“… I have dreamed the grass
growing up around his Portland grave like rushes
through his barge’s mossy ribs, and I have
read the faded label on his smithied tomb of tin.
But he’s not lying where the Fraser doesn’t flow.
His bones feel the swimming magnet of this coast.
We come back to where our blood was racing full:
Deas is here because the cycle claims us all.”
Thus ends “The Tinsmith,” a poem included in Tim Bowling’s first collection, Low Water Slack, published in 1995. It imagines the life of John Sullivan Deas, a mixed-raced South Carolinian who, for a time in the mid-19th century, was the largest salmon canner on the Fraser River. When Bowling was a boy the Massey Tunnel, which runs under the river from Richmond to Delta, was known as the Deas Island Tunnel.
“Often what haunts you for a long time has the potential to become literature,” Bowling says. “And I think I’ve been haunted by that character since I was a kid.”
He resurrects Deas — this time rechristened William Sullivan Dare — in his novel The Tinsmith, a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the winner of which will be announced Wednesday.
Bowling describes the book as “a novel about the kind of violence that we do.” The Tinsmith begins on the eve of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day of the American Civil War, and ends on the shores of the Fraser River on the eve of a historic salmon harvest.
Our guide to this world is Anson Baird, a small-town doctor now working as a surgeon in the Union Army. In the aftermath of the battle, as he tirelessly operates on the wounded and dying — hacking off limbs is usually the first course of action — Baird is aided by a soldier named John who, it turns out, is a runaway slave suspected of murdering his former taskmaster in a particularly gruesome manner.
John is light-skinned and can pass as a white man, and Baird, who believes his purpose in life is “to preserve one good man’s life in a world indifferent and even hostile to virtue,” helps John evade capture, providing him with the identity of a recently deceased soldier. The story then jumps forward 20 years, to British Columbia, where the former slave is now a successful cannery owner whose competitors are beginning to suspect his past.
“Nobody questions the importance of the American Civil War as something that should be of interest to a novelist,” Bowling says, on the phone from his home in Edmonton. “[But] the development of the pioneer salmon canning industry on the Fraser River? Well, why’s that interesting? Who cares abut that? I wanted to yoke the two together and say, ‘Well, there’s some connection here.’ ”
Bowling, 48, has long felt the pull of the river; he dedicates the novel to his siblings and “the river that shaped us.” He grew up in the fishing community of Ladner, on the river’s south shore, “literally a stone’s throw from the government wharf,” where his parents, both in the fishing industry, had lived since the late 1930s. His 2007 non-fiction book, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture, includes a photo of a young Bowling standing on a fishing boat, an enormous salmon held up beside him.
“I had an intimate connection to it,” he says. “You can’t be taken out on a fish boat at the age of three or four and not have a sense of awe and mystery about the natural environment.”
He describes his childhood as “idyllic,” yet “it was often scratching a living for my family,” he says. “The transition from being a fisherman to being a writer is certainly consistent in that sense. You have to put your money aside in a good year in expectation of the down years.”
He himself worked the river until 1995, when he left fishing behind to write, though much of his work remains tied to the region. Part of the reason, he says, is that “for such a remarkably beautiful place with such ethnic diversity,” there really weren’t really that many books about the area “when I was a kid growing up. I was a big reader, and I set out to, I think in a way, try to map the place that wasn’t really mapped in a literary way.”
Bowling, who was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, admits to being pigeon-holed as a “West Coast” and “salmon guy.” Yet his work has left the currents of the Fraser River — his 2004 book In the Suicide’s Library explores the world of book collectors, for instance, and his next project revolves around Buster Keaton and the world of silent film — just as he’s branched into different forms, from poetry to non-fiction to novels.
“I tend to try things out in different forms over time, and I think with novels I’ve kind of gotten the hang of how to do them now,” he says. “When I was in my twenties I don’t think I would have been able to do [The Tinsmith] justice. My skills as a novelist have got to a point where I felt I could take it on.
“Every book that I write I try to write as well as I can,” he continues. “If I do it to the point where I like it, I think that it’ll find its readers. I’ve always just sort of maintained that hope, that faith.”