North By North

North By North

Johnny Harrison was a Northerner plain and simple. Norway, Sweden, Scotland, and Canada all swam in his blood. And the truth be known, not a single Harrison nor Harris nor any otherancestor had ever lived south of the fifty-second parallel.

Then one day a woman entered his life. daughter of a high-flying sportsman who fished many of the lakes of the North thanks to the bush pilots. Clara Hamton hailed from Birmingham, Alabama. Way, way south. The testosterone-filled nineteen year-old backwoodsman/hunter/trapper/fisherman guided father Lloyd to all the right fishing holes, but misguided charming Clara completely.

Lloyd would have nothing to do with a marriage between his daughter and a mere guide, though he was skilled, completely dependable, and had already made a respectable niche in the North by owning one hundred acres and the equipment to make it pay. The reason that Lloyd Hampton resisted, even refused to agree to a wedding was an insight he'd gained long ago and expressed in the saying an anthropologist: extremescannotcoexist. So Lloyd was convinced that this northern Canadian and his southern American would simply find no common ground.

But a father, no matter how determined, cannot order his daughter's every move. Besides, she was twenty-one. So Clara moved to Alberta in spite of her father's fuming.

What does a nineteen year-old backwoodsman know about love? Psychology? Women? In Johnny's case, nothing. And so when Clara died of pneumonia the first winter, the young father was simply stumped about raising daughter Erin.

Louisa, Clara's mother, naturally tried to assume responsibility for the infant.

"Please, Johnny, let me take care of her. Let me love dear Erin as deeply as ever I did sweet Clara."

The words attacked the woodsman's bottom-line sense of capability. The notion of moving south was preposterous. Also of sending his blood

away. And so against all pleading, Johnny kept Erin. And he raised her as only he knew how.

Which means he didn't raise her at all. From the beginning to the end he simply expected the girl to get along on her own -- the way he was raised. Except for his wild evening on the pine needles with Clara when he found that women really are different, he never treated his daughter like one. For that matter, Johnny never treated her any special way. Erin was simply another human being. Living and doing was all that he knew.

And so Erin grew doing everything expected of her; what did she know?. She sawed trees, split wood, hauled water, skinned and gut deer, bear, and moose, farmed, fished, cooked, snowshoed to town: all the things he and everyone else in the North did.

This is not the story of a girl that proved better than her male counterparts. There's no such thing as feminists in the primitive North: you either pull your weight or you drop behind. Erin did occasionally out saw some of the boys; she did haul in heavy nets; she even out-lifted some of the boys now and then. But such happenings were never done with a sense of gender. All work was part of one's duty as an inhabitant.

But deep down there is a spark that marks each of us different. Not male or female, unique. And Erin's individuality expressed itself in the girl's mid-youth in the form of kayak racing.

"Preposterous!" yelled Lloyd all the way from Birmingham. "What does kayak racing have to do with being a girl?"

But the grandparents who saw Erin only once a year, and that during kayak season, knew there was nothing they could do to feminize their granddaughter. Johnny Harrison was so set in his ways that anyone who told him he didn't know what he was doing wished he hadn't interfered.

"If Erin wants to paddle, okay -- providing she gets her chores done first. And that's all there is to it."

But it's not paddling or living as an individualist that underlay Erin's desire to kayak. It's what she sensed at the rallies, at the races, at the intermingling of girls and boys her own age.

Erin was now eighteen, a year younger than her father had been when he learned the difference between boys and girls. And though she had no reason or even any great curiosity about the other gender, the subject came up naturally. Because just as father Johnny had expected his child to be like everyone else, Harry McKenzie from Banff expected girls to be girls. No matter how strong and self-sufficient they were. In other words, the one-

time Olympic alternate simply assumed that this Erin Harrison and he would some day paddle together in his double kayak.

The story now takes an interesting bend: of differing paradigms clashing. Harry McKenzie was raised to see men and women different: that they were intended to cohabit and help each other. Harry believed that though basically independent, male and female should, if not depend on each other, at least complement one another.

We know that Johnny Harrison saw all people the same. What mattered to him was how well a person handled himself. How he lived, got along, functioned. All this bally-hoo about differences and feeling was for 'the strange ones'.

Conflict always occurs when opposites encounter each other. But before we see how the uni-people father and the every-gender's-different suitor dealt with the problem, let's look at how Erin saw things. Erin had more of grandmother Louisa in her than anyone expected. Though Erin felt the Southern Yankee as strange, still the girl sensed a closeness. A fellow femininity that she couldn't put into words because of her distance. Erin sensed the closeness was real as she watched her mother's mother flitter and flutter about the rented lodge summers on Grandfather's fishing trips. Erin was drawn to her only female role model's warmth, understanding, and softness.

Erin also knew that Harry expected her to be like that. While he admired her for al her strengths, the well-rounded man also assumed his girlfriend would play the role of woman. And so Erin began to feel herself like two people. Obviously the heretofore underdeveloped heart had to be exercised. She must become warm, understanding, and learn about love.

Now, when father Johnny was faced with raising a child, and a female one at that, a number of clicks occurred in the simple man's head. One, he really detested people from the South. He saw them as financially rich and character weak. It took only one winter and Claradied. So women simply aren't what they're all cracked up to be. If anything, they were less than human. If that wasn't enough, Johnny grew a strong dislike for women in general. And the clincher was that Johnny blamed Clara for burdening him with the responsibility of cohabiting with one ofthem.

So the father denied the female in his daughter. Easy to do when she wore insulated underwear and goose down coats most of the year anyway as she worked along side of him like a boy would. We need to know this because it is a variable that influenced the outcome of balancing the

equation. For when the femininity aspect of Erin presented itself through Harry's advances, Johnny, still in denial, only saw one person drawing another person away from him, and when he sensed Harry was doing it because of her being a female, his denial flipped and hate surfaced.

Luckily Harry was a good paddler. In truth, it was to their definite advantage that as a couple, no one could catch Harry and Erin double-blading a two-person kayak.

And so Johnny Harrison, permanent resident of the fifty-second parallel and staunch believer in individuality with a capital I, paradoxically had to say good-bye to that awkward phase of his life. To vent his profound resentment of both females entering and leaving him, he chopped down three White Pine trees non-stop. So furiously that even he, used to hard work, got blisters.

And, ironically, the daughter he never had, moved South. Well, to Banff, anyway. Had she gone to the land of the Yankee, way down South to that distant state of Alabama, Johnny Harrison would probably not have been able to process it. Such is the way of people who think only one way. As for the Northerner, he was perfectly content staying where he was doing what he'd always done. In the latitude of his ancestors.