Oh Lord, What Am I Doing

The ticket was bought and paid for, and I still told them no.

It came all of a sudden. The beginning of March, 1966, and a telegram arrives to say that ten tickets to Canada had been paid for us — one for every soul in the family, my mom and dad and the eight of us kids. Just like that. Ten seats bought and settled, and the whole thing set in motion before I had any say in it at all. And the only thing I could think when I heard it was, Oh, no. What am I going to do now?

When my mother and father set their minds on going back to Canada, they booked my seat right along with theirs, and I did not want it. I went to my grandmother first and I told her plain: “I’m not going.” Never mind that the ticket was already paid. Tickets paid or not, I was staying. But there is no arguing with a whole family that has made up its mind, and my mom and dad put so much pressure on me to come along that in the end there was nothing for it. I went. I was twenty years old. And the worst of it was that I had a girl in Paraguay, and going meant leaving her behind. I was not the least bit excited about any of it — I was very depressed, very sad. I promised her I would come back one day, though a man promises a lot of things in this life and means every one of them at the time he says it. For a long while after, I figured that game was over and done with, and I do not think she expected to see me again any more than I expected to go back.

You would have to know where I sat in that family to understand why I dug my heels in the way I did. I was the biggest earner of the lot. I had a good job, I made the most money of anybody, and my mom and dad really depended on me for it. Every dollar I brought in I handed to them. All of it, to Mom and Dad. And I kept right on giving it to them after we got to Canada too, every dollar of it, until I was twenty-three. I never grumbled about it once. Why would I? My clothes were washed for me every day. The food was always on the table. I had nothing in this whole world to complain about. So when the talk first turned to pulling up and moving to a country on the other side of the earth, I could not make sense of it. Why would I want to move? When a man has it that good at home, it doesn’t make a bit of sense. I still can’t understand people who would.

The truth of it is my parents had wanted to go back to Canada for a long time, and never once had the money for it. There was a whole stream of people doing what we were about to do — from the time I was a boy there had been families leaving the Chaco colonies and heading back north, hundreds of them out of Menno and the colonies around it, driven out by the hard living and pulled up by whatever a man could make in Canada. We were only one family in a long line of them. What made it possible for us in the end was other people. My dad had a cousin up in Clearbrook, Henry, and a friend of ours took our whole situation in hand. He went to a man named Herman Jesse, who ran a big berry farm with an accommodation house standing right on it, and he got the lot of us taken on as pickers. Nine berry pickers signed on before we ever left. That was no small thing, because Clearbrook and the country around it was built on the small fruit, the raspberries and the strawberries, and the people who’d come out from the Prairies to settle that valley had made their living that way for years. A family with that many pickers in it was worth bringing over.

But the work waiting for us at the far end did not pay for getting there. For the fare itself, our friend — Mr. Enns — went to the MCC and borrowed the whole of it. Every cent. Four thousand and ninety dollars. I have never once forgotten that figure, four thousand and ninety, and I’ll tell you it was a tremendous amount of money in those days. We were going to Canada on borrowed money, owing it to our own people, and that debt rode along with us the whole way. That was an old thing among our people, the borrowing and the working-off — it went clear back to the ones who first came over from Russia on credit and spent years paying down what they owed for the passage, a thing they carried like a weight and did not speak of with much pleasure. We were carrying on a debt our people had been carrying one way or another for forty years.

Getting out of the Chaco was a journey before the real journey ever began. There was no quick way out of where we lived. There was a road by then, the big one they had cut through the Chaco — but it was dirt the whole way, and in the wet it turned to a swamp that would swallow a truck to the axle. A cousin ran me over on his motorbike first, so that I could say my goodbye to my girl, and that goodbye was a terrible thing — one of the hardest I ever stood through. Then the bus came for us at four in the afternoon, and we travelled up through the night, right up until one o’clock in the morning, and then we came to the ferry. And there we stopped. There was no bridge to take us across — there would not be one near the city for years yet — so a man crossed that water by boat or he did not cross it at all. We had to wait there until the morning before the ferry would carry us over the river. It was a big river, that one — like the Fraser is here, that wide. So we sat through the dark by the water, the whole family and everything we were taking, waiting for the light so a boat would move us across.

From there we went on into the main city, into Asunción. I had never once laid eyes on it. There was only the one real city in the whole country, and I had grown up clear out in the colony and never seen it — and here it was, the capital, near three hundred thousand people in it, with paved streets and motor cars and lights and the river port where everything in the country came and went. A Low German farm boy set down in the middle of all that. We stayed there several days. We had to wait until the Sunday, because my brother’s and my sister’s passports still had to be made up, and that work could only be done in the city. So we waited in Asunción until the papers were in hand.

My own papers, at least, were never any trouble. I was born in 1945 and my sister the year after, in 1946, and the two of us came into Canada as Canadians already, on Canadian passports. That was because both my mother and my father were Canadian-born themselves — my dad up in Saskatoon, my mother from south of Steinbach — and they had only gone down to Paraguay as children. My mother was two years old when her people moved south. My father was twelve. So the citizenship came down through them to the two of us, and it was settled by the registration of our births long before any of this.

Then on the Sunday it was the long way north. We left Asunción on the Sunday evening at seven o’clock and flew into Rio de Janeiro — an hour and a half, that flight is. At Rio we left again at ten, and from there we flew all night. Ten hours in the dark. We landed at eight o’clock in the morning in New York. Then on to Toronto. Around four in the afternoon we left Toronto, and at seven o’clock that evening we landed in Vancouver, clear across the whole of the country. Flying, in those days, was a thing most people never did even once in their lives — it was for the well-to-do, people who got dressed in their good clothes to do it, and here was a borrowed-money family from the Chaco strung out across the sky for the better part of a day and a night. The sixteenth of May, nineteen sixty-six. That was the day we came. And we ended up out on a farm.

I can still lay that whole journey out in order, sixty years gone — the night drive, the ferry, the city, the Sunday, every flight and the hour it left. A man remembers a thing like that. It was the day I left the only place I had ever known.

We did not come down into a town at all, not at first. Where they took us was a big berry farm out at Bradner — Herman Jesse’s place — because picking berries was the work we had been brought over to do, and there was a farmhouse on it big enough to hold all nine of us. But that whole corner of the valley was thick with our own kind of people. Clearbrook, the town my dad’s cousin lived in, was four thousand souls in those days and most of them Mennonite, families that had come out from the Prairies the same as ours had come up from Paraguay, our language on the streets and in the stores. A man could land in that valley off an airplane from the other side of the world and still hear his mother tongue the minute he stepped down. That was a mercy I did not think much about at the time, but it was a mercy all the same.

We picked berries that whole first summer. Right through to the end of August we picked, until the berries were finished and gone, and there was at last something to set against the loan we owed. They called Abbotsford the raspberry capital of the country, and it was the families like ours that brought the crop in — it was Mennonite hands on those canes, year after year, the whole picking done by our own people. But I will not pretend that summer was anything but awful. All nine of us slept in the farmhouse on the place, and we had come into it knowing not one single soul, not a word of English among us, total strangers in a country that did not know us either. That is a hard thing — to go into a foreign country when you cannot speak the language of it. It is a time I would just as soon forget forever.

That fall, once the berries were done, my folks bought a house in Clearbrook, and we came in off the farm at last.

And it took a long time to have any friends at all. That was the language, mostly — when you can’t speak to a person, you can’t get near him, and it holds you off from people for years. The first company we had was two other families that had come up from Paraguay same as we had. They had teenagers too, near our own ages, and so we got together with them, the few of us that could understand one another. That was the beginning of it. The church came later — later on we found our people that way too — but at the first it was just those two families and us, a little island of the old language in a country full of a language we didn’t have.

When the season was over, my parents bought a house in Clearbrook. An old place. I think we paid nine thousand dollars for it, somewhere around there. It wasn’t much of a house, but it was ours, and it was in Canada.

My own work after the berries was whatever I could lay my hands on. I helped a farmer frame a big chicken barn. And after that I went and worked for a chicken farmer named Hall, hauling chicken manure — the whole month of November, nineteen sixty-six, every single day of it. Here is what the work was. I would load the whole of the manure into a wheelbarrow and run it up onto an elevator, and the elevator carried it up into a big truck, and then I would drive the truck out to a field and dump it, and then come back and start the whole thing over. I just about killed myself at it, all day long. And the man I did it for knew nothing in this world but work, work, work. At the end of a day where I had given it every last thing I had in me, he would look it over and say, “You should have done more.” Every time. A whole month of that, shovelling and hauling for a boss who would not have been pleased if you’d worked yourself clean into the ground. Some welcome to a new country. It was not my favourite month.

Construction was where I finally landed, and where I stayed for good. A friend of ours in Vancouver had found a contractor — a framing man who was looking for two helpers. So my brother Ben and I took it. We started on the seventh of December, nineteen sixty-six, in Vancouver. We could not have walked into it at a better time, though I did not know it then. The whole of the Lower Mainland was throwing up houses as fast as men could frame them, cheap little wood-frame places filling up the suburbs, and a crew could always use another pair of hands.

And I will never forget that first day. Half snow and half rain, the whole day long, the both of them coming down at once. The mud was over my ankles. I stood out there in the cold and the wet and the muck, soaked through, on the first day of work in my new country, and I said to myself, Oh Lord, what am I doing? What is this? I swore right then and there that I would never make a career of it. Not this. Never this.

But a man does what he has to. When you come to this country and you cannot speak the language, you take what you can get — and you are glad there is anything at all for you to take. So the next morning I got up and I went back. And the morning after that, the same. I went back into the snow and the rain and the mud, day after day, and I stayed in that trade — the one I swore I’d never do.

After about a year, that first contractor quit the framing altogether. So Ben and I went to a cousin of his, John Jensen, who was looking for two carpenters. He took us both on, and he was a very nice boss too. A good man to work for, after Hall.

And that was the pattern of those first years — I bounced from one boss to the next, and it seemed like every good one had a bad one waiting on the other side of him. One of the bad ones was a man in Abbotsford named Henry Friesen, and he was another Hall. Another one who was never satisfied. I gave it a little better than a month and that was already too long. It seemed like I couldn’t work hard enough for him. At the end of a day he’d stand and look it over and figure we could have done way more — and that was BS, plain BS, because we worked our butt off, every day of it. So that was one more boss cut from that same cloth. I quit.

But there was the other kind too. My father-in-law was working for a couple of fellows in Abbotsford, and they needed a carpenter real bad. So they asked would I come, and I went. And those men treated me special. Very special. Because I was an experienced carpenter by then, and they knew it — when I walked onto a job they didn’t have to tell me a single thing. That is a good feeling for a man, to be wanted on a job for what he can already do. After a boss like Henry Friesen it was like coming in out of the cold. A good one and a bad one, back and forth, and every one of them teaching me a little more of the trade whether I wanted the lesson or not.

He didn’t have many years left in him, my father-in-law. He died in 1972, a heart attack, and he was still a young man when it took him. He was one of the good ones to me right to the end, the man who treated me like a king, and then he was gone.

I didn’t know where any of it was headed yet, standing in the mud that first December. All I knew was that I had never wanted to come, and that I had left the best of what I had behind me in Paraguay.

And I will tell it the way it was, because there is no sense dressing it up. I was bitter. For a number of years I was bitter, and I did not accept being here. Those first two years made me almost angry. I had been hauled across the world out of a life I loved into the cold and the mud and a language I could not speak, and somewhere down in me I could not forgive it. I went where my body had to go and did the work that had to be done, but the rest of me stayed back in the Chaco for a long, long time.

It took years for that to turn. But it turned. I am thankful now. Deeply thankful that my mom and dad made me come. If a man walked up to me today and offered me a million dollars to move back to Paraguay, just for the moving, I wouldn’t do it. There is absolutely nothing there for me anymore. My whole family is here. Every one of them. Everybody’s here. That is what changed everything. Whatever I lost in coming, I gained the people who matter to me, and you do not trade that back for any amount of money on this earth.

And yet. I will tell you the other half of it, the half that never did go away. Paraguay is still my homeland. I have been back twice, and both times the minute I stepped off that plane and the sun of Paraguay came down on me, I felt I was home. Home, in my home country, back where I belonged. I don’t think a man ever loses that, no matter how long he lives somewhere else. However long you live in a place, you can still be a foreigner in it. That is how I feel. I can feel it in me. I have made my whole life in this country and I am grateful for it, and still I am a foreigner here, and I expect I always will be.

You see it plainest in the small things. When I go and sit with the coffee guys, those fellows are all men who were born here. They grew up here. And a lot of the time I just sit and listen while they talk, because they go on about the things you talk about when you all came up in the same place — the boyhood, the old days, the things that happened around here when they were young. I don’t have any of that. I haven’t got those stories to put in. So I sit there, and I listen, and I enjoy them, but I don’t have the things to talk about that they have.

And it comes at you in ways you don’t expect. I remember crossing over on a trip once, and the customs man started right in on me in German — asking me in German where I was going, where I lived. I understood him well enough and answered him back the way you would: “Yes, sir.” And he was surprised at that. I asked him how he came to speak German, and he told me he’d been a student in Germany four years himself. That was where he’d got it. Then a little further along there was another one of them, a different customs man, and he went at me with all kinds of questions too. Finally I said to him, “Are you familiar with German Mennonites?”

And he says, “Yes — because I am one. My parents are fully German Mennonites.”

Well, there you go. And that is just the thing about it: the minute they hear you’re a foreigner, they question you right away. That is what happens. I have crossed a lot of borders in my life and I know the look of it by now.

The strange part is that my own father was the very opposite of me, and over the same kind of distance. He had been thirty-nine years in Paraguay. He’d gone down there as a boy of twelve and built the whole middle of his life in that country. And when he stepped off the airplane in Toronto, the first thing he said was, “Thank God I’m back home.” Home. After thirty-nine years away from it, Canada was still home to him, and he was glad in his bones to be back. And here I was, his son, who had only ever lived in Paraguay, stepping onto that same soil feeling like I’d been carried off to the ends of the earth. The same trip, the same airport, the two of us pointed exactly opposite. He was a Canadian who’d spent a long time away. I was a Paraguay boy who’d been brought to a country that was supposed to be mine.

There is one place that gives it back to me a little. Mexico. I only have to go to Mexico and I almost feel home already, because the whole of it is so much like what I knew. The environment, the people, the language, the warmth of it — even the temperature feels like Paraguay to me. I would have no trouble at all living down there. Honestly, I would love it. Some part of me is still looking for that sun the whole time, and Mexico gives me a taste of it.