Coming to Life Again
Nan's husband Richard Morenus figures prominently in her first article for Maclean's entitled "Jim Chief," published on October 15, 1946. There is no mention of Richard in her second article for Maclean's published the following year. By that time their marriage was over.
Nan had written "Jim Chief" in the winter of 1945-1946, finishing it in mid- to late April of 1946. I know this because the editor noted at the end of Nan's article that she had completed her article about six weeks after Jim Chief died on March 8. When Richard filed for divorce, he stated that Nan had deserted him on February 22, 1946.
It is clear that Nan stayed on in northern Ontario throughout 1946 and into 1947. She was hospitalized in Sioux Lookout in late February 1947, likely for her chronic abdominal issues. She then went on a wilderness adventure which she chronicled in her second article published later that summer.
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| First page of Nan's article in Maclean's, August 15, 1947. |
"The Woman's Bushed"
Nan's second article "The Woman's Bushed!," published in Maclean's on August 15, 1947, likely started as diary entries that were rewritten and then submitted to the magazine in a hurry. Nan's circumstances were not great. Her marriage to Richard was over and she was (perhaps) alone in Sioux Lookout.
This article is another example of Nan's evocative writing skills. It provides an account of her canoe expedition north of Sioux Lookout with a bushman-prospector named Joe in search of "a rich vein of high grade." (I asked Dorothy Maskerine if she knew who Joe was. "Everyone knew Joe," she replied in our phone conversation of June 18, 2021. "He just kind of turned up in Sioux Lookout and hung out at the Hudson's Bay Company store with his dog." Dorothy is going to try and find out Joe's last name for me.)
The trek involved 240 kilometres (150 miles) of rapids and at least 20 portages. When Nan
asked Joe, a man she said she had known for years, if she could join him on the trip., he exclaimed, “The
woman’s bushed!” A week out of the hospital where she was lyin’
for months an' already she wants to go chippin’ rocks.” (By dropping letters with apostrophes, Nan was giving Joe's voice a regional accent or dialect. Was he from a specific area or race or social group? Because she never provides any background about Joe, it seems disrespectful.)
After a long illness in hospital, Nan saw this journey as a “celebration at being alive and back in the bush once more.” After a month of convalescing (“It took me all that time to get my legs moving one before the other again”), Nan and Joe shoved off from the lodge on Abram Lake. It was a hot July day. “The memory of the months of fever, pain and the smothering confinement of sickness would be swallowed up in the stringent demands of the bush. I was coming to life again.”
The map above is my rather crude attempt to chart the route taken by Nan and Joe from Abram Lake to Spirit Lake and back in the summer of 1947.
Nan’s account reveals her strong descriptive writing skills. For example, here’s her description of running some rapids in a canoe:
“You have felt yourself slipping in the bathtub. That satiny slide beneath your feet. That flying contorted feeling in your limbs as you grip desperately at nothingness. It lasts for only a moment. Our rapids lasted much longer but the bathtub sensation endured. … A broad flat rock just beneath the surface. No time, no room to avoid it. Over it we slid. I felt the canoe’s agonized groan, felt the vibration as the flooring grated and the ribs contracted inward. There is that sickening pity for tortured live things. I felt it now for the canoe . . . that bush possession above all others that endears itself like a personality, a brave and eager partner.”
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| "Canoe in Rapids." Painting by Winslow Homer. Source |
One interesting observation Nan and Joe make during their trek was that northern Ontario was becoming the "land of the vanishing portage." Several times as they travelled through the bush country they discovered that the places where portages were clearly indicated on their map were overgrown and unrecognizable. Much time was lost scouting the shoreline on foot looking for a usable trail, often uncleared and choked with windfall. "Nowadays most fellows go in by plane," Joe says. "Looks like no one wants the hard work anymore."
Nan and Joe never did find the rumoured high-grade vein. As they left behind the final and 27th portage of their trip and headed back to Abram Lake, Nan writes that it was somehow a letdown. “A world had closed behind us.” She had “caught a severe case of prospecting fever” and wanted someday to return, “come hell, higher water or more beavers.”
Nan was good to her word, although it wouldn’t be Ontario that she returned to. She had heard about uranium discoveries in northern Saskatchewan, and within two years she was back prospecting – and writing – this time with trapper and prospector John Albrecht by her side.
A Writer to the End
Nan never gave up writing, however. She took her typewriter with her to Saskatchewan, planning to write about prospecting in the North. Floyd Glass, a northern pilot based in Prince Albert, wrote in his contribution to the book Gold and Other Stories (1986) that the few times he dropped into Nan and John’s camp, she gave him some stories she had written for magazines to take down in the mail. Glass recalled that she sold a couple of stories but if she did, I haven’t located them yet. [Source: Gold and Other Stories as told to Berry Richards, W. O. Kupsch and S. D. Hanson, eds. Regina, SK: Saskatchewan Mining Association, 1986.]
On August
18, 1950, Nan’s occupation, as recorded on her infant son's birth certificate, was writer. After she died 15 days later from complications of
childbirth, her obituary states that Nan was a writer.
That would have been her wish. Now it is my wish to locate more of Nan’s writing.
NEXT: Richard Writes a Book, Part 1 - Click HERE
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©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.
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