Ch 24: Kemano visit

      My mother, a first-time flier, arrived safe and sound in Vancouver. We had not seen each other for seventeen years. She looked a little smaller and older but otherwise hadn’t changed much. She started to give me the latest family gossip.

“What are you arguing about?” asked my wife after a while. “Why do you ask? We are not arguing.”

“You are yelling at each other.””We are not yelling, just talking loud like we are used to.” We were back in time to our old routine.          

  

   

 How do you break the ice among three-generations of strangers meeting for the first time, speaking different languages? We went to Stanley Park, where my mother dipped her feet into the Pacific Ocean and smoked her last Czech cigarette. I was busy talking and translating and kids were getting used to their strange “babička” (grandmother). 

 I asked her what she would like to do in Vancouver: “Go to a supermarket, buy Canadian cigarettes and try a McDonald’s hamburger.” Her first choice didn’t surprise me. Shopping in the small town of Libochovice, where she lived was as exciting as shopping in Kemano and we too were eager to go to the supermarket. We were pushing the shopping cart along the aisles, checking and comparing prices, with my mother tagging along behind us, until we came to the meat and vegetable section. She stopped there and didn’t go any further, admiring the variety, quantity and packaging. “We only get meat in butcher shops and oranges or bananas are available just at the  Christmas time”   she  complained.

   

    

    She wasn’t dazzled by the variety or fancy packaging in stores like I was on arrival to Canada: Canadian cigarettes were too smooth, a McDonald’s hamburger was not as good as the Czech “karbanátek” but the French fries were superb. White bread was awful, Czech beer was better, highway traffic was terrible…  

      I was little disappointed with her observations but maybe she would be impressed by pricey houses so we drove around North Vancouver:  “…The houses are very nice but they are built from wood, they look like big cottages…”

      Well, it was time to go. It would be a long trip to Kitimat but we were not in a hurry; we had four days to catch the boat to Kemano. We camped at Barkerville and toured the historical town famed for its gold rush. A shovel of pay dirt salted with gold cost $5 and the kids panned for gold. No nuggets were found. My mother tried another shovel so she could brag that she panned for gold but had no luck either. The trip to Kitimat was long, through endless forests and mountains and she would pipe up from the back seat “My God, so many trees, I can’t believe the country is so big.”                                                                                  

        MV NECHAKO was Alcan’s ferry boat sailing twice a week between Kemano and Kitimat. It carried about 30 passengers on a four-hour trip, returning the next day. The trip was a mixture of a pleasure journey and long distance commuting. The old timers were sleeping, reading or playing cards, kids were having fun in the playroom, and in the galley there was free coffee and cookies. For newcomers it was an unforgettable trip with surprises behind every bend of the long fjord. Most of the time it was smooth sailing but occasionally the trip was rough with seasick passengers and a few times the boat had to anchor i

n a sheltered bay to wait for a blizzard to pass. 
      Finally we arrived at Kemano and my mother could unpack her bags and relax. Then the bedroom window started to rattle. “What was that?”She asked. “It’s nothing, just an avalanche coming down from the mountain” Her trip was a string of unfolding surprises. 

After a couple of days she got busy trying to teach my wife how to cook my favourite meals “the Czech” way, helping with the kids and with the household chores.  My wife took her to the fitness class and she came back bragging that she could keep up with women half her age.

      One day she decided to replant our pathetic flower bed under the windows. It was a joint effort with our kids and it was interesting to listen to their multilingual English-Czech-German conversation while they were pulling out weeds. The next day mother was shocked; all flowers were gone, pulled out! Who would do that? Well, the culprits were our kids. They wanted to surprise babička and pulled out “all of the weeds”! Now they listened to a string of bad Czech words that I had taught them earlier.

     

After supper she usually went for a long walk around Kemano. Many times the phone started to ring. “We saw your mother walking down the road, she should be careful, there was a bear sighting yesterday…” It was hopeless trying to warn her, especially after visiting our ZOO that was the local garbage dump, and watching the bears harmlessly rummaging through garbage. One evening after she came back she told me”I saw a big green barrel on wheels; I looked inside but could not figure out what it was.” I was shocked. “I hope you didn’t try to climb inside, it was a bear trap!”

      

       For better or worse she developed a reputation of a bear-daring, or in some eyes foolish visitor, nothing out of place in the history of Kemano. There was a security guard that used to chase bears out of town with a broom, a man that used to hand feed bears, and couple times a bear became an unwelcomed guest in a house after the owner forgot to close their door. One time a golf tournament had to be postponed for a day because a grizzly strolled onto the golf course and refused to leave, ignored honking trucks and even gunshots into air. Some offending bears were given a helicopter ride out of town, but persistent offenders were shot.

       In the end it was Fred that took care of my mother. Fred was an old bachelor who came from Czechoslovakia after the war and had a somewhat murky past he didn’t want to talk about. He claimed to be either Czech or German, depending on whom he was talking to. Now every evening after supper he had a “date” with mother and went for long walks. 

   

Mushroom picking is a Czech national hobby. One day Fred took us to his favourite mushroom patch. My mother was thunderstuck, the clearing in bush vas overflowing with mushroom. "I can't believe my eyes, I never seen so many mushrooms, nobody will believe me...."  

     Fred smiled. “I am the only one here that goes mushroom picking. I gave mushrooms to the cook in the cafeteria but they wouldn’t cook them, they were afraid they could be poisonous, they know nothing about mushrooms. So I dry them and send them to friends. But I can use only so many… ”

Time went by fast. On weekends we went sailing and mother tried her hand at steering the sailboat and fishing. After she overcame her shyness, her English improved, and she would chat with neighbours. Favourite topic: bears.

      

     Finally it was time to say good-bye to Kemano. Fred seemed to be very upset and my mother later told me a “secret”: Fred was going to retire next year. Every year he had spent his holiday in some far-away place. Now he was going to travel around the world visiting all the exotic, famous places and asked mother if she would like to go with him.  “I told Fred that he is my friend but I have a husband at home. He told me he just wants my company. We would travel first class, he’s got a kilo of gold bars in the bank…” Wow, so mother even had a romance in Kemano!!

     Going back home was a long and complicated trip for the weary traveller. First a boat trip to Kitimat, then flight from Terrace airport to Vancouver. From there she would fly to Toronto and then catch a flight to Prague. She was scared of getting lost at the big Vancouver airport but fortunately one of the consulting engineers that came to Kemano was a Czech living in Vancouver and he promised to look after her when she arrived. 

    It would be ten more years before I saw mother again in my first visit home after the Berlin Wall came down. One day, we talked about Kemano and I was shocked by what she told me.

”I liked Kemano very much, but many days I was hungry, your wife was stingy and wouldn’t give me enough to eat…” Hungry in my house? Wife stingy? I couldn’t believe it.

Mother showed me a little notebook, her journal and read from it: “Sunday, she gave me few French fries and asked only once if I want more. Boys ate my share”… and here: “Hamburgers for supper, I got only one, she didn’t ask me if I want more and took the plate away…” she kept on. Eventually I realized what happened.

In my old country when a guest comes for a visit and is offered something to eat, it is polite to put up a little fuss about eating,  not to look too eager to eat too much, a custom that goes probably back to the war time, when there was not enough food. So the guest makes a fuss, turns down two or three times the offer of extra food and then graciously accepts the invitation to eat. Mother being a well-mannered guest, followed this custom on her visit to Canada, not knowing that “I am not very hungry” meant exactly that. Being small wife took it for granted that she didn’t eat much and offered her small portions.

“Why didn’t you tell me that we didn’t give you enough to eat?”

“I was your guest, how could I tell you that you have a stingy wife?”