On Being A Writer in Wales: Tristan Hughes

Tristan Hughes

It’s usually quite tricky to say where exactly a novel begins. Maybe as an observation scribbled in a notebook, a story overheard on a train, an epiphany one bright midsummer morning, a bleak memory returning at midnight… it’s always different.

But I know precisely where Boundary Waters began: with a fourteen-year-old me setting out, alone in a canoe, from the dock of my family camp in northern Ontario, my head full of romantic notions about the wilderness that surrounded me.

I was going to follow in the footsteps of those fur traders and voyageurs whose legacy had surrounded me for as long as I could remember.

In the small town where I was born, you might go have a milkshake in the Voyageur Diner, then buy a comic in the Voyageur Mall, and then wait while your parents filled up the car at the Voyageur gas station and bought some supplies at the Hudson’s Bay store.

Relics

Meanwhile, back at camp, I could look at the miniature birchbark canoe my grandfather had made, hanging from the wall along with two hand-carved paddles. They were all relics and reminders of an historical world that felt not so very far away in time, and closer still in space – our home lake was only a day or two’s paddle from some of the main Canadian fur trading routes of the nineteenth century.

And that younger me must have imagined I’d inherited this history by some strange kind of osmosis.

I was going to paddle across lakes, cross portages, sleep under the stars, light out for the territories, just like those traders and voyageurs had.

I doubt I was even certain what direction I was headed. But it wouldn’t have mattered what my compass said. If this had been America, I would have thought of it as west, but in Canada the direction of myth and lighting out and adventure has always been north.

And the Canadian north carries a different cargo of meanings – a place of allure and mystery and promise, yes, but also one of fear and trembling, of chastening realities. It’s a tough place for illusions.

Romantic notions have a short shelf-life up there.

Terrifying

Mine lasted about twenty-four hours. I crossed one lake. I made one portage. I saw one sunset. And then spent one of the most terrifying and uncomfortable nights of my life. I’d lost my food supplies on the portage, my matches had got wet, and the fish I’d planned to feast on had had other plans.

As soon as twilight came, I was tormented by clouds of mosquitoes so thick I had to pick them out of my teeth.

And then I spent the hours until daylight huddled beneath my canoe, listening to large beasts crashing around in the woods around me. In my panicked imagination, these morphed from moose and bears (fearful enough in their own right) into sasquatches and wendigos.

As soon as there was a sliver of light on the horizon I was paddling back to camp, one day older, a few years wiser, and about five pounds lighter after paying my blood dues to the mosquitoes.

What I didn’t know then was that everything that had led me on my hapless way – the desire to imagine what it had been like back then, the thrill of being in a landscape that had hardly altered since those voyageurs and traders had paddled through it, the excitement about what lay ahead beyond the next portage – would never go away.

Time travel

I guess all that changed was the realisation that, as a writer, there was another kind of vessel available for me to time travel in.

And so I began to write an historical novel. It would be an adventure story, a love story, a coming-of-age story, a wilderness picaresque, a northern.

It would also become, as I dug deeper into the history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century fur trade, about a period when boundaries and borders – geographically and culturally – had been constantly shifting and entangled and porous, spread out as they were across vast distances and bringing together the Indigenous, French and Scottish peoples who were predominantly involved in the trade.

And the further I wrote, the further another boundary became unexpectedly more blurry and indefinite, as those decades that separated me from my younger self began to fall away.

And there I was, back in the canoe, about to set out all over again, heading north, waiting to see what lay over the next horizon.

Boundary Waters by Tristan Hughes is out now in paperback from Parthian Books (£12.00) https://www.parthianbooks.com/products/boundary-waters

Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan in northern Ontario and brought up on the Welsh island of Ynys Mon. He is the author of four novels, Send My Cold Bones Home, Revenant, Eye Lake and Hummingbird – which won the Edward Stanford Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place and the Wales Book of Year People’s Choice Award – as well as a collection of linked short stories, The Tower. His short fiction has appeared in various journals, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and New Welsh Review. He is a winner of the Rhys Davies short story prize and an O. Henry Award.