Here and There – Canada
When I started this account of some of my travels, I was quite sure I didn’t want to visit Canada ever again. I’d had a strange relationship to the country, as two visits there were associated with disasters, and they had coloured my perception of the place. The first was nearly 50 years ago, and the second thirty years later.
The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time of rebellion in the UK. I use the word ‘rebellion’ carefully, as it was a time when children rebelled against parental control, students rebelled against university curricula, and artists or every kind rebelled against past practice. Some talked about revolution, and read Marxists, French intellectuals and even German theorists, but most of us just wanted to get on and do stuff differently.
In 1971, I arrived at the University of Edinburgh to join what was then a typical ‘odd’ department, the Centre for Research in the Educational Sciences. You didn’t know there were educational sciences? Nor did the department, as it was really a refuge for new thinking of one kind or another, all such thinking loosely (very loosely) connected with education. There were a couple of staff interested in new approaches to learning and curriculum development, largely influenced by work on learning organisations and various quasi-Marxist writers in South America and later in Europe and the US. Others were interested in medical education, in rethinking educational administration, and even intellectual preferences! The head of the Centre was Liam Hudson, who had been a researcher in Cambridge, and was famous for his work on the different approaches, practices and lifestyles of what he called ‘convergent and divergent’ thinkers, a categorisation that loosely overlapped with a division between those interested in and working in the sciences, and those involved in the arts.
What was I doing there? I had been studying social anthropology, but as I didn’t want to go to uncharted part of the world for 2 years of fieldwork (I was married with three young children). Instead I wandered into social psychology, the emerging career paths of computer programmers, and just about anything else that looked interesting. I had already started doing some work in medical education, especially in the rethinking of the traditional medical school curriculum. Yet another area of research involved cyclicity, and that linked me to the studies being undertaken on Edinburgh on dream recall. Once there, a small nudge from the researcher suggested we could look at whether dreams were affected by cyclical change.
My first idea was to study dreaming and dream recall using the sleep laboratory at the university. The research methodology was simple: you covered the participants (guinea pigs?) heads with sensors and woke them as they were experiencing rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. After answering, “What were you dreaming about?’, you allowed them to go back to sleep. Amazingly, participants did not remember being woken during the night. The sleep laboratory researchers were interested in the themes that dominated dreaming (the work was undertaken in the Department of Psychiatry). Well, I thought, why not see if the nature of dreams was affected by other changes: clearly, we should study women’s dreaming and relate recall to the stages of the menstrual cycle. A great study that never happened, as having women as sleep laboratory participants was not allowed (this was in the early 1970s).
To cut a long story short, I came up with another proposal. How about seeing if the contraceptive pill affected the recall of dreams. This was still relatively early on in the use of oral contraceptives, and back then various brands had quite different levels of progestogen and oestrogen, and some had no oestrogen at all. As part of a survey of a number of issues germane to the Centre’s work, we put together a survey to be administered to undergraduates at the university. It included questions on dream recall, the use and types of contraceptive pill, alongside others concerned with psychosomatic illnesses, field of study, and several background characteristics. By infiltrating the annual matriculation process at the university, we were allowed to set up at the entrance to the room where every student was required to matriculate each year. The result was a very high response rate (well over 90%): the students had nothing else to do while they waited! It would be impossible to get approval to such an approach today, and I doubt the survey would pass muster. However, the data was fascinating. There were clear links between reported levels of dream recall and chemically different types of contraceptive pill. Dream Recall and the Menstrual Cycle, appeared in the 1974 Journal of Psychosomatic Research. It was to be my most cited academic paper.
Now, at this point you might wonder what this has to do with Canada. Did I say the Centre was creative? No, it was a hothouse, and as far as I was concerned, it was positively throbbing with UST (yes, unresolved sexual tension!). Is there such a thing as a 10-year itch? I had several staff. One was the research assistant who worked on the dream recall study, and other projects. We became more and more involved with each other. We would be invited to the head of department’s house some evenings, to have a glass of wine, listen to what was often very sexy music (Roberta Flack’s Reverend Lee, and Will You Still Love Me in the Morning), and sometimes, just sometimes, talk about the projects. It was a hothouse atmosphere; I suspect we provided an excellent experiment for observation.
Losing any sense of reality one night together, we decided to to tell our current partners we were going to split up with them. I had been accepted to present a paper at a conference in Montreal, and we planned to go there together; we saw it as a good way to make the break. In fact, what happened was we learnt that plans made in the aftermath of passion are often ill-thought, and frequently wrong! The next day we were both snapped out of our fantasy plans. To salve my bruised ego, I decided I would drink every malt whisky available in the University Staff Club, in three days: I did, ten glasses at lunch time and ten in the evening. I got to the end and was sick with alcohol poisoning for days. To this day, I can’t stand the smell of scotch, and certainly have tried to avoid drinking another drop, except in a cocktail. All told, a fateful example of a delayed seven-year-itch (just a few years late!).
Let’s leap ahead by 30 years. In the early part of 2006, my youngest daughter was in Year 10. My (second) wife had been having a bad time. We’d been in Canada the previous summer, and on our way back she had experienced a really bad bout of ‘flu. From then on, it seemed her health was up and down; I think she had treatment for pneumonia twice. She was finding it hard to walk up hills, even medium ones like the one that ran from the centre of Melbourne up Bourke Street to Liverpool Street, Parliament House and beyond. She put it down to her weight, but this was more than a weight problem, and she was referred to a lung specialist in Malvern, who arranged for her to have a bronchoscopy. She had cancer, and we were told her life expectancy was around three months. Unfairly, I blamed Canada for her illness.
My wife was very determined to do everything to beat the cancer. Quickly admitted for surgery, it became evident her cancer was aggressive and had grown in the short period between diagnosis and her operation. She died just three months after her initial diagnosis, and two months before our youngest daughter’s sixteenth birthday. How do you survive a blow like that? You have to move forward, of course. I went back to work, and my young daughter, who must share some of my character, went back to school. I proved to be a master at suppressing my emotions, and it’s only been recently I’ve been able to admit to the grief.
Stop! Perhaps it is time for a reset on this account. Two times Canada had figured in disasters, and for a long time it meant that I could see no point in going there. I suppose I am a slow learner, but in the past few years I have been able to put the past in a more balanced perspective. The first visit, fifty years ago, was nothing more than thinking about using a conference trip for a foolish affair. I did go to Montreal, presented a couple of academic research papers, and I saw little other than the hotel conference room and restaurant. I went alone, and I avoided a disaster. That idea was already lost to the past!
The second visit, which took place the year before my wife died was wonderful. Before leaving for Canada, which was part of a longer visit to North America, I had researched what we could do. I had no particular desire to go over to the east, but the West Coast and the Rockies beckoned. Indeed, a primary school friend’s father had waxed eloquently about the trans-continental train journey he had taken, from Vancouver all the way to Toronto. We didn’t want to go that far, but I discovered we could go from Vancouver to Jasper by train, and then drive back to Vancouver through part of the northern Rockies.
The summer of 1995 was cool, at least in Vancouver. We drifted around town for a couple of days, and then went to the railway station to catch the Canadian, run by Via Rail Canada, a crown corporation with a mandate to run intercity passenger services. We were to be travelling in the train’s original stainless-steel coaches built for the Canadian Pacific Railway forty years earlier. It was cold at the terminus, and both my wife and daughter looked grim. At last we boarded and found we were in the last coach, the rear half of which was the club car! Warmth, at last. Going forward to the next carriage, we could go upstairs into an elongated bubble on the roof of the coach, totally glassed in, and idea for viewing. We spent most of the daylight there.
As railway journeys go, this has to be one of the most spectacular, especially for the first 24 hours going through the Rockies. We went through the improbably name Kamloops during the night, (sleeping well after cocktails in the club car), a city whose name is the anglicized version of the Shushap word ‘Tk’əmlúps’, meaning ‘meeting of the waters’. Despite playing a key role in trade, especially fur, it was decimated twice over, first by smallpox and later by TB. Slightly boggle-eyed, around mid-day we arrived in Jasper.
From Jasper, we hired a car and travelled along the spine of the Rockies to Banff. Close to the city was the spectacular Lake Louise. A small town, initially settled in 1884 as an outpost for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Lake Louise is 1,600 m (5,200 ft) above sea level (I later learnt it is Canada’s highest community). The nearby lake, framed by mountains, is one of the most famous mountain vistas in the world; I would have been even more impressed if I hadn’t already seen Maroon Lake with the Maroon Bells mountains near Aspen. Lake Louise is famous for the famous Chateau Lake Louise, a stunning older hotel building, constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway, and later taken over by the Fairmont group. Well beyond our usual price range, but we had to go there. Finally we worked out way back down to Vancouver. I had expected the Rockies to be spectacular and the scenery was stunning. However, I hadn’t expected to see snow in the middle of summer, and there it was. Near Revelstoke we walked over to the foot of a glacier, a mere 100 yards from the road.
I’m not a fan of Vancouver, but it does have some wonderful places to visit. The second highlight of our time there was to go by ferry to Victoria on Vancouver Island. Yet another friend to blame, this time one who had told us we needed to see the Butchart Gardens. The story of the gardens is unusual. Robert Butchart manufactured Portland cement, and in 1904 he and his wife Jennie established their home, Benvenuto, near his quarry on Tod Inlet some ten miles north of Victoria. In 1907 Isaburo Kishida, a sixty-five-year-old garden designer from Yokohama, Japan, was commissioned to build a Japanese Garden. Then, in 1909, when the limestone quarry was exhausted, Jennie set about turning it into a Sunken Garden, which was finally finished in 1921. In 1926, they replaced the tennis courts with an Italian garden and in 1929 they replaced their kitchen vegetable garden with a large English Arts and Crafts style rose garden. The quarry on Vancouver Island had totally disappeared.
Since then, the gardens have become a major tourist attraction. They now include a Children’s Pavilion with its Rose Carousel, decorated by a menagerie including thirty animals ranging from bears to horses, ostriches, and zebras, intended to mirror the world of visitors to the Gardens. The designs were hand-picked by the owner, in consultation with an artist from North Carolina. North Carolina? Yes, where I was to move six years later!
If that isn’t once connection too many, there are several bronze statues displayed in the gardens. One, of wild boar, was cast in Florence and is a replica of a 1620 bronze cast by Pietro Tacca. It is called ‘Tacca’ in honour of the sculptor and, just as is the case with the original, its snout is shiny from the many visitors rubbing it for luck. As a result, the boar has acquired a dull green patina, except for the nose. I’ve rubbed both Il Porcellino snouts! Yes, the gardens were as extraordinary as my friend had suggested.
It must have been a cold summer that year. Did the cold aggravate my wife’s cancer? She was sick after the trip, and it was the first of a number of times. However, I don’t think I can claim it caused her cancer, which was most likely the result of the chemicals her previous husband used in his carpentry activities (he was to die a few years later with similar symptoms).
Since I have decided to retell the story of visits two Canada, now I have to make another admission. I had been there between the conference visit in 1974 and the Rockies visit in 2005. My other major visit was also for a conference, in this case to Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was presenting a keynote address on what back then were called ‘native peoples’. The situation of Australia’s indigenous population was of great interest to Canadians, as they have a large number of indigenous tribes, especially given the many settlements to be found along the West coast of the country. Way back in my undergraduate days I had read about the potlatch, the extraordinary mass and often destructive feast held by the Kwakiutl and other tribes in order to demonstrate their wealth and power. I wanted to learn more.
Did I say Vancouver was cold? It was warm compared to Winnipeg in November. Winnipeg was so cold that car drivers who wanted to park outside shops in the downtown area would plug their car engine block into a heater made available as part of the parking meter. In fact, it was so cold that shopping was a challenge if you attempted to go on foot from your hotel to the local shops. It wasn’t the walking that was the problem, it was managing what you should wear. The minute you stepped outside, it was bitterly cold, so thick pullovers, coats, scarves and hats were standard gear. However, once you entered the shopping mall, everywhere was summery warm. This meant you had to take off your jumper, coat, gloves and hat – and carry them, making you even hotter!
I introduced this account stating I didn’t want to visit Canada again. Rubbish, truth demands honest admissions. I have enjoyed every visit and would love to go back!
