Selected Articles From PAX Quarterly Magazine

     A Family Pilgrimage*

     A few years ago, while I was trying to explain my work to a friend of a friend, I was offered some unusual advice.  Calling me an "ancestral scapegoat," he encouraged me to continue the visual history project I was struggling to manifest.  He warned that my relatives might not always welcome the stories I would track and seek to share but that I must persist as the one of my generation who was driven to know the truth and willing to tell the tale.  He urged me to nevertheless continue the search for my creative and spiritual homeland.

     The yearning for a genuine and profound experience led me to formulate a pilgrimage - neither religious nor secular, but personally sacred and tied to a familial landscape I barely knew.  By undertaking a quest and vowing to complete it, I am participating in a universal tradition and practice: to seek and experience the presence of God while separating from the everyday.  

     "The only way out is through," according to Robert Frost.  Decide and the doing gets done, so I began to plan a road trip to what is essentially the middle of nowhere, drawn by a spiritual magnetism to the remarkable geographical landscape of Lake Manitoba.  In its centre is an intersection between two realms, a liminality called Manitoobaa in Ojibwa - Straits of Manitou, the Great Spirit - and known by the pounding of waves and pebbles on its limestone shores, like a spirit pounding a drum.

Cayer Beach (internet-anonymous, 2011)

     My mother was born in the vicinity and a few of her cousins who still live in the region join me on the gravel road journey from Dauphin and Ste. Rose du Lac to Cayer Beach on Lake Manitoba.  It is still several hours before summer solstice and within this liminal zone of time, place, and intention, we discuss the spiritual business of the family - from replacing the fallen gravestones of great-grandparents and finding a way to repair the church roof, to assorted graveside stories of kith and kin.  For a short while the impediments of distance are suspended and the improbable is imagined.  Here, in the smallest of communities and in the most remote of provinces, I find a tangible connection to my ancestors and their stories in the company of the family members who want to know.

     We turn away from the edge of the beautiful lake and the church our grandfather built and named St. Jean de Brébeuf.  We drive back toward the world of everyday, on the other side of an invisible threshold - but different.  We convene and celebrate over a late lunch at the Chicken Chef in Ste. Rose.  I commemorate these family rituals by vowing to return as I have done in four previous encounters with this meaningful place were every exploration reveals inner meaning.  Perhaps I will return again for the longest day of the year in June, or come back in August when it is good for camping and swimming, or perhaps visit in January because winter is my favourite Manitoba season and this is a special place in the cold.  Having a destination and making a vow to reach it fulfill the longing for a meaningful journey, a pilgrimage.

No. 1173 - 20 June 2013 - 13:42:52

*  PAX: No.19 St. James' Day © 2013

Pilgrimage - Part two

No. 9067 - 28 Jun 2012 - 14:59:13

In the copse up ahead is the house in which my mother spent a dozen years of her childhood. I visited it with her 18 years ago and even though it had already been abandoned to the elements we were able to enter and go up the stairs to the little room she used to share with her two sisters. Unfortunately the photographs I took inside the house did not turn out and I must rely on my memory to recreate the place that nurtured my mother's shared remembrances of a
depression-era upbringing.

The homestead was built on another's land, a tenancy farm, after her family lost their land in Cayer due to the 1929 stock market crash. It was situated a few miles north of Gilbert Plains, a small town on Highway 5, north of Riding Mountain National Park and west of Dauphin in Manitoba. The relocation precipitated their eventual departure from the prairies and permanent move west to British Columbia 13 years later, at the end of World War II.

Nos. 9012, 8989, 9000, 9032, 9002, 8992, 9014, 9020 - 28 Jun 2012

A thicket of poplar trees has grown tightly around the little house my grandfather built for my grandmother - out of sight as if a Sleeping Beauty. I could not see it when I first drove by and only spied part of its fallen roof after I turned the car around. With some difficulty I breached the barrier of little trees to discover the roof had collapsed through the second floor and through the first where once stood the parlour and all is sinking into the cellar.
A tree grows through the front porch.

Nos. 9041, 9037, 9024, 9025 - 28 June 2012

No doubt my grandparents would be puzzled and fairly amused at my sentimental feelings for this pile of rotting timber. It is my understanding that, once the decision to leave was made, they left and never looked back. And yet, as a second generation survivor of the Great Depression, I feel as though I too know that house from hearing my mother speak of it often and lovingly
when I was young.

Old farms die like this on the prairie - slowly and with plenty of melancholy.

Family Plot

No. 2028 - 29 May 2011 - 10:48:49 * No. 2037 - 29 May 2011 - 10:58:58

No. 2057 - 29 May 2011 - 11:10:13

No. 2055 - 29 May 2011 - 11:09:36 * No. 2066 - 29 May 2011 - 11:12:19

I have been to this Catholic cemetery, in St. François-Xavier (turn off the Trans Canada Highway west of Winnipeg at the statue of the White Horse), three times in the last twenty years because this is where my grandmother was born and she and her nine siblings were baptised in the church pictured above. I spent three days in the Manitoba Archives recently, searching through Henderson's Directories on micro-fiche for any mention of the great grandparents who came to settle in Manitoba from Québec after 1875 and found evidence for Narcisse Cayer II and Marie Perras having lived in the parish before they died. Upon returning to the cemetery this year it took only five minutes to locate these people, my great great grandparents,
who came from LaPrairie, Québec.

Happily and unexpectedly I was also given access to an ancestor chart which lays out 400-500 plus years of my maternal grandmother's Quebec and French ancestry. Additionally, I have discovered, through further research, that the very Marie Perras buried here represents the family's direct line back to Charlemagne and the merovingiens. A large percentage of French people can trace a similar link and it is exhilarating to connect to history, in such a familal way, with names and dates. My field of interest is in the migration of human populations and rather broader than the study of my personal genealogy but smaller, independent and community based stories often reflect the larger movements just as a tree in the forest appears to be
a fractal of the entire forest.

The cemetery is showing its age and the current state of flood affairs in the province of Manitoba. The sinking tombstone, in the bottom left corner above, belongs to Father Kavanagh, the half-blind, Irish priest who baptised my grandmother and her many siblings and
whose messy French longhand is a struggle and satisfaction for me to read and translate.
I was happy to find him resting next to my
great great grandparents.

St. Jean de Brébeuf Church and Churchyard in Cayer Manitoba

Narcisse Cayer was my maternal great-grandfather. He came from Sherbrooke, Québec in 1880, to Manitoba where he worked for the Hudson's Bay Company driving Red River carts.
He met and married my great-grandmother, Marie-Anne Camyré, formerly of Montréal, in St. Vital before relocating to Pigeon Lake, west of Winnipeg, where they started a family and ran a general store next to the Assiniboine River.
In 1911, the family of 11 moved, north of Ste. Rose du Lac to the shores of Lake Manitoba, with a few other homesteading families, seeking more land to graze their cattle and pursue entrepreneurship
in the new community where they opened and ran the post office.
Their legacy resides in a name, a place and a postal code -
Cayer, Manitoba R0L 0K0.