Jack’s arm was healed, but its slight deformation was enough to keep him out of active military service in the next war. He wasn’t disappointed.
Cyril and Amelia were enrolled in high school in September. Cyril had a new and different story about the interesting scar on his right cheek whenever anybody asked. Nobody believed the story about pirates.
Amelia started high school with all the enthusiasm of any student at that academic milestone in life. She borrowed at least two books from the library every week.
Rose found a job for that first summer, but went back to school in September. A school on Jasper Avenue needed a teacher for Grade 6.
Ten years later, Jack and Cyril borrowed a canoe and traveled down the Athabasca from Hinton. They stopped for a while at the place where they had learned something about being the man of the house. They decided not to take pictures of what was left of the house, but did take one of a spruce stump that was slowly giving way to rot.
They finally pulled out near a mill at Whitecourt. It was far enough.
War ends with the death of its last veteran. Only then does it really become history.
Afterword
The Athabasca River has its beginnings in the glaciers that flank the Yellowhead Pass in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. It eventually flows into Lake Athabasca as part of the Arctic watershed. The Yellowhead Pass is one of the lowest through the Rockies, and the northernmost one through which the railway first forged its way in the late 1800’s.
Today, the tourism town of Jasper nominally marks the beginning of the turbulent Athabasca, as it tumbles through scenic rocky gorges, before flowing out through the forested foothills. And, near its outflow into Lake Athabasca, it flows through the oil sands around Fort McMurray. Along its modern length, railways and highways cross it; lumber and oil industries are scattered along either bank, competing with farms for economic priority.
In the period between the two World Wars of the last century, the Athabasca was largely the same as it had been in the centuries before. Its surroundings were still as wild and rugged as they had been during the days of the fur trade, when Fort McMurray and Jasper House were well known to the voyageurs. But the transcontinental fur traders were gone in the 1900’s. The railways had displaced their raw and basic activity. Farmers and industries were coming in their wake. Only the Great Depression seemed to slow them down. But only for a little while.
It was during that period, between the Wars, that the Whyte family retreated to the banks of the Athabasca to escape from the problems of the world. Or from their own.
Jack, the oldest boy in the Whyte family, couldn’t even remember if that had been in 1931 or 1932. Not knowing that was probably another reason for his adolescent anger, confusion, and all that follows.
Acknowledgments
To credit some people for their influence or assistance in this would mean leaving out, or forgetting, many more. Something excusable, I suppose, during this stage of retirement. The forgetting thing, that is.
However, there is one distinct memory.
It was with great foreboding that those of us in North Bay Teachers’ College in the mid-1960’s entered into Miss Thorn’s classroom for the first time. We had heard that she was the very epitome of her own name—precise, to the point, and more. And all of our expectations, or fears, were realized under her tutelage in that year of preparation for our own turn as teachers.
We learned what we respected; we were guided by her precision; and we were encouraged to realize that we, too, could learn more and more. Teachers, after all, should never stop being students themselves.
But, most of all, what she imparted was a love for language and the art of communication in whatever form that might take.
These qualities were also seen in the editorial staff of Red Deer Press—(Peter Carver and Penny Hozy).
So, thanks to them, and those whose names are possibly forgotten but whose influence continues.
Interview with Harry Kleinhuis
What led to your wanting to tell this story?
Three people were the basis for this story. Jack and Cyril were neighborhood kids back in the fifties. Jack was a young teenager. Cyril was his tag-along little brother. Jack was the oldest in the family and expected to be exemplary in all that he did. It was an expectation that was beyond anybody’s talent or ability. Jack used to say that he often got beat for being less than expected. I heard that kind of “event” happen one Saturday afternoon. Jack had failed at something, again. He emerged from the house and his father’s punishment, looking stoic, confused, angry, and staring straight ahead, already anticipating the next encounter. Cyril was the one who cried on Jack’s behalf. But only briefly.
Joe, a stoic individual who worked with my dad, was not connected to Jack and Cyril in any way. He was a loner, an electrician. I watched him ply his trade, so to speak, helping to re-wire and upgrade our house. All by himself, he wrestled with wires and a brace and bit to bore the holes where those wires needed to go. On a summer day, it was a hot, sweaty job. And the harder it was, the harder Joe worked. Worked, as if pursued by some tireless demon. As a kid, I helped by fetching things for Joe from time to time. But, really, I was there waiting for something to happen. Joe had a reputation. Something that people called shell shock. Something to do with his memories of being in the war. Something that often led to peacetime explosions at work and elsewhere.
You clearly know a lot about the Athabasca country. How did you come by this knowledge?
The rivers in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains rattle and hiss through the gorges and channels they’ve carved out over the centuries. For a few years in the late sixties, I taught in a school situated on the North Saskatchewan River, about forty miles west of Edmonton. Canoe trips were a part of the school’s curriculum, usually following the routes of fur traders—the voyageurs. One of those trips was down the Athabasca, over to Lac la Biche, and then along some more sedate, meandering prairie rivers. We pulled out at La Loche. The beauty of traveling along a river like the Athabasca in the foothills is that, because of the river’s deep valley and rugged nature, there is little to see of the farming and other economic activity up above and beyond that valley. Here the rivers exist in natural isolation.
These rivers create and ensure their own isolation by seasonal flooding, sometimes rising into the trees well above their banks.
Malcolm is a man who has been permanently damaged by fighting in the First World War. Do you think all those who take part in such conflicts suffer from such trauma?
I had the privilege of being the padre to the local Canadian Legion for a few years. The vets were interesting people. And the older the better. They all had stories to tell, but they never talked about the things they did at the front. Their favorite stories, or memories, were about when it was all over—when countries had been liberated.
As padre, I was involved in a lot of ceremonies and a lot of funerals. The following poem I wrote is a reflection on one of those events.
Tribute To A Comrade
A paper poppy—
Such a simple thing
To lay upon the flag-draped coffin
Of a friend
Whose deeds the world had long ago forgotten.
But, in the figure bent
And stooped beneath the gravity
Of that long, solemn moment,
Was seen an honest tribute
In that last silent eulogy
To a fallen comrade . . .
What had their memories shared?
Was it the knowledge of near death
In the savage chaos on a now forgotten hillside
Where flesh and blood
Were the cost and price of each square yard?
Was it, perhaps, the memory of fear
So rich that it brought home
Some men no longer men<
br />
But only hollow bodies,
And hands no more equipped
To do the work that peace demanded?
And yet, how could I know?
Or we, or all the world
Who from a grave so easily return
While in his solitary silence
Alone
A comrade mourns
The Whyte family has been living in isolation for seven years when we meet them in this story. They have come to depend on each other for everything, yet they never clearly express their love, even affection, for each other. Why do you think that is?
In the stories of Tevya by Sholem Aleichem (which led to the musical, Fiddler on the Roof), Golde asks her husband, Tevya, “Do you love me?”
What follows is a litany of all the work and things they have done together, or for each other, over their many years of marriage. At the end, after all of that, Tevya rhetorically asks, “Why talk about love right now?”
Love is not in saying the words, but in living the life of marriage and family. At times it seems like an obligation but, ultimately, as with the Whytes, love exists in promises fulfilled.
During the time Jack and his father are camping along the river while the boy recovers from his broken arm, he sometimes realizes he’s not experienced in making conversation, even though he is fifteen years old. What does he mean by that?
As a result of the Whytes’ isolation, Jack hasn’t had any experience talking with people—the family is his only society. And, within the family, he is further isolated by being the eldest of the three children. He’s trapped in the “no man’s land” between his parents and his younger brother and sister. He’s becoming a man on his own. Like the young eagles, he knows what he’s becoming, but just doesn’t know how to get there. And his dad hasn’t been any help in the process because he had also been denied that mentoring process, because his own father had died and left him to be the man of the house.
At one point, Malcolm suggests that those who didn’t take part in the war can’t have any idea of what it was really like. Yet countless memoirs and novels about wartime continue to appear. Do you think Malcolm was right?
Dime novels of the old west, apparently, were often written by people who had never been west of the Mississippi. Their tales were romanticized legends. Such stories exist about war as well. However, to really know something about anything, you have to do it—you have to be there. You get to know a river by going up it as well as down, and for more than just a few miles. You need to do more than just cavort in a shallow set of rapids on a sunny summer day—although, that might be a good place to start.
What do you think Jack will have learned from his father after the family leaves their isolated home on the Athabasca River?
Jack is introspective and reflective. In the same way that he watched the eagles, he will look back on what his father was, and the things he did, and begin to realize why it all happened. He will also realize that in looking back on his father, he will begin to see a reflection of himself.
What is your message to young writers who have stories they want to tell? How important is it to have one’s work published?
Writing is the simple process of walking in someone else’s shoes and using your imagination to do it. One step at a time, and you’re walking. One word at a time, and you’re writing.
It’s surprising how far you can walk in one day, or paddle.
And getting published is a bonus.
Thank you, Harry, for your insights.
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