Waking Nanabijou. Jim Poling, Sr.
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plan. It pinned Ray against a wall, mangling his left arm. The doctors put it back together the best they could but said the nerves were dead forever and suggested amputation because that would allow him to apply for a disability pension. He refused to give up the arm for a pension and began working with it, exercising and lifting weights. It recovered. He always carried a rubber ball in his left hand, which he squeezed to build strength in his fingers. Later he got seriously into fly-fishing, using the rod left-handed to work the injured arm.
It is not known if Ray Poling knew Veronica’s secret when they married on November 30, 1940. Ray’s eldest brother Bob said no one in the family knew, and his brother never mentioned it to him. The priest who married them did know because he had an important role in the secret.
There was little money coming in while he struggled to gain full use of the arm. Both the Polings and the LaFrances helped out, and many of the groceries were put on credit at Wilmott and Siddall, the neighbourhood grocery store across the street from Port Arthur Tech. Never once did Ron Wilmott or anyone else at the store push for payment. For years after, the Poling families refused to consider buying groceries anywhere else. Eaton’s downtown location had a grocery section and prices were cheaper, but Ray ordered that all groceries be bought from Wilmott no matter how much the bigger stores cut prices.
Ray got work as a pitman doing minor maintenance for the city transit system. He worked on the street railway cars, then the electric buses. He later got a job selling life insurance, which suited him perfectly. He was personable, an impeccable dresser, and had an interest in people, and did well at it.
The early years of marriage also brought another misfortune. A boy, named Richard, died at birth, and there was some concern that other children would not be possible. A couple years later, in February 1943, Ray, still an American citizen, walked beaming into St. Joseph’s Hospital and planted a Stars and Stripes at the bedside where Veronica was showing off their first child — me. The flag fulfilled his belief that a child born under the U.S. flag could claim American citizenship. That was nice, but he forgot to register me the with the U.S. government, an omission that no doubt saved me from having to dress in combat gear and wade through the rice paddies of Vietnam some twenty years later.
Isidore and Louise LaFrance, originally denied children by fate, gave thanks for a grandchild who was joined by Barbara Ann in 1947 and Mary Jane in 1953.
4 — McVICAR CREEK
Water was life in Port Arthur. It floated the long ships that carried off western grain; it made the shipyards ring with activity and supplied liquid for the chemistry that turned logs to pulp and then paper at the mills crouched along the waterfront in spaces where the grain elevators did not sit. It nourished life with the jobs it provided and soothed the spirit with its beauty. Every path led to water. Every piece of water led to a larger piece of water that eventually found its way to the biggest piece of freshwater of them all, Lake Superior, the Big Lake. The Current and Mclntyre Rivers, McVicar Creek. In the lowlands of Port Arthur’s flat-chested and homely twin, Fort William, the Neebing River and the Kaministiquia, which divided into the McKellar and Mission Rivers, all paid homage by ending their journey at the Big Lake.
Water was central in many local legends. The Three Sisters, or Welcome Islands, off the Port Arthur waterfront, are said to be three Ojibwe sisters turned to stone and cast into the water after they killed their younger sister out of jealousy.
West of the Big Lake at Kakabeka Falls, some say that on certain days you can see the figure of Green Mantle, an Ojibwe maiden, in the mists of the falls of the Kaministiquia. Legend tells of the young maiden misleading a war party of Sioux enemies to their deaths over the stupendous falls, sacrificing herself but saving her village.
Water also was central to the life of the Polings, much to Veronica’s chagrin. She hated the water and I learned this early. My first memory of her is from Loon Lake, the popular cottage lake just east of Thunder Bay. I was an infant on my very first excursion into the northern Ontario wilds. I remember the water gurgling a mild protest against the push of the paddle. The canoe whispered a calming lullaby to the lake, a fair-weather friend that could turn as tempestuous as it was now tranquil.
Far in the distance, a magnificent black steam locomotive boasted its size and superiority over everything along its moving landscape. Not the boldest of birds, not even the cocky jays, dared to call while the pounding engine issued shrill screams that pierced the chilly air then floated into the distance like wide wet vowels. These were the urgent calls of a passenger train at full throttle, rocking and clicking and clacking, hell-bent to keep time with the fine Hamilton railwayman’s watch held in the flat of the engineer’s broad hand. The whistle calls intensified as the train thundered past Loon Lake, only to be swallowed by the advancing dusk as it roared west toward Port Arthur at the head of the Big Lake. There would be no stop at the brick-red Loon Lake station today because it was too late in the year. Summer was almost a memory and three seasons must change before the shrieking steam engine decelerated to chuffs and puffed and panted to a stop beside the lake, disgorging cottagers and their kids and men wearing wide-brimmed fedoras and carrying tubular fly-fishing rod cases. The lake returned to the bush for another year, except perhaps for the solitary trapper or rock hound and two adults and a baby making for the far shore in a nasty little thirteen-foot cedar strip and canvas canoe known as the Undertaker.
The passing of the train was momentous, though not because of its failure to stop or because its fading whistle accentuated the isolation. It was because Veronica, in spite of her terror of water, removed one hand from its death grip on the gunwale for a second or maybe two, to perform a perfunctory half-wave before regripping the varnished wood. The wave was more from habit than bravery because Veronica grew up in a railroader’s home and railroad folks wave at every passing train. Not waving on this night would be a special breach of railway etiquette because the tall man in the pinstripe overalls pushing the locomotive throttle with one hand and checking the precise Hamilton watch in the other was Isidore LaFrance, running flat out on the home run into the Port Arthur roundhouse. A lifetime of waving at trains, especially one commanded by your dad, could not be overcome by the numbing fear of riding in a deathtrap canoe carrying the man you love in the stern and your first-born on the cedar strip floor beside the box of groceries.
Veronica loathed the water and all forms of water transport, unreasonably so in those early days. The rationale for her fear and loathing would come later, after years of living in a family obsessed with crossing water in things that would float, or often only half float.
Why we were in that canoe on that lake in the autumn of 1944, I cannot say. Nor should I be expected to say considering I had entered the world only eighteen months previous and was just then experiencing the first sights and sounds to be committed to memory. Perhaps my father was without work, or perhaps it was one of those last precious holidays given to people before they shipped out to the killing grounds in Europe and the Pacific. Others had gone already. Ray’s younger brother Jack was in a British hospital after riding the tail of a flaming bomber into a field somewhere in Wales. Terri, one of Ray’s three sisters, was destined for the WACs and two future brothers-in-law, Gus Hungle and Sandy Brown, were at sea or about to be.
Already the Polings had one posthumous war hero, whose life was snuffed out by a Nazi U-boat ten days before my birth. Capt. Clark Poling, a thirty-year-old U.S. Army chaplain and a distant cousin, was one of the famous Four Chaplains aboard the troop ship USAT Dorchester sunk en route to Europe. The Dorchester was a down-at-the-keels coastal liner that had sailed in luxury before being pressed into war service to ferry troops across the Atlantic. It carried 902 persons as it steamed through the icy blackness of the patch of Atlantic known as Torpedo Junction, 250 kilometres off Greenland just after midnight on February 3, 1943. Most of the troops were sleeping when the torpedoes hit, killing many instantly and leaving the others scrambling to reach the decks for life jackets. There were not enough for everyone, so Clark Poling and three fellow chaplains removed theirs and gave them to soldiers beside them. As the Dorchester tilted and prepared for its horrible slide to the bottom, the four chaplains linked arms at the deck rail and prayed, sang, and offered