Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (7 page)

Seven years old and sitting two weeks in a moving van as we drive across the United States.

Seven years old and standing on the ferry to Victoria, my hair blowing into my eyes, watching the vast ocean, the many islands, my brother standing beside me, the solid presence of Canada all around.

I step on the boat an American. I walk off the boat a Canadian landed immigrant.

It’s funny how I want my memory to work a certain way. I want it to be like those history classes I took in high school, chronological and ordered, completely straightforward. Dates combined with facts create a moment in time. But memory doesn’t work that way. It’s not a connected line; instead it’s a series of images flashing on my consciousness, images that are connected only by a thread of thought. It’s a chain reaction. Tip over one domino and the rest will fall down.

In the middle of June 1975 my family packed up a U-Haul moving van, the biggest on the lot. We also packed up our little car. We put everything we had into these two vehicles (cat, toys, dishes, furniture, bedding, clothes) and left our small house in Stony Point, Virginia, for a two-week adventure through the United States. We were the Beverly Hillbillies. We were cowboys. We were pioneers in our stagecoaches and we were the settlers. My brother was nine. I was seven. I had just played the role of Betsy Ross in my grade one end-of-year school play. I remember some complicated manoeuvre the teacher taught me where, as I pretended to sew a blank piece of white cloth, I would turn my hand slightly and push the American flag up through the cloth. From plain white to red, white and blue. It was my first and last magic trick.

Americans have been coming to Canada for a good long time and for all sorts of reasons. During the Civil War in the 1860s, Americans dodged the draft and many settled in New Brunswick in a place referred to as Skedaddle Ridge. (During World War I it was the opposite, America providing a safe refuge for those Canadians who didn’t want to enlist to fight overseas.) In the late 1950s, U.S. academics started moving to
Canada when Canada was expanding its universities and founding new ones. About 125,000 Americans came to Canada between 1964 and 1977 as draft dodgers of the Vietnam War. Half of them stayed.

Back and forth. The borders touch. It’s one big mass of land. There’s no getting around it.

My father had taken a job at the University of Victoria as an English professor. On our glass coffee table, before we left, he laid out a map of the United States and Canada and my brother and I kneeled down to trace the route we would take: through Pennsylvania, through the Midwest to Chicago, through Iowa and the Badlands and Wyoming or Montana (nobody’s sure any more), through Idaho to Washington state, where we would take the Anacortes ferry to Victoria and touch down (all of us—our toys, the U-Haul, the poor carsick cat) on Canadian soil. My father told us about Victoria. He told us about living on an island. He told us about the Queen and my seven-year-old mind pictured a Disney-style monarch with a Cinderella past—both suffering and noble. He showed us how big Canada was. When he told us about the vastness of Canada, we saw the huge expanse of colours on the map, hardly any of it covered in writing. Somehow I understood that the journey would be a big one, and that the line my
father traced across the country was not really an armspan long but stretched for miles and miles and miles.

At that time I imagined we were going somewhere temptingly exotic, somewhere outside of any experience I had ever had. Having read
Pippi Longstocking
, I wondered if Canadians would walk backwards or, even better, walk on their hands. I was looking for adventure. The fact that the neighbouring kids didn’t know where Canada was made it even more exciting. “We’re moving to Canada,” I would say to the little girl down the street as she stood in her driveway surrounded by chickens. We were leaving grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins in New Jersey (where, at Thanksgiving dinners, we would all congregate, the men, unbuckled, watching football on TV, the women chattering away in the kitchen, the kids running haywire around my grandparents’ home). We were leaving people we loved, my career as Betsy Ross, my ballet class, the fields and woods around our house.

The Vietnam War was over, Watergate was winding down. My parents had friends who had trained their one-year-old to stick out his tongue and blow noisily at Nixon whenever he was on TV.

My parents had done this kind of mass moving before. My father’s Ph.D. is from Berkeley, California (my mother gave birth to my brother and me in a teaching hospital in San Francisco). He then received a Fulbright Scholarship and they shipped off (with two small children) to the U.K. to study in London. Before they had children, my parents taught in Sierra Leone for the Peace Corps. So this kind of relocating was old news for them. They’d packed up their houses and apartments many times to live in other countries, other places. They knew to come prepared: bags of games and toys for each day that we could open in the moving van or car; pop and chips in front of the TV in the motel at night. Start driving at 8 A.M., end at 4 P.M. and, most importantly, always find a motel with a pool. My brother and I were usually separated between the car and the van, each getting to spend time with one parent, each keeping one parent awake (this kept us from bickering with each other). My father taped all our records, and whoever was in the van got to listen to “Jelly on Your Belly” and
The Lone Ranger
over and over.

The van was expansive. My feet didn’t touch the floor. My father was omnipotent. There he was controlling this huge beast. I stuck my hand out the
window and shot things—a tree, a bird, the landscape of cars below us. I waved my hand in the wind, an early version of breakdancing. I sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” because my teenage cousin had taught me it earlier that year as she strummed her guitar.

I remember the Badlands, or at least the photograph of me standing there. I can see the beige short set I was wearing, the scabs on my knees, the dust blowing. I remember the prairie dogs poking out of their holes, arms poised, begging.

The scenery changed. Things became lush (although anything is lush after the dust bowls of the Prairies). The motels were nicer, the pools clean. There was something coming, bright, just around the corner. Anticipation was thick in the air. We were approaching Canada.

We weren’t running from persecution, we weren’t leaving because we had to, we weren’t coming to Canada for good. We would return to the States, we reasoned, in a couple of years. We spoke the same language as Canadians. We had come from a democracy to a democracy. My father had a guaranteed job. He was an academic. I was blonde and blue-eyed. I’d memorized all the states and their capitals. I knew the U.S. presidents. We’d fit right in.

The ferry docked July 1, 1975. If you know Vancouver Island, you’ll know that it was probably raining. My mother had clam chowder at a local pub in Sidney while the customs officers went over our moving van. She remembers that, what she ate. I don’t know what I ate or what I felt like or what I was thinking. I was tired. Two weeks on the road, no matter how many bags of toys you get or swimming pools you dive into, or sodas to drink, potato chips to eat, takes its toll on a seven-year-old. There was a need for home, for stability, for somewhere to put down those bags of toys.

The first house we rented had a balcony attached to my second-floor room. I would stand on the balcony and look down at my brother as he and his new friends would ride in circles on their bikes, trying to make me dizzy. My father played the trumpet and the jazz sounds would echo around the walls.

The summer we arrived, my brother and I on our bikes with a gang of kids from the neighbourhood, we weren’t different. Once I got here, everything around me said that things wouldn’t be different in Canada. I had new bell-bottom jeans like the kid down the street. I had long hair I wore in pigtails just like every other girl I saw. I went from riding bikes with banana seats and streamers in Virginia to riding
bikes with banana seats and streamers in Victoria. Both places started with a V. All was the same.

Then came Mrs. Harrington’s grade two class. Oaklands Elementary School. We were a pretty bright class. At least we liked being there in grade two: no one had dropped out yet and the kids weren’t smoking behind the school during recess. (Not in grade two. Grade four, maybe.) We had a nurturing older teacher. I listened to the class sing “O Canada” and say the Lord’s Prayer every morning. I kept waiting for the national anthem. When did we “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,” the flag I had so trickily sewn in that school play—red, white, blue? I would look around, waiting. What was going on?

And then it dawned on me about a month into school that everyone around me knew things I didn’t know. The provinces. They knew what provinces were. They even knew the capital cities of the provinces and the lakes and the other big bodies of water. Sure, I was superior—there were many more states than their flimsy little province-count, and I knew them all—but I was suddenly not the same as everyone else and suddenly very far behind. And kids notice that kind of thing. They notice when you pronounce words differently. I remember sitting with a
little girl in the school library on one of the first days and everyone laughing at me because I said “orange” differently; I said “R-ange.” I also said “toilit paper” and “maalk.” The little girl was so nervous that day that she threw up all over the library books spread out in front of us. I remember the smell. But no one noticed, because I was the novelty of the day.

Years ago my mother was accused of having an Australian accent. Her New Jersey drawn-out a’s and r’s mellow with the length of time she spends in Victoria. When she goes home to visit her family, she comes back sounding like she never left the States. It takes a week or two to fade. I notice my slight accent (just on certain words) when I’m giving readings. The American twang to my speech seems to fit my writing, seems destined to be part of how I think.

“Yankee,” the kids said on the second day. They must have gone home and told their parents about me. Tensions between Canada and the U.S. were relatively high at that point. Academics like my father were being written up in the newspapers as having taken jobs away from Canadians. The year before we came to Canada, there was an amendment to the immigration act which stated that if there was a qualified Canadian applicant to a post-secondary institution, he or she should be considered before a foreign
applicant. Even with this amendment, there was still a strong fear that the universities would become Americanized. There was also ripe, fetid anger against Americans following the horrible truths about the Vietnam War. After all, the draft dodgers (mostly middle-class, educated, white young men, who assimilated quickly into Canadian culture) had fled here and were working and living in Canada. The facts of Vietnam were coming out.

So we were the “Yanks.”

This, of course, is the history I remember. This is something that has no corresponding photograph I can refer to.

I remember rapidly learning the provinces, trying desperately to catch up to the rest of the class. By Christmas I was cast as Mary in the nativity play we were doing at school. There is a photograph of me, kneeling down in front of the cradle, my head swathed in a veil (a soft white towel, it looks like), wearing a blue dress. There are kids to the left of me, to the right of me, Joseph and the three wise men standing there looking lost, a choir singing. How did I earn the right to be in the centre of all of this? Between September and December had I started to pronounce words correctly? Had I stopped being a Yankee? Did the teachers feel sorry for me? Or
maybe it was just one of those times where the new kid has to do the thing that no one else wants to do.

I had friends. I had best friends. I rushed to school early every morning to play floor hockey. I hung around with the crowd who chased the boys, and I played a big part in getting them to kiss us. I joined a baseball team and did cartwheels out in centre field. In the beginning of grade three I remember Mrs. Harrington died. And that broke my heart. This elderly British woman had taken me in and made me feel as if I had arrived somewhere, as if I were finally home. She never once corrected my accent or made me feel different.

By the end of grade three I was quickly forgetting the States. I forgot everything I had ever learned. My grandparents visited from New Jersey every year, and one year they brought me a Betsy Ross pincushion doll.

“Who’s Betsy Ross?” I asked my mother as I flipped up the skirt to see what you poked pins into.

We never moved away from Victoria, but we travelled quite a few summers to the States—California and Washington, D.C.—for my father’s research for the books he was writing. We went to New Jersey
for Christmas one year and were spoiled rotten by my grandparents because we were suddenly distinct, different from our cousins. Or maybe it was just because we lived so far away and they missed us. We were spoiled with Haddenfield cream doughnuts, a delicacy that, in memory, still causes my mouth to water and makes me remember my grandparents. (A little aside: When visiting my grandparents on my own when I was in university, I froze a Haddenfield cream doughnut and mailed it to my brother, who was living in Vancouver. Just one little doughnut. He said it arrived all mushy, probably stale, but he ate it anyway. He knew the importance of the gesture. He knew that something small like that still carried so much weight.)

My parents became Canadian citizens in 1988 and 1989, and my brother and I followed some years later. My brother was actually registered for the draft in the U.S. from age eighteen to twenty-six. The Selective Service System had tracked him down, just in case. They thanked him when he turned twenty-six and let him go with a letter that said his “registration was an important part of America’s peacetime military preparedness [and] played a part in maintaining peace and protecting the citizens of our Nation and their freedom.”

I asked my father recently if he felt he was Canadian and he immediately answered yes. I wonder about this myself. What would I say if my daughters asked me if I felt Canadian?