Man Facing West
Event, Fall 2011 (Vol 40.2)
Reading Don Gayton’s ‘Prologue,’ I briefly feared meeting yet another elderly grump at pains to show why his life and politics have been exemplary, but then he made me laugh by describing his largely autobiographical stories, a crafty blend of fiction and non-fiction, as literary catch and release, for which you do not need a license.’ Amused and curious, I stepped into the country of Man Facing West.
About two-thirds of Gayton’s stories are chronological and memoir-ish. Varying greatly in length, they focus on high (or low) points in his journey from a loving Republican family to solo student. Peace Corps member, Vietnam war resister, and then to marriage and another loving family on the Canadian prairies first and eventually in British Columbia, with ecology and land preservation at the centre of his life. Smitten, I’m now eager to read more of Gayton’s work, such as Wheatgrass Mechanism: Science and Imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape (1990) and Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden (2007).
Gayton’s writing is admirably specific and precise. “Destination Dungeness” describes how in childhood he made bullets for a deer rifle, while in “Curious Rarity” he unexpectedly meets the silver buffaloberry:
I was exploring the far-eastern edge of the Granton that fateful day, along a small ephemeral stream. As the stream’s watercourse reaches a slope break, there is an alluvial fan of sorts, where shrubs seemed to prosper. Many of the saskatoons and mock oranges were head high and more…one of the shrubs caught my sleeve with a viciously sharp thorn, a good two inches long. There were hawthorns in the area, and that was my first thought. But with its dusky, smooth-margined leaves, this was no hawthorn.
With striking clarity, “Little Bluestem and the Geography of Fascination’ explicates theories of plant distribution and further exemplifies Gayton’s delight in nature:
I could be entertained for hours if I were handed a stack of distribution maps on transparent plastic sheets, all to the same scale. If they were stiff enough, I could shuffle them like cards, and one by one place them over each other, to see if the five-lined skink might confess to some clandestine geographical relationship with the Kirtland’s warbler. Or the three-tip sagebrush with the stinkbug, and so on.
A happy scientist, this. “Little Bluestem” also illustrates Gayton’s appreciation for different ways of knowing. He classifies students of plant life as either lab coats “who refuse to look at a plant until it’s been through a Waring blender” or cowboy hats. After one of the former identifies not one but three kinds of photosynthesis, it turns out that these different biochemical groups...fit nicely with one of the cowboys’ pet categories — cool-season and warm-season grasses. Academic study and field experience illuminate the text. Gayton finds such completion satisfying, even hopeful.
Politically, he has followed a path familiar to his and my generation, from conservative upbringing to more radical adulthood. Unlike many of our peers, however, he is not sour on his young self, not embittered and humourless. Although he despairs over industrial society’s ruination of the planet, he is always constructive, sustained by the Earth’s ingenious resilience and beauty. As well, the decades have mercifully ended his estrangement (rooted in Vietnam) from his father. ‘A Schooner in Memory’ shows the two travelling together, with Gayton relishing his own inherited landscape—physical, intellectual, emotional.
Other stories in Man Facing West surprise the reader with new first person narrators, such as “Henri Bonpland”, an obscure Parisian botanist specializing in tropical palms’ of the early 19th century, and with third-person tales of (among others) a Spanish priest, a drylander on a Pacific beach, a Yukon geologist and a Texas accountant who has never seen a butterfly. I wish that this narrative mix had been expressed in the book’s design. The pages are cleanly laid out, but a fresh typeface or other visual distinction for these differing viewpoints would have added pleasure. And why not give story titles on each right-hand page, instead of endlessly repeating the book’s name? “Gliding in the Pleistocene” is the best of this second group. Full disclosure: time-travel usually produces in me an eye-rolling Oh yeah? Two pages in, though, I was completely taken. The energy of the intertwined storylines is irresistible, the voices strong and both land- and airscapes are imagined with Gaytonian clarity. When the daring paleontologists fly into their old and newfound land, the author seems to envy their wild chance to synthesize its knowledge with their own. Gayton’s admirable and unusual book is all about that continual openness to learning and to action.
Prairie Fire Review of Books, Vol 11 #1, 2011
Don Gayton is a writer and ecologist from the BC Interior who has published some six books of nonfiction in the personal “nature writing” genre. He is a Canadian by choice, attached to place, but someone who has also lived and explored elsewhere. California, Mexico, Colombia, Washington State, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia all appear in this volume although, as the title Man Facing West suggests, the locations are centrally “western.” Ecology and botany are passions that Gayton has crafted into careers in agriculture, forestry, and rural development. As both a biologist and a writer, he sees connections which he translates into stories about person and place. In the writer, and in his work, there is the organic link between cultures (plants growing together) and cultures (humans nurtured in a landscape). His persona suggests that of the contrary, challenging both peers and authority figures. He states in the Prologue, “In my case, resistance to an unjust war transformed into a passion for rural development and then morphed again into an all-consuming bond to natural landscapes” (10). As a scientist and writer, he still insists on pointing out the answers to the questions we don’t want to ask (9). Luckily for readers of this collection, the answers are proffered in the form of a variety of stories.
Man Facing West inspired me to want to read more of Gayton but the local library system (barely 200 km from his hometown) lists only two titles, and not the one I wanted, Landscapes of the Interior. I did read and enjoy his Okanagan Odyssey: Journeys through Terrain, Terroir, and Culture, in which he looses his love of words, expanding from the origins of the word “landscape” to his own definition, “a tract of land, hopelessly entangled in aesthetics and culture” (OO, 67). He explains the use of the word “terroir,” stressing the link between land, grapes, and wine. I like this thought that ideas grow from real specific things attached to the real world of earth, water, and sky. I like the way he does not hide his romanticism: “Wine transforms ordinary confusion into an ecstatic form of wonder. . . . We still crave place, and wine is our surrogate for it. . . . We imbibe, and for a moment we feel connected. Wine is a message in a bottle” (OO, 60–61). But the fact that libraries seem to prefer to emphasize circulation and “pop culture” is disappointing. Learning more and more about where we live, which writers like Gayton help us to do, seems to me a necessary way to develop attachment to the land, which in turn will lead to acts of caring and conservancy. Unfortunately, BC is still a province where economics seems to trump environment every time.
That phrase, “entangled in aesthetics and culture,” applies to Man Facing West. My one problem with this collection is with its aesthetics, with Gayton’s deliberate and celebrated (should I say contrarian) attempt to meld fiction and non-fiction. The fact that the reader is given no clues as to which stories are fiction or “invented memory” and which are non-fiction creates problems with credibility. Did the cub-scout leader in “Flag Day” really strip the boy of his badges and banish him? Or is this story fiction, with the leader a handy symbol of authority who creates cognitive dissonance in a child by an inappropriate overreaction to an accident?
Anger and punishment are inappropriate in the story’s situation; modelling the proper reaction, the protocol, to an accident causing a fallen flag would have been a teachable moment. Trust the tale but not the teller. But not being able to trust the teller is a problem when it comes to his attempting to shift the paradigm. Not being able to trust the scientist is an easy out for those who do not want to listen. Even clumping the fiction and non-fiction into units would have helped. I did enjoy the stories that were obviously fiction — about the botanist’s assistant, “Humboldt and Bonpland,” and the chariots-of-the-gods story of time travel in Saskatchewan, “Gliding in the Pleistocene.” But did the writer and his once-estranged father really look for ancestral graves together, as in the story “A Schooner in Memory”? Or is it a case of “invented memory,” of “victim,” heal thyself? Come to think of it, did the former teammate and Vietnam vet at the high school reunion really say: “Gayton, I did the right thing, and so did you” in “The Fracture of Good Order”? (226) A benediction, certainly, and one I would like to believe was truly given.
Man Facing West is enjoyable, especially because many of the locations are familiar and it pleases me to read about them in books. It is also interesting to learn about the background of a conscientious objector, the lessons demonstrated to us by the people we are sent to educate, the possibility of using imagination to bandage family wounds, the potential of all narrative to heal and to teach.— J.M. Bridgeman
J.M. Bridgeman writes from the Fraser Valley.
