February 23, 2017 Williams Lake, Canada
Today I misplaced Ivan Denisovich.
I read that Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about life in a Stalinist prison camp before 2000, when I began writing about books I read. The only Solzhenitsyn I wrote about is The Gulag Archipelago, which I read in 2010. That larger novel, about many prison camps, was not at the local used book sale in the mall, where I freed Ivan from a backroom box today, only to misplace him.
Perhaps I should blame my being sick, not sick as in Cancer Ward, whose inmates suffer from counterrevolution, not congestion. I have congestion, but I haven't been tested for counterrevolution.
That third Solzhenitsyn novel I remember reading is not in the book sale, making losing it there impossible.
The 1965 film version of Doctor Zhivago says, near the end, that Lara's name could have been on a list that got misplaced. Such things happened in those days. I misplaced the Ivan book this day.
I volunteered my time at the book sale, as Solzhenitsyn did in a Stalinist camp. I found Ivan, a couple Hemingways, no doubt counterrevolutionary, and various other interesting books imprisoned in back room boxes. I filled and hauled out a couple boxes of such books, but I don't remember where I shelved Ivan for sale.
Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union in the 1970s for the United States, but later criticized his adoptive country more than he had his birth country. Perhaps he would have approved of my effort against the commodification of art, particularly his art. He's dead now. Used book sales send no royalties to authors, alive or dead.
If the book landed among the books about nature, or children, or the mass-market paperbacks, someone not even looking for it might buy it.
"Look, Ed," Sheila might say. "Here's a book about a day in a life. Remember that day the camper broke down and we had to sleep in it on the highway, until your brother Bill drove up with a u-joint the next morning? That was quite a day. Perhaps this Ivan guy had quite a day. He must have had, to need a whole book to describe it."
"Look at this book, Martha, right beside the Stephanie Myers books," Mary might say to her teenage friend at the sale. "This book only covers one day. Myers can put months in a book. Should we buy it. How interesting can a single day be?"
"Ruby, I found the book for you, in with the Danielle Steele books, of all places. It's about a day in man's life. He sounds like a foreigner. You know how those foreigners are. Remember what I told you about the young men working on the cruise ship that Paul and I were on in the Caribbean? Those bucks pack a lot into a day, let me tell you; but I'm married, so I didn't find out. My friend Barbara, though.....Whoa! She walked funny for days. This book might be about some hot foreigner."
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is out of its back room box and displayed for sale, somewhere, in the used book sale. Twice a year, the local Rotary Club sells used books, largely the same books that rotate through the club's collection bins, scattered around this city. The Stalinists rotated people through prison camps. If my sickness-induced ineptitude increased the chances of the sale of just this one book, then I spent my time well.
Ivan might not have gotten along with Hemingway, who would fit better beside Danielle Steele than among real literature.
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Red Klister Era
Sunday, February 12, 2017 Williams Lake, Canada
Is ours a red klister era?
Red klister is a ski wax for warm temperatures. I rarely used it when I skied in adolescence in the late-1970s. From warmest to coldest, the waxes were red, blue, green, and white; green I used the most often; not much call for cold-weather wax in this warming climate
HAROLD AND PINE TAR
I have my brother Harold to thank for starting me cross-country skiing.
When I was 14 and he worked in social services and recreation in Wildwood, he brought several pairs of skis, his spouse Joanna, my younger sister Maryanne, and I to the Edson golf course one cold winter day. We donned ski boots, mine too small, attached them to the three-point toe bindings on skis, and learned to ski. After skiing around on the golf course for awhile, we packed into his and Joanna's station wagon, turned the heat on full, and held one another's cold feet and hands.
Harold got me and Maryanne boots, poles,m and wooden skis. My Finnish Splitkein skis covered many kilometres that winter and the next, until I skied off the edge of the bank of Millar Lake and snapped the top two feet off one ski. Those skis had cost $20. He got me a new pair, Norwegian like our mom's dad's ethnicity, and I used them constantly during high school, and later in the Northwest Territories. As I type this, I listen to a compact disc of Edvard Grieg piano music by Knut Erik Jensen, who performed here a few years ago: good Scandinavian soundtrack for this story.
After a day of high school, or during a weekend, I, and sometimes Maryanne, would go out back door of our Edson-area acreage house, put on our skis, and ski off into the nearby boreal forest, toward the gravel pit past the dump. The gravel pit's hills were endless enjoyment, and regular wipe-outs.
Those wooden skis required pine tar, heated and rubbed in with a rag, and wax, rubbed in with cork. Harold had shown us how to do this. We would go to gas stove in the Little House, the house my dad had hauled from Spike Island to the acreage in the early-1950s for his mother, our Irish-born granny (1879-1960). Spike Island was the Edson neighborhood of railway workers. A few old houses stood there the last time I passed through Edson, in 2016.
Using a 3 cm paintbrush, we would paint tar from the 250 mL can onto half the length of the ski. A stove burner lit, its iron cover removed using the iron lifter with the heat-resistant coiled handle, we would put the tarred ski over the flame, careful not to start the tar burning. Remove the ski, rub the tar in with a rag, and tar the other end.
The skis tarred, wax each with wax for that day's air temperature. Sometimes put a different color wax under the part of the ski under the boot, for grip climbing hills. This helped even if one encountered a steep hill, requiring fish tracks, that is, splaying the toes of the skis outward to walk up duck-style, or setting the skis parallel to the hill and climbing it by walking sideways.
"PFFF."
In the Northwest Territories in 1986-87, I had those wooden skis, after Dad sent them by bus in early winter. I did not tar them but I might have waxed them once or twice. I skied mostly along trails beside the Mackenzie River in Fort Providence, where I lived from September-July to work in the Hudson's Bay Northern Store. As I recall in Michael Wynne: My Youth, some days the bush was so quiet that I could hear snow from trees hit the ground snow as it fell from tree branches: "Pfff. Pfff."
I also skied in Fort Resolution, in the Slave River Delta, when I ran that Bay for one week in late March, 1987, while the manager was in Edmonton for meetings. The local priest had fixed wooden runners between the skis on a sled his snowmobile pulled. He used this contraption to make ski trails, "Seven trails, numbered 1 to 7, like the seven highways in the Northwest Territories," he told me.
BOITANIO PARK
Skiing for the first time this winter, finally, in Boitanio Park today, I remembered those days, so long ago. My skis are fibreglass, a mid-1990s gift from my dear spouse Carla. My old boots, which came with the wooden skis, were cracked and worn. I skied using them and the wooden skis once or twice near Alexis Creek in 1991-92, and to teach children to ski at Alkali Lake a couple years later, using the shed full of skis and boots and poles the school had.
I miss skiing more than I miss teaching.
Boitanio Park, named after an Italian who settled in Williams Lake decades ago, is a kilometre long and about a half kilometre wide, a hundred metres down a walking path from our apartment building. It's not skiing out the back door into the boreal, but it's what's available here, unless I want to drive 20 km north to Bull Mountain, the local ski club's trail network, and pay to ski.
Pay to ski? That'll be the day, although I have downhill skied, the last time having been near Quebec City during the 1990 Christmas break from my McGill University teacher training program. I also downhill skied at Silver Summit, near Edson, and Mount Timothy, near Williams Lake, where I cross-country skied the same day, our daughter's elementary school field trip day there.
CANADIAN COLONIALISM
Making a wee trail network on the park today, and skiing over it a few times, I thought about colonialism and the upcoming 150th anniversary of the July 1, 1867 founding of Canada as a nation, on Indigenous land. I had planned a trip to Ottawa for the anniversary, but knowing what I know about Canada's ongoing colonial legacy, I decided against the trip. Once one has learned the truth, how can one revert to living the lie?
"This land called Canada" is how the teacher of a University of Northern British Columbia First Nations history and culture course describes this land. She's Metis and I'm her teaching assistant for this all-day Friday-Saturday course taught this month at Tl'esqox, a Tsilhqot'in community 50 km west of where I type today.
The Tsilhqot'in never surrendered their land in battle or by treaty, although most do not go as far as many Mohawks, and deny they are Canadians. Still, one elder said during a recent Tl'esqox meeting attended by the federal minister who oversees Indigenous people, there's little to celebrate on July 1. He seems not to call himself Canadian. His statement decided me against going to Ottawa, although I am not Indigenous. Yet, once one knows Canada's sorry colonial history, continuing today via its Indian Act, among other unjust laws and practices, can one celebrate in good conscience? I cannot. Today's skiing made me wonder if I should help organize a critical celebration here on July 1. Perhaps this elder has some ideas.
Confederation in s 1867 was a deal made by white men of property to better exploit other settlers on stolen land. Perhaps it helped prevent the United States from annexing Canada, a worry then, and still; but that was more scare tactic than real threat: the U.S. could have annexed a British colony or a British dominion with equal ease. See how much Canada has fallen under U.S. sway since 1867.
RED KLISTER RESISTANCE
Resistance rises against colonialism, against capitalism around the world, including on Indigenous and, which the Americas, Australia, Africa, and much of Asia are. These were rich places when European colonizers stole them; Europeans had battled for land for centuries before they left Europe. These places were not paradises; they had inequality and the wars is spawns. Under colonialism, the descendants of the pre-contact people became poorer, many died, many collaborated, many resisted. That history, the true history of Canada, is worth noting, and some of it is even worth celebrating.
Resistance to colonialism sticks around, like red klister wax sticks to skis.
To those who say, "It's over. Get over it," I say that it continues, learn it, and join the resistance, which begins inside each person. You need not block pipelines or mines or retrieve Indigenous children stolen by the foster care system, or help prevent more Indigenous women disappearing while bringing to account those who made many disappear in the past and others who make many disappear today. You need not inveigh against the systemic racism underlies all these injustices, and others.
Instead, you need to learn the real history of this land called Canada. This will help you understand why residential school survivors drink, why young people kill themselves, why a lack of trust and respect exists between Indigenous and settler people, and why some on each side strive to make a better land for us all. Join this red klister resistance to lies, and stick to the truth.
LAND, BEAUTIFUL LAND
It's about land, at bottom. It always has been about land. I skied over settler-colonial land today, and decades ago, before knowledge of settler colonialism liberated me, as honesty and truth always liberate. This ongoing liberation is joyful, as surely as skiing was joyful on this beautiful day, on this beautiful land.
Is ours a red klister era?
Red klister is a ski wax for warm temperatures. I rarely used it when I skied in adolescence in the late-1970s. From warmest to coldest, the waxes were red, blue, green, and white; green I used the most often; not much call for cold-weather wax in this warming climate
HAROLD AND PINE TAR
I have my brother Harold to thank for starting me cross-country skiing.
When I was 14 and he worked in social services and recreation in Wildwood, he brought several pairs of skis, his spouse Joanna, my younger sister Maryanne, and I to the Edson golf course one cold winter day. We donned ski boots, mine too small, attached them to the three-point toe bindings on skis, and learned to ski. After skiing around on the golf course for awhile, we packed into his and Joanna's station wagon, turned the heat on full, and held one another's cold feet and hands.
Harold got me and Maryanne boots, poles,m and wooden skis. My Finnish Splitkein skis covered many kilometres that winter and the next, until I skied off the edge of the bank of Millar Lake and snapped the top two feet off one ski. Those skis had cost $20. He got me a new pair, Norwegian like our mom's dad's ethnicity, and I used them constantly during high school, and later in the Northwest Territories. As I type this, I listen to a compact disc of Edvard Grieg piano music by Knut Erik Jensen, who performed here a few years ago: good Scandinavian soundtrack for this story.
After a day of high school, or during a weekend, I, and sometimes Maryanne, would go out back door of our Edson-area acreage house, put on our skis, and ski off into the nearby boreal forest, toward the gravel pit past the dump. The gravel pit's hills were endless enjoyment, and regular wipe-outs.
Those wooden skis required pine tar, heated and rubbed in with a rag, and wax, rubbed in with cork. Harold had shown us how to do this. We would go to gas stove in the Little House, the house my dad had hauled from Spike Island to the acreage in the early-1950s for his mother, our Irish-born granny (1879-1960). Spike Island was the Edson neighborhood of railway workers. A few old houses stood there the last time I passed through Edson, in 2016.
Using a 3 cm paintbrush, we would paint tar from the 250 mL can onto half the length of the ski. A stove burner lit, its iron cover removed using the iron lifter with the heat-resistant coiled handle, we would put the tarred ski over the flame, careful not to start the tar burning. Remove the ski, rub the tar in with a rag, and tar the other end.
The skis tarred, wax each with wax for that day's air temperature. Sometimes put a different color wax under the part of the ski under the boot, for grip climbing hills. This helped even if one encountered a steep hill, requiring fish tracks, that is, splaying the toes of the skis outward to walk up duck-style, or setting the skis parallel to the hill and climbing it by walking sideways.
"PFFF."
In the Northwest Territories in 1986-87, I had those wooden skis, after Dad sent them by bus in early winter. I did not tar them but I might have waxed them once or twice. I skied mostly along trails beside the Mackenzie River in Fort Providence, where I lived from September-July to work in the Hudson's Bay Northern Store. As I recall in Michael Wynne: My Youth, some days the bush was so quiet that I could hear snow from trees hit the ground snow as it fell from tree branches: "Pfff. Pfff."
I also skied in Fort Resolution, in the Slave River Delta, when I ran that Bay for one week in late March, 1987, while the manager was in Edmonton for meetings. The local priest had fixed wooden runners between the skis on a sled his snowmobile pulled. He used this contraption to make ski trails, "Seven trails, numbered 1 to 7, like the seven highways in the Northwest Territories," he told me.
BOITANIO PARK
Skiing for the first time this winter, finally, in Boitanio Park today, I remembered those days, so long ago. My skis are fibreglass, a mid-1990s gift from my dear spouse Carla. My old boots, which came with the wooden skis, were cracked and worn. I skied using them and the wooden skis once or twice near Alexis Creek in 1991-92, and to teach children to ski at Alkali Lake a couple years later, using the shed full of skis and boots and poles the school had.
I miss skiing more than I miss teaching.
Boitanio Park, named after an Italian who settled in Williams Lake decades ago, is a kilometre long and about a half kilometre wide, a hundred metres down a walking path from our apartment building. It's not skiing out the back door into the boreal, but it's what's available here, unless I want to drive 20 km north to Bull Mountain, the local ski club's trail network, and pay to ski.
Pay to ski? That'll be the day, although I have downhill skied, the last time having been near Quebec City during the 1990 Christmas break from my McGill University teacher training program. I also downhill skied at Silver Summit, near Edson, and Mount Timothy, near Williams Lake, where I cross-country skied the same day, our daughter's elementary school field trip day there.
CANADIAN COLONIALISM
Making a wee trail network on the park today, and skiing over it a few times, I thought about colonialism and the upcoming 150th anniversary of the July 1, 1867 founding of Canada as a nation, on Indigenous land. I had planned a trip to Ottawa for the anniversary, but knowing what I know about Canada's ongoing colonial legacy, I decided against the trip. Once one has learned the truth, how can one revert to living the lie?
"This land called Canada" is how the teacher of a University of Northern British Columbia First Nations history and culture course describes this land. She's Metis and I'm her teaching assistant for this all-day Friday-Saturday course taught this month at Tl'esqox, a Tsilhqot'in community 50 km west of where I type today.
The Tsilhqot'in never surrendered their land in battle or by treaty, although most do not go as far as many Mohawks, and deny they are Canadians. Still, one elder said during a recent Tl'esqox meeting attended by the federal minister who oversees Indigenous people, there's little to celebrate on July 1. He seems not to call himself Canadian. His statement decided me against going to Ottawa, although I am not Indigenous. Yet, once one knows Canada's sorry colonial history, continuing today via its Indian Act, among other unjust laws and practices, can one celebrate in good conscience? I cannot. Today's skiing made me wonder if I should help organize a critical celebration here on July 1. Perhaps this elder has some ideas.
Confederation in s 1867 was a deal made by white men of property to better exploit other settlers on stolen land. Perhaps it helped prevent the United States from annexing Canada, a worry then, and still; but that was more scare tactic than real threat: the U.S. could have annexed a British colony or a British dominion with equal ease. See how much Canada has fallen under U.S. sway since 1867.
RED KLISTER RESISTANCE
Resistance rises against colonialism, against capitalism around the world, including on Indigenous and, which the Americas, Australia, Africa, and much of Asia are. These were rich places when European colonizers stole them; Europeans had battled for land for centuries before they left Europe. These places were not paradises; they had inequality and the wars is spawns. Under colonialism, the descendants of the pre-contact people became poorer, many died, many collaborated, many resisted. That history, the true history of Canada, is worth noting, and some of it is even worth celebrating.
Resistance to colonialism sticks around, like red klister wax sticks to skis.
To those who say, "It's over. Get over it," I say that it continues, learn it, and join the resistance, which begins inside each person. You need not block pipelines or mines or retrieve Indigenous children stolen by the foster care system, or help prevent more Indigenous women disappearing while bringing to account those who made many disappear in the past and others who make many disappear today. You need not inveigh against the systemic racism underlies all these injustices, and others.
Instead, you need to learn the real history of this land called Canada. This will help you understand why residential school survivors drink, why young people kill themselves, why a lack of trust and respect exists between Indigenous and settler people, and why some on each side strive to make a better land for us all. Join this red klister resistance to lies, and stick to the truth.
LAND, BEAUTIFUL LAND
It's about land, at bottom. It always has been about land. I skied over settler-colonial land today, and decades ago, before knowledge of settler colonialism liberated me, as honesty and truth always liberate. This ongoing liberation is joyful, as surely as skiing was joyful on this beautiful day, on this beautiful land.
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Groundhog Bottle and Can Deposit
Thursday, February 2, 2017
This overcast Groundhog Day, no overcast groundhog fled from its shadow hereabouts, which means that winter is over.
Today, I did not flee from 1066 pop and beer cans and bottles, as William the Conqueror did not flee from King Harold's army inEngland in 1066 A.D.. Instead, yesterday, our car hauled several bags containing 706 containers from Anaham to Williams Lake, where I sold the containers this morning to the local bottle depot for $41.99. Today, helpful in-laws brought in the 360 containers that did not fit in the car yesterday, and I sold them for $23.42; the containers, not the in-laws.
Pop cans, bottles, and tetra packs 1L or less pay $0.05, bigger than 1L pay $0.20, and beer cans and bottles pay $0.07; hence the uneven dollar totals. Canada has had no penny, no $0.01 coin for a few years, the action of a centsless government, so the $41.99 rounds to $42.00. Think of the 2 1/5 and 3s 10d of English money before decimalization there.
Think of the day, decades ago, when a boyhood friend and I found in the neighborhood dump, washed, and brought to the bottle depot about 200 pop bottles, for $0.02 each, mere weeks before the bounty rose to $0.05. The gopher bounty was $0.05 then, I recall from counting gopher tails before selling them to my uncle, who sold them to the provincial agriculture department.
Timing is everything in gleaning, as I know whenever I go to the local Salvation Army Thrift Shop's free food table and luck into bell peppers, tomatoes, or other earthly bounty from that other-worldly place.
The Salvation Army's world headquarters is in London, England. Last year I saw the church's impressive office building there.
William the Conqueror might have cleaned up after himself when he invaded, but the "green and pleasant land" I found in England was rotten with discarded drink containers. The English pay no deposit, nor get none back for empties, which litter streets and parks.
By contrast, Neugraben, a Hamburg suburb I spent August, 2016 in, courtesy of my generous sister, had a container-eating machine in a grocery store. Feed it your empty, and it give you 0.25 Euros.
Perhaps discarded drink containers impeded German efforts to overrun England during World War Two. Could a drink-container wall along the Canada-United States border keep the peace between these two countries? Ask your local groundhog.
This overcast Groundhog Day, no overcast groundhog fled from its shadow hereabouts, which means that winter is over.
Today, I did not flee from 1066 pop and beer cans and bottles, as William the Conqueror did not flee from King Harold's army inEngland in 1066 A.D.. Instead, yesterday, our car hauled several bags containing 706 containers from Anaham to Williams Lake, where I sold the containers this morning to the local bottle depot for $41.99. Today, helpful in-laws brought in the 360 containers that did not fit in the car yesterday, and I sold them for $23.42; the containers, not the in-laws.
Pop cans, bottles, and tetra packs 1L or less pay $0.05, bigger than 1L pay $0.20, and beer cans and bottles pay $0.07; hence the uneven dollar totals. Canada has had no penny, no $0.01 coin for a few years, the action of a centsless government, so the $41.99 rounds to $42.00. Think of the 2 1/5 and 3s 10d of English money before decimalization there.
Think of the day, decades ago, when a boyhood friend and I found in the neighborhood dump, washed, and brought to the bottle depot about 200 pop bottles, for $0.02 each, mere weeks before the bounty rose to $0.05. The gopher bounty was $0.05 then, I recall from counting gopher tails before selling them to my uncle, who sold them to the provincial agriculture department.
Timing is everything in gleaning, as I know whenever I go to the local Salvation Army Thrift Shop's free food table and luck into bell peppers, tomatoes, or other earthly bounty from that other-worldly place.
The Salvation Army's world headquarters is in London, England. Last year I saw the church's impressive office building there.
William the Conqueror might have cleaned up after himself when he invaded, but the "green and pleasant land" I found in England was rotten with discarded drink containers. The English pay no deposit, nor get none back for empties, which litter streets and parks.
By contrast, Neugraben, a Hamburg suburb I spent August, 2016 in, courtesy of my generous sister, had a container-eating machine in a grocery store. Feed it your empty, and it give you 0.25 Euros.
Perhaps discarded drink containers impeded German efforts to overrun England during World War Two. Could a drink-container wall along the Canada-United States border keep the peace between these two countries? Ask your local groundhog.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
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.
"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.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Swimming in Memories of Europe
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Europe jumped out of the wee bag that holds my swim access card today. My first time in the local pool since before my summer, 2016 trip to Europe, I found in my wee bag a receipt for cookies, from the Tesco grocery store in Hove, beside Brighton. I also found a one-cent Euro coin, from Germany.
I remember paying 40 British cents for those cookies on the sunny early-September day I walked through Hove, where we house sat for two weeks, to a Medieval church, in whose by-donation book box I found a 2009 English translation of Celestina, Rojas' 1499 picaresque novel, a century before Cervantes' Don Quixote. I read and gave away Cervantes' decades ago, and Rojas this fall, before I gave it to the local recreation centre for the person who teaches conversational Spanish.
The recreation centre, two rinks, a concert hall, and the pool, is halfway through a two-year expansion which will result in two pools and a water slide. The wading pool, hot tub, steam room, and sauna are gone; in their place the lane pool goes up, across a temporary wall from the current lane pool. When the new lane pool's done, the current lane pool will close, for the building of the leisure pool and water slide in its site.
England, the mother of parliaments, votes, as did Williams Lake in the October, 2015 municipal election referendum to approve the borrowing of ten million dollars for the recreation upgrade.
While I upgraded my own recreation this morning, I thought of Hamburg, Luneburg, Cuxhaven, Berlin, and Rostok, the German cities I saw this summer, courtesy of my generous sister. I know not where the one-cent coin came from, but I am glad I kept a few European and British coins as souvenirs.
"Was I in Europe this summer?" I marveled. "Did I spend four weeks at a Hamburg house-sit? Three nights in Berlin, the farthest east I ever was? Day train trips to Cuxhaven and Luneberg, on the North and Baltic Seas, respectively?" My generous younger sister was why.
"Did we walk the Brighton beach many times during our two-week house sit in adjacent Hove? Did we eat great fish and chips in a London restaurant, after a day in renown art galleries? Did we house sit for two weeks in Manchester, ride its funky street cars, and see the canals still plied in this Industrial Revolution epicentre? Did I watch 75 000 pour out of the Manchester United stadium after a soccer game?
As I swam along, back crawl, this morning, I thought, "My, what a generous younger sister I have! She bought me a plane ticket from Edmonton to Hamburg, and another from London to Edmonton. She fed, sheltered, and entertained me. She translated for me in Germany. We spent eight weeks together, our longest time together in more than 25 years."
We flew together to Canada, her first time out of Europe in more than two years. She plans to return to Europe in early 2017. Why not, eh? I'm glad she got me there, this time, and two times before: 2015 to Britain and Ireland, 2011 to France.
The Tesco receipt and European one-cent coin, sitting on the desk beside this laptop, remind me that I was in Europe this summer. What memories!
Europe jumped out of the wee bag that holds my swim access card today. My first time in the local pool since before my summer, 2016 trip to Europe, I found in my wee bag a receipt for cookies, from the Tesco grocery store in Hove, beside Brighton. I also found a one-cent Euro coin, from Germany.
I remember paying 40 British cents for those cookies on the sunny early-September day I walked through Hove, where we house sat for two weeks, to a Medieval church, in whose by-donation book box I found a 2009 English translation of Celestina, Rojas' 1499 picaresque novel, a century before Cervantes' Don Quixote. I read and gave away Cervantes' decades ago, and Rojas this fall, before I gave it to the local recreation centre for the person who teaches conversational Spanish.
The recreation centre, two rinks, a concert hall, and the pool, is halfway through a two-year expansion which will result in two pools and a water slide. The wading pool, hot tub, steam room, and sauna are gone; in their place the lane pool goes up, across a temporary wall from the current lane pool. When the new lane pool's done, the current lane pool will close, for the building of the leisure pool and water slide in its site.
England, the mother of parliaments, votes, as did Williams Lake in the October, 2015 municipal election referendum to approve the borrowing of ten million dollars for the recreation upgrade.
While I upgraded my own recreation this morning, I thought of Hamburg, Luneburg, Cuxhaven, Berlin, and Rostok, the German cities I saw this summer, courtesy of my generous sister. I know not where the one-cent coin came from, but I am glad I kept a few European and British coins as souvenirs.
"Was I in Europe this summer?" I marveled. "Did I spend four weeks at a Hamburg house-sit? Three nights in Berlin, the farthest east I ever was? Day train trips to Cuxhaven and Luneberg, on the North and Baltic Seas, respectively?" My generous younger sister was why.
"Did we walk the Brighton beach many times during our two-week house sit in adjacent Hove? Did we eat great fish and chips in a London restaurant, after a day in renown art galleries? Did we house sit for two weeks in Manchester, ride its funky street cars, and see the canals still plied in this Industrial Revolution epicentre? Did I watch 75 000 pour out of the Manchester United stadium after a soccer game?
As I swam along, back crawl, this morning, I thought, "My, what a generous younger sister I have! She bought me a plane ticket from Edmonton to Hamburg, and another from London to Edmonton. She fed, sheltered, and entertained me. She translated for me in Germany. We spent eight weeks together, our longest time together in more than 25 years."
We flew together to Canada, her first time out of Europe in more than two years. She plans to return to Europe in early 2017. Why not, eh? I'm glad she got me there, this time, and two times before: 2015 to Britain and Ireland, 2011 to France.
The Tesco receipt and European one-cent coin, sitting on the desk beside this laptop, remind me that I was in Europe this summer. What memories!
Sunday, December 4, 2016
First Ice Skate of the Winter
Sunday, December 4, 2016
"Don't know much about history," minor hockey, frozen tobacco smoke, the Rideau Canal, Joe the sport reporter, the Fort Providence snye of the Mackenzie River, and reverse direction came to mind, and feet, as I went for my first skate of the winter. It was free, one of the monthly skates sponsored by this or that local business or charity. It was in the smaller of the two indoor rinks here. My old legs, on my 40-year-old skates, did 100 laps in 55 minutes. The biggest challenge was dodging the 100+ other skaters, perhaps all of them younger than I, some using plastic walkers to learn to skate, many going in unpredictable directions, including down. This is good agility practice, although skating backwards is not allowed this year, unlike last year.
First on skates at age seven or so, I sometimes brought them to my Grade 1-3 school because it had an outdoor rink. It was easier then that it would be now to sit atop snow, such as surrounded the boards of that rink, and put on and take off my skates.
At that time, decades ago, for 25 cents a person could public skate on Friday night in the local indoor rink in the town where I grew up, about 700 kilometres east of where I live now. The music today was Christmas carols, mostly old, sung by Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and Mahalia Jackson, among others. I distinctly remember childhood skating nights with "What a Wonderful World," by Louis Armstrong on the rink speakers.
Minor hockey, which I played from age 9-14, was all boys; but today's skate saw many girls, 10-12 years old or so, bigger and stronger than boys at that age, in hockey skates, flying around the rink as I did at that age. Today I used the skates I got at age 14, during my last minor hockey year, in 1975-76.
The youngest players played the earliest on Saturday mornings. I remember getting to the rink for a 6:00 A.M. game, Dad tightening my skates. He would watch from the stands. Like others, he smoked in the arena. Frozen tobacco smoke was a smelly feature of the Edson rink and lobby, as was hot chocolate. When I was a bit older, my games sometimes had freshly-flooded ice. Today's hoard on the rink snowed and scratched the ice pretty thoroughly.
Later, at 20, I first skated on Ottawa's Rideau Canal, the world's longest rink. It winds seven kilometres from near Carleton University, where I finished my Bachelor of Arts in English that year, north through Ottawa, past Parliament Hill, and into the Ottawa River.
The next winter I was 21 and a newspaper reporter in Whitecourt, Alberta. The sports reporter, Joe, from St. Catherines, Ontario, did not skate well, but he signed up for a fundraising skate-athon. Several times, before the event, he and I went to the local indoor rink so Joe could practice skating. During the event, Joe did not fall, and he did skate the required distance, 200 laps, I think.
A few years later, in the winter of 1986-87, I worked for the Hudson's Bay Company in the Western Northwest Territories. I began in Fort Simpson, spent the winter in Fort Providence, and filled in for a week in Fort Resolution and a month in Fort Liard for managers who were away. The Mackenzie River flows past Fort Providence. Just downstream from the dock for barges, a snye, perhaps against flooding, opens perpendicularly from the river along the edge of this village of several hundred. This waterway was about 20 m wide and 80 m long. When it froze over, it was as clear and smooth as glass, until snow covered it. That made for joyful skating. The village had an outdoor rink, too.
Today's skate, overseen by three "Skate Patrol" teenage girls, two on the ice at any one time, did not go only counterclockwise, as Edson public skates went. Every 45 minutes, a patrol person announced on the arena speakers that everyone was to skate in the opposite direction. Thus, 53 of my 100 laps were counterclockwise and the other 47 were clockwise. I was there for about an hour, but this free skate lasted three hours. Staying longer might have pained my left knee, which hurts a few days per month, but only mildly.
At 55, seniors age for the local recreation complex, currently amid renovations that will replace the existing 45-year-old 25m, 6-lane pool with the like, and add a leisure pool, which will include a water slide, I am happy that my health is realtively good. Before today's skate, I'd walked five kilomtres for various errands. I'll walk farther tomorrow, twice to and from my part-time job at the local Loomis Express courier office, and on various errands around town.
"What a wonderful world it would be...."
"Don't know much about history," minor hockey, frozen tobacco smoke, the Rideau Canal, Joe the sport reporter, the Fort Providence snye of the Mackenzie River, and reverse direction came to mind, and feet, as I went for my first skate of the winter. It was free, one of the monthly skates sponsored by this or that local business or charity. It was in the smaller of the two indoor rinks here. My old legs, on my 40-year-old skates, did 100 laps in 55 minutes. The biggest challenge was dodging the 100+ other skaters, perhaps all of them younger than I, some using plastic walkers to learn to skate, many going in unpredictable directions, including down. This is good agility practice, although skating backwards is not allowed this year, unlike last year.
First on skates at age seven or so, I sometimes brought them to my Grade 1-3 school because it had an outdoor rink. It was easier then that it would be now to sit atop snow, such as surrounded the boards of that rink, and put on and take off my skates.
At that time, decades ago, for 25 cents a person could public skate on Friday night in the local indoor rink in the town where I grew up, about 700 kilometres east of where I live now. The music today was Christmas carols, mostly old, sung by Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and Mahalia Jackson, among others. I distinctly remember childhood skating nights with "What a Wonderful World," by Louis Armstrong on the rink speakers.
Minor hockey, which I played from age 9-14, was all boys; but today's skate saw many girls, 10-12 years old or so, bigger and stronger than boys at that age, in hockey skates, flying around the rink as I did at that age. Today I used the skates I got at age 14, during my last minor hockey year, in 1975-76.
The youngest players played the earliest on Saturday mornings. I remember getting to the rink for a 6:00 A.M. game, Dad tightening my skates. He would watch from the stands. Like others, he smoked in the arena. Frozen tobacco smoke was a smelly feature of the Edson rink and lobby, as was hot chocolate. When I was a bit older, my games sometimes had freshly-flooded ice. Today's hoard on the rink snowed and scratched the ice pretty thoroughly.
Later, at 20, I first skated on Ottawa's Rideau Canal, the world's longest rink. It winds seven kilometres from near Carleton University, where I finished my Bachelor of Arts in English that year, north through Ottawa, past Parliament Hill, and into the Ottawa River.
The next winter I was 21 and a newspaper reporter in Whitecourt, Alberta. The sports reporter, Joe, from St. Catherines, Ontario, did not skate well, but he signed up for a fundraising skate-athon. Several times, before the event, he and I went to the local indoor rink so Joe could practice skating. During the event, Joe did not fall, and he did skate the required distance, 200 laps, I think.
A few years later, in the winter of 1986-87, I worked for the Hudson's Bay Company in the Western Northwest Territories. I began in Fort Simpson, spent the winter in Fort Providence, and filled in for a week in Fort Resolution and a month in Fort Liard for managers who were away. The Mackenzie River flows past Fort Providence. Just downstream from the dock for barges, a snye, perhaps against flooding, opens perpendicularly from the river along the edge of this village of several hundred. This waterway was about 20 m wide and 80 m long. When it froze over, it was as clear and smooth as glass, until snow covered it. That made for joyful skating. The village had an outdoor rink, too.
Today's skate, overseen by three "Skate Patrol" teenage girls, two on the ice at any one time, did not go only counterclockwise, as Edson public skates went. Every 45 minutes, a patrol person announced on the arena speakers that everyone was to skate in the opposite direction. Thus, 53 of my 100 laps were counterclockwise and the other 47 were clockwise. I was there for about an hour, but this free skate lasted three hours. Staying longer might have pained my left knee, which hurts a few days per month, but only mildly.
At 55, seniors age for the local recreation complex, currently amid renovations that will replace the existing 45-year-old 25m, 6-lane pool with the like, and add a leisure pool, which will include a water slide, I am happy that my health is realtively good. Before today's skate, I'd walked five kilomtres for various errands. I'll walk farther tomorrow, twice to and from my part-time job at the local Loomis Express courier office, and on various errands around town.
"What a wonderful world it would be...."
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Dirt, Sushi, Guitar, and Lilacs
October 4, 2016
Shakespeare "yokes by violence together" images that do not belong together, mid-1700s English writer Samuel Johnson complained in his Preface to Shakespeare. Below, I yoke together dirt, sushi, a guitar, llilacs, and other images. I invite your complaints.
I have dirt from a graveyard in Brookeborough, Northern Ireland. My sister mailed it to me from Ireland soon after she acquired Irish citizenship due to our dad's mom's Irish birth, and went to Ireland. In 1916, 100 years ago, Granny Mary Irvine left Ireland for Canada. About two years after her arrival in Central Canada, Granny married Grandpa, Harry Wynne, born in Quebec to Irish immigrants. They soon migrated thousands of kilometres west.
In 1919, Granny bore our dad in Quesnel, in the Cariboo Region, a region I have lived in since 1991. Doctor G.R. Baker delivered Dad. Quesnel now boasts G.R. Baker Hospital. Years ago, I found and photocopied, from a Quesnel newspaper in the archives, Dad's birth announcement.
My next relative born in the Cariboo would be my daughter Chelsea, born in 1992 here in Williams Lake, about 120 kilometres south of Quesnel.
GENOCIDE IN CANADA
Perhaps you know that, in 1864, closer to 1919 than 1919 is to 1992, Quesnel was where Judge Matthew Begbie tried and hanged five Tsilhqot'in leaders. They had defended their land against disease intentionally brought by settlers from Victoria, the colonial capital city of British Columbia. British Columbia is one of ten provinces and three territories that comprise Canada, the settler-colonial country where I was born and raised, and where I still live.
In 1864, the Cariboo Gold Rush was in progress. In 1867, the country Canada was created on Indigenous land. Many leading settlers along the Pacific Coast soon threatened to invite annexation by the United States if Canada did not extend a railway to the Pacific. In 1846, the United States had wrested the lower Columbia River valley from English control, resulting in the states of Washington and Oregon. In the 1850s, a Fraser River gold rush inspired many USians to agitate to annex all of the Pacific Coast; the US took a large northern section of that coast, from Alaska to Prince Rupert, near the Skeena River Delta. The new province of British Columbia joined Canada in 1871. Rails reached the Pacific in 1885.
Remember that the entire New World, the Americas, are lands stolen from Indigenous people. In the early 1860s, the Tsilhqot'in resisted efforts to dispossess them of their land by exterminating them. Quesnel lawyer and author Tom Swanky has detailed this genocidal history in The True Story of Canada's War of Extermination on the Pacific:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMiyMxhfFEs
I met Swanky many times. The first time, when he presented his research to a packed concert hall here, I wrote an article about his presentation. I sent the article to my friend who taught at Grande Prairie Regional College. He added it to his curriculum. I bought Swanky's book. I lent the book to a relative of my daughter's, on her Tsilhqot'in mother's side. That relative's last name is Lee, the maiden name of my granny's mother. Perhaps my spouse and I are distant relatives; there is only one race, the human race.
The Cariboo Lees are descendants of Norman Lee, who came from the British Isles to the Cariboo in the 1890s, bound for the Klondike Gold Rush, in Yukon, almost 2000 kilometres to the north. Lee tried to herd cattle north from the Cariboo to feed the miners, but weather and terrain stopped him and his cows. The cows, and some of the cowboys, died before reaching Yukon. Lee returned to the Cariboo, ranched for awhile, and had children by a Tsilhqot'in woman. He brought some children back to the British Isles and left one in the Cariboo. He later returned to the Cariboo, with a spouse from England. Lee's Corner, 90 km west of Williams Lake, is named after Lee.
The child whom Norman Lee left in the Cariboo is the ancestor of many, including the Lee to whom I lent the Swanky book. That Lee child is my spouse's paternal grandmother. Mabel Lee was an old woman when Carla and I got together. She lived until our daughter was four; our daughter remembers her "?etsu cho."
The attempted genocide of the Tsilhqot'in people, which claimed more than 75% of them, was more recent, and relatively deadlier than the English-induced famine that killed or caused the exile of half of the people of Ireland in the 1840s. I have heard of Irish psychologists who say that effects of "The Hunger" endure in Irish people to this day. Imagine what effects endure in Tsilhqot'in people, not to mention in other Indigenous people of the Americas. Rather than throw guilt at one another, or ignore such liberating history, may we all come to know and respect the other, to reduce racism, and increase dignity and respect and the equality that can flow from them.
TRAVEL TROUBLES AND DISCOVERIES
My spouse and I each have a dad who each had an interesting mom, each woman worth more words than I gave them; but there is still sushi, a guitar, and lilacs to discuss.
There is also someone to discover: Mary Irvine, whom we met this summer, not the Mary Irvine, our late grandmother from Ireland. We were on our way to Liverpool for my 55th birthday. We were fresh off the streetcar in downtown Manchester, and walking to the train that would take us to Liverpool, 60 kilometres down the Mersey River. We met two Irish women, one over 60, the other in her 30s. They were mother and daughter. They asked us how to reach the Manchester airport.
Someone mentioned Enniskillen, the Irish town near our granny's home village. My sister or I said that Granny was an Irvine. "I'm an Irvine, too," the mother said. "My name is Mary." "Our granny was Mary Irvine," my sister or I replied, agog at the coincidence. "There are lots of Irvines in Enniskillen," the mother said before she and her daughter left us.
This summer, my sister bought me a plane ticket from Edmonton to Hamburg, to visit her. She was house sitting near there in August. She had house sat in Europe since July, 2014. I joined her in suburban Neugraben until late August. We migrated to September house sits in Brighton and Manchester, England. On September 26, we flew from London to Edmonton. Having paid most of my European expenses, she also bought my plane ticket back to Edmonton. I have giving siblings.
The plane was four hours late leaving London's Gatwick Airport. The airline offered passengers gift certificates worth ten English pounds, about 17 Canadian dollars, to spend in the airport. We spent ours in a sushi restaurant.
We were to leave London at around 11:00 A.M. local time and reach Edmonton at around 1:00 P.M. local time. Instead, we left London near 4:00 P.M. and reached Edmonton near 5:30 PM. We rode a the city bus that plies the 30-kilometre route from the airport to the south end of the light rail transit system in Edmonton. We rode a train a couple stops, to a station from which a bus brought us north, through the University of Alberta, and east a couple kilometres. From there, we walked, four wheeled bags in tow, three blocks to Royal Pizza. We were to meet and eat with our older brother and sister and their spouses at 7:00 P.M., after dropping my younger sister's bags at the MacEwan University residence room she booked, and my bag at the Greyhound bus station. Instead, we got there with our bags at 7:30 P.M.
The day was long and tiring but not over yet.
Sitting down across from my older sister, I happily drank the glass of draft beer she poured me. Between us, over the next two hours, she and I drank two pitchers of beer. When our brother and his spouse packed my younger sister and our four bags into their sports utility vehicle, I carried a full box of leftover pizza. My brother had brought the larger bag from his place near Calmar, where it spent my vacation. Each of my two bags was on wheels. I had brought the smaller, Europe-bound bag inside the larger bag, gifts for Alberta kin and friends in Alberta packed between the bags. Greyhound riders get to check one bag, weighing up to 75 pounds, for free: my bag within a bag weighed about 72 pounds when I left home. Outside the pizza restaurant, as the sun went down, I put the smaller in the larger bag, and stuffed both back into his truck.
By 9:30 P.M., we reached MacEwan University, where we dropped off our younger sister and her three bags. By 10:05 P.M.,we reached Southgate shopping mall, where I and my bags got out.
DEATH AND A SPEEDING TICKET
I mentioned that I had brought, from home, gifts for Alberta kin and friends. Among those kin were our mom's sister, 87 the last survivor of our parents' generation, who lived in Beiseker with her husband of 67years,age 91, their younger son, and a couple grandsons.
That is, she lived with her husband of 67 years, until his death in late September. That sad event makes me happier than I was at the time to rent a car to visit them overnight, August 2-3. I got the car in Edmonton, drove it to meet my brother and his spouse near Calmar, where they live, about 40 kilometres southwest of Edmonton, left them gifts and picked up a credit card for our European sister. My brother gave me $100 toward the car rental; my siblings are so generous with me.
Driving 300 kilometres south southeast from Edmonton to Beiseker under cloudy skies, I wished my spouse and daughter were with me. My Beiseker relatives always give them a warm welcome. I thought about going to Beiseker months later with them, and wondered why I made this rushed trip alone. That my uncle died within two months of my visit made me very thankful that I made this trip. I liked my uncle, and I hope my aunt bears widowhood well. I'm glad my cousin, their youngest child, lives there to help. It was very nice to see them and stay overnight in their house. A flashing, rumbling thunderstorm helped put me to sleep that night.
I commended my cousin for staying near his aging parents. My spouse, the second-youngest in her family, the youngest by 10 minutes being her twin brother, was the main caregiver for their parents during their declining years. Their mom died in November, 2011, their dad in November, 2014.
Last but not least in the death theme is my own dad. He died on September 29, 1989, the night before he would have turned 70. He might snicker at my speeding ticket, due 27 years later to the day. I paid it by credit card.
What speeding ticket, you ask?
A $158 speeding ticket I got via photo radar in Edmonton the next day, while I drove the car back to the rental place. waited at home during my European vacation. I was doing 66 in a 50 zone, northbound on 106 Street near 34 Avenue. That ticket came by mail before I got home. Payment was due September 29, two days after I got home.
GLORIOUS GUITAR
Return to the lively challenge of getting from London to Williams Lake. I found myself, and found my friend Doug, in the Southgate shopping centre parking lot when my brother and sister-in-law dropped me there at 10:05 P.M. on Monday, September 26. I had to get to the Greyhound bus station, several kilometres to the north, at least an hour before my 12:15 A.M. bus, to get my reserved ticket.
With Doug, however, there is always time for what Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day called "the corporal works of mercy." We loaded my bag-in-bag into the trunk of his Buick, and I climbed into the front seat, the leftover pizza on my lap. Doug gave me another edible, a foot-long ham and cheese submarine sandwich. Then we drove, under the speed limit, to his daughter's place nearby, for he had something for her, as had I.
She is a recent university graduate who shares a basement suite. Students and former students like pizza. I therefore added the pizza to the European souvenirs I gave her. She gave me a boxed drink and a disposable plastic container of grapes. Doug gave her what he had to give.
We then drove north in the Edmonton night to the bus station, and reached it by 10:55 P.M., an hour and 20 minutes before the scheduled bus departure. I had made the hour deadline for ticket pickup with 20 minutes to spare. Many times that day I did not think I would be on time for this last leg of a many-legged day.
At 10:55 P.M. on Thursday, December 24, 1992, my daughter arrived at British Columbia Children's Hospital, after a traumatic birth in Williams Lake, evacuation by medical jet to Vancouver, and short flight by helicopter from the Vancouver airport to the hospital. Her admission form said 10:55 P.M., a little more than an hour before Christmas Day began. I remembered that when I looked at my watch, at 10:55 P.M., in the bus station, so many years later.
I showed the bus ticket agent my identification and booking number. Within seconds she printed my ticket. I excavated, from my bag within a bag, some European gifts for Doug. I thanked him for all his help during my time going through Edmonton toward Europe, and back through Edmonton toward home.
I then waited for the bus, in this busy new station which is also a VIA Rail train station.
I heard an accoustic guitar, such a welcome, relaxing sound after what had been a very long day. Was a passenger playing? No. A VIA Rail ticket agent was strumming. The crowd in the station visibly relaxed/ I certainly relaxed.
DIRT, DISTANCE, AND LILACS
A series of four buses, with me enjoying a double seat on each bus, and sleeping for several hours until Valemount, brought me 900 kilomtres from Edmonton, through Kamloops, to Williams Lake. This is much longer than distances we traveled within Europe.
Imagine Norman Lee, coming from the British Isles to Canada, going several thousand kilometres by train to Ashcroft, and several hundred north from Ashcroft, more than 100 years ago.
Imagine Granny coming from Ireland to Canada 100 years ago, going several thousand kilometres by train to the Cariboo, and bearing Dad.
Dad liked lilacs. He grew a lilac bushes on the acreage where he and Mom raised their five children near Edson, a couple hundred kilometres west of Edmonton.
More than 10 years ago, I planted a lilac bush in the yard behind the apartment building where I live with my spouse and our daughter.
More than a year ago, my sister sent dirt from the Enniskillen Catholic church yard. Remember the dirt from the start of this story? I will put that dirt around the base of that lilac bush I planted. It was less than a metre tall when I planted it. Now it is about four metres tall.
My granny bore my dad in the Cariboo almost 100 years ago. My Tsilhqot'in spouse bore our daughter in the Cariboo almost 25 years ago. I consider our daughter to have the strongest roots in this land of anyone in my family. The Irish dirt on the lilac bush completes a circle that began in Ireland and passed through Canada, and joined diverse people, as Shakespeare joined diverse images.
Shakespeare "yokes by violence together" images that do not belong together, mid-1700s English writer Samuel Johnson complained in his Preface to Shakespeare. Below, I yoke together dirt, sushi, a guitar, llilacs, and other images. I invite your complaints.
I have dirt from a graveyard in Brookeborough, Northern Ireland. My sister mailed it to me from Ireland soon after she acquired Irish citizenship due to our dad's mom's Irish birth, and went to Ireland. In 1916, 100 years ago, Granny Mary Irvine left Ireland for Canada. About two years after her arrival in Central Canada, Granny married Grandpa, Harry Wynne, born in Quebec to Irish immigrants. They soon migrated thousands of kilometres west.
In 1919, Granny bore our dad in Quesnel, in the Cariboo Region, a region I have lived in since 1991. Doctor G.R. Baker delivered Dad. Quesnel now boasts G.R. Baker Hospital. Years ago, I found and photocopied, from a Quesnel newspaper in the archives, Dad's birth announcement.
My next relative born in the Cariboo would be my daughter Chelsea, born in 1992 here in Williams Lake, about 120 kilometres south of Quesnel.
GENOCIDE IN CANADA
Perhaps you know that, in 1864, closer to 1919 than 1919 is to 1992, Quesnel was where Judge Matthew Begbie tried and hanged five Tsilhqot'in leaders. They had defended their land against disease intentionally brought by settlers from Victoria, the colonial capital city of British Columbia. British Columbia is one of ten provinces and three territories that comprise Canada, the settler-colonial country where I was born and raised, and where I still live.
In 1864, the Cariboo Gold Rush was in progress. In 1867, the country Canada was created on Indigenous land. Many leading settlers along the Pacific Coast soon threatened to invite annexation by the United States if Canada did not extend a railway to the Pacific. In 1846, the United States had wrested the lower Columbia River valley from English control, resulting in the states of Washington and Oregon. In the 1850s, a Fraser River gold rush inspired many USians to agitate to annex all of the Pacific Coast; the US took a large northern section of that coast, from Alaska to Prince Rupert, near the Skeena River Delta. The new province of British Columbia joined Canada in 1871. Rails reached the Pacific in 1885.
Remember that the entire New World, the Americas, are lands stolen from Indigenous people. In the early 1860s, the Tsilhqot'in resisted efforts to dispossess them of their land by exterminating them. Quesnel lawyer and author Tom Swanky has detailed this genocidal history in The True Story of Canada's War of Extermination on the Pacific:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMiyMxhfFEs
I met Swanky many times. The first time, when he presented his research to a packed concert hall here, I wrote an article about his presentation. I sent the article to my friend who taught at Grande Prairie Regional College. He added it to his curriculum. I bought Swanky's book. I lent the book to a relative of my daughter's, on her Tsilhqot'in mother's side. That relative's last name is Lee, the maiden name of my granny's mother. Perhaps my spouse and I are distant relatives; there is only one race, the human race.
The Cariboo Lees are descendants of Norman Lee, who came from the British Isles to the Cariboo in the 1890s, bound for the Klondike Gold Rush, in Yukon, almost 2000 kilometres to the north. Lee tried to herd cattle north from the Cariboo to feed the miners, but weather and terrain stopped him and his cows. The cows, and some of the cowboys, died before reaching Yukon. Lee returned to the Cariboo, ranched for awhile, and had children by a Tsilhqot'in woman. He brought some children back to the British Isles and left one in the Cariboo. He later returned to the Cariboo, with a spouse from England. Lee's Corner, 90 km west of Williams Lake, is named after Lee.
The child whom Norman Lee left in the Cariboo is the ancestor of many, including the Lee to whom I lent the Swanky book. That Lee child is my spouse's paternal grandmother. Mabel Lee was an old woman when Carla and I got together. She lived until our daughter was four; our daughter remembers her "?etsu cho."
The attempted genocide of the Tsilhqot'in people, which claimed more than 75% of them, was more recent, and relatively deadlier than the English-induced famine that killed or caused the exile of half of the people of Ireland in the 1840s. I have heard of Irish psychologists who say that effects of "The Hunger" endure in Irish people to this day. Imagine what effects endure in Tsilhqot'in people, not to mention in other Indigenous people of the Americas. Rather than throw guilt at one another, or ignore such liberating history, may we all come to know and respect the other, to reduce racism, and increase dignity and respect and the equality that can flow from them.
TRAVEL TROUBLES AND DISCOVERIES
My spouse and I each have a dad who each had an interesting mom, each woman worth more words than I gave them; but there is still sushi, a guitar, and lilacs to discuss.
There is also someone to discover: Mary Irvine, whom we met this summer, not the Mary Irvine, our late grandmother from Ireland. We were on our way to Liverpool for my 55th birthday. We were fresh off the streetcar in downtown Manchester, and walking to the train that would take us to Liverpool, 60 kilometres down the Mersey River. We met two Irish women, one over 60, the other in her 30s. They were mother and daughter. They asked us how to reach the Manchester airport.
Someone mentioned Enniskillen, the Irish town near our granny's home village. My sister or I said that Granny was an Irvine. "I'm an Irvine, too," the mother said. "My name is Mary." "Our granny was Mary Irvine," my sister or I replied, agog at the coincidence. "There are lots of Irvines in Enniskillen," the mother said before she and her daughter left us.
This summer, my sister bought me a plane ticket from Edmonton to Hamburg, to visit her. She was house sitting near there in August. She had house sat in Europe since July, 2014. I joined her in suburban Neugraben until late August. We migrated to September house sits in Brighton and Manchester, England. On September 26, we flew from London to Edmonton. Having paid most of my European expenses, she also bought my plane ticket back to Edmonton. I have giving siblings.
The plane was four hours late leaving London's Gatwick Airport. The airline offered passengers gift certificates worth ten English pounds, about 17 Canadian dollars, to spend in the airport. We spent ours in a sushi restaurant.
We were to leave London at around 11:00 A.M. local time and reach Edmonton at around 1:00 P.M. local time. Instead, we left London near 4:00 P.M. and reached Edmonton near 5:30 PM. We rode a the city bus that plies the 30-kilometre route from the airport to the south end of the light rail transit system in Edmonton. We rode a train a couple stops, to a station from which a bus brought us north, through the University of Alberta, and east a couple kilometres. From there, we walked, four wheeled bags in tow, three blocks to Royal Pizza. We were to meet and eat with our older brother and sister and their spouses at 7:00 P.M., after dropping my younger sister's bags at the MacEwan University residence room she booked, and my bag at the Greyhound bus station. Instead, we got there with our bags at 7:30 P.M.
The day was long and tiring but not over yet.
Sitting down across from my older sister, I happily drank the glass of draft beer she poured me. Between us, over the next two hours, she and I drank two pitchers of beer. When our brother and his spouse packed my younger sister and our four bags into their sports utility vehicle, I carried a full box of leftover pizza. My brother had brought the larger bag from his place near Calmar, where it spent my vacation. Each of my two bags was on wheels. I had brought the smaller, Europe-bound bag inside the larger bag, gifts for Alberta kin and friends in Alberta packed between the bags. Greyhound riders get to check one bag, weighing up to 75 pounds, for free: my bag within a bag weighed about 72 pounds when I left home. Outside the pizza restaurant, as the sun went down, I put the smaller in the larger bag, and stuffed both back into his truck.
By 9:30 P.M., we reached MacEwan University, where we dropped off our younger sister and her three bags. By 10:05 P.M.,we reached Southgate shopping mall, where I and my bags got out.
DEATH AND A SPEEDING TICKET
I mentioned that I had brought, from home, gifts for Alberta kin and friends. Among those kin were our mom's sister, 87 the last survivor of our parents' generation, who lived in Beiseker with her husband of 67years,age 91, their younger son, and a couple grandsons.
That is, she lived with her husband of 67 years, until his death in late September. That sad event makes me happier than I was at the time to rent a car to visit them overnight, August 2-3. I got the car in Edmonton, drove it to meet my brother and his spouse near Calmar, where they live, about 40 kilometres southwest of Edmonton, left them gifts and picked up a credit card for our European sister. My brother gave me $100 toward the car rental; my siblings are so generous with me.
Driving 300 kilometres south southeast from Edmonton to Beiseker under cloudy skies, I wished my spouse and daughter were with me. My Beiseker relatives always give them a warm welcome. I thought about going to Beiseker months later with them, and wondered why I made this rushed trip alone. That my uncle died within two months of my visit made me very thankful that I made this trip. I liked my uncle, and I hope my aunt bears widowhood well. I'm glad my cousin, their youngest child, lives there to help. It was very nice to see them and stay overnight in their house. A flashing, rumbling thunderstorm helped put me to sleep that night.
I commended my cousin for staying near his aging parents. My spouse, the second-youngest in her family, the youngest by 10 minutes being her twin brother, was the main caregiver for their parents during their declining years. Their mom died in November, 2011, their dad in November, 2014.
Last but not least in the death theme is my own dad. He died on September 29, 1989, the night before he would have turned 70. He might snicker at my speeding ticket, due 27 years later to the day. I paid it by credit card.
What speeding ticket, you ask?
A $158 speeding ticket I got via photo radar in Edmonton the next day, while I drove the car back to the rental place. waited at home during my European vacation. I was doing 66 in a 50 zone, northbound on 106 Street near 34 Avenue. That ticket came by mail before I got home. Payment was due September 29, two days after I got home.
GLORIOUS GUITAR
Return to the lively challenge of getting from London to Williams Lake. I found myself, and found my friend Doug, in the Southgate shopping centre parking lot when my brother and sister-in-law dropped me there at 10:05 P.M. on Monday, September 26. I had to get to the Greyhound bus station, several kilometres to the north, at least an hour before my 12:15 A.M. bus, to get my reserved ticket.
With Doug, however, there is always time for what Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day called "the corporal works of mercy." We loaded my bag-in-bag into the trunk of his Buick, and I climbed into the front seat, the leftover pizza on my lap. Doug gave me another edible, a foot-long ham and cheese submarine sandwich. Then we drove, under the speed limit, to his daughter's place nearby, for he had something for her, as had I.
She is a recent university graduate who shares a basement suite. Students and former students like pizza. I therefore added the pizza to the European souvenirs I gave her. She gave me a boxed drink and a disposable plastic container of grapes. Doug gave her what he had to give.
We then drove north in the Edmonton night to the bus station, and reached it by 10:55 P.M., an hour and 20 minutes before the scheduled bus departure. I had made the hour deadline for ticket pickup with 20 minutes to spare. Many times that day I did not think I would be on time for this last leg of a many-legged day.
At 10:55 P.M. on Thursday, December 24, 1992, my daughter arrived at British Columbia Children's Hospital, after a traumatic birth in Williams Lake, evacuation by medical jet to Vancouver, and short flight by helicopter from the Vancouver airport to the hospital. Her admission form said 10:55 P.M., a little more than an hour before Christmas Day began. I remembered that when I looked at my watch, at 10:55 P.M., in the bus station, so many years later.
I showed the bus ticket agent my identification and booking number. Within seconds she printed my ticket. I excavated, from my bag within a bag, some European gifts for Doug. I thanked him for all his help during my time going through Edmonton toward Europe, and back through Edmonton toward home.
I then waited for the bus, in this busy new station which is also a VIA Rail train station.
I heard an accoustic guitar, such a welcome, relaxing sound after what had been a very long day. Was a passenger playing? No. A VIA Rail ticket agent was strumming. The crowd in the station visibly relaxed/ I certainly relaxed.
DIRT, DISTANCE, AND LILACS
A series of four buses, with me enjoying a double seat on each bus, and sleeping for several hours until Valemount, brought me 900 kilomtres from Edmonton, through Kamloops, to Williams Lake. This is much longer than distances we traveled within Europe.
Imagine Norman Lee, coming from the British Isles to Canada, going several thousand kilometres by train to Ashcroft, and several hundred north from Ashcroft, more than 100 years ago.
Imagine Granny coming from Ireland to Canada 100 years ago, going several thousand kilometres by train to the Cariboo, and bearing Dad.
Dad liked lilacs. He grew a lilac bushes on the acreage where he and Mom raised their five children near Edson, a couple hundred kilometres west of Edmonton.
More than 10 years ago, I planted a lilac bush in the yard behind the apartment building where I live with my spouse and our daughter.
More than a year ago, my sister sent dirt from the Enniskillen Catholic church yard. Remember the dirt from the start of this story? I will put that dirt around the base of that lilac bush I planted. It was less than a metre tall when I planted it. Now it is about four metres tall.
My granny bore my dad in the Cariboo almost 100 years ago. My Tsilhqot'in spouse bore our daughter in the Cariboo almost 25 years ago. I consider our daughter to have the strongest roots in this land of anyone in my family. The Irish dirt on the lilac bush completes a circle that began in Ireland and passed through Canada, and joined diverse people, as Shakespeare joined diverse images.
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