Ruth Buchanan
Al Buchanan
The second of five children, Cathy Marie Buchanan was born and bred in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Her father was a teacher, and her mother, a former teacher, was a homemaker.
She grew up in an area not all that different-looking than most 1960s suburban neighborhoods—though there were continual reminders that she was not living in just any town. The family made the trek to the falls whenever they had visitors—riding the Maid of the Mist, walking through Queen Victoria Park, gazing out over the Niagara Gorge—and regularly swam at Dufferin Islands, picnicked at Queenston Heights, and climbed in and out of the Niagara Glen, all favorite spots along the river. As a local she was, of course, privy to the never-ending stream of quirky Niagara Falls lore, stories like that of a high school boyfriend’s brother surviving the plunge over the falls in a barrel wearing only cowboy boots and a hat.
Cathy at 5
Cathy
A defining feature of Buchanan’s childhood was the two-month camping excursion the family made each summer in their VW camper van. By her early teens, she had seen most every province in Canada and most every state in the U.S., and had swum in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea. Her family made the first of these journeys—driving from Niagara Falls to the tip of Mexico and then on into Belize—in 1976, well before Mexico was set up for tourism, and with her two-year-old sister in tow. She believes that her parents’ tendency to throw caution to the wind helped shape her into an adult who would one day exchange the trappings of the corporate world for the writing life.
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