CHAPTER 1
Life is a mystery. Just when you think you have the answer, something turns up to make you think otherwise. For many years, while very young, I’d go someplace and I’d feel I had been there before. Yet that was impossible because, at that time, my parents had been pioneers in a country, which was a wilderness when they settled there. The changes that had come in the environment was the result of their own efforts, and that of their neighboring pioneers, which would cancel out the idea that I may have been there in a previously incarnated life. The concept that our lives are preordained has also occurred to me, and sometimes the idea seems to hold water. But where does free choice come in? Or is there an inner voice that nudges us to make the choices we are destined to make, but for what purpose?
When we act intuitively and with strong conviction, we are attuned to that inner voice, but is it always the right choice? When we think of the fanatics who have brought devastation to the lives of people and nations, one may wonder what inner voice have they listened to? Was that little voice broadsided by a tortured spirit that could not or would not slough off the anger, prejudice, or hatred, possessing it, and chose to create its own destiny for better or worse?
Is it only in a state of peace, tranquility, and universal love that this inner voice can instruct our conscious mind for the good and truth?
From experience I should be convinced that there are spiritual forces in the world that may have a caring interest in someone dear and may make contact to comfort the bereaved at a time of his or her greatest need or put one on alert to expect something unanticipated to occur. I have experienced twice the unmistakable phenomenon of mental telepathy. So now the question: Is my mind capable of being receptive because of the intensity of the sender’s concern so I would be awakened from sleep? This happened with a living person. One time, in particular, I was strongly startled while wide-awake and in broad daylight. In symbolic terms, the person was suggested, and the time was precise of a tragic occurrence. It was prophetic, and when it happened, I knew my presence was required on the scene. These extrasensory occurrences happen very rarely and without any voluntary action on my part. However, I have learned to show them respect.
As I think back now, in my late senior years, I cannot help but marvel at the spontaneous, by sheer chance, my meeting and making acquaintances and friends through the years with people that were linked up as in a chain. They were not sought after but appeared as if by coincidence to form a link although separated by thousands of miles.
It seemed almost as if there was a guiding hand steering me through life, unbeknownst to me, without my being aware, of some plan. To be sure, had I been the architect of such a plan and had pursued to enroll or enlist the progression of those people I would have been a total failure.
Yes, I was born as nature designed, and had the circumstance of my birth been an omen or be symbolic of my future, it would not have spelled propitious. I was born at an end section of a stable reserved for containing the hay that was fed to the horses and cows each morning and in the evening when the animals were brought in for the night.
Before the sun rose on the morning of October 25, 1919, my father was away from home somewhere on a large-scale grain farm as a harvest hand in Southern Manitoba, known as Souris. My mother with the older children managed the farm chores on their 160-acre homestead. The children were all asleep when Mother started a fire in the cast-iron kitchen range and the black sheet metal heater to warm up the house for the children. She picked up a pail and went to the stable to milk the cows. When she accomplished feeding the animals and milking the cows, she left through the side door for the house. But what confronted her was the house aflame.
In shock she dropped the milk pail and dashed for the house to save the sleeping children and whatever else for which there was time. The children were many, in age from one-year-old to twelve.
The cause of the fire was obvious. To quickly warm up the house, Mother started the fire in the big sheet metal heater in the middle of the main room with kindling and then ample split, dry, spruce firewood, which burns furiously, if unregulated, because of its high resin content, carrying red hot sparks onto the hay-thatched roof. With adrenalin pulsing high, she got the children all safely out and into the stable with herself beginning to feel the pangs of labor pains. At ten o’clock that morning, with her birthing bed the stack of hay in the lean-to alcove to the stable, she delivered me, her tenth child into the world.
Whether my birth was partly premature or her milk was adversely affected by the surge of adrenalin, I was the only one of her thirteen children who refused to breastfeed, thus being deprived of the colostrum essential for building of an infant’s immune system. I grew up plagued with diphtheria, mumps, chicken pox, shingles, asthma, repeated colds, and allergies and did not gain the normal height for my age until I was sixteen years old.
My parents were raw pioneers in Manitoba, Canada, where they settled in what became known as the village and community of Rembrandt, eighty miles north of Winnipeg along the branch of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), which terminated in the town of Arborg ten miles farther north. Their original homestead was located actually two miles to the east before the railroad line was built. My father, being a practical man, decided to abandon the original site and buy a 160-acre quarter section adjoining the railroad and only a mile and a half from and south of the railroad station.
The railroad line ran parallel to another line separated by approximately ten miles and which closely followed the west bank of Lake Winnipeg. At the time my parents settled on their original homestead—about 1903—the last stop on this line was Gimli, the seat of the closest general store and post office. It was at Gimli that the train dropped off the passengers from Winnipeg and picked them up going south the following day. The territory west was a wilderness. There were no roads, just trails, made by the pioneers as they made their way to their chosen or allocated homesteads. If the newly located homestead owners were fortunate to own a horse or a team or a pair of oxen, it was their means of transportation to and from when heavy hauling was necessary, but for minor shopping, it was invariably on foot. Neighbors would help each other when one would make the long track. Taking a letter to the post office or bringing one back or purchasing and bringing back even a very small quantity of tea or sugar was a great blessing. Amenities and comforts in the isolations of the heavily wooded country were very meager and often far below the poverty line. For my parents, Gimli was at a distance of eighteen miles.
But Gimli was a thriving community. It was situated on the west shore of Lake Winnipeg, the largest freshwater lake on the North American continent after the Great Lakes, separating the province of Ontario from the USA. As I was growing up living at home, I, naturally, heard fragments, in conversations by my mother and my dad, of the trials and tribulations they had faced in their early pioneering days, but it was always somehow taken for granted. As long as they were with us, we, the children, must have assumed the resource would always be there. But when I discovered that Mother’s exploratory surgery revealed a terminal condition, I was shocked and desperately wanted a fuller and more tangible memory of her experience to live with me long after she was gone. I lived at that time in Santa Monica, California, approaching three thousand milesaway from Winnipeg and Matlock Beach in Canada. I asked her if she would write me something of her history.
She died on December 29, 1952, at the age of sixty-eight. She had no time to write an autobiography, but I am very grateful for the limited number of pages she did write and had them mailed out to me while she was still alive. And probably at this stage in my memoir, it may be appropriate to record it, as close to verbatim as possible, because of the need of translation which often lacks the color and strength of the original idiom.
The 160 acres of wilderness was a homestead given by the Canadian government free to encourage settlement and development of the country. In Europe from where my parents emigrated, one would be considered well-off owning even one acre of land. The promise of 160 acres seemed like bonanza, resulting in attracting shiploads of people without property, the disadvantaged, simply poor, or those wishing adventure with the possibility of improving their fortunes. From Mala Polska (Little Poland) in Austria, if they managed to pay for the transportation, they packed up whatever they could carry with them and headed for the promised land of the new world not having the faintest idea of what was awaiting them.
In Austria my grandfather, on my father’s side, had been a bridge engineer who died before my father emigrated at the age of twenty-one. Dad learned the practical skills from his father, which helped enormously when faced with the challenges of the wilderness.
When the Canadian Pacific constructed the Winnipeg to Arborg branch of the railroad system with stations at five-mile intervals all the way to Arborg, my father saw the advantage of abandoning the original homestead and purchasing the quarter section of land adjacent to the railroad. This property was heavily wooded with spruce trees and white poplar (aspen) essential for construction and firewood, a smattering of oak, black poplar (cotton wood) interspersed with wide variety of wild fruit-bearing miniature trees and shrubs, such as highbush cranberry, plums, saskatoons, choke and pin cherries, and raspberries. It had also lush hay-producing meadows for providing feed for the animals and, above all, an easily developed good and plentiful source of water. A couple of low wetland meadows attracted the migrating ducks and killdeer long after the spring snowmelt and was a sight when the marsh marigolds were in bloom.
A quarter section of land was a half-mile square and consisted of 160 acres. The site for the first home here, Father chose an area about a third of the way from the north boundary and about halfway between the railroad and the east side of the property line running alongside a road that ran north and south. A circular grassy field provided hay for thatching a roof and proved to be a perfect location for a good and plentiful source of water for the family and the livestock without having to dig a well too deep. The sunlit open space of the meadow brightened even the thick forest surrounding it. This was a blessing for the timbers used in building the log house, and stable had to be dragged to the building site and hand hewed to form a tight fit in the walls of the structures.
Despite the hardships, deprivations of adequate food supplies, and all comforts of normal living—as we now know, experienced by my parents—I, as a child, do not ever recall any atmosphere of gloom in our home, although, as a young child, on a few occasions when I would feel alone, I’d experience some nostalgic longing as if searching for something that had given me warmth. On one such occasion, when about two years old, I remember seeking the door to the stable where I was born, entering and peering into the hay-storing alcove. The occasion may have been the abandoning of the site and moving for good to the big new home that Father had built at the south end of the property close to the north-south road and the east to west road, running perpendicular to it and leading toward the railroad.
From this location, it was two and a half miles to Rembrandt one drove or walked along the railroad to pick up the mail or supplies from the quickly sprung general all-purpose country stores. The merchants were paid (bartered) almost exclusively by cordwood of white poplar cut in four foot lengths, split for firewood, then transported to Winnipeg in freight boxcars by rail for heating of homes in the city. Spruce was similarly cut as pulpwood, to be processed at the paper mills. For the pioneers this was the only local source of income but strictly as a winter occupation when the frozen trees could be easily felled, cut into cords, split, and hauled on a sled, one cord at a time, by a two-horse team or a pair of oxen. In the spring, there was land to be cleared of trees and undergrowth for the grain fields and produce gardens for household use and root cellar, to be stored for the long winter. Clearing was no easy chore. The virgin trees were big. Removing the stumps, often as much as two feet in diameter, and getting to their thick roots required axes, long crowbars, often long strong planks for leverage, handsaws, exhausting human exertion, and aid of horsepower. This had to be done before any planting. The procedure was slow, time-consuming, and backbreaking. In addition, the movement of the glaciers during the Stone Age left in their recession a rich harvest of stones of every imaginable size, which had to be gathered and moved away either on top of a wagon and deposited along the fence lines, or if the boulders were too big to lift, on top of a wide, flat sledge equipped with a single or double tree and dragged away by a horse or a team.
When the crops were sown and the vegetable garden planted, there still was no time to rest. There was always the need for more land to till. The brush, stumps, and stacks of branches had to be burned, and a semblance of roadways had to be cleared and shaped with a horse-drawn scrape shovel.
Still, in spite of the serious misfortunate of the fire my parents suffered, it was not all gloom. The pioneers had to take it all in stride. When the time for my baptism came about, there was no home to celebrate the occasion, but my godmother, Mrs. Hrushuwa, decided her home—an oblong thatched steep-gabled house—would serve the purpose. It had a large main room and an extra big kitchen, and it was a mile closer to the village of Meleb (three miles south and one mile west from our home) and the Roman Catholic Church.
Mrs. Hrushuwa, God Bless her soul, had made it an event to remember. She invited the local amateur musicians who played the fiddle, mandolin, accordion, hammer dulcimer (cymbale), and drum. My father provided the moonshine (a vodka kind of home brew). Mother roasted a goose. Between her and my godmother, and some other help, they provided whatever else that was required to made a befitting meal for the occasion.
The guests were all in high spirits. They danced the waltzes, polkas, and kolamaikas. Father performed his specialty, a solo broom dance. Mother who loved to dance did so only when able to break away from duties of the hostess, and Mrs. Hrushuwa brought the house down with her hilarious version of the cancan. All this followed the serious matter of the day: the blessing of the infant by the priest and the good wishes of all the guests. Full details were never described to me, but one item, as remembered by my eldest sister Angela was my father proudly placing a pen in my tiny hand.
I have no remembrance of my godmother. She was widowed when her husband died from influenza at the close of World War I. She moved to the city of Winnipeg and never looked back at the old homestead with the clay-plastered outside walls of her first Canadian home which remained abandoned in its setback location from the road, standing lonely for many years.
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