herself but saving her village.
Water also was central to the life of the Polings, much to Veronica’s chagrin. She hated the water and I learned this early. My first memory of her is from Loon Lake, the popular cottage lake just east of Thunder Bay. I was an infant on my very first excursion into the northern Ontario wilds. I remember the water gurgling a mild protest against the push of the paddle. The canoe whispered a calming lullaby to the lake, a fair-weather friend that could turn as tempestuous as it was now tranquil.
Far in the distance, a magnificent black steam locomotive boasted its size and superiority over everything along its moving landscape. Not the boldest of birds, not even the cocky jays, dared to call while the pounding engine issued shrill screams that pierced the chilly air then floated into the distance like wide wet vowels. These were the urgent calls of a passenger train at full throttle, rocking and clicking and clacking, hell-bent to keep time with the fine Hamilton railwayman’s watch held in the flat of the engineer’s broad hand. The whistle calls intensified as the train thundered past Loon Lake, only to be swallowed by the advancing dusk as it roared west toward Port Arthur at the head of the Big Lake. There would be no stop at the brick-red Loon Lake station today because it was too late in the year. Summer was almost a memory and three seasons must change before the shrieking steam engine decelerated to chuffs and puffed and panted to a stop beside the lake, disgorging cottagers and their kids and men wearing wide-brimmed fedoras and carrying tubular fly-fishing rod cases. The lake returned to the bush for another year, except perhaps for the solitary trapper or rock hound and two adults and a baby making for the far shore in a nasty little thirteen-foot cedar strip and canvas canoe known as the Undertaker.
The passing of the train was momentous, though not because of its failure to stop or because its fading whistle accentuated the isolation. It was because Veronica, in spite of her terror of water, removed one hand from its death grip on the gunwale for a second or maybe two, to perform a perfunctory half-wave before regripping the varnished wood. The wave was more from habit than bravery because Veronica grew up in a railroader’s home and railroad folks wave at every passing train. Not waving on this night would be a special breach of railway etiquette because the tall man in the pinstripe overalls pushing the locomotive throttle with one hand and checking the precise Hamilton watch in the other was Isidore LaFrance, running flat out on the home run into the Port Arthur roundhouse. A lifetime of waving at trains, especially one commanded by your dad, could not be overcome by the numbing fear of riding in a deathtrap canoe carrying the man you love in the stern and your first-born on the cedar strip floor beside the box of groceries.
Veronica loathed the water and all forms of water transport, unreasonably so in those early days. The rationale for her fear and loathing would come later, after years of living in a family obsessed with crossing water in things that would float, or often only half float.
Why we were in that canoe on that lake in the autumn of 1944, I cannot say. Nor should I be expected to say considering I had entered the world only eighteen months previous and was just then experiencing the first sights and sounds to be committed to memory. Perhaps my father was without work, or perhaps it was one of those last precious holidays given to people before they shipped out to the killing grounds in Europe and the Pacific. Others had gone already. Ray’s younger brother Jack was in a British hospital after riding the tail of a flaming bomber into a field somewhere in Wales. Terri, one of Ray’s three sisters, was destined for the WACs and two future brothers-in-law, Gus Hungle and Sandy Brown, were at sea or about to be.
Already the Polings had one posthumous war hero, whose life was snuffed out by a Nazi U-boat ten days before my birth. Capt. Clark Poling, a thirty-year-old U.S. Army chaplain and a distant cousin, was one of the famous Four Chaplains aboard the troop ship USAT Dorchester sunk en route to Europe. The Dorchester was a down-at-the-keels coastal liner that had sailed in luxury before being pressed into war service to ferry troops across the Atlantic. It carried 902 persons as it steamed through the icy blackness of the patch of Atlantic known as Torpedo Junction, 250 kilometres off Greenland just after midnight on February 3, 1943. Most of the troops were sleeping when the torpedoes hit, killing many instantly and leaving the others scrambling to reach the decks for life jackets. There were not enough for everyone, so Clark Poling and three fellow chaplains removed theirs and gave them to soldiers beside them. As the Dorchester tilted and prepared for its horrible slide to the bottom, the four chaplains linked arms at the deck rail and prayed, sang, and offered hope to the soldiers in the water.
“It was one of the finest things I have ever seen this side of Heaven,” one of the 250 survivors said later. The other 672 soldiers and sailors on board died.
The story of the Dorchester torpedoing and the uncommon valour of the four chaplains is immortalized in the Chapel of the Four Chaplains at Temple University in Philadelphia. It opened in the early 1950s, dedicated by Clark’s dad, Rev. Daniel Poling, and his friend President Harry Truman.
Whether they were preachers or papermakers, the Polings loved the outdoors. And that love was the reason that Robert Lee Poling’s second eldest child, Raymond Marcel, was paddling the Undertaker across Loon Lake with his wife, Veronica, and me. Why a supposedly sane man like Robert would allow his son and family to borrow and actually use that canoe remains a puzzle many decades later. My grandfather’s canoe was the most homely, most ungovernable, and crankiest little beast ever to kiss the water. It lived long and dumped many, but never my grandfather, and he loved it.
War raged, but Loon Lake was another world. After the passing of the train, the lake regained its solitude. A raven returning to nest croaked. A trout splashed off the starboard stern, causing my father to bend forward and reach for his fly rod, an action immediately halted by a scream of terror:
“Ray, I told you before, you’re going to tip this damn canoe and drown us all!”
My father stared down at me curiously, then wistfully out at the widening ring of the speckled trout rise. I am certain that it was only my presence that caused him to set the rod down. A frightened wife, yes, even a wet wife clinging to an overturned canoe, was not reason enough to pass on a trout like that. A baby was.
For my part, speckled trout belly flopping for flies held no interest. The outside world was just too big and too amazing to try to bring into focus, let alone try to comprehend. My world was in front of me in the form of that grocery box with intriguing bags, cans, and bottles sticking out the top, so tantalizingly close to my stretching little fingertips.
“Oooh, nooo!”
This sudden sound startled me, and of course my mother, who immediately concluded that it announced the inevitable end of us all. It was a sound I was to hear many times in the future in many variations. Sometimes it was multisyllabic, with the oooh and nooo stretched out like oooh-ah nooo-ah to emphasize disbelief so complete that it contained anguish. Sometimes the last sound was repeated, as in oooh, no, no, no, no, which was accented by a violent sideways shaking of the head from which the sound was emanating. This day the sound was just mournful, so rounded that it floated across the lake and into the trees, skipping lightly off rock faces, never bouncing back as a sharp echo, but simply floating on a course into the next valley and beyond.
For me growing up, oooh nooo became a bush sound as familiar as the crack of a long fallen branch crushed by something dark and unseen. Or the syrupy and insistent trill of the vireo or the thump of a bear paw dismantling a stump alive with breakfast grubs. A bush sound that always announced that my father was near and in some momentary distress.
After my initial fright, the sound made me laugh with delight and I rocked forward and backwards clapping my hands, hoping to hear it again. “Oooh, nooo, no, no, no!” The sound flew from my father’s mouth as he flailed away with a paddle, trying to put the canoe into a 180-degree turn and full reverse at the same time.
“Oh,
