Estate of mind
Post #2, 16 March 2022: Anne Machin, David Kristmanson, Peter Westwell, Michiel Oudemans, Holly Cole, Les Hull, Don Mackenzie, William B. Davis, John 'Birdman' Westhaver
Anne Machin. Painter. (25 April 2017, Ottawa.) Flying Montreal-Paris yesterday I pondered ‘architecture and middle age’. How, as children in Fredericton, we’d be taken to visit “Machin and Kenny,” Anne and Kenneth Machin, at their house atop the ridge at Kingsclear (that evocative place-name). Though already in mid-life when my parents were just starting their family, the Machins remained their close friends for decades.
They’d arrived in Fredericton from Cape Town in the early 1960s under circumstances never clear to me. Conservative-minded Ken, an early environmentalist in the WWF mode, chaired the local SPCA for many years. Kindly and perceptive, Sheffield-born Ann Machin painted small convincing landscapes in oils, perhaps finding reassuring familiarity in the rolling Saint John River valley vista from her studio’s north-facing window. We visited the English Peak District once in their company. For years they cared for her mother, “Duke,” who died a centenarian.
As a child I associated their musty potting shed at Kingsclear with the desiccation of middle age, its fallow odour of soil and clay, indirect light, cobwebs on weathered boards. The shed formed a lowly part of their support system. With no children or surviving relatives there was just the impermanent academic community, gradually fading as Ken, a professor of mechanical engineering, passed deeper into retirement.
Yet this humble garden structure, along with their Doberman Fritzi’s barred hut, assured their estate’s embeddedness in its landscape. Their bungalow with a detached garage was perched on a large hillside lot commanding a view of the valley, church and hall directly below. I trace here a subtle balance between the ‘estate’ in its sense of privately-held land improved with the signature of its owners’ identity, and an ‘estate of mind’ that made their exilic spatial ethos portable and transposable.
Machin’s studio, its air of turps, her painting smocks, the tidily stacked canvases, her easel adjusted to the view on the fields sloping down to the river, with Keswick Ridge and Curry Mountain in the background: this ‘estate of mind’ gathered landscape and built-form into a life practice that deeply respected its setting, and yet could be transposed to a new place.
At tea time, Machin served us round thick imported biscuits. Oddly enough, those foreign cookies with bucolic scenes glazed in coloured icing, along with her renderings of South African and New Brunswick landscapes, memorialize for me a certain nobility in their achievement of a movable ‘estate of mind’ in rural New Brunswick, quite apart from the brute possession of lands and buildings.
David Kristmanson. Chemical Engineer. (14 Dec 2009, Paris.) At the outset of his sabbatical year in England Dad took me by train to collect our new VW campervan from the manufacturing plant outside Düsseldorf. Ushered to the centre of a large cobbled courtyard, he drove us majestically out through the opened gates to collect my mother, sister and brother waiting for us at a downtown hotel. A few weeks later, somewhere on the western extremity of Paris, we arrived in a campground on the bank of the Seine. Spatial memory suggests it was near Neuilly-sur-Seine fringing the Bois de Boulogne, I can’t be sure. It was August 1969. I was nine, Helen five and Dan two. We were instructed not to play with the Gypsy children, and their parents were mutually suspicious of us. We saw Roma often in our travels around Europe, more than are seen now. Disregarding instructions, we hung out happily with those kids near their caravans, watching long barges speed by with the current. I don’t remember night-time in that grimy campground, but condensation would bead on the underside of the raised roof-canopy under which I slept. If a drop fell on my face, I’d awaken to the night sounds.
Peter Westwell. (n.d. ca. 2005.) 1969-70, near Stanmore in North London. My school friend Peter’s father, an elite soldier rotating in and out on tours in Vietnam, sequestered his family in a walled residential compound in our borough. Once, he returned with a gift for Peter—an ingenious collapsible commando’s canoe. We paddled it on the pond inside the gated community. Taciturn, behind a thick beard, Peter’s father had the bearing not exactly of the classic soldier but rather of the specialist tasked with exacting assignments unimaginable outside the theatre of war. That whiff of danger prompted in me a faint self-awareness of our sheltered existence.
Wouter ‘Jack’ Oudemans. Civil Engineer. (November 2019, Ottawa.) In 1972 our Dutch neighbour Jack Oudemans led a family picnic to a New Brunswick ghost town he’d noticed on an aerial map, likely through his work as a bridge designer. The remote ‘Bagdad Road’ was muddy and rutted. Only after a wilderness hike did we emerge into the ghost town’s overgrown main avenue. Had we discovered ‘Bagdad’, in the spirit of that road’s oddly failed naming? Its roofless shop-fronts and the high street itself were cheerfully shot through with mature trees. Clapboard was falling away, and the windows were broken. Jack, unlike his brother, had survived Nazi occupation. His Old-World eye perhaps found solace in our meagre Maritime innocence. Could it be why he led us children to this village retreating into a state of nature?
... (25 January 2010, Ottawa.) In 1977, I returned to Europe with a group of musical friends. We shipped our instruments in a home-built plywood crate, reinforced with fibreglass tape, designed to fit into the used van we’d buy in Amsterdam. I was seventeen. Our adventures in Holland included staying for two weeks with a musically-lively Northern Irish couple in Hoofddorp, south of Amsterdam, and also visiting the Oudemans’ family estate Schovenhorst near Putten. We were quartered not within the Chateau itself but in a generous workers’ residence on the grounds. In return we volunteered in the estate’s verdant arboretum by day, playing our folk music for the elders at night.
The patriarch, Dr Oudemans, Jack’s father, by then in his late 80s, had perpetuated the scientific family’s legacy as a biologist, overseeing Holland’s largest privately-owned forest. (His own father, an eminent zoologist, had cooled his scientific reputation in 1890 with a speculative study of sea serpents.) Though he’d lost much of his sight Dr Oudemans sped his Citroën through Schovenhorst’s dense forest pathways with unswerving assurance. His lawyer daughter, returning from her house in Amsterdam, sought polite means to ease us on our way.
My father’s Uncle Joe was a fisherman, captain of a black seiner called The Spider. Known in Prince Rupert for (among other exploits) discovering the giant skeleton of a supposed sea serpent, there is a published photo of him standing beside its bleached twisted armature on a rocky beach.
I had the impression that Dr Oudemans was delighted by this surprise visit of young Canadians. He took me into his ‘cabinet’ in the great house, a long formal room lined with his magnificent glass collection. The family had once owned a glass works. Light steamed in from tall shuttered windows behind his desk at the end. Conversing all the while in near-perfect English, he reached up into a shelf crowded with exquisite objects and extracted what he assured me was his most prized possession: an argillite Haida totemic carving presented to him by my father when we visited Schovenhorst as a family in 1970 in our camper.
I see now that Dr Oudemans died in 1978, not long after our visit. I learned only recently of the strange sea-serpent resonance in our families’ histories. Among the Kristmansons, Uncle Joe is said, with pride, to have been a rare outsider accepted into the Haidas’ potlatch; perhaps both he and Dr Oudemans, each in their way, harboured shamanic qualities.
Holly Cole. Singer. (10 December 2019, Ottawa.) I suppose it’s typical for elder brothers to regard their younger sisters’ friends with a certain detachment. As a teenager, I’d not have pegged Helen’s school-chum Holly, sitting on our living room floor with her guitar in the 1970s, as destined for the biggest stages of central Canada and beyond. But she was, and she progressed from Fredericton to Ottawa to Toronto, from the Queen St. West bars to soft-seaters in the 1980s. I remember her awkward, but electric, debut in the NAC Theatre marking that transition. It became clear that, supported by her CBC parents and her musically-gifted younger brother, Alan, she would become an artistic force. When I passed by her dressing room for ‘down home’ chats before her NAC gigs, Holly was cheerful, positive and intelligent. With her astute manager, she understood, and stayed true to her mature and upscale market niche, her success a rarity in Canada’s music business as it struggled to adapt to the digital era.
Les Hull. Politician, Mayor, Teacher. (24 July 2019, Fredericton.) A burly man, Mr. Hull gathered our gym class around him at Albert Street School invariably introducing his pep talks with, “if you were half as good as my boys….”
Speaking of his family, he’d jest, “we’re from so far back in the woods we had to come out to hunt!”
After leaving teaching for politics, he served as Fredericton’s Mayor, and his term overlapped with mine as head of the New Brunswick Arts Board in the early 2000s. We attended various events together. Yet, in chatting recently with my father at the retirement home where they both live, he retained no memory of me.
Les was an amiable teacher, especially compared to his successor Mr. Nichols who cruelly taunted his students, especially kids with disabilities. Finally, the rabid Nichols was ousted for hurling a football at full force through the door of the boys’ noisy changing room, injuring my classmates with fragments of frosted glass.
A few days ago, seated in their dining hall, my father remarked to Les Hull that Louis J. Robichaud’s Premiership of New Brunswick in the 1960s remains under-recognized. Les said he’d worked under Robichaud as a young man. Listening to the practiced politician spiel about his career, Dad deduced that Les must once have been my physical education teacher. It was only as they were leaving the dining room—and this is classic Les Hull—he turned to my father meaningfully.
“I think I remember Mark,” he said. “Yes, he was tough, a very tough kid!”
Me, at fourteen? Skinny, shy, long-haired, artsy?
I remember Les giving a wide berth to the sex-ed curriculum he’d been required to teach us. Instead he’d discourse Don-Cherry-like about sports trivia. Tough? True, I’d learned to keep my head down and fend for myself among the ‘type A’ boys Les favoured. But never tough in the sense he meant.
Dad concludes his story, and my wife looks at me, smiling:
“They’ll say you left town after you beat up the hockey team.”
Then my sister-in-law returns to the room bearing a framed certificate. It attests to my vertiginously imposing nephew’s receipt of Fredericton High School’s ‘Les Hull Athletic Award.’
Look out, Mr. Hull, we’re on the move...
Don Mackenzie. Production Manager. (n.d. ca. 2008, Ottawa.) With an allowance so paltry that I’m carrying two paper routes to save for a Laser dinghy, I team up with Andrew Bartlett and Ernest Bauer in a quest for real money. We approach a Mactaquac farmer offering to pick apples. Paid by the bin, we're quickly daunted by the mountain of fruit required to fill even just one. Scaling wooden A-ladders we lower down apples until our limbs are sore and faces burnt. Initiated as the sole driver of the steam-punk tractor, I drag bins into position. Later, when Andrew insists on his turn in the perforated metal driver’s seat, the headstrong creature surges straight into a tree, thereby irrevocably severing our relations with New Brunswick agriculture.
Afterwards, he and I, though not Ernest, wash dishes at the University cafeteria, a minimum-wage experience so harrowing that one night of flung food remains and gravy-stained clothes is enough. With confidence borne of desperation, I yank open the stage door of the Fredericton Playhouse and present myself to Don Mackenzie, the Production Manager. A competent man of few words, he sizes me up and nods towards the crew wheeling in the road-boxes of a Quebec rock band.
William B. Davis. Theatre Director, Actor. (2009, Ottawa.) The apparent diffidence of a given moment can yield to ‘production’: things can be shone up brighter than we imagine. In 1976 I'm seated with my Les Paul copy and jet-phaser pedal beside Peter Atkinson, lightly holding his classical guitar, on the stage apron of the Playhouse. We glare nervously into the blinding front-of-house lights towards Bill Davis and his team, in the dark out at the director’s table. Gently, expertly, he coaches us through a session recording scene-change music for Theatre New Brunswick’s Taming of the Shrew. Although years later he will achieve global notoriety as the cigarette-smoking villain in The X-Files, today he calms the two jittery teenagers who’ve been recommended to him for this musical assignment. Then, like a wizard, applying analogue equalization, compression, reverb, and stereo separation, sound engineer Jim Gow mixes our delicate, dry-sounding takes. On opening night my heart stops during the blackout as the first of our electro-acoustic compositions with an Elizabethan sensibility thunders through the speakers while the stage turntable revolves into the next scene.
John Westhaver. Musician, Record Store Owner. (8 September 2019, Ottawa.) Having made his way from Fredericton to the capital, John sagely steered clear of government employment, instead forging a reputation as an early and loyal defender of vinyl, particularly a sub-genre of hardcore, free-form, experimental punk. Growing up in my neighbourhood he started his musical career as the drummer of 'Motorized Milk', a grade-six bubble-gum band formed with Eric Leblanc to play school dances. John and Eric lived in almost adjacent tidy suburban houses on Montgomery Street.
Known as ‘Birdman John’ after his Ottawa record store, I will visit that narrow vinyl-lined Bank St. lair once in a while to pick an album, chat about school days and music. His inventory, bewildering to the outsider, attests to the resilience of the underground music network he nurtures. Though far from easy-listening, one deduced much about that scene from his weekly broadcasts on CKCU, Carleton University’s student radio. Regarding John’s music with ‘Resin Scraper,’ the ensemble’s name speaks for itself. It is noteworthy that stately and sedate Fredericton should be the locus of such fierce musical chaos in the 70s and 80s, including Mark Carmody’s ‘Exploding Meet’, Jeff Beardall’s bands in Fredericton and Toronto, and John’s groups in Ottawa, all too often passing undocumented.
An evocative and vivid glimpse into another time and place and those you met along the way. Looking forward to reading more posts!