A Life in the Bush: Lessons from My Father

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

This is a book-length eulogy, a son’s tribute to both a deceased
father and a deceased way of life. Duncan MacGregor was a lumberman in
Ontario’s Algonquin Park from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. This
huge wilderness of bush and lakes, which was his home for more than 50
years, defined not only his work and rough-and-ready physical existence,
but his philosophy and values.

Roy MacGregor, a journalist and author of several books on sports,
portrays this crude, hard-edged way of life with the soft, rose-colored
tones of sentimentalism. Duncan’s world was undoubtedly harsh, dirty,
dangerous, and crude. Yet Roy delivers it to us in words that create a
soft fog, as ethereal and wispy as early-morning mist rising off an
Algonquin lake.

We’re prepared to accept that MacGregor remembers his father as a
near-mystical figure, so in tune with the bush that even the wild
animals abandon their elusiveness in order to pay tribute to him on the
day of his funeral. We’re prepared to accept that, although education
and travel passed him by, Duncan radiated wisdom and knowledge. We’re
prepared to accept that he was all a father should be. Yet to read
chapter after chapter of MacGregor’s poetic prose is to drift through
a fluffy-cloud version of Duncan’s harsh reality.

A Life in the Bush is the perfect work to read while dozing by the fire
on a cold winter evening far from the bush.