In Canada, Flashback to the ‘70s

At some point early in his new life in Canada, Don Gayton stopped being “Don Gayton the draft dodger” and became simply Don Gayton. It was no magical moment, no grand transfiguration.

It was, he says, “a matter of moving on.”

Life had turned tumultuous for him in the early 1970s. Gayton, who spent his childhood in Los Angeles, had received a draft notice and been denied conscientious objector status. He and his wife packed up their two kids and drove north in a ’53 Chevy pickup, crossed the border near this funky town in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, and never looked back.

Like so many of the estimated 50,000 American war resisters -- draft dodgers, military deserters, pacifists -- who migrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, Gayton worked hard to blend in in his new country and that meant, in part, cutting loose from his old life and identity as a Yankee.

Border crossings in those years became points of dispersal: War resisters arrived in steady streams, but on crossing the line, scattered into their own separate lives.

Once settled, Gayton didn’t seek out other draft dodgers, and they didn’t seek him out.

Over three decades, Gayton became a cowboy, an ecologist, a stalwart husband and busy father of five. He became, he says, a super patriot of Canada while diligently following the news south of the border.

Then in March 2003, a lifetime removed from the trauma of the Vietnam War, the United States invaded Iraq, and something in him revived.

“It reawakened some very intense emotions,” he said. “All those moral and ethical issues, about war, about patriotism -- all those questions: ‘Did I do the right thing?’ ‘Am I a coward?’ They weren’t on the radar for a long time. They’re back on the radar.”

Gayton reached out to other American expatriates. It wasn’t difficult. He’d been living around them for decades, even chatting with them at the post office or supermarket.

They knew one another as “expats” but were not interested in delving far into personal histories. They spoke as small-town neighbors, as ruralites, as Canadians.

But the conflict in Iraq tapped a common vein. Their “old country” was at war again, and the arguments over America’s actions, to them, paralleled the debates over Vietnam. Their stories as war resisters became relevant again.

Casual encounters in the street became intense reminiscences. Phone numbers and e-mail addresses were exchanged. Some expatriates began meeting regularly.

Gayton didn’t know it, but the same thing was happening in other parts of the country. The Iraq war was having a uniting, galvanizing effect. War resisters throughout Canada seemed to be networking as never before, rising up to oppose a different war, distant and yet strangely familiar to them.

“The war in Iraq disgusts me,” says Jeff Mock, a draft dodger from Long Island, now a tofu-maker in Nelson. His sentiments echo those of many expatriates. “The United States government is doing it again, being the bully. That’s why I left.”

In Toronto, expatriates started an organization to help gain refugee status for U.S. soldiers opposed to the Iraq war. In Vancouver, filmmakers began documenting the lives of Vietnam draft dodgers and military deserters who settled in the area.

In Nelson, organizers proposed a monument to American draft dodgers and their Canadian allies. Town leaders, at first supportive, killed the project after American veterans threatened an economic boycott. But the same organizers, fired up by the controversy, are planning the first-ever Canadawide gathering of American war resisters. “Our Way Home” is scheduled in Nelson for the summer of 2006.

Most of the town seems open to the event, says Mayor Dave Elliott, who points out that Nelson has long been a haven for political exiles.

Native Americans fled here in the 19th century; then came Christians exiled from Russia in the early 20th century and Quakers in the 1950s. Some of the Americans have been here so long that they are considered old-timers in town.

John Hagan, a sociology professor at Northwestern University and the University of Toronto, plans to attend the resisters’ gathering. A draft dodger who migrated to Canada in 1969, Hagan wrote “Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada” (Harvard, 2001). Hagan said the Iraq war coincided with a particular life phase among war resisters who are now in their 50s and 60s.

When they were young, the focus was on starting new lives and forging new identities. “Now, in late middle age, we’re more into reviewing our lives” and more able and willing to talk about it with others, Hagan said. For many, the Iraq war reaffirms their decision to leave the United States.

Hagan estimates that roughly half of those who fled to Canada decided to stay -- even after President Carter granted draft dodgers amnesty in 1977. Of those who stayed, about 40% -- 10,000 or so -- settled in British Columbia, many in the Kootenay region that makes up the southeast corner of the province, just north of the Washington-Idaho border.

At the heart of the region, like a mossy pearl wedged between snow-capped mountains, sits Nelson.

*

For a lot of war resisters who ended up in nearby farms and valleys, Nelson was the place to buy supplies, do laundry, grab a couple of bottles of wine and a bag of organically grown coffee beans. Today it’s a place where old hippies rub elbows with clean-cut urban refugees here for the mountains, and some, for the counterculture.

The town’s main drag, Baker Street, looks like a miniature version of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, with hole-in-the-wall coffee shops and bookstores, and a constant buzz of people of every color and nationality, more than a few sporting tattoos and dreadlocks and tattered fatigues from the local Salvation Army.

A large segment of the population (officially 9,300) is a shaggy, eclectic, peace-loving, pot-smoking lot. Marijuana is freely discussed, grown, smoked and distributed, with police mostly turning a blind eye. Even mainstream travel guides comment on the high quality -- and quantity -- of the region’s pot.

On the sidewalk patio of a popular coffee shop, Gayton, 58, sips from a cup as he tells his story. He is tall and big-boned, with glasses and gray hair. He has a mountain man’s full beard.

His decision to move to Canada, he says, alienated his father, a Boeing engineer who worked on the development of the B-29 bomber. “We didn’t speak for 10 years,” Gayton says, and their bond was never the same after that decade. “It was a real break, one of my biggest regrets.”

In retrospect, Gayton says, he can almost understand why he and his father saw things so differently: Fate had given them opposite circumstances.

“He and his generation lived through the ultimate just war, World War II,” Gayton says. “Vietnam was the ultimate unjust war.”

Within 10 minutes, Gayton spots or greets four expatriates passing by or getting coffee.

“Too many hippies here,” one jokes to Gayton as he passes.

Another stops to chat. Ernest Hekkanen, 57, a writer and painter, fled Seattle and the draft in 1969. He and Gayton didn’t strike up a friendship until after the U.S. invaded Iraq, introduced by a mutual peace-activist friend.

Both are passionately opposed to the war, and both are in contact with organizers of Our Way Home.

Nobody knows how many war resisters still live in the region, but most agree there’s a high concentration here. They seem to be everywhere.

Last fall, just before the U.S. presidential election, residents organized a coffeehouse gathering to discuss and poke fun at their neighbors to the south. Skits were performed, antiwar songs played, stories of harrowing border crossings retold.

More than 80 people attended, three-quarters of them “old Yanks,” said Lane Haywood, herself an old Yank. Haywood, from San Marino, came to Canada in 1968 to join her future husband, a draft dodger from Arcadia.

Many of the migrants who settled here were Californians, and Michael Pratt, 72, recalls how the migration began. Pratt was living in Vancouver, Canada, during the early part of the Vietnam War and became part of the underground railroad of peace activists who smuggled draft dodgers across the border and helped them get settled. Pratt says he and his wife aided about 20 Americans in the 1960s.

One was a young man from Riverside named Timmy Sullivan. In 1967, Sullivan wanted to settle north, but the only free ride he could find was headed east. So east he went for about 400 miles, stopping in the Slocan Valley, near Nelson.

There, he was taken in by members of a Christian sect from Russia called the Doukhobors, who had settled the valley in the early 1900s. They were political exiles -- forced out of Russia for refusing to fight in the czar’s wars. Their pacifist views and communal ways appealed to Sullivan. According to Pratt, Sullivan sent word back home that he had “found a cool place to live.”

Three friends from Riverside soon joined him, and after that, a steady stream came from California, and then from all along the West Coast. Sullivan stayed there until he died of throat cancer three years ago.

Pratt himself moved to the Slocan Valley in 1969, buying a 39-acre farm for $5,000. Cheap land, gorgeous mountain vistas and a culture of pacifism and laid-back living all made the place a Shangri-La for counterculture types and people who wanted a simpler life connected to the land.

By the mid-1970s, thousands of American war resisters settled in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. Thousands more went north to the Sunshine Coast and east to the Kootenay region. Pratt said hundreds made their way to the Nelson area.

“So that’s the answer to ‘Why Nelson?’ ” Pratt says. “It was by accident. Pure chance.”

*

Just a block from where Gayton and Hekkanen chat outside the coffee shop, Isaac Romano strolls down Baker Street, hobnobbing with other locals.

Romano, 56, came to Nelson from Seattle in 2001, drawn here by a woman. The woman left and Romano stayed. It was his kind of place. A family counselor and lifelong peace activist who got a military deferment during Vietnam, Romano says it broke his heart when U.S. forces invaded Iraq.

A few months after the invasion, Romano came up with the idea of building a bronze monument to honor Vietnam-era war resisters. It would be the sculpted figures of a man and woman greeted by a Canadian with outstretched arms. With supporters by his side, Romano held a news conference to announce it.

When news reached the United States, the 2-million-strong Veterans of Foreign Wars organization lobbied President Bush to persuade Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin to quash the project. There were calls to boycott Nelson, and the town’s official website was inundated by e-mails like this one from Charles A. Rahn of Jacksonville, Fla:

“The ones that want to build a war resister memorial, they should all be lined up and shot at sunrise.”

Nelson officials, with prompting from the local chamber of commerce, pressured Romano to withdraw the idea. But the controversy drew attention to the Our Way Home gathering, when the monument was to be unveiled. The monument was dropped, but the gathering, Romano says, is gaining momentum.

“There could be hundreds, there could be thousands,” said Gary Ockenden, a Canadian national board member of Amnesty International, who is one of the key planners.

Not all war resisters in Canada share the enthusiasm.

Lee Zaslofsky, 60, of Toronto, says he won’t attend. Zaslofsky deserted from the U.S. military in 1970 and is coordinator of the War Resisters Support Campaign, a group founded to help Iraq war deserters.

The organization is helping five American deserters who have openly sought refugee status in Canada. Zaslofsky says there are about 100 deserters from the Iraq war in the country who have not yet gone public.

One person who definitely plans on being in the Nelson area is Woody Carmack, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Maple Ridge, near Vancouver. He is president of a group called Vietnam Veterans in Canada. It is estimated that 10,000 to 40,000 Canadians enlisted in the U.S. military and fought in Vietnam.

Carmack has announced plans to hold a festival for Vietnam veterans in Nelson at the same time. That event has been named Firebase Canada 2006.

Gayton looks forward to Our Way Home. He doesn’t regret moving to Canada, but he still wonders about some things.

Last fall, he attended his 40-year high school reunion at Franklin High in Seattle. A number of his pals on the football team had gone to Vietnam; five didn’t return. Their faces were featured in a memorial. Gayton spent a long time looking at them. He asked himself whether his courage matched theirs.

At one point in the evening, one classmate who did return from Vietnam approached him. The two assessed each other guardedly.

“He said, ‘We did the right thing. And you did the right thing too,’ ” Gayton recalls. “That was huge for me.”

A part of Gayton had waited more than 30 years to hear something like that.

They talked civilly and, in moments, almost intimately, two graying men with two divergent stories to tell, standing only a few feet apart.