Main Feature
On The Permanent Pilgrimage: Prairie Spring Sojourn
Volume 29 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: June 30, 2015
Normally, a couple of times a year, I try to go to see my kids on the Prairies, usually driving and stopping with friends if time permits. This spring was no exception, leaving a little earlier than usual at the end of April due to circumstances.
One of my sisters had to attend a conference in Saskatoon early in May and my other sister decided to join us there for a week to have a little family reunion as three of my daughters still live there.
I have two grandchildren by my third daughter Martha, named Poppy, 7, and Raine, a little boy who would be celebrating his fourth birthday in May. So the gathering would be part of the celebration of that. Of the five girls, only Martha and Jeff have kids and unless I miss my guess they might be the only ones to do so.
Normally, a couple of times a year, I try to go to see my kids on the Prairies, usually driving and stopping with friends if time permits. This spring was no exception, leaving a little earlier than usual at the end of April due to circumstances.
One of my sisters had to attend a conference in Saskatoon early in May and my other sister decided to join us there for a week to have a little family reunion as three of my daughters still live there.
I have two grandchildren by my third daughter Martha, named Poppy, 7, and Raine, a little boy who would be celebrating his fourth birthday in May. So the gathering would be part of the celebration of that. Of the five girls, only Martha and Jeff have kids and unless I miss my guess they might be the only ones to do so.
As a result, there are a lot of doting aunts and it is a lot of fun to observe and participate in the process. With my two sisters there was even an extra layer of doting great aunts.
I try to leave three weeks for these sojourns. My ultimate destination was Winnipeg, which is four days driving at the pace I usually go. Five or six hours of driving is plenty when you are hoping to find the overall exercise restful and renewing. Besides I have friends to visit. The first day is a leisurely pace, a total of five hours to Kamloops, where my father happened to grow up, so he is always reminding me to visit his mother’s grave at the Hillside cemetery.
My friends there are Geoff and Kenna who have a house high on a ravine at Barhartvale, beyond the city. My father says he used to hitchhike out to dance there on Saturday nights when young.
One time he came along with me and they entertained him and he them with all his inveterate stories.
Kenna has a blended way of telling her stories, half Irish, half English which is her heritage. The English part seems to always censor out the Irish candour, which spoils the effect, so I thought I would try an experiment this time.
I have been interviewing the poet Mike Doyle about his life’s journey, taping him for two hours every couple of weeks. I have reached a certain stage with the process so wanted to review the tapes while away, so I brought out my trusty tape recorder and a blank tape and asked Kenna about her grandparents, hoping to get her talking in a more uninterrupted flow.
It seemed to work. When I listened to it later in Saskatoon, the result was more satisfactory, if only because with interviewing you can go back over previous ground, and get a restart which compensates for conversation self-censoring which people do when they think they are talking too much or run into what Jung calls a feeling-tone complex which usually causes a halt.
In their early seventies, Geoff and Kenna are collectors, so their place is an eccentric and eclectic combination of ephemera and half-finished projects. After ten to twelve years in that location it is approaching a more completed stage and the feel of a work in progress fast reaching some sort of finale. I’ve watched and enjoyed the effect over the years and always look forward to its soporific effect as a start and close to my travels.
Calgary through the Roger’s Pass was the next stop. At the summit on my birthday there was sleet in late April. That part of the highway between Revelstoke and Golden can be treacherous travel. On my previous trip, coming back the traffic was backed up for ten hours due to a fatal head-on-collision on the only part of the Trans Canada which is still only two lanes. It can be a little nerve wracking if you are trying to stick to any sort of schedule.
I like to stop in Field near Lake Louise, just on this side of the Alberta boundary. It still seems to serve as a railway workers area but also attracts alternative culture backpacker types and has the funky shops which suit them, or grow that way under their influence. I got into habit years ago when a close friend’s brother lived and worked there for many years.
Through that connection, I discovered The Velvet Antler pottery studio where I used to raid the seconds bin for treasure until the potter realized there are no mistakes and people were almost preferring the ones with so called flaws. It’s unique work and makes for great small gifts, especially when heading to a family celebration.
They have a sleepy dog who presides over the atmosphere, and this time the owner’s daughter has taken up residence as a creative potter showing me wine glasses she has invented which also serve as candle holders.
At Calgary, I stayed this time with my daughter and her husband at what I call the epicentre of industrial Calgary. They have taken a sixteenth floor high rise unit in the skyscraper part of the city. There is a unit you can let at a reasonable rate in that historic corner of that neighbourhood, so there is talk of a family reunion this fall, utilizing the hotels and interesting restaurants.
Sarah has only moved to Calgary from Saskatoon a year ago so I was kidding her and Nathan on the provincial election polls just prior to the May 5 election that showed the NDP at risk of forming a government. I said I thought it was more than a coincidence and she said she had had the same thought.
Not particularly political, Sarah went for years to Bible camp with Cam Broten who has ended up as the elected leader of the provincial NDP in Saskatchewan, despite being her age of 37.
The next day we drove in two cars to Saskatoon, which takes about seven hours through Drumheller if you can avoid the dinosaur tracks. You go though a town called Hanna which is Sarah’s next younger sister’s name.
Usually when I go to Saskatoon I will spend a disproportionate amount of time catching up with Hannah as she is a lively talker who likes to share her experience and she is also fascinated by the process of her stages of life. She also has a hair salon directly across from the Senator Hotel, the three star historic venue where I often stay so we can easily connect.
She also likes to visit art galleries and had one lined up with an opening the evening I got there. It was an interesting experience. Ostensibly, we were all gathered in Saskatoon for my grandson Raine’s fourth birthday which was coming up in the middle of May.
Hannah and I came up with the bright idea of purchasing a small painting from the show. It would be a gift for him, but of permanent value to the whole family.
We both settled easily on one bordering on abstraction by Jacqueline Miller done out at Christopher Lake, a cottage retreat area away from the city. Coincidentally it turned out to have his name for the title, but spelled Reigne.
Aside from the many family get togethers that make up the texture of occasions during such visits, my two sisters and I were able to visit the First Nations heritage site just outside the city, called Wanuskawin.
In the late 1980's it was given its name, which means “seeking peace of mind” or “living in harmony”. Today it continues to be a place of spiritual renewal, sharing history and inspiration.
Wanuskawin is the location of one of only eleven medicine wheels across North America. There is a terrific video on the significance of the place in terms of the four elements, four directions and four stages of human maturity which forms the central tenets of First Nations Spirituality in its emergent classical dimensions.
While my sister Christine has been teaching a course in theology at Concordia University in Montreal on First Nations Spirituality, in Winnipeg, Rita works in a First Nations Seniors Residence structured along the lines of such thinking.
Our father James, now age 93, has a First Nations background, from the Boothroyd Reserve near Kamloops, and he has been exploring more of his own First Nations background to some real satisfaction.
We picked up some little gifts for the children in the gift shop. Poppy’s was a little whistle on a necklace she could wear. She drove her bicycle home from school blowing it all the way that afternoon when I walked over to get her in Lawson Heights where they live.
Poppy, 7, is someone who often keeps her self and her counsel to herself but we seemed to have had a bonding experience. So the evening before the visit to Saskatoon ended, she spotted me sitting making some notes on an envelope. She sidled over and plopped down, looked me in the eye asking “Producing any new books?” The wording struck me as interesting. I asked her back if she thought she might one day be a writer, to which she replied, matter of factly: “I’m not ready for that yet.”
The next day the visitors dispersed. Rita and I drove back to Winnipeg and I spent a few days there catching up with a few people and visiting favourite spots. I got to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, where Wanda Koop, an interesting Prairie painter had a show of her large canvases, six feet by seven feet mask icons in the lobby gallery of the building. They also have an excellent gift shop for small symbolic token souvenirs.
I wanted to get to the new Human Rights Museum at The Forks, the six thousand year old historic First Nations gathering spot where the Red and the Assiniboine Rivers converge at St. Boniface in the city. Unfortunately it was closed on the one day I had to get there so I sidled across the river to the historic graveyard at St. Boniface Cathedral where Louis Riel is buried. His grave is adjacent to a long line of graves of the diocesan priests of whom I have had the acquaintance of a number in my work.
There I spotted the unfinished grave of the latest priest to die, Raymond Roussin, who served as Bishop of Victoria 1999-2004 (see article page seven). He had a tough time here for which he was not particularly prepared. It took its toll and he succumbed early after the stress of church politics which ensued when he replaced another former St. Boniface clergyman, Remi Joseph De Roo of Swan Lake, Manitoba.
Somehow his grave site seems symbolically appropriate for a man I see as a martyr to the postmodernist crisis of the Catholic Church in Canada.
My brother-in-law in Winnipeg is employed by the Archdiocese of St. Boniface. I gave him a copy of my book on the subject of Bishop Roussin’s role in the post-Remi De Roo controversies on Vancouver Island, to present to the new archbishop who seemed to have some of the false impressions which the book is designed to counter.
Driving from Winnipeg, along the Trans Canada highway one is struck by the wind dynamos set up to capture the energy source of one of the region’s previously largely untapped resources, the Wind.
It also reminds me of Don Quixote tilting at Windmills, and the absurdist unlikelihood of that having any real effect.
It was all as unlikely as the idea of a leftward political party ever having any electoral success in Alberta. This proved the evening’s topic of conversation on my stay over in Calgary with Clint and Mary who happen to reside in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s federal riding and whose provincial riding was a dead heat requiring a recount in the NDP landslide of May 5. An unlikelier result after 44 years of Tory rule was harder to imagine even weeks before the vote. The winds of change had shifted. Evidence of the new consciousness bred by the internet and demographic shift, the new style mayor of Calgary and the demise of the mini-petro state future of Alberta.
In Vancouver, the final stop after a revisit to Kamloops where I guiltily did not visit my grandmother’s hillside grave, a highlight was visiting another art show, an international Asia-Pacific one. It featured the work of some sixty selected painters including the water colour specialist and close family friend Susannah Della Paranich, previously of Victoria. Her entry, West Coast Serenity, an acrylic, graces the back cover of the print issue of ICN and can be found under the Literary/Arts tab on the left-hand side of this website.
I was also able to consult another one of my siblings about the question of care for our now ninety-three year old father. Between my sisters and another brother in Winnipeg, we had been able to converse on these changes. Since our mother’s death more than eight years ago, he has really been struggling without his life partner and spiritual compass.
It has long been plain that given his nature and condition he could be much happier in a residential setting of assisted living. Now that he has taken to falling it has reached a crisis proportion. The next period is key to his future, so the consultations have become more intense.