{two} The Stegner House

Find yourself in the middle of nowhere.

Former Eastend tourism slogan

What we noticed first was the silence. If you stood on the curb in front of the Stegner House and listened, you could feel your ears reaching for sounds, as if they were trying to stand up as sharp as a coyote’s. Now and then, a vehicle whispered along the main drag a couple of blocks to the south, and every hour or so a truck hauling a load of huge round bales growled down a gravel road on the western edge of town. But apart from these brief transgressions, the houses on both sides of the street seemed to lie in a trance, as if even the ticking of their clocks had been silenced.

In the kitchen of the Stegner House, the prevailing quiet was broken by an aged refrigerator, which wheezed asthmatically in the performance of its duties. When the wind blew, the storm windows rattled in sympathy and the rooms filled with the rhythmic, wavelike whooshing of the spruce trees in the front yard. But inexplicably these sounds served only to signal an eerie absence of noise. The black rotary telephone beside the dining-room table did not ring. Although our hosts had foreseen all of our basic needs and comforts, they had neglected to provide a radio, and the antiquated TV in the living room, equipped with rabbit ears, could emit little more than hiss. (Our attempts to watch the Canadians beat the U.S. 3–2 in the gold-medal game of the Women’s World Hockey Championship came to naught because the action appeared to be taking place in a blizzard.) With the van consigned to dry dock for as-yet-undetermined repairs, we did not even have the benefit of the radio there. We had been cast adrift, with nothing to guide us but our thoughts and our unaided senses.

Morning after morning, Keith woke to report strange dreams, many of them about his father, who had died, in England, six months earlier. “I’ve never dreamed anything like that,” he’d say, and then tell me how, in his sleep, he had looked at himself in a mirror and seen the face of his dead father looking back. Do you think it’s this stillness? we asked each other. Do you think that staying busy, in constant commotion, is a way to keep from knowing what is really happening to us? Is that why people talk about “profound” silence? For my part, I slept dreamless, as if I were made out of wood, as if I were sleeping the rooted sleep of a poplar.

That was another thing: the dark. On clear, moonless nights just at bedtime, we’d often stand, shivering, in the backyard and gaze out into the universe. The darkness was as black as water, and you sensed that if you lost your footing, you might fall helpless into its depths. And the stars, stars beyond counting, streaming across the sky, all trillions of miles distant across an ether of space and time. “Stay put,” the voice had told us. “Pay attention to where you are.” We were in the yard of the Stegner House, on Tamarack Street, in the town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, at the foot of the Cypress Hills. We were whirling through space on the skin of a living planet.

In a town where everyone knows everyone else, visitors are painfully obvious. So we weren’t surprised when, occasionally, someone stopped us on the street or in the grocery store and politely ran through the basics of who, what, why, when, and where. Were we enjoying our stay in Eastend? they’d ask in conclusion, and we were happy to oblige with a “yes.” But the aisles of the Co-op, between the tea and the tinned beans, didn’t really seem like the place to talk to strangers about our inner lives. Instead, I might say that it was a treat to see cottontails and white-tailed deer grazing on people’s lawns. Or in a more expansive mood, I would rhapsodize about the view from the room at the top of the Stegner House (where I should have been working but wasn’t, though they didn’t need to know that) and the way the land drew your eyes from the backyard across the alley to the creek, with its fringe of willows, and then up and away to the hills. Strange, misshapen hills that made me think of ancient, fantastical worlds.

If the questioner seemed particularly sympathetic, I might even admit to the homely pleasures of nostalgia. For walking the streets of Eastend that autumn was like walking onto a set for the movie version of my childhood. Although the prairie towns of my youth were hundreds of miles distant and decades in the past, this place was almost as I remembered them. The grain elevators that presided over Railway Street, though strangely unbusy, recalled the dry, half-forgotten aromas of grain dust and “chop.” The guys in ball caps who drew their half-tons up side by side in the middle of the main street looked familiar as they leaned out their cab windows to exchange shop talk. The kids on bicycles who, unafraid of strangers, stopped to talk to me and Keith could have been my childhood friends or models for paintings by Norman Rockwell. When the school bell rang to announce recess, it was all I could do to keep from hurrying over to the playground and looking for my own small self, shrieking with joyful dizziness on the merry-go-round or catching spiders in the tall grass along the fence.

If I were ever to lay claim to a hometown, it would have to be somewhere like this, a kind of simulacrum of all the places where my family had lived. Although my parents had both started out as teachers, my mother gave up her profession in the late 1940s to prepare for my birth, the first in what would become a family of three daughters. The result was that our family life, thereafter, was ruled by my father’s career. Motivated sometimes by necessity and sometimes by boyish ambition, he moved from job to job and from success to success. Every time he changed jobs, and sometimes when he did not, we moved house. In my first fourteen years, we moved fourteen times.

I don’t know how my mother put up with it, all that packing and unpacking, all that rending and rebuilding of life, but as a kid, I was remarkably open to the promise of a fresh start. Maybe this time I’d get a room of my own. Maybe the new town would have a better library than the last one or a befuddled, grandmotherly librarian who would pat me on the head and let me borrow books from the adult section. Yet even then, I sensed that these opportunities always came at a cost. With every move, we left behind friends and newly familiar places, losses that became more painful the more often they recurred. And even more troubling, because irrevocable, was the loss of a material connection to our personal past. Clothes we had outgrown, toys we no longer played with, doodles and scribblers stuffed into the bottom drawer of a desk: everything that we were unlikely to need in the future had to be discarded.

Why, I wondered, couldn’t we be like the families I read about in books, who lived in mansions filled with treasures amassed in years long past by generations of swashbuckling uncles and shadowy spinster aunts? In particular, I yearned for an attic like the ones in which the young heroes and heroines of those novels launched their finest adventures, a midden of romantic old lamps, mysterious wardrobes, and battered trunks filled with lavender-scented letters.

“Did I ever tell you how I used to wish for an attic—” I ask Keith one day, but I can see that he’s busy with his own thoughts. We are walking down the main drag in Eastend: on our right, we pass a romantic old brick bank that has been converted into a used bookstore. A few doors down, there’s a mysterious storefront with a cracked window that, though vacant, still bears the boast of past glory as a “World Famous” antler exhibit. At the far end of the block, the former movie theater, somewhat battered but unbowed, carries the banner of the town’s historical museum (at the moment unfortunately closed for the season).

“Look,” Keith says, pointing up a side street toward a squat brown building shaded by cottonwoods. “Does that sign really say ‘Cappuccino’?” Five minutes later, we are sipping espressos on the sunny patio at Alleykatz, an up-to-the-minute business that unexpectedly combines a coffee bar, a pottery studio, and a daycare. “Coffee, clay, and kids,” as Deb, the proprietor, cheerfully informs us. Okay, so Eastend isn’t just a collection of relics that have washed up from my past. It’s a living, breathing town, a valiant little vessel that, though missing a mast here and a sheet there, is sailing against the trends of rural depopulation. (It must be the dazzle of the wind and sun on the poplar leaves that puts me in the mood for nautical imagery.) Keith and I linger on the deck for an hour or so, nursing our coffees, watching people come and go, and filling our lungs to the brim with contentment.

I had left small-town life for good, without the slightest twinge of regret, the year I finished high school; that was 1967. The quiet that I now found so consoling had been intolerable to me then, and I remember fuming about the airlessness of small-town thinking, the smug, white-gloves-on-Sunday assurance that there is one correct answer to each of life’s questions. God was in His Heaven, all was right with the world, and history was progressing under His beneficent supervision. In school and in the pulpit, this comfortable self-assurance had frequently found expression in a homespun myth, the epic saga of Western settlement.

Here was a story so glorious that even my teenage cynicism could do little to tarnish it, a story in which I could cast myself, vicariously, among the heroines. Back in the 1700s, my own ancestors had left Europe, crossed a perilous ocean, and faced a wild continent rather than betray their heart’s convictions. My dad’s people had been Swiss Anabaptists who, in a quest for religious freedom, had fled first to Pennsylvania, then (as pacifist refugees from the American Revolution) to Upper Canada, and finally as pioneers to Alberta. My mom’s family, though on the opposite side of the religious controversy, had followed a similarly convoluted path. They were Roman Catholics who, forced from Portugal and then England, had settled in Maryland in the 1600s. When that refuge also failed them, they had resumed their migration, heading inland to settlements in Kentucky and then Missouri, before they too made the trek to the Canadian prairies.

Both lines had held strong to their religious convictions until the early 1900s, when at opposite ends of Alberta, my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother had each broken with tradition by marrying outsiders. In other essentials, however, even these renegades remained true to the family heritage as they devoted their lives to bringing the prairie under cultivation and laying the groundwork of community life.

My parents had both grown up on homesteads, and my sisters and I used to beg our mother for stories of her childhood, as fabulous to us as Greek myths. Imagine riding to school on horseback or making butter with a stoneware churn or lying in the grass, watching fleets of flat-bottomed clouds float overhead. These borrowed memories came back to me here in Eastend, in the company of friendly ghosts, and especially during evenings in the Stegner House, itself a vestige of the pioneer era. Curled up on the couch in a pool of lamplight, with a dog at my feet, I again opened Wolf Willow, looking for confirmation of these honeyed stories.

What I found instead was an atmosphere of melancholy that I hadn’t noticed in my earlier encounters with the book. “By most estimates,” Stegner confessed in his opening chapter, “including most of the estimates of memory, Saskatchewan can be a pretty depressing country.” 1 Despite his rapturous reappraisal of the landscape a few pages later—“grassy, clean, exciting”—his memories were permeated by a sour whiff of disappointment. Stegner’s father had been a hard-luck gambler, a man who staked his family’s future on 320 acres of sun-scorched, wind-scoured prairie a hard day’s drive south of town and who then, through the consecutive misfortunes of wheat rust, fire, and drought, had lost the toss. “My father did not grow discouraged,” Stegner recalled, “he grew furious. When he matched himself against something he wanted a chance to win. By 1920 he was already down in Montana scouting around for some new opportunity.” 2 The family left for Great Falls the following year and then for Salt Lake City, where they settled in like a wind-blown drift of Russian thistles.

During their sojourn in Saskatchewan, the Stegners had spent summers on the homestead and winters in this house. It was here that, by Stegner’s report, the entire family had nearly died in 1918 of the Spanish flu; here also that, in his words, “my grandmother ‘went crazy’ and had to be taken away by a Mountie to the Provincial asylum because she took to standing silently in the door of the room where my brother and I slept—just hovered there for heaven knows how long before someone discovered her watching and listening in the dark.” 3 In the cozy kitchen a few paces from where I sat reading, Stegner’s father had once “clouted [him] with a chunk of stove wood,” sent him flying across the room, and broken his collarbone. The shadows cast by the lamp seemed to deepen, and the silence gathered as I read; these traumas were too close for comfort.

Fortunately for my peace of mind, the members of the Eastend Arts Council had provided another account of the settler experience that struck a more cheerful note. A weighty volume, bound in green and emblazoned with gold, too large for the bookshelves upstairs, it was tucked away with the phone book on the telephone table. Entitled Range Riders and Sodbusters, it had been published by the local historical society in 1984 as a tribute to “our” pioneers. “We record these stories with awe,” the editors wrote, aware “that this area had its definite beginnings in these stories never again to be relived and an era in history never to be repeated.” 4

Completely typical of the genre—books like this one had been compiled in communities across the prairies as the old-timers began to fade, including a couple that featured members of my own family—it consisted of capsule biographies of the founding fathers and, somewhat grudgingly, the founding mothers of the area. Who could resist the smiling faces that gazed shyly out of these pages or their stories of heroic determination?

One of the pictures that caught my eye showed an atypically somber-faced man in a three-piece suit, standing aslant to the camera and clasping the hand of a sturdy woman with back-swept hair and a foursquare stance. Their names were Edmond and Marie Nibus. As Marie proceeds to explain, they had come to Canada from Belgium in 1912, along with their five-year-old son, and arrived on their homestead, in the middle of a blizzard, the following autumn. Their first home on the prairie was a two-room shack, punctured with knot holes and furnished with little more than a stove, a table, and a bunch of apple boxes. “It had a brand new board floor,” Marie recalled, “and I thought it was wonderful.”

“Life on a homestead had a lot of hardships,” she continued. “I think young ones are spoiled nowadays. Many were the days that I’d go out and disc with four horses. I had to take [son] Leon with me and he sat on my knees while I drove. We’d stay out from morning till evening, then figured that the horses needed a rest.” 5 (Ed, meanwhile, was working for neighbors to earn some much-needed cash.) A note at the end of the entry informs us that Marie and Ed lived and worked on their farm until 1954, when they retired into town. They died there, aged 94 and 101 respectively, in the early 1970s, shortly after celebrating their sixty-fourth wedding anniversary.

I spent hours leafing through the volume, with its tales of runaway horses and broken machinery, lightning strikes and blizzards, good crops and bad, all animated by a surprising lightness of spirit. Even the 1918 influenza epidemic, which had taken the lives of so many and left a bruise on Wallace Stegner’s thoughts, could be construed as having unexpected benefits. “There was an atmosphere of ‘togetherness’ . . . that united the community,” one survivor recalled. “Truly these folks were the best in the world.” 6 Reading between the lines, it appeared that this same togetherness had helped to bring the community through the terrible thirties drought. “With no crops, no money, in debt and on relief, times were hard,” one old-timer admitted, “but we got along somehow . . . There were picnics, dances and parties. The women would bring lunch and the men paid a quarter. Part of this bought the coffee, and the fiddlers were given the rest.” 7

Hard work and fiddle tunes, bread and roses. Through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, these dauntless people had created not only farms and ranches but also churches, libraries, hospitals, and schools. They had played in dance bands, organized Christmas concerts, and planned community fairs; they had raised flocks of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Even though I had never met any of these people, I recognized them as my own. Here I was in Eastend, home away from home.

One morning, Keith and I decided to treat ourselves to breakfast at Eastend’s premiere dining establishment. Jack’s Café is on the main drag, a couple of doors up from the late-and-lamented antler museum. Very much a going concern, it is nonetheless also a blast from the past, complete with a soda fountain, a glass cabinet full of pies, and, on the wall, one of those old-fashioned rotary displays that flips from ad to ad. Fabrics and Notions, flip. Livestock Hauling, flip. Septic Service, flip. One of the oldest surviving businesses in town (a tidbit I had picked up from the local history book), it had been founded by immigrants from the Peloponnese, of all places, around 1920 and then lovingly passed down, from hand to hand, to a succession of Greek-Canadians. One husband-and-wife team, George and Angela Doolias, had become so renowned for their steaks and Greek specialties that they earned annual listings in Where to Eat in Canada, the national guide to fine dining.

When you order pancakes at Jack’s, you get pancakes: they arrived three high and large as platters, with sausages on the side and cups of acrid coffee to wash them down. As Keith and I attempted to do justice to this munificence, we had plenty of time to look around and admire our surroundings. It wasn’t just the vintage fittings that caught our attention, as charming as they were. Angie Doolias was not just a restaurateur; she was also an artist. From counter height to ceiling, all around the room—jogging above the cabinets, slipping over doors, flowing seamlessly around corners—the room was encircled by a mural.

Beginning on the north wall, above the cash register and partially obscured by a Coke machine, it showed the primordial prairie landscape, unpeopled and untouched, grazed by herds of buffalo and overflown by a golden eagle. Moving around to the east, humans enter the scene, and we see them driving buffalo over a cliff and, later, pitching their tipis in a broad valley. But change is coming, just around the bend. Beyond the pies and above the door to the kitchen, a column of covered wagons is wending its way toward a fort, led by a pair of riders in red-serge tunics and pillbox caps. Clearly, these are not the blue-coated fighting men that so stirred Bill Cody’s pride. Instead, as a loyal Canadian, Doolias has memorialized the arrival of the North-West Mounted Police at what I assume must be Fort Walsh. With law and order now assured, the pageant of progress picks up, as homesteaders break the sod with oxen along the south wall and a train steams into the station of a nascent Eastend in the southwest corner. If you look closely, you can see Jack’s Café already in place, between the bank and the hotel.

I’m guessing that it was at about this point in the creation of the mural when two Aboriginal men came into Jack’s for lunch. (I have this story from a friend who happened to be there at the right moment.) “Where’s it going to end?” one of the diners asked the artist, as he surveyed what she had done. “With a mushroom cloud?”

“No,” George Doolias shot back, coming to his wife’s aid. “It’ll be two Native guys in a Lincoln, pit-lamping deer.” Everyone had a good laugh.

But of course the mural does not end with a nuclear apocalypse or with poachers, either. In fact, Aboriginal people have disappeared from the action halfway around the room, as if they have no part to play, for good or ill, after the incomers appear. Instead, as the mural rounds the home stretch onto its final wall, it celebrates the fulfillment of the settlers’ dream, with a century of technological advancement and plenty. The story draws to its triumphant conclusion above a bank of orange plush booths in the northwest corner of the café. In the foreground a pair of combines plies the fields of a prosperous, modern farm, its yard lined with shiny bins poised to receive the golden harvest. In the middle distance, a landscape once dotted with buffalo is now studded with oil wells, and the crenellated skyline of Calgary lures the eye, ever onward, into the future.

That evening, I stood in the yard of the Stegner House, under a sky quilted with clouds, and listened to the yip-yip-yipping of coyotes on the hills above town. Tell the truth. Although I had been brought up on the Creation Story of prairie settlement and, as the past few days had proven, was still susceptible to its charms, I was no longer a true believer. It was one thing to sit in Jack’s Café, blissed out on maple syrup, and enjoy a confident portrayal of the pageant of progress. But did I really believe that a prairie landscape dominated by pump jacks and industrial agriculture is, in any ultimate sense, an improvement on the now-shattered buffalo ecosystem? And while it had been entertaining and, yes, even inspiring, to sit with the local history and recall my debt to the people who had planted me here, did I really believe that the West had been won while whistling a happy tune?

If I interrogated my memory, I could hear my mother’s voice turn brittle when she spoke, as she rarely did, of the beatings her own father had inflicted on his sons, but not his daughters, violent explosions of rage that seemed out of proportion to youthful misdeeds. Frustration refracted into cruelty. The Stegners, with their two sons, had been able to pull up stakes and leave when things turned sour on them; the Humphreys, with a brood of ten, did not have that option. They had toughed it out on a bankrupt farm, too proud to accept relief—but not too proud, in my mother’s nightmare recollection, to attempt to abandon a promising little girl, her own small self, to the care of a more prosperous neighbor. When she told me this story eighty years later, her voice still cracked with grief. Perhaps I had been avoiding Wolf Willow out of mere cowardice, a reluctance to face home truths when they were offered.

The night wind had an icy bite and it chased me back indoors, past Keith dozing on the couch and up the narrow stairway to the back room, where young Wally and his brother had once slept. With the spectre of their bewildered grandmother in the hallway behind me, I gazed out the window into the heavy dark and recalled how my own sense of Western history had, over the years, gradually come unmoored. I remembered sitting in Sunday school one morning (in the minister’s study at First United Church in Vermilion, Alberta, to be precise) and suddenly seeing with irrevocable clarity that the assurances of Christianity, and of a divinely ordained plan, were an illusion. This revelation left me with little to show for my religious upbringing except the Golden Rule and a slightly idiosyncratic version of a favorite children’s hymn:

All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wild and wonderful . . .

I thought of the day, a few years later, when I looked down on the prairie from an airplane and for the first time saw how the curvilinear contours of hill and valley, with their scribbled water courses, seemed to struggle against the straight lines of the surveyors’ rule. This wild and wonderful land was caught tight in a net, and my people, and others like them, had ensnared it.

And there was something else. On the homestead in the Peace River Country where my dad grew up, there was, and is, a piece of land known affectionately within the family as the Indian Quarter. Closer to a half-section in reality, it consists of a cultivated field bisected by a track that leads to a brushy ridge. Past this horizon, the land folds downward, through a tangle of aspen and spruce, to the wild currents of the Beaverlodge River. On the grassy ledge beside the water, the whole family often gathered together when I was a kid—a happy tribe of aunts, uncles, and cousins—to picnic and swim in summer or, when the ice was clear, to skate and drink hot chocolate on winter afternoons.

According to the family story, this spot had once been a favorite stopping place of the local Beaver Indians, who had continued to camp here until about 1910, when my pioneering great-grandfather and his sons had purchased the property from them. Like many family legends, this account is at least partly false, since treaty Indians at that time were not permitted to hold individual title to land. But whatever the truth of the matter, I was fascinated by the thought of those disappeared encampments and of the people who had lived in them. Now we were here, enjoying ourselves, and they had vanished.

I’m not sure how old I was when this discomfort first coalesced into an image, though I may have been eight or nine. In my mind’s eye, I saw my late grandmother (think Queen Victoria in a housedress) crossing the field on the dirt track that led toward the riverbank. Opposite her, at a distance, a young Beaver woman (an Indian princess in buckskin) stood at the edge of the brush, as if she had just come up the hill from the water. The two women faced each other across the clearing, as diffident as stones. No matter how often I conjured them there, they never approached each other, and neither uttered a word. The silence that lay between them seemed impenetrable.

Nights passed, and days, and our two-week booking at the Stegner House was drawing to a close. Our van turned up, roadworthy, with a little time to spare, but to our surprise we no longer wanted to go anywhere. Keith had settled into a happy routine of reading in the backyard—summer having graced us with a brief return—or just sitting and looking across the creek at the sun-cured hills. The land was tawny, streaked with black in the gullies where brush flowed down the slopes, and it reminded him, in a distant way, of his East African boyhood.

Stay put, the quiet voice had told us. Pay attention to where you are. We were in Eastend, Saskatchewan, on the northernmost edge of the great North American plains. We were traveling through time, through memory, the invisible dimension.

And then, before we quite knew what had happened, our holiday had sped past, and we were back in the city, bound to our desks. Although we often spoke of our time in Eastend—I mean, really, a cappuccino bar in a beat-up prairie town, and coyotes singing in the dark, and the light spinning around the cottonwoods, and the lure of all those places we had tried to get to and hadn’t, and the unheralded sense of euphoria that had overtaken us by the time we left—despite all that, not to mention our unexpected immersion in the settlement saga and the connections with our own pasts, we had no expectation that we’d be coming back.

Yet when we hit the road the following summer on another of my grassland research tours, guess where we ended up? It seemed that all roads led to Eastend. When we noticed a tidy white bungalow for sale on Tamarack Street, a block north of the Stegner House—and when we bought it—we knew that we were hooked. This homely little town in its nest of wild hills had charmed us into putting down tentative roots. And all around, the bright wind whispered through the grass, speaking to us of reasons we didn’t yet understand.