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Great Song, Great Book

You can’t ask what you’re asking me to do

And I hope you understand when I refuse

I’m going North with my point of view

And I’m never gonna think the same as you

The above lyric is from one of my all time favorite songs, “An American Draft Dodger In Thunder Bay” by Sam Roberts, from his 2006 album Chemical City. This is one of those songs that I can’t listen to just once on my Ipod; I have to listen to it three or four times before I’m satisfied. Not only is it a phenomenal song musically, but like many great songs, it tells a story.

The “draft dodger” mentioned in the song’s title is an unnamed young man living in the American south, who is at risk of being drafted by the U.S. army to fight in the Vietnam War. The young man, who has “nothing against them Viet Cong”, refuses to travel across the world to kill his fellow human beings simply because the powers that be disagree with their beliefs. Against the wishes of his war-hawk father, the young man escapes to Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he gets a job teaching at a high school. Although he misses Mississippi, he embraces the community and is embraced by it, and begins to “put down roots in [the] frozen fields.”

When I had my second job interview at Dundurn Press, I told my interviewers that I had browsed through their Spring 2009 catalogue and was very interested in many of the titles. When asked for an example, I told them I was dying to read Erratic North: A Vietnam Draft Resister’s Life in the Canadian Bush by Mark Frutkin, because the title instantly reminded me of the Sam Roberts song I love so much. I got my wish, as they sent me home with a copy of the book, which I read in one sitting.

Frutkin’s memoir is a fascinating one. In 1971, the then twenty-three year old was issued an induction notice to report for active duty in Vietnam, to fight in a war he believed was ill considered and hypocritical. Against his parents wishes, and like an estimated 50 000-100 000 other would-be American soldiers, Frutkin voted with his feet and hightailed it to Canada, where he had spent childhood summers with his Toronto-born mother.

A hippie version of Henry David Thoreau, Frutkin escaped to the isolated wilds of the Quebec bush, where he faced the bitter cold and snow of cruel Canadian winters, torture by blackflies like “tiny flying draculas”, and intense loneliness. Frutkin spent his time in the bush learning how to farm, communing with nature, and searching his soul. It was there, in a remote cabin lacking electricity and running water, that Frutkin “learned to write by writing.”

With the story of his grandfather’s escape from Czar Alexander III’s pogroms in Russia to the promised land in America woven throughout the story of his own journey to freedom, Frutkin gives readers a beautifully written personal memoir about his rejection of mainstream American society and his desire to go “back to the land” to find where he belonged. As Frutkin writes in Erratic North, “When I eventually came to Canada, I truly felt I was coming home.”

Oh, Canada! Glorious and free.

© 2009 Defining Canada.