HBC 350 Memories

April 19, 2020

I hired on with the Hudson's Bay Company Northern Stores Department in

Edmonton in July, 1986.  Two plane rides later, I was in Fort Simpson, Northwest

Territories, 1 200 km to the north.   One relative I left behind called it

"Fort Nowhere."

I began 13 months of raw fur buying, running in-store post offices and banks, and

selling a range of items that included food, clothes, housewares, televisions, snowmobiles,

motors for boats, and guns and bullets. I literally sold guns to Indians.  The

four communities I spent that year in were from 60-95% Indigenous, with

300-1100 people in each one.

Every account ledger page I used in 1986 had the preface "316."  The 1987 ones

had the preface "317."  That stood for the number of years since the first ship

of supplies came from England to Rupert's Land.  King Charles II gave that Indigenous

land, not his to give, to the new Hudson's Bay Company on May 2, 1670. 

That date is inscribed on more than one Hudson's Bay Company

department store building in Western Canada, including Winnipeg (national

headquarters), Edmonton, Vancouver, and Victoria.

I worked in Forts Simpson, Providence, Resolution, and Liard.  I read newspapers

under the midnight summer sun.  I swam in the Mackenzie River.  I cross-country

skied in the wilderness beside the Mackenzie and Slave Rivers.  I haggled

for the fresh pelts of beavers, muskrats, mink, martens, foxes, wolves,

weasels, squirrels, lynxes, and one otter, which somehow got hundreds of kilometres

up the Mackenzie River from the river's Arctic Ocean delta.  I still have a lynx

foot that I found in my fur bin, a wooden box about the size of a coffin, when

I emptied the bin's furs into burlap bags, a weekly duty, for shipping south to the

Edmonton fur auction. A leg-hold trap, standard then and illegal now, loosened the

lynx's foot enough for it to fall off in my bin. 

The greasy pile of a couple hundred muskrat pelts I found upstairs when I ran the Fort

Resolution Bay, during its manager's week long trip to Edmonton meetings, had a

heavy, oily stink that made me feel as if I was inside a muskrat in the nearby

Slave River Delta at Great Slave Lake.  "Send those on the next truck to Edmonton,

would ya?"  Kevin asked before he left.  With relief I did.  I don't think there are

many fur auctions nowadays, although I met a trapper at a Christmas, 2019 market

in Williams Lake.  I can't find the photos I took of him or his furs, but below is a link to his trapping school and a book I bought from him.

 

The 1920s-era Fort Providence staff house I spent the 1986-87 winter in had an oil

barrel for a heater stove, lit by turning on the spigot from the adjacent oil tank and

throwing a burning piece of paper into the stove.  Every couple months, the Fort

Providence village authorities sent a truck to fill that tank.  Every week they

sent a truck to fill the fibreglass tank inside the house for water.

I filled my wringer washer by bucket from the kitchen sink, and drained it into a

metal garbage can I dragged outside to dump in the years of tangled grass that

surrounded the house, 100 metres from the Mackenzie River.  I strung a clothesline

from one corner of the outside of the house to the adjacent, protruding corner of the

glassed-in porch.  This house had been the store from the 1920s-60s.  When I

visited Fort Providence in August, 2005, another "Bay Boy" lived in that house,

by then renovated, including its heating and plumbing.  I have a CBC Radio Yellowknife

cassette of interviews with Bay oldtimers, many from Scotland.  My Edmonton boss

was from Scotland.

The Bay deducted about $130/month from my $800-$1 200 salary for housing and

food.  I could eat what I liked from the store, whose wholesale prices I entered in

a store journal kept for staff; there was no monetary limit to staff food, but even

though I stocked the store, it was too small to have much diversity of food.  I

had to stock the "Core List" of Bay items, including Pilot Biscuits, which I like to

this day.  I have a package in my cupboard now.  They're made in St. John's,

Newfoundland, for the seafaring crowd.  See the pilot biscuit photo below. 

The above introduces the following news from the Canadian National Historical

Society, whose emails I get a couple times per month.  The theme of this news

is the 350th anniversary of The Bay, one of the world's oldest firms.

 

The website for this is canadahistory.ca.  April 6, 2020 is the date of the stories

that came in my email.  I couldn't attach that story of others to this email.

Native Trapper's School – Canadian Winter Wilderness and Wildlife Experience

Beverage Container Deposit Dialectics

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

     We called them pop bottles in the early-1970s.  One summer morning, my friend and I bicycled two kilometres north to the local dump and scrounged about 200 10-ounce pop bottles.  We laboriously hauled them back to my family's acreage a couple kilomtres north of town.  We washed them at the tap on the outside of our house.  My dad agreed to drive us and them to the local bottle return depot in nearby Edson, Alberta.  We got two cents for each bottle, about four dollars in all.  That was big money when ten cents bought a chocolate bar or fudgesicle and twelve bought a bottle of pop.

     Less than a month later, the bottle deposit refund rose from two to five cents.

     The deposit remained at five cents for decades.  In the 1990s, bottles and cans my spouse and I collected cans and bottles in the Indigenous community of Alkali Lake.  We lived there for two years and I taught school there for three, commuting 50 kilometres from Williams Lake the last year.  We took turns pushing our infant daughter in her baby buggy as we walked around collecting containers, which filled plastic shopping bags hung on the back of the buggy.  We added more than a thousand dollars to her savings account this way, in two years.

     By then I knew that collecting cans and bottles was something that poor and/or Indigenous people did in Williams Lake.  I joked that Williams Lake had Indigenous "troopers" and Alkali Lake had me, a white "trooper." My Vancouver professor friend who grew up in Edson when I did calls them "binners" for scrounging in garbage bins.  I've also heard them called "dumpster divers."

     Today's Williams Lake paper's front-page photo is of a homeless "white" man scrounging for bottles in the dumpster behind the local Indigenous hall while people inside discuss homelessness.

     That brings me to the point of this story:  "appearances deceive," as I told a man and woman surveying the homeless who crossed my path between home and the bottle depot yesterday morning.  The cans were from my spouse's Anaham house.  We brought them to Williams Lake a couple days ago to sell.  We got too busy to sell them before the bottle depot closed.  I took them from the trunk that evening, before she drove back to Anaham.

     The next morning, the annual day that local anti-poverty activists seek, question, and count the local homeless, the surveyors politely stopped me as I walked with the bag toward the bottle depot about a kilometre away.

     "We're doing a homeless survey," they said, or less ambivalent words to that effect.  I'm sure the survey had a home, as did the surveyors.

     I also had a home.  "I live in that building there," I pointed for them.  "Appearances deceive."  I held up the bag of cans. 
 
     I wished them well and we parted.

     As I walked toward the bottle depot, I regretted that I hadn't talked longer to them.  I wondered about their survey and much else, but I was happy I didn't delay them more, and happy I chipped a bit off a stereotype in their minds:  not all men, Indigenous or otherwise, carrying bags of bottles, are homeless, or even poor.  I'm thrifty, a nice word for cheap. 

     My coat has my spouse's band's logo, and I'm a prominent walker around here.  Recently I got my photo in the local paper's online edition for joining a demonstration of solidarity with the Wet'sowet'en blocking a gas pipeline planned for their traditional territory a few hundred kilometres northwest of Williams Lake.
   
     In recent months, the bottle deposit refund rose from five to ten cents.

    My bag of containers earned me exactly ten dollars.  That's about how much my friend and I would have earned for our 200 or so pop bottles had we waited a month or so for the refund rate to rise from two to five cents.

     The bottle and can deposit thus rose five fold, from two to ten cents, in my lifetime.   The price of a chocolate bar rose about twice that, ten fold, from ten cents to a dollar.

     I eventually attended university, whose tuition is now about ten times higher than I paid; but summer job wages aren't ten times higher now than then.  United States Marxist economist Michael Parenti wrote and spoke of the "Third Worldization" of people overseas and at home.

     Would Karl Marx or Michael Parenti collect and sell beverage containers?

Back in Time for Winter Reflections

Saturday, February 22, 2020

     "Back in Time for Winter, Reflections" is the seventh, summary episode of the CBC series that has a Sudbury family spend one episode in each of the 1940s-1990s, in their house refurnished for the decade.  Their clothes, food, housework, and recreation vary according to stereotypes of each decade.  The tv mom does all or most of the housework until the 1990s episode.  The power goes off in the 1990s, a implicit criticism of privatized power systems that replaced the dependable public power systems of earlier decades.  During the rare times our rural neighborhood's power went off during my 1960s-70s childhood, our lifestyle didn't change much because many of our appliances used natural gas, not electricity:  the stove, dryer, furnace, and hot water heater.  I remember a neighboring family eating with us during those times because they had an electric stove.
     Today is March 8, many days after something interrupted this draft before I could post it on this blog.  I forgot about this draft until I put that International Women's Day post on my blog tonight.  I don't remember all that I wanted to mention about this tv series.  I do remember the tv children saying that the episodes before digital electronics included family activities that were more social and less individual than they were accustomed to in this digital era.  They liked those antique activities.  I grew up with them, but I like email, word processors, and the internet.  I don't miss typewriter correction tape and whiteout.  I like but rarely write or receive letters, but I'm glad I have many from past years.  The internet doesn't reduce our recall, which Socrates said that writing would do; it makes us think differently.  People still know lots; the wise don't pretend they know all. 
     I'll end here and return to real life, which is genuinely social, unlike social media, which is misnamed.

International Women's Day

Sunday, March 8, 2020

     Today is International Women's Day, first proposed  at the 1910 International Socialist Women's Conference by German delegates Clara Zetkin and Kate Duncker.  The February 1917, Russian Revolution began on February 23 on the Gregorian Calendar, the equivalent of March 8 on the Julian Calendar Russia soon adopted.  Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky said that women's day was a fitting day to start a revolution.
     The sexism that soaks society implies that men get the rest of the year's days, but there has been an International Men's Day, on November 19, for a few decades.  The United Nations recognizes women's day but not men's day.  Men's day promotes good role models and the prevention of family violence, among other things.  Is Leon Trotsky a good role model?
    
    

Back in Time for Winter 90s

February 22, 2020

     "Back in Time for Winter, the 90s" is the last decade described by the CBC series my friend Tony recommended. The tv parents grew up in the 90s, decades after I grew up, so they remember teen activities from then to show their teen daughters now:  road hockey with a tennis ball, rather than the sponge pucks I used in the70s; hair scrunchies, a sort of curling using paper strips, it seems; riding inner tubes to slide down snowy hills, whereas I used toboggans, cardboard, and when my daughter was a 90s child, crazy carpets; hand-held electronic game gadgets; and low-fat foods such as omelets using egg whites from a carton, and veggie burgers from scratch.

     Raw garlic as a cholesterol and general health aid was a 90s fad, the narrator says, and each tv family member eats a clove, reminded me of old Dolly in the Edson nursing home eating a clove per day from before I met her in the 80s.  She danced a little jig as she explained this habit.  I ate raw garlic regularly for months a couple years ago, but now I eat a daily anti-cholesterol statin pill.

     Food is becoming more familiar as the tv family lives decades closer to now:  bagels were a 90s item and remain one for the family.  I saw my first bagel at Edmonton's Heritage Festival in the early-80s, and ate plenty of them in the Carleton University cafeteria in 1981-82.  I even made them once, in the late-80s, I think.  In 1990, I found famous bagels in Montreal's St. Viateur Bagel and Fairmont Bagel.  Every Saturday I'd walk or bike to one or the other place near the St. Urbain Street, 1920s-era first floor apartment Ira, Mikhael, and I shared in one of those famous Montreal buildings with the iron stairs up its front.  The smell of steam, yeast, and sesame seeds pervaded the bakery as the bakers took seas of bagels from the oven and slid them down the sloped steel table toward the front counter.  Bring them home in the paper bag while they're warm.  Put them on top of the fridge.  Put them in the plastic bag that came in the paper bag once they cooled.  Ira brought bagels when he and Mikhael visited us here in Williams Lake later in the nineties, and I got some when I visited them in 1999, the last year of the decade.

     The Y2K frenzy ends this episode.  That's already 20 years ago! 

      They seem to enjoy the 90s more than earlier decades, but still they whine about things they do from that era.  One hopeful item is the tv dad in the kitchen, once solo.  Families were busy and kids were latch-key, the narrator says, so instant food is common, homemade veggie burgers notwithstanding.  There's a frozen chocolate cake, such as the 60s Rolling Stones song "Mother's Little Helper" mentions.   Pushing 60, I disagree that it's a drag getting old, a lyric from the song, and no doubt a motive for the producers of this series, who might have made it to recapture their youthful experiences.  One can never go home again, whether or not one puts one's foot in the river twice:  different home, different river.  Remember the good times and notice more as they come.

     There's a last episode, in which the tv family members reflect on their experiences.        

Back in Time for Winter 60s to 80s

February 12, 2020

I watched the next three episodes of Back in Time for Winter and although I didn't remember as many details of each episode as I did of the first two episodes, I say a few things below.

The 1960s episode had mod clothing and hair and weaving and painting and knitting crafts.  Mom knit, including pairs of mittens for us and Dad.  She tried to teach me but my four-stitch line widened to several stitches a few rows down.  I could knit funnels?  The tv dad plays outdoor ice hockey on a homemade rink.  Mom's still mired in the kitchen but there's much canned food, easing cooking.

The 1970s episode, during a time of economic slump, features pork hocks, sauerkraut, and other budget eats, as well as cross-country skiing.  From the sixties on, the tv family had synthetic outerwear, having left wool behind in the fifties.  In the seventies, I learned to ski.  I skied in heavy fleece, not the lightweight clothing they use for skiing.  I remember standing over a heat register in the floor in our kitchen to warm my feet, after skiing or road hockey.  The tv family by the sixties had a portable electric heater.  The tv daughters disco danced in  the house.  My Grade 12 chemistry and biology teacher taught us Grade 12s various dances, including disco and waltzing, before our 1979 graduation ceremony and dance.  There was television, as in the sixties episode.  The daughters said they liked the human interaction in the living room, a relief from their current cell-phone lives.  I'm glad my 1992-born daughter can socialize in person, unlike many of her generation, and indeed of my generation, enslaved by personal digital screens.

The 1980s episode, of the era in which the tv parents grew up, after the 60s and 70s when I grew up, was more prosperous than the 70s era, and thus food was fancier, including foreign fruit and vegetables, shrimp in the shell, and escargots.   That the tv mom mixed and rolled out spinach pasta as one would a pie crust, then cut it in strips and dried it hanging on dowels.  It reminded me of home made egg noodle pasta from our family friend Marie Lingitz.  My younger sister and I made pasta from scratch that decade, and I still have a pasta maker, but it's fiddly work and the contraption is hard to clean.  It pines in one of the two lazy Susans in my kitchen.  Better times brought lusher sports, including downhill skiing for the tv parents, and apre-ski drinks.

The 1990s episode's yet to come.  I hope to watch it alone and thus remember more of it than of these past three episodes.

Back in Time for Winter the 1950s Was Less Irritating

February 10, 2020

CBC Gem's "Back in Time for Winter the 1950s" reminded me of much, and irritated me less than the 1940s show did.  Perhaps I'm merely in a better mood than when I watched that first episode of this series.  Perhaps the producers of the series pine for a past that was better than their present, although the present is pretty good, I think.  Also, there's much from the past worth keeping.

The tv dad "eats anything, like all dads," like my dad, smiling eating over-salty macaroni that Mom made when they were newlyweds in 1950.  He tries and fails to assemble a model car from a kit, a hobby I briefly had, in which I assembled two cars, a 1950s-era one I painted purple and a 1920s-era one I painted red and yellow.  Other boys I new made more models, including airplanes.  I kept those model cars for years.  The tv dad also sharpens his daughters' skates using a manual sharpener, a stone inlaid into a handle he rubs along the skate blade.  I had one such sharpener.  The episode mentions the 1955 Richard Riot in Montreal, which Dad remembered and told me about:  National Hockey League President Clarence Campbell suspended Richard just before the playoffs for accidentally hitting a referee during a fight.  Montreal's St. Catherine Street became a battleground strewn with broken glass, after people tried to attack Campbell in the hockey arena during a game after the suspension.

The tv mom nervously uses a pressure cooker, which Mom thought too dangerous, so we didn't have one.  My 1981-82 Ottawa landlord Richard Abbott, a Harvard-trained judge and law professor who rented me a 6 x 8-foot room, "the size of a Kingston Penitentiary cell," for $68 per month, had a pressure cooker.  He told me that he was so poor at Harvard that he ate every second day.  This bachelor cooked beets in his pressure cooker while he grumbled and swore at his cat, named Stupid.  Abbott cousin was Stephen Leacock.  On April 17, 1982, just before I finished my Bachelor of Arts in English at Carleton University, I bicycled downtown to parliament hill to watch the queen and prime minister sign the patriated Canadian constitution.  Back at Richard's house, his patriation party included back bacon and whale meat, which I found chewier, greyer, and saltier than beef. 

The tv eldest daughter clumsily peels apples for an apple-cheese crisp, new to me, who does know about apple crisp and just last week made apple sauce from scratch.  The tv family sneers at spam. I like spam.  I have a can in the cupboard.  They eat corned beef and cabbage, which I don't remember eating. 

The narrator says that post-1956 immigrants from "The Hungarian Revolution," actually a counter-revolution, brought spicier food, including paprikash, which my friend from Sarajevo makes here in Williams Lake; but I remember goulash as our token Hungarian dish, also made of noodles and ground beef.   The principal of the rural, coastal Quebec school where I practice taught a Grade 1-2 class in May, 1991 during McGill University teacher training came from Hungary after the 1956 uprising.  The other 1956 Hungarian I met was in the Mayerthorpe, Alberta old folks' home when I was a newspaper reporter there and in nearby Whitecourt in 1982-83.  Kmill Kvak could be half drunk and still beat me at chess:  "Very interesting, but not fun," he would say at this or that move of mine, before he took advantage of it.  The hockey game playing on the common room tv near us elicited the odd, drawling, "The great Gretzky" from this retired Red Deer tailor for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.     

I remember portable record players such as the tv family dance to:  we had them at home and at the bunkhouse of our farmer cousins 400 km to the southeast.  Their farm, and their house without a flush toilet until a 1969 house replaced it, was in the region where our cousin's mom and our mom were born in time for the 1930s drought. That event drove their family to the northwest, where I was born and raised.  My family had a flush toilet by the late-50s, in time for my early-60s birth.  We'd play records in the late-60s in our cousins' bunkhouse, and I don't remember any hired hands living there; perhaps they lived there at other times of the year.  I remember listening to songs by 1910 Fruitgum ("Snoopy Versus the Red Baron"), The Stampeders ("Sweet City Woman," whatever one of those was to my rural child mind), Neil Diamond ("Cherry Cherry"), and other musicians.  When my older sister left for university, her portable record player stayed behind, under my bed.  Before I went to sleep, I sometimes pulled out the machine and played records, including a three-record set of 1950s songs I got for $8 by mail in 1973. The record player was probably a late-50s or early-60s machine, and it had a green bottom half, a white top half, and a heavy brown plastic arm housing the needle.   

The tv mom has a fur coat.  Mom had a fur coat, fake fur.  Both moms put on makeup before going out; Dad called Mom's makeup "war paint."  The tv mom is taking her middle and youngest daughters to a figure skating lesson, but must look her best in public, a rare escape from kitchen bondage.  Unlike the tv dad, my dad washed dishes, and even cooked a bit, most memorably French toast on Saturday mornings.  I and my cousin came home from school many days to find a pile of dishes drying in the sink for us to dry and put in the cupboards that my mom's younger brother built into her 17 x 17-foot kitchen when the house expanded from two to five bedrooms in the late-50s.  One of the two sons of the man who helped expand the house told me about that, and about hauling the shack from Edson to our acreage for Dad's mom a few years earlier, when I met the son, by then 85, at the free pancake breakfast my younger sister organized for September 29, 2019, in the Edson Legion, which since 1989 had been named after Dad.  The hundredth anniversary of his birth was the next day.  Two tv daughters skate.  Dad put on and tightened my skates during my first couple years of ice hockey.  I remember the smell of the rink:  frozen cigarette smoke and hot chocolate, especially in the lobby.

While the eldest tv daughter is mired in the kitchen, the dad and two younger daughters have fun in the snow, riding circular plastic saucers sliding down hills, saucers I don't remember seeing until the early-1970s, but we had an aluminum toboggan big enough for three, as the 1940s episode has, and there was always cardboard around Willmore Park near the McLeod River, the best tobogganing place, about ten kilometres south of our house.  Dad didn't toboggan; he said that years earlier he'd tobogganed into a prickly bush that stripped the skin from one of his legs.  I thought of that years later, when I jumped through a fire that had moved from the grass around my Hudson's Bay staff house in Fort Providence and started burning a wall of the house.  I jumped through the rising fire and ran around the front of the house for a pail of water from the kitchen.  I put out the fire, leaving only a black singe a couple feet up the wall:  I was in short pants and the fire burned the hair off at least one leg.  Many years later, I would lose every hair on my body to cancer treatment. 

The episode narrator said that there was public encouragement to play outside in all weather.  In Grade 11 physical education, running outside was optional if it was colder than -30.  I ran my best two miles, 11:10, that year, outside, in -37.  In my Grade 4-6 school, we went into the bush near the school and shake or kick evergreen trees, then try to jump out of the way before their snow fell on us.  We'd also start rolling snowballs for snowmen, but more often merely combine the muscles of many children to make one snowball very big.  The tv dad gets indoor as well as outdoor exercise, using a Canadian air force exercise pamphlet I recognized because ten or so years ago I acquired one just like it at a used book sale.

Perhaps I like the 1950s episode more than the 1940s one because I'm used to the sniffy British accent of the narrator and the characters' sneers at the old-style food and gadgets. 

I like spam and I can make pancakes from scratch, two novelties for the tv mom, but not for my mom, or for me, or for my daughter.  This cute show bursts with reminders of yesteryear, and of this now, for those of us who see history as a force making us what we are, not as an irrelevant curiosity.