***
The following is an essay from past longtime-resident Michael McGrath. "Voyagers" is from his collection of twenty humorous personal essays, titled The House of Phyllis, recounting his childhood in Canmore, back when it was just a grubby little coal-mining town and not the posh mountain resort it is today.
Having graduated from Canmore High School in 1979, he obtained an education degree and was a high-school PE teacher in Calgary until his retirement in 2013.
***
I can’t recall the exact forecast for the Canmore region that particular midsummer’s day, but I’m willing to bet that it didn’t warrant my remaining indoors, parked in front of a TV set. July 20, 1969, was no ordinary day, though, and so I sat on my grandmother’s staircase eagerly awaiting the moon landing. As Neil Armstrong safely touched down in the Sea of Tranquility and calmly announced “The Eagle has landed,” the equally immortal words of Captain James T. Kirk ran through my eight-year-old mind: Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise...
When the astronauts finally emerged from their capsule later that evening, my grandmother looked up from her knitting and said, “Well, would you look at that. A man on the moon. My goodness, I never thought I’d see the day.” That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. “Just think, Michael, that could be you in a few years.”
While going to the moon had occasionally crossed my mind, I told her that it didn’t top the list of my desired travel destinations. That distinction belonged to Disneyland, another far-off world that I’d longed to visit. I didn’t think the moon had as much to offer, especially after the novelty of weightlessness wore off, the prospect of collecting moon dust from a few craters paling in comparison to hanging out with Mickey Mouse and all his friends.
Midway through describing my ultimate fantasy, I was brought back down to Earth by a message from mission control. “I’ll give you a trip to Disneyland if you’re not careful. Right on the end of my foot.” I peered through the banister to find my mother staring at me from her spot on the sofa. “You must think your father and I are made of money,” she said. “If you want to hang around with a bunch of animals, the forest is chock-full of them. Not the kind dressed up in a costume with oversized hands and feet either, but the real McCoy. That was my Adventureland as a kid, and if it was good enough for me, then it’s going to have to be good enough for you too.”
***
Once I realized that I had about as much chance of setting foot in Disneyland as walking on the moon, I set off in search of what my mother was talking about. I soon discovered meadows crawling with Mickey’s cousins, and ponds and creeks, where I encountered Donald Duck mallards and skittish, wide-eyed Bambi fawns. Hearing the frenzied barking of neighbourhood dogs, I’d race through the woods to gawk at Baloo being chased up a tree by Pluto and Goofy. But it was while wandering along a stretch of railway tracks that I stumbled upon the most captivating thing of all, my own version of Pirates of the Caribbean.
The tracks led to an old iron crossing, which was known as the Engine Bridge and was used solely for transporting coal across the river to the main railway, and before continuing my journey I scrambled down the riverbank with the intention of skipping a few stones across the water. My plans quickly shifted, though, when I noticed shards of brown glass, interspersed with bottle caps, littered among the rocks of the bridge’s underbelly. Where did these come from? I wondered, and as I began to gather them into a plastic bag salvaged from a pile of driftwood, Captain Kirk’s familiar narration returned: Captain’s Log, Star Date 1969. After beaming down from the Enterprise, First Officer Spock and I have arrived at a desolate, deserted landscape, its barren shore scattered with colourful trinkets, offering only the slightest clues as to who might have inhabited this world.
I spotted a waterlogged beer case and sifted through its soggy remains. Printed on the tattered flap, the words MOLSON BRADOR, MALT LIQUOR/LIQUEUR DE MALT, pointed to the only explanation that seemed plausible: this must be all that’s left of a band of French-Canadian voyageurs that once passed through this valley on their way to Hudson’s Bay.
My train of thought was then interrupted by Mr. Spock, who unexpectedly weighed in on the matter, saying, “Fascinating theory, Captain, though I find it highly illogical.”
On any other mission I would have welcomed Spock’s sage advice, but on this particular day I found his input strangely annoying, and, after telling him to keep his Vulcan logic to himself, I flipped open my communicator and contacted Mr. Scott in the engine room. “McGrath to Enterprise,” I said, employing my best William Shatner impression. “Beam up Mr. Spock and have him report immediately to Dr. McCoy in sickbay.”
Having successfully flushed Spock from my thoughts, I set my phaser on stun and resumed my exploration of this mysterious planet, my mind reeling as each strange new bottle cap brought me a little closer to the truth...
***
Following another harrowing day of shooting the rapids, Pierre Beliveau and Gaston Cournoyer paddled their birchbark canoe onto the riverbank, and once safely ashore, the two rugged men crossed themselves and kissed the crucifixes dangling from their necklaces. Having risked their lives on countless expeditions, this was the closest either of them had ever come to dying, and while the good Lord had spared them, the others in their travelling party had not been as fortunate. Gone forever were their stalwart companions, swallowed up by the treacherous waters of the Bow River.
Pierre looked to the heavens. “Au revoir, Henri Lapointe, my old friend. Farewell, François Vachon. Until we meet again.”
“You were a great man, Jacques Savard,” Gaston added. “I will never forget you.” He bowed his head. “Rest in peace, Guy Tremblay, Godspeed, mon ami.”
Trapping season had been good, and the icy river lapped at the voyageurs’ moccasins as they unloaded the fur pelts that were sure to bring a fine price once they reached their destination. Finally, exhausted, Pierre and Gaston collapsed onto a fallen tree trunk and wiped the sweat from their foreheads with their flannel sleeves. “Sweet Mother Mary and Joseph,” Pierre sighed. “I t’ought we were goners dere a coupla times, for sure, you know.” His sinewy hands trembled as he unfurled a pouch of tobacco and tamped a generous amount into his pipe.
“Ah, mais oui,” Gaston agreed, his voice reduced to a weak, almost inaudible whisper, full of loss and anguish. “Mais oui. Dis river, she is a cruel one, yes, for sure.”
“We will drink to our departed friends tonight,” Pierre continued. He struck a match and inhaled the rich, aromatic smoke deep into his lungs. “Grab a couple of two-fours out of de canoe and I will put dem in de river to chill.”
A full moon joined the twinkling stars in the sky that evening, illuminating the two grieving men in celestial-blue light, and while feasting heartily upon brook trout and pemmican cooked over the campfire’s orange glow, they toasted the memories of their fallen friends with ice-cold bottles of Labatt Blue and Molson Brador. The beer flowed freely as they drowned their sorrows, quenching the mighty thirst that only a French-Canadian voyageur can muster.
Shortly after midnight Gaston stood to stretch his legs and wished Pierre a good night, yawning, “It is late, Monsieur Beliveau, and I t’ink de time has come for me to hit de bed roll.”
Pierre nodded. “You are correct, Monsieur Cournoyer. It is late. But it is never too late for a night cap, non?”
“Aw, go on, den. One more it is.”
A moment later the night’s stillness was shattered by the sound of a beaver’s tail repeatedly slapping the nearby shore. “Mon dieu!” Pierre shouted. “De beer, Gaston, de beer!”
The two voyageurs watched in horror as the beaver’s head slipped under the rushing current, leaving flattened boxes of smashed and broken bottles in his wake. “Our holy Brador! Our sacred Blue!” Pierre and Gaston cried. This moment of shock and dismay would live on in French folklore, immortalized as “Sacré bleu!” The beaver’s role in this tragedy would also be commemorated, his likeness forever captured on the back of the Canadian nickel.
Pierre collapsed to his knees and cradled his head in his hands. “Death, she has begun our day, and now, she has ended it as well.”
And Gaston said, “Sweet Mother of God’s holy vagina. De game, she is over.”
***
When I returned home, my mother was in the kitchen with an old rag, applying a little elbow grease to her copper kettle. Resting beside her on the kitchen table sat our good silverware, and I could tell by the way she had each piece perfectly laid out that they were next in line for a good polishing.
“Look what I found down at the Engine Bridge,” I told her, holding up my bag of bottle caps, and after looking up from her buffing and giving them the once-over, she said, “Get those filthy things out of here and then go wash your hands before you get an infection.”
I reminded her of the tetanus shot I’d received the previous spring after stepping on a rusty nail and then continued with my story, hoping she’d acknowledge, or at least suggest, that my artifacts might be, in their own unique way, just as valuable as the family heirlooms she was cleaning. Instead, she just kept going to town on her kettle, gasping and grunting and working it like there was no tomorrow. “Voyageurs, eh?” she panted. “So that’s what, ugh!...high-school kids are, ugh!...calling themselves these, ugh!...days.”
I attributed my mother’s disinterest to an underdeveloped sense of culture, one that I was determined to rectify by establishing a museum in which to house my burgeoning collection. Using an empty shelf in the back of our garage, I placed the samples I deemed to be in mint condition into an old shoebox, and then returned periodically to the Engine Bridge in a continuing effort to curate my exhibition, cataloguing any new acquisitions according to brands, editions, and colours. As the museum expanded, I designed a guided tour for the benefit of any interested parties that might happen to drop by, rehearsing an informative lecture until I had it memorized. “When you’ve finished counting the rabbits on the Lethbridge Pilsner label, I’ll have you turn your attention to these two Old Vienna beer caps,” I would say, moving from one shoebox to the next. “Notice how one has OLD VIENNA written in script while the other displays only the letters OV. My father says, ‘OV stands for Old Vagina,’ but I think he’s just making fun of the way it tastes.
“Moving on, if you’d be so kind to make your way over to the Molson exhibit, I think you’ll be pleased with this Export cap featuring the outline of a tall ship. Watch what happens when I turn this particular cap on its side: the tall ship suddenly morphs into the shape of an armadillo. Likewise, if you rotate the emblem on this limited-edition Molson Golden cap—like so—you will be pleasantly surprised—wink, wink—to find it now depicts a stylized image of two seals doing the mambo.”
***
Because of my mother’s fixation with housekeeping, when a situation arose that clashed with her need for orderliness, the neat freak in her always won out. If I wanted to roam unattended through the wilderness, exposing myself to a possible bear mauling or a cougar attack, then so be it. But the house wasn’t going to clean itself. Someone had stay behind and keep those pesky little dust bunnies at bay. Someone had to steam clean the curtains. Someone had to get down on her hands and knees in order to scrub behind the refrigerator. And that someone would be my mother. Such was her devotion to housework.
When faced with matters not conflicting with her cleaning schedule, though, my mother’s rulings were far more judicial in nature. For instance, when I entered junior high and began asking for permission to attend school dances, my mother acted with the utmost urgency, negotiating as if our national security were at stake. According to her, a congregation of teenagers gathered in a darkened gymnasium, even under the strict supervision of chaperones, could only lead to no good. This, as if popping a boner while slow dancing to “Stairway to Heaven” would somehow result in a host of negative ramifications that were sure to cause me irreparable harm.
“We’ll see,” she would say in response to my requests. “Let’s talk about it later.” Every time she said, “we’ll see,” I held out hope that she actually meant “maybe,” thus allowing me to remain optimistic about revisiting the conversation in the “let’s talk about it later” stage. When that time actually came, though, I’d be met with an expression of bewilderment, my mother looking at me as if I’d received my information from a three-year-old playing in a sandbox. “I said nothing of the sort,” she’d tell me. “You’re sadly mistaken if you think I’m going to let someone your age go gallivanting around at night.” Then she’d slowly shake her head and chuckle, the way you might in reaction to a particularly clever knock-knock joke. “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. I’m fully aware of what goes on at those kinds of things.”
“Like what?” I’d ask. “From what I hear, all the guys stand around at one end of the gym cracking farts while the girls huddle at the other, hoping their zit cream doesn’t show in the strobe lights.”
“Bull tweet they do. You’re so full of crap, your eyes are turning brown.”
From there we’d argue back and forth, talking in circles, me begging and pleading and she telling me to shut up, that it was for my own good. Though my arguments made perfect sense to me, it was as if I were speaking a language that was impossible for her to understand. Like Elizabethan English. Or Latin. Or maybe a combination of the two.
“I beseech ye, fair lady. ’Tis a verdict most unjust.”
“Oh, shut up. It’s for your own good.”
“Nofairum maximus!”
“Oh, shut up. It’s for your own good.”
“I’m going to the dance anyway,” I’d finally say. “You can’t stop me.”
“You do that, and I’ll have your father teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.”
“Violence doesn’t solve anything.”
“Oh, shut up. It’s for your own good.”
Then came the final dance of grade nine—the “Spring Fling”—and I detected what appeared to be a subtle crack in my mother’s armour. One night after dinner, as she was washing the dishes and I was doing my homework at the kitchen table, she casually brought up “that Spring Fling thingamajig” and asked if I’d like to go.
I put down my pencil and cocked my head, unsure if I’d heard her correctly. I’d been turned down so often in the past, I didn’t think the subject was even worth broaching. “Well, yeah, sure, I’d love to go. Definitely. I mean, as long as it’s OK with you, that is.”
“Oh, don’t act so surprised.” She dried her hands on her apron and placed a stack of dishes into the cupboard. “I was going to buy you a decent pair of shoes anyway, so at least now you’ll have something nice to wear.”
As we’d never reached this point in our discussions before, I apprehensively asked if she was joking.
“Of course I’m not,” she said with a look suggesting that she was insulted I’d even considered the possibility. “I’m dead serious. Now get your nose back into that book before I change my mind.”
It was one thing to question my mother—"putting up with her guff,” I called it—but quite another when I too began having second thoughts. Is this how I should sway my body? I’d ask myself, practicing my dance moves before my bedroom mirror. Is this how I should comb my hair? This being my official unveiling, I wondered if any girl would even want to dance with me. Even worse, what if one did, and then everybody, including her, started laughing at me? Then there would be the hassle of breaking in new shoes, but despite my reservations, I still couldn’t wait for the Spring Fling to arrive. Let them laugh, I thought. And to hell with the shoes. So what if my feet hurt. It would all be worth it.
In the end, it happened so suddenly: late May, early evening, the sun shining brightly over the mountains, and I’d just finished lacing up my new shoes and was about to head out the door to the Spring Fling, when my mother entered the porch, saying, “Those are some real spiffy shoes you’ve got there.” Normally I would have taken this as a compliment, but as it was, her tone was sullen, her expression troubled, almost tortured. Then she folded her arms across her chest and let out the kind of sigh that always seems to accompany bad news. “About this dance tonight,” she said.
Thine words dost carry the foulest of stench, I thought when I saw the writing on the wall. GOOD-BYE, CARPE DIEM. HELLO, MEMENTO MORI, it read.
“I’ve had a change of heart. You’re not going.”
“But you promised—”
“Uh-uh-uh,” she said, her eyes darting up from the floor to meet mine as she dropped one hand to her hip and wagged a finger with the other. “You can stop right there.”
“But what about my shoes?”
“Oh, Jesus, give it a rest. You don’t give a damn about those shoes.”
“But—”
“But nothing. ‘Tough titty’ said the kitty. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it.”
I chose to lump it, fleeing through our backyard and into the woods. Five minutes into my pout, I realized that I’d forgotten to change out of my shoes, but I was in no mood to turn back. I had absolutely no idea where I was heading, and I didn’t care as long as it took me as far away from my mother as possible.
I emerged from the trees onto a secluded soot road that led to an abandoned mine pit that was now flooded and used as a swimming hole. By this time my feet were aching, and so I headed straight to the mouth of the icy stream that flowed from the pit to soak the blisters that had formed on my heels. As I sat on the bank taking off my socks, I noticed a shimmering palette submerged beneath the rippling water. Stashed between the smooth stones lining the creek bed was an assortment of beer bottles, their colourful caps matching the specimens that had once populated my shoebox collection. “Well, hello there,” I said, the bottles looking as sexy as any girl I’d ever met. “Long time no see.”
After fishing out a half dozen bottles, I pried one open using my belt buckle. “Here’s to you, mes amis,” I said, raising a toast to Pierre and Gaston for their apparent generosity. “Salut!”
I took a cautious first sip, which was followed by a drink and then a guzzle, and by the time I finished the bottle, the pain in my throbbing feet had vanished along with any cares I might have had about the Spring Fling. The sky became bluer, the clouds fluffier, the birds chirpier, and I hopped onto a nearby picnic table and belted out a hearty rendition of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Halfway through my fourth or fifth beer—I can’t exactly recall—I was overcome with a feeling of weightlessness. “Beam me up, Scotty,” I said to myself as I grabbed hold of the railings to my own personal stairway to heaven and, without the aid of a first kiss or a raging hard-on, began my ascension into space. As I floated past the craters on the lunar surface, I waved hello to the man in the moon but did not stop to chat, for I was on a voyage to the Magic Kingdom and did not want to be disturbed.
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