Separate Ways
The town where I was born no longer exists. A fly-in mining hamlet when built in the late 50s, it was dismantled and bulldozed about thirty years later, when the quarry was no longer profitable, and its four thousand residents packed their mattresses and memories, and drove away, as by then there was finally a road.
That road is all that remains: a section of highway that briefly widens to become a boulevard, complete with a median, sidewalks, and sewers — and this, as Wikipedia states in a faintly astonished tone, despite being deep in the Canadian wilderness, hundreds and hundreds of kilometres from the nearest active community.
There is nothing for me to remember about the place, as my parents moved me and my two older brothers to a town close to Montreal a few months after I was born, one known in part for the gritty black soot on every outdoor surface, dust that spewed from the iron ore smelters by the river, but mostly for the low rumble of the Hell’s Angels’ Harleys cruising the stretch of cracked asphalt that led from the factories to the centre of town.
It was here, with its yellow-bricked art deco market hall, faux Italian restaurant facades (yes, I mean you Pizza Sorrento) and criss-crossing town square paths modeled after the Union Jack, that I found myself sitting in a country and western bar forty years after graduating high school, sipping some locally-brewed cider, and listening to a Journey cover band. I had not been back to my home town in four decades, and it seemed that this, a pandemic summer when international travel was limited, was as good a time as any to make a day trip of it.
It started as the four lane highway arc’d over le pont neuf, a fifty-year old bridge, still considered new as it was built after the first one, and continued as the speed limit halved to give way to a commercial strip just south of the centre of town, where my father used to take me to Canadian Tire on Friday nights while my mother shopped groceries at Steinberg’s.
It kept building as I drove past the park where I had my first kiss, the bench where I got stupidly drunk on Baby Duck wine sucked through a straw, and the shop where I was fired from my first job at a Dairy-Queenesque ice cream counter.
By the time I pulled out a stool and sat at the counter, it was impossible to ignore.
It wasn’t dread, or apathy, or remorse, but some exponentially escalating mash-up of the three, tightening every muscle from my throat to my stomach. If there was excitement or curiosity in the mix, they were no more than whispered prayers in a hurricane.
But wait. I am starting in the wrong place. This all began much further back, not in my childhood, but to the early fifties when my parents, then teenagers in love, boarded a steamship in the port of Bremen. Behind was the bombed village near the Dutch border, which was everything they knew until that point, and ahead, a heaving Atlantic that over the course of ten or so days, they crossed to land in Montreal.
They arrived at a time now known as the Great Darkness, to a deeply Catholic, rural Quebec, where social and reproductive choices were prescribed by the government, and immigrants were met along a continuum from suspicion to intolerance, particularly ones who did not speak French, and worse, had a last name like Schmidt. With little more than their high school diplomas, they began to make a life among the god-fearing French Canadians, many of whom could trace their heritage back to the 1600s when the founding settlers arrived in what was then called Nouvelle France, and still attended Sunday mass in Latin, grasping their missals in neat rows behind the priests back.
The saying If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing came to mind as the band took a break after the first set. I looked around me, both wanting and dreading seeing anyone I once knew.
This was the kind of place my parents would never go to, or be invited to join friends. As new immigrants, they kept their heads down and worked, my mother as the third floor maid for a Westmount family whose wealth came from cigarette manufacturing (before her first pregnancy brought an end to that), and my father, shovelling snow off the train tracks at dawn, before becoming an electrician at the rail yard working the night shift.
Keeping your head down was particularly important as a German at that time, as everyone was assumed to have been a Nazi, worked for the Nazis or was somehow related to the atrocious acts of the Holocaust, by act or by knowledge.
Years of my teenage life were peppered with invasive questions about my parents, who by then had climbed the rungs of professional life, saved a bit of money, and bought the house I grew up in. Barely out of cloth diapers when the Brown Shirts came to power, they were nonetheless tainted with assorted war crimes, and to boot were not pure laine Québécois, which is to say they did not belong, and were frequently treated that way. Not always. Not by everyone. But by enough people, enough of the time.
This kind of not belonging carries down through generations. All you have to have is the ‘wrong’ name, or not go to the same American beaches as your neighbours during summer break. In this place, just being tall as a girl was questionable. It was all this history, this outsider identity coursing through me as I studied the glass of my slowly warming drink.
I looked up. The band was gearing up for another set. I went to high school with the lead singer, now a teacher at the école secondaire we both left back in the early 80s, having written in one anothers’ yearbooks things like ‘Bonne chance’ and ‘Change pas.’ He may have recognized me.
Some things you only begin knowing after decades pass, and once again you step onto sidewalks a previous you walked on. They were on the chorus now, that song we all once danced to in the cafeteria.
How we touched and went our separate ways.
I didn’t stay for the second set. There are places you never belong, and what some people get to call home is often for others a moment of contact, then a long walking away.
