<strong>Written By:</strong> graham watt
<strong>Date:</strong> 2007-08-28 21:46:37
<a href="/article/124436612-growing-up-canadian">Article Link</a>

When I was a teen I spent four summers working on a cattle ranch in a remote area of British Columbia. The ranch was 160 kms from the nearest town. There, I indulged myself in the fantasy of cowboy life, trying to develop a decent slouch in the saddle, gazing into the distance and muttering things like: “Too far south for Navajo, unless Shit-for-Brains has been stirring them up again”. The overwhelming power of the cowboy freedom image which spawned the success of Marlboro cigarettes burned in my vulnerable soul. I wore the right jeans (Lee’s, better than Levi’s because you only needed to undo two buttons to have a leak). I had Paris Company lace-up cowboy boots from Vancouver, the only laced cowboy work boots with a high heel. I had a chambray shirt and a Smithbilt hat. I was a skinny kid from NDG in Montreal but by God, I’d found a new place to hide. My cousin, a first rate cowboy and ranch owner was as cowboy as they come. He’d lean in his saddle as we’d draw up to a knoll with a view and gaze out at the vast Chilcotin plateau and say things like: ”Mighty pretty country”. Once, on a long cattle drive I asked Dick Church, a legendary Chilcotin rancher if the water in a slough we passed was potable. With a little smile emerging beneath the crinkley crowsfeet he drawled:” Don’t see no bones”.

To me, magic came out of that cowboy mystique so ably exploited by advertisers after being caught by artists like Frederick Remington and Charles Russell. The idea of man, alone, heroic, and innocent, which has inspired the American myth as the aww shucks nation of dreams. A nation which can lose its virginity every 20 years and still remain chaste. Then two things happened in those summers which changed my perspective about being Canadian.
To me then, Americans were people who always dressed the part. They actually had the right stuff. We only had tuques and a lot of knitted things. But Americans had authentic uniforms. If they were cowboys, they looked like cowboys. Their airline pilots had the just-enough-grey-at-the-temples to make you feel secure. Their soldiers had neatly pressed uniforms, even if their stripes were on upside down. I think they even had medals for stuff like neatness and maybe for going to chapel. I loved the dress up part. Then I met Billy Foster. Billy, from Telegraph Creek BC, came to work as a ranch hand. I couldn’t stand him. When riding he insisted on wearing a taxi driver’s hat he’d found in Williams Lake. It even said TAXI on the diamond badge on the front. Billy’s ambition was to drive taxi. His dreams had nothing to do with slouching or drawling. I hated riding around with him because of the dichotomy of the taxi and the Smithbilt hats, ruining my image of the lonely cowpoke, blaspheming in my Marlboro country. But then a little light began to shine. Could there be another way to be? Could I wear something else to represent me, perhaps even myself, as Billy seemed to do so easily? That was the first inkling. Then one day my cousin and I loaded two horses into our decrepit old truck and went looking for strays on the range. This truck had no brakes and the incessant whine of our progress, never out of second gear, on the hilly rangeland made conversation impossible.

Along the way we met the American owner and the foreman of the Gang Ranch, then the world’s biggest with over one million acres. They were in a Fargo Powerwagon, a huge winch on the front, great knobby tires with chains on all four wheels, the obligatory rifle in a rack behind their heads. My cousin chatted with them for a few minutes. Then they left. As they went, my cousin turned and said: “Look at those guys; knobby tires, chains, all that 4-wheel drive stuff. Me, I like to give the hill a chance. I like to try to outsmart it, maybe take a longer run at it or go up backwards. It’s like fly fishing, you want to participate. These guys just don’t get it”.

This stuck with me because it wasn’t a mean thing to say, it was just another way to look at a problem. It was different. One way was to overwhelm, another was to participate. I think these two incidents were the raw beginnings of my looking at myself in the context of overwhelming influences from without, and discovering some elemental differences in the way we can live. I was 15 years old and I’d begun to realize that Canadians have a different perspective from Americans even though we may be sometimes sibling close. The way of thinking is different. Maybe we weren’t just Americans with sinus trouble after all. I had already noticed how the beer was different, the cigarettes too. But at fifteen I hadn’t enough of a mental platform from which to view differences in values. I’ve since seen the media effluent from America wash away the way we pronounce things, pasta becoming pawsta, mum becoming mom, but amazingly, that little critical appraisal my cousin made 45 years ago, about how we’re different, not why we’re different, is more alive than ever. It’s a strange country indeed where we can daily ingest another country’s culture, whims and idiosyncracies on television, enjoying them and all the while keeping our own perspective locked safe inside us. Little platforms ready to be stood upon, should any situation require it.

Not a bad way to be.

   

Well said.

I love the bit about giving the hill the chance, I learnt
stuff like that growing up as well. And in that exact
context I learnt what polite was and how it's rude not to
be polite.

I often think that the view that the Canadian identity is
defined by what we are not (i.e. American), is really just
the opinion of someone who doesn't understand anything but
their own point of view.

Thanks!

   

A Damned Fine piece of writing!

Evoked a lot of emotions
Humour being foremost!
BRAVO!!


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"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do."

William Blake

   

Its the beer eh.

Hal,
Ottawa

   

Fantastic! What a beautiful article, very impressive. I enjoyed every word!

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"aaaah and the whisper of thousands of tiny voices became a mighty deafening roar and they called it 'freedom'!"' Canadians Acting Humanely at home & everywhere