A
Storied Winnipeg: Fables and Local Legends: Introduction
In the Aboriginal
storytelling tradition, which is more than applicable to tales
about Winnipeg, your right to relate a narrative is important.
You cannot merely claim, as those from the European tradition
do, "I read this in a book". You are responsible for stating your
claim to the story, to its antecedents and your connection to
the material. "What right do you have to tell this story?" an
Aboriginal audience might justly ask, and just as Winnipeggers
innocently imitate "Ho-lee" with its Aboriginal intonation, Winnipeggers
might ask the same question.
I first moved
to Winnipeg in 1995. Before that Winnipeg was a blank spot in
junior high geography class and my knowledge of the city was limited
to its status as capital of Manitoba, a province whose boundaries
were refreshingly square after the difficult geography of Ontario
and Quebec.
This was ameliorated
slightly when I drove across Canada in 1988, moving from the University
of New Brunswick in Fredericton to the University of Victoria
on Vancouver Island. We stopped in Winnipeg briefly, hearing rumours
of Folk Fest and Folklorama. The overnight at the Osborne Village
Motor Inn, which is justly famous in Osborne Village, quickly
frightened us onto the road again. We had parked behind the Inn
and while watching our car, which was filled to the brim with
our belongings, we saw dozens of interested people pass by it
on their way to the beer store in the back. Deciding to move the
car we drove across the Osborne Street Bridge into the downtown
to park off Portage Avenue which was summer-night crazy and scarcely
seemed any better. We were obvious tourists and more than one
pedestrian called us out. On the walk back we crossed Memorial
Park in front of the Legislative Building with its ornate, baroque,
Doric, Romanesque, Ionic columns and domes and marveled that such
a complex sprawl would be here of all places.
We left Winnipeg
the next morning and I never returned until a day in 1993, when
I was accepted at the University of Manitoba for a Masters that
I ended up taking at the University of New Brunswick. I was driving
across the country with Jono and Michele and came to Winnipeg
to see the university. While I met with people at the school,
they walked around the Forks, only to report to me later that
it was a strange and evocative place. Their stories were confused
and provided no traction in my mind for later remembrance.
I moved to
Winnipeg in 1995 for a PhD, and was introduced to the English
department at the University of Manitoba by their comment about
the view. They said I'd picked the best seat in the house, on
the sixth floor of Fletcher Argue, and when I looked puzzled they
told me I had a great view. I looked again at the broad sweep
of the Red River and the closely cropped fields that belonged
to the agriculture faculty. I was to spend the next five years,
in the winters at least, living and working next to those fields
and avoiding that river.
When I moved
here, Winnipeg was a magical city for me, despite my girlfriend
at the time who said it was "full of freaks". She lasted three
years, for as every Winnipegger knows, Winnipeg is a place you
must develop an allegiance to quickly, before winter sweeps across
the plains and buries you. Otherwise, you have no staying power.
I liked it
that the many Aboriginal people living in the city greatly increased
my chance of hearing their language and accent, as well as that
of a hundred other nationalities who call Winnipeg their residence
if not their home. Here people are schooled in Ukrainian and Dutch,
Vietnamese and Spanish, and recently, the school system, reeling
under the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee,
have even added Ojibwe to some schools. I heard a hundred languages
and saw faces I thought would not have been possible even given
the standard variation of the human type. The nightly news carried
the hog report and sow belly futures, and local commercials ranged
from well-performed and thoughtful to innocently campy.
The city is
insular, and strangers are viewed with suspicion, although they
are nearly all strangers. A woman on the river walk lost her purse
onto the ice, which must have been difficult to do since the walk
is some three metres from the river, and as the news explained,
a total stranger went to help her when she fell in trying to get
it back. The Good Samaritan was touted in the news and it was
remarked on every channel that he was unknown to her. In the Winnipeg
imagination that was at least as interesting as his action.
Similarly,
a homeless man who'd chosen to camp near the shore rescued a number
of people who threw themselves from the bridge or fell into the
fast moving Red River. This was also marveled at, even while the
Human Rights Museum was built next door on a concrete pad which
sealed underground the many Aboriginal artefacts for which the
Forks is famous. Perhaps it is meant to be a deliberate time capsule,
but in any event the artefacts will stay there until a later generation
wishes to learn about Aboriginal people and their historical presence
in the city.
I lived at
first on Mayfair, where the cheap doctor owner lorded over the
building as though he were an Earl from the medieval period, and
then in Osborne Village in a building shaped and coloured like
a dingy sugar cube. There my neighbour masturbated for the people
in the window opposite and when I called the police about a fight
in the yard they came first to my apartment so that all might
know who was responsible for their presence.
My friend's
mother living off Mountain called the police when two men were
breaking into her home, thinking the police would love to catch
people in the act, only to be told if she didn't like the neighbourhood
she should leave. My owling friend was set upon by three cars
and six policemen in Tuxedo where a neighbour had called about
someone creeping along the riverbank in the night, not aware he
had permission from the mansion next door. At the same moment,
his bird watching friend stood for forty-five minutes over a man
who'd been stabbed in the north end waiting for the police and
ambulance. Some people say there are two cities, divided and circumscribed
by infrastructure and services, although there are many more than
that.
I ventured
into the north end to peruse pawn shops and marveled that they'd
been truthful enough to reject the naming of Westview Park in
favour of the more credible Garbage Hill for the mound that housed
the old landfill. In the far east end I looked for car parts in
much-perused U-pick yards off Springfield Road. In the far flung
reaches of the city, the St Pauls, both east and west, I visited
people and saw how their view of the world did not contain either
the city or the rest of Canada. I sat in opulent homes in Tuxedo
and met their offspring at university where they slyly claimed,
in their poverty-stricken way, that they did not come from wealth.
"I live in a regular three level house," I was told on more than
one occasion.
In the south
of the city I've been lost in the sweeping curves that is the
suburban attempt to make the flatness of the prairie as confusing
as possible for the driver, where without sidewalks teenagers
played video games in basements, fought on porch steps and drowned
in pools.
A major spring
flood gripped the city after my second winter. The flood of 1997
was significant enough to have Chrétien come for a photo op, although
in a typical Winnipeg fashion someone had overloaded his sandbag
and nearly gave him a hernia. I sandbagged a building along the
Assiniboine which would not allow us inside to use the bathroom,
and briefly I worked alongside a couple dressed for the part in
sports clothes and saw them take the pictures which would prove
their worth to their community before they left. I watched as
the city dealt with the emergency and I doubt I was alone when
I wondered that we could build the Brunkild Dike from mud and
old school buses and derelict cars in the time that it took the
water to come from Grand Forks, Dakota, which had drowned and
burned. Grande Point lost a few mansions and we were treated to
the owner's pleas that the city let itself be flooded to save
the twenty or so houses of their affluent neighbourhood. "We were
sacrificed," they told us incredulously, "to save Winnipeg."
When the flood
was over, I sat with a thousand others listening in disbelief
as the city officials debated tearing out the dike they had spent
millions building, believing somehow that the flood could never
come again. We were reminded of Duff Roblin, who pushed for the
floodway despite Winnipeg's overweening optimism. Penny pinching
and short-sighted Winnipeggers had declaimed his reasoning by
claiming that the flood of 1950 was unusual. It will never happen
again. In 1997 few were saying that as the waters poured inexorably
north and the floodway brimmed. Even in 2009 when nearly the same
scene was repeated, the commentary had slowed to a brief squall
in the racist murmur on the Free Press website.
I met people
from outside the city, from Beausejour, Altona, Steinbach and
Morden, who were terrified of the city, and others from Carmen,
Brandon, Ashern, and St. Anne, who loved what it offered. I went
with my owling friend as he baited raccoons for his research,
and watched wildlife biologists oblivious to the screech owl's
discomfort try to encourage us to walk beneath fledglings. I saw
the large offices where the business of the province was decided
upon, and in city hall I watched their dissembling as complacent
councillors lied about policy while they flipped through the rolodex
of their bribes, keeping an accounting of who paid, and more importantly,
who didn't.
I joined marches
against wars, talked with people in tepees outside the legislature
in the middle of winter, and met with the occupy protestors who
took over Memorial Park. I joined Filipino barbeques in Kildonan
Park in the summer and walked with the River Heights people in
Assiniboine Park. I bicycled along the river paths swerving around
people who lived in the only unpoliced wild space, and I found
an accordion in the trash next to a 1930's sewing machine someone
had carefully packed for removal.
I went to
performances by the Contemporary Dancers and the Royal Winnipeg
Ballet, two world class troupes in one city, and saw free plays
by university students which far outshone the offering of the
professional stages. I read of the Masonic underpinnings of the
downtown architecture, and strange interpretations of Shakespeare
in the fake ruins at the Forks in the Aquarian, a free newspaper
which survives by ads from the most questionable of businesses.
I watched a student set up five-foot cones from snow in the park
for four hours until I asked him why and he said he wanted to.
In hidden corners in Chinatown I tasted strange vegetables and
bought my food by pointing since we had no language in common.
At the city's many restaurants I ate ethnic food that was cheap
enough for the Winnipeg pocket and gourmet enough to bring me
back for Ethiopian and Vietnamese, Thai and Indian, Portuguese
and Chinese vegetarian and any of a hundred other combinations
from restaurants which sprung up like ear-shaped Chinese mushrooms
and disappeared almost as quickly.
I bought books
from local authors who could compete on the world stage and went
to readings that were incoherent enough that the audience spent
their time looking through the crowd for someone from the publisher
who'd sponsored their friend. I went from rooftops into abandoned
buildings, found shopping carts ten deep in the river by the perhaps
aptly named Misericordia Hospital, and took photos of hurried
graffiti whose artists had already moved their craft west.
I'd picked
up hitchhikers in Ontario who we soon discovered were friends
of friends, Winnipeg having at the most two degrees of separation.
Aboriginal friends told me they taught their children to beware
of police, and run when they saw them, instincts left over from
the residential schools and Starlight Tours still protecting them.
Others told me how they were held in detention for three days
for looking Métis or pulled over because they were driving while
Indian.
Winnipeg is
the confusing clatter of languages on the bus, the kind driver
who stops with his full load to tell the waiting people in minus
forty that another bus will come soon, as well as the crazies
who lash out for no reason. On the 60 run to the university Art
talked non-stop and had a thousand followers before he retired.
Even now a driver's attempt to be loquacious will make the older
people sigh, remembering that most gregarious of men who used
his eight hour shifts to comment on the weather and people and
restaurants one should try.
In the inner
city I met a man showing a film about underground labour movements
in Argentina, only to have my Argentine friend rejected when he
asked for a copy of the pirated DVD, since it was against some
sub-set of rules the DVD was about breaking.
I spoke with
one of our politicians on the bus when he was going to give a
talk about globalization. He told me how busy he was and how he
had no time to prepare and therefore he needed his bus time. Speaking
speedily and at length, he told me that for forty-five minutes
from the university, telling me how important he was and how many
people depended on him, so that when I left the bus he had mere
time to gather his things before he had to speak.
I met people
so disregarding of the weather that they bragged of the remote
starter on their car and their warm offices even while people
slept on grates wrapped in cardboard. I stood with the people
lining up on a Saturday morning to get into the Sherbrook Inn
bar while they told me how the staff in the Salvation Army store
across the street destroyed what they threw away so that no one
could benefit from their dumpstered goods. I listened to them
moralize about the waste, about the devastated looks of the very
poor who looked through dumpsters for shoes only to find them
slashed in the Salvation Army's attempt to keep their coffers
full, and I agreed. My alcoholics were better than my do-gooder
volunteers.
I saw people
I had known disappear into the twelve tribes cult which sleeps
hundreds in their large houses, their only appearance in town
to sell their organic goods at markets and their shop, or walking
in twos in order to keep an eye on each other, the women long-haired
subdued and the men bearded pride.
I listened
to the clashing noise of a hundred different explanations for
strange religions from people as various as women who'd had their
childhood raped from them by the residential schools and rich
kids from the Mennonite farming communities south of the city.
They called upon gods and afterlives, until their promises and
threats, by their frequency and variety, sounded as hollow as
the empty ground upon which the city stands.
I saw the
truck which lay at the bottom of the hole under Daly Street by
Confusion Corner, and listened to a postal delivery woman at Christmas
enter my house to tell me about her baby that had been born in
my bedroom. I watched her face as she waxed ecstatic while outside
children darted into traffic as a game, the screeching tires and
cursing only silenced when the hit-and-run drivers smashed a car
and then, glancing, sped away.
I walked by
intersections I was told were particularly bad for car crashes,
and looked carefully for how they were different than others,
since all corners in a flat city laid out in a poorly formed grid
are the same, lights and flat and perpendicular roadways and rules.
I stood on
the ice with a few thousand others and watched the fireworks set
off from the bridge above descend into the waiting crowd. Instead
of dismay and fear, people laughed as their children jumped on
the burning packages which had barely missed their heads.
I was in Winnipeg
when the former policeman Daryl Evans reluctantly told how criminals
here are easy to catch because it takes them at least a month
to realize they leave tracks in the snow. "We usually just follow
their tracks to their house or their car," he told an aghast Winnipeg,
which roiled under the blow to their intellectual self-esteem.
Likewise,
the Montreal tourism ad which confronted eager vacationers with
the dread prospect of a Winnipeg landing brought the city pride
out in force. Not the city pride which is our biggest street party
of scantily clad queens and techo-bop, but rather the fear that
anyone might think Winnipeg was not as good as anywhere else.
Even this
winter we have faced such talk, and Winnipeg was predictably outraged
that we would be declared the most racist city in Canada. "What
is your metric?" shouted some, while others resorted to commentary
about Regina and Saskatoon and racial slurs that if they but knew
it proved the claim to be true.
Winnipeg is
all these things and a million more. The water quality hovers
just above a boil water advisory and the best bands in the world
stop at our venues. Mosquitoes haunt every green space in the
city and many of the people here are inadvertently friendly, seemingly
unaware that they should be as cold as the rest of Canada. Even
so, they will never invite you home, that's reserved for the friends
they have had since kindergarten. The only way onto their soft
furniture is to crawl back into the womb and be born here, cry
against the cold and curse the heat, despise and fiercely defend
the city, and look in everyone's eye as they pass. You might know
them.
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