Daylight in the Swamp: Memoirs of Selwyn Dewdney

1950

Preface

Selwyn Dewdney died on November 18, 1979, following open-heart surgery to correct a faulty artificial valve. His death marked the biblically allotted three score and ten years of human life, a seventy-year period that he used well. In his boyhood in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, his teen years in Kenora, Ontario, and his adult life in Owen Sound and London, Ontario, Selwyn Dewdney followed three paths: art, education, and the bush.

Art replaced an earlier call that he thought he heard as a boy. His father was an Anglican minister who, as Selwyn entered his teens, became the bishop of Keewatin. Selwyn’s oldest brother, Alec, was also a minister. At the age of sixteen, Selwyn accompanied the bishop on a gruelling eight hundred mile trek through the northern Ontario bush to visit far-flung native communities. From that moment on, the bush called him with increasing urgency. For a time his newfound love of the Canadian wilderness, would masquerade as missionary zeal, but that youthful illusion did not last long. Even when the call of art replaced that of religion, painting itself would take on a secondary role, becoming an excuse to set out into the bush with his beloved canoe. During his high-school teaching years, Selwyn stretched his salary to the breaking point in order to finance his wilderness excursions. At first he travelled alone but later he took his wife, Irene, and, at one time or another, all four of his sons, Donner, Keewatin, Peter, and Christopher.

In the handful of years that remained to him before the fateful second operation, Selwyn worked on these memoirs. He assembled passages from his bush diary, field notes, and letters home. He wrote (and rewrote) from memory, pounding away on his trusty Underwood portable typewriter at odd moments. He worked at home in London, Ontario, and at his island cabin on Lake Windermere. He pasted scraps of paper listing new ideas onto the margins of old material. At the time of his death he left a manuscript that was partial at best. The strange thing was that while his family was certainly aware of the memoirs project, we all forgot it when he died. Perhaps it was the shock of his death.

The night following his funeral, I lay in bed trying not to think about anything, hoping that sleep would soon bring relief. Suddenly, I felt someone standing beside the bed, a presence. I squinted into the half light of the hallway creeping through a doorcrack. Nothing. No one. The presence was a feeling, an awful feeling. And it was him! As a scientist, I could hardly believe in ghosts, but what else could you call this presence? It was Selwyn and something was wrong, something I was supposed to set right. But what? Okay, I said into the darkness. Okay. I understand. Abruptly the feeling ceased.

But it began again the very next morning, not the presence, but the urgency. When time permitted, I visited the house where he and my mother had lived for twenty-five years. I walked from room to room without the slightest clue of what, if anything, I was looking for. And I felt a bit foolish, to boot. I went into his study and stared dully at the typewriter, the azalea plant, the rows of books, the light in the garden. Then it caught my eye, beside the typewriter. The manuscript was plainly marked Daylight in the Swamp. As soon as I picked it up, the feeling of dread and urgency ceased abruptly.

I kept the manuscript for many years before starting to work on it. Some chapters were fairly straightforward, others were a mess. I dreaded the doing but remembered my promise, as such. With the advent of inexpensive word-processing, Daylight in the Swamp suddenly looked easier. I started in. Selwyn’s prose resembled the northern bush. Here were fine, open glades of memory but here also were swamps of badly organized prose, miles of passive voice, streams of run-on sentences, thought-bite deadfalls, sermonizing, and a general lack of continuity that only a word-processor, with its ability to move whole blocks of prose instantly, could remedy.

It is done now. I have preserved his voice, I think, and sustained the stories and sketches that true lovers of the North will cherish. From the title (the last line of a highly questionable bush-poem) to the final section on native pictographs, readers will hear a new and authentic voice of history, of native people, of a land undergoing irretrievable change. Some daylight, at last, has entered the manuscript.

Keewatin Dewdney

1997

chapter one

First Love

She’s a little honey. She’s lying behind me right now—I’ve only to turn to see her trim little figure on the sand. We were made for each other...

From a letter to Irene Dewdney, July 10, 1942

The quote above refers to Olga, my canoe. She was not the first canoe I had paddled, to be sure, nor the first I had fallen in love with, but she was the first canoe that I had paid for in hard pre-inflation Canadian dollars. And she has always held a special place in my memory as the only canoe I have known that perished by accidental cremation.

Even Olga’s name had a special significance for me and Irene. It was to have been the name of the daughter Irene hoped to have. But after the birth of four sons, she reluctantly gave up that dream. Another dream we shared remained nothing more than a dream for decades: The discovery of an island home in God’s country, the Canadian North.

If my love affair with the Algonkian canoe and our search for an island home amount to leitmotifs in these memoirs, larger themes are also present. I wonder if, looking back on such a varied and confusing life, I shall find a unifying element, a deeper unconscious direction that I have followed unwittingly. Perhaps C.P. Snow is correct when he says that ... in your deepest relations, there is only one test of what you profoundly want: It consists of what happens to you.

One thing is clear. From childhood I have had an urge to wander the Canadian hinterland, to extend the dreams and desires of a boy born on the edge of Saskatchewan’s boreal forest. It seems reasonable, therefore, in trying to sort out the confusion of that life, to hope that an exploration of my bush experiences will shed some daylight on the swamp of my memories. Inseparably, an account of my first love, the Algonkian canoe, will emerge.

Going back to the little lake, scarcely more than a slough and a mere fifteen miles north of Prince Albert, I return to the place our family spent its summers for three incredible years. Incredible, that is, in my memory. Of the dozens of Sand Lakes and Sandy Lakes scattered across Canada, this Sand Lake must have been the smallest. I revisited it in 1965 to find that, whatever it was then, it is now neither sandy nor a lake. Just another Saskatchewan slough, shrunk to a pitiful relic of the lake I knew. Swamp grasses had overgrown the sand.

I’m not certain of the date of our first summer there, but it must have been before the flu epidemic of 1919, in which my brother Robert died. I still have the snapshot of the whole ladder of six boys. Baby John was at the bottom, then Harold, Robert, myself, Albert, and Alex, the eldest, at the top.

Dad had bought a tin Lizzie a year or two earlier and, although I may be exaggerating, I recall that the fifteen mile trip out to Sand Lake took most of the day. There were the sand hills. After you crossed the North Saskatchewan river, even in low gear, with everyone but the driver walking, we would have trouble. We would back all the way down for another run at it if the first attempt failed. Or we would just get stuck in the sand.

Figure 2. Alfred Daniel Alexander Dewdney Bishop of Keewatin

We always had at least one flat tire en route. This meant taking out the inner tube of the afflicted tire, patching it, getting it all on the rim again, then pumping it up by hand. There was no spare wheel, so carrying an extra tire and inner tube saved no time. At a corner called Spruce Home, we would turn off the main road, drive through a series of farms (opening and closing gates), bumping over bare roots and getting stuck in mudholes.

Finally, we reached an open stretch of cleared land, a sandy double track from Galbraith’s to Balfour’s farm; from there to the lake it was a mere fifty yards. Dad and Alex had built the floor and frames for what we called the Big Tent and the Little Tent, their corners nearly touching. The little tent held bunks for the four older boys. The two youngest slept in the big tent with Mother, as did Dad when he got away from his clerical duties. As Archdeacon of Prince Albert, he frequently visited prairie parishes, implementing plans he had drawn up for their new churches. Immigration was at a high level, mainly from central Europe but substantially from Great Britain, too.

Figure 3. Alice Dewdney, Selwyn’s mother, relaxes on the beach at Sand Lake

There was then a surprising amount of beach along the south side of the lake: a wide area of dry sand and a firm, sandy bottom as far out as we could wade. Much of the shore was interspersed with reeds, the round, tapering type that grow in a few feet of water and bend gracefully in the wind.

The lake was essentially swamp water, and mother used it only for washing. We boys took turns going to Balfour’s well to bring back ice-cold drinking water in bright tin pails. My daily chore was to clean out the porridge pot, which I did with dispatch by the little two-plank dock, anticipating a free day after that. So it was up to the big tent with the clean pot, then a joyous dash down to the beach to greet our elegant sixteen-foot Peterborough-type pleasure canoe, my first true love. Even then I understood that romance was wonderful, but symbiosis was even better.

For a nine-year old boy she was a large craft, but long and heavy enough to tolerate my sixty pounds in the stern without becoming at all unstable. In fact, I was just heavy enough to lift the bow slightly out of the water. This made it eminently manoeuverable in the evening calm. But I learned soon enough to move amidships when there was a wind. I was totally untaught. My two older brothers had no more canoe experience than I and although I can recall going out in the canoe with Albert, I can’t remember his being as enthusiastic as I was. It seems that I had access to the canoe almost whenever I wanted it.

The evening calm was my favourite time. If I needed any evidence that the water was not good to drink, I had only to watch the lines of creamy foam along the shore where the waves beat on a windy day. As the water subsided in the evening, the foam began to detach itself from the shore in long lines at first, then breaking up into smaller units and irregular formations. How fascinating it was to manoeuvre the canoe in and out among these little islands, imagining them as icebergs whose slightest touch would bring doom. Or I would be a cavalry officer smashing irresistibly through an unbroken line of foam, swinging around to attack from the rear. Although it was all to no conscious purpose, I was learning to control my craft.

But my techniques were the crudest. All I knew was that you could turn either by hard paddling on one side or by dragging the paddle on the other side. Alternatively, by building up speed, paddling on alternate sides to keep on a straight line, I could use my paddle like a rudder to swerve in one direction or the other. Inevitably, I got quite skillful in spite of these limitations. Even later in life I got quite a bang out of paddling along a high rock face at a lively speed, so controlling the craft that the gunwhale would touch the rock with just a whisper. Back on Sand Lake there were no cliffs or rocks of any description, just the foam and long reeds. When there was no foam to charge, I would come at the reeds that arched gracefully out of the water along the shore.

Sand Lake was not always calm. There were days when a wild wind blew out of the northwest and waves crashed menacingly along the beaches. Then I would become a Viking, launching my longboat with a berserk burst of strength, leaping aboard as she mounted the first great breakers, then standing amidships to stroke out to sea with quick, powerful thrusts of my paddle.

There were explorations along the shore, as well. One day I paddled across to the north shore of the little lake, pulled the canoe up into the brush, and entered the dense spruce forest that bordered the lake across from our camp. I remember the silence and the feeling that this forest would go on and on northwards, without end. I went deeper and deeper into the forest, not knowing what I was seeking, until I came to a great tree, probably a white spruce. I looked upward in awe to where its trunk faded into the lower grey screen of outlived branches. I was alone, exhilaratingly alone in the forest hush, staring and staring upward as if that great tree had a message for me alone.

Family berry-picking excursions acquainted us with much of the lake. We might work our way out of the northwest corner of the lake into a series of sloughs. We named them the Greater and Lesser Shallow Lakes. Here, my elder brothers took precedence as canoemen but I held my peace, knowing that after supper she would be mine alone.

On the east shore of the lake there was a rookery among the tall, white poplars. From here issued some of the strangest croaks and caws as adult crows gave gawky young their first vocal lessons. It was a good place for high bush cranberries, but the flies were fierce when the berries were ripe. Dad, who, among other things, was a great tinsmith, fashioned tin cans into berry cups that we boys could clip to our belts, bringing them full to pour into a five-quart pail. There were no blueberries at Sand Lake, but there were Saskatoon berries in abundance. Those who rave about blueberry pie have never tasted Saskatoon berry pie. Fresh picked, this pear-shaped purple fruit is larger and seedier than your average blueberry, but just as juicy. Preserved, it has a unique flavour that no other berry can match and that I couldn’t begin to describe.

In the northeast corner of Sand Lake, it seemed so shallow that you doubted the canoe would float until you dipped your paddle toward the dark bottom to feel nothing. Bubbles that came up from the stew of black and rotting vegetation stank of sulphur dioxide and other noxious vapours, earning the bay its name: Devil’s Perfume Bay. Only years later did I learn the correct technical term for the odoriferous muck: loon shit.

Figure 4-a & b Kenora, 1925

The west shore of the lake opened onto the pasture land that Balfour’s small herd of milch cows grazed all night. Only once, in Ontario’s Haliburton County, have I ever heard again the nostalgic combination that lulled me to sleep night after night at Sand Lake: the soft clang of distant cowbells and the distant fluting of the loons.

One seemingly trivial experience at Sand Lake left an indelible mark on my memory. One windy day I landed the canoe at a spot on the south shore that I had never visited before, the only place where waves had washed out a bank of gravel scarcely a foot high. Embedded in the bank was a large stone that I pried out and stared at with awe. There are not many rocks on the Prairies, and to my inexperienced eye it was enormous, bigger than a man’s fist! How was it possible for a rock to be that big?

Kenora became our new home. In the winter of 1921, on the last leg of the journey from Winnipeg across the flats of Manitoba, our train entered a strange land. Although the snow made it familiar enough to the eye, we passed through rock cuts where walls of solid granite towered higher than I could see, even craning my neck at the window. The house that came with Dad’s new job as the Anglican Bishop of the diocese of Keewatin was high on the rocky shore of Tunnel Island, across the bay from the town of Kenora. When spring came, there was rock everywhere.

Figure 5. Rocky shore of Tunnel Island

The only way the builders could provide a lawn for the house was to put up a stone retaining wall six to eight feet high, bringing in earth to fill it. Instead of blasting out a basement, they made one on the ground floor and built the living floor of the house some ten feet above ground level. There was a hospital on Tunnel Island just north of our house on even higher rock. A bridge connected the island to the mainland and in winter, when people from the town wanted to visit the hospital, they would take the short cut across our property. Naturally, we did too.

During our first summer in Kenora I was in the family canoe morning, noon or night, whenever it became available. Sometimes I would use an errand to town as my excuse. I can’t recall whether we brought the Sand Lake canoe with us or acquired another. I only remember that it was the same model of cedar-strip Peterborough canoe and that someone had painted it blue.

I was in it whenever we were both free. With no foam to chase or reeds to dodge, I concentrated on making perfect landings at the boathouse dock and got quite good at it. But I was still using my self-taught techniques of Sand Lake.

Twice during the early days in Kenora I was confronted with the fact that I was a novice. Once, a man, a woman, and two children glided past our boathouse in a birchbark canoe. They sat on their calves with every appearance of ease, their paddles slipping so silently and smoothly, with such effortless ease, that I realized they could keep up the stroke all day without tiring. I tried to master the art of squatting as low as they did, realizing that this was the way to stabilize the canoe when it had no load for ballast. I had learned to kneel for short periods of time in choppy water, but ten minutes of sitting on my calves was too much. It took another ten minutes to straighten my knees when I stood up!

I had also noticed that the man never seemed to drag his paddle to keep the canoe on course, as if he didn’t need to steer. But I hadn’t watched his paddle stroke closely enough to discover how he did it. I didn’t learn how to achieve this effect until the following summer. Hector Angus, the local piano tuner, taught me how.

While his wife was in the Tunnel Island hospital, he would visit by canoe. I noticed him pulling up to the hospital boathouse on several occasions. He paddled a fourteen foot canoe, smaller than ours, but he sat amidships and handled the craft with the skill and ease of a master. From him I discovered the Ojibway steering twist. Until that time, when I wanted to keep the canoe from swinging, I would turn the blade out at each power stroke so it acted like a rudder. Angus turned the blade in at each power stroke just as he lifted the paddle out of the water on the return stroke. I tried it and it worked. But I was awkward because I had to fight my former practice.

A year or two later, when Angus came over to tune our piano, I had a chance to talk to him. He was morose and somewhat laconic until I asked him about canoeing. Then he came alive. What stuck in my mind, apart from the glow of his eyes on that occasion, was his engaging description of traveling at night. In a calm that lasted from evening through the night, you could make better time, he said at one point. But I suspect, after travelling at night myself in later years, that it was not merely the efficiency that attracted him, but the night echoes of loons and owls, the stars above, and the dark, mysterious shores, silhouetted against the night sky. And the long silences when all you heard was the drip of water from your lifted paddle.

It may have been Angus, too, who taught me that you can tell a novice by how he bends his elbow when he brings the paddle out of the water for the return stroke. An expert relaxes the lower arm while the paddle swings wide, almost of its own volition. Angus always paddled alone. Stories around town suggested that he was not the ideal father or husband, sometimes disappearing for weeks on end.

I’ll never forget the sight of Angus in a canoe: lean, alert, his paddle flashing in a tireless rhythm, bending forward with each stroke for maximum leverage in the water. His paddle would leap out of the water at the end of his power stroke, then skim the water, sweeping wide. He would feather it for minimum resistance to wind or wave, entering the water for the next stroke without a ripple. Over the years I have developed my own style, but no matter how good I may have seemed to myself, I have always reminded myself that Hector Angus did it better.

After that first glimpse of the Ojibway family, it was years before I saw another birchbark canoe. Most of the Lake of the Woods Ojibway paddled store-bought canoes. Carefully noting their stroke, I noticed, too, how they invariably paddled close to the shore, even though