I get to sit down with Farley Mowat on Monday for an interview. The writer and activist's new memoir “Otherwise” – described as the last book he will write -- is just hitting shelves, and he's on a book tour.
It will be the third time I’ve interviewed Farley, and I’m pretty excited. In one way or another, this giant of Canadian literature has played a pretty important role in my life.
When I was pretty young – maybe 12 or so – my uncle Dave gave me a couple of books by him, including “Lost in the Barrens” and “The Curse of the Viking Grave”, that my older cousin Scott had outgrown.
I devoured those books and started dreaming of a career in anthropology or trapping or canoe-guiding – anything that would allow me to explore the Barrens in Canada’s north and live out the kind of adventures I was reading about.
I moved on to "People of the Deer", "Never Cry Wolf", "The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be" – anything the public library had on hand.
A couple of years later my family moved to a small town in a remote part of Northwestern Ontario, and those stories suddenly took on new meaning as I met real-life people who hunted wolves and bears and trapped otters and beavers for their pelts.
But my most personal encounters with Farley Mowat occurred after I graduated from journalism school and moved to Port Hope, Ontario to work as a reporter at the Port Hope Evening Guide.
Though Farley and his wife spend the summers in Cape Breton, they spend the rest of the year in Port Hope. I lived in a cottage right on Lake Ontario, and he lived around the corner on King Street, and would walk his dogs on the path that ran right in front of my place.
I had the chance to interview him a couple of times. The first was when his name was included on a list the RCMP released of suspected Communist sympathizers that had been under surveillance during the Cold War.
He told me a hilarious story about visiting the Russian consulate in Ottawa with his father Angus, getting drunk on Vodka and standing on the roof of the building in their Scottish kilts, mooning the CSIS agents they knew were holed-up in the building across the road.
The second time was when one of his short stories was turned into a film called The Snow Walker. The film is about a brash bush pilot in northern Canada who has no regard for his surroundings. All he needs to survive, he thinks, is his plane and his own wits.
That outlook caves in pretty quickly when he crashes in the Barrens and is forced to rely on his young aboriginal passenger to survive.
After we had discussed – over cranberry juice and whisky -- the adaptation and how Farley felt about it, he said “now what about you? What’s new in your life?”
It’s not a question a reporter expects to hear very often, so I was taken aback. But after a moment I managed to tell him I was actually getting ready to go to Morocco in a couple of weeks, to spend a year doing volunteer work with a Christian organization – and I was pretty excited about it.
Farley’s eyes lit up and he moved to the edge of his seat.
“You need to listen to the lesson in The Snow Walker!” he told me. “You can’t be like the bush pilot who thought there was nothing to learn. You can’t go over there thinking you’re going to help and teach people, but you need to be the student and learn from them!”
It was powerful, insightful advice, and I never forgot it. I was often reminded, during my time there, of those words and how true they were.
So I’m excited to meet Farley again, and to thank him for his advice. I hope he remembers me. I think he will. At 87 years old he’s still sharp and insightful, and is probably still walking his dog along the waterfront trail in Port Hope and sipping cranberry and whisky in the afternoons.
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