The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2009, Page 39

Vol. 62 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
81
The Angel of the Waterfront
by Audrhea Lande
Anna’s story came to me sideways,
edging up through the cracks of the story I
was researching.
I had come to Victoria to ask Barbara
Bjerring about her cousin-in-law,
Sigurbjorg Stefansson, the highly-regarded,
highly-private teacher from Gimli,
Manitoba. So why was she telling me about
someone named Anna? Who was Anna?
Perhaps, I thought at first, Barbara had got
her stories mixed up. She was, after all,
ninety-four years old. A person is allowed
to confuse the memories of ninety-four
years. My gentle attempts to refocus her
recollections on Sigurbjorg were rebuffed.
I was going to hear the story of Anna
Halldorson, even though Barbara was
unsure of Anna’s connection to Sigurbjorg.
It was sometime in 1976 when Barbara
and her now-deceased husband Kari got
involved in Anna’s life. Sigurbjorg
Stefansson - Kari’s half-cousin on their
mothers’ side-had written to them, asking
them to find Anna. Sigurbjorg had said that
Anna’s letters to her had become increas-
ingly bizarre and then had ceased altogeth-
er. Could Barbara and Kari go and find
her? Maybe she was in trouble. Maybe she
needed help.
Aha, I thought. So Anna was someone
who corresponded with S.S. as I had come
to call her. It was my first hint of a treasure
trove of letters and essays that lay in wait
for me, a treasure trove written by S.S., sent
to others who, happily for me, saved them.
When she asked Kari and Barbara to find
Anna, they agreed. Kari and S.S. were very
close family, having shared a home from
1916 to 1920, and a deep affection lay
between aunt and nephew. If S.S. asked, of
course Kari would do.
Kari had his own memory of Anna,
Barbara said, from the time he was 5 years
old. In 1916 he and his intrepid mother had
gone to the prairie pioneer community of
Wynyard, Saskatchewan, to get Sigurbjorg
and her mother to live with them in
Winnipeg, so that Sigurbjorg could attend
Wesley College. Kari’s mother, Sigga
Bjerring, was determined that her niece
would not be denied the opportunity of an
education, as she herself had been, due to
poverty. After Sigurbjorg’s father passed
away, she took Sigurbjorg and her mother
in with her family at 550 Banning Street,
and funded her education.
It was there on the Saskatchewan
prairie that Kari first saw Anna, sixteen
years old, leaping over a small creek, gold-
en hair flying behind her. She made an
impression on the five-year-old. She was
beautiful, he said.
“Aha”, I thought. “A childhood
friend, that’s who Anna was to Sigurbjorg.
A childhood friend who had stayed in
touch, a special friend for whom Sigurbjorg
cared deeply.”
Barbara and Kari were dispatched to
the place from whence Anna had last sent a
letter, an area along the Vancouver water-
front, where she had been living with her
brother, a boat mechanic. They didn’t find
her there, but they learned what had hap-
pened from the transients who lived by the
tracks and storage facilities that lined the
Fraser River. The vagrants knew Anna. She
was the crazy character who wandered the
water front, finding throwaway goods and
redistributing them to homeless others. She
gathered up grain spilt from boxcars to feed
her few chickens. The brother she’d lived
with had disappeared, they said. Anna had
returned from her wanderings one day to
find groceries and some money on the
kitchen table, but no brother. He’d van-
ished, and was never heard from or seen
again. Anna herself disappeared after that.
Their Angel of the Waterfront gone off,
wandering. Maybe looking for the lost
brother? Who knows?
How they found Anna a hundred
miles up river, living in a barn, Barbara can-