“The Caboose at the Cape”

Jeff Green | Apr 12, 2012

Ompah’s Helen Forsey has published two very different books in the last few months. One is a 400-page chronicle of the career and the ideas of her father, the academic activist, senator and constitutional expert Eugene Forsey. It is a book she has been researching, composing and sweating over for almost 20 years.

As well, back in November, Forsey published a smaller, more personal book, “The Caboose at the Cape”, which is about a caboose on the coast of Newfoundland, her father’s home province. She has restored and re-located the caboose, and now lives for part of the year in it.

While the two books are vastly different, in tone as well as subject matter, they share at least one thing in common. They are rooted in the connection between Helen and two of the most important men in her life. As the book “Eugene Forsey, Canada’s Maverick” is a tribute to her father, “The Caboose at the Cape” is about her connection to Newfoundland, Eugene’s birth place, and as well to her late son Roddy, who discovered the caboose with her and who died of pancreatic cancer in 2007.

I have decided to review the two books in turn, starting with the Caboose at the Cape this week, followed next week by a review of the Eugene Forsey book.

“The Caboose at the Cape – A Story of Coming Home"

In April of 2003, Helen Forsey was on a trip to Newfoundland with her son Roddy, a lawyer who lived in Montreal, when they came upon a lonely old caboose sitting on a tiny cape, metres from the sea. When they approached the caboose they found that it had been turned into a makeshift cabin after it was decommissioned by the Newfoundland railway, but had eventually been left to deteriorate.

The image of the caboose stayed with Helen Forsey long after the end of her trip to Newfoundland, and eventually she conceived the idea of buying it, moving it, fixing it up and using it as a seasonal home base in Newfoundland.

The book is partly about Helen’s love for Newfoundland and her need to establish a new presence for herself and her family in her father’s birth place. But it is primarily an account of how the caboose was transformed from a relic not only of the bygone railway, but also of the bygone fishing heritage off the Newfoundland shore, into a cozy seaside cabin.

It chronicles how the ownership was determined, how the adjacent piece of land was purchased, and how the cabin was moved, with anecdotes about all the people involved peppering the tale.

It also includes a number of more whimsical, speculative sections: the story as told by the caboose itself. This literacy device allowed Helen Forsey to bring information she gleaned from the family that owned the caboose and about the way the Newfoundland railway used and eventually dispersed the old wooden cars. Later in the book these sections provide a different perspective on how a caboose would feel about being jacked up, dragged from one location to another, and placed on a new foundation.

The story of the caboose has been told before, in an episode of Out Front, the CBC radio program. The Out Front piece was done right at the time that the caboose was moved, in May of 2005, and the book, which was written a few years later, has the benefit of reflection, and an added element.

Although the book does not dwell on it, the story is infused with Helen Forsey’s grief at the loss of her son. Some of the particularities of the story, how she and her son found the caboose together, how he encouraged her when she had the idea of making it her own and helped it to happen, all of these factors are there.

Finally, the caboose is the location where there is some solace for a mother’s grief.

This is captured in a passage from the post script, which describes a visit Helen Forsey made to Newfoundland two months after Roddy’s death:

“The patchy snow in the meadow and the great ocean swells were just as they had been there years before when Roddy and I first stood on that windswept shore.

I could feel his spirit there, like rock and sea – turbulent, beautiful, enduring. The sadness was ever present, but the wind battered and cleansed my heart, and forced it to breathe.”