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Marieke Walsh is a reporter in The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa bureau.
Globe reporter Marieke Walsh, seated in the front row in a yellow shirt, is pictured with her family in Holland in 1992.Handout
This weekend I was supposed to be camping in a Dutch cow patch with 61 of my closest relatives.
It doesn’t quite sound like the start of an idyllic vacation but that wasn’t the point. When your family lives on the other side of the Atlantic, you travel to connect, not to tour churches and museums.
And so when finances, work schedules and the family lives of 22 households finally align, you travel to create memories, laugh at inside jokes and make new ones with the people who know you best and who have somehow figured out how to know you best from 5,978 kilometres away.
The pieces were falling into place just before the lockdown hit.
Porta potties? Check.
Food trucks? Booked.
Beer delivery? Yup.
Where were the cows going to spend the weekend? Not a clue. But my flight was booked.
Joke's on us.
Maybe we should have been more suspicious of our reunion plans given that the last one was stymied by a volcanic ash cloud. But that temporary detour had nothing on the much more permanent stop to overseas travel brought on by the novel coronavirus.
As a political reporter for The Globe and Mail in Ottawa, I’ve covered the daily pandemic news grind for three months. It has laid bare the unequal impact of economic and health crises and how they break down along socio-economic lines. And it continues to cause immeasurable grief and pain. But it has also forced us to think more about family, connection and isolation, and that theme has been running in the back of my head at a steady hum as calendar reminders for where I was supposed to be and who I was supposed to see keep popping up this week.
For me, the pandemic isn’t changing how I think about my dual Dutch-Canadian identity but it is making the feelings of absence and distance more pronounced.
My mum, Maria Huijbregts, followed my dad to Canada in 1980. Back then, frequent trips home were an expensive no-go and international phone calls cost a dollar a minute. Through cheaper air travel, the dawn of video calls, WhatsApp and social media, the distance between me and my bevy of aunts, uncles and cousins seemed to narrow. But the doors opened by technology wouldn’t have had much effect if it weren’t for the early work put in by Mama H.
She started us young by raising us Dutch, no small feat when your kids are born in Toronto, their dad is from northern England and the language has about as much value to their future education and career success as Pig Latin. Once we hit school-age, she was contending with the complaints of three kids whose idea of a good time did not include a sixth day of school taught by the grumpiest teacher you ever did meet.
Despite our reluctance, staying connected to our history was a non-negotiable condition set by our mum, not just for us, but for anyone who wanted more than a casual friendship with our family. These people quickly learned to understand basic Dutch phrases, eat meals like stamppot (mashed potatoes mixed with endive and bacon) and serenade us on our birthdays in our mother tongue (they didn’t always get the Dutch pronouns right).
And those six-day school weeks? Turns out Mama H was right. Learning Dutch became the key to turning, for instance, my geographically distant Aunt Gerarda into a second mom, my Uncle Cornelius into a trusted confidant and my cousins Stijn and Jules into sibling alternates.
Marieke Walsh's family pictured at a reunion in 1992.Handout
The pandemic is now keeping us at a distance – a small impact in the grand scheme of the hardship COVID-19 has caused. And yet, for the more than one in five Canadians and permanent residents who have made Canada home, but are born elsewhere, it means missed milestones and connections not just now but for the months (maybe years) to come as the pandemic plays out unevenly around the world.
The reporter in me wanted to hear how other immigrants are experiencing the pandemic. So I asked an acquaintance, Hira Kamal, who is a dentist studying for her Canadian licensing exams. When she moved to Canada last year she told me she took it as a given that air travel could always bring her family back together. But then Toronto went into lockdown the day she gave birth to her daughter and the planned visit from her mum in Pakistan became impossible. What comes next for Hira is still unknown, she said, as their travel plans depend on two countries getting the pandemic under control. In the meantime, a happy side effect of the pandemic and a new baby has been a spike in video chats and phone calls.
“It’s brought us closer together, at the same time it just seems like the distances are so much greater,” she said.
When travelling abroad will return is one of the many unknowns that my family, and every other one, is contending with. But as my friend and colleague Janice Dickson pointed out to me, for the first time many other Canadians are getting a glimpse of the isolation that can come with immigration.
The physical space between us may be amplified but my immigrant family is lucky to have had a lot of practice connecting from far away. As for our future plans? A wedding, a reunion and a birthday party have all been booked on back-to-back weekends next June. Hopefully we’ll make it. I have an Air Canada travel credit itching to be used.
What else we’re thinking about:
The unofficial start to the camping season is just over a week away and Parks Canada’s gift to you after three months of lockdown is the gradual resumption of camping in parks across the country. It’s starting slow, though. At first only people with pre-existing reservations will be allowed to set up camp. But if falling asleep under the stars while wondering whether you hung your food high enough in the tree is your idea of a good time then this link is for you. And if you’re camping in the Rockies, the RCMP are asking you to keep an eye out for Americans who might be taking advantage of the Alaska loophole to spend their vacations north of the border. No matter what you get up to in the next few months, Globe health reporter Carly Weeks has you covered on vacationing in the time of COVID.
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Marieke Walsh