Chasing the Comet: A Scottish-Canadian Life (review)

This is the twelfth in Marlene Kadar's series and the first to feature the full life of a man. That man is David Caldow, born in Scotland in 1903 and still alive at the time the book was published. The text is the result of several of years of taped interviews taken by Koretchuk, a family friend and long-time writer of shorter profiles. She explains her theory of her task in an introduction that should interest any scholar who tries to speak in the subject's true voice through her or his own mouth. This is impossible, of course, but Koretchuk, in providing us with her methodology, has much to show us about the obstacles to be overcome.

Caldow's story includes beatings by his father but great love and respect for him (leading to a lifelong desire to come up to his father's standards as a farm manager); use of prostitutes while holding a proto-feminist respect for women; anti-unionism but tremendous regard for the value of the working man (including unpopular Japanese-Canadians); absence of prejudice against his wife for having a daughter out of wedlock but an insistence that appearances be maintained by keeping her true relationship to his son secret. Choice of content obviously had to be swayed by Koretchuk, but it seems that she was given a thoughtful, hard-working man capable of personal growth across his hundred years of life.

Caldow is a unique farming immigrant in that, following the pattern of most farmers in Scotland, he managed the larger farms belonging to others, rather than focusing on his own. This choice helps him avoid the agony of attempting to convince a son to stay on his land and leaves the story free of the tussling of two generations over the family property. Instead, he has the problems of needing approval for his budgets as well as his hiring and firing decisions, and in the end, the lack of a pension, which takes him on what he describes the greatest adventure of his life: two years in his seventies, with his ailing but game wife, training farmers in Tanzania.

Most of Caldow's working years, however, were spent at two medical facilities of the type that no longer exists: the Essondale Mental Institution and the tuberculosis sanatorium at Tranquille, both in British Columbia. Stories of his work there include arsonists, thieves, work cures for mental patients, social occasions, the class lines among institution staff, injuries, favourite and hated animals and people, the ability of his immediate family to adjust to his heavy and itinerant work situation, and the tendency of his larger family to help one another out.

But always the focus of Caldow's story is his work, something that he himself describes as making him a poor husband and father. He tells us of experiments for the better or worse but, most importantly, adds to the historical literature the little-studied story of these large farms, meant to provide food for not only the inmates or patients and resident staff but also to be sold at a profit to defray some of the institution costs. He frequently stresses that his budget was never generous but nonetheless has the backing to run a large mixed operation of a type that could make sense at this time and place in no other guise. We learn a very great deal about the challenges of managing food production, complete with a surplus sufficient to buy what was needed in tools, etc., for a community. No wonder he has chosen at his advanced age to try to replicate his successes in the community fields of Tanzania.

This is a well-written piece, accessible to the general reader but with a thoughtful introduction that would make this a good selection for an undergraduate life-writing class. There is much for discussion here: the use of dialogue, the effect that a female 'ghost' might have...