Where I Live Now

by Sharon Butala

  There was no end to the excitement in that five-year period when so much was going on and people were coming from all over the country to see the Old Man On His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area, now called verbally, strictly for ease, the Old Man On His Back Ranch (or OMB) and sometimes even the Butala ranch. As I write this, I am making preparations to attend the twentieth-anniversary celebration of its establishment. I think it will be a sad affair for me, as well as a joyous one, not just because Peter won’t be there, but because most of the original participants in this glorious project — who remember how exciting it was, how thrilled we all were, how devoted to the endeavour — will not be there, having retired or moved on to other work, and in one significant case, sadly, died.

  Once the contracts were signed and the Nature Conservancy of Canada became manager and owner, we kept on ranching for another six years, and held our herd dispersal sale in 2001, although by then Peter had cut back the herd bit by bit so that it was a small sale. Still, he was so devastated by what it represented that I had to persuade him to attend it. He had only six years after that, good years when he kept an eye on the place and was the official tour-giver, guide, and interpreter (how he relished that job), and we could finally get away to travel, sailing around Orkney and the Shetlands, even all the way to mythic Fair Isle in the North Sea (how he loved sailing!), with our biggest trip together being six weeks away in Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji. I have always been grateful he was well enough for that trip, the fulfillment of a dream he had held for many years.

  During this period when we were more or less retired and had begun travelling, but before that last Australian trip, Peter, with great curiosity, entered my world. We had already been to a number of productions in which my actor-writer son, Sean Hoy, had had roles. Peter had viewed them with great interest rather than the bored patience I had expected. We often drove a hundred miles into Swift Current to see productions, music or theatre, brought in by the local arts council, then drove the hundred miles back home. At one of the first of these we attended, the actors had mimed driving in what we would have called a “ground blizzard” (when a strong but low, driving, snow-laden wind keeps you from seeing the road except in glimpses now and then). To do this, two sets of actors with one actor at each end of long flexible strips of white cloth twisted, rippled, and flapped them so that it mimicked exactly what the road would look like to a driver. Peter, apparently never before having seen what professional stage effects can do, said, out loud, in amazement, “T’hell!”

  Travelling around the world was thrilling, and we lapped up every new sight, every mode of travel — ever the technology lover, Peter especially couldn’t get over the high-tech cross-country buses we took in Mexico from Mexico City or Guadalajara to San Miguel de Allende, claiming there was no such thing in Canada — and every new country. After our yachting excursion in the North Sea and a number of other trips, he decided he wanted most to see where his Slovak father had come from; he wanted to know something about his ancestors. He didn’t mention Ireland, his mother’s ancestral home as it was my mother’s, but I feel sure we would have gone there to seek out the church and graveyard if nothing else, if he had lived longer. (After he was gone, I went twice by myself to Ireland and, with the help of some wonderful Irish people, found the ancestral home and land and graveyard.) Slovakia, however, turned out to be perhaps the most fascinating of all our trips, surprisingly so to me, who had expected nothing much of interest to myself and was doing it mostly to support my husband in his wish to see where he had come from.

  This impulse of Peter’s to find his father’s village was and is anything but unusual on the Canadian prairies. So very many immigrants, well over a million, came from Europe around a hundred years ago or even sooner, most of them with children, and none of the original settlers, or almost none, was ever able to return for even a visit. My impression is that most of them — once the early hardship had lessened — had no desire to return, finding that, eventually, their lives in Canada were so very much better. There was no vicious oppression or torture, no constant war, free education for their children, and plenty of land for all. Peter’s father and his uncles were among those who seemed to hold no desire to return. But the next generation feels very differently, and once they have reached middle age, and assuming they are prosperous enough, many of them are eager to see their true homeland.

  Our adventures in Slovakia — we took the ten-hour trip between Prague and Košice by train in order to see as much countryside as possible — I described in my non-fiction book Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West. In eastern Slovakia then, tourists were a rarity — almost nobody spoke English — so we had to buy small Slovak-English dictionaries and use our wits and a tourist guidebook to get from A to B. My one regret about that trip was that I couldn’t persuade Peter to take a local bus from Košice up north to the tiny village Andy Warhol’s family came from and where there is a cache of Warhol’s work I was dying to see.

  We had a bit of wonderful good luck in that when we visited the archaeological dig in the centre of Košice where the original city dating back to the thirteenth century was being excavated, a young male guide with perfect English befriended us and, because we couldn’t, found the village on an old map. (It had been destroyed by the Communists twenty or so years earlier, and its inhabitants, who had been told this was to make a pristine watershed area for a dam called Starina that was then built nearby, were moved elsewhere.) Then in his small car he took us and another backpacking tourist, a young Englishwoman he had met the night before in a tavern, out into the countryside east of Košice to find it.

  What an adventure that was, seeing the green and fruitful countryside, the tininess of the usually sloping fields — we were in the Carpathian Mountains — compared to the size we Canadians were used to, feeling the steady humidity, and marvelling at the bountiful green forest we trekked through. Pears grew there! The spiders were enormous, furry, and bright yellow! The small crumbling castles on the hills above were a delight. We could hardly believe Peter’s father could have left such a paradise, but thinking of the history he had left, and with the First World War about to start, we couldn’t blame him.

  Then, after certain misdirections and errors, there it was, what was left of the village — nothing, it turned out. But even Communists couldn’t move the graveyard. It and the small ceremonial building placed there by the villagers after their dispersal were all that was left. The graveyard was full of Butalas, but sadly the high humidity had left many of the grave markers, especially if made of iron, unreadable, or, if of wood, decayed. We stayed a couple of hours while Peter, moved beyond speaking, the look on his face not describable, dug in the thick green grass, scraped off headstone surfaces, and searched for his ancestral past. We spent another week in the Slovak Republic, but after the graveyard, there could be nothing but anticlimax.

  As I’ve written, Peter wasn’t good at talking about his feelings, and I read the importance of this trip to him in the way he held his face and from what I saw in his eyes. I have tried to extrapolate from my own moments driving around the lake district of Northern Ireland and staring at the house, still in use, that my great-grandfather had grown up in, what it was Peter might have been feeling. But I couldn’t do it; the two experiences were too dissimilar — he finding his own father’s past and I having to go back much farther than that to a man I never in my life saw, about whom I knew only stories, none flattering, although sometimes funny. I was fascinated but not moved; Peter was profoundly moved, and did not want to leave. He told me he had been searching, although fruitlessly, for his grandfather’s grave. He was diligent in that search, and I thought it was as if all his life he had been floating and wanted to find an anchor, and thought that in his grandfather’s grave he would find it.

  This was touching to me, although also puzzling, until I remembered that on my father’s side I am deeply proud to say that we are Acadians and can trace our family to the arriva
l on these shores of the first ancestor in 1647. Once I understood this, some yearning dropped away from me. I felt that — despite my failed struggles to become bilingual, and my not having lived in a French community since I was a small child, and never among Acadians — I knew who I was; I know who I am. Peter’s desire to find his grandfather’s grave took on a deeper meaning.

  But many cultures practice ancestor worship, or something close to worship; those are people who have stayed for many generations in the same place. In the Canadian West it is commonplace, even seemingly de rigueur, to make that trip back to the ancestral home, proving, it seems to me, the universality of that desire to know where one comes from and thus, in some barely explainable sense, who one is. It is a craving of the human soul.

  So we went to Slovakia, we found his paternal family’s burial site, we went back home again, and he did not talk about it. Yet, also oddly, he was determined to preserve the ranch his father and uncles had created in this new country, having arrived penniless; he was almost completely invested in his identity as the man who had done this, or who would do it, even though his name would not be on it. He bowed to the earlier claim of the Indigenous name, the Old Man On His Back Plateau. He experienced no grief over this, saying, “It is bigger than that,” meaning that the project was bigger than his family name. Of course, in the interpretative centre his and his sisters’ names are prominent, and there is also a stone memorial to him out on the land. It may be, it occurs to me, that his land and his devotion to it took the place of the natural son he never had, the one who would have carried on the Butala name. As for his father, who died only months after our marriage, I didn’t know him well enough to have a sense of how he would have felt about Peter’s endeavour, although I do know that he was very proud of him. “I never thought,” I once heard him say, gazing admiringly at Peter from across the room, “that I would have such a son!”

  It was remarkable that Peter and I survived together for over thirty-one years, especially in the face of predictions that it wouldn’t last a year. Even though I came from a family of five girls (“Your poor father,” people sometimes said), and even though I’d been married before, men had always been a mystery to me, as I was never raised with brothers. It took us a long time together before he began to be demystified. But that is true, I suppose, of all marriages.

  As well, moving from the culturally forward-looking university community into a small society where women were definitely second-class citizens, being reduced to the silent helpmate in public circumstances was a challenge for me. I survived only because Peter was proud of me and treated me with respect, so that in his presence the other men were usually not dismissive of me. Over time we found a way to meld our separate and often contradictory worlds, because, in the end, we shared the same values. If he had not been stricken with illness and died too young at only seventy-two, we would have continued to love one another.

  As it does for most couples, what we shared in the beginning transformed as the years passed. His sudden, unexpected attraction to me that I didn’t take very seriously and my slower attraction to him began to deepen as we learned to know each other better, and bit by bit, he let slip stories of his own past, and I did the same for him. Then, as we both aged, and I slowly withdrew from most active participation in the ranching work, and he had to examine some of his unacknowledged assumptions — chiefly that I, a five-foot-tall, college-educated non-athlete would be made into a tobacco-chewing, horse-breaking cowgirl, or even a silent, hard-working, acquiescent partner who was always a rank below him — we stepped back a little from our early years of marriage and reconsidered. I had learned so very much from him, had learned to deeply value rural life through his experience and tutelage, whether planned by him or not, and he had grown in sophistication and shed some of his youthful notions about life. We had learned some boundaries that there would be no crossing, even while we had each moved some distance from the people we were when we married.

  But at the end, as he lay dying and I stood beside him, my hand on his face, in an unspoken communication that was private between us, it was at last clear to us both that we had become linked together forever in our souls. I see this connection now as something larger, richer, and deeper than romantic love, and I am the more grateful for it.

  HOME

  Sharon and Boots circa 1978.

  7

  A Place of My Own

  Over the years, given the statistics of women surviving men, I had often asked myself, if I had to leave the country, where would I go to live? With Peter’s death the question had suddenly become real, had taken on urgency, and in my frozen state I had no answer. People said to me politely, carefully, “I suppose you’ll buy a house in Eastend and live there?” But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life by myself in Eastend, because, as I have said, from there you could drive a hundred miles in any direction and you still wouldn’t be anywhere. If that had once seemed intriguing to me — to be “not anywhere” — with Peter’s death and my resulting confusion and inability to make decisions, I knew only that such isolation would not be good for me emotionally.

  Others said, “You’ll be going back to Saskatoon, of course,” and I would nod in polite agreement, because for many years I had suspected that if anything happened to Peter I would probably go back to where I had come from. But I had arbitrarily chosen to answer “Saskatoon” when people asked where I was from. In truth, I had no hometown, having come from “the bush” south, through three small towns where I’d gone from grade one through grade seven. It was too hard to explain, and not having a hometown seemed to discomfit the questioner, as if it were the same as saying I was a homeless person. Or perhaps the questioner suspected me of lying, and obviously for reasons that had to be disreputable. So I learned to answer “Saskatoon,” because, by the time I married Peter, I had spent the longest period of my life there, and because it saved me certain kinds of speculation as to who I was and what might be expected of me. But I had no ancestral home anywhere in Canada, no farm I could point to as the place I’d been raised as both my parents had been able to do, no fixed location even in Saskatoon that I could call home and mean it. Still I had lived there long enough, had had so many formative experiences there, as to feel fully myself when I was there, as I did not anywhere else other than on the hay farm with Peter. I suppose that is one definition, or an important part of one, of home.

  But I had no close family members in Saskatoon; even many of my best friends had moved on, even Sean and his family had moved to Calgary, and housing prices had zoomed upward in the year of Peter’s death so that it now looked too expensive. If I no longer had any choice but to go to a city, my first choice was Vancouver, but it was priced so ridiculously high that you had to be either very young and willing to live cheaply, or else very rich to get into the housing market there. My two remaining sisters (Sheila died in 1998 of breast cancer, and Kathleen in 2014, also of cancer) suggested I move to the small coastal British Columbia community where they lived, and even though being close to family again had huge appeal, those coastal communities felt too isolated to me now. Now that the decision about where to live was mine alone, I swore I’d never live more than two hours from a major airport ever again, or from movie houses showing first-run movies, or from a theatre that staged plays regularly, or from where there were regular chamber music concerts. I see now that I was searching for a place I could call home, but I couldn’t find one that had all the necessary components (not that I had ever articulated what those components were) that would allow me to feel, once again, “fully myself.”

  A few others said, “I guess it will be Calgary now,” perhaps thinking that as I was a writer, I belonged in a city, and the closest big city (1.2 million) was indeed Calgary. But for years I’d heard nothing good about it: the dense traffic and belligerent drivers, the intense competitiveness and excessive youthfulness, the super-right-wing tendencies, the way it was Americanized (through oil), the hordes of arrogant
, self-indulgent nouveau riche. It was the polar opposite of Eastend, in other words. This judgement, I knew, could be partly attributed to rural people’s natural dislike of any city. But Calgary was too big, too urban; even with Sean there it scared me. Where did I find the courage, then, to choose it?

  In the end, I left almost everything behind when I moved to Calgary. I left behind nearly all our furniture, and except for a storage locker in Swift Current loaded mostly with books that I couldn’t part with, I somehow managed to rid myself of thirty-three years of household objects. I brought a few things with me to Calgary because it would be easier to dispose of them in the city than in a rural community with few agencies for the homeless or the very poor. Some items I brought that I thought I would need turned out to be useless to me in my new life, and eventually I gave them away, the best example being during the aftermath of the great flood of 2013, when I stuffed four large plastic garbage bags with bedding and gave them to a flood-relief drive. Starting again cleanly was turning out to be what I most wanted to do.

  Perhaps I felt that such a thing would come in the natural course of living. Perhaps I thought I could simply shake off all those years as if they had never happened, and emerge new to start another new life, as I had once abandoned my career, friends, and family to join Peter on his ranch.

  I could not take the land with me — I would deal with that grief later — but I would take a few symbolic remnants of it. I took one buffalo horn, actually the casing thereof, that I had myself found and dug out of the prairie and that I prized as a connection to the heroic past, and a small chunk of the backbone of a cow that was rough-surfaced and stained a dark brown-gold with age and that was to me beautiful art; I took a fossilized piece of fish that either Peter or I had found in the river, one side of which still glimmered purple, green, and blue; I took a few scrapers or flakes I had picked up in the early days, before I developed my own protocol about what I might pick up and what had to stay where it was, that had fluted edges cut by a First Nations person a hundred or a thousand years ago; I prized a large red sandstone scraper I had first found in the field and that represented a place where spirit had spoken to me. I took also — although I can’t find it now — the small white skull with the delicate white antlers of a young deer that I nearly tripped over one day in the field. I had held it in my hands in awe at its grace, feeling blessed at having found it. Then I had looked up and counted twenty-two deer, motionless and silent, gazing down at me from the ridge. I brought with me the eagle feather in its carved box that was given me by a First Nations person after Peter’s funeral and sometime after an honour song had been sung for him. I gathered what I was afraid would be my last bouquet of pasture sage to put on my desk once I was settled in the city, where it was to fill the room with the blessed, muted, yet pungent scent of Canadian prairie.