MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

90 MLCM WINTER/SPRING 2019 It could be hard to schedule a viewing—and even if you did, you had to be careful to be invited back. If you had the audacity to open an album without washing your hands or—and I can still hear her complaining about this—to consume food while leafing through the pages: “They got crumbs in them!” Aunty Babe would denounce such visitors with a thump on the table for effect. We lived a short boat ride away on a good day (or a nearly insurmountable journey during a westerly) and we would visit Aunty Babe often. During the few times in my youth that I was deemed clean enough, polite enough, and mature enough to sit and look through them, those albums changed my life. I was growing up in the same isolated community that she had documented, one that was hugged tightly to the edge of the world by miles of forest and hemmed to the shores by the expansive ocean. It was one with little influence from beyond our small harbour. I’ve always appreciated a beautiful photograph, but it was the documentary nature of Aunty Babe’s images that connected with me. Her ability to freeze a moment, an era, an emotion in time for me to experience all those years later was powerful. Through her photos, I could join the family trips to Helby Island and smell the musty canvas tent walls. I could hear the giggles of my mom and Aunty Darlene as they whispered to each other and played in the yard. There I was waving goodbye to my great grandmother, dressed for the city, as she boarded a float plane leaving Bamfield. The salt hangs in air while we all scramble together on the rocky beaches, pilot the boats, and proudly display the day’s catch. When I delve into these albums, I am no longer an observer, I am a participant, I am transported to another time and place. When Aunty Babe could no longer live in Bamfield on her own, she moved to Nanaimo and eventually in with her daughter. She filled her bedroom walls with framed images—the very same ones from her albums. And as time slowly took pieces of her away from us and her mind began to lose its grasp on the present day, those photographs were a comfort. Being free to live, once again, in those moments where she could hear the laughter over the waves as her kids played in the sand around her, eased the uncertainty of her confusion. Aunty Babe has since passed, and her albums are more freely available for viewing these days. But, although I am now an adult—usually with clean hands—I have never cracked a cover without first silently asking permission. Some things in this life are sacred. My great Aunty Babe only had one focus: to document her life, and in doing so she recorded a whole community and their way of being. THELMA "BABE" HEGSTROM