Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

Remembering Winter
February 2009

         Winter is a state of mind, a story that people tell in their own way. Each cold season has a signature, but each one also shows many different aspects. Compressed by memory, they layer up like striations in a glacier, with snows from long ago crystallized into the blue ice of lore.
The present winter, 2008-09, has brought big events that have piled together into one of those sagas. After the dry late summer and fall, the first cold snap brought back the Depression-era lament of "Snow on the dust." Around Christmas, temperatures that dropped far below zero and stayed there for a few days froze the Pend Oreille River from Newport to Cusick, evoking dreams of old ice saws and big blocks packed in sawdust. Some people opened the 1860 journals of British army officer Charles Wilson, who clambered about on the frozen Kettle Falls during one thirty below day, or his colleague James Keast Lord, who tracked a wave of boreal owls that flew down from the Arctic to shelter in the corrals around Fort Colvile.
            When this year's Christmas storm door opened and snow began to pour down in earnest, it didn't seem to matter whether you lived in town or out in the country: getting through the day became the sole priority for many people. The way things kept getting buried deeper and deeper brought to mind an old Kalispel story, related on tape by elder Antoine Andrews in 1970. In his soft, sing-song voice, Antoine related how during a similar deep winter, his great-grandfather had made an epic journey across the mountains from the Pend Oreille to the Colville Valley, where a good supply of fat muskrats helped save his family from starvation.
            When the Chinook winds began to eat our deep snow in early January, it was hard not to think of fur trader David Thompson's trip over Athabasca Pass almost exactly two centuries ago. As his party of dog sleds hauling trade goods started to mush down the west slope of the Rocky Mountains, similar southerly winds raised the temperature from thirty below zero to thirty above in one day's time, hopelessly bogging down Thompson's dog teams and changing his plans for the new year.
            Every part of the north country preserves phrases and images like this, retelling them around the stove or campfire or den and searing them into the minds of young listeners. That's why some of the best winter tales end up in the category of illustrated children's books, and why it's fun for everyone, no matter what age, to curl up with some of the classics. Two that I've been spending time with over the past couple of months are Virginia Lee Burton's Katie and the Big Snow and William Kurelek's A Prairie Boy's Life.
Virginia Lee Burton (of Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel fame) was born in western Massachusetts during the Great Depression. As a young girl she experienced some powerful winter storms. At some point, however, her mother declared she couldn't take the cold weather any more, so the family pulled up stakes and moved to California. There, Burton received a good education in the arts, but never forgot those magical storms. In time, her childhood wonder manifested itself as the story of a city brought to its knees by a four-foot blizzard and the little snowplow that digs it out, one chugging push at a time. Katie the snowplow has been inspiring young heavy equipment enthusiasts to make chugga chugga sounds ever since.
Burton's contemporary William Kurelek tells a much starker story. The eldest son of a large family of Ukrainian immigrants, Kurelek was born on a wheat farm in Alberta in 1827. When his dad lost that place during the Depression, the Kureleks moved east to try dairy farming in Manitoba, where the plains were flatter, but the wind still blew.  The endless hard work of milking cows did not suit William; he clashed with his parents over his interest in drawing, and escaped from the farm to study art in Toronto and Mexico. He was pursuing his dream in England when, at age 25, he entered a psychiatric hosptial and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Many people in the U.S. know Kurelek only because he painting prolifically while in the institution, including one tortured piece titled "The Maze" that saw new life as the cover of the 1981 Van Halen album Fair Warning.
But art has the power to heal memory, and William Kurelek eventually returned to Toronto and produced a series of graceful young adult books about his snowbound youth. A Prairie Boy's Winter includes twenty carefully rendered paintings, each one accompanied by a prose paragraph that illuminates a frozen moment in the late 1930s farming community outside of Stonewall, Manitoba. From techniques for icing down a hockey rink to calling pigs out to feed; from axing holes in the water trough to skiing behind the hay rack; from wrestling firewood out of snowdrifts to rolling up snowballs for an all-out battle at school recess, every one of Kurelek's memories has been relived somewhere in the Intermountain West this season. His work, and this winter, have succeeded in collapsing time back to the first snowflake ever caught on the tongue of a curious child.
During a snowfall like that a couple of Februarys ago, I sat in a coffee shop in Creston, B.C., listening to a Lower Kootenay friend named Robert Louie tell stories about his grandmother, Marion Ernst. He called her by her Ktunaxa name, Di Di, and the big flakes wafting down on a couple of inches of dirty snow reminded Rob of what Di Di used to say every winter.
"She'd look out at the snow pack and shake her head as if it wasn't much. Then she'd saw one hand across her waist and say, 'See this? It used to come up to here every winter, and higher. Now we don't see nothing.' She'd grumble for a minute or two. 'But wait,' she'd say. 'One day you'll see it come back this high again.’ And with that Di Di would raise her hand from across her waist to around chest, then clear up to her neck. 'Way high. And then lots of other things will start changing back to the way they used to be, too. You'll see.'"
For Di Di, Katie the Snowplow, little William Kurelek, and, after this winter, for every kid in the North Columbia Country, the snow of their youth will always be four feet high. Even after Chinook winds melt the big drifts away, they know that some day the blizzards will return in force, and snow us in all over again.

Illustrations: Courtesy of William Kurelek, A Prairie Boy's Winter, 1973

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