I Remember The First Time

I remember the first time I saw the sun rise over Rainy Lake, just north of Fort Frances Ontario. I was on my way to a meeting at Mitaanjigamiing (Multi Use Facility) organized by Grand Council Treaty #3. 

I was fifty eight years old and travelling with two others whose ages probably did not quite add up to fifty eight. We'd driven the day before along the highway between Thunder Bay and Fort Frances. Snow had fallen the whole way. Visibility on the highway wasn't too bad, but, when you looked to the side when the trees parted, the horizon vanished behind an impenetrable wall of white. All the plows were behind us. The tires on our rented SUV churned through two centimetres of fallen snow. The trip, normally a four hour drive, took every minute of five hours. 

The potential hazards of that drive did not preoccupy our minds as much as the potential hazard facing us the next day.

The Mitaanjigamiing was more than an hour's drive away from our hotel by the highway, but twenty minutes by ice road. My young companions spent their time after we'd arrived at our hotel and eaten dinner canvassing the locals about the state of the ice road.

It tells you something that none of the locals - the non-First Nations locals - were even aware that there was an ice road.

As a last resort, my companions drove out and took a look at the road themselves. It had been recently plowed. "If a snow plow can make it without falling through the ice," they thought, "then so can we."

I was persuaded (and impressed) by their reconnaissance and felt confident enough the next day that I not only travelled with them to cross on the ice road, but had a colleague snap a happy photo of the moment.

For the record, I am standing on terra firma on the approach to the road. The ice road itself is that band of white just above the near vegetation and below the dark band of the horizon. 

The ice road was easily twenty metres wide and followed the shoreline. We were supposed to have crossed on the road with several others attending the meeting, but, we'd lost contact with them, so we just headed out on our own.

The rule we broke by doing that was we failed to offer tobacco to the spirits before we crossed. For the trip back, we gave two offerings of tobacco. 

Remembering Aunt Betty 

Betty at the Clark Family Reunion, Qualicum Beach, July 2015

I remember my first strong impression of my Aunt Betty. We were in her house in Sparwood B.C. I was about twelve years old.

Her daughter Barbara was married either that day or the day before (I can't remember), and Betty was throwing a back yard party as part of the celebrations. 

As a young one, I was expected to help. Under Betty's direction, I made devilled eggs: peeling the hard boiled eggs, slicing them carefully in two, mashing the yolks with salt, pepper and mustard and loading the mixture back onto the rubbery egg white. I put the eggs on a plate, conferring with Betty in detail about the arrangement and whether the eggs should be dusted with paprika. I was wholly engrossed by this task, happy to be helpful and Betty was my kind, wise guide. 

It's the best gift of this weird thing called memory that the earliest ones are the strongest and last the longest. So when I'm elderly, frail, and forgetting, this will be my recollection of my Aunt Betty.

Betty was my dad's oldest sister and with her passing at about the same time I was making the trip back on the ice road, the last of that generation. All my father's siblings, and my father, are now gone.

Thanks for reading.

Karen