Not all of Pa’s stories are lost to history

We called him Pa and he had a habit of living in places lost to time.

My grandfather was born in 1905 in Houston County, Minnesota, before moving north to farm dusty plots near Plato, Sask.

You’d be hard pressed to point out either of these places on a map today.

We don’t have his birth records because the parish church in Houston County burned to the ground. Plato still exists because Canada Post still uses it for a depot of some kind — much to the surprise of the nine or so folks who still live in the area.

It must be a clerical error.

But none of that bothered Pa, whose diaries, letters and stories filled in any gaps lost to history.

He was a simple, hard-working man devoted to God, his family and trains. That’s about it. Retiring to a war-time home in Saskatoon — some 800 square feet of it — may have felt luxurious to him.

At his birthdays, my aunts and uncles often bought him Vogue tobacco in the yellow tins because he rolled his own.

Smoking unfiltered cigarettes his entire life, he might as well have worked in an asbestos mine.

Mom cried unrelentingly at his funeral in 1983. He was 78 when he died, but to me was the picture of health until cancer caught up to him.

I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life after watching — and listening to — him cough up blood into an empty milk jug.

Elmer Eugene Bidwell (you can see why he preferred Pa or Gene) had another health lesson for me, but I didn’t hear the story until just recently.

My uncle Gerald is a fastidious keeper of our family’s history. His genealogy skills are remarkable, and he recently sent us many of Pa’s letters or diary entries, with special mention of one in particular.

It began: “In the fall of 1918 when I was 13 years old, our family moved from Algona, Iowa, to Idaho.”

His mom moved them there to work in a lumber camp. He helped her in the kitchen while his dad worked in the bush.

“All went along fine until the early part of

December when the influenza epidemic (sic) hit camp,” he continued. “We all came down with it, but the worst was my dad, who got seriously ill with pneumonia. The lumberjacks put a mattress on a push-car and he was wrapped in blankets.

“They pushed him seven miles to Fernwood over the logging railroad. There, he was put in the baggage car of a passenger train and taken to the St. Maries hospital. Fortunately, the rough ride on the push car jarred the clotted blood loose in his lungs, and he was able to cough it up during the trip to the hospital. Dr. Blackwell told us later that it had saved his life.”

My great-grandfather spent two months in hospital regardless.

“Mother and the two youngest children went to St. Maries to be with Dad, but Frank (Pa’s older brother) and I stayed in camp. The men looked after us, as we were terribly sick in the bunkhouse, but we came through it okay.”

Clearly they were the lucky ones. The 1918 Pandemic (I don’t call it the Spanish flu because there’s no evidence it came from Spain) killed 50 million people worldwide and infected an estimated 500 million people — one-third of the globe’s population at the time.

Experts now believe the death toll was actually much higher.

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At the end of his life, my grandfather refused medical interventions to slow his cancer. It had started in his prostate, and metastasized in his lungs.

He told Uncle Gerald in another letter that he didn’t fear death. He’d lived a good life, and he would rather die at home.

“Maybe I am wrong in that idea,” he wrote on June 14, 1983, “but my mind is set against an operation.”

I’ve not reached that point in my life, but when I do I hope that I’ve inherited some of his clarity and bravery.

Don’t take what I’m writing as an indication Pa survived the flu without any help, and we should all be fighting COVID with vitamins and “positive thoughts.” The 1918 strain of H1N1 killed those younger than five, those 20-40 and those older than 65. Pa was at the right age, but it killed some within hours after they’d started showing symptoms.

Pa never gave me any indication that he feared modern medicine, and I’m almost certain he would have gladly stuck out his arm for a flu vaccine in 1918.

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You shouldn’t care that I’m now vaccinated against COVID-19.

It should be assumed that all able-bodied adults in Canada have —at the very least — registered to receive the vaccine.

In a perfect world, telling you that I was jabbed on Sunday would be like telling you “Giraffes are tall.”

We’re not there.

Our office has been picketed at least twice over the past year by a loose collection of misfits railing against vaccines, masks, lockdowns — you know this group well by now.

COVID denial has reached such a ridiculous level online that I’m reluctant to write anything about the issue just to avoid those crusading keyboard morons and their halfbaked comments.

But this is important, isn’t it? Or would you rather endure another summer like last?

If anyone out there actually believes we’re better off without vaccines or social distancing or masks, then maybe they’d happily ride an open push-car over seven miles of railroad in the dead of an Idaho December, all the while coughing up bloody froth.

Didn’t think so.

Please, do the right thing and get vaccinated. Anything less is to ignore the sacrifices of countless thousands who have died unnecessarily from preventable and treatable disease.