>>PREVIEW
LINDEN MACINTYRE
Thursday, October 12
Glenbow Museum Theatre
You don’t have to be from the Maritimes to enjoy Linden MacIntyre’s Causeway: A Passage from Innocence (HarperCollins, 320 pp.), but if you are, you’ll love it. Even better, you’ll feel like you’re back home with all your Gaelic relatives as you read it.
MacIntyre is familiar to TV news junkies from his journalistic stints on CBC, co-hosting the fifth estate and producing documentaries that have netted him eight Gemini Awards.
For a change of pace, he turned to writing fiction. The Long Stretch, his first published novel, was shortlisted by the 2000 Dartmouth Book Award and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award.
When he was urged to write a memoir – that he says falls somewhere between fiction and journalism – he was reluctant because, like many public figures he values his privacy and has little truck with anything that smacks of "celebrity." However, in a conversation with a fellow resident of Cape Breton, when the talk turned to the building of the Canso Causeway, he realized that it had been a defining moment. His hopes, like those of many others, were on the causeway construction bringing jobs and prosperity to the rocky shores of the island and the tiny village of Port Hastings, population 115. Young Linden wanted something else. He wanted to know his father, to have a relationship with him and he felt this was possible if his father had work that would allow him to live at home. Unspoken in the book is the hope that, finally, he will get to know his hard-rock-mining father who always worked away.
"The causeway brought into focus what happened in 1955 before and after," says MacIntyre. "Maybe my relationship and effort to define it tells us other things about economics and history. Alberta is now finding with people coming from away to work that they are glad for the work, but miss their families and their communities."
MacIntyre says his father went off to the Fort McMurrays of that time, but they were mining projects.
"The old fellow decided the family would stay in the community and he would go away and stay as long as it took. He was always looking for a job to come home to. He was shrewd, intelligent and learned about the lumbering business and trucks and tried to turn to self-employment. My mother was a teacher and my sister and I stayed with her.
"When I saw them blowing rocks off the side of a mountain and haul them away with trucks, I thought my father would come home," he continues. "The causeway would transform our community and my family. And the world came in and dad came home. The causeway was built, and then he went away.
"No education meant there was no place for him and he was incapable of asking for anything. He couldn’t go to anyone who was in a position to help. I can still see that canvas duffel bag with mining paraphernalia," he says, listing the equipment his father carried for his work trips.
MacIntyre’s father never went to school, but grew up speaking Gaelic on a bucolic mountain. "Ironically, when he had found the job to keep him home, I was gone to work away."
On a trip home, he had time to spend with his father, but after a boozy evening together the next day he chose to reconnect with friends until it was time to catch his plane. Shortly after, his father died.
MacIntyre’s own situation at home with a new baby didn’t provide an ideal time to deal with his grief. Eventually he did deal with both his grandmother’s and his father’s deaths, as well as the effects of discovering a suicide.
At one point, MacIntyre thought he had made a huge mistake in writing this book, "making myself feel miserable and unpacking these things. But I plowed through, and if the publisher finds it trite, well, OK. It was written fairly fast, during the 50-day lockout by CBC."
"My father was a gentle, fine guy who cared but didn’t have much to work with. With my five kids, there is a very close friendship and intimacy. All are different. If you asked them about me, you would think they were talking about five different fathers. Each is a unique relationship. I became a parent with a blank slate.
"My relationship with my father did not equip me for fatherhood, but I was equipped for friendship by a curiosity about other people." |
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