Читать книгу The Bushman’s Lair - Paul McKendrick - Страница 10

“The bush is neutral. It is neither for nor against me . . . It is incapable of doing me harm.”

Mors Kochanski, Bushcraft: Outdoor Skills and Wilderness Survival

Having been informed from media reports that Bjornstrom had been closest to his youngest sister, Jennifer, I went in search of her, and fortunately she was much easier to track down than Bjornstrom himself. She had a Facebook account, so I joined for the first time. (I later learned that even the Bushman had a Facebook account, the possibility of which I had failed to consider.) Within hours of messaging Jennifer, my phone rang. She was understandably apprehensive and skeptical of my intentions but ultimately agreed to meet me for lunch at Denny’s in downtown Williams Lake. When she appeared there with a white cane, I apologized for causing her to travel to meet me. She explained she is visually impaired but still able to read large print on a computer screen and navigate familiar routes through town via a combination of buses and walking. We spent some time talking about the fire that had nearly engulfed the city a year earlier, forcing her to evacuate for sixteen days, but revisiting the experience still left her visibly shaken. Eventually our conversation turned to her brother, and she shed some light on his unordinary life.

John Bjornstrom began life as Nicholas Korody in Toronto in 1958. His birth parents, Nicholas Korody Sr. and Margaret Gizzella, were among the refugees who fled the post–World War II Soviet satellite state of Hungary following the Uprising of 1956. Many of them, including the Korodys, were Roma, often referred to as gypsies. They were stereotyped based largely on the work they undertook, which was compatible with their transient way of life: livestock trading, animal training, blacksmithing, entertaining, fortune telling. Their common heritage traces back to India, but sometime by the fourteenth century they had arrived in Europe.

Formalized persecution began a couple of centuries later, when the first anti-Romani legislation was introduced in the present-day Czech Republic. Gradually more European countries introduced legislation expelling them and even executing those who didn’t comply. Attacks on the Roma escalated dramatically during the Holocaust, known to the Roma as Porajmos, or “the Devouring,” when it’s estimated that between 250,000 and 1.5 million Roma were executed by the Nazis.

In 1956 the general unrest in Hungary under Soviet control erupted into an uprising that led to the collapse of the government; before the Soviets reasserted control, more than two hundred thousand Hungarians fled. Canada had not yet signed on to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, but the government improvised, organizing immigration screening procedures and transportation. Within the year, over thirty-seven thousand Hungarians were welcomed to Canada, including many Roma.

The Korodys landed in Toronto, but their marriage didn’t survive the exodus despite the Romani history of families prevailing through migrations. They were divorced when their son was just two, and custody was granted to his father, a truck driver. Shortly thereafter, he was badly injured in an accident that left him unable to look after the boy, who was sent to a home for children run by the Pentecostal Church. Margaret, just nineteen at the time, had moved to Vancouver, but she was now able to gain custody, and her son eventually joined her on the West Coast.

Most of the ’56ers, as the Hungarian immigrants came to be known, adjusted well to their adopted land. Historians have attributed this partly to the compassion and hospitality that greeted them and have recognized their integration as the template for Canada’s ongoing sponsored refugee programs. But immigration was not a success for all. Margaret settled with her son into Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which by the 1950s had become rundown as the city centre migrated westward. Once-popular hotels were converted into single-room occupancy housing, and beer parlours and brothels replaced theatres and shops. The area wasn’t yet the magnet for drug users it would become, but Margaret still succumbed to addiction. She often left her son on his own or with strangers in rat-infested places even though he was unable to communicate well in English. She became involved in drug trafficking across the US border and was arrested. “The last time I saw her I was six years old and she was in a hospital bed,” Bjornstrom recounted in front of a courtroom, though he was unsure exactly where the encounter took place. “She gave me a chocolate bar and I threw it away.”

He was taken into foster care, then placed with a Norwegian couple, Sverre and Joanna Bjornstrom, in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. In search of a better life, they had emigrated in the 1940s from the small town of Bardu, Norway, close to the Arctic Circle, and became foster parents when they learned they were unable to have biological children. Despite the initial language barrier, they quickly grew attached to the boy, formally adopted him and renamed him John. The family eventually grew to include a total of four adopted children.

Jennifer told me the Bjornstroms treated their children very well. Sverre worked as a carpenter while Joanna worked at various jobs, including one at a marshmallow factory, memories of which brought a smile to Jennifer’s face as she reminisced. When they weren’t working, they tried to spend as much time as possible in the outdoors with their children—camping, fishing and skiing. Sometimes they would go to work and leave the children on their own for the day at a nearby lake with a tent trailer. Bjornstrom preferred this to school: he was a hyperactive kid and happiest in the bush. He had a strong affection for animals and would bring home various creatures he encountered, including stray and sick ones. One day he brought home a bullfrog and placed it in a box with holes, and the family watched as the box bounced around the house. He was enrolled in Boy Scouts and soaked up everything it had to teach him about the outdoors.

Despite being well treated at home, Bjornstrom ran away when he was twelve. At nearby Pitt Lake he found a partially sunk discarded boat that he repaired and used to travel to a small island. He had a tent with him, and for a couple of weeks he fished and snared small game to keep himself fed. His parents eventually figured out where he was and visited him. After their second visit, he decided to return home.

Burnaby was not ideal for Joanna, who had become sick and feared that the air quality at the coast was a factor. Friends from Norway were living in Williams Lake and encouraged the Bjornstroms to join them. Located in the Cariboo country of central BC, Williams Lake had a population of about four thousand at the time. It was, and continues to be, well known for hosting the annual Williams Lake Stampede, “The Greatest Show on Dirt,” which precedes the Calgary Stampede’s “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” on the rodeo circuit.

The rural life was an adjustment for some of the Bjornstrom family, but they soon grew to love their new home. They moved into a single wide trailer and purchased two horses they used to explore nearby lakes. Sverre split his time between building a house for the family and working as a carpentry foreman in Prince George, a few hours’ drive farther north. John was soon riding horses bareback in rodeos and going hunting with his adoptive father. Sverre, who had served in World War II, owned various firearms that he used for hunting, and once John was able to shoot a quarter off a fencepost nine times out of ten, he was given his own gun.

Despite the appeal of Williams Lake, John was only there for one year before he asked his parents’ permission to leave school and find work. Around the same time, a neighbourhood girl had become pregnant, and Joanna believed her adopted son was responsible, which had created friction in the family. The girl later told Joanna that there had never been any intimacy between them, but by the time the misunderstanding was sorted out, Bjornstrom’s parents had already warned him that if he wanted to work instead of completing school, he would have to leave home. So at the age of fourteen, before completing grade nine, he ventured off on his horse, Charlotte, and found work at the Alkali Lake Ranch south of Williams Lake.

After a summer working odd jobs on the ranch and sensing the limitations of his opportunities there, he set off across the mountains on horseback for Alberta. He didn’t have trouble finding work on ranches, initially patrolling ranges, and one summer Jennifer was able to visit him for two weeks on a ranch near Camrose. Another of his jobs was at the Big Coulee Cattle Company farther south, where he eventually managed a large herd of Simmental cattle. He also got involved with farming operations—tilling, seeding and harvesting—and out of necessity became comfortable with repairing farm equipment.

In his twenties, enticed by the oil boom and the freedom of the road, Bjornstrom began driving long-haul trucks. Initially he hauled explosives used in seismic exploration to locate oil and gas reserves and other underground deposits, and some of his trips took him through Williams Lake to deliver explosives to a local mine, providing him with a convenient way to see his family. In the spring of 1980 he was living in an apartment in Grande Prairie, Alberta, when a family from Ontario moved in next door with a seventeen-year-old daughter who caught his eye. Her name was Lucette.

Lucette now lives in Kapuskasing, in northeastern Ontario, which is where I met up with her. The town was developed in the 1920s as a result of a partnership between the New York Times Company and the Kimberly-Clark Corporation to secure a stable wood supply from the surrounding sea of boreal forest for producing newsprint and Kleenex. Although the town is not particularly close to the Quebec border, French is the predominant language, as many workers migrated there from Quebec.

Lucette grew up here in a francophone family but like most people in the area is perfectly bilingual. Her father, a trucker, was enticed to Grande Prairie in 1980 by the booming Alberta economy and a job that was supposed to be waiting for him. After settling his family into an apartment next to Bjornstrom’s, he struck up a conversation with the fellow trucker. “That young man would be good for you,” he told his daughter afterwards. A few days later, Bjornstrom showed up at McDonald’s, where Lucette was working, with a dozen red roses in hand. She agreed to a date with the “very good-looking cowboy.” He taught her how to square dance and took her to see the country singer Barbara Mandrell.

Their courtship was soon tested when it became apparent that the job opportunities in Alberta were not as readily available as hoped. And despite its French name, Grande Prairie was an anglophone city, and Lucette’s family found it difficult to fit in as francophones. It was a large convoy that made its way back across the country: Lucette’s father led in his ten-wheeler, her mother drove the family van, her sister drove a pickup truck with a goat in the back that her mother had purchased on a whim, her brother-in-law drove his truck and Lucette joined Bjornstrom in his truck with his horse, Charlotte, in a trailer behind it. Back in Ontario, the young couple settled in a small town called Opasatika, down the road from Kapuskasing. A couple of months later, Lucette was pregnant.

But just as Lucette’s family had found it hard to fit into the anglophone culture of Grande Prairie, Bjornstrom found it difficult to adjust to the francophone environment, and his employment opportunities were limited. “My French is only enough to get me in trouble, but not enough to get me out of it,” was how he described his fluency level. More inconveniently, however, he was due back in Alberta to serve out a jail sentence. According to Bjornstrom, before landing in Grande Prairie, he had been hauling cargo for a company out of Coronation, Alberta, with his own truck. When the company hadn’t paid him for several months, he forged cheques on the company’s account for what he was owed to cover his expenses, and “not a cent more.” He was handed a six-month sentence for theft and forgery. He had neglected to inform Lucette of his impending incarceration, and being seven months pregnant when he left, she was forced to move back in with her parents.

She gave birth to a girl and named her Julie. Unsure if she could raise a child on her own, she put Julie up for adoption without telling her parents. When the local priest who managed the adoption process showed up to take Julie away, the grandparents intervened and committed to raising her themselves. Bjornstrom eventually returned and asked Lucette to take him back, but she feared a repeat vanishing act and rejected him.

Bjornstrom remained in the area and was able to see Julie regularly. He trained as a blacksmith and found work tending to horses’ hooves to supplement his trucking income, and attended an agricultural college with ambitions of opening a riding stable. He became known to locals as Cowboy John after he returned to bareback riding in rodeos and tried his hand as a bullfighter (otherwise known as a rodeo protection athlete). He also found work as a guide for the Ontario Provincial Police, escorting officers through the backcountry and teaching them survival skills, including hunting. Eventually he started seeing another woman, and they had two children together, but she left with the kids for city life in southern Ontario when the children were young, and they remained largely estranged from him.

In 1989 Bjornstrom returned to Alberta. There, his search for work became entangled with a special ability he believed he possessed, which he thought could be of help to others: a sixth sense.