Читать книгу Waking Nanabijou - Jim Poling Sr. - Страница 14
Оглавление4 — McVICAR CREEK
Water was life in Port Arthur. It floated the long ships that carried off western grain; it made the shipyards ring with activity and supplied liquid for the chemistry that turned logs to pulp and then paper at the mills crouched along the waterfront in spaces where the grain elevators did not sit. It nourished life with the jobs it provided and soothed the spirit with its beauty. Every path led to water. Every piece of water led to a larger piece of water that eventually found its way to the biggest piece of freshwater of them all, Lake Superior, the Big Lake. The Current and Mclntyre Rivers, McVicar Creek. In the lowlands of Port Arthur’s flat-chested and homely twin, Fort William, the Neebing River and the Kaministiquia, which divided into the McKellar and Mission Rivers, all paid homage by ending their journey at the Big Lake.
Water was central in many local legends. The Three Sisters, or Welcome Islands, off the Port Arthur waterfront, are said to be three Ojibwe sisters turned to stone and cast into the water after they killed their younger sister out of jealousy.
West of the Big Lake at Kakabeka Falls, some say that on certain days you can see the figure of Green Mantle, an Ojibwe maiden, in the mists of the falls of the Kaministiquia. Legend tells of the young maiden misleading a war party of Sioux enemies to their deaths over the stupendous falls, sacrificing herself but saving her village.
Water also was central to the life of the Polings, much to Veronica’s chagrin. She hated the water and I learned this early. My first memory of her is from Loon Lake, the popular cottage lake just east of Thunder Bay. I was an infant on my very first excursion into the northern Ontario wilds. I remember the water gurgling a mild protest against the push of the paddle. The canoe whispered a calming lullaby to the lake, a fair-weather friend that could turn as tempestuous as it was now tranquil.
Far in the distance, a magnificent black steam locomotive boasted its size and superiority over everything along its moving landscape. Not the boldest of birds, not even the cocky jays, dared to call while the pounding engine issued shrill screams that pierced the chilly air then floated into the distance like wide wet vowels. These were the urgent calls of a passenger train at full throttle, rocking and clicking and clacking, hell-bent to keep time with the fine Hamilton railwayman’s watch held in the flat of the engineer’s broad hand. The whistle calls intensified as the train thundered past Loon Lake, only to be swallowed by the advancing dusk as it roared west toward Port Arthur at the head of the Big Lake. There would be no stop at the brick-red Loon Lake station today because it was too late in the year. Summer was almost a memory and three seasons must change before the shrieking steam engine decelerated to chuffs and puffed and panted to a stop beside the lake, disgorging cottagers and their kids and men wearing wide-brimmed fedoras and carrying tubular fly-fishing rod cases. The lake returned to the bush for another year, except perhaps for the solitary trapper or rock hound and two adults and a baby making for the far shore in a nasty little thirteen-foot cedar strip and canvas canoe known as the Undertaker.
The passing of the train was momentous, though not because of its failure to stop or because its fading whistle accentuated the isolation. It was because Veronica, in spite of her terror of water, removed one hand from its death grip on the gunwale for a second or maybe two, to perform a perfunctory half-wave before regripping the varnished wood. The wave was more from habit than bravery because Veronica grew up in a railroader’s home and railroad folks wave at every passing train. Not waving on this night would be a special breach of railway etiquette because the tall man in the pinstripe overalls pushing the locomotive throttle with one hand and checking the precise Hamilton watch in the other was Isidore LaFrance, running flat out on the home run into the Port Arthur roundhouse. A lifetime of waving at trains, especially one commanded by your dad, could not be overcome by the numbing fear of riding in a deathtrap canoe carrying the man you love in the stern and your first-born on the cedar strip floor beside the box of groceries.
Veronica loathed the water and all forms of water transport, unreasonably so in those early days. The rationale for her fear and loathing would come later, after years of living in a family obsessed with crossing water in things that would float, or often only half float.
Why we were in that canoe on that lake in the autumn of 1944, I cannot say. Nor should I be expected to say considering I had entered the world only eighteen months previous and was just then experiencing the first sights and sounds to be committed to memory. Perhaps my father was without work, or perhaps it was one of those last precious holidays given to people before they shipped out to the killing grounds in Europe and the Pacific. Others had gone already. Ray’s younger brother Jack was in a British hospital after riding the tail of a flaming bomber into a field somewhere in Wales. Terri, one of Ray’s three sisters, was destined for the WACs and two future brothers-in-law, Gus Hungle and Sandy Brown, were at sea or about to be.
Already the Polings had one posthumous war hero, whose life was snuffed out by a Nazi U-boat ten days before my birth. Capt. Clark Poling, a thirty-year-old U.S. Army chaplain and a distant cousin, was one of the famous Four Chaplains aboard the troop ship USAT Dorchester sunk en route to Europe. The Dorchester was a down-at-the-keels coastal liner that had sailed in luxury before being pressed into war service to ferry troops across the Atlantic. It carried 902 persons as it steamed through the icy blackness of the patch of Atlantic known as Torpedo Junction, 250 kilometres off Greenland just after midnight on February 3, 1943. Most of the troops were sleeping when the torpedoes hit, killing many instantly and leaving the others scrambling to reach the decks for life jackets. There were not enough for everyone, so Clark Poling and three fellow chaplains removed theirs and gave them to soldiers beside them. As the Dorchester tilted and prepared for its horrible slide to the bottom, the four chaplains linked arms at the deck rail and prayed, sang, and offered hope to the soldiers in the water.
“It was one of the finest things I have ever seen this side of Heaven,” one of the 250 survivors said later. The other 672 soldiers and sailors on board died.
The story of the Dorchester torpedoing and the uncommon valour of the four chaplains is immortalized in the Chapel of the Four Chaplains at Temple University in Philadelphia. It opened in the early 1950s, dedicated by Clark’s dad, Rev. Daniel Poling, and his friend President Harry Truman.
Whether they were preachers or papermakers, the Polings loved the outdoors. And that love was the reason that Robert Lee Poling’s second eldest child, Raymond Marcel, was paddling the Undertaker across Loon Lake with his wife, Veronica, and me. Why a supposedly sane man like Robert would allow his son and family to borrow and actually use that canoe remains a puzzle many decades later. My grandfather’s canoe was the most homely, most ungovernable, and crankiest little beast ever to kiss the water. It lived long and dumped many, but never my grandfather, and he loved it.
War raged, but Loon Lake was another world. After the passing of the train, the lake regained its solitude. A raven returning to nest croaked. A trout splashed off the starboard stern, causing my father to bend forward and reach for his fly rod, an action immediately halted by a scream of terror:
“Ray, I told you before, you’re going to tip this damn canoe and drown us all!”
My father stared down at me curiously, then wistfully out at the widening ring of the speckled trout rise. I am certain that it was only my presence that caused him to set the rod down. A frightened wife, yes, even a wet wife clinging to an overturned canoe, was not reason enough to pass on a trout like that. A baby was.
For my part, speckled trout belly flopping for flies held no interest. The outside world was just too big and too amazing to try to bring into focus, let alone try to comprehend. My world was in front of me in the form of that grocery box with intriguing bags, cans, and bottles sticking out the top, so tantalizingly close to my stretching little fingertips.
“Oooh, nooo!”
This sudden sound startled me, and of course my mother, who immediately concluded that it announced the inevitable end of us all. It was a sound I was to hear many times in the future in many variations. Sometimes it was multisyllabic, with the oooh and nooo stretched out like oooh-ah nooo-ah to emphasize disbelief so complete that it contained anguish. Sometimes the last sound was repeated, as in oooh, no, no, no, no, which was accented by a violent sideways shaking of the head from which the sound was emanating. This day the sound was just mournful, so rounded that it floated across the lake and into the trees, skipping lightly off rock faces, never bouncing back as a sharp echo, but simply floating on a course into the next valley and beyond.
For me growing up, oooh nooo became a bush sound as familiar as the crack of a long fallen branch crushed by something dark and unseen. Or the syrupy and insistent trill of the vireo or the thump of a bear paw dismantling a stump alive with breakfast grubs. A bush sound that always announced that my father was near and in some momentary distress.
After my initial fright, the sound made me laugh with delight and I rocked forward and backwards clapping my hands, hoping to hear it again. “Oooh, nooo, no, no, no!” The sound flew from my father’s mouth as he flailed away with a paddle, trying to put the canoe into a 180-degree turn and full reverse at the same time.
“Oh, Ray, what happened now? We’re sinking, aren’t we?” my mother, her voice tight with fear, asked from the bow. Her question would have been answered if she had simply turned her upper body and looked into the canoe wake. Such movement is not possible when one’s fingers are squeezing the grain out of the cedar gunwales and one’s elbows are tightly locked as if stricken with rigor mortis. Whatever the problem, my mother was not going to view the wake because she was convinced that even a wrinkle of the nose would spin the Undertaker like a top and drown us all. Nothing could loosen her death grip on the canoe until its nose touched the sandy shore on the other side of the lake and my father pried her fingers loose.
Why she so feared the water I do not know, probably because I didn’t ask her, just as I didn’t ask her other things that I should have. I had no fear of the water and proceeded to stand in the canoe to get a better view of the problem. I already knew what the problem was, of course, because I created it but wanted a full view of the action, and my effort to hoist myself by the gunwale set the Undertaker rocking and elicited another scream from the bow.
“Ray, for God’s sake, we’re tipping! Hail holy Queen, mother of Mercy and Light …”
My father’s hand let go of the paddle that was executing a fast right turn to push me to the canoe floor. Before it did, I got a pretty good look into the wake where a little brown paper bag made its final bob before its bottom gave way, creating a starburst of dazzling white crystals dissolving as they sank into the dark waters of Loon Lake. Our family cache of sugar, not replaceable under war rationing, was gone.
The remainder of the ride across the lake was jerky as my father interrupted his normally rhythmic paddling to tap my fingers while they tried to extricate another bag from the grocery box and continue this delightful new game. Far too soon, however, the bow of the canoe scrunched into the beach sand, my mother leaped to safety and pulled me from the clutches of the demon craft.
I have no recollection of what happened after that. I learned later that we had two or three days of golden autumn filled with walks across the forest floor newly matted with yellow brown birch and poplar leaves. At night there were quiet talks at campfires that flickered orange yellow and listened for a train whistle meant just for us. My parents talked and crooned the old songs like “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” and “Shine on Harvest Moon” and drank strong tea without sugar. They cut it with thick and sickly sweet Carnation evaporated milk, cans of which sat on the oilcloth tabletops of every cabin in the Canadian bush, wooden matchsticks sticking in their tops to keep the pouring holes from crusting over. No doubt John Barleycorn stopped by the fire to help shake off the chill.
I don’t remember the quiet talks by the campfire or the autumn walks, but I do remember dozens of later Loon Lake visits. We didn’t own a camp as they are called in the North (as opposed to “cottage” in the south), but there was always one to rent or borrow or visit. I learned to dog-paddle there because I couldn’t stand the oozing bottom of the lake between my toes. I got my first dog bite there, a full canine slash to the right thigh, and set off a hell of a commotion when someone who had obviously failed animal identification put up the alarm that a wolf had attacked me.
I came close to drowning there twice, nearly fulfilling my mother’s prophecy that water eventually would take all of us. Once I got in over my head and was pulled to safety by a friend. Another time I was riding in the bottom of the Undertaker, paddled by my dad, when his little brother Gerry stood in the bow and dumped us all into the lake. I remember floating near the bottom, my hand touching the light brown sand ribbed like snake’s tracks by the creek’s current and seeing little fishes darting into a patch of thin green reeds. It was quiet down there. Everything moved in slow motion, and I was sleepy and ready to dream until I saw my father’s contorted face appear, the wavy dark brown hair flattened back against his head, his open fingers stretching out to grab my long blond hair that had yet to see its first cut.
When I awoke onshore after my dad’s artificial respiration had produced a thankful gurgling, I heard another of his expressions, the one reserved for times of great anger when immediate danger had passed: “Jesus Mexican Murphy!”
Veronica was not present so was spared the agony of seeing the near drowning of her first born. However, when she learned about it, she shook her head and uttered a line reserved for the Polings and their wild bush ways: “You’re all crazy. Crazy as loons!”
After the sugarless outing in the autumn of 1944, I never again saw Veronica in a canoe or boat of any kind. She could not avoid the water, however. It was everywhere and in particular it was near our house, in the form of McVicar Creek.
McVicar Creek was no turgid urban trickle in those days. To the neighbourhood kids, it was an artery in the heart of Borneo. It entered the city from somewhere far off the northern edge of the city map and plunged through pieces of heavy bush, revealing itself to the backsides of a couple of middle-class neighbourhoods before crossing under River Street. There it made a sharp left turn in a grass and rock meadow before beginning the plunge down the steep hill to the Port Arthur waterfront, passing under Algoma, Court, and Cumberland Streets to achieve its true purpose: delivering itself to the vast inland sea of Lake Superior. It wasn’t so narrow a creek that you could jump it, but it slowed its pace in spots where you could ford it in times of low water. In the spring and times of heavy rain, it roared and threatened to be as big and bold as its nearby river cousins.
McVicar Creek was the jungle of our young lives. Above the River Street Bridge, there were pools for swimming and meeting places to discuss secret plans. Below the River Street bridge, we dangled worms to entice the last of the little speckled trout struggling against urbanization and trekked and hunted the strip of woods that clothed the creek’s path to downtown’s edge. This little forest was perfect for conducting war games and for hiding and spying on the people who walked the McVicar Creek path to Algoma or Court Street before veering right into downtown.
We lived in make-believe kiddie pueblos among the rocky outcroppings overlooking the creek behind the intersection of Dawson and Jean Streets. Smooth flat tabletop rocks provided our beds where we lay and stared into the summer skies and let the clouds stimulate our imaginations. The fluffy cloud shaped like a contorted cross definitely was an angel carrying a candle. Others were elephants and airplanes and other objects that sparked eye-of-the-beholder arguments. The smaller rocks were our tables and chairs where we feasted on the snacks our mothers gave us before letting us loose for days that started immediately after early breakfast and ended at the 9 p.m. city curfew with only meal breaks at home as interruptions. Sometimes we shared candies bought at the corner store with the pennies we got from the pop bottles our grandmothers gave us to return. Throughout the day, our playtime business took us down to the creek for exploration, swimming, war games, or searches for adventure.
We roamed as we wished, spending hours at a time out of parental sight. Surely there was evil about in those days, but it didn’t seem to manifest itself often. We knew from our parents’ warnings not to play south of the Cumberland Street bridge because bad men gathered there to drink cheap cologne and shoe polish mixed with pop, anything from which they could get a bit of alcohol. We also knew from our own experience not to play in the trash left on the north side of the creek at Algoma Street by the Port Arthur Brewery, which made beer with a picture of the Indian princess Green Mantle on the label. Rats — black, vicious rats with red eyes and sharp teeth — lived there and more than one kid had felt their bite.
Veronica spent much of her time as a young mother planning how to keep me away from the creek. Her strongest weapon was exaggeration. She laid on me tales of the evil men at the mouth of the creek and the dangers facing little boys who played by the creek. Who knows what lurks in the bushes? Any little boy who falls into the creek is swept away out into the lake and into the clutches of Nanabijou. You’ve heard him roaring, haven’t you, on those stormy days? Interesting, but I preferred the story of the ancestor shipwrecked and found by the Natives. I imagined myself being pulled from the water, nursed back to health, and becoming a member of the tribe, hunting and warring throughout the river forest.
Mothers worry too much and Veronica’s cajoling and stories of danger could not keep me away. There was too much water, too much lure of water, for any mother to keep her children away from it. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and there was much she didn’t see. Like the day our terrier, Trixie, and I were carried away by the spring-swollen creek. An ice jam saved us from being swept into the arms of Nanabijou, but when we returned home soaking wet and shivering, Veronica made me promise I would never go near the creek again. It was a promise that would be broken many times.
Our home then was the LaFrances’ two-storey red-brick house at 402 Dawson Street at the northeast corner of College Street. They had moved to the new place, three blocks over from 63 Peter Street, the year before Veronica and Ray married.
We originally had lived in the top storey of 331 Van Norman Street, then on Rockwood Avenue in our own tiny bungalow. Veronica used to tie me to the fence there so I could watch all the comings and goings in safety, but we didn’t stay in the little wartime house very long. Things had not been going well over at 402 Dawson Street where Louise and Isidore had become empty nesters. Louise was stricken with arthritis. The pain in her joints worsened, then began to twist her fingers and legs. Walking became difficult and it was soon obvious that she was a victim of the most crippling type of arthritis. Within a year of so of my birth, she rose from her bed only with great difficulty and we moved into 402 Dawson Street, so my mother could help her father care for her.
This marked the end of Veronica’s sheltered and somewhat pampered life. What had once been a life of a majority of joy would be transformed into a string of heartbreaks. Caring for her bedridden mother made for long, hard days and sleepless nights when the pain had Louise crying in the night. Worse was watching the searing pain suck the power out of such a strong, independent woman.
Still, life at 402 Dawson Street was close to as good as it got in the 1940s. For us kids, the neighbourhood was a quiet pool at which to rest before starting the serious part of life’s journey. Dawson Street, once a dirt trail but now an asphalt stream lined with stone curbs and sidewalks that held the roadway back from double-storey houses, tumbled over the Port Arthur hillsides toward the Big Lake. Middle-class working people lived along Dawson Street. My grandparent’s house was not large, but it sat prominently on the northwest corner as one of the nicer places on the street. It was two storeys but tightly designed and looked larger than it was because of the semi-mansard roof that eliminated the typical “A” peak at the front. Its red brick and red mortar gave it a solid protective look.
The neighbourhood was typical of less busy times. Most of the houses were two or two and a half storeys, with the lower levels made of brick and the upper levels cedar or clapboard. All had porches — some open, some closed — for sitting out and watching weather or the kids at play. Grass medians separated the concrete sidewalks from the asphalt road, curbed with black granite rocks. There were no driveways and anyone who owned a car parked it at the rear of their house accessed by the back alley.
There was a telephone pole at the corner in the front of our house and every kid in the neighbourhood had put his or her face to it and covered their eyes while counting down the time to hide in a game of hide-and-seek. I can still feel my face pressed against that pole, nostrils inhaling the bittersweet scent of cedar and creosote, fingers tracing the bite marks of linemen’s spikes in the dry roughness of the wood.
Along the College Street side of the house, there was a white and green fence with a side gate. The fence had a sculpted look because its boards were deliberately cut uneven at the top. At the rear of the property, the fence connected with a white and green clapboard garage with double barn-style doors. Inside was the black early 1940s Chevrolet that Isidore kept spotless for family Sunday drives.
The most interesting feature of 402 Dawson Street was a side portico, an enclosed bricked porch area with country church-style windows along the side and front. It served as an entranceway to the house and a place to sit and look out at the street out of the weather. It was a great place for Trixie and me to hide when we were in trouble, like after our near drowning at the creek.
The McVicar Creek incident was the last great adventure for Trixie. Not long after, she was strolling across the street in front of 402 Dawson Street when a speeding car smacked her. My dad and I bundled her into a blanket and took her down to a vet who operated out of a rough board shack on the Port Arthur waterfront. It was a dark, foul place that smelled of dogs and whisky and mange medicine. The old vet laid Trixie on a kitchen table and put her back together with some rough stitches, but she was blind after that. I remember the mixture of pride and sadness I felt watching her stumble around my grandfather’s house, walking into walls and falling down stairs. I was proud of her courage but saddened by the pathetic images of her trying to exist without sight. None of us, Veronica especially, could stand to watch her and soon we returned her to the old vet, and she didn’t come back home ever again. It was a heartbreaking time, but it taught me a lot about life and my mother — someone with an uncanny understanding of animals.
Not long after the McVicar Creek incident, there was another dangerous meeting with water. A bunch of us kids were sliding on the rapidly shrinking snow on Prospect Hill. God made this hill for kids. Bald as a bowling ball, the hill and surrounding field covered a huge area bordered by Dawson Street on the north, Prospect Avenue on the east, High Street on the west, and Prospect Public School on the south. It was a sliding hill extraordinaire in the winter. We learned to ski and toboggan there and in summer ranged through it with our bikes, pretending we were army patrols going through the mountains. It was the site of plenty of broken bones, black eyes, and bleeding noses. If you got a good slide from the top, your toboggan would zoom across Prospect Avenue into someone’s hedge. Biking down the hill was sheer madness.
The hill’s greatest danger appeared only in spring. Beside Dawson Street was a deep depression in the side of the hill and it filled with runoff water, occasionally to a depth of six feet or more. It froze and thawed and refroze in spring. Older kids, like us eight-year-olds, knew instinctively to stay away from that hole. Nobody told us about it. It was just something you knew from being out in the neighbourhood. My sister Barbara, then five years old and three years my junior, had not been blessed with the instinct. She decided to walk on it and plunged through. The rest of us kids were sliding nearby and heard her scream.
The ice was so rotten that she had gone through on the first footfall, right at the edge. She was screaming and crying as I skidded down the bank and grabbed her hand. She pulled, I slipped, and we were both thrashing in the mushy ice water together, clawing at the bank for leverage. I managed a handhold and dragged us out as the other kids arrived and made a chain of hands.
As I pulled Barb up the hill and along the street home, kids scattered everywhere to shout news of the miraculous rescue. I was a neighbourhood hero, and kids everywhere sang my praises, for at least a day or two, all except Barbara. She was unimpressed that I had so daringly risked my life to save hers. Her lack of gratitude was inexplicable. She seemed to labour under the misconception that I was assigned to look after her and that by calling her scaredy-cat and shooing her off because she was afraid to slide on the steepest part of the hill, I in fact had created the problem.
Fame is fleeting and mine slipped away swiftly. Before the year was out, I was no longer the hero of the Prospect Hill. A combination of circumstances led me into another incident that earned me the name Fire Bug.
The grass was high, brown, and dry along the hill that fell off the Dawson Street cliffs and into McVicar Creek. We were playing in our pueblos as usual when I made an incredible discovery. I found in the rocks a perfectly good, unused wooden match. One of those stick matches about two and a half inches long with a fat red head topped with a white cap. Sometimes the heads were blue and white, but the ones my parents kept for the old stove were red and hidden away in a sturdy cardboard box with red birds printed on the cover.
You have to understand the times to understand the significance of the match discovery. In an age of wood-frame houses filled with flammables such as untreated heavy fabrics, straw insulation, cracks packed with coal dust, matches were dangerous; definitely adult things. Children did not play with matches — ever. “Never play with matches” was among the most holy of the prohibitions, right up there with not talking to strangers.
My little friend Brett, a couple of years younger than me and awestruck by the find, immediately advised me to bring it to my ma. His big brother Earl wondered if the match was any good. That got me thinking. I had seen my father take such matches and scratch them across the side of the matchbox and had always been mesmerized when they burst into flame. What made them do this? Could they be scratched anywhere and made to explode?
I suggested that we might have a campfire, catching my breath at the boldness of the statement.
Brett, becoming visibly nervous, said kids don’t know how to make campfires. Only dads did.
I knew he was right. The consequences of a campfire would be enormous and I really didn’t know how to start one. But the match. Was it any good? I made a lightning-quick decision, sweeping it across the rocks, watching it explode into flame. The explosion of flame was so startling that I tossed it away in fear.
The chances of a wooden match, barely struck when thrown into the breeze, landing still lighted in the grass were tens of thousands to one. My match rode the breeze over the cliff, gaining flame as it fell onto the rocks and bounced into a patch of high grass. Within seconds, the patch was ablaze, sparks blowing into other patches. We stood on the cliff spellbound as the breeze whipped the flames from patch to patch into the high grass. Within minutes, the valley was ablaze and we ran off the cliff and up the lane to our secret hiding spot in the loft of the garage at the rear of Earl’s house.
Grass fires normally are not a big deal. Many people started them in those days to clean the vegetation and green up for spring. This grass fire, however, had the makings of a major catastrophe. Two dozen old houses lined the west side of the McVicar Creek valley. The breeze was from the east and the fire marched quickly to the backyards filled with sundry outbuildings and dry fences. If it hit the backyards, the fire would be blown into the houses and we would have a neighbourhood conflagration of Biblical proportions.
We could hear the scream of the fire trucks as we hunkered down in the loft’s bed of old straw, dust, and dried pigeon shit. It was dark there except for the light spilling through cracks in the weathered barn boards. The cracks also let in the sweet smell of burning grass. We had heard fire reels, as we called them then, many times before but never to this extent. It seemed the fire departments of both Port Arthur and Fort William had arrived, and there were sounds of urgent activity and shouts everywhere. My friends’ reaction to all the commotion was the same as Trixie’s had been that day at the creek. They looked at me as if someone had just planted on me the kiss of death and fled, abandoning me crouching alone in the dark and peering out through a crack in the garage siding.
Four generations of Polings gathered in the back yard of Robert and Eva’s house at 331 Van Norman Street, Port Arthur. Left to right: Veronica, Robert, Ray, Barbara (baby), Eva, Jim (the author), and Grandma and Grandpa Desilets, Eva’s parents from Superior, Wisconsin. This picture was taken circa 1948 and the Desilets would have been well into their eighties.
My father, called home from work as were other fathers in the neighbourhood, found me and led me to the scene of the crime. Earl and Brett, under light questioning, had given me up, adding how they had warned me not to do it. Dad and I stood on the hill overlooking the blackened valley. Firemen with sooty faces rolled dirty hoses while others checked for hot spots in the charred grass and along some of the fences that had caught fire. There was no “oooh, nooo!” or “Jesus Mexican Murphy!” this day. I had not seen my father so wracked with emotion but regretfully would again, many years later when another mistake changed our lives forever. I absorbed the scene of my destruction, then received a spanking on the spot and a lecture on the seriousness of my actions. Dad explained that only a superhuman effort by the firemen and volunteers had saved the houses.
Veronica and Barbara waited at the door when we arrived home. My mother’s face was pale and drawn. Barbara’s was round, shining with glee. She saw this as superb payback for the Prospect Hill incident. She referred to me as the Fire Bug. My parents’ disappointment with me lingered for a long time. The neighbourhood had received a serious scare and they were at the centre of it.
I learned later that fire created a special fear in the Poling family. Fire was part of the reason the family had moved to Canada from Minnesota. The Great Fire of 1918 wiped out Cloquet, Minnesota, where my grandfather worked at the paper mill and where my father was born. Family lore told of how my grandmother held her babies in her arms as she waded in the St. Louis River as the fire consumed the town. My great-grandparent’s house burned down and the lack of future work in the Minnesota woods and mills influenced my grandfather’s decision later to take the family to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, where a new mill offered steady work.
The Cloquet Fire started October 10,1918, as a smoulder at a Great Northern Railway siding called O’Brien’s Spur. It spread under a pile of cordwood and crews tried to extinguish it over two days but left it because it didn’t seem serious. On October 12 it erupted into a full fire. It marched across the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation and headed for Cloquet where more than 100 million board feet of dried lumber made the town a potential bomb.
The fire was part of fifty to seventy-five separate fires that merged, fanned by winds of seventy miles an hour. Within a fifty to one hundredmile radius of Duluth, two thousand square miles burned. The fire left four hundred dead, two thousand injured, and thirteen thousand homeless. It was an incredible disaster. Cloquet suffered heavily. Five people died and most of the residential and business areas were destroyed.
Phil Bellefeuille, my Grandmother Poling’s nephew, remembered the Cloquet Fire. As of September 1998 he was still living in Seattle at age eighty-nine when he wrote the following description:
I was staying with them [Grandma and Grandpa Desilets in Cloquet] and going to school. Grandma took me to a show and coming out in the afternoon the sky was smoky and the sun was like the yoke of an egg. After supper all the whistles blew. Grandpa went to find out and came back then we had to go to the [rail] depot. There we had to climb up and into a gondola car [flat car with sides]. Ladies climbed up, the youngster was handed to her and buggy cast aside.
While waiting I remember seeing a burning branch or something floating through the air. I suppose the heat of the fire kept it up, then it would fall and start another fire. The depot was on the river flats and the town was on a hill.
And I remember after we got going one lady had several kids that got sleepy. One laid down, another on him and so forth as that the standing area made the sleeping area. The train was so crowded that we could not have fallen down.
Dad found us with some friends of theirs. [He came] to take me back and while waiting in Carlton this nosy kid [Phil] had to open this door in the depot, looked in and there on the floor covered with cheesecloth were several black corpses. This kid shut that door quickly.
In Cloquet, the depot was next to a sawmill and where they had lumber stacked high, air drying, it was now but a black prairie. The concrete block buildings had some of the walls standing. Grandpa had some rifles and guns in the woodshed — their barrels were now pretty crooked.
The only buildings saved were on the island in the St. Louis River and that was mostly saloons and maybe another business?
I will never forget Oct. 12, 1918. It was a school holiday they called Columbus Day. [It was in fact Columbus Day, but it was a Saturday.]
Phil said the Desilets moved to Superior, Wisconsin then. When he arrived there he had only a shoe in one pocket and a statue of St. Anne with the Virgin Mary in another.
In my grandmother’s house, there was an old photo of two women holding babies in arms while wading in the river and watching the flames. I heard that that was my grandmother holding my dad and his sister. The picture is long gone and we’ll never know all the truth now. Certainly fire was burned into the family memory, and I couldn’t look at the picture without imagining my mother and my friends’ mothers standing in McVicar Creek while the fire I set consumed the neighbourhood.
Later that summer we again heard the scream of an emergency vehicle on an urgent mission. This time it was an ambulance and it came directly to 402 Dawson Street. Inside, Isidore LaFrance felt ill after dinner and began pacing between the living room and dining room, rubbing his left arm and left chest with his right hand. I paced behind him, thinking it was a new game. Down to the walnut cabinet that contained the radio receiver around which we gathered at night, then back past the dining room table and down to the Queen Anne chair from which I had taken my first steps. He was grey in the face. The pain took his breath away and suddenly he collapsed from what we later learned was a stroke.
He had retired less than a year earlier, walking away from the big black locomotives that he had tended or drove for just weeks short of fifty years. His railroading days were replaced by sitting and talking at Louise’s bedside and taking us kids out for car rides to Boulevard Lake. The grey-striped engineer’s cap and overalls were set aside for suits and shirts and a fedora. No matter what he wore, he always looked massive, a neatly-dressed Paul Bunyan. And, whatever the clothes, one pocket always carried treats: hard candy for the grandchildren, Sen-Sen liquorice mints for himself.
Now he was on the floor, a huge immovable bulk. The big man who had lifted me so effortlessly into the cab of the hissing locomotive only months previous for his retirement run from Fort William to Port Arthur refused to respond to my little hands shaking his shoulders or my pleas for him to wake up. The ambulance took him away, and I never saw him again. Within a day, Isidore LaFrance was dead in a hospital at sixty-six.
For Veronica, it was more than the death of a father. It was the end of a fairytale existence in which a once childless couple devoted their lives to shielding their unexpected treasure from life’s cruelties.
