Permanent astonishment, p.12
Permanent Astonishment, page 12
The first of September, 1958, dawns bright and crisp in the village of Koowap. Cool yet warm, a breeze from the south ruffles the water of Reindeer Lake. To my child’s eyes, that lake is joyful. And so, that morning, is Joe Highway’s heart. He walks with a bounce so, thus inspired, I walk with a bounce, for that’s what we are doing—walking down the footpath that leads from our tent through the forest to the dock at the fish plant: Mom, Dad, Louise, Florence, Daniel, Rene, and I. All as the Norseman that is coming to get me buzzes the treetops above us as it banks in for landing. I love planes; I can’t wait to ride one.
Off to school in far maameek with our brand-new (though empty) suitcases, Florence, Daniel, and I are dressed like models in brand-new outfits Louise has ordered, like the luggage, through the Eaton’s mail-order catalogue. White cotton shirts, black pants and jackets, and black canvas runners with white shoelaces for me and Daniel; for Florence, a pastel sky-blue, light wool sweater with white plastic buttons down the front, a blouse of white poplin with embroidered collar, a flouncy pink skirt also of poplin, and, on her head—the style back then in north Cree culture—a floral-patterned silk kerchief to match her skirt, tied loosely under her chin. Why loosely? Because of her “country-star pouffe” of a hairdo, a frothy concoction Louise has sculpted with her burnt-in-charcoals-and-cut-into-strips Carnation-milk-tin curlers.
We arrive at the fish plant. At its dock, moored already and waiting for us, floats the silver Norseman. With its dark blue stripes encircling its midriff horizontally, it sways slightly in the inch-high waves. People stand clustered on the dock beside it and under its left wing, the crush so intense it’s a wonder the wooden structure doesn’t buckle. There is excitement, a festive environment. The crowd spills out onto the slope that climbs its way to the fish plant and beyond and yet more appear emerging from the bushes. All have come, it is clear, to bid their children a fond farewell—their sons and daughters, their sisters, brothers, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, even lovers. And how we know this is because Mom, Dad, Louise, and Rene are there for the exact same reason.
When we get to the dock, we have to practically elbow our way through the throng to get to the plane. The pilot, a young blond man with bright, white teeth and a print cotton shirt, stands on one of the plane’s two pontoons, engaged already in the act of loading children and their suitcases. He lets Daniel, who is ten, jump from the dock down to the pontoon from whence he scrambles athletically, like the other boys of similar age, up the four rungs of silver steel ladder and hence to the door and the plane’s interior. To Florence, who is fourteen, the pilot gives a hand, like a prince with a princess, first with her suitcase and then her person. With the breeze on her flouncy pink skirt and pink silk kerchief, Florence Highway flutters up the ladder like a monarch butterfly and into the plane. As for the younger ones, the fathers pass them from the dock to this pilot ten inches down on the plane’s pontoon who then heaves each child the two feet up to the open passenger door of the aircraft, each from there to take their seat. Rene wants to come with me but can’t, says Dad; he is too young. He cries.
Finally, it is my turn. For Daniel and Florence, this is their third and fifth time respectively flying off to school in far maameek, for me my first. I am not scared, however, nor am I nervous. And I am not shy either. Rather am I gung-ho. Evidently of like mind and spirit, Dad kneels on the dock before me. Placing his hands on either side of my bony waist, he looks into my eyes. I look into his. The joy inside them is palpable; I could reach in and touch it. Then again, it is hard for Dad not to be joyful. No matter what happens, he always finds a way to laugh his way out of it. If the expression “finding the silver lining behind every cloud” was invented for anyone, it was for him. He just has this gift for turning disaster into something spectacular. And when disaster happens, which, of course, it does from time to time, he laughs his trademark laugh that goes, “Ho-ho!” Rhyming with “the hoe!” it sounds like a trumpet announcing the entrance of Chief Chi-Louie at a major event. The classic story of his finding that lining goes like this…
17
Eleven years prior to my birth, my family is passing the winter on Nueltin Lake, the lake that straddles the Manitoba–Northwest Territories border and is so vast that it makes Christ’s Sea of Galilee look like a duck pond, says Father Egg Nog who knows these things as he is a Chaariman and has seen Nueltin Lake. Dad is thirty-two, making Mom twenty-nine, Vi eleven, Swanson nine, Marie-Adele and Sylvia still alive at six and three, and Louise still a baby. As for me and Rene—and Florence and Daniel, for that matter—we are unborn, dreamt of only.
Nueltin Lake lies a hundred miles long and fifty at its widest—except that its shape is whimsical. When seen on a map, it looks like a bloodstain, thanks to glaciers of times long past that have gouged all these craters for lakes to thrive on. And though its wealth in islands knows no limit—some parts could pass for a mangrove swamp when seen from the air, there are that many—it also features four wide-open stretches that know no land. And it is on the eastern shore of one such section that Dad has chosen to establish camp that winter. Why? He knows of an abandoned trapper’s cabin that stands there. As with so many others in his sub-Arctic wanderings, and as he has always had a way with saw and hammer, he transforms the cabin in a matter of days to make it habitable. One-room shelters of the genre, in any case, are willingly co-shared by northern adventurers; no rent is charged; if unoccupied, all passing travellers are welcome to use them. Northern hospitality. That’s what it’s called.
And the reason some enterprising hunter or trapper has built the cabin on this location is that a Hudson’s Bay fur-trading post stands almost directly across, the distance at that point in the curve of the north–south shorelines more like twenty miles as opposed to fifty. Once a week on average, Dad drives his sled from this cabin across this stretch to this trading post to trade in his furs, returning with groceries such as milk in cans, tea, lard, flour and, of course, a packsack holding his trusty sleeping robe.
Finished doing business this one fine day, he emerges from the post at half-past noon (he says) just in time to spy in the distance a gathering storm, clouds roiling and churning. A blizzard of the kind that kills and maims is on its way. Normally, with an empty sled, an experienced racer like Joe Highway can cross twenty miles within two hours if he goes full tilt. With a practised eye, he measures the distance between himself and the clouds. Will he make it or will he not? Always a gambler, he throws his box of groceries into the sled, unties his lead dog—Rich, at the time; Kip was yet to come; from the fence post she is tied to, jumps on the footboard, grabs the handlebar, and, to the ever-ready, ever-enthusiastic, and handsome Rich, snaps his whip. “Marches!” he shouts, and off they go. (The French word from which comes “mush,” the canine directive that means “go!” and is now used by all dogsledders. And it’s always marches as opposed to marchez because the verb is singular and so is meant for the lead dog only.)
Eastward he races. And races and races. He races like a madman, he races like a wind, he races like no man in the north has ever raced before, not even when Oos-eye Naapao (Yellow Man) Hatchet, the great Cree shaman, fled from the Weetigo. Always determined, sure of his destiny, Joe Highway will make it to the eastern shore, his dear weegi-maagan (wife), and his five children by 4 p.m. that day. Nothing will stop him, not storm, not hell, not even Machaa-is.
Unfortunately, he is wrong. With a wallop and a bang that sends stars flying inside his head, the storm hits, boom, and he is blind. He can’t see his nose let alone Mistik, the last dog in his team. That’s what blizzards in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions are like: white-outs, they’re called, because, of course, all one sees is white. And all one hears is a terrific roar, a monstrous whistling. At this point, most people panic. They give up the ghost. They lie down and die. Of exposure. Not Joe Highway. Joe Lapstan Highway of Brochet, Manitoba, is made of different material. With a crack of his whip, he yells “whoah” at Rich, who stops on the spot.
Struggling against the gale-force wind, barely breathing, blinded, he claws his way from behind the footboard to the front where sits, rolled up inside its packsack, behind his groceries, his saviour—his cherished sleeping robe. All by feel, he extracts it from the bag, unrolls it lengthwise, and lays it across the sled’s wood bottom in two thick layers like a hotdog bun might be made ready to receive its wiener. The north wind doing everything it can within its power to blow him all the way to the North Pole, he clambers in. His plan? He will have a nap, the kind that Lazarus of Bethany was reputed to have had before Jeezoos raised him from the dead. And the last thing he does before he shuts himself in is snap his whip one final time at Rich. (Attached to the handle, which is made of spruce carved finely and beaded artistically, the whip’s ten-foot length is made of a hundred shotgun ball-bearings tied tightly together by strips of hide braided in three. Which is why, when snapped, it curls out dreamily over the animals and comes to a snap just over the lead dog’s nose.)
The sled inches forward. And inches forward and inches forward, each snail-like advance a titanic struggle for the beasts of burden. Inside the sled, the north wind’s roar has been contained, muffled to a murmur by piles of goose down which, acting in concert with the sled’s soft rocking, lull my father to babe-like sleep. And dream…
Here in Koowap, Saskatchewan, I am ready for adventure of the kind Joe Highway is known for. On this crisp, bright morning on the first of September, 1958, on the border between Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Joe Highway takes his fourth son, his eleventh child, and second-last born off the fish plant dock by the waist and lifts him high. Seen in the hands of this taut-muscled hunter, this world-champion dogsled racer, I am tiny. Aloft, I am his trophy, lustrous, golden, glittering in the light of a mid-morning sun. His brown skin glowing, his white teeth flashing, he beams with pride and says, “Keegwaathoo itigwee paaskach igootee kaawee-naatak” (“What on Earth is he going to get down there?”), the question rhetorical, asked of no one. But the answer is implicit, and all there know it; it scintillates between each word, syllable, consonant, and vowel. That answer? “Marvels, marvels, marvels…he is going down there to accomplish marvels.” Whisked by the breeze to far keeweet’nook (the north), the echo tapers.
“Yes”—the voice inside me climbs that echo and rides it, rides it, rides. “I am travelling south to dance with marvels.” Dad hears it clearly, I know, feels its vibration inside his blood—“keetha kichi, paapaa” (“for you, Father”).
“Ho-ho!” Joe Highway trumpets. And puts me in the hands of the princely pilot who, in turn, lifts me easily on to the plane. I don’t even remember his hands or his presence. I am too busy floating…
Back at Nueltin Lake, seventeen years prior to this late-summer morning in Koowap, Saskatchewan, Dad wakes up. In his goose-down sleeping robe. The sled has stopped. The wind has stopped. All is silence. For days on end, perhaps even years, so far as he knows at that point in time, he has slept through the blizzard. Or has he died and gone up to heaven? When he peeps out the sleeping robe, he sees clear sky and hears child-laughter, Sylvia Highway’s tinkly voice ringing above it, “paapaa, paapaa.” He sits up. Only to find his adored three-year-old facing him by six mere inches. And smiling so hard she hurts his eyes (four years later will she be dead). Behind her appear his four other children, Viola eleven, Swanson nine, Marie-Adele six (to die in three years), and baby Louise cradled in the arms of her elegant mother. Standing at the door, she waits for him. Three full hours after he has sunk into a sleep as deep as death, his lead dog, Rich, has found her way through the white-out. On the sense of smell.
The moral of the story? Many is the time sled dogs in the Arctic have saved the lives of their masters. Yes. Perhaps. But more important: When disaster strikes, you don’t take fright, you don’t panic. You just lie down and take the most beautiful nap the world has known. And when you wake up four hours, two years, or three decades later, you will find yourself at your destination…
As a boy/girl of six, to be seven in three months, I am sitting on that Norseman with eleven other children and adolescents. Now airborne and leaving Koowap, I see my parents far down below, still standing on that dock waving at me. Dad holding Rene in his arms; tiny Rene, too, is waving. And he is crying, I know he is crying because I, too, am crying. But I’ll see him again, I’ll see him in June. And through the wash of tears, the sky takes over, sky that fades into a surface of white and yet more white. And, in that white, I see Dad crossing Nueltin Lake. And a voice inside me whispers, breeze-like: “I think I’ll take a nap.”
18
I am sitting in the trailer of a truck that is rumbling down a road. The road of gravel, the vehicle leaves in its wake a swirling cloud, making it a trick to breathe at times. The trailer being open to the air, what is there for us to do but try our best, “us” being the twelve young passengers who have just disembarked from the plane from Koowap? Built into the walls like shelving units, the benches they have given us as seats afford us leg room while the walls of the trailer serve us as backrests. Our destination a school somewhere out there, all I know is that we have just left the floatplane base on the outskirts of a town called The Pas. The vehicle rattles. A half-hour later, we turn a curve and there it stands, this building that reaches to the sky by three whole storeys and sprawls from the forest to the lake behind it. I must stand up so I can see better.
Never have I seen a house so huge. Constructed out of brick pink-orange in colour, its windows just go on forever to the right and left, three entire rows of them, in fact, one row on top of the other on top of the other. It looks like a cake. As we get closer, I see that the parking lot in front is a seething mass of black.
“Nuns,” explains one girl who is much older than me, “nuns and priests all dressed in black.” Priests I have seen, nuns never. I am curious. “They belong to an order called the Sisters of St. Joseph,” my new friend adds, “from a convent in far-off Quebec.” Greek to my ears but I like her anyway.
The truck comes to a stop. Like a gate, its back door opens. We hop off nimbly (though Daniel helps me). Glad to have our feet on ground that is solid, we are attacked. Hands reach out to touch us, white faces beam, voices both male and female cluck like ptarmigans, the words they utter a general babble, a monstrous moo.
It can accommodate three hundred people, says the older girl who has shared our journey from Koowap and whose English, it is clear, is good enough for her to interpret what is being said. In this case, that language is being spoken by the priest who is chief here; that much is evident by the way he talks and by his presence, which is forceful, as he waves his arms about explaining his fiefdom. The number three hundred beyond my reach, I merely nod. It even has a church, says my interpreter, a teen from Southend whose name is Hilda. And two gymnasia. To me, the word sounds threatening. Like Mom’s TB, it might be fatal. I must take care that I am breathed on only by people who don’t have gymnasia.
“Nimantoom” (“My God”), I whisper, more to breathe out anxiety than to express my awe of this building. Awe and anxiety colliding inside me, I stand there reeling, the gravel of the parking lot against my soles. Back home, the ground was caribou moss with my soles, not against them; the difference is minor but, to me, significant. Dwarfed by this edifice, I feel like an ant but hear Dad’s counsel-by-action: The silver lining, nigoosis (my son), always look for the silver lining. Eyes unblinking, shoulders squared, I persist in my absorption of this avalanche of fact, of smells, of faces and voices, of odd sensations.
Built to replace its predecessor, the burnt-to-the-ground residential school at Sturgeon Landing, Saskatchewan—where went Louise and Florence—and after Daniel spent his first two years of schooling, along with Florence, at the burnt school’s interim facility in The Pas, the new Guy Hill Indian Residential School is opening today, September the first, 1958, and it gleams accordingly, the floors so clean they look like mirrors. Kindergarten unknown in the north back then, we grade ones are thus, in a sense, its first crop of residents. Florence and Daniel, too, of course, are here, but they don’t count; in advanced grades already—three and five, to me stratospheric—they’re practically fossils when compared to us neophytes. In a sense, therefore, they are moving in with me. And this misti-waaska-igan (big house) is my palace. There, Dad. How’s that for positive thinking?
The building has its back to an emerald-watered lake, its front to this gravel-covered parking lot with room for a dozen vehicles of one sort or other including the truck we’ve just pulled up in. Dogsleds? I somehow doubt it. Spreading out beyond this lot lies a field with grass and tufts of flowers; beyond it the road to The Pas, the one we have just navigated. Escorted by the nuns in single file—and there are twelve, explains this Hilda—up the central staircase that leads to the entrance, it strikes me as odd that, shrouded in black, full-length robes with veils that look heavy, only their hands and faces betray them as human. Oversized black rosaries that hang from their waists go clickety-clack as they trundle up the stairs.
The building’s facilities too numerous to describe, suffice it to explain that there are, at one end on the upper two floors, three dormitories for a hundred boys, at the other, three more “dorms” for a hundred girls. In between and on lower floors are situated gender-divided dining rooms, washrooms, and playrooms—what, in the last case, my tour guide, Hilda, called “gymnasia”—though the classrooms, at least, will be mixed in gender, she assures me. Also on this floor are one-room sleeping quarters, dining rooms, and lounges for staff both lay and clergy. Then there are the laundry facilities, the sewing room, the infirmary, the storerooms, the church which the nuns call “chapel,” a boiler room the size of Companeek that controls, apparently, the water, heating, and electrical system for the entire facility. Still, the most impressive, at least for me, is the kitchen that can feed over two hundred people, says my friend, Hilda, with ovens so immense they could each roast a moose unbutchered, antlers and all. The place is a labyrinth, as I am soon to discover, a kaleidoscope: for me, a kingdom of magic. There, Dad. How’s that for a silver lining? No one here—no one—will ever think of calling your second-youngest child sentimental or cowardly, not when I have Hilda, Florence, and Daniel.
