July 20th
Take a moment and think of a teacher who made a difference in your life. How they made you feel better than you were, smarter, and more curious about life, regardless of their subject, or in addition to their subject. If you’d like an assignment, tell someone about your teacher, and ask them about theirs. You’ll smile and have a happier day.
I’ve had two. One was an Ojibway Indian named George, and the other was my painting teacher, Robert Neuman. George first. He was hired by the canoe camp, Wabun, to be the guide for a Section A trip, their senior trip. We were 15 to 17 years old, but as experienced as any sixteen year old. The head counselor, Peter, might have been in his early 20s. George was older and had a family in North Bay, Ontario, a young family he would not see for two months. He was to guide this group of ten privileged white children on a canoe trip. George and Peter did not get along. That was obvious from the start. Our trip wasn’t down a river, but around in a circle starting in the town of Nakina, Ontario and returning there. Nakina had a railroad running through it. That’s how we arrived with our equipment, food, and canoes, and how we went home, except for George who’d left us by the end of the summer.
George was the lead canoe. Terry was his bowman. George never wanted to get his feet wet. He’d paddle miles around a portage not to get his feet wet. In his honor, I am the same. He was quiet. He rolled his own cigarettes. As we passed through a section of the trip, George ripped that piece off the map until eventually he had only a piece of map the size of a Post-it note. What he disagreed with Peter about was how Peter pushed us, wanted to travel fast, and keep us busy. George wanted us to enjoy the summer and look around. Peter was the head counselor so we spent the summer doing things his way. Peter was the kind of man who would carry two packs across a portage, one on top of the other, just because he liked to.
What I liked about George was he’d take the time to show you woodcraft, if you asked. He’d never force anything on you. He taught me how to split wood with an ax and not cut your foot. How to bake bannock. How to find the blaze for the next portage. How to tell what animals were in the neighborhood. What the birdcalls were. How to take care of your tumpline. How to carry a canoe. I was the baker and often started the fire, rain or shine. One wet day, I was struggling. George walked by. Without saying anything, he emptied his pocket full of dry cedar shavings next to me.
When we reached our last camp, George announced his job was done. He was leaving. Peter disagreed, and said it was not done until we were on the train back to Temagami, in two days. George went into Nakina and got drunk. He came back that night while we were sitting around a large fire. He let out what he had held in all summer. He and Peter faced off by the fire. They had a good old yelling match, each of them sticking up for their point of view about how the summer had gone. I don’t remember who struck the first blow, but all of a sudden they were fighting, rolling on the ground punching each other. They rolled through the fire. We were scared. Finally, George stood up and Peter stayed on the ground. George went back into town.
In the morning, there was no George. Peter sent Terry and I to see if we could find him. We were the two who liked George the most. We found him in the town cafe sitting at a table, breakfast done, and drinking from a nearly full bottle of Jack Daniels for desert, if you have desert after breakfast. He would not come back with us, but we stayed with him. We’d ask for swigs. When he loaned us the bottle, we took as much in our mouths as we could and spat it out when he wasn’t looking. Several times we were able to pour some out without his seeing. He went to the super market. He had a haircut. He had another meal. The people in town were sacred to say no to him. He was drunk. We finally persuaded George to come back with us. He was incredibly hung over, but he and Peter apologized. The next morning George was gone. We took our train back to camp Wabun. George was blackballed from ever guiding at a camp again. I heard he came to collect his summer’s wage. I heard he came from North Bay in a taxi that cost him his whole summer’s salary.
Bob Neuman was a fish out of water teaching creative art at Harvard. When I was a student, Bob still taught drawing. After an initial promise to offer creative arts, Harvard gutted contemporary artists from the Carpenter Center for the Arts. Bob survived a few years longer. We became friends when I smart-alecked an early drawing assignment. He asked our class to modulate space on a large piece of paper by making dots with a pen. Lots of dots. I looked at the paper, and baulked at the hours it would take to modulate the space. I went to my sister, a clothes designer, and asked her help. I borrowed her sewing machine, and with Eve’s help we attached a pen nib where the needle would be, and I was off. It took fifteen minutes to ‘modulate’ the space by rotating the paper under the nib on the sewing machine. The machine went up and down quickly creating lots of dots. Bob asked me how I’d done it because he noticed too many straight lines of dots in my drawing. I told him, and he laughed. He hadn’t said not to use a sewing machine. He was an abstract painter. He had studied with Max Beckman and Antoni Tapies. He had come of age in San Francisco along with painters Richard Diebenkorn and David Park. Bob had a wicked sense of humor and a healthy disrespect for academia. He was all for thinking for yourself and having a cool eye toward almost anything. Like prying an oyster out of its bed, he loosened up the traditional ideas I had for my life. He offered studio space to a few students in an old abandoned theatre in nearby Watertown. I wasn’t very good at painting. But I read and listened. I wound up becoming a canoeist. I owe a lot to Bob.
