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Sketches of a
Little Town and Margaret
Laurence's Manawaka books which showed me what a
Canadian small town was like and of course Terrace
is an Ontario town because the people who founded
it are from Ontario. Terrace was founded in 1911.
There had been settlers there before, white
settlers, but the town was started because of the
mill to cut ties for the CN--whatever the CN was
called then--the Grand Trunk Pacific--and the man
who founded it, George Little, set up his mill to
cut the ties and then by 1913 there was this
enormous pile of tie ends, heap of tie ends, and
someone thought it was a great idea to set this on
fire--a day I think that was very much like the day
of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. It was hot
and windy--a great day to start a fire on a hot
windy day and the resulting fire leaped the Skeena
River twice and destroyed 70% of the usable timber
within 3 miles of Terrace. So as a result of this,
the city fathers then brought out all these
saplings from Ontario and planted them along the
streets of Terrace, so all over Terrace there are
now 80 year old trees from Ontario of various kinds
and it has the little straight streets and the main
street that leads down to the lake, except it's a
river, like in Leacock. So that's when I arrived
and as I began teaching I realized that here I am
in the very world that Leacock and Laurence and
also Sinclair Ross in a starker way describes a
town called Horizon in For Me and My
House but then I
realized it was changing--it was becoming something
else, it was becoming what it is now--a terminal of
the global village and so in that period I can see
the whole transition from bourgeois society which
was based upon the main street to what we have now
based upon the mall. I can see it as a period in my
understanding of society under capitalism and I can
see it as a period in my understanding of what
Canada was, and what Canada was is coming to an
end, has come to an end and I can also see it, I
guess, as the centre of my life in a way, my mature
years, so to speak, spent in this activity of
teaching which I hadn't done much of before, which
I don't really intend to do much more of from now
on unless I have to for money. I probably will. I
don't mind going back and teaching every couple of
years, a couple of sections, but ya, I feel that
that period of my life--the Terrace period even
though my base is still Terrace, my base really is
the North. As soon as I get out of Terrace, like on
the bus a couple of miles away from Terrace, I
realize that this is the country where I live. I
really love this country, but I forget that when
I'm in Terrace because I know just too much about
both the small town politics of the place and also
seeing it as a terminal and outpost of the global
village. So ya, I think that period has pretty much
come to an end although, you know, I have another
long poem in manuscript now--called Terrace
Landscapes, so that now
maybe that I think of it I started out in Terrace
with Mountains and
Air and maybe I am
finishing it with this other long poem which I
haven't even looked at yet and my plan for this
poem, because the last manuscript I have been
working on I've gotten, oh I think 5 poems out of
it now, 2 that are published in North Coast
Collection and 3 in the
Capilano
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