By Eric Marks

As a teen, I worked in a village museum for seven summers. Going to work was like paying a visit to another country. Summer students were taught to read the stories in documents and photos, tools and personal possessions. We were exposed to the collective memory of a place, from 10,500 years ago until the present, and learned to see the shadow of that other land underlying the community in which we lived. So perhaps it's no surprise I've come to think of heritage as a way of seeing.

I have stood on the seabed at midsummer at the spot where a ship was wrecked in midwinter, more than 100 years ago, and tried to climb the cliffs the sole survivor scaled as his clothes froze on his body.

I have hiked past campsites where fires burned 3,000 years ago, following a path worn into bedrock by men and women who left few other traces of their existence. I have knelt to retrieve a stone knife that looked as though it might have been dropped that afternoon, though I am told the man who made it died 16 centuries before. Had the people who blazed that path and the man who made that knife never lived, the world today would be unimaginably different. So I am grateful to know they were here; to be able, in some small way, to appreciate the continuity between their world and our own. To honour those connections and the fact of precedence: for, as Alden Nowlan wrote a generation ago, the world belongs not only to the living, but to those millions yet unborn, and to the named and nameless dead who brought us forth.

Without a sense of heritage, we are deaf to our elders and indifferent to our grandchildren.

If a sense of heritage results in better seeing, it begins with better listening.

My first history lessons began at home, at the feet of my parents and grandparents. The greatest influence was probably my maternal grandfather, who, at 16, witnessed the Halifax Explosion and participated in its terrible cleanup. He served on a navy minesweeper during the First World War. His father had fought in the Boer War, and his older brother survived the mud and gas and shelling at Ypres. Other brothers were not so lucky. My grandfather later became one of the first peacekeepers in the 20th century, as part of the allied army policing the demilitarized Rhineland. He boarded with a guesthouse keeper and his son, both veterans of the German navy, and so added the young submariner's knowledge of what it was like to be depth charged to his own memories of what it had been like to be the target of U-boat torpedoes and mines.

As an elderly man, he tried to convey to his grandchildren something of the honour of soldiers and the treachery of politicians, which know no nationality. He was not a pacifist, but a lifetime of heeding his country's call to arms had made him a sceptic.

His was not the generic experience of war we are taught to remember, and I believe we are the richer for having heard it; because, in truth, there is no generic experience of anything. History is a tapestry woven from millions of individual threads. Too often we are encouraged to look for the larger pattern without becoming aware of the details.

The warp and woof of the past matter, but it is the individual threads - our specific ancestors and their communities - that are the reason we are who we are. Until we start listening to the differences in our personal experiences, we can't value the things that make our own lives unique, or be aware of the richness of our heritage.

Like a winding road, the past goes on without us, even when we are not aware of it. Sometimes it takes a stranger to point out where we've come from.

One year, when I was working for the census in another county, I was cornered by a dog at a farmhouse about a kilometre down a dirt road from the nearest neighbour. The man who lived there greeted me with what I had come to regard as the standard salutation: a gruffly shouted, "Who are you?"

I stated my name and business, which he quite reasonably felt were insufficient grounds to strike up a conversation. So he asked me a question I hadn't expected: "Who's your grandfather?"

I told him, not just my grandfathers' Christian names, but the nicknames they had gone by among their friends. He seemed to consider the information, then stepped back into the house, telling me over his shoulder to stay put. In a few minutes, he stuck his head out the doorway.

"You can come in. Dog won't bite."

Inside, the house was lined floor to ceiling with books, papers and all manner of electronic equipment, from simple crystal radio sets and old telegraph machines to a working navy-surplus shortwave transmitter in the kitchen. In a corner of the living room, he threw open a wooden trunk the size of a small sea chest and lifted out a large manila envelope, from which he extracted a black and white photograph.

A dozen or so men posed alongside the sawdust, logs and tools of a lumber camp. "This was taken in 1940. That teenager on the far side is me. The third man from the right is your grandfather."

He smiled at my surprise and offered his hand. "My name's Bill."

During the next hour, Bill filled me in on another aspect of Canada's war history - the thousands of men like himself and my paternal grandfather who were too young or too old to fight, or too badly injured, or who had large families to support. They worked in the woods, in the mines and smelters and on the docks and railroads, producing the raw materials that kept the war effort going.

At one point, I asked him about the radios, which were everywhere - the house resembled an electronics museum. He smiled.

"Now, that's a story."

It went something like this: as a young teen in 1939, Bill had acquired a crystal set, the simplest radio possible. Broadcast strength and frequencies weren't regulated as they are today, so a boy who was patient could tune in to broadcasts from Europe or farther afield at night after his chores were done.

Over his crystal set that night in 1939, Bill heard a frantic broadcast from Poland. The Nazis were invading. The nightmare that would become the Second World War had begun. Night after night, he listened as Europe was torn apart.

"After that, I was pretty much hooked."

After talking to Bill, so was I.

This is our heritage: not the bare bones and empty buildings cast off by the past, but their personal meaning for those who inhabited them, and the continued relevance of that experience today, albeit in transmuted form. The past lives through us and through our stories.

I wasn't there when much of Halifax was destroyed by gunpowder and fire in 1917, but I have listened to a man who was. I couldn't ride the convoys across the North Atlantic to the battlefields of the First World War, but I have shared his terror of torpedoes and floating mines, just as he later shared the terror and elation of the Germans who launched them. Had he not lived through those experiences, I would not be here.

The Second World War began on another continent 31 years before my birth, but I have spoken with a man who listened to other men, who were there, describing the chaos it ushered in. And while I did not work in New Brunswick's lumber camps, I have spoken with enough men who did to have developed a healthy respect for the dangers they faced, and the tremendous price that was paid in their communities.

My life is richer for what I have been allowed to share of these experiences. My sense of what men and women are capable of, for good and evil, is more expansive, and this has made me both more optimistic and less forgiving of how we govern the world we have inherited.

We must listen to our elders and read the evidence of the past to learn who we are and where we have come from. And we must convey a sense of this to our children, if we do not want them to lose their way.

Talk to someone in your family or community about the past. Take
the time to really listen.

Learn two stories and tell one.

Eric Marks is a newspaper editor. He lives in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.