The Bay Boys

Thursday, January 26, 2017

"You had to be physically fit, dentally fit, and between the ages of 17 and 21."

So said a "Bay Boy" on a CBC Radio Yellowknife cassette tape I played this morning.  Awake early, in a quiet, thoughtful time of day, I chose in semi-darkness the next cassette from my 70+ cassettes in alphabetical order behind the down-opening door of a quaint piece of furniture, some shelves open, some behind doors.   I bought this furniture for $10 a few years ago at the semi-annual used clothing and housewares sales at the seniors' activity centre near where I live.  That sale featured furniture from a suite within the centre, a suite the seniors' association then stopped using as an apartment for a live-in manager.  Read on, whether you are young or old, about the young and old, who include me.

I was  "Bay Boy" in the Hudson's Bay Northern Stores Department in the mid-1980s, 30 years ago this winter.

JOANNA

I did not plan to listen to this cassette this morning.  It merely came to hand, next in line after the two Joan Baez cassettes I listened to earlier this week.  I listened to Joan Baez to honor my niece Alison's mother Joanna, who died of cancer on this month in an Edmonton hospital.  One of the Baez cassettes was songs I recorded from Joanna's Joan Baez two-record set, Joan Baez:  From Every Stage in 1978. I was in high school in Edson, where I grew up and where Joanna taught.  Edson is 700 kilometres east northeast of where I type now, in Williams Lake, where I plan to spend the rest of my life, I hope many years.

JULY 4

Eight years after 1978, in early July, 1986,  in the Hudson's Bay Northern Stores Department Personnel Office, on the third floor of the downtown Edmonton Hudson's Bay department store, Personnel Manager Steve, a Canadian, and Mackenzie River Regional Manager Bruce, a Scot, hired me to work for The Bay.  On July 4, 1986, I flew from Edmonton to Yellowknife, and in a second, smaller plane from Yellowknife to Fort Simpson.  Or did I fly directly from Edmonton to Fort Simpson?  However I flew, The Bay deducted the $600 plane fare from my first six paychecks.

July 4, 1986 and July 4, 1992 were pivotal days in my life.  July 4, 1992 is a day for another story.

I worked for The Bay in the Mackenzie and Slave River Valleys from July, 1986-August, 1987.  I rose from working in the accounts office office of the Fort Simpson Bay to running the grocery side of the Fort Providence Bay to running the Fort Resolution Bay during its manager's absence for Edmonton meetings, to running the Fort Liard Bay between the time The Bay moved one manager to another store, and brought another manager to that store. 

SMALL CAT

I remember driving from Fort Nelson to Fort Liard the half ton truck of incoming manager Dale, who was transferring, with his wife and cat, after their holidays, from Fort Macpherson, near the Arctic Coast, to the north.  Years later I would meet a teacher who moved with her husband from Fort Macpherson to Anaham, my spouse's community 100 kilometres west of where I type.  Betty was from Smoky Lake, east of Edson, and her husband Ivan was from know not where. 

The farthest north I ever got with The Bay was Fort Simpson, but I had wanted to try the Arctic.  I didn't stay long enough to become one of what the radio interviewees called a man from the Arctic Department, to whom Winnipeg Bay workers "gave a wide berth" whenever one went to the Canadian head office there.   

Thirty years ago this morning, I was at the Bay in Fort Providence, my longest posting, September, 1986-July, 1987.  Fort Providence, the first settlement along the Mackenzie River after the river leaves Great Slave Lake, had about 600 people, more than 575 of them Slavey Indians.  My house was the old store, an early-1900s building a 500m walk downriver from the new store. 

LARGE CAT

The residential school had been closed and torn down, in favor of an elementary-junior secondary school.  High school meant boarding in Yellowknife's school district dormitory, a few hundred kilometres east.  One night, teacher Ron, from southern Canada, played his guitar in the Irish-born nurse's residence, and I sang all of Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant."  I forget the middle-aged nurse's name.  She provided the only mainstream medicine.
        
It was during my Fort Providence time that I acquired the cassette tape I played this morning.  CBC Radio Yellowknife people mailed it to me after I wrote a Christmas story the station aired.  I still have a cassette recording of my story, which the station also mailed to me.  The local post office was in my store, as was a wooden box about a metre by a metre by two metres long, for furs that I and the store manager bought from local trappers. 

A lynx foot sits the cassette tape box as I type this morning.  The foot, with no flesh, but only hair, skin, and claws, was at the bottom of the fur box after I bagged the fur one day to ship to Edmonton for auction.  I don't know if the lynx foot has increased of decreased my luck since I acquired it. 

The stories on the cassette make my brief time at the "tail end" of the fur trade seem routine,  however exotic I or my readers might imagine my Bay time to have been.  For this cassette contains interviews from men, mostly from rural northern Scotland, who joined The Bay in the 1950s-60s, at what they called the tail end of the fur trade.  They describe Bay Men who had been there 30 or more years by then.

The long hours and hard work in what one man called a "paramilitary" organization trained the young migrants for prosperous lives outside The Bay.  The pay was "adequate," the job ad said in Scotland, one man recalled.

THE SEA LIFT

One Bay Man, who by 1986 was a manager in the Northwest Territories government, said that many young Scots who came remained in the North, and fit there because they had come from remote areas and faced discrimination, as the Inuit faced.  He grew up speaking Gaelic, but when the British government banned the language in schools when he was 7, he went from a Friday speaking Gaelic in school to Monday having to speak English, which he did not yet know.  Happily, Inuktitut is one of three North American Indigenous languages still retaining its numbers over generations (25 000), along with Cree (100 000) and Navajo (250 000), according to a linguistics professor whose phonetics course I recently assisted. 

Another Bay Man recalled getting in a dispute with the manager of a store on the Hudson Bay west coast during the sea lift.  That was the annual landing of a ship of supplies and merchandise for the store.  The Fort Providence manager for whom I worked, an epileptic from Ottawa who later became a recreation director before dying a few years after we parted, worked for The Bay in Inuvik and Holman Island, which had sea lifts.  Those were 16-hour days of unloading ships.  The radio interviewee said that his boss punished him by sending him with the ship to work at sea lifts at three other posts along Hudson Bay.  After this tiring ordeal, he said that he slept for two days straight.

I worked  no sea lift, but when the freight truck reached the Fort Simpson store dock, the intercom in the store announced it and commanded all staff not at a cash register to help unload it.  My first day in Fort Providence, I helped Store Manager Scott and Stocker Tony unload a truck.  I visited  Tony, a local,in his house when I visited the community in August, 2005, having armtwisted the school board into interviewing me for a teaching job I did not get.

FIRE! 

That 1500-km trip each way also found Tony's sister Linda still working in the store.  On Christmas Eve day, 1986, her cash register took in about $10 000 and balanced to the penny.  I therefore gave her a turkey.  Warm weather after Christmas threatened my unsold frozen turkeys in the warehouse, unrefrigerated, a problem I solved by having turkey raffles and other promotions to move the birds.

By 2005, my 1986-87 staff house had been renovated, a furnace having replaced the oil-burning barrel stove that heated it when I lived in it.  Open the valve near the stove, send oil from the tank outside the house, throw in a lit piece of paper, and hope for heat rather than conflagration. 

In the spring of 1986, I had the bright idea to burn the brown grass tangled in the acre that surrounded the house.    The fire raged.  Others rushed to help, as they did when my mother's grass fires raged when I was growing up and she was burning up.  Wearing shorts, leaping through the flames along one toasting wall, carrying a pail of water, I burned the hair off my right leg.  Treatment for lymphoma in 2001 would take every hair, including my eyelashes, off my body.  I am now years older than any of my hair.    

RUM BY THE CASE



"We worked hard and we partied hard," one Bay interviewee said.  He recalled a time the freight had arrived and nobody was on hand at ten in the morning to unload it.  He went to the staff house, a mess, with people sleeping all over the floor, and by eleven, the men were at work.  When he walked into the house, one local woman woke up, stood up, and asked, "What oil camp am I at?"  HBC stands for Hudson's Bay Company, but also for Here Before Christ, and Horny Boy's Club. 

An interviewee said that a local Catholic priest told him he "had the keys to the kingdom of Heaven," that is, the keys to the store, a major food and supply place.  Local women, born and raised in poverty, would likely do for Bay Men things that neither the women nor the men would confess.  Two women bedded me and I bedded a third, each encounter as free and equal as the racism and colonialism of Canada allow.  "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone...."

My first night in Fort Simpson, I went into the staff house and found a crowd of young men and women around the kitchen table, playing cards and drinking beer.  That house being full, I was told to stay with Grocery Manager Dave, in his staff house next door.  Fort Simpson's liquor store, open about 10 hours per week, rationed alcohol; but Dave shipped in rum by the case.  While I lived there, the store manager, Cal, a Scot, trying to sober Dave up, transferred this Ontario man to Norway House, Manitoba, off the road and far from liquor stores.

CALVIN AND HOBBES

Fort Simpson Store Manager Cal had worked for The Bay in Winnipeg and wanted a promotion to return there, or to go to Edmonton, his memo I saw said.  He got the Saturday Winnipeg Free Press by  mail, many days after Saturday.  Many of the staff, I included, read it.  One of the staff, a meat cutter named Gord, from Ontario, had on the wall of the staff house a piece of cardboard covered with Calvin and Hobbes comics, the first time I saw that comic strip.  Gord did not like his promotion to meat manager that summer, so instead of returning from his annual holiday down south, the Bay flying him for free to and from where it hired him, he quit while on holiday.  When Mackenzie Regional Manager Bruce came for his twice-yearly check on the store, he told Cal that he had seen Gord in the Edmonton airport, but Gord had fled, deserted, rather than confront him. 

 Another Canadian I found in Fort Simpson was happy to be back in the bush after postings in Iqaluit on Baffin Island.  "It was so cold there:  40 below with a 40 mile-per-hour wind off the water."  A woman working in the local post office, in a Canada Post building, not in The Bay, told me that she preferred "Simpson" to her former posting at Pangurtung on Baffin Island.  "There are seasons here."


GARBAGE GABE SHOOTS DOGS

Daily, I would walk the zippered, locked pouch of store receipts, $5000-$10  000, to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Fort Simpson's only bank.  In Fort Providence, I would circulate the same money, taking in what people spent and giving back for cheques they cashed; but I sometimes ordered money, by mail, from the Bank of Montreal in Edmonton, Fort Providence having no bank.  The first time I saw Canadian $1 coins was when I ordered and received a box of four 25-coin rolls of them.  Pennies were too expensive to ship, so once every couple months, I would post a sign on the bulletin board in the store encouraging people to bring in pennies. 

That Fort Providence Bay bulletin board was like the local newspaper, with some important, eccentric notices.  When too many dogs ran around the community, Gabe the local garbage collector would post a sign saying which day he would start shooting loose dogs:  tie them up or lose them.  Another sign, in mid-June, announced the forthcoming Treaty Day. 

The early-1900s discovery of oil, gas, and precious metals in the area caused the negotiation and 1921 signing of Treaty 11.  It promised an annual $5 to each signatory, their kin, and their descendants.  On July 1, people, "Dene" in Slavey, lined up at a table under the sun outside the store.  Two federal government people sat there, to give each entitled person a $5 bill.  One man in line quipped to a man behind him, "Lend me five dollars.  I'll pay you back soon."  One old man, Jean Marie, wore a red shirt, with collar and long sleeves, to this event each year. 

Jean Marie's photo is on the front of Nahecho Keh:  Our Elders, a picture book of local elders, with short biographies in English and Slavey.  I sold it in my store and I have a copy to this day.

HAAGEN DAZS

Ah, what will become of that book, and my lynx foot, after I'm gone?  The men talking on my 30-year-old cassette are likely all dead now, but some of their stories live on, as might some of mine.  I never saw their stories in print, but I did read, from the Fort Simpson library, Ernie Lyall's An Arctic Man: Sixty-Five Years in Canada's North.   Lyall, one of 19 children born in Labrador to a Scot who worked for The Bay, had an Inuit Number, rare for a non-Inuit, I remember from this autobiography.  
I joined The Bay older than the radio interviewees did, and stayed less time. They were 17-21.  I was 24, which seemed older then than it does now.  Unlike them, I had been on my own for a few years, had numerous jobs, and more education:  two university degrees.

 No doubt not all Bay Men stayed for years, even then.  "In those days, you stayed, you learned the language.  You didn't just go there for a stint of one to three years," one interviewee said.  I left The Bay after a year, to became an academic, but I did not become an academic.  Perhaps I did not stay with The Bay long enough to learn hard work, although I worked some long hours for my $14 000 annual salary, $120 deducted monthly for room and board. 

There was no limit to what value of food the staff could charge at the store, but one day in the store office, Cal told Ian the main bookkeeper and me that he wanted to reduce staff food costs.  He had walked into the staff house and seen "one guy eating steak, another pork chops, another a frozen dinner," and ordered the staff to reduce their food costs by eating more meals in common, using less-expensive ingredients.  Still, the staff continued to ship in Haagen Dazs ice cream, affordable only to them and to the few well-paid others in the village.  I don't know what became of Cal; old, perhaps dead.  Ian quit that summer to return to his native Montreal for a Masters of Business Administration degree.  He and I kicked a soccer ball around the local high school playground a few times.  I  hope Ian, a few years older than I, is all right today.  

Soon after Ian quit, Cal, finding me unable to do Ian's job despite the business degree that probably caused The Bay to start me in the office, transferred me to Fort Providence by Labor Day, 1986.  Over the next few months, Store Manager Scott taught me how to run every aspect of a store, after almost firing me on my 25th birthday, September 22.  "They sent you here to burn you off [make me quit], but you talked me out of firing you," I remember him saying.  We got on well after that, and after he browbeat me into keeping my grocery manager desk neat, a habit I kept in a future, brief career as a teacher.  Neither The Bay nor teaching was for me. 

NEWFOUNDLANDERS

I hope David is fine, too.  This Bonavista man, about my age, was at Fort Simpson when I arrived, as was a Stephenville man whose name I forget but whose Newfoundland accent was different from David's.  After I quit graduate school in 1989, I saw Newfoundland for the first time, and I heard both its east coast lilt and harsher west coast accent; southern and northern Ireland, transposed to Canada?  A couple years later, in May, 1991, I practice taught in Blanc Sablon, Quebec, on the Labrador Border, across the Strait of Belle Isle from Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula.  There I heard French spoken with a third Newfoundland accent/.

"I thought I'd never get a day off," David told me when we met.  "I worked 17 days straight when I got to Fort Providence," he explained.  I think he joined The Bay a few months before I joined.  We both quit in the summer of 1987.  After my sister drove our family truck from Edson to Fort Liard to retrieve me, we returned south with a chipboard crate that contained the motorbike that David had bought.  He wanted to ship it home to Bonavista.  We put it on an Edmonton train car.

Years later, in 2006, I met on the overnight shift in the Grande Prairie Superstore a Newfoundland woman whom Loblaws had lured West by promising travel and some housing costs in exchange for her signing a two-year contract.  I worked there while I waited for my renewed Alberta teaching certificate, but soon after I resumed teaching, a teaching job closer to home lured me back.   I who have had many homes in my adult life have at last found a home for the rest of my life.  I  hope that woman is all right.  We used to talk during our my break from shelf stocking and her break from posting prices.  My spouse of almost 25 years is in that course.  I can honestly tell her and the few who read this story that that Grande Prairie woman and I, and all the women I have met since my spouse and I got together in 1992, had only social, not sexual intercourse.

PEOPLE AND STORIES MIGRATE

Tomorrow I will start what I expect will be my last teaching job, assisting a professor teaching a course in Indigenous Canadian history and culture.

People migrated from Scotland to Canada with The Bay.  People still migrate to and within Canada for work, although the oil boom that lured people West for decades has recently ended, and shows no signs of restarting.

Still, the stories live on, eh?  Tell me yours.