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.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
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.
Monday, September 29, 2008
They dropped us in a cage
They put us in the cage and dropped us deep into the earth. Twelve of us at a time standing belly to bum, shoulder to shoulder, pressed in much tighter than men would stand together if it weren’t for the money. The cage operator ushered the long line of miners into the cage. Each of us crossed the threshold, leaving behind personal space, family, daylight, safety. As different as we all were on the surface, in the cage we were all the same.
Same hardhats with the same little lamp on our foreheads with the same electrical cord snaking down to our belts where ten pounds of battery was the light of our life. As the steel door slid across with a slamming clang, we were all imprisoned in the same battle. Each shift we took new ground. Tearing iron ore out of the earth’s belly, sending it to the surface where the Company turned to it gold. In the alchemy of that process our lives were the by-product. Paycheques in exchange for a living; for dreams worth risking limb and youth for. The Cage man rang his long warning bell and pushed the lever that released the brake holding the elevator cable. We left behind those lives and dreams.
When the cage drops we’re all at the end of the same steel cable. That steel cable is our umbilical cord as we drop into Mother Earth’s womb. The Company’s no Mother. This is no elevator taking us gently to our floors of work – we drop free fall – stomachs still full of breakfast sucked up into chests, daylight snatched away, we all become suddenly lighter on our feet – somehow appropriate – we’re as close together as queers on a dance floor.
Of course we were scared shitless at first. Five university kids looking to mine the tunnels for danger and come up twelve weeks later with enough cash to cover tuition and rent for another year. We were there to cover summer holidays for the regular crews. After a long winter in Snow Lake, the few weeks of warm weather and sunshine kept the men sane and their wives content.
Snow Lake was the end of the road. There was no more road going any further north into Manitoba. You had to travel a long ways to get there. It wasn’t a place you’d just wander to – like ending up in Vancouver or Halifax. No, if you were there – you were there with a reason. And your reason wasn’t the fat paycheck waiting for you at week’s end. Your reason was what you’d left at home. There was a farm’s debts to cover. Hospital bills to pay. There was a house full of kids waiting in Portugal or Newfoundland for their chance in the land of malls. Most of the men were there on their way to somewhere else. Only a few hundred had made this place their home. Their trailers had porches with swings and flower beds – evidence of women and children. Women were rare and single women over the age of 15 were non-existent.
The old timers were slugging it out in hopes of a pension that would keep their wives going long after their husbands’ lungs and livers gave out. The middle aged guys would try not to think about their own dreams anymore. They listen instead to their teenagers’ dreams of escape. They see us university kids here to earn a ticket to take them somewhere else. They know it’s a pit stop for us. Some pat us on the back. Some try to trip us up. They have their fun telling us to watch out for the Stope Rats down below.
The cage drops each crew to our Drift for the day. With a sudden jerk like pull on the leash, the elevator stops at the level – 200, 400, 600, all the way to 2400 feet. From there the horizontal Drifts start zig zaggin down on a decline all the way down to 3600 feet. All the mined ore gets dropped to that bottom before being hauled up the processing Mill on the surface.
Have you ever seen an ant farm? You know – dirt between two panes of glass with ant tunnels through it? You see the vertical tunnels – they’re called Shafts. The horizontal tunnels are Drifts. The excavated areas where the ants live and the miners’ work are Stopes. The opening of every Shaft was called a Grizzly. Sometimes the Shaft would drop 20 or 60 feet from a Stope down to a Drift. On every Drift opened the main Grizzly where ore was dropped to the bottom. Lose your footing here and your end was – well – grizzly.
Big Al McAllister was our kindergarten teacher. He was a lifer. He was the boatman who took us across into Hades and showed us the dark secrets of underground mining. In his fifties, he was solid heft. You knew that he could easily lift any one of us off the ground. He’d been injured – not bad enough to stop mining – but bad enough to give him the job of schooling the green recruits. He had the bark of a drill sergeant, but he loved nothing more than to bite off and chew over a big story from his years of mining. He was a storybook character. We all loved him immediately and wanted to impress him with our miner’s hearts. After some safety instruction, he’d let loose with a ballad of dangers gone by, of close calls and tales of warning. Told us that all of our wages were paid just from the traces of gold smelted from these black rocks. And he told us about the closet full of fool’s gold they’d discovered in one young dreamer’s room.
The Drill Crews were the real Miners. They were the front line in the battle. The progress of their drills was what we were all there for. Unlike Drift mining where the drilling was done from wheeled, motorized tanks, Stope mining was all hand, legs and back work. Stope Miners were the Infantry. They packed in their heavy machine-gun like drills on their backs. Set the drills up on tripods. Hauled and hooked up the hydraulic hoses that powered them and opened fire on the rock face.
Every shift they’d drill their holes, fill them with dynamite, and run their electric detonation wires like spiders connecting threads to a web. Once every man was on the surface a single electric switch would be thrown detonating the charges in the dozens of holes all through the mine all at once.
Eight hours later the next shift would trudge through the settled dust and begin dragging the debris to the grizzly’s mouth. With winch, pulley and cable, small bulldozer like blades would be engineered, again with hydraulics and air power, to drag the rock across the Stope to drop down the hole. Grizzly fed, they’d set up for the day’s drilling.
Al told us tales of men whose lungs had filled with gas before they knew what’d happened. Their would-be rescuers had dropped one, two, three bodies down before an older hand figured it out. They’d struck open a fissure of gas - it was snatching the breath out of them.
Al told us of friends lost to loose rocks let go from the Back. The Back was the roof of every Drift or Stope. Loose was the rock that might let go at any moment crushing the life out of you like a mosquitoe slapped by God’s hand. He drilled into us how to watch for “loose” in a Stope that’d been blasted the shift before. How to test it with an iron bar and an ear tuned for the drum beat that told you there was a crack of air behind that rock.
Our classroom was a brightly lit oasis down a well lit shaft at 1600 level. It’d been a shop in the days when 1600 feet was the bottom of the mine. Now the mechanics worked another 1000 feet below us. When Al tired of teaching us the rules and dramatizing their rationale with his stories, he ‘d give us small assignments out in the dark hallways. First, we’d all go out together to clear rubble and lay rail down a shaft that would probably never be used. Then, when we’d proven to him that we wouldn’t flip out in the dark, or buckle under the workload, he’d start assigning us as helpers to the men who were making money for the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company.
My brother Pete was apprenticed to a train driver. They’d empty loads of rock from the Stope grizzly into their train of bucket-cars. Positioning a bucket car under this grizzly, they’d hit a lever and WHOOSH the rocks and boulders would tumble down. If you didn’t close the hatch in time, the bucket would overflow and you’d have to clean the spilled rock by hand. Every so often you’d throw the switch and nothing would happen. The rocks would be jammed up in the hole in their hurry to drop. With a steel bar in hand, you’d stick your head up into the hole and poke away until gravity once again took over. Hopefully you’d be back out of the way before the avalanche hit.
Then, they’d haul those buckets of rock down the main drift to the big mother grizzly. There might be three or four Stopes on a level but the train crew could only keep up with a couple at a time. The mouth of the Mother Grizzlies was about six feet across – further than you’d want to have to jump. The Shaft dropped hundreds of feet, maybe a thousand depending on where you were in the mine. Over beers in the town’s only bar, Pete would tell us tales of his workmate jumping around the edges of that hole like a warrior daring a dragon to swallow him hole. He was in too big a hurry to hook his belt line to the safety anchor. His nonchalance at dancing with death would raise the hair on the back of Pete’s neck. He’d shake his head telling us about it – getting it off his chest and drowning the fear with another beer.
From the bottom of the Mother Grizzly it’d be hauled again in massive dump trucks built low and long. I never worked this part of the mine – and it wasn’t part of Big Al’s orientation - so had to just imagine the huge elevator that pulled the rock up to the surface. I can’t think of that part of the mine without also thinking about the man who fell to his death there that summer. In mind’s eye I see his body lying on top of the rubble waiting to be lifted. With a slip of the foot he dropped. Never again did he see the surface where his hopes waited and withered.
On the surface the Mill did its crushing. The valuable minerals would be extracted from the pulverized rock leaving only a sandy residue of waste.
That sand was recycled. Mixed with water it was sent back down into the Mine through snake holes drilled in the rock. This slurry would be piped to the Stopes in 8 inch PVC plastic pipe. As the miners blasted away at the monster’s “back” the roof would tumble down and be hauled away.
The muddy contents of the pipe – appropriately named “Fill” would fill the Stopes back up, raising the cavern floor to where the miners’ drills could once again bore up into the Back. The water in the Fill would drain away into the bowels of the mine leaving a beach of black sand for the miners to stand on. The work of filling up the Stopes was giving to the “Fill crew”. That’s where Al assigned me.
I’ve often wondered why I got the beach detail and Pete got the death-defying dirty son-of-a-bitch job. From what I’ve seen so far, the job of a big brother is to break the hard ground. The younger brother watches and learns and gets to know the easier paths to take. Did Al know that? Pete was the alpha dog and he got the toughest jobs. All the summers we worked together he’d be given the shitty end of the stick and I’d sit back a bit and watch and learn. It wasn’t fair. I’d feel bad about it knowing Pete was risking his life while I sat on the beach watching fill flow from the pipe. It was the way it was.
There were three of us on the Fill crew. One guy was given a radio walkie-talkie that connected us with the Mill on the surface. At the start of the shift we’d radio for the Fill to start. If, after an appropriate time delay, the Fill was flowing then it was just a matter of positing the end of the 8 inch pipe so that the Stope filled up uniformly.
But, if the Fill didn’t flow, or if it stopped at any time during the shift, the guy with the radio had to call in to halt the flow. If that sand and water wasn’t flowing where it was supposed to be - it meant a pipe had burst. Somewhere in the mine a drift was filling up with sand. A drift full of sand meant trains got stopped - meaning Miners might get backed up with no where to put their loads of ore. The gravy train would come to a stop. And that couldn’t happen.
The other two guys on the Fill crew were sentries. They patrolled the miles of drifts on every level. In every drift there were the places where the Fill’s snake holes emerged. Steel pipe would provide safe passage through the drift down through the next 200 feet to the level below. On the level where the Fill was needed plastic pipe would direct the flow horizontally along the drift to a Stope. The Fill crew was constantly checking those pipes for weak spots or potential new leaks.
Preventing a burst pipe meant saving time and effort. If the guy in the Stope suddenly realized that the flow wasn’t happening, he had to get on the radio and stop it immediately. Every second counted. Sixty seconds of Fill flowing into and active Drift could take hours to clean up.
Once the Mill was alerted, the hunt began. Where was the leak? If it was on an active level where trains ran we’d hear about it pronto. If it was one of the dozen or so inactive levels, it could take us some time to hunt it down, repair it, dig out the mess, and get things flowing again.
When the Fill was flowing, the job was a breeze. Once in a while, the guy in the stope watch would have to re-position the pipe to “fill” up a different part of the cavity. But for most of the eight hour shift, it was like watching a huge bathtub fill up with water. It was a day at the beach – just no sun. I took big fat novels with me in my lunch bucket.
The sentry duty was just as enjoyable. We’d split up and cover different parts of the mine. Instead of bothering the Cage Operator to take us between levels, we’d find our way down through abandoned Stopes on wooden ladders. Every level was connected by these ladders once you found your way. You might step down a ladder for a hundred feet through a hole only big enough for a man - only to come down into a Stope so huge your headlamp got lost in the dark before hitting rock face.
I’ve climbed a hundred feet up into a Forest Ranger’s Tower. That height is terrifying. It’s not the same when you’re in the dark. If you can’t see how far you might fall, your imagination has less to go on. It’s like youth. When you haven’t fallen from heights before, you’re not afraid to climb. What you can’t see – can’t hurt you.
Roaming the Drifts, climbing the Stopes, we’d run into fellow Miners. More often than not they were happy for some diversion and they’d stop what they were doing to shoot the breeze. We had kind of a Social Convenor, Morale Booster role as we’d hear their beefs for the day or get a taste of what they were looking forward to that weekend. We’d hear the speculation about what Stope was opening up next and where the Drill Crews would next be assigned. A miserable Fill crew member could spread a lot of misery throughout a mine in a day.
The head of our Fill Crew was Ray. He’d been in the mine for a few years and knew the ropes. His way of shifting from a dead earnest telling of his world’s philosophy to a clowning good humour reminded me of Ross Hudman - my early teen friend and guide. He was a tall and skinny sewer rat of a guy well suited for work in this strange world. He was Ralph Norton of the Honeymooners. He was full of wisdom sayings like “you don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you.” He was curious about my life and would ask about University and what I hoped to get from it.
Ray didn’t talk a lot about himself. He seemed content to work away at this chosen trade – shared no big dreams with me - resigned maybe to a place in the world he’d found that suited him. He kept to himself. Didn’t hang with any crowd in the dorms or in the bar. Was friendly with everyone but no one’s friend. Solitary man. I guessed at a broken-heart story that sent him down away from the pain and into the hard-rock mines. He wanted nothing from anyone and took only what life offered today.
He was a different guy in the bar. Much cooler. Much more business like. Under the cover of dark, underground, there was an intimacy – a brotherhood - a willingness to talk more freely, to share ideas, away from watchful eyes. In the bar, you had to watch your back – always aware of the potential for public shame – a test coming your way in the form of an insult or fistfight - getting caught in the drama of someone else’s pain. In the mine you left that surface world behind. You could work out your thoughts on the day before. You could try out new thoughts or old philosophies on someone worth swapping ideas with.
One morning we walked into a Stope, returning to the place where we’d been sitting all day the day before -.to discover a rock the size of a house where we’d spent yesterday’s shift lounging in the sand. These were the pink elephants you tried not to think of as you went about your day’s work. It did kind of put life into a dark, stark, perspective. You never know when something gonna let loose and – it’s all over.
Everyone says that. People always say “you never know” but you also never really think about it. You go on with your day in the bright sunshine distracted by a thousand things to see and do. But in the dark, sitting there in a black Stope for hours, you can focus and such things as life and death.
Once it happened that the five of us students met up underground. We stopped and had a smoke and shot the breeze. We got to talking about what it felt like to be in a pocket of air with miles of rock surrounding you. Pete came up with a game. “Let’s all turn off our lanterns. We’ll see who’s the first to turn their light back on.”
I’ve never experienced dark like that. The absolute absence of light. In every dark room I’ve woken in – sometimes it’s taken a few seconds to get my bearings – but your eyes adjust and you can make out where you are. In that black hole the primeval fear of the grave that holds no promise of further life rose within us and our hands were quick to snap those lanterns back on as soon as the first of us had weakened.
While Pete slaved away feeding the grizzly, I sat back and feasted on the finest literature. That summer I devoured Dostoyevski’s “Brothers Karamazov” smorgasbord. I chewed over Melville’s long idle wanderings of muse in “Moby Dick”. I reread Conrad’s spicy “Heart of Darkness”. I tasted “War and Peace” but didn’t have an appetite for Tolstoy. On that black beach, I had hours to read slowly. On those black Stope walls I could project the stories and let them take my heart and imagination into the expanses of a starless sky.
In the art of those words. In the power of those ideas pictured and turned into tales. In the world of meaning they painted, I found a resonance, a note, a chord was struck deep within me. I knew that putting together words was why I‘d been given breath. I knew that what those guys did with those novels, I could do. What God had given the world through those men’s hearts and imaginations, God was picking me up like a pen to do again.
Those hours on the Fill crew provided me with a footing, lifted me up to the place where I would mine out of the earth my work and purpose. A song was written in me that resonated with everything I’d seen through my child’s eye. It was the word spoken to me in the womb. It was the tuning fork that every thing that life through at me struck against. In that black cave, this little light of mine, blazed bright.
But on the surface, in the sun, among men and lives lived hard, I was a boy. How could I dare to sing a song to such men? Their songs were wild and tough and truer than I what I could ever capture. What they’d felt, I hadn’t even touched. What they’d seen, I hadn’t even noticed. In the light of day, on the surface of things, my song dissipated into silly daydreams. The note that was struck remained deep underground. Stored away in a treasure chest. Visited only in dreams. Forgotten with the morning’s occupations.
On the surface we lived and ate and drank hard at it. We enjoyed the fantastic northern fishing and did several canoe treks into the wild lakes surrounding. But beer was our main surface occupation. In August there was a crisis. The truck drivers were on strike and the Hotel, the only source for a case of beer, declared no more off sales. That meant you could only get a beer in the Hotel bar. We declared it a conspiracy and a corruption of the monopoly that the Hotel held over our lives. We never considered quitting drinking.
By August the heavy drinking schedule and the heavy dreaming schedule down below began to play on my mind. The two worlds were becoming blurred. One day I found myself looking in the dorm closet for my shoes. To see into the dark corner, I tried pointing my head over and down – as if it had a lamp on it. That’s when I knew I was starting to lose it.
Around the same time I stepped into the dorm room to see Anne standing there waiting for me. In the blink of an eye she vanished. The young beauty who’d seduced me into her bed the year before had become a vision. My literary imaginings were surfacing and getting a little too real. I pushed them back down below where they belonged.
The drying up of the beer supply caused tensions in the town to run high. We heard tales of domestic squabbles rising. Of course the trailer town and the dorm were two separate worlds joined only underground – and in the bar. One of the biggest and wildest of the Miner’s decided that he had a hate on for one of us university kids. Newf, called after his homeland, was a known troublemaker and brawler. Derek had been assigned to him for a day and had somehow pissed the big Newf off. At the bar, Newf let it be known that he was gonna “get” Derek.
I don’t know if he was just toying with us or if he had really chosen Derek as the next outlet for his steaming brewpot. But we did get a few chuckles out of Derek’s gymnastic manouevers – avoiding running into the Newf at all costs. He quit going to the bar. Which meant that he quit drinking and peered around every corner before stepping out. Of course it would have been much less painful to just confront the bully and let him give him a pummeling. But I had sympathy for Derek’s fears. I joined in with the teasing of him, but I also carried with me the same fears of facing the bullies – letting my written words get pummeled in public.
The town dried up in more than one way. There was also very little rain that summer. Forest fires were raging through the northern Jack pine. Rumours of them coming our way were spreading through town just as fast. We didn’t care. We had nothing in town to care for. We were told that if the fire hit town we’d be recruited to fight it – with fire pay on top of our miner’s wages. Sounded good to us.
We were drinking at the Hotel one night and it was unusually empty. Just a few of the hard core alkies and us. At closing time we walked out onto the main drag – to find smoke in the streets. Car horns were blaring through the usually silent night air. We climbed the hill up to our dorm and could see that the lights were on in all of the trailers below. People were packing up and leaving town. We had no where to go and nothing to pack. One of us came up with the brilliant idea of climbing the town’s water tower to get a better look.
Up we went the five of us. From the tower, we watched as the ants below scurried to get their kids and wives and photo albums and TVs and stereos to safety. There was a never before seen traffic jam as a line formed to take the one road out of Snow Lake. From where we sat it was all pretty entertaining. As the night wore on, the smoke got thicker and we could see the night sky light up with the fire’s glow just over the next ridge. That extra pay was practically in our pockets.
We figured we better get back down to the dorm where they could find us for fire duty. We sat and waited and wondered why they weren’t showing up. In the wee hours of the next day, when daylight mixed with the smoke in the streets, we finally crashed and found our pillows.
The seven a.m. breakfast bell rang and we shuffled down to the mess hall. “What was happening?” we asked and the kitchen crew told us. About 4 a.m. the wind had shifted. The wind that had been blowing the fire into town was now blowing the flames back. Back into the forest it’d already run through - and so it was burning itself out. The crisis had passed.
Work in the mine was halted that day while the Miners brought their families and possessions back to the trailers untouched by disaster. We weren’t so greedy that we were sad that their homes hadn’t gone up in flames. But we did enjoy the holiday from a shift at the mine.
Such was our perspective on the world. Young and care free. No strings and no worries. Working just to pay our way through school our lives had an up in the air, ungrounded, way about them. Even though we dropped in the same cage every day shoulder to shoulder with those Miners, our lives on the surface were up in a tower. Maybe not an ivory tower, but a tower of youth and priviledge and bravado that kept a distance between us and the “real” world.
With each passing year I would climb another few rungs down that ladder. Down to earth where wife and family and photo albums waited to be filled. But that treasure chest hidden deep below the earth that I found that summer remained buried. Not forgotten. The memory of purpose found fed by words written by others on pages in the past. My own pages remained empty. And in me, there remained a vast empty Stope where the hard rock mining of God’s work waited.
Same hardhats with the same little lamp on our foreheads with the same electrical cord snaking down to our belts where ten pounds of battery was the light of our life. As the steel door slid across with a slamming clang, we were all imprisoned in the same battle. Each shift we took new ground. Tearing iron ore out of the earth’s belly, sending it to the surface where the Company turned to it gold. In the alchemy of that process our lives were the by-product. Paycheques in exchange for a living; for dreams worth risking limb and youth for. The Cage man rang his long warning bell and pushed the lever that released the brake holding the elevator cable. We left behind those lives and dreams.
When the cage drops we’re all at the end of the same steel cable. That steel cable is our umbilical cord as we drop into Mother Earth’s womb. The Company’s no Mother. This is no elevator taking us gently to our floors of work – we drop free fall – stomachs still full of breakfast sucked up into chests, daylight snatched away, we all become suddenly lighter on our feet – somehow appropriate – we’re as close together as queers on a dance floor.
Of course we were scared shitless at first. Five university kids looking to mine the tunnels for danger and come up twelve weeks later with enough cash to cover tuition and rent for another year. We were there to cover summer holidays for the regular crews. After a long winter in Snow Lake, the few weeks of warm weather and sunshine kept the men sane and their wives content.
Snow Lake was the end of the road. There was no more road going any further north into Manitoba. You had to travel a long ways to get there. It wasn’t a place you’d just wander to – like ending up in Vancouver or Halifax. No, if you were there – you were there with a reason. And your reason wasn’t the fat paycheck waiting for you at week’s end. Your reason was what you’d left at home. There was a farm’s debts to cover. Hospital bills to pay. There was a house full of kids waiting in Portugal or Newfoundland for their chance in the land of malls. Most of the men were there on their way to somewhere else. Only a few hundred had made this place their home. Their trailers had porches with swings and flower beds – evidence of women and children. Women were rare and single women over the age of 15 were non-existent.
The old timers were slugging it out in hopes of a pension that would keep their wives going long after their husbands’ lungs and livers gave out. The middle aged guys would try not to think about their own dreams anymore. They listen instead to their teenagers’ dreams of escape. They see us university kids here to earn a ticket to take them somewhere else. They know it’s a pit stop for us. Some pat us on the back. Some try to trip us up. They have their fun telling us to watch out for the Stope Rats down below.
The cage drops each crew to our Drift for the day. With a sudden jerk like pull on the leash, the elevator stops at the level – 200, 400, 600, all the way to 2400 feet. From there the horizontal Drifts start zig zaggin down on a decline all the way down to 3600 feet. All the mined ore gets dropped to that bottom before being hauled up the processing Mill on the surface.
Have you ever seen an ant farm? You know – dirt between two panes of glass with ant tunnels through it? You see the vertical tunnels – they’re called Shafts. The horizontal tunnels are Drifts. The excavated areas where the ants live and the miners’ work are Stopes. The opening of every Shaft was called a Grizzly. Sometimes the Shaft would drop 20 or 60 feet from a Stope down to a Drift. On every Drift opened the main Grizzly where ore was dropped to the bottom. Lose your footing here and your end was – well – grizzly.
Big Al McAllister was our kindergarten teacher. He was a lifer. He was the boatman who took us across into Hades and showed us the dark secrets of underground mining. In his fifties, he was solid heft. You knew that he could easily lift any one of us off the ground. He’d been injured – not bad enough to stop mining – but bad enough to give him the job of schooling the green recruits. He had the bark of a drill sergeant, but he loved nothing more than to bite off and chew over a big story from his years of mining. He was a storybook character. We all loved him immediately and wanted to impress him with our miner’s hearts. After some safety instruction, he’d let loose with a ballad of dangers gone by, of close calls and tales of warning. Told us that all of our wages were paid just from the traces of gold smelted from these black rocks. And he told us about the closet full of fool’s gold they’d discovered in one young dreamer’s room.
The Drill Crews were the real Miners. They were the front line in the battle. The progress of their drills was what we were all there for. Unlike Drift mining where the drilling was done from wheeled, motorized tanks, Stope mining was all hand, legs and back work. Stope Miners were the Infantry. They packed in their heavy machine-gun like drills on their backs. Set the drills up on tripods. Hauled and hooked up the hydraulic hoses that powered them and opened fire on the rock face.
Every shift they’d drill their holes, fill them with dynamite, and run their electric detonation wires like spiders connecting threads to a web. Once every man was on the surface a single electric switch would be thrown detonating the charges in the dozens of holes all through the mine all at once.
Eight hours later the next shift would trudge through the settled dust and begin dragging the debris to the grizzly’s mouth. With winch, pulley and cable, small bulldozer like blades would be engineered, again with hydraulics and air power, to drag the rock across the Stope to drop down the hole. Grizzly fed, they’d set up for the day’s drilling.
Al told us tales of men whose lungs had filled with gas before they knew what’d happened. Their would-be rescuers had dropped one, two, three bodies down before an older hand figured it out. They’d struck open a fissure of gas - it was snatching the breath out of them.
Al told us of friends lost to loose rocks let go from the Back. The Back was the roof of every Drift or Stope. Loose was the rock that might let go at any moment crushing the life out of you like a mosquitoe slapped by God’s hand. He drilled into us how to watch for “loose” in a Stope that’d been blasted the shift before. How to test it with an iron bar and an ear tuned for the drum beat that told you there was a crack of air behind that rock.
Our classroom was a brightly lit oasis down a well lit shaft at 1600 level. It’d been a shop in the days when 1600 feet was the bottom of the mine. Now the mechanics worked another 1000 feet below us. When Al tired of teaching us the rules and dramatizing their rationale with his stories, he ‘d give us small assignments out in the dark hallways. First, we’d all go out together to clear rubble and lay rail down a shaft that would probably never be used. Then, when we’d proven to him that we wouldn’t flip out in the dark, or buckle under the workload, he’d start assigning us as helpers to the men who were making money for the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company.
My brother Pete was apprenticed to a train driver. They’d empty loads of rock from the Stope grizzly into their train of bucket-cars. Positioning a bucket car under this grizzly, they’d hit a lever and WHOOSH the rocks and boulders would tumble down. If you didn’t close the hatch in time, the bucket would overflow and you’d have to clean the spilled rock by hand. Every so often you’d throw the switch and nothing would happen. The rocks would be jammed up in the hole in their hurry to drop. With a steel bar in hand, you’d stick your head up into the hole and poke away until gravity once again took over. Hopefully you’d be back out of the way before the avalanche hit.
Then, they’d haul those buckets of rock down the main drift to the big mother grizzly. There might be three or four Stopes on a level but the train crew could only keep up with a couple at a time. The mouth of the Mother Grizzlies was about six feet across – further than you’d want to have to jump. The Shaft dropped hundreds of feet, maybe a thousand depending on where you were in the mine. Over beers in the town’s only bar, Pete would tell us tales of his workmate jumping around the edges of that hole like a warrior daring a dragon to swallow him hole. He was in too big a hurry to hook his belt line to the safety anchor. His nonchalance at dancing with death would raise the hair on the back of Pete’s neck. He’d shake his head telling us about it – getting it off his chest and drowning the fear with another beer.
From the bottom of the Mother Grizzly it’d be hauled again in massive dump trucks built low and long. I never worked this part of the mine – and it wasn’t part of Big Al’s orientation - so had to just imagine the huge elevator that pulled the rock up to the surface. I can’t think of that part of the mine without also thinking about the man who fell to his death there that summer. In mind’s eye I see his body lying on top of the rubble waiting to be lifted. With a slip of the foot he dropped. Never again did he see the surface where his hopes waited and withered.
On the surface the Mill did its crushing. The valuable minerals would be extracted from the pulverized rock leaving only a sandy residue of waste.
That sand was recycled. Mixed with water it was sent back down into the Mine through snake holes drilled in the rock. This slurry would be piped to the Stopes in 8 inch PVC plastic pipe. As the miners blasted away at the monster’s “back” the roof would tumble down and be hauled away.
The muddy contents of the pipe – appropriately named “Fill” would fill the Stopes back up, raising the cavern floor to where the miners’ drills could once again bore up into the Back. The water in the Fill would drain away into the bowels of the mine leaving a beach of black sand for the miners to stand on. The work of filling up the Stopes was giving to the “Fill crew”. That’s where Al assigned me.
I’ve often wondered why I got the beach detail and Pete got the death-defying dirty son-of-a-bitch job. From what I’ve seen so far, the job of a big brother is to break the hard ground. The younger brother watches and learns and gets to know the easier paths to take. Did Al know that? Pete was the alpha dog and he got the toughest jobs. All the summers we worked together he’d be given the shitty end of the stick and I’d sit back a bit and watch and learn. It wasn’t fair. I’d feel bad about it knowing Pete was risking his life while I sat on the beach watching fill flow from the pipe. It was the way it was.
There were three of us on the Fill crew. One guy was given a radio walkie-talkie that connected us with the Mill on the surface. At the start of the shift we’d radio for the Fill to start. If, after an appropriate time delay, the Fill was flowing then it was just a matter of positing the end of the 8 inch pipe so that the Stope filled up uniformly.
But, if the Fill didn’t flow, or if it stopped at any time during the shift, the guy with the radio had to call in to halt the flow. If that sand and water wasn’t flowing where it was supposed to be - it meant a pipe had burst. Somewhere in the mine a drift was filling up with sand. A drift full of sand meant trains got stopped - meaning Miners might get backed up with no where to put their loads of ore. The gravy train would come to a stop. And that couldn’t happen.
The other two guys on the Fill crew were sentries. They patrolled the miles of drifts on every level. In every drift there were the places where the Fill’s snake holes emerged. Steel pipe would provide safe passage through the drift down through the next 200 feet to the level below. On the level where the Fill was needed plastic pipe would direct the flow horizontally along the drift to a Stope. The Fill crew was constantly checking those pipes for weak spots or potential new leaks.
Preventing a burst pipe meant saving time and effort. If the guy in the Stope suddenly realized that the flow wasn’t happening, he had to get on the radio and stop it immediately. Every second counted. Sixty seconds of Fill flowing into and active Drift could take hours to clean up.
Once the Mill was alerted, the hunt began. Where was the leak? If it was on an active level where trains ran we’d hear about it pronto. If it was one of the dozen or so inactive levels, it could take us some time to hunt it down, repair it, dig out the mess, and get things flowing again.
When the Fill was flowing, the job was a breeze. Once in a while, the guy in the stope watch would have to re-position the pipe to “fill” up a different part of the cavity. But for most of the eight hour shift, it was like watching a huge bathtub fill up with water. It was a day at the beach – just no sun. I took big fat novels with me in my lunch bucket.
The sentry duty was just as enjoyable. We’d split up and cover different parts of the mine. Instead of bothering the Cage Operator to take us between levels, we’d find our way down through abandoned Stopes on wooden ladders. Every level was connected by these ladders once you found your way. You might step down a ladder for a hundred feet through a hole only big enough for a man - only to come down into a Stope so huge your headlamp got lost in the dark before hitting rock face.
I’ve climbed a hundred feet up into a Forest Ranger’s Tower. That height is terrifying. It’s not the same when you’re in the dark. If you can’t see how far you might fall, your imagination has less to go on. It’s like youth. When you haven’t fallen from heights before, you’re not afraid to climb. What you can’t see – can’t hurt you.
Roaming the Drifts, climbing the Stopes, we’d run into fellow Miners. More often than not they were happy for some diversion and they’d stop what they were doing to shoot the breeze. We had kind of a Social Convenor, Morale Booster role as we’d hear their beefs for the day or get a taste of what they were looking forward to that weekend. We’d hear the speculation about what Stope was opening up next and where the Drill Crews would next be assigned. A miserable Fill crew member could spread a lot of misery throughout a mine in a day.
The head of our Fill Crew was Ray. He’d been in the mine for a few years and knew the ropes. His way of shifting from a dead earnest telling of his world’s philosophy to a clowning good humour reminded me of Ross Hudman - my early teen friend and guide. He was a tall and skinny sewer rat of a guy well suited for work in this strange world. He was Ralph Norton of the Honeymooners. He was full of wisdom sayings like “you don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you.” He was curious about my life and would ask about University and what I hoped to get from it.
Ray didn’t talk a lot about himself. He seemed content to work away at this chosen trade – shared no big dreams with me - resigned maybe to a place in the world he’d found that suited him. He kept to himself. Didn’t hang with any crowd in the dorms or in the bar. Was friendly with everyone but no one’s friend. Solitary man. I guessed at a broken-heart story that sent him down away from the pain and into the hard-rock mines. He wanted nothing from anyone and took only what life offered today.
He was a different guy in the bar. Much cooler. Much more business like. Under the cover of dark, underground, there was an intimacy – a brotherhood - a willingness to talk more freely, to share ideas, away from watchful eyes. In the bar, you had to watch your back – always aware of the potential for public shame – a test coming your way in the form of an insult or fistfight - getting caught in the drama of someone else’s pain. In the mine you left that surface world behind. You could work out your thoughts on the day before. You could try out new thoughts or old philosophies on someone worth swapping ideas with.
One morning we walked into a Stope, returning to the place where we’d been sitting all day the day before -.to discover a rock the size of a house where we’d spent yesterday’s shift lounging in the sand. These were the pink elephants you tried not to think of as you went about your day’s work. It did kind of put life into a dark, stark, perspective. You never know when something gonna let loose and – it’s all over.
Everyone says that. People always say “you never know” but you also never really think about it. You go on with your day in the bright sunshine distracted by a thousand things to see and do. But in the dark, sitting there in a black Stope for hours, you can focus and such things as life and death.
Once it happened that the five of us students met up underground. We stopped and had a smoke and shot the breeze. We got to talking about what it felt like to be in a pocket of air with miles of rock surrounding you. Pete came up with a game. “Let’s all turn off our lanterns. We’ll see who’s the first to turn their light back on.”
I’ve never experienced dark like that. The absolute absence of light. In every dark room I’ve woken in – sometimes it’s taken a few seconds to get my bearings – but your eyes adjust and you can make out where you are. In that black hole the primeval fear of the grave that holds no promise of further life rose within us and our hands were quick to snap those lanterns back on as soon as the first of us had weakened.
While Pete slaved away feeding the grizzly, I sat back and feasted on the finest literature. That summer I devoured Dostoyevski’s “Brothers Karamazov” smorgasbord. I chewed over Melville’s long idle wanderings of muse in “Moby Dick”. I reread Conrad’s spicy “Heart of Darkness”. I tasted “War and Peace” but didn’t have an appetite for Tolstoy. On that black beach, I had hours to read slowly. On those black Stope walls I could project the stories and let them take my heart and imagination into the expanses of a starless sky.
In the art of those words. In the power of those ideas pictured and turned into tales. In the world of meaning they painted, I found a resonance, a note, a chord was struck deep within me. I knew that putting together words was why I‘d been given breath. I knew that what those guys did with those novels, I could do. What God had given the world through those men’s hearts and imaginations, God was picking me up like a pen to do again.
Those hours on the Fill crew provided me with a footing, lifted me up to the place where I would mine out of the earth my work and purpose. A song was written in me that resonated with everything I’d seen through my child’s eye. It was the word spoken to me in the womb. It was the tuning fork that every thing that life through at me struck against. In that black cave, this little light of mine, blazed bright.
But on the surface, in the sun, among men and lives lived hard, I was a boy. How could I dare to sing a song to such men? Their songs were wild and tough and truer than I what I could ever capture. What they’d felt, I hadn’t even touched. What they’d seen, I hadn’t even noticed. In the light of day, on the surface of things, my song dissipated into silly daydreams. The note that was struck remained deep underground. Stored away in a treasure chest. Visited only in dreams. Forgotten with the morning’s occupations.
On the surface we lived and ate and drank hard at it. We enjoyed the fantastic northern fishing and did several canoe treks into the wild lakes surrounding. But beer was our main surface occupation. In August there was a crisis. The truck drivers were on strike and the Hotel, the only source for a case of beer, declared no more off sales. That meant you could only get a beer in the Hotel bar. We declared it a conspiracy and a corruption of the monopoly that the Hotel held over our lives. We never considered quitting drinking.
By August the heavy drinking schedule and the heavy dreaming schedule down below began to play on my mind. The two worlds were becoming blurred. One day I found myself looking in the dorm closet for my shoes. To see into the dark corner, I tried pointing my head over and down – as if it had a lamp on it. That’s when I knew I was starting to lose it.
Around the same time I stepped into the dorm room to see Anne standing there waiting for me. In the blink of an eye she vanished. The young beauty who’d seduced me into her bed the year before had become a vision. My literary imaginings were surfacing and getting a little too real. I pushed them back down below where they belonged.
The drying up of the beer supply caused tensions in the town to run high. We heard tales of domestic squabbles rising. Of course the trailer town and the dorm were two separate worlds joined only underground – and in the bar. One of the biggest and wildest of the Miner’s decided that he had a hate on for one of us university kids. Newf, called after his homeland, was a known troublemaker and brawler. Derek had been assigned to him for a day and had somehow pissed the big Newf off. At the bar, Newf let it be known that he was gonna “get” Derek.
I don’t know if he was just toying with us or if he had really chosen Derek as the next outlet for his steaming brewpot. But we did get a few chuckles out of Derek’s gymnastic manouevers – avoiding running into the Newf at all costs. He quit going to the bar. Which meant that he quit drinking and peered around every corner before stepping out. Of course it would have been much less painful to just confront the bully and let him give him a pummeling. But I had sympathy for Derek’s fears. I joined in with the teasing of him, but I also carried with me the same fears of facing the bullies – letting my written words get pummeled in public.
The town dried up in more than one way. There was also very little rain that summer. Forest fires were raging through the northern Jack pine. Rumours of them coming our way were spreading through town just as fast. We didn’t care. We had nothing in town to care for. We were told that if the fire hit town we’d be recruited to fight it – with fire pay on top of our miner’s wages. Sounded good to us.
We were drinking at the Hotel one night and it was unusually empty. Just a few of the hard core alkies and us. At closing time we walked out onto the main drag – to find smoke in the streets. Car horns were blaring through the usually silent night air. We climbed the hill up to our dorm and could see that the lights were on in all of the trailers below. People were packing up and leaving town. We had no where to go and nothing to pack. One of us came up with the brilliant idea of climbing the town’s water tower to get a better look.
Up we went the five of us. From the tower, we watched as the ants below scurried to get their kids and wives and photo albums and TVs and stereos to safety. There was a never before seen traffic jam as a line formed to take the one road out of Snow Lake. From where we sat it was all pretty entertaining. As the night wore on, the smoke got thicker and we could see the night sky light up with the fire’s glow just over the next ridge. That extra pay was practically in our pockets.
We figured we better get back down to the dorm where they could find us for fire duty. We sat and waited and wondered why they weren’t showing up. In the wee hours of the next day, when daylight mixed with the smoke in the streets, we finally crashed and found our pillows.
The seven a.m. breakfast bell rang and we shuffled down to the mess hall. “What was happening?” we asked and the kitchen crew told us. About 4 a.m. the wind had shifted. The wind that had been blowing the fire into town was now blowing the flames back. Back into the forest it’d already run through - and so it was burning itself out. The crisis had passed.
Work in the mine was halted that day while the Miners brought their families and possessions back to the trailers untouched by disaster. We weren’t so greedy that we were sad that their homes hadn’t gone up in flames. But we did enjoy the holiday from a shift at the mine.
Such was our perspective on the world. Young and care free. No strings and no worries. Working just to pay our way through school our lives had an up in the air, ungrounded, way about them. Even though we dropped in the same cage every day shoulder to shoulder with those Miners, our lives on the surface were up in a tower. Maybe not an ivory tower, but a tower of youth and priviledge and bravado that kept a distance between us and the “real” world.
With each passing year I would climb another few rungs down that ladder. Down to earth where wife and family and photo albums waited to be filled. But that treasure chest hidden deep below the earth that I found that summer remained buried. Not forgotten. The memory of purpose found fed by words written by others on pages in the past. My own pages remained empty. And in me, there remained a vast empty Stope where the hard rock mining of God’s work waited.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
working and sinning
I took my first job when I was twelve. Not many of my peers had jobs at that age but my dad was raised by a farm boy and considered it his duty to make sure we were saddled with a strong work ethic early on. My older brother had been a carrier for the Toronto Star newspaper for several years. He’d amassed many prized possessions that he was now willing to sell me – for cash. My parents weren’t about to buy me these important consumer items – stereos, records, bicycles, basketballs…so I put the bit in my mouth and slung that bag over my shoulder and began the lifelong trudge for cash.
Not like Tyler Trap’s parents. He lived two doors down, was an only child, and got whatever he asked for. His dad had worked for Canadian Tire since high school. He’d always taken the stock options on his paycheque instead of Christmas bonuses. It meant that by forty, he was financially secure enough to retire to a career as a Postal Carrier. Working for Canada Post in those days was like retirement with four hours of daily exercise and a good paycheque. I dreaded going over to Tyler’s the day after Christmas. It took the shine off of my consumer high to see the loot his parents had laid out.
Tyler’s mom was a full time church lady. She had a big smile, big hair, big boobs and a big old car with batmobile fins from the fifties. She sang in the gospel choir at the Baptist church. I went along with Tyler once – only to find that I was a statistic in a recruitment campaign. The worship was fun and everyone was excited – especially about the prizes for the most new recruits. Not unlike bringing in new customers for the Toronto Star.
No, I was in the same boat as Ross Hudman. He lived across the street from Tyler. His parents were German immigrants and made my parents seem like spendthrifts. His older brother was a few years older than my big brother. Roman would soon quit school to start working the bar and nightclub scene. Ross had a younger sister like me too. So we’d sympathize over the latest cruel inequity our family’s had come up with to make us miserable as the three of us, Tyler, Ross and I, walked the mile to Fairmount Public school.
Ross got up in the dawn hours and delivered the Globe and Mail to our suburban Scarborough neighbours. I delivered the Star after school. Ours was a middle middle class street. A few streets to the east were the blue collar middle class homes and a few streets to the west were upper middle class homes. Roy’s route took him further west where mine took me further east. I had it better because the distance between homes decreased as you went east - and the tips increased. Ross’s reward for climbing to the big homes on the hill was a pat on the back and regular pay. I might get stiffed the odd week but at least I could cut across the lawns – no high fences and big hedges between homes on my route. Less to protect but more to share seemed to be the way of things in the cross section of life that was my world.
Ross was new to the neighbourhood. His parent’s thick German accents were the first non-anglo voices I’d heard. Tyler and I had been fast friends since my family moved in the summer before grade one. We were attached at the hip, liked all the same things, watched all the same TV shows and re-enacted them daily. Whether we were fighting off intergalactic Romulans in his basement wreckroom, or wrestling Tarzan’s white hunters in his backyard pool, the bad guys all had German accents – just like Ross parents.
The Hudman family moved in at the end of our Grade Five year. Ross wasn’t into pretend games. He introduced us to the art of playing practical jokes on neighbours – mostly just Nicky Nicky nine door – which was about how many times you could ring someone’s front door and run away before they came out in a rage to chase us. But Ross was definitely the third wheel in our trio.
But other things were changing in my world that year too. My body was becoming large. And not just tall. I was still the tallest kid in the class – even though I’d been “accelerated”. Me and six other kids had done grades 4 and 5 together. So, not only was my body accelerating me into a fat, goofy-looking, uncoordinated kid – but my brain had pushed me into a nerd status among the tough kids.
The tough kids shared common ground with the good boys in their love of sports. Sports had changed that year too. They were no longer games we played. They had acquired a competitive edge that meant if you sucked at sports you’d be cut from the team – cuts that went deeper than who won and lost. If you were a brain and good in sports, the bad guys left you alone. Without status on the field – I found I was a target – a big one.
The last day of grade five, out at the bicycle racks, the guys gathered to see who was in who’s class next year. It came down to who was on the class team that would help beat the other class’s team. Bruce and Steve, the guys who always did the playground team picking, were taking stock. When Bruce got to me he said “Amos you’re in our class? Well you suck at sports so you’re no help.”
He wasn’t being particularly cruel. Just stating the facts. I’d been assigned a seat on the bench marked “Loser”.
Getting fat that year was really bad timing. Not only had something changed about sports but over that summer the fairer sex had somehow transformed from pests to sex objects. We were all obsessed with breasts. And I don’t mean just the boys and girls of our class – girls with the purchase of bras and boys with the budding fruit they held. No, our whole world was titified. The sexual revolution was in full swing. Playboy mansion scenarios were becoming mythologized in the media as if it were Mount Olympus. Teenage beach movies filled our pubescent heads with the idea that “Life’s a Beach”. Our mothers even brought porn into our living rooms. Cosmo magazines were the next best thing to Playboys to a hyper-inquistive twelve year old – and beat the underwear section of the Eaton’s catalogue by a mile.
Tyler had always been really happy to see me return from the family cottage in September. But that summer, he’d spent the long Scarbro days hanging out with Ross Hudman. They’d developed a repertoire of inside jokes and had some fun teaching me their new games. It didn’t take long to discover that the object of the game was to ditch me.
My active imagination was now put to work with a new task – pretending that I didn’t care about being ditched. Pretending to laugh along as a wobbly third wheel. Pretending while learning to protect my dignity with a brave face. Tears wouldn’t do. Temper tantrums might get my parents sympathy when my brother would pull such tricks on me. But I was swimming with sharks now – I found that my friends had teeth and would tear me apart at the slightest taste of blood.
Tyler’s betrayal of our “best friends” relationship was a kick in the nuts. But what are you gonna do? As a kid your social choices are limited to your neighbourhood. You get along with whoever is within bicycling distance or go it alone. I chose to go it alone.
I pulled back into my own world. Like I’ve said – it was a well-developed world of books and scenarios of one adventure after another. It was a world full of excitement and risk. It was a world that tested our limits in life and death missions. It was a world I’d shared with Tyler. But now I shut that door and kept it to myself.
The door had been closing slowly – pushed shut as my peer group put away first their stuffed toys and then their GI Joes and finally their Hot Wheel cars. Imagination was longer “fun”. Fun was to be found within the rules of the playing field. Only girls and gays would spend time playing without rules. Rules defined how to keep score – who were the winners and losers – and that was how you “played”.
Probably my greatest liability in that game of life - that game we all must play – the sport of survival – is that I have always taken things very seriously. To me, at the heart of it all, GOD is watching and always measuring my capacity for passion. If I can’t be passionate about what I’m doing. If it doesn’t matter – really – if it isn’t about life and love and a sacred purpose that makes risks small and the blood pump – then it isn’t really worth my time.
If I played soccer or football or streethockey, GOD was watching. If I wasn’t playing a heroic part. If I was, in fact, a liability for the team. Then I was wasting my time. Might as well waste it by myself than waste it with friends who would sideline me.
If I talked with a girl, it was about whether we would spend the rest of our lives together. No - I wouldn’t actually talk with a girl about that – I wasn’t mentally ill. It was just that I was always watching my self through GOD’s eyes. And GOD was passionate and full of purpose and deadly serious – even if HE did enjoy silly kids’ Sunday school songs – it was really all about those slow trudging sacred straight-faced hymns.
My Mission Impossible – should I choose to accept it – was to go undercover. I would play along as best I could with whatever scenario life presented – public school, piano lessons, Sunday school, hanging out with friends, spending time with extended family. Only I would know that I was in fact pursuing a purpose worth risking my life over. Only I, me and GOD, would be able to measure the progress, the slow careful patient steps that would result, in the end, after sacrifice and suffering, in GOD’s justice and mercy.
Ross Hudman was Mephistopheles. The demon sent to tempt and test and train me. Little did he know. Little did I know. I was a double agent. While Ross dragged me down to the devil’s ground - out of the high and mighty clouds that a minister’s son lived in – GOD was preparing me to live in a world of deception and betrayal. I learned that my mission, my secret purpose, could be and would be pursued in any circumstance. The straight and narrow path of a good Baptist boy was not for me. My road would wind and curve and dip and peak and get mired and muddy. While many eyes might see it as wrong, GOD and I would keep the faith.
It was the paper route that eventually drew Ross and I together. Slowly Tyler came to take his turn as the third wheel in our trio. There were several factors. I had accelerated grades ahead of Tyler so that now Ross and I were going into grade 6 while Tyler was still in the 5th grade. It didn’t make a big difference but it mattered.
Tyler was good at sports. He joined in after school sports teams. I had my paper route to do instead. Ross was even worse at sports than me. I was fat and uncoordinated. He was skinny and equally uncoordinated. That was another factor that made a difference.
Sin was maybe the big divide that Tyler couldn’t cross. Ross had taken to smoking cigarettes. At first it was a big secret. One of those big secrets that he and Tyler shared that kept me on the outside. But for Ross, the best part of sinning was sharing it. He told me and swore me to secrecy. The parents couldn’t’ know.
Ross would smoke on his early morning paper route. At first he’d steal a smoke from his mother’s pack. It helped him to wake up in those early morning hours, he explained. Soon he was buying his own pack at the corner store. I remember the thrill of the adventure, Tyler, Ross and I going to the corner store to buy his first pack of smokes. We shared in the risk he was taking - to see if he the people who’d been selling us candy and pop and comic books for years would now enter into this conspiracy of silence between us and the adult world.
We hurried down to the woods of the ravine and watched Ross light up his first purchased cigarette. He got me to take a puff but Tyler wouldn’t touch it. He’d been warned about GOD’s wrath for sinners. The United Church GOD that I served wasn’t too worried about such trespasses. In the end it was theology that split up our trio.
Tyler couldn’t take GOD with him into sin and I could. Tyler’s world was divided into GOD’s world the THE world. I’d been taught that GOD is love. Love, of course, is to be found everywhere. I didn’t see sin as a deep pit, or high wall, that separated the saved and sinners. Maybe it was because I knew so many ministers and knew that it wasn’t the lack of sin that made them saints.
It was the kind of lesson I couldn’t put my finger for you - just something within the way my dad taught me, the way he talked about other people and treated people. I never saw sin as anything more than the clothes you chose to wear. Sin might define who you hang out with. But GOD could see us all naked in our birthday suits and couldn’t be fooled by behaviour. GOD was love and even smokers could love.
My parents were worried though. They asked me if Ross was smoking. I knew immediately that Tyler had told his mom and his mom had told my mom and now I was being put to the test. I told my parents that just because Ross was smoking didn’t mean that I was gonna start.
They were worried, just like Tyler’s mom, about the bad influence he might have on me. Tyler’s mom put a wedge between her son and Ross. But I asked my parents about whether they didn’t think that I could be a good influence on Ross, they were able to see things upside down. Ultimately, they trusted me. Even though they never knew whether I was on that secret mission from GOD or not – they trusted that I was.
In the years to come I gave them lots of reasons to suspect differently. I took a puff of pretty much whatever Ross offered me after that. While I never did take to smoking, I did get into pot and porn and rock and roll and bars and well, I never did get laid - but that’s another story.
The worst part about the paper route was also the best part. Both Ross and I hated going “collecting”. So, we’d go together to keep each other company and give each other courage. Knocking on doors and shaking people down for the week’s paper money could bring out all kinds of strange reactions in folks. Some were cold and stiff. Some were rude and would treat us like pests. Some were terrific. Some were just strange.
Roy would do imitations of each of them as we approached. He could nail the character of every and any customer and have me splitting my sides laughing by the time we got to the door. If it was my turn to collect he’d make little side comments while the customer dug in purses or pockets that would produce guffaws and strange, annoyed looks from the adults.
After collecting we’d buy pop and chips and head for Ross’ basement. Inside the lid of his parent’s old stereophonic cabinet Roy would put record after record on the turntable. My brother had Beatles and Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkle records. Roy’s brother was a few years older. He was into much heavier fare. I was introduce to the funk of Bad Company; the rage of Black Sabbath (I knew I shouldn’t be listening to such obviously satanic-driven art but it rang true with something in me). Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention broke taboos and Alice Cooper made a circus of it.
And Led Zeppelin. We knew their first album well – every song - and I remember getting excited by Roy’s anticipation as he played me their second offering. Roy’s enthusiasm drew me in. Before there were DJs, Roy was my own personal tour guide of rock and roll music. The hours I spent reading he spent listening. It was like he would pull out the best chapters and verses and delight in the sharing of them. We just sat and listened. It wasn’t background – it was a taste of the life waiting in our foregrounds.
Roy would offer comments and cues – “listen to this part – - - don’t you just love that?” And I did. The heavy rocking thunderous rolls of sound drew out my adolescent, hormone-raging angst. The sexual energy of the Lemon Song made us laugh and squeezed out of us our own sensuality. The driving sorrow of “Heartbreaker” made me love the Blues before I’d ever heard them. Jimmy Page’s peels of guitar made your guts soar – taking your anger and throwing it to the stars. Robert Plant’s vocals; his moans and cries and the way he put everything into every song was heroically inspiring. John Paul Jones was the invisible master adding the bass lines and synthesizer that held it all together. But it was the drumming. The drumming of John Bonham that pulled me in and makes me a lifelong fan. Led Zeppelin provided the beat that I walk to - to this day. This music – its variety and range unique and unduplicated by any others - is the Beethoven of our age.
Ramble On would seduce you into a gentle country rhythm that starts like a Crosby Stills and Nash song but bursts into heavy surges of metal only to take you back to a gentle rambling.
I’ve got to Ramble On
I’ve got to find the Queen of all my dreams
How years ago in days of old when magic filled the air…
Those basement jam sessions brought me, more than anything else – more than girls, more than pubic hair and deepening voice, more than parental or peer pressure – into adolescence. I found in the music the expression of the wide-ranging emotions, thoughts, fears, taboos, and guts that it would take to live life fully. I knew, or felt, in some uncanny way that this music was the safety net that I could always fall into when the tightrope-walking act I practiced every day failed to suspend me.
My closest friends have always been people who could turn me on to new music. Sometimes I find stuff I like on my own. But mostly I rely on the passions of others. When I find someone who has searched out and dug deep into an artist or a genre with passion, I love to hitch my wagon and get taken for a ride. Nothing yet however has replaced my first love – the tortuous courting and friendship of Ross Hudman who broke my hymen and opened up my soul to rock and roll.
Not like Tyler Trap’s parents. He lived two doors down, was an only child, and got whatever he asked for. His dad had worked for Canadian Tire since high school. He’d always taken the stock options on his paycheque instead of Christmas bonuses. It meant that by forty, he was financially secure enough to retire to a career as a Postal Carrier. Working for Canada Post in those days was like retirement with four hours of daily exercise and a good paycheque. I dreaded going over to Tyler’s the day after Christmas. It took the shine off of my consumer high to see the loot his parents had laid out.
Tyler’s mom was a full time church lady. She had a big smile, big hair, big boobs and a big old car with batmobile fins from the fifties. She sang in the gospel choir at the Baptist church. I went along with Tyler once – only to find that I was a statistic in a recruitment campaign. The worship was fun and everyone was excited – especially about the prizes for the most new recruits. Not unlike bringing in new customers for the Toronto Star.
No, I was in the same boat as Ross Hudman. He lived across the street from Tyler. His parents were German immigrants and made my parents seem like spendthrifts. His older brother was a few years older than my big brother. Roman would soon quit school to start working the bar and nightclub scene. Ross had a younger sister like me too. So we’d sympathize over the latest cruel inequity our family’s had come up with to make us miserable as the three of us, Tyler, Ross and I, walked the mile to Fairmount Public school.
Ross got up in the dawn hours and delivered the Globe and Mail to our suburban Scarborough neighbours. I delivered the Star after school. Ours was a middle middle class street. A few streets to the east were the blue collar middle class homes and a few streets to the west were upper middle class homes. Roy’s route took him further west where mine took me further east. I had it better because the distance between homes decreased as you went east - and the tips increased. Ross’s reward for climbing to the big homes on the hill was a pat on the back and regular pay. I might get stiffed the odd week but at least I could cut across the lawns – no high fences and big hedges between homes on my route. Less to protect but more to share seemed to be the way of things in the cross section of life that was my world.
Ross was new to the neighbourhood. His parent’s thick German accents were the first non-anglo voices I’d heard. Tyler and I had been fast friends since my family moved in the summer before grade one. We were attached at the hip, liked all the same things, watched all the same TV shows and re-enacted them daily. Whether we were fighting off intergalactic Romulans in his basement wreckroom, or wrestling Tarzan’s white hunters in his backyard pool, the bad guys all had German accents – just like Ross parents.
The Hudman family moved in at the end of our Grade Five year. Ross wasn’t into pretend games. He introduced us to the art of playing practical jokes on neighbours – mostly just Nicky Nicky nine door – which was about how many times you could ring someone’s front door and run away before they came out in a rage to chase us. But Ross was definitely the third wheel in our trio.
But other things were changing in my world that year too. My body was becoming large. And not just tall. I was still the tallest kid in the class – even though I’d been “accelerated”. Me and six other kids had done grades 4 and 5 together. So, not only was my body accelerating me into a fat, goofy-looking, uncoordinated kid – but my brain had pushed me into a nerd status among the tough kids.
The tough kids shared common ground with the good boys in their love of sports. Sports had changed that year too. They were no longer games we played. They had acquired a competitive edge that meant if you sucked at sports you’d be cut from the team – cuts that went deeper than who won and lost. If you were a brain and good in sports, the bad guys left you alone. Without status on the field – I found I was a target – a big one.
The last day of grade five, out at the bicycle racks, the guys gathered to see who was in who’s class next year. It came down to who was on the class team that would help beat the other class’s team. Bruce and Steve, the guys who always did the playground team picking, were taking stock. When Bruce got to me he said “Amos you’re in our class? Well you suck at sports so you’re no help.”
He wasn’t being particularly cruel. Just stating the facts. I’d been assigned a seat on the bench marked “Loser”.
Getting fat that year was really bad timing. Not only had something changed about sports but over that summer the fairer sex had somehow transformed from pests to sex objects. We were all obsessed with breasts. And I don’t mean just the boys and girls of our class – girls with the purchase of bras and boys with the budding fruit they held. No, our whole world was titified. The sexual revolution was in full swing. Playboy mansion scenarios were becoming mythologized in the media as if it were Mount Olympus. Teenage beach movies filled our pubescent heads with the idea that “Life’s a Beach”. Our mothers even brought porn into our living rooms. Cosmo magazines were the next best thing to Playboys to a hyper-inquistive twelve year old – and beat the underwear section of the Eaton’s catalogue by a mile.
Tyler had always been really happy to see me return from the family cottage in September. But that summer, he’d spent the long Scarbro days hanging out with Ross Hudman. They’d developed a repertoire of inside jokes and had some fun teaching me their new games. It didn’t take long to discover that the object of the game was to ditch me.
My active imagination was now put to work with a new task – pretending that I didn’t care about being ditched. Pretending to laugh along as a wobbly third wheel. Pretending while learning to protect my dignity with a brave face. Tears wouldn’t do. Temper tantrums might get my parents sympathy when my brother would pull such tricks on me. But I was swimming with sharks now – I found that my friends had teeth and would tear me apart at the slightest taste of blood.
Tyler’s betrayal of our “best friends” relationship was a kick in the nuts. But what are you gonna do? As a kid your social choices are limited to your neighbourhood. You get along with whoever is within bicycling distance or go it alone. I chose to go it alone.
I pulled back into my own world. Like I’ve said – it was a well-developed world of books and scenarios of one adventure after another. It was a world full of excitement and risk. It was a world that tested our limits in life and death missions. It was a world I’d shared with Tyler. But now I shut that door and kept it to myself.
The door had been closing slowly – pushed shut as my peer group put away first their stuffed toys and then their GI Joes and finally their Hot Wheel cars. Imagination was longer “fun”. Fun was to be found within the rules of the playing field. Only girls and gays would spend time playing without rules. Rules defined how to keep score – who were the winners and losers – and that was how you “played”.
Probably my greatest liability in that game of life - that game we all must play – the sport of survival – is that I have always taken things very seriously. To me, at the heart of it all, GOD is watching and always measuring my capacity for passion. If I can’t be passionate about what I’m doing. If it doesn’t matter – really – if it isn’t about life and love and a sacred purpose that makes risks small and the blood pump – then it isn’t really worth my time.
If I played soccer or football or streethockey, GOD was watching. If I wasn’t playing a heroic part. If I was, in fact, a liability for the team. Then I was wasting my time. Might as well waste it by myself than waste it with friends who would sideline me.
If I talked with a girl, it was about whether we would spend the rest of our lives together. No - I wouldn’t actually talk with a girl about that – I wasn’t mentally ill. It was just that I was always watching my self through GOD’s eyes. And GOD was passionate and full of purpose and deadly serious – even if HE did enjoy silly kids’ Sunday school songs – it was really all about those slow trudging sacred straight-faced hymns.
My Mission Impossible – should I choose to accept it – was to go undercover. I would play along as best I could with whatever scenario life presented – public school, piano lessons, Sunday school, hanging out with friends, spending time with extended family. Only I would know that I was in fact pursuing a purpose worth risking my life over. Only I, me and GOD, would be able to measure the progress, the slow careful patient steps that would result, in the end, after sacrifice and suffering, in GOD’s justice and mercy.
Ross Hudman was Mephistopheles. The demon sent to tempt and test and train me. Little did he know. Little did I know. I was a double agent. While Ross dragged me down to the devil’s ground - out of the high and mighty clouds that a minister’s son lived in – GOD was preparing me to live in a world of deception and betrayal. I learned that my mission, my secret purpose, could be and would be pursued in any circumstance. The straight and narrow path of a good Baptist boy was not for me. My road would wind and curve and dip and peak and get mired and muddy. While many eyes might see it as wrong, GOD and I would keep the faith.
It was the paper route that eventually drew Ross and I together. Slowly Tyler came to take his turn as the third wheel in our trio. There were several factors. I had accelerated grades ahead of Tyler so that now Ross and I were going into grade 6 while Tyler was still in the 5th grade. It didn’t make a big difference but it mattered.
Tyler was good at sports. He joined in after school sports teams. I had my paper route to do instead. Ross was even worse at sports than me. I was fat and uncoordinated. He was skinny and equally uncoordinated. That was another factor that made a difference.
Sin was maybe the big divide that Tyler couldn’t cross. Ross had taken to smoking cigarettes. At first it was a big secret. One of those big secrets that he and Tyler shared that kept me on the outside. But for Ross, the best part of sinning was sharing it. He told me and swore me to secrecy. The parents couldn’t’ know.
Ross would smoke on his early morning paper route. At first he’d steal a smoke from his mother’s pack. It helped him to wake up in those early morning hours, he explained. Soon he was buying his own pack at the corner store. I remember the thrill of the adventure, Tyler, Ross and I going to the corner store to buy his first pack of smokes. We shared in the risk he was taking - to see if he the people who’d been selling us candy and pop and comic books for years would now enter into this conspiracy of silence between us and the adult world.
We hurried down to the woods of the ravine and watched Ross light up his first purchased cigarette. He got me to take a puff but Tyler wouldn’t touch it. He’d been warned about GOD’s wrath for sinners. The United Church GOD that I served wasn’t too worried about such trespasses. In the end it was theology that split up our trio.
Tyler couldn’t take GOD with him into sin and I could. Tyler’s world was divided into GOD’s world the THE world. I’d been taught that GOD is love. Love, of course, is to be found everywhere. I didn’t see sin as a deep pit, or high wall, that separated the saved and sinners. Maybe it was because I knew so many ministers and knew that it wasn’t the lack of sin that made them saints.
It was the kind of lesson I couldn’t put my finger for you - just something within the way my dad taught me, the way he talked about other people and treated people. I never saw sin as anything more than the clothes you chose to wear. Sin might define who you hang out with. But GOD could see us all naked in our birthday suits and couldn’t be fooled by behaviour. GOD was love and even smokers could love.
My parents were worried though. They asked me if Ross was smoking. I knew immediately that Tyler had told his mom and his mom had told my mom and now I was being put to the test. I told my parents that just because Ross was smoking didn’t mean that I was gonna start.
They were worried, just like Tyler’s mom, about the bad influence he might have on me. Tyler’s mom put a wedge between her son and Ross. But I asked my parents about whether they didn’t think that I could be a good influence on Ross, they were able to see things upside down. Ultimately, they trusted me. Even though they never knew whether I was on that secret mission from GOD or not – they trusted that I was.
In the years to come I gave them lots of reasons to suspect differently. I took a puff of pretty much whatever Ross offered me after that. While I never did take to smoking, I did get into pot and porn and rock and roll and bars and well, I never did get laid - but that’s another story.
The worst part about the paper route was also the best part. Both Ross and I hated going “collecting”. So, we’d go together to keep each other company and give each other courage. Knocking on doors and shaking people down for the week’s paper money could bring out all kinds of strange reactions in folks. Some were cold and stiff. Some were rude and would treat us like pests. Some were terrific. Some were just strange.
Roy would do imitations of each of them as we approached. He could nail the character of every and any customer and have me splitting my sides laughing by the time we got to the door. If it was my turn to collect he’d make little side comments while the customer dug in purses or pockets that would produce guffaws and strange, annoyed looks from the adults.
After collecting we’d buy pop and chips and head for Ross’ basement. Inside the lid of his parent’s old stereophonic cabinet Roy would put record after record on the turntable. My brother had Beatles and Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkle records. Roy’s brother was a few years older. He was into much heavier fare. I was introduce to the funk of Bad Company; the rage of Black Sabbath (I knew I shouldn’t be listening to such obviously satanic-driven art but it rang true with something in me). Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention broke taboos and Alice Cooper made a circus of it.
And Led Zeppelin. We knew their first album well – every song - and I remember getting excited by Roy’s anticipation as he played me their second offering. Roy’s enthusiasm drew me in. Before there were DJs, Roy was my own personal tour guide of rock and roll music. The hours I spent reading he spent listening. It was like he would pull out the best chapters and verses and delight in the sharing of them. We just sat and listened. It wasn’t background – it was a taste of the life waiting in our foregrounds.
Roy would offer comments and cues – “listen to this part – - - don’t you just love that?” And I did. The heavy rocking thunderous rolls of sound drew out my adolescent, hormone-raging angst. The sexual energy of the Lemon Song made us laugh and squeezed out of us our own sensuality. The driving sorrow of “Heartbreaker” made me love the Blues before I’d ever heard them. Jimmy Page’s peels of guitar made your guts soar – taking your anger and throwing it to the stars. Robert Plant’s vocals; his moans and cries and the way he put everything into every song was heroically inspiring. John Paul Jones was the invisible master adding the bass lines and synthesizer that held it all together. But it was the drumming. The drumming of John Bonham that pulled me in and makes me a lifelong fan. Led Zeppelin provided the beat that I walk to - to this day. This music – its variety and range unique and unduplicated by any others - is the Beethoven of our age.
Ramble On would seduce you into a gentle country rhythm that starts like a Crosby Stills and Nash song but bursts into heavy surges of metal only to take you back to a gentle rambling.
I’ve got to Ramble On
I’ve got to find the Queen of all my dreams
How years ago in days of old when magic filled the air…
Those basement jam sessions brought me, more than anything else – more than girls, more than pubic hair and deepening voice, more than parental or peer pressure – into adolescence. I found in the music the expression of the wide-ranging emotions, thoughts, fears, taboos, and guts that it would take to live life fully. I knew, or felt, in some uncanny way that this music was the safety net that I could always fall into when the tightrope-walking act I practiced every day failed to suspend me.
My closest friends have always been people who could turn me on to new music. Sometimes I find stuff I like on my own. But mostly I rely on the passions of others. When I find someone who has searched out and dug deep into an artist or a genre with passion, I love to hitch my wagon and get taken for a ride. Nothing yet however has replaced my first love – the tortuous courting and friendship of Ross Hudman who broke my hymen and opened up my soul to rock and roll.
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