Emotional times can’t shatter family’s spirit

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/09/2017 (2969 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We may watch far-away television images of the Houston floods with empathy, but for me, people fleeing danger and evacuating their communities means more because it hits closer to home.

And it feels even closer still when you have friends among them.

Victor Harper called me from his Winnipeg hotel room on Wednesday evening, even before I’d heard that his northern Manitoba community was in the midst of a wildfire evacuation. Victor, his wife Emma and 15-year-old son Harris had been designated to be on the first Perimeter Aviation Dash 8 for the 468-kilometre flight to Winnipeg on Tuesday evening.

“I’m bewildered,” Victor said on the phone. “The fire was miles from the reserve. And then it was on our doorstep.”

Victor still seemed to be in shock when we met the next day at Canad Inns Polo Park, where a taxi — paid for by the Red Cross — had taken them on arrival.

“When something happens to you where you sort of lose your mind, you’re thinking too much. Too much thinking. Then you start remembering. You’ve got friends. And you’ve got to tell your friends, your friends here and everywhere. That’s why I called.”

With that, Victor and Emma told me their story.

It starts before the fire, in the emotional embers of a sad weekend.

Last Friday, Victor was medically evacuated to Winnipeg because of a prescription-drug problem associated with his advanced diabetes. His sister, who was also in a Winnipeg hospital, died on Saturday and that same day Victor insisted on flying back to Wasagamack with her body.

She was buried on Monday.

On Tuesday afternoon, with the fire still believed to be far in the distance, Victor went to the Wasagamack nursing station for treatment.

“The doctor told me to rest,” Victor said. “So I was resting and then my son runs in and says, ‘You got to get out!’ I said, ‘There’s no way I’m leaving.’”

His family insisted he look outside.

“Holy smoke!” were his first words.

The second were almost as predictable: “I gotta get out of here.”

I asked how it happened so quickly.

“The wind,” Victor said. “The wind shifted toward Island Lake.”

“It was so sudden,” Emma said.

It was sudden for the Harpers, but from what they told me, community leaders and health workers were already preparing for an evacuation before the flames could be seen from Wasagamack.

A TV channel was making evacuation announcements on Tuesday, and the Harpers were listening for their names — until the screen turned as black as the sky.

The power had gone out across all three Island Lake communities.

“I think that’s when the panic started,” Emma said.

She described people at the nursing station trying to round up their children.

The power would return about an hour and a half later, as Victor remembers it.

There were more evacuation announcements, now with a more urgent pace, for fear the TV would go dark again.

And then the Harpers headed for a motorboat where they and three others made the 15-minute ride across the lake to an airstrip at the sister Island Lake community of St. Theresa Point.

“Like when you look back, you see all the black smoke,” Emma recalled. “It’s like a big tornado. On one side you can see kind of the clear, bright colour, like a sky. And then you see a little spot where the flames are.”

Maybe it was the power-outage panic Emma spoke of, or the announcements being interrupted or Victor refusing to go until he looked out the window, but when it was time to leave their home they didn’t pack any suitcases. Emma just took the medical supplies she needed to treat her husband. And their son grabbed his PlayStation. All they had when I sat with them on Thursday were the smoky-smelling clothes they were wearing when they fled.

When the plane arrived, it was so full of soot, Victor told me, that it was a wonder the propellers turned.

He told me he doesn’t know what will happen to his house in the community. But his home on the land — his “ancestral place” — has been consumed by the fire. And presumably so have most of the wild creatures that have allowed Indigenous people to survive.

I’ve always considered “the land” to be the soul of Indigenous culture. The place where Victor found peace — and found himself — after his personal experience with residential-school trauma.

“Someday, I’ll smile,” Victor said when I asked how he felt.

“But not today.”

And with that, he gave me a big smile.

That’s something else I’ve learned about the Indigenous culture and the people who practise it.

It’s not just the land that’s basic to who they are and how they’ve survived.

It’s their sense of humour, too.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca