Ghosts of Terrace past

I’m sitting in the Terrace Grill, finishing my coffee. Through the glass door I watch my brother discard his cigarette and stroll into the hotel, toque on head. There is a half-wall between the restaurant and the lobby. From here I have been keeping an eye on the hotel’s main entrance. Dave joins me at my table and we order coffee. “I saw your noggin right away,” he says.

I haven’t heard the word “noggin” in years, and I like the familiar sound. What did he see, I wonder. My mop of graying flyaway curls? Perhaps he noticed my forehead with its deep vertical crease identical to his. We’re not frowners, but we’ve both had these since we were young. Inherited from Dad.

When I was last here, about twelve years ago, our children were still young. That time, Dave and I spent a lot of time drinking coffee at the pool, watching through the picture window while his two sons swam with my daughter. In his backyard, we built a bonfire and roasted weenies. I remember a still-shirtless neighbour boy who came to join the party long after the summer evening had grown dark. I can still shiver, remembering.

Now our kids are doing summer jobs, preparing to return to their different universities. Dave’s younger son is in the process of applying to join the RCMP, and is studying while he waits for news of his acceptance. My daughter, a part-time reservations clerk at the Best Western Langley, arranged my stay here at the Terrace Inn.

The night I arrived, Dave was working and I drove around the town with his wife Anne to view the changes. I wanted to see what the recent floods had done, and how high the water had risen.

“Let’s go down to the corduroy road,” I said.

“The corduroy road? What’s that?” She and Dave have been married for over thirty years, but she was mystified.

“A memory from about fifty years ago.”

Known to my sister-in-law simply as Skeena Street, this road was laid down in swampy land when we were kids. We asked Dad why they had placed logs across the road, and he explained the whole process. When the road bed is boggy, logs are placed across it. Resembling wales of corduroy, they form a rough surface on top of which layers of dirt and gravel are added. This makes the road less likely to sink or buckle. Without the ribs of “corduroy,” such roads can swallow truckload after truckload of gravel, as huge potholes form and are filled.

When Dave and I saw the road in the corduroy stage, we were newly arrived in Terrace from the flat farmlands of central Alberta. All that bush made a huge and exciting playground for us. Near the then-unfinished corduroy road were wonderful patches of wild raspberries. What gave the raspberry picking an extra frisson was the perverse pleasure of knowing there could be bears in the bush, and that they would like raspberries too. Alone in the berry patch, many times I enjoyed a chill of half-imaginary fear every time the bushes rustled.

1958, that first year in the new hometown marked the beginning of a childhood ritual of wild berry picking that lasted until I graduated high school and left home for the city. ’58 was a hot year too, with lots of forest fires. I remember Dad stepping outside on a July morning, looking up at the sky, saying, “It’s going to be a scorcher today,” and pointing out the water bombers that were flying out to fight a fire somewhere in the bush.

My reverie was interrupted by Anne’s voice.

“You’ll have to ask Dave,” she told me. “I have no idea about the corduroy road. That was before my time.”

Laughing, I explained that it was our childhood name for Skeena Street, explaining how we saw the logs laid down to form the first layer of the road bed. Dave and Anne still live in the house where I grew up, a short distance from that road.

As we continued our journey, Anne updated me on the recent spring floods. The worst in many years, they made the national news. She showed me which houses had had water in their yards, and which areas had been evacuated. We drove past her Mom’s old place, now sold. It was being raised to have a basement put under it. To me it all looked unrecognizable.

Now, in the Terrace Grill, Dave and I finish our coffee, rise as one and sally forth to take a walk around town. I point to a building on the next block. “That used to be the Skeena Hotel,” I say. “Right,” he says. “It’s still the same building.” The tobacco-coloured stucco walls of the Skeena are now slatted with brown boards, and I smile. This faux Tudor English pub style is strangely out of keeping with the surroundings: sparse buildings, rail yards, vacant lots overgrown with fireweed and goldenrod, now in brilliant bloom.

Dave is a carpenter. “I did part of this renovation,” he says, adding, “That was quite a few years ago now.” He stops me on the sidewalk in front of a blank stucco wall. “Test,” he says. “What was here?”

“The Skeena Hotel?” I venture, wondering where he has been during our recent conversation.

He laughs, spreading his arms to indicate a certain span. “This used to be the entrance to the bar,” he said. There was a door here marked ‘Ladies and Escorts.’ And down here — ” he strides along a few paces — ”was the other door.”

It is all coming back now. That other door was marked simply “Men.” Long before we were old enough to be allowed through either of those doors, Dave and I had peeked in as we passed, our noses filling with the yeasty smell of beer and the heavy fug of cigarette smoke. In the Skeena, like in other bars of the time, both doors opened into the same cavernous room. Dark and windowless, it was furnished with wooden tables and chairs, a pool table, a jukebox, and of course, a long bar. The forbidden glimpses of childhood revealed groups of men in plaid logger shirts and caps or toques imbibing rounds of golden beer slapped down by waitresses who often delivered two beer per person in a single round. Careless of rings on tables, or beer slopping over the sides of glasses, they weaved between tables, trays of glasses held high.

As children do, we absorbed information ceaselessly. Long before we came of age, we knew that drinking in the bar involved certain rituals. When drinking with a group, we knew it was the custom to take turns standing a round for the table. But I wondered. Wouldn’t it be dangerous to sit at a table with a lot of people? You couldn’t leave till you’d stood your round, or people would think you were just bumming free drinks. But if there were too many drinkers, you might be under the table before your turn came.

“So this bar, the Skeena,” I ask him. “Was this the tough one? The one that used to be called “the blood bucket”, because of the fights?”

“No,” he grins, “That’s your hotel, the old Terrace.” He hastens to add, “Of course this end of town has been cleaned up now. The hotel was completely renovated.” As I well know, fresh from my peaceful morning shower in a bathroom done up in sparkling new white tiles and my pleasant breakfast in this quiet grill.

“The Skeena was okay,” Dave adds. “Just a working-class bar. I was there a few times.”

He has moved on again, and I follow and find myself standing in front of a box-like building. Utterly plain, though recently painted white, it offers nothing to relieve the boredom of the eye except a tiny strip of grass in front.

“Test,” Dave says again. He is having a great time. “What was this?” I dredge my memory but nothing comes. This appears to be an apartment building. The location is beside the tracks, near the Legion, far beyond the part of town I would have ventured into back in the day.

“The Empire Hotel!” he reveals triumphantly, sounding like a magician who has just removed a rabbit from a hat. Now I remember. It was pale pink, and stood alone, its four storeys forming quite a high building for the time. I had seen it only from a distance, and from car windows. It looked desolate, alone and bare on my small horizon.

“I was in there once,” Dave says, “with Dad.” Seeing my incredulous look, he adds, “He was looking for some guy, but he wasn’t there. We went to the Legion after, and found him.”

When our family arrived in this town in 1958, World War II had been over for only 13 years. We grew up smack dab in the middle of the atmosphere and rituals of the post-war era. Then, we had no idea what that meant.

“It must have been built during the war, for the soldiers to drink at,” I muse, recalling that there were soldiers stationed here too. Some local drama involved the Conchies – conscientious objectors or pacifists – and “Zombies,” French Canadians who were drafted unwillingly. They had been promised home service, because they did not support Canada’s involvement in the foreign war. They nearly revolted too. It was a close thing.

My thoughts are interrupted by my brother’s voice.

“This was what used to be called an apartment hotel, on the good end of the sliding scale. On the other end…” he hesitates.

“A flophouse,” I fill in, and he laughs.

Maybe the building went back even further than that. Far off the beaten track, and close to the railroad, this hotel with a bar may have been here in the dirty thirties. Wasn’t that when the term flophouse originated? Perhaps transients stayed there briefly before moving on.

Dave’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “Next stop, Royal Canadian Legion, Branch 13.” Unlike the Empire Hotel, the Legion is very familiar. We approach it from the street close to the rail yards, rather than from the main drag, as we used to when we passed it while riding in Dad’s pickup.

Of course we didn’t go into the Legion. Children weren’t allowed in drinking establishments. But on many occasions we had to wait for Dad in the car when he had to “see someone” in there. When Mom heard about these expeditions afterwards, she’d give him an earful.

As we approach the low wooden building, we look up the hill to where a row of former barracks still used to stand in our day, used then by a logging company called Columbia Cellulose. Few remain. After a facelift, one is now a home for seniors, where, my brother tells me, one of our mother’s best friends now lives. He ran into her recently and she was still the same, he said.

“Ok,” I say, pausing in the Legion parking lot, “Pegasus (the old family car, a roundbacked black Mercury) is parked here.”

“No,” he moves a few steps closer to the building. “More like here.”

“Right,” I say briskly, following him to the correct parking place, “time for you to try a test.”

And I begin to sing a song our elder sister made up for us to sing in rounds, while we waited for Daddy to emerge from the Legion. “If Daddy’d come,” I begin, and signal him. He picks it up, repeating, “If Daddy’d come.”  As if we’d just done it yesterday, we get into the swing and repeat this sequence twice more. But the chorus is the piece de resistance. It goes like this, “If only, only, only Daddy’d come.” Without missing a beat, we pass the “onlys” back and forth, neat as tennis players passing a ball. We sing the final line together, our voices rising to a crescendo. Then we both burst out laughing.

“Okay,” I say. “You passed.”

There are no cars now in the small gravel lot that used to look so huge back then. This is a Wednesday morning. The door is locked, and nobody is about. Standing there, we read the freshly posted casualty lists from Afghanistan. I am shocked to see how many deaths have taken place among active service men in the past year.

“Of course, this list is for all of Canada,” Dave says.

I glance down the column that tells how they died: car accident, suicide attack, rocket, grenade…

We are quiet a moment, reflecting. To think there was a time when I almost expected the Legion to slip into anachronistic irrelevance. I hoped it would no longer be needed, could become an institution whose aging members had outlived their era.

A little beyond the legion is a big ball park, and here we stop to sit alone on the dark green bleachers. Dave lights up a cigarette and we reminisce about the year we spent at Riverside, the elementary school that used to stand here. At that time, we were still living in a rented house on Lakelse Avenue, the town’s main street, across from the Ranger Station, where in the blistering summer of 1958, the forest fire danger was marked as extreme.

Our return journey takes us past the place where we waited to wave to Queen Elizabeth when she visited our town. A faint memory of that occasion lives on in the old airport road that was re-named Queensway, and paved in her honour.

For a moment, I am back there, young and impatient, waiting to see the Queen. My mother is excited. She insisted that Doris and I wear our dress and duster sets. Dave is decked out in his brown and yellow Davy Crockett shirt, pants, and hat. We sit behind a guardrail, on the strip of grass by the Legion parking lot, waiting for the Royal car to pass. Doris tells us not to move, or someone will get our places and we won’t be able to see. It is hard to sit still and wait.

I have a vague memory of how the Queen looked that day. She was wearing a dress with a matching hat, powder blue, I fancy, and long white gloves. Prince Phillip had something on with gold braid trim. That day, by careful observation, Doris and I learned the Queen Elizabeth wave, which we have used periodically with ironic effect ever since.

Now, standing there in the silence of the beautiful sunny town in the valley ringed by mountains, I realize that that was probably Elizabeth’s first visit to Canada, that she had only been about five years on the throne. I know now that she was the first British monarch to take the trouble to visit and get to know the many countries over which she reigned as Queen.

Back we stroll, along Lakelse Avenue, discussing which businesses were where when we were young. Before we know it, two hours have passed. My body is grateful for the gentle exercise, air and sunshine. I have not walked this much in a long time. And my heart is glad of the familiar, undemanding company of my brother.

We return to Dave’s car and drive out to the Zymacord River. On the journey I listen to the rumbling of the truck’s engine and watch the changing views of the Skeena. The weather is perfect. I am ambushed by the beauty of this place, not least because of its unpopulated quietude. Seeing the familiar shapes of the mountains beyond, I suddenly remember that in a trunk at home I still have a folio of amateurish watercolours I painted of this very scene.

Dave has taken off his toque, and a wisp of his white hair is standing on end. I reach over to smooth it down.

“You have Daddy’s hair now,” I tell him, and our father’s image appears in my mind’s eye, his snowy hair standing on end, waving upward like the flames of a colourless campfire. Framed by a khaki shirt collar, his large head rises from his wattled neck, exuding the power of his personality. Beneath the vertical crease in his forehead, his hooded blue eyes look out, sharp and alert.

There is nothing to see at the Zimacord bridge but the river itself, its green and quiet banks where a cabin once stood that was occupied by friends. But I refuse these other memories now, as Dave turns the car beside the bridge.

On the drive back, I relent and we talk about this friend from long ago, who once lived in that cabin, and later unaccountably took his own life. He seemed to us so talented and full of promise. We were deeply shocked by the news of his death, the more so since he left behind his wife, my former classmate, and at least two children.

We have one more stop to make on the way back to town. At Kalum Lake Road, we turn and wind our way up Graveyard hill, past the old cemetery, past the college. We park at the new cemetery, stand side by side and gaze down at our parents’ gravestones. Dave surrounds my shoulder with a protective arm.  

On our mother’s stone, along with her dates, 1913-1982, is inscribed the name we always called her as kids, “Mompy.” We also recorded her birthplace, St. John’s, Newfoundland. My father’s marker is the standard Legion one, with his name and dates, 1901-1989 and RCNVR, Royal Canadian Legion Volunteer Reserve, an affiliation he was proud of.

My brother’s brown eyes search my face as we look down at these two stones. “Are they there?” he asks.

My answer is a quotation, “’Do not stand by my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep…’” Then, out of long habit as an elder sister, I feel compelled to add something of my own, “They are in us. As long as we are alive, they will be with us.” Side by side, we kneel down and scrape away the extra grass from the edges of their stones. He does Mompy’s stone, and I do Daddy’s. The markers we had place here have stood up well and we are glad. Mompy has lain here for twenty-four years now, and Daddy for almost eighteen.

Accompanied by the sound of birdsong, we walk around the green and quiet cemetery awhile longer, looking at other graves of people we have known. Finally, after Dave has another cigarette, we get back into the car.

Hungry and relaxed, we drive back into town to eat lunch in a little patio at Tim Horton’s. I go to fetch our food, and in spite of a sign explicitly forbidding customers to take the crockery outdoors, I smuggle our trays out, one by one. Nobody challenges me, nor should they. I can be trusted. I will see they get their dishes back safe.

Over our lunch of soup, salad, Tim bits and coffee, we talk of insignificant things. I feel happy to be here in my hometown visiting my brother.