Bravo!

March 27, 2020 by Sheila Peters

“As the majority of people infected … have no symptoms and are unaware of their infection, the virus may spread through a large population before even being recognized.”

Sound familiar?

It’s not about Covid-19; it’s a reference to Canada’s polio epidemic. Most people with the disease had no symptoms; about five per cent developed mild symptoms and less than one percent developed limb paralysis. Of those, five to ten percent died. Between 1949 and 1954 about 11,000 people in Canada were left paralyzed and in 1953 alone, 500 died, the most serious national epidemic since the 1918 influenza pandemic, according to the Canadian Public Health Association.

My dad with my brother and sister a couple of months before he got sick.

In 1953, about six weeks before I was born, my dad, a millwright in the paper mill here in Powell River, got polio. He had mild symptoms for several days, my mom says. “He’d be standing in the bathroom shaving, saying his neck hurt. I finally got the doctor who thought it might be meningitis.”

While Dad was hospitalized, Mom noticed he wasn’t moving one of his arms properly. His symptoms were classic. He was flown to Vancouver and put in an iron lung as muscle function in his lungs deteriorated.

“It was quite bad because after he got flown down, we’d phone and they said he hasn’t reached the crisis yet – it was about ten days until he reached the crisis. It was,” she says, “a terrible time.”

My mother remembers standing beside a man, both of them looking in at their spouses lying in the iron lungs, the ventilators. The next day, the man wasn’t there and the nurses explained that his wife had died.

Mom and my one-year-old brother and three-year-old sister were injected with gamma globulin, an immune booster. There was no vaccine. I was born in December and six months later taken to see my father for the first time. My mom loves to tell me how the sight of my chubby red cheeks cheered him right up.

Dad lived, but he was one of the unlucky ones whose paralysis was permanent. It’s not like spinal cord paralysis that cuts off all feeling below the injury; the polio virus kills the motor neurons that activate muscles and they don’t regenerate. Rehab can bring some improvement and after about three years, my dad could walk, with support, and use his arms and hands.

Outside our new house.

By the fall of 1957, he was able to move with us into the house he’d been building when he got sick. Mom had gone back to work teaching and we managed quite well. Dad was able to be home on his own during the day and he was there when we came home from school.

It wasn’t easy – he had a temper and would get very frustrated as he tried to get us to do chores around the house or painstakingly teach us to do something he could have done in a second. But I suspect the tensions were no more than was normal in most houses. Our family activities were limited, but he found ways to extend his mobility. He had a friend build him a wheelchair made of copper pipes that was very light and easy to pack when we went visiting. One summer Mom drove us all in our Vauxhall station wagon to Saskatchewan to visit his family. I think she had just learned to drive. He encouraged her to continue with summer school courses and finish her education degree, and later to apply for a job as a school principal.

While Mom was at school one summer, Dad stayed at Pearson Hospital where he had spent time in rehabilitation. Many polio survivors had been there for years, some in iron lungs or rocking beds. We felt lucky indeed we could bring our dad home.

When we had a house built down here at Grief Point in 1968, he and a neighbour, also a millwright, designed its elevator. But less than two years later, he developed symptoms of post-polio syndrome, which no one knew much about then. He died suddenly in his sleep Feb. 11, 1970.

My father had a life beyond his wheelchair; he worked as a bookkeeper, he read, played bridge, and loved a good argument. He was also very aware of how people with disabilities were judged and taught us that labels mattered. Cripple was still a common name for folks like him; he hated it. He was a paraplegic, he insisted. Disabled. Today, we often imagine how much fuller his life could have been with an electric scooter and a computer.

As of today, there are over half a million confirmed cases of Covid-19 around the world and about 25,000 deaths. According to the Canadian International Immunization Initiative, at the peak of its spread, polio “paralyzed or killed over half a million people worldwide every year.”

I used to get upset when people didn’t vaccinate their kids because our family experienced directly what diseases like polio can do. Now, when people talk about how we’re over-reacting, about the low percentage of people dying from Covid-19, I’m even more frustrated. It’s easy to forget that each one of those deaths is a loss to families, friends and communities.

Seeing those images of rows of people in ventilators in ICUs, I can’t help thinking of my father. How much pain he must have felt, how afraid he would have been. We have been through this before and I say, bravo! to those (that includes all of us) trying to stem the tide flooding the world right now.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

March 7, 2020 by Sheila Peters

The sea lions have been going crazy off the point here – sometimes leaping right out of the water. The herring are spawning and for the first time in years, streaks of white signaling the milt the males deposit on the eggs appeared in Scuttle Bay. When we went to take a look, we noticed that the sign welcoming you to t’Ɩšosǝm (Sliammon) explains that the name itself refers to that milky water.

Photo courtesy PR Outdoors

In Written as I Remember It, Elsie Paul describes the excitement about the herrings’ arrival, the richness they provided for the whole community of coastal life. “Like when the herring came in – it used to be around February and March, people are watching and ready and going down to the beach and really looking for – “Is it out there?” The seagulls are out so that means they’re here. And the word would get around. People are all hyped up and visiting back and forth and down the beach and it’s almost like you’re welcoming them.” (114)

We’re still in our first year of transition here and word of the herring reminded me of last February’s snowy drive to Gingolx at the mouth of the Nass to the community’s Hobiyee, a celebration in anticipation of the return of the eulachon to spawn in the river.

Unlike herring, eulachon spawn in the farthest tidal reaches up large rivers like the Skeena and Nass – they used to appear from northern California to Alaska. One freezing spring we visited the eulachon camps on the Nass as the fishermen dodged ice floes to set their nets; another year they were drilling through two feet of ice, an outflow wind howling out of the mountains.

The location of the camps are vested in families, the resources to catch and process them shared. This is no work for a lone fisherman – the tons of fish harvested to create the ‘grease’ require a large and organized workforce. The oil rendered from the fish, through an infamous process of rotting and heating, was a valuable trade commodity for coastal people and fed people far inland. The trading routes were called grease trails.

I interviewed eulachon biologist, the late John Kelson, for an article I wrote several years ago: “Eulachon play a crucial ecological role. Offshore, they are a key link in transferring energy up to the higher predators we humans like to eat, such as salmon and halibut. They are the first fish to run in the spring at a time when food supplies have been low and many animals are gearing up for reproduction. They are like the gas in the engine of the estuary and forest ecosystem. A few meals of eulachon can increase the number of offspring in seals and sea lions, otters, eagles, gulls and other seabirds.”

A couple of weeks after our trip to Gingolx, we were at tide water on the Skeena along with thousands of gulls, hundreds of eagles, sea lions and seals.

John Kelson photo

The eulachon spawn in gravel, unlike the herring which, when they haven’t been fished to near extirpation, deposit their eggs on almost anything. Elsie Paul describes how they hung out cedar boughs in the milky water and the eggs would be deposited, then collected and dried. Further north, kelp laden with roe was gathered and preserved.

“Several years ago, they opened seine fishing in this area [1983/84]. This whole area was lit up front of the village from Sliammon to Scuttle Bay and towards Powell River, over to Harwood. There was all kinds of seine boats out there. And they scooped the herring. We never did get herring after that.” (116)

Powell River Historical Museum and Archives photo

Betty Wilson’s short film, Harwood, shown at the Powell River Film Festival, contained an even more dramatic image of the boats crowding into the strait, their gear getting tangled, and tempers flaring.

It’s no wonder those who spotted the milky water in Scuttle Bay were excited. And little wonder why so many are upset that DFO has once again opened the Vancouver Island herring roe commercial fishery. The herring play a similar role to the eulachon further north by providing food here for chinook salmon, the preferred food of the endangered southern resident killer whales. Humans are fond of the chinook as well.

Looking around Powell River at all the plants budding, the ducks donning their breeding plumage, the male mergansers spluttering and splashing around the females, the eagles sitting side by side, looking out over the strait, we all recognize and welcome what Dylan Thomas calls “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

That force here on the northwest coast is fed at some fundamental ecosystem level by herring or eulachon and links us all.

A horned grebe. Photo by Carol Reid.

And then …

… just a few hours after posting this piece, we walked south along the sea walk toward Grief Point. Sea lions were lounging in clusters, the water seemed to be foaming up and turning milky. As we continued it became more and more apparent, the spawn was happening here as well. The spawn drifted south all afternoon, the sea lions and seagulls filling the evening with their cries.