A Search

This is a story about memory, and how we are utterly failed by it.

A week ago, I took a trip with friends from Calgary into British Columbia.  We travelled through Banff, Radium Hot Springs, Wasa, Cranbrook, Yakh and Creston.  From there, we took a minor road north to Crawford Bay, then on a ferry to Balfour and Nelson.  From there we went north to New Denver, Nakusp and Galena Bay, where we caught another ferry to Shelter Bay.  We drove north to Revelstoke, then back to Calgary through Golden.  Distance numbers on the map are in red, indicating kilometers.

The country is beautiful; we drove through and visited five national parks, six provincial parks and some of the most magnificent and remarkable mountains in the world.  But the reason for this strange circular journey was not only to look at mountains.  I was also looking for my grandfather.

I have spoken about my grandfather on the blog before.  Born in 1886, emigrated to Canada at 18, a Canadian veteran of both World Wars, a writer, a painter, an ornithologist and towards the end of his life, a mountain man who squatted on land he did not own, in the very country I visited last weekend.  Only thing is, I didn't know where.

My grandfather was 51 when my father was born; my grandfather was 85 in 1971, when he had a stroke and was brought by my father to Foothills Hospital in Calgary.  There he remained as a convalescent until his death in 1976.  My parents are both gone now, so all I have left of him are my memories when I was only five or six.

I remember visiting him in British Columbia, perhaps two or three times before his stroke.  I had a memory of what Cranbrook and Creston looked like ... but I hadn't been there since before 1971.  Yet I remembered the highway; I remembered there was a big house with glass windows on the right hand side, and that there was a huge lake on that side.  On the other side, the mountainside came down to the highway.  I remembered that we always drove south to reach my grandfather.  But of course, there are hundreds of places in B.C. that look exactly like this.  My only thought was to get some sense of where his house might have been.

I was certain the place had to be somewhere between Cranbrook and Creston.  It might be somewhere before Cranbrook.  But as we came down highway 93, it was obvious from the great flat valley that my grandfather couldn't have lived around Cranbrook.  And as we followed highway 3 to Cranbrook, nothing looked at all familiar.  There were no large lakes, and the mountains were all wrong.

I'd told my fellow travellers about my search on the first day, so they were on the lookout as well for clues and possibilities.  I must point out that we couldn't be on the wrong highway; every valley in this country has exactly one paved route.  That night in Creston, I must admit feeling downhearted.  There were no highways further south; Creston is only a few miles north of Idaho, and we certainly never crossed the border.

So, last Sunday, a week ago, we started north on highway 3A.  Kootenay lake loomed beautifully on the left hand side, the wrong side by my memory, while we enjoyed the journey.  Then my friend Jan called out that we were passing a "Glass House" on the left-hand side; it was also the wrong side by my memory, but he stopped the car and we veered back.

As I got out of the car, looking at the house, it looked completely wrong.  I saw large panes of glass in my mind, a tall angular roof.  Here's what we saw:

I couldn't know it, but The Glass House is a famous B.C. tourist site; but I don't have any memory in 1970 of it being anything special.  I said out loud to my friends that it definitely wasn't the right place.

Nevertheless, for the sake of stretching our legs and maybe finding a nice piece of B.C. jade, we parked the car and walked to the shop.  We were greeted by a friendly woman in her 60s.  And on some ludicrous whim, I asked her if she'd ever heard of a man by my grandfather's name.  She said she didn't, but she called her husband, asking if he might have.  Her husband's name was Eldon and he had lived there since he was a boy, back into the 1960s.

He remembered my grandfather perfectly.  For an hour, I listened as he told story after story, funny ones and serious ones; things my grandfather had taught him; jokes my grandfather had made.  It was clear that Eldon was as stunned and pleased to find the grandson of this man in his company, as I was to hear stories from someone other than my parents.  My grandfather was a recluse; not a part of the larger family, divorced from his wife and her people, out of choice.  The serendipity of the moment was ... astonishing.  I'm still confounded.  The chances of my choosing to take the journey; to have any expectations at all of finding even a scrap of evidence; the chances of this man Eldon still living in this place where he was a boy, and still remembering an old man, a man 70 years his senior, so well that he could talk and talk and talk about him.  The chances of our meeting.  It's stupefying.

My friends listened just as I did; no one felt any need to rush away.  For the next two days, we found ourselves wondering at it, as though we'd just witnessed a great historical event.

Now I'm staring at my coffee and not writing, so I must be out of things to say.