Winter, Language and Connecting the Spaces

Canadian culture is a collective of regional cultures. Yes, there are underlying themes and values, many of which we've explored in these postings. But the experiences described, way there are expressed, the interpretation drawn from them are very different from the Atlantic provinces to Québec and Ontario, the prairies, British Columbia and the North.

One of our common themes is Winter, and this expresses starkly in our songs. The unofficial national anthem of Québec is Gilles Vigneault's Mon pays (pay-EE), whose chorus runs:

Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver
Mon jardin, ce n’est pas un jardin, c’est la plaine
Mon chemin, ce n’est pas un chemin, c’est la neige
Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver …

(My country is not a country, it’s winter
My garden is not a garden, it’s the plain
My path is not a path, it’s the snow
My country is not a country, it’s winter…)

A less literal, more singable translation goes:

Wintertime is my country, the one that I know
Winter fields are my garden, wherever I go
And the path that I follow is the fresh-fallen snow
Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.

Vigneault is a Québec sovereigntist: part of a generation of chansonniers dreaming of Québec independence. To the perceptive, there is a subtext to these words to outsiders, that runs:

"My country is not your country."

Nevertheless, the words themselves fit Canada as a whole as much as they portray Québec. And beside Vigneault's lyrics, we can set lines from other regions:

"And the winds sure can blow cold away out there..." (from Four Strong Winds by Ian Tyson about Alberta)

"Saskatchewan the land of snow, where winds are always on the blow..." (opening line to Saskatchewan, sung to the tune of the hymn "O Beulah Land...")

Oh, it's forty below in the winter
And it's twenty below in the fall
And it rises to Zero in springtime
And we don't get no summer at all.

(from Forty Below, a parody on "Red River Valley" on Manitoba)

"Found him thirty-eight miles up the Canol Road
In the Salmon Range at forty-eight below..."

(from Canol Road by Stan Rogers, on the Yukon)

Even British Columbia in the north and interior regions has its winter blasts and deepfreezes in common with the Yukon, which it adjoins.

But the song that really articulates this more than any other, more than regional ballads, more than simple survival-in-the-face-of-all-odds songs is Stan Rogers Northwest Passage:

Ah for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea
Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

Rogers takes this theme far beyond a collective to response to the elements to a raison d’être. He moves from the early seagoing explores to the present in his second verse:

Three centuries thereafter I take passage over land
In the footsteps of brave Kelsey where his “sea of flowers” began
Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again:
This tardiest explorer driving hard across the plain…

After moving back and forth between his present trek by car and those who came before—and left their names on the map—he pulls it all together:

How then am I so different from the first men through this way?
Like them I led a settled life. I threw it all away
To seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men
To find there but the road back home again …

Rogers has summed up Canada’s reason for being. His is a lyrical version of the theme in a book by John Murray Gibbon who said “The Canadian Pacific Railway is the Northwest Passage in today’s [1936] world…” Gordon Lightfoot’s contribution in Canadian Railroad Trilogy (yesterday’s posting) is an important part, but only a part.

The Railway is a material link, symbolic of Canada’s role in the world as a land bridge between Atlantic and Pacific, and between Europe and Asia. As Gibbon wrote in another memorable line “Canadian Pacific Spans the World” (and “Pacific” can be read as a quality as well as a railway).

To be a country not only rooted in the past but in quest of a future, to seek a passage and to build and become that passage in awakening world: that’s what Canada is about.

Rogers’ North West Passage was nominated as a Second National Anthem by listeners of “Morningside” on the English language CBC Radio network. And it translates almost literally and effortlessly into Canada’s other official language.

At the time of he died at 33, Rogers was planning to compose in French, having prepared by producing an album "La Ronde des voyageurs" for the Québec group Éritage. In partial continuation of that project, Stan’s Anthem appears here alongside that of Gilles Vigneault:

Ah pour juste une fois je parcourrais le passage
Chemin qu’a cherché Franklin à la Beaufort solitaire
Ligne rouge, étroit, à travers le front sauvage
Pour frayer un passage à la mer.

Du détroit de Davis ça devait aboutir
La voie maritime pour laquelle plusieurs allait mourrir
Pour l’or et pour la gloire ils allait s’épuiser
Tout près d’un tas de pierres oubliés.

(Ah pour juste une fois …)

Trois siècles plus tard je fais mon passage par terre
Du champ fleuri de Kelsey que lui simulait la mer
En avant chaque ville se dresse, en arrière elle s’engloutit
Pour moi, dernière explorateur qui franchit la prairie …

Et au volant durant la nuit, comme le mileage monte
Je pense à Mackenzie, David Thompson, tout ce qui ont
Su percer les remparts alpins, m’ouvrant ce chemin je suis
La course au long du Fraser qui rugit …

Et moi, suis-je tellement différent de ces hommes du passé?
Moi aussi, foyer et vie j’ai toute ranoncé
Pour chercher un passage à l’appel de maintes voix
Pour trouver que le chemin qui ramène chez moi …

(Ah pour juste une fois …)