Chapter 21 - Changing Seasons
Preparing to leave Telegraph Creek
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Over the coming days and weeks, once the shock wore off, the planning began. Walter was renting a cabin near Terrace, at Lakelse Lake. Trish would resign from her job and live there with him once they were married. They were planning a winter wedding, they chose the date of January 27, 1973, just five months in the future.
Trish needed to notify her family and friends, so after she returned home to Telegraph Creek and told her brother the news, she sat down and began writing letters. The first was to her mum. She wasn’t sure how to start. Although Florence hadn’t said much when Trish announced she was moving to Canada permanently, it must have been upsetting. And again, when Richard wrote to tell her he wasn’t returning home from his visit to Canada, what did her mum think? Two of her three children had left the country, and traveling back and forth to visit was a costly and infrequent event.
Now, Trish was telling her mum that her only daughter was getting married, knowing it was impossible for her parents and youngest brother to attend her wedding. Trish decided to deliver the news just as her mum would–directly and without fuss. Once that letter was tucked in an envelope, Trish started on the letter to Jean. She knew Jean would be surprised by the news. Getting married was Jean’s dream, not Trish’s. Still, Trish knew her friend would be happy for her, and would wish her well. She had a few other friends she also wanted to notify, but those letters were easier.
Next, Trish needed to confirm a Maid of Honour for the wedding. Back in England, Jean would have been her clear choice, but in Canada, she wasn’t so sure. Susie, in Vancouver, had been a good friend over the years, but Trish wasn’t willing to ask her to take time off work and travel to be in the wedding. Trish next thought of Judy, one of the nurses she had worked with in Bella Bella. Trish and Judy had become friends and still stayed in touch through letters. Trish put pen to paper and asked Judy to stand with her at her wedding.
When Trish told her news to Mary, after the obligatory congratulations, Mary mused that Trish was marrying the pilot. Janet, the nurse before her, married the doctor, and the nurse before her had married the RCMP officer.
“Who’s left?” asked Mary, throwing her hands in the air in feigned despair.
Trish laughed as she remembered the Employment Officer telling her the very same story during her recruitment. Back then, sitting in his office, Trish had just smiled when he went through the list. Then he paused, looking across the desk at her. She wasn’t sure if he was expecting a response from her or not. Marriage wasn’t on her mind, but that was none of his business. Now, less than a year later, she knew he would have had to add the pilot to his list when he hired her replacement. As she wrote her resignation letter to her employer, she paused to wonder who would take her position and how long they would stay before following the pattern. She had decided her last day of work would be in December, before Christmas, even though the wedding wasn’t until late January. She thought it would be nice to spend Christmas in Terrace with Walter and have time to plan the wedding without having to manage the details from afar. Still, she was giving her employer ample notice–more than three months–and she hoped that would be enough time for them to find someone who would be a good match for the community and the work.
Life in Telegraph Creek felt different for Trish now that it had an end date. At times, she forgot she would soon be leaving as she went about her work, but at other times, it felt surreal–like when she and Walter discussed their wedding plans and life together beyond that day. Those moments reminded her of the feelings she had back in England once she had made up her mind to come to Canada. It felt as though she had one foot solidly planted at home, while the other was striding forward, and she wasn’t quite sure what sort of ground it would land on.
Although Telegraph Creek felt like home in many ways, there were still surprises that caught Trish off guard. Surprises like waking up one autumn morning to Richard telling her she needed to go outside and take a look at her garden. She did as he suggested, and saw hoof prints all around the Nurses’ Station, and the plants in her garden eaten down to the roots. The hoof prints had been left by horses, but there were no horses to be seen by the time Trish surveyed the wreckage of her garden. Later that day, she recounted to Walter what happened.
He told her the horses belonged to the Glenora ranch. They had been out in the bush all season, on guiding and hunting expeditions, and now they had been set loose for the winter. The return of the horses added an element of excitement for Walter and the other pilots as well. The horses liked to graze on the already hazardous airstrip, and the pilots had to be careful. A pilot on the approach had to hug the treetops, then as the runway came into view, if the horses were grazing where he needed to land, he had no choice but to pull up and hope the horses would be scared off by the sound of the engines and the airstrip would be clear for the second pass. It was just another quirk of the community that required alertness and quick thinking to navigate, not dissimilar to her experience as the village nurse, Trish thought.
She had come to the realization that Telegraph Creek had the most interesting patients she had seen in her career. It was very isolated, and she thought that was a factor in the number of strange cases that she didn’t think happened elsewhere. Halloween that year offered up two such cases in one evening. The first, a girl about 12 years old, with an obvious developmental disability, slipped on ice while trick-or-treating. She fell, dislocating her knee. Her family took her home, then called Trish. Trish went to the home, noting it was nearly bare of furniture. The girl sat on a bed that had no sheets or bedding, with her knee at a very unnatural angle. She smiled at Trish as she entered. A dislocated knee is usually very painful, but this girl appeared to have no distress at all. Trish’s questions about which way the knee twisted at the time of injury were met with the same smile. It was already evening, and the light was gone, so there were no flights out until the following day, Trish felt she had no choice but to relocate the limb. She asked one of the men in the house to hold the girl at the top of the bed, while Trish applied traction to the leg, hoping the joint would slip back into place. She braced herself for screams as she began to manipulate the leg, but the girl didn’t react. The knee slipped back into place, and Trish checked for pulses, and any neurological deficits. Though the knee was very swollen, everything seemed ok, so Trish applied a full plaster cast to the leg, from thigh to ankle, to keep the knee stable until the patient could be flown to Terrace the following day. The girl calmly watched Trish work, then went back to sorting her Halloween candy. Trish was relieved she had been able to relocate the joint but was bewildered at the girl’s lack of response to the situation. Any other patient would have been screaming when she manipulated that knee, and the house would have been in chaos.
Later that same night Trish was called to another house, where a woman was reported to have fallen and broken her leg at a party. By the time Trish arrived, the woman in question was in the middle of a sexual encounter with a man on the lower of two bunkbeds, and Trish had to wait until they finished. Once the fellow left, Trish prepared to assess the injured leg. She unwittingly gave her flashlight to an older woman who was occupying the top bunk, asking her to hold it so Trish could see what she was doing. Instead, the older woman began hitting Trish on the head, with her own flashlight, muttering “damn you, nurse,” over and over. Amidst the chaos, dodging blows to her head, and in poor light, Trish set the woman’s leg and applied a cast. The following day she sent both the woman and the girl out on the same flight to Terrace. Given the circumstances of the injuries, and the treatment environments she ended up in, she was very relieved to learn from the receiving doctor in Terrace that both injuries had been set well and were expected to heal without complications.
Christmas was fast approaching, and Trish and Richard were preparing to leave Telegraph Creek. Walter had rented a basement suite in Terrace, where Trish and her brother could live until the wedding. Trish hoped that once they were in Terrace where there were more opportunities for work, her brother could find a job and become independent. In the meantime, the plan was for him to stay with Trish in the basement suite, and then, if need be, he could move into Walter’s cabin with them after they were married until he found work. Trish was relieved that a new nurse had been hired and would be arriving the same day Trish was scheduled to leave. There would only be a short time to show her the Nurse’s Station, just as it had been when she herself arrived nearly a year earlier and took over from Janet.
As Trish tidied the examination room after her final afternoon of open clinic hours, she reflected back on all the circumstances and events that had brought her to this place, and this time in her life. Her decision to duck out of her work of punching cards at the AT&E factory when she was 17 years old, to attend an interview to become a nurses’ aide, had triggered a series of events and put her on a path that her 17-year-old self could never have anticipated. Her only goal back then was to escape a boring job her father had chosen for her in favour of a more interesting one, and in doing so she had completely changed the course of her life.
She was knocked out of her reverie when she heard Mary come into the building, kicking snow off her big winter boots.
“It’s starting to snow,” Mary said. She didn’t say more, but her meaning was clear. Flights in and out of Telegraph Creek were weather dependent–there were no flights when it was snowing. The new nurse was to fly in on the sked the next day, and Trish was to fly out. If the snowstorm lasted, her departure would be delayed. There was nothing to be done about it, the weather was as the weather was. They bid each other a good evening, Mary beginning her evening work of giving the clinic a good cleaning, and Trish retreating to the kitchen to feed Waldo, who always seemed to be hungry–he was still growing, and full of energy. She commented to Richard about the snowstorm; he had already discussed it with folks in the village, and had heard it was going to last for a few days. Trish hoped that wasn’t the case. Now that her last day was here, she was keen to leave, there was no sense in lingering when it was time to move on.
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Author’s Notes
N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Telegraph Creek and Iskut, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.
The communities of Telegraph Creek and Iskut sit on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nations. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.
N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?
To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.
Trish Lewis was 17 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.
Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.