The Dutch Store, another meeting

I met him in the Dutch Store, which he founded when he came to Canada. It is a remarkable store, just an unattractive low building from the outside. It could be anything, a garage, a shed. Inside I find a Dutch world in miniature. In this part of Winnipeg where many Dutch immigrants live as well as Germans and Mennonites, this store is quite popular. To my surprise I see Dutch brands, "Bolletje beschuit", "ontbijtkoek", Dutch cheeses, and not only Gouda cheese which is exported to many countries, but also Dutch farm cheese, which is much nicer as far as taste and quality are concerned. There are chocolate letters which are given in December at St. Nicholas, unique for Holland, there are Delft blue products, tea towels, cheese slicers, Dutch coffee and cacao which is unsweetened, and much more.  The owner, Marten Posthumus, a Frisian from the Northern provinces of the Netherlands, has retired and his son, a true Canadian born in this country, has taken over the shop. I would like to meet his father, who has written a book about his youth in Friesland, as son of a poor labourer’s family. He has illustrated this with his own pen drawings, and that is the reason why I would like to meet him. I wonder if there are any similarities with my own father, who has also written a book about his youth as the son of a poor fisherman, an autobiography which he embellished with his own drawings and watercolours.

 pictures of a ghost town

 An abandoned old timer

The former general store

In the shop there is a marvellous book on display, the latest one by Marten Posthumus, a fat tome with drawings of ghost towns, barns, grain elevators and small towns in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, drawings of a past life that is quickly disappearing. In these black and white pen drawings he has captured this past, abandoned homesteads as in spite of hard labour the land did not yield enough to make a living. 

Badlands; Big Muddy River

I have just travelled with dear friends through this part of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, through the Badlands (556) and the wide open grasslands, where the winds blow freely across the treeless prairies. A land which seems too barren and wild to cultivate. A land with its own beauty of undulating grass in an ever changing pattern of pastel colours, with grasses turning orange in autumn.  When the sun slants through the grasslands, they look like burnished gold. In some places there is arable land, with ripe corn rippling in the wind.

Badlands

 Big Muddy River

 orange grasses and ranchland

Some of the old grain elevators are still in use, others abandoned like so many other buildings, the paint peeling, the place names fading. With the dismantling and disappearance of those old grain elevators, the small towns have vanished, the elevators being the heart of the towns, the reason for their existence. Grain is now stored in modern, much bigger and uglier elevators, and everything is done on a grander scale, so the towns are dying.

The book which is on display captures the sadness of lost dreams, mourning and honouring a vanishing past. It pays homage to the hardship of the settlers who tried to cultivate this land under difficult circumstances, battling with the forces of nature, the climate, the land, the barren winters and the heat and drought of summer, the wild animals. As everything was built of wood, in 50 years time there will be no trace left of those villages, as if they never were.

 Some old grain elevators

 an empty land

Part of the Dutch store has small tables and chairs and serves as a coffee shop and lunchroom. Apart from typically Dutch food, such as “kroketten” one can also buy soup, a BLT or a Rueben sandwich, which is American: pastrami and sauerkraut on bread. To my surprise the former owner of the shop, the author of the book on display, enters the shop. I am told he comes to the shop every day to meet people he has known for as long as his shop exists. We start talking and there is an immediate rapport. Posthumus reminds me so much of my father. He was widowed a few years ago but has this attitude which I recognize, thankfulness for every new day, a love of the natural world and an eye for beauty. He still draws and drives around to forgotten towns and homesteads with his sketchbook to record what he sees before it gets lost forever. Like my father, he admires the hand of the Creator in the wonders of nature. His background is Dutch Reformed, as is mine and my father’s. So there is this feeling of knowing each other, of finding a soul mate, in spite of the differences in age and living conditions. We talk about his book, and he tells me a book about Friesland is going to be published soon. He and his son have just come back from a visit to the Netherlands and Friesland, which he thinks it will be his last. I wonder how this shop will change after his death. His son was born in Canada, is Canadian. So as well as the homesteads, this remnant of a Dutch past, of the history of the Dutch immigrants and their culture, will also die.

I buy his book as a present for my friends, and he signs it for me. When I say goodbye to him, it is as if I say goodbye to my father.

It is one of the more memorable and meaningful meetings during this trip through Canada.

The Rocky Mountains from the air, and impressions from Vancouver

This September a dream came true, to cross the Rocky Mountains by train. I had travelled through that area two years earlier with dear friends, and the urge to see it from the train had become stronger than ever. My friends tried to convince me that I would see more from the road than from the train tracks, but I still wanted to experience how people travelled through that area in the 20^th century. There are not many passenger trains left, but instead there is the Rocky Mountaineer, a fancy tourist train which is of course more expensive than the usual train which still crosses the Rockies. But the tourist train only rides during the day and drops off its passengers in hotels for the night. So the most exciting and stunning parts of the mountains are seen in daylight.

 Just a view from the porthole window

 Above and below: Confluence of the Thomson and Fraser Rivers

 The Rocky Mountains seen just before landing in Vancouver

I flew to Vancouver, a city I had briefly seen earlier, and after a long flight still had a few hours left to do some sightseeing. Vancouver is beautifully situated on the water. It was a very warm and balmy day and evening, and although sleepwalking I enjoyed the view from the Vancouver lookout Tower and walking along the Waterfront. I had a meal there in an Irish pub cum restaurant, seeing the moon rise on the water like an enormous football. Then it was time to pick up some food before retiring to my luxury hotel, courtesy of the Rocky Mountaineer.

 Downtown Vancouver

 Two different views of the lookout Tower

Two views from the tower

Two views from the Waterfront

The moon rising over the Waterfront

Vancouver seemed like an Asian city, with more people from the Far East than Westerners. Also the majority of schoolchildren and students I saw seemed to be Asian. To my surprise the shops in the downtown area where I stayed carried expensive and exclusive fashion labels. But I was shocked to see so many beggars and homeless people in this seemingly affluent city. It seemed that two extremes exist side by side in this city.

Meeting people

The most valuable aspect of traveling is meeting with people, sometimes in unexpected places. On the long transatlantic flight, during the two day train trip through the Rockies, in remote towns where we were not expected, in Indian reservations, during hikes, everywhere I encountered kind people who shared part of their life stories with me. Countries might stun us with their natural beauty, the vastness of the skies, with awe that settlers have had the courage to try and cultivate very unpromising lands. I can be jealous of their surroundings, their freedom, of the beauty around them. As a mere tourist this might be my first reaction. But when talking to people it is clear that they too suffer from despair, illness, loneliness, autism, family tragedies and poverty like any human being. Beauty is no guarantee for happiness. Glimpsing the different ways people live their lives, may help us to be more content with our own lives. Or give us an impulse to change the way we live, the routine we are used to. Or at least question that routine. And it might make us more compassionate and tolerant.

The house of the spirits

Among the memorable encounters is the meeting with a few Indians in a reservation, one of them claiming he had sired 69 children, which made us wonder if apart from their own language they might have their own arithmetic system.

We were on our way to see an Indian burial ground, the “house of the spirits”. The unusual white roofs low on the ground built over the graves lured us into the village. We knew we had to make our intentions clear if we met any body. At first we did not see them, as they were hidden in the shade of a tree. An old sofa, something which looked like an old car seat, a tree trunk, those made up the outdoor furniture. How many there were I do not really remember. Five or eight maybe, and just one woman among them. They were at leisure, talking, drinking beer, and just passing time. Not till one of them raised his hand in greeting I noticed them. We walked down and asked if we could see the “house of the spirits” and how to get there. They pointed us in the right direction. We had not expected them to follow us, but two of them did. Perhaps they did not trust us, perhaps they just wanted to be guides. Whatever, they told us quite a few stories about the people buried in that graveyard. They all seemed to be related: a twin brother who died at the age of two, a father, a mother, aunts and uncles. It was only a small village, but apparently housed one large family group. We were allowed to take pictures, not so much of them as of the graves which seemed unusual to us. Afterwards we walked back to the big tree where they sat down again and started to tell even more stories. The man who claimed to have 69 children was quite proud of his success in that field. And who wouldn’t, as long as you do not have to support all of them? It seemed unlikely anyway, given the size of the village.

This was not the only burial ground we came across in that part of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. A sad one was the lonely grave of a little girl, just the one grave near a creek, all on its own in the vast wilderness.

Ponteix

Ponteix. The old grain elevators have not been replaced by modern ones yet fortunately.

Another memorable meeting was that with the couple in a remote prairie town, Ponteix, who proudly showed us round their church, a church the size and shape of a cathedral, a small Chartres, the spires visible from a great distance, next to the two old grain elevators. Their lives seemed filled with happiness, till the wife told me about the cancer of her youngest grandson, still a baby.

The story of the church was a remarkable one, and of the French nuns who started all this and came quite unprepared to these remote lands, where they found very primitive living conditions and were shocked by the undrinkable water. The water is still bad, as it comes from what they call sloughs, shallow pools which have a high content of salt. The little sloughs in the prairies are often surrounded by thick rims of blindingly white salt, and the taste of the water is bitter. Most people now have purifiers in their homes for their drinking water.

It is sad to see the decline of a once thriving town, built partly by the efforts of the nuns who established excellent schools. Apart from the buildings, not much is left. The church is still there, but it is hard to keep it open and in good shape now that the Roman Catholic population is diminishing and the whole town is not as thriving and important as it once was. But at least the church is still standing and people care.

And there were many other encounters.

It began on my flight from Amsterdam to Vancouver.

I sat sardined between two women who were traveling alone. Nine hours is a long time to keep silent, so somehow or other we started talking. The woman on my right was the first to turn to me and to make an attempt at conversation. She was Irish, newly divorced from her Dutch husband of many years and lived and worked in the town I grew up in and which is not very far from where I have lived since leaving for university. Quite a coincidence on a full plane. The conversation somehow turned to Irish authors and she was surprised I knew anything about them, not knowing literature and English literature is my subject. Every year she played the part of Molly Bloom, a main character in Joyce’s Ulysses, in the town which for me still feels like home. And she looked the part: generous and generously endowed with her full figure and long, blond curls. She was going to Vancouver for a surprise party organized by the wife of a rich man who was celebrating his 60^th. Apparently he lived in a large house in an expensive part of the Vancouver area.  “Molly” had flown in for the weekend celebrations and would fly back three days later. Just for one weekend of parties she had taken two big suitcases with her.   

“Well, you know, I want my shoes to match every outfit, so I took many pairs – and many outfits,” she confessed, a bit embarrassed about it all. I love that woman! What bliss to find a fellow sufferer of the Imelda Marcos syndrome, a woman who knows her priorities. 

The woman in the window seat was on her way back from Finland. She was married to a Canadian, and lived on a farm in a beautiful part of the Rockies, between Kamloops and Golden, on a lake. Now that her children had left home, she was homesick for Finland and wanted to retire there as she still owned a farm in her home country. But her husband, also of Finnish descent, did not want to leave Canada. Traveling through that stunning part of Canada, I thought: Who would not want to live here? Perhaps she didn't like mountains. It is hard to understand why some emigrants are always homesick, and some adept wonderfully to their new lives and surroundings. She was an extremely good guide for me. It was a clear day and she offered me her seat once we were flying over the Rockies. To my delight I recognized places and the confluence of the Thomson and Fraser rivers which I had seen on a road trip two years earlier. She pointed out the landmarks to me and explained where we were. It was like a Google map unfolding below me, the satellite version.

Before the plane landed we exchanged email addresses. Whether we will ever use them or meet again, I do not know. “Molly Bloom” might be my best bet. Perhaps one day I may even see her playing the part of Molly.

Vancouver