1 My Alberta Home
Katherine Govier
I am in front of the MacDonald Hotel on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton. It is November. At four o’clock in the afternoon daylight is gone. An icy, transparent curlicue of wind attacks my ankles, raising a thin layer of snow from the pavement. The whole earth whitens. Home. I know the place. But I’ve been gone a long time. And the place doesn’t know me.
I’ve stood on this corner hundreds of times. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, after ballet class, I waited for the Number 1 bus to take me down 101st Street Hill, across the toe-tickling metal struts of the Low Level Bridge and up the hill to Garneau. I stamp my feet: can I force recognition into this recalcitrant, frozen bit of earth? There is no signal, no spark of love for the returning native.
Earlier that afternoon I had taken the “Redway”—a covered pedestrian walk—through downtown. I recognized it all and I didn’t recognize a thing. Some worm had been at work, the worm of franchising, of homogenization, of forgetfulness. As I walked, one story above the ground, I felt inordinate sadness, even grief. Why are we so separated from the past? The city as I knew it is erased, plastered over, driven down under a new layer of settlement. Where will my memories go? Where will anyone’s?
Even the Bay, the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose fort this was over two hundred years ago, is gone from Jasper Avenue. Surrendered once along with Rupert’s Land, surrendered again to The Gap. We bought lavender at Christmas here; we sat in the basement “Town Square” with the ersatz English village painted on its walls. There was a proverb on the menu: Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone. I thought then it was an admonition to try the soup or the meatloaf. I’m much wiser now.
The MacDonald Hotel, at least, with its chateau-inspired turrets, and the addition beside it, always known as “the box it came in,” still perches above the North Saskatchewan River valley. My windows look southward: in the waning light the river is as ever, a wide green muscle studded with grey ice. The old Riverdale flat houses have been razed for modern townhouses; I can still glimpse the set of wooden steps my friends and I climbed. And over the valley the same huge sky presides: a layer of rose at the horizon above which is a cuttlebone of charcoal, then green, then peacock, then a glorious budgerigar blue stripe rising to the clear, deep, royal blue overhead. It darkens by the moment.
Home. Its dimensions are impressed on our minds for life. All my childhood versions of far and long and high, of danger, of cold, of shame, or wonder were formed around this valley. If you missed the bus and had to walk from the South Side to the North, that was far. You might take the High Level Bridge, a two-tiered strap across from bank to bank, hundreds of metres high above the water. And it was just what I said: high. The last year I lived in Edmonton, a boy named Murray Siegel and I walked over the High Level on the railroad track. I know, mad. There were only the wooden ties and two iron rails and no place to go if the train came roaring through, as trains more frequently did then. But it was spring and the snow was melting after the longest cold snap on record: forty days of twenty below Fahrenheit weather. The radio stations were giving out certificates saying “I survived.” I already knew I was leaving Edmonton. And Alberta.
I turn from the window. The city has fallen into darkness and I am somehow relieved. All over town my points of contact are disappointing me: Old Government House, the gravel pit, the Normal School, Tipton Park, the South Side Swimming pool. The city has gone to enormous lengths to consume itself and the past. I dine in a darkened bar with a kind of “international nowhere” in its DNA. What did I expect? Did I hope to find that some shadow self has been here all along holding my place? That out of loyalty to me, change had been held off? No, not here. Progress, the future, innovation, growth, expansion, all these are held dear in Alberta. This is the West, land of the tomorrow tamers. Perhaps my error is to imagine that in revisiting the place I can revisit the time. I ask myself, in a life nearly split in half between Alberta and Toronto, where is home? And realize maybe it is nowhere at all.
***
As casually as, in 1971, I drove away eastward in a red Ford Econoline van, I came back. After thirty years in Toronto I began spending months every year in Alberta, in Canmore. I visit my parents and my sisters. Sometimes I meet old friends, like the night I was sitting on the verandah of Tapas, the Spanish restaurant in town, and a man walked in on crutches, after a hip transplant. I immediately recognized him as Steve, last seen in Grade Six at Windsor Park School.
Back when I was growing up in Edmonton in the fifties and sixties, we used to say it was the largest city of any size this far north, rivaled only by Moscow. Then I had never been to Moscow. Now I have. Frankly, there’s no comparison. In Moscow one feels the huge and vengeful empire that grew, fell, was rebuilt, crumbled again, and groans with agony; that the ground is soaked in blood; that people have been crushed into it by furious tyrants; that hinterlands press on it. In Edmonton we bobbed on the surface. The North Saskatchewan took several absent-minded turns in its great gouged valley and left our rapidly assembled city exposed as if on a platter through frigid winters and short, brilliant summers. The landscape was of telephone poles, rapid-growing poplar trees which shed fluff every spring, and frame houses in subdivisions. Edmonton was far from everywhere. Before email, the internet, skype, and all, geography counted. Distance counted. To get to Calgary, Banff, Vancouver, or Montana we drove for hours on dead straight roads that never faltered in their rush over the horizon.
The house where I lived from the age of two was a big, square, two-story in a neighbourhood that wrapped around the western edge of the university overtop the river valley. My father designed it. Our house was one of the first to go up, while the other crescents were still mudholes. We played in a little wild sunken grove where there was a spring. At the end of the street was the steep toboggan train called Lolly Bacon where my sister gouged her leg straight through to the bone.
The planes of the house were flat, the roof was flat, and the second floor was a smaller box set on top of the first. We had an attached garage where I was occasionally sent to eat my dinner if I couldn’t stop giggling, and a square sundeck where one night Dad got us out of bed to see Sputnik. Sometimes we slept out on that deck. From my bedroom window I could see across the park to my friend Beth’s house, and try to send her Morse code signals with my light. I lay in bed thinking that the car lights that traveled across my ceiling were German soldiers marching below.
Until I left home for university I lived in spaces my father designed: thrifty, sensible modernist spaces with tidy storage, arborite counter tops, and adequate electrical outlets, heated by natural gas. He designed our priorities too. We had and we did what was necessary, what was useful, and what made sense (to him.) We three girls adored the laundry chute down which we threw clothes from our bedroom closet, which opened up by the washing machines near the kitchen. For birthday parties my mother would turn it into a fishing pond—we’d drop down a line and she’d catch it below and tie on a gift which we then pulled up. But the house was unsentimental. Little was around that spoke of history, what came before. A couple of beautiful old Japanese dolls that my grandfather had bought while he was trading silks in the thirties fascinated me. There were other touches of magic: ballet and books.
At six on summer mornings I would cut across the street to the Gainer’s house. Mrs. Gainer would be gardening or washing her car. After I helped, I was rewarded with bacon, sausages, and maple syrup for breakfast. Mrs. Gainer also gave me a book of poetry—A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. There was a lot of gardening. It was the urban equivalent of breaking the land. A city had to have green lawns and flower gardens so we brought in topsoil and planted grass seed, hedged and trimmed, and put in snapdragons. On Arbour Day we planted saplings because a city, even one on the northern edge of the plains, had to have tree-lined streets.
My job was to dump the grass clippings. I pushed the full wheelbarrow to the edge of Lolly Bacon. One day, there, I had a moment of vertigo when the illusion of a modern city wavered. I had only gone a hundred steps to the end of our street but I could see deep forest and wide river, bounded by quicksand. I saw that we were “in the middle of nowhere” as the saying went. Nothing lay between us and the four points of the compass. It frightened me. I remember having that feeling one other time. It was winter: Dad had made a rink in our backyard. I skated in circles under a thin moon. In the lit kitchen window I saw my mother at the counter making dinner. I had a looming, falling sensation: I was suspended over great empty spaces. I felt alone: the world was far away. If my mother’s lit face went away, I was gone.
Perhaps she felt it too. The men were involved with drilling and rigs, and classrooms of engineers and formulas. My mother did her best to fill our life with art. My sister took music, I took dance. We went to every theatre presentation we could. Mum took us to the library every week and we read what Canadian books there were. The novels set in the prairies involved weather-beaten farmhouses and howling coyotes, or small towns where everyone knew your business. But I was a city girl. Anne of Green Gables and her village charmers did not speak to me. I did love the animal books—Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be and Silver Chief, Dog of the North. But my imagination was caught by English novels, and as soon as I could write my name in cursive to get a library card allowing me upstairs to the adult section, French ones too, like Les Misérables, which I read too young and which made me vow never to steal a loaf of bread.
As I went through school the empty stretches of Alberta began to fill up. We fished and skied and walked on the river banks and discovered the beauty of the place. I read the Janey Canuck books of Emily Murphy. I knew writers—I passed Sheila Watson’s house on the way to school and later took a course from her at the University of Alberta. Elsie Park Gowan examined me for my Writer’s badge in Brownies. W.O Mitchell played badminton with my mother. A colleague of Dad’s was R.B. Millar, a biologist who studied trout and who wrote a book called A Cool Curving World. I remember him sitting out in our garden after a barbecue, his forehead absolutely black with mosquitoes. I begged him to swat them. “I’ve eaten my fill,” he said. “Let them eat theirs.” Into our backyard, too, came international students, from Turkey and Pakistan and China, with their stories and their families.
When I graduated from university I moved to Toronto because I wanted to publish, and that’s what people did then, who wanted to publish. There was culture shock being in “the East”—my clever graduate student friends and I found the culture derivative, too dependent on New York, and wrongheaded in the idea it held of Alberta. “The Texas of Canada?” Was that my home? I didn’t think so. Before my first novel came out I lived in London, England, but I was too attached to be an exile. I loved the language as the English spoke it and wrote it. I felt the absence of native people in Britain and understood that despite the nostalgia it raised in me, for the world of nursery rhymes and English lit, it was not my home and that we, in Canada, were colonizers. When I lived in Washington DC I grew more and more resolutely Canadian. I then settled in Toronto where I raised my children, always making sure they came to Alberta at Christmas and in the summer, in hopes that they might become, in part, westerners. And when I began to write, it was the spaces and the sounds and the look of the place, and the people and their ways, that came to my mind, and to my heart.
It was the newness of Alberta that had discouraged me, as a young woman who wanted to write, the insistence on industry, the thin cultural soil. I didn’t want to be a pioneer. I knew about pioneers: my grandfather and his general stores in small prairie towns, falling prey to bad crops and finally to the car, which carried his customers to bigger towns. My mother taught Canadian fiction to scores and scores of Calgary women, outside of universities which at that time didn’t want much to do with books written by the locals. She had defended her friend W.O. Mitchell to an American academic at the University of Calgary, who called him “a sort of Canadian Amos and Andy.” I admired the first, but I did not want it. I wanted to exist in a milieu where stories and dance and history were deep and well-established. And I have enjoyed those places, but Alberta remains my home.
I have discovered by now that we are all pioneers in the writing business in Canada: it is still new and tentative, and on thin ice. The stories that were not yet written when I was a child are being written now. It has been a short flowering—forty years and not much more. Long may it continue, but, in the recent struggles in the business of books and bookselling, there are no guarantees.
In 1979 I published my first novel, Random Descent, describing the experience of moving West, picking up and moving again, until finally you had to go back East or fall off the edge. Going Through the Motions followed, set in Toronto. Then came the short story collection Fables of Brunswick Avenue, chronicling the struggles of young artists who have moved to the centre of the city (Toronto again!) to make their way in the world.
Then, in 1985, I published Between Men, a novel set in Calgary and dealing with a historical murder, Calgary’s first, of a young Cree woman in a hotel on Stephen Avenue. In it I set a pattern for novels to come: I worked in archives and libraries to research a real moment in history and wrote a contemporary novel that explicated the past. My journeying between East and West now became journeying between past and present as I followed that novel with more stories, The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery, and then spent five years writing Angel Walk.
In Angel Walk, published in 1996, I revisited family history, this time tracing my father’s family in Parry Sound on the shores of Georgian Bay, and the role of that town—Nobel, Ontario—in producing explosives for the world wars. I continued also my interest in artists as central figures in fiction. The artist in this case was Cory Ditchburn, a war photographer who looks back on her adventures in Belgium in the Second World War, from the “Safe Harbour” of a cottage on Georgian Bay.
At this point, restless, I began to look at the wider world. Not many Canadian writers did that at the time: we had lots to write about at home. But I had said a great deal about what I knew. It was what I didn’t know that drew me. I wrote The Truth Teller about a small private school for misfit kids and their encounter with Greek mythology. And then I chanced upon the Toronto Public Library’s John James Audubon prints from his elephant-portfolio Birds of America. These brilliantly coloured, stagey, timeless aquatint engravings astounded me. I discovered that Audubon spent a little-known summer in Labrador searching for the great seabirds and discovering that loss of habitat was leading to their disappearance. That became the novel Creation, which was published in the United States and Canada and became a New York Times Notable Book.
It also started me on a journey through nineteenth-century printmaker Audubon to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pearl traders, and to that other astounding printmaker, the Japanese Hokusai, almost Audubon’s exact contemporary, and like the French-American, a man who introduced his contemporaries to the wonders of a natural world they would never otherwise see. The trio of novels—Creation, Three Views of Crystal Water, and The Ghost Brush—occupied a decade of my life, from 2002 to 2012. It was terrific fun to travel to private homes in Holland, to visit tiny collections of ukiyo-e in rural Japan with a translator, to meet with curators at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I became a reporter and a detective. My credo was that I would find out as much as I could from the historical record, and then armed and convinced about what had happened in “the gaps,” I would speculate. It was a method I learned writing Between Men while using the Calgary Public Library.
And now, I have returned to Alberta with The Three Sisters Bar and Hotel, a novel about the family of a packtrain outfitter in the early years of Banff National Park. A mystery surrounds the disappearance of a scientific expedition he guided, a mystery that involves his daughter and eventually his grandchildren. It centres around a homecoming. I must say, using the Whyte Museum in Banff was that for me. I speak the language. My main characters shout from every shelf to be put on the page. Half the time I’ve met the people they’re based on, or their descendants.
I wonder if it matters if you are an Alberta writer or an Ontario writer. It matters that the stories are told, and that those tellings are not lost. The stories are everywhere and always growing; they are begging to be told, actually. What I have come to understand about my Alberta childhood and family is how very lucky I am to have been born in this place to people who adopted Alberta. Because my parents, and their generation, were immigrants themselves, although it was never spoken of that way. My mother’s parents had migrated as adults from England to Vancouver, and she had come to Alberta as a bride in 1940, to mud streets. My father’s family, we have recently discovered, dates back to the Pilgrim Fathers, but his mother too had been nearly an adult when she found herself set down outside of Moose Jaw beside the CPR tracks. They made every effort to come to terms with the enormous scale of the province, its rawness, and the mingling of cultures. From my parents and their generation I learned to appreciate not only the physical grandeur of the mountains and foothills, but the intellectual wonder of books and ideas.
When I published my first novel, there was a newspaper headline: “She’s not called Margaret and she’s not from a small town.” People have found it difficult to classify me as a writer: I don’t do the expected thing or take the expected turn. But a closer look finds traces of my past in everything I do: I first encountered the culture of Japan in that Edmonton neighbourhood, when a student came to board with us. I first learned about Audubon in the South Side Library in Strathcona.
When I dream about the house my father built us in Windsor Park, I dream about newfound rooms. I discover an entire wing or a new basement; my god! it has been there empty and unnoticed until this very moment. In my dream I take one step around a corner on the familiar linoleum into an enormous new territory, great reaches of domestic space, gleaming wood floors fit for a ballroom, huge sunlit windows. It is all there, in the place where I have always been—although inexplicably I had not seen it before. These are wonderful dreams. Discovering great reaches through old doorways gives me a kind of peaceful elation.
I believe we all harbour a knowledge of brilliant, untouched worlds within our real spaces. Last night it was the basement, in fact the furnace room. It was very tidy with old shoes, hats, photograph albums, books, skates, camping supplies—all clearly labeled in large wooden crates. I wandered farther and found two closets. I’ve always loved closets—they hold whatever evidence of the past has survived. The doors were shut and it was dark inside. I’ll have to get in there soon.