Trading law school for a life in art
In this excerpt from his 2018 book Sonny Assu: A Selective History, Campbell River artist Sonny Assu recalls childhood summers on his grandfather’s seine boat and how they helped shape his path toward becoming an artist.
When I was a kid, I would lay on the bow of the W.#7, my grandfather’s seine boat, as we travelled up and down the B.C. coast. I had many “spots” on the boat, but the bow was one of my favourites, mainly on our trips back to Campbell River. As I reflect on this, I envision Leo and Kate from Titanic. No idea why, as I was a lone chubby kid with an affection for sweatpants. Yet, in that place and at that time, I did feel like the king of the world.
The bow was a place of solace. It was where I could take a break from monkeying around, reading comics, or drawing in the galley. Rough life, I know. Here, I’d watch the boat part the water around it, like two ribbons of cedar being planed off a board. I would listen to the cacophony of the sea battling the rhythmic hum of the diesel engine and the frantic flapping of the wind-tattered flags.
As I lay in the warm sun, the cool breeze of our homebound travel brought the smell of the sea to me. I’d be hit with the reddy smell of rust from the anchor and its chain — a smell you can place a colour to, like how grape juice tastes purple. It smelled like red. The aroma of the mud, brought up from last night’s slumber, was folded in. It was earthy and pungent. The mud was infused with kelp, rocks and bits of shellfish, all drying in the sun and wind. I remember kicking the massive chain next to me and watching the dried mud crumble into the sea. No expected plop. Just mud, absorbed into the wake and placed back from where it came.
My grandfather is steering from “up-top” with Ivan, one of his skiff-men. Everyone calls him Tarzan, and even to this day, I’m unsure why. Tarz squints towards the distance, keeping a watchful eye for jumping salmon as we travel homeward.
My grandfather catches my eye and nods his head up with a smile. His face is sun-worn, brown and stubbly, with the character of a man who has worked hard all his life. His “fisherman’s tan” covers his face, neck, and hands only. Even on the hottest days, he wears a long-sleeved shirt to hide an embarrassing tattoo on his forearm.
I smile and wave and turn back to see if his nod is not merely a show of affection but an indication for me to see what I’ve been waiting for. And then I see what I always come to this spot for: the porpoise. Porpoises are small whales that look like dolphins but with a stubbier snout. What is special about witnessing these creatures isn’t just the fact that they are here, but how they dance in and out of the water, up and down, mere metres from the bow. It amazes me how fast they can swim. Here I lie on the bow, thinking they have come just to see me and dance for me. Arms widespread, the breeze drying the salty spray on my face, I am in wonder of these creatures.
It is hard to say what drew me to this memory as I sat down to write the introduction to my work. Perhaps it was pure escapism — a response to an unconscious need to revisit a time when I wasn’t plagued with stressful tasks such as writing about my own career. A simpler, carefree time, when my only worries were having enough quarters in my pockets for an afternoon at the Family Fun Centre, running to the Bee Hive Cafe to grab a handful of comics or begging my grandfather to let me explore the pebble shore of a remote beach.
Or perhaps the memory was triggered by a conversation that happened the other day. I was gassing up my car, and there was Christine, Tarz’s daughter, working the till at the Clam Shell (what my granny called the Shell gas station on the Rez). We never really hung out at all as kids, but we knew each other. So we made small talk; she asked how things were and how I liked living in Campbell River. (We’d moved here last year from the Lower Mainland by way of Montreal.)
“I love it,” I said. “I thought it would be challenging for my work, but I’m feeling pretty focused here. There is something about waking and working where our ancestors are.”
“Cool,” she said approvingly. “Who would have thought: Sonny Assu, not a captain of a fishing boat?”
“Right?!” I said as we shared a laugh. She did have a point. I had been so close with my grandfather that I called him Dad. I’d been his shadow, and for a while everyone, including him, thought I would carry the family line and become a seine boat captain.
But as I grew older on that boat, I became less and less interested in actually working on it. It never was in me, I think, to be a fisherman. And that became pretty clear to my grandfather one day as I tried to get a salmon out of the webbing.
My grandfather had stopped the drum to allow the deck crew to do what they do. I can’t recall exactly how old I was, maybe 14 or 15. I was standing with him on the stern, and I was having zero luck getting the sockeye freed from the net. I was cussing up a storm, which is probably the only practical skill that I ever gleaned from working on a boat. I was getting progressively agitated until I had enough and started to Hulk out and whip that salmon around until its head popped off and the body slid right into the hold.
“That’s it,” my grandfather said to me. “You’re going to law school.”
He wasn’t disappointed; he just knew this wasn’t the life for me, and he figured I might as well do something important with myself.
Now, art has always been a big part of my life. I used to show my pops all my drawings of crazy superheroes, and he got a kick out of my imagination. But to him, doing something important with your life was tied to what Indigenous people of his generation thought would benefit all others.
“Why law school?” I asked as I kicked the salmon head off the stern and into the drink.
“We need people to fight the system from the inside,” he said to me. But I think we both knew I didn’t have what it took to be a lawyer.
A couple of years later, my grandfather passed away unexpectedly. A fisherman all his life, and he never learned how to swim. This is more common than you would think.
Sonny Assu will give a free artist talk and book launch at the Tidemark Theatre in Campbell River on Thursday, June 21, at 7 p.m.
Sonny Assu: A Selective History, by Sonny Assu, with Candice Hopkins, Marianne Nicolson, Richard Van Camp and Ellyn Walker, Heritage House, 2018.