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I last heard from Neil on my birthday, March 21, 2019. Yes, he was one of those folks who actually has the forethought to log your birthday into his Outlook calendar and then send you a nice personalized email to congratulate you on your milestone of progress through life. I had known about his illness — his glioblastoma multiforme — for a few years, though he had continually tried to make it sound a tad less ruinous than it really was. But now he was writing to me to say, “News from this end is ... grim” along with a note about being grateful about not being in pain.

News of his death caught up with me a few days after he died on Jan. 7. I was eating dinner and listening to the news.

We all learn about a friend’s death in different ways — usually a phone call, text message or an email, and so this was the first time that it came to me on the national news. But then Neil was a celebrity, right? A legend, the “drummer’s drummer” and some said he was possibly among the best or even THE best in the world.

Rare and unusual friendship

I didn’t know him as a drummer and I wasn’t really even a fan of Rush, although I later grew to appreciate much about their music. In fact, way back in the 1990s when he first contacted me, I had no idea who he was, but soon we established an unusual and somewhat longlasting type of friendship that I believe is quite rare these days.

By rare, I mean, it was the kind of literary relationship that British writers had with each other in the 18th and 19th centuries. And that was probably part of what made it work. Words were

In 1996, Pottersfield Press published The Masked Rider. That's when publisher Lesley Choyce found out in a big way that Rush had a legion of followers..

important to both of us. Written words.

Neil, of course, wrote lyrics to the Rush songs and I was constantly scribbling away at fiction or poetry or some damn thing that might keep me relatively sane.

It started out with fan letter of sorts from Neil to me concerning my novel, The Republic of Nothing. God knows how he came across it, but he wrote me a cleanly typed two-pager telling me that it connected with him and that he thought I should know. I think he introduced himself as someone who played in a “rock trio” or “rock combo” — something like that, and that he was primarily a guy who “banged on things with sticks.”

It eventually clicked. The drummer behind Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. I remembered some old publicity photos of three long-haired guys in turtlenecks. And they played those loud, high-powered rock anthems that made for great soundtracks for driving crosscountry.

I wrote back, of course. And keep in mind, I’m talking about letters that you mail in the corner post box. He wrote back again, this time telling me he had written a manuscript about riding a bicycle around Cameroon. I said send it along.

And he did.

And it was damn good.

'We drove here from Michigan for this'

That’s when I confessed to him that I ran a small (and I do mean small) publishing company for local writers here in distant, foggy Nova Scotia. And by the way, Neil, why don’t I publish this tale of biking, sweating, culture shock, exhaustion and diarrhea through Pottersfield Press?

Neil said he’d shown the manuscript around Toronto and been told to stick with his day job of banging on things with sticks. But if I wanted to take a publisher crack at it, he said, go for it. So I did.

Thus, in 1996, Pottersfield published The Masked Rider and, lo and behold, I discovered that Rush, and Neil in particular, had a legion of followers.

Rush went on tour not long after that and so did the book.

We sold scads of copies in Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas and Cincinnati, Ohio to name a few places where the band performed. The hard part for me was keeping up with the reprinting. Thousands of copies were sold. And soon after, Neil was on to writing his second book.

That summer, a teenage boy from Michigan showed up with his parents in my driveway wanting to know if this was where Neil’s book had been published. When I said, yes, he waved for his parents to join him. They wanted photos of me and my house and his mom said, “We drove here from Michigan for this.” I’m sure there must have been other reasons to drive this far, but that was the story.

Rush drummer Neil Peart, at back, performs with bassist and lead singer Geddy Lee, centre, and guitarist Alex Lifeson in Halifax on Friday, July 12, 2013.

Finally, a meeting

I met up with Neil in person for the first time at his home in Toronto where I was introduced to his wife, Jackie, and their teenage daughter, Selena. We talked about books, family, and what it’s like to be in our 40s. (Yikes, how could we both be that bloody old? Neil was born in 1952; I was born in 1951.) He might have told me a story or two about his own drumming mentors — older percussionists of the jazz persuasion but there was no rock-star talk, as I recall.

And when he said, “I want you to listen to some music,” he put on an old LP of Barry White.

Go figure. I think, in truth, we were both kind of quiet, shy, intellectual types who ran out of things to talk about as the evening wore on.

But our literary friendship continued just fine. Now we had moved up in the technological world to sending faxes to each other. I had a pet blue jay at the time who loved to hear the fax machine chime and would help tug the paper out as Neil’s epistles from Ontario came in.

And always, they were not just letters, they were fine literary documents.

My first Rush concert was in Vancouver where I initially tracked Neil down at his hotel.

“I’m checked in as Fred Flintstone,” he told me. I found it hard to believe that he used an alias (and a silly one at that) to avoid hard core fans who might be stalking him at his hotel but there it was. At the front desk I asked the young man to tell Fred Flintstone that Lesley Choyce was here. He did and shortly thereafter, told me, “Mr. Flintstone will be right down.”

And so I had a chance to hang out for the afternoon sound check which, as you might know, is really a rather tedious and mundane technical affair, in this case involving the monster iconic drum set, guitar tuning, keyboard sound levels and checking the proper functioning of the several onstage signature clothes dryers.

The concert was a blast, of course, with a fully packed Rogers Arena and Rush fans going wild at Tom Sawyer and New World Man, Subdivisions, among others. At intermission, I checked out the book sales and, when I told a Rush fan my relation to Neil, he wanted my autograph. It was a weird world indeed.

Pottersfield Press publisher Lesley Choyce first became acquainted with Rush drummer Neil Peart through their mutual love of writing.

Second book and a rift

I had plans for publishing Neil’s second book, but I think the success of the first one and some urging from his upperechelon friends in Toronto encouraged him to find a bigger publisher. He had already lined up a New York literary agent and before long Neil and I had some “professional disagreements” as to how his second book should be published. Soon after, while I sitting in an internet café in the West of Ireland (we corresponded by email now), he told me he was going to go with a larger publisher.

I was more than a little pissed off. There was a flurry of nasty correspondence – semi-professional, personal, vindictive. My daughter, Sunyata, got wind of the falling out and, without my knowing, faxed Neil from my office a scathing letter. Neil responded to me about how my whole family was against him.

It looked like business might be the end of the friendship.

Hah. I don’t know who flinched first or whether it was through fax, phone or email but, after a relatively short bout of you said/no, you said, we both decided to put it behind us.

Business is business and friendship is friendship. And thus, we remained long-distance friends for the rest of Neil’s life. In the years following, Neil even donated several thousand dollars a year to my daughter’s non-profit organization, Project Colours, for charitable work in South Africa and the Dominican Republic. He was a guy who didn’t hold a grudge.

Two tragedies, a broken heart

In 1997, tragedy struck. Neil’s daughter, Selena, 19 at the time, died in a car crash in Ontario.

His wife, Jackie, died of cancer within the year. We were still corresponding on a regular basis with the occasional phone call and I offered what little I could as friend for consolation. Neil spent considerable time holed up in his cabin in the Laurentians and I probably should have gone to visit him, but I didn’t.

Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, includes some of Neil Peart's correspondence with Lesley Choyce.

His daughter had been close in age to my own daughter and, in truth, I could literally feel his pain. The darkness in his letters was as articulate as it was frightening. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in his world that worried he’d do something desperate and when he told me his neighbour had lent him a gun for shooting at troublesome squirrels, I called to see how he was doing.

It wasn’t good.

But he carried on. And, still grieving and looking for some way to relieve the pain, forget the tragedy or just get distracted, he decided to get on his motorcycle and go on a solo continental journey of escape. He travelled from Quebec to British Columbia and south as far as Belize, then north and east, all the while staying in touch with his close friend Brutus and a few others including me. Then one day he showed up at my door at Lawrencetown Beach for a planned layover before heading back on the lonely road.

Although I always knew he and I were living in very different worlds, I felt a kinship that often prompted me to call him “brother,” in the way we used to do back in the hippie days.

It was a kind of brotherhood, for sure. We talked long into the night and he hinted that he believed the road was delivering the best medicine possible.

Nothing miraculous. Just something. Purpose, maybe? You have to get up in the morning, pack up the saddle bags and just go. Don’t stop.

Neil slept that night in an old camper trailer I had in the back yard and in the morning said, “At least now I’m proper trailer trash.” It gave a glimmer of hope that the legendary drummer (now without sticks or drums) still had a sense of humour.

There was a book from the journey, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, and it was a powerful document of survival and recovery. It included some of our correspondence, for which I am most grateful, and it stands as a memorable document of how the ultimate tragedy of one man can be wrestled back into a meaningful existence.

The rider pulled up in California and found a new love in his life, Carrie, and a new life altogether, along with the birth of a daughter, Olivia, born the same year my first grandchild, Aidan, was born. We swapped photos of babies and continued to write about our lives and resurrected dreams. And somehow Neil found his way back to music.

The Neil Peart I will remember is the modest, soft-spoken, literate and loyal friend who rose to the top but whose feet were most solidly planted on the ground.

I didn’t see Neil again until he set foot back in Nova Scotia in 2013. Rush was back on the road and as the CBC noted, “Rush fans have waited more than a quarter of a century for the iconic Canadian band to return to Halifax — and now the wait is almost over.” Sitting three rows back from the stage, I was as blown away as any teenage rock fan could be. The word “legendary,” which I had so often scoffed at so often, suddenly seemed most appropriate.

Neil graciously invited me and my wife Linda to join him and a small group of his travelling companions at the ritzy secluded Trout Point Lodge. He was still biking it from venue to venue on his tour and we met up with him there in the woods to catch up around an evening fire with lobster, oysters, wine. and some other guests who soon realized the guy tossing them a beer was someone they’d seen in music videos.

It was in March of 2017 — my birthday message again — when Neil told me about the brain cancer and asked that I not mention it to others. He did a fairly good job of keeping it quiet for the ensuing few years. I think I understand that it’s better to hunker down with close family rather than face an outpouring of sympathy from fans far and wide.

The emails grew shorter, the jokes fewer, the prognosis grimmer. But he stayed in touch and there was not a hint of wallowing in his prose. The Neil Peart I will remember is the modest, soft-spoken, literate and loyal friend who rose to the top but whose feet were most solidly planted on the ground.

And then the news hit me, Friday at dinner time, after a day of teaching, after some afternoon preaching about how writing shapes a life. I’ll always remember Neil as a writer. A lover of words and literature, a craftsman of music and lyric and, as The Masked Rider revealed, a modern-day Dante who, in midlife, found himself on a descent into hell and mustered the will, the courage and the wisdom to find his way back into the sunlight of everyday life.