As Long as the Rivers Flow

by James Bartleman

  “Morning! Welcome aboard,” he shouted over the roar of the motor. “I was afraid you weren’t coming. It’ll be nice to have some company. It’s a long and boring ride out to Pickle Lake.”

  The driver turned on the headlights, put his rig in gear and moved it through the community, shifting from first to second, and to third as he picked up speed. Talkative and friendly by nature, he sought to engage Martha in conversation.

  “My name’s Olavi. That’s Finnish. What’s yours? Where are you going after Pickle Lake? Off to Thunder Bay? Got relatives there? Taking a winter break? Looking for a job? You lived all your life on the reserve? Do you think it’ll be hard to adjust on the outside?”

  Martha told him her name and said nothing further. It was difficult to hear what he was saying over the sound of the motor and transmission, and she found his English with its heavy Finnish accent hard to understand. And as her thoughts turned to the life she was leaving behind, his words simply did not register. When she did not respond, Olavi resorted to the radio for company, turning it on and scrolling through the dial until he picked up the local one-watt community FM station operated by a volunteer speaking in Anishinaabemowin.

  “Bojo. Good morning, everybody in beautiful Cat Lake First Nation. It’s seven o’clock and time to get up. It’s a cold one this morning. Minus fifty without the wind chill. Sunrise at nine, sunset at three. A sunny day ahead. Mothers, be sure to bundle up your kids before you send them to school. Those of you heading out to Pickle Lake, remember to take spare cans of gas, blankets, shovels, sand and food in case you break down. You might have a long wait. Conditions are good but count on eight hours of hard driving. Now a little gospel singing in our very own language to get you ready for the day.”

  Olavi was happy when he heard the music. Although he did not understand Anishinaabemowin, he loved listening to the old-time favourites sung with passion whether in Finnish, English, Anishinaabemowin or Cree. In a few minutes, they reached the shore of Cat Lake, and Olavi shifted to first and eased his truck carefully down the embankment onto the ice. Ahead, illuminated by the headlights, was the start of the winter road, marked on each side by black spruce branches stuck in the snow.

  “Now the fun begins,” said Olavi. “There’s only six feet of ice between us and freezing water one hundred and fifty feet deep! I’ve lost plenty of friends driving on these lakes in winter. Problem is the weight of the truck bends the ice and we push a wave of water ahead of us as we go. Sometimes the wave bounces back off the shoreline and ice just explodes ahead of you from the pressure and down you go. But I’m an old hand. I respect the ice and never go too fast. I keep my door unlocked and am always ready to jump, and you’d be wise to do the same thing.”

  Martha did not respond and Olavi listened to the gospel music until they were out of range of the station. He then tuned in to the CBC Northern Service broadcasting from Thunder Bay but turned off the radio when he heard classical music playing.

  “I like that kind of music but am not in the mood for it today. How about you, Martha?”

  Martha said nothing and Olavi tried again. “I’ve lived in Pickle Lake for more than forty years now. Ever since the end of the war. I’d been called up when I was just a kid to fight the Russians in 1939. Everything went well at the beginning. We pushed those Ruskies back almost to Leningrad and were winning. But our mistake was to have the Germans on our side. When they lost, we lost, and the Russians took their revenge. It was terrible. They stole half the country and times were really tough.”

  Martha stared impassively out the window as Olavi glanced at her, uncertain how to interpret her apparent indifference. He had seen things as a young man that he would never forget: hand-to-hand combat in the snow, advancing through artillery barrages to engage the enemy as comrades fell beside him, retreating with his unit through burnt-out villages, and long lines of refugees fleeing advancing Red Army troops. Faced with death, he had been more alive than he ever had or would be in peacetime. Perhaps it was too much to expect that someone who had spent her life in the bush would understand the importance of his story.

  “That’s when the bride and me decided to clear out and take our chances in Canada,” he said, feeling compelled to go on. “We came up here because we’d heard there were lots of Finns working in the mines and logging camps. Best thing we ever did. We were already used to the cold and there was always work if you weren’t afraid to get your hands dirty. The kids did well. Went to university in Thunder Bay. Became professional people. The bride and me are really proud of them. Just wish they’d come home more often. We miss our grandchildren.”

  By now Martha was uncomfortable, not understanding what this white man, one of the few she had met since her days at residential school, wanted from her. Why was he telling her about his life before he came to Canada? Who were the Ruskies anyway? What point was he trying to make when he talked about his kids? Was he saying white kids were smarter than Native kids? Was he talking down to her? She wasn’t sure. In any case, his words were barely intelligible and he seemed too friendly to be sincere. Perhaps he was just like Father Antoine, saying nice things but just wanting to have sex with her. It was better just to ignore him even if it made her look rude.

  Olavi shrugged his shoulders and muttered to himself in frustration.

  “What disrespect. I give her a lift and she won’t even talk to me. Never understand these Indians if I live to be a hundred! Never open their mouths. Don’t even know if she speaks English. Don’t understand them. In Finland there were aboriginal people—Lapps. Raised reindeer and paid their way. Why can’t these Indians do the same? I belong in the north just as much as they do. I come from Finland after all. How come I can come to Canada and get a good job—they live here and they can’t. How come my kids go to school and become teachers and lawyers and theirs don’t? Are these people lazy? Yes, that’s probably the answer. They want something for nothing.”

  As the truck moved eastward, the stars faded in the night sky and were replaced by a crimson glow that lit up the horizon ahead of them. The sun came up, a red ball in a warm orange-cream sky that soon turned lemon yellow and cobalt blue. On the lakes, the sunlight reflected off the snow in a harsh glare, but in the bush, a soft light filtered through openings in the black spruce, hemlock and cedars, colouring the snow green and turquoise. Other than the occasional crow and raven, there was no wildlife to be seen.

  From time to time, they met trucks and cars going in the opposite direction, and Olavi would pull over, exchange information on road conditions, tell a joke or two and have a good laugh before continuing on. After each encounter, he would turn to Martha, make a comment or two in the hope she would respond, but she remained silent.

  At noon, Martha opened her backpack, removed a cardboard box and gestured to her companion to share her lunch. Olavi brought his rig to a halt and they ate cold smoked Canada goose, bannock, boiled whole potatoes and blueberry pie accompanied by cups of hot tea from Martha’s Thermos. While Martha remained as taciturn as ever, the mood in the cab was much improved when they resumed their journey.

  By mid-afternoon, a shadow began to run ahead of the truck, the sun turned red and set in the west behind them, the light of the short northern day vanished, and by the time they reached Pickle Lake, the stars had reappeared. When Olavi dropped Martha off at the entrance to the restaurant that doubled as the bus terminal, he gave her a big, friendly smile and wished her a sincere “Good luck.”

  Martha pushed open the door, went in and sat down at the counter beside two Native men from Mishkeegogamang who were eating fish-and-chip dinners. They were speaking to each other in Anishinaabemowin when one of them, responding to a joke, burst out laughing. The other grinned and made a quick comeback that provoked an even heartier guffaw from his friend. Martha wanted to join in as they carried on with their bantering, but she was too shy and said nothing.

  However, a half-dozen white men and women, waiting for the bus to Toronto at a nearby table,
exchanged worried looks. Were the Indians talking about them? Were they drunk? Were they dangerous? Would they have to share the bus with them? Would they smell? Did they have lice?

  One of them got up, went over to a woman behind the till who doubled as waitress and ticket agent, and whose name, “Yvette,” was embroidered on the blouse of her uniform.

  “Yvette,” he said, squinting first at her name and smiling at her with an air of complicity.

  “Yeah,” said Yvette. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s about those Indians,” the man said in a low voice, indicating with a nod of his head the two Native men who continued to chortle and talk rapidly.

  “What about them?” Yvette replied, putting her hands on her ample, matronly hips.

  “Look, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against Indians but I sure hope you haven’t sold those two any tickets on the next bus south. My friends and me are worried. They’re laughing and carrying on in here and we think they’ve been drinking. Drunk Indians are dangerous, especially on buses. Don’t you think you should call the police?”

  But if the white man expected a sympathetic response, he was mistaken. For Yvette, with her blue eyes and blond hair, had come north one summer at the beginning of the 1980s from her small Franco-Ontarian hometown of Hearst to work as a maid at a local fishing lodge. Shortly thereafter, she had met and married a Native guide, and they settled down to raise their family at Pickle Lake. Life would have been perfect had it not been for the racist names their two brown-skinned children were sometimes called in the schoolyard.

  “What’s it to you if they’re going on the bus?” she said, raising her voice until she was almost shouting, and drawing the attention of everyone in the room. “You call the cops if you’ve got a problem, but you damn well better have some good reasons for bothering them because those two men are behaving themselves just as good as you.”

  “Okay, okay. Forget I asked,” the man said. He returned to his seat, shrugging his shoulders to his companions as if to indicate that he had done his best but this hick waitress obviously wasn’t prepared to listen.

  After witnessing the exchange, the two Native men glanced at each other and at Martha, paid their bills, pulled on their parkas and went out into the cold. Afraid the white people would try to prevent her from taking the bus since she was Native, Martha wanted to follow them. But Yvette had been watching her and went over to provide reassurance.

  “Now don’t you worry about those yahoos. You’ve as much right to be in here and to take the bus as them. Now what can I do for you, dear?”

  “I’d like a one-way ticket to Toronto please.”

  “My, my, you are burning your bridges. I hope you know what you’re doing. That’ll be fifty bucks. The next bus is in two hours.”

  With her ticket in one hand, and her backpack over her shoulder, Martha went outside to wait, preferring to stand alone with her thoughts in the snow and cold rather than to share the restaurant with the white travellers who had something against her people.

  Eventually, the Greyhound from Toronto pulled up and with a sucking pneumatic hiss, the door opened to let out a handful of passengers. The white people, led by the man who had clashed with Yvette, emerged from the terminal and lined up to present their tickets to be punched and to have their luggage stowed in the exterior compartments before climbing on board. Martha was the last one to enter, clutching her backpack tightly as she took a seat by herself at the rear, as far away from the others as she could get.

  For the first three hundred miles, the bus went south and there was little to see from the light of its headlights other than high snowbanks, utility poles, poorly marked roads leading into the bush to far-off reserves, signs indicating they were passing through provincial parks, and billboards advertising fishing and hunting lodges with scenes of moose and giant northern pike and muskellunge leaping into the air.

  After reaching the Trans-Canada highway at the Franco-Ontarian community of Ignace, the bus made its way through the light traffic of the winter night southeast toward Thunder Bay. The driver by then had turned off the interior lights, and the only visibility within was provided by the tips of cigarettes glowing in the dark and the illumination of the dashboard dials. One after another, the passengers extinguished their cigarettes, pushed their seats back into the recline position and slumped over asleep until Martha and the driver were the only ones left awake.

  From time to time, someone would cough, wake up, stumble half-asleep to the rear, push open the thin aluminum door to the toilet and go in. After a few minutes, there would be the sounds of flushing and water running, and if the person was a man, he would usually lurch out the door still zipping up his fly, and if a woman, she would be adjusting her clothing. Male or female, they brought with them the stench of the toilet mixed with the smell of cheap air fresheners and stale cigarettes.

  Eventually, Martha grew angry. She would not allow her fear of the white passengers to keep her confined to the back of the bus! She was a human being too and deserved respect! She would stand up for her rights and not allow anyone to push her around!

  She struggled out of her seat and moved forward to join the others, taking possession of an empty seat just behind the driver and defiantly placing her backpack beside her to keep other passengers away. All the way to Toronto she protected her place, not allowing anyone to sit beside her.

  As the bus made its way through the northern Ontario night, Martha leaned forward, peering over the driver’s shoulder out the front window and wondering if her decision to leave home had been the right one. She felt ill at ease, for she had entered a world that was unfamiliar and vaguely unsettling and menacing.

  Each time the headlights of oncoming traffic lit up the interior of the bus, she recoiled and shielded her face with her hands. Whenever the driver accelerated and changed lanes to overtake slow-moving snowploughs and sanders with their ominously flashing blue lights, she seized the arms of her seat and hung on, terrified the bus would skid off the road. When tractor-trailers and trucks, loaded with pulpwood, logs and lumber, went roaring by in the opposite direction, mudguards flapping, spraying sand, salt and water over the front windshield, she held her breath until the overtaxed wipers cleared the view ahead.

  In the middle of the night, the driver pulled into the terminal at Thunder Bay and the passengers got off, some to go to their homes and others to stretch their legs and have something quick to eat before climbing on board again. New passengers joined those who were continuing on, and another driver took over to navigate the next leg of the journey—the seven-hundred-mile swing along the arc of the north shore of Lake Superior to Sudbury.

  When the bus entered the small towns and villages strung out along the highway, Martha could not help comparing them to her reserve. At Cat Lake First Nation there were no restaurants, no strip malls and no movie theatres—only a rudimentary outdoor rink with natural ice for recreation. These communities with their Italian, German and Finnish clubs, Chinese eateries, McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Zellers, Shoppers Drug Marts, hockey arenas, bingo halls, video rental outlets, beer and liquor stores, used car lots, snowmobile sales outlets, topless dancing bars and churches, attracted and repelled her at the same time.

  There was obviously so much more to do in these places than back home. Yet would she be accepted if some day she wanted to settle in one of them? That was not at all certain. As at Pickle Lake, each one was served by a combined bus terminal and restaurant. And as at Pickle Lake, although they were still in the north, she had the impression the white people looked at her with barely concealed fear, distrust and suspicion when she left the bus to buy coffee and sandwiches. What would they think of her in the south? She wouldn’t live anywhere she wasn’t welcome.

  In the mid-afternoon the bus made a stop at Sudbury and headed south, leaving the sparsely settled north to begin its final run through central Ontario to the provincial capital. No longer did Martha spend her time looking at the passing
panorama. Instead she stared out the window with unseeing eyes trying to make sense of what she had experienced in her life to date.

  She thought of the years she had spent listening to people in authority at the residential school telling her that Natives were primitive and inferior to whites. She thought of the spirit of resignation that had infected the people of her own community, most of whom had already relinquished their old self-sufficient ways to subsist on government handouts. She thought of the two Native men in the restaurant in Pickle Lake, the racist comments of the white customers, and Yvette, the waitress who had been nice to her. She thought about Spider, now well into his mid-teens, and wondered if she would see him again. But most of all, she thought of Raven and missed her terribly.

  It was all too difficult to sort out. But by the time the bus pulled into the Bay Street terminal, Martha had decided that she had only one life to live and had no intention of spending it brooding over past wrongs, real or imaginary.

  But first she had to survive her initial night in Toronto. Knowing nobody and with no idea where to go for accommodation, she set off walking aimlessly through the alien world of Toronto’s downtown core. It was early evening, and the rush hour was at its peak. Cars, trucks and buses clogged the streets, spitting out wet, foul-smelling fumes from exhaust pipes, befouling the air and making her queasy. Police cars, ambulances, fire engines and streetcars, pushing their way through the traffic, assaulted her ears with wailing sirens, honking horns and clanging bells. More people than she could ever have imagined poured out of subway exits to gather on corners and stare at traffic lights, as if waiting for permission from some unseen power buried deep within their mechanical guts to cross the streets. A giant flashing electronic sign high up on the side of a building displayed a happy family drinking Coca-Cola under the slogan Can’t Beat the Real Thing. In the well-lit window of a clothing store, elegantly dressed individuals stood motionless, staring straight ahead with their arms extended. Martha paused and waited for them to grow tired and to leave. She moved on, smiling when she realized she was looking at mannequins of the type she had seen in Eaton’s mail-order catalogues back on the reserve.