Miracle at Indian River - Alden Nowlan

I found this book of short stories at a lovely little used book store in Kitsilano, solid wooden shelves immaculately stacked, rain pelting the window, dog lying beside the counter. It seemed to me the perfect place to stumble upon the writings of a quintessential Canadian author, albeit one who hailed from the opposite shore.

I had actually been looking for a book of Nowlan’s poetry, as he is more widely known as a poet and I suffer from a serious poetry dearth. Generally, my eyes will glaze over after the first few stanzas, but Nowlan’s poems seem different, with their tales of struggle amongst hard-bitten Canadian pragmatists. Those, I could read.

The stories within Miracle at Indian River are pretty much archetypal early Can Lit. They are peopled with labourers, those who toil in lumber camps and saw mills, those who scrabble a living from desolate farms, those who sweat in factories and long for escape. The struggle to survive looms large in these stories, but within this struggle for mere existence lies also the struggle for dreams to survive. Most of Nowlan’s people have only known abject poverty, most of their days are consumed with the menial struggle to feed and house themselves. And yet, there is a spark of hopefulness within. Despite the crushing weight of daily existence, these people maintain a dignity that transcends the wretched reality of their days.

Sometimes the dreams are so meager that it is almost heartbreaking. There is the teenage boy who risks the distain of the taciturn men in the lumber camp to listen to the Polish immigrant’s memories of glass roses. There is the girl from the potato chip factory who wears her best dress to dinner at the boarding house, practices her diction to put the stain of her impoverished family behind her and dreams of becoming a shop girl. There is the boiler man who finds solace in the flames.

It was odd reading these stories so long after this man-against-the-elements phase of Can Lit has passed, and at times I was in danger of thinking of them as caricature. But in reality, this was the world that Nowlan knew. He was born in Nova Scotia in 1933, into an impoverished family, and left school after grade 4. His stories in Miracle at Indian River are old school Can Lit, because that is the school from whence Nowlan came.

I’m glad I found and read this book. But I am still looking for those poems.