An Antidote to Our Ceaseless Whining

BIG CREEK – A mother-daughter telephone conversation: The daughter grew up in the Lower Mainland of B.C. The mother, before she came to the Big Smoke, was a Chilcotin girl.

“Hi mum. We’ve got a crisis today.”

“What kind of crisis?”

“We can’t have a bath, we can’t wash the dishes, we can’t even make coffee.”

“How come?”

“The District is flushing the mains this morning. We’ve got no water.”

“What are you talking about, no water?”

“Exactly that. We have no water.”

“What about that thing at the bottom of your garden?”

“You mean the lawn sprinkler? Nope, it’s shut off too.”

“No. I am not talking about the automatic sprinkler system. I am talking about that other thing. You know, it goes gurgle, gurgle, gurgle.”

“You mean Kanaka Creek!”

“That’s RIGHT. You got it. You solved it. I always knew you had a mind there if you could ever free it up for thinking. It’s water that makes that gurgle gurgle gurgle sound.”

“You mean I should go down to the creek and pack water up to the house? You’re kidding.”

“Until Dad got a cold water tap in our house that’s what I did every day when I was young, that’s how I our family got water. The creek had a different name, it was called Riske, but it was build out of the same stuff, water.”

“Oh mum!”

“Okay, bring the kids over so they can go to school clean. While you’re here I’ll educate you some more by telling you what a genuine crisis is like.”

The daughter is lucky that she still has a living link to the pioneer days which are now rushing away from us into the past the way movie cartoons dwindle to zero.

We need a few reminders of those tough, resourceful and uncomplaining pioneers. Such was an obituary written not long ago for the Williams Lake Tribune by Diane French, a former editor and author of the book The Road Runs West.

Dead, at age 88, was Mary Ann Ross, a little woman who always rode a big horse in the Chilcotin Country. She was the daughter of George Turner, allegedly an outlaw, and Louisa, daughter of Chief One Eye. Louisa was nicknamed Sitkum Memaloose, Chinook for Half Dead, because one side of her body was partially paralyzed by a stroke.

What did Mary Ann accomplish? By her early teens she could outride, outrope and outshoot most men in Chilcotin. She was fearless. She and an older sister, while still children, once captured and castrated a rogue bull. They were never suspected because people didn’t believe children could do it.

She and her husband, Jim Ross, who died a few years ago, had ranches of their own and worked for many others in Chilcotin, Cariboo and the south. Toward the end of her working life Mary Ann was top cowboy at the big C1 ranch near Alexis Creek.

Until well into her eighties she went hunting meat each year and never failed to get her moose or her deer. She dressed them out herself, packed them out herself, tanned the hides herself and made moccasins, gauntlets and vests, all done with traditional Indian designs.

Is there more? Yes, there is what most people would consider to be considerably more. Mary Ann Ross raised twelve healthy children top be good citizens and watched the arrival of 26 grandchildren and 20 great grandchildren.

Like most people of her type, she never complained in adversity, she never apologized for herself and she never backed away from a challenge. She was of the pioneer breed. She asked nothing of the rest of the world and when nothing was exactly what the rest of the world gave her that suited her.

How is this country or ours going to get along without the pioneers who can stiffen our backbones and demonstrate that hardiness can triumph.

Where can inspiration come for today’s young people when Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, our national radio system, the darling of the chattering classes, brings us nothing but one long ceaseless whine about the environment, about the economy, about new causes of cancer, newly endangered species, oppressed minorities and even oppressed majorities, about every suffering one of us with enough breath for a whine.

“Poor me, poor me, pity poor, poor me.”

Nov/02