Tuesday, April 25, 2023: Memories and answers.
This photo shows Queen Elizabeth II on her visit to Kapuskasing in Canada in 1952.
In order to explain how it came into my possession, why I love travelling and how everything began, I’ll take you with me on a trip into the past.
I’d like to introduce you to a boy named Kurt who was an orphan from the age of six. He grew up at a farm and had to do hard work. Although he had to sleep in a stable, he was a good student. Therefore a teacher saw to it that Kurt could start as an apprentice at VOEST Industries in Linz, otherwise he would have been a logger for the rest of his life.
After World War II some countries offered young people from Germany and Austria to immigrate and work there. This is why Kurt and three of his friends went on a ship to New York in 1951, and then took a train to Kapuskasing in Canada – in the middle of nowhere.
Kurt had been offered a job as a logger for a papermill in Kapuskasing/Ontario – one of those legendary lumberjacks who worked in the woods with horses and slept in camps in the wilderness to meet the increasing needs of paper industries for log.
Shortly before leaving he got to know a girl named Anni and fell in love with her. In 1953 he sent her the money for the ship passage. At that time he had already moved to Hamilton near the Niagara Falls and had started a career. Not really from rags to riches, but he was doing really well. For the woman of his dreams things were different. She had strong roots in Austria, had parents and brothers and sisters and decided to stay. So he returned to Austria which at that time was a poor post-war country. After some months they got married.
In 1961 I was born.
My father worked his way up in the sector of industrial furnaces, and was at steel work building sites all over the world, even as site manager. He had an adventurous, happy life with lots of friends, many interests and hobbies and – most important of all – his family.
In 1988 I came to Canada the first time. In Toronto I wrote a letter to him, telling him how much I enjoyed staying in this wonderful country. Two days after receiving this letter he died from a sudden heart attack. This happened shortly before his 60th birthday.
Canada had always been the land of his dreams. But he had never gone back.
With a father working abroad so often travelling was natural in our family from the beginning. As a kid I went on holidays with my parents. Later, during my time at the university, I visited destinations which were considered unusual at the beginning of the 1980s, for example Nigeria. To explore the world, watch nature, get to know different cultures, find out how people in other parts of the planet think and live – this curiosity has never left me yet.
In 2019, when I was emptying my mum’s apartment after her death, I came across the old album from the 1950s. My father as a young man on board a ship, at the Niagara Falls, the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in Kapuskasing … My father had never told us much about his journeys, but the few things he mentioned I kept in my mind. I think that I didn’t hear the name Kapuskasing more often than twice or maybe three times, and I remember me thinking, “I’d like to go there.”
Somewhen I took my laptop to search for Kapuskasing. And really, in the middle of the woods of Ontario there’s a small town with a huge paper mill at a river which forms a curve there. Kapuskasing means “river bend” in the language of the Cree. What a coincidence that the name of my hometown Linz derives from the Celtic word Lentos which describes a bend formed by the Danube.
The road through Kapuskasing is marked with a white maple leaf on a green background. This is the northern route of the Transcanada Highway which leads from the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia to the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island and is more than 8000 km (5000 miles) long.
Suddenly there it was – the thought, “If you go from Halifax via Kapuskasing to Calgary and then turn right once and left twice, you’ll be in Anchorage.” The next thought brought me back to reality and reason immediately, “You are completely crazy! You simply can’t go all the way through Canada to Alaska by yourself!”
Wilderness, bears, dirt-roads, forests, bears, the Rocky Mountains, glaciers, lakes, moose, not to mention bears … Yes, I am scared of bears. Absolutely.
Not long after this I found a card saying, “If it scares you, it might be worth trying.” I put the card on a shelf in the living room and found myself looking at it every now and then, with the “completely crazy” slowly changing to “Maybe you should dream over it.”
From that moment on everything seemed to happen by itself. Of course, preparing this journey was complex and a lot of work, but somehow the solutions kept approaching from somewhere, the pieces of the puzzle put themselves together to form a picture that made it clear to me: Yes, this is how it works.
And so I ended up in my father’s footsteps … and beyond.
Annie Way and the Gang (Sally the Sloth, Leona Loewenfeld and Leopold) arrived three days ago and are waiting for me at Halifax Harbour. I am flying into Halifax on May 1.