Ramón 70

Juoppo

My paternal grandfather was a Jack-of-all-trades.  He was also an alcoholic.  It wasn't uncommon among Scandinavians one hundred years ago.  The darkness and the cold can lead one in that general direction and my grandfather took the reins with gusto.  I once asked my father where his father had come from.  I was quite young at the time and at that age when one learns about the circle of one's family.  My father replied succinctly and without humour, "from the bottom of a wine barrel."  That ended the genealogical discussion for some time.

Rooting around in some of the steamer trunks in the barn when I was a kid, I would find all kinds of treasures.  A gold watch chain, photos of people in coffins, and a lot of useless documents.  One day I stumbled upon a handful of licenses to operate motion picture projectors.  Some with photos, some without.  They dated from about 1910 into the early 1920s.  There was my grandfather, illuminated by holes in the barnboard, staring back at me sternly across the decades.

I learned that aside from manning a projector, he had worked in a mine, was a sign painter, and as well, a photographer.  His father, my great great grandfather, was of all things a ringmaster in some forgotten European caravan of players.  Beyond that, the trail grows cold.

Later, when I was older, my father would tell me stories.  He must have been told these stories by his mother because I knew that Hugo had died when my father was only five years of age.  One famous one had to do with a cheque he had received for the painting of a sign.  The owner of the shop, knowing Hugo as he did, tried his best to redirect the funds (from the purchase of drink to the family proper) by putting my grandmother's name on the cheque.  Being handed the cheque and reading the name, Hugo flew into a rage and tore the sign down with his bare hands and stomped on it.  He would not be denied.

A violent drunk, he would with a sort of superhuman strength rip the cast iron wood stove in the kitchen from its moorings and deposit it out the door.  He apparently did this on more than one ocassion.

And yet there must have beat within him a heart with some sort of feeling.  The projectors in the days of silent film were lit by arc lamps, literally the light from an electric current jumping between two nodes.  And the film was made of nitrate, highly flammable.  Extreme care and constant attention had to be taken to run them.

There is ghost town up north, it is in fact even less than a ghost town now.  Not much remains except a few scattered graves and an open pit.  It was an iron ore town, and home to the Moose Mountain Mine.  The town attached to the mine was called Sellwood.  It was pretty much abandoned by the early 1920s when the profitable body of the ore was mined out.  Dilapitated by the 1940s, the remaining structures were razed in the 1950s.  The mine was aptly named by the American surveyor who was invited up to square the place off.  On his first day in the bush he was chased by two different bulls and a cow with two of her calves.  He was forced to escape up trees more than once.  Three encounters with moose on the same day convinced the fellow to christen the place correctly.  Hugo was there in its heyday, and he was there as a miner.  He was also there as a photographer.

 

Some forty of his images survive on paper in a postcard size format.  The negatives, lost to time.  The camera as well, is unknown.  The people in the photos are all anonymous.  From the large hats the women wear to the moustaches in the Kaiser style, one can guess these are pre-war images.  Of all of them, of men posing to box, of burly men swimming in the Vermilion River, of the children, the families, one is my favourite.

Here clearly, my grandfather has redeemed himself to me with all the sensitivity of an artist.  In a perfect balance of light and shadow he has captured this pair, with utter simplicity, and in a kind of humble acknowledgement to being human.  I love her hand on his shoulder and love too his arm resting on his hip, his hand drawing our gaze to his sidearm - an Iver Johnson revolver - choice weapon of anarchists and assassins at the turn of the century.  In this case I am sure it is employed as protection from forest creatures.  And the backdrop?  This is their land.  They're clearing the forest.

The story goes that years later, after Sellwood and the Moose Mountain Mine, Hugo had a favourite bootlegger that he would always call upon.  According to my father, one day he had a hankering for a bottle of bunk hootch and bought from the fellow.  Apparently it was a fresh batch and quite potent.  He drank it down and it poisoned him.  Hugo stumbled and fell into a ditch and died.  It was there, sometime later, that my grandmother found him.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow