Our Kansas-Canadian Connection

Our Kansas Canadian Connection

I’m thinking of running away. To Canada--which is a time-honored American tradition. At the recent Left Coast Crime conference in Santa Fe, I met another group of writers from Canada. My first experience was at Malice Domestic last year. The Canadians were super friendly, unusually helpful, and urged me to attend Bloody Words next year. It’s  major Canadian conference for crime novelists. I intend to do just that.

We Americans have been running off to Canada since the 1800s. Although we might associate this flight with Vietnam draft dodgers, in fact before the Civil War, Canada was the ultimate destination for runaway slaves. It was the last stop on the Underground Railroad.

How did slaves know when they had reached their destination? Canadian novelist Louise Penney has a captivating series set around a tiny village of Three Pines. In one of the books, she stated that three isolated pines trees were a marker to slaves. At last, they had arrived in free territory. I can’t find anything that backs this up, but it makes sense. As with much of the information in African American history, we have to depend on the oral tradition and stories passed down. Separating fact from fiction is difficult

I’m a big fan of Louise Penny’s books. They are traditional mysteries—that is to say, whodunits—told in a unique captivating style. Recently, I was angry when I couldn’t find a single copy in our Loveland library. Then when I checked the card catalog, I learned the library owned every book. They were all checked out. Constantly.

Canadian author Vicki Delany’s book, In the Shadow of the Glacier, gives a dynamic look at Canadian’s attitudes toward American refuges during the Vietnam period. I never dreamed the country was so divided toward the fleeing Americans. Some of them stayed. In fact, not all Canadians welcomed runaway slaves. Some African Americans returned to the United States after the Civil War and some American citizens returned when amnesty was granted.

I was enchanted by the tales about the weather told by my new Canadian friends. But if they thought they could out-do me they had another think coming. No one can top a Kansans when it comes to bragging about adverse weather. It’s the way we start conversations. We check the weather the first thing when we get up in the morning. Our daily activities are dictated by the weather. And it changes. Drastically and instantly.

I grew to love the inconsistency of our crazy weather and the high drama of just getting up in the morning.

Living in Kansas has always been suspenseful.