Terry
By Douglas Coupland
Douglas & McIntyre,
176 pages, $28.95
A quarter-century ago, nearly to the day, a curly-haired 21-year-old from Port Coquitlam, B.C., began a journey that many believe will never end. Dunking the foot of his artificial leg into the harbour waters off St. John's, Nfld., Terry Fox swung his body and his hard-grit will westward. His plan: to run across the country, step by step, province by province. Nothing -- not the distance, not inconsiderate motorists or incompetent volunteers, and certainly not the cancer he believed he'd beaten -- was going to slow him down. Like the sun itself, Terry Fox rose in the east to swing high into the sky, blazing with a ripening glare that etched his resolute grimace, his swing-double-hop gait (later dubbed the Fox Trot) and his intense, uncompromising demeanour into our national consciousness.
Many have struggled to portray Terry Fox's determination and his grandeur that moving summer. CTV news anchor Lloyd Robertson said, "He embodied the best of the Canadian spirit. We are a generous people, fair-minded, not stridently patriotic, but deeply proud of our country. And we're courageous, when we have to be -- just like him." Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford (then with The Toronto Sun) wrote her finest sentence about Terry: "He gave us a dream as big as our country." Star reporter Leslie Scrivener, who wrote the definitive biography of Fox, described him as "running into the pages of Canadian history."
Those selfsame pages get an extreme makeover now, thanks to Vancouver writer, visual artist and ardent nationalist Douglas Coupland, who retools his successful Souvenir of Canada format for a look at the life and legacy of Terrance Stanley Fox (1958-1980). Coupland's gift for the telling detail, zooming in on life's seemingly innocuous flotsam with lysergic intensity, pays off here.
"When people look at photos of Terry," Coupland notes in an entry accompanying photos of Terry outdoors and waiting to kick off an Ottawa Rough Riders football game, "most of them remember that his face was sunburned. What's often overlooked is that it was mostly Terry's left cheek--the cheek that faced the sun as he ran westward--that was sunburned, the Canadian landscape burning itself onto his body."
It's that devotion, that earnest combination of hyperacuity and empathy, that enriches Terry, which might otherwise be discounted as a mere photo-essay yearbook in comparison to Scrivener's exhaustive work. (Coupland makes repeated references, and gives explicit thanks, to the earlier bio in his own text.) Let's call them liner notes, these 63 brief passages: insightful, evocative, irreducible, startling as Coupland so often is. Beside a photo -- one of the many lovely, everyday, energetic photos that fill this worthy book -- showing a youthful Terry, ready for his high-school graduation (white tux with black velvet lapels and bow tie; white ruffled shirt), Coupland writes:
"Looking at these images almost makes you want to enter a time machine and travel back to the 1970s and say, 'Hey, Terry, you don't know it, but you've been marked for greatness.' On the other hand, there might also be people out there in the future who want to travel back and tell any of us that we too have been marked for greatness."
That line could come out of any number of Coupland's novels; it has the compassionate sorrow of last year's Eleanor Rigby. It also conveys the from-the-beyond acceptance of his more supernatural novels, such as Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus! And it touches on the twin forces that drive so much of Coupland's art: his quest for spiritual meaning and his lifelong study of distance as a metaphor for human relations.
Surely Terry Fox knew a thing or two about distance: he Fox Trotted his way across 3,339 miles of this vast country before cancer cut short his Marathon of Hope. His struggle made that vastness concrete (and that concrete sure was hard; it wore through nine shoes and constantly jarred and abraded his stump). But he also shrank those distances in a time that was less high-tech and pre-Pico Iyer. Coupland, writing in Souvenir of Canada II, remarked on that same paradox: "We're both a small country and a vast country. We live in six time zones, and yet everybody's just one person removed from everyone else. We are small. We are vast. The one thing we are not is merely big."
Terry Fox wondered why, of course: Why him. He struggled to articulate a relationship with God. That's not mentioned here, despite Coupland's long-standing interest in the divine. But a different kind of spirit shines through. The outpouring of grief after Terry's death, documented here with reproductions of letters, gifts and news accounts, has still not stopped, even 25 years on. Terry Fox runs continue each September around the world, and Coupland himself plans to follow up this Terry Fox Foundation-endorsed retrospective with a second volume compiling reminiscences of Terry gathered by the CBC over the coming months.
There's a teary pride to be found studying these photos, a sense that Terry Fox found meaning through his marathon not just for himself, but for all of us. Coupland: "In just four years, this guy from a typical Canadian suburb changed the world. If any of us are ever in need of reminding that life has surprises in store for us, these photos offer more than enough testament."
Vancouverite John Burns spent a week in 1987 on the Jocelyn Muir Ontario Lake Swimathon for Multiple Sclerosis. He knows what those tour vans smell like.
Chapter One
Readers can find the first chapter of Terry today on our website, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/bookclub.