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  Not Your Penance

  Not Your Penance

  Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

  Not Your Penance

  Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

  Copyright © 2020 Demeter Press

  Individual copyright to the work is retained by the author. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Demeter Press

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  Website: www.demeterpress.org

  Demeter Press logo based on the sculpture “Demeter” by Maria-Luise Bodirsky www.keramik-atelier.bodirsky.de

  Printed and Bound in Canada

  Front cover image: Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

  Front cover artwork: Michelle Pirovich

  Typesetting: Michelle Pirovich

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Not your penance / by Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich.

  Names: Bromwich, Rebecca, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana 20200242598 | ISBN 9781772582864 (softcover)

  Classification: LCC PS8603.R645 N68 2020 | DDC C813/.6‚Äîdc23

  There are landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places—retreated to most often when we are most remote from them—are rare among the most important landscapes we possess.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Erratic

  The car kept rolling. How many times, she didn’t know. But, when it finally stopped, her head and shoulders were outside the driver’s window. She woke up drenched in sweat, her heart pounding. Forty-one-year-old Enid Kimble got her bearings, glancing around her room. Her breathing slowed as she realized she’d once again awakened from the nightmare.

  It was an October morning in Cincinnati, Ohio. But the dream, the nightmare, always took place thousands of miles away, near Okotoks Rock, a famous glacial erratic in Alberta, Canada. In it she saw her mother’s vibrant red hair dancing in a chinook, frost on prairie grass, a young man with wavy hair and a dangerous smile, the Okotoks petroglyphs, a white stag, and a car spinning out of control and rolling, rolling, rolling. But this time, she also saw her five children, and the nightmare went to a whole new level of terror.

  Fully awake now, she couldn’t shake the sense of danger it left in its wake.

  Theirs was an ordinary house. A tidy, white, postwar, 1950s bungalow that featured the same pragmatic floorplan and aluminum siding as so many of its kind. It was located on a cul-de-sac in the Calgary suburb of North Haven, just steps away from Nose Hill Park, in the northwest quadrant of the city. West-ward beyond the windswept prairie grass of this Alberta high plain rose the Rocky Mountains.

  Nurtured by the love of her clever, patient and free-thinking parents, Enid spent a happy childhood in this house and its big-sky country setting. She and her mother shared two bedrooms, a living room, a small kitchen and a view of those majestic mountains.

  The years of Enid’s youth fluctuated between heady boom and despon-dent bust in the oil industry-driven growth of Calgary. In good times, beige and salmon-coloured, stucco McMansion houses sprouted to the north and west of her home. In lean times, those houses were deserted, and then brought to life again once prosperity returned.

  By the time Enid was a teenager, the far outskirts of her community had morphed into vanilla suburbs of hastily thrown-together, matchbox houses, sitting uncomfortably close to one another. She and her plump, brunette, middle-child friend, Jane, considered it suburban hell. They sometimes took the C-Train to trendy Kensington coffee shops, where they plotted how they would leave behind “McMediocrity,” and live creative, distinctive and extraordinary adult lives in an apartment in New York City. Jane wanted to be a veterinarian. Enid wanted to be a lawyer.

  While living in the tightly knit suburb of a booming city, Enid also had the wide-open space of Nose Hill Park, one of the largest urban parks in North America. There, she and Jane ran freely through prairie grass; chinooks brought warm winds from the west; and frigid winds howled from the north. At night, she heard the yipping of coyotes through her open bedroom window. Sometimes she thought she also heard wolves baying at the moon. Today, homes surround the vast protected land of Nose Hill Park. Back in Edith’ childhood, the only thing between her family’s bungalow, the park and the open prairie was the wind.

  Enid knew the park held secrets. She and her parents collected and read many books and stories about its history. Ancient rivers, successive glaciers, and their run-off gradually carved and eroded the landscape that became Calgary, creating the valleys and lowlands, leaving Nose Hill on the east, and Broadcast Hill on the west towering over the Bow River Valley.

  From deep within the Rocky Mountains, the glaciers also carried rocks that geologists call erratics, and deposited them on Nose Hill. Enid knew that one large rock on the east side was a glacial erratic that had once been a part of what is now Mount Edith Cavell in Jasper National Park. Before they vanished from the prairies in the late 19th Century, bison shed their winter coats by rubbing repeatedly against this rock. And so it became known as the Rubbing Stone.

  Enid and her mother, Judith, discussed glacial erratics many times in their small kitchen, drinking chamomile tea during their home-schooling sessions. They woke up at five o’clock every morning to do lessons on whatever was coming up in the school curriculum. They also had evening sessions. It was a strategy to ensure Enid’s success at school for the day. Trained to teach high school English, Judith had held permanent positions, until two things changed her status. The first was the ongoing practice of not renewing permanent contracts. The second was the complaints from her students’ parents. Judith discussed topics such as capital punishment and war crimes in kindergarten classes, and free love in grade four classes. She talked about why oil was destructive to the environment. She disparaged religion as an opiate. She used banned books for novel studies.

  Judith’s approach and comments in the classroom got back to the kids’ families. She was regarded as a patient and caring teacher, but she didn’t share the prevailing views about what was age appropriate for children to discuss. Nor did she share Albertans’ predominantly conservative views. For good or ill, Judith had the courage of her convictions, and when asked to refrain from discussing adult topics with small children, she refused. Relegated to substitute teaching for her sins, she ended up with an income and schedule that were precarious. The upside of this precarity was that she rarely had grading or lesson preparation to do. With a nod to Kierke-gaard, she said she now had the “dizziness of freedom.” With her new-found free time and her relentless energy, she sharpened her focus on her daughter’s education.

  By the time she was a teen, Enid grew to resent these early morning sessions. She asked her mother why they were necessary. Judith insisted it was vital that she had every opportunity to make the mark she might want to in life. Enid suspected the sessions weren’t really for her at all, but a way for Judith to cope with insomnia. Or to carry forward her own unrealized dreams. Enid was pretty sure her mother had dreamed of something more for her own life.

  Judith did not sleep well. She had nightmares. Enid slept just fine, but longed to get up at a more reasonable time. She envied Jane, who rolled out of bed at 7:45, with her tangle of siblings, and boarded the bus with them to school. But she knew that challenging the 5:30 wakeup rule could distress h
er mother. When upset, Judith seemed almost like someone else entirely, completely alien to her usual, cheerful self. More often she appeared almost improbably happy.

  Between bursts of frantic jubilation, when she would surprise Enid with ice cream for breakfast, Judith spiraled into sudden, unpredictable bouts of sadness. They were infrequent. But they were memorable. Enid never knew what might bring one on, so she was careful to keep things calm. One of her first childhood memories was of Judith, sitting at the steering wheel of her car in a rainstorm, saying, “If we die, at least we die together.” Enid held her hand, terrified but also comforted by the closeness of her mother’s arm to her.

  Another time, her mother was in the kitchen, making soup, and sudd-enly threw herself on the floor, crying. There had been no explanation. Half an hour later, she stood back up and carried on as usual.

  Enid’s mornings s were structured. She and Judith reviewed math, French, physics, chemistry and biology. While less structured, her evenings included academic discussions, along the lines of seminars. They discussed literature and the social sciences. Enid enjoyed that part of her home schooling. And what she really loved was discussing human geo-graphy and history.

  It was a Saturday night in February. Enid was 15. She shared a simple comfort-food dinner with Judith in the cozy ambiance of the bungalow’s small, tidy kitchen, with its white cupboards and black and white check-ered tiles. Their tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches were served up by Enid, whose turn it was to cook. Two years earlier, Judith began teaching Enid cooking skills, showing her how to make omelets, pastas, sandwiches and soups. Now they took turns cooking. Enid loved the routine, especially chatting with her mother as they prepared the food.

  Cleaning up after their meal, mother and daughter enjoyed the peppery scent wafting gently from a bouquet of yellow freesias that Judith purchased that afternoon on her way home from work. She joked that they for the little kitten, Spanx, their first ever pet, to offer her some warmth and colour on that frigid, wintry day.

  As Judith washed the dishes, they danced to Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic, spinning on the turntable of their record player in the living room. Judith’s long, curly red hair flowed as she moved to the music, mesmerizing Spanx. Sitting on the kitchen floor, the kitten tracked the colourful flow, even as Enid scooped her up to cuddle her. She was eight weeks old and an adorably tiny bundle of soft black fur. They had decided on her name while exiting the pet store at North Hill Mall, and noticing that lingerie store beside it sold Spanx undergarments. Spanx purred against Enid’s neck, her tiny front paws kneading the arm that gently held her. Laying a thick atlas on the table beside her cup of chamomile tea, Judith said “Tonight, let’s learn about Okotoks Rock.”

  The peppery scent of freesia mingled with the smell of the atlas paper and the earth-and-apple fragrance of Judith’s tea. On the turntable, Into the Mystic changed to Moondance.

  “We can talk about it, but I’m not sure all the answers are in that atlas,” said Enid, keen as any teenager to challenge her mother’s authority. “There are many stories out there about the Big Rock.”

  “Sure,” said Judith. As usual, it was frustratingly hard for Enid to disagree with, or rebel against, her mother. Unlike Jane’s boxy, rigid, grey-haired mother, Judith was lithe, open-minded, vibrant and fun. And she loved to dance! Fresh from graduating with degrees in Classics and English Literature at the University of Toronto, she impetuously moved to Calgary to get her teaching certificate. A thirst for real-life adventure led her west, but she brought with her the intellectual openness of her liberal arts education, which she applied to homeschooling Enid from the age of three.

  Having never ventured west of Toronto before, Judith hadn’t anticipated that the scrubbed conservatism of the Albertan homesteaders’ descendants would overshadow this wild western landscape of bright light and long shadow that so appealed to her. Calgary was full of contradictions. A place offering the freedom and adventure of rugged prairies, mountainous vistas and open skies, it was also a bastion of intense conservatism, born of a century of Protestantism and teetotalling politics that accompanied the European immigrants who had firmly entrenched their views and values as they settled in the area.

  “There will be multiple stories when people try to conceptualize movements in geological time, Enid,” she continued. “It’s hard for us to understand a dance of rocks and rivers and glaciers through a chronology in which human lives are fleeting shadows. We need to look for the facts in the commonalities. We need to read the stories critically. Where do the studies of geologists and the interpretations of tourists agree? Where do our own impressions fit in?” She passed the book over to Enid.

  “The atlas and the tour brochures all say that the Big Rock is the world’s largest glacial erratic. On the interpretive signs, it’s called The Rock That Ran.” Forgetting for a moment to be irritated with her, Enid looked up at her mother. “I like that!”

  “Erratic,” said Judith. “It means inconsistent, unpredictable, changeable. Not characteristics you would usually attribute to a rock.”

  Enid agreed. “Rocks are solid, stable.”

  “Sometimes, and sometimes not, I guess,” said Judith. “This one is inconsistent and unpredictable, actually, because it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the landscape. It’s about the size of a three-story apartment building. Remember how big it is?”

  Enid nodded. “Yes, I remember. Duh. We drove out there last summer.” They had gone exploring the foothills one Sunday in August, parking and walking the long path to the rocks, then eating a picnic lunch on the grass just outside the gravel path that encircled them, near the interpretive signs.

  “And, if changeable is interpreted as moveable, that’s apt, too,” said Judith. “Going back to the name, The Rock that Ran, it did actually run—in or under a glacier, all the way from high up in the Rockies. Then again, Calgarians often call it Okotoks Rock, which I suspect may amuse the Indigenous peoples linguistically. She pointed to the open atlas. “It sits on the territory of the Niitsitapiiksi, Siksika, or Kaini, and in their language Okotoks means big rock. So, to them, we’re just being repetitive by saying in effect Big Rock Big Rock. But in a way, the repetition does make sense, because it’s a single mass of quartzite, split into two sides rising on either edge of a footpath. The two pieces look like monoliths, much as do the stones at Stonehenge in England.”

  Judith went on. “So, looming over the Alberta prairie, Okotoks Rock has intrigued early settlers’ and present-day tourists’ imaginations, as well as inspiring Indigenous people’s legends. It would have been a very significant landmark well before the settlers made maps. Now, the metaphorical shad-ow of the Okotoks Rock has spread across Canada and the United States, in the form of beer.”

  Enid looked up at her mother rolled her eyes again in irritation. “Come on, Mom. Are you just checking to see if I’m listening? That’s not in the atlas. How do rocks change into beer?”

  Judith smiled. “They didn’t become beer. They inspired it. The rock is the namesake for the Big Rock Brewery, founded in 1985, which has gen-erated million dollar fortunes in Okotoks products including traditional and grass-hopper ales. People all around the country have probably sipped a Big Rock beer, perhaps not realizing that its name was inspired by a piece of a mountain flung far from its home.”

  “You don’t drink beer, Mom,” said Enid. “And neither do I.”

  Judith smiled. “True. But we don’t need to drink the beer to appreciate the rock. We can read about it.” Judith began to read out loud.

  Fractured in two by the glacial shift that brought them to their place of rest on the prairie grass, the Big Rock is otherwise unweathered. Though it is linked to smaller rocks strewn across the prairies in the same glacial journey, the Okotoks Rock appears as a traveler out of time and place. Geology tells a scientific story explaining the presence of the rocks so far out of place, a story about the
flow of glacier movement. Two ice streams, they say, melted at the end of the last ice age. When they did, they left behind the Okotoks Rock, alone on the prairie. It’s a 16,500 tonne quartzite boulder, 9 meters tall, 41 meters long, and 18 meters wide.

  Looking up from the book, Judith said, “Remember, Enid, one tonne, with two n’s and an e, is 1000 kilograms.” She went back to reading.

  It was transported far from its place of origin high in the Rocky Mountains by a rockslide. That was followed by a glacial sheet of ice. Over a long period, somewhere between 10,000 to 30,000 years ago, the rock moved with the glacier, probably under it, to its present day location just west of the Town of Okotoks, Alberta.

  Judith paused, and took a sip of her tea. “So, Big Rock ran in geological time,” she said. “But long, long, long before that, it began as part of a mountain formation in what is now Jasper National Park. It wasn’t alone to begin with. It was part of a chain, like a family, of mountains.” She went back to reading.

  That mountain was forged as part of what is called the Gog Group formation. Of course, mountains have their own beginnings, too. So, before it was a mountain, it was sand. The stones that make up the Big Rock are sedimentary. They began their lives, as sand under a giant, but shallow, inland sea. Over millennia, the sand accumulated layers, and that sediment deposited between 600 million and 520 million years ago became rock. Layer built upon layer. The grains of sand became rock four kilometres deep. Heat and pressure produced by the weight of overlying sediments compacted the lower grains of sand, cementing them, transforming them into an extremely hard, sturdy quartzite. Then, about 80 to 55 million years ago, in what geologists call the Laramide Orogeny Period, tectonic plates started buckling underneath the North American plate. When the tectonic plates slid against each other, the Rocky Mountains were lifted.

  “So,” concluded Enid, “Sand became stone, stone became mountains, mountains shed rocks, rocks splintered into stones, and the stones became beer!” She rubbed Spanx’s belly. “Everything shifts. There’s nothing solid to hold on to. Mom, that’s scary.” A sudden anxiety crept in. Her heart was pounding, and she felt dizzy. She buried her face in Spanx’s head, and breathed slowly, finding comfort in the touch of warm, soft fur.