By John K. Samson
It is worth reminding ourselves that we live in small towns, even if those small towns are technically cities. Winnipeg, with its 600,000 static enumerated citizens, certainly qualifies as a city, but it is really thousands of small towns tied together with infrequent transit and decaying streets.
In the late ’90s I lived downtown, near Old Market Square, site of massive gatherings during the 1919 General Strike-the event that still defines so much of the city, in so many ways. In some recent inflight magazine there was a list of the populations of the downtowns of every city in Canada. The numbers were listed in the thousands, except for Winnipeg, which was listed in hundreds. Urban sprawl has created a downtown with a population about the size of your stereotypical small town. And it certainly felt that way-mostly deserted after dark, full of nodding acquaintances, seemingly uneventful. I would go for weeks without leaving the four-block radius of my room. And I mostly liked it. It felt comfortable and correct.
My mother grew up in Killarney, Manitoba, population not very big, a little less than three hours from Winnipeg. She left shortly after her 18th birthday, and has rarely returned. I have been there perhaps a dozen times, often for funerals. It is a beautiful town, with a lake and a Chinese restaurant and old brick houses and a lumberyard that my grandfather owned. A very interesting uncle still lives in Killarney, a good reason to visit once in a while, but other than that there is little reason to make the drive. Still, I think of it often. It is part of me, and I don’t really know anything about it. I have some artifacts: a chair, a table, my great-grandmother’s collected works of Dickens-bound in faded blue, spines cracked, underlined in a shaky hand-but they offer few clues. I could never picture what daily life was like there, and my mother could never really impart anything but seemingly insignificant details.
I was as Wayne Gretzky obsessed as any prairie boy, and I remember once discussing him with my mother, and her saying how strange his number, 99, seemed to her. She told me that when she was a child, there was a sad, possibly insane man who would wander the main street of Killarney yelling “Ninety-nine!” over and over again. She couldn’t explain it. For some reason this became the focus of my understanding of her town. What did he mean? On the rare occasions we would visit I would look for him without telling anybody. Sometimes I would yell “Ninety-nine!” when I was alone.
There was a TB sanitarium up the road from Killarney in the ’50s, where patients were quarantined and sometimes died. This detail always interested me, too. I would daydream about getting TB and being forced to stay in bed all day reading books and looking mournful. People would feel sorry for me. Eventually I would heroically recover. Never mind that TB was mostly eradicated by the time I was born, and the san had been closed for years.
A couple weeks ago I was reading Blood of the Lamb, by Peter de Vries, a really good short novel written in the early ’70s, which a friend had lent me. It is set in the ’50s, and the main character contracts TB and is sent to a sanitarium. When he arrives there he is given a physical. The doctor asks him to say “Ninety-nine” as he listens to his chest with a stethoscope. I had to read the passage over and over just to be sure. Ninety-nine. I wasn’t surprised. I always knew it meant something like that. All the sad man wandering the main drag of Killarney wanted was to be diagnosed. To be told what was wrong with him.
I still don’t understand Killarney, or Winnipeg, or Toronto or Berlin for that matter, and find them difficult to talk about with any certainty, but I know they are pretty much all the same. Small towns. And maybe the details are the only things we can transmit about where we live. Sometimes those details will mean more than we can know.