Olde-Tyme Scottish values flourish in tough times 

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
September 12, 2008

Scottishness is something you can't outrun. I have spent most of my life trying – and my Scottish-Canadian mother has been patience itself over the years as she watched me lashing at those Calvinist ties that bind – but I concede defeat. Every woman becomes her mother. I give in, ma. I am Scottish.

I only mention this because I just read The Long Emergency, the 2005 book by the American theorist James Howard Kunstler that lays out North America's future as it runs out of fossil fuel. It's a timely read because of two fall elections, as well as the news that gas just jumped 13 cents a litre overnight.

Like most people who read Kunstler's book, I put it down with shaking hands and a new facial twitch. It is the most dire thing since the Old Testament.

What Kunstler sees for us scarcely bears mentioning. Thirst, chaos, make-do-and-mend, full-time camping, shoe leather as a big factor in personal prosperity a.k.a. survival, no viable buildings over five storeys, a diet of turnips, a horse in the driveway, short trips by coal-fired steam engine, and say hello to feudalism but without the hygiene, finely crafted justice system and persistent good cheer.

And then I realized that my personal future would just be a version of the household my mother ran when I was a child. And I could cope with that because Scots are raised to cope with anything.

Admiring Scottish pluck

That great Canadian John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a book about Canada's Scots. He said they believed in continence and fidelity because "faithful and chaste behaviour was the least expensive." This is the kind of dry humour that left Galbraith un-honoured by his University of Guelph alma mater for 60 years.

My parents didn't buy a house until they had saved enough money to buy one outright. My mother baked her own bread and made sandwiches out of corned beef that came in a wedge-shaped can with a key to roll up the lid. She melted soap scraps to make lumpy reincarnated soap and used old cloth diapers as kitchen dishtowels. We drank milk made out of skim milk powder mixed with water.

Shop, American-style

Hah! I said. I went through years of student poverty, scrimping so I could keep myself in English Lit texts and recreational drugs. I was still baking scones and sewing my own clothes in my last year of journalism school. And then I got a job and let loose on a career of being un-Scottish.

It's called going all-American, like Rudy Giuliani after the attack on the Twin Towers. I still think his call to shop for freedom was the most crass statement ever made by a politician – surely the blessed thing is being able to make the choice to shop – but people fell for it. Maybe I did too, a little. It's hard to believe, but I once wrote a weekly newspaper column called "Bought," in which I wrote about my own shopping. I didn't want to write it – it seemed absurd – so I demanded $1 a word, an outrageous fee I thought would be prohibitive, and got it. I calculated that I was earning $400 a week for something that took me seven minutes to write, a rate an accomplished prostitute might envy.

Yes, I hear you.

Spend freely and trust in your capacity to earn more, was my motto. Virginia Woolf most uncharacteristically said it, but doesn't it sound like Nan Kempner? Jonathan Franzen wrote in The Corrections that his mother saved every cotton ball from every medicine bottle she had ever purchased. I made a point of not doing things like that, and made free with my discarded bread bags and elastic bands.

Then in China in 1996, I saw a young man by a riverbank gathering discarded white Styrofoam food boxes – the kind they give you as doggy bags in restaurants – for washing and re-using, and an alarm, both moral and economic, went off in my head. Hard times ahead?

Changing times, changing habits

"No matter what happens, I'll always have poetry," my mother said recently over the phone. She was referring to a book by W.H. Davies ("What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare") that I had sent for her birthday.

My mother has a knack for saying things that echo in my mind like a tolling bell. "You married above yourself," she once told me and 15 years later in times of stress, I still mention this to my husband in acid tones. Does it still hurt? Goodness, no, it's the accuracy of the remark that rankles.

So I started reading poetry again, which is comforting in an era that produces very little good fiction. I read Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which is scarily good at painting a forsaken landscape. "As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair /In leprosy," Browning wrote in 1855. "No! Penury, inertness and grimace." Clearly this is where Kunstler got his inspiration for the look of the American urban southwest in 2025.

Last week I was waiting for the bus and thinking about my mother. No matter what happens, I'll always have … I'll always have … "Windex," I said to myself, and I realized I had returned to my essential Scottishness - sensible, clean, thrifty - and was now psychologically prepared for the long emergency. We traded the Camry in for a Yaris, we dine at a Vietnamese restaurant where the entrees (all exquisite) are $8.50 tops, and I'm planning to replace my water-greedy lawn with moss.

You can't go wrong with moss, something I used to say about cheese on toast for dinner, but they're both true. I have toned down my ambitions – I refuse to use the word "downshift," same goes for "tipping point" – and my small Windexed house is more than I need. No McMansion for me. Kunstler says they're the tenements of the future, full of squatters, unheatable, distant, crumbling. I love it when he goes into his spasms of dereliction to come; it stiffens my spine.

Scottish-Canadians are generally a dour hard-working people; we are slightly suspicious of pleasure; we have a sense of decency. All these are great virtues and for years, I denied possession of them. Now I'm fine with it. My Windex will never let me down, and I will always have my poetry, memorized, and thus excellently priced.