A year of surprises and shakeups
I think the greatest gift of all is to be surprised, to be shaken out of a point of view, or maybe just shaken up, period.
What follows are some of my aha! moments of 2013.
■ Amanda Lindhout and A House in the Sky.
I kept only a distant eye on the story of this young woman’s kidnapping in Somalia in 2008.
In my defence, as Lindhout herself notes, such stories — there are many — usually disappear quickly from the headlines.
In my prosecution, I imagined I already knew what I thought of her — she was young and feckless, a wannabe journalist who had wandered smack into trouble.
Then I read an excerpt of A House in the Sky, the book she wrote with Sara Corbett, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. It was sufficiently gripping I bought the book, whereupon I learned just how bloody wrong and smug I’d been.
Lindhout has in spades the most important qualities of a journalist: She’s curious, a smart observer of the world around her, bright and brave. She wasn’t widely published at the time she was captured (though not for lack of trying), but in the ways that matter most, I think, she was genuinely a reporter in her bones. She spent 460 days in captivity. Though she is self-deprecating, and generous to the former boyfriend-cum-photographer she invited to join her in Somalia and who was her fellow captive, by the end of the book I sure knew with whom I’d prefer to be jailed — and it was Lindhout.
By the way, she can write too (or Corbett can, or more likely, both of them). There isn’t a superfluous word in the book.
I gobbled it as I do thrillers. Since then I’ve bought probably a dozen copies as Christmas books, at least a couple for young working reporters of my acquaintance.
Upon her release and recovery, Lindhout set up a non-profit foundation called Global Enrichment, which is terrific of her. But I for one would like to see her writing somewhere regularly.
Continuing the bookish theme, one friend (Al Strachan), one colleague (Dave Bidini) and one object of my affections (Bobby Orr) have all written excellent books this year. Strachan’s is called 99. It is about Wayne Gretzky, and may be the best book he has done; the foreword alone, by Roy MacGregor, is worth the dough. Orr’s is on the bestseller list, as it should be. Bidini’s is about Dave Keon, and his search took him to my hometown, and Keon’s, Rouyn-Noranda, Que. Curiously, Bidini was there just a couple of weeks before my brother, nephew and I drove up for a minireunion.
■ Rouyn-Noranda itself.
I hadn’t been back for at least a couple of decades, my much older brother Les for even longer, though Andy, his brilliant reporter son and my nephew, had been in the area a few times for work.
I expected the place to look smaller, as it had when I’d last been there — shrunken, the way a hometown often does, and a bit sad.
But Rouyn-Noranda is thriving, almost doubled in size since we lived there, smart and sophisticated. We had our first dinner there on a warm early summer’s night on Rue Principal, which was jammed with outdoor cafés and restaurants; we could have been in Montreal.
Our guide, and Bidini’s weeks earlier, was the wonderful Yvon Martin, who sneaked us into the Dave Keon rink, which our late father managed way back, and where my bro and his pals, who toiled there, once cleaned the super-high wooden beams over the ice surface for the princely sum of 85 cents an hour.
■ As Toronto and southwestern Ontario have been reminded by a significant ice storm which left hundreds of thousands without power, in the eternal contest between man and nature, it ain’t no contest: Nature always wins if she puts her mind to it.
I was personally reminded of this hard truth about a month earlier, when I attended a lawyers’ conference on the Caribbean island of Anguilla as a guest speaker.
It was incredibly indulgent. The conference was held at a luxury resort, where I had an enormous twolevel room with my own plunge pool. Naturally, I felt guilty about this, and mostly hunkered down in a small corner of the room, fretting.
The speech went well, or well enough anyway that no one threw things at me and, much relieved, I headed down to the beach. The ocean was a bit rough at first, so I baked in the sun and had something to eat, and checked again an hour later.
Now it was calm, and I saw a few people going in, so I waded in up to about my neck. But it changed in a flash, as the ocean can I guess, and when I turned around, I saw a wall of water coming at me, and attempted to ride it in; I’m an ex-lifeguard and a strong swimmer.
It didn’t matter a bit: The wave picked me up, tossed me about like a piece of flotsam, and drove me headfirst into a sandbar; I remember thinking I’d probably broken my neck. The next one picked me up, did the tossing routine again, and this time threw me down hard on my left shoulder.
I ended up so winded I could only mouth “Help me,” like a dead thing about 20 yards from safety.
A young British woman who had seen it happen and stuck around to make sure I was OK, came rushing to my rescue; she and another young woman grabbed me by the wrists and, with the riptide almost pulling us all back in, dragged me to safety.
I had a mild separated shoulder and a pretty significant case of whiplash; two lawyers from the group were also hurt about the same time on the same beach.
Don’t turn your back on Mr. Ocean. Don’t underestimate Ms. Nature. And pray if and when she catches you by surprise, you have a conquering heroine or two in the wings, as I did. Merry Christmas.