books from the adult section. Yet even then, I sensed that these opportunities always came at a cost. With every move, we left behind friends and newly familiar places, losses that became more painful the more often they recurred. And even more troubling, because irrevocable, was the loss of a material connection to our personal past. Clothes we had outgrown, toys we no longer played with, doodles and scribblers stuffed into the bottom drawer of a desk: everything that we were unlikely to need in the future had to be discarded.
Why, I wondered, couldn’t we be like the families I read about in books, who lived in mansions filled with treasures amassed in years long past by generations of swashbuckling uncles and shadowy spinster aunts? In particular, I yearned for an attic like the ones in which the young heroes and heroines of those novels launched their finest adventures, a midden of romantic old lamps, mysterious wardrobes, and battered trunks filled with lavender-scented letters.
“Did I ever tell you how I used to wish for an attic—” I ask Keith one day, but I can see that he’s busy with his own thoughts. We are walking down the main drag in Eastend: on our right, we pass a romantic old brick bank that has been converted into a used bookstore. A few doors down, there’s a mysterious storefront with a cracked window that, though vacant, still bears the boast of past glory as a “World Famous” antler exhibit. At the far end of the block, the former movie theater, somewhat battered but unbowed, carries the banner of the town’s historical museum (at the moment unfortunately closed for the season).
“Look,” Keith says, pointing up a side street toward a squat brown building shaded by cottonwoods. “Does that sign really say ‘Cappuccino’?” Five minutes later, we are sipping espressos on the sunny patio at Alleykatz, an up-to-the-minute business that unexpectedly combines a coffee bar, a pottery studio, and a daycare. “Coffee, clay, and kids,” as Deb, the proprietor, cheerfully informs us. Okay, so Eastend isn’t just a collection of relics that have washed up from my past. It’s a living, breathing town, a valiant little vessel that, though missing a mast here and a sheet there, is sailing against the trends of rural depopulation. (It must be the dazzle of the wind and sun on the poplar leaves that puts me in the mood for nautical imagery.) Keith and I linger on the deck for an hour or so, nursing our coffees, watching people come and go, and filling our lungs to the brim with contentment.
I had left small-town life for good, without the slightest twinge of regret, the year I finished high school; that was 1967. The quiet that I now found so consoling had been intolerable to me then, and I remember fuming about the airlessness of small-town thinking, the smug, white-gloves-on-Sunday assurance that there is one correct answer to each of life’s questions. God was in His Heaven, all was right with the world, and history was progressing under His beneficent supervision. In school and in the pulpit, this comfortable self-assurance had frequently found expression in a homespun myth, the epic saga of Western settlement.
Here was a story so glorious that even my teenage cynicism could do little to tarnish it, a story in which I could cast myself, vicariously, among the heroines. Back in the 1700s, my own ancestors had left Europe, crossed a perilous ocean, and faced a wild continent rather than betray their heart’s convictions. My dad’s people had been Swiss Anabaptists who, in a quest for religious freedom, had fled first to Pennsylvania, then (as pacifist refugees from the American Revolution) to Upper Canada, and finally as pioneers to Alberta. My mom’s family, though on the opposite side of the religious controversy, had followed a similarly convoluted path. They were Roman Catholics who, forced from Portugal and then England, had settled in Maryland in the 1600s. When that refuge also failed them, they had resumed their migration, heading inland to settlements in Kentucky and then Missouri, before they too made the trek to the Canadian prairies.
Both lines had held strong to their religious convictions until the early 1900s, when at opposite ends of Alberta, my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother had each broken with tradition by marrying outsiders. In other essentials, however, even these renegades remained true to the family heritage as they devoted their lives to bringing the prairie under cultivation and laying the groundwork of community life.
My parents had both grown up on homesteads, and my sisters and I used to beg our mother for stories of her childhood, as fabulous to us as Greek myths. Imagine riding to school on horseback or making butter with a stoneware churn or lying in the grass, watching fleets of flat-bottomed clouds float overhead. These borrowed memories came back to me here in Eastend, in the company of friendly ghosts, and especially during evenings in the Stegner House, itself a vestige of the pioneer era. Curled up on the couch in a pool of lamplight, with a dog at my feet, I again opened Wolf Willow, looking for confirmation of these honeyed stories.
What I found instead was an atmosphere of melancholy that I hadn’t noticed in my earlier encounters with the book. “By most estimates,” Stegner confessed in his opening chapter, “including most of the estimates of memory, Saskatchewan can be a pretty depressing country.” 1 Despite his rapturous reappraisal of the landscape a few pages later—“grassy, clean, exciting”—his memories were permeated by a sour whiff of disappointment. Stegner’s father had been a hard-luck gambler, a man who staked his family’s future on 320 acres of sun-scorched, wind-scoured prairie a hard day’s drive south of town and who then, through the consecutive misfortunes of wheat rust, fire, and drought, had lost the toss. “My father did not grow discouraged,” Stegner recalled, “he grew furious. When he matched himself against something he wanted a chance to win. By 1920 he was already down in Montana scouting around for some new opportunity.” 2 The family left for Great Falls the following year and then for Salt Lake City, where they settled in like a wind-blown drift of Russian thistles.
During their sojourn in Saskatchewan, the Stegners had spent summers on the homestead and winters in this house. It was here that, by Stegner’s report, the entire family had nearly died in 1918 of the Spanish flu; here also that, in his words, “my grandmother ‘went crazy’ and had to be taken away by a Mountie to the Provincial asylum because she took to standing silently in the door of the room where my brother and I slept—just hovered there for heaven knows how long before someone discovered her watching and listening in the dark.” 3 In the cozy kitchen a few paces from where I sat reading, Stegner’s father had once “clouted [him] with a chunk of stove wood,” sent him flying across the room, and broken his collarbone. The shadows cast by the lamp seemed to deepen, and the silence gathered as I read; these traumas were too close for comfort.
Fortunately for my peace of mind, the members of the Eastend Arts Council had provided another account of the settler experience that struck a more cheerful note. A weighty volume, bound in green and emblazoned with gold, too large for the bookshelves upstairs, it was tucked away with the phone book on the telephone table. Entitled Range Riders and Sodbusters, it had been published by the local historical society in 1984 as a tribute to “our” pioneers. “We record these stories with awe,” the editors wrote, aware “that this area had its definite beginnings in these stories never again to be relived and an era in history never to be repeated.” 4
Completely typical of the genre—books like this one had been compiled in communities across the prairies as the old-timers began to fade, including a couple that featured members of my own family—it consisted of capsule biographies of the founding fathers and, somewhat grudgingly, the founding mothers of the area. Who could resist the smiling faces that gazed shyly out of these pages or their stories of heroic determination?
One of the pictures that caught my eye showed an atypically somber-faced man in a three-piece suit, standing aslant to the camera and clasping the hand of a sturdy woman with back-swept hair and a foursquare stance. Their names were Edmond and Marie Nibus. As Marie proceeds to explain, they had come to Canada from Belgium in 1912, along with their five-year-old son, and arrived on their homestead, in the middle of a blizzard, the following autumn. Their first home on the prairie was a two-room shack, punctured with knot holes and furnished with little more than a stove, a table, and a bunch of apple boxes. “It had a brand new board floor,” Marie recalled, “and I thought it was wonderful.”
“Life
