On the Road again
He’d chosen this path and wasn’t at all unhappy about it. He could have bought a plane ticket with the last of his tree-planting stash and made it back to Ontario in time for Law school. He’d spent the fall and winter of the previous year studying for the LSAT exams while driving cab in Toronto. With fair test results, he’d applied and been given a place on the Lawyer’s slow boat to success. It took a spring and a summer in the Rockies to convince himself what a bad idea Law school would be.
It was just too easy. And another four years of uninterrupted study was just too hard. Being a lawyer just seemed way too predictable, and when it came down to it – Amos considered himself too complicated for such a “normal” path. No, he was much happier memorizing street maps, and Vancouver Taxi cab driver regulations. It was a three day course and he was set loose on the road – fresh meat for the Diamond cab company.
He signed up for his first shift at midnight the same day they gave him his cabbie license. Nights on the beach were getting cooler and the Youth Hostel staff were getting tired of him stealing showers. So, he began scratching and scrounging out a living as a tourist behind the wheel of a Vancouver cab.
He could speak English fluently– which was better than about a third of the drivers – new Canadians driving cab nights, practicing English, working day jobs too trying to get a foothold on the slippery slope of the Canadian dream. For $50 a night and the cost of gas you could rent a car and flog your wheels on the streets. Maybe another third of the drivers were young like him and using the wheels as a way of paying the rent until the rest of their life began – acting, writing, studying, pimping, pushing drugs towards any number of dream-lives just over the horizon. The rest of the drivers were career men. They owned their own cars and cab license plates - worth as much as a house. They’d rent their cars out for the night shift to guys like Amos and put in long dayshift hours feeding coffee to, and sharing tips with, the company dispatchers.
There was also the odd middle-aged guy who’d been spit out of a regular job and was trying to keep all the ends of his life still meeting. Everyone knew though, that the longer he spent hours behind the wheel of a cab, the greater the stretch became. Those guys had the wild-eyed look of a drowning man and were just no fun to be around. A few women drove too. They were tough chicks – like they’d grown up in a family of brothers and enjoyed the status of being treated like they had balls.
Amos had his own secret dream. It was maybe more like one of those endless, repetitive nightmares - he was driving, hunting, driving around the city trying to find the address for – “Amos Brown: Author”. He told no one and only admitted it to himself every time his mind turned another phrase or his brain started composing narratives of say - his drive across the Lion’s Head bridge. He carried a note pad around in his jacket pocket to jot down choice inspirations. The words in his head sounded true. He was sure only a mind like his could conjure them up. But the words stayed in his head. They faded away every time he picked up his pen. His dream of being a writer always seemed so profound and real until he picked up his pen - and the dream slipped away like smoke.
He saw himself as unremarkable. He couldn’t see - in the broad glaring light of day - that he had anything new or worthwhile to say. His comments had been covered. His story was common. His observations were only as smart and cynical as the next young poet’s. He wanted to produce something wise and worthwhile. But he was green and hadn’t yet earned his say. In spite of these self-doubts, he saw himself as a heavyweight. He just didn’t want to step into the ring and take the punches - not until his own punches were ready to throw. So, the pages remained blank and he filled hours with quick cab conversations, books between customers, tokes and tunes, and - plans for his season of skiing in the Rockies.
You see, dreamer that he was, Amos had another dream he was pursuing. It was his high-school idea of a successful life. What could be better than the life of a Rocky Mountain ski bum? While being a Lawyer, or a Writer, was miles and miles and years away, in just a few months there’d be snow in the Rockies and Amos planned to be skiing. Not that he was any kind of great skier. Never much of any kind of athlete, skiing for him was closer to dancing and he could dance – sort of. He had just enough rhythm and agility to get down the hill to his own suburban white boy satisfaction. He skied with music in his head and loved it – no team to let down – no pressure to perform for a coach – just him and the hill testing his turns.
So, Amos put the pieces in place to make that teenage dream come true. He needed to know that the things he dreamed up in his head – that he could step into them outside of his head. Before he could write a story, he needed to live a story.
Next step, up at the University, he found an ad - someone named Helen was looking for a female student to share a basement apartment in Kitsilano. He called and must have sounded harmless enough - Helen invited him over for tea. In the kitchen, where you could just barely see sky through the window over the sink – between the top of the back alley’s hedges and the bottom of the first floor apartment’s deck - Helen and Amos worked out an arrangement. She was a third year biology student from New Zealand. She was quiet, and serious, pretty in an old black and white English movie kind of way. She had a good sense of humour. He liked that she wasn’t afraid of him and spunky enough to return his teases with a taunt of her own.
Helen thought Amos seemed pretty normal. He told her about his travels to New Zealand and wandering through the Pacific Islands. He told her about his university days studying poetry and philosophy and his trail out to B.C. where he’d ditched the idea of being of a lawyer and instead - just wanted to ski. She was a little bit charmed by his boyish sense of adventure and she was a little bit worried about the way he tested her with a party-animal story thrown in – watching her for reactions.
But he listened and paid attention to her in a way she hadn’t encountered among many Canadian boys. Amos asked her questions in a gentle kind of big brotherly way. Helen wondered what her folks back in Kiwi-land would think about her shacking up with a strange man. That thought was what sealed the deal. She heard herself agreeing to share the little basement flat with this water-eyed man.
Amos and Helen were both far from home and, for whatever other reasons, were here to cut their own paths beyond the reach of parental approval and protection. For Helen, pushing past her parent’s idea of a proper roommate was proof to herself that she really was her own person and not just a child waiting to grow into her mother’s image.
For Amos, Helen’s respectability offered some ballast to his small sailing craft being tossed about in the ocean’s big, deep, swells. He knew the ocean recognized no names and no credentials and tested every man the same. He wasn’t looking for a lover, or a party, just a place to roost and write and become whatever it was that he was becoming. He knew that winter storms were coming and that a safe harbour – one that would draw out the gentleman in him – just felt right.
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Honour among Drunks
What did he have to lose? Amos tried to calculate the gamble in his head. In exchange for maybe 15 minutes of prime rush hour chances to catch some quick choice cab fares, he was going to follow up on a three week old drunken promise. It was a crazy long shot he concluded. When you’re driving cab, timing is everything. You don’t want to interrupt the flow if it’s happening and Amos had already had a good start to his day. First trip out, a radio call from his zone took him way out across the Lion’s Head bridge to North Vancouver. A nice $18 fare and two buck tip to start the day. So, why was he now considering wasting precious minutes on a lost cause?
Maybe it had something to do with the taste of fate in this coincidence. That first fare took him right to the same street, same spot he’d been just weeks before. He recognized the building across the street as the place he’d dropped those two drunks. Talk about a wild goose chase. He’d played out quite a little game with those characters trying to get his fare from them. It was pretty funny – now - looking back at it. At the time he hadn’t been too amused. They’d told him to come back. They’d sworn that if he came back – they’d give him his money. And now - not only did they waste his time three weeks ago - now Amos was going to waste time again standing there knocking on the door to apartment #112.
********************
I’d only bin out a week and was makin up for lost time. The pogey cheque they spring you with didn’t last 48 hours. A hundred dollar hooker, a bag of Johnny-pills, a few quarts of whiskey and I had me a comin-out cel-bration. I didn’t have no worries ‘bout spending the $600 they give ya on rent like you’re supposed to. My bud Frank had an apartment in North Van and he owed me. Yeah, he owed me for keepin my yap shut about that other guy the witness saw comin outa the house wit me.
If those damn people had shovelled their walk, I never would’ve felled on me ass with that TV in me arms. Who ever heard of snow in Vancouver in November? Just my fuckin luck. I don’t blame Frank for leavin me there. The alarms were goin like crazy, and a big fuckin German Shepherd was comin round the corner. That was the way we did things – if shit happened – and you had the toilet paper to get a clean break – you took it. That’s the way it goes. That’s the way it went down.
So now Frank owed me. He was puttin me up at his place til we could get some new jobs happenin. Share and share alike – like it or not. Just when my cash ran out, Frank’s pogey cheque arrived and it wasn’t long before we’d worked our way through that too. We spent the last of his cheque drinkin at our fav-rite waterin hole - the ol’ Queensway Hotel. Really, our fav-rite was the Dunsmuir but we’d bin barred from there since ’79 when that waiter got just a little too lippy for his own good.
So anyways, we go strollin out of the Queensway, into the daylight to catch the number 98 bus home, when Frank flags a cab. I’m thinkin –we got no money for that- but Frank’s already climbin in the back seat so who am I to question why?
The driver’s this young pup with curly long hair and beard. He’s the kind to show off his street smarts but you know that his mother still folds his fuckin underwear for him. So I get the jump on him with a little intimidating. Before I put me ass in the seat, I leans over into the front seat. I pins his right shoulder back hard with my right hand while my elbow’s pinning his arm down too. I stick me face into his and the kid pulls back as far as he can – which ain’t too far. I give im my best junk yard dog growl - “I’m the meanest son-of-a-bitch you’re ever gonna meet. I’m so mean – even my mother hates me.”
I could tell he was scared eh? His eyes went wide and for a second there I thought he was gonna cry. But, then he puts this grin on his face and he says to me, he says “Even your Mother?” He’s acting all kinda surprised - but pullin my leg like. And shit - he had me – I had to laugh.
I weren’t expectin this young pup to be pokin fun at me - and that mighta pissed me off but - I could tell he weren’t laughin at me – he was jes jokin wit me. What’re gonna do when yer bluff gets called? He was bettin on my good-natured side. Made me think of me dear old mom - ol’ Evelyn, that drunken bitch who‘d slapped me into this world. So I has to laugh and I says to him, I says “NO - not me mother. Sure she loves me – in her own way.”
When I’m that pissed y’know, I gets all tender-hearted like and sappy and this kid had hit me there where I weren’t expectin it. I could tell eh - the kid had heart. From any other college-smart-ass that remark mighta come across cocky-like and earned him a cuff. But this kid weren’t puttin me down – he was just gettin down wit me - and joinin in on our little party.
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So Amos drove them all the way across the bridge to a run-down little apartment building that’d seen better days. All the way they’re telling Amos tall tales about a cop they’d nearly killed and a bank they’d nearly robbed and how much money they could make robbing houses in West Van where the insurance companies just buy the people newer stuff. These guys are a couple of jokers thought Amos. Eugene, the guy doing all the talking, had an oily Elvis slick three decades old. Frank didn’t have enough hair left for that and had had to settle for a greasy comb-over. They both wore button up patterned polyester shirts over beer guts and under hip length leather–like jackets. They were a real comedy team. Intent on impressing Amos with their gangster status and mostly just coming off like barking dogs who’d lost too many teeth to bite. They were probably dangerous enough in their day, Amos noted. And you still wouldn’t want to push them too far – no telling how deep a mean streak ran in guys like that – what was one more assault charge to them? But as pickled as they were today, it was just a matter of keeping them talking about how bad they were and they’d be as happy as a pair of puppy dogs with old shoes to gnaw on.
**********************
“So, when we gets back to Frank’s place with the kid, I’m honestly feelin pretty bad ‘bout telling this kid that we gots no dough. He was just a workin stiff and here we were stiffing him more. As Frank’s breakin the news to him, I gets an idea. I says “Hey bud, you just wait here and I’ll get some cash from the landlord for ya.”
Well, now the kid’s havin a laugh at me and I can’t blame him eh? How many times has he heard that one eh? So I says to him, I says “Come in wit us then – we’ll get you the cash.” Frank’s lookin at me sideways like, but we all pile out of the cab and in we go.”
The door to Pete’s apartment is never locked. As shitty a landlord as he is, ya gotta give him one thing - at least he’s got an open door policy. In we go shouting out his name, but he’s not around. Frank’s heading for the door but I head for the bedroom and the Cabby, well he’s following me step for step. Sure enough, Pete’s in bed so I gives him a shake and tell im we needs some money.
Well, ol’ Pete was a little less than hospiti-able about the whole thing. After he tells us to fuck off about six times, he gets his ass outa bed and staggers into the kitchen. The cabbie’s lookin at me like “what the fuck?” but I’m on Pete like a dirty shirt – I know he’s always got cash – he’s just tighter than a friggin Scotsman.
Pete gets to his kitchen and he’s in the fridge – it’s empty. He slams the fridge door, looks around, lifts up a quart of whiskey off the counter – it’s empty too. Then he heads out the door and down the hall -the three of us followin along like a bloody Labour Day parade. He goes straight down to #112 and uses his pass key and lets himself right into Frank’s apartment. Franks like “what the fuck?” but by the time we get in the door, Pete’s already got our forty-pounder of C.C. in his paw and he’s pourin himself a tumbler full.
By now, I can see that Pete’s not carin diddely bout payin off our cab fare. Frank’s gets a couple more glasses out and sits at the table with Pete pourin himself a cupful. So, what the hell eh? I takes a seat and pour out one for me and I turns to the kid and says “I’m sorry bud but you can see we ain’t got the cash. Ya wanna a drink?”
It was the least I could do – be a little hospiti-able - and this fuckin kid – y’know what he has the balls to do? He walks over to the table and grabs the bottle and tells us, he says “No, I’ll just take the rest of this and we’ll call it square.” Well, you never seen three old dogs jump faster. You don’t take no bone away from no hungry dog – never mind three of em. That young pup was crossin the line there. He had no idea what he was gettin in fer – whoa baby!.
He takes a coupla steps back towards the door but he smartens up and lets me take the jug back outa his hand - and he’s got this big grin on his face again like he was jes pullin our leg with that little stunt. But I can tell that he’s pretty pissed at us too - bout being jerked around. This kid’s surprisin me. He’s got some spunk. I like him and I tell him so. “Listen, you little fucker - you’re a good kid. You come back here at the end of the month and I’ll have your fare for ya.”
He gives me a look like “what kind of sucker do you take me for?” and that makes me say “Really, I swear on me mother’s grave. You come back at month’s end and I’ll have your cash fer ya. You come back – you’ll see.”
******************
So Amos knocks on the door. It’s the end of the month. It’s a busy time for cabbies. Folks who can’t afford cars, with pogey cheques to cash, are calling cabs. He waits thirty seconds. Then he gives the door a pound and waits some more. He’s just giving up and leaving when the door opens and there he is. Eugene’s in his underwear and looking like he’s just been washed in with the last tide. It’s five o’clock in the afternoon and he’s obviously sleeping off a drunk so Amos figures – “yup, I’ve wasted my time.”
But right away his drunken friend recognizes him and he says “Jes a minute, jest a minute” and disappears back into the apartment. Amos wonders what new wrinkle he’s gonna pull now but he’s already invested this much time in the mission. So, he gives ol buddy boy yet another precious minute and he comes right back. He’s got a crumpled up ball of toilet paper in his shaking hand and from inside it he pulls out a crumpled twenty dollar bill. He hands it to Amos and says “there you go kid.” and closes the door.
Amos stood there in the hallway looking at that crumpled twenty for an age and a half. He couldn’t believe this guy had actually come through with the cash. But - he had believed in him - just enough to get Amos away from his cab and up to his door – and here that belief had paid off - unbelievably.
Amos wondered what kind of resolve it took for that guy to put that cash away. The toilet paper ball was a stash that he’d hidden away from himself – and from the claims of his brother thieves - so he could keep his word to a cabbie he didn’t even know.
That was one of the best nights Amos ever had driving cab. It was like there was a Big Dispatcher in the sky just lining up fares for him - sidewalk flags that took him out to the suburbs where a few blocks away a customer had called and was waiting to take him right back downtown where bingo, he’d get another flag, then a call, then a flag, then an airport run - and so it flowed all night. He had a ball. The full moon was a coin in his pocket. Everyone was in a good mood and wanting to talk and have conversations that flowed with the music on the radio – gentle and jazzy, staccato and rocky, deep and classy – every time he changed the station the next passenger picked up on the vibe and added to it. When it flows it flows. Some days having faith is just so easy.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Machu Picchu Shuffle
Amos remembered that only six months before, he’d walked a mountaintop trail in the Andes…
The cloud that they’d been walking through all afternoon lifted just in time to reveal the sun going down. His legs were rubbery weak. There was a great relief in his bones and his heart that they’d found a place to camp. And what a place. It’d seemed like a gift from the ancient Andean ancestors.
Discouraged and tired they’d started back down the trail on the other side of the peak. It was getting dark and there was no patch of level ground that wasn’t strewn with rocks and boulders. What else could they do except keep trudging down the Inca trail? It was the end of their second day of walking. The trail had taken them up over one peak, then deep down into a lush forested valley, and back up,up,up to a second peak and down and up now through rain and thick mist to this third mountain pass.
With every step his knees would wobble. The pain had passed into weakness but now, descending, a new set of leg muscles were being asked to perform. For the ten thousandth time he wondered what he’d been thinking when he’d agreed to this mountain trek. The only exercise he’d had in the past winter was walking from his cab to the front door of his next customer. He’d developed a belly; a counterweight for the pack on his back perhaps, but it was just more dead weight for his sorry long legs. Pushing a gas peddle requires very little muscle tone. Pushing two hundred pounds up a bloody mountain is a different story.
The guys he was with, James and Andy, were in good shape. James, a high school buddy from Scarbro, was a construction carpenter. His legs were trusty tools he used for long hours every day. They’d met Andy in Cuzco. He was an Engineer for Shell Oil working out of Burma. It was a desk job but he was the kind of guy who sought out physical activity over drinking or spectator sports. He was in Cuzco to do the Inca trail so James and Amos invited him to join them. His legs, watching them pumping up the path in front of him, looked like hydraulic powered cord and pistons under skin.
Amos soon realized that there was no way he could keep up with his mates. At their pace, he had to stop every 50 steps because his lungs just kept running out of air. The mountain air had been thin in Cuzco. James had read that the trail would take them up to 4,200 metres. It felt to Amos like he was trying to suck oxygen out of the air with a straw and it seemed to be a rarer and rarer commodity – the bottom of the glass - with every step they climbed. He could tell that James and Andy were getting frustrated by his more frequent and lengthier stops. They were impatient to discover the mysteries of this ancient path.
The train out of Cuzco had dropped them at the spot reserved for the young gringo tourists. Young European and North American and Australian backpackers traveled a well worn path from one cheap hotel to youth hostel to cheap food spots along what the locals called the Gringo Trail. What the guide book didn’t tell you, the other travelers would – passing tips to each other as they crossed paths. Thousands of them every year all looking for the same things.
You could take the train’s first class car right to the foot of Machu Picchu and a tourist bus would haul your ass up to the “lost city”. You’d stroll through the site, snap a bunch of photos, get your photo taken beside a llama, buy an alpaca sweater in the tourist shop, and get back to town in time for dinner. But on the gringo trail you rode second class with the locals and their chickens and baskets full of produce and penny candies and even pots of hot cocoa tea. How those women made it from one end of the jam-packed train car to the other pouring tea into bright coloured plastic cups was a mystery to Amos - let alone how they managed to keep that tea hot.
The porters had pitched their giant packs off the luggage car railside and they’d made their way down a steep slope to where a river raged churning white and muddy through a deep gorge cutting them off from the mountain trail before they’d even begun. Smiling campesinos waved them over to a small platform at the gorge’s edge. A heavy steel cable ran from one side across to the other. From the cable hung a homemade steel and wood basket with not really enough room for the three of them, their packs and a family of forest dwellers on their way home. They paid him his 500 peso fee – pennies to them - and left their courage behind as the little platform swung out over the gorge. His partner pulled them across with a rope tied to the basket - suspended from a single wheel riding that cable a hundred, or was it a thousand, feet over the surge.
The smiling little guy from the mountain side got pulled back across by his buddy and they disappeared up across the train tracks til tomorrow’s batch of gringos arrived. There was obviously no turning back now. We’d crossed over. Civilization was cut off behind us by that angry mud-white river. A wide clear stone path into the jungle beckoned us back into time. The family had already disappeared along it before the boys had even hoisted their packs. They were suddenly ten years old and ready for adventure.
The boyish fun took Amos a good way into the jungle. Even when the trail began switching back and forth up inclines, his enthusiasm was enough to keep him pushing to keep up. At times they even had to use their hands to pull them up over the next scrabble of rocks and roots. What kind of trail was this? Then a burro and a mother and two little kids trotted past them. That inspired another surge of energy.
But by mid afternoon, Amos was just running out of steam. He had to take longer and longer breaks to stoke up another head of energy to get him marching on. When the frustration became loud on his compadres faces – they’d said nothing – he ordered them to stop waiting for him. “You guys go ahead at your own speed. There’s only one trail up here. I’ll catch you at our first camp. Have dinner ready eh”
It took no convincing to set them free. They hadn’t traveled across the globe to go slow. James and Andy were eating it up and hungry for more. This was the trail that warrior messengers ran with urgent news of the Incan kingdom. This trail crossed the whole range of the Andean mountains from Chile and Bolivia through Peru almost to Ecuador. Armies marched it to conquer and control an expanding kingdom centuries before any European set foot on it. This piece of the trail would take them to the most sacred site of the Empire. Machu Picchu – where the high priests sacrificed the best and brightest young specimens of their tribes to the sun god – trading bright futures of one in exchange for a Sun that would shine on the fortunes of a whole kingdom. Off my friends sprang into the dark, bloody history of the Inca trail.
Amos discovered something that he’d missed by trying to keep up. He discovered his own pace. Instead of throwing his hiking boot out to the full extent of his long leg, he simply brought it up beside the other and let it drop just a foot ahead. It was slow. It was progress. It felt right. It freed his mind. Instead of having to focus on the push, push, push of physical effort, the short-stepped trudge freed his mind to explore his surroundings. He fell into a pace that allowed him to lift his gaze from the path to look around and see. Right away he started noticing amazing details about his jungle path that had been a blur before.
How thick the moss grew on fallen trees. How it hung like a beard from crisscrossing deadfalls suspended, hung up by the branches of other trees off the forest floor. He noticed the tears dripping from those beards. Why were they crying? Crying to see this suburban invader bringing the most dreadful disease yet to the wild. Crying to see yet another member of the consumer culture scourge that had already infected this wild sacred place and would – within the lifetime of a jungle tree – become the killing cancer of the last age of earth.
Amos didn’t just notice what was around him. He started to notice what was going on inside too. The trudge was telling him about who he was. The slow, steady stomp of long heavy legs suited him. He was no gazelle. He was no monkey. He was a lumbering bear. He was destined to be a wise old Galapagos turtle carrying the ages on his back – hard to crack and full of observations that only the slow traveler will gather.
The more he reflected on how this pace was working for who he was, the more he started enjoying himself. Soon the music came. His whole body started getting into the slow steady beat, beat, beat of the path. He was into it. Amos even came up with a name for this dance of his. He’d call it the Macchu Picchu Shuffle. It would take him wherever he needed to go.
Rounding a bend he came upon James and Andy taking a break. He shuffled up to them and kept going right on by. “Hey boys” he said with an easy smile “Make way - I’m coming through” and through he stepped like a cat hip to a tune that they couldn’t hear. They passed him before he rounded the next bend but for all their quick starts and stops, Amos never stopped again all afternoon. The Shuffle carried him right up over the first amazing mountain pass –where he stopped to inhale the panoramic view of mountain ranges in every direction – and then down, down, down to a well worn dirt campsite where the boys had a fire blazing and a pot cooking dinner.
It was a restless night. Jungle noises are unfamiliar distractions for suburban boys. Amos could sleep through traffic and sirens and the beeps, buzzes, and hums of electronic conveniences. But the sounds of the forest kept his imagination going with theories of what creatures each snap in the woods and each chirp or growl or cry might belong to – and how desperate they might be for a taste of American beef. He dozed on and off. The tarp kept the drizzle that arrived before dawn off his sleeping bag and quietened the forest. Its peaceful patter gave him an hour or more of solid rest before the jungle choir - a thousand voices strong - woke him his facing breaking into a wide happy grin matched on the faces of his fellow warriors. Sunlight had made it’s way down into the valley to find their campsite while the sun itself remained hidden somewhere behind the next mountain they had to climb.
A quick meal, bread and jam and some cocoa tea sent them off on their quest. It was at least a three day journey and they had a lot of ground to cover. There was a steady stream of trekkers and you wanted to keep your place in line. Amos didn’t mind being overtaken by a pair of other gringos every so often. He was having way too much fun with the Shuffle. He soaked in every change in the forest as the trail took him through dense underbrush to great stands of mature mossy jungle where even the air seemed green. Over trickling clear streams washing bright gravel pebbles down to their destinies, then, into wide quick rivers where ropes strung across allowed the trekkers to wade hip deep safely through.
His steady unstopping pace allowed him to catch his mates where they stopped for extended rests at such picturesque places and they snapped photos of each other crossing the river, risking their necks on slippery rocks for the big payoff – stories to tell. Tell soulmates, tell children, tell the guy on the bunk next to them in the Salvation Army Shelter. Who knew what lay ahead for them? Their young legs took them further on to find out.
By midafternoon they got up above the treeline to where the trail started leveling off. It still dipped and turned but the switchbacks straightened out and they were now moving across a set of mountaintop ridges. A fog had descended onto them before they could reach sunshine. They could only catch glimpses of the distant terrain. Looking down from the trail they could see dizzying drops to rivers winding through the valleys. But the peaks on the other sides were up in the same cloud that they were walking through.
With fewer things to see, Amos spent more time looking in. He had to pay attention to where his feet were going. At times the trail grew thin along steep mountain flanks. The path was reinforced and widened in those places with the ancient stonework of the Incans. The same interlocking, mortarless stonework as the great ruins around Cuzco was evident in these mountain roads. They remained in tact centuries later. The masons had knit their stonework into the hillsides to become part of the mountain’s fabric.
As he made slow progress across the ridges he strolled back through time. He visited childhood friends and remembered people he hadn’t thought of in years. He remembered with thanks those teachers who had influenced him by recognizing who he was, appreciating his gifts, and encouraging him to keep growing. He stumbled upon those who had angered and hurt him. Ignorant bastards who had misunderstood him and thwarted him with pesky disciplines or worse – ignored him. He kicked at memories of those he had let down. Who saw great things in him but he’d disappointed by steering away from their high hopes to stay safe and alone with his own version of himself.
Amos had always shied away from success. It never seemed attractive enough to be worth all the hard work - giving up on his freedom to read stories and watch movies and just play with his thoughts and imaginings. Those teachers found him bright and quick and curious in a way that set him apart from most of his peers. The older he grew the fewer playmates he could find who wanted to venture into make believe and adventure. Boys turned their adventures into sports where there was little drama for him. He wasn’t fast enough or coordinated enough to play the hero and was relegated to the role of supporting or chasing down the heroes. Girls games turned into gossiping circles and he didn’t have the guts to engage in those bloody little dramas. He wasn’t a girly boy but he wasn’t a boy’s boy either.
So he worked for his teachers but he lived for his time alone with his musings. He made those teachers proud at times but they were always disappointed in the end. “If only he would apply himself” the report cards read year after year. His parents loved him the way he was – but, but, but they always tried to coax and cajole and even threaten him into achievements. Amos just kept trudging along looking for something out there to match the power of what was inside.
Instinctively he knew that he didn’t want to be the big success in other’s eyes. Instead he coveted the role of the hidden unlikely hero. The shepherd boy that only Samuel can see as King. The stable hand who without thinking or trying pulls the sword from the stone in an emergency – called upon to serve in a moment of need. No, the high road was not for him. He watched and waited and played the game as best he could – without heart or hope of winning. He would remain a loafer and aloof and alone.
Lost in these revelries, as he remembered, he discovered new insights about the boy he thought he knew. From this height on a mountain in the future, he could see how the boy had shaped the man and how the man was pushing those same roots deeper into the soil of destiny.
He’d written his Law entry exams that past winter, studying in the cab during long waits for the customer’s call. He’d done okay on it. Good enough to get him into one of the less prestigious schools and he’d sent off his applications to the three he thought would take him in. He didn’t want to be a lawyer but he couldn’t think of a better way to get to where he thought he was going. Advisors had told him that law was a good platform from which he could work out a career. It would lift him up to a professional strategic height and from there he could map out a path.
Amos heard footsteps behind him and voices higher and more lilting than the mostly male backpackers who he’d met so far. He paused at a wide place in the path and a young man with two young women approached and stopped to say hello. Their accents were French and they exchanged the usual questions and answers. Where was he from? And them? How long have you been traveling? You? Any good finds along the way? What’s next? Isn’t this great? They were Swiss it turned out. Nothing memorable about the one pair but he knew he would always remember the sweet angelic face of their companion. Her smile was warm as sunlight and her eyes lit him up from deep inside. It was her!
Secretly he’d pined for a woman who could see in him what others missed. Someone who served the same mission with a passion that would ignite his own. His girlfriend from University had been his first real love. Joanne was funny and earthy and best of all – undemanding. She could drink like a fish and enjoyed getting high just as much, and as often, as Amos. He often thought of her more as a buddy who he slept with than as a lover. She was a great traveling buddy but could never go deep down into the heart of things with him. When he got morose and philosophical she would joke and poke at make fun of him til he came around. That was good for Amos. They complemented one another. But, to his shame, he was still always searching for the one who would ignite his passion and purpose.
But of course he was tongue-tied beyond the usual gringo small talk and let her slip past up the trail. She took his heart with him and Amos spent much of the rest of the afternoon pursuing her. The thought of catching another glance and smile kept him amused as the day wore on and the incline started getting steep again. The path was switching back and forth in tighter patterns but it was hard to make out how high into the cloud they climb might go. It was a grey soup. A drizzle of rain accompanied the fog and he caught up with James and Andy at a campsite. They’d stopped to pull rain ponchos from their packs. There were three different small groups of packers all pulling gear from their packs. They were pulling out tents and starting to pitch them.
“It’s getting late” noted James. He was their navigator. He had the map and was tracking their progress. “This is the only campsite marked and then there’s nothing for a long ways”.
There sure isn’t much room here” noted Amos.
We might run out of daylight before we make the next one.
Should we try to jam in here or should we go back?
What sacrilege to suggest going back. There didn’t look like enough room here for the packers that had already started pitching camp let alone three more guys. They would have to go on and they would deal with whatever they found. Amos hated leaving behind his Swiss sweetheart and his big chance at romance. She’d given him another warm smile as he managed to bump into her with some lame smalltalk. The guys were waiting now. Off they went.
Turns out all three of them had been smitten by her. “She’s mine” each one protested as if they were laying claim to a newly discovered land. They walked on. The going got only slower and wetter. The climb was steeper and steeper with each switchback and the turns started coming sooner and sooner. Amos’ legs were giving out. Even the shuffle was hard to keep up. The shuffle was all his companions could muster too and even they were starting to complain between heavy gasps for the next lungfull.
They reached the summit in a total fog. A wind only blew in more cloud and rain and they only knew they were at the top because in every direction they stepped the mountain sloped away. All that effort and no panoramic payoff. No place to camp. No way to see what lay ahead. Just a great cloud of unknowing.
With no other choice - they started down. Amos was truly fearful that his legs were going to give out on him. He tried rallying his courage by swearing and cursing out loud and his companions joined in with a good round of complaints to the gods or anyone else listening. In that haze it felt as if angels could be just a few steps away and they would never know it.
They would never know it - except for the magical appearance of the stone stairway. They almost missed it. James and Andy marched right past it and so did Amos but he’d caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye and stopped in his tracks. Was that his imagination? He backed up a few steps and there, cut into an almost vertical rock face was a set of stairs going up into heaven. “Hey guys! Stop! You gotta check this out!”.
He waited until the three of them were huddled together on the narrow track and he got to see their eyes open wide in amazement. They dropped their packs and Amos claimed rights to be the first up. It was almost a ladder but each step was deep enough for an excellent footing and there was no fear involved. His heart beat fast with the adrenaline of discovery.
Just twenty steps up he stepped out onto a leveled grassy spot the size of a modest suburban living room. James and Andy were at his heels and they stood and staggered open-mouthed around the site. It was backed by a six foot wall and surrounding the half-moon of ground was a thigh high handcrafted stone wall. They laughed and hooted and slapped each other on the back and Amos thanked those that had been listening after all. This place was not on the map. This place was a gift.
The adrenaline still pumping, they climbed back down to get their packs and James thought he heard the trickle of a stream. He scrambled down as far as they had climbed up and found a stream of fresh water. As they pulled out their tarps and pots for cooking over the small firepit, Amos produced a surprise bottle of scotch. “Boys, I didn’t tell ya before, but today is my birthday.
No way! the guys exclaimed.
Yup - no longer a boy. I’m twenty one today.
And then, as Amos poured a round of drinks into tin cups, the curtain lifted - as if the experience had been staged and timed. The three of them turned, and in a silent awe, watched the wind take the cloud away to reveal a long deep valley before and beneath them. The sun was setting behind a set of peaks at the far distant end of it. From this spot they could survey all that the valley contained.
“This is a sentry post. declared James their guide in all things Incan. From here the sentries could keep an eye on anything coming or going towards Machu Picchu. They just shook their lucky little heads, took a seat on the ancient wall, sipped at the single malt and laughed and chuckled at their fortune as the light slowly took away the magnificent mirage.
They cooked a simple meal over the campfire and told stories while the stars arrived bright and blanketing the sky. They were all so exhausted from the day’s march that soon they climbed into their bags for sleep. But in spite of his weariness, sleep eluded Amos. He lay on his back examining the stars. They became the people of his past. As he focused on each one, or on a group, individuals came to mind. Soon they were beyond numbering. His heart swelled with a sense of the wealth of his inheritance.
The love and attention he’d been paid by so many. Even the challenge and abuse he’d received he valued as part of what had both hurt and hardened him. And along with this great wealth that filled him, there was also a great obligation that surfaced and expanded out into the sky. His future was out there beyond him. His manhood was waiting to be traveled and, whatever it held, he knew that it would both surprise and impress all who had known him. Impress them not so much with he might do - as with how the Creator had used him for something special, unusual for a Scarbro boy - more precious than simply success.
It was more of a feeling than a thought and he lay there in awe of what was being presented. He lay there for a long, long time. It held him and slowly became part of him. A transformation was under way in his DNA. It was either the aliens who’d inscribed the Nazca plains, or the Incan gods who accepted the potent blood of youth in exchange for life spilled and distributed, or it was the ancestors transforming his ideas about the childhood Jesus he’d known - into something only to be discovered much further down the trail. Whatever it was – it was both very real and very unreal and he knew only that it had changed him.
The next morning the guys were still laughing at their luck. Amos said nothing to his companions about his sleepless night and tried to see in their faces if they saw anything different about him. But they hadn’t, or didn’t, or surely couldn’t put it into words if they had, and they packed up slowly reluctant to leave the magic of this high, strategic, stronghold. They’d another day’s walk ahead before they’d reach Machu Picchu.
Amos traversed that long valley’s trail still shuffling along but with a light heart that carried the load. Now it felt like he was carrying his future on his back instead of his past and his mind roamed ahead trying to imagine what role he might play in the world. He knew that whatever it was, he would be accompanied by the mystery and magic that had revealed those stairs in the rock.
That night they camped on another height. This one was on the map. It looked down upon the sacred Machu Picchu like they were looking down from the Toronto Dominion tower at Nathan Phillips’ square below. The next day they would explore the famous ruins and join with all the world travelers who could tick off that visit as a wonder accomplished. But the mountains held another wonder for them first.
That night around the campfire, as Amos turned away and stood to pee out over the cliff, he stretched his back in an arc and looked skyward. There were no stars in the sky. Only clouds. But as Amos moved to turn back to the fire, he noticed that something also moved in the sky. Intuitively he lifted his arm and saw a dark arm raised on the cloud before him. He laughed and quickly shared this new magic with his friends. They played puppet shows into the night – silly with the thought that here they were - projected larger than life in the sky above world famous Machu Picchu. It was both fun and strange. Holy unreal - and simply explained.
In the morning they came down from the mountains and walked through the maze of stone walls. Amazed at the magic craft of stone age people - the combining of human skill and awesome natural beauty together in this remote jungle sanctuary. Mixing with middle-aged American and Japanese tourists muddied the pure spring water experience they’d shared on their trek. Amos knew that the ruins they walked among were only a human, if ancient, expression of the mystery hidden up among the mountain clouds of unknowing.
---------------
The cloud that they’d been walking through all afternoon lifted just in time to reveal the sun going down. His legs were rubbery weak. There was a great relief in his bones and his heart that they’d found a place to camp. And what a place. It’d seemed like a gift from the ancient Andean ancestors.
Discouraged and tired they’d started back down the trail on the other side of the peak. It was getting dark and there was no patch of level ground that wasn’t strewn with rocks and boulders. What else could they do except keep trudging down the Inca trail? It was the end of their second day of walking. The trail had taken them up over one peak, then deep down into a lush forested valley, and back up,up,up to a second peak and down and up now through rain and thick mist to this third mountain pass.
With every step his knees would wobble. The pain had passed into weakness but now, descending, a new set of leg muscles were being asked to perform. For the ten thousandth time he wondered what he’d been thinking when he’d agreed to this mountain trek. The only exercise he’d had in the past winter was walking from his cab to the front door of his next customer. He’d developed a belly; a counterweight for the pack on his back perhaps, but it was just more dead weight for his sorry long legs. Pushing a gas peddle requires very little muscle tone. Pushing two hundred pounds up a bloody mountain is a different story.
The guys he was with, James and Andy, were in good shape. James, a high school buddy from Scarbro, was a construction carpenter. His legs were trusty tools he used for long hours every day. They’d met Andy in Cuzco. He was an Engineer for Shell Oil working out of Burma. It was a desk job but he was the kind of guy who sought out physical activity over drinking or spectator sports. He was in Cuzco to do the Inca trail so James and Amos invited him to join them. His legs, watching them pumping up the path in front of him, looked like hydraulic powered cord and pistons under skin.
Amos soon realized that there was no way he could keep up with his mates. At their pace, he had to stop every 50 steps because his lungs just kept running out of air. The mountain air had been thin in Cuzco. James had read that the trail would take them up to 4,200 metres. It felt to Amos like he was trying to suck oxygen out of the air with a straw and it seemed to be a rarer and rarer commodity – the bottom of the glass - with every step they climbed. He could tell that James and Andy were getting frustrated by his more frequent and lengthier stops. They were impatient to discover the mysteries of this ancient path.
The train out of Cuzco had dropped them at the spot reserved for the young gringo tourists. Young European and North American and Australian backpackers traveled a well worn path from one cheap hotel to youth hostel to cheap food spots along what the locals called the Gringo Trail. What the guide book didn’t tell you, the other travelers would – passing tips to each other as they crossed paths. Thousands of them every year all looking for the same things.
You could take the train’s first class car right to the foot of Machu Picchu and a tourist bus would haul your ass up to the “lost city”. You’d stroll through the site, snap a bunch of photos, get your photo taken beside a llama, buy an alpaca sweater in the tourist shop, and get back to town in time for dinner. But on the gringo trail you rode second class with the locals and their chickens and baskets full of produce and penny candies and even pots of hot cocoa tea. How those women made it from one end of the jam-packed train car to the other pouring tea into bright coloured plastic cups was a mystery to Amos - let alone how they managed to keep that tea hot.
The porters had pitched their giant packs off the luggage car railside and they’d made their way down a steep slope to where a river raged churning white and muddy through a deep gorge cutting them off from the mountain trail before they’d even begun. Smiling campesinos waved them over to a small platform at the gorge’s edge. A heavy steel cable ran from one side across to the other. From the cable hung a homemade steel and wood basket with not really enough room for the three of them, their packs and a family of forest dwellers on their way home. They paid him his 500 peso fee – pennies to them - and left their courage behind as the little platform swung out over the gorge. His partner pulled them across with a rope tied to the basket - suspended from a single wheel riding that cable a hundred, or was it a thousand, feet over the surge.
The smiling little guy from the mountain side got pulled back across by his buddy and they disappeared up across the train tracks til tomorrow’s batch of gringos arrived. There was obviously no turning back now. We’d crossed over. Civilization was cut off behind us by that angry mud-white river. A wide clear stone path into the jungle beckoned us back into time. The family had already disappeared along it before the boys had even hoisted their packs. They were suddenly ten years old and ready for adventure.
The boyish fun took Amos a good way into the jungle. Even when the trail began switching back and forth up inclines, his enthusiasm was enough to keep him pushing to keep up. At times they even had to use their hands to pull them up over the next scrabble of rocks and roots. What kind of trail was this? Then a burro and a mother and two little kids trotted past them. That inspired another surge of energy.
But by mid afternoon, Amos was just running out of steam. He had to take longer and longer breaks to stoke up another head of energy to get him marching on. When the frustration became loud on his compadres faces – they’d said nothing – he ordered them to stop waiting for him. “You guys go ahead at your own speed. There’s only one trail up here. I’ll catch you at our first camp. Have dinner ready eh”
It took no convincing to set them free. They hadn’t traveled across the globe to go slow. James and Andy were eating it up and hungry for more. This was the trail that warrior messengers ran with urgent news of the Incan kingdom. This trail crossed the whole range of the Andean mountains from Chile and Bolivia through Peru almost to Ecuador. Armies marched it to conquer and control an expanding kingdom centuries before any European set foot on it. This piece of the trail would take them to the most sacred site of the Empire. Machu Picchu – where the high priests sacrificed the best and brightest young specimens of their tribes to the sun god – trading bright futures of one in exchange for a Sun that would shine on the fortunes of a whole kingdom. Off my friends sprang into the dark, bloody history of the Inca trail.
Amos discovered something that he’d missed by trying to keep up. He discovered his own pace. Instead of throwing his hiking boot out to the full extent of his long leg, he simply brought it up beside the other and let it drop just a foot ahead. It was slow. It was progress. It felt right. It freed his mind. Instead of having to focus on the push, push, push of physical effort, the short-stepped trudge freed his mind to explore his surroundings. He fell into a pace that allowed him to lift his gaze from the path to look around and see. Right away he started noticing amazing details about his jungle path that had been a blur before.
How thick the moss grew on fallen trees. How it hung like a beard from crisscrossing deadfalls suspended, hung up by the branches of other trees off the forest floor. He noticed the tears dripping from those beards. Why were they crying? Crying to see this suburban invader bringing the most dreadful disease yet to the wild. Crying to see yet another member of the consumer culture scourge that had already infected this wild sacred place and would – within the lifetime of a jungle tree – become the killing cancer of the last age of earth.
Amos didn’t just notice what was around him. He started to notice what was going on inside too. The trudge was telling him about who he was. The slow, steady stomp of long heavy legs suited him. He was no gazelle. He was no monkey. He was a lumbering bear. He was destined to be a wise old Galapagos turtle carrying the ages on his back – hard to crack and full of observations that only the slow traveler will gather.
The more he reflected on how this pace was working for who he was, the more he started enjoying himself. Soon the music came. His whole body started getting into the slow steady beat, beat, beat of the path. He was into it. Amos even came up with a name for this dance of his. He’d call it the Macchu Picchu Shuffle. It would take him wherever he needed to go.
Rounding a bend he came upon James and Andy taking a break. He shuffled up to them and kept going right on by. “Hey boys” he said with an easy smile “Make way - I’m coming through” and through he stepped like a cat hip to a tune that they couldn’t hear. They passed him before he rounded the next bend but for all their quick starts and stops, Amos never stopped again all afternoon. The Shuffle carried him right up over the first amazing mountain pass –where he stopped to inhale the panoramic view of mountain ranges in every direction – and then down, down, down to a well worn dirt campsite where the boys had a fire blazing and a pot cooking dinner.
It was a restless night. Jungle noises are unfamiliar distractions for suburban boys. Amos could sleep through traffic and sirens and the beeps, buzzes, and hums of electronic conveniences. But the sounds of the forest kept his imagination going with theories of what creatures each snap in the woods and each chirp or growl or cry might belong to – and how desperate they might be for a taste of American beef. He dozed on and off. The tarp kept the drizzle that arrived before dawn off his sleeping bag and quietened the forest. Its peaceful patter gave him an hour or more of solid rest before the jungle choir - a thousand voices strong - woke him his facing breaking into a wide happy grin matched on the faces of his fellow warriors. Sunlight had made it’s way down into the valley to find their campsite while the sun itself remained hidden somewhere behind the next mountain they had to climb.
A quick meal, bread and jam and some cocoa tea sent them off on their quest. It was at least a three day journey and they had a lot of ground to cover. There was a steady stream of trekkers and you wanted to keep your place in line. Amos didn’t mind being overtaken by a pair of other gringos every so often. He was having way too much fun with the Shuffle. He soaked in every change in the forest as the trail took him through dense underbrush to great stands of mature mossy jungle where even the air seemed green. Over trickling clear streams washing bright gravel pebbles down to their destinies, then, into wide quick rivers where ropes strung across allowed the trekkers to wade hip deep safely through.
His steady unstopping pace allowed him to catch his mates where they stopped for extended rests at such picturesque places and they snapped photos of each other crossing the river, risking their necks on slippery rocks for the big payoff – stories to tell. Tell soulmates, tell children, tell the guy on the bunk next to them in the Salvation Army Shelter. Who knew what lay ahead for them? Their young legs took them further on to find out.
By midafternoon they got up above the treeline to where the trail started leveling off. It still dipped and turned but the switchbacks straightened out and they were now moving across a set of mountaintop ridges. A fog had descended onto them before they could reach sunshine. They could only catch glimpses of the distant terrain. Looking down from the trail they could see dizzying drops to rivers winding through the valleys. But the peaks on the other sides were up in the same cloud that they were walking through.
With fewer things to see, Amos spent more time looking in. He had to pay attention to where his feet were going. At times the trail grew thin along steep mountain flanks. The path was reinforced and widened in those places with the ancient stonework of the Incans. The same interlocking, mortarless stonework as the great ruins around Cuzco was evident in these mountain roads. They remained in tact centuries later. The masons had knit their stonework into the hillsides to become part of the mountain’s fabric.
As he made slow progress across the ridges he strolled back through time. He visited childhood friends and remembered people he hadn’t thought of in years. He remembered with thanks those teachers who had influenced him by recognizing who he was, appreciating his gifts, and encouraging him to keep growing. He stumbled upon those who had angered and hurt him. Ignorant bastards who had misunderstood him and thwarted him with pesky disciplines or worse – ignored him. He kicked at memories of those he had let down. Who saw great things in him but he’d disappointed by steering away from their high hopes to stay safe and alone with his own version of himself.
Amos had always shied away from success. It never seemed attractive enough to be worth all the hard work - giving up on his freedom to read stories and watch movies and just play with his thoughts and imaginings. Those teachers found him bright and quick and curious in a way that set him apart from most of his peers. The older he grew the fewer playmates he could find who wanted to venture into make believe and adventure. Boys turned their adventures into sports where there was little drama for him. He wasn’t fast enough or coordinated enough to play the hero and was relegated to the role of supporting or chasing down the heroes. Girls games turned into gossiping circles and he didn’t have the guts to engage in those bloody little dramas. He wasn’t a girly boy but he wasn’t a boy’s boy either.
So he worked for his teachers but he lived for his time alone with his musings. He made those teachers proud at times but they were always disappointed in the end. “If only he would apply himself” the report cards read year after year. His parents loved him the way he was – but, but, but they always tried to coax and cajole and even threaten him into achievements. Amos just kept trudging along looking for something out there to match the power of what was inside.
Instinctively he knew that he didn’t want to be the big success in other’s eyes. Instead he coveted the role of the hidden unlikely hero. The shepherd boy that only Samuel can see as King. The stable hand who without thinking or trying pulls the sword from the stone in an emergency – called upon to serve in a moment of need. No, the high road was not for him. He watched and waited and played the game as best he could – without heart or hope of winning. He would remain a loafer and aloof and alone.
Lost in these revelries, as he remembered, he discovered new insights about the boy he thought he knew. From this height on a mountain in the future, he could see how the boy had shaped the man and how the man was pushing those same roots deeper into the soil of destiny.
He’d written his Law entry exams that past winter, studying in the cab during long waits for the customer’s call. He’d done okay on it. Good enough to get him into one of the less prestigious schools and he’d sent off his applications to the three he thought would take him in. He didn’t want to be a lawyer but he couldn’t think of a better way to get to where he thought he was going. Advisors had told him that law was a good platform from which he could work out a career. It would lift him up to a professional strategic height and from there he could map out a path.
Amos heard footsteps behind him and voices higher and more lilting than the mostly male backpackers who he’d met so far. He paused at a wide place in the path and a young man with two young women approached and stopped to say hello. Their accents were French and they exchanged the usual questions and answers. Where was he from? And them? How long have you been traveling? You? Any good finds along the way? What’s next? Isn’t this great? They were Swiss it turned out. Nothing memorable about the one pair but he knew he would always remember the sweet angelic face of their companion. Her smile was warm as sunlight and her eyes lit him up from deep inside. It was her!
Secretly he’d pined for a woman who could see in him what others missed. Someone who served the same mission with a passion that would ignite his own. His girlfriend from University had been his first real love. Joanne was funny and earthy and best of all – undemanding. She could drink like a fish and enjoyed getting high just as much, and as often, as Amos. He often thought of her more as a buddy who he slept with than as a lover. She was a great traveling buddy but could never go deep down into the heart of things with him. When he got morose and philosophical she would joke and poke at make fun of him til he came around. That was good for Amos. They complemented one another. But, to his shame, he was still always searching for the one who would ignite his passion and purpose.
But of course he was tongue-tied beyond the usual gringo small talk and let her slip past up the trail. She took his heart with him and Amos spent much of the rest of the afternoon pursuing her. The thought of catching another glance and smile kept him amused as the day wore on and the incline started getting steep again. The path was switching back and forth in tighter patterns but it was hard to make out how high into the cloud they climb might go. It was a grey soup. A drizzle of rain accompanied the fog and he caught up with James and Andy at a campsite. They’d stopped to pull rain ponchos from their packs. There were three different small groups of packers all pulling gear from their packs. They were pulling out tents and starting to pitch them.
“It’s getting late” noted James. He was their navigator. He had the map and was tracking their progress. “This is the only campsite marked and then there’s nothing for a long ways”.
There sure isn’t much room here” noted Amos.
We might run out of daylight before we make the next one.
Should we try to jam in here or should we go back?
What sacrilege to suggest going back. There didn’t look like enough room here for the packers that had already started pitching camp let alone three more guys. They would have to go on and they would deal with whatever they found. Amos hated leaving behind his Swiss sweetheart and his big chance at romance. She’d given him another warm smile as he managed to bump into her with some lame smalltalk. The guys were waiting now. Off they went.
Turns out all three of them had been smitten by her. “She’s mine” each one protested as if they were laying claim to a newly discovered land. They walked on. The going got only slower and wetter. The climb was steeper and steeper with each switchback and the turns started coming sooner and sooner. Amos’ legs were giving out. Even the shuffle was hard to keep up. The shuffle was all his companions could muster too and even they were starting to complain between heavy gasps for the next lungfull.
They reached the summit in a total fog. A wind only blew in more cloud and rain and they only knew they were at the top because in every direction they stepped the mountain sloped away. All that effort and no panoramic payoff. No place to camp. No way to see what lay ahead. Just a great cloud of unknowing.
With no other choice - they started down. Amos was truly fearful that his legs were going to give out on him. He tried rallying his courage by swearing and cursing out loud and his companions joined in with a good round of complaints to the gods or anyone else listening. In that haze it felt as if angels could be just a few steps away and they would never know it.
They would never know it - except for the magical appearance of the stone stairway. They almost missed it. James and Andy marched right past it and so did Amos but he’d caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye and stopped in his tracks. Was that his imagination? He backed up a few steps and there, cut into an almost vertical rock face was a set of stairs going up into heaven. “Hey guys! Stop! You gotta check this out!”.
He waited until the three of them were huddled together on the narrow track and he got to see their eyes open wide in amazement. They dropped their packs and Amos claimed rights to be the first up. It was almost a ladder but each step was deep enough for an excellent footing and there was no fear involved. His heart beat fast with the adrenaline of discovery.
Just twenty steps up he stepped out onto a leveled grassy spot the size of a modest suburban living room. James and Andy were at his heels and they stood and staggered open-mouthed around the site. It was backed by a six foot wall and surrounding the half-moon of ground was a thigh high handcrafted stone wall. They laughed and hooted and slapped each other on the back and Amos thanked those that had been listening after all. This place was not on the map. This place was a gift.
The adrenaline still pumping, they climbed back down to get their packs and James thought he heard the trickle of a stream. He scrambled down as far as they had climbed up and found a stream of fresh water. As they pulled out their tarps and pots for cooking over the small firepit, Amos produced a surprise bottle of scotch. “Boys, I didn’t tell ya before, but today is my birthday.
No way! the guys exclaimed.
Yup - no longer a boy. I’m twenty one today.
And then, as Amos poured a round of drinks into tin cups, the curtain lifted - as if the experience had been staged and timed. The three of them turned, and in a silent awe, watched the wind take the cloud away to reveal a long deep valley before and beneath them. The sun was setting behind a set of peaks at the far distant end of it. From this spot they could survey all that the valley contained.
“This is a sentry post. declared James their guide in all things Incan. From here the sentries could keep an eye on anything coming or going towards Machu Picchu. They just shook their lucky little heads, took a seat on the ancient wall, sipped at the single malt and laughed and chuckled at their fortune as the light slowly took away the magnificent mirage.
They cooked a simple meal over the campfire and told stories while the stars arrived bright and blanketing the sky. They were all so exhausted from the day’s march that soon they climbed into their bags for sleep. But in spite of his weariness, sleep eluded Amos. He lay on his back examining the stars. They became the people of his past. As he focused on each one, or on a group, individuals came to mind. Soon they were beyond numbering. His heart swelled with a sense of the wealth of his inheritance.
The love and attention he’d been paid by so many. Even the challenge and abuse he’d received he valued as part of what had both hurt and hardened him. And along with this great wealth that filled him, there was also a great obligation that surfaced and expanded out into the sky. His future was out there beyond him. His manhood was waiting to be traveled and, whatever it held, he knew that it would both surprise and impress all who had known him. Impress them not so much with he might do - as with how the Creator had used him for something special, unusual for a Scarbro boy - more precious than simply success.
It was more of a feeling than a thought and he lay there in awe of what was being presented. He lay there for a long, long time. It held him and slowly became part of him. A transformation was under way in his DNA. It was either the aliens who’d inscribed the Nazca plains, or the Incan gods who accepted the potent blood of youth in exchange for life spilled and distributed, or it was the ancestors transforming his ideas about the childhood Jesus he’d known - into something only to be discovered much further down the trail. Whatever it was – it was both very real and very unreal and he knew only that it had changed him.
The next morning the guys were still laughing at their luck. Amos said nothing to his companions about his sleepless night and tried to see in their faces if they saw anything different about him. But they hadn’t, or didn’t, or surely couldn’t put it into words if they had, and they packed up slowly reluctant to leave the magic of this high, strategic, stronghold. They’d another day’s walk ahead before they’d reach Machu Picchu.
Amos traversed that long valley’s trail still shuffling along but with a light heart that carried the load. Now it felt like he was carrying his future on his back instead of his past and his mind roamed ahead trying to imagine what role he might play in the world. He knew that whatever it was, he would be accompanied by the mystery and magic that had revealed those stairs in the rock.
That night they camped on another height. This one was on the map. It looked down upon the sacred Machu Picchu like they were looking down from the Toronto Dominion tower at Nathan Phillips’ square below. The next day they would explore the famous ruins and join with all the world travelers who could tick off that visit as a wonder accomplished. But the mountains held another wonder for them first.
That night around the campfire, as Amos turned away and stood to pee out over the cliff, he stretched his back in an arc and looked skyward. There were no stars in the sky. Only clouds. But as Amos moved to turn back to the fire, he noticed that something also moved in the sky. Intuitively he lifted his arm and saw a dark arm raised on the cloud before him. He laughed and quickly shared this new magic with his friends. They played puppet shows into the night – silly with the thought that here they were - projected larger than life in the sky above world famous Machu Picchu. It was both fun and strange. Holy unreal - and simply explained.
In the morning they came down from the mountains and walked through the maze of stone walls. Amazed at the magic craft of stone age people - the combining of human skill and awesome natural beauty together in this remote jungle sanctuary. Mixing with middle-aged American and Japanese tourists muddied the pure spring water experience they’d shared on their trek. Amos knew that the ruins they walked among were only a human, if ancient, expression of the mystery hidden up among the mountain clouds of unknowing.
---------------
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Mountaintop grace
Mountaintop Grace
Amos wanted his life to be a story worth telling. That was about all he knew. And he was terrified of wasting his life doing something meaningless. So terrified that, rather than fail his own proud self image by pursuing the wrong path, he’d become stalled here at a dead end. At the end of the last public beach. At the end of the road west. At the end of his childhood.
Not a bad place to end up. He was in an idyllic rain forest, ocean side oasis, living off the fat of the land in a bubble of time that, like his youth, couldn’t last. The fall weather was coming. Even in Vancouver’s temperate climate it meant rain, rain, cold and colder rain. Urban camping was fine for the summer but he’d have to find four walls and a roof in that concrete city sometime soon.
Amos managed to cadge a shower every few days at the Jericho Beach Youth Hostel. He figured the staff were onto him – they knew he wasn’t checked in. But since he fit in with the young crowd traveling cheap, they looked the other way as he strolled casually by with soap and towel in a bag.
Urban camping wasn’t alot different from being homeless. He had a home of course. Back in his parent’s basement in Ontario there was a place for him. But he was here to find a way forward. To go back would be a defeat. This was something he had to do on his own. What that “thing” was seemed just beyond his reach – out there in the ocean somewhere. He was hoping it might wash in with the next tide.
Amos walked the beach. He read and read and read. Jung and Castenada and Neitsche. He cooked meals over a Coleman stove on a picnic table in the public park where he parked his Dodge Dart. At the Canadian Tire, he bought fiberglass and body putty and spent hours sanding down and repairing the rust holes in the body of the Fleshmobile. It was far from a professional job. It was more of ritual than he knew. He was patching up the holes in his heart. The salt on the slippery road of adolescence had eaten away at his defences. It needed working over – a new face. Working with his hands got his mind settled and focused and he started developing a plan for the new man.
He jotted a few things into a notebook but would doze off before he got anywhere into it. He wandered the downtown streets enjoying feeling both stranger and tourist - feeling like, as a Canadian, this was his city. He belonged here. Both strange and familiar. Familiar like the feel of the wheel in his hand taking corners at high speed. Strange like what was going on inside him – spinning out of control. It was a confusing mix of heroic aspirations and the brutal realities of his limitations. He dreamt of doorless concrete walls that shut him out.
A few weeks went by like this and things were getting thin. Amos was getting concerned about his quickly dwindling treeplanting stash of cash. He located the Provincial government’s Social Services office and sat patiently waiting most of a morning to talk to an intake officer. The middle aged woman had her hair pulled back so tight it looked like it was causing the pain in her face. She took in his story as if she’d heard it before. Amos was getting the impression that maybe he wasn’t the only lost soul on Vancouver’s doorstep.
Homeless, jobless, injured back, no place to go. He was looking for a welfare cheque to get himself a place to stay. She told him to get lost. Not a touch of motherhood in her. Wouldn’t even start a file on him – without an address he didn’t qualify as a resident.
Leaving with his tail between his legs, it was a blow to his balance. It felt like he’d lost his footing. Canada had rejected a favoured son. He’d put his pride away and held out his hand for some help. Getting it slapped down was harsh. He thought he had a place at the table. They pointed him to the dumpsters in the alley and told him to help himself.
Leaving that cold glass and steel office tower, he had a sense of why there were thousands of angry people protesting in the square outside the building. Something about cutbacks the new government had imposed. He listened to a speech or two. It wasn’t hard to connect with the anger. It felt like the vibe of a punk bar. Fun stuff - but his time for such theatrics was short. It would take him nowhere fast. He needed to find a footing before he could dance.
In that punch-drunk state, Amos almost called up Christine. He thought about trying to patch things together again – get back to familiar ground. Then he remembered that she’d be going back to college and getting into that circle of friends and he couldn’t stretch his imagination far enough to see himself in that circle.
Not that they’d be all that different from his circle of friends back in Scarbro. They were a little younger than him and still mostly passionate about enjoying life. They were living within the security of their family’s wealth. Homes with full fridges, cars to take them to the next party, cottage playgrounds to run away to when responsibilities got to feeling heavy. The difference between his suburban pals and these Vancouver rich kids was only that they had much more of the same. Their luxuries came with spending money and no need to work at crappy summer or afterschool jobs. Those rich kids would have to get jobs eventually. But they knew it was just a matter of stepping onto the next stone in their parent’s country club pond.
It wasn’t his family’s pond Amos was interested in. Working in a church seemed a worse fate than becoming a corporate hack. It was good work he knew, but he couldn’t get his head around being good himself. The effort involved in being a good person - that others would look up to – just didn’t feel like him.
So here he was facing the Pacific Ocean gathering courage to swim his way into the future. His guts told him he had to step out from under the shadow of the large trees in his family. The branches of his clergyman family – father, two uncles, older brother all hung over his head. The lack of daylight was stunting his growth. He’d grown tall fast reaching for those heights - for a place in the sun – achieving in the academic skills it takes to compete with those tall trees. But his trunk was still narrow.
Instead of growing slowly and steadily – developing the breadth and width of experience that would give him the weight he needed to pull off the art that was in him – he was top heavy. Full of knowledge and no wisdom - he was only just wise enough to know it. The fruit that was waiting to spring from within needed a good heavy trunk to deliver the juice up out of those deep roots. He was gonna step out into the sun. If it’s possible for trees to step. He was gonna feed on pure sunshine and brave the westerly winter storms unprotected and alone.
Lost my shape
trying to act casual
Can’t stop
I might end up in a hospital
Changing my shape
I feel like an accident
They’re back
to explain an experience
I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting
The feeling returns
whenever we close our eyes
lifting my head
looking around inside
The island of doubt
it’s like the taste of medicine
Working by hindsight
got the message from the oxygen
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting…
“Crosseyed and Painless” by Talking Heads
from the album “Stop Making Sense”
He was free. Or so he thought.
He was free. Free to do and be as he pleased. He’d dropped the heavy pack of expectations of family and friends on the shore at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Passing on a place in an Ontario law school, he’d cut the ties to a future designed to please and impress.
But Amos was finding all this freedom to be a troublesome friend. Free will is God’s greatest gift to us human kind. It’s also God’s greatest burden. As free and unentangled as Amos had worked to become, he still was haunted by devils and saints who kept after him with their bantering questions. Somewhere in his psyche was rooted the idea that his life was a gift. And from that root in his tree squabbling crows sat in the branches – trading questions and answers …
“how will you spend your days?”
“it’s a free gift – enjoy it to the fullest!”
“will you waste them?”
“it’s all yours – you can do whatever you want”
“who do you think you are?”
“you won’t know it ‘til you taste it – to experience is why we’re here”
“are you a leech or are you a lion?”
“don’t worry, be happy”
“unto whom much is given, much is also expected”
One great find in Amos’ life so far was that he’d discovered one place –maybe the only place – that he could truly feel like “me”. Deep in the midst of nature he could hear himself think. Wind, water, rocks, trees, sky - ocean islands, mountaintops, woods, rivers, lakeshores, meadows – took him away from the mirrors those saints and devils confused him with.
He saw mirrors in the eyes of everyone he met. Caring too much about what others thought of him weighed him down, tired him out, sapped the creative fruit juice right out of him.
So, scrambling up from behind his beached logside bed with the pre-dawn light only just crowning the mountains in the east, he threw his bed into the back of the Fleshmobile and headed for that light. He’d asked around a bit and was told about a mountain trail just up the Whistler highway a bit. Reportedly it offered a mountaintop lake and enough of a hike to keep him walking all day.
The parking lot was at the foot of a spectacular waterfall – a roadside picnic spot. The sun was shining. There was a cool breeze blowing. No humidity in the air. Amos couldn’t have ordered up a better day from a menu. Out of the car’s back seat, he pulled out his pack with a bit of food and water, sleeping bag and tarp, and found the trail entrance. A sign-board described what the hike was like but he walked right past it. That’s why he was here – to find out what the hike was like. He could read about it in the city.
The process of walking up a mountain for Amos was like taking a walk down into his soul. Climbing up from a boulder strewn meadow into a steep-banked forest, he was already thinking through the worries of today and getting into the memories of yesterday. People would pop up like visitors in a dream. People he hadn’t thought about in years. People he thought about all the time. In the conversations he’d have, hardly noticing the trail, new ideas would come up and old questions would get tossed around.
His attention would get momentarily pulled back by the stream he’s gotta cross or the view that greets him from a break in the trees at a turn in the path. Amos pauses and lets the beauty sink in a bit – the difference between waking-sight and inner-sight slowly melting away.
A good view always made Amos lonely. He knew it was natural to want to share something beautiful - but he also didn’t really mind being alone. Amos was a dreamer. Since childhood he’d loved to get lost in stories – especially stories of adventure. The hero must suffer many pitfalls and setbacks that test his resolve and push him to the edge of surrender. The quest makes it all worthwhile for he values it more than his life. A damsel, or a dame, is always involved, but the goal for the true hero is even greater than bagging a babe. The goal is peace and prosperity for all; the holy grail – a return to the Garden, Camelot, etcetera, etcetera.
To see himself as the hero of a story was to be awake for Amos. If he didn’t feel that he was a part of an emerging story, he’d get lost and confused. If a song couldn’t be written about his day – it was a day when he’d lost the trail. The greatest thing for Amos about driving a cab – he’d spent last winter driving in Toronto - was picking up the storylines of people’s lives. Some would spill them out to you in a blog of passion to tell you who they are. Others would make you guess –dropping hints with every word and laugh and sigh and expression captured in the rearview mirror.
Walking up that mountain, Amos was looking for a plot worthy of his own efforts. He was like an out-of-work actor killing time. And it was killing him to not know where or how he would play his part. He needed a part with drama and challenge and a good dose of the impossible all through it. The quest - that seemed to defeat so many valiant souls - was to live well.
To fail, was to fall into the fearful pit of becoming “normal”. Settling for a life of wife and job and kids and the accumulation of stuff that told you were a success seemed a ruse. It was the seduction of a witch with a head full of snakes that seemed so strangely desirous. But the hero knew that ruse would turn you to stone within a few short years. Amos was terrified of looking back from a future waking and discovering that he’d been seduced and his time stolen; quest sidetracked and forgotten. Only a mirror could defeat the witch – and he was afraid of mirrors.
Fear, as always, was the enemy that had him confused. Somehow, Amos instinctively knew, that walking up a mountain –just him and his fears – that he’d sweat out the answers he was looking for.
The sun had peaked and was already heading for Hawaii – giving up on him so soon. The path was getting steeper and the woods thinner. There were larger patches of sky appearing with each turn of the switchback trail. The turns were getting tighter and more often. Amos was feeling like the day would end with him no closer to thinking his problem through. How would he make his way? What profession? What path? How to begin? Back to Law School? On to Journalism? Just start writing his guts out? Butcher, baker, soldier, spy? It was weighing as heavily on his mind as the dinner in his pack. He was hungry and tired and the courage was draining out like a slow leak in his water bottle.
Each step was heavier and slower. His breathing was quicker and deeper and his heart was making itself known. Of course, these were all signs that the peak was just ahead. So he kept on. With each plodding step it felt like he was repeating the question over and over. “Which way to go? Which way to go? It got chopped into a mantra “Which – foot up - Way – foot down. Which – Way? Which – Way? …Which - … ”
Just before Amos reached the top - it was only a turn or two away, the hairs on his necked bristled . From behind, so close that he could hear the flap of wind beneath wings, an eagle swooped over.
“Whoa!” It stunned him – as if an angel – suddenly, surprisingly – had dropped in with an announcement. He was a rabbit instantly frozen as talons sunk and lifted. The power of something sacred pierced deep.
Stopped in his tracks. Breath lost with surprise. He waited for the other shoe to drop. But it was gone. No message. A mirage.
With a heavy breath in and a sigh out – he kept on. His step was just a bit lighter. There was an afterglow still. The air was thinner. The wind lifted.
Reaching a peak is always a holy moment. Going from the view of one side of a mountain – as spectacular as those views can be – to the view of all the valleys surrounding and the peaks beyond in every direction you turn – is to transform from a human’s to a bird’s-eye-view. Like an epiphany, suddenly you see what God sees – how God sees the world; the big-picture perspective, the long and the short of it. You see how small and limited your day to day view of the world can be – only when you get a glimpse of just how expansive the curve of this planet really is.
And on this peak, not only did Amos get a bird’s eye view – soaking it up like a sponge – but he also got to view a big beautifully awesome bird soaring in the winds that rose up off the cliffs. There it was – that eagle angel. His gaze followed it intently. His aching body left behind, Amos became only eyes and sighs.
It soared with wings outstretched. Without effort - held aloft by mountain winds. And then, with a simple dip of one wing, it turned and circled down in long wide arcs that pulled along his attention like a good story. Until, when it seemed like it was over, the bird found a current that lifted it up, up, up, up again.
Amos couldn’t look away. It was like the bird had snatched his soul in its talons and was stealing it away. It rose up higher than the setting sun. Up over the mountain peaks, he watched it climb - his head craning back and jaw slack with wonder. This time it dipped the other wingtip and, with a little more speed but still without effort, spun in an arc in the opposite direction. He followed its twisting path down, down, down, almost out of sight until – a new draft was discovered - and up lifted the great bird as if by a great hand - to begin the story all over again.
It repeated this game of wing and wind over and over and over. The sun dropped behind the horizon and Amos watched until the wings blurred past stars appearing. His soul was gone. Or, what he’d thought of as his soul. Amos realized now it was only an earthbound imposter. In it’s place there was a vast emptiness – deeper and wider than even his huge ego could contain.
Like a feather dropped at his feet, the angel had delivered its message. God had told Amos as clearly as if he’d read it in the Psalms. “You are as free as my eagle. Whatever direction you choose, I am already there; with you, before and behind you. Wherever you go, I will use whatever you offer.”
Amos had thought he was gaining freedom by ditching his past. Now, his future offered him a freedom that finally lifted the weight from his heart. The burden of choice that had made his own free will a troublesome friend was now a gift. The Maker had assured him that the choices he would make and the directions he would choose really mattered very little in God’s big picture. God would use every dip of the wing, every decision – good and bad - to create opportunities for life and love abundant. Instead of a troubling responsibility, his freedom was a creative opportunity to play. He’d found the path back to the Garden. Amos was on his way.
Before darkness set in, he followed the path down the other side of the peak. The trail led him around and up another rise and just beyond that was a clear grassy spot overlooking a small mountain lake. Bigger than a pond it rested in the midst of a ring of hills. It’s surface was calm. In the night’s dark it mirrored the galaxy’s shining stars. And those stars seemed closer than they ever had before.
Amos started a small campfire, cooked up some grub and boiled water for a brew of mint tea. He stretched out and gazed over the dim dark outline of the lake. With bites and sips, he chewed over the gifts of the day. Sleep began to sneak up on him. The dreamlike quality of that day was drifting towards the dreams that lived at the bottom of that mountain lake.
Whether he dreamed it or not, he wasn’t sure. A glow appeared just beyond the peaks across the lake. As he watched it, it slowly grew in size and intensity. Amos wasn’t sure at first, but the glow seemed to have a green hue to it. To his surprise and amazement, a giant full moon slowly rose from behind the hills to totally bathe Amos and the lake and the hills in its mirrored light. It was as green as grass. If the moon is made of cheese – it had gone moldy that night.
Mold, of course, is new life emerging from the decay of yesterday’s food. For Amos, it was a sign; the advent of an adventure. It peered down from the sky, and also looked up at him from the lake. It was like two great monster eyes were regarding him sideways – amused - wondering - what will this small hero do?
Standing at the crossroads,
trying to read the signs,
to tell me which way I should go to find the answer.
And all the time I know
- plant your love and let it grow
let it grow, let it grow
let it blossom, let it flow
in the sun, the rain, the snow
love is lovely, let it flow
Time is getting shorter
and there’s much for you to do
only ask and you will find what you are needing.
The rest is up to you
- plant your love and let it grow
let it grow, let it grow
let it blossom, let it flow
in the sun, the rain, the snow
love is lovely, so let it grow
Eric Clapton’s “Let it Grow”
Back in the city, the next day, Amos invested the last of his cash reserves in a course to become a Vancouver taxi driver. He bought a can of dark brown metallic house paint and a roller and just like the guy in “Black like Me” gave himself a new colour of flesh. As he slapped the paint on the Fleshmobile in the beach parking lot in the late afternoon sun. A car whizzed by with a kid hanging out the window who let out a WHOOP! It sounded like ridicule. It sounded like a war cry challenge. Amos dipped the roller into the paint and kept at his crazy transformation. There was no turning back now. He was going native.
Amos wanted his life to be a story worth telling. That was about all he knew. And he was terrified of wasting his life doing something meaningless. So terrified that, rather than fail his own proud self image by pursuing the wrong path, he’d become stalled here at a dead end. At the end of the last public beach. At the end of the road west. At the end of his childhood.
Not a bad place to end up. He was in an idyllic rain forest, ocean side oasis, living off the fat of the land in a bubble of time that, like his youth, couldn’t last. The fall weather was coming. Even in Vancouver’s temperate climate it meant rain, rain, cold and colder rain. Urban camping was fine for the summer but he’d have to find four walls and a roof in that concrete city sometime soon.
Amos managed to cadge a shower every few days at the Jericho Beach Youth Hostel. He figured the staff were onto him – they knew he wasn’t checked in. But since he fit in with the young crowd traveling cheap, they looked the other way as he strolled casually by with soap and towel in a bag.
Urban camping wasn’t alot different from being homeless. He had a home of course. Back in his parent’s basement in Ontario there was a place for him. But he was here to find a way forward. To go back would be a defeat. This was something he had to do on his own. What that “thing” was seemed just beyond his reach – out there in the ocean somewhere. He was hoping it might wash in with the next tide.
Amos walked the beach. He read and read and read. Jung and Castenada and Neitsche. He cooked meals over a Coleman stove on a picnic table in the public park where he parked his Dodge Dart. At the Canadian Tire, he bought fiberglass and body putty and spent hours sanding down and repairing the rust holes in the body of the Fleshmobile. It was far from a professional job. It was more of ritual than he knew. He was patching up the holes in his heart. The salt on the slippery road of adolescence had eaten away at his defences. It needed working over – a new face. Working with his hands got his mind settled and focused and he started developing a plan for the new man.
He jotted a few things into a notebook but would doze off before he got anywhere into it. He wandered the downtown streets enjoying feeling both stranger and tourist - feeling like, as a Canadian, this was his city. He belonged here. Both strange and familiar. Familiar like the feel of the wheel in his hand taking corners at high speed. Strange like what was going on inside him – spinning out of control. It was a confusing mix of heroic aspirations and the brutal realities of his limitations. He dreamt of doorless concrete walls that shut him out.
A few weeks went by like this and things were getting thin. Amos was getting concerned about his quickly dwindling treeplanting stash of cash. He located the Provincial government’s Social Services office and sat patiently waiting most of a morning to talk to an intake officer. The middle aged woman had her hair pulled back so tight it looked like it was causing the pain in her face. She took in his story as if she’d heard it before. Amos was getting the impression that maybe he wasn’t the only lost soul on Vancouver’s doorstep.
Homeless, jobless, injured back, no place to go. He was looking for a welfare cheque to get himself a place to stay. She told him to get lost. Not a touch of motherhood in her. Wouldn’t even start a file on him – without an address he didn’t qualify as a resident.
Leaving with his tail between his legs, it was a blow to his balance. It felt like he’d lost his footing. Canada had rejected a favoured son. He’d put his pride away and held out his hand for some help. Getting it slapped down was harsh. He thought he had a place at the table. They pointed him to the dumpsters in the alley and told him to help himself.
Leaving that cold glass and steel office tower, he had a sense of why there were thousands of angry people protesting in the square outside the building. Something about cutbacks the new government had imposed. He listened to a speech or two. It wasn’t hard to connect with the anger. It felt like the vibe of a punk bar. Fun stuff - but his time for such theatrics was short. It would take him nowhere fast. He needed to find a footing before he could dance.
In that punch-drunk state, Amos almost called up Christine. He thought about trying to patch things together again – get back to familiar ground. Then he remembered that she’d be going back to college and getting into that circle of friends and he couldn’t stretch his imagination far enough to see himself in that circle.
Not that they’d be all that different from his circle of friends back in Scarbro. They were a little younger than him and still mostly passionate about enjoying life. They were living within the security of their family’s wealth. Homes with full fridges, cars to take them to the next party, cottage playgrounds to run away to when responsibilities got to feeling heavy. The difference between his suburban pals and these Vancouver rich kids was only that they had much more of the same. Their luxuries came with spending money and no need to work at crappy summer or afterschool jobs. Those rich kids would have to get jobs eventually. But they knew it was just a matter of stepping onto the next stone in their parent’s country club pond.
It wasn’t his family’s pond Amos was interested in. Working in a church seemed a worse fate than becoming a corporate hack. It was good work he knew, but he couldn’t get his head around being good himself. The effort involved in being a good person - that others would look up to – just didn’t feel like him.
So here he was facing the Pacific Ocean gathering courage to swim his way into the future. His guts told him he had to step out from under the shadow of the large trees in his family. The branches of his clergyman family – father, two uncles, older brother all hung over his head. The lack of daylight was stunting his growth. He’d grown tall fast reaching for those heights - for a place in the sun – achieving in the academic skills it takes to compete with those tall trees. But his trunk was still narrow.
Instead of growing slowly and steadily – developing the breadth and width of experience that would give him the weight he needed to pull off the art that was in him – he was top heavy. Full of knowledge and no wisdom - he was only just wise enough to know it. The fruit that was waiting to spring from within needed a good heavy trunk to deliver the juice up out of those deep roots. He was gonna step out into the sun. If it’s possible for trees to step. He was gonna feed on pure sunshine and brave the westerly winter storms unprotected and alone.
Lost my shape
trying to act casual
Can’t stop
I might end up in a hospital
Changing my shape
I feel like an accident
They’re back
to explain an experience
I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting
The feeling returns
whenever we close our eyes
lifting my head
looking around inside
The island of doubt
it’s like the taste of medicine
Working by hindsight
got the message from the oxygen
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting…
“Crosseyed and Painless” by Talking Heads
from the album “Stop Making Sense”
He was free. Or so he thought.
He was free. Free to do and be as he pleased. He’d dropped the heavy pack of expectations of family and friends on the shore at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Passing on a place in an Ontario law school, he’d cut the ties to a future designed to please and impress.
But Amos was finding all this freedom to be a troublesome friend. Free will is God’s greatest gift to us human kind. It’s also God’s greatest burden. As free and unentangled as Amos had worked to become, he still was haunted by devils and saints who kept after him with their bantering questions. Somewhere in his psyche was rooted the idea that his life was a gift. And from that root in his tree squabbling crows sat in the branches – trading questions and answers …
“how will you spend your days?”
“it’s a free gift – enjoy it to the fullest!”
“will you waste them?”
“it’s all yours – you can do whatever you want”
“who do you think you are?”
“you won’t know it ‘til you taste it – to experience is why we’re here”
“are you a leech or are you a lion?”
“don’t worry, be happy”
“unto whom much is given, much is also expected”
One great find in Amos’ life so far was that he’d discovered one place –maybe the only place – that he could truly feel like “me”. Deep in the midst of nature he could hear himself think. Wind, water, rocks, trees, sky - ocean islands, mountaintops, woods, rivers, lakeshores, meadows – took him away from the mirrors those saints and devils confused him with.
He saw mirrors in the eyes of everyone he met. Caring too much about what others thought of him weighed him down, tired him out, sapped the creative fruit juice right out of him.
So, scrambling up from behind his beached logside bed with the pre-dawn light only just crowning the mountains in the east, he threw his bed into the back of the Fleshmobile and headed for that light. He’d asked around a bit and was told about a mountain trail just up the Whistler highway a bit. Reportedly it offered a mountaintop lake and enough of a hike to keep him walking all day.
The parking lot was at the foot of a spectacular waterfall – a roadside picnic spot. The sun was shining. There was a cool breeze blowing. No humidity in the air. Amos couldn’t have ordered up a better day from a menu. Out of the car’s back seat, he pulled out his pack with a bit of food and water, sleeping bag and tarp, and found the trail entrance. A sign-board described what the hike was like but he walked right past it. That’s why he was here – to find out what the hike was like. He could read about it in the city.
The process of walking up a mountain for Amos was like taking a walk down into his soul. Climbing up from a boulder strewn meadow into a steep-banked forest, he was already thinking through the worries of today and getting into the memories of yesterday. People would pop up like visitors in a dream. People he hadn’t thought about in years. People he thought about all the time. In the conversations he’d have, hardly noticing the trail, new ideas would come up and old questions would get tossed around.
His attention would get momentarily pulled back by the stream he’s gotta cross or the view that greets him from a break in the trees at a turn in the path. Amos pauses and lets the beauty sink in a bit – the difference between waking-sight and inner-sight slowly melting away.
A good view always made Amos lonely. He knew it was natural to want to share something beautiful - but he also didn’t really mind being alone. Amos was a dreamer. Since childhood he’d loved to get lost in stories – especially stories of adventure. The hero must suffer many pitfalls and setbacks that test his resolve and push him to the edge of surrender. The quest makes it all worthwhile for he values it more than his life. A damsel, or a dame, is always involved, but the goal for the true hero is even greater than bagging a babe. The goal is peace and prosperity for all; the holy grail – a return to the Garden, Camelot, etcetera, etcetera.
To see himself as the hero of a story was to be awake for Amos. If he didn’t feel that he was a part of an emerging story, he’d get lost and confused. If a song couldn’t be written about his day – it was a day when he’d lost the trail. The greatest thing for Amos about driving a cab – he’d spent last winter driving in Toronto - was picking up the storylines of people’s lives. Some would spill them out to you in a blog of passion to tell you who they are. Others would make you guess –dropping hints with every word and laugh and sigh and expression captured in the rearview mirror.
Walking up that mountain, Amos was looking for a plot worthy of his own efforts. He was like an out-of-work actor killing time. And it was killing him to not know where or how he would play his part. He needed a part with drama and challenge and a good dose of the impossible all through it. The quest - that seemed to defeat so many valiant souls - was to live well.
To fail, was to fall into the fearful pit of becoming “normal”. Settling for a life of wife and job and kids and the accumulation of stuff that told you were a success seemed a ruse. It was the seduction of a witch with a head full of snakes that seemed so strangely desirous. But the hero knew that ruse would turn you to stone within a few short years. Amos was terrified of looking back from a future waking and discovering that he’d been seduced and his time stolen; quest sidetracked and forgotten. Only a mirror could defeat the witch – and he was afraid of mirrors.
Fear, as always, was the enemy that had him confused. Somehow, Amos instinctively knew, that walking up a mountain –just him and his fears – that he’d sweat out the answers he was looking for.
The sun had peaked and was already heading for Hawaii – giving up on him so soon. The path was getting steeper and the woods thinner. There were larger patches of sky appearing with each turn of the switchback trail. The turns were getting tighter and more often. Amos was feeling like the day would end with him no closer to thinking his problem through. How would he make his way? What profession? What path? How to begin? Back to Law School? On to Journalism? Just start writing his guts out? Butcher, baker, soldier, spy? It was weighing as heavily on his mind as the dinner in his pack. He was hungry and tired and the courage was draining out like a slow leak in his water bottle.
Each step was heavier and slower. His breathing was quicker and deeper and his heart was making itself known. Of course, these were all signs that the peak was just ahead. So he kept on. With each plodding step it felt like he was repeating the question over and over. “Which way to go? Which way to go? It got chopped into a mantra “Which – foot up - Way – foot down. Which – Way? Which – Way? …Which - … ”
Just before Amos reached the top - it was only a turn or two away, the hairs on his necked bristled . From behind, so close that he could hear the flap of wind beneath wings, an eagle swooped over.
“Whoa!” It stunned him – as if an angel – suddenly, surprisingly – had dropped in with an announcement. He was a rabbit instantly frozen as talons sunk and lifted. The power of something sacred pierced deep.
Stopped in his tracks. Breath lost with surprise. He waited for the other shoe to drop. But it was gone. No message. A mirage.
With a heavy breath in and a sigh out – he kept on. His step was just a bit lighter. There was an afterglow still. The air was thinner. The wind lifted.
Reaching a peak is always a holy moment. Going from the view of one side of a mountain – as spectacular as those views can be – to the view of all the valleys surrounding and the peaks beyond in every direction you turn – is to transform from a human’s to a bird’s-eye-view. Like an epiphany, suddenly you see what God sees – how God sees the world; the big-picture perspective, the long and the short of it. You see how small and limited your day to day view of the world can be – only when you get a glimpse of just how expansive the curve of this planet really is.
And on this peak, not only did Amos get a bird’s eye view – soaking it up like a sponge – but he also got to view a big beautifully awesome bird soaring in the winds that rose up off the cliffs. There it was – that eagle angel. His gaze followed it intently. His aching body left behind, Amos became only eyes and sighs.
It soared with wings outstretched. Without effort - held aloft by mountain winds. And then, with a simple dip of one wing, it turned and circled down in long wide arcs that pulled along his attention like a good story. Until, when it seemed like it was over, the bird found a current that lifted it up, up, up, up again.
Amos couldn’t look away. It was like the bird had snatched his soul in its talons and was stealing it away. It rose up higher than the setting sun. Up over the mountain peaks, he watched it climb - his head craning back and jaw slack with wonder. This time it dipped the other wingtip and, with a little more speed but still without effort, spun in an arc in the opposite direction. He followed its twisting path down, down, down, almost out of sight until – a new draft was discovered - and up lifted the great bird as if by a great hand - to begin the story all over again.
It repeated this game of wing and wind over and over and over. The sun dropped behind the horizon and Amos watched until the wings blurred past stars appearing. His soul was gone. Or, what he’d thought of as his soul. Amos realized now it was only an earthbound imposter. In it’s place there was a vast emptiness – deeper and wider than even his huge ego could contain.
Like a feather dropped at his feet, the angel had delivered its message. God had told Amos as clearly as if he’d read it in the Psalms. “You are as free as my eagle. Whatever direction you choose, I am already there; with you, before and behind you. Wherever you go, I will use whatever you offer.”
Amos had thought he was gaining freedom by ditching his past. Now, his future offered him a freedom that finally lifted the weight from his heart. The burden of choice that had made his own free will a troublesome friend was now a gift. The Maker had assured him that the choices he would make and the directions he would choose really mattered very little in God’s big picture. God would use every dip of the wing, every decision – good and bad - to create opportunities for life and love abundant. Instead of a troubling responsibility, his freedom was a creative opportunity to play. He’d found the path back to the Garden. Amos was on his way.
Before darkness set in, he followed the path down the other side of the peak. The trail led him around and up another rise and just beyond that was a clear grassy spot overlooking a small mountain lake. Bigger than a pond it rested in the midst of a ring of hills. It’s surface was calm. In the night’s dark it mirrored the galaxy’s shining stars. And those stars seemed closer than they ever had before.
Amos started a small campfire, cooked up some grub and boiled water for a brew of mint tea. He stretched out and gazed over the dim dark outline of the lake. With bites and sips, he chewed over the gifts of the day. Sleep began to sneak up on him. The dreamlike quality of that day was drifting towards the dreams that lived at the bottom of that mountain lake.
Whether he dreamed it or not, he wasn’t sure. A glow appeared just beyond the peaks across the lake. As he watched it, it slowly grew in size and intensity. Amos wasn’t sure at first, but the glow seemed to have a green hue to it. To his surprise and amazement, a giant full moon slowly rose from behind the hills to totally bathe Amos and the lake and the hills in its mirrored light. It was as green as grass. If the moon is made of cheese – it had gone moldy that night.
Mold, of course, is new life emerging from the decay of yesterday’s food. For Amos, it was a sign; the advent of an adventure. It peered down from the sky, and also looked up at him from the lake. It was like two great monster eyes were regarding him sideways – amused - wondering - what will this small hero do?
Standing at the crossroads,
trying to read the signs,
to tell me which way I should go to find the answer.
And all the time I know
- plant your love and let it grow
let it grow, let it grow
let it blossom, let it flow
in the sun, the rain, the snow
love is lovely, let it flow
Time is getting shorter
and there’s much for you to do
only ask and you will find what you are needing.
The rest is up to you
- plant your love and let it grow
let it grow, let it grow
let it blossom, let it flow
in the sun, the rain, the snow
love is lovely, so let it grow
Eric Clapton’s “Let it Grow”
Back in the city, the next day, Amos invested the last of his cash reserves in a course to become a Vancouver taxi driver. He bought a can of dark brown metallic house paint and a roller and just like the guy in “Black like Me” gave himself a new colour of flesh. As he slapped the paint on the Fleshmobile in the beach parking lot in the late afternoon sun. A car whizzed by with a kid hanging out the window who let out a WHOOP! It sounded like ridicule. It sounded like a war cry challenge. Amos dipped the roller into the paint and kept at his crazy transformation. There was no turning back now. He was going native.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
down from a Rocky Mountain high
down from a Rocky Mountain high
They took the long way down to Vancouver traveling off the Trans Canada thoroughfare, taking a minor two lane route across country to Whistler and Christine’s family condo first. The rugged healthy fun of the Treeplanting camp followed them and they kept it going through the first weeks of sunny July days. But Chuck and Hannah had jobs lined up in Ontario to take them through the rest of the summer. They’d be gone as soon as they got to Vancouver. Vancouver posed a problem for Amos. It was the end of the road. It meant a decision.
He’d been accepted at the University of Ottawa Law School. The plan was to make a bundle treeplanting and return for four years of Law. He didn’t really want to be a lawyer but he figured he could be and then he could do something worthwhile with a law degree. “Unto whom much is given, much is also expected.” was his Dad’s mantra. Right along with “a Brown boy’s never been in jail.”
Law school was the kind of thing expected of an intelligent young man coming out of the suburbs. On the other hand, he knew that he’d barely completed three years of undergraduate studies. He hadn’t found anything to sink his teeth into in the academic world. He’d gotten by with courses in English Lit and Philosophy where he could do little research and simply apply his own critiques and analysis. With his natural intelligence and overactive imagination he didn’t need to bother reading and quoting secondary sources. His professors seemed satisfied enough to read a student’s own ideas instead of reading quotes from the critics they’d assigned. He could apply himself instead to his main preoccupation of tasting life. The idea of spending four years applying himself to the absorption and regurgitation of law texts was daunting.
It seemed like now was the time to take the leap and start writing. For as long as he could remember he’d thought of himself as a writer. He’d stopped talking about it years ago. Being a lawyer was a much easier future to talk to people about. Everyone knew what to expect. Telling people he wanted to be an author was as much as saying “I’m different from anyone I know or we know. I think I can do something no one we know is good enough to do. I think my thoughts and words are worth more than what any of you might have to say.”
If he was ever going to write, he was going to have to get beyond those haunting ideas. He instinctively knew that he would have to cut loose and recreate himself – he had no idea how to do that – but now was the time to try. Here at the other end of the country, over the mountains at the end of the road – make it happen now or give up on that dream forever and pursue the well-beaten path of a law degree.
Christine felt Amos growing quieter and more distant by the day. The fun they’d found up in the mountains was magical. But when she tried to take her mountain man home with her, the spell started wearing off. As she introduced him to her family and friends, she started looking at him through their eyes. It was as if the layers of camp dirt were slowly washing off with each successive day.
Amos was losing his sense of humour. That decision was pinching at him the way his spine pinched that nerve in his back at every move. Those little doses of pain wore at him. Amos found that he had to work at being “fun to be with” and that was making his jokes wooden and his laughter hollow. They explored the town of Whistler and ran into Christine’s brother at the pub one night.
He was an impressive and likeable guy. Good looking, athletic and wealthy. Cam was training for Coast Guard rescue work. Amos was impressed. It felt like he was in the presence of Royalty; a young Duke, a playboy who was choosing to serve an honourable purpose. He was in a league beyond Amos’ reach.
He wanted to get along and be sociable; be happy with Christine, enjoy the carefree days of summer. But more and more he was feeling a strong physical rejection for all fashion of things. He was becoming super-sensitive to anything that seemed superficial, commercial, phony. In the mountains everything was so completely real. As they made their way down to the city, there was a new target for his phony-meter everywhere he turned.
They explored Vancouver with Christine as tour guide. By far the most impressive sight was where she called home. She took them deep into the West Vancouver rainforest. The road to her parent’s place wound its way along the shoreline from the north end of the Lion’s Gate bridge towards Horseshoe Bay. It passed one impressive home after another. These weren’t the big new money mansions you’d find up the slope on the other side of the freeway. These homes were uniquely crafted into the shore’s nooks and crannies and forest. Old money had carved out a piece of priceless shoreline where architects designed not huge but large impressive West Coast homes. Passers by only caught glimpses of each estate tucked behind rocky outcrops or dense cedar forest.
Their destination was down a lane and behind a tall hedge. The first impression was modest and inviting. It was no mansion. But it was a very, very cool place. The young couple, Christine’s parents, that had built this home to raise their family in had impeccable taste. They had nothing to prove with money they’d always know and always would know. It was fifties Hollywood chic; cocktails, art, and elites. A Cary Grant Vivian Leigh generation had lived out a family life here.
Christine’s friends were a generation with nothing to build. It was all provided for. Their creativity seemed to be all about getting the most pleasure out of what they had. They all had well refined social skills and the clothes to match. Christine had taken him shopping and he dutifully bought a polo shirt and shorts to match. He wouldn’t put out the eighty bucks for the Docksider shoes though and that was the give away. Her friends took one look at his old runners and sniffed out his contempt for the fashions that gave them their “How do you know if you’re in, if you don’t know who’s out?” definition.
Amos had traveled in different cultures. He’d ventured boldly into workplaces where his school smarts set him apart. He’d traveled in third world countries where he crossed language barriers with courage. In those places he’d gotten by with humility and humour. Here though he found his humility undervalued. He wasn’t just a fish trying to swim with sharks. He was a fish out of water.
He was trying, putting on a fair show of it, but you could see that he was trying – trying to hide how he was flopping around. Amos tried to find places in the conversation to add in his stories of labouring in the mines or traveling in the third world. They listened politely privately confirming their assessments that this guy wasn’t one of them. He might have been able to pull off an aloof, too cool for school, style if he’d had any cash to back it up. But he was broke. His rusty old flesh-toned Dodge Dart stuck out like a sore thumb among the sports cars and convertibles in Christine’s friends’ driveways. He was like a foreign exchange student. There, not because he fit in, but because he was so different.
Their talk was all about windsurfing, mountain biking and the last party. It seemed none of them had jobs to speak of. Christine’s treeplanting experience was an exotic anomaly – like this specimen she’s brought home with her. That was when he first heard the old joke “Whoever dies with the most toys – wins.” He tried to swallow his distaste but it only made him sick and sallow.
What was handicapping Amos was that he wasn’t just playing along. His best creative energy was being spent inside his own head. He was trying to figure out what was true and real inside himself. He wasn’t really much interested in trying to fit in with this West Van crowd. But what was worthy of his efforts? What part of him was real and what had been contrived and fashioned as a means of pleasing family, friends, and the ghosts of social so-called “norms”?
He found that he wasn’t willing to dance to those tunes any more. He was searching for a ground that was authentic for him – but he wasn’t sure of just who he was. He kept catching himself simply reacting to the same old “strings being pulled”; being the good boy his parents wanted or being the bad boy his friends were comfortable with. When he was by himself he was an artist - but had no idea how to play that out in the world outside his own head.
With an ever-diminishing ground to stand on, he withdrew. To say he was self-conscious would be an understatement. More like self-absorbed and scared silly. It felt like an adolescent awkwardness on steroids. Because he refused to be the puppet of his former self, he had no arsenal of social skills to draw from. He’d hung up his guns. How does a gunslinger get along without guns? He was defenseless and alone.
Christine’s dad, the Financier, tried to engage him during a short sail on his thirty-two foot boat up the sunshine coast to their summer home. They couldn’t seem to find any ground they could stand on together. Luckily Chuck was there to carry the conversation so it didn’t get totally awkward. Chuck asked him questions about the boat and sailing the coast. It was simple polite conversation that never occurred to Amos.
Her mom asked Amos to help with a salad. As he sliced carrots she got his family background out of him. No pedigree there. He was just a few generations off the farm. Parents were professionals – clergyman and a schoolteacher. Respectable sure but neck deep in middle-class aspirations. And, since she just happened to be a psychoanalyst, she gave her daughter her assessment.
“You’ve got a complicated one on your hands dear. As a middle child he’s got something to prove. He’s trying to transition from boy to man but he’s got no idea where he’s heading. He wants to cut a different path from the way his family’s gone but he’s all tied up in a knot of what he thinks God wants of him with no taste for it. A bad case of Protestant work ethic, mixed in with a powerful dose of suppressed creative anger, bottled up under a heavy lid of self-righteous guilt.”
“Could you help him Mother?”
“He could really use a year of good therapy but my pro bono slot’s already filled. No, I can’t help him but I can help you. Cut him loose dear. Right now, he’s like a stray cat that’s afraid of the indoors.”
They drove Chuck and Hannah to the airport and with those goodbyes went the last threads of their treeplanting adventure. That journey was over. He told Chuck that maybe he’d see him in September. Then again, he explained, I might just ski the Rockies this winter. He’d never admitted to Chuck his dream about writing. But he had talked over his reservations about Law School. He’d worked up a good cover story. “I’ve always dreamed of being a ski bum in the Rockies. If I don’t do it now – I never will.” That story – was true – and was a lot more socially acceptable a story for Chuck to take home to Scarbro. He couldn’t have Chuck explaining to people that “Amos has decided to be an artist.” That was just way too gay, too presumptuous, too out there.
Christine and Amos drove back into the city. They’d left Christine’s car parked at the beach along the city’s shoreline. It was neutral territory. They were on the Stanley Park side of Lion’s gate bridge. At the centre of the bay between West Van on the north Shore and Kitsilano on the south shore. They walked the beach mostly in silence. They’d talked about what’s next over and over and they both knew that neither of them really fit into each other’s next chapters. Still, it was hard to say so. Amos was entering deep waters. It was hard for him to let go of what felt like his last lifeline to shore. Christine knew as well as he did that she couldn’t rescue him and anyways he didn’t want to be pulled in to the shore where she stood.
They sat on one of the beached logs that scattered the shoreline –put there like benches by ocean storms decades ago - and watched the sun go down. Christine left for her West Van home and Amos drove out to the opposite side of the bay. Out to the edge of the Kitsilano suburb where cliffs rise up from Jericho beach to Shaunhessy Heights and the University of BC.
Without a job, he didn’t want to spend the last of his dwindling tree-planting stash on rent, so he’d decided to live on the beach, do some urban camping out of the trunk of the Dodge Dart. He walked out to the most remote part of the beach where he figured he wouldn’t be disturbed. From the giant beached log, where he made his bed with a tarp, some rocks, and rope, he could look across the harbour and roughly pick out, he guessed, the beach where days before he and Christine had walked the family’s dog. Looking east from where he sat, the city of Vancouver glittered, reflecting the setting sun’s last rays and replacing them with its own bright lights. Under the stars, with the surf rolling, rolling, rolling he closed his eyes on who he’d been. Tomorrow he’d start writing the first chapter.
They took the long way down to Vancouver traveling off the Trans Canada thoroughfare, taking a minor two lane route across country to Whistler and Christine’s family condo first. The rugged healthy fun of the Treeplanting camp followed them and they kept it going through the first weeks of sunny July days. But Chuck and Hannah had jobs lined up in Ontario to take them through the rest of the summer. They’d be gone as soon as they got to Vancouver. Vancouver posed a problem for Amos. It was the end of the road. It meant a decision.
He’d been accepted at the University of Ottawa Law School. The plan was to make a bundle treeplanting and return for four years of Law. He didn’t really want to be a lawyer but he figured he could be and then he could do something worthwhile with a law degree. “Unto whom much is given, much is also expected.” was his Dad’s mantra. Right along with “a Brown boy’s never been in jail.”
Law school was the kind of thing expected of an intelligent young man coming out of the suburbs. On the other hand, he knew that he’d barely completed three years of undergraduate studies. He hadn’t found anything to sink his teeth into in the academic world. He’d gotten by with courses in English Lit and Philosophy where he could do little research and simply apply his own critiques and analysis. With his natural intelligence and overactive imagination he didn’t need to bother reading and quoting secondary sources. His professors seemed satisfied enough to read a student’s own ideas instead of reading quotes from the critics they’d assigned. He could apply himself instead to his main preoccupation of tasting life. The idea of spending four years applying himself to the absorption and regurgitation of law texts was daunting.
It seemed like now was the time to take the leap and start writing. For as long as he could remember he’d thought of himself as a writer. He’d stopped talking about it years ago. Being a lawyer was a much easier future to talk to people about. Everyone knew what to expect. Telling people he wanted to be an author was as much as saying “I’m different from anyone I know or we know. I think I can do something no one we know is good enough to do. I think my thoughts and words are worth more than what any of you might have to say.”
If he was ever going to write, he was going to have to get beyond those haunting ideas. He instinctively knew that he would have to cut loose and recreate himself – he had no idea how to do that – but now was the time to try. Here at the other end of the country, over the mountains at the end of the road – make it happen now or give up on that dream forever and pursue the well-beaten path of a law degree.
Christine felt Amos growing quieter and more distant by the day. The fun they’d found up in the mountains was magical. But when she tried to take her mountain man home with her, the spell started wearing off. As she introduced him to her family and friends, she started looking at him through their eyes. It was as if the layers of camp dirt were slowly washing off with each successive day.
Amos was losing his sense of humour. That decision was pinching at him the way his spine pinched that nerve in his back at every move. Those little doses of pain wore at him. Amos found that he had to work at being “fun to be with” and that was making his jokes wooden and his laughter hollow. They explored the town of Whistler and ran into Christine’s brother at the pub one night.
He was an impressive and likeable guy. Good looking, athletic and wealthy. Cam was training for Coast Guard rescue work. Amos was impressed. It felt like he was in the presence of Royalty; a young Duke, a playboy who was choosing to serve an honourable purpose. He was in a league beyond Amos’ reach.
He wanted to get along and be sociable; be happy with Christine, enjoy the carefree days of summer. But more and more he was feeling a strong physical rejection for all fashion of things. He was becoming super-sensitive to anything that seemed superficial, commercial, phony. In the mountains everything was so completely real. As they made their way down to the city, there was a new target for his phony-meter everywhere he turned.
They explored Vancouver with Christine as tour guide. By far the most impressive sight was where she called home. She took them deep into the West Vancouver rainforest. The road to her parent’s place wound its way along the shoreline from the north end of the Lion’s Gate bridge towards Horseshoe Bay. It passed one impressive home after another. These weren’t the big new money mansions you’d find up the slope on the other side of the freeway. These homes were uniquely crafted into the shore’s nooks and crannies and forest. Old money had carved out a piece of priceless shoreline where architects designed not huge but large impressive West Coast homes. Passers by only caught glimpses of each estate tucked behind rocky outcrops or dense cedar forest.
Their destination was down a lane and behind a tall hedge. The first impression was modest and inviting. It was no mansion. But it was a very, very cool place. The young couple, Christine’s parents, that had built this home to raise their family in had impeccable taste. They had nothing to prove with money they’d always know and always would know. It was fifties Hollywood chic; cocktails, art, and elites. A Cary Grant Vivian Leigh generation had lived out a family life here.
Christine’s friends were a generation with nothing to build. It was all provided for. Their creativity seemed to be all about getting the most pleasure out of what they had. They all had well refined social skills and the clothes to match. Christine had taken him shopping and he dutifully bought a polo shirt and shorts to match. He wouldn’t put out the eighty bucks for the Docksider shoes though and that was the give away. Her friends took one look at his old runners and sniffed out his contempt for the fashions that gave them their “How do you know if you’re in, if you don’t know who’s out?” definition.
Amos had traveled in different cultures. He’d ventured boldly into workplaces where his school smarts set him apart. He’d traveled in third world countries where he crossed language barriers with courage. In those places he’d gotten by with humility and humour. Here though he found his humility undervalued. He wasn’t just a fish trying to swim with sharks. He was a fish out of water.
He was trying, putting on a fair show of it, but you could see that he was trying – trying to hide how he was flopping around. Amos tried to find places in the conversation to add in his stories of labouring in the mines or traveling in the third world. They listened politely privately confirming their assessments that this guy wasn’t one of them. He might have been able to pull off an aloof, too cool for school, style if he’d had any cash to back it up. But he was broke. His rusty old flesh-toned Dodge Dart stuck out like a sore thumb among the sports cars and convertibles in Christine’s friends’ driveways. He was like a foreign exchange student. There, not because he fit in, but because he was so different.
Their talk was all about windsurfing, mountain biking and the last party. It seemed none of them had jobs to speak of. Christine’s treeplanting experience was an exotic anomaly – like this specimen she’s brought home with her. That was when he first heard the old joke “Whoever dies with the most toys – wins.” He tried to swallow his distaste but it only made him sick and sallow.
What was handicapping Amos was that he wasn’t just playing along. His best creative energy was being spent inside his own head. He was trying to figure out what was true and real inside himself. He wasn’t really much interested in trying to fit in with this West Van crowd. But what was worthy of his efforts? What part of him was real and what had been contrived and fashioned as a means of pleasing family, friends, and the ghosts of social so-called “norms”?
He found that he wasn’t willing to dance to those tunes any more. He was searching for a ground that was authentic for him – but he wasn’t sure of just who he was. He kept catching himself simply reacting to the same old “strings being pulled”; being the good boy his parents wanted or being the bad boy his friends were comfortable with. When he was by himself he was an artist - but had no idea how to play that out in the world outside his own head.
With an ever-diminishing ground to stand on, he withdrew. To say he was self-conscious would be an understatement. More like self-absorbed and scared silly. It felt like an adolescent awkwardness on steroids. Because he refused to be the puppet of his former self, he had no arsenal of social skills to draw from. He’d hung up his guns. How does a gunslinger get along without guns? He was defenseless and alone.
Christine’s dad, the Financier, tried to engage him during a short sail on his thirty-two foot boat up the sunshine coast to their summer home. They couldn’t seem to find any ground they could stand on together. Luckily Chuck was there to carry the conversation so it didn’t get totally awkward. Chuck asked him questions about the boat and sailing the coast. It was simple polite conversation that never occurred to Amos.
Her mom asked Amos to help with a salad. As he sliced carrots she got his family background out of him. No pedigree there. He was just a few generations off the farm. Parents were professionals – clergyman and a schoolteacher. Respectable sure but neck deep in middle-class aspirations. And, since she just happened to be a psychoanalyst, she gave her daughter her assessment.
“You’ve got a complicated one on your hands dear. As a middle child he’s got something to prove. He’s trying to transition from boy to man but he’s got no idea where he’s heading. He wants to cut a different path from the way his family’s gone but he’s all tied up in a knot of what he thinks God wants of him with no taste for it. A bad case of Protestant work ethic, mixed in with a powerful dose of suppressed creative anger, bottled up under a heavy lid of self-righteous guilt.”
“Could you help him Mother?”
“He could really use a year of good therapy but my pro bono slot’s already filled. No, I can’t help him but I can help you. Cut him loose dear. Right now, he’s like a stray cat that’s afraid of the indoors.”
They drove Chuck and Hannah to the airport and with those goodbyes went the last threads of their treeplanting adventure. That journey was over. He told Chuck that maybe he’d see him in September. Then again, he explained, I might just ski the Rockies this winter. He’d never admitted to Chuck his dream about writing. But he had talked over his reservations about Law School. He’d worked up a good cover story. “I’ve always dreamed of being a ski bum in the Rockies. If I don’t do it now – I never will.” That story – was true – and was a lot more socially acceptable a story for Chuck to take home to Scarbro. He couldn’t have Chuck explaining to people that “Amos has decided to be an artist.” That was just way too gay, too presumptuous, too out there.
Christine and Amos drove back into the city. They’d left Christine’s car parked at the beach along the city’s shoreline. It was neutral territory. They were on the Stanley Park side of Lion’s gate bridge. At the centre of the bay between West Van on the north Shore and Kitsilano on the south shore. They walked the beach mostly in silence. They’d talked about what’s next over and over and they both knew that neither of them really fit into each other’s next chapters. Still, it was hard to say so. Amos was entering deep waters. It was hard for him to let go of what felt like his last lifeline to shore. Christine knew as well as he did that she couldn’t rescue him and anyways he didn’t want to be pulled in to the shore where she stood.
They sat on one of the beached logs that scattered the shoreline –put there like benches by ocean storms decades ago - and watched the sun go down. Christine left for her West Van home and Amos drove out to the opposite side of the bay. Out to the edge of the Kitsilano suburb where cliffs rise up from Jericho beach to Shaunhessy Heights and the University of BC.
Without a job, he didn’t want to spend the last of his dwindling tree-planting stash on rent, so he’d decided to live on the beach, do some urban camping out of the trunk of the Dodge Dart. He walked out to the most remote part of the beach where he figured he wouldn’t be disturbed. From the giant beached log, where he made his bed with a tarp, some rocks, and rope, he could look across the harbour and roughly pick out, he guessed, the beach where days before he and Christine had walked the family’s dog. Looking east from where he sat, the city of Vancouver glittered, reflecting the setting sun’s last rays and replacing them with its own bright lights. Under the stars, with the surf rolling, rolling, rolling he closed his eyes on who he’d been. Tomorrow he’d start writing the first chapter.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
If you're going thru hell...
His August of house-sitting for a girlfriend’s rich, West Vancouver, parents had dwindled with that relationship. Christine was starting to feel sorry for him and that didn’t help the old self esteem much. He found it harder and harder to be “fun to be with”. Although, Amos mused, he never did perform well under pressure.
The last of his Worker’s Compensation claims paid for one last Physio treatment. He’d twisted his back pretty good throwing boxes of tree seedlings around on the tree-planting crew that spring. Painkillers had gotten him through the rest of the ten week planting season. In the mountains, living in tents, a crazy instant community had formed among the treeplanters. They shared the same food, weather, and work. The different social scenes they came from didn’t seem to matter up there.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Turns out the crew played just as hard as it worked. On the way to their third block, they came down out of the mountains like bees and swarmed the only pub in a little valley town. Avola had a gas station and a post office and not much else. Except – there was a great little picturesque log pub. Not fancy but far from a dive. It had a warm and inviting character, a good rockin sound track, and was almost empty on a Tuesday evening.
The crew knew each other pretty well by this time and were really letting loose and crazy. Ten days of pushing themselves to their physical limits required a response of pushing themselves to their alcoholic limits. The twenty of them managed to clean out the bar’s fridges and kegs, and were working on the booze when the owner showed up and cut them all off. It was in the fun and hilarity of that night that Christine and Amos had fallen together as a couple.
The thin mountain air; the stunning views from their hillside workplaces; the tough conditions and hard work, made Amos feel very alive, and very happy. He was not a great planter. The ground was a long way down and he lacked an athlete’s trained inner push. His natural inclination was to find a way around the pain and meet up with those who had a talent for suffering on the other side.
No, Amos had more of a talent for fun. He could make people laugh – not as a joke-teller or clown, but with timely little bits of wit thrown into a day that made things roll along; poking the fire to make it burn a little brighter. He wouldn’t often take the lead, but he would go along with anything, or anyone, for a ride and a laugh.
He was especially attracted to anyone who would laugh at his sense of fun and Christine’s laugh was strong and light. It gushed out of her clear and tumbling like a mountain stream. She found Amos fun to be with and he was more fun when she was with him.
It was on the first day of the third block that Amos wrenched his back. He was helping Bill throw boxes of seedlings into the back of the pick-up when he felt that familiar sharp twinge about a handspan above his tailbone. Amos had injured himself this way before. Two summers ago he’d done a number on his back swinging bags of concrete for a pool company. He limped through the rest of the day. Every bend to plant a tree was accentuated with a searing stab of pain in his left lower back.
The next day he went to town and picked up pain-killers and muscle-relaxants at the clinic. When, at the end of that plant, the pills had failed to free him from the pain, he and Bill agreed on a plan to get him through the rest of the short tree-planting season.
The crew’s productivity was good but the government inspector was finding a high percentage of rejects – seedlings with exposed roots, roots not planted straight down deep enough but with a bend, trees planted too close together. Bill would keep Amos on the crew as a tree-checker doing quality control for fifty bucks a day. Amos realized that he wasn’t going to make the bundle of cash for his first year of law school in Ottawa like he’d planned, but, what else was he going to do? He was having the time of his life with this mountain family – take away the sweat and toil and it would be like getting paid to camp and hike in the mountains.
Amos soon found that he enjoyed telling others what to do and how to do it. He did his best to not be an asshole - use his humour and diplomatic easy ways to encourage them along. He’d approach the planters with a big smile if it was a beautiful morning - or a sympathetic grunt and complaint if it was raining. His approach was to make a common enemy of the Ministry of Natural Resources Checker. He’d point out their mistakes through her eyes.
Verna was a local girl; a mountain woman; earth mother. Even though he demonized her a bit to the crew, he actually felt honoured to be following around the mountainside quizzing her about life in the Rockies. She was so healthy and so mature. Verna wasn’t a decade older than Amos but she seemed to belong in the natural beauty that still felt like living in a postcard to him. She was a mountain lioness to his city alleycat.
To the crew, Amos was so obviously afraid of coming across like a picky, power-tripping, jerk that they ended up wanting to help him out. They slowed, sacrificing speed (money) to plant more carefully. Poorly planted trees would look bad on him –not to mention the fines their company would get hit with from the Ministry - and he sought out their help in a needy, little brother, kind of way. It was surprising and a little disarming. For such a big, strong, smart and happy guy, Amos’ watery eyes were always searching you out for approval.
One night it happened that the crew’s women found themselves alone in the mess tent and conversation turned to Amos. Christine wasn’t there so they started in about the couple – how good they seemed together but - Amos’ bad boy eastside rough patches were a strange mix for a rich girl West Van debutante like Christine. Darlene laughed “Oh, that Amos can adapt and swim in most waters. He just might be able to pull it off.”
Barb nodded, she wondered out loud if the others had noticed how much of a chameleon Amos was?
“What do you mean?” they asked digging for the goods, leaning in, curiosity peaked.
“Well, I first noticed it when he started talking to Claude with a French accent.” Barb smiled as eyes widened and heads slowly started nodding. “Then I started watching him a little closer.” Barb was a doing her Doctoral work in Languages and Semiotics. “He can change his diction, his vocabulary, even adjust his dialect to fit yours.”
“Wow, what a phony!” scoffed Olga.
“It’s actually a highly developed social talent.” explained Barb “he uses it to put you at ease and make you feel comfortable. He makes you feel at home - like you’re talking to a family member. I don’t think he even realizes that he’s doing it. It’s kind of endearing.”
There was a moment of thoughtful silence in the circle.
“Of course,” Barb continued, “he could also use it to con you and suck you in.” The hairs on the women’s necks raised in unison as spines stiffened and they pulled back from the huddle.
“Will he use his powers for good or for evil?” Barb teased them and with a “hmmphh” or two the subject shifted and they carried on dissecting the crew’s interplay, intercourses, and social evolutions. It was a dirty job – but – as Bill liked to say - someone had to do it.
The season was coming to an end with the arrival of July’s blistering heat. There were no more misty mornings where the crew woke up and ate their breakfast in the midst of a soggy mountain hugging cloud. The curtain of mist was pulled back and the sun was with them from the time they first threw back their tent flaps to the time the crawled back in dirty and weary and a little richer. This was their last block. And it turned out to be the worst. Instead of the jungle-gym tangle of left behind scrub trees to climb over and through, this block had been burned clear.
A controlled Ministry burn had left a blanket of black ash an inch thick over the whole clear cut. By midday, the sun would take the surface temperature up over 100 degrees. Even in early morning, the ground was throwing off a low heat.
This meant that the ash would fry the tree seedlings before they’d get a chance to start growing. So, the planters would have to scrape away a 12 inch circle clear of the ash. They’d get an extra 2 cents per tree for their trouble but it slowed their progress considerably. The heat of the sun would suck the strength and sweat out of them as if with a straw. It seemed an especially cruel way to end a physically grueling season.
Amos was truly happy that he wasn’t planting. Even though he was gonna end the season with only a third of what the others had made, he’d loved the time spent with this mountain ragtag family. His back still stung with every step but the pain seemed worth the pleasure. As sorry as he was that their mountaintop high was coming to an end, he was also really looking forward to traveling down to the coast with Christine and Chuck and Hannah. Christine had invited them to stay at her parent’s condo at Whistler. She said they could probably also visit the summer cottage on the Sunshine Coast if it wasn’t being used by her parent’s friends already.
Bill had him carrying extra water from the camp up to the crews. On his third run of the morning, Bill pointed him up over a ridge towards the east side of the block where he’d find Barb’s team planting. He put the jugs into empty tree bags, slung them over his shoulders wincing with the extra weight, and started his ascent.
At least there were no fallen trees to climb over with this burned block. The ash crunched under his boots like gravel and sent up little puffs of black dust with every step. The sun was heavy on his back and neck like a hot hand pressing down. The tree bags bounced and tugged with every step. He put his chin down and leaned into his trudging Sisyphus task.
He broached the ridge and discovered a further obstacle. A thicket of black burnt trees lay in a little gulch between him and slope ahead. They’d been scorched of their foliage but not incinerated. The fire must have swept up across the gulch, leaping it for better fuel on the other side. He could make out the crew up, almost at the top of the clear cut, another half mile up. The thicket ran all across the mountain’s ridge maybe thirty, forty yards deep. He could try to walk around it – although it stretched right into the forest with no end in sight. Or, he could push his way through. Extend his suffering in long walk around, or intensify it with a quick push through.
He pushed forward. There was no obvious path through. The short, thick, poles stood dense together like burnt stakes in the ground. Their branches were brittle and broke off easily as Amos forced his way. There was just enough room to get your body past each pair of stakes, then you’d have to sidestep and push ahead through the next space. No straight rows like the tree planters left behind – this was Nature’s chaotic maze.
Sadistic Scientists couldn’t have come up with a more cruel psychological game to put rats through. Amos pushed his way forward into the test. The charred branch stubs scratched at his exposed arms and face. With every step they’d catch at his sweat drenched T-shirt and pants causing him to have to stop and unhook himself from their clutches. The tree bags of water would also get caught on a branch behind him and he’d have to spin around and tug them free. About halfway through the thicket, Amos began to stop stopping.
A fury had got hold of him. Like a bear swarmed with bees, he began thrashing at his attackers, throwing his weight forward against the branches, no longer caring about the tears at his clothes and flesh. The heat had toasted the patience right out of him. He was in a senseless place, he’d passed beyond reason and care and an animal fury had taken his mind and was driving his body against care of self or soul. Control was somewhere ahead of him and instinct took from him the option of stopping. To stop would be to resign himself to hell’s eternity there. “If you’re going through hell – keep going” was the voice in him – human or animal or holy – he couldn’t tell. Nor could he stop to wonder what he’d done to deserve this. His purpose had never been so focused.
“If there is a hell” he muttered through clenched growling teeth “I must be in it now.” By uttering this complaint, he now felt the attention of the spirit world upon him. He’d named it and by the power of word, had called forth the presence – at least in the presence of his own mind - the angels and demons that were taking bets on him. Did he have the guts to keep it together? Or, would he lose it? Would his soul let slip his mind’s grip? Let his sense evaporate - sucked like so many drops of sweat up into the sun’s thirsty atmosphere – dropped into dust and ash at his feet?
The voices asking these questions, stopped him in his tracks. Amos took a deep breath. There was something sweet in that breath - different from the hot panting breaths he’d been sucking. Attention paid now - Amos thought he could hear the rustle of a falling stream. He took six careful steps and stopped again. The sound was like a drink. He could feel the cool sound touch his mind and find his cerebral cortex. It trickled down his spine and found his balls slowly filling gut with calm and hope.
The hope of relief transformed him and he shook off the burdens of skin and muscle. This renewed strength hurried him on. It wasn’t the mad dash that had driven him before. He was still catching more scratches than he would have with a slower, steady pace, but the growing sound of water tumbling over rocks and into his ears drew him with calm instead of the panic driven into him by the heat.
The last few yards of the thicket, when he could see clear ground ahead, he started kicking over the poles in his way – snappin them off with the force of his whole weight in each kick. “Get the fuck out of my way” his boots were telling those trees. Clearing the thicket – finally – fuck! - he peeled the tree bags and his slimy torn shirt and boots and socks and pants off his trembling limbs. He stepped into the stream; into water that had started the day as snow. The stream grabbed his feet and the sensation was pure toe to head orgasm. He turned facing down the mountain, looking back at his torture-test and dropped his naked butt down onto a rock only twelve inches under water. It pushed the hot breath right out of him. He let it out in a crazed laugh-yelp-hoot of victory. He lay back, up into the stream, across sharp wet rocks as if it were a cool green lawn. The ice-water tumbled over his shoulders and swept away the last of the heat and hurt. He tilted his head back into the tumble and the freezing water filled his ears and eye sockets and open mouth. He lifted his head and spat it out – a newborn spitting embiotic fluid from its lungs.
And that was how Barb and Mike and Renee found him. Naked as a baby, giggling with a shameless wide grin on his silly face. They’d heard his holler from the midst of the thicket and had quickly trundled down to see what’d happened.
“What are you laughing at?” it was Barb’s voice full of delight at this sight of Amos finally vulnerable and free. Amos pulled himself up to his elbows. “You all look like fried shit.” They had big grins on their faces – apparently they found his naked near-corpse amusing. He climbed to his feet and after splashing them all - up onto the bank beside Barb. He reached over to the tree bags by his discarded boots and pulled out the bottles of water.
“I brought you guys some water” he explained – waiting for his hero’s welcome. Mike stepped forward grabbing the offered bottle. He twisted off the lid, took a sip, and turned it upside down at arm’s length. Amos’ jaw dropped with the falling water. Mike stepped over to the stream, and filled it up. Then, he lifted it high to his mouth and poured it down his throat letting it splash down his neck and chest and lifting the last of it up over his head for an ice-cold shower. Barb was killing herself laughing. Mike looked over chuckling at Amos’s sorry expression “Thanks for the drink man. We found this stream on our way up this morning.”
There was one final crew party but it was subdued. Members of the crew had already started to drift off to their next destinations. Some hoped to get on with fire-fighting crews deeper in the interior. Others were heading back east to Ontario. Amos knew that if he was going to pull together enough cash for a school year, he should be doing the same - heading home and looking for more work fast. But he wasn’t ready to head back to Ontario yet.
He hadn’t come this far without making it all the way west – as far as he could go. There was more adventure in the trip yet – he knew it. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find on the coast. He knew that he was running from his future as much as he was running for it. But he didn’t let that voice talk much. It could be shut up with beers and plans for the next day’s road trip.
The last of his Worker’s Compensation claims paid for one last Physio treatment. He’d twisted his back pretty good throwing boxes of tree seedlings around on the tree-planting crew that spring. Painkillers had gotten him through the rest of the ten week planting season. In the mountains, living in tents, a crazy instant community had formed among the treeplanters. They shared the same food, weather, and work. The different social scenes they came from didn’t seem to matter up there.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Turns out the crew played just as hard as it worked. On the way to their third block, they came down out of the mountains like bees and swarmed the only pub in a little valley town. Avola had a gas station and a post office and not much else. Except – there was a great little picturesque log pub. Not fancy but far from a dive. It had a warm and inviting character, a good rockin sound track, and was almost empty on a Tuesday evening.
The crew knew each other pretty well by this time and were really letting loose and crazy. Ten days of pushing themselves to their physical limits required a response of pushing themselves to their alcoholic limits. The twenty of them managed to clean out the bar’s fridges and kegs, and were working on the booze when the owner showed up and cut them all off. It was in the fun and hilarity of that night that Christine and Amos had fallen together as a couple.
The thin mountain air; the stunning views from their hillside workplaces; the tough conditions and hard work, made Amos feel very alive, and very happy. He was not a great planter. The ground was a long way down and he lacked an athlete’s trained inner push. His natural inclination was to find a way around the pain and meet up with those who had a talent for suffering on the other side.
No, Amos had more of a talent for fun. He could make people laugh – not as a joke-teller or clown, but with timely little bits of wit thrown into a day that made things roll along; poking the fire to make it burn a little brighter. He wouldn’t often take the lead, but he would go along with anything, or anyone, for a ride and a laugh.
He was especially attracted to anyone who would laugh at his sense of fun and Christine’s laugh was strong and light. It gushed out of her clear and tumbling like a mountain stream. She found Amos fun to be with and he was more fun when she was with him.
It was on the first day of the third block that Amos wrenched his back. He was helping Bill throw boxes of seedlings into the back of the pick-up when he felt that familiar sharp twinge about a handspan above his tailbone. Amos had injured himself this way before. Two summers ago he’d done a number on his back swinging bags of concrete for a pool company. He limped through the rest of the day. Every bend to plant a tree was accentuated with a searing stab of pain in his left lower back.
The next day he went to town and picked up pain-killers and muscle-relaxants at the clinic. When, at the end of that plant, the pills had failed to free him from the pain, he and Bill agreed on a plan to get him through the rest of the short tree-planting season.
The crew’s productivity was good but the government inspector was finding a high percentage of rejects – seedlings with exposed roots, roots not planted straight down deep enough but with a bend, trees planted too close together. Bill would keep Amos on the crew as a tree-checker doing quality control for fifty bucks a day. Amos realized that he wasn’t going to make the bundle of cash for his first year of law school in Ottawa like he’d planned, but, what else was he going to do? He was having the time of his life with this mountain family – take away the sweat and toil and it would be like getting paid to camp and hike in the mountains.
Amos soon found that he enjoyed telling others what to do and how to do it. He did his best to not be an asshole - use his humour and diplomatic easy ways to encourage them along. He’d approach the planters with a big smile if it was a beautiful morning - or a sympathetic grunt and complaint if it was raining. His approach was to make a common enemy of the Ministry of Natural Resources Checker. He’d point out their mistakes through her eyes.
Verna was a local girl; a mountain woman; earth mother. Even though he demonized her a bit to the crew, he actually felt honoured to be following around the mountainside quizzing her about life in the Rockies. She was so healthy and so mature. Verna wasn’t a decade older than Amos but she seemed to belong in the natural beauty that still felt like living in a postcard to him. She was a mountain lioness to his city alleycat.
To the crew, Amos was so obviously afraid of coming across like a picky, power-tripping, jerk that they ended up wanting to help him out. They slowed, sacrificing speed (money) to plant more carefully. Poorly planted trees would look bad on him –not to mention the fines their company would get hit with from the Ministry - and he sought out their help in a needy, little brother, kind of way. It was surprising and a little disarming. For such a big, strong, smart and happy guy, Amos’ watery eyes were always searching you out for approval.
One night it happened that the crew’s women found themselves alone in the mess tent and conversation turned to Amos. Christine wasn’t there so they started in about the couple – how good they seemed together but - Amos’ bad boy eastside rough patches were a strange mix for a rich girl West Van debutante like Christine. Darlene laughed “Oh, that Amos can adapt and swim in most waters. He just might be able to pull it off.”
Barb nodded, she wondered out loud if the others had noticed how much of a chameleon Amos was?
“What do you mean?” they asked digging for the goods, leaning in, curiosity peaked.
“Well, I first noticed it when he started talking to Claude with a French accent.” Barb smiled as eyes widened and heads slowly started nodding. “Then I started watching him a little closer.” Barb was a doing her Doctoral work in Languages and Semiotics. “He can change his diction, his vocabulary, even adjust his dialect to fit yours.”
“Wow, what a phony!” scoffed Olga.
“It’s actually a highly developed social talent.” explained Barb “he uses it to put you at ease and make you feel comfortable. He makes you feel at home - like you’re talking to a family member. I don’t think he even realizes that he’s doing it. It’s kind of endearing.”
There was a moment of thoughtful silence in the circle.
“Of course,” Barb continued, “he could also use it to con you and suck you in.” The hairs on the women’s necks raised in unison as spines stiffened and they pulled back from the huddle.
“Will he use his powers for good or for evil?” Barb teased them and with a “hmmphh” or two the subject shifted and they carried on dissecting the crew’s interplay, intercourses, and social evolutions. It was a dirty job – but – as Bill liked to say - someone had to do it.
The season was coming to an end with the arrival of July’s blistering heat. There were no more misty mornings where the crew woke up and ate their breakfast in the midst of a soggy mountain hugging cloud. The curtain of mist was pulled back and the sun was with them from the time they first threw back their tent flaps to the time the crawled back in dirty and weary and a little richer. This was their last block. And it turned out to be the worst. Instead of the jungle-gym tangle of left behind scrub trees to climb over and through, this block had been burned clear.
A controlled Ministry burn had left a blanket of black ash an inch thick over the whole clear cut. By midday, the sun would take the surface temperature up over 100 degrees. Even in early morning, the ground was throwing off a low heat.
This meant that the ash would fry the tree seedlings before they’d get a chance to start growing. So, the planters would have to scrape away a 12 inch circle clear of the ash. They’d get an extra 2 cents per tree for their trouble but it slowed their progress considerably. The heat of the sun would suck the strength and sweat out of them as if with a straw. It seemed an especially cruel way to end a physically grueling season.
Amos was truly happy that he wasn’t planting. Even though he was gonna end the season with only a third of what the others had made, he’d loved the time spent with this mountain ragtag family. His back still stung with every step but the pain seemed worth the pleasure. As sorry as he was that their mountaintop high was coming to an end, he was also really looking forward to traveling down to the coast with Christine and Chuck and Hannah. Christine had invited them to stay at her parent’s condo at Whistler. She said they could probably also visit the summer cottage on the Sunshine Coast if it wasn’t being used by her parent’s friends already.
Bill had him carrying extra water from the camp up to the crews. On his third run of the morning, Bill pointed him up over a ridge towards the east side of the block where he’d find Barb’s team planting. He put the jugs into empty tree bags, slung them over his shoulders wincing with the extra weight, and started his ascent.
At least there were no fallen trees to climb over with this burned block. The ash crunched under his boots like gravel and sent up little puffs of black dust with every step. The sun was heavy on his back and neck like a hot hand pressing down. The tree bags bounced and tugged with every step. He put his chin down and leaned into his trudging Sisyphus task.
He broached the ridge and discovered a further obstacle. A thicket of black burnt trees lay in a little gulch between him and slope ahead. They’d been scorched of their foliage but not incinerated. The fire must have swept up across the gulch, leaping it for better fuel on the other side. He could make out the crew up, almost at the top of the clear cut, another half mile up. The thicket ran all across the mountain’s ridge maybe thirty, forty yards deep. He could try to walk around it – although it stretched right into the forest with no end in sight. Or, he could push his way through. Extend his suffering in long walk around, or intensify it with a quick push through.
He pushed forward. There was no obvious path through. The short, thick, poles stood dense together like burnt stakes in the ground. Their branches were brittle and broke off easily as Amos forced his way. There was just enough room to get your body past each pair of stakes, then you’d have to sidestep and push ahead through the next space. No straight rows like the tree planters left behind – this was Nature’s chaotic maze.
Sadistic Scientists couldn’t have come up with a more cruel psychological game to put rats through. Amos pushed his way forward into the test. The charred branch stubs scratched at his exposed arms and face. With every step they’d catch at his sweat drenched T-shirt and pants causing him to have to stop and unhook himself from their clutches. The tree bags of water would also get caught on a branch behind him and he’d have to spin around and tug them free. About halfway through the thicket, Amos began to stop stopping.
A fury had got hold of him. Like a bear swarmed with bees, he began thrashing at his attackers, throwing his weight forward against the branches, no longer caring about the tears at his clothes and flesh. The heat had toasted the patience right out of him. He was in a senseless place, he’d passed beyond reason and care and an animal fury had taken his mind and was driving his body against care of self or soul. Control was somewhere ahead of him and instinct took from him the option of stopping. To stop would be to resign himself to hell’s eternity there. “If you’re going through hell – keep going” was the voice in him – human or animal or holy – he couldn’t tell. Nor could he stop to wonder what he’d done to deserve this. His purpose had never been so focused.
“If there is a hell” he muttered through clenched growling teeth “I must be in it now.” By uttering this complaint, he now felt the attention of the spirit world upon him. He’d named it and by the power of word, had called forth the presence – at least in the presence of his own mind - the angels and demons that were taking bets on him. Did he have the guts to keep it together? Or, would he lose it? Would his soul let slip his mind’s grip? Let his sense evaporate - sucked like so many drops of sweat up into the sun’s thirsty atmosphere – dropped into dust and ash at his feet?
The voices asking these questions, stopped him in his tracks. Amos took a deep breath. There was something sweet in that breath - different from the hot panting breaths he’d been sucking. Attention paid now - Amos thought he could hear the rustle of a falling stream. He took six careful steps and stopped again. The sound was like a drink. He could feel the cool sound touch his mind and find his cerebral cortex. It trickled down his spine and found his balls slowly filling gut with calm and hope.
The hope of relief transformed him and he shook off the burdens of skin and muscle. This renewed strength hurried him on. It wasn’t the mad dash that had driven him before. He was still catching more scratches than he would have with a slower, steady pace, but the growing sound of water tumbling over rocks and into his ears drew him with calm instead of the panic driven into him by the heat.
The last few yards of the thicket, when he could see clear ground ahead, he started kicking over the poles in his way – snappin them off with the force of his whole weight in each kick. “Get the fuck out of my way” his boots were telling those trees. Clearing the thicket – finally – fuck! - he peeled the tree bags and his slimy torn shirt and boots and socks and pants off his trembling limbs. He stepped into the stream; into water that had started the day as snow. The stream grabbed his feet and the sensation was pure toe to head orgasm. He turned facing down the mountain, looking back at his torture-test and dropped his naked butt down onto a rock only twelve inches under water. It pushed the hot breath right out of him. He let it out in a crazed laugh-yelp-hoot of victory. He lay back, up into the stream, across sharp wet rocks as if it were a cool green lawn. The ice-water tumbled over his shoulders and swept away the last of the heat and hurt. He tilted his head back into the tumble and the freezing water filled his ears and eye sockets and open mouth. He lifted his head and spat it out – a newborn spitting embiotic fluid from its lungs.
And that was how Barb and Mike and Renee found him. Naked as a baby, giggling with a shameless wide grin on his silly face. They’d heard his holler from the midst of the thicket and had quickly trundled down to see what’d happened.
“What are you laughing at?” it was Barb’s voice full of delight at this sight of Amos finally vulnerable and free. Amos pulled himself up to his elbows. “You all look like fried shit.” They had big grins on their faces – apparently they found his naked near-corpse amusing. He climbed to his feet and after splashing them all - up onto the bank beside Barb. He reached over to the tree bags by his discarded boots and pulled out the bottles of water.
“I brought you guys some water” he explained – waiting for his hero’s welcome. Mike stepped forward grabbing the offered bottle. He twisted off the lid, took a sip, and turned it upside down at arm’s length. Amos’ jaw dropped with the falling water. Mike stepped over to the stream, and filled it up. Then, he lifted it high to his mouth and poured it down his throat letting it splash down his neck and chest and lifting the last of it up over his head for an ice-cold shower. Barb was killing herself laughing. Mike looked over chuckling at Amos’s sorry expression “Thanks for the drink man. We found this stream on our way up this morning.”
There was one final crew party but it was subdued. Members of the crew had already started to drift off to their next destinations. Some hoped to get on with fire-fighting crews deeper in the interior. Others were heading back east to Ontario. Amos knew that if he was going to pull together enough cash for a school year, he should be doing the same - heading home and looking for more work fast. But he wasn’t ready to head back to Ontario yet.
He hadn’t come this far without making it all the way west – as far as he could go. There was more adventure in the trip yet – he knew it. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find on the coast. He knew that he was running from his future as much as he was running for it. But he didn’t let that voice talk much. It could be shut up with beers and plans for the next day’s road trip.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Treeplanters
The treeplanters formed a family for a season. At its head, Bill Williamson, was the benevolent pirate captain. He kept his crew fed and safe but always hungry for the treasure of gold to be made planting trees. Bill was a tall and lanky farmer’s son of unquestionable integrity; strong enough to wrestle any bull-headed idea to the ground. Mythical tales were circulated about Bill lifting a man off his feet with one hand and shaking him til he was scared-silly. The man had kicked Darlene’s kitten. Darlene and Bill had been sweethearts since highschool. Together they’d trained as church educators but Lawrence had led her out into the mountains and she’d never got him back into church again. Every summer he’d rule his crew like a young Moses – a pirate Moses - leading Israel to the promised land.
The promise of big bucks for backbreaking toil drew a crew of mostly university students to Bill and Darlene’s mess tent in the Rockies. Half the crew had done a season or more already with them. Success had brought them back. The most seasoned of the planters was Joseph. He and Marie towed a trailer with kids and a dog and cats and a bird and kept mostly to themselves like the gypsy aunt and uncle of the crew.
There were a handful of women in the crew which tended to keep things a little more civilized. Barb was a graduate student that’d been with Bill and Darlene three seasons already. She was intelligent and kind; a big sister who laughed easily and enjoyed the antics of her wild, younger brothers.
Colleen was a theology student who was preparing for her first Ministry post by going way out of her comfort zone - and way beyond her physical abilities - to let the mountain wilds test her, break her, or season her for any challenge.
Olga, was a big, strong, cowgirl blonde from Calgary. She’d also joined the crew to test her strength and got an extra daily stipend as the crew’s nurse. Christine showed up a week late in her own little green Pacer. She was an athlete; short and sinewy and the youngest member of the crew. On days off, she’d bounce up the mountain roads for morning runs just to burn off extra energy.
Claude was last season’s top planter. He had the Voyageur spirit of a Quebecois – quiet (he was working on his English) but quick to laugh and join in a story or song. Frank was studying to be a Chiropractor. He’d practice on anyone who’d admit within his earshot to having a sore back. Steve was the muscle-man. He’d pump weights before breakfast. At mealtimes we’d catch him flexing and caressing his arms and chest.
At the first camp bush party, once the block had been planted, Steve challenged the crew-boss to an arm-wrestle. Bill was pretty liquored up and feeling no pain. He turned his cap backwards, stuck his smoke in clenched lips and dropped his elbow onto a forty-gallon diesel drum. He let Steve –pumped up and deadly serious - give it his best shot. Bill calmly finished his hand-rolled smoke. With his free hand he put it out on the drum’s side and, to the crew’s delight, gently pushed Steve’s pride down to the drum’s top.
After that, Steve still pumped iron every morning, but the caressing subsided. Craig was another farm boy from southern Ontario. He was cut from the same genetic cloth as Bill. Their families knew each other. He and Amos and Chuck had arrived at the camp together, driving Amos’ “fleshtoned” Dodge Dart.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“I’ve never been so scared, or run so fast, in my life.
The speed might have had something to do with the fact that I was running down a mountainside but the fear – the fear was all about the bear. I should have been afraid of turning an ankle or wiping out against one of the logs that crisscrossed the clearcut forest, but there was only one thing on my mind. Putting distance between me and that big fucking bear.”
It was only our first day out. Chuck and Amos and I had been assigned to plant a section of clearcut on a mountainside overlooking the Caribou Valley. We were so green that we’d plant a tree or three and then stop to admire the view. I couldn’t get over how beautiful it all was.
I grew up on a farm, so I was used to the outdoors, but I had never felt so surrounded by its wonders all at once. Mountain peaks lined up in a row up all down both sides of the valley. Their stony heads pushed up above the tree line that draped their shoulders like green robes on royalty. Their toes cooled in the wide, white, river that ran the length of the valley. We were way up on one side of the valley. It’d taken us a couple of hours to drive Amos’ old Dodge Dart up the rough logging roads to find our camp.
He’d picked me up at my family’s farm just south of Orillia a week before. We’d both just finished our exams; me at Guelph and him at Trent. Our new boss, Bill Williamson, had told me to catch a ride with this guy Amos. Treeplanting promised good money for hard work. Hard work I was used to. I’d been picking stones from my Dad’s fields since I was old enough to lift a football sized rock. The idea of making $200 a day sounded too good to pass up. I had another year’s tuition to pay and the more I could keep that student loan down the better. As a farm boy, I knew all about carrying debt.
We’d taken turns driving his Dart across the country. This Amos guy was a laugh. He was a big boy. I’m six foot and close to two hundred pounds but he had several inches and more than a few pounds on me. He had flab, but there was muscle beneath it. And he had a big grin that he wore on his face almost all the time – at least when he was with you. On those long stretches of road, he’d go off to another place and his face would drop and he’d get all serious and sometimes mutter to himself. I could tell he was a more complicated kind of guy than he let on. Wasn’t into sports at all so we couldn’t talk about that. He studied literature and philosophy and I didn’t have much to say about that.
That was the kind of stuff that chicks and artsy guys took but he didn’t seem too artsy to me. Sure he listened to that art rock, King Crimson, Eno, Talking Heads, type stuff I’d never heard til I got to university. This guy Amos was a bit of a mixed bag. He had the body of a Jock and the head of a Nerd. On the outside he was a Hoser. Jeans and construction boots, plaid shirts, long hair. And then, with a closer look, a serious, sensitive side would surface.
– like this one time I was knocking gays and he got all angry-defensive-like and his eyes watered up. Just when I thought he might cry - he turned it on a dime and pretended to make a pass at me – staring at my balls and stroking my thigh and saying in a fag voice “I couldn’t help but notice you’ve got a nice set there.” I turned red and told him to fuck off and we both laughed – almost hit a deer - except I swerved onto the shoulder and missed it.
Mostly though, Amos was just into having a laugh. He had a small stash of grass with him and we’d do a toke or two every day just to help with the monotony of driving along. It always made the car stereo sound better too – even the art rock was tolerable then.
We’d been traveling across the top of the States on two lane highways through Michigan and North Dakota. Just when we were ready to head north into Saskatchewan, we hit a snow storm – a blizzard really. Kind of surprising for the last week of April. The roads got so bad, and the radio reports so full of warnings, that we decided to pull off for the night and shell out for a motel. Everyone was off the road, even the truckers and the motel was full up – we got the last room.
Next morning, the radio said the roads were closed between Saskatoon and Regina. We were still an hour or two south of Saskatoon. Amos said we had to pick up Chuck at the airport in Edmonton that night. It was like the roads were closed for ordinary folks, but not for Amos.
“Let’s hit the road Craig.”
“But the weather guy is telling everyone to stay off the roads.”
“Good, then there’ll be no one for us to hit.”
The transport trucks, and us, were the only ones on the road that morning. We got our tires into the grooves the transports made and were making progress. The snow was so deep, you could hear the Dart’s belly, the oilpan and undercarriage, dragging along the snow ridges between the tracks. Amos just kept slipping and sliding along. He put on a country station, rolled the windows down and sang along at the top of his voice. It was contagious and I had to join in.
We made it up to Saskatoon and cruised right through the downtown and out the other side. By the time we got to the outskirts, the roads had been cleared and the sun was shining. Amos put the hammer down and we were off – we’d make Edmonton on time no problem now. Then - the car engine died. The motor just quit.
We pulled off to the side, got out and lifted the hood.
What a laugh!
We were looking at a snow bank!
The snow was jammed up all around the engine so tight that you could even see the imprint of the underside of the hood in the snow. A pick-up pulled over and a couple of old farmers in baseball caps trudged over and they got quite a chuckle out of our predicament.
“Dig out your distributor cap and dry off your wires and give ‘er a try then.” they recommended, “See what happens.”
So, armed with windshield scrapers we chipped the snow out all around the motor and found the distributor cap and took it off and wiped it with a rag. We pulled and wiped down all the spark plug wires, and Amos jumped in the drivers seat, and started her right up.
“Let’s go man, we can still make Edmonton in time if we boogey.”
We picked up Chuck at the airport just in time. His exams hadn’t finished in time for him to make the drive out, so he’d had to shell out the extra cash for a plane ticket. Chuck and Amos had gone to high school together in Scarborough. The presence of Chuck in the car was like adding a little high test to Amos’ engine. All signs of the sensitive, thoughtful Amos disappeared. With Chuck he was a full out, rock n roll, better to burn out than to fade away, maniac.
We met up with Bill late the next night at the Clearwater Hotel. After a few beers and some tall tales, he told us to meet him in the parking lot next morning at 6am. We didn’t want to mess-up our first day, so we crashed early. Next morning, we met a straggly crew of about twenty treeplanters. Everyone was in good spirits as we got introduced around. By the look of them they were mostly students like ourselves. Mostly guys but there were women in the group too.
The Dart pulled in behind a convoy of two trucks and a van. Like I said, it took us a couple of hours winding up those logging roads to get to our lot. Logging trucks would thunder down the road past us filled with the pines we were replacing. We shook our heads at the speed they traveled and wondered what would happen if we ever met one coming around one of those hairpin corners. The Dart bounced and shook and roared fishtailing under Amos’ heavy foot. He showed that little fleshtoned granny car no mercy as we drove it up, up, up into the steep forests.
The camp was already set up. There was a big canvas mess tent with two long tables for us to sit and chow down at. An old school bus carried the cook stove, propane fridge, food and water supplies. Bill’s wife Darlene, and her sister Hannah, ran the kitchen. We were told to find places to pitch our tents, get ourselves set up, and then help with unloading the boxes of tree-plugs ready for the morning.
At dinner the stories started. A good planter could do at least a thousand trees a day. This was considered pretty rough territory to plant in so the price per tree was higher than the flatlands of Northern Alberta or Ontario. Looking up the mountainside from camp we could see that a clear cut block was anything but clear. As you negotiated the pitch of the hill you had outcrops of rock and boulders to climb over or around. The loggers had taken the best trees but certainly not all of them. Hundreds of trees were cut down but left behind - not considered worth taking. In places, they were like piles of pick-up-sticks strewn across the hectares. A planter had to climb over or under them to get at a patch of dirt to plant the plug in.
We were issued short, narrow shovels and instructed in the craft. First, scrape away the topsoil. Then, stab your the shovel blade into the earth up to its hilt. With a shove forward of your arm and a simultaneous kick of your boot, you’d push the earth forward to make room for a tree-plug. As you bend for a toe touch, your other hand is reaching into the bag slung around your shoulders holding several dozen young trees. Each one was maybe four inches of tree and four inches of root in a plug of dirt. It was important to push the roots straight down into the earth – no folded roots. Each tree was to be planted no closer than 8 feet from another. If the Ministry Checker discovered folded roots or trees too close – we’d be docked pay. Too many bad plants and the whole crew could be fined or even pulled from the contract.
“Plant them fast and plant them right.” was Bill’s final words of instruction. The experienced planters nodded their agreements and exchanged knowing smirks, tilting heads and rolling eyes at us green recruits.
The first day was brutal. It was still dark when Lawrence barked at our tent doors “Time to get up.” I couldn’t believe how friggin cold it was.
I crawled out of my tent onto a crust of frost and new snow. At the mess tent every new planter that joined us was shivering and bitching about the cold. The experienced planters finished their oatmeal and eggs quickly and grabbed their bags and shovels and headed out to pick up their trees and assignments for the day.
I was teamed up with Chuck and Amos for the day. Bill showed us our line to follow up the mountain – a piece of orange tape was tied to a limb or a young tree every fifty feet or so. “Follow that line up over that ridge and start planting at the top of the ridge. Plant til you get to the edge of the clear cut at the tree line. We filled our two bags with seedlings two hundred per bag – a bag across each shoulder bouncing off each hip as we headed off like paper boys with Saturday morning deliveries to make. We scrambled up over the criss-cross of fallen trees, around the rock outcrops and through the patches of underbrush left untouched by the loggers. Three southern Ontario greenhorns, laughing and joking and bitching our way up to our first day on the job.
Like I said, we were off to a slow start. We’d plant a bunch of trees and someone would make a joke…
“Nine hundred and sixty-five still to go”
“When’s our first coffee break?”
“Bill and the snack wagon should be by any minute.”
“Wow, will you look at that view eh?”
“Yeah, awesome!”
We’d stop to wipe our brows and look around again at that British Columbia picture postcard perfection in every direction we could see. By mid-morning, we were still maybe a hundred yards from the tree line when we heard it.
“Crash, crash, crash” it sounded like a huge boulder had come loose and was crashing down the mountain. We all three looked up at the same time. It was no boulder but it was just as terrifying - and it was heading straight for us. We three looked at each other, and as if on cue, shouted in unison…
“A BEAR!”
“What do we do?” asked Chuck in a panic.
“RUN!” shouted me and Amos together.
We turned on our heels and booted it down the mountain with the sounds of a charging bear in our ears. I took one more quick glance behind me as my legs started pumping. It was the biggest, brownest, fastest, bear I’d ever seen. I’d seen some fair sized black bears around the farm, and in Algonquin Park, but this bugger was way bigger and it was crashing down the mountain straight at us like vengeance on delivery.
Running wasn’t exactly a straightforward effort. Not only did we have two heavy bags of trees on either hip that bounced with every jog, but there were those boulders and fallen trees to get across. It was a boot camp obstacle course with live ammunition being fired at your back to keep you moving. Over my shoulder I saw Amos jump up on top of a tree and run down along it. Chuck was a step or two ahead of me and we reached the edge of the ridge together and went flying over it like a couple of rabbits, our tree bags bobbing like bunny tails behind us.
Chuck and I kept running down that hill. All I could think of was getting off that mountain as quick as I could. We only noticed that it was just the two of us when we started slowing down at the bottom of that ridge. We heard a shout that pulled us both up short. It sounded kind of like….
“FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUCK AAAAAWWWWWFFFF”
We looked at each other and Chuck’s eyes grew wide. We both turned and started shouting…
“AAAAA-MOSSSSS, HEY AAAA-M-O-S-S-S, AMOS, ARE YOU OKAY? – AMOS – AMOS-S-S-S “ we stopped shouting and listened.
Nothing.
Nothing but silence.
An awful, dread-filled, silence as it dawned on us.
Amos was somewhere up over that ridge with a big fucking grizzly bear. What was even worse was that we were going have to do something about it. The thought of going back up there with that bear sent a chill through me. It started down in my bladder and went up into my skull. Chuck looked at me again.
“A-MOSSSS – AAAMOSSS - HEYYYY - ARE YOU OKAY? But it was no use. The only response was sound of the blood pounding in my head and the heavy breaths still pumping in and out of our lungs. That beautiful wild mountain had now turned cold and deadly on us. We stood there still and listening – it seemed like time had stopped. It was like my feet had turned to stone and my legs were planted in that rock. I knew we had to go back and find him. I just didn’t know where I’d find the courage to do it.
And then we saw him.
Standing on the ridge, grinning, and swinging his shovel over his head. He was hooting a victory howl like a friggin Maple Leafs fan.
I was never so glad to see anyone. Chuck looked at me and we both started laughing – relieved and happy and surprised as hell.
He started down the mountain towards us and we started up.
“You guys won’t believe what the fuck happened.” he blurted out to us as soon as we were within earshot.
“I don’t believe you’re alive.” I admitted.
“How did you get out of that one Amos” laughed Chuck.
He told us that he had wiped out running along the top of that log I’d seen him on. He said he hit the ground and looked back and saw that there was no way he was gonna out run the bear. It was getting really close.
He said that’s when he remembered that bears have bad vision.
“They hunt with their noses right. I knew that if I zigzagged I just might have a chance of that bear losing my scent.”
So, instead of heading for the ridge, he ran at a right angle and when he looked back, ready to make another turn, the bear had stopped fifty feet behind him.
That’s when we heard him shout “Fuck Off” at the bear. What we thought were his last words was in fact the effects of adrenaline and fear and anger coming out of one totally freaked out Amos.
He said the bear just looked at him when he did that.
“Maybe she thought I was crazy” he laughed, “Probably, she just figured that she‘d already scared the crap out of us - showed us who was boss. So why bother further with a crazy human screaming and shaking a shovel at her?”
What was truly crazy, was that we went back and started planting trees again. I don’t know if we were so determined to make our $200 bucks that day, or if we were more afraid of disappointing Bill. Anyhow, we only lasted maybe ten minutes. It was hard to plant trees with one eye always on the woods above us. We finally came to our senses and headed back down the mountain with only a few hundred trees planted but one hell of a story to tell.
The promise of big bucks for backbreaking toil drew a crew of mostly university students to Bill and Darlene’s mess tent in the Rockies. Half the crew had done a season or more already with them. Success had brought them back. The most seasoned of the planters was Joseph. He and Marie towed a trailer with kids and a dog and cats and a bird and kept mostly to themselves like the gypsy aunt and uncle of the crew.
There were a handful of women in the crew which tended to keep things a little more civilized. Barb was a graduate student that’d been with Bill and Darlene three seasons already. She was intelligent and kind; a big sister who laughed easily and enjoyed the antics of her wild, younger brothers.
Colleen was a theology student who was preparing for her first Ministry post by going way out of her comfort zone - and way beyond her physical abilities - to let the mountain wilds test her, break her, or season her for any challenge.
Olga, was a big, strong, cowgirl blonde from Calgary. She’d also joined the crew to test her strength and got an extra daily stipend as the crew’s nurse. Christine showed up a week late in her own little green Pacer. She was an athlete; short and sinewy and the youngest member of the crew. On days off, she’d bounce up the mountain roads for morning runs just to burn off extra energy.
Claude was last season’s top planter. He had the Voyageur spirit of a Quebecois – quiet (he was working on his English) but quick to laugh and join in a story or song. Frank was studying to be a Chiropractor. He’d practice on anyone who’d admit within his earshot to having a sore back. Steve was the muscle-man. He’d pump weights before breakfast. At mealtimes we’d catch him flexing and caressing his arms and chest.
At the first camp bush party, once the block had been planted, Steve challenged the crew-boss to an arm-wrestle. Bill was pretty liquored up and feeling no pain. He turned his cap backwards, stuck his smoke in clenched lips and dropped his elbow onto a forty-gallon diesel drum. He let Steve –pumped up and deadly serious - give it his best shot. Bill calmly finished his hand-rolled smoke. With his free hand he put it out on the drum’s side and, to the crew’s delight, gently pushed Steve’s pride down to the drum’s top.
After that, Steve still pumped iron every morning, but the caressing subsided. Craig was another farm boy from southern Ontario. He was cut from the same genetic cloth as Bill. Their families knew each other. He and Amos and Chuck had arrived at the camp together, driving Amos’ “fleshtoned” Dodge Dart.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“I’ve never been so scared, or run so fast, in my life.
The speed might have had something to do with the fact that I was running down a mountainside but the fear – the fear was all about the bear. I should have been afraid of turning an ankle or wiping out against one of the logs that crisscrossed the clearcut forest, but there was only one thing on my mind. Putting distance between me and that big fucking bear.”
It was only our first day out. Chuck and Amos and I had been assigned to plant a section of clearcut on a mountainside overlooking the Caribou Valley. We were so green that we’d plant a tree or three and then stop to admire the view. I couldn’t get over how beautiful it all was.
I grew up on a farm, so I was used to the outdoors, but I had never felt so surrounded by its wonders all at once. Mountain peaks lined up in a row up all down both sides of the valley. Their stony heads pushed up above the tree line that draped their shoulders like green robes on royalty. Their toes cooled in the wide, white, river that ran the length of the valley. We were way up on one side of the valley. It’d taken us a couple of hours to drive Amos’ old Dodge Dart up the rough logging roads to find our camp.
He’d picked me up at my family’s farm just south of Orillia a week before. We’d both just finished our exams; me at Guelph and him at Trent. Our new boss, Bill Williamson, had told me to catch a ride with this guy Amos. Treeplanting promised good money for hard work. Hard work I was used to. I’d been picking stones from my Dad’s fields since I was old enough to lift a football sized rock. The idea of making $200 a day sounded too good to pass up. I had another year’s tuition to pay and the more I could keep that student loan down the better. As a farm boy, I knew all about carrying debt.
We’d taken turns driving his Dart across the country. This Amos guy was a laugh. He was a big boy. I’m six foot and close to two hundred pounds but he had several inches and more than a few pounds on me. He had flab, but there was muscle beneath it. And he had a big grin that he wore on his face almost all the time – at least when he was with you. On those long stretches of road, he’d go off to another place and his face would drop and he’d get all serious and sometimes mutter to himself. I could tell he was a more complicated kind of guy than he let on. Wasn’t into sports at all so we couldn’t talk about that. He studied literature and philosophy and I didn’t have much to say about that.
That was the kind of stuff that chicks and artsy guys took but he didn’t seem too artsy to me. Sure he listened to that art rock, King Crimson, Eno, Talking Heads, type stuff I’d never heard til I got to university. This guy Amos was a bit of a mixed bag. He had the body of a Jock and the head of a Nerd. On the outside he was a Hoser. Jeans and construction boots, plaid shirts, long hair. And then, with a closer look, a serious, sensitive side would surface.
– like this one time I was knocking gays and he got all angry-defensive-like and his eyes watered up. Just when I thought he might cry - he turned it on a dime and pretended to make a pass at me – staring at my balls and stroking my thigh and saying in a fag voice “I couldn’t help but notice you’ve got a nice set there.” I turned red and told him to fuck off and we both laughed – almost hit a deer - except I swerved onto the shoulder and missed it.
Mostly though, Amos was just into having a laugh. He had a small stash of grass with him and we’d do a toke or two every day just to help with the monotony of driving along. It always made the car stereo sound better too – even the art rock was tolerable then.
We’d been traveling across the top of the States on two lane highways through Michigan and North Dakota. Just when we were ready to head north into Saskatchewan, we hit a snow storm – a blizzard really. Kind of surprising for the last week of April. The roads got so bad, and the radio reports so full of warnings, that we decided to pull off for the night and shell out for a motel. Everyone was off the road, even the truckers and the motel was full up – we got the last room.
Next morning, the radio said the roads were closed between Saskatoon and Regina. We were still an hour or two south of Saskatoon. Amos said we had to pick up Chuck at the airport in Edmonton that night. It was like the roads were closed for ordinary folks, but not for Amos.
“Let’s hit the road Craig.”
“But the weather guy is telling everyone to stay off the roads.”
“Good, then there’ll be no one for us to hit.”
The transport trucks, and us, were the only ones on the road that morning. We got our tires into the grooves the transports made and were making progress. The snow was so deep, you could hear the Dart’s belly, the oilpan and undercarriage, dragging along the snow ridges between the tracks. Amos just kept slipping and sliding along. He put on a country station, rolled the windows down and sang along at the top of his voice. It was contagious and I had to join in.
We made it up to Saskatoon and cruised right through the downtown and out the other side. By the time we got to the outskirts, the roads had been cleared and the sun was shining. Amos put the hammer down and we were off – we’d make Edmonton on time no problem now. Then - the car engine died. The motor just quit.
We pulled off to the side, got out and lifted the hood.
What a laugh!
We were looking at a snow bank!
The snow was jammed up all around the engine so tight that you could even see the imprint of the underside of the hood in the snow. A pick-up pulled over and a couple of old farmers in baseball caps trudged over and they got quite a chuckle out of our predicament.
“Dig out your distributor cap and dry off your wires and give ‘er a try then.” they recommended, “See what happens.”
So, armed with windshield scrapers we chipped the snow out all around the motor and found the distributor cap and took it off and wiped it with a rag. We pulled and wiped down all the spark plug wires, and Amos jumped in the drivers seat, and started her right up.
“Let’s go man, we can still make Edmonton in time if we boogey.”
We picked up Chuck at the airport just in time. His exams hadn’t finished in time for him to make the drive out, so he’d had to shell out the extra cash for a plane ticket. Chuck and Amos had gone to high school together in Scarborough. The presence of Chuck in the car was like adding a little high test to Amos’ engine. All signs of the sensitive, thoughtful Amos disappeared. With Chuck he was a full out, rock n roll, better to burn out than to fade away, maniac.
We met up with Bill late the next night at the Clearwater Hotel. After a few beers and some tall tales, he told us to meet him in the parking lot next morning at 6am. We didn’t want to mess-up our first day, so we crashed early. Next morning, we met a straggly crew of about twenty treeplanters. Everyone was in good spirits as we got introduced around. By the look of them they were mostly students like ourselves. Mostly guys but there were women in the group too.
The Dart pulled in behind a convoy of two trucks and a van. Like I said, it took us a couple of hours winding up those logging roads to get to our lot. Logging trucks would thunder down the road past us filled with the pines we were replacing. We shook our heads at the speed they traveled and wondered what would happen if we ever met one coming around one of those hairpin corners. The Dart bounced and shook and roared fishtailing under Amos’ heavy foot. He showed that little fleshtoned granny car no mercy as we drove it up, up, up into the steep forests.
The camp was already set up. There was a big canvas mess tent with two long tables for us to sit and chow down at. An old school bus carried the cook stove, propane fridge, food and water supplies. Bill’s wife Darlene, and her sister Hannah, ran the kitchen. We were told to find places to pitch our tents, get ourselves set up, and then help with unloading the boxes of tree-plugs ready for the morning.
At dinner the stories started. A good planter could do at least a thousand trees a day. This was considered pretty rough territory to plant in so the price per tree was higher than the flatlands of Northern Alberta or Ontario. Looking up the mountainside from camp we could see that a clear cut block was anything but clear. As you negotiated the pitch of the hill you had outcrops of rock and boulders to climb over or around. The loggers had taken the best trees but certainly not all of them. Hundreds of trees were cut down but left behind - not considered worth taking. In places, they were like piles of pick-up-sticks strewn across the hectares. A planter had to climb over or under them to get at a patch of dirt to plant the plug in.
We were issued short, narrow shovels and instructed in the craft. First, scrape away the topsoil. Then, stab your the shovel blade into the earth up to its hilt. With a shove forward of your arm and a simultaneous kick of your boot, you’d push the earth forward to make room for a tree-plug. As you bend for a toe touch, your other hand is reaching into the bag slung around your shoulders holding several dozen young trees. Each one was maybe four inches of tree and four inches of root in a plug of dirt. It was important to push the roots straight down into the earth – no folded roots. Each tree was to be planted no closer than 8 feet from another. If the Ministry Checker discovered folded roots or trees too close – we’d be docked pay. Too many bad plants and the whole crew could be fined or even pulled from the contract.
“Plant them fast and plant them right.” was Bill’s final words of instruction. The experienced planters nodded their agreements and exchanged knowing smirks, tilting heads and rolling eyes at us green recruits.
The first day was brutal. It was still dark when Lawrence barked at our tent doors “Time to get up.” I couldn’t believe how friggin cold it was.
I crawled out of my tent onto a crust of frost and new snow. At the mess tent every new planter that joined us was shivering and bitching about the cold. The experienced planters finished their oatmeal and eggs quickly and grabbed their bags and shovels and headed out to pick up their trees and assignments for the day.
I was teamed up with Chuck and Amos for the day. Bill showed us our line to follow up the mountain – a piece of orange tape was tied to a limb or a young tree every fifty feet or so. “Follow that line up over that ridge and start planting at the top of the ridge. Plant til you get to the edge of the clear cut at the tree line. We filled our two bags with seedlings two hundred per bag – a bag across each shoulder bouncing off each hip as we headed off like paper boys with Saturday morning deliveries to make. We scrambled up over the criss-cross of fallen trees, around the rock outcrops and through the patches of underbrush left untouched by the loggers. Three southern Ontario greenhorns, laughing and joking and bitching our way up to our first day on the job.
Like I said, we were off to a slow start. We’d plant a bunch of trees and someone would make a joke…
“Nine hundred and sixty-five still to go”
“When’s our first coffee break?”
“Bill and the snack wagon should be by any minute.”
“Wow, will you look at that view eh?”
“Yeah, awesome!”
We’d stop to wipe our brows and look around again at that British Columbia picture postcard perfection in every direction we could see. By mid-morning, we were still maybe a hundred yards from the tree line when we heard it.
“Crash, crash, crash” it sounded like a huge boulder had come loose and was crashing down the mountain. We all three looked up at the same time. It was no boulder but it was just as terrifying - and it was heading straight for us. We three looked at each other, and as if on cue, shouted in unison…
“A BEAR!”
“What do we do?” asked Chuck in a panic.
“RUN!” shouted me and Amos together.
We turned on our heels and booted it down the mountain with the sounds of a charging bear in our ears. I took one more quick glance behind me as my legs started pumping. It was the biggest, brownest, fastest, bear I’d ever seen. I’d seen some fair sized black bears around the farm, and in Algonquin Park, but this bugger was way bigger and it was crashing down the mountain straight at us like vengeance on delivery.
Running wasn’t exactly a straightforward effort. Not only did we have two heavy bags of trees on either hip that bounced with every jog, but there were those boulders and fallen trees to get across. It was a boot camp obstacle course with live ammunition being fired at your back to keep you moving. Over my shoulder I saw Amos jump up on top of a tree and run down along it. Chuck was a step or two ahead of me and we reached the edge of the ridge together and went flying over it like a couple of rabbits, our tree bags bobbing like bunny tails behind us.
Chuck and I kept running down that hill. All I could think of was getting off that mountain as quick as I could. We only noticed that it was just the two of us when we started slowing down at the bottom of that ridge. We heard a shout that pulled us both up short. It sounded kind of like….
“FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUCK AAAAAWWWWWFFFF”
We looked at each other and Chuck’s eyes grew wide. We both turned and started shouting…
“AAAAA-MOSSSSS, HEY AAAA-M-O-S-S-S, AMOS, ARE YOU OKAY? – AMOS – AMOS-S-S-S “ we stopped shouting and listened.
Nothing.
Nothing but silence.
An awful, dread-filled, silence as it dawned on us.
Amos was somewhere up over that ridge with a big fucking grizzly bear. What was even worse was that we were going have to do something about it. The thought of going back up there with that bear sent a chill through me. It started down in my bladder and went up into my skull. Chuck looked at me again.
“A-MOSSSS – AAAMOSSS - HEYYYY - ARE YOU OKAY? But it was no use. The only response was sound of the blood pounding in my head and the heavy breaths still pumping in and out of our lungs. That beautiful wild mountain had now turned cold and deadly on us. We stood there still and listening – it seemed like time had stopped. It was like my feet had turned to stone and my legs were planted in that rock. I knew we had to go back and find him. I just didn’t know where I’d find the courage to do it.
And then we saw him.
Standing on the ridge, grinning, and swinging his shovel over his head. He was hooting a victory howl like a friggin Maple Leafs fan.
I was never so glad to see anyone. Chuck looked at me and we both started laughing – relieved and happy and surprised as hell.
He started down the mountain towards us and we started up.
“You guys won’t believe what the fuck happened.” he blurted out to us as soon as we were within earshot.
“I don’t believe you’re alive.” I admitted.
“How did you get out of that one Amos” laughed Chuck.
He told us that he had wiped out running along the top of that log I’d seen him on. He said he hit the ground and looked back and saw that there was no way he was gonna out run the bear. It was getting really close.
He said that’s when he remembered that bears have bad vision.
“They hunt with their noses right. I knew that if I zigzagged I just might have a chance of that bear losing my scent.”
So, instead of heading for the ridge, he ran at a right angle and when he looked back, ready to make another turn, the bear had stopped fifty feet behind him.
That’s when we heard him shout “Fuck Off” at the bear. What we thought were his last words was in fact the effects of adrenaline and fear and anger coming out of one totally freaked out Amos.
He said the bear just looked at him when he did that.
“Maybe she thought I was crazy” he laughed, “Probably, she just figured that she‘d already scared the crap out of us - showed us who was boss. So why bother further with a crazy human screaming and shaking a shovel at her?”
What was truly crazy, was that we went back and started planting trees again. I don’t know if we were so determined to make our $200 bucks that day, or if we were more afraid of disappointing Bill. Anyhow, we only lasted maybe ten minutes. It was hard to plant trees with one eye always on the woods above us. We finally came to our senses and headed back down the mountain with only a few hundred trees planted but one hell of a story to tell.
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