Steve and I in Winnipeg

When Steve Fobister and I began to plan our reunion in Winnipeg next week the good folks at the University of Manitoba learned we would be in town and first invited us to speak at a previously scheduled event for the evening of the 6th, then set up this event for earlier in the day.

Isn’t the old camp lovely to behold? It’s the inspiration for Innish Cove.

And I have arranged for Steve and I to be video taped as we talk about meeting for the first time, about working and living together in the frontier days on the English River, about when he entrusted me with the legend of Anung, and where my Indian nickname came from. I look forward to sharing the videos with you.

Ball Lake Lodge

How about it? This photo is from the early 60’s, just a couple of years before I started working for Barney Lamm at Ball Lake Lodge.

You want a sense of the scope of the business he built? Well, all the buildings in the left third of the photo were for camp operations, and there are others not captured in this picture. There are storehouses, the ice house, a fish house, Barney’s office and radio room, his wife Marion’s office; there is the camp store where guests could purchase fishing tackle or soft drinks or a Hudson Bay coat; the lunch box room where we collected supplies for our shore lunches; a motor repair shop and building that housed the electric generator; two bunk houses called ‘The Bachelors’ for the guides who lived at Grassy Narrows but stayed at camp when working; a bath house with showers and a washing machine; cabins for bush pilots that may need to spend the night; a dance hall; and cabins for cooks and the diesel mechanics and other skilled employees required to maintain this small village needed to support the fishing camp that could, when filled to capacity, host nearly 100 guests at a time.

I counted, there must be about 40 boats pulled up on the beach, outfitted to handle two Guests to a boat, three if need be. Barney employed a lot of guides.

By the time I began working there Barney started tacking a new red carpet down the length of the long dock; my first job was to keep it swept clean, always, two or three times a day.

You can only see four Guest cabins, sitting just above the beach. The rest of the cabins, the main lodge, are all tucked back in the forest, behind the ones you see, and off to the right.

The first day I arrived I was set to work as part of a crew that was going to build a new dock, much smaller, around a rocky point that is outside the photo, to the right. Dutch, Brian’s right hand man in the daily operations, was in charge of the job. I listened to them fine tune their plans and as Dutch turned to get to work, and as I followed him, he said to Barney something to the effect that, sure, they have a smart plan for building this dock, but after all “the devil is in the details.” I have such a clear memory of Barney stopping him and telling him with a certain passion I found compelling that no, Ball Lake was built with a “God is in the details” approach. I came to learn he was right, as Brian taught us how to fill each inch and every minute with a generous care for his Guests.

And those planes, tied up to the dock, a Norseman, a Beechcraft, and a Cessna, are but a small sample of the fleet of bush planes owned and operated by Brian’s float plane airline, Ontario Central Airline.

My fictionalized version of this, the Great Lodge at Innish Cove, is true in many ways to this remarkable place, this Eden, built by Barney and Marion and Dutch Ackerman and Joe Loon.

It makes me happy, it makes me sad.

In Praise of Barney Lamm

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a song written about Barney Lamm. He lived such an extraordinary life of adventure, surrounded by legendary figures as he was creating his own.

He began building Ball Lake Lodge on the English River in Northwest Ontario in 1947, starting with a single two room log cabin on a beautiful sandy beach 50 miles north of the frontier town of Kenora. Over the next couple of decades he and his wife Marion built it into one of the most successful and famous fly-in fishing camps in all of Canada, the destination of rich and famous Americans as well as adventure seekers from around the world who enjoyed a bit of rustic comfort at the end of the day. Over the years Barney and Marion hosted John Wayne, the Getty Oil brothers, Natalie Wood, Patrick Hemingway, and James Hoffa, among others. Barney was an international sportsman of renown and he and Hemingway published a book about their safaris in Africa that Barney would give to favored guests.

He also built Ontario Central Airlines, perhaps the largest float plane airline in Canada during its heyday, and a great strategic business partner for his fishing camps—Ball Lake Lodge was his number one operation, but he also owned Maynard Lake Lodge, priced more for middle class guests.

Excuse me, but he would frown if I left it guests. He always insisted it was Guests.

OCA had a fleet of Norsemen, the plane you see in the picture, a few Cessna’s, two Grumman Goose’s, a Beechcraft, and I recall the drama of a big PBY landing on its belly in the middle of Ball Lake a couple of times. I think he bought it as a curiosity but soon sold it.

He not only transported his guests to his camps, and the constant flow of supplies his camps needed, but he also transported passengers and supplies to the other camps on the English River’s chain of lakes, as well as the engineers and miners still exploring the wilderness for resources and knowledge.

He respected the Ojibway who worked for him and treated them fairly and was made an honorary chief of both the Grassy Narrows and White Dog Ojibway Reserves and later was Ontario’s Business Man of the Year.

When I worked for him I always found him to be a wonderful man, both demanding and generous, very clear about what he wanted, the best first boss a 15 year old kid could have. After a season spent in a ‘room and board’ apprenticeship were I earned my keep as a camp laborer, my second year I began to guide and Barney assured me that even if I was just 16 that I could guide two 50 year old highly successful businessmen out on the river and its lakes for four days of fishing, that I would ‘be in charge of my boat’, if I practiced servant leadership.

He didn’t use that label—it was a couple of years before Robert Greenleaf wrote his seminal essay on the concept where he coined ‘servant leadership’—but he helped me understand that as a fishing guide if I first and foremost saw it was my job to serve the men in my boat, to care for them, that when they saw they were the beneficiaries of that care, well then they would willingly grant me all the authority over them I needed to do my job, and that if I continued to use that authority to care for them, they would continue to grant me more and more.

I am delighted and proud to say it worked. I guided for three more years, for Barney in Canada and on the White River in Arkansas, and later I found bringing a servant leader leadership strategy to my start- up work was generative of the best outcomes. Thanks Barney.

Barney’s legend continued to grow when it was discovered that the English River was toxic, that it was polluted by a chemical plant 100 miles upstream. Though it would mean the destruction of his businesses, he blew the whistle on what was happening. When the Canadian government and industry tried to cover it up he flew in scientists to test the waters and it was discovered there was the greatest concentration of the highly toxic methyl mercury ever discovered. He and his family became the target of death threats when he demanded the problem be seen for what it was—an environmental disaster of the greatest magnitude that would have devastating impacts on the Ojibway for decades, for a century. And since that truth would lead to serious economic loss for many in the area he became the target of death threats; when next they were directed at his five daughters he sold their home in Kenora and moved away.

But he continued to fight until he died, certainly to protect his own economics self-interests, but always fighting for truth and justice for the Ojibway of Grassy Narrows and White Dog as well.

It’s a fight that continues, for neither have been accomplished.

An Excerpt from Novel 3: The Cliffs of Moher

Early in the third novel in ‘The River of Lakes Trilogy’ Brian travels with his teenage daughter, Grace O’Malley Burke, to Ireland, to visit his home village of Cong. They are traveling with two of Grace O’Malley’s girlfriends, two Ojibway girls from Joe Loon’s clan, Annie Fobister and Louise Keewatin, who have never been outside their world on the River. Maureen, Grace’s mother, was not able to accompany them on this trip.

They stood beneath O’Brien’s Tower at the Cliffs of Moher, Brian nearest the edge, Grace next to him, Annie and Louise a step back and holding hands, all standing past the signs that established the safe boundary. The winds were fierce on this cold winter morning but they found it exhilarating for they were dressed for worse. They stood together, alone with their thoughts, more than 600 feet above the Atlantic; the tower was built very near the highest point of the cliffs. The wind promised crashing waves but offered only an easy swell and modest chop of softly cresting waves below them and all up and down the shore.

They studied the cliffs’ face and shoreline north and south; the face of the cliffs spattered and splattered with white stains everywhere, from the great number of seabirds that perch and roost and nest in the cracks and on the small ledges the cliffs’ face provides. It was too early in the year for the nesting colonies of razorbills and guillemots to return from their winter range but the fulmar was a permanent resident and there were plenty of them, white and grey birds swooping and soaring and resting on this ledge or that.

It was Annie who saw them first, near a large rock, just off shore. She saw two of them, rising with the swell, falling with it, riding the waves around the rock as if playing, and she called their name to the wind. “Nibiinaabe.”

Grace heard the magic in her friend’s voice and turned and saw the tail end of two seals surface dive…but were they seals?

Louise heard Annie too but turned too late to see them and she spoke to Annie in their native tongue. “You saw man fish water spirit?”

Annie pointed at the rock, to the south. “Two. I saw two.”

Brian listened, smiled, and turned to Grace. “I’m thinkin’ we’re hearin’ a language never spoke here before…” but Grace wasn’t paying attention, she was asking her friends “Seals?”

Annie shook her head no. “I don’t know the seal. I saw Nibiinaabe.”

Like her mother Grace O’Malley loved learning and speaking the language of the Ojibway, but this was a new word for her. “Nibiinaabe?”

“Nibiinaabe is a water spirit. With the head and body of a man, or a woman, but no legs. Instead of legs, they have the tail of a fish.”

“I saw the tails, but that’s all. I thought they were an animal that lives in the oceans called seals.”

Brian was delighted. “Sure there are mermaids in these waters. But if you ask me it’s more likely what you saw was a selkie.”

“Mum told stories about selkies.”

Brian told the girls about selkies, creatures who lived in the North Atlantic waters around Scotland and Ireland. They took on the appearance of seals in the ocean but could remove their seal skins to live on land as humans. They carefully guarded their skins when they walked the earth, and often had families. And when they were human they had remarkable powers.

“Perhaps you saw selkies.”

Annie said to Louise. “I do not know the seal. I saw Nibiinaabe. Two of them.” And Grace understood.

Tales from an Ojibway Chief: n’Gosh

Having just submitted ‘Worlds Between’, the second novel in The River of Lakes trilogy, for publication in the Spring, I am focusing now on the third novel. My working title for this book has been n’Gosh’, which is the name Steve Fobister gave me when we worked together as teenage boys, for it isn’t until this third novel, set in 1969, that a character loosely based on me shows up.

This character’s name, by the way, is Guy Greene. And Guy immediately falls in love with the daughter of Brian and Maureen Burke, who they named Grace O’Malley Burke.

First he saw her hair. It was long and black, wild and wavy. And then he saw her eyes, her bright blue eyes, just as wild. She was boundary breaking beautiful, and his were busted.

Steve gave me the name n’Gosh the first summer I worked in Ontario, the summer I turned 16. I loved it and was afraid to ask Steve what it meant. It was magic, too good to be true, that I had been given an Indian name, and I didn’t want to ruin it by finding out it meant something not so pleasant. I had a thick head of nearly black curly hair in those days and somewhere along the line I got the impression that’s what it meant, the curly headed one, something like that, so I left it there for much of the summer.

Then the first season was nearly over, soon I would be headed home, so finally I asked Steve what it meant. He said “I don’t know, you tell me.”

“I should tell you what it means?”

“Yes,” he replied, “you say it all the time?”

“I say it all the time?”

“Sure. Like when I show you a new water fall or the pictographs or the burial site, you always say ‘n’Gosh!'”