A Rock Fell on the Moon Page 6

  Joe Stevens underwent minor surgery last week when Dr. Clark removed a growth from his lip. Although Joe was never noticeably handicapped by this formation, the doctor thought it best that it be removed. No time was lost by Joe, as he appeared at work the morning after the operation as spry and energetic as ever.

  The Tramline, July 26, 1956

  A big booster of the Elsa–Keno area was the late geologist Aaro Aho. His 2006 book Hills of Silver: The Yukon’s Mighty Keno Hill Mine is the definitive history of the Keno–Elsa district up until the mid-1970s. A member of the Yukon Prospectors Hall of Fame, Aho spent thirty years scouring the territory, many of them in the Keno–Galena Hill area. He dubs his chapter on UKHM’s prime time—the fifties—“The Halcyon Years.”

  “During the early 1950s camp spirit at United Keno was excellent,” Aho wrote. “In those days… the district was still relatively isolated and people felt that they had to co-operate in order to survive. Housing was spacious, comfortable and cheap… Doors were never locked, even when one was leaving for a month’s holidays, yet there were no recorded thefts.” Well, okay, there was one.

  On the home front, Vona and I were fuss-free playmates and did nearly everything together; we would dance, sing, play piano duets and trade secrets using our code language, Pig Latin. The latest games, books and records from far away magically arrived in the mail. My parents belonged to both the Columbia Record Club and the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Dad frequently came home bearing plain brown paper packages.

  My Elsa was full of daily marvels, laughter and loving kindness, but I know that for others it held the opposite. Mining towns could be rough, lonely and brutal. For some single miners, it was as soul-destroying as a prison sentence. “The typical underground worker,” writes Jack Hope, “rises at seven, eats in the mess hall, takes a company bus to his shaft at eight, works till four in the damp, unlit tunnels, showers in the ‘dry,’ busses back to town, eats an early dinner, and spends the long evenings reading, talking or, most commonly, drinking in the company beer parlour… The drabness and danger of days underground is at least matched by the monotony and frustration of social life aboveground.”

  Digging and blasting under the earth can also be bad for your health.

  FATAL ACCIDENT IN ELSA MINE: People of this mining community were shocked to learn of the tragic death Tuesday evening of popular Heinz Alff, Elsa miner, in the first fatal accident on UKHM properties since January, 1953. Deceased was operating a mucking machine when he was killed instantly by a fall of loose ore in the 521 drift in the Elsa mine. Employed at UKHM since 1952, he is survived by his wife Gerda of Elsa and by his parents in Germany.

  The Tramline, April 26, 1956

  Married or single, people socialized laterally in hierarchical layers as firm and impervious as sedimentary rock. The top crust consisted of mine managers, geologists, engineers, the doctor and the clergy. Then came skilled staff such as electricians, carpenters and millwrights. As UKHM’s chief assayer, Dad was staff. Next came the miners, first those who lived in houses and had families. Many lived in Flat Creek, Elsa’s very own wrong side of the tracks. The single, recent-immigrant miners from countries such as Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Hungry were housed in bunkhouses. Near the bottom of the social strata were the few Chinese men who baked bread and cooked meals for the miners. Their real homes (and families) were in Vancouver or China and they alternated one-month shifts with a replacement group of men. Last and least were the Indians, as they were known. In school, we studied the brave Iroquois, the river-canoeing Algonquin and the noble Plains Indians who built teepees, killed buffalo and rode painted ponies across the prairie—just like the “red skins” on the movie screen. But our Indians were as good as invisible. I do not recall any local Indian students in our school, or ever being taught about the local Natives—an Athabascan people called Na-Cho Nyak Dun, based in Mayo. Our adopted aunt and uncle—Mayo-based big game guides Louie and Dolores Brown—revered their Indian wranglers, especially one named Lonny Johnny, but I never spoke to him and, for the most part, in my world, Indians existed in books, movies and deep in the bush. Except for once a year, at Halloween, when we returned from trick-or-treating in knee-high snow, pillowcases full of frozen candy. Mom allowed us to choose one treat each. The rest, she said, would be given to the Indian children.

  An Indian petitioned a judge of an Arizona court to give him a shorter name.

  ‘What is your name now?’ asked the judge.

  ‘Chief Screeching Train Whistle,’ said the Indian.

  ‘And to what do you wish to shorten it?’ asked the judge.

  The Indian folded his hands majestically and grunted, ‘Toots’.

  The Tramline, November 23, 1956

  Along with the racist, classist and colonialist attitudes of the fifties came free-for-all sexism. Working single women didn’t work for long. They married, left town or did both. Still, if my mother was any indication, most women didn’t mind the trappings of domesticity: homemaking, handicrafts, child-raising and husband-taming. Elsa men were tough, taciturn and a little wild, or so they liked to imagine. But a happy wife made for a happy life. The women weren’t submissive housewives, but productive and spirited team players who proudly navigated the mud streets in high heels and muskrat coats and enjoyed distilling town gossip, playing bridge and hearts, giving friends haircuts and Toni permanent waves, babysitting each other’s children and drinking cup after cup of percolated coffee.

  When it came to emotional and spiritual survival, few men made it without a woman. As retired mining engineer and former UKHM employee Bob Cathro wrote, “Successful family life was impossible without a very strong spouse.” Given the era and a culture that took every opportunity it could to publically denigrate women so as to better elevate men, inner strength was the only way a woman could maintain self-respect, let alone sanity. Anti-women diatribes permeated books, magazines, music, movies, advertising, newspapers and radio so deeply they were rendered invisible by their ubiquity. On February 18, 1965, The Whitehorse Star ran a cartoon of two men watching a dogsled team. The lead “dog” is a large, block-headed woman with a fridge for a body. With great effort, she strains forward as four dogs run behind her. The musher, the man on the sled, cracks his whip. Under the cartoon the text reads: “Tried that with my wife Effie one time—durned if she didn’t bite me.”

  In May 1961, the American men’s magazine Argosy ran an article by Dick Adler titled “Steak for Men Only.” My mom saved it not only for the terrific sauce recipe but also for Adler’s prose: “Women and steaks are not compatible. By their very nature, females are timid, trusting, unadventurous and generally ill-equipped for the exacting task of engineering a slab of sirloin to the peak of perfection.” In our family, Mom did 80 percent of the cooking. Omi, who lived with us for the first eight years of my life, did the other 20 percent. And Dad, who never so much as fried an egg, thought nothing of saying, “I make the living—you make the living worthwhile.”

  From table manners to bedroom techniques, every family generates and nurtures its own curious habits. Children, of course, think their family defines normal and all others are weird. One of our quirks was the persistence of German endearments despite my dad’s claim that our home was his Anglo-Saxon fortress. We were too much of a hugging, kissing, touching family to be truly English anyway, and when my paternal grandparents visited we sat on our hands. But what we called each other in private was embarrassingly juvenile. To this day my sister and I refer to our parents (both dead) as Mammy and Pappy (pronounced “puppy”). And almost till the day they parted, they called each other Liebchen (Sweetheart), and were always holding hands, kissing hello or goodbye or goodnight, or touching each other affectionately. Omi was short and plump in a delicious, doughy way, and her wide, deep lap was highly coveted and routinely fought over. Second place was Dad’s lap, which wasn’t so cushiony but comfy nonetheless.

  As bab
ies and toddlers, my sister and I heard and spoke more German than English. Dad left the house and German ruled. We reverted effortlessly to English when he returned. Unlike Mammy, Omi never took an English lesson in her life and for a few years spoke haltingly and said little in Dad’s presence. Vona and I were called Kleine (Little One) and Schätzlein (Little Treasure) and Süße (Sweetie). Then one day, when we were approaching school age, Dad laid down the law: no more German in his house. Besides being the tongue of “the godless Hun,” it was guttural and ugly, and if his girls heard and spoke more of it, they’d have trouble learning proper English. Furthermore, Dad said, the quickest way for Omi to learn better English was to force her to speak it.

  My sister’s name, Vona, is a strange one. Mom told me she pulled the name out of the air but the truth is more interesting. Vona was supposed to be a boy, just as I was later. As her pregnancy ripened, Mom tired easily, and quickly became short of breath and dizzy. Doctors detected a pathological heart murmur and suspected that sometime in her childhood she’d endured a bout of rheumatic fever, a disease that can permanently scar the valves of the heart. In early August 1952, at eight months along, Mom was sent “outside” to Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital, put in a private room and restricted to bed rest. Doctors told her that, unfortunately, serious scarring of her heart valves meant her first child must be her last.

  By strange coincidence, my Dad’s elder brother Bill was at St. Paul’s Hospital at the same time, undergoing surgery for a brain tumour that, within a year, would take his life. Meanwhile, my Dad remained in Elsa. In the fifties, it was not unusual for expectant fathers to be absent from the culminating event. Whether it was customary for a man to avoid visiting his terminally ill brother was another matter.

  Aug. 29. 1952

  Dearest Lambchen,

  I was sad to hear that there’ll be only one baby, Liebchen. If that’s so, I hope for a boy because I want a son, oh very much! Maybe we could adopt one? But no, that wouldn’t be nice either… Well, if it’s a boy, how about the name Carl? I like that one. I’ll make a deal with you: if it’s a girl, you name it what you like and if it’s a boy, we take Carl. Good enough? If you like Svetlana, that’s good enough for me.

  It was a girl, born September 3, 1952. Searching for a name, a name that would perhaps go a small way to assuage her husband’s great disappointment, she recalled a Spanish love ballad he often sang, called “Juanita.”

  Nita! Jua……a….nita! Ask thy soul if we should part!

  Nita! Jua……a….nita! Lean thou on my heart.

  Only four years out of Germany, Mom chose the name Juana—close to Juanita, but not so foreign sounding. In old German, the “v” is sometimes pronounced softly as a “w,” as heard in “Juana.” For her middle name, Mom chose Gerina, a feminized form of Gerald.

  Within four months of her return to Elsa with her new babe and her mother, Mom was again pregnant. Four months later, she received a letter from Dad, who was visiting his parents in Nelson.

  April 6, 1953

  I was around Alan and his little boy, who is sure ugly compared to Vona. As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen any baby as nice as Vona anywhere. And soon a little boy? Ja? Everyone else has a boy so I just feel we are going to be lucky and come fall we’ll have a little Paulchen!!

  I arrived on August 29,1953, in Mayo Landing Hospital, induced one month early to ease the strain of a full-term baby on Mom’s heart. Dad was canoeing down the Stewart River at the time. The story goes that a friend greeted him at the Mayo dock with: “I’m sorry Gerry—it’s another girl.” My name isn’t straightforward, either. Alicia is the name Mom gave me and it brands my birth certificate, but for all my Elsa years and about six years after, I was called Alice, my Dad’s mother’s name. Maria, my middle name, is Mom’s mother’s name. Occasionally, when we were alone, Mom called me Alicia, but otherwise I bore Granny’s first and last names. Sometime within my first year Mom became pregnant for the third time. Doctors declared that the child, if brought to term, could kill her. Mom was flown to Edmonton where she had a therapeutic abortion and her tubes tied, a calamity neither she nor Dad ever mentioned. Over the next forty years, Mom would undergo six heart operations, four of them open-heart. Her first doctors predicted she’d be lucky to see the age of fifty.

  Of the close to three hundred letters, cards and telegrams Dad wrote Mom, 99.9 percent of them declare his love and devotion to an operatic degree: “I love you more than life itself .” “You are my whole reason for being.” The exception was a wicked snippet concerning money, which of course he controlled completely and intended to keep it that way. In the fall of 1956, as Mom was convalescing in Vancouver from her second heart operation, Dad encouraged her to choose some new and necessary household fixings from the nation’s largest department store. With delight she sat propped up in bed and selected a full couch, a chair, a faux-marble coffee table and two matching end tables from the more than six-hundred-page Eaton’s fall catalogue; then she filled out the purchase form and phoned in the order COD—cash on delivery to Elsa! Dad was livid, writing her with accusations of selecting furniture “far more expensive than anything we had ever considered.” He wired Eaton’s and cancelled the order, and transferred all money in their joint account into his account. Any cheques she wrote would bounce. Then he set out the new rules. There was no more “our” money, only “his” money. He would allot her forty dollars a month for “house money” and “outside of that, you’ll have nothing to do with money.” Her new marching orders arrived on the day of their fifth anniversary.

  You’ve been married to me for five years, have seldom been given any money of your own and have had to make do in the way of furniture. You’ve had very little money to spend on fixing up the house and not a great deal even for your children’s clothes. That you’ve done so well, I have been proud. But we’ll remember this—you’ve never been mistress in your own home. You’ve never been responsible for the running of this home, not even in the larger sense, the governing factor in the upbringing of our children. Your mother has been that simply because she’s a stronger character than you. Natural enough under the circumstances. You’ve not been well. I know that and sometimes feel I’ve let that influence me to a far greater degree than I should have. I’m not going to waste time crying of the disappointments I’ve had in marriage. You’ve had some too, I’m sure.

  As officious, false and insulting as those words were, Mom simply turned the other cheek. She came home, new furniture arrived and for the greater part of time and from where we stood, we were an affectionate and fun-filled five: Pappy, Mammy, Omi, Vona and me. Vona was contrary, courageous and too clever by half. I was compliant, cautious and too credulous for words. Vona was happy playing with her plastic horses or drawing horses or reading about horses, or outside scrapping with someone, girl or boy, it didn’t matter. I was happy playing inside with my Noah’s ark set or my View-Master, or outside building rivers in the free-flowing spring melt or tearing through the bush with Caesar. We both were most content with our heads between pages. Dad teasingly dubbed us Thing One and Thing Two, after the two simian creatures in Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.

  Mom was radiant, playful and infinitely inventive. Didn’t have any shortening or butter for a pie crust? No problem. Cooking oil would do. And when I needed an Easter bonnet for the Easter parade (indoors of course), she turned a round bread basket upside down and wove purple and yellow hair ribbons through its wicker, then glued a downy toy duckling and fluffy white bunny on top. I won first prize. On rare occasions she would allow me to see her naked in the bath. But only after she was fully immersed and had placed her washcloth in a diamond shape strategically over her nether regions. As steam filled the warmed room and I stared at her mini-mermaid body, she said, “You know darling, Pappy is the only man I let see me like this.”

  Omi was our rock. When Dad and Mom went on camping trips or Mom went outside for any rea
son, she was our mother more than our grandmother. As a girl, she had fallen from riches to rags, having begun life in a wealthy, land-owning family who lost everything, including themselves, to revolution and anarchy. With her birth family and her only son imprisoned somewhere in the Gulag, she suffered lifelong survivor guilt, relieved only by her Mennonite faith. Despite her piety, she had no truck with the Anglican or Catholic churches in town. For many years in the Yukon, her only link to those she left behind was a heavy, cream-coloured plastic short-wave radio. She would spend winter evenings turning its dial in search of Russian- and German-language stations. Most often, though, she tuned it to Radio Free Europe, the US anti-Communist campaign dedicated to converting Russia into the Christian nation it once was. A twist of fate had terminated her long journey out of Russia, across Europe and across the Atlantic in northwestern Canada, just across the Bering Sea from her banished relatives.

  We adored Omi. She loved us like a Siberian tiger. She told us true-life adventures, sewed us fancy outfits for everyday use and embroidered our household linens with cherries, ferns, flowers and long-tailed birds. For months the outside world was dark, grey and barren but inside, our pillowcases, tablecloths, tea towels and clothes burst with colours and shapes from a Ukrainian harvest. Omi was a skilled Mennonite cook who rarely measured ingredients; her kitchen mainstays were milk, cream, eggs and butter. Chocolate, however, was anathema: it had once been a key element in a concoction she’d mixed and ingested to successfully treat her tuberculosis during her first year in Canada. Take raw whole eggs (shells included), immerse in freshly squeezed lemon juice and let dissolve in fridge overnight. Then add melted pork fat and, to make the whole thing palatable, several ounces of melted chocolate. One year’s bed rest near an open window, plus three tablespoons a day of her medicinal brew, and Omi was cured. It was near the end of this convalescence at the Rempels’ farm that Omi, as she described it, “confessed her sins and received Jesus into her heart.” When we asked what those sins could possibly be, she answered, “In the terror times, I did what I did to stay alive.” Before her sudden conversion, she’d been a Mennonite but only nominally. In Canada she was fully baptized and born again.