Compared to big smoky cities like Toronto and Montreal, the industrial activity in Howey Bay was nothing. The wilds of natural beauty were scored, here and there, by wounds of resource extraction – mining and logging, mostly. I cringed at the gaping gashes left behind in the earth, but while the landscape might experience a periodic ruin, the rural folk prospered. They didn’t mind driving by the odd clear-cut or tailings site, if it meant they could survive in the boreal environment they loved.
I admired them for their pluck, if nothing else.
The mine held court as the top employer in the region, renting out houses and dorm rooms to employees. The company built a recreation centre where workers could go bowling and swimming; it also held family carnivals in summer and parties at Christmas, inviting everyone, the wives and children too, and doling out presents by the thousands. The mine owned the town and made it a pleasant enough place to live.
However, it didn’t own the Mennonites. And Howey Bay was chock full of them. Their lands and their mission received funding from Pennsylvania evangels who had heard rumours of the industrial explosions up north and their effects on the local native populations.
You’ve got to love Mennonites, any type at all. These ones were Pennsylvania Dutch, whose ancestors descended on American three hundred years ago. They were followed by others over the centuries, including the Russian refugees who came to Canada in the 1930s, looking for arable land – frazzled and orphaned, gentle and hardworking as ants.
While the more recent Mennonites had all assimilated within a generation or two, the Pennsylvania Dutch still clung to old customs. The women wore black veils and plain dresses, never pants, and the men were not allowed to wear ties (too fancy). Good on them; what they lacked in style they made up for in sincerity and work ethic.
Through the latter half of the 20th century, they kept busy serving the town of Howey Bay, at least in a spiritual sense. I may have encouraged them to some extent, just because the gold miners were too raucous and rowdy for my liking. They smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank too much alcohol. They sold that nasty stuff to the Cree and Ojibway who’d already lived in the region for several thousand years, and usurped their lands and resources, without offering much of anything in return.
The Pennsylvania Dutch went up there and tried in their own way to rectify the situation. It went awry, as salvation often does. The Mennonite mission received funding from Pennsylvania evangels alarmed by rumours of industrial explosions up north and the ensuing effects on local native populations. Airplanes flew full of good-hearted if ignorant Christian conservatives, teaching supplies, Bibles, and food to the northern reserves of Pikangikum, Poplar Hill, Sandy Lake, Pickle Lake. The men gently scolded the First Nations people for drinking too much alcohol, while the women bathed and tended to children whose eyes were glassy with neglect and gasoline fumes (often a cheap and popular way to escape from the bleak reality of reserve life). A cohort of thirty families provided the long-term bulk of the labour for these missions, supplemented by a rotation of single men and women who felt the call to serve for shorter periods.
They actively strove to replace the First Nations culture with that of Eurocentric Christianity, believing their forms of education, nutrition and spiritual friendship to be inherently more worthwhile, honourable and helpful than the intuitive, land-based methods and practices generated by the Cree and Ojibway over several millenia. The well-meaning (questionably, in the end) white folks built a mission and a reception centre, which sadly led to their involvement in operating a number of residential schools on behalf of the government (definitely not my idea – but they posed it as such). They invited the townsfolk to church, and invited even more Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonites to come and “serve”.
While the Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonites were arriving in Howey Bay during the middle of the century, Ellen’s parents were growing up in Eastern Canada. Eventually the 70s found those two young derelicts lounging on the floor of a rank Montreal apartment smoking Moroccan hashish in their stained bellbottoms. Keanan was conceived accidentally in one of these apartments during one such bender, while the 17-year-old mother was on a long and convoluted acid trip. More kids bounced along accidentally, like wayward rubber balls.
Georgie and Marisol began to sober up, slowly, and realized the need to figure out how they’d go about making their way in life with all these mouths to feed. His family was in the mining business; he heard about gold way up in northern Ontario. They made their way to Howey Bay in an old Dodge Caravan, just in time for Ellen to be born.
Of course, it was actually regular old white people like Georgie and Marisol who most needed the grace and compassion of the gentle Mennonite culture. They took to Eurocentric Christianity like ducks to water. It gave them a certain high that they’d both been craving all along, and a great deal of emotional security to boot.
Most Mennonites have a weird and blessed way of keeping apart, and they always retained this habit in Howey Bay. They did not work in the mines or municipality positions. Some of them were builders, others pilots; however they made a living, it was within their own little Mennonite cell. Many of the men hunted moose, deer, and grouse in the bush. The women stayed home to cook and care for children unless they were single, in which case they went up to teach at one of the residential schools until they did get married and have children.
But they were not invisible. The women with their modest dresses and black head coverings had become a common sight. “Those Mennonites,” people called them. They shopped in local shops, borrowed books from the public library. Some couples ran regular businesses. Marjean’s widower started a donut shop, even; the best donut shop in town. Still – they stayed apart and kept their heads down, working, never indulging, never cutting loose, never drowning under the perpetual tsunami of gossip, addiction, and indolence.
The mission itself, right on the north shores of Howey Bay, received truckloads of donations from the USA. Many of the Mennonite families received rations from these donations, so they didn’t need to buy much of their food at the local grocery stores. Even though they were a strict, palpable presence in the town, they had a way of making themselves unobtrusive.
Unless you knew them.