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  Dad asked her to marry him, and they became Stanley and Irene Debogorski. In 1953 my parents moved to the Canadian province of Alberta, up in the Peace River country. It’s a beautiful area of the world and actually looks a bit like Poland, farmland interspersed with evergreen forest, with creeks and rivers and lots of wildlife. My grandparents on my father’s side were already there, and my mum and dad set up a little farm across the road from them.

  My mother devoted a lot of attention to me, her little Alex. She tried to teach me to play the piano and sing. If there was a party at Christmas or New Year’s my mum would dress me up and I would sing and dance for the guests. I guess I was pretty comical, because everyone would laugh and clap like crazy. Then my mother would play the piano and we would sing together, those sad songs of the old country, my mother singing harmony in the background. Everyone tells me that I had a beautiful singing voice, although it’s hard to believe that now!

  Aunt Elsie

  When Alex was young, I was married to his father’s brother.

  We would go and visit the grandparents on the farm, and Alex was always there, among the kids. I never really noticed him, to tell the truth. You know what kids are like. They run around in the yard. They’re all more or less the same.

  Then when he was nine years old he came and lived with me for two days. We were living in Peace River, in northern Alberta, and Alex’s mom wanted to go into the recording studio and make some musical tapes. She was a striking woman, slim, six feet tall: and very good-looking. She came from a high-class family in the old country and she carried herself that way, very sophisticated and elegant. She was an accomplished musician and she wanted to go into the studio and record some tapes of her own music, so she showed up at my door with Alex and asked me to take care of him for two days. I was glad to take him. It’s always fun to have kids in the house.

  My impressions of him were quite different from the little ruffian that I used to see playing in the farmyard. He was quiet, very studious. A nice boy who was obviously very close to his mom. They were like two peas from the same pod. She told me that Alex was going to be a doctor or a lawyer or a politician. That was her plan for him. She was not going to let him grow up to be a farmer.

  The whole time he stayed with me he had his nose in a book. He loved reading. He never gave me any trouble and had nice manners. He was tall for his age, like his mother, and even though he didn’t do anything but read he was always hungry. I would put out a quart of milk and a bag of cookies so he could have a little snack and I’d come back five minutes later and the whole works would be gone. In the morning I would pour half a box of cereal into a salad bowl and he would gobble it down.

  Years later, he still had that same appetite. The family came over one time for breakfast and I cooked a dozen eggs and a pound of bacon and put it on a platter on the table in front of Alex. I thought that everyone would take what they wanted, but Alex ate the whole platter, thinking that I’d made it for him.

  Life on the farm was rough and tumble. But my mum was this polished, cultivated lady, so I grew up with two sides to my life.

  I had the sensitive artistic side and the roughneck side. It was like I had two little genies sitting on my shoulders—one a poet and the other a wild man. They were both whispering in my ear, one urging me to be good, the other bad.

  I was big, too, bigger than the other kids. I grew like a weed because of the diet they gave me when I was a baby. When I was only a few months old my mother started putting mashed potatoes and gravy into my milk bottle. By the time I was four years old I’d eat a whole salad bowl filled with porridge for breakfast, then top it off with some bacon and eggs. When I was finished with that I would run across the road to Grandma and Grandpa’s and they’d give me another breakfast. She’d say, “Gosh, doesn’t your mother feed you anything?” I was eating enough for two kids, and I was getting to be the size of two kids.

  My mother always had high hopes for me. She thought I was the special one, the one who was going to be the doctor or lawyer. She wasn’t always happy. Compared to the prewar aristocracy she left behind, all she had was poverty, dirt, hard work, and very little in the way of music and culture, all those fine things that she had grown up with. I think she suffered from post-traumatic stress from all the terrible things she saw during the war, and even though she was no longer in Poland or Germany, she carried all of those memories inside her, like ghosts.

  She sometimes heard things and saw things that were strange. Maybe they were real. Maybe they weren’t. It wasn’t much help talking to the older people because they were even more superstitious than she was. That was the culture in the old country. Those Eastern Europeans could go pick herbs in the bush and make medicine. The poor didn’t have doctors. They relied on some old granny who was a medicine woman. In that sense they were more like Indians than white people. And they got along real well with the Indians, too. They had a lot in common. You might laugh at their beliefs, but if you spend any time with them they start making more sense.

  When I was a kid I spent a lot of time with the Indians. There was a meadow next to our log house and Native people from the Duncan reserve used to camp out in that field on their way up north to hunt moose. I visited with them and talked to them and learned to respect their culture, their values, and their way of thinking about the world. And in 1965, after my mum died, when I was twelve years old, a local Native fellow named Ernie Runningbear helped take care of us in that awful transition time when we had no mother and Dad had to work all day. So I have a lot of admiration for Indians. They’re humble people, have a healthy respect for the power of nature, and many of their ideas about medicines, spirits, and animals are similar to the ideas that my ancestors professed back in Poland.

  Years later, I met a Native guy in Yellowknife who had been cured of cancer by an Indian medicine man after doctors had given up on him. I was visiting him at his home in Northland Trailer Park. He boiled a pot of water on the stove, then grabbed a handful of vegetation and put it in the pot. He said he was making tea. I was shocked. I said, “My grandmother made tea with the same weeds.” He told me that the medicine man from High Level, who was Cree, same as the Native people from back in the Peace River country of Alberta, had told him to drink tea from these weeds and not drink alcohol. That way he would cure his cancer. That was over thirty years ago, and he’s still alive today. When you live close to nature you learn about natural medicines, and the medicines seem to be the same cross-culturally.

  So that was the local culture that my mother was raising her family in. It was like the old country, in the sense that it was full of ghost stories and healers, but it was maybe a little on the bad side, because she had all these haunting memories from the war. Nowadays, medical people have a better understanding of how psychological trauma can injure a person. But we didn’t have access to that kind of care. She was on her own, a long way from the home that was wiped out by war, surrounded by deep dark woods, and I know she got spooked at times.

  One time she was at home by herself while we were at school and Dad was working on the railroad. This was about 1961, when I was eight years old. The cows got out of the corral. Someone had left the gate open and the cows all wandered off. We had about forty or fifty head at the time. She went outside and tried to start the old John Deere tractor but she couldn’t get it going and she was very upset because she knew that Dad would be angry. Meanwhile, the cows were heading off down the road and out of sight. She went back into the house to have herself a good cry, and then she saw something out the window and there were the cows coming back!

  They were being herded by an old man with a white beard and a big collie. The dog would run after the cows and make sure they were going into the gate, and went right back to the man and he would pat the dog like he was encouraging it. She told us the old man with the collie herded the cows until every last one was through the gate. Mum hurried back into the house and put the tea on and started preparing something to ea
t. She went outside to invite him in but he was gone. The gate was still open so she closed it and walked down the road looking for him. There was nobody there. She ended up walking all the way down to the corner—three-quarters of a mile—but he had disappeared. It had rained all summer and the road was pure mud, but there were no tracks in the ground, just the tracks of the cows.

  She went and talked to her neighbor, Lloyd Newton, who lived a mile away, and Lloyd told her that the only thing he could think of was that there used to be a ghost up north of our place. He said he’d seen it several times up in the pasture. It was an old man with a collie and the dog would jump up to his shoulder. The best thing that Lloyd could figure was that this same ghost had brought the cows home. My mother was sure that she had been visited by a ghost.

  She had all kinds of other fears. I remember her telling us once that the ground of Poland was soaked with blood because of all the wars the country had endured for centuries. She told us a story about a trip her mother made in Poland. They were in a stagecoach crossing a wide-open plain when they noticed a huge black ball rolling along behind them. The driver was frightened and whipped the horses, but no matter how fast they galloped this ball, about eight feet in diameter, was rolling right along beside them. She said it was the Devil’s Ball. It was made up of all evil things. They finally got to the town and the ball disappeared, to their great relief.

  When we were kids we were fascinated by this story of the Devil’s Ball, and we used to beg her to tell us about other scary things that had happened in the old country. She would say, “No, I can’t tell you. You’re too young.”

  We never got to hear about most of them because she started having a lot of problems with depression, and when I was twelve years old, in 1965, she hanged herself. She was tough enough to survive the Nazis, but she couldn’t stand the isolation of the backwoods and the gnawing memories of her past. My dad was left alone with five kids and little help. My siblings are Richard, Mark, Simone, and Gregory. Gregory, the youngest, was six months old and I, the oldest, was twelve. Social Services was going to take us away, but my dad fought them off and managed to keep me, my brothers Richard and Mark, and my sister Simone at home. My little brother Greg was considered too young and he ended up in foster care for three years.

  It was very different once my mum was gone. I did most of the housework and looked after myself and three siblings. I cooked, cleaned, and washed the laundry. My dad was a hard taskmaster. He said, “I guess Mother wanted you to be a doctor, did she? Well, I agree, but you need more discipline.”

  He learned discipline from twelve years in the British military and would give out a licking at the drop of a hat. I don’t know how many willow switches he broke across my rear end. At school one time I went to sit down and forgot that my ass was sore. As soon as my rear end touched the seat, I jumped up. The teacher said, “Alex, what’s wrong, did someone put a tack on your chair?”

  I sat back down as gently as possible and I said, “No, ma’am, I’m fine.”

  I didn’t want anyone to know that my dad had been whipping me.

  Wild Animals Were My Friends

  When I was growing up, nature amazed me, scared me, and sometimes tickled me on a daily basis. When I was three years old, it was the bear that was standing at the front door. I opened the door with my cap gun in my hand, and when I saw the bear only four feet away, I got off two shots before my mother grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me back into the house. It was the mouse that I found in my pocket when I was eight years old. It took me a minute to figure out what the tickling was, then I kind of jumped, and the mouse was as startled as I was.

  It was the bird that used to nest every year under the eaves of our log house. It was the most beautiful shade of blue, like the sky. It was darker blue on top and lighter blue underneath, and it had the most beautiful song you’ve ever heard. It wasn’t a Rocky Mountain bluebird and it wasn’t like any other type of bird. That pretty little thing built a nest under our roof overhang every year until around the time that my mum died. Then it disappeared, and I never saw it again.

  I remember one of my pets was a coyote. I was maybe twelve years old, walking home from school, and I spotted this coyote lying in the ditch. I don’t know what was wrong with it, but it didn’t look too healthy. I went home and got my little wagon and went back and picked up the coyote and loaded him into the wagon. I took him home, put a collar on him, and tied him up to a tree with a long rope. I fed him some scraps and gave him some milk and over the next few days he started to come around. The coyote and I got along pretty well. He was well behaved and made a good pet. I had lots of pets growing up, chickens, pigs, dogs, a steer, but this was my first coyote.

  One day I came home from school and there was my coyote lying there with no head. I went and found Dad and said, “What happened to my coyote?”

  He said, “The police killed it and took its head.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “It was foaming at the mouth, so they thought it might have rabies. So they cut off its head and sent it to the university.”

  What good is a pet coyote with no head? I was upset, but I got over it. There were animals everywhere and a potential pet behind every bush and under every stone. We had a team of Belgian horses to do the farm work, cutting hay and hauling grain, and while my dad was driving the team my little brother Richie and I were always trying to push each other off the wagon. My dad would wait until we were both rolling on the ground, then he’d speed up the horses and we had to run like heck to catch up with him. He’d keep the horses going just a bit faster than us.

  So we were chasing the wagon across the field one day when my brother and I spotted a great horned owl that couldn’t fly. It was young but it was an immense thing, about two feet high, so of course we wanted to keep it for a pet. My dad told us to let it go, but somehow we won the argument and took it home and made it into a pet. It was like having your own personal feathered kite. It had huge wings, about four feet across, and Richie and I would run across the yard and throw that owl in the air. It would glide for quite a ways and land on the ground. Then we’d pick it up and turn around and fly it the other way.

  My dad didn’t want us to have the owl because we had a nice flock of pigeons in the barn and he was convinced the owl would go after them. He kept saying, “That damn bird is going to eat all our pigeons.”

  We kept saying, “No, Dad, our owl won’t eat pigeons.”

  For a week or ten days we played with that owl every day, running back and forth across the yard and flying him like a kite. Finally one day we tossed him in the air and he just kept going!

  We called him but he wouldn’t come back. We thought that was pretty ungrateful. Heck, we took care of him and then he just left!

  A few days later, my dad noticed a few pigeon feathers lying on the ground beside the barn. Within a month there wasn’t a pigeon left on the property.

  Dad Buys a Wife

  When my mum passed away, in 1965, I was twelve years old and I had four younger brothers and sisters, including my youngest brother, Greg. He was only six months old and had to go to a foster home for a while before my dad managed to get him back.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the government Social Services people were trying to take us away from Dad and put us in foster care. Dad was having a hard time looking after both us and the farm, so he was always looking for a woman to help out. She’d have to be a little crazy to take us on. Just keeping things clean was a major job. Our log cabin had a little kitchen and a Briggs & Stratton–powered washing machine that you had to kick-start like a motorcycle. Smoke would pour out of it and it would shake and shimmy all over the floor. If you weren’t watching it would fetch up against the trapdoor to the cold cellar, shake the trapdoor open, and the next thing you know the washing machine would be roaring away and falling down into the root cellar.

  Then the wrasslin’ match would start! I was the one who was suppose
d to be watching the washing machine, and if Dad came in and saw the washing machine falling down the hole he’d give me a good lick, so I’d be jumping into action, trying to wrestle a big motorized washing machine full of water and clothes out of this trapdoor. Once the clothes were washed you’d have to run a hose out into the yard and drain the washer, and that would make a nice big pool of muck and suds in the yard.

  The walls of the house were insulated with sawdust, and come spring the flying ants would emerge. I don’t know where they came from. I guess they made nests in the walls, but anyway they’d be everywhere. They’d be all over the stove, in the frying pan, in the soup. Great big ones. I’m sure they had a fair amount of protein and vitamins in them, and we probably ate more than a few of them. I guess the ants were an appetizer before the porridge. We kept a twenty-pound bag of porridge in the cupboard. The mice would get in through the bottom of the bag. Then the odd bit of mouse poop would appear in our dish with the rolled oats. Of course, when boiled, mouse poop swells up to about half the size of a raisin. When cousin Tony came to visit he’d put lots of brown sugar on his porridge, close his eyes, and eat it all up. He said it wasn’t bad as long as he didn’t see the mini raisins in it.

  Lying in bed at night I remember the mice would be running in the walls, right past my head. It was like having a freeway going past your pillow, scampering feet, one after the other. Every time I see one of those nail guns they have today I wish that I had one back in those days, and I would have given those mice a hard time. They acted like it was more their house than it was ours.