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Ottawa, where Hutchison attends Question Period and describes the House of Commons as “the true heart of Canada.” Here, he thought, everything that was felt in the vast nation was spoken of within a matter of hours. He also believed Parliament was floating in a “comfortable vacuum” and disconnected from the reality of the country.
    The Hutchisons slip through Ontario—“I do not pretend to understand Toronto”—and then head ever west, stopping in Gimli, Manitoba, to write about Icelandic immigrants and eventually ending up in the lotus land of British Columbia.
    At the end of this trip he’s so overawed by the magnitude of trying to understand and describe this vast land that the man who would write more than three million words before his death turned to someone else’s words to sum up the experience. Hutchison quotes Captain George Vancouver, the eighteenth-century explorer of the west coast: “A lifetime is not enough to explore this country. A man is too small to feel its size. The poet has not been born to sing its song, nor the painter to picture it.”
    Hutchison had set out to do just that and, judging by The Unknown Country ’s sales and shelf life, his attempt was successful.
    The book is at times lyrical, at times purple, at times terribly out of synch with current reality. French Canadians are pipe-smoking, goodhearted, simple country folk; the Japanese in British Columbia are breeding so quickly he finds no hope of their assimilation over time. The book is also sexist, consistently ignoring the female half of the population. That is, of course, the way men thought and wrote in 1942. Sixty years from now, today’s words will carry different weights.
    In Winnipeg Hutchison went to see Free Press editor John W. Dafoe, a man he considered the greatest Canadian of the times and whom he credited with helping move the country out of its colonial mindset and into full nationhood. Dafoe, he writes, originated Canada’s push to find its own role on the world stage as an “honest broker.” Sixty years on, that sentiment has fallen badly out of focus, the phrase itself, when it’s used at all, invariably tied to Lester Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize work more than fifty years ago. John W. Dafoe, on the other hand, is no longer a name Canadians recognize.
    Hutchison knew that the war had revitalized the country’s economy following the Great Depression. Canada was now a stronger nation than anyone had imagined possible and, thanks to Dafoe’s enlightened thinking, would take its new and rightful place among leading nations once the war was over.
    In Hutchison’s opinion, Canada in 1942 was on the verge of greatness. “Now our time is come,” he wrote, “and, if not grasped, will be forever lost.” No wonder that in later years Peter C. Newman would call Hutchison “the eternal optimist.”
    HE WOULD NOT REMAIN that way.
    The four of us—Jamie Lamb, Vaughn Palmer, Hutchison, and I— headed back into Victoria for lunch at his Union Club. He sat in the passenger seat while I drove. To passersby who happened to peer in at this shrunken little hawk-nosed man, his tie perfectly knotted, his black hat fitted so tight it seemed threaded on, he would have looked like a frail senior being taken for a ride by his grandsons. They wouldn’t have known that he was the one in charge, barking out directions and condemning a “Road Closed” sign as one more reminder of the new housing developments bearing down on him.
    Nor would they have seen his hands, sitting loosely on his lap over the cursed cane. The man who once described Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King as having “the hands of a physician” still had, at nearly ninety, the hands of a woodsman, their size and grip shaped more by axe than by acquaintance.
    Hutchison’s love of chopping wood was, for me, one more reason to admire him.