Peter Velisek: Immigrant Pioneer of the Little Slocan
In honour of the man who raised me to view the land as home
My dad’s calloused hands snap the twigs, placing them in the fire pit. Behind him, Monica Mountain rises up, craggy and gray, worn by the rough weather of alpine elevation, lit up by the descending sun. The years on my father’s face fit right in.
This backpacking trip into the Purcell Mountains had been my idea, my desire to wake up amongst the mountains on my birthday; I’d asked my old man along for the adventure. But I was quickly realizing that this was a trip about my dad, in fact maybe for my dad, and hearing more of the stories about the paths he took to be the age he is now.
My dad Peter was born in Czechoslovakia in 1948, during a time of scarcity and poverty in a small country under Soviet govern. He and his two older brothers, Vita and Ivan, would cause trouble in classrooms and gymnastics; as they grew older, they directed their Slavic high-energy into flatwater kayaking and canoeing on the Otava river, Ivan and Peter later reaching National levels of competition.
Eventually adulthood became unavoidable, and the boys enlisted for their mandatory duty in the army. They would be caught sneaking out of their dorms from windows twenty feet above the cobblestone street or found drinking strong vodka with a spoonful of goose fat to keep intoxication at bay. Dad bought a tiny Fiat and ripped along the twisting roads of Switzerland and Germany, dodging police and staying with friends until the army caught him for leave without absence and locked him up for 25 days.
Then the Soviets invaded. My dad, along with his fellow jail mates, were released, the Russians unsure what to do with them. Czechoslovakia became a very different place. One evening while returning home through the streets of Prague, he stepped into the Old Town Square and was met with the looming shapes of parked tanks. The weather was foggy, the square empty, and it all felt dark and scary. He turned around and took a different route.
We reached a V in the trail and my dad leads us to the left, up the steeper but faster route, he says. “I’ll show you where I slept without a tent when it was raining!” This hike had become an annual adventure for him, and each time he always has something new to say about it.
“How old were you when you came to Canada?” I ask, my legs starting to feel the couple hours of hiking we’d already done.
“I was twenty… twenty-two!” he stops and looks back at me, grinning. “I remember landing in Montreal and when I walked off the plane, my legs were shaking!”
“From the flight, or the excitement?”
“Oh yes, I was excited,” he says, turning back to the trail, “And then I took a train to Vancouver. I remember we were three days in and not there! Canada was huge.”
He’s wearing a utility kilt, the kind carpenters wear, and his skinny legs poke out from underneath. His colourful, striped rugby shirt is hung over his backpack “to dry the sweat”. He plods forward, head down, always keen to press on.
When my dad arrived in Vancouver, he received a sponsorship to learn English for ten months as an immigrant. He moved in with his brother Ivan and Ivan’s then partner, paying only fifty bucks a month in rent; he found a job making sandwiches and flipping burgers for two bucks an hour at a “sleazy” club called the Purple Steer where women would walk around topless. “It was the 70s,” he says with raised eyebrows, and I imagine the shock of the sight after a more conservative style in Eastern Europe.
“Then the club fell apart, so I had to find something else.”
We’ve made camp for the night, nestled between two berms on soft alpine grass. The glaciers and sharp granite of the Purcell’s ring us in the last rays of a pink sunset.
My dad has started a fire, and it crackles joyfully, eating up the dead larch branches he meticulously collected. His eyes twinkle with memory as he recounts an incident during his next micro-career.
“I found a job painting buildings with a New Zealander, an Irish, and another Canadian. We would be up on these scaffolds, twenty, thirty, fifty feet up, and they had these two buttons on either side that would lower and raise the platform,” he pauses, rubbing his shins to warm them.
“Well one day, one of the buttons got stuck, and the platform was starting to go on an angle! It was moving fast! But the guy kept hitting the button again and again, and eventually it stopped,” he says excitedly with a grin.
My dad’s way of storytelling relies on his emotion from the moment. As he’s gotten older, he’ll miss words, getting caught up in the feeling instead, and sometimes, whole sentences will be forgotten, and the listener is left wondering at the storyline.
But that’s another part of the artist in in my dad. He’s a sensitive man, and intuitively creative. As a young man, back in the mother land, he’d landed himself his first “artist-in-residency” in the clock tower in his hometown. A little room at the very tippy top with two small windows, an immense view of the town and countryside and nothing but wine to drink and art to make. It was his debut into the art world, drawing on inspiration from the changing moods of the landscape around him.
In the first year he was in Canada, he kept up his sketches and paintings.
“I took my work to this gallery, run by a Dutch woman, but she told me that I’d have to come back another time. You know, I was eager,” he grins and prods the dying fire with a larch branch.
An owl flies over us silently, making a couple more passes in the search for a meal. My dad is quiet, staring into the flames, lost in the deep vaults of memory I’ve stirred up with my questions. The stars above are bright and cold, Orion and Ursus Major standing out boldly. I yawn, bid my dad goodnight and crawl into my sleeping bag.
In the morning, my hands busy with boiling water for tea, I ask my dad for more – more stories, more memories. He sits framed by the rising sun, the fire smoking in front of him and a smile on his face.
“What about Nelson?” I ask, sitting down across from him with a cup of tea.
“Let’s see,” he crosses his legs, weaving his fingers around his knees and leans back, eyes trained on the fire, “well, after the gallery didn’t want my art, I decided to drive to Halifax. I’d heard about a place – a little cabin – where I could go and live, but when I got there, the people said ‘no, no, you can’t do that here,’ so I turned around and drove all the way back.” He laughs.
“You drove to Halifax, stayed for a couple hours and then drove back?” I ask, grinning at his delight in the story.
“Yes! And when I got back to Vancouver, I heard about an art school in Nelson, so went there instead.”
It’s getting to be breakfast time, and my body is starting to want some warm food. There had been frost on the tent fly in the morning when we’d woken up. I pour a quick oat mixture into a small pan, scrounging raisins from the trail-mix and dropping them in. A few minutes later, our cups are filled with sweet, steaming oats.
“It took me a few tries to get to Nelson. I never made it further than Princeton,” my dad says, and I remember the hitch-hiking trip he’d taken back from Vancouver Island this summer; he’d gotten stranded in Cache Creek over night and slept in a ditch, getting a thru-ride from a glaciologist the next morning. He’s one for those out of left pocket travel journeys, the ones that always end up with a good story to tell.
“Eventually I made it and applied for a spot in the art school. But they’d all filled up, so I found a job instead. I worked for a guy, shortly, on the marina that needed to be rebuilt under the [Nelson] bridge. One of the counsellors at the school had a place in Thrums and needed a hand. I remember one day he came home for lunch and told me that a spot had opened! My dream had come true!” He giggles at the memory and pops a spoonful of porridge into his mouth.
After completing art school, Dad moved up to Kitimat to work in the plant, “the pot plant” as he refers to it. Ivan was up there as well, and it was a good way for some immigrant boys to make money. He met a fellow Czech, who also resided in Nelson otherwise, and they bought a house together in Taghum.
Back in the Kootenays, he met Joe Irving, a pioneer born in a covered wagon in 1911, now living and homesteading in Crescent Valley. Joe and his wife Sylvia took him in like a son, offering room and board for help around the ranch. Peter was eager. He learned how to drive horses, fall trees, maintain equipment and build his own home.
At this time, he met his first wife Sharon. When his Czech buddy and he fell out, Peter used his share of the money from their house sale and bought a piece of land. Although he admits to it being all his idea, he and Sharon made it work.
“We had to take out a loan for our first work horse!” he exclaims, “But then after a summer of making hay, we were able to pay it off.”
I get up from my cramped position next to the fire and stack our empty dishes. We hadn’t brought enough water with us, but we’d agreed the night before to explore a lake before we headed off the mountain. That was something I always admired in my dad, his keenness and desire for adventure, to explore and seek out the hidden secrets of whatever strange land he is on. Throughout my child and teen years, he would be off in the Scottish highlands, walking and camping, sometimes taking to the waterways in a landscape that inspired his art. It reminded me of a book I had read once – an anthropological text about how the first peoples came to the Americam landmass. It spoke of a gene that was carried down through the generations succeeding them – the “wandering gene” – a gene that allowed for the migration of peoples. I figure my dad has that gene, and since it had a habit of being passed down, I have a good hunch I’d got it from him.
My dad drove school bus for the Kootenay Lake school district for almost forty years, and the schedule allowed him to farm at the same time.
“We got summers off, and winter holidays. I’d be up at four to milk the cows, and then work around the farm until the afternoon with the horses, and when I got home, I’d be back out milking the cows,” he states, his hands folded in his lap.
He had five kids in his first marriage but didn’t get to see them through all their years of growth. His first marriage fell apart and he was left with another one of his creations, a homestead crouched next to the Slocan River, under the lee of a mountain that stole the sun in the winter. Art became his solace, and he would attend live drawing classes in Nelson.
“That’s how I met your mum,” he says, “But you know, I had a hard time, I was still dealing with what had happened and I had a hard time letting it go.”
“Didn’t you ask her something about GI Joe?” I ask, remembering their meeting I’d been told about long ago.
“We were in the class one night, and she was there with her friend. I had a GI Joe statue, toy, no, figurine, and I went and asked her if she’d let her kids play with it,” he laughs, winks dramatically and says, “and then she left her boyfriend for me.”
At that time, Dad had sold his first timber palace, and found a square of land even more secluded in the Little Slocan Valley. And he set to work doing what he did best, creating another home hewn from the timber fallen on the land, hauled by his Percherons and milled by his Woodmizer. His was the last property at the end of a maintained road, south-facing, built on an old landing from when the skid roads criss-crossing the land still operated. It was back to milk cows and pigs, a massive garden that would feed a family, and soon my younger sister and I crawling along beside it all, sticking our noses into a business we’d be raised learning.
My dad wades into the knee-deep lake at the base of Monica Mountain, sediment rising around his feet with each step. I crouch on exposed rocks, cleaning our dishes in the clear water, watching his strong shoulders and aging body. He’s seventy-five now, and the years of hard labour and adventure line his face and his hands, shaping his body. But he isn’t one to slow down, no, he still falls trees and builds his artfully chiselled buildings in place of a hobby, he cross-country skies in the winter and hikes into the backcountry with his daughters.
We make our way back up to the trail, stopping to capture a picture together in the warm sun, my dad bare-chested, in his beige utility kilt and big hiking boots. He may stand with a bend in his back, and walk with a limp in his stride, but he’s got a story to tell.
Odds are, it’ll be a little crazy, and out of left pocket.
So beautiful❣️