Young writer becomes “codger” to write book

Patrick White wryly admits he became a “part-time codger” in order to tell the story of rough-and-tumble Cambridge Bay Mountie Bill White.

His adaptability has paid off: during the week before Christmas, Mountie in Mukluks: The Arctic Adventures of Bill White was outselling books by B.C media oldtimers Rafe Mair and Arthur Black.

When I interviewed him a week ago, White, 23, who is not related to his subject, was in the midst of packing up his Toronto apartment -- both to come home to Pender Harbour for Christmas and in preparation for a move to a new place. His bachelor’s degree in history behind him, White has just completed a stint with stylish guy-magazine Toro; in January, he'll begin a six-month editorial internship at Walrus. After that, he hopes to move to New York to attend the Columbia School of Journalism.

White says he was influenced by oral histories such as Ten Lost Years, and still has five of the late Barry Broadfoot’s books on his shelves. He admits not many of his peers have read both Pierre Berton and Broadfoot. “Our collective memory is really falling by the wayside,” he says, sounding worried.

Maybe that’s why he had such an affinity for Bill White, who volunteered for Arctic service in the RCMP in 1930 after an early start as a trapper in the Lac La Ronge area of northern Saskatchewan. After four action-packed years, White moved to Vancouver to work in the wartime shipyards. He died in 2001 at the age of 96.

As he worked on the book, Patrick White was surprised at how easily Bill slipped under his skin. “I’d be greeting my friends and hear myself saying something like, ‘Jesus Christ, it's goddam good to see you, ol' buddy!’ I’d just lapse into Bill White’s voice.

“My girlfriend would smack me on the arm, and say, ‘You’re doing it again.’ I guess I became a part-time codger for a while there.”

As the younger son of Howard White, founder of Harbour Publishing, Patrick grew up in a household frequented by countless old loggers and writers and poets.

“There were always these old barnacles coming through the door,” he says. “Today, people my own age find it strange how well I get along with seniors. But I find each old person has an incredibly interesting story.’’ He describes Bill White as “very much a man’s man. He ordered around his wife and never had much time to talk to women or children. When he came over, his subjects were politics and hockey, and he always wanted to see dad.

“What I remember most about him was his wrinkly chin, I remember watching the furrows in his chin and wondering how he got those.”

Patrick says he didn’t see Bill during the last two years of his life, when he was in a nursing home. “My dad and my grandfather visited him . . . . He would embark on his Arctic stories, and they’d be as fresh and crisp as they were the first time. It was incredible. His memory served him right up to the end.”

White’s raw material came from the old Mountie’s taped commentary, recorded between 1971 and 1992 due to Howard White’s encouragement. Patrick’s working relationship with Bill White began in the summer of 2000 when he was doing odd jobs for his father. “I was cleaning out the office closet, and I found this dusty brown briefcase loaded full of tapes.”

They were Bill White’s tales of his RCMP years. “I knew he’d been a union leader because my dad had written a book (A Hard Man to Beat) about those years, but I didn’t know much about his Arctic adventures. So I began transcribing the tapes that summer.”

Three years later, when Patrick White was looking around for a topic for his Arctic history class, he remembered that the transcripts from four of Bill White’s tapes were on his laptop; they became the basis for his paper. He recalls that his professor said Bill’s story was a “great read and would make a good short story, but as a history paper, it wasn’t up to much.

“I took that as a compliment as I had been trying to get away from academic writing,” he adds. “I pitched the story to Dad, and he thought it was great.

I moved into my old room with my old hockey posters on the wall and treated [the book] as a full-time job,” White recalls.

His biggest challenge was finding the context for White’s tales. Sometimes dates and place names were missing, as were subjects’ names. Bill White’s family and staff at the Vancouver Maritime Museum provided invaluable help in sorting out events.

“The museum had a lot of his archival material,” Patrick White says, “and I talked to people around Pender Harbour who filled in some of the details. Once I got the chronology worked out, I was able to tell the story from there.”

As well as capturing Bill White’s unique, iconoclastic voice, Mountie in Mukluks shows how Inuit life has changed. In 1974, Bill White paid a return visit to Cambridge Bay (1,850 km northeast of Edmonton), 43 years after he’d left, and found it a sad state of affairs that he had to tell Inuit kids “about their own doggone country . . . how we used to hunt for seal, how we made snowhouses.”

On a windy October day in 200l, atop Mount Pelly, the highest point around Cambridge Bay, Bill White’s ashes were sprinkled over “the land he could never completely leave.”

Somehow, I doubt Bill’s voice will ever leave Patrick White’s head.