The story of the Dorchester torpedoing and the uncommon valour of the four chaplains is immortalized in the Chapel of the Four Chaplains at Temple University in Philadelphia. It opened in the early 1950s, dedicated by Clark’s dad, Rev. Daniel Poling, and his friend President Harry Truman.
Whether they were preachers or papermakers, the Polings loved the outdoors. And that love was the reason that Robert Lee Poling’s second eldest child, Raymond Marcel, was paddling the Undertaker across Loon Lake with his wife, Veronica, and me. Why a supposedly sane man like Robert would allow his son and family to borrow and actually use that canoe remains a puzzle many decades later. My grandfather’s canoe was the most homely, most ungovernable, and crankiest little beast ever to kiss the water. It lived long and dumped many, but never my grandfather, and he loved it.
War raged, but Loon Lake was another world. After the passing of the train, the lake regained its solitude. A raven returning to nest croaked. A trout splashed off the starboard stern, causing my father to bend forward and reach for his fly rod, an action immediately halted by a scream of terror:
“Ray, I told you before, you’re going to tip this damn canoe and drown us all!”
My father stared down at me curiously, then wistfully out at the widening ring of the speckled trout rise. I am certain that it was only my presence that caused him to set the rod down. A frightened wife, yes, even a wet wife clinging to an overturned canoe, was not reason enough to pass on a trout like that. A baby was.
For my part, speckled trout belly flopping for flies held no interest. The outside world was just too big and too amazing to try to bring into focus, let alone try to comprehend. My world was in front of me in the form of that grocery box with intriguing bags, cans, and bottles sticking out the top, so tantalizingly close to my stretching little fingertips.
“Oooh, nooo!”
This sudden sound startled me, and of course my mother, who immediately concluded that it announced the inevitable end of us all. It was a sound I was to hear many times in the future in many variations. Sometimes it was multisyllabic, with the oooh and nooo stretched out like oooh-ah nooo-ah to emphasize disbelief so complete that it contained anguish. Sometimes the last sound was repeated, as in oooh, no, no, no, no, which was accented by a violent sideways shaking of the head from which the sound was emanating. This day the sound was just mournful, so rounded that it floated across the lake and into the trees, skipping lightly off rock faces, never bouncing back as a sharp echo, but simply floating on a course into the next valley and beyond.
For me growing up, oooh nooo became a bush sound as familiar as the crack of a long fallen branch crushed by something dark and unseen. Or the syrupy and insistent trill of the vireo or the thump of a bear paw dismantling a stump alive with breakfast grubs. A bush sound that always announced that my father was near and in some momentary distress.
After my initial fright, the sound made me laugh with delight and I rocked forward and backwards clapping my hands, hoping to hear it again. “Oooh, nooo, no, no, no!” The sound flew from my father’s mouth as he flailed away with a paddle, trying to put the canoe into a 180-degree turn and full reverse at the same time.
“Oh, Ray, what happened now? We’re sinking, aren’t we?” my mother, her voice tight with fear, asked from the bow. Her question would have been answered if she had simply turned her upper body and looked into the canoe wake. Such movement is not possible when one’s fingers are squeezing the grain out of the cedar gunwales and one’s elbows are tightly locked as if stricken with rigor mortis. Whatever the problem, my mother was not going to view the wake because she was convinced that even a wrinkle of the nose would spin the Undertaker like a top and drown us all. Nothing could loosen her death grip on the canoe until its nose touched the sandy shore on the other side of the lake and my father pried her fingers loose.
Why she so feared the water I do not know, probably because I didn’t ask her, just as I didn’t ask her other things that I should have. I had no fear of the water and proceeded to stand in the canoe to get a better view of the problem. I already knew what the problem was, of course, because I created it but wanted a full view of the action, and my effort to hoist myself by the gunwale set the Undertaker rocking and elicited another scream from the bow.
“Ray, for God’s sake, we’re tipping! Hail holy Queen, mother of Mercy and Light …”
My father’s hand let go of the paddle that was executing a fast right turn to push me to the canoe floor. Before it did, I got a pretty good look into the wake where a little brown paper bag made its final bob before its bottom gave way, creating a starburst of dazzling white crystals dissolving as they sank into the dark waters of Loon Lake. Our family cache of sugar, not replaceable under war rationing, was gone.
The remainder of the ride across the lake was jerky as my father interrupted his normally rhythmic paddling to tap my fingers while they tried to extricate another bag from the grocery box and continue this delightful new game. Far too soon, however, the bow of the canoe scrunched into the beach sand, my mother leaped to safety and pulled me from the clutches of the demon craft.
I have no recollection of what happened after that. I learned later that we had two or three days of golden autumn filled with walks across the forest floor newly matted with yellow brown birch and poplar leaves. At night there were quiet talks at campfires that flickered orange yellow and listened for a train whistle meant just for us. My parents talked and crooned the old songs like “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” and “Shine on Harvest Moon” and drank strong tea without sugar. They cut it with thick and sickly sweet Carnation evaporated milk, cans of which sat on the oilcloth tabletops of every cabin in the Canadian bush, wooden matchsticks sticking in their tops to keep the pouring holes from crusting over. No doubt John Barleycorn stopped by the fire to help shake off the chill.
I don’t remember the quiet talks by the campfire or the autumn walks, but I do remember dozens of later Loon Lake visits. We didn’t own a camp as they are called in the North (as opposed to “cottage” in the south), but there was always one to rent or borrow or visit. I learned to dog-paddle there because I couldn’t stand the oozing bottom of the lake between my toes. I got my first dog bite there, a full canine slash to the right thigh, and set off a hell of a commotion when someone who had obviously failed animal identification put up the alarm that a wolf had attacked me.
I came close to drowning there twice, nearly fulfilling my mother’s prophecy that water eventually would take all of us. Once I got in over my head and was pulled to safety by a friend. Another time I was riding in the bottom of the Undertaker, paddled by my dad, when his little brother Gerry stood in the bow and dumped us all into the lake. I remember floating near the bottom, my hand touching the light brown sand ribbed like snake’s tracks by the creek’s current and seeing little fishes darting into a patch of thin green reeds. It was quiet down there. Everything moved in slow motion, and I was sleepy and ready to dream until I saw my father’s contorted face appear, the wavy dark brown hair flattened back against his head, his open fingers stretching out to grab my long blond hair that had yet to see its first cut.
When I awoke onshore after my dad’s artificial respiration had produced a thankful gurgling, I heard another of his expressions, the one reserved for times of great anger when immediate danger had passed: “Jesus Mexican Murphy!”
Veronica was not present so was spared the agony of seeing the near drowning of her first born. However, when she learned about it, she shook her head and uttered a line reserved for the Polings and their wild bush ways: “You’re all crazy. Crazy as loons!”
After the sugarless outing in the autumn of 1944, I never again saw Veronica in a canoe or boat of any kind. She could not avoid the water, however. It was everywhere and in particular it was near our house, in the form of McVicar Creek.
McVicar Creek was no turgid urban trickle in those days. To the neighbourhood kids, it was an artery in the heart of Borneo. It entered the city from somewhere far off the northern edge of the city