Grand Bend sits on Lake Huron, Ontario's west coast, on territory ceded by the Attawandaron in 1829. Its population sits at just over 3000. That swells significantly in summer as tourists drive down its main drag to postcard beaches or dip in as they make their way up and down the Bluewater Highway. It has a reputation stretching back 100 years as a party town, a place where regional teens book post-prom and people bring blankets and bikinis and drink dreams of endless summer. It draws families and freshwater surfers, cottagers and cameras. MTV's unscripted drama Grand Benders takes place there or, at least, in a version of the lakeside locale, hyperbolized by Hollywood editing.
Tomson Highway, playwright, novelist, composer, and musician, grew up in Canada's far north. His family spoke Cree and followed the caribou herds. He listened to western music on a transistor radio they often hung from a tree to better receive the signal.
He was one of eleven children, most of whom survived. But he also calls the land in which he grew up a Garden of Eden, the most beautiful country in the world, a place of endless lakes. He later went to school in The Pas, Manitoba and Western University in London, Ontario.
I first met my wife at the intermission of a production of Highway's play, The Rez Sisters, over a quarter-century ago. We first met Highway a decade later at a different production of the same play, where we were able to tell him that he, in a manner of speaking, introduced us. That encounter took place just before everyone came permanently equipped with cameras.
He came to Grand Bend as a part of the Huron Waves Festival. Graham Green, the celebrated actor from Six Nations– probably best-known as Kicking Bird in Dances With Wolves– did the introductions. Both men are now in their seventies. They bantered about how long they'd known each other. When they first met, said Highway, the Sleeping Giant* was still standing up. "It was so long ago... Remember how Genghis Khan used to bully me in kindergarten?"
Highway sat at the piano and talked about his life and work and how he's going blind, and then brought out the band, jazz saxophonist Marcus Ali and singer Patricia Cano, a Peruvian-Canadian singer and actress who has appeared in some of Highway's musical productions. They parlayed and performed a set of his songs with introductions dramatic, comedic, and tragic. The singer and the saxophonist musically mimicked an intimate encounter. Cano performed the often-comical Marie-Louise in excerpts from The (Post) Mistress, a Juno-winning trilingual musical set in northern Ontario.
They also sang a song for Helen Betty Osborne, the Cree teen and aspiring nurse savagely assaulted and murdered by four white men in 1971 in The Pas. Her death met with official indifference. Substantial numbers of people knew or suspected the identity of the killers, but refused to speak. Sixteen years later a dogged RCMP investigator broke the case, but by then compelling evidence proved elusive. One man took a deal to testify in return for immunity. Only one of the remaining three was ever convicted. Highway and Osborne attended the same high school, though he left around the time she started. These events influenced elements of The Rez Sisters.
Time warped and vanished and the evening came to an end.
And afterwards, we finally got a photo with the man who introduced us.
*A northern Ontario mesa which resembles a man in repose.