My parents met on the first Wednesday in December in the sixth year of the Second World War, at a United Services dance in the Eaton’s Annex on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg, where they began to fall in love while jitterbugging to the music of Mart Kenney and His Western Gentlemen. My father wore the uniform of an infantryman and my mother wore a skirt and sweater and nylon stockings with seams up the back and shoes with low heels. He was a medical student at the university and she was a tap dancer with the City Hydro Victory Troupe, a spirited ensemble “providing high class entertainment” as described in the Victory Troupe brochure, at Manitoba air stations and army camps and supper clubs out on the Pembina Highway. My mother’s name appeared frequently in the literature of the Victory Troupe, as one of ten “Victorettes” who formed the main line of tap dancers, and as one of the “Four Bombshells” who performed the “Boogie Woogie Tap,” the “Sophisticated Toe Strut” and the “Swing-copated Tap,” in the dance halls of Deer Lodge, Portage la Prairie, Brandon, Fort Garry, Camp Shilo and Pointe du Bois.

The war years were the heroic age of the wind instrument: the trumpet, the trombone, the saxophone and the clarinet, which together with the piano transformed the march of armies into the ecstatic processional of the jitterbug, the jive and (especially) rapid fire bursts of syncopated tap dancing. My mother and father, aged 20 and 21, danced all all through the last year of the war: dancing is how they remember a war that they had known since they were teenagers, and that they considered to be an activity for the aged and the dull. They jumped and jived and danced the Lambeth walk, and they perfected the Winnipeg dip, a flourish recognized in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax; they danced to the music of Herbie Britain’s house band in the auditorium behind the university; they danced all night for 25 cents in the auditorium on Vaughan Street to the King Cole Trio in front of a 17-piece orchestra, and, in the last days of the war, to Woody Herman and his screaming First Herd as they wailed away through “Northwest Passage” and “Get Your Boots Laced, Papa” (one line of which was: “Don’t be a goon from Saskatoon”). The dancing went on as long as the war went on and then the armed forces folded up their tents and went home, and the Victory Troupe disbanded and the dancing began to wind down. By the time my parents got married in October of 1945, the days of boogie-woogie tap were at an end.

Ten months later, in August 1946 (the year Jack Kerouac began writing On the Road), my parents boarded the Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship in Churchill, Manitoba, and set out across Hudson Bay and through Hudson Strait and then north through the icefields of Baffin Bay into the mouth of the Northwest Passage. There, in a cairn on Somerset Island, my mother left a note with her new name on it (now preserved in the Archive of the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife): “We, the undersigned, passengers on the Nascopie, passed here on September 10th, 1946.” The cairn had been erected 100 years earlier by Leopold McClintock, the British sea captain who confirmed the death of Franklin and the loss of the ships Terror and Erebus.

My parents’ destination was a settlement on Baffin Island, a land about which and about whose people they knew almost nothing, and which they would discover to be under the sway of a genial missionary whose apocalyptic research had led him to prophesy that the world would end within ten years in the tribulation described in the Book of Revelations. He was a canon in the Anglican Church and a British Israelite, and he was convinced that the people of Baffin Island—most of whom had been baptized, and none of whom, he claimed, had ever (as my mother remembers him putting it) “gone over to the Papist”—belonged to a lost tribe of Israel.

The British Israelites were founded by Richard Brothers, a Newfoundlander, who, in 1787, upon discovering that his wife loved another man, fled to England, where he announced that the millennium would begin on the 19th of November, 1795, and that he, as “Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty,” would lead the lost tribes of Israel back to Jerusalem. He published this claim in A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times in 1794, and his ideas were revised a century later by an Englishman named Hine, who claimed in 1894 that the lost Israelites were to be found among an island people far to the northwest of Palestine, which he took to be the British Isles, and which the Anglican canon at Pangnirtung took to be the island named for William Baffin, one of many navigators who failed to discover the Northwest Passage.

The end times would begin when the Beast with seven heads emerged from the fiord; when the sun turned black and the moon poured blood and the stars fell out of the sky; then would begin a time of anguish such as had never been known: this is what the canon, who was admired for his rollicking hymn-singing, preached to the people he promised to redeem, and a generation of Baffin Island children came of age in terror of impending Armageddon.

After 40 days at sea, the ship carrying my parents put in at their destination (where whitewashed buildings indicated hospital, church, police station, Hudson’s Bay Company post, and doctor’s residence); the unloading of their supplies (which would have to last them a year) and the exchange of passengers and cargo took several days. My mother remembers the Nascopie anchored in the fiord out past the reef and small boats ferrying passengers and goods to and from the shore. The Nascopie had been a small ship when they boarded it a month ago at Churchill; now it was enormous. Then one morning she looked out and the Nascopie had vanished: the fiord was empty and vast, and she felt that her world, which until that moment had been full of motion, had stopped moving—possibly forever.

Excerpted from The Coincidence Problem: Selected Dispatches 1999–2022, by Stephen Osborne ©2024 Published by Arsenal Pulp Press.

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From the heart of the city to the edges of the Arctic: a brilliant and observant essay collection by a modern flaneur

In 1990, writer Stephen Osborne and his partner, Mary Schendlinger, began publishing Geist, a literary quarterly based in Vancouver, BC. From the beginning, the magazine established a reputation for observant photography, thoughtful essays, and off-the-wall humour, not least because of Osborne's regular contributions. The Coincidence Problem brings together Osborne's dispatches covering a wide range of subjects, from civic monuments to family history to global terrorism, the lynching of Indigenous youth Louie Sam, end times in the Arctic, and yes, even cats. A modern flaneur, he investigates the city, translates the ordinary, and deflates the pretentious. The Coincidence Problem confirms Osborne's reputation as an incisive writer of narrative non-fiction that is at once personal and expansive.