One clear morning in 1972, when I was 11 and my father was 38, and we were sailing his 19-foot, two-masted yawl around Little Betty Island off Nova Scotia’s South Shore, near Halifax, the wind came up and—without warning—he lost the top half of his right, middle finger.

After he barked at me to take the tiller—before he shoved the bloody stump into his mouth—he hissed, almost softly: “Shit.” For Harry Bruce (who died in Halifax at the age of 90 on August 18) this was no ordinary catastrophe.

In all the years he’d spent honing his reporting and writing chops at the Ottawa Journal, Maclean’s magazine, Saturday Night magazine, The Canadian, and The Toronto Star Weekly, he never learned to touch type, to position his hands democratically across a keyboard; he only ever deployed two of his fingers—the middle ones—to deliberately peck each letter of the words he wanted to see on the page.

Now, as he sucked on his wet cigar stub of a digit, I knew he wasn’t thinking about the boat’s four-foot, steel centerboard—which had mysteriously freed itself from its cleat to come down like a guillotine—or even whether we would make it back to shore with the rest of our pieces intact. I knew he was figuring out how to file the column he’d been working on for days with one working finger.

My Toronto-born-and raised father—who moved with my mother, sister, brother and me, to Nova Scotia in 1971—was one of Canada’s pre-eminent men of letters. The CBC broadcaster Barbara Frum once told an interviewer that if she had anything she wished she could do, it would be “to write like Harry Bruce.” As as a journalist and author whose roots in Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore stretched deep into the 18^th century, the man also inspired more than a generation of East Coast writers and broadcasters with his virtually peerless prose.

When he was up for (and won) a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Atlantic Journalism Awards in 2012, journalist and author Stephen Kimber wrote, “He was a generous and helpful mentor to many, including me. His journalistic accomplishments are many and stretch far beyond his own collection of local and regional national magazine articles and newspaper columns.”

Writer and author Silver Donald Cameron called him “a fearless commentator, piercing observer, and a honey-smooth stylist, one of the most elegant ever to practice his craft in this country.” Equally important, Cameron said, “is the power of his example. He’s been a self-sustaining professional journalist for more than half-a-century, an inspiration to all those who aspire to support themselves by their skill and intelligence.”

While that’s indisputably true, my father utterly rejected the notion that he was an inspiration to anyone. If he admired other writers it wasn’t because he thought they were gifted or blessed or driven to unfurl their promethean talents before appreciative crowds. It was because, he said, they knew in their bones that writing was their job and that something always threatened to keep them from doing it. “Not Writing is the dark fact of every writer’s life,” he once wrote. “Some look as cheerful as normal people, but behind the facade there’s always a soul that Not Writing is tormenting.”

Certainly, his own body of work was prodigious—21 books on everything from Lucy Maud Montgomery to ferry boats, to grocery baron Frank Sobey, to walking around Toronto with a hangover. He also won a lot of awards—more than he could remember, including Atlantic and national journalism, magazine and book awards, and an ACTRA for radio drama writing. But nothing made him happier than tackling a new project with no promise at all that any part of it would work, let alone triumph. In fact, he sometimes courted disaster just to see how possible doing the “impossible” really was.

In 1979, when he agreed to helm a new, glossy periodical in Halifax, the smart money said he and his pals were crazy. National advertisers weren’t interested in backwater markets like Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. Hell, did anyone even know how to read down there?

Within six months, working at kitchen tables— strategically located in urban squats between downtown taverns and the liquor store—he and his small staff emerged with the first edition of Atlantic Insight magazine. It was Macleans, Canadian Living, People and Esquire magazine all rolled into one, and it cleaned up at the Nationals, winning Outstanding Achievement Award. I told him the first edition was stunning. He smiled and said, “More like astonishing.”

He said the same thing about himself at his 90^th birthday party—surrounded by his kids and grand-kids and his wife of nearly 70 years—a month before he died. “Astonishing”.

He had a book coming out, Characters Along the Road. In one story, he describes how he and my mother, Penny, missed their last opportunity to see an old childhood friend from Toronto. “On March 7, 2023, three days after a fall in which he fractured several bones, Neil died in hospital. I dug out something he’d written years before while jauntily topping off a letter to us: ‘I think of you both almost every day, an example of how memory operates as we edge towards oblivion, itself a compelling and, even, delightful aspect of life itself.’”

At the party, I remembered the time when he lost his finger at sea and I somehow motored our way into port at the village of Prospect and my mother rushed him to hospital. I remembered another boat, decades later, as we set out on a broad reach to beat the remnants of Hurricane Hugo on Chedabucto Bay, reading the water, trimming the sails, grinning like madmen, heading for oblivion or home.

He didn’t finish his column that day either. But he did later. And with one finger tied behind his back.

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Alec Bruce is a senior contributor to Atlantic Business.