Tomson  Highway

Permanent  Astonishment

tomsonhighway.com

The part of travel by dogsled that is most striking is its silence. The vastness of the land demands it—immense, a sigh that yawns, the swelling of a lung divine in nature. It helps, of course, that the sled is engine-less. The cacophony of cars thus non-existent, the hum of powerlines, the blare of radios, television, or gramophones, the babble of voices human or otherwise, none of this is there to distract it. And if the cawing of a crow, the squeaking of the sled on crisp new snow, or Dad’s mellifluous baritone exhorting his dogs left, right, or forward do break that silence, if rarely, then the blanket of snow that coats that landscape muffles such events, renders them sibilant, irrelevant. So that what that silence ends up doing after an hour of non-stop gliding through virgin snow is paralyzing its listeners with a music beyond experience. And the visuals that go with that “music” confirm that trance.

There is no trail; we make our own. And we make it on snow just freshly fallen, snow of a whiteness that is seen nowhere else in God’s good kingdom, snow so white it hurts one’s eyes. And we weave our way through mile after mile of stands of spruce trees thus finely cloaked, lake after lake—large, small, and medium—each likewise enhanced, river after river each likewise white. White, a general, a universal white. A hopping rabbit here, an Arctic fox there, a ptarmigan, a weasel, all four species in their seasonal white, a chickadee here, a junco there, a lynx, a squirrel, the forest is alive, the forest is an act of soundless magic. Then there is the air. Direct from the North Pole, not once on its entire more than twelve-thousand-mile-long journey down to our homeland has it passed through any conceivable source of pollution so that, by the time it gets here, it makes lungs gasp, it makes lungs sing. And newborn babies sleep like angels.

For vast as it is, this region of the world still forms but a portion, and a small portion only, of Canada’s Arctic. To take one point of comparison, the distance from the Manitoba—Nunavut border at latitude sixty to the country’s northern extremity at latitude ninety—that is, the North Pole—is the same as that from Vancouver to Halifax. Another point of comparison: the territory of Nunavut, with its population, in the year 2021, of 39,000, is the same size as all of western Europe, with its population of a near half-billion. And that’s just one territory of Canada’s thirteen provinces and territories. So that from the perspective of an eagle surfing the breeze a half-mile overhead, the Highway family must look, “down there” that sunlit morning, like a line of ants traversing a bedsheet. I don’t, of course, remember the journey, but I will see that landscape innumerable times throughout my life. I will live it, dream it. And between Mom, Dad, and Louise, who will tell me the story a thousand times as I grow up, I have it on excellent authority that this, indeed, is the trip we make that tenth day of December, 1951.

Finally, after four excruciatingly slow days of progress in order to accommodate Dad’s injured foot—that part of the journey normally entails three days, if that—we burst from the forest and onto the surface of a river called the Cochrane. Lined in summer by swaths of wild grasses that come to the chest of a full-grown man and sway like dancers when coaxed by breezes and with willows that lean over the riverbank like tearful widows, the Cochrane River winds its way from just under the Northwest Territories’ border to the northern extremity of Reindeer Lake, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles all told. In so doing, it follows the warp and weave of endless eskers (glacier-carved, sky-high, miles-long land formations that look like molehills), connects one lake to another and another, and is marked by rapids large and small at intervals irregular. In winter, naturally, these chutes don’t freeze. The churning movement of water won’t allow it. The result? Ice sculptures chimerical in shape that rise from the depths to heights of yards and mists that churn, billow, hover, ghostly in shape, a phantom presence. Our passage across such stretches thus blocked completely, we are forced to climb the river- bank and pass through a short stretch of yet more forest before we slide back down to the river post-rapids, thus allowing us to resume our homeward trajectory. And the largest of these rapids appears just before the river opens out to Reindeer Lake. A passage that is legendary for its great schools of pickerel, it fires the dreams of rod- wielding fishermen from Texas to Europe.

An ice-cream cone in shape, this titan among lakes straddles the border between the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Tabulated as the twenty-third-largest lake in the world, its northeastern tenth lies in Manitoba, its southern nine-tenths in Saskatchewan. As for its length, its northern extremity lies one hundred and fifty miles south of the Northwest Territories’ (now Nunavut) border, its southern, 1,500 north of the US border. One hundred and fifty miles of water from north end to south and forty from east side to west, that’s Reindeer Lake. Picture Lake Ontario with five thousand islands, many of them ringed by gold sand beaches. That’s Reindeer Lake. Picture Lake Erie with water so clear you can see to its bottom and so clean you can drink it with your hand, untreated. That’s Reindeer Lake. Picture your family with thirty-five islands all to itself. That’s Reindeer Lake. With some eight hundred people at its northern tip (Brochet, just inside Manitoba), twelve hundred at its southern (Southend, just inside Saskatchewan), and two dozen in the middle (Kinoosao, right on that provincial border)—two thousand people all told on a lake half as large as the Netherlands with its population of 17 million—the three communities are separated by so much distance that, no matter which island you camp on, you get the impression that you are alone, that you have the entire lake to yourself. That’s Reindeer Lake. And the village of Brochet sits perched like the cherry on that ice-cream cone.

That September, I sneak into [little brother] Rene’s bed at the far other end of the Small Boys’ dormitory at every opportunity. For the first half-hour, I doze with my arms wrapped tightly around him. Only when I am assured that he is asleep will I sneak back out. But in my dreams all that autumn and into the winter, he and I are sitting astride the feathery backs of Waagichaan and P’weegichaan, our hands clutching their necks. And we are soaring in the air in great wide circles, the wind in our hair, our faces white with elation. Our tents below us get ever smaller until they fade from view. The eagles’ voices arcs of sound that soar first up then down, we look down at the Earth with eyes semi-paralyzed by permanent astonishment. There the thirty green islands of Seeseep Lake with their golden beaches, there the sandy eskers winding their way to Inuit country, there the Cochrane River long, blue, and sinuous winding its way south to Brochet, the bays, the beaches, and the five thousand islands of Reindeer Lake, the bears, the moose, the skeins of geese, the schools of fish, the beaver dams, the long-bodied otters sliding down the slopes of algae-covered granite into the blue of Casimir Lake, where Florence was born, the great herds of caribou, the Arctic, the North Pole, Greenland, Norway, France, Italy, the Vatican, the African desert and the African jungle, the Indian Ocean, the elephants of India, Australia’s kangaroo hopping across the great southern outback, the coast of Antarctica, Antarctica itself, the South Pole, the human heart, its complex network of veins and blood, its million molecules, its pulse, its rhythm, we see it all …

When Tomson Highway says he was born in a snowbank, he means it literally. He arrived in December 1951, ahead of schedule, forcing his parents to stop their dogsled, pitch a tent in a snowbank in northern Manitoba and send their 12-year-old daughter out to fetch a midwife in the night. Canadians know Highway as a world-renowned composer, pianist, playwright and author of the novel Kiss Of The Fur Queen. He chronicles the first 15 years of his life in the memoir Permanent Astonishment.

Tomson Highway was the 11th of 12 children to come out of the remarkable marriage of Joe and Balazee Highway. Joe was a world champion dogsled racer and a celebrated caribou hunter. The Highway family were nomads, traversing Canada's great northern landscape by dogsled and living off the land. Highway is fluent in multiple languages, but his mother tongue is Cree. He describes it as “a laughing language” capable of providing the “most pleasurable sensations.” Highway started learning English and piano at a residential school, which he attended for nine years before deciding to enrol in high school in Winnipeg.

I needed to assess my life. It's a good way to assess your life. I think everybody has a story that's worth writing, you know? Who knows what will become of it. It could be a fluke. My first success was a fluke. You don't sit down to write a hit; that's the last thing on your mind. You do it just to clean up your mind. You don't sit down to write a masterpiece. You don't sit down to write a hit; that's the last thing on your mind. You do it just to clean up your mind. It's like housekeeping for your soul or your spirit. You clean out the cobwebs and the dust and ... take your life into stock. Then if you're lucky, and also you have a very good education, it'll get you somewhere eventually with a tremendous amount of patience. And so I decided to write this book because of that.

The moment that launched me on the project was I have extraordinary parents. I come from the kind of marriage that they can only dream of in Hollywood. They will never make enough money in Hollywood to afford the kind of marriage that I come from. So that's a stroke of luck number one. They are both gone now. They would have both been over 100 years old, but they were the loveliest couple imaginable. They were kind. They were funny. They loved to laugh. They were hardworking and they were also physically beautiful. I wanted to write to thank them for the life that they gave us, which is an extraordinary life, right from the moment of birth up in northern Manitoba, near Nunavut.

It felt very good. I realized that the central lesson that my parents taught me was to laugh. I grew up in a laughing household. I grew up in a laughing marriage and I grew up in a laughing language. The Cree language is the funniest language on the face of the Earth. The way the syllables work, the way they bounce out, they're just funny. Every time you start speaking Cree, you start laughing automatically, and every time you switch back to English or French, you stop laughing automatically. Really, it's like that.

Cree is a joyful language and that's why I laugh all the time. English is an intellectual language and it's brilliant and I love it. I speak French too. I haven't spoken English in a long time. My partner of 36 years is Franco Ontarian from Sudbury, Ont., but we live here in Quebec. We lived in France for many, many years. French and the Latin languages, because I speak Italian as well, are emotional languages. They come from the emotions. Cree comes the third part of the body, which is the funniest, most ridiculous looking part, most pleasurable. [Cree is] capable of giving the human body the most pleasurable sensations on the face of the earth. I'm writing about that right now. People have to understand that Cree is a joyful language and that's why I laugh all the time. I've come to believe after all this research that I've done all these years about mythology, that the reason God put me on the planet is to laugh. I'm here to laugh, and that's all there is to it.

The reason why my writing stands out, they tell me, is because first of all it's influenced by the Cree language, which is a very rhythmic and funny language. The second thing is, my writing is conceived of musically—musical structure, breathing, phrasing, counterpoint, harmony, form, all those things. I wrote this book as a symphony. It's a symphony to life. If you read it carefully, it's very musical. It's all conceived of musically. I have two pianos in the house, one here in my office downstairs, and one in the living room. People ask me frequently, “What music do you work best to?" It's because artists, a lot of the time, use music to push them along. In spite of the fact that I make so much noise as a pianist, my favourite music is silence. I work best in complete silence. I live in a space that is completely silent, and I live in a neighborhood that is so quiet, it's like nobody lives out there. We live in a retirement community, so it's full of elderly people and they have quiet lifestyles. I love silence and that's what inspires me. I listen to the silence of the North, which is in my heart and there's nothing quite as astonishing, breathtaking as the silence of the North. You can't imagine unless you're there to hear the wind, the rain, the water lapping up on the shore, those natural sounds. So in a sense, silence doesn't really exist. But it's always there and I thrive on it.

I have a very good memory. I'm a trained musician, a classically trained pianist. Classical musicians are taught to memorize reams of music and very complex music in some cases. If you've ever seen a score by Rachmaninoff—thousands of notes. Complicated music to memorize, and you have to memorize it for your concerts. My memory work was put to an early test when I was young. As a result, I've built my muscles of memory if you want to call it that. So I have an excellent memory.

The other reason I wrote the book is that the average Canadian does not know that this kind of lifestyle existed here in Canada up to recently, that people were born in snowbanks, were born in the snow regularly, born in tents pitched in snowbanks and sometimes in lean-tos right next to campfires. There was nothing unusual in that, being born in a snowbank back in those days, 1950s and 1940s and before. We're active people, OK? We live in the snow. As a result, I've had this extraordinary life. I have very vivid memories of those extraordinary adventures that I would never forget. from CBC Interview: www.cbc.ca/books/tomson-highway-s-memoir-permanent-astonishment-is-written-as-a-symphony-to-life-1.6199176