Once Upon A Time...

This article "Answer is blowing in the wind" was originally published in the Guardian, PEI's leading circulation daily on February 19, 2001 and was written by Mike England, the Guardian's Kensington correspondent.
E-mail: mengland@auracom.com
©The Guardian 2001.

... "Answer is blowing in the wind"...

For a guy who does not claim to be very musical, Peter Baker has managed to bring a lot of music into people's lives.

Even if people do not know him by name, they certainly know his product.

For the last 20 years, he has been making wind chimes at his studio situated atop the hills of South Granville - one of the windiest locations on P.E.I.

Crafting chimes was not Baker's childhood dream. While growing up in Connecticut, Baker was exposed to craft by his father, a teacher / potter.  He learned about clay.  He even undertook a five-year pottery apprenticeship.

But Baker, who saw himself as the 'outdoors type', was convinced that his future lay in farming.  Through his teen years, he spent most his summers working as a farm hand.

He really developed a taste for rural life while working in Vermont.

"I was so impressed by the lifestyle and the people involved in it,"
says Baker.

"I would have continued but small farms were closing down and the farm labour force was flooded."

A holiday visit to P.E.I. with his family, in 1971, convinced him that his farming dreams might still be possible.

When the family returned to the United States, Baker stayed behind and settled into rural life Island-style.

Baker might still be farming today if his brother had not come to the Island in the early 1980s and begun producing wind chimes. At the time, people were not familiar with them, but they soon became very popular.

In order to keep up with the demand, Chris taught his brother how to make chimes, and it was not long before cutting tubular steel took precedence over ploughing furrows.

After a while, Chris turned to other pursuits and left Peter running the business.  In the first year of production, Baker turned out 1,000 wind chimes.

It was an open market. For a while, Baker's chimes had no competition anywhere in Canada, but, without patent and copyright protection, it was not long before he began noticing chimes built on the same model as those his brother had first introduced.

Business was severely hit for a while, but Baker was convinced that he could compete if he continued to produce the quality item he knew he had.

People told him that the beauty of his chimes lay in the harmonics. It all came down to tuning, says Baker.

"Most of our chimes are in the key of C. People find that very relaxing.  For many of them, it beats putting on the radio. It's a natural sound. The wind makes the music."

The chimes have become popular with rural folk and cottage dwellers, says Baker.

"They have no problem with neighbours calling them up and saying: That thing's making a lot of noise."

However, a couple of problems have arisen with suburban owners of the larger chimes, tuned in the key of D. They returned their chimes after neighbours threatened to call the police.

While a few may take exception to the sound of his windchimes, Baker says that he receives good feedback from musicians.  At shows, they will comment on the pleasant tonality and the precision tuning.

The best validation came when he learned that Bruce Cockburn had used a set of his chimes on stage during one of his show tours.

On one occasion, a set of Baker's chimes was entered in a talent contest on P.E.I.

It happened when his late father Jim, who was known for his waggish sense of humour, told CBC producer Donna Allen, that he had composed a piece of music for wind chimes.

Allen was so impressed that she invited him to participate in a talent contest being organized by CBC at the Eptek Centre in Summerside.

" The audience was very polite as he stood there shaking the chimes," says Peter.

"Some members of the audience were smiling, as they tried to hold back laughter, but most of them sat quietly and applauded at the end."

But Jim was enjoying himself.  Emboldened by the warm reception, he announced that he would play another composition entitled Wind Thru Long River. By the time it was over, Jim was red in the face from the effort of trying to contain his own laughter.

Two days later, he received a phone call informing him that he had won the contest. As if that were not sufficient embarrassment, he received another call shortly afterwards from the producer of the CBC Morningside program in Toronto inviting him to do a live interview and play his composition on air.

Baker has still  not forgiven his father for turning down the offer.

"That would have been the best publicity ever for our chimes," he says.

Today, Baker operates his business from a converted barn not far from the old farmhouse he bought when he came to the Island, and where he still lives.

He has never lost complete touch with his farming interests. In a building adjacent to the studio barn he keeps a few sheep. In his yard are three vintage tractors, which still see action when he goes to the woods to cut birch for use in the assembly of the chimes.

He could never have foreseen the direction his life would take after coming to P.E.I., but, as he looks back to his early years, he recalls a moment which now seems ironic.

His Grade 4 teacher asked him to stand in front of the class and sing a Bob Dylan song, which was popular at the time. Its title? Blowing in the Wind.