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A great look at a Canada that worked hard and believed in itself
Book Review
By Derryll White
Crook, Marion McKinnon (2021). Always Pack A Candle – A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin.
The author has a soft but dynamic way of immediately pulling the reader into her story. A public health nurse fresh out of school, plunked down in Williams Lake, 1960s, on her first job is a very compelling introduction.
Marian learns a lot – about ranching, managing people, and how to subvert government resources in order to maintain new programmes such as home care nursing. This is real life and she documents it articulately and well. Life away from the big city!
Marion Crook has a delightful thread of feminism running throughout this story. Remember, rural B.C. in the 1960s, mostly ranchers and logging/sawmill personnel. She brings a common sense view to a social order that had yet to hear it. “I mean ‘normal’ is defined in our society as masculine.” No preaching, just laying out the inequities and indicating that the status quo wasn’t good enough.
Another thing this novel graphically portrays is the reliance people in the Cariboo had on each other at that time. There was no communication – no cell phones or satellite phones. When Marion was on the road to Anahim Lake in December, she had a candle in the glove compartment, a sleeping bag in the back seat, and the belief that the infrequent traffic would stop to help if she was in trouble.
She tells the story vividly and in a most believable manner. This is a great look at a Canada that worked hard and believed in itself.
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Excerpts from the novel:
DEATH IN THE WOODS – He’d gone to work the way I’d gone to work this morning, doing what was expected of us, trying to be productive and useful to earn a wage. We didn’t expect to die. The fates were capricious, grabbing a life without any forewarning. The older man who had been praying had tried to comfort himself by putting order around Arlie’s sudden inexplicable death. He couldn’t do it. There was no order. Knowledge was supposed to protect us. Arlie was supposed to know enough to stay alive. I was supposed to know enough to help him stay alive. We’d both failed. I sat on the rock, letting the river hurry by, unstoppable, predestined, like the thread of Arlie’s life – and let the tears fall.
CARIBOO WINTER – Everyone dressed for the cold, looking like a blimp with boots. Everyone’s car looked like a frost-covered alien vehicle for the first hour of the day until the interior heater defrosted the windows and then it looked like an alien vehicle with eyes. The compensation for the dropping temperatures was the almost constant sun. Bright days lifted my spirits.
RACISM – “… I took blood at the jail every week for four months, I saw only one non-Indigenous prisoner. No one talked about racism; it was just practised. I noticed racism everywhere now, revealed slowly day by day. Experience melted my ignorant white cover like snow, and I could see the real groundwork of society. It made me uncomfortable in my own skin.
WOMEN’S INSTITUTE – “I move,” another woman said, “that our Women’s Institute give them five hundred dollars to help them rebuild”.
Five hundred dollars was more than a month’s salary for me. The motion passed unanimously.
“And now,” Betty Jean said, “How are we going to raise that money?”
I was astounded. I’d assumed they had five hundred dollars in their WI treasury, but they didn’t. They just decided how much the young couple should have, and now they were going to figure out how to raise it. I’d never met such a bold bunch. By the time the business part of the meeting closed, they had mapped out their path to achieve their goal: bake sales, a meat draw, bingo, and several other events. It would take energy and time and they seemed happy to do it.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
