There he was, lost. The sun he'd kept on his left shoulder had gone, absorbed into a sky cold as milk, and the wind that he'd remembered as east, east on his face, had dodged somehow around, leaping at him in different directions, confusing him in showers of dry leaves. Small clearings of light in deep spruce and fir and stripped hardwoods mocked him as he plunged first towards one, then another…City boy without a city.
It is the 1970s and the long-haired Innis Corbett certainly is lost -- born in Cape Breton, but raised in a Boston suburb, Innis was deported back to Canada after a string of luxury car thefts. Forced to move in with a begrudging uncle he doesn't know, in a wooded setting both foreign and remote, the 19 year old Innis is forced to decide what kind of man he will become.
As Cape Breton Road begins, Innis is removing the brush from a clearing in the woods where he has planned to transplant some pot plants that he has taking root in his uncle's attic. Assured that a dozen plants could earn him ten grand, and believing his plan to be without risk, Innis sees the crop as his ticket off the island -- away from the hard-drinking, womanising uncle and the nosy but well-meaning strangers who all know more of his history, what people he belongs to, than Innis himself does -- and once off Cape Breton, Innis would finally have a chance to start over with a clean slate. Although at first impulsive and bitter (and especially resentful about the way that his mother could have allowed him to be deported), as Innis explores the woods and builds his body up through hard work, he develops a respect for nature and himself that bodes well for his future. When Uncle Starr has his latest girlfriend, Claire, move into the home, the sexual tension builds up to the point where Innis doesn't know if he can wait for his cash crop to mature before he's forced to either escape or explode.
By the time the book ends (after Starr has destroyed the nearly mature pot plants, Innis steals an unguarded Cadillac -- which he wrecks as he desperately attempts to warn Starr that he had impulsively added deadly Hemlock to his uncle's water supply before attempting to run away), Innis has lost all of the ground he had gained and reminded me of Holden Caulfield in the way that, on the verge of becoming a man, neither character was able to control his impulses and behaved in a knowingly self-destructive manner. Like a typical anti-hero, I wanted for Innis to succeed at growing and selling the pot so that he could get that second chance, but as a well developed and sympathetic character, I hoped that Innis could see that the ancestral home he never knew might be where he belonged after all; that the slate he worked to clean might be the one worth having.
In Cape Breton Road, D. R. MacDonald writes beautiful and naturalistic scenes of the woods and the water, capturing nuances of light and shadow and mood. So too does he capture the nuances of people and relationships and their ties to the land and each other. Thoughts and memories are brought up organically alongside the current action (none of that clumsy "it reminded him of the time when…") and small vignettes capture the setting in a way that transported me there:
There was no person anywhere, but a little building off behind a cyclone fence, and further along on the other side of a small lake, a solitary trailer, accessible only by a causeway with a locked cyclone gate. A day's workclothes beat like drab flags on a line strung from the trailer to a pole. Shirt, trousers, socks. Something forlorn in all that, fluttering out flat in a cold wind, the guy shut away inside the trailer by himself, his lonely stuff hanging outside, his underwear.MacDonald is a masterful writer and I am humbled to have not met him before -- honestly, more people should be reading his books than I see evidence of. Cape Breton Road is filled with fascinating people (I especially liked the aged Dan Rory of the second sight) and intriguing events (I especially liked the motley gathering of the clans at the ostensible Gaelic college) -- and everyone and everything fits together just so; masterful in the way that it slowly captured my imagination and touched my heart with such seemingly effortless prose. Like Newfoundland, Cape Breton must be one of those "thin places" that the old folks talk about; for although the setting of this book is far away in time and place, it feels like it's sitting, just there, at the end of my fingertips; timeless; a place I could gladly visit on the page of a book again and again.
It's funny that every book about juvenile delinquents reminds me of my big brother Ken -- my younger brother, Kyler, also got into trouble but we were like the moon to our older brother's Earth; easily lost in his eclipsing presence. Maybe some day I'll tell some stories here about Kye, too, but as a private kind of person, maybe he wouldn't appreciate that too much. Ken, on the other hand, is fascinatingly, perpetually, shameless.
I know I've probably said here before that Ken was a teenaged car thief. He says that when he was 13 or so, he used to sneak out of the house at night and drive our Dad's car into Toronto (about 45 minutes away at the time). Just for the joyride. Imagine the self-centered and thoughtless nerve that takes: I'm the mother of a level-headed 18 year old, and I get a bit nervous when she drives her car, legally, into Toronto in the light of day. But that was Ken -- he always took just exactly whatever he wanted: Any food in the house; my money (that he'd strong-arm out of me); any money he found lying around in our mother's purse.
I think Ken was about 14 when he decided to go big time. Ken planned to sleep over at his friend Marc Lalonde's house. Marc lived in a foster home out in the country, and while the sleepover might have seemed a bit unusual in retrospect, it was okayed at the time. In the middle of the night, Ken and Marc snuck out and stole a car from a home across the street. In a weird bit of symmetry, this car belonged to the sister of my longtime elementary school "boyfriend", Timmy Burns. Ken and Marc planned to drive this car out to Alberta where they both had family (*see my Uncle Mike after my last book review), and as only impulsive and unthinking adolescents could plan it, they believed that just showing up on their doorsteps would oblige distant relatives to take them in.
Of course they didn't make it to Alberta -- the police caught up with them in northern Ontario -- but this event precipitated the downward spiral of Ken's delinquency and our parents' anger and despair. His most fascinating story from this trip: High on pot and listening to Black Sabbath, Marc sketched out a pentagram in the dirt at the roadside where they had stopped one night and he invited Ken to enter the pentagram and give himself over to Satan. Can you believe I don't remember whether Ken did or not?
When Ken was 16, our family moved out to Alberta anyway, a transfer my Dad wanted partly to give Ken a fresh start. He was still a pot-smoking, school-skipping delinquent, though, and eventually moved out and I never saw him around. When I was in grade 12, my parents went away for the weekend -- that never happened -- and Kyler and I had a bit of a party. While he and his friends did whatever downstairs, my best friend and her boyfriend were (likely) having drunken sex in my bed while I slept (chastely but romantically) beside my boyfriend in my parents' bed. I don't know how Ken heard that our parents were away, but he and some friends bust into the house and started yelling at Kyler that he had come for his childhood bedroom furniture, and he also needed the keys to Dad's truck to move it. I heard Kye say that I had the keys, and although I dove to lock the door, Ken picked the lock and burst in, and after a brief bit of wrestling, he took the keys, the furniture and the truck. By this time, my parents were so used to his lawlessness, that, after they got home, they didn't even seem to react to the news of what Ken had done, didn't care about the lost furniture if he needed it, and were just glad the truck had been returned safely. As Kyler and I didn't want to prolong any investigation into what we had been up to at the time, I didn't press just how frightening the encounter with my own brother had been.
In another bit of symmetry with Innis from Cape Breton Road, when Ken had later pretty much burned all of his bridges in Lethbridge (there's some story I only half overheard about Ken stealing a Snap-On Tools truck; some event that our Dad called in a bunch of favours on to keep Ken out of jail), he moved down to PEI, back to our roots, to live with our grandparents until he could get back on his feet. I believe that, just like Innis, he soon found that being surrounded by people who know your whole history, and that of your parents, isn't a do-over at all: reading this book, I felt Innis' pain as though it was my brother's.
Eventually Ken moved back home with us -- he was maybe 20 by then and looking at going back to school (by which I mean, finishing high school). One of the first things he did was go into Kyler's room when he wasn't home, take a pair of sweatpants from him (which Kye would have bought for himself, as we were both expected to buy our own clothes with our part-time job money) and then Ken cut them off, jaggedly, into a pair of shorts -- making them useless to Kyler. This is still a story Kyler will refer to with great bitterness nearly 30 years later. But it was just the same old Ken -- taking anything he wanted.
The happy news is that Ken did turn himself around -- he is married with kids, a beautiful home, a challenging and rewarding job -- but there was a long time when it looked like it could have gone either way. It is entirely likely that I connected so deeply with Cape Breton Road because I wanted Innis to realise that he wasn't stuck on the self-destructive path; that clean slates and do-overs do exist.
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| Ken and his kids trying to act like gangsters-- if they only knew, lol |
Another reason why I liked this book so much is that, although Cape Breton is an island I've never been to, it is off the coast of and connected by bridge to Nova Scotia -- where our parents now live. The forests that Innis tromps through might well be made up of the same trees and undergrowth as the woods behind my Dad's barn; it's familiar territory. When Innis is swimming or boating in the rocky cove, I know I've been there, too -- that sounds just like the cold and steely water off White Point where we once watched some brave body surfers taking to the water.
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| Don't be fooled by the apparent sunshine... |
Funny, really, how much symmetry I found between this book and my real life, and if someone were to accuse me of over-rating it because of that, I would remain steadfast in my -- highly subjective -- opinions. Some Nova Scotia scenes:
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| Boating... |
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| Planking... |
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| Dripping wet at Peggy's Cove |
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| Sunset on my parents' cove |
And I should really end by saying that my own girls, at 18 and 15 right now, are really great kids -- if they have ever gotten up to any mischief, they've been discreet about it since it never got back to me. And believe me, after the house I grew up in, I know how lucky I am to live in such a peaceful home now.
Edit from August 9/14:
I had reproduced Ken's hitch-hiking adventure here as well as I could remember it after 30+ years, but having heard the stories again, I have reproduced them here more faithfully. I'm not going to correct what I've written above because I think it serves as a look at how memories change over time. I was sure that he slept over at the Lalondes' the night he first ran away. And was sure he took off with Marc, not John.
