Skip to main content

Step....

By....

Step....

Step...by...step....

Step by step....

STEP-BY-STEP!

STEPBYSTEP!

At 10 minutes to seven Atlantic Time, Saturday evening, Nov. 21, 2009, 19-year-old Emma MacEachern will reach a trembling hand - of that there is no doubt - to accept the Olympic torch and run with it - though they once thought she might never even walk again - down historic Great George Street to light the Olympic flame at the Cradle of Confederation.

She does not keep her mantra - Step by Step - in her head, but tattooed on her right wrist as a constant reminder of a vow she made to herself three years ago, the day she left hospital.

If the swift little forward could not now live her Olympic dream of playing for the Canadian women's hockey team, she would switch dreams to one day walking again and perhaps even skating again - never suspecting that the dream itself would change and that she would, in fact, still have that precious Olympic Moment.

Only it would be different.

When she takes that torch Nov. 21 she will be near Province House, and she will run over the very ground that, 145 years ago, the Fathers of Confederation walked as they came to the 1864 Charlottetown Conference that led, three years later, to the very creation of the country that will host the 2010 Winter Games.

The modern Olympics were founded in 1896 on the belief, not long upheld, that it was possible to escape politics - and even national flags - for a few weeks every four years.

How appropriate, then, that Emma MacEachern's 300-metre run, which she fully intends to run, will take her down to the harbour where the delegates from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and, later, "the Canadas" arrived on Sept. 1, 1864 - only to be totally ignored by the population of Charlottetown.

They had better things to do.

The "Olympics" were in town - Slaymaker & Nichols' Olympic Circus, featuring acting dogs, monkey performances and, in a wonderfully ironic and accidental slight to the politicians gathering, the Snow Brothers were to put on a daring display of balancing feats.

The purists didn't approve. "What possible advantage can be obtained by viewing the whimsical freaks?" asked the Protestant & Evangelical Witness, when there were other matters "truly valuable in life" to consider at such a time. Attending the events being held in a huge tent erected on a vacant lot on the corner of Fitzroy and Queen Streets, the paper said the Olympic Circus would "dissipate the mind, and poison it with a vain and frivolous taste" and lead to a "general depravity" among the populace, which then amounted to around 7,000 citizens.

The scolding went nowhere. When the contingency from "the Canadas" arrived on Sept. 1 - including the likes of John A. Macdonald, Thomas D'Arcy McGee and George-Étienne Cartier - the colonial secretary, William Henry Pope, had to commandeer a rowboat to go out to meet the S.S. Queen Victoria, in local lore greeting the future Fathers from a seat on a pickle barrel.

If true, it was somewhat appropriate, as the seeds for Canada were laid here in Charlottetown during those September days when the various colonials debated the merits of bonding together to avoid being swallowed up by the ambitious and powerful military force to the south. Days filled with speeches were followed by evenings - some lasting onto dawn - of glasses filled with champagne and brandy.

"The tongues of the delegates waggled merrily," Canada West delegate George Brown, proprietor of the Globe, wrote to his wife Anne.

"What other country," asks local historian Catherine Hennessey, who has co-authored an upcoming book on the 1864 gathering, "can say they partied themselves into existence?

It is a party that still breaks out periodically, with a different and very much alive Canada emerging from its usual reserve and relative obscurity. It happened in 1967, Centennial Year. It certainly happened at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, when a total of 16 million of us tuned in as both men and women brought home the gold medal in hockey. And it will surely happen again this coming February in Vancouver and Whistler when what may well be the strongest Canadian Olympic team ever goes up against the world.

The Winter Games are very different from the Summer Games. In summer, this northern country often feels itself a summer visitor, surprised and grateful for any success. In winter, however, there is an unmistakable swagger to Canada where victory is not only expected, it is demanded. It is when Canada shows the world the confident face it wished it always wore.

While the original hope of Baron Pierre de Coubertin for a non-nationalistic Olympics was soon dashed - "The Games have become an affair of state," he bemoaned as early as 1908 - the Winter Games, for Canada, have become as nationalistic, as flag-waving, as purely Canadian as this usually reserved country ever allows itself.

"Canada is an idea," Senator Laurier Lapierre says in a short film presentation at Province House, "an idea that is re-thinking itself every day."

It will happen on Prince Edward Island Nov. 21-23, as the torch makes its way around the island.

One carrier will be Marlene Bryenton, an environmental activist who is almost solely responsible for the creation of the Joseph A. Ghiz Memorial Park in a rundown industrial section of Charlottetown and who never expected to be given any such an opportunity.

"The call came out of the blue," she says. She believes she was selected on the basis of her community work but she will be running, she says, for all who have battled cancer - as she and Emma MacEachern have.

That fight, the energetic grandmother says, makes her feel even more a part of the Olympic Torch Run.

"I can kind of relate to the athletes and what it takes in a very small way," she says. "It takes a lot of courage to keep going. And you have to have a dream."

Emma MacEachern began her own great dream about Olympic participation nearly a dozen years ago. She was seven years old when her uncle, Dave MacEachern, won the gold medal in two-man bobsleigh at Nagano, serving as brakeman for driver Pierre Leuders.

She knew from that moment on that she wanted her own medal. As she so cockily put it, "I'd like to outdo him."

Her choice was hockey. She didn't come from a hockey-playing family - her three siblings have their own passions, her father Frank's tongue-in-cheek nickname for road hockey is "Zamboni" - but she was hockey mad from the first time she was able to stand on skates and hold a stick at the same time.

After four years in boys' hockey, Emma discovered a Charlottetown women's team and made the switch, convinced that if everything worked out as she wished she would one day play for Team Canada. She played left wing - "and a good one" - and worked hard at her game.

But gradually her game stopped progressing. In fact, as her parents Frank and Jennifer later realized, it was regressing. Emma's back hurt constantly. At one point, she was taking up to 14 Advil a day. Her hands were sometimes numb and she would lose her stick. Her feet lost feeling and balance and twice she had to be taken off the ice on a backboard after falling hard backwards onto the back of her helmet.

"I sneezed once and I fell," she says.

Finally, the doctors discovered the problem: a finger-length tumour in her spinal cord. They decided to operate in Halifax. Her parents were understandably worried about the prognosis for their 16-year-old athlete.

"It wasn't really that big a deal to me," Emma says. "They told me I might come out of it as I was, which was pretty rough, and the worst case scenario was that I'd be paralyzed from the neck down."

Neither was an option in her mind: "I knew that I would play again."

The delicate surgery was followed by four months rehabilitation in Toronto, during which the 16-year-old, by far the youngest in the facility, was on her own for weeks at a time, her parents making the long trip to Ontario whenever possible. But she never felt sorry for herself, never quit on herself. She steeled herself to the fact that it would be a long process and she would have to approach it on a day-to-day basis.

The day she got the wrist tattoo, she laughs, "My dad went for a long cup of coffee."

No one knew about the second tattoo: six numbers - "04/16/07" - etched discreetly along a rib.

"That was the day," she says, "I took my first step."

Since then, every step has seemed both ahead and up. While certain side effects remain - her hands tremble - they are slowly subsiding. She attends the University of Prince Edward Island, studying science, and works summers and weekends at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, selling tickets to the Anne of Green Gables musical and sometimes serving as a national heritage guide. She hopes to leave the province to study elsewhere next year and plans to be a neuro-physiotherapist specializing in spinal injuries and sickness.

In the months following her critical operation, she received a signed jersey from hockey great Mario Lemieux - himself a cancer survivor - and signed photographs from Wayne Gretzky and Don Cherry. She has been written up in the Charlottetown Guardian. She exchanges e-mails with Canadian women's team stalwart Jennifer Botterill and has even skated briefly with Team Canada captain Hayley Wickenheiser.

That's great, she says, but not enough.

At her last checkup with the neurologists, she asked the one most pressing question in her very young life.

"Can I play again?"

The answer thrilled her: yes, but never again competitively, and no chance of the Olympics.

Which is what makes this moment so very special for 19-year-old Emma MacEachern, who has the longest and sweetest 300 metres of her life awaiting her on Great George Street.

Step....

By....

Step....

Step...by...step....

Step by step....

STEP-BY-STEP!

STEPBYSTEP!

"I'll be running," she vows.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe