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Memoir: Restless
Prologue
This memoir started to emerge
after I discovered Uncle Billy’s manuscript in Banff, Alberta in 1992. While
I’d been told his story before, I remembered William McCardell only as our
maternal grandmother’s Uncle Billy, one of three railroad workers who had
discovered the hot springs at Banff. I
had been through the area once before with my then husband and two children and
we had seen a wax effigy of William McCardell in a museum on the main street. I
wanted to see this effigy again while at a writing studio at the Banff Centre
of the Arts some years later, but I couldn’t find it. Each day I questioned the
man in a local artifact shop in the centre of town and finally he suggested
there could be more information in the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.
Thus was
I led to a huge typewritten manuscript that contained accounts of the
adventures of this maternal ancestor. When I went back for dinner in the
cafeteria at the Banff Centre that day, I was almost jubilant. It was something
I wanted to tell everyone, even to shout it from a mountain top.
My
residence at Banff that spring was a significant point on a long journey. I
went there with a novel to work on which took almost twenty more years to write
and publish. In 1992 it had already been emerging for almost that long already.
I found useful critique and guidance, new colleagues and Uncle Billy’s
manuscript while at the writing studio. There was magic in those six weeks in
the mountains -- a solitary room for work, a cabin with a piano, long walks by
the Bow River and ongoing conversations in the halls, in the cafeteria and over
a pool table.
“Do
you think you’ll do anything with it?” was the most common question about my
discovery. Since we were all writers, it was not surprising that these new
colleagues thought I might write something.
What?
I had no idea.
As time
went on, I felt compelled to jot down thoughts about this manuscript and the
connections it had led me to ponder. Those early thoughts became the starting
point for this memoir, something I wrote because it felt as if I had to. I did so knowing that if there
were any value to it beyond my need to create some perspective on my own life,
it would only be apparent much later. What unfolded is largely a reflection of
another era, a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared. How did I
become a feminist? How did I become a
published author? How did I, in other words, get from there to here? At each
juncture there were likely pivotal events as important as the discovery at
Banff. The beginnings in a northern mining camp where another language
surrounded us. A particular family and its roots and history. Something as
minute as arguments between siblings.
How I came to grow up in a northern mining
community was a result of a job my father found. A mechanical engineer, he
was hired by Sigma Mine to design the hoist and to oversee the technical
aspects of its operation. He
went to the golden valley because of gold, but I doubt he thought it would lead
to his first million. Or any million,
for that matter.
My
parents, Beryl Goettler and Geoff Cosser, were married in 1935 and their first
home was one of the company houses mine management had just built in northwestern
Quebec for their first employees. After I was born, my mother and father moved
into a larger mine house where they lived until all their children had left
home. Had
my father not developed a near fatal condition that required an ambulance to
transport him over 500 miles to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto in 1962, they
probably would have been there much longer.
The impact of this mining
town, and others like it across the north in those days, was to create a tribe
of northerners, something that remains in one’s blood for a lifetime. There is
always an instant rapport as well as some common understandings when one meets
someone else from that northern landscape. Yet other factors and themes are the
basis of whatever myths sustained our family. Myths that are likely at the very
root of what created the life trajectories of each of the three Cosser
children, my two younger siblings and me. Likely everyone constructs such
myths, creating narratives to
make sense of our lives. We may know ourselves better if we can remember where
we’re from and how we became the people we are now. In my
family, each of us might have answered differently the question of how and why
we’ve followed particular paths, yet there would be some commonalities drawn
from the themes of the isolation of a mining camp in those days — the sound of
the whistle at the mine as well as the blasting underground, the French
language surrounding us, the family silver, the focus on reading, the English
dictionary, the fireplace. Or could it have been mainly the experience of our
father going off to war in 1942, shortly after his third child was born, that
formed us? Was it his focus on overseas as well as on ancestors and family
trees? Perhaps it was his alcoholism that seemed to be a consequence of that
time overseas. Offset somewhat by our mother’s joy in good company, good food
and dancing.
I knew early and only too well
the impact of the alcoholism, the fear aroused when Dad’s footsteps were uneven
as he staggered into the house, when his voice became loud and angry. But I was
not aware of the importance of most of these other themes except as underlying
refrains. And even underlying that was the gold. We knew so much more about it
than we were even aware of knowing. For we children of the company houses all
knew the price of it was $37 an ounce. We knew the miners went underground with
their hard hats with lights on to find it, to that dark place where only men
were allowed to go to hack and dig into the rock. Where they planted the
dynamite that created the loud sounds we heard at intervals on surface. We knew
that the rocks came up in the cage (elevator) in open rather small rail carts
that ran on narrow tracks to the crusher. That the conveyor belt we could see
from the highway that ran beside the fence around the mine took this crushed
rock to the mill where it was put in large vats. The extract from the mill was
then melted in a hot furnace, the liquid poured out in a yellow liquid stream
into rectangular pans to create bars of solid gold. These were hidden away
somewhere unbeknownst to us to conceal them from thieves. We knew these things,
but we played our games blissfully unaware of the ongoing saga of gold and how
it held all of us in its grip. We played, went to school and made friends who
came and went when their fathers moved from one mine to another. We left it to
the adults to concern themselves with the mine and the gold. Although my
siblings and I knew that we weren’t allowed to use the only telephone, set down
on a small table next to Dad’s easy chair, for more than a couple of minutes at
a time because it was used to contact our father if an emergency occurred
underground. Or when the mine manager
wanted to reach him.
Some of the men did make their
first million in the frontier era of the gold mines. Probably not by mining.
More likely on the stock market or by prospecting, some by high-grading
(stealing gold from underground). The high graders were men who brought bits of
gold up at the end of a shift, hidden in their mouths, in their clothing, in
their lunch buckets. It was called high grade because it was the most valuable.
We heard whispers that there were ways of selling such loot through mob
contacts in places as far away as Montreal, Buffalo and New York City. Like so
many things children knew, this was something we overheard the adults talk
about. We knew who was suspected of high-grading and who had put money into the
stock of some penny mine that had gone into production and already created wealth
for owners off in some city.
I was aware as I grew older
that my father invested in some of the larger gold producers, but in reality he
left the finances to my mother. His job was to draft and design and to go
underground to check on the equipment. He knew how everything worked - the
mill, the hoist, the underground cage.
Oddly enough, this wealth of story surrounding our lives elicited only
mild curiosity on my part at the time. Although as children we breathed in this
atmosphere and were affected by it.
Dad’s
stories about his family’s history with gold, his own father having traveled
first to South Africa from England because of it, possibly permeated slightly
deeper. As did his attempts to convey his fascination with genealogy. Even when
we were quite young, he showed us family trees and how to read the hallmarks on
silver. As I watched his fingers trace the squiggly lines connecting names
I was apparently descended from , I was amazed at his interest in these large
pieces of old yellowed and folded paper. Only long after he died, did I begin
to understand why such interest in one’s ancestry might be of value to me. I wished he was still around to hear about my
discovery at Banff.
As children, we were told about
Uncle Billy’s discovery of the Banff Springs, something that seemed remote yet
rather intriguing. Like gold, another mystery hidden away in the earth. And as
I had sat reading from his manuscript, what had gradually struck me were the
ways in which my family had a role in the creation of a country. From the
discoveries of Uncle Billy in western Canada of the hot springs and,
apparently, also of oil (along with someone called LaFayette) to the grandfather who worked in gold mines
in South Africa before emigrating to the gold mines of northern Ontario. And to
my father from there to the ones in northern Quebec. From the ancestor, also on
my mother’s side, whom I learned about only after her death, who had come from
France to settle on the banks of the St. Lawrence, who was the first settler in
Canada. And as well of her Irish forebears who tilled the soil around Stratford
somewhat later.
It was
at Banff I suddenly saw these individual stories within a wider context and
wished I could have another session with my father. Never before had it
occurred to me how the strands of my family history were connected to this
larger narrative, something I didn’t recall that he’d tried to tell me. Nor had
he understood my lack of interest might have evaporated had I had any idea of
this broader picture. Or maybe it
wouldn’t have at that young age. How would I know? But I do know as I thumbed
through Uncle Billy’s manuscript in the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies
that I was suddenly and unexpectedly reassured that my restlessness- the need
to question, to explore and travel, to be somewhat of a maverick - was not just personal, but a trait I shared
with my ancestors.
