Swan River

by David Reynolds

  * * * * *

  The sky was dark and there was a cold wind as I strolled about Swan River the next morning. My impression from the previous night was accurate; the buildings were mostly post-1960, low and square. I was surprised to see a tourist information centre – in a pristine log cabin that looked as if it had just been built. I took away a brochure with maps of the town and the Swan Valley, sat with it in a café and learned that people came to the region to camp, hike and hunt in the nearby provincial parks, that in winter there was skiing on Thunder Hill, and that Swan River was the valley’s trading centre but was surrounded by eight smaller villages. It was as though the writer thought that the town would have little appeal to tourists – although I saw that there was a museum further up the road past my hotel – and was letting them know that there were attractions nearby. The eight villages were listed and shown on a map. One of them was Durban.

  I ate fried chicken, drank a Coke and lingered over coffee. I was almost deliberately delaying the next step – driving to Durban. Though Swan River had been the goal specified by Uncle George, Durban was where my grandfather had lived. If this trip had an epicentre, Durban was it.

  It was south-west from Swan River. My grandfather had written that it was a twelve-mile walk; it was twenty miles by a road that ran between large fields of young green wheat, a foot or so high. A single-track railroad ran close to the road for much of the way, and there was a long, low ridge to the west which I identified as Thunder Hill. I passed new-looking farmhouses with conical grain stores made of corrugated iron or plastic and occasional fields of brown cows. Otherwise, the rippling wheat was broken only by clumps of poplar and willow and by old grey-timbered shacks and barns that looked as if they could have been there in the time of Tom Reynolds.

  I turned off the main road. Durban was half a mile away. There was a level-crossing ahead, a few trees and a tall, square, wooden tower, similar to the one by the railroad in Swan River; I knew now, from the tourist brochure, that these buildings were called grain elevators.

  I left the car and walked around. Durban was a collection of about twenty-five disparate buildings, ranging from a handful of dilapidated wooden shacks to ten or twelve well-kept houses of various ages. An old church, built of boards from which cream paint was peeling, was locked and looked little used. There was a post office, small and made of concrete, but shut. Several buildings seemed to have been abandoned and left to decay. Two men were unloading timber from a lorry by the grain elevator, another was mending a roof. One or two pick-ups drove south through the village. Children shouted somewhere, dogs barked.

  It was still early afternoon. I drove south between fields, away from Durban and the main road, towards some low hills. The tarmac soon gave way to a rutted mix of mud and yellow gravel. Further on, the road crossed another at right angles, and further on again, another. I turned left and drove around for an hour on dirt roads which seemed to have been laid out on a grid. Every mile or so I passed farm buildings buried among trees. I stopped to photograph an old grey barn, and again at a solitary church among a clump of yew trees, where I lingered over graves grouped into families and read the inscriptions on the tombs of young children.

  I stopped the car near a wooden bridge over a narrow stream, and read through my transcriptions of my grandfather’s five letters from Durban. They were all sent to Uncle George’s home in Upper Clapton and three were addressed to him.

  The first, sent in October 1906, states, with no embellishing details, that he crossed the Atlantic on the SS Pomeranian, with a single box containing a few clothes and other possessions, and travelled by train from Quebec to Winnipeg and on to Swan River with an Irishman whom he met on the ship. He walked from Swan River, and at Durban got work on the new Thunder Hill branch of the Canadian Northern Railway. He spent the whole of September living under canvas beside the track and is now, temporarily, living with his foreman in Durban in a bungalow, which Tom helped him to build. ‘The life I am leading is awfully rough, but the grub I get is, and has been, good and in quantity.’ He says that the district is strong on temperance and that there are no pubs. ‘What drink is obtained is got on the quiet so I have not had any since leaving Winnipeg.’

  The next letter is to Sis and written almost two years later – there may, of course, have been others not handed down to my father. It begins with a conciliatory paragraph and expresses the ‘hope that we might be reunited’, but goes on to grouse about ‘other people’s damned cussedness and selfishness that has brought about our separation’. He asks her to send him photos of herself and Cliffie ‘which I have over and over again kicked myself for not getting before I left the Old Country’.

  He describes himself as ‘one of the original pioneers’ in a pioneer town in a beautiful valley where there are several forests and the houses are made of wood. ‘Life inside one of these houses is not all too bad.’ The summers are delightful – though care must be taken to avoid mosquitoes – and in winter the cold is severe but ‘it is such a dry cold that you don’t really feel it like those cold miserable days in London that I mind so well’. In winter

  men do the outdoor work while women tend to stay inside, ‘but the women, ladies or girls, are always willing to go any distance to a dance or social’. He says that it is not unusual to travel ten or fifteen miles to a dance in a sleigh with a team of fast horses. ‘It is glorious driving so long as there is no wind.’

  The next two letters are both to Uncle George, and written in March and October 1909. Both include lengthy complaints about George’s failure to send him news of Sis and Cliffie; he says angrily that he’ll cause trouble by appealing to certain unnamed people unless he receives the news he regards as his right, and threatens that he might well, at some time, return to London. In the March letter, he writes of the previous winter which has been the longest and coldest for ten years, but says that he is acclimatised and didn’t find it as hard as his first winter. At its worst, it was 64 degrees below zero. ‘I did feel that bad, and was nearly frozen in my bed in my little wooden house, in which I live all alone of course. I had to get up at 2 a.m. to put on a big fire of wood or should certainly have been dead in the morning. Some surprise has been expressed by my neighbours that I have managed to get through the winter so well but, as I tell them, I am all right.’

  The last letter from Tom was written on 30 November 1909 to Cliffie, and is a sorry rant, with no information about his life in Durban. He is obsessed with the idea, alluded to in some of the other letters, that Cliffie should have a good opinion of him and that he has not been told the truth. He writes as though he knows that Cliffie won’t see the letter, but that Uncle George – and perhaps Sis and Old George – will. ‘I suspect that you have been told some tale or yarn about me which is very far from the truth… I can and will satisfy you that my character in London is as good as it ever was… I am determined to have communication with you and if this letter is suppressed I shall make it exceedingly unpleasant for those who do it… I have got to that stage of my feelings for certain people and for their treatment of me that my sole and principal object in life is to get some satisfaction out of them and I will get it in spite of what they do or do not do.’

  I got out of the car and stood on the bridge. The letters contained all I had known about Tom’s life in Durban before I came here. Despite the dances and the good, plentiful food, he sounded lonely and, as the years went by, increasingly unable to forget the past. I imagined that he had gone on drinking. If he had reformed, would he not have returned to London with pride and tried to be close to his son, if not his wife; or, if that had seemed too difficult or too painful, would he not have seen his old life – from a sober perspective – for what it was and have abandoned old grudges and looked forward? Drink could be got on the quiet, and, because he hadn’t thrown off the anger he felt towards Sis and her family, I found myself hoping that he had got it. But also, perhaps, that here, away from Sis and with a full stomach, he was able sometimes to sto
p at that early stage of an evening when he could still taste the drink and it was giving him some pleasure.

  I had learned almost nothing more about his life by visiting the town; it must have changed totally since he was there. But Durban was in the middle of the valley and, but for some woods which had been ploughed for wheat, the valley was the same now as it was then. He had praised the valley. It was flat and wide – probably about five miles across, north to south – with low ridges, still covered with trees, to the south and west. I looked around and contemplated the dome-like sky. The horizon was visible in every direction and I felt as if I was at the centre of a hemisphere. He must have gained something from this space, homesteaded by pioneers and so different from Norfolk Road or the streets around his office in Westminster.

  The clouds had lifted; the sky was pale blue with streaks of white in the north and grey over the hills in the south. The air was clear, the light was pure. Did he find consolation in the horizon or the sky or the air? Or was I searching too hard? Why was I so keen to establish that Tom’s life had not been relentlessly miserable? Perhaps because I thought he was a good man until his marriage and had been treated unfairly. Perhaps Uncle George had thought that too; it would have been perverse of him to send me to this remote place just to witness Tom’s misery. Had he expected me just to pay some kind of homage? Or was I supposed to learn something?

  There was one more letter, but not from Tom. Like his, I had transcribed it and printed it out on an A4 sheet, but I fetched the original from the car and reread it. It had been sent from Durban to Uncle George on 9 December 1910 by a man called R.W. Glennie; it said that Tom had died of tuberculosis and other diseases in Winnipeg General Hospital the previous day. The letter was well phrased and compassionate, and conveyed that Mr Glennie had been a good friend. Tom had asked him to write to George and to his brother, Bertie, if anything happened to him, and had left some ‘books and trinkets’ with him. Sadly, the Health Officer had ordered that these be burned along with Tom’s clothes and blankets. There was nothing more that Mr Glennie could say, except to offer his condolences.

  27

  Loon Lake

  I was the only visitor to the museum. The curator asked where I was from and I told her, adding that my grandfather had lived in Durban for four years from 1906. She asked his name and said she would look at her records to see if there was any information. There were some old photographs of Durban in the drawer of a cabinet; I was welcome to look through them.

  I spent most of the day there. It was a spacious L-shaped room crammed with pictures and memorabilia, and outside was a field of genuine old buildings that had been transported intact from their original locations, many with their entire contents. Swan River’s first general store was there, filled with tins, jars, packets, farm implements and clothing; plaster hams hung from the ceiling and the owner’s living quarters were at the back, as though he, his wife and a tribe of children were about to return. It had been built ten years before my grandfather arrived, and at first had served only trappers and fur traders. I looked at the floor – he must have travelled back to Swan River from time to time and trodden there – and at the worn counter where he would have put down his dollars and cents.

  There was a school, a church, a blacksmith’s shop, a telegraph office and a complete railway station – with platform, rails and a two-car train. I looked closely at two log cabins. One was clean and plainly furnished and had belonged to a homesteader. The other was a trapper’s cabin, with space only for a table and a bed, both of which had been roughly knocked together from unplaned wood. The trapper’s clothes were hanging on nails, and he had just two or three fur blankets, a kettle, a frying pan and a pair of rifles. The place was full of dust and cobwebs. I imagined my grandfather in such a place in midwinter, a bottle of whisky and the odd book and trinket beside him, trying to keep warm.

  Inside the museum I stared at innumerable images and objects, and captions that told stories. There was a photograph of a family named Reynolds; they were standing beside a covered wagon in which they had brought their goods from Ontario in 1898. It had a lengthy caption: the father and eldest son came first, staked their claim and built a home; almost a year later the mother arrived with the four younger children, and father and son went to meet them at a river crossing; the eldest daughter, who was fifteen, was so excited at the sight of her father and brother on the facing river bank that she ran into the water thinking she could wade across; she stumbled, was swept away by the current and drowned.

  I sifted through drawers of photographs categorised by subject – Durban, Swan River, the railroad, house-building, threshing, daily life, leisure, football, curling – in search of a man with a large moustache who looked like Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata. There were one or two possibilities, including a photograph of four men standing, facing the camera, on a railway line; the man on the left had a moustache. Ann, the curator, lent me a magnifying glass.

  In the Durban drawer there were two pictures from the early 1900s. One was a view along Main Street, shot from the ground. The other could only have been taken from the top of the grain elevator; the street and the valley beyond were covered with snow, and in the foreground, two horses were pulling a sleigh. The street was straight and broad and lined with two-storey buildings that butted up close to each other and to the sidewalk. On both sides of the street the buildings were formally regimented in a line and of roughly the same height. It was not unlike the High Street of an old town in England, except that the buildings were wooden and their roofs were flat; there was no resemblance to the place I had visited the previous day.

  I could read the signs on the two nearest buildings. ‘The Durban Stores’ was built to Georgian proportions with cornices and a flagpole. Facing it, on the corner, was an equally elegant edifice. The sign was on the side around the corner from Main Street. I looked at it through the magnifying glass: ‘Pool Room’. I smiled to myself; Tom would surely have been a regular. Behind the street to the east I could see smaller houses and shacks. Perhaps one of them was his home.

  Ann photocopied some of the photographs for me. She hadn’t found any references to Thomas Reynolds, but she had written down the phone number of a man she thought I should call. He was the author of a history of Durban.

  ‘Really? There’s a history of Durban?’

  ‘We used to stock it. Stuart wrote it a few years back. It went out of print, but he may be able to lend you a copy. He’s a nice guy.’ Despite what she said, I imagined an overly intense academic with wire-rimmed glasses and a jutting chin.

  He lived in Swan River in a quiet street off Main Street. The house was new and built of brick and had a neat front lawn like its neighbours. Stuart was tall and lean with close-cut grey hair around a tanned, bald dome. I guessed he was about sixty-five. He smiled in greeting and introduced me to his wife before taking me downstairs to a basement room with armchairs and bookshelves. He fetched us each a Molson, and we drank from the cans as I told him about my grandfather and his letters; I tapped the folder I had brought. He thought for a few moments and said that he didn’t know of my grandfather. The only Reynoldses he was aware of were the ones whose daughter had drowned, and they had lived in another part of the valley.

  ‘There were a lot of bachelors back then.’ He spoke almost as if he had been there. ‘Lived in shacks close together. You got any other names? People he knew? Mentioned in his letters?’

  ‘Only one. R.W. Glennie.’ I spoke the name slowly and precisely, without much hope of his recognising it. I picked up the folder. ‘There’s a letter from him. He wrote to the family in London in 1910 to tell them my grandfather had died.’

  ‘You got the letter? Let me see it.’ Glennie’s original letter covered two sheets of paper. Stuart scanned the first page, lifted it aside and looked at the name at the bottom of the second. He looked up at me and gently slapped his knee. ‘Bob Glennie! Well, I’ll be damned!’ His face broke into a wide grin.

  ‘You
’ve heard of him?’

  He was holding the letter up and peering at it. ‘Bob Glennie! December 9th, 1910. I’m damned!’ He looked at me again. ‘I knew Glennie. He was my neighbour for thirty years. He moved to BC – that’s British Columbia – in 1945.’

  I was amazed, and doing mental arithmetic. How old was this man with the kind eyes and slow smile?

  He read Glennie’s letter carefully and put it down. ‘Tells me a lot about your grandfather. If he was a drinking man in London, then he went on drinking when he was here. Lots of them drank. It was sort of illegal. But they drank – every night, in the back of Honsinger’s livery stable. Glennie drank. When his house burned down, the only thing he rescued was a crate of whisky.’

  Stuart was eighty-four; he had been born in Durban in 1914. His grandfather, his father and his uncles had come to the district from Ontario in 1899 and established themselves on homesteads. I asked if he had been a farmer himself. He looked a little insulted and said, ‘I am a farmer,’ and told me that his sons, both in their sixties, now ran the family farms near Durban.

  Though he hadn’t known my grandfather, he had known a lot of people who surely would have known him, and he had a full understanding of what the town had been like in the years my grandfather was there, the years just before he, Stuart, was born. The town I had seen the day before contained just the faintest relics of the place Tom had known – wooden buildings were liable to burn down and were easy to demolish if you wanted something new.

  A building boom had begun in Durban in the summer of 1905 in anticipation of the arrival of the railway that autumn. From that date, the place had been a lively pioneer town and in many ways surpassed Swan River – though the pendulum was to swing back again with the arrival of large grain businesses in the 1930s. Stuart confirmed Tom’s assessment of himself as a pioneer. ‘Oh, sure,’ he said with a drawn-out lilt. ‘A man who worked on the railroad here in those years was a pioneer.’