The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite
Little is left of the old nickel town of Victoria Mines: a few metres of crushed slag that once formed a road; sunken foundations, bits of wood. Now a ghost town in Ontario’s Sudbury Basin, it is where my family’s Canadian story began, around the turn of the last century.
Since my father’s death, my heart has been balled into a fist. I thought that coming to look at this place might ease the grip. As we exit the car, we spread out and take measure. Granite tumours bulge: unwelcoming, treacherous for my elderly mother and aunt and uncle. My husband and I keep our little boy close.
Occupying this ground demands an almost sepulchral reverence. It is a haunted space, even if its ghosts exist only in my awareness that life once burgeoned here and then was gone.
Scattered in the scrub are morsels of ore and the occasional verdigris shock of copper-cobalt. Evidence of the living – broken jars, a wooden cross, shards of metal – lie hidden within a hissing ocean of weeds and grass.
Where the mine and the smelter once thundered and murky smoke drifted across the years, while a thousand souls fought for survival, there is silence.
Wind shushes through the leaves, a parched, papery sound, and I swear I can hear the murmuring past: the clatter and tinkle of the dinner table, men’s voices, occasionally women’s, the distant wailing of a baby.
The sky is cloudless and almost pure indigo. Chirring grasshoppers and the ravens that haw from time to time form a bleak antiphony to the ghost-echoes of women dying in childbirth; the barking and hacking of tuberculosis, silicosis, cancer; the low and terrible moans of hunger and disease in brutal winters.
My father’s death has unnerved me, even though it was expected. Through him I was bound to my ancestors, but I was coldly severed in that instant when his world went black and disappeared. Ever since, I have felt as much left behind as these places that formed, and deformed, our history.
When the past is unknown, the individual lives caught up in those shadows can become unknowable. This was my father, and in a way he was lost to me long before his death. I thought that maybe, if I picked through our shared past, I would find my dad and feel connected to something I never really had.
The oldest family photo of my grandfather shows him in 1914 on the newly built porch of his general store in Coniston, about 60 kilometres west of Victoria Mines. Another spoke in the Sudbury hub, Coniston was born out of the ruin of Victoria Mines, whose operations dried up like dozens of others dotting the ore-rich Basin.
For the rest of this essay, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/staring-down-my-ghosts-in-northern-ontario/article4582533/