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actually fall all the way. Meech Lake had been intended to bring Quebec into the 1982 Constitution Act that the province had angrily refused to sign when Premier René Lévesque felt the final deal had been struck behind his back without his knowing.
    But there was much more to the national angst than the familiar fretting over Quebec and Confederation, no matter how intense it might be at the moment. The economy was sinking. The deficit was drowning the federal government. And even Hutchison’s little house in the country was threatening to wash away after a solid week of hard rain.
    Jamie Lamb and I had come by rented car and ferry from Vancouver, where Lamb was doing a general column for the Sun, and we were joined by Vaughn Palmer, the fine legislative columnist for the same paper. Despite an age difference of half a century, Palmer was Hutchison’s closest friend and very much treated as a son by the older man.
    We drove up between the tall Lombardy poplars that Hutchison had planted as seedlings sixty-five years earlier. The trees had grown so high they now seemed out of all proportion to the little wooden bungalow perched on a small rise of land. We knocked on the door— the knocker a brass and smiling William Shakespeare—and were greeted by a small, wizened old man with large, black horn-rimmed glasses and a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century British wardrobe that made him seem more a character out of P.G. Wodehouse than of the laid-back Canadian West Coast.
    He had a cane in his hand and its presence clearly embarrassed him, but the endless damp of this disappointing spring had turned his sciatica leg pain “excruciating.” Up to now the old man’s health had always been excellent, but during his annual visit to Ottawa over the past winter—a visit that invariably included a tête-à-tête with whatever prime minister happened to be in office, from Mackenzie King to Brian Mulroney—he’d ended up in an ambulance rushing him to Ottawa General, where doctors had diagnosed a small but cautionary heart attack.
    He needed the cane to get about his garden, which he insisted on showing off even though the tulips were bent over as if they’d just run a marathon. “It’s not what it used to be,” he said, waving the cane over the expansive lot while his spit-and-polished black shoes sank in the long wet grass. “But then, what is any more?”
    The very question I’d come to ask.
    Bruce Hutchison, after all, had published The Unknown Country in the 1940s. A generation later, in the 1980s, seized in an octogenarian fit of energy, he’d penned a follow-up book whose essence could be gleaned from the title: The Unfinished Country .
    â€œThere won’t be a third!” he said in his creaky old man voice.
    BRUCE HUTCHISON was only forty-one in 1942 when he wrote whatwas, for many years, the best-known book in the land. Today, The Unknown Country is out of print—its red cover with the gold-embossed maple leaf on the spine sometimes showing up in second-hand bookstores—and has been largely forgotten. The book is undeniably out of date, both socially and historically, yet it remains a mandatory read for anyone trying to gain any grasp at all of this slippery thing called Canada.
    It wasn’t even a book he’d intended on writing. He said that it came out of a liquid lunch—Hutchison was a very light drinker—with a New York publisher who kept pushing drinks and insisting that Americans needed to know about their northern neighbour—and that Hutchison was the man to do it. Six weeks later he delivered the manuscript.
    Right from the well-known opening sentence—“No one knows my country, neither the stranger nor its sons”—there is a sense of the nation’s new spirit and of the author’s great optimism for what was to come. He saw Canada more as an energetic youth than a mature adult, a youth unaware