Time Lord

ALSO BY CLARK BLAISE

Story Collections
A North American Education
Tribal Justice
Resident Alien
Man and His World
Brief Parables of the Twentieth Century:
New and Selected Stories

Novels
Lunar Attractions
Lusts
If I Were Me

Non-Fiction
Days and Nights in Calcutta
(with Bharati Mukherjee)
The Sorrow and the Terror
(with Bharati Mukherjee)
I Had a Father: a post-modern
autobiography
Here, There, and Everywhere: American,
Canadian, and Post-Modern Literature

NATURALISTS AND PSYCHOLOGISTS
believe that of all forms of animal life, only man possesses a sense of time. It may be our defining characteristic. The historian of ideas Daniel J. Boorstin devotes the first three chapters of
The Discoverers
to time and the history of its measurement, because nothing is more fundamental to our nature than the observation of time and the struggle to measure it accurately. Without an agreed-upon standard of time, we cannot mark or measure change. There can be no innovation, no discovery. Like Robinson Crusoe notching a stick, or prisoners in the Gulag scratching a line for every day of their confinement, we are embedded in time. Even when we leave society behind, our very sanity depends on periodicities. What day is it? How long have I been here? The way we know time today has a great deal to do with the creation of standard time, and the man this book, in part, celebrates.

His name fades with each new generation, although plaques and memorials abound. A college and a few secondary schools are named for him, but fifty or sixty years ago, Sir Sandford Fleming would have won the possibly self-ironizing title of “outstanding Canadian of the nineteenth century.” Born in Scotland, in the manufacturing town of Kirkcaldy, in 1827, the son of a local contractor, he received his six years of formal education in the town (burgh) school, and then apprenticed himself another
six years to the local land surveyor, John Sang. In 1845, at the age of eighteen, he and his older brother sailed for Canada. A cousin presented him at the docks with a silver sovereign. His father entrusted to him a valuable watch with a built-in sundial, an emblem of the time system he would eventually overthrow. The ticket to his future on the sailing ship
Brilliant
cost the sizable sum of £4, for which he and his brother were guaranteed a daily quantity of drinkable water and basic uncooked rations.

In the towns and cities of Scotland, horse-drawn omnibuses made regular stops, their painted sides announced their final destinations. “Glasgow Docks,” it might say, “with train connections to Liverpool” to meet all sailings. The young men whose wooden trunks contained meager treasures of books and professional instruments, the tins of flour and tea, and the bedding, were headed for Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Some chose the more alien challenge of the United States. Emigration was the inescapable destiny of the bright and enterprising Scotch, as they called themselves: populate the Empire, build the machines, run the engines, make their fortunes. The lessons of their straitened childhood and the strictures of the Presbyterian Church kept them sober and responsible for the rest of their lives.

They were the steamfitters, the boilermakers, the gauge-readers, the engineers of the world, proud of their hardiness and frugality, quick to grasp the mechanical advantage. Victorian pop psychology assigned various aptitudes to distinct “races,” and the Scotch were thought to have an uncanny affinity for technology. (The stereotype carried forth to our own fantasies in which “Scotty” worked his mechanical magic on the starship
Enterprise.)
Kirkcaldy, on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, across the water from Edinburgh, was also the birthplace of Adam Smith. Thomas Carlyle had served as master in the same burgh school a decade before Fleming’s matriculation. Linoleum was
invented and manufactured in Kirkcaldy. There’s probably not a significant settlement in Scotland that could not provide a comparable list of famous sons and their useful inventions. Fleming’s later friend Andrew Carnegie, one of the America-bound, hailed from the nearby Fifeshire town of Dunfermline. Samuel Cunard, the shipping magnate, and the parents of James J. Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railroad, the first two prime ministers of the Canadian nation, Sir John A. Macdonald and Alexander Mackenzie, and untold bankers and businessmen, who collectively established Canada as Britain’s leading colony among presumed equals, had all made the same passage and adjustment from Scotland to Canada.

What they carried with them was their faith, their confidence, and their “genius for hard work.” They remembered Scotland fondly, returned often, and contributed materially to its survival. They got on well with Americans, and many, of course, like Carnegie or Alexander Graham Bell or J. J. Hill, are associated almost entirely with their American successes.

There’s a subtle parallel to be traced between Scotland and Canada, two non-countries by the standards of Victorian diplomacy, unrecognized, even threatened, by their powerful southern neighbors. The exuberant reticence of the Scotch—sober, hardworking, calculating to the last penny—was particularly appreciated in the underpopulated void of autonomous colonies called British North America before the 1867 British North America Act that created Canada. Popular opinions of the Scotch were quite a bit more flattering than the general view of their fellow Canadians, the Irish and French. Doubtless, the Victorian mind distinguished them for their sturdy Protestantism. But the Scotch, like the country they had left and the new territory they were building, were negotiating a very tight passage between proud survival and overt surrender. They were “emigrants,” not immigrants. They had known poverty in their homeland, but
overnight, it seemed, had been transformed into hardy transplants in Canada, the United States, or in England itself. Fleming’s life is one long demonstration of competing loyalties to Canada, to Scotland, and to the idea of the British Empire. As a prime example of the successful emigrant, he nevertheless lamented on return visits to Scotland the loss of his distinctive accent, and even his ear for the purer strains of the “north of Tweed” dialect. Only in Kirkcaldy was he taken for a native.

The Fleming brothers nearly died on that forty-four-day passage in 1845. On one fearful night in the midst of a North Atlantic gale, Sandford took readings of wind speed and direction, calculated the ship’s heading and tonnage, and determined that they might not survive until morning. He inscribed that sober assessment, adding a declaration of faith in God and a profession of filial gratitude, bottled the note, and threw it overboard. Naturally, his life being one long monument to industry and good fortune, the bottle was picked up on a North Devon beach and delivered to his parents not many months after he’d settled in Peterborough, his first Canadian home. He kept that letter in the top drawer of his desk the rest of his life, along with the never-spent silver sovereign his cousin gave him at the Glasgow docks. In Peterborough he found no work, only discouragement. He traveled to other Ontario towns, taking surveys and striking town maps off his own lithography stones and selling them. His notebooks detail every sale, every expense. Half of his earnings were sent back to the family. Within three years, his parents joined him in Canada, settling on a farm their son had managed to purchase.