The Book: the rough draft and a title

A year and a half ago I wrote the prologue to a book about my life at Bow Narrows Camp in Red Lake, Ont., and since then, nothing. Many of you have encouraged me here on the blog and in person to go on, and I dearly wanted to but I kept getting stuck, in my head that is. I start thinking about what would make appropriate chapters, what to include and what not.
Then, a year ago, I suffered a traumatic brain injury which I have fortunately all but recovered from now. The main lasting effect is a total loss in the sense of smell. Just in case you are wondering if maybe I have Covid-19 since the loss of smell is one of the symptoms, I have MRI pictures showing a spot in my brain where the olfactory cells used to be and also my symptoms began a year before anyone even heard of coronavirus. With no smelling ability, I also can't taste much either. Mostly I can just differentiate sweet, sour and salty.
If you have to lose a sense, I guess smell would be the one you would pick. Unfortunately, it was my most acute sense. I have astigmatism and even with glasses I can't focus too well at a distance. I now wear hearing aids in order to hear Brenda, saw-whet owls and goldfinches. But even with my eyes closed I used to be able to tell what type of trees I was near and if someone was smoking a cigarette two hundred yards upwind.
"Isn't that the way they say it goes?" wrote Jim Croce, one of my songwriting heroes, cut down in his prime a long time ago, in his song Operator.
And now we have lost the great John Prine. Man, that's a blow. And a wake-up call for me -- "You better hurry and write that damned book!"
So I am going to write it, right here on the blog, and I am going to blow right past the organizational problems that were holding me back by using a trick taught me by John Bishop, one of my great  journalism professors at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. "Just get things down on paper. You can cut and paste it in the right order later."
Those words served me well in my career as a reporter and columnist for the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, a daily newspaper. My editor, Ingolf Richter, who would also become my friend, once told me he never saw as prolific a writer  I sometimes wrote three or four news stories a day. I would routinely write weekend features that, with photos, made center-spreads. I just wrote and wrote and let Ingolf organize it. Hundreds and hundreds of stories. Just write.
So that's what I'm going to do here. It's going to come out in no particular order and it is going to be about more than just Bow Narrows Camp. That's another thing that has been holding me back, figuring what part of my life is about camp and what isn't. I think you could argue that in the end, it's all about camp since my experiences were reflected in what camp became and what many of you came to know.
I'm going to write it all and I might go back and edit things from time to time. Just write. These postings might become a paperback at some point and might not, but at least it will be out there. And hey, so many of us are at home right now self-isolating, it might be entertaining. Feel free to comment at any time.
Think of it as The Book, the rough draft. I'm also going to give it a title, finally:
A Yankee in the Canadian Bush.
It starts in the next posting.
Stay safe, everybody.