The death of the Carleton FreePress
On an unusually warm and sunny morning in late October of last year, I drove into the Carleton Civic Center parking lot. I could feel the frown settle on my face.
I received an email earlier that morning from my boss, Bob Rupert, the editor of the Carleton FreePress. He asked to meet at the parking lot and not to tell anyone else about it. I couldn’t do any work, I was too preoccupied with what seemed like the beginning of the end.
Jody Coughlin drove up and parked beside me. She started at the paper a month or so before I was hired as a full time staffer.
“What’s with the cloak and dagger?” I asked her.
She shrugged. She knew something was rotten in Woodstock and it had something to do with our jobs. She wasn’t smiling, and Jody was almost always smiling.
I expected the worst and I got it.
Bob Rupert and our court reporter Anthony Cooper came in a burgundy sports utility vehicle. Rupert, an old school newspaper man from Ottawa who had come to Woodstock to support the fledgling new paper, got out of the car with his shoulders slumped. He was dressed neatly in a sports coat and light blue sweater-vest. He shielded his eyes from the sun and confirmed our suspicions.
“Guys, we’re in trouble.”
A hanging set to music
Benny Swim was hung in Woodstock, New Brunswick on October 6, 1922. His body was cut down too soon and survived briefly before being hung a second time.
Swim murdered his cousin Olive and her husband Harvey Trenholm in March of that year in a jealous rage. He was in love with his cousin and acted with violence and brutality before turning the gun on himself. He shot himself in the head but survived. Benny Swim walked for seven miles to the closest farm where the authorities picked him up.
The story is being turned into a musical called The Trials of Benny Swim.
Nick Lawson, 25, of Woodstock is writing the play set for production in mid to late August of this summer. It will consist of three acts totalling 90 minutes. The play is the fourth and final production of 2009 for the Valley Young Company, a theatre company based in Woodstock.
While few facts are known of what went on behind the scenes of the Swim hanging, Lawson will take this opportunity to explore questions of morality, justice and mercy as well as the psychology of someone facing his final days.
“The plot action, the emotional moments and emotional scenes are built from those moments between the facts where you just can’t know what’s going through someone’s head. Especially when they’re on their own or even when there’s someone there to witness it, you never really know,” he says.
“It’s sort of up to the jury to make the call and who are we to judge? That is a strong element of the play itself. The whole thing is sort of set, we see twisting realities in terms of Benny’s memory and Benny’s imagination mixing with his reality. The entire tale is told within his skull almost but it’s told within the view of a jury.”
Truth is potentially more subjective in analysis than it is in practice. When two people look at the same thing, perception can alter it.
A portrait of Benny with his back to society by Laurel Green
“The things you read in the paper, the things people are quoted as having said; can you really trust that they were said and weren’t hearsay?” Lawson asks. “Even now, 85 years later the topic is still emotionally charged in town. It still carries weight, people feel it. They know the name and even have a little scrap of a story. Or they don’t quite know who you mean but they stop and think when they hear the name Benny Swim.”
In preparation for the writing, Lawson has been reading scripture. The book of Job deals with the same themes of judgment and mercy that he wants to explore.
Am I a sea monster, thou that settest a watch over me? – a variation of Job 7:12
“What does it mean to show mercy to monsters?” Lawson says. “The idea of purgatory, heaven and hell…there is a strong element of religion…religiousness…religiousity? I don’t know. I think it was important to people in the 20s. I think it was important to people in the sense of dividing lines. And beyond that, Benny and Olive grew up together and had a hard life, they were poor. That’s not easy for anyone. They had lots of times when they had to have someone to pray to.”
Two hangmen, Doyle and Gill, were hired for the job. Gill was a back up in case Doyle was incapable. Doyle lodged in the local hotel while Gill stayed at the jailhouse where Swim was being held. While there is no documentation regarding any confrontation between Gill and Swim, Lawson is exploring what their relationship could have been.
“If you stay at the jail where you have access to the man who is doomed to die by your hand, what do you talk about?”
Because Doyle proved to be unreliable, Gill was asked to perform the second hanging. As a result an inquiry was filed to determine who cut the rope too soon on the first attempt.
The Trials of Benny Swim marks the second musical Lawson has written. He points to his collaborative team as the driving force behind the creation. Local musician Amy Anderson is writing the music.
“Her experience playing the organ and piano for the church these past few years has certainly given her, I think, an interesting perspective on hymns and so we’re curious to see what she’ll come up with,” Lawson says of Anderson. “The music will be a bit challenging. We take the Benny story very seriously so it’s very important to maintain a mood of solemnity so we’re not really doing the pop tunes all that much. It’s going to be more in the classical vein, sort of a composed style, in some ways operatic. But also in some ways cinematic the way music can underline dramatic dialogue.”
Olive, the tortured voice of reason by Laurel Green
Local artists Laurel Green and Michael McEwing are working with Lawson on set designs, conceptual art and costumes.
Green has produced three charcoal and pastel sketches on cardboard so far including one of a solitary Benny Swim under a large tree. The town of Woodstock is behind him and he sits and waits idly for what is to come.
“It’s more of a ghost of Benny. It’s a rough outline that portrays more emotion than the actual character. He sits very sorrowfully, very lonely under this tree with his back to society, very much the way he feels in the play,” Green says.
The judgment of Benny Swim, by Laurel Green
Through his research, Lawson has found stats indicating that most murders are committed by a person known to the victim. In some cases the act is carried out by a loved one, like Benny Swim killing his cousin Olive.
“It’s not the stranger in the alley,” he says. “So what is it that turns love into such, is it even hatred? It’s just destruction, senseless destruction. And what’s the payment for that? What’s the justice? Does a person have enough to give to set that right?”
These are the questions he wants to ask, but not necessarily answer in the course of the story. He wants it to be more ambiguous. The audience, in this case, acts as the jury. The trials in the title represent more than a courtroom but the human struggle Swim goes through in his life and even death.
“I want to engage the audience. I want them to feel something. I want them to be able to admit that it could have happened this way, that it could have been their Woodstock. I want them to feel embroiled in the play. I want them to have a certain gut reaction with certain characters. They should dislike some characters. They should like some characters. They should root for people even when they know it’s wrong.”
The complexity of right and wrong in the realm of justice and mercy are the themes Nick Lawson will employ to fill in the blanks without being untrue to the known history of Benny Swim’s hanging.
Wandering through Thailand — A Woodstock man’s journey
American novelist Henry Miller once said “one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
Curtis Wetmore of Woodstock was getting the proverbial ‘itch’ to see the world. On May 15, he flew to Thailand for a three week excursion of backpacking and cultural awakening.
“I wanted to be anywhere other than here. I needed a culture shock.”
He landed at the Bangkok airport and as he exited the plane he took in his surroundings. As a tall, white male he stuck out in the crowd.
In Canada, Wetmore’s appearance may be the norm, but this is not the case in Bangkok. But instead of being uncomfortable with the lack of familiarity, Wetmore felt relieved.
“It was so great to finally be a minority,” he said.
He didn’t travel to Thailand to spend time in an airport so he fled as soon as he could and found a cab to downtown Bangkok. The ride took two hours and only cost him $8.
“It was a huge culture shock how we take for granted how much our currency is worth. I changed $300 into 12,000 Baht, which is the currency in Thailand. I didn’t think it was going to be much.”
It was ample. He went to a convenience store and tried to pay with a bill worth 1,000 Baht and the store didn’t have enough change for him.
Wetmore spent the first three nights in a hotel, wandering through Bangkok on his own before eventually meeting up with a group of fellow travelers. From his perspective, he saw a huge financial gap in the public. The middle class is seemingly non-existent.
“Bangkok has such distinct contrast. There are huge skyscrapers and maybe a pink Lamborghini and then you drive a couple blocks and you’re in the poorest area you’ve ever seen in your life, people are basically living in holes in the wall.”
Wetmore saw both extremes of the spectrum. The filthy rich and the filthy poor with no in between. The two seemed to live in an odd harmony as he wandered the streets of Thailand’s capital city.
A curious traveler and not exactly a traditionally religious individual, Wetmore spent much of his time familiarizing himself with the Buddhist faith. Visiting temples, taking meditation classes and reading on the history of Buddha…the path to enlightenment is an arduous one indeed.
At night, the city doesn’t shut down like municipalities in this neck of the woods. He says it’s literally a city that never sleeps.
“There were nightclubs open until seven o’clock in the morning, you could party all night. Shops were open in night-markets. Bangkok is the city that never sleeps, you could stay awake 24 hours a day.”
The tourist center is Khao San Road. A thoroughfare where rules are distant. Drink vendors populate the street, baby elephants march through more comfortably than a stray dog would in Canada. Opium is smoked on the streets as Curtis Wetmore wanders through the night.
“It’s very fun…and very chill. I felt safer in Bangkok than I did in Toronto. In places like Toronto or Vancouver, you all speak the same language but they can be very cold (places). In Thailand, you can’t speak the language as everyone else…but everyone communicates…it was really comforting.”
After three days Wetmore met up with his travel group, his nights in the comfort of a hotel bed were numbered. They took a train to northern Thailand, a place called Chiang Mai.
“It’s a beautiful spot. It’s a quarter the size of Bangkok so it’s still a huge city but it’s in jungle. It’s a city in the middle of really lush forests. My favourite place in Thailand.”
Their stay in the city was short-lived as the group hiked through a tour of local tribes living in the surrounding jungle. He hiked through mountainous terrain and slept in a bamboo hut, a stranger in a foreign land.
“The interaction with the tribes was definitely less than the people you’d meet in downtown Bangkok because they speak very far out languages that I don’t even know how to pronounce the names of.”
Their guide, Tui, was the only form of communication they had with the indigenous tribes they visited.
“The tribes were completely organic and self-sufficient. They grew everything they ate, they made everything they used, they made their homes and educated their children.”
These people operated on the bare minimum from what Wetmore could tell. They set up meals on the bamboo floor, cleared dinner and slept on the same floor. This is their everyday existence and but a blip on the path of an intrepid traveler like Wetmore.
The group left the jungle, and Wetmore, at least, gained a greater understanding about the unimportance of becoming too connected to his material possessions.
“That’s what the Buddhist religion is all about. Buddha was one of the few monks to reach enlightenment. That’s where you have to cut everything out of life, every type of material possession, every material based thought. You have to slow your mind down to think in the present.”
Though his spiritual journey through Thailand ended after three weeks of backpacking, island hopping and exploring, the adventure didn’t quench Wetmore’s thirst for travel, it accentuated it.
“It gave me perspective on how small the world really is. You can travel to the other side of the planet in a day!”
Wetmore gained comfort in solitude, a trait in the global traipsing community expressed as a necessity by Freya Stark when she wrote “to awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
Wetmore’s travels have only begun.
This story originally appeared in the July 8, 2008 edition of the Carleton FreePress
Upper Kent commando gets Bronze Star from U.S.
The Devil’s Brigade is sometimes known as the first Special Forces.
In 1942, the combined Canadian and American commando unit began training soldiers at a base in Helena, Montana. One of the men to join the brigade was Arthur Jones, 89, currently residing in Upper Kent, New Brunswick.
“I (first) went overseas with the Cape Breton Highlanders over on the Adriatic side of it in the Cassino area,” he says. “It was a place that was completely run down and completely rubble.”
In 1943 Jones spent up to two years in Europe from Italy to France and beyond. Cassino was a dreadful location.
“Just outside of Cassino there was a hill, Monte la Difensa. The Germans were up on that overlooking (us). You couldn’t move during the daytime, only by smokescreen or by night. The stench of dead bodies was unbelievable on a hot night with no air… no wind.”
Jones injured his arm by gasoline burn. The burn led to blood poisoning and a stint in a military hospital. After he was healed he joined the Devil’s Brigade.
“It was while I was off the line getting this (burn) looked after… they posted a notice wanting some more guys in that unit. I put my name in to go and my name was removed from the list. When I made an inquiry I found out that our commanding officer had sent word back to the holding unit not to let any of his old men go.”
Jones disputed the claim from his former commander and was allowed to join the new brigade.
He did however revert rank back down to private in order to qualify for the front lines. The reversion did not last.
“While I was with them I became a technical Sergeant,” he says. “Taking that hill, Monte la Difensa, we pushed on from there to Rome. We were some of the first ones in Rome for that unit.”
Jones traveled from Rome to a village he believes was called Santa Maria to take rubber boat training for the eventual storming of southern French beaches.
“For that period of time… we had a trip to Corsica,” he says. “We had to climb cliffs and what not. This was the sort of area we were going to hit in France.”
In August of 1944, Jones and the rest of his brigade hit southern France a good five hours before the invasion by rubber boat. Nine men to a boat.
Approximately 1,800 people in the brigade led the advance attack on southern France. They were responsible for around 12,000 German soldier casualties.
“We went in to destroy communications. Pick fights. To distract (the Germans) from where the main course was going to hit.
We were of the understanding that we were there to stay. We let our boats go adrift. If they didn’t make the beach head we were stuck there.”
Fortunately for Jones and the survivors the main attack was successful, and any ideas of abandonment disappeared.
“After we pushed the Germans to the Italian front we took the highland there, which I think is called the Green Alps,” Jones says. “It comes right out to the Mediterranean and looks straight down. I recall a highway around the edge of the beach. We took the high ground and just stayed there.”
The group was disbanded. They were no longer going to paint their faces black in the middle of the night and charge a guerilla style attack on the enemy. The army had no need for that kind of fighting as the war wore down.
“We were withdrawn and as I recall, an American-Japanese unit was pulled in there. Any Canadian that had been with the British Eighth Army command in Italy had to go back to Italy and this involved me.”
Other soldiers were sent to different units and the Devil’s Brigade was no more.
Jones has received 12 medals for his work during the war, most recently receiving a Bronze Star from the U.S. Army in late June of this year.
Other members of the Devil’s Brigade who applied also received the medal.
63 years since the end of World War II, Jones is still being recognized for his efforts. Engraved on the medal are the words: Heroic Meritorious Achievement.
The memories of war and the pains of loss and suffering do not go away but Jones knows his time is remembered as he is still being honoured for service during that brutal time in history.
This story originally appeared in the July 22, 2008 edition of the Carleton FreePress
Golf doesn’t cut it for adventurous doctor
Define the word ‘vacation’. The ideal break from the every day routine will differ from person to person. Given the opportunity would you stay at home and relax or push yourself to the limit in the great outdoors?
Dr. Ian Giberson of Florenceville elects to do the latter. He first traveled to the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in 1995 with his wife Ruth’s brother-in-law. They landed in Cambridge Bay.
“We went up to visit a friend of his. We went to fish and hike, get a taste of it and found out what it’s like to fly to Yellowknife and then fly another three or four hours to somewhere and actually see nothing other than hills and rivers and mountains and trees somewhat.”
The remote landscape reached Giberson in an almost spiritual way. It took his love for the outdoors and amped-up the experience ten-fold.
“It was just the magnitude of the thing. Based on the things you heard and read or the documentaries you see and that sort of thing, it turned out to be true, we live in a phenomenal country,” he said. “Growing up in (Carleton County) I always enjoyed the outdoor stuff – fishing, hunting, that sort of thing. It was the pinnacle of that sort of thing by going up to northern Canada.”
It would not be his only trip to the Great White North.
In 2001 he returned to canoe the Mountain River and again in 2004 to travel the Coppermine River. Giberson has formed a profound connection to the sparse and peaceful wild.
“What isn’t up there is part of the beauty of it too. But you really have to be there to listen to it and breathe it and see it. It’s different but it’s nice.”
While there is every opportunity to tackle this adventure solo, without guides, Giberson would advise against that. He contacted outfitters up north to travel with him, along with other travelers.
“You can do it yourself but it’s horrendously expensive that way. You would have to lease a float plane to fly you somewhere and get another to take you back and taking a canoe from Florenceville up there would be crazy. It’s safer, easier and a whole lot cheaper to go with an outfitter.”
The North is largely untapped by large tourist groups or constant flows of society tramping through the hills and valleys.
“Not a lot of people do it. It isn’t Las Vegas. There aren’t 10,000 people flying in there every day. In some of these places they might get 100 a year. You’ll paddle for days without seeing another person. You won’t even see a plane fly overhead.”
The trip provides an opportunity for Giberson to slow things down, and soak up the scenery.
“When you are actually there – it smells different, the air is a lot cleaner. You can see further. It’s a different thing. The sounds are different. It’s quiet here relative to Toronto… but it’s quieter up there. And it’s like that all day, every day.
“If you work sunup to sundown you could paddle through it more quickly and be done but that’s not why you’re up there. You want to take five or six hours a day, fish some, swim, hike up into the hills through the valleys and see the variety of animals, which is unbelievable.”
Caribou, arctic wolves and moose are not uncommon.
Fish are practically jumping out of the water through Coppermine River. Grayling, char and lake trout provide feasts for breakfast and lunch but never in the evening. Typically after a meal of fish the troupe will leave to travel further down the river instead of camping so the fish smell doesn’t attract any unwanted visitors.
“Up in either grizzly bear or polar bear country, for the tremendous reputation grizzly bears have, polar bears are worse. You don’t want fish laying around your campsite,” he says. “You’re only going to keep what you can eat.”
Giberson has been away from the Arctic since 2005 but plans on returning in the next few years.
It’s a tiring trip, but a testament to strong will and determination and at least for Giberson it’s worth the risk.
When he first went canoeing down the Mountain River it was a rich sense of accomplishment.
“Oh my God I’ve actually done this,” he says, thinking back. “A lot of people think about these things, ‘Oh I’ll do it next year’ or ‘maybe’. Just after a while I got to a point where I didn’t care if it was going to hurt. I was going to try it.”
The North provides Giberson with a safe haven, away from the technological jungle. In the wilderness, cell phones, the internet and television are all gone.
“It’s the simplicity of it. We live in such a complicated… we have so much stuff. It’s nice to go to these places and be totally self-reliant, with only a tiny bag of stuff in one spot and be able to do it for a while.”
It’s an escape that is not for everyone, but it reaches him.
“I tried golf too but that wouldn’t work.”
