Canadians Read Online Free PDF Page B

of its strengths and uncertain of where exactly it might fit in. It had all the trappings of such young ambition: high hopes and deep doubts, delight and despair, but most of all a restlessness about what might become of it.
    Hutchison wrote about a then-young country, eleven million strong but spread so thinly in such an impossibly large space that the real story of the eleven million was an uncanny “loneliness”—the people huddled around the lights of little towns and a few cities, the country forever beyond.
    The people, he believed, didn’t yet know their own country, but it was slowly coming into focus. It was young and filled with great energy, just coming out of the muffling snows of the past and into a promising new season. The very name of the country was to him the shout of a youth, a name filled with sounds of geese returning and melting rivers roaring down mountains, destination uncertain.
    It was as if he could hardly wait to see what was coming. Then .
    In preparing for whatever this book would become, I naturally began my research with The Unknown Country . After all, Hutchison had beenthere first and had certainly stayed longest. I broke open the dark red covers of a second-hand volume, inhaled the must of yellowed pages, and was much heartened to read in Hutchison’s introduction that he’d begun with a plan but had instantly abandoned it. The original plan, he hoped, would not matter in the end.
    I, too, had a plan and I, too, soon abandoned those detailed architectural designs. It made sense when I mapped it out; it stopped making sense the moment my fingers stepped, uncertainly, onto the opening page. Hutchison’s warning on his opening pages might not have been as direct as Mark Twain’s in Huck Finn—“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted” —but he did have a motive, even if he claimed no master plan.
    His assignment had been to explain the great empty northern neighbour to the United States. It was released to a country that barely took notice. One year later, however, the book would be published north of the border and would become a remarkable bestseller.
    It was Canadians, it turned out, who wanted to know about Canada. Hutchison wrote that he wanted to open up southern eyes to what was happening on the northern half of the continent. In part because of its impressive war effort, he believed that Canada already stood with the significant countries of the world. And he argued that both countries needed to know each other better, for in coming years this North American relationship would prove an essential factor in world politics.
    He could not, however, offer Americans any clear-cut description of the northern personality. The Canadian just didn’t define as readily as the English or the French or the German, all so firm in people’s minds in this time of war; nor as readily as the American, whose personality was increasingly well formed and known to the world. The only truly distinct Canadian was found in Quebec, he said—this was 1942, remember—but the country’s overall identity was still far from clear.
    The best Hutchison could do was offer up a snapshot of Canada as he saw it at the time. He knew the country was evolving, had to evolve, and that soon enough that snapshot would have to fade. You might capture it for a moment, or even bring into brief focus a sizeableportion of it, but in the end it remained the unknown—perhaps even unknowable—country.
    Many years later, historian Pierre Berton, who considered Hutchison a mentor, would say he had it right. The Unknown Country ’s very title still held up—a wolf howling in the distance, heard but not seen, a personality left largely to the imagination.
    Hutchison decided to write his book as a travelogue. He and wife, Dorothy, visit the Maritimes and Quebec, where they are hopeless with the language. They stop off in