Clara and Me: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship (Whitecap $17.95)
Article

Set on a remote homestead in British Columbia, this is the true story of how two very different women form a lifelong friendship. Deanna Kawatski reveals her longing for female companionship, her initial awkwardness with her mentally challenged new neighbor Clara, and her delight in their evolving friendship.

In Deanna Kawatski's remote Ningunsaw Valley, a bottle of ketchup was a luxury item.
Persevering in the bush with two children 120 miles from the nearest town of Stewart, B.C., her family had to hike three miles over a rough, bog riddled trail to reach the nearest gravel road in order to hitchhike to 'civilization'. They routinely foraged for clothing at the garbage dump.
She and her husband Jay had a combined annual income of five thousand dollars — for his woodcarvings, taxidermy and snowshoe making, and for her freelance magazine articles. But Kawatski's greatest poverty was female friendship.
“For eleven years I had dreamed of having another woman within walking distance,” she writes in Clara and Me: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship (Whitecap $17.95).
Kawatski's wish was granted in 1990, but fate made a mockery of her vision. Raised among sophisticated peers in Salmon Arm, Kawatski had naturally yearned for a woman to share her literary concerns. Instead her neighbour for the next two years would be Clara, a 'small bent twig of a native woman' with no visible teeth to support her idiotic grin.
Barely able to speak, Clara was the mentally challenged wife of Fritz Handel, her ingenious and kindly protector. While the two mechanically gifted husbands disappeared to contrive homestead improvements, Clara clumsily invaded Kawatski's privacy, with slobbering affection. At first it was like having another clinging child to care for.
“Most people can, at the very least, retreat to the toilet for a few moments of peace,” she recalls. “Unfortunately, Clara always saw my retreat beyond the yard to urinate as the call for an outing.”
Kawatski was often marooned in the kitchen or garden with two families to feed instead of one. In her follow up memoir to Wilderness Mother, she frankly recalls the awkwardness of incorporating Clara into her life.
“At first glance Clara was ugly, and I had felt myself participate, initially, in the compulsion to reject her on that basis. And even though the impression came and went, I saw too much personality glittering within the rough ore and I was open enough to seek out other facets. But over time I witnessed the snap judgements made by others, particularly men.”
Gradually Kawatski tossed out the mentally challenged label. She accepted Clara as a baffling blend of complete idiocy, ancient wisdom, childlike mirth and anger. She recognized that Clara was the same as everyone else except she had very different proportions of the same ingredients.
“In some ways Clara had it made,” says Kawatski. “She had love, security, and far more freedom, both mentally and physically, than I had.
“Fritz gave Clara the luxury of choice and never pressured her to do more than she wanted, while I lived with a man who sometimes seemed like a tyrant.”
Kawatski's husband resented her writing. She rose as early as 4:30 a.m. to work on her gardening journal. As their difficult marriage became an isolated battleground, Kawatski increasingly turned to her outings with Clara to escape her husband's criticism and expand her emotional horizons.
“If depth of feeling was any measure of intelligence, then Clara was a genius.”
Particularly on their snowshoeing expeditions — which “held the rhythm of wading through clouds” — or taking their children to the river, Kawatski and Clara bonded with Mother Nature and their natures as mothers.
“With time Clara and I had merged as womanspirit. Members of the same mysterious clan... We shared our own insignificance in the big picture, and the small one as well, where a man's opinion carried so much more weight than a woman's.”
To thwart her increasing success as a freelancer, Kawatski's husband served an ultimatum in writing: stop writing or see a lawyer for a divorce. In support of Deanna Kawatski's need to leave Ningunsaw Valley, Fritz Handel and Clara also left their home, returning to Kinaskan Lake.
Kawatski's Wilderness Mother became a Book of the Month selection in 1994. A contributing editor to Mother Earth News, she now lives on a farm at Shuswap Lake with her daughter and son.
“From Clara I learned patience, tolerance, and the capacity to stand up for myself more often. She showed me that no matter how uneducated or intellectually stunted we are, somewhere within dwells a spirit with clenched fist and chin held high, which will rise in defence of itself.
“Call it human dignity or the survival instinct. Without it we won't survive in our full capacity. The soul light can be turned down to a mere flicker by the blackness of oppression. Clara reminded me that I had rights and not to tolerate their violation.

“What I learned about communication from Clara was the vital need for all of us to be understood. And that what we all need most apart from basic physical demands is acceptance. And love.”