,” I said, leaning out the window to see this tall figure more clearly, “you’re not surprised Canada has its own literature?”

“Not at all,” he said, “but I’m surprised we have to study it.”

I was better prepared the third time. When asked what I was doing at the university, I said, with a big smile, that I was part of a fifth column of Canadian poets planning to take over the United States. The border guard looked me in the eye, shifted the wad of chewing gum from one cheek to the other, and, adjusting his holster, handed over my passport with a begrudging half grin: “Piss off.”

These three encounters got me thinking about Canadian involvement in the U.S. over the previous century, which resulted in a talk I delivered at my welcome banquet in Bellingham’s former city hall, now part of the Whatcom Museum. I began with my previous adventures at the border. Then I proceeded to list the work of special Canadian operatives in the States, starting with Mary Pickford, one of the first great silent movie stars, whose most recent biography had the provocative subtitle The Woman Who Made Hollywood. Of course, I said, we all know that Tinsel Town was established to distract Americans and the world from what was going on behind closed doors: in other words, as a means of shaping and subverting the national narrative. Pickford, born in Toronto as Gladys Louise Smith, had quickly become “America’s Sweetheart” and “Queen of the Movies.” She was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The only temporary lapses I could find in her career as a Canadian subversive came when she supported the election campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, which may have been part of her strategy for avoiding suspicion, or the first signs of mental deterioration.

After Mary Pickford, many Canadians were sent to win the hearts and minds of Americans, none more successful than the handsome, Toronto-born high school dropout Peter Jennings, whose career as a reporter and television journalist catapulted him to the position of lead anchor at ABC News. Jennings was noted for those irresistible Canadian qualities of calmness, comfort, and humour: he once had his photo taken during an interview with suit coat but no pants. He was, of course, described by colleagues as “genuine, a nice guy.” While Jennings slowly assumed control of the television medium, offering a Canadian interpretation of American and global events, an Ontario farm boy named John Kenneth Galbraith had already risen in the world to become a scholar, economist, Harvard professor, and U.S. ambassador to India. He had the ear of the Democratic presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, working tirelessly behind the scenes to breathe into those ears the dubious but much lauded and treasonous Canadian values of decency, diplomacy, tolerance, public enterprise, and economic responsibility. With this level of indoctrination, it was only a matter of time before the United States folded into that cool northern embrace, suffering a slow and apparently easy death from freezing or boredom.

To keep Americans laughing and unaware of this gradual takeover, we sent legions of comedians south, including Wayne and Shuster, Rich Little, John Candy, and so many others, while we quietly gained control. I managed to restrain myself from mentioning to my rapt audience at the Whatcom Museum that other cadre of subversives: those infamous poets who’d been clever enough to be born to Canadian parents working in the U.S. or who had emigrated as adults to carry on the work of subtle indoctrination. This group included Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Strand, Heather McHugh, David Wevill, and Daryl Hine, just for starters. I also neglected to mention that I had played my own part in the takeover by contributing my first wife, Norma, who became a director of nursing in Richmond, Virginia, and my eldest daughter, Jennifer, who became editor of The Hedgehog Review in Charlottesville and a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, specializing in (what else?) evil. Both, you’ll have noted, were well placed to keep an eye on activities at the Central Intelligence Agency’s Langley headquarters.

The local television station in Bellingham, desperate for material, filmed my talk and ran it seven times over the next couple of months. Then one day, while I was eating a cheese sandwich, the phone rang in my office at Canada House. With my mouth half full, I answered it and heard an official voice claiming to be the head of the U.S. Customs Service in the State of Washington. I panicked and almost choked on the dry, extra-old cheddar, thinking law enforcement was going to arrest me for subversive activities or some serious infraction, such as not properly registering my foreign sailboat when I arrived in Bellingham’s Squalicum Harbor or smuggling an uneaten Florida orange back into the States. However, as it turned out, I was being invited to give the same talk to border guards as comic relief at their next official luncheon. I was so flustered, and still trying to swallow the antiquated cheese, that I made up an excuse and declined the invitation.

Of course, such a conversation could have happened only before 9/11 or, for that matter, before they stopped Ahmed Ressam trying to enter from Canada on December 14, 1999, with a trunk full of explosives and timing devices. He was planning to use his homemade arsenal to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve and was apprehended when he disembarked from the Coho, a ferry that crossed from Victoria to Port Angeles, Washington. Three years later, my little joke about taking over the United States would surely have resulted in my arrest and rendition to torture chambers in Syria.

My experience of teaching at the University of Western Washington proved to be enjoyable and instructive. The job, well paid, saved me from some difficult financial negotiations and embarrassment resulting from early retirement and a marriage breakup. I commuted to Bellingham by car each week from my cabin at French Beach, west of Victoria, leaving Tuesday morning and returning Thursday evening or Friday morning. I used to joke about heading south to go home, because although most of my colleagues knew I had to go north to the Canadian mainland border, Victoria and the lower tip of Vancouver Island are actually well below the forty-ninth parallel and farther south than Bellingham — thanks to the peculiar deliberations of the German kaiser Wilhelm I, who helped to determine the international boundaries following the infamous Pig War.

I was well treated and welcomed by the university, given an office, and told I could teach as much or as little as I liked. When I proposed a course on Wednesdays from 4 to 8 p.m., I was advised that WWU had a mostly rural clientele who would likely be going home for dinner around then. “I can solve that problem,” I said. “So let’s try it.” The maximum twenty signed up, with others on a wait-list hoping to join the fun, which took place in what had been the living room of former university presidents, all windows, with a view of the ocean, boats, passing gulls, eagles, and whales. After an hour-long introduction to the material, I told the students to go into the kitchen, take a plate and utensils, and help themselves to the salad and pasta with a vegetarian tofu sauce. Dessert would follow. There is something about the intimacy and informality of eating together and sharing ideas that appealed to me and to my students. In fact, enough of them enrolled in other courses I offered during the following terms that I had to warn them that taking multiple classes from a known Canadian subversive might not look good on their academic records.

To present Canadian literature in the best possible way, I requested and received a modest grant from External Affairs, which enabled me to invite and host forty-three Canadian writers to read from and talk about the poems, plays, or fiction of theirs that we were studying during my three years in Bellingham. That list included Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Mel Dagg, Lee Maracle, Ron Smith, Howard White, Sharon Thesen, and Tomson Highway. When I picked Tomson up at the Vancouver International Airport, he warned me to expect to stop the car every ten minutes, as he had the habit, for health reasons, of starting each day with eight glasses of water. He proved to be a great success, not only for frequent urination but also for inspiring students, especially when I arranged for him to talk at the nearby Northwest Indian College. Three years later, as a visiting writer at the University of British Columbia’s Green College, I would have the pleasure of inviting Tomson again, this time to address an audience of 500 at the old Frederic Wood Theatre. Backstage, moments before I was to introduce him, he looked at me earnestly and asked, “Gary, what were you wanting me to talk about tonight?” Then he laughed and nodded toward the gap in the curtain leading to the stage. After my brief introduction, as I disappeared backstage, I could hear his opening remarks: “I was born so far north in Canada, we didn’t get hemorrhoids; we got polaroids.” This was followed by a huge roar of applause. He had the audience in the palm of his hand.

It was said, only partly in jest, that Canadian authors were the major entertainment in Bellingham for those three years, a perfect moment for the annexation of Washington State. Instead of that, I brought each of my classes back to French Beach for a weekend of study, relaxation, and, of course, indoctrination. By the time the fourth car in our convoy arrived at the border, the Canadian customs official, looking in the window, said, “I suppose you’re going to that poet’s house as well.” Numerous students became lifelong friends, sending birth announcements, copies of their publications, and invitations to weddings. One of the bolder ones asked if she and her fiancé could use my waterfront house for their honeymoon, which I could hardly refuse. I gave them my key and my blessing and disappeared for a week on my sailboat.

For much of the first year of teaching at WWU, I slept on that boat, for which I’d rented a berth at Squalicum Marina. My students considered this pied à l’eau quite romantic. I never disabused them of this illusion or told them how cold, damp, and noisy a night on the water could get in winter, with the clanging of improperly secured lines striking the aluminum masts. Or how frightening it was when a disturbed blue heron emitted a blood-curdling scream that sounded like corrugated sheet metal being shaken. Or how my early morning ablutions and evacuations in the marina washroom were often greeted by a pair of legs sticking out from under one of the adjoining toilet stalls, belonging to some hapless individual trying to warm up after a night on the street. Later, I was able to abandon this dreary pied à l’eau and lucked out with some of the comforts of good old American hospitality. But that is another story.

Although I loved much about the country, including its poets, and was both honoured and grateful for the three years I spent there as Extinguished Professor of Canadian Culture, I never failed to tease my students for not knowing how to spell English words, especially that crucial one: “neighbour.” I also tried out on them the observation of the Canadian philosopher George Grant, author of Lament for a Nation, who insisted that so‑called internationalism was promoted to produce not internationals — he insisted there were no such animals — but Americans. I took pleasure too in reminding my friends in Bellingham, apropos of the “global village” and the ostensible benefits of the new free trade agreement, of Stephen Leacock’s witty remark: “Whenever an American tells you you’ve driven a hard bargain, you know he’s taken you to the cleaners.”

When I took my leave of Western Washington University in the summer of 2001, the students came to my office to present me with the gift of twenty second-hand copies of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which we’d studied in class and which they knew I loved so much that I was giving copies to all my friends and acquaintances. It was the surprise book in a course about the lyrical novel, with all but one of the authors being Canadian poets; the objective was to see if we could detect in novels by poets any special poetic or lyrical elements not found in what is considered “ordinary” fiction. As it turned out, the most poetic of the group was the American novelist Robinson, not a poet by reputation, but her work positively sang. You could take any page of Housekeeping and break it into what looked like poetic lines that were beautiful and lyrical enough to make most poets weep with joy — and envy. The students had scoured every used-book store in Bellingham to find those copies, which were the perfect parting gift for the alien poet and academic who’d tried, but failed, to take over the United States and who turned out to be bringing more beauty home than he’d left behind.