Pop89: Val Marie 2021
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
My mother was born here in 1930. But I didn’t come here until after she died. Last night, my neighbour Patsy was driving down Railway Ave. East (not to be confused with Railway Ave. West) as I was walking home from watering Maurice’s petunias. My eyes were on the fat black busy storm clouds rolling above us. Patsy usually stops to give me a listen to what’s playing on Willy’s Roadhouse. And usually, it’s Willie, thanking all the girls he ever loved, singing the praises of farms and countryside. But this time she stopped to show me some old photographs of the village.
“First, let me pull over,” she said. Which struck me as funny because no one else was on the road, or any road in town, for that matter. In fact, people usually stop right where they are and start talking to the fella in the truck going the other way. No one thinks anything of it. We just drive around. We certainly don’t honk – unless it’s to say hello.
These village roads are typically wide and can fit a couple of double-load dump trucks. In fact, there are six of those beasts parked next to my place right now, taking up both sides of the road. I’m not used to so much traffic here in the middle of nowhere. To be surrounded by giant gravel trucks feels intrusive, all wrong. But the crew, working on paving Highway 4 down to the US border, is staying in my building.
Suddenly this is a residential area. Other people are now inhabiting my apartment building. I’ve become used to the silence since moving here nearly eight years ago. And I love the darkness. In fact, when the yard light burned out, I asked Betty (landlady, hall manager, curling rink coordinator, fundraiser, farmer and friend) if we could keep it like that. Without it, I can bask in the darkness. I can almost convince myself I live alone in the country.
I live in the country; I tell friends in Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal. Some picture a single cabin surrounded by fields, or buttes and coulees. Others - like the emigres leaving England after gazing longingly at lavish posters of babbling brooks running through dense thickets full of happy songbirds - imagine a bucolic gem of a cottage, bathed in a ray of light, the hand of God breaking through the clouds. Others might imagine a tumbled-down ranch house with palominos and a rusty red Ford in the backyard. And maybe a cowhand whittling a pipe on the front stoop.
But none expect to find me cozily ensconced in an apartment building attached to three other units. They don’t imagine me in a town, even if it is a village of 89 people. Who lives in a village these days? The villages of the 1600s, like Quebec and Ville-Marie grew into the cities of Quebec and Montreal. The settlements of York and Gastown are now the metropolises of Toronto and Vancouver, respectively. And, of course, before all of that, they were the indigenous villages of Kebec, Tiohtia, tKaronto and K’emk’emelay. No. No one lives in a village anymore.
Every morning I gaze upon five muscular horses grazing and racing each other in the field across the road. (That is, I did, until my own buddy, escaping Toronto, built a cabin on the lot between me and the field. Now she has the view of horses, cattle, and Maurice’s oasis of poplars, birches and Siberian elms, swaying in the wind, home to a hundred birds and one massive horned owl who flies over to my friend’s phone pole every morning and evening. Now I sit in her cabin, sipping a beer or a tea, and watch, through her wall-to-wall windows, the changing sky and busy critters all evening long.)
However, I have more than one view. My southern view faces the highway headed to Montana, the highway the fellas are busy paving. And my western window faces the village campground, which, at the moment, is full of mega-campers and the odd tent. Beyond them, I can still see the cross atop our old church, silhouetted against a burning orange sunset. The church closed last year due to lack of interest. (We were down to eleven parishioners, six of us being one family. They supplied altar girls and choir leader, and they covered far too many of our expenses.)
I suppose I should be happy to see people moving about after so long in isolation. But the truth is, isolation is why I came here. And I’ve enjoyed the silence; despite living “in town,” I am still, for the most part, immersed in silence. Ok, there’s the dump trucks with their air brakes and their warming up for fifteen minutes every morning, not to mention the fumes leaking into my home. And there’s the sprinkler system with a mind of its own that switches on at all times, day and night. And there’s the birds. When I first moved here and was waxing poetic about the blessed silence, a local looked at me with a cock-eyed grin and said, “You mean, minus those bloody birds making all that racket at 4:30 in the morning?”
I’m standing leaning into the passenger side of Patsy’s van as she shows me a stack of old photographs, some with dates scribbled on their backs: Val Marie 1925, 1958, 1964. People walk the wooden sidewalks. Model T Fords line Centre St. from the highway to Railway Ave.
“The town had over six hundred people,” she says. “This is one of our stores; we had a few. And a lumber yard and a garage. And that’s the old elevator. Oh, that reminds me,” she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a twenty-dollar bill and shoves it at me. “Take this for your elevator committee. I got some money for my 80th birthday.”
“Wow, thanks, Patsy. You sure?”
“Just shut the f*** up and take it.” She waves her bunch of photos at me. “I’ll make some copies of these for you.”
Then she drives away as thunder rolls overhead.
Birds, big trucks, thunder, Patsy, the many sounds of my village.
Val Marie 2016. Photo by Kate Winquist