Mnemonic (24 page)

Years ago, we drove through the Boundary country, where Phoenix had been, on our way back from a family camping trip to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller. There had been traces of my grandfather on that trip — we stopped at the site of the coal mine near Drumheller where he'd worked, and which my father said was more or less adjacent to his family's small holding. I wondered briefly about happiness — the hills were so bleak and colourless, empty; or at least that's what I saw; though my father had mentioned long walks in search of dinosaur bones, rock outcroppings rich with fossils — but I was so busy keeping my small children fed and occupied that I didn't linger much on family connections to Drumheller.

The summer of that camping trip was very hot, and I know from my father's accounts of his childhood that the winters were perishingly cold. I had found the Drumheller landscape bleak, without the luxury of trees and verdant valleys, though I suspect if I went again, I'd see beauty of another sort.

On a late September day in 2009, my husband and I drove from our motel in Osoyoos to Greenwood. The Boundary country is beautiful, with rolling pastures fringed with pines, aspens turning as we drove farther east. Greenwood was idyllic on the morning we arrived. We visited the museum, after espresso and pastries in the Copper Eagle Cappuccino and Bakery; we took ourselves on the walking tour to see the lovingly restored houses and buildings, all with their modern gloss of appearance in
Snow Falling on Cedars
, a movie set on the San Juan Islands but filmed in part in Greenwood and now given a place of pride in the town's history. A sign on the side of one brick building, cleverly faded to suggest a long presence, is a remnant of the film; it advertised San Juan Island strawberries. This seemed slightly ironic to me, though I'm sure the infusion of money was welcome, and the legacy of that moment of fame lingers on.

When I asked about Phoenix in the wonderful Greenwood Museum, the woman at the desk gave me a map for a self-guided tour of the Phoenix Interpretive Forest. She said there was not much left up there. We walked briefly over the site of the old smelter at the Lotzkar Memorial Park, a moonscape of dark heaps of black glass, and bell-shaped slag, and decided to drive up to Phoenix anyway, thinking that we could continue on to Grand Forks on the other side of the mountain.

The self-guided tour was organized to direct a driver from Grand Forks to Greenwood over Phoenix Mountain so we were, in essence, doing the tour backwards. This meant rapid little math figurings to determine where we were, kilometre-wise. But I rose to it, subtracting the small sums, and we paused at the switchback — our first, the guide's third, at 20.5 on the Phoenix Interpretive Forest Road, which turns off 19.2 kilometres from Grand Forks, or 0.9 from our beginning — to see the view of Greenwood and the slag pile. Then the Forshaw Homestead, where a pair of dogs barked like crazy and raced along the inside of their fence as we stopped to take a few photographs of the old farmhouse. The Coordinated Resource Management Plan Sign didn't seem worth stopping for, but the Phoenix Cemetery certainly was.

The first grave we encountered was for a woman who was buried with her infant twin sons. A pair of teddy bears and some plastic flowers graced the top of this grave. I stood in the late September air, cool but bright, and tried to imagine how the husband and father might have continued after this loss, coming home after work to empty rooms.

In that stillness, a grey jay caught sight of us and swooped to a nearby tree, eager with gossip. But nothing he said provided me with more than a fugitive understanding of the place and its stories. Men, mostly; some women; several graves with resting lambs and inscriptions indicating a nine-day-old baby or very young child. A child and a father within days of each other in 1918 when Spanish flu killed millions around the world. Some Masons. Some members of the Independent Order of Oddfellows. Men from Sweden, Finland, England, Wales, Italy. Clusters of deaths which indicated mine accidents of some severity: July 5, 1914.

Almost all the pickets had been freshly painted, and there was evidence that the work was ongoing: a brush and can tucked into a sheltered area, drips of white paint on the grass. And such dignity in the inscriptions: for a baby, two days old when he died, “Budded on earth, to bloom on heaven”; for a man from Sweden, twenty-eight years old, “Here rests a woodman of the world.” There were also a number of wooden tablets, weathered and worn, with names carved in, almost gone. These wooden monuments were poignant — for their economy and for the way they are clearly modelled on expensive stone tablets. They are shaped as carefully, some of them erected (the inscriptions tell us) by family members from across the continent, or the world. Rusty tin cans hold a few wild flowers or plastic roses, and it's obvious people come to replace the flowers and prop up falling monuments.

The jay inclined its head as we walked slowly through the cemetery, touching the wood, leaning closer to read the fading names and dates. He'd seen this before, and was hoping for food.

I made a gathering of names of people who died the year my grandfather's name showed up on the census:

WILLIAMS, THOMAS
H, b. North Wales, d. Dec 07, 1911, age: 40yr

SHEA, EUGENE P
, b. Jan 01, 1869 Saranac Lake NY, d. Dec 03, 1911

MICHELA, ANTONIO,
b. Feb 10, 1873, d. Jun 13, 1911, born Aglie Corino

MARTIN, GUSTAA ADOLF
, b. Sep 14, 1886, d. Feb 02, 1911

EVANS, JOHN
, b. North Wales, d. Mar 20, 1911, age 32yr

COOK, NANNIE A
, b. May 06, 1880, d. Oct 09, 1911

I wonder if any of these were his friends or fellow boarders in the place where he was living. I can't find them on the census. Most of the names on the list have “Boarder” beside them in thick black ink but small clusters with the same name seem to indicate cooks, children, a foreman.

I wonder if my grandfather knew children in the boarding house, and if any of them might still be alive, with a vague memory of a stocky man with a strong accent. Or if he worked with young boys who might remember him still, or their sons, the ancient men you find in small towns like Greenwood or Merritt, their eyes still bright and curious, and eager to tell you what they knew in their youth.

In Alice Glanville's
Schools of the Boundary: 1891-1991
, I came across a telling moment in the School Inspector's report for the Phoenix School, 1905: “For the past year the school had an enrolment of 137 students and an average daily attendance of only half that number. A curfew by-law is urgently needed.”
²
Were they truant, those absent children, or were they working, their small bodies underground with the horses and picks?

I was surprised, during the rest of the drive, that there really wasn't much left of that bustling city. The books and articles I have about Phoenix describe a true place, and it was hard to believe it had disappeared.

The first log cabin was constructed in 1895 and a photograph shows it, plain as anything, roof planks cut any old way, but the men lounging against it — including developer, promoter, and future mayor of Phoenix, George Rumberger — suggest that big plans are being made. Several men are in suits; one wears a rather formal derby hat. Confidence is in the air. A photograph taken just a year later shows a CPR terminal, several shaft houses, a crushing plant, bunkhouses, stores, quite a large hotel, a couple of trim houses. By 1901, there was a hospital designed by Francis Rattenbury, and a three-storey miners' union hall with a banquet room and theatre. When the town was abandoned, the houses and buildings stood for some years, overseen by a man called Forepaw for the hook he had instead of a hand. His real name was Adolph Sercu (or Cirque) and he'd come from Belgium to work in the Boundary mines. He was hired as caretaker of the townsite, which he accomplished from his base in the city hall where he'd moved after cutting out a star from a soup tin to wear as a badge of office.

The buildings crumbled or were scavenged for materials. In 1927, the hospital still looked intact, though it was ruined inside. When the Granby Company began an open-pit operation at Phoenix in 1956, what was left of the town was bulldozed into oblivion, apart from the cenotaph that was erected in 1919 with the proceeds of the sale of the covered skating rink, where hockey games had provided such entertainment in the town's heyday. The cenotaph had been moved from the townsite to its current placement on Phoenix Road. We stopped to look at it. It was inscribed with a line from Horace's
Odes
(Book III:ii): “
Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori
.”

Sad, to realize how things change and don't change — that young men still rush to war and that the resulting monuments still offer such lies to their memory, though, “It is a sweet and honourable thing to die for one's country” had perhaps not yet publicly acquired its harsh and ironic gloss in 1919. Wilfred Owen's poem which uses part of the line as its title, “
Dulce Et Decorum Est
,” wasn't published until 1920, after Owen's death. Its fierce admonishment wasn't part of the general discourse:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori
.
³

And yet these young men deserve their monument — to bravery, to courage (think of them setting out from remote Phoenix in its valley of fireweed that summer of 1914, the horrors in their immediate future unimaginable), to the loss of everything they might have contributed to the world. Some of them had no doubt skated in the rink sold to finance their monument. We photographed the cenotaph in its wild loneliness, visited by people like us on days when the road wasn't mired in mud or heavy with snow.

When we came down off Phoenix Mountain to where the road meets Highway 3, I was filled with emotion but it was mysterious or at least baffling to me. I'd hoped for something of my grandfather, though I knew it was unlikely. Where he had lived in 1911 had been bulldozed under, covered with tailing dams, a lake created for Phoenix's water source and now home to rainbow trout and sunfish. We didn't venture into any of the underground workings, scared away by the signs warning of danger. I've seen the photographs, though, of these ghostly caverns with their open stopings, a man dwarfed to one side. I tried to make a connection with my grandfather but felt only the abstract sorrow I'd experienced in the cemetery. The cemetery, though, was perhaps the place where he might have stood, on ground I stood on almost a hundred years later, his hands folded, at the funeral of a friend, under small trees now grown to full and dignified height, while an ancestor of the grey jay hovered and scolded.

So far from Bukovina. So far from Drumheller, where my grandfather met and married my grandmother; from Beverly, where they moved during the Depression to that tin-roofed house where my brothers and I cried in fear during a hail storm. From Cyrillic to English; from one name to another; from the single status listed on the census to fatherhood (and grief as his first young daughter died of diphtheria at three years of age in 1924). From the beeches of his birth country to the lodgepole pines, larches, and aspens of Phoenix Mountain — though the townsite was stripped of its trees in those heady days of its origins, when he walked out in early morning to the shaft.

My grandfather was accustomed to vegetable gardens; he came from peasant stock that grew what they could or risked hunger. Probably they were hungry anyway, which is why my grandfather came to North America and sent money to bring a cousin over a few years later. Did he expect gardens in Phoenix? The short growing season meant lawns and flower borders were scarce, though lilacs flourished, and when we stopped on the roadside for our lunch, I was astonished at the size of the wild strawberry plants. I've read that potatoes were grown, and that lettuce did well, though a man working long hours digging ore or filling carts with it, or whatever it was my grandfather did, needed something more substantial than lettuce. Still, he would have known meals of potatoes and perhaps not much else in Bukovina. One of only a small handful of stories I have about my grandparents is about them digging potatoes in Drumheller in October 1926. My grandmother realized she was in labour and prepared to leave the garden. My grandfather asked, “Aren't you going to finish your row?”

For years my father remembered particularly delicious potatoes, and his mother's butter, and the foods of her homeland — cabbage rolls, perogi, noodles made with eggs from their own chickens. The butter and noodles were often sold or bartered for essentials during those bleak years of the 1930s.

In Royal Jubilee Hospital, someone had to feed my father because his right side was paralyzed.