“Howard White was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the B.C. coast and never got over it.” Thank goodness. Local literature would be much poorer for it had White had another life.
That quote – only partly tongue-in-cheek – comes from the website of White’s and his wife Mary’s Pender Harbour company, Harbour Publishing, which has put out more than 500 books since 1974, and with some restraint, only a few of them by White himself. But the latest, Here on The Coast: Reflections from the Rainbelt, is by him, and it’s a delight.
Filled with scurrilous and saintly characters, true tales, and absorbing history, Here on The Coast provides 50 brief narratives that will have you alternately chuckling and shaking your head at the range of pluck and folly of those who settled here over the last century and a half. Among them were the Whites, from the Fraser Valley, who ventured here in 1950 when Howard was five.
Anyone who has read his columns in the quarterly Coast Life magazine since 2007 will recognize many of the themes that White touches on here in his poignantly readable, smart, and always mirthful style. That he has won a Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour is entirely appropriate. (The Leacock accompanies his many honours, including an Order of Canada, an Order of B.C., and two recognitions from Queen Elizabeth.)
Where else are we to learn how this peninsula, despite a metre-plus of annual rainfall, got the name “Sunshine” Coast? (Blame Harry Roberts, he of Roberts Creek, although he did not act alone.) While we’re at it, how did so many places between Powell River and Port Mellon get their names? (Thank a British naval surveyor who also bet on the horses, as White explains.) How about Milo Filgas – not a nickname – who ran a fuel dock in Irvines Landing? Then there’s Dr. Alan Swan, the great soul who ran the Pender Harbour medical clinic (the only health facility on the Coast for many years). A lot of local newborn boys in his day were to be named Alan, we learn, without a whiff of scandal.
Dozens of other memorable personalities populate this book, including White’s father, Frank, who it seems lived fully every day of his 101 years, generating stories himself like sparks from a grinder’s wheel. There’s the ferry incident, for one. Everyone who’s lived here has a ferry tale. Rest assured there is no ferry story like the White family’s ferry story, which will drop your jaw.
With his name on a dozen books, three of them volumes of poetry, Coast Reporter asked White how many hours a day he has to put in at the keyboard to do all that. Often none, he said.
“I would probably have a lot more books to my name if I did do that, and that was certainly my intention,” said White. “Long ago, when I came up with a bright idea of getting into publishing I thought, ‘OK, what I really want to be is a writer, so this is going to allow me to cheat and earn a living, doing what I like and, and give me lots of time to write on the side.’ But in fact, publishing is such an all-absorbing activity that by the end of the day, I’m so tired of words, I just want to watch hockey. So, I haven’t made it as steady a habit as I would have liked to.”
Here on The Coast: Reflections from the Rainbelt is officially published on March 27, but it is in most local bookstores now.
