The Long Trail: My Life in the West (20 page)

I
sat by myself in the stone house, alone on the ranch. Spring comes late on the northern plains, and this March morning in 2008 was no exception. The divorce had been finalized in February. It was officially all over between Twylla and me.

Adelita wasn’t talking to me either. In breakups like these there has to be a villain and a hero. It simplifies the whole process, gives it a cold logic: this is the good person, this is the bad person. Adelita was firmly in her mom’s camp when we split. She seldom wrote or called.

Estranged from my twenty-two-year-old daughter, I played an arpeggio riff on the guitar and started writing lyrics, thinking of the kid and resisting the easy temptation to rhyme.

My thoughts drifted back to happier times, as often happens with songwriting. I thought of the days when, as a nine-year-old, Adelita would hop off the school bus at the end of the driveway and dash up to the corrals, saddle up Spinner and ask me to ride with her. Back then I was her hero. Together we’d cross the road and race on the westside hayfield with the Rockies as our backdrop. Spinner always beat Bud, which pissed Bud off no end. We raced again and again on that field. Adelita didn’t care about badger holes and neither did I.

Happy times, but everything had soured since. Twylla and I had neglected our marriage for years. Finally she said to hell with it and ditched the ranch and me. She decided to take Adelita on the rodeo circuit, pulling the kid out of the Catholic high school in nearby Okotoks where she was a straight-A student. Adelita jumped at the chance to bust off the ranch. She hit the American circuit with her mom and finished the rest of her classes online. They headed south with the dually truck and trailer, camping in friends’ yards for months at a time so Adelita could compete.

There’s no question that Adelita is a good horsewoman. She’s no gunsel; she’s always been a natural and she’d had a
lot of success in barrel racing. She was about sixteen when she started running with the pros, but there she had less success. Spinner couldn’t quite compete with the pro horses.

Adelita barrel-racing at the Steamboat Springs Pro Rodeo Series in
Colorado
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

Twylla thought the solution was to buy Adelita’s way into the big leagues with an expensive horse. I was wary of that plan. I’ve seen enough oilmen go to futurity cutting-horse sales and pay $160,000 for a horse, then you never hear of them again.

Charmayne James became a world champion barrel racer when she was only fourteen, and she had made her own horse, a fabled animal called Scamper. Charmayne’s people
were poor feedlot cowboys in Clayton, New Mexico, on the Texas line — about as far out in the sticks as you can get. They came up the hard way. Charmayne
had
to make her own horse. That’s what most of the female racers do, and I think that helps them gain a much better perspective on life and their careers.

But Twylla wanted Adelita on the fast track, so I paid $43,000 for a horse. Adelita stepped up in class with the new horse, but she was still getting beat. This kind of thing happens a lot. A kid blows everybody away on the amateur rodeo circuit in Alberta, then she gets stars in her eyes and decides to turn pro, thinking it’ll be a cake-walk. That’s when she’ll often hit a brick wall. The gap between the talented amateur rider and the pros is like the Grand Canyon.

Twylla, meanwhile, was spending a ton of money. While she’s capable of being a sensible woman, she really lost it during that period. It might have been a cathartic thing for her, but the spending was really getting out of hand. I did my best to cut off the flow. It had to be done.

For a while Twylla and Adelita were back and forth to the ranch, since Twylla had her bank accounts and credit card bills and everything else here — more than twenty years’ worth of her life. (Given that fact, it’s pretty amazing how thoroughly she seemed to sever the connection.) I was paying most of the bills, and I guess that enabled her to walk out and come and go as she saw fit. On one of her last trips she left me a note with an ultimatum: she wanted signing authority for my ranching and music companies, though, of course, I’d still be the guy paying for everything. No way, I said.

From there it got ugly, turning into the classic Mexican
standoff, with the lawyers running the show. The whole thing was a wreck. Our union was deemed a “marriage of long standing” under Canadian law, which meant that Twylla would get half of everything in the divorce. She came and took all her stuff and much of our artwork from the house while I was touring. It was a big shock to come through the door and find that a lot of my artifacts were gone.

I was a wealthy man back then, thanks to the hard negotiating of my agent, Paul Mascioli. Divorce is supposed to be a fair fifty-fifty split, but it never seems to work out that way. Land prices were soaring when the divorce went down — bad news for me. People were getting seven or eight hundred thousand dollars for a quarter-section out here. The land craziness meant that my spread was evaluated at twice what it’s worth now.

Meanwhile, Harris Dvorkin, the owner of Ranchman’s who had taken Twylla into his family in the 1970s, poured as much gasoline on the fire as he possibly could, seemed to relish the role of adviser, taking Twylla’s side all the way. She also got half of my publishing catalogue, which means she gets half of my songwriting royalties. I couldn’t catch a break — that’s just how the cards got dealt.

I don’t think the high divorce rate in our society has anything to do with the emancipation of women or feminism or anything like that. It’s due to people being people: males being males and females being females. Simple as that. You can see it in horses. They have trouble living together too. Bud is mean to Pokey but she’s devoted to him, even though he’d like to get the feed buckets right together, side by side, so she can’t have anything. He’s totally selfish. Yet the meaner he gets, the more she loves him. It’s crazy.

The divorce was tough. The lawyers made a lot of money. The accountants made a lot of money. Twylla made a lot of money. And I signed all the cheques. As they say at the rodeo, I missed the short go — the championship round — again.

As all of this was going down, four green Mounties were gunned down in the line of duty near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. This happened in March 2005, shortly after Twylla and Adelita had left for good. The killings hit the province like a hard punch in the gut, leaving people sick and dazed. Everybody wondered, How could this have happened? Those rookie officers were so young. The oldest, Constable Leo Johnston, was only thirty-two. The other three — constables Brock Myrol, Peter Schiemann and Anthony Gordon — were in their twenties.

A few days after the killings, an RCMP inspector called me on the ranch phone.

“Would you sing ‘Four Strong Winds’ at the memorial service?” I’ve had difficulty with that song off and on over the years. In the Ranchman’s days there were times when I’d flat out refuse to play it. I regarded it as a relic of my folk years, representing a place I didn’t particularly want to go. But I was more than willing to sing the old song on this occasion. “Just give me directions and I’ll be there.”

I stopped off for Mel Wilson, one of my old pickers, on Thursday, March 10, and we headed north to Edmonton in my truck. There we rendezvoused with two Mounties at a south-side Tim Hortons. One of them was a woman who had served in Africa for several years. She and her partner
drove us to the University of Alberta Butterdome, and as we approached the campus, I was struck by the immensity of what we were about to do. The place was packed with cops from everywhere in Canada and the U.S., people who’d come from as far away as Boston and Texas to pay their respects to the fallen police officers.
I can do this
, I thought to myself.

The political dignitaries read their tributes to the fallen officers. Governor General Adrienne Clarkson expressed it well when she said, “Most of us cannot truly understand what it means to embrace a profession that always holds the possibility of danger or death. We count ourselves blessed, though, that dedicated men and women take on this challenge, sustaining the peace, the order, and the freedom that we cherish.”

It seemed that sadness and solidarity were present in equal measure in the Butterdome that day. As I listened to the speeches, I knew my performance of the old song would be emotional. I wanted it to be honest and authentic too. I played the song slowly and mournfully, like a dirge:

My guitar pretty much played itself, and as I sang, I felt the music resonate throughout the hall.

Afterwards I shook a few hands, Melvin packed up the guitar and we headed home. I didn’t realize at the time that my performance had been televised (I don’t remember signing a release). But suddenly the old song was back in the limelight again.

A couple weeks after the memorial, I was riding a colt up in my round pen. It was a cold March day and I had the truck door open with the radio cranked up, tuned in to the CBC. Jian Ghomeshi was counting down the top songs for a series called
50 Tracks: The Canadian Version
. The idea was to let CBC listeners pick the “essential Canadian popular songs” of the past century. “Four Strong Winds” had been nominated for the list. I was curious to see how far it would go, so I listened as he counted ’em down.

“From 1981, ‘Northwest Passage,’ written and recorded by Stan Rogers — the number four song.… At number three, from his groundbreaking record
Harvest
, here’s Neil Young and ‘Heart of Gold’ from 1971.”

My song hadn’t made the cut. Too bad.

“The second most essential Canadian popular song of the last hundred years: the Barenaked Ladies, and ‘If I Had $1,000,000.’ ”

I could see Lightfoot taking number one. Ghomeshi interviewed music critic Nicholas Jennings before announcing the top song. “If you don’t get goose bumps listening to this song, I think your Canadian citizenship should be revoked,” Jennings said.

Ghomeshi continued: “This is a song that seems to have had an air of destiny about it from day number one. Ladies and gentlemen, the number one Canadian popular song: Ian & Sylvia, ‘Four Strong Winds.’ ”

I damn nearly fell off my colt. It was surreal. The wind is howling, horse turds are blowing across the pen and I’m riding in circles freezing my ass off — and Jian Ghomeshi announces that a song I wrote in Albert Grossman’s New York flat back in 1962 is the top Canadian song of all time. The phone started ringing off the hook with friends calling to pass along their congratulations.

I’ve been told that after my performance at the RCMP memorial, the number of votes for “Four Strong Winds” in the CBC contest increased dramatically. It’s almost as if the old song had been reborn out of tragedy.

And then I lost my voice.

It was the summer of 2006 and I was playing the Havelock Country Jamboree in Ontario, a big outdoor hoser festival about a hundred miles northeast of Toronto. I’d had a bad experience with the sound guys there when I played the festival in 2001. This year I was having even more trouble. It was as if they’d never heard of acoustic instruments or equalized monitors. They had the bass all cranked up, Nashville rock-and-roll style, and the rest was mud. I started shouting into the mic, trying to out-muscle the system — a stupid thing to do. I should have known better.

When I got off the stage, I knew I’d hurt my voice. It wasn’t painful but I could feel a constriction when I was talking with Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, the act that followed us. (I believe Ray brought his own mixer to avoid the problems I had encountered.) I felt terrible, because I knew something very bad had happened.

A couple of months later I caught a bad virus on a plane out of Denver, and after that my voice really shut down. I played some shows and tried to do the best I could, but in Eugene, Oregon, I couldn’t sing at all. I just rambled on to the audience (the people there were very sympathetic). When I got home, my doctor told me I had to see a specialist in Calgary. The specialist put a TV camera down my throat and found a lot of scarring. He basically told me, “You’re screwed.” That scared the hell out of me.

For a while I made different attempts at rehabilitation. I worked with a holistic doctor in Fernie, B.C., who used allnatural potions from Belgium. She did a voodoo-type treatment where she hooked me up to a computer; I’d hold on to two copper clamps and the computer would come up with these coloured bars that she then fed back into the computer. The computer analyzed them and said which nutrients I was missing. I did that for about a year and then thought,
This ain’t working
. But now I think it
was
working. In any case, it made me healthier.