ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book evolved over many years. It reached this stage only because many people helped with research, manuscript criticism, and encouragement.
My niece Michelle helped confirm who my mother, her grandmother, was and where she came from.
Edmonton researcher Pat Pettitt helped track down the LaRose family line and provided invaluable assistance at the Alberta archives.
My son Jim, neighbour Jane Gow, and friend Stuart Robertson read early manuscripts and provided valuable criticism. Stuart’s interest and encouragement in the project has been constant.
In Vegreville, Alberta, hospitality and valuable information was provided by Mabel Hunt, Peggy Weder, Lavonde Melnyk, and Marveline Wesley.
Erica Mansell in Innisfree set up these special Vegreville contacts and gave me much information about Innisfree and the LaRose family.
George Patzer kindly took me through the Pioneer Museum in Hanna, while Rev. Scott Gale provided me access to St. Andrew’s Church records.
Thanks also to Jody Curran for sharing some of the Curran newspaper family history and to various Thunder Bay seniors who came forth in letters, phone calls, or in person to offer recollections and leads.
Special thanks to new-found cousins Linda Becker of Gold Canyon, Arizona; Kathy Munson of Iowa; Marlene Poloway of Edmonton; and Betty Matlock of Rancho Mirage, California.
INTRODUCTION
The Northern Sun, opaque in the last wisps of morning mists, spills midday warmth directly onto Lake Superior, flattening and softening the whitecaps, and creating a deceitful tranquillity. The calm seduces even the most experienced lake traveller, smothering memories of the savagery with which this piece of water can kill.
Over the glassy horizon floats Nanabijou, the Sleeping Giant, an apparent mirage formed from the mists of great mysteries. But it is real, a rocky spine thrust out from the mainland to create the vast bay fronting Thunder Bay, Ontario, or Nimkii Wiiwedoong, an Ojibwe reference to the exploding thunder and lightning that rakes the bay when Nanabijou stirs. The Welcome Islands float below the Giant’s feet and beyond them the mesa-like formation of Pie Island. Far beyond that, and usually lost in the immensity of the world’s largest freshwater lake, is Isle Royale in the United States. The islands appear so delicate in the distance, and one wonders how the screaming tempests for which the lake is famous do not blow them off their rocky feet.
This panorama of natural beauty spreads below assorted lookouts on the hills that watch over Thunder Bay’s waterfront. You can view the scene from Hillcrest Park, not far from downtown, or from Lover’s Lane high above the Current River on the other side of town. The best lookout, from an emotional perspective, is just east of the downtown waterfront along the Terry Fox Courage Highway, the closest thing to a freeway in northern Ontario. Overlooking the highway and the lake is a three-metre bronze statue of the young runner frozen in mid-stride during his historic attempt to run across Canada on an artificial leg. The statue marks the spot where the twenty-one-year-old cancer patient abandoned his cross-country marathon after 5,373 punishing kilometres and 143 days after leaving St. John’s, Newfoundland. He had dreamed of running ocean to ocean to raise money for cancer programs, but the cancer caught up to him and he died instead.
I know that spot well. It was part of my trap line when I was kid. Just steps into the bush from the memorial, a tragic event occurred that shattered my family’s life when I was not much younger than Terry Fox.
Whenever I return to Thunder Bay, I go to the memorial and stare out over Superior’s vastness and think about how each life is a circle that intersects other circles. The life circles of Terry Fox, my mother, and me intersected one day in Thunder Bay. At the intersection of those circles, Terry Fox left a legacy, my mother left a secret, and I realized I had a story to tell.
My mother always warned me that people should not disturb Nanabijou. Awakened, he becomes angry and displays his displeasure, punishing the bay and its people with wind and rain and killing lightning and ear-splitting sounds. Writing a memoir is like waking a sleeping giant. Things long ago left to rest are stirred, sometimes with unhappy consequences. We all have breathed, however, the invigorating freshness of air cleared by a storm. In ignoring my mother’s warning, I hope any storms pass quickly and that tolerance and understanding spread in their wake.
Book One
WATER
1 — EVEREST FUNERAL HOME
I did not cry the evening that she died. I stood in the doorway of the hospital room after the nurse slid her eyelids shut and stared like a deer dumbfounded by car lights penetrating the forest edge. I did not run to the bedside to touch her hand or kiss her face. There didn’t seem to be any point. It was over. My mother was dead at age sixty-three, and displays of grief would be for me only, and would change nothing. So I turned and went down to the hospital parking lot, which stretches out to the edge of St. Mary’s River in downtown Sault Ste. Marie.
Falling darkness turned the water a deep and dangerous black, broken here and there by the reflections of lights from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan on the other side. The river passed swiftly below my feet, as I remembered how much she feared the water. I thought that the darkness and the lapping would bring on the tears. I wanted to cry for her, but I could not. Not because I didn’t love her, not because I wasn’t sad, not because hurtful events had created a gap in our closeness. The tears just would not come.
Tears never did come easy for me. I grew up in a time and family in which crying didn’t count for anything. The people of my childhood lived through a terrible Depression and war. When tough things happened, you picked yourself up and moved on.
It had been a long time since I last cried. Twenty years, in fact. That dirty time in November 1960 when I leaned over my dad’s coffin at Everest Funeral Home in what is now Thunder Bay and kissed his waxen forehead, dried my tears, and became the man of the family at age seventeen.
Now in August 1980 on the St. Mary’s riverbank in Sault Ste. Marie, my mother dead in the hospital behind me, I was destined to return to the Everest Funeral Home and all its agonizing memories. My mother had willed it. She had made me promise to bring her back home to Thunder Bay, Everest, and her final resting place in Dad’s grave at St. Andrew’s Cemetery.
So two days after her death, I fulfilled the promise and stood in the sunshine near the heart of downtown Thunder Bay, emotions exploding inside my chest, tears rimming my eyes. The viewing parlour inside Everest Funeral Home was dim and close, the air sickeningly sweet with the smell of dying flowers. When I saw her in the coffin, I bolted back outside. It wasn’t so much the coffin, or the atmosphere in which it sat. I had been to Everest many times before. Poling family dead all went to Everest, then made the short trip across the street to St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church, then up the hill to the cemetery. As a child, adolescent, and adult, I had kneeled at coffins there to touch the stiff hands of four grandparents and, most horribly, the younglooking man with a full head of black hair. My father died on us when he was forty-four, and when he did, I knew that nothing else in life could ever hurt as much.
Everest itself did not scare me. I was there as promised. I brought my mother home from the place where she had fled when my father died. She had made me promise to ignore the feelings of her second husband and to take her body out of Sault Ste. Marie, the Soo or Sault for short, and bring her to Thunder Bay to be buried beside Dad. She knew this request would hurt Bill Brooks, the Algoma Steel foreman she married after moving to the Soo to escape the misfortunes that had fallen on us. She had been adamant, on her deathbed