The boy Paco had never known about any of this nor about what all these people would be doing on the next day and other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not even realize they ended. He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition.

Ernest Hemingway - The Capital of the World

1533 A. D. Strasbourg, Holy Roman Empire

I am a disciple of the Dutch Anabaptist leader Melchior Hofmann. Hofmann is the new Elijah. He has told us this. I believe in him.

Hofmann has prophesied that the world will end this year. Though I have been baptized into the pure church of Christ, and I am well prepared for Christ's return, still I am afraid.

We have gathered in the city of Strasbourg, the New Jerusalem, to await the return of the King. The local citizens are contemptuous of our presence. They derisively refer to us as "Melchiorites", and precede the title with adjectives that draw similes between our "pagan" and "heretical" beliefs and the bodily functions of animals. We are afraid because the magistrates have imprisoned Hofmann just as the time is approaching. Still, we have faith. Hofmann has told us that the wicked will be destroyed before the return of the King. A prophet and a pious ruler will appear, and in cooperation the saints will rule the purified earth, in preparation for the Parousia - the second coming of Christ.

1534 A. D. Straight of Belle Isle, New-Found-Land

They have been coming now for centuries. These tall forests and white clouds, filled with their demon-white faces. A polyglot of fear spills into the mist as their vessels approach the shore.

I watch the boat approach land from the far coastline. I am with my first hunting party, a young Micmac warrior. My people speak with a tongue so complicated that the tongues of these barbarians, derived from the language of their Latin conquerors, pale in complexity. We use it now to voice our fascination with the unfolding events.

A man in black has disembarked the small dory which has been rowed out to land from the ship. He plants a piece of wood into the ground.

What strange behaviour. Nothing can grow in this barren ground.

Strange chants fill the air and the men left in the dory, seemingly frantic now, touch their chests at four points.

A loud voice from the ship fills the air. A man on the deck is its source. His voice is one of authority. Many years later when I learn their tongue and their religion, I finally understand what he says.

"The Land of Cain." Is how he describes his first impression of my home.

1945 A. D. Strasbourg, France

I am visiting the medieval town of Strasbourg on leave. The war is almost over for me. I am a member of the Canadian First Army. I went ashore with the 8th Canadian Brigade on Juno Beach on the 6th of June, 1944 in Normandy. Fighting towards Bernieres we were unable to gain our objective, the town of Caen, due to fierce counter-attacks by the 21st Panzer division. I saw a hundred friends, men and boys from the Prairies, the Maritimes, Southern Ontario, Western Quebec, slaughtered by the ferocious German counterattack. In exchange for more death, over the next weeks we captured Caen, and pushed north, toward the Low Countries. The British and the Americans headed to Paris. To vanity the spoils. I preferred the sober Netherlands anyway. It's in my blood.

My family is of Metis/French Protestant heritage. We had originally been among the settlers of New France, but had been forced to give up our investments in the fur-trade and our other holdings, when the Bishop of Quebec purged the colony of Protestants.

My ancestors went west, into the Hudson Bay Company's Rupert's Land. They worked for "the Company" until they settled down to farm, a century later, in the Southern Manitoba Red River colony.

I have come to Strasbourg, because this is where my family is from. My ancestors arrived here in 1533 from the Low Countries, followers of Dutch Anabaptist leader Melchior Hofmann. Hofmann was thrown into prison for his radical Christian beliefs, and died there nine years later. My ancestors, disillusioned with the prophecies of the Anabaptists, settled into a conservative Calvinism. One of their grandsons, dreaming of the New World, left the comfort of the city and travelled through France, to the colony in North America. He landed in the fishing outports of Newfoundland and from there, with his new Micmac bride, moved to Quebec City where he rose to a position of wealth through the fur trade. Their grandchildren never enjoyed the fruits of their success.

I enjoy the sun of a warm spring day. The French First Army liberated the city in December of 1944 from the Germans, and though there is still hardship in the city, it is once again French.

The single spire of the city's main cathedral looms over me. The cathedral is an unfinished tribute to dreams of religious and cultural utopia. The spire is a symbol of Babel, the desire to bring God down from his heaven. I've seen enough death in the past months that I can't help but wonder if the effort was in vain.

They say we're fighting this war for democracy. I wonder if it's for another reason. Winston Churchill remarked in August of 1941 to Mackenzie King that, "this is not a war of men but a war of highly specialized machines."

I sometimes wonder if we're fighting because that is what men do.

I heard a shot just a moment ago. I'm numb to the sound. A few moments later, and after the requisite noise of booted officialdom, I hear the cries of a woman, and a man shouting in vain. "He was a traitor. He said that Strasbourg is a German city. That it was in the past, and will forever be. I showed him the future. A Strasbourg free of scum like him." The gendarmes hauled him away. Civil power. Peace has returned.

2000 A.D. Vancouver, Canada

It's another day of rain. It has rained for the past forty days and nights. It will rain again tomorrow. The rain is as constant as the land, omnipresent, and always changing - direction, speed, force, and purpose.

I'm sitting at my computer the day after my grandfather's funeral trying to make sense of his death. I'm not coming to any easy answers, though I suppose this memoir is a start. My grandfather was a Second World War veteran from Southern Manitoba. He and Grandmother came to Vancouver after the war. In a new city they found a new life.

I spend my days as an environmental researcher. I study the destruction of the North American mammal population. As a result of deforestation, industry and overpopulation, the continent is starting to see a dramatic loss of wildlife. The grizzlies are almost gone. So are the beavers. I'm in daily contact with people from around the globe through my e-mail and Internet connections vainly trying to halt the destruction.

The Europeans are my biggest supporters. I was in contact today with a group from Eastern France, Strasbourg I think they said, or some other old, dark, medieval place like it. They're coming to Vancouver next month to film a documentary about the destruction of Canadian wildlife.

Their leader was going on in an e-mail about Native peoples and culture and how North Americans need to save their wildlife because look what happened in Europe and did you know that Greece was once heavily forested and look at it today?

I gave him a virtual nod, and dismissed him. I hate politics. I don't know why I care so much about the issue, it's certainly not political for me. Politics are just a tool. I think it's because I think of my children and wonder after I'm gone what they'll do. I worry a lot. What kind of world will I leave them? What kind of legacy?

Perhaps the greatest gift I can give them is the chance to live and thrive in a country as great as the one bequeathed to me from my ancestors.

For what purpose? I can't say.

I'm not looking to create a utopia in the wilderness of Canada. I don't desire to create or recreate any fiefdom or government or political system in the kingdom of the rain. I don't believe there is a single motivating factor behind my drive to strike a balance between the needs of human survival, and the means of survival, the earth, which is in such precarious health in this era of human history. What other people call my "cause".

There are other causes, why this one? There are still wars being fought on this planet. People still, needlessly, die of starvation. There is no justice in my own land for the First Nations.

I look out into the darkness, and the rain has given way to a soft mist coming off of the water. Behind the shroud is a landscape, and a people desperately trying to make sense of its meaning.

Perhaps the answer to my query can be found in my "cause." "Cause" I can and I will. "Cause" that is why the Creator gave us this stage upon which we constantly play and replay our morality tales for the benefit of the Universe. "Cause" that is what I am. Until that is, I am not. My cause is simply my part.

When the curtain closes, I hope that the encore will continue in the guise of my offspring, and their attempt to experience and understand all that I have been unable to.

Epilogue

It's individual stories which give significance to our collective human desire to understand. A collective voice which resonates with single tones. A chorus of inquiry.

I now share this inquiry with the world through my computer. My medium of discovery. Others do so through the visual arts, through music, through theatre. Media as different as every individual human. Each medium asking: Why? How? When? Where?

The inquiry continues seemingly innocuous to the voices of the past, which sympathetically lend harmony and dissonance to the song. It's these voices from the past, the context of inquiry, that is so fascinating to me, as we enter into a new historical epoch with the turn of the millennium.

It's time to listen for context as we seek to understand.

Context is the sum of the history of events which culminate in a historical happening. The happening is only significant in that it is the foundation for future happenings. We can talk, in any period of history, about both the past, present and future, and depending on the reference any event can stand for each proposition or all three.

I suppose then, the significance for me in all of the fuss over the turn of the century and the millennium, is that we're congratulating ourselves for our ability to understand the elusive nature of time. We're celebrating ambiguity. The fog amidst which inquiry takes place.

Welcome to the past, present and future.

Copyright © 2000 Robert F. Delamar All Rights Reserved

Robert Delamar enjoys splashing unsuspecting passers-by with puddle water. He has lived on Canada's Wet Coast for most of his life. He is the Managing Editor of *spark-online.