A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF LIFE
Visionary artist and inventor who flew with geese dies at 78
Lying in bed one night in 1985, Bill Lishman told his wife, Paula, that he was going to teach birds to fly with him.
The dyslexic, colour-blind, wildly creative sculptor woke his three kids up and told them the same thing. They laughed off their enthusiastic, larger-than-life father and went to bed.
But for the next three years they all worked with geese, which “imprint” on the first thing they see, considering that person or thing to be their parent and following it.
Lishman tried to get the geese to imprint on the sound of an engine. He got them to follow his motorcycle first, and then an ultralight plane.
In 1988, he took off in the ultralight with a flock of 12 Canada geese on either side of him. In a V-formation, together they flew — the geese had imprinted on the plane. Five years later, he flew with 36 birds to South Carolina from Scugog Township in Durham Region. Lishman told the story of his family’s work and the flights in his autobiography, Father Goose, which was the basis of the 1996 movie Fly Away Home, starring Jeff Daniels.
“Prior to shooting Fly Away Home, I’d always considered myself a creative spirit but when I met Bill, I found someone even more creative, even more alive, even more imaginative,” Daniels wrote in an email to the Star. “He taught me a lot about what it means to be a true artist and it was an honour playing him.”
Lishman died Saturday. Ten days prior, he had been diagnosed with leukemia. He was 78.
He died in the house he built: a 2,600square-foot underground home with igloo-like domes, built into a hill overlooking the Purple Woods conservation area and Lake Scugog, 80 kilometres northeast of Toronto.
His family was close by: his wife of 50 years, fashion designer Paula, 68; his two sons, Aaron, 45, and Geordie, 42; and his daughter, Carmen, 34.
“Everything he made seemed to either take flight or was about to,” said Will McGuirk, a family friend and a local arts and culture writer. “Everything he worked on seemed to elevate us as a planet and give us a view from way out there.”
His flight with birds affected the way migration was explored by biologists, helping to preserve the whooping crane.
Lishman was raised by a Quaker mother on a dairy farm in Pickering, where dinner preparation involved anatomy lessons. He never finished high school but was, in his words, “unencumbered by formal education.” He learned how to work with metal at a blacksmith’s workshop that he moved into as a young adult.
“He had a real sense of the big picture,” his son Aaron said. “As much as technology would allow, he experienced it all. He had the ability and the nerve to make it happen. He had the vision and tenacity to see it through and to bring it to reality.”
Later in life, he’d receive two honorary degrees for his extraordinary imagination.
“He was a renaissance man, probably one of the only ones I’ll ever meet, a true multi-talented intellect,” family friend Kerri King said.
Over the years, his sculptures kept getting bigger and taller: a 13-metrehigh metal sculpture inspired by icebergs in the Arctic installed at the Canadian Museum of Nature; a 26metre metal cone with a swirling, still flow of traffic created for Expo 86 in Vancouver; 25 steel figures representing different human movements from dancing to snowboarding installed outside Bridgepoint Hospital in Toronto.
“He didn’t separate himself from the land, nature, air, birds,” said Mary Delaney, chair of Land Over Landings, an advocacy group against plans to build an airport in Pickering while preserving the farmland community in the central Ontario region.
“It was all one big interconnected adventure.”
Land Over Landings succeeded People or Planes, the movement Lishman helped found in the 1970s to fight the same cause. Lishman staged mock hangings and led a march with coffins on Queen’s Park, labelled with names such as “Mother Nature.” It inspired Delaney, as did Lishman’s constant advocacy work in the Arctic, Nicaragua and in his own backyard.
Lishman’s words “in nature there are no straight lines” are being remembered widely in the days after his death.
“He just stepped on top of all those obstacles and kept on climbing,” Delaney said. “He taught us all to look at things askew. He taught us to think outside the box, over the box, under the box, through the box.”
At the end of a 2015, Lishman responded to the Oshawa This Week newspaper’s request for 16 words for the new year. His response: “Aliens will finally reveal that they are actually angels and will save us humans from ourselves.”
Plans for his funeral are still underway, the family said. “How do you really capture everything that dad was?” Carmen Lishman asked.
The perfect send-off, said Paula Lishman, would be to hold the funeral outside with planes flying over and birds all around. No minister, just the people who imprinted on him through his work and his persona.
“He taught us all to look at things askew. He taught us to think outside the box, over the box, under the box, through the box.” MARY DELANEY CHAIR, LAND OVER LANDINGS