My first encounter with Canada was seventy five years ago. I was eight, in the fourth grade in Catholic school in Buffalo, New York. Saint Aloysius School, what a name for a saint! I was a star student and they fed my pride. It worked for a few years.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Canada. My first realization. It’s like waking up and realizing you’re part Canadian.

My brother and I were living with my mother in her brother’s home, with their older sister Lavancia. Lavancia. What a name! Those Catholics must have gone out of their way to find names that were hardly used. We called her Aunt Dot.

After school was over for the year, my mother and her sister planned a trip for us, the Great New England Tour that would take us up as far as Canada and cross over the border into another country so my brother and I could grow up being international.

I was docile in those days, a good little boy, followed directions, took everything in stride, accepted that adults always know best. And they had grown up in Buffalo, my mother and Aunt Dot, so they’d been around, they knew the territory.

I was too young to realize that I should have taken notes. When you’re young, you just are wherever you are, and don’t think about trying to remember. So my recollections come back in fragments. I remember being in the back seat of the car for miles and hours and days. I remember, vaguely, in scattered flashes, some things we saw as we drove by. I remember an impression of Franconia Notch rising up high on both sides, and the Old Man of the Mountain which the guidebooks emphasized and which I saw in person with my own eyes, but I couldn’t draw it now, just the satisfaction of the little boy saying, “Yes, I saw it.”

Of course, because we started in Buffalo, we had to see Niagara Falls. That was a drenching experience, and my young ears rang with the roar. We crowded onto the excursion boat, The Maid of the Mist. They put raincoats on us, with hoods to cover our heads, because we’d be going right into the constant mist kicked up by the roaring falling water. There was a cluster of nuns on the boat with us, out for a holiday released from the convent. They were in their uniforms they called habits, with big headdresses that wouldn’t fit under the raincoat hoods. They did the best they could to cover their heads, and laughed like little girls not minding they’d get wet because it was only water.

The boat was steady and relentless as it chugged its way into the outer edges of the falling water just far enough away to be safe, but close enough to be part of the experience. It was all larger than life, and when we returned to the dock, we were changed. And, of course, wet.

There are very few times in life when you can be transformed and survive. This was one of them. And I was just a little boy, hanging onto the rail, the heavy mist in my face, so of course I remember.

And we looked across the river to the Canada side. It looked clean and nice and orderly and sane. There were little houses we could see over there, and they looked like a different country, orderly, clean, safe. We knew we’d be crossing over the border, wherever that was, and we’d be in another country we could see from this side. We were just on the verge of being international.

We crossed over.

We drove around it seemed to me a lot. We drove some around Montreal and it was like old Europe. I particularly liked the cliffs. The buildings were big and solid and ornate and I felt they had been carried over across the ocean and set up here on this side to keep it France. Ottawa was the capitol and it looked it.

I particularly liked the cliffs leading up to the Plains of Abraham where the two Generals, Montcalm and Wolfe, fought it out, France against England, and the French were caught by surprise because they thought nobody could climb those cliffs but the clever wily English did it at night and in the morning they were already on the field and the French didn’t have a chance and the English won and the French surrendered and the war was over and the English stopped America from being French, and then not too much later we had to fight again to stop America from being English. I had read about it in school, and was excited just by reading about it, so seeing it in person made it personal to the young boy with the satisfaction of already knowing the outcome.

Canada was another country. And there it was right there, and I was in it, and somehow knew all kinds of things without having to think about it.

And then we moved back to California, Southern California, and Canada was farther away, but still there, just not in the forefront.

Every now and then Canada would come up to remind us. There was Jon Vickers, one of the truly great tenors, Canadian. His Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio I saw on television where he makes the great aria come out of the screen as the camera gets close.

And Maureen Forrester, that superb Canadian contralto as good as anyone of the best who sang the repertoire I particularly loved. And Louis Quilico, that Canadian baritone who was not only very good, but sang the things I wanted to sing and so lodged himself in my heart.

And, it turns out, so many more, some I didn’t even realize were Canadian, like Teresa Stratas, Canadian Greek, who sang so wonderfully and acted living into the characters so you didn’t need or want any other singer.

And Canada gave us comedians, stand up, televised, and they emphasized again that Canada is a country intellectually alive, up to the minute in the modern world, aware of but free from the dross and trash we see so much of everywhere.

And of course during those days of the Vietnam War, Canada was a refuge, and we thought of moving there if the draft caught me, but I just barely escaped, one step ahead, as exemptions came in order just in time, student, then married, then father, so I was safe.

And friends we knew who escaped to Canada. One dear friend, who even rented a room in our house, and warned us that they might be coming after him, don’t tell them where, gave us the impression that it was Canada, but when they came to our door, we said, “We don’t know where he is, haven’t seen him in awhile, we think his family is somewhere down near San Diego, you might ask them.” And they left, knowing that we didn’t know. But it wasn’t Canada. Unknown to us, he had gone to England. But that’s another story.

And then all those trips to Banff. I have a series of Banff poems, Shirley going to study ballet, and then next summer I went with her in the opera division, and we were Canadian for three months and thought seriously about staying.

And then the trip on our own going back because we just couldn’t stay away. You go once, bless you. You go twice, bless you again. We had some time-off in the summer, and I, always worried about money, still scraped enough together to take us on a limited budget if we were careful, and we could camp to avoid hotel costs, the camping fees were low enough. We joined KOA and they laid out places where we could stop and stay.

So when we went up the West Coast through Oregon and Washington and came to Canada, and a few miles in, Vancouver, we took a campsite outside town. It was a little muddy boggy, but we had a tarp to put under the tent, and the air mattress raised us up enough above the cold and damp. We set up the tent and drove into the city.

We had some booklet tour guides from the Auto Club which told us where to go. I clutched my meager wallet which limited our options, but we were in Canada, and in a beautiful west coast city that we knew we could live in happily because the climate was close to what we were used to, and there were universities, quality culture everywhere, good food we could afford if we weren’t extravagant. And people who could converse, and knew at least as much about the world as we did. And everywhere the calm gentility of people who already knew things and made the right choice. It wasn’t just stereotype. Canadians are calm and caring and educated and democratic and so much like us, Shirley and me, that we thought again and again of staying because we already felt we belonged.

Vancouver was a city the way cities should be. It had everything. And it was clean and vibrant. It was like ducks to water, and we joined in the swim.

The city had areas. Chinatown. And Gastown. You could go and just be there and not have to spend money, which was a good thing, because we didn’t have more than just barely enough.

Of course we went to the Great Museums. The influence of the University seemed to infuse the Museum of Anthropology. We felt the power of Haida artist Bill Reid in his cedar sculpture The Raven and the First Men. We had seen Haida art before, and indigenous art of the Pacific Northwest, back home at the Southwest Museum which had a surprisingly comprehensive collection. But here was the real thing in full force and it was like the conclusion of a journey. We were overjoyed. And then the museum back door, in the back yard, there were the totem poles, a whole bunch, standing up, tall, section by section by section stacked up, birds and animals and men, looking out over the gardens to the sea, the eye following the gaze.

It was as if everywhere we went in Canada, there was significance in the more to see.

Of course we drove through Stanley Park, because we had our car and could get around, and we drove through the lawns on both sides and thought of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco where we drove through the same curated grass within sight of the same ocean. We could see how people loved Stanley Park, spread over the lawns, and we stopped at a little tea house midway, parked, and had tea. Then we continued to the suspension bridge, admired the lions, and crossed over to the other side and took the Skyride up Grouse Mountain. From the top we could see everything. It was like the view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower, everything spreading out to the horizon. We looked down past our feet at the houses on this side, knew they cost less, and if we ever moved and settled here, this is probably where we could afford to live. And the city itself was just minutes across and away, and the whole rest of the world was within reach.

We had gas in the car, and drove to the ferry. We crossed to Victoria Island, landed in Nanaimo, drove through their outside art and down the coast to Victoria. A surprisingly beautiful and complete city, extensive enough to satisfy, and we toyed with the notion of living here as one of the acceptable choices. After all, it was the headquarters of ABE Books, and I was one of their booksellers for years. Again, it was like coming home. They had said to me, “Come on up. You can be Canadian. We have room.”

We drove a little more up and over on the mainland, I don’t remember details, but I think we went through Banff to say hello to the places of happy summer memories. We may have gone on to Calgary and Edmonton where we had toured with the Canadian Opera. I seem to remember the Calgary Stampede, but that may have been years before when we were studying at Banff.

Driving back toward Vancouver and then down to home, we drove through Kelowna and the Okanagan Valley, the Canadian agricultural powerhouse like California’s Central Valley producing local and food for the world. We stopped to verify, bought peaches, ripe off the vine, the juice dripping off our chins. I don’t know where you can get them these days, in the stores they’re never ripe. I guess now we have to drive out to the farms and a farm stand by the road, organic, fresh picked, too ripe to ship to markets. In Kelowna the farms were as real as the farmers, the old values still in force. I think we stocked up on peaches, hoping we could get them across the border for the trip down through Washington and Oregon back to California and home. I think it more likely that we ate them all before we got to the border. They were like the peaches in Greece, fresh and sweet and ripe and juicy.

I was counting pennies, estimating the gas it would take to get home, joking from the map, “It looks like it’s all downhill, we can coast…”

And so we got back home just before the summer ended. We knew we couldn’t afford to go to Canada very often. If we lived near the border, we could go there all the time. We could move up to Seattle. That was almost walking distance to Canada. But Seattle was expensive. And we already had a nice house in Altadena.

We thought of ways of scheming money for more trips. But in the meantime, we clutched our memories, the joy of intelligent sanity in a neighbor country just up there, hoping the border was semi-permeable so the good influences could trickle through to us.

And we were already Canadian enough to know, wherever we were, we belonged to the world, and Canada is a very big part of it.