The Long Trail: My Life in the West (2 page)

I
’ve always wanted to be where the sagebrush grows. When he was in his late teens, my old man, George Dawson Tyson, had that same desire. He’d been born July 4, 1889, into a large Victorian upper-middle-class family a few miles west of Liverpool, in the little seaside town of Hoylake, England. Somehow he got infused with the romance of the North American West — probably by reading about Buffalo Bill’s buffalo-hunting adventures — and he immigrated to Alberta in 1906 with dreams of becoming a cowboy. George arrived on the Canadian prairie green as a gourd, landing work as a ranch hand near Bowden, about sixty-five miles north of Calgary. He later told me he’d go to social events and almost freeze to death on the way back to the ranch, shivering under his buffalo robe.

The winter of 1906–07 in particular was a killer on the northern plains. Entire herds of cattle died. “The year of the blue snow” is how Wallace Stegner described it in
Wolf Willow:
“That winter has remained ever since, in the minds
of all who went through it, as the true measure of catastrophe.” My dad had gone to Alberta seeking the romance of cowboy life, not frostbite, and after a couple of harsh winters disabused him of his puncher plans, he drifted to the more moderate climate of the West Coast. Years later he told me he’d witnessed the last of open-range ranching in Alberta.

My father, George Dawson Tyson, in Alberta
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

By his telling, he also saw the last of the real Native coastal villages in the Pacific Northwest — complete with totem poles — while working for a government survey crew on Nootka Island around 1910. After that job ended, he applied for a 160-acre homestead in the bush on Vancouver Island near Cowichan Bay. He liked to tell the story of felling a bunch of arbutus trees on that homestead and dropping them into the saltchuck, where, to his surprise, all
the logs promptly sank. He had to dig a well and build a rudimentary shack to improve the homestead so he could keep it, but he never got it done; the land must have reverted back to the government.

He hung out for a time with a bunch of English rounders on the island, and then the war came. In 1914 he enlisted with the Victoria-based 50th Regiment (Gordon Highlanders), which provided troops for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. My old man headed to France in April 1915 as a twenty-five-year-old private. (Many of the other CEF troops were British-born too.) Eventually he ended up as a captain in the King’s Liverpool Regiment of the British Army.

I don’t know all the details of his war service, but at some point — I don’t know when or how — the Germans wounded him pretty severely in his neck and back. Shrapnel wounds, I suspect. After that the Germans captured him and kept him in a prisoner-of-war camp hospital for a few months. I do know that he struggled to communicate during that time because he couldn’t pick up German. Eventually he was repatriated to England, where he spent some more time in hospital recovering from his war wounds. For the rest of his life he always stood a little crooked because of his neck injury.

My father said that when he got back to Duncan, B.C., after the war (that’s where he lived at the time), a cenotaph had been built to commemorate the dead. His was one of the few names of young men from the area that wasn’t on it. They were all killed in the early part of the war, those Canadian boys. My dad was lucky.

The British Army gave him a Military Cross, with bar — the equivalent of a second MC. The citation said the medal
had been awarded for “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. After ably leading his company in a successful attack on the enemy’s lines, he advanced with his own and another company, filled a dangerous gap in our line and by excellent control firmly held his own against a counter attack in the face of very heavy shelling. Throughout the operation he displayed the utmost ability and skill, and kept his men’s spirits up by continually pressing along the line at imminent personal risk during heavy hostile shell fire.”

When I was growing up, each November my dad and I would ride our horses through the meadows and oak trees of the Uplands, an area in Oak Bay dotted with English-style estates, on what he called Armistice Day. At 11 a.m. we would dismount and stand silently for three minutes. Afterwards he would tell me some of his battle memories, recalling the rats in the trenches and the snipers that had fired upon the Allied lines. He’d also talk about the Christmastime ceasefires with the Germans, when the snipers stopped shooting for a day. The next day they’d be right back at it, killing each other again.

It’s amazing that the war didn’t destroy my old man the way it wrecked so many World War I vets. He saw lots of action but, for whatever reason, he didn’t internalize the experience. It probably helped that he never went through a gas attack. Growing up on Vancouver Island, I saw many of those old English guys who’d been gassed in the war, and a lot of them were crazy.

After the war, George met my mother, Margaret Gertrude Campbell, a native-born islander with a Scots Presbyterian
background. (Her people had come to Victoria from Ontario — probably via San Francisco — in the 1870s, and her father, Duncan Campbell, ran a successful apothecary.) My mom’s parents owned a summer home at Cadboro Bay, just east of the present-day University of Victoria, and my dad often stayed at the nearby Cadboro Bay Hotel. Somehow my mom and dad met on the beach, and they married on June 18, 1930. He was thirty-nine; she was twenty-six.

Their first child, Jean Tyson, was born the following year. Jean was always a shy kid. After I was born, in 1933, she felt I got all the attention from our parents, and she was probably right. We didn’t like each other very much as kids and we squabbled constantly, especially when we played Monopoly.

It sounds strange, but I never really knew my mother. She wasn’t an extrovert by any means — she kept her thoughts and feelings pretty much to herself. She had four siblings, a couple of whom were alcoholics, and as a result my mom didn’t drink. Unlike my dad, she was pretty severe; she didn’t approve of “loose morals” at all. She was always there for me over the years, but poor Mother lived a pretty dour life.

She had fully bought into Presbyterian doctrine, and at Christmas and Easter she’d drag Jean and me to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, a big brick building on the corner of Douglas and Broughton streets in downtown Victoria. I hated going there and really disliked the music — it was terrible. That poor organ at St. Andrew’s suffered great musical indignities in the cause of Presbyterianism. I would have much preferred it if Mother had hauled us to a Baptist or Pentecostal church, where the music was more rockin.’

The first house Jean and I lived in was a bungalow on Dufferin Avenue, just west of Cattle Point. Our house was surrounded by big open fields, little oak trees and scotch broom — beautiful country, almost like range. The green meadows stretched right down to the ocean. It felt like we were out in the country, yet the Uplands just north of our place was furnished with paved roads connecting the houses, lit by ornate cast iron lampposts just like you’d find in a city. It was a lovely arrangement, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since. That entire area is now completely developed, but back then the suburbanization of Victoria, a civil-service town of old brick and wooden buildings, was only just beginning.

People living there when I was a kid liked to pretend they were British; they thought of their city as a bastion of the British Empire, strong and loyal. My earliest memory is of bonfires burning all along the rocky coastline of Cattle Point in 1939 as people eagerly awaited the arrival of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, whose steamship was to come up the coast and into Victoria Harbour. There the royal party would mingle with their loyal subjects. I was five at the time, and I seem to remember people waving little Union Jacks as they waited for the ocean liner, a surreal scene that plays like an old movie in my mind.

In addition to the anglophile culture, a whole other class of people thrived on the island. Immigrants — Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Irish — drove the economy, working as loggers, fishermen and miners. And as you went north up Vancouver Island, the pretensions of mock empire rapidly gave way to a working-class ethic that attracted me even as
a little boy. Those guys were out in the fresh air doing hard labour, and it seemed like a lot more fun than working in a stuffy downtown office as a civil servant. Of course, as a kid I didn’t realize just how hard their manual labour was.

Even in the depths of the Great Depression, the feeling on Vancouver Island was one of optimism. There would never be an end to the big timber. The salmon and other fishing stocks were inexhaustible. The natural resources would last forever. A strong man would always find work. This was not the Dust Bowl.

My old man managed the Monarch Life Assurance Company’s Victoria branch, which sold life insurance to loggers. That wasn’t a bad idea, since those guys were always getting killed in spectacular accidents. He’d go up the coast on a little steamer to Port Alberni and Port Renfrew to do business. When he was home, he was always busy, a hyper banty rooster of a man. He wasn’t that big — five foot eight — and had black hair very much in the style of the 1930s, like British-American actor Cary Grant’s. He was very proud of his hair.

When Jean and I were really young, Dad used to take us up to Smugglers Cove, on Ten Mile Point, a peninsula that sticks out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We’d all stand on the rocks and watch the killer whales going north in their spring migration as seabirds wheeled overhead. The old man would bring along some glittery jewellery he had bought at Woolworth’s, which he’d bury in the sand. Then he’d tell Jean and me that if we dug deep enough we might find treasure. That memory has stayed with me; I wrote a song about it (“Smugglers Cove”) more than six decades later:

The old man never came to church with Mom, Jean and me. His church was the great outdoors.

We’re pretty similar, the old man and I. He approached life in a very visceral, non-intellectual way, always living in the moment and having fun. He loved fishing and riding horses, though he wasn’t very good at either. He was certainly no horseman. I haven’t a clue how he got into horses — he might have learned when he went to boarding school on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea — but his idea of riding was simply to hop on and go fast. He didn’t know anything about a horse’s mind.

When I was about six, the rodeo came to Vancouver and my dad took me on the ferry over to the mainland to see it. I met my first cowboy at that rodeo — a Native, dark as mahogany. He was wearing a purple satin shirt, and when he lifted me up and stuck me on the saddle, I said to myself,
This is it
. That saddle was where I was meant to be.

My dad usually kept two or three ponies of his own — mostly cayuses (low-quality horses) — for playing polo on. Dad was always scuffling around looking for pasture for his polo horses, and I remember them being tethered around the open fields surrounding our house.

I was scared to death the first time a horse broke into a
lope while I was being ponied by my dad. When you’re a little kid, it feels like you’re way up in the sky on that saddle. Some people give up altogether after a scare like that, just as some people give up on hockey the first time they’re checked into the boards. Not me. I got back on.

Me at nine
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

The old man was always on the lookout for a cheap horse, and I encountered more Native cowboys on trips up into the British Columbia interior with him. We’d head off to Clinton or 100 Mile House and stay at dude ranches and reservations. The cowboy culture in British Columbia those days was heavily Native, and the colourful characters fascinated me. Their demeanour was so different from the suits in Victoria, and they also worked with their hands
like the labourers I admired. The Natives would cowboy in the summer and in the winter they’d work as loggers. That Native cowboy culture I knew as a kid is now gone, completely gone.