22-Nov-2006: Kerry-Ann F.
A few weeks ago I saw a story in the paper headlined, "Couple Dies in House Fire." The sort of tragic
story that editors consider newsworthy from time to time. I read the name of the
town where the fire occurred and took notice. It was a town near where we had once lived, more than 200 kms from here.
I didn't know many people in the town proper, but as soon as I saw the name Kerry-Ann F. I knew it could be no other.
We were living in the bush at the time while I commuted to the big city of Ottawa to work. First one neighbour
suggested we commute together and share expenses, then word spread and I, at one point, was sharing transportation
with five women. They all worked in downtown Ottawa, so it worked well for us. Most of them held clerical positions
in the federal government. I was surprised, at first, to discover how many women there were living in an isolated
forest community and working in Ottawa. But, when you consider that their partners worked in seasonal occupations,
like snow plowing or forest clearing, it made sense that the women would want to earn a regular income.
One of the women in the commuting group was named Kerry-Ann F. She lived in what can only be called a shack not too far from our place.
The building was right up against the road. It was a ramshackle of bits and pieces held together with randomly-coloured sheets of plywood.
It appeared to be big enough for only one room, but I never was inside it. She lived with her boyfriend whose income came from delivering
newspapers. Kerry-Ann's hair stuck out in wild-looking tuffs that she could never get under control. Her clothes were simple, but matted with
dog hair and stinking of nicotine. Her breath could have felled a bear. That was understandable when you consider that often when I sounded
the horn at her place, there would be a brief pause, then Kerry-Ann would appear, struggling to button her blouse or hauling a sweater over her
head, and pop into the car out of breath.
There wasn't much time for personal hygiene in her mornings.
So, what did this woman, whose life appeared to be a disorganized improv, do in the big city? She held a very senior position in the
Prime Minister's Office. Now the PMO, as it is known in Ottawa, is a huge government department; not some cozy little office tucked away
with a receptionist protecting the leader of Canada from intrusions. I never knew what, exactly, her position was (thanks to Canada's security
regulations), but every now and then I'd see her in the background of a news photo of Prime Minister Chrétien. It was difficult to imagine this
woman rubbing shoulders with the upper mandarins in her dog hair-matted wrinkled clothing, but, the other women in the group
told me that Kerry-Ann was brilliant at what she did.
Okay. But still, in a city where appearances count for so much...well, connections were even more important...and I didn't work with her to know what
it was that apparently made her immune to dress codes and other superficial requirements of civil servants.
Now you might think that a woman living in a shack in the woods with a barely employed boyfriend who sometimes was hiding from the
police (that was one of his excuses to me for failing to deliver my daily newspaper), would be tough and rough-hewn. Well, many of the women
who lived in the bush were not tough and rough-hewn. They could look after themselves, but, generally were soft spoken and, well, I hate to
use the expression but I don't know how else to describe them, "lady-like." Polite, well-mannered, paid attention to their appearance and looked out
for others. Kerry-Ann, however, seemed to fit the profile of a pioneer woman who could wrestle a bear. Her voice was rough and her speech was
laced with profanities. She drank heavily and chain-smoked. She complained non-stop about her boyfriend and neighbours during the hour-long trip in
each direction. She didn't seem to care what the rest of us thought of her and her stories.
One of the other women told me that Kerry-Ann had grown up in an extremely wealthy family in the city. Her family had owned a large section of downtown
Hull (now called Gatineau) across the river from Ottawa. There had been some sort of falling out and she wound up living hand to mouth in a shack. I was told
she had a fairly large chunk of money put away, but she never spent it. She loved her boyfriend, but was not a fool about him. She occasionally threw him out of the
house because he sometimes hung out with the town's only prostitute. There were stories....
I stopped commuting with the gang of women when my job moved to Kanata, a high tech suburb of Ottawa. I no longer drove through the downtown and I
could not predict with any accuracy what time I could drop off or pick anyone up. My interactions with members of the group changed from
two-hours a day in a car, to meeting at random times at the local grocery store. I heard that Kerry-Ann had sold her shack and bought a more pleasant
place beside a lake. A few months later her old shack burned to the ground one night, killing the couple who had bought it from Kerry-Ann.
We eventually moved away and I heard no more news about Kerry-Ann and her
boyfriend, or any of the other women in that part of the world, until I saw that story in the newspaper.
The report said that both had died from smoke inhalation and that the fire had been caused by a faulty wood stove.
If life were a novel, it would appear that Kerry-Ann's fate was to die in such a fire. After all, she had recently sold a building where the new
owners died in a similar manner. But, life isn't a book where elements such a plot devices, irony, foreshadowing, and an organized structure come into
play. Or, is it?
The trouble with our brains is that they are continually trying to impose patterns on what we experience. One result is that the past is
rewritten to fit a pattern. Kerry-Ann's story becomes a tragedy with the estrangement from her family, her decision to live in remote desolation,
her falling in love with an unstable man, the drinking and general carelessness, the foreshadowing of the first fire, and climax of the final one.
But, something urges me not to fit her life into such a neat framework. She was human. Neither perfect, nor free from error. She was led from
one event to another the same way all of us are: one stumbling step at a time. Like all of us, she wanted to be liked, but an anger within her
made that difficult to do. She was valued for her skills in the working aspect of her life. And, as with all people that we meet during our voyage
through this world, much remains unknown. No historian or biographer is likely to dig into the details of her life to offer me a picture of Kerry-Ann
that is more complete than what I know of her.
There are worlds and galaxies to explore in the people we come into casual contact with. Sometimes I wish I were a better observer. I want to
write about real people to leave some mark, some small tribute, not to their accomplishments, but to the whole complexity and humanity of their lives.