Al at the Beach

The beaches of Lake Ontario in Prince Edward county have long been a summer playground. Incredible natural beauty, a rare topography, fresh air and healthy outdoor recreation, family picnics and holidays...and amour. Two baymouth sandbars, across the entrances of West and East Lake (once called Sandbanks and Outlet beaches, respectively, a great deal easier to explain than today's provincially amalgamated Sandbanks Provincial Park.






Photos of well-dressed ladies perched on the sand-dunes in buttontop boots, high collared white blouses and wide hats never fail to amuse. On excursions, or resident at respectable resorts like Lakeshore Lodge, they enjoyed (somewhat formally) the area in late 1800's and early c.20.

once the road to the dunes, now a protected panne

Photos from the 1930's, 40's and 50's show an increasing number of less formally attired folk enjoying sand and waves. Because there were no roads, auto traffic accessed the Outlet Beach (as folk who grew up around here called it) by driving between the dunes and out onto the hard-packed sand. Towels tucked in car windows provided change rooms, nature provided other amenities.






In 1957, the provincial goverment took over the beach we locals called the Outlet, and land along the Outlet River leading from East Lake to Lake Ontario (where until now most of the picnicking, dancing, and tower-diving occurred at a privately run resort - most recently known as Martin's). They built a road inshore of the dunes at that beach - today's park road.

overlooking West Lake

Later, in the way that governments have of 'acquiring' private land and expanding provincial parks (I admit to being firmly on the fence, beneficiary as I am of several weeks of off-season camping and nature each year) the rich farmland was converted to campground and recreational space. Much of the land is being planted back into trees.

The story can be found in this  post on my heritage architecture (and themes related) blog.

mouth of the Outlet River, firmly closed

But our interest settles on the beaches of the 1940's, when a feckless, pre-Eurithe Al Purdy did what all the boys did...took girls to the beach. A local guy with the extra appeal of an RCAF uniform, and an old if unreliable Whippet or Ford for transportation, Al  squired the occasional local girl to the beach, for the same reasons fellows have made those pilgrimages forever...the healthy outdoor recreation, of course.

Here are Al's accounts of two such hopeful adventures. He did not emerge the stuff of romantic fiction in either case. His candour about his ineptitude is charming.

"Shirley and I drove to the sand banks near Picton a couple of days later, with the ostensible purpose of swimming. I ran the car out of gas along the way and had to walk to a service station for more, at considerable loss of dignity....For the first time in my slightly retarded life I was on the verge of contact with another mind and body...And I blew it."

the beach the way I like it

And on another occasion, with another date:

"We went swimming later at the sand banks near Picton (scene of my earlier embarrassment with Shirley).I continued my seduction attempts very seriously. Same result, no dice.

In the bright moonlight, parked on the romantic sandy shore of Lake Ontario. Acting Sergeant A. Purdy: "Dear (whatever-the-hell-her-name-was), Let's drive farther down the beach where it's quiet (read, darker).Okay?" "Okay".

The Ford wouldn't move. Migawd, what's happening? Wheels are spinning around in the wet sand. I give it the gun, they spin some more. We were mired in the sand, permanently, or at least an hour of permanence. I had parked the car where the small and harmless waves made sleepy soothing noises which I thought might be romantically helpful.

Someone in another moonlit vehicle knew the girl, so I ditched her with them. Then called a farmer with tractor for hire nearby to haul me out of the sand. When I paid for the service, my girl was long gone... "

Embarrassing. Cringe-making. Most of us can identify with Al's candid seduction-gone-terribly-wrong stories. Next time you're on "the Outlet beach", elbow to elbow with sun-bathers, think back to those days when folks drove out and parked there, in the moonlight. Hearts full of love...and hope.

(excerpts from Reaching from the Beaufort Sea, pages 84,88)
(archival shot courtesy Prince Edward County Library and Archives)

no I do not love you

at Amelasburgh library, thanks Eurithe

Al was a man's man, it's said, and it's obvious in the person he reveals so completely in the autobiography 'Reaching for the Beaufort Sea'. A muscular poet, with pugnacious poems. I have heard him referred to as misogynist. He was a man of his times - with Ridley Purdy as a boyhood model.

Then there's that sensitive man creeping in. I appreciate his respectful correspondence with many women writers, his self-deprecating observations.

Of Eurithe, the emotional centre for his long writing life, not enough can ever be said. Grudgingly, it almost seems, he acknowledges her constancy, her practicality, her strength, her wisdom. But he was in awe of it, I do believe. She admits with a smile that  he hated it when she was right.

I won't ask. Only she knows. And that's enough. That doughty intelligent woman to whom so much of Canada's best poetry was dedicated.

I let the poems tell me. As in the wonderful 'The Horseman of Agawa' account of their meeting with ancient  first nations rock paintings on the edge of mighty Superior:

"I just watch my wife's face
she is quiet as she generally is because I do most of the talking
it is forty years old and has felt the pain of children
the pettiness of day-to-day living and getting thousands of meals
but standing on the rock face of Lake Superior
it is not lessened in any way
with a stillness of depth that reaches where I can't follow..."

Love. Not stated, but recorded. For Eurithe, On the Intelligence of Women, The Horseman of Agawa, The Double Shadow, Necropsy of Love, so many others.

Hollywood Joe

Few people know that humble Trenton, Ontario is famous for more than Al Purdy. The wonderful local history 'The Movie Years' by Peggy Dymond Leavey (1989) recounts the small town's flirtation with film between 1917 and 1934. The fast life of Hollywood stars with fur coats and big cars seems incongruous, but it happened. Briefly. The pinnacle was the filming of one of the well-known "Carry On" series of silent films. Then the 'talkies' and new film technology relegated the longest operating Canadian film studio to its small place in history.

In' Morning and Its Summer'(1983), Purdy mentions "the town idiot", whose dignity he discovers and shares in the moving poem Joe Barr (Wild Grape Wine, 1968). Joe pops up again in the memoir , a lovely little book which includes autobiography, history, personal photos and selected poems inspired by Al's growing-up in 1920's Trenton. Of Joe he writes:

"I have seen him when he wasn't aware of being watched, with an odd gentle look on his face, as if he were thinking of something he couldn't say, for which he couldn't find words. ..Of course he knew there was something wrong with him, but never found out why the world was such a cruel place. 

When they made a movie in Trenton in the 1920's, called Carry on Sergeant, Joe hung around doing odd jobs for the moviemakers."

On my workroom wall

A Purdy poem of which I am very fond  is On My Workroom Wall, first published in 'Naked with Summer in your Mouth' in 1994. It's like Al is showing the reader around his writing shed, and as we do when we share those things which amuse and inspire us, revealing himself. It's a wonderful meditation on inspiration, and how to hold onto people and moments of grace. On his wall he gathers around him Gabrielle Roy, Margaret Laurence, Harold Ballard ("his cane spanking the world in geriatric rage"), "Acorn of course", Tiff Findley, Atwood, Eurithe and many dead poets.

I can't quote it all, and it would lose a great deal
if I cut out just my favourite bits.

Try to find a moment today to reread it. Here's an invitation to the conversation:

"I have gathered them all together

like a casual group of strangers

at this meeting place under my roof

who will never meet again

their only relationship supplied by me

who told them to come here

to wait and be silent on my wall

while I contemplate

not their nature but my own

and know as much about myself

by proxy as from looking deep

into the mirror of what I am"

Each time I visit the now-empty shed, I have to remind myself that much of the writing of this prolific and important Canadian poet was created in this tiny reclaimed structure, modified by the hand of the poet and his good woman.

And when I read Al's work, my feelings mirror what he felt of his inspiration, D.H.Lawrence: "Two original Lawrence letters/both so alive he can't be dead..."

work experience

 Al Purdy's autobiography 'Reaching for Beaufort Sea' is quite the most candid 'story of myself' that I have ever read. Al records in detail (and recycles in poems and other prose) not just the shenanigans (bar fights, drunk tank visits, bootlegging), but the mistakes, the doubts and fears, the depressions, the unflattering things that most of us don't want to face - for he had a poet's soul.

The former Bata shoe plant - modernist style

Al recounts his early rootlessness and later desperate poverty in works which feature two local 'landmarks'. This is their little story, should you travel past.

"During my schoolboy summers, and after I quit school,there were odd jobs - picking apples, making boxes for apples, farm work, almost anything. When the Bata Shoe Company built their shoe factory, they took me on as a machine operator. I was a terrible workman and never did learn how to make shoes. I left after only five or six weeks." (Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, p.45)

former Jay Sprague canning factory, Mountainview

The Bata Shoe plant (still standing in Batawa, north of Trenton) was the creation of Czech immigrant Charles Bata, who arrived in Canada in 1939 as events in Europe threatened the family's shoe making business. The Bata shoe factory, opened in this lovely modernist building (above) in the 1940's, was developed as the centre of a company town. The company owned the village and provided accommodation and social supports to its workers, many of them immigrants from Czechoslovakia. The company closed in the 1980's because of the familiar 'off-shore' pressures, but the name lives on in philanthropic works and the astonishing Bata shoe museum in Toronto.

After moving to Ameliasburgh in 1957, Al and Eurithe had some pretty difficult years. At one point, they did what many local folks did - worked at the local canning factory - in those days when Prince Edward County was famous for its canned produce, and its many canneries. The factory pictured above canned green beans until just recently, when the operation moved to Belleville. It was owned by the family who ran the original cannery where Al and Eurithe would have worked, just a short distance away in the village (thanks to Terry Sprague, local naturalist for helping me get the story straight).

"Eurithe and I both worked at Jay Sprague's Mountainview canning factory in 1958. She peeled tomatoes. I operated a machine which capped the 28-ounce cans."  (RBS, p. 173)

Funny all those links. Pedestrian and poetic.

Turvey

Today I was listening to Al Purdy read some of his work from The Collected Poems (Audio Encore cassette). Broke me up when he prefaced one of the readings with a description of his "long but inglorious" World War II military career. Immersed as I have been in his work lately, doing a line by line study, winkling out local connections for a future Purdy literary tour, it took no time to locate his accounts of the military life in Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, and poems like About Being a Member of our Armed Forces.

The bucolic countryside of the Quinte region has been home to no less than three military bases in recent history  - two exist today. During World War II, the Commonwealth Air Training Plan brought thousands of Canadian, American and British trainee fly-boys to the area. Astonishing to look back; in Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, Purdy describes the nearby Trenton air base: "1941-42 was a boring and highly dramatic time at Trenton Air Base....high excitement for officers and sergeant pilots. The Commonwealth Air Training Plan was coming into full effect then. Camouflaged Lancaster bombers lounged on the tarmac; British Mosquitoes, Fairey Battle fighter-bombers lunged and swooped...Yellow Harvard trainers climbed like vivid moths in the sun".

Camp Picton operated until the 1960's as a military base. Many evocative World War II era buildings still stand, home to a few industries. The location has been used in several films - it's a good stand-in for POW or internment camps.



Al's friend Earle Birney wrote a great send-up of the military life in Turvey, published 1949. I remember studying the novel in a Canlit course in the '80's.George Woodcock in the introduction describes Turvey's buoyancy thus: "it ends showing Turvey as the natural man triumphant, having survived all the numbering and testing and regimenting and bullying and discipline and short-arm inspecting" (oops)"to emerge in the end as irrepressibly his own self as Sancho Panza at the end..."

Sounds like Al may have taken some pages from Birney's training manual.

all photos from former Camp Picton

Of his time at Picton, Purdy writes: "Anyway, as the Picton NCO in charge of things, I used to go to Belleville sometimes, flanked by two or three of the American guard boys.We drank some beer....One one occasion we 'picked up' three girls on the street...The name of my girl was Eurithe Mary Jane Parkhurst." And that turned out to have been the best outcome of Al Purdy's military career.

Earlier in the account he wrote: "Then Picton. The army barracks there had previously been headquarters for the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment (which is Angus Mowat's and Farley's 'Hasty P's)" - of which my uncle Elmo was a proud member. "Promoted to the temporary rank of sergeant, I was the NCO in charge of a hundred or so candidates for air crew..."

Long story short, Purdy ended up "demoted and demoted and demoted to the point where I finally saluted civilians" (About Being a Member of our Armed Forces")

How did he put it? "Long but inglorious?" But what amazing times to have lived through.

the last picture show

Herons are a portent bird for me. At some of the most difficult times in my life, their appearance has brought comfort and a sense that all would be well. Two herons (the season's first) flew over high above the highway I travelled this morning.  I was reminded of my visit last week with some creative writing students at Trenton High School. One of them shared his feelings about this poem, which I had forgotten.

In one of the last poems he wrote, Al Purdy reveals, in such a simple fashion, that the heron was special to him too:

"A hunched grey shape
framed by leaves
with lake water behind
standing on our
little point of land...

...a blue heron
and it occurs to me
that if I were to die at this moment
that picture would accompany me
wherever I am going
for part of the way"

From 'The Last Picture in the World', New Poems (1999)