"The Red Path" Novel Corrections

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Have embarrassingly-many corrections, page by page, to  The Red Path, which I finally got by mail, and wish I had proofread before CreateSpace published it.  Underlined bits should be added to the text.  Novel writing is harder than it looks.

2.  RCMP were

2.  on his heels

2. who had parlayed

7. our daughter

8. he had been  listening

13. “She... tonight.”

13. Frank the maintenance man

17. It was

18. on the heels

18. it had given

20. (The supreme court decision, after the book was published, in fact recognized Chilcotin land title, not just the right to land use.)

22. had recommended

22.  system?

22. “Click” had intended

22. blindfold on  (Good grief, so many mistakes on one page!)

24. less violent (no hyphen)

30.  whites

37. Williams Lake branch

39. (Odious debt is that because it is incurred for anti-social purposes, not because because of social cuts to repay it.  Indeed, repayment is unethical.)

40. to Russia

42. closer to Great Grandpa

43.  century earlier

43. had invented

44. fewer than

44. knowing how rare

44. entitled them

45. she had reached

45.  His decline was

48. princess were

48.  Amelia Knight (not Brown)

50.  (Chris began with that name, but I changed it to Leon, but given the reference to namesake Christopher Wren, I should have retained “Chris.”  There’s no Leon Wren, Elizabethan architect.  In future I’ll edit by reading, not by relying on word-searching and replacing.  See “Leon” and read “Chris” throughout, please.  Or if you prefer “Leon,” which I do, then make Christopher Wren a philosophical, not philological namesake.  Hell, I didn’t even proofread this novel before printing.  Sorry, readers.)

50. was Piele, (The whole name, originally “Tudud,” got deleted in a word processor word substitution, with no substitute of a man’s name.  The mistaken “was,” is absurd, makes James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake look as plain as Hemingway.  Tudud is a woman’s name, I learned after I made it Chris/Leon’s middle name.  Oops.  My bad.)

51. and to be quick

51. with that handsome

53.  (That’s not Henry’s Crossing.  It’s the Davidson, or Taseko River Bridge)

54. and putting sculptures

59.  eighth generation (this misprint recurs)

59. (The Fish Lake mine was turned down by two federal governments, the second rejection coming after publication of the book, in which the second government approved the mine.)

60. courts have

64. on our island

66. Peter Posnan, not Peter Wajda.  (Both are Polish names, the first a place, I think, the second the last name of a famous Polish filmmaker.  Posnan recurs.  Use it.)

70.  sisters

70. Alfred Wallace

70. peaceful world

71. (No “ Can....”)

73. in India

77. and returned to the socialism

79. Chilcotin people (no “s” on Chilcotin)

81. boreal forest

84. and had self-destructed

85. would now build

86. well-heeled recently tripped up by bankruptcy

90. is in over his head (mistake twice on page)

92. “ I find myself

93. “These people...live in!”

94. presumed not

96. “Should the United States....country.”  (“, not ‘)

96. “Not a bit,”

96. she herself could keep up

97. so, to cover

97. People judge a person

98. many places

102.  had derailed oil

106. the referenda

106. about Joe Hills, safe not shot

109. more importantly

110.  soon defaulting itself

112. the eighth generation (error twice on page)

112. smallpox.  What

113. eighth generation (error twice on page)

114. on which everyone’s food (remove “that”)

115. he had lost his job when his mining company

115. That friend was Albert, less full of himself

117. Its mail, shipping,

118, is becoming

121. backdropped

122.  as well as provincial

124. Anchor Larsson

125.  Archie , not Paul Ittaq

126. Leon, not Chris (error twice on page)

127. is it that, not “is is that”

127. “Leon/Chris” problem again

128. “Leon/Chris” again

129. some charity

131. (remove “however; but”)

133. across the world

133. Bengalis’ discussions

134. covered by construction

136. Alberta was now

138. “Preserved” was the right word.

140. greedy bygone era?

141.  Leon/Chris problem again

142.  dismantle roads and use

142. more Leon/Chris confusion

145. (That analogy about the tree should start with the icy blasts of winter against the tree, not the tree enduring the blasts, to make better parallelism with the Chilcotins.)

145. healed of much of the harm

146.  Chris again

147. starkly-beautiful 

Wordsworth Burnaby Norway Salvation

That blog entry title raises reader expectations.  If you want to know what's at the root of this tale, then come with me back to an elementary school writing assignment.  I was nine or ten.  The teacher had us each invent an event, then write an advertisement for it.  Then he had us remove words from it, to teach precision, until we had to choose one word to advertise our event.   I think my word was the event's location.  I reasoned that people interested enough would merely go to the site and wait for the event.

As I pondered a title for this tale, I remembered that assignment.  "Norway Salvation" came easily, but "Burnaby" came later, and "Wordsworth" last.  The early-1800s English poet Wordsworth called poetry "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, recollected in tranquility."  Oil links the Canadian west coast city of Burnaby and Norway.  The setting, the where, was the local Salvation Army thrift store.  Where, with dashes of when and whom, made this event described below.   

As I walked back to tranquility, ah would tranquility always reachable merely by walking, to compose this little tale, I thought about Henry Miller.  This mid-1900s United States writer, whose prose was too obscene for there but fine for France, produced entertaining prose from routine events.  Here is my humble, similar effort, minus the sex, sexism, and swear words.  Perhaps those deletions are deleting some readers.

Quantum theory about being in two places at once, which would have undermined my elementary school writing assignment, aside; the physics of multiple simultaneous universes which would produce readers elsewhere for those lost here, aside; Mark Twain's mockery of German as a language with verbs at the end of sentences, hence a reader is mystified until the last page of the work, where he finds all the verbs, aside; Twain a hint that you've swum many words so far and reached no storied shore; all that aside, read on about a thrift shop sale, three men, and a 45 rpm record.

The Salvation Army had a sign on the sidewalk today advertising 50% off furniture and Easter items, and books for $4.00 per bag.  There was no advertised bag size, I would later think, as I looked at the books and pondered the weight of a big black plastic bag full of books.  Perhaps Easter furniture got a double discount; I didn't notice any life-sized, or other sizes of crucifixes in stock.  Perhaps an Easter or furniture book, or coffee table book big enough to be a coffee table, got a double discount.   A big coffee table book about Easter?  As well as many religious books, I noticed Frank McCourt's autobiography Angela's Ashes in stock.  In it, he says he and his Irish brethren, and sistern, spent much time in the church in rainy Limerick, more to get dry than to get religion.  I don't know what the discount would be on a book about building furniture, or on a chair shaped like an Easter basket.

Around a corner, where life often gets more interesting, I found two men discussing pipelines.  Neither wanted the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, planned to stretch from the petro-province of Alberta, to tidewater on the rainforest coast of British Columbia, 1500 kilometres west.  I don't think Enbridge asked for these men's opinions, but neither did the two men ask for mine after one said the pipeline should go south, through the United States, to tidewater on the Gulf of Mexico.


"Nebraska stopped that pipeline," I interjected cryptically, as Henry Miller would in a Parisian brothel, to interrupt a different sort of flow.   "There'll be no Northern Gateway Pipeline," I continued definitively.  "The people up North won't have it.  Also, the mayor of Burnaby is against more pipelines through his city," I finished.

One of the men then crowded this thrift store conversation by raising an oil refinery, although one wouldn't fit in the store.  "What about that guy who wants to build a refinery on the coast?  He owns The Tribune."

Invoking imitation journalism, such as that paper practices, didn't help the man's case.  "The problem is the pipeline," I continued.  "Enbridge couldn't even clean up a leak in Michigan, which is flat with lots of road access.  They wouldn't have a chance in the mountains around Terrace."

Wise nods all round.

"They should refine it where they dig it," the other man said.  Before I came upon them, they lamented that pipelines bring few jobs.  "More jobs that way." 

Norway is imminent, readers.  Be patient.

"Or scale down the tarsands," I added.  "Look at Norway," I dragged into this refinery-crowded thrift store conversation.  "They have almost a trillion dollars in a trust fund from their oil."

"I was in Norway," the second man said.

Who expects a customer in a Canadian Salvation Army thrift store to have been to Norway?  That statement made me want to write about this encounter.  There is a Sons of Norway club in this city, and there have been Norwegian language classes here, and the coast to the west of here boasts Norwegian settlers because its fjords resemble those of Norway,and the Lutheran church is the biggest building in the coastal community of Hagensborg; but I was surprised that this thrift shopper had been in Norway.  Of course, Norway is a thrifty country, banking oil money, moving its fish farms to Canada's west coast, spreading disease among local fish.

As English Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said when Iranians elected a socialist government and threatened to stop English theft of Iranian oil, "Socialism is fine in England, but not in Iran." 

The Norway traveler had my attention.  Now I have yours.

"I was there," he said.  "They have a whole underground city set up, with special roads and rail lines.  There's enough room for lots of people."

English writer HG Wells' story "The Time Traveler" and German film maker Fritz Lang's film "Metropolis" swirled in my mind, like Norwegians in a bunker.

"The Norwegians are ready for the future," I offered, lamenting that Canadians aren't, and are instead going into the past, this time as hewers of tarsands, drawers of water.

"They're ready for disaster," he amended.

"We have disaster already, in government," I added.

Laughs all round.

Then the first man said goodbye and headed toward the furniture.  The second man went the other way, toward the clothes.  I stayed there and found a 45 rpm record of "One Tin Soldier" by the Original Caste.  I didn't buy it, but I did think of adding something of it to this story's title.  The song played in my head as I looked at the books and pondered big black plastic garbage bags.  Nor did I buy Frank McCourt's autobiography, nor anything else.

On my way out, I looked at an old, heavy, sturdy table and chair set, too heavy for Jesus to overturn in the temple, but probably not gopher wood and therefore not optimal for a crucifix.           
      
 An old comic strip, "Hagar the Horrible", has a monk lament to Hagar the viking that more understanding among people would bring more peace in the world.  Hagar replies, "True, true.  How are we going to get everyone to speak Norwegian?"

Happy Easter, everyone. 


       

Great Blue Heron

I saw many birds during today's early-morning walk to the lake in my small Canadian city, but one bird stood out, then flew away.

During the who walk to the lake, crows croaked, on the ground, on treetops, on buildings.  Chilcotins  here call them ravens, but a Shuswap once told me they are mostly crows, which have black legs and feet, which she said raven's don't have.  Both Chilcotins and Shuswaps venerate ravens.  Many who venerate ravens know a dance called the Crow Hop, originally from Prairie indigenous people.    

Dozens of gulls milled in the parking lot between the curling rink and the rodeo grounds, too late to curl, to early to ride.  I don't know anyone who venerates gulls.

Redwing blackbirds are another story, and bird, rare enough to attract bird experts from far away.  One expert spoke at the lakeside nature centre a couple years ago.  A couple trees by the lake were a-chirp with these robin-sized birds.  Crows croaked in the same trees.  Two weeks ago, I saw my first robin of the year.

Geese honked on the ice and overhead.  Ducks paddled about.  A couple geese would waddle ahead of me on the road back from the lake, which the city surrounds.  Some would be on the rodeo grounds.

I interrupt this bird saga to mention three deer I saw yesterday in the field by my apartment building.  I now return to today and birds.

I walked the trail that goes to the tip of the peninsula in the lake, the woods and sky alive with the rustle and song of birds, geese milling and honking on the lake, ducks swimming in the few patches of open water.  I looked down the lake, the risen sun orange on the water, then turned around and looked over the city and the three kilometres I had walked.  I stood there long, thinking, happy to see another spring.

Then I started walking back on the peninsula trail.  I took a detour along a narrower trail that boasts some wooden walkways.  I stopped to look over an expanse of last year's cattails, dry and akimbo.

Then I saw it, across the cattails, at water's edge:  a great blue heron.  It was the first time I saw this long-beaked, tall, skinny, blue bird.  Stately.  Pretty.  Strong.  Within three seconds it launched itself quietly into flight.  I stood watching it fly out over the lake, which is a kilometre wide, five long, and very deep, like most lakes in the Western Cordillera.  Neighboring Quesnel Lake is 600 metres deep.     

The Boreal Forest around where I grew up had different birds, but never this bird.  It had chickadees, and I heard some as I walked this morning.  It had blue jays, sparrows, robins, starlings, grouse with their noisy flutter.  Where I live now, south of the Boreal Forest, I have seen eagles, hawks, owls, bluebirds.  A couple weeks ago I saw an eagle launch from a ditch:  six-foot wingspan, it seemed.

Today I saw a great blue heron for the first time in my life.  This shouldn't surprise me because I live along a major migration route for birds.  The local nature centre organizes a yearly bird-count day in which people recognize dozens of birds.  Today's heron counted for me.      

 

Pliny on Religion

Pliny the Elder, quoted in Benjamin Farrington's Greek Science 2, (Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1949) inveighs against religion.  Farrington introduces Pliny, and at the end calls Pliny's a cheerful life:

  "And here in conclusion, is another passage, which owes some of its arguments to Lucretius, but is completely personal and characteristic.  'Beyond the grave lie the empty speculations about the spirits of the dead.  For every man it will be the same after his last day as it was before his first.  After death neither body nor spirit will have sensation any more than they did before he was born.  This vanity of staking a claim on the future and imagining for oneself a life in the season of death takes various forms:  the immortality of the soul, the transmigration of souls, the life of the shades in the underworld, the worship of the spirits of the dead, even the deification of one who has already ceased to be a man.  As if, forsooth, we drew our breath in any way that could distinguish us from the other animals; as if there were not many creatures who live longer than we do, for whom nobody has imagined a similar immortality.  These are the inventions of a childish folly, of a mortality greedy of never ceasing to be.  Plague take it, what madness is this, of repeating life in death?  How shall those born ever rest, if sense is to remain with the soul on high or with the ghost below?  Nay, this fond fancy destroys nature's chief blessing, death, and doubles the smart of him that is to die by the calculation of what is still to come.  If life is to be so sweet, who can find it sweet to have ceased to live?  But how much  happier, how much more sure, that every man should come to trust himself and take from his proven insensibility of what was before he was born his warrant of the peace that is to be.'  The author of these words lived an active, cheerful life in the service of his fellow-men and died an adventurous death while making too close an observation of Vesuvius in eruption."  (136-137)

Farrington notes Lucretius, whose On the Nature of Things I read years ago and highly recommend.  Farrington's book details Ancient Greek and Roman scientific achievements, despite religious efforts to corral and conscript science.  Judeo-Christianity,  like the war machine now, soon drew the best minds to its service, and science progressed little until the Renaissance. 

Interesting quote.  Interesting book.      

Israel in Dustbin of History?

Decades ago, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said that socialism would leave capitalism in the dustbin of history, or words to that effect.  That's still a work in progress, but I made progress in a dumpster this week.  I found Israel there.

This phrasing recalls the religious zealot who asks, "Have you found Jesus?"  My reply,  "I didn't know Jesus was lost."

"Boy Scouts for Israel?" the hotel clerk asked a janitor on the phone.

"Boy Scouts for Israel?" I puzzled humorously to myself.  I had told the clerk that the pin said "Boycott Israel."  The janitor might have opposed the sentiment might have purposely thrown it out.

"It's hard to replace.  I got it in Edmonton," I explained.  I remembered the Palestine Solidarity Edmonton table at the north end Islamic cultural centre and high school.  There in December, 2012, a fundraising event for medical aid to Gaza raised tens of thousands of dollars.  There I got the pin, and another that said "BDS" for "Boycott Divestment and Sanction." 

History will leave Israel in the dustbin, but how did my pin get into a dumpster?  And how did I find it?

The hotel in question was the site of a two-day seminar on Canadian indigenous education.  South Africa got its apartheid idea from Canada's treatment of indigenous people.  This seminar was an effort to restore indigenous dignity through education.  One might argue that any parallel system, even one run by indigenous people, perpetuates Canadian apartheid; but that argument was absent at the seminar.  I would argue that a parallel system improves on the pathetic public system and anti-democratic private systems of education, and that this indigenous system should continue until the public system is really inclusive.  Indeed, the seminar argued for inclusion, against the racism that continues in the non-indigenous systems.

That afternoon, my pin was absent from my coat, which I had taken off at the seminar.  I went to the hotel desk to ask if anyone found the pin.  Two friendly women there were happy to call the janitor who cleaned the seminar site.  I explained the pin, which features a graphic of the Israeli apartheid wall.  I was happy not to meet a wall of indifference or hostility in seeking the pin.

Nikita Khrushchev's Berlin Wall is in the dustbin of history, waiting for the Israeli Apartheid Wall to join it.  The Soviet system wasn't perfect, but it aimed for that, aimed for a better future, unlike the Zionist system, which aims for a non-existent past at the expense of the present and future of Jews and non-Jews.    

"Yes, the janitor found a pin," one clerk told me as she talked on the phone.  "'Boy Scouts for Israel,.'" she confirmed into the receiver.

She confirmed something that doesn't exist.  The United Nations made in 1948 confirmed something that shouldn't exist when it allowed a Jewish state on Palestinian land.  Religous states should have disappeared with the Reformation, but a few hang on, like the greasy discarded food, coffee grounds, and napkins I found in the garbage bag in that dumpter, after I climbed in.

A bag of discarded seminar papers confirmed that I had found the one bag which the janitor had used for the site's garbage.  I poured out the bag.  I used one piece of garbage to poke through the rest of the garbage.  The United States, perched on stolen land,  uses Israel to poke the land it stole in 1948.

On the point of giving up, I saw the pin glint, among coffee grounds. 

Climbing out of the dumpster was much harder than climbing into it had been.  I commend the dumpster divers who troll these metal behemoths for beverage cans and bottles, for which recycling agencies pay deposits.

Climbing out of Israel apartheid will be harder than sliding into it had been, for Zionists, Palestinians, and the world.  Palestine has room for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as it had for centuries, until Zionism sabotaged peace and progress.

As I dug in the garbage, as I struggled out of the dumpster, as I walked away into a sunny winter day in my mountainous home in Western Canada, a home on indigenous land, I thought of Gaza, thought of Palestine.

People in Occupied Palestine suffer more than I did.  Soldiers stop them as they go about their peaceful daily duties, governments and courts rule against their human rights, jailers detain them unjustly, a few outsiders help by boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning the Zionist state of Israel, and the world watches, wrings its hands, and does little, lest the United States, and increasingly Canada, attack the world for trying to bring justice in Palestine.

I live on stolen indigenous land, which is America, that New World which meant to improve on the Old World of European empires and wars.  That improvement is not here, but it is coming, thanks to such as the seminar I attended, thanks to people in solidarity around the world, thanks to justice, sometimes weak, but never dead, thanks to the harm that injustice does to others and to itself. 

Khrushchev's dustbin still has room for obsolete, hurtful ways of thinking and living, including  capitalism, racism, and anti-semitism and its spawn Zionism.  English poets Percy Shelley and Samuel Coleridge wrote of "Ozymandias" and "Kublai Khan," whose empires fell to dust.            

I recently re-read Ancient Greek tragic plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.  They put their cultural myths on stage.  The myths and the plays taught people how to live justly in an unjust world.  They showed history driving people to tragedy despite their efforts to avoid it.  Modern dramatists could stage our era's historically-driven tragedy of indigenous land called home by competing people.  Cassandra claimed "There's no way out."  Khrushchev and I beg to differ.  If not, better art as Aristotle might confirm, but worse life, as indigenous suffering implies today.  The Athenian Empire did suffer the fate of Ozymandias and Kublai Khan.

Well, readers.  Get to work.  Get writing.    

A Story About the Sisters of Christ the King in Anaham, 1944-2013

A Story of the Sisters of Christ the King and Anaham, 1944-2013

   In 1944, Tl’Etinqox Chief Casimir Bob offered land to the Sisters of Christ the King.  Archbishop Duke built the convent.  The sisters offered to serve the people, which they did for decades.  At one time, Anaham had ten sisters.      

   "Sister Nurse"

                                                        

   The sisters were nurses.  In those days, people rarely travelled.  For many of us, these sisters were better than doctors.  People would travel by horse and wagon to see “sister nurse.”  Sister Theresa would travel by horse and wagon, in all kinds of weather, to treat the sick.  The convent was our pharmacy.

    The sisters ran the hospital near their convent.  They treated people from all over.  They delivered babies.  They saved lives.  Oldtimers will remember the day the hospital burned down, in June, 1958, on a hot day.   People came running to rescue as many patients as they could, but some patients died in the fire.

     The convent was also our source of religious inspiration and religious articles.  Who didn’t get a rosary or scapular from them?      

   "Teaching All Subjects"

 

     The sisters were also teachers.  They taught in our schools, and not only catechism.  The first school was a one-room cabin by the priest’s house.  The second school was Raphael Alphonse’s old house.  The third school was Late  Johnny Harry’s house.  Then the present school was built, with electricity and plumbing, which the earlier schools did not have.    Sister Assumption taught in the one-room cabins and in the present school.   Soon there will be a new school. 

   Many people remember the sisters teaching all subjects in the school.  Until the 1970s, all the teachers were sisters.  Even the first teachers who were not sisters were Catholic:  Mr. Joe McIsaac and Ms. Joy Zelamaya, for example. 

Sister Eileen would be in the school early every day to supervise floor hockey, and there until late at night.  Under her leadership, the school won tournaments in floor and ice hockey, in Anaham and elsewhere.  When she blew her whistle, children and staff jumped.

The sisters also brought school students on field trips.  One memorable annual trip was to the May Ball Festivities at Alexis Creek.  Students square danced, as they did at other times during the school year.  The sisters even ran clubs, such as Brownies, Girl Guides, Cubs, and Boy Scouts.    

The annual school Christmas concert was a fun and glittery event.  It required lots of preparation.  One year, the school performed “The Nutcracker.”  Another year’s theme was “Around the World.”  Students had fancy costumes and did dances from different cultures:  Dutch, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and prairie Indian, for example.  Another year, the students acted out “Twas the Night Before Christmas.”  At the end of the concert, people would honor the nativity scene.  Sometimes there was a real baby in the nativity scene.  

                                                                                                                        

"Happy and Relaxing"
 

Sister Rose, our special Sister Rose, collected and distributed clothes for years.  She had a green thumb, and her garden was beautiful every year.  Many of us stole apples from her tree.  Sorry, Sister.  There were even chickens for awhile.   Sister Rose wanted to be buried in Anaham, but she rests in peace in Quebec, near other sisters and their Mother House.  Perhaps there’s an apple tree there. 

The beautiful grounds around the convent  were a great place for children to play.  How happy and relaxing that was for us kids.  Some children even stayed in the convent for awhile.          

The sisters prepared generations of us for sacraments.  They did this throughout the Chilcotin:  Stone, Redstone, Nemiah, Toosey, and Alexandria.  For baptism,  communion, and confirmation, the sisters were our patient, caring teachers.  A sister would help nervous parents and godparents during baptism.   

Sisters saw many priests serve in Anaham, and they fed many of these priests at the convent.  Father Haggarty was a frequent diner.  Now that he is in  Lillooet without any sisters to help, perhaps he can cook.  Father John is in North Vancouver and Father Maynard is in Edmonton.  Perhaps they can cook now, too.  The people gave the sisters fish and moose.  The sisters gave the people their dedication.

  The sisters served with many priests, brothers, bishops, chiefs, and councillors.     

  The sisters also made spiritual house calls.  They would visit homes during May, the Month of Mary.  They brought communion to the sick and to elders.  They would always be ready when a family was bringing a body back before a funeral:  the church would be open, clean, and welcoming in those hard times.  They would pray with us.  They would pray for us.  They became part of us.

"Busy Times"

At Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, busy times, the sisters would decorate the church, with help from the community.  At Thanksgiving, each helper would bring something.  Each would go home with something. 

During advent, the church was beautifully decorated, with a nativity scene, branches, and candles.  If a sister chose you to light an advent candle, you would feel like a very special person.  Up in the loft, the children would sing along.  These young participants would remember Midnight Mass for years.  The church would be warm and crowded.  The New Year’s Eve  celebration would sometimes be in the convent chapel.   

During Holy Week, sisters would choose the readers, as they would for weekly masses.  Being asked to read at a mass was an honor.    

Many times during the year, children and their families went to the convent chapel in the wee hours.  This was before everyone had electricity.  The convent would be a warm and bright place.

"Favorite Sisters"

     

Each of us has favorite sisters. Some were here for a long time.  Some were here for a short time.  Some went away for awhile and came back.  Some went to other countries:  Haiti, Philippines, Korea, and countries in Africa, for example.  Some sisters retired.  All were special:   Sister Marcella, Sister Hisako, Sister Joanne, Sister Jackie, Sister Gemma, Sister Henriette, Sisters Sheila and Elnora playing guitars, Sister Edwina, and Sister Joan with her beautiful singing voice.

Sister Helen had a volkswagon, which people would race on horseback, and a little house where she taught pottery and other crafts.  Sister Eileen played the church organ, and drove fast, until a deer hit her.  She says she didn’t hit the deer.  She says the deer hit her.     

Sister Theresa was called Sister St. Paul, when sisters had saint’s names, not their own names:   Sister Lucienne (Sister Assumption), Sister Evva (Sister Veronica), Sister Irma (Sister Gabrielle), just to name a few.  In 1994, the sisters celebrated 50 years of service in the Kamloops diocese.

"In Our Hearts"

Chief Casimir Bob welcomed the sisters to Anaham.  Today his grandson, Chief Joe Alphonse (me), and councillors, thank the sisters for 69 years of service.

This is a sad time and a happy time.  We say farewell to the sisters, who have been here so long and done so much.  We miss them already, and they’re not gone yet.  Come visit anytime.  We’ll ask the deer to stay out of the way. 

The sisters leave our land, but they stay in our hearts.

-Written by Carla Alphonse and Michael Wynne      

Bike, Bush, Breach, Be, Beer, Bard

Sunday, October 6, 2013   Williams Lake, Canada

With a title that goes from bike to bard,
Catching your eye should not be hard.

This tale begins on a bike, riding in search of Dog Creek Road.  One can find this road by driving
from Vancouver on the TransCanada Highway 350 kilometres north northeast, then on Highway 97 200 kilometres north, then on Highway 20 two kilometres west of the Williams Lake junction.

Today I found Dog Creek road through on bush trails that spidered up the hills that divide it from South Lakeside Drive, which branches off Highway 20 one kilometre west of the aforesaid Williams Lake junction.

A previous attempt had me go to the end of South Lakeside, about seven kilometres, then climb onerous hills on shrinking trails before I emerged at Kwaleen School, the latest local public school to close; but on the same side of the hills as South Lakeside Drive.  Today I branched up less-onerous hills only two kilometres along the drive.

Bushwacking away, mostly pushing my bike, I emerged at Allen Road, which joins Schmidt Road, which joins Dog Creek Road.  Rather than a leisurely coast downhill back to Williams Lake, however, I rolled eastward off Dog Creek Road onto Tamarack Road, to search for a bush trail way to get back downhill to the city below.

Woody Guthrie came to mind as I walked up to a log fence with a sign that said, "No Trespassing."  On the other side it said nothing.  That side was made for you and me, but I walked along the fence rather than breach it.  A log mansion has breached the hilly forest, its kilometre-long, winding driveway private, but a necessary path downhill, to...

Walmart, another breach of the local wilderness, and robust local economy and fair wage legacy.

That legacy is history across Highway 20, where a non-operating sawmill squats along the Williams Lake River Valley.  A lake river valley, you wonder?  Yep.  Riding among the many buildings and piles of planed lumber and logs, I remembered when this mill was noisy with jobs and production, a few short years ago.

I rode toward the millsite bridge, to avoid going farther along the river to find a cross the river on one of many railway flatcars converted to bridges farther downstream.  Every time I have seen the bridge, the gate on its east side has been locked.  Today the gate was open, the padlock hanging on the gate's chain links.  Open gate, open lock, like Rome, open city in the Italian film of that name, private property in retreat, at last.  The mill people or the bike people breached this barrier, I rejoiced.  I want to find someone to thank.

I rode a kilometre along the path on the river's east side, then began to climb a trail to the railway crossing above.  This crossing had crew shacks and sheds when I came to Williams Lake in the early-1990s.  An old woman lived in a little house surrounded by lilacs, on the west side of the tracks.  Now all the buildings are gone.

Two snakes, brown, about a centimetre wide and 40 centimetres long, crossed my path as I climbed the trail.  Coleridge's line from The Ancient Mariner came to mind as I stopped my bike to let first one snake, then 20 metres farther uphill the other snake, cross my path:  I honored man and bird and beast, as Coleridge wrote; or at least I honored snakes.  Perhaps a reference to Milton's Paradise Lost is more fitting.  The snakes breach the land long after provincial government sold what was a provincially-owned railway to what was a federally-owned railway, and is now a subsidiary of a United States railway.  The railway went.  Jobs went.  Snakes survived, possibly thrived.

I considered riding a few kilometres north to the dump, with its Share Shed, actually two sheds, and surrounding ground, where people may leave things or take what others leave.  I imagined that many former millworkers shopped there, given the recent destruction of the local economy by governments and businesses, near and far.

But people be.  People survive, some happily like me, here in this depressed and sometimes depressing city, whose population was 13 000 when I got here in the early-1990s and is below 10 000 now.  The art of merely being, enjoying each day of life, is a useful art too rarely practiced.  My late mother-in-law could do it.  I have a photograph of her merely sitting on a lawn chair, smiling in the summer sunshine.  Many times I saw that look of contentment on her face:  merely glad to be alive.

The beer can, which I found in the dirt off the edge of the Walmart parking lot, in my bike bag, I rode across the train tracks, walked uphill a couple blocks, and rode a few more blocks home.  Riding along the paved path that joins my apartment building to the local recreation centre, with its swimming pool, two ice rinks, and performing arts theatre, I saw several beer cans.  They filled my bike bags.  The beer cans were from fans of last night's hockey game between a local team and another town's team, in an adult league that feeds no professional hockey league.  The economy goes nowhere, the hockey players go nowhere, but the beer cans go for dimes at the local liquor store, a  government-owned corporation in a province and country selling assets built by generations of people.

These were mostly Budweiser beer cans.  I once read that the Busch brewery in St. Louis, USA, or somewhere, has enough capacity to fill the whole Canadian beer market's volume; albeit with yucky beer. This could turn Canada into a nation of teetotallers, or alcoholics for lack of tasty beer. 

One bike trail from earlier in the day was called Guinness, presumably the beer choice of some mountain bikers.   I wouldn't ride those steep trails, drunk or sober.

While I wait for a local renaissance, I'll turn on the U.S. Public Broadcasting System television channel to watch William Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth, Part Two, from the English Renaissance:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/the-hollow-crown-shakespeares-history-plays/synopsis-henry-iv-part-2/1750/