The Photograph

Memories bubble to the surface every time I view this framed sixty-year-old 12”x15” hand-coloured photograph of the farmstead where I grew up just outside of Edmonton. This piece of paradise, now long gone, was the wellspring of my existence.

Although it may not fit the strict definition of an heirloom, it is important to me for a couple of reasons. One is that it is a graphic generator of countless memories from my youth, nearly all happy ones. Every detail in the picture evokes a memory of some event or situation.

For example, when I see the rock garden in front of the house, I think of my mother lovingly maintaining it even though she was fully occupied managing a household and coping with the demands of three reluctantly helpful sons. On the left of the picture is the swimming hole where we would take a dip after a hot day in the hay field. It’s also where my brother once launched a leaky old boat just in time to save me from drowning. In winter the pond became a skating rink where hockey pucks were continually fished out of the bordering snowbanks.

A glimpse of the then new barn takes me back to an agricultural engineering class where I designed its innovative features. The barn was attached to the original milk house built in 1935, and paid for by a swap for a cow because cash was so scarce in those depression days. On the horizon is the Texaco oil refinery where after high school I was initially offered a job but later was rejected for lab work because of colour blindness. These associations are only a sample of how this picture is both a source of stories from my earliest days, and a visual context that adds more life to these stories when shared with those who were not there.

As a child I knew and loved every square foot of that farm. I would wander aimlessly over its acres, my senses filled by the trembling aspens, the melodic meadowlarks, and the pungent aroma of the wild mint by the creek. I knew where the crocuses sprang up every spring; where the saskatoons, chokecherries and hazel nuts thrived; and where to find the nest of any bird you could name. And there was such an abundance of birds: orioles, purple grackles, loggerhead shrikes, killdeers, bluebirds, tree swallows, red-tail hawks, great-horned owls, and many more, nearly all of which have moved to friendlier environs and many of which, sadly, are much less common today.

Whether I was ambling through the woods or running down hills for the sheer joy of doing so, I simply accepted the texture of the soil and the varying topography just as they were, with little thought of how they came to be that way. There were times when I did wonder why the soil was sandy here but not there, or why there was a series of potholes in the north field while other fields took different forms. It was not until I studied glacial geology that I realized that much of the farm was formed by a ten thousand-year-old glacial melt-water stream that flowed from remnants of a glacier in the Beaver Hills to the east, into a temporary glacial Lake Edmonton to the west. While this explained the origin of the sandy areas, ridges, and creek-bed, and led to my seeing the land a little differently, it did not diminish my emotional attraction to it; rather it enriched it.

Whatever my feelings were then about the farm, I now recognize that its existence was only a short clip from the movie of its history. Its function as a source of food production and a delightful place to grow up was simply a phase which that land went through. My father acquired it in its native state, covered with trees except for a few natural grassy clearings. For countless years before, it was inhabited, or at least visited, by First Nations people as evidenced by the two stone ax heads we turned up while harrowing.

Today, in its latest phase, only a couple of acres of the original topography can be recognized. Anyone passing by on the freeways that intersect on what used to be south pasture of the farm would have no clue that once there was a farmstead, a home, and a cradle of joyful family life. What has not been converted to highways has been leveled and covered by industrial development. I am sorry to see the disappearance of the farm and the rich natural habitat that I once loved. However, these changes have helped me see that my feeling of connection to that particular farm was really an initiation to a deep and abiding concern for the welfare of the earth and natural environment in general.

I will keep this photograph as an heirloom mainly because it preserves and enriches stories from bygone years, both for myself and for those who follow. There is a second reason why I value this image. This farm to me is a symbol of the historical connection of my forbears to the land. My own bonding with the earth, although not as a farmer, is just the most recent link in a patrilineal cultural chain that stretches back at least nine generations. Starting with the first recorded Haythornthwaite in the sixteenth century (my father said he dropped the ‘thwait’ in the Atlantic on coming to Canada), records show that every one of my male progenitors had been a farmer. It seems that the male Y chromosome of these forbears must have contained some kind of “farmer gene” for this to have happened.

As it turns out this might very well be the case. In 2009 researchers at the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester studied the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome of groups of men with the same surname. Forty uncommon family names were selected for testing, among them Haythornthwaite and Attenborough. The Haythornthwaites were one of the least genetically diverse, implying that they likely were all descended from that ancient first recorded member. But what is also interesting is that their Y chromosome contained a gene grouping, or haplotype, rarely seen in other families. Because most of the early men with this surname had been farmers, the researchers called this sequence of genes the “farmer” haplotype!

A connection to the land has continued in my immediate family, in one way or another, even if I have to stretch the linkage a bit. When the pictured home farm was sold after my parents died, my brother Dick and I jointly purchased a half section farther from the city that he continued to farm. He later moved to the Chilliwack area and operated a dairy farm there until he retired. After he and I sold the Alberta farm I bought a sixty acre former homestead north of Edmonton which my family continues to enjoy as a nature retreat. My younger brother Owen, although a teacher, spent the last forty years of his life on ten acres in the middle of a farming community north of Toronto. Neither of my older half-brothers were farmers, but one of them co-authored a book, “Land and Labour” based on his PhD research into the history of social and economic conditions of farm labour in Canada. He also lived on acreage on the outskirts of Ottawa until it was swallowed up by the city.

I treasure this old farmstead photograph not only because it serves to remove some of the haze from the window into my childhood, but also because it symbolizes my family’s historical connection with the land. Perhaps my choice of this as an heirloom validates the old expression, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”

Don Haythorne