Of This Earth

by Rudy Wiebe

  Coaldale’s sweet gold. In the forties it was the Japanese Canadians, forced inland by the Canadian government from their Vancouver homes during World War II, and the immigrant Russian Mennonites, adults and children alike, who provided most of the labour that nurtured 30,000 acres (12,150 hectares) of beets grown in the Lethbridge district. As Joy Kogawa, a grade behind me in Coaldale School, would later write in her novel Obasan:

  … the heat waves waver and shimmer like see-through curtains over the brown clods and over the tiny distant bodies of Stephen and Uncle and Obasan miles away… then on my knees, pull, flick flick, and on to the end of the long long row … it will never be done… It’s so hard and so hot that my tear glands burn out.

  I whined but never wept, though I know my mother did: the pain in her misshapen bunioned feet, her bent back. Between beet hoeing sessions we children picked green and yellow beans when they matured in late July and August. All along the Nortondale streets were small plots of “cash crop” assigned by the Broder Canning Company, on our back acre as well. One cent a pound for first and second picking, two cents for third, but you had to strip your row carefully, and clean, no tearing up plants or grabbing clusters from other rows. Sometimes a day in a good field paid almost $2—imagine that, when before the war Dan worked that long for fifty cents.

  In September Liz entered grade nine (not a word in her diary) and for me in grade eight “Barnyard” revived immediately. But I had begun to learn something about clothes and walking away from names in silence. And Murray Robison, one of the finest teachers I ever had, further undermined the label by grading me between seventh and ninth in the class of thirty-five, not so far behind Bob Baker, the lanky, good-natured son of the principal who was invariably first. Other vestiges of bush-farm bumpkin disappeared when, as a spring drama event, Robison had us stage A. A. Milne’s delicate one-act fluff, The Princess and the Woodcutter, and to my happy astonishment assigned me to play the Yellow Prince, the most garrulous and foppish of the three princelings vying for the Princess’s hand. It was performed in our classroom, for ourselves and families, in full costume.

  Of course the Woodcutter ultimately wins the Princess, and I’m not sure whether we prairie plodders captured much of the upper-class English filigree the play is meant to convey, but the Yellow Prince is there with the Woodcutter—Shirley Smith, the prettiest girl in class—looking over his (her) shoulder at me with classic profile disdain while I, in the yellow knee pants and vest Mam had sewed from a dyed flour sack, flick my hand at him (her) in whatever princely condescension I can manage.

  Personal problems sometimes fade as simply as they arise in an enjoyable, learning classroom. That we Wiebes were a poor worker family on the edge of a hardscrabble prairie town dominated by several influential businessmen and wealthier irrigation farmers did not yet register very strongly. Our life was so different from isolated bush Speedwell—with electric lights, coal delivered by truck, a cistern storing irrigation water, which we hand-pumped in the kitchen (it never tasted as good as our former well). There was a huge church of over seven hundred adult members, a brick school, streets, stores and houses in what seemed to me a crowded town—life was so changed that I barely noticed we had no car or telephone, and it would be four years before anyone in Coaldale had running water, sewage services or natural gas. The euphoria of leaving a dreadful war behind and the end, at last, of the Nuremberg trials, smudged wealth and class distinctions, especially among teenagers. We were told the world was clean and new for us, we began to think we could do, could become, anything we wanted: “Work hard, the sky’s the limit!”

  And in fact Alberta’s enormous “sky” was expanding. On February 13, 1947, just south of Edmonton, Leduc No. 1 Discovery Well blew in with an enormous explosion of gas that rained oil on ecstatic, dancing drillers; the first of thousands of wells in hundreds of square miles of deep Alberta oil reefs. For most of us the fifties and sixties would grow far beyond any teen imaginings.

  But more than obvious opportunity, Coaldale Consolidated School proved to be a daily Canadian multicultural manifestation more than twenty years before Ottawa named that an official policy. In 1948–49, when I was taking grade nine, I see in my yearbook that Coaldale Consolidated High had 108 students; of these, 37 were of Russian Mennonite ancestry (22 of them girls), 23 were British, 17 Japanese and the remaining 31 a potpourri from everywhere, largely central Europe. When the new aluminum-covered R.I. Baker School was opened in March 1950, some one hundred students from twelve grades performed a rainbow “Pageant of the Nations” written by English–French teacher Edna McVeety and directed by Murray Robison. Greetings were printed in twenty languages and twenty-two different nationalities made presentations, often wearing traditional clothing. We Mennonite kids together sang “Glaube der Väter,” “Faith of Our Fathers,” in four-part harmony.

  Gaining some peer acceptance and good marks were not the most memorable benefits of living aundasch, different, in Coaldale. More significant for the solitary kid I gladly remained—I discovered how to disappear in a crowd—more crucial were books. The 1948–49 CCHS Yearbook was prescient beyond all wit when it analyzed Rudy Wiebe’s ambition as “To own a library” and his “Weakness: Fiction.” The latter has obviously proven to be a lifelong pun.

  Shelves of books from floor to ceiling in the school library, and also in the new (1945) public library on Main Street. Between them these small rooms contained perhaps two thousand volumes, but after vacant Speedwell the very sight of so many book spines was both miraculous and evocative. The public library even allowed you to take out two books at a time, almost enough for a weekend.

  And beyond books there was the land: open, visible to every long circle of horizon. The earth, the sky, the unfailing wind. Anywhere in southern Alberta you could see for miles, nothing to bristle from the green vistas of land except trees planted in careful rows, lonesome shelterbelts or windbreaks as they were called, huge cottonwoods lined up along streets or protecting farmsteads, and sprouting alone on the elevations or in the hollows of irrigation canals, but they always stopped abruptly, turned square at corners like leafy walls. Nowhere were there overwhelming spruce or aspen forests hiding the land completely, bending in groves to the muscle of the wind, no whitening flicker to the sad sigh of their leaves. In contrast to the world where I was born, or the river and forested mountains of Vancouver where we briefly lived, on the prairie everything man-made—houses, farms, towns, elevators, even the small city of Lethbridge along the edge of the Oldman River coulees—was exposed, poised on a long, open cliff of often staggering wind, a wind that could run ice in summer with hailstones, or hot in the depths of winter to lick every flake of snow into mud when Old Man sent the “snow biter wind,” as the Blackfoot people called it, of his winter chinook blowing up over the incline of the Rockies and sweeping east down the frozen prairie.

  A seemingly endless land forever open to the visitation of wind. Bracing myself into that breathing wind, I would grow to feel it: a land too far to see, fathomless to the looking eye—but, perhaps, touchable by words. Words strung out with utmost care, like the thin, high steel of the railroad bridge at Lethbridge stretching itself across the immense canyon of the Oldman River, words forged and bolted together into the living architecture of story.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Childhood memory is always a family affair, especially in an immigrant Mennonite family. Abram and Katerina Wiebe had seven children, and in 2006 only three of us remain. Therefore my first and most heartfelt thanks are for my brother Dan Wiebe, Grande Prairie, Alberta, and my sister Elizabeth (Wiebe) Uren, Lethbridge, Alberta, and for the stories we could tell each other. In particular, the five-year diary which, for several years, Liz continued intermittently after Helen’s death, has helped me pinpoint events with a precision far beyond any possible memory. Thank you, dearest Liz; I know you will be understanding where my remembering, as given here, bears little or perhaps even no resemblance to your own.

 
Thank you also to the following: Tony Fiedler, Lethbridge; Gerald Fiedler, Belleview, Alberta; Frances (Hingston) Cotcher, North Battleford, and Anne Klassen, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Paul Poetker, Edmonton; Ferne Goll and the Glaslyn committee that published the two huge volumes of Northern Reflections: History of Glaslyn and the Rural Municipality of Parkdale (2005); the Speedwell School contingent at the Glaslyn celebrations on July 1, 2005, which included (to give them their Speedwell names) Elsie Koehn, Margaret and Jack Trapp, Hilda and Jake and John Enns, Olga and Nick Sahar, Edward and Vera Funk, Henry and Stella and Margaret Martens; special thanks to Mary (Loewen) Fehr, Kelowna, British Columbia, who sent me her 117-page personal memoir: “My youth, my school, our farm, our church in Speedwell, Saskatchewan,” and also Dave Little of Willowdale, Ontario, who discovered and sent me a copy of the application map for a “Pearl Lake School District” made by Aaron Heinrichs in 1930.

  In particular, I want to acknowledge the work of Dr. Jack Thiessen, without whose absolutely unique Mennonite Low German Dictionary, Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, Madison, Wisconsin, USA (2003), so much of this book would have been impossible to write. Thank you, Jack, for making the (for me) instinctive sounds of Low German systematically visible on paper; at last.

  And to Louise Dennys, Jennifer Shepherd, Nina Ber-Donkor, Angelika Glover, Scott Richardson, Deirdre Molina and Sharon Klein: you are the people who make publishing with Knopf Canada much more than bringing a book into existence. Thank you.

  RUDY WIEBE is widely published internationally and the winner of numerous awards, including two Governor General’s Literary Awards for the novels The Temptations of Big Bear and A Discovery of Strangers. His most recent novel is Sweeter Than All the World. Rudy Wiebe is an Officer of the Order of Canada and lives in Edmonton.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2007

  Copyright © 2006 Jackpine House Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2007.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Wiebe, Rudy, 1934–

  Of this earth : a Mennonite boyhood in the boreal forest / Rudy Wiebe.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37347-2

  1. Wiebe, Rudy, 1934– —Childhood and youth. 2. Mennonites—

  Saskatchewan—Speedwell—Biography. 3. Farm life—Saskatchewan—

  Speedwell. 4. Speedwell (Sask.)—Biography. 5. Authors, Canadian

  (English)—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  ps8545.138z47 2007 971.24′2 c2006-904700-6

  v3.0