My original home, the place where I first saw life, about two hours north and an hour and a half west of the Wiwcharuk farm, was just north of the fifty-third line of latitude. But set a person from the Endeavour area, blindfolded, down in Garrick (north of which my family homesteaded, and in the forties about the same size as Endeavour, and named, astonishingly, after the eighteenth-century English actor, playwright, and director David Garrick), that person would not know the difference. We had childhoods in wilderness, and more than forty years after the Wiwcharuk farm was sold out of the family, and sixty after my family left, the areas are still wild.
The town of Endeavour itself, originally called Annette after the first settler in the small community nearest to the Wiwcharuk home, was later named after the monoplane, the Endeavour, flown by Captain Walter Hinchcliffe in 1928 in a bid to be the first to cross the Atlantic from east to west. The attempt ended in a crash, killing him and his female co-pilot. That was the same year the CNR line came through the area, and it changed the name to Endeavour. (A nearby siding originally called Etomami, now extinct, was named Hinchcliffe after the Endeavour’s pilot. “Etomami,” according to Bill Barry in his People Places, is a version of the Cree ayitaw-mâmihk, meaning “downstream on both sides” or “watershed.” This was a portage between the north and south Etomami River, the south branch of which runs along the eastern border of Endeavour and is now called the Lilian River.
Many Saskatchewan communities were named after someone or someplace far from the new community, and having little or no relationship to the new village or hamlet that sprang up in response to the needs of settlers and of the CNR. Actually, renamed would be a more accurate description since all such places had names in Indian languages of those who had known them for centuries, but nobody took the time to find out what those names might be, or they could not pronounce or spell the native names, or felt such “primitive” naming to be meaningless. (Sometimes the towns were given names that encapsulated the settlers’ dreams—Plenty, Success, Conquest, Climax—which, before long, became ironic.) In fact, the nearest Reserve to the town is the Key (Chief Ow-tah-pee-ka-kaw) Reserve inhabited by mixed Cree and Saulteaux peoples, created in 1875 under Treaty Four. Perhaps what the settlers really felt was that by renaming a place, they were altering it forever from the wilderness abode of “savages.”
So, our first experience of life—Alex’s from April 1939, and mine from August 1940—was not of a neat frame, brick, or stone farmhouse in the midst of cleared and seeded fields of wheat, oats, barley, or rye, and of, within walking distance, other long-settled farms just like ours, with a pleasant, prosperous village with freshly painted white church and brick schoolhouse just over the next hill. Our first memories were of uncut, uncleared, and untamed forest, and all the worries and fears that the forest induced: fear of wolves, which we heard howling every day at sundown; of bears, of which we saw traces every day, and often caught glimpses and heard stories; fear of being lost in the endlessly wide, deep, and unbounded forest, and never found; fear, also, of who-knew-what other mysterious and dark forces, out of the realm of fairy tales.
And then there were the always-present Aboriginal peoples, pushed to the periphery of our society, where they could safely—at least on the surface—be ignored by the ruling whites (however poor, however “foreign” those whites might be), and who, when Alex and I were children, were profoundly mysterious presences. Besides dressing differently and behaving differently, often they spoke little or no English. Our parents couldn’t tell us their history; for the most part, our parents had no idea what it was, or maybe they didn’t talk about the “Indians” out of some buried and unmentionable shame. So we children didn’t understand who they were; we did not know what they did, or why they were there, or what we should think about them. We knew only the implicit judgement surrounding us that they were inferior.
Children such as Alex and I lived in mystery; it was all around us. What were the northern lights, those eerie lights in the twilight or night sky? And we were born into a resonant but frightening world of sound: the mournful cry of loons, the soul-shivering wail of the timber wolves, the babbling of the great flocks of geese going north or south depending on the season and filling the sky with their noise, the scream and battering of the snow-laden wind during winter storms, the trickling of water, or its splash and roar in the spring as streams swelled and became impassable. And for me, the fierce and terrifying whine of the bull saw at the sawmill my father ran, and for Alex, the more reassuring roaring clank of the old mechanical farm machinery, and the steady loud chug of the donkey engine that gave electricity to those of us who had one, but that, because they burned fuel and fuel was expensive, we ran for only a few hours each day.
That same wild and threatening forest, though, was full of interesting plants, from wild hazelnuts to berries of many different kinds, and we children knew these plants from for-ays with our mothers to pick them—saskatoons, chokecherries, blueberries—and sometimes wildflowers to brighten our log or frame shacks. The pastures and the ditches beside the makeshift roads were rife, in spring, summer, and fall, with many-coloured wildflowers: the red-coral of Indian paint-brush, the delicate mauve-tinged blue of bluebells and flaxflowers; in late summer and fall the glow of goldenrod, the brilliant black-dashed scarlet prairie lily—whole astonishing, enchanting fields of them in those days; in spring the purple of crocuses, not to mention the dandelion that showed its yellow face everywhere in the grass. And there were pussy willows and cattails and rushes and sedges growing in the bogs and swamps, and wild, deep-pink roses blooming profusely everywhere and scenting the already scented air.
We smelled the north; we breathed wildness in with every breath, and did not know that was what we were breathing; the brilliant, clear air of the north carried down to us through the arctic snows and ice, across the tundra, and the miles and miles of pine and spruce forest farther north of us. We could smell water—in those days, in those places, water was everywhere: in spring, small streams became rushing rivers, bogs and swamps grew wider and deeper, roads were destroyed, people were stranded by the water. Our fathers and brothers would fell more trees, slice them lengthwise (or not bother) and cover the offending mud-and-water-filled holes with logs neatly arranged perpendicular to the direction of the road—called corduroy roads—over which our horse-drawn wagons or our Ford Model T’s could navigate without getting stuck.
But in autumn the forbidding, dark forest would transform to glowing gold, orange, yellow, and red that whispered and rustled and tapped softly to us. We lived in a world of light until the leaves fell, stripping the trees to their skeletons, covering the ground underfoot with a crackling carpet. Then the snow began to descend, the wind to howl around us, and winter arrived. The snow, mountains of it, never ceasing, never subject to the snow-eater wind, Chinook, but piling up and piling up all winter long until it seemed that we would all be buried alive under its ceaseless fall.
Yet winter had its own great beauty, with the sun or the moon shining on snow, causing it to glitter like fields of jewels, or change from white so bright you couldn’t look at it to deep blue and purple, despite the danger of frostbite and worse, of freezing to death, of disappearing in a blizzard and not being found until spring. In those days, in that place, we had cold of such intensity and ferocity that those of us who lived through it—people like Alex and me—can’t think of it except in mythical terms. Nobody raised up there in the days before reliable vehicles and down-filled parkas could ever forget what it feels like to be cold, dangerously cold, of freezing cheeks and noses and fingertips and toes, and the hurt of the thawing. Or memories of our fathers and brothers sitting on bare wooden kitchen chairs or pine benches, pant legs rolled up to their knees, their rarely seen and both comforting and startlingly large white feet resting in tin tubs of snow melted and warmed to tepidness and set on the bare plank floor, and in which their frozen toes were being slowly, painfully, brought back to life.
Work went on in winter too, though, including the chore of keeping the woodpile replenished with chopped lengths of trees to burn in the cookstove and the heaters to keep the house warm. I can still feel the weight of the loads too heavy for me to be carrying, so that after I had rolled them into the woodbox beside the stove, I had difficulty straightening my arms. If, after I’d taken off my parka, I bothered to push up my sleeve, my skin would be indented and pockmarked with red where the knots had been and the places where rough edges and bark had pinched my flesh. But through most of my childhood, wood had to be brought in and unlike Alex, who had six brothers, I had none; often my sisters and I were the wood-carriers.
This morning I sprinkled a handful of blueberries, bought at the store in town, onto my bowl of oatmeal. When I crushed the first one onto the roof of my mouth I remembered kneeling in sand somewhere in the north—outside of Nipawin, Saskatchewan, I think—in my homemade bib overalls and white cotton blouse, clutching a cup in one hand as I picked small, intensely flavoured blueberries from their low bushes. Somehow, in my memory there is always a pallisade or a high, peeled-log gate just ahead of me—I am guessing an entrance to a provincial park. It was—whatever the occasion—a happy time, it seems to me; no dark cloud hangs over that day. Of such were our northern childhoods made: berry-picking excursions, in good weather playing outside all day, listening (without realizing we were) to the birds and the animals, watching the ever-changing wild northern sky, using for toys sticks and branches and leaves and wildflowers and mud or clay and grass, and water, omnipresent and the most engrossing of all. I barely remember conventional toys; most of us had none, and didn’t miss what we didn’t even know about.
And the cooking! Our mothers and older sisters, our grandmothers and our aunts baked bread because there were no bakeries, they grew what vegetables they could and canned them, they picked berries and canned them, too, and they kept chickens and a milk cow and were expert in separating milk and making butter and cheese, and killing a chicken and preparing it for our supper. The huge amount of food the men consumed in those days, needing every calorie of it to offset the great number of calories they burned in their labours—labours which went on from before dawn until darkness fell and night lit its stars, and the northern lights—aurora borealis—began their pale pink, green, and white gossamer dance across the darkened, glowing sky.
All of this, Alex and I had in common as our first vision and knowledge of the world, and I cannot help but think that no matter what came after, where we went, the kind of education we were given, the future we imagined for ourselves had to have been deeply influenced by that very difficult, yet in some ways magnificent beginning—the beauty, the mystery, the intimate knowledge of the power of nature, breeding both a healthy respect bordering on terror, and an incurable awe. Whatever the specifics of our situation, Alex and I shared that northern pioneer beginning.
If anything contributed to the difficulty, beyond intractable nature itself, it had to have been our parents’ belief in how the world should be, how it was in the places from which they had come. For my mother, a prosperous farm in southern Manitoba was paradise itself; for my father, it was an intimate connection with a settled and well-peopled French-speaking, Roman Catholic community. Alexandra’s father had come as a boy from Ukraine with his own father, Stefan. His mother, Alex’s grandmother, did not follow for some years, most likely until her husband had settled on some land and built, if not a full-blown house, at least a shelter that would withstand the winter, and until he had begun tilling his land, growing a crop that he could sell in order to have an income, at least partly to pay his wife’s passage. Alex’s parents and seven of an eventual ten children were driven from their first home at Rhein, Saskatchewan, by a five-year grasshopper infestation, which is how they settled at Endeavour—their second try.
Alex’s oldest sister, Marie, tells me that their grandparents and their father came in 1912 from Chernovtsi, or at least, she remembers that he often mentioned that name. I assume he meant he had not come from the city, but from the Oblast, or region. (There is, or was, a large immigration hall in the city of Chernovsti, in the province of Buchovina, and because many Saskatchewan Ukrainian people came from it, today it is a sister city to Saskatoon.) Alexandra’s mother was born in Canada, although she spoke little English and her children, even after they’d become fluent in English and accustomed to using it every day, continued to speak Ukrainian to her. What might have been paradise to them, I can only guess, had to have been land of their own, and enough of it, in a Ukrainian community, preferably Ukrainian Orthodox as the Wiwcharuks were.
How the world should be was not how it was. We weren’t born in Ukraine or Quebec or anywhere else but where we were. What was, to our parents, the unfortunate present, fit only to be altered and repaired but never quite measuring up to the past, was in fact our only reality. Or it would have been our only reality, if our parents hadn’t kept suggesting that the real world was elsewhere (that mysterious place from which they had come), or was in the future. Maybe all parents do that to some extent to all children, but for the children of pioneers it was virtually guaranteed that they would be taught that things as they were weren’t good enough, and that the true home was elsewhere. And for us, the worst of it was that our parents had chosen to go places where creating the world they wanted wasn’t going to be possible. Farmers at heart, all of them, even my father, would find there were too many trees, too many huge balls of roots, too much brush to be cut, piled, and burnt, and after the trees and brush were gone, too many stones, too poor a soil, too harsh winters, and too many biting insects the rest of the year.
Our family would be gone in a few years, my father having failed in his sawmill operation; Alex’s family would hang on until she was in nursing school before they sold the farm and retired to that acreage outside of Saskatoon. My family left broke; Alex’s parents left never having achieved the prosperity pioneers dreamt of. My memories would be forever tinged by my parents’ memories of their failure. Struggling between my mother’s dreams of elsewhere—an elsewhere I had never seen—and her hatred of the only place I knew, and my own not-quite-settled feelings about my first home, I would never think of that place without an aching bewilderment.
Perhaps the same wasn’t true of Alex. She was fifteen when she left that small home farm, voluntarily, to go to high school in the city. She was the youngest, the last child to leave, according to the sister next to her, Ann, the favourite, and her parents remained behind for another six or so years on their farm. It had to have been simply home to Alex, and if there were bad memories too, as there always are in families—and hers was large, ten children—they were subsumed by her intense love for her parents, and by a primal sense of that world containing in itself the possibility of paradise. If I grew up never sure where home was, Alex would have had no doubt. If I grew up with an ineradicable insecurity about who I was, Alex would have been secure in that knowledge, even if, one day, wanting to claim a more glamourous background, she might choose to deny it.
I can’t help but think about what that beginning meant to me: it may have prepared me to be a constant questioner, or if not to actually ask the questions out loud, to gaze around me, in a kind of confused surprise, with awe always behind my perceptions. If my first view of the world was was filled with a sense of the perilousness of life, of insecurity, and of great mystery that existed just beyond the skirts of my mother’s house-dress, this feeling would not vanish, but instead would form the basis of how I viewed the cosmos.
Surely Alex also must have had some of that same sense of the underlying danger and mystery of life, and of its precariousness: the precariousness of our households, our farms, our places in the world. We all knew that where our next meal would be coming from depended on the continuing goodwill and good health of our moms and dads; it depended on the weather. In those days we stayed alive because we were determined to stay alive, and because we were willing to work as hard and as long as was
necessary.
Being a girl was a big part of it. Girls were expected to work as much as men, but they knew that the important work was done by the men, the hardest work, and that without the men we could not survive. I had my father, a couple of uncles, and my grandfather in my life. Alex had her father and six brothers, although by the time she was fifteen and ready to leave for the city, there would have been only her father left at home. The odd thing was that coming from such a world you did not feel yourself to be capable of anything, but instead felt the necessity of having strong, god-like men in your life.
We would be torn, all our adult lives, between the need to claim Ukraine or Ireland or France as our true home, and the recognition that our entire lives had been made and lived in Canada on the Western prairie. We dreamed that when the time came and we had earned the money, we would go back to our roots. It would be our attempt to make some kind of order out of the chaos that is the past and, thus, to make some sense of the present.
Now, looking back, I think it a fine metaphor: the wilderness of forest, rock, and swampy land standing for the unremembered, untamed past, which nonetheless formed us, formed our souls, formed also our idea of home, yet all of this unrecognized and unacknowledged, and not to be reclaimed as part of our real lives until we were old. For Alex, who didn’t live long enough, never.
I think about the governments that opened that difficult land for settlement and found ways to encourage the unwary, the hopelessly romantic, or the desperate, to take their families there to try to forge an existence out of such wilderness. I detect a sense of personal superiority in remembering those politicians and civil servants: It’s good enough for them, they seemed to think. I wouldn’t dream of doing it myself, and anyway, I have no need to because I have made a better life for myself than those poor dolts will ever do. It makes me furious to think of it; it makes me furious to think of our claim that Canada is a class-less society.
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 4
