“Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit a while with me;
I’ve got to watch the bannock bake — how restful is the air!
You’d little think that we were somewhere north of Sixty-three,
Though where I don’t exactly know, and don’t precisely care.
The man-size mountains palisade us round on every side;
The river is a-flop with fish, and ripples silver-clear;
The midnight sunshine brims yon cleft — we think it’s the Divide;
We’ll get there in a month, maybe, or maybe in a year.”
— from the poem “While the Bannock Bakes” by Robert Service
Ross Toms prospected by just about any means possible — converted patrol boat left over from the Second World War, dog team, bush plane, helicopter, and foot. Toms covered most of the Labrador and Ungava coastline, a large share of Baffin Island, and stretches of the coast of southern Greenland. Of his many stories from this period, a couple stand out.
One concerns a time the clouds came in when Toms was flying back to camp on Baffin Island in a plane running low on fuel.
The pilot looked over at Toms and said: “Well, Mr. Toms, you’d better say your prayers.”
“I can’t,” Toms, recalled delightfully, “I don’t know any.”
Then there was the time a drill camp in the far north needed a box of drill bits during ice break-up in June. The pilot couldn’t find a suitable place to land, so Toms radioed that they would circle low and drop them out the window at a point near the camp — which turned out to be the outhouse.
Toms went on to play a role in many famous Canadian exploration plays, including the Johan-Beetz uranium rush on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, and the Casa Berardi gold rush, also in Quebec.
Riding the waves of the mining industry, he surfed from commodity to commodity and province to province, but always returned to his home in Port Cunnington, Ont., a few hours north of Toronto. The house was usually littered with paperbacks, rocks and maps; bone harpoons and caribou antlers hung on pine paneled walls; and a legion of weird and wonderful Eskimo carvings sat on a stone fireplace as mute witnesses.
By the time I met Toms. he was well into his 70s and still going strong. He and I would tread through the La Cloche hills along the north shore of Lake Huron, and each day he would find a new spring and fill his thermos with water for us to mix with our scotch later in the evening.
I remember going up to see him at Port Cunnington during the winter, a few years ago, by which time he was well into his 80s. Upon arriving, I found the door open and no one inside. Suddenly some snow cascaded off the roof, I looked up and, sure enough, there he was, roped to the chimney, shoveling, with a big grin on his face like a schoolboy who knew he shouldn’t be doing what he was doing but who was having fun doing it.
Toms had his own inimitable collections of phrases and terms. “What’d that guy ever find?” is what he usually muttered upon leaving the office of a big company geologist who had declined one of his projects. And there was “heartstarter” — a concoction of readily available alcohol and mix (a lot and a little, respectively), ideally administered first thing in the morning upon arriving downstairs to the kitchen at Port Cunnington, where Toms would usually be found busily preparing his first batch of perfectly round pancakes. “By jesus, let me get you a heartstarter,” is how it usually went.
To me, Toms was part grandfather, part mentor, part business associate, but first and foremost a friend. He passed away last November, shortly after falling and breaking his hip. His ashes are interred in the Toms family plot at Port Cunnington, overlooking Lake of Bays and just down the road from his beloved home.
— This is the last of three parts. The author is a geologist with Toronto-based Odyssey Resources.
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