Maybe if You Were Pierre Berton....

And Other Dilemmas Faced by Middle-Aged Women On Book Tours circa 1995

MAYBE IF YOU WERE PIERRE BERTON…

...that's what the flustered librarian told me, by way of explaining the audience of five hardy souls who turned out to hear me read in Dease Lake.

I had not uttered a word of complaint about the audience size and had maintained a cheerful demeanour the entire evening, in fact. I did not deny that I was not the famous bow-tied Mr. Berton, capable of drawing an audience of at least five dozen people on a chilly October evening in northern B.C. Instead, I said that I'd had a very good visit with an eighty year old woman who'd trained to be a Red Cross Outpost Hospital nurse alongside my aunt.

“Oh, her,” she muttered and sniffed, again.

I kept smiling. There is a 4-H girl inside this woman I am, one determined to show a cheerful, resolutely unflustered face to the public despite blatant insults, conniving maternal competitiveness and just plain bad luck and crappy timing.

I told the grouchy librarian I very much enjoyed meeting the Dutch exchange student because my mother was Dutch too. This was a conversational strategy on my part. It's difficult for even the most insensitive individual to keep firing cannons loaded with verbal abuse when mothers are summoned from the universal ether. The librarian had the presence of mind to avert her gaze.

The Dutch student attended with his Canadian host and her daughter, having driven 140 kilometres, one way, to hear me read. All three had stayed after my reading, beaming at me, asking good questions and then buying two sets of all three of my books, one set bound for Holland.

Well, she rallied; the timing of this reading of mine wasn't great for her because her sister-in-law was visiting from Edmonton. The mystery woman prowling the stacks who then disappeared, possibly into a broom closet, was finally identified.

I can't recall now what I might have said to that petulant non-sequitur, beyond 'Oh', that's too bad. I was, and am, still entranced by the act of someone driving 140 kilometres over gravel and paved roads from an isolated beef ranch somewhere near Telegraph Creek just to attend a reading by an unknown yet very much alive Canadian writer. I likely said some polite thing about appreciating the effort it took to organize events. That sometimes no matter how many notices went into mail boxes, other activities claimed the Thursday evening time and energy slot of the townsfolk.

I should know, I didn’t carry on to inform her, because I've organized at least fifty times as many events for other writers, actors, musicians and artists as I've ever participated in during my career of sorts as a writer. All it takes is one blizzard or forest fire to wipe out an event into which dozens of volunteer hours have been expended. Conversely, one great radio interview and a better than average placement in the local newspaper above the fold can amount to a packed house, a gratifying response thanks to a complete lack of other more urgent news items, like blizzards, all-candidates debates, forest fires or hockey play-offs.

Later, in my hotel room, I reflected on the fact that I will never forget the sweet smile on the Dutch student's face as I read several of my stories aloud. Nor would I forget the joyful recounting of 1930's nursing stories once our family surname connection was confirmed by my aunt's school friend, who twinkled at me non-stop. I autographed my books with a flourish that evening.

The librarian's little volley of personal and, though I hesitate to apply the term, professional, frustration after the event, this ill-tempered dumping on a female writer in her forties with a mere three books to her credit, such a far cry from the prolific, manly Pierre, was nearly neutralized by the genuine enthusiasm shown by those five people.

On my way to this event, the first of a six day reading tour in northern BC and Yukon, I slept fitfully for several hours between a tidy white Anglican Church and a line of towering totem poles, both lit up by klieg lights mounted on hydro poles, my sleep-deprived logic leading me to believe that one god or another would look after me in my tiny rental Chevy Cavalier. I'd already driven for five hours in pounding rain and inky darkness, listening to CBC Radio until I lost the signal in the mountains. But I was over-tired and maddeningly alert, attempting to sleep on the reclined front seat. I eventually gave up and found my way back to the highway leading north.

I tuned into a country music station whose jovial host (“There's no country like aboriginal country!”) warned us all not to pick up hitch-hikers because two prisoners had escaped a minimum security jail and were believed to be in the region. I had a collapsible umbrella, several pens and a charcoal pencil in my arsenal of self-defence weapons. Plus the gift of the gab, my secret weapon, which had saved me from uncertain fate more than a few times already.

The heavy coastal rains were replaced by dense swirling mists. There was no one else driving at 3:30 a.m. except for a few empty logging trucks doodle-bugging to their landings in the mountains. I drove for hour after hour until I started to see double, opening the car window to let in the chilled mist, slapping my own face hard to stay awake. I decided to try for more sleep at a rest stop, parking alongside a crew of fall mushroom pickers in assorted vans and campers, a welcome sight for my puffy eyes. When I woke again the fog had lifted, I felt rested and the parking lot was empty of vehicles.

I love driving on unfamiliar roads even when I have somehow misinterpreted a road-map and seriously under-estimated the time I'll need to get to my writing gig. I've hopped across the country by airplane to perform my writerly duties in the usual big cities but nothing limbers up my dormant lust for adventure more than driving to an unfamiliar place entirely. Except the odds for taking the inevitable ego thumping sharply increase off the beaten track because I am not now, nor have I ever been, a household name like the A-list Pierre Berton.

In one small town, I was badgered by the local school principal (he prefaced his first question with his occupational title but I'd noticed him earlier, the kind of big, tall guy who keeps both arms crossed tightly over his heart and yet who sprawls in his chair, legs akimbo, corduroyed family jewels a-jumble, an odd mix of male body language) as the rest of the audience squirmed and rolled their eyes. His main complaint seemed to stem from the fact that I'd written a novel and not a travel guide to the region. He then proceeded to list all the useful local books I should read.

“Well, thanks for that information,” I believe I said in my perky, polite fashion when he took a long overdue breath. Then I gratefully took a question from another reader to the rescue among the several dozen assembled that evening.

It’s very bad form and almost always counter-productive for an invited author to snap at audience members, no matter how often one is asked whether one's fictional stories aren’t really just tarted-up autobiography. A boorish, impatient author is remembered for a lifetime by those in the audience. I know this. And yet....and yet someday I may disintegrate in a very colourful fashion behind the podium.

Meanwhile, I’m forever trying to develop pithy responses which firmly yet politely rebuff territorial oafs and other toxic literary types in the audience who are threatened by an invited guest speaker, someone designated an authority by someone else out there in the vast world so very far beyond their control. I imagine myself as a lightening rod or a flapping red cape, an ordinary woman who has actually had the colossal nerve to achieve the secret dream of thousands, all with equal access to the alphabet. You think I'm kidding? Perhaps you have not been treated to the sight and sound of idling pick-up trucks in the parking lot outside the reading venue, each with a man in the cab, waiting for this book thing the wife is so anxious to attend to be over with, to drive them home where the chores and other sensible duties await them.

I was approached after a reading in Whitehorse by a smiling woman and a young man whom I took to be her son. Turns out he was a writer too and asked if he could trade his first book for one of mine, even though his was three dollars less and would I mind an even trade? This request was made in a tone equal parts nervousness, shyness and bravado.

I could hardly refuse the swap, which could be interpreted as rude, after all, even though I was the one being held hostage in public, as it were. I had to admire his youthful chutzpah, empathy being one of my better qualities although it gets me into muddles all the time. His mother beamed at me while he produced a paperback from his parka pocket. A voluptuous mermaid was splayed across the cover. He allowed he'd done the artwork as well. Mother giggled but he avoided her adoring eye contact. He riffled the pages and then opened the book to the title page to autograph it for me. Too late, I noticed swaths of dense, 9 point indigo type. Throughout the entire book. Oh dear.

His radiant mother informed me that she'd planned to come to my reading several days earlier but, she said, as she rubbed herself in a most unmaternal fashion against the pushy young man, they decided to head for the city and catch my reading here. She'd heard from one of her friends back home that her husband had tried to hassle me during my reading but her friend said I'd been very polite and patient with him and that I'd been a real hit back there. I nodded and smiled while my brain clicked and whirred.

“Some teachers are real know-it-alls, like him, believe me, and then they went and made him a principal,” she said, waving cheerily as her young swain tugged her away without further ado or conversational niceties, his mission accomplished, his self-published book in the hands of a semi-famous writer from somewhere else.

As usual, I kept nodding and smiling while I chortled inside. No wonder that principal launched a verbal vendetta on marauding writers.

I just wish I could come up with snappy responses at the time of the affront instead of censoring myself with polite mouthing, afraid what might leap out of me if left to my own uncivil instincts.

But it’s better to stay on the high road, just be polite, suffer the envious fools and the wrathful cuckolds, in this most recent instance, one and the same person, shamed in front of his home town crowd and looking to wreak humiliation on the handiest writer available. My dumb luck strikes again. His runaway wife had leapt from the proverbial frying pan into the fire, from what I discerned in my brief encounters with all three parties.

Advice to self: Stay calm, stay strong. Be a boxer, bob and weave. Writing well is revenge enough. Oh, and keep laughing. That really drives them crazy.

The author, in 1995, hops out of a warm vehicle driven by a wonderful librarian from Whitehorse to pose beside the Alaska Highway en route to Carcross for a reading in the public library there. It’s about -31 Celsius (-25 Fahrenheit) but I’m wearing a 1948 muskrat fur coat which I’d bought for $15 in a thrift store and I have good Sorel boots on, the kind with felt packs inside right up to your knees. Note the absence of a polka-dotted bow tie…