The Devil you say?

1Now Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wild. For forty wilderness days and nights he was tested by the Devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when the time was up he was hungry.
The Devil, playing on his hunger, gave the first test:
Luke 4 from “The Message”

Amos definitely didn’t feel good about the way things went. He felt really guilty about Helen having to move out of her own place. It wasn’t that they didn’t get along, or got entangled in a love thing. It was just the devil that made him do it. But we’re getting ahead of the story.

As a student of literature in university, Amos had come across many, many, references to Goethe’s classic story of “Faust”. Doctor Faust’s deal with the devil is rooted deep in the anglo-saxon cultural genetics. The idea of cashing in one’s soul for some short term rewards pops up in TV shows and songs and conversations continually. Marlowe retold the Faust story in 17th Century England, and American’s know the story as “The Devil and Daniel Webster. Of course, it’s a retelling of Adam and Eve’s deal with the devil. Neil Young’s “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” was the seventies version of the wartime “Live like there’s no tomorrow”.

Short term, self-destructive decisions, in exchange for the quick payoff, are the shadow side of North American culture. No matter how many times we see – in personal and political stories - how it was tears apart the earth, communities, and our families - and have plenty of angels on our shoulders to point it out - we can’t help picking the devil’s fruit and tasting it. To be human is to deal with the devil.

On the surface, Amos told himself, he was merely continuing his classical education. He found a modern translation of Goethe’s “Faust” –not Marlowe’s later retelling - at the Vancouver Public Library. Now that he had an address, he could get a loan card. He felt good about pursuing his own studies – just for the sake of it. It felt mature and manly like when he smoked stale tobacco in his tortoise shell pipe. But the way his blood pumped in his veins as he carried the text home revealed something more was going on - he was unraveling forbidden treasure. It felt like he was thirteen again, stealing home with his first Playboy magazine. He was playing with Promethean fire, unlocking Pandora’s box, daring to mess around in places where little boys get eaten by witches and only heroes survive with scars to show.

Up in the mountains tree planting that summer He’d worked his way through a good chunk of Nietchze’s attempts to push off God and pump up the human spirit’s potential to achieve god-like status through science and reason. The fact that Neitchze’s journey had ended up in a madhouse only made it more interesting and challenging. The attempt to reach the edges of the human psyche - without falling off the end of the world - seemed a worthy venture for a young romantic with no better plans.

Add to that cocktail, the month on his injured back with Jung and Castenada and Huxley and you might get a taste of the elixir he was concocting for a journey into soul and identity. In other words, he was spending way too much time inside his own head - and the heads of dead white men.

So Dr. Faust’s deal with the Devil – to sell his soul in exchange for a devil’s tour of ultimate earthy experience - was a logical next read for Amos. Faust conjures up the devil Mephistopheles and trades his soul to possess the forbidden knowledge waiting over morality’s high garden walls. His pursuit of truth – as a scientist - drives him to exchange an eternity in hell for a quick trip in the Garden – to taste all of the world’s enticing temptations. To live fully he frees himself – for now - from judgment’s second-guessing that sours the sweet fruit of lusts explored. As Amos ate up the poetry of Goethe’s story, he had to admit that his otherwise worthless English & Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts, University degree did allow him to wade through these dense texts. He was able to discover how hopeless Romantics like himself, in other ages, had told their stories.

He’d discovered a good place to settle in with a book. A diner on the corner of Broadway and Granville offered a large plate glass window view of the bridge downtown with the mountains behind. He could look up from his book, out from the vinyl benched booths, into the - more often than not - wet - Vancouver night and at the same time catch his own reflection - reflecting on his path forward. That was where Amos first met the Devil. The Devil was drunk and giving the mousey little waitress a hard time. He broke through Amos’ concentration - shouting at her across the restaurant with a surly demand for more coffee. That was the bait. The wily master snagged a glance of Amos’ disapproving glare like that was what he’d been fishin for all along – the self-righteous can’t resist scolding evil.

“What’re ya lookin at? Never seen a drunken Indian before?”
Spooked, not expecting to have his challenge confronted, Amos tried to play like it hadn’t happened. He quickly turned his head back down to the pages – ignoring the question. But he could feel the Devil’s glare searing into him – the hook was set. He was caught. “O Shit” he thought - still keeping his head down “here we go.” as the drunk pulled himself to his feet and reeled over to Amos’ booth. He stuck a large, wide, clenched fist between Amos’ nose and the novel and fiercely growled “What gives you the right not to talk to me?”

Up to this point in his life, Amos had avoided conflict by either using a distracting humour, by letting others fight his battles, or by simply running. For some reason that night those choices didn’t seem to be options – or maybe, just maybe, Amos was ready to try something else.

He slowly looked up from the book, doing his best to seem calm and cool. But with a closer look at his antagonist now, the cool turned suddenly hot. The drunken Indian’s chest was thick and square equipped with a pair of heavily muscled, tattooed arms. A shoulder length black mane framed a handsome, still-young, face set with a wide, thick-lipped, angry mouth. Dark eyes, under dark brows, pierced through the alcohol’s haze. It was a sure bet this hombre had been in more than a few street fights. Amos had always had the glass of a TV screen between him and any such action.

“If you wanna fight - let’s take it outside” he heard himself say looking straight into the Devil’s eyes. At the same time, in another part of his head, he was thinking “Amos - are you fucking crazy?” He knew, swallowing the second of silence that hung between him and the Devil’s glare, feeling the blood rush suddenly to his head, that if this Indian took him up on the suggestion, he’d get his clock cleaned. Even drunk, this guy was gonna do him some damage. A picture of himself getting pummeled on the street outside, while angels watched helplessly laughing, flashed through his mind.

To his surprise and relief, the devil withdrew his still clenched fist. His face softened just a bit. His shoulders set back from their hunch forward. With dignity he replied “No, I don’t want to fight. I just want to talk.” Thinking he was off the hook, not realizing he was just being played, Amos jumped at the offer. “S-S-Sit down then” he stuttered trying to reclaim the cool that had flown out the window beside him. The Indian took a seat on the bench across from him. The waitress brought him a fresh coffee and topped Amos’ up, giving him a knowing smirk - another fish in net. And that was the beginning of Amos’ association with the Scottish Indian, Danny Sadler. Over several cups of coffee they told their stories.

They were only halfway through that first cup of coffee when Amos realized who he was talking to. He had just conjured Danny up out of the pages of Faust to present himself, in the flesh, as the devil Mephistopheles. In Amos’ mind’s eye, the conversation at the formica table was mirrored in the plate glass; an ancient story was unfolding on another level, in a bizarre but equally real through-the-looking-glass world.

Danny scoffed at Amos’ descriptions of suburban home and book learning. He took the wind out of Amos’ attempts to be self-critical by quickly stealing away any doubt that there was any value at all in what Amos had to say for himself. He took up the part of Amos’ demons and told him what he already knew about his own life. How a sheltered, comfortable, secure life had done nothing to show him what life was really all about. Satan knows the heart as well as Jesus does. This was the chief of devils to whom Amos’ many familiar little household demons reported. The bargaining had begun. First Mephistopheles would discount the value of what Faust was bringing to the table.

Then the offer was put down. Danny’s story seemed to hold all the rich temptations that Amos had only read, or wondered, about. Danny held the cards that were missing from Amos’ deck. He’d Grown up in an Ottawa ghetto, dropping out of high-school still semi-illiterate. The three years Amos had spent studying literature, politics and philosphy, Danny had spent in prison. While Amos had been taught the lessons of living a good life, Danny had sold weapons swimming deep in the ruthless rivers of violence where sharks would always hunt the soft underbellies of “good” people. To be able to see beauty and meaning, and even purpose, in a life lived from these depths was to be able to take in all of life’s offerings and judge for one’s self beyond childish moralities of good and bad.

Amos’ fear of such deep waters was part of what compelled him – the way Niagara Falls draws you standing at its edge - over and down into the void. Danny’s life story was the dark underbelly of Amos’ privileged walk. To be an artist of any weight, Amos hungered to know the passions; to possess the intimate, dark, secrets of the paths Danny had traveled. And, on cue, just as Mephistopheles had offered Faust all he was missing, Danny dared Amos to try on his world and learn something about life through his eyes.

Danny explained he was on a quest to live clean and pure and taste the fullness of a purpose. He was trying to educate himself about art and literature and philosophy – not to achieve some degree or status or job but to know how great men had harnessed life’s passion and made a difference – helped others suffer the sweet pains and subtle joys of living life fully. He invited Amos along.

When they were ready to part, Danny pulled out a stack of cards held with a thick elastic band and handed one to Amos. They were glossy, head shot, colour photos of Danny in a bandana with a sexy grin. His name and number were scrawled on the back. They agreed to meet the next day.
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5For the second test he led him up and spread out all the kingdoms of the earth on display at once. 6Then the Devil said, “They’re yours in all their splendor to serve your pleasure. I’m in charge of them all and can turn them over to whomever I wish. 7Worship me and they’re yours, the whole works.”

Amos couldn’t resist. In the morning light, Danny’s calling card was obnoxious and conceited. To call that number was obviously just asking for trouble. Still, there was truth in the devil’s telling - that he knew what Amos could never know. What Amos did know, was that if he truly wanted to write as an artist, he’d have to use light and dark and more shades of colour in his portraits than he currently possessed. Danny was offering to add those missing shades of colour to his palette. There’d be a cost of course. That was part of the story. It just seemed too strange a coincidence that a devil would appear at just the right time in his story. The encounter had an unreal feel about it – like there was more going on than what was being said. Subtle clues, like the waitress’ knowing look, Danny’s wink with his offer, was that a whiff of sulphur? The book was off the shelf, it’s cover had opened to the first chapter he needed to live before it could be written. Ready or not, the next page was his to turn.

Of course, it turned out that Danny was a reader of tales also. He was a lover of literature, but unlike Amos, completely self taught. He showed up at the beach just below 2nd and Arbutus by the pool, where they’d agreed to meet, with a dictionary under his left bicep and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” in his left hand. A rolled umbrella served as a walking stick in his right. “Every time I come to a word I don’t know, I look it up” he explained. “Every time I read about another author or book, I write it down”. And that was his course of study.

Danny’d done time for possession and sale of illegal weapons back in Ontario. He was short on details about that life. He wanted to talk about where he was going. He’d been out here in Vancouver even longer trying to forge a new identity free from the broken chains that still hung from his wrists and ankles. He’d sing out as they strolled “I comb my hair in a different way - but end up lookin just the same”. His sense of his own absurdity was as endearing as his proud peacock routine was maddening.

They walked as they talked. Danny was dressed sharp. Sports jacket, dress shirt, jeans and black leather wingtip shoes to Amos jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. Danny would drop their conversation cold every time a single woman appeared. He’d turn and follow, or cross the street to tell her she was gorgeous or sexy or whatever and hand her one of his photo cards. Rejoining Amos he explained “I got a thousand of these made up. Even if one in a hundred gives me a call, I’ll be rolling in pussy”.

It was the way Danny talked about, and treated, women that would sour their times together. They were either queens or cunts and nothing in between. While Amos didn’t put his women on a pedestal, he set them apart in a holy seclusion from the world of men. He couldn’t stand to have them profaned. Or maybe Danny’s abuse triggered his own undeclared hatred of women’s harsh power over him. They would argue passionately about it until they were both enraged. Of course there’d also be large quantities of alcohol involved and they’d split up wherever they were. Amos would go home and wouldn’t see Danny til sometime the next day - learning about the scuffle and accommodations provided by the boys in blue. But I’m getting ahead of the story again.

That first day together, before their first fights, they got to talking about music. Did Amos know this band and did Amos know that singer and Danny announced that Amos’ first lesson had to be in music. Amos was amused that this strange character had apparently taken him on as a student – he didn’t remember signing up. On the way to Danny’s rooming house on the East Side, Amos shelled out for a bottle of Johnny Walker Red (his idea of a sophisticated drink). The lads said a polite hello to Danny’s German landlady on their way up to the second floor room. Amos had never been in a rooming house and he felt like he was walking into a movie. On a table by the bed was a turntable sitting atop a silver amp. On the floor beside the table, a row of records stood between two speakers. The room was sparse of furniture otherwise. A shared toilet was down the hall.

Danny started with Amos’ first love – the Led Zeppelin of his seventies-suburban-basement youth. From there, Danny took him back into Rock n Roll history. Like a DJ, he’d spin a sampling of the groundbreaking Birds with Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck on guitar. From England to New York’s Velvet Underground - John Cale and the roots of punk. Then an obscure sampling from The Band – pre-Dylan. Danny would instruct his charge to listen intently to the drumming, now the bass, this guitar wail – the genius of the artistry so original and so sublime they could only be purchased with blood – no?. By the time they got to Danny’s most soul-ripping favourite, Rory Gallagher, the scotch was gone and the stereo was cranked up to window-rattling loud. They’d already ignored the landlady’s banging on the door, but when the record needle ground to a halt in the middle of a wailing riff - the silence suddenly dropped them from the heights of musical ecstacy into the darkening late afternoon room.

“The ol’ bitch cut the power. Let’s get out of here.” Danny was on his feet and out the door before Amos had a chance to stagger to his feet. They stumbled down the stairs and out, past the screaming threats of the landlady, squinting, into the still bright afternoon sun.

“You have a car right?” Danny said. “We should go to Vancouver Island. I’ll introduce you to some people you need to meet.”
“Let’s go man!” said Faust to the deal. “Take me on your tour!”
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9For the third test the Devil took him to Jerusalem and put him on top of the Temple. He said, “If you are God’s Son, jump. 10It’s written, isn’t it, that ‘he has placed you in the care of angels to protect you; 11they will catch you; you won’t so much as stub your toe on a stone’?”

The next hour was a bit of a blur. Somehow they got into the Dodge Dart, got out of the city, and down to the ferry just in time to drive on and pass out. The second the car stopped, Danny crawled into the back seat. Amos slumped over across the front bench. A ferryman thumped on the car’s hood until Amos sat up and got told to turn off the car’s engine. At least Amos thought it was a ferryman. In fact, it was the angel who had gotten them that far without mishap.

It was night when they got to Victoria and Amos drove them up out of the city. Danny pointed out the sights and spots of his life in that city. He’d lived there for a time and was full of praise for the place. “Why don’t you still live here then?” Amos asked. “It’s a long story.” was all that Danny would say. They drove out of the city. Danny directed Amos to turn here and there until they came to a trailer home set in the woods along a quiet country lane. It was well past midnight and Amos wanted to just sleep in the car. But Danny insisted and knocked and walked through the door and into the trailer with Amos shadowing him. A large bearded man emerged from the back bedroom and at first didn’t seem to recognize Danny, seemed a little hostile about these midnight intruders. Amos was turning to leave when the guy growled “You know where the blankets are.” and turned back to his bed.
They crashed on the bench couches in their clothes.

Amos woke to the smell of coffee. There was a woman with long dark hair standing at the stove cracking eggs into a fry pan. “How do you like your eggs Danny?” she asked in a maternal way – with a mix of endearment and impatience – wisdom that knew the futility of scolding - only adding fuel to the fire - when boys are being boys. She made them breakfast while Danny and her man caught up on news.

Amos slipped outside to pee and try to blow off the worst of his morning farts. He found a small stream down a path and stuck his head in it. He sat back on his haunches and looked around and wondered where the wind that had brought him here was blowing from? If he was on the highway to hell what were these good hospitable people doing here along the way?

He ventured into their company and received a plate of eggs and toast and was passed thick country sausage and homemade raspberry jam and bits of cheese that all were too good to have come from off the island. He could feel his body giving thanks for it. Over cups of strong black coffee with thick rich cream Amos gathered that Danny and Bill had walked together for a time and in a way that had made them brothers. The story wasn’t sung but the fact that Bill and his beautiful wife Gloria couldn’t refuse Dan a bed, told Amos that Danny had shared something valuable with them. Whatever it was, Amos liked what he saw in the simple wealth they so generously shared with him.

They headed for Nanaimo and Danny’s friends’. Amos put his favourite road trip tape into the Fleshmobile’s deck and the adventure was on again. All the way Danny regaled Amos with assurances about how they were journeying to meet a truly spiritual man. Desmond was a true friend – unlike anyone Amos would ever have met in his limited shallow life. Desmond was the older brother of Danny’s love-of-his-life-ex-wife Helene and would greet them as brothers. Helene was the perfect woman. Artistic and wise and street smart and sexy and compassionate and pure. If Amos asked the wrong question, or tried out a joke about her, Danny would ignore it or slap it down quick. Amos had never met such a woman Danny assured him. She would be there at her brother’s home – and Amos would see.

They were more than a bit of a sad sight showing up in yesterday’s clothes, reeking still of yesterday’s alcohol, when they arrived on the doorstep of Desmond’s 5 yr. old daughter’s birthday party.

Amos tried to turn Danny around and get him to come back another day. But Desmond and his wife Sophie and their friends did indeed live up to Danny’s words. A gracious, magical, afternoon opened up to them sitting and chatting with the grown-ups on the front porch of their A-frame home while the children played in the forest’s clearing. Danny was surprisingly quiet. He would speak only to urge Amos and Desmond on into conversation about important things.

These people were practitioners of EST – a behavioural psychology movement that sought to heal and help. They told Amos of “The Hunger Project” that took them proselytizing into urban streets trying to convince people of the fact that there really is more than enough food to feed the world if only humans would cooperate and organize distribution channels.
They were earnest and sincere and interesting people. Amos could see how people in the street could be attracted by such people. They were in possession of a purpose. That purpose gave them an inner light and a confidence that was attractive to anyone who had none of those elusive things.

From bits of conversation over the afternoon, Amos slowly pieced together Danny’s story. These were the people who had tamed the wild beast when he first arrived from Ontario. They became family to him and with EST helped him to do battle with some of the personal demons that had followed him west. Desmond’s younger sister – Helene - was “away” that day. It was the only explanation of her absence given. She had fallen in love with Danny and they had a child; a daughter together. But something had gone wrong. There was something not told. A betrayal or some other broken link in the story had sent Danny out on his own again; banished from island life to begin yet again in Vancouver.

The afternoon was golden and as it turned from bright and sunny to a hazy finish, Amos had the feeling that these faerie creatures in this forest clearing would vanish – taking him with them – when the setting sun released the spell dropping behind the trees. Danny announced that their was not complete. They had to visit Denman and Hornby islands to complete a real taste of Island life. Their hosts, recognizing a quest in the making, urged the boys to carry on their journey. They departed with big slabs of homemade lasagna and cake pressed into Amos’ hands. His heart was as full as his hands. He switched the tape player off as they pulled away letting the afternoon’s song ring on a little longer in the silent appreciation held between them.

A mighty little car ferry took them out to Hornby Island. It seemed like the last refuge of hippies and artists mixed together with the money people. The rich and the creative co-existed in a symbiotic relationship. The artists needed the patrons and the rich need the “look” that the artists gave their groovy little island retreats. Hornby was a short hop across and they just made the last twilight ferry to Denman stars appearing on cue to guide them to the end of the road. Would they find the pot of gold at this rainbow’s end? They stopped into an idyllic English pub in a rustic village. They turned their wallets out and found that their first beer was also to be their last.

But the road had one more turn in it still. Just as they were standing to go, Danny got a slap on the back from a couple of big, middle-aged, Irish rugby type guy. He greeted him as a long lost brother. Turns out that Danny had worked as a labourer in Jack’s construction company. Over a fresh round of beers, a round that turned into two, then three, Amos learned that Danny was a brute for hard work. As the story went, Danny would be the first to show at the construction site and the last to leave. He’d work the day through feeding two skilled bricklayers with brick and block and mortar. Danny was the grease that kept the whole machine going – making money for buddy boy here.

They had a merry time with Jack and his pal Bill and Amos was beginning to hope that they’d give them a bed for the night when he discovered that that was just what was in mind. The boss’s friend followed him into the Men’s room, and standing at the urinal beside Amos, leaned over looking down where his hand was and declared “I’d sure like to give that lovely one a suck!”.

In his sheltered life so far, Amos’d never yet been made such an offer. With a raised eyebrow, Amos simply replied “Yeah? Well, I don’t think so pal.” put it away, zipped it up, and washed his hands of the offer without another word between them. Back at the table, Danny and Jack were into a heated debate about the Hunger Project. Amos sat and listened a bit. The boss was threatened by the idea that he might be responsible for somebody else’s hunger. He was eager to trash any idea that generosity might save the world. Danny was back at him “You can make a difference man. Open your heart. If you don’t open your heart and your clenched fists you’re going to die an ugly mean little man.” That really got Jack excited and he started railing against “do-gooders and bleading hearts and dreamers.”

Amos was disgusted by the cynicism. It was tarnishing the afternoon’s still golden memories. He leaned over and grabbed Dan’s shoulder and said so the other’s could hear. “Let’s go man. We’re wasting our time here.”

Dan stood straight up walked out the door with Amos scrambling to follow. He gave one quick look back at their startled angry looks from the departing boys to the waitress standing beside them with a pretty healthy tab to cover. Danny and Amos were laughing and hooting out to the car. They made a quick escape down the road to who knows where they were going. Amos was still indignant about the bathroom proposition but Danny just shrugged it off “Get used to it man.” Amos had yet to discover that being openly gay was as common as rain in Vancouver. This wasn’t frosty white Ontario. Out here, his sexuality was up for grabs – literally.

The road ended - being an island road - at an ocean beach and they climbed out of the car and threw themselves down on their backs in the sand just listening to the surf and exposing their hearts to the stars. Deep breaths of the warm gentle wind mixed with the beer in their bellies. Amos let go of the day - trusting the stars to keep watch over his bedeviled soul.

A kiss of the first rays of the rising sun brushed Amos’ eyelashes open. He looked over to where Danny lay to find only sand. Had he vanished; a figment of Amos’ overactive imagination; a spirit creature gone home? Amos sat up to see a naked Indian diving into the surf. Returning the “whoop” from the waves he stood and shed clothes as he jogged down and into the icy cold ocean waves – sobering up quick from the last two days of drunken dream.

Climbing back into the Fleshmobile, clothes dampened with seawater, the boys agreed they’d never felt better. Retracing the path back they spoke little of what’d gone between them. Their talk was of the mission ahead. They had good news to bring to the broken-hearted, freedom to share with the captives, manna for the hungry and songs for the sorry, lonely souls the city’s cup was brimming with.

They still had the few bucks they’d never spent on beer money the night before - enough for a cheap breakfast at a diner. They were overjoyed and relieved – laughing at their luck - that all the ferry tickets purchased were return trips. So it was in the company of a sacred laughing hoping spirit that they arrived back to Vancouver’s rain-drenched streets – glistening with sunlight breaking free of clouds to promise a new world begun.

Dropping Danny off at his rooming house they noticed a pile of junk out on the front porch. Upon closer inspection it proved to be Danny’s worldly possessions. It seemed his landlady had trouble recognizing the prophet in her midst and had put out a Room for Rent sign along with Danny’s stuff.

And so back in the basement apartment in Kitsilano, Danny poured on a devilish charm with Helen of Auckland that convinced even Amos that somehow things would all work out between their unholy trinity. Danny became the occupant of the third bedroom in the little apartment with the stairs going up and out into a grassy, shady, backyard off the alley where the Dodge Dart Fleshmobile patiently awaited the next mission...

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Honour Among Drunks

On the Road again
He’d chosen this path and wasn’t at all unhappy about it. He could have bought a plane ticket with the last of his tree-planting stash and made it back to Ontario in time for Law school. He’d spent the fall and winter of the previous year studying for the LSAT exams while driving cab in Toronto. With fair test results, he’d applied and been given a place on the Lawyer’s slow boat to success. It took a spring and a summer in the Rockies to convince himself what a bad idea Law school would be.

It was just too easy. And another four years of uninterrupted study was just too hard. Being a lawyer just seemed way too predictable, and when it came down to it – Amos considered himself too complicated for such a “normal” path. No, he was much happier memorizing street maps, and Vancouver Taxi cab driver regulations. It was a three day course and he was set loose on the road – fresh meat for the Diamond cab company.

He signed up for his first shift at midnight the same day they gave him his cabbie license. Nights on the beach were getting cooler and the Youth Hostel staff were getting tired of him stealing showers. So, he began scratching and scrounging out a living as a tourist behind the wheel of a Vancouver cab.

He could speak English fluently– which was better than about a third of the drivers – new Canadians driving cab nights, practicing English, working day jobs too trying to get a foothold on the slippery slope of the Canadian dream. For $50 a night and the cost of gas you could rent a car and flog your wheels on the streets. Maybe another third of the drivers were young like him and using the wheels as a way of paying the rent until the rest of their life began – acting, writing, studying, pimping, pushing drugs towards any number of dream-lives just over the horizon. The rest of the drivers were career men. They owned their own cars and cab license plates - worth as much as a house. They’d rent their cars out for the night shift to guys like Amos and put in long dayshift hours feeding coffee to, and sharing tips with, the company dispatchers.

There was also the odd middle-aged guy who’d been spit out of a regular job and was trying to keep all the ends of his life still meeting. Everyone knew though, that the longer he spent hours behind the wheel of a cab, the greater the stretch became. Those guys had the wild-eyed look of a drowning man and were just no fun to be around. A few women drove too. They were tough chicks – like they’d grown up in a family of brothers and enjoyed the status of being treated like they had balls.

Amos had his own secret dream. It was maybe more like one of those endless, repetitive nightmares - he was driving, hunting, driving around the city trying to find the address for – “Amos Brown: Author”. He told no one and only admitted it to himself every time his mind turned another phrase or his brain started composing narratives of say - his drive across the Lion’s Head bridge. He carried a note pad around in his jacket pocket to jot down choice inspirations. The words in his head sounded true. He was sure only a mind like his could conjure them up. But the words stayed in his head. They faded away every time he picked up his pen. His dream of being a writer always seemed so profound and real until he picked up his pen - and the dream slipped away like smoke.

He saw himself as unremarkable. He couldn’t see - in the broad glaring light of day - that he had anything new or worthwhile to say. His comments had been covered. His story was common. His observations were only as smart and cynical as the next young poet’s. He wanted to produce something wise and worthwhile. But he was green and hadn’t yet earned his say. In spite of these self-doubts, he saw himself as a heavyweight. He just didn’t want to step into the ring and take the punches - not until his own punches were ready to throw. So, the pages remained blank and he filled hours with quick cab conversations, books between customers, tokes and tunes, and - plans for his season of skiing in the Rockies.

You see, dreamer that he was, Amos had another dream he was pursuing. It was his high-school idea of a successful life. What could be better than the life of a Rocky Mountain ski bum? While being a Lawyer, or a Writer, was miles and miles and years away, in just a few months there’d be snow in the Rockies and Amos planned to be skiing. Not that he was any kind of great skier. Never much of any kind of athlete, skiing for him was closer to dancing and he could dance – sort of. He had just enough rhythm and agility to get down the hill to his own suburban white boy satisfaction. He skied with music in his head and loved it – no team to let down – no pressure to perform for a coach – just him and the hill testing his turns.

So, Amos put the pieces in place to make that teenage dream come true. He needed to know that the things he dreamed up in his head – that he could step into them outside of his head. Before he could write a story, he needed to live a story.

Next step, up at the University, he found an ad - someone named Helen was looking for a female student to share a basement apartment in Kitsilano. He called and must have sounded harmless enough - Helen invited him over for tea. In the kitchen, where you could just barely see sky through the window over the sink – between the top of the back alley’s hedges and the bottom of the first floor apartment’s deck - Helen and Amos worked out an arrangement. She was a third year biology student from New Zealand. She was quiet, and serious, pretty in an old black and white English movie kind of way. She had a good sense of humour. He liked that she wasn’t afraid of him and spunky enough to return his teases with a taunt of her own.

Helen thought Amos seemed pretty normal. He told her about his travels to New Zealand and wandering through the Pacific Islands. He told her about his university days studying poetry and philosophy and his trail out to B.C. where he’d ditched the idea of being of a lawyer and instead - just wanted to ski. She was a little bit charmed by his boyish sense of adventure and she was a little bit worried about the way he tested her with a party-animal story thrown in – watching her for reactions.

But he listened and paid attention to her in a way she hadn’t encountered among many Canadian boys. Amos asked her questions in a gentle kind of big brotherly way. Helen wondered what her folks back in Kiwi-land would think about her shacking up with a strange man. That thought was what sealed the deal. She heard herself agreeing to share the little basement flat with this water-eyed man.

Amos and Helen were both far from home and, for whatever other reasons, were here to cut their own paths beyond the reach of parental approval and protection. For Helen, pushing past her parent’s idea of a proper roommate was proof to herself that she really was her own person and not just a child waiting to grow into her mother’s image.

For Amos, Helen’s respectability offered some ballast to his small sailing craft being tossed about in the ocean’s big, deep, swells. He knew the ocean recognized no names and no credentials and tested every man the same. He wasn’t looking for a lover, or a party, just a place to roost and write and become whatever it was that he was becoming. He knew that winter storms were coming and that a safe harbour – one that would draw out the gentleman in him – just felt right.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Honour among Drunks
What did he have to lose? Amos tried to calculate the gamble in his head. In exchange for maybe 15 minutes of prime rush hour chances to catch some quick choice cab fares, he was going to follow up on a three week old drunken promise. It was a crazy long shot he concluded. When you’re driving cab, timing is everything. You don’t want to interrupt the flow if it’s happening and Amos had already had a good start to his day. First trip out, a radio call from his zone took him way out across the Lion’s Head bridge to North Vancouver. A nice $18 fare and two buck tip to start the day. So, why was he now considering wasting precious minutes on a lost cause?

Maybe it had something to do with the taste of fate in this coincidence. That first fare took him right to the same street, same spot he’d been just weeks before. He recognized the building across the street as the place he’d dropped those two drunks. Talk about a wild goose chase. He’d played out quite a little game with those characters trying to get his fare from them. It was pretty funny – now - looking back at it. At the time he hadn’t been too amused. They’d told him to come back. They’d sworn that if he came back – they’d give him his money. And now - not only did they waste his time three weeks ago - now Amos was going to waste time again standing there knocking on the door to apartment #112.

********************

I’d only bin out a week and was makin up for lost time. The pogey cheque they spring you with didn’t last 48 hours. A hundred dollar hooker, a bag of Johnny-pills, a few quarts of whiskey and I had me a comin-out cel-bration. I didn’t have no worries ‘bout spending the $600 they give ya on rent like you’re supposed to. My bud Frank had an apartment in North Van and he owed me. Yeah, he owed me for keepin my yap shut about that other guy the witness saw comin outa the house wit me.

If those damn people had shovelled their walk, I never would’ve felled on me ass with that TV in me arms. Who ever heard of snow in Vancouver in November? Just my fuckin luck. I don’t blame Frank for leavin me there. The alarms were goin like crazy, and a big fuckin German Shepherd was comin round the corner. That was the way we did things – if shit happened – and you had the toilet paper to get a clean break – you took it. That’s the way it goes. That’s the way it went down.

So now Frank owed me. He was puttin me up at his place til we could get some new jobs happenin. Share and share alike – like it or not. Just when my cash ran out, Frank’s pogey cheque arrived and it wasn’t long before we’d worked our way through that too. We spent the last of his cheque drinkin at our fav-rite waterin hole - the ol’ Queensway Hotel. Really, our fav-rite was the Dunsmuir but we’d bin barred from there since ’79 when that waiter got just a little too lippy for his own good.

So anyways, we go strollin out of the Queensway, into the daylight to catch the number 98 bus home, when Frank flags a cab. I’m thinkin –we got no money for that- but Frank’s already climbin in the back seat so who am I to question why?

The driver’s this young pup with curly long hair and beard. He’s the kind to show off his street smarts but you know that his mother still folds his fuckin underwear for him. So I get the jump on him with a little intimidating. Before I put me ass in the seat, I leans over into the front seat. I pins his right shoulder back hard with my right hand while my elbow’s pinning his arm down too. I stick me face into his and the kid pulls back as far as he can – which ain’t too far. I give im my best junk yard dog growl - “I’m the meanest son-of-a-bitch you’re ever gonna meet. I’m so mean – even my mother hates me.”

I could tell he was scared eh? His eyes went wide and for a second there I thought he was gonna cry. But, then he puts this grin on his face and he says to me, he says “Even your Mother?” He’s acting all kinda surprised - but pullin my leg like. And shit - he had me – I had to laugh.

I weren’t expectin this young pup to be pokin fun at me - and that mighta pissed me off but - I could tell he weren’t laughin at me – he was jes jokin wit me. What’re gonna do when yer bluff gets called? He was bettin on my good-natured side. Made me think of me dear old mom - ol’ Evelyn, that drunken bitch who‘d slapped me into this world. So I has to laugh and I says to him, I says “NO - not me mother. Sure she loves me – in her own way.”

When I’m that pissed y’know, I gets all tender-hearted like and sappy and this kid had hit me there where I weren’t expectin it. I could tell eh - the kid had heart. From any other college-smart-ass that remark mighta come across cocky-like and earned him a cuff. But this kid weren’t puttin me down – he was just gettin down wit me - and joinin in on our little party.

*************************

So Amos drove them all the way across the bridge to a run-down little apartment building that’d seen better days. All the way they’re telling Amos tall tales about a cop they’d nearly killed and a bank they’d nearly robbed and how much money they could make robbing houses in West Van where the insurance companies just buy the people newer stuff. These guys are a couple of jokers thought Amos. Eugene, the guy doing all the talking, had an oily Elvis slick three decades old. Frank didn’t have enough hair left for that and had had to settle for a greasy comb-over. They both wore button up patterned polyester shirts over beer guts and under hip length leather–like jackets. They were a real comedy team. Intent on impressing Amos with their gangster status and mostly just coming off like barking dogs who’d lost too many teeth to bite. They were probably dangerous enough in their day, Amos noted. And you still wouldn’t want to push them too far – no telling how deep a mean streak ran in guys like that – what was one more assault charge to them? But as pickled as they were today, it was just a matter of keeping them talking about how bad they were and they’d be as happy as a pair of puppy dogs with old shoes to gnaw on.

**********************

“So, when we gets back to Frank’s place with the kid, I’m honestly feelin pretty bad ‘bout telling this kid that we gots no dough. He was just a workin stiff and here we were stiffing him more. As Frank’s breakin the news to him, I gets an idea. I says “Hey bud, you just wait here and I’ll get some cash from the landlord for ya.”

Well, now the kid’s havin a laugh at me and I can’t blame him eh? How many times has he heard that one eh? So I says to him, I says “Come in wit us then – we’ll get you the cash.” Frank’s lookin at me sideways like, but we all pile out of the cab and in we go.”

The door to Pete’s apartment is never locked. As shitty a landlord as he is, ya gotta give him one thing - at least he’s got an open door policy. In we go shouting out his name, but he’s not around. Frank’s heading for the door but I head for the bedroom and the Cabby, well he’s following me step for step. Sure enough, Pete’s in bed so I gives him a shake and tell im we needs some money.

Well, ol’ Pete was a little less than hospiti-able about the whole thing. After he tells us to fuck off about six times, he gets his ass outa bed and staggers into the kitchen. The cabbie’s lookin at me like “what the fuck?” but I’m on Pete like a dirty shirt – I know he’s always got cash – he’s just tighter than a friggin Scotsman.

Pete gets to his kitchen and he’s in the fridge – it’s empty. He slams the fridge door, looks around, lifts up a quart of whiskey off the counter – it’s empty too. Then he heads out the door and down the hall -the three of us followin along like a bloody Labour Day parade. He goes straight down to #112 and uses his pass key and lets himself right into Frank’s apartment. Franks like “what the fuck?” but by the time we get in the door, Pete’s already got our forty-pounder of C.C. in his paw and he’s pourin himself a tumbler full.

By now, I can see that Pete’s not carin diddely bout payin off our cab fare. Frank’s gets a couple more glasses out and sits at the table with Pete pourin himself a cupful. So, what the hell eh? I takes a seat and pour out one for me and I turns to the kid and says “I’m sorry bud but you can see we ain’t got the cash. Ya wanna a drink?”

It was the least I could do – be a little hospiti-able - and this fuckin kid – y’know what he has the balls to do? He walks over to the table and grabs the bottle and tells us, he says “No, I’ll just take the rest of this and we’ll call it square.” Well, you never seen three old dogs jump faster. You don’t take no bone away from no hungry dog – never mind three of em. That young pup was crossin the line there. He had no idea what he was gettin in fer – whoa baby!.

He takes a coupla steps back towards the door but he smartens up and lets me take the jug back outa his hand - and he’s got this big grin on his face again like he was jes pullin our leg with that little stunt. But I can tell that he’s pretty pissed at us too - bout being jerked around. This kid’s surprisin me. He’s got some spunk. I like him and I tell him so. “Listen, you little fucker - you’re a good kid. You come back here at the end of the month and I’ll have your fare for ya.”

He gives me a look like “what kind of sucker do you take me for?” and that makes me say “Really, I swear on me mother’s grave. You come back at month’s end and I’ll have your cash fer ya. You come back – you’ll see.”

******************

So Amos knocks on the door. It’s the end of the month. It’s a busy time for cabbies. Folks who can’t afford cars, with pogey cheques to cash, are calling cabs. He waits thirty seconds. Then he gives the door a pound and waits some more. He’s just giving up and leaving when the door opens and there he is. Eugene’s in his underwear and looking like he’s just been washed in with the last tide. It’s five o’clock in the afternoon and he’s obviously sleeping off a drunk so Amos figures – “yup, I’ve wasted my time.”

But right away his drunken friend recognizes him and he says “Jes a minute, jest a minute” and disappears back into the apartment. Amos wonders what new wrinkle he’s gonna pull now but he’s already invested this much time in the mission. So, he gives ol buddy boy yet another precious minute and he comes right back. He’s got a crumpled up ball of toilet paper in his shaking hand and from inside it he pulls out a crumpled twenty dollar bill. He hands it to Amos and says “there you go kid.” and closes the door.

Amos stood there in the hallway looking at that crumpled twenty for an age and a half. He couldn’t believe this guy had actually come through with the cash. But - he had believed in him - just enough to get Amos away from his cab and up to his door – and here that belief had paid off - unbelievably.

Amos wondered what kind of resolve it took for that guy to put that cash away. The toilet paper ball was a stash that he’d hidden away from himself – and from the claims of his brother thieves - so he could keep his word to a cabbie he didn’t even know.

That was one of the best nights Amos ever had driving cab. It was like there was a Big Dispatcher in the sky just lining up fares for him - sidewalk flags that took him out to the suburbs where a few blocks away a customer had called and was waiting to take him right back downtown where bingo, he’d get another flag, then a call, then a flag, then an airport run - and so it flowed all night. He had a ball. The full moon was a coin in his pocket. Everyone was in a good mood and wanting to talk and have conversations that flowed with the music on the radio – gentle and jazzy, staccato and rocky, deep and classy – every time he changed the station the next passenger picked up on the vibe and added to it. When it flows it flows. Some days having faith is just so easy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Machu Picchu Shuffle

Amos remembered that only six months before, he’d walked a mountaintop trail in the Andes…


The cloud that they’d been walking through all afternoon lifted just in time to reveal the sun going down. His legs were rubbery weak. There was a great relief in his bones and his heart that they’d found a place to camp. And what a place. It’d seemed like a gift from the ancient Andean ancestors.

Discouraged and tired they’d started back down the trail on the other side of the peak. It was getting dark and there was no patch of level ground that wasn’t strewn with rocks and boulders. What else could they do except keep trudging down the Inca trail? It was the end of their second day of walking. The trail had taken them up over one peak, then deep down into a lush forested valley, and back up,up,up to a second peak and down and up now through rain and thick mist to this third mountain pass.

With every step his knees would wobble. The pain had passed into weakness but now, descending, a new set of leg muscles were being asked to perform. For the ten thousandth time he wondered what he’d been thinking when he’d agreed to this mountain trek. The only exercise he’d had in the past winter was walking from his cab to the front door of his next customer. He’d developed a belly; a counterweight for the pack on his back perhaps, but it was just more dead weight for his sorry long legs. Pushing a gas peddle requires very little muscle tone. Pushing two hundred pounds up a bloody mountain is a different story.

The guys he was with, James and Andy, were in good shape. James, a high school buddy from Scarbro, was a construction carpenter. His legs were trusty tools he used for long hours every day. They’d met Andy in Cuzco. He was an Engineer for Shell Oil working out of Burma. It was a desk job but he was the kind of guy who sought out physical activity over drinking or spectator sports. He was in Cuzco to do the Inca trail so James and Amos invited him to join them. His legs, watching them pumping up the path in front of him, looked like hydraulic powered cord and pistons under skin.

Amos soon realized that there was no way he could keep up with his mates. At their pace, he had to stop every 50 steps because his lungs just kept running out of air. The mountain air had been thin in Cuzco. James had read that the trail would take them up to 4,200 metres. It felt to Amos like he was trying to suck oxygen out of the air with a straw and it seemed to be a rarer and rarer commodity – the bottom of the glass - with every step they climbed. He could tell that James and Andy were getting frustrated by his more frequent and lengthier stops. They were impatient to discover the mysteries of this ancient path.

The train out of Cuzco had dropped them at the spot reserved for the young gringo tourists. Young European and North American and Australian backpackers traveled a well worn path from one cheap hotel to youth hostel to cheap food spots along what the locals called the Gringo Trail. What the guide book didn’t tell you, the other travelers would – passing tips to each other as they crossed paths. Thousands of them every year all looking for the same things.

You could take the train’s first class car right to the foot of Machu Picchu and a tourist bus would haul your ass up to the “lost city”. You’d stroll through the site, snap a bunch of photos, get your photo taken beside a llama, buy an alpaca sweater in the tourist shop, and get back to town in time for dinner. But on the gringo trail you rode second class with the locals and their chickens and baskets full of produce and penny candies and even pots of hot cocoa tea. How those women made it from one end of the jam-packed train car to the other pouring tea into bright coloured plastic cups was a mystery to Amos - let alone how they managed to keep that tea hot.

The porters had pitched their giant packs off the luggage car railside and they’d made their way down a steep slope to where a river raged churning white and muddy through a deep gorge cutting them off from the mountain trail before they’d even begun. Smiling campesinos waved them over to a small platform at the gorge’s edge. A heavy steel cable ran from one side across to the other. From the cable hung a homemade steel and wood basket with not really enough room for the three of them, their packs and a family of forest dwellers on their way home. They paid him his 500 peso fee – pennies to them - and left their courage behind as the little platform swung out over the gorge. His partner pulled them across with a rope tied to the basket - suspended from a single wheel riding that cable a hundred, or was it a thousand, feet over the surge.

The smiling little guy from the mountain side got pulled back across by his buddy and they disappeared up across the train tracks til tomorrow’s batch of gringos arrived. There was obviously no turning back now. We’d crossed over. Civilization was cut off behind us by that angry mud-white river. A wide clear stone path into the jungle beckoned us back into time. The family had already disappeared along it before the boys had even hoisted their packs. They were suddenly ten years old and ready for adventure.

The boyish fun took Amos a good way into the jungle. Even when the trail began switching back and forth up inclines, his enthusiasm was enough to keep him pushing to keep up. At times they even had to use their hands to pull them up over the next scrabble of rocks and roots. What kind of trail was this? Then a burro and a mother and two little kids trotted past them. That inspired another surge of energy.

But by mid afternoon, Amos was just running out of steam. He had to take longer and longer breaks to stoke up another head of energy to get him marching on. When the frustration became loud on his compadres faces – they’d said nothing – he ordered them to stop waiting for him. “You guys go ahead at your own speed. There’s only one trail up here. I’ll catch you at our first camp. Have dinner ready eh”

It took no convincing to set them free. They hadn’t traveled across the globe to go slow. James and Andy were eating it up and hungry for more. This was the trail that warrior messengers ran with urgent news of the Incan kingdom. This trail crossed the whole range of the Andean mountains from Chile and Bolivia through Peru almost to Ecuador. Armies marched it to conquer and control an expanding kingdom centuries before any European set foot on it. This piece of the trail would take them to the most sacred site of the Empire. Machu Picchu – where the high priests sacrificed the best and brightest young specimens of their tribes to the sun god – trading bright futures of one in exchange for a Sun that would shine on the fortunes of a whole kingdom. Off my friends sprang into the dark, bloody history of the Inca trail.

Amos discovered something that he’d missed by trying to keep up. He discovered his own pace. Instead of throwing his hiking boot out to the full extent of his long leg, he simply brought it up beside the other and let it drop just a foot ahead. It was slow. It was progress. It felt right. It freed his mind. Instead of having to focus on the push, push, push of physical effort, the short-stepped trudge freed his mind to explore his surroundings. He fell into a pace that allowed him to lift his gaze from the path to look around and see. Right away he started noticing amazing details about his jungle path that had been a blur before.

How thick the moss grew on fallen trees. How it hung like a beard from crisscrossing deadfalls suspended, hung up by the branches of other trees off the forest floor. He noticed the tears dripping from those beards. Why were they crying? Crying to see this suburban invader bringing the most dreadful disease yet to the wild. Crying to see yet another member of the consumer culture scourge that had already infected this wild sacred place and would – within the lifetime of a jungle tree – become the killing cancer of the last age of earth.

Amos didn’t just notice what was around him. He started to notice what was going on inside too. The trudge was telling him about who he was. The slow, steady stomp of long heavy legs suited him. He was no gazelle. He was no monkey. He was a lumbering bear. He was destined to be a wise old Galapagos turtle carrying the ages on his back – hard to crack and full of observations that only the slow traveler will gather.

The more he reflected on how this pace was working for who he was, the more he started enjoying himself. Soon the music came. His whole body started getting into the slow steady beat, beat, beat of the path. He was into it. Amos even came up with a name for this dance of his. He’d call it the Macchu Picchu Shuffle. It would take him wherever he needed to go.

Rounding a bend he came upon James and Andy taking a break. He shuffled up to them and kept going right on by. “Hey boys” he said with an easy smile “Make way - I’m coming through” and through he stepped like a cat hip to a tune that they couldn’t hear. They passed him before he rounded the next bend but for all their quick starts and stops, Amos never stopped again all afternoon. The Shuffle carried him right up over the first amazing mountain pass –where he stopped to inhale the panoramic view of mountain ranges in every direction – and then down, down, down to a well worn dirt campsite where the boys had a fire blazing and a pot cooking dinner.

It was a restless night. Jungle noises are unfamiliar distractions for suburban boys. Amos could sleep through traffic and sirens and the beeps, buzzes, and hums of electronic conveniences. But the sounds of the forest kept his imagination going with theories of what creatures each snap in the woods and each chirp or growl or cry might belong to – and how desperate they might be for a taste of American beef. He dozed on and off. The tarp kept the drizzle that arrived before dawn off his sleeping bag and quietened the forest. Its peaceful patter gave him an hour or more of solid rest before the jungle choir - a thousand voices strong - woke him his facing breaking into a wide happy grin matched on the faces of his fellow warriors. Sunlight had made it’s way down into the valley to find their campsite while the sun itself remained hidden somewhere behind the next mountain they had to climb.

A quick meal, bread and jam and some cocoa tea sent them off on their quest. It was at least a three day journey and they had a lot of ground to cover. There was a steady stream of trekkers and you wanted to keep your place in line. Amos didn’t mind being overtaken by a pair of other gringos every so often. He was having way too much fun with the Shuffle. He soaked in every change in the forest as the trail took him through dense underbrush to great stands of mature mossy jungle where even the air seemed green. Over trickling clear streams washing bright gravel pebbles down to their destinies, then, into wide quick rivers where ropes strung across allowed the trekkers to wade hip deep safely through.

His steady unstopping pace allowed him to catch his mates where they stopped for extended rests at such picturesque places and they snapped photos of each other crossing the river, risking their necks on slippery rocks for the big payoff – stories to tell. Tell soulmates, tell children, tell the guy on the bunk next to them in the Salvation Army Shelter. Who knew what lay ahead for them? Their young legs took them further on to find out.

By midafternoon they got up above the treeline to where the trail started leveling off. It still dipped and turned but the switchbacks straightened out and they were now moving across a set of mountaintop ridges. A fog had descended onto them before they could reach sunshine. They could only catch glimpses of the distant terrain. Looking down from the trail they could see dizzying drops to rivers winding through the valleys. But the peaks on the other sides were up in the same cloud that they were walking through.

With fewer things to see, Amos spent more time looking in. He had to pay attention to where his feet were going. At times the trail grew thin along steep mountain flanks. The path was reinforced and widened in those places with the ancient stonework of the Incans. The same interlocking, mortarless stonework as the great ruins around Cuzco was evident in these mountain roads. They remained in tact centuries later. The masons had knit their stonework into the hillsides to become part of the mountain’s fabric.

As he made slow progress across the ridges he strolled back through time. He visited childhood friends and remembered people he hadn’t thought of in years. He remembered with thanks those teachers who had influenced him by recognizing who he was, appreciating his gifts, and encouraging him to keep growing. He stumbled upon those who had angered and hurt him. Ignorant bastards who had misunderstood him and thwarted him with pesky disciplines or worse – ignored him. He kicked at memories of those he had let down. Who saw great things in him but he’d disappointed by steering away from their high hopes to stay safe and alone with his own version of himself.

Amos had always shied away from success. It never seemed attractive enough to be worth all the hard work - giving up on his freedom to read stories and watch movies and just play with his thoughts and imaginings. Those teachers found him bright and quick and curious in a way that set him apart from most of his peers. The older he grew the fewer playmates he could find who wanted to venture into make believe and adventure. Boys turned their adventures into sports where there was little drama for him. He wasn’t fast enough or coordinated enough to play the hero and was relegated to the role of supporting or chasing down the heroes. Girls games turned into gossiping circles and he didn’t have the guts to engage in those bloody little dramas. He wasn’t a girly boy but he wasn’t a boy’s boy either.

So he worked for his teachers but he lived for his time alone with his musings. He made those teachers proud at times but they were always disappointed in the end. “If only he would apply himself” the report cards read year after year. His parents loved him the way he was – but, but, but they always tried to coax and cajole and even threaten him into achievements. Amos just kept trudging along looking for something out there to match the power of what was inside.

Instinctively he knew that he didn’t want to be the big success in other’s eyes. Instead he coveted the role of the hidden unlikely hero. The shepherd boy that only Samuel can see as King. The stable hand who without thinking or trying pulls the sword from the stone in an emergency – called upon to serve in a moment of need. No, the high road was not for him. He watched and waited and played the game as best he could – without heart or hope of winning. He would remain a loafer and aloof and alone.

Lost in these revelries, as he remembered, he discovered new insights about the boy he thought he knew. From this height on a mountain in the future, he could see how the boy had shaped the man and how the man was pushing those same roots deeper into the soil of destiny.

He’d written his Law entry exams that past winter, studying in the cab during long waits for the customer’s call. He’d done okay on it. Good enough to get him into one of the less prestigious schools and he’d sent off his applications to the three he thought would take him in. He didn’t want to be a lawyer but he couldn’t think of a better way to get to where he thought he was going. Advisors had told him that law was a good platform from which he could work out a career. It would lift him up to a professional strategic height and from there he could map out a path.

Amos heard footsteps behind him and voices higher and more lilting than the mostly male backpackers who he’d met so far. He paused at a wide place in the path and a young man with two young women approached and stopped to say hello. Their accents were French and they exchanged the usual questions and answers. Where was he from? And them? How long have you been traveling? You? Any good finds along the way? What’s next? Isn’t this great? They were Swiss it turned out. Nothing memorable about the one pair but he knew he would always remember the sweet angelic face of their companion. Her smile was warm as sunlight and her eyes lit him up from deep inside. It was her!

Secretly he’d pined for a woman who could see in him what others missed. Someone who served the same mission with a passion that would ignite his own. His girlfriend from University had been his first real love. Joanne was funny and earthy and best of all – undemanding. She could drink like a fish and enjoyed getting high just as much, and as often, as Amos. He often thought of her more as a buddy who he slept with than as a lover. She was a great traveling buddy but could never go deep down into the heart of things with him. When he got morose and philosophical she would joke and poke at make fun of him til he came around. That was good for Amos. They complemented one another. But, to his shame, he was still always searching for the one who would ignite his passion and purpose.

But of course he was tongue-tied beyond the usual gringo small talk and let her slip past up the trail. She took his heart with him and Amos spent much of the rest of the afternoon pursuing her. The thought of catching another glance and smile kept him amused as the day wore on and the incline started getting steep again. The path was switching back and forth in tighter patterns but it was hard to make out how high into the cloud they climb might go. It was a grey soup. A drizzle of rain accompanied the fog and he caught up with James and Andy at a campsite. They’d stopped to pull rain ponchos from their packs. There were three different small groups of packers all pulling gear from their packs. They were pulling out tents and starting to pitch them.

“It’s getting late” noted James. He was their navigator. He had the map and was tracking their progress. “This is the only campsite marked and then there’s nothing for a long ways”.
There sure isn’t much room here” noted Amos.
We might run out of daylight before we make the next one.
Should we try to jam in here or should we go back?

What sacrilege to suggest going back. There didn’t look like enough room here for the packers that had already started pitching camp let alone three more guys. They would have to go on and they would deal with whatever they found. Amos hated leaving behind his Swiss sweetheart and his big chance at romance. She’d given him another warm smile as he managed to bump into her with some lame smalltalk. The guys were waiting now. Off they went.

Turns out all three of them had been smitten by her. “She’s mine” each one protested as if they were laying claim to a newly discovered land. They walked on. The going got only slower and wetter. The climb was steeper and steeper with each switchback and the turns started coming sooner and sooner. Amos’ legs were giving out. Even the shuffle was hard to keep up. The shuffle was all his companions could muster too and even they were starting to complain between heavy gasps for the next lungfull.

They reached the summit in a total fog. A wind only blew in more cloud and rain and they only knew they were at the top because in every direction they stepped the mountain sloped away. All that effort and no panoramic payoff. No place to camp. No way to see what lay ahead. Just a great cloud of unknowing.

With no other choice - they started down. Amos was truly fearful that his legs were going to give out on him. He tried rallying his courage by swearing and cursing out loud and his companions joined in with a good round of complaints to the gods or anyone else listening. In that haze it felt as if angels could be just a few steps away and they would never know it.

They would never know it - except for the magical appearance of the stone stairway. They almost missed it. James and Andy marched right past it and so did Amos but he’d caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye and stopped in his tracks. Was that his imagination? He backed up a few steps and there, cut into an almost vertical rock face was a set of stairs going up into heaven. “Hey guys! Stop! You gotta check this out!”.

He waited until the three of them were huddled together on the narrow track and he got to see their eyes open wide in amazement. They dropped their packs and Amos claimed rights to be the first up. It was almost a ladder but each step was deep enough for an excellent footing and there was no fear involved. His heart beat fast with the adrenaline of discovery.

Just twenty steps up he stepped out onto a leveled grassy spot the size of a modest suburban living room. James and Andy were at his heels and they stood and staggered open-mouthed around the site. It was backed by a six foot wall and surrounding the half-moon of ground was a thigh high handcrafted stone wall. They laughed and hooted and slapped each other on the back and Amos thanked those that had been listening after all. This place was not on the map. This place was a gift.

The adrenaline still pumping, they climbed back down to get their packs and James thought he heard the trickle of a stream. He scrambled down as far as they had climbed up and found a stream of fresh water. As they pulled out their tarps and pots for cooking over the small firepit, Amos produced a surprise bottle of scotch. “Boys, I didn’t tell ya before, but today is my birthday.
No way! the guys exclaimed.
Yup - no longer a boy. I’m twenty one today.

And then, as Amos poured a round of drinks into tin cups, the curtain lifted - as if the experience had been staged and timed. The three of them turned, and in a silent awe, watched the wind take the cloud away to reveal a long deep valley before and beneath them. The sun was setting behind a set of peaks at the far distant end of it. From this spot they could survey all that the valley contained.

“This is a sentry post. declared James their guide in all things Incan. From here the sentries could keep an eye on anything coming or going towards Machu Picchu. They just shook their lucky little heads, took a seat on the ancient wall, sipped at the single malt and laughed and chuckled at their fortune as the light slowly took away the magnificent mirage.

They cooked a simple meal over the campfire and told stories while the stars arrived bright and blanketing the sky. They were all so exhausted from the day’s march that soon they climbed into their bags for sleep. But in spite of his weariness, sleep eluded Amos. He lay on his back examining the stars. They became the people of his past. As he focused on each one, or on a group, individuals came to mind. Soon they were beyond numbering. His heart swelled with a sense of the wealth of his inheritance.

The love and attention he’d been paid by so many. Even the challenge and abuse he’d received he valued as part of what had both hurt and hardened him. And along with this great wealth that filled him, there was also a great obligation that surfaced and expanded out into the sky. His future was out there beyond him. His manhood was waiting to be traveled and, whatever it held, he knew that it would both surprise and impress all who had known him. Impress them not so much with he might do - as with how the Creator had used him for something special, unusual for a Scarbro boy - more precious than simply success.

It was more of a feeling than a thought and he lay there in awe of what was being presented. He lay there for a long, long time. It held him and slowly became part of him. A transformation was under way in his DNA. It was either the aliens who’d inscribed the Nazca plains, or the Incan gods who accepted the potent blood of youth in exchange for life spilled and distributed, or it was the ancestors transforming his ideas about the childhood Jesus he’d known - into something only to be discovered much further down the trail. Whatever it was – it was both very real and very unreal and he knew only that it had changed him.

The next morning the guys were still laughing at their luck. Amos said nothing to his companions about his sleepless night and tried to see in their faces if they saw anything different about him. But they hadn’t, or didn’t, or surely couldn’t put it into words if they had, and they packed up slowly reluctant to leave the magic of this high, strategic, stronghold. They’d another day’s walk ahead before they’d reach Machu Picchu.

Amos traversed that long valley’s trail still shuffling along but with a light heart that carried the load. Now it felt like he was carrying his future on his back instead of his past and his mind roamed ahead trying to imagine what role he might play in the world. He knew that whatever it was, he would be accompanied by the mystery and magic that had revealed those stairs in the rock.

That night they camped on another height. This one was on the map. It looked down upon the sacred Machu Picchu like they were looking down from the Toronto Dominion tower at Nathan Phillips’ square below. The next day they would explore the famous ruins and join with all the world travelers who could tick off that visit as a wonder accomplished. But the mountains held another wonder for them first.

That night around the campfire, as Amos turned away and stood to pee out over the cliff, he stretched his back in an arc and looked skyward. There were no stars in the sky. Only clouds. But as Amos moved to turn back to the fire, he noticed that something also moved in the sky. Intuitively he lifted his arm and saw a dark arm raised on the cloud before him. He laughed and quickly shared this new magic with his friends. They played puppet shows into the night – silly with the thought that here they were - projected larger than life in the sky above world famous Machu Picchu. It was both fun and strange. Holy unreal - and simply explained.

In the morning they came down from the mountains and walked through the maze of stone walls. Amazed at the magic craft of stone age people - the combining of human skill and awesome natural beauty together in this remote jungle sanctuary. Mixing with middle-aged American and Japanese tourists muddied the pure spring water experience they’d shared on their trek. Amos knew that the ruins they walked among were only a human, if ancient, expression of the mystery hidden up among the mountain clouds of unknowing.

---------------

Mountaintop grace

Mountaintop Grace

Amos wanted his life to be a story worth telling. That was about all he knew. And he was terrified of wasting his life doing something meaningless. So terrified that, rather than fail his own proud self image by pursuing the wrong path, he’d become stalled here at a dead end. At the end of the last public beach. At the end of the road west. At the end of his childhood.

Not a bad place to end up. He was in an idyllic rain forest, ocean side oasis, living off the fat of the land in a bubble of time that, like his youth, couldn’t last. The fall weather was coming. Even in Vancouver’s temperate climate it meant rain, rain, cold and colder rain. Urban camping was fine for the summer but he’d have to find four walls and a roof in that concrete city sometime soon.

Amos managed to cadge a shower every few days at the Jericho Beach Youth Hostel. He figured the staff were onto him – they knew he wasn’t checked in. But since he fit in with the young crowd traveling cheap, they looked the other way as he strolled casually by with soap and towel in a bag.

Urban camping wasn’t alot different from being homeless. He had a home of course. Back in his parent’s basement in Ontario there was a place for him. But he was here to find a way forward. To go back would be a defeat. This was something he had to do on his own. What that “thing” was seemed just beyond his reach – out there in the ocean somewhere. He was hoping it might wash in with the next tide.

Amos walked the beach. He read and read and read. Jung and Castenada and Neitsche. He cooked meals over a Coleman stove on a picnic table in the public park where he parked his Dodge Dart. At the Canadian Tire, he bought fiberglass and body putty and spent hours sanding down and repairing the rust holes in the body of the Fleshmobile. It was far from a professional job. It was more of ritual than he knew. He was patching up the holes in his heart. The salt on the slippery road of adolescence had eaten away at his defences. It needed working over – a new face. Working with his hands got his mind settled and focused and he started developing a plan for the new man.

He jotted a few things into a notebook but would doze off before he got anywhere into it. He wandered the downtown streets enjoying feeling both stranger and tourist - feeling like, as a Canadian, this was his city. He belonged here. Both strange and familiar. Familiar like the feel of the wheel in his hand taking corners at high speed. Strange like what was going on inside him – spinning out of control. It was a confusing mix of heroic aspirations and the brutal realities of his limitations. He dreamt of doorless concrete walls that shut him out.

A few weeks went by like this and things were getting thin. Amos was getting concerned about his quickly dwindling treeplanting stash of cash. He located the Provincial government’s Social Services office and sat patiently waiting most of a morning to talk to an intake officer. The middle aged woman had her hair pulled back so tight it looked like it was causing the pain in her face. She took in his story as if she’d heard it before. Amos was getting the impression that maybe he wasn’t the only lost soul on Vancouver’s doorstep.

Homeless, jobless, injured back, no place to go. He was looking for a welfare cheque to get himself a place to stay. She told him to get lost. Not a touch of motherhood in her. Wouldn’t even start a file on him – without an address he didn’t qualify as a resident.

Leaving with his tail between his legs, it was a blow to his balance. It felt like he’d lost his footing. Canada had rejected a favoured son. He’d put his pride away and held out his hand for some help. Getting it slapped down was harsh. He thought he had a place at the table. They pointed him to the dumpsters in the alley and told him to help himself.

Leaving that cold glass and steel office tower, he had a sense of why there were thousands of angry people protesting in the square outside the building. Something about cutbacks the new government had imposed. He listened to a speech or two. It wasn’t hard to connect with the anger. It felt like the vibe of a punk bar. Fun stuff - but his time for such theatrics was short. It would take him nowhere fast. He needed to find a footing before he could dance.

In that punch-drunk state, Amos almost called up Christine. He thought about trying to patch things together again – get back to familiar ground. Then he remembered that she’d be going back to college and getting into that circle of friends and he couldn’t stretch his imagination far enough to see himself in that circle.

Not that they’d be all that different from his circle of friends back in Scarbro. They were a little younger than him and still mostly passionate about enjoying life. They were living within the security of their family’s wealth. Homes with full fridges, cars to take them to the next party, cottage playgrounds to run away to when responsibilities got to feeling heavy. The difference between his suburban pals and these Vancouver rich kids was only that they had much more of the same. Their luxuries came with spending money and no need to work at crappy summer or afterschool jobs. Those rich kids would have to get jobs eventually. But they knew it was just a matter of stepping onto the next stone in their parent’s country club pond.

It wasn’t his family’s pond Amos was interested in. Working in a church seemed a worse fate than becoming a corporate hack. It was good work he knew, but he couldn’t get his head around being good himself. The effort involved in being a good person - that others would look up to – just didn’t feel like him.

So here he was facing the Pacific Ocean gathering courage to swim his way into the future. His guts told him he had to step out from under the shadow of the large trees in his family. The branches of his clergyman family – father, two uncles, older brother all hung over his head. The lack of daylight was stunting his growth. He’d grown tall fast reaching for those heights - for a place in the sun – achieving in the academic skills it takes to compete with those tall trees. But his trunk was still narrow.

Instead of growing slowly and steadily – developing the breadth and width of experience that would give him the weight he needed to pull off the art that was in him – he was top heavy. Full of knowledge and no wisdom - he was only just wise enough to know it. The fruit that was waiting to spring from within needed a good heavy trunk to deliver the juice up out of those deep roots. He was gonna step out into the sun. If it’s possible for trees to step. He was gonna feed on pure sunshine and brave the westerly winter storms unprotected and alone.

Lost my shape
trying to act casual
Can’t stop
I might end up in a hospital

Changing my shape
I feel like an accident
They’re back
to explain an experience

I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting

The feeling returns
whenever we close our eyes
lifting my head
looking around inside

The island of doubt
it’s like the taste of medicine
Working by hindsight
got the message from the oxygen

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them

I’m still waiting
I’m still waiting…

“Crosseyed and Painless” by Talking Heads
from the album “Stop Making Sense”










He was free. Or so he thought.

He was free. Free to do and be as he pleased. He’d dropped the heavy pack of expectations of family and friends on the shore at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Passing on a place in an Ontario law school, he’d cut the ties to a future designed to please and impress.

But Amos was finding all this freedom to be a troublesome friend. Free will is God’s greatest gift to us human kind. It’s also God’s greatest burden. As free and unentangled as Amos had worked to become, he still was haunted by devils and saints who kept after him with their bantering questions. Somewhere in his psyche was rooted the idea that his life was a gift. And from that root in his tree squabbling crows sat in the branches – trading questions and answers …
“how will you spend your days?”
“it’s a free gift – enjoy it to the fullest!”
“will you waste them?”
“it’s all yours – you can do whatever you want”
“who do you think you are?”
“you won’t know it ‘til you taste it – to experience is why we’re here”
“are you a leech or are you a lion?”
“don’t worry, be happy”
“unto whom much is given, much is also expected”

One great find in Amos’ life so far was that he’d discovered one place –maybe the only place – that he could truly feel like “me”. Deep in the midst of nature he could hear himself think. Wind, water, rocks, trees, sky - ocean islands, mountaintops, woods, rivers, lakeshores, meadows – took him away from the mirrors those saints and devils confused him with.

He saw mirrors in the eyes of everyone he met. Caring too much about what others thought of him weighed him down, tired him out, sapped the creative fruit juice right out of him.

So, scrambling up from behind his beached logside bed with the pre-dawn light only just crowning the mountains in the east, he threw his bed into the back of the Fleshmobile and headed for that light. He’d asked around a bit and was told about a mountain trail just up the Whistler highway a bit. Reportedly it offered a mountaintop lake and enough of a hike to keep him walking all day.


The parking lot was at the foot of a spectacular waterfall – a roadside picnic spot. The sun was shining. There was a cool breeze blowing. No humidity in the air. Amos couldn’t have ordered up a better day from a menu. Out of the car’s back seat, he pulled out his pack with a bit of food and water, sleeping bag and tarp, and found the trail entrance. A sign-board described what the hike was like but he walked right past it. That’s why he was here – to find out what the hike was like. He could read about it in the city.

The process of walking up a mountain for Amos was like taking a walk down into his soul. Climbing up from a boulder strewn meadow into a steep-banked forest, he was already thinking through the worries of today and getting into the memories of yesterday. People would pop up like visitors in a dream. People he hadn’t thought about in years. People he thought about all the time. In the conversations he’d have, hardly noticing the trail, new ideas would come up and old questions would get tossed around.

His attention would get momentarily pulled back by the stream he’s gotta cross or the view that greets him from a break in the trees at a turn in the path. Amos pauses and lets the beauty sink in a bit – the difference between waking-sight and inner-sight slowly melting away.

A good view always made Amos lonely. He knew it was natural to want to share something beautiful - but he also didn’t really mind being alone. Amos was a dreamer. Since childhood he’d loved to get lost in stories – especially stories of adventure. The hero must suffer many pitfalls and setbacks that test his resolve and push him to the edge of surrender. The quest makes it all worthwhile for he values it more than his life. A damsel, or a dame, is always involved, but the goal for the true hero is even greater than bagging a babe. The goal is peace and prosperity for all; the holy grail – a return to the Garden, Camelot, etcetera, etcetera.

To see himself as the hero of a story was to be awake for Amos. If he didn’t feel that he was a part of an emerging story, he’d get lost and confused. If a song couldn’t be written about his day – it was a day when he’d lost the trail. The greatest thing for Amos about driving a cab – he’d spent last winter driving in Toronto - was picking up the storylines of people’s lives. Some would spill them out to you in a blog of passion to tell you who they are. Others would make you guess –dropping hints with every word and laugh and sigh and expression captured in the rearview mirror.

Walking up that mountain, Amos was looking for a plot worthy of his own efforts. He was like an out-of-work actor killing time. And it was killing him to not know where or how he would play his part. He needed a part with drama and challenge and a good dose of the impossible all through it. The quest - that seemed to defeat so many valiant souls - was to live well.

To fail, was to fall into the fearful pit of becoming “normal”. Settling for a life of wife and job and kids and the accumulation of stuff that told you were a success seemed a ruse. It was the seduction of a witch with a head full of snakes that seemed so strangely desirous. But the hero knew that ruse would turn you to stone within a few short years. Amos was terrified of looking back from a future waking and discovering that he’d been seduced and his time stolen; quest sidetracked and forgotten. Only a mirror could defeat the witch – and he was afraid of mirrors.

Fear, as always, was the enemy that had him confused. Somehow, Amos instinctively knew, that walking up a mountain –just him and his fears – that he’d sweat out the answers he was looking for.

The sun had peaked and was already heading for Hawaii – giving up on him so soon. The path was getting steeper and the woods thinner. There were larger patches of sky appearing with each turn of the switchback trail. The turns were getting tighter and more often. Amos was feeling like the day would end with him no closer to thinking his problem through. How would he make his way? What profession? What path? How to begin? Back to Law School? On to Journalism? Just start writing his guts out? Butcher, baker, soldier, spy? It was weighing as heavily on his mind as the dinner in his pack. He was hungry and tired and the courage was draining out like a slow leak in his water bottle.

Each step was heavier and slower. His breathing was quicker and deeper and his heart was making itself known. Of course, these were all signs that the peak was just ahead. So he kept on. With each plodding step it felt like he was repeating the question over and over. “Which way to go? Which way to go? It got chopped into a mantra “Which – foot up - Way – foot down. Which – Way? Which – Way? …Which - … ”

Just before Amos reached the top - it was only a turn or two away, the hairs on his necked bristled . From behind, so close that he could hear the flap of wind beneath wings, an eagle swooped over.

“Whoa!” It stunned him – as if an angel – suddenly, surprisingly – had dropped in with an announcement. He was a rabbit instantly frozen as talons sunk and lifted. The power of something sacred pierced deep.

Stopped in his tracks. Breath lost with surprise. He waited for the other shoe to drop. But it was gone. No message. A mirage.

With a heavy breath in and a sigh out – he kept on. His step was just a bit lighter. There was an afterglow still. The air was thinner. The wind lifted.

Reaching a peak is always a holy moment. Going from the view of one side of a mountain – as spectacular as those views can be – to the view of all the valleys surrounding and the peaks beyond in every direction you turn – is to transform from a human’s to a bird’s-eye-view. Like an epiphany, suddenly you see what God sees – how God sees the world; the big-picture perspective, the long and the short of it. You see how small and limited your day to day view of the world can be – only when you get a glimpse of just how expansive the curve of this planet really is.

And on this peak, not only did Amos get a bird’s eye view – soaking it up like a sponge – but he also got to view a big beautifully awesome bird soaring in the winds that rose up off the cliffs. There it was – that eagle angel. His gaze followed it intently. His aching body left behind, Amos became only eyes and sighs.

It soared with wings outstretched. Without effort - held aloft by mountain winds. And then, with a simple dip of one wing, it turned and circled down in long wide arcs that pulled along his attention like a good story. Until, when it seemed like it was over, the bird found a current that lifted it up, up, up, up again.

Amos couldn’t look away. It was like the bird had snatched his soul in its talons and was stealing it away. It rose up higher than the setting sun. Up over the mountain peaks, he watched it climb - his head craning back and jaw slack with wonder. This time it dipped the other wingtip and, with a little more speed but still without effort, spun in an arc in the opposite direction. He followed its twisting path down, down, down, almost out of sight until – a new draft was discovered - and up lifted the great bird as if by a great hand - to begin the story all over again.

It repeated this game of wing and wind over and over and over. The sun dropped behind the horizon and Amos watched until the wings blurred past stars appearing. His soul was gone. Or, what he’d thought of as his soul. Amos realized now it was only an earthbound imposter. In it’s place there was a vast emptiness – deeper and wider than even his huge ego could contain.

Like a feather dropped at his feet, the angel had delivered its message. God had told Amos as clearly as if he’d read it in the Psalms. “You are as free as my eagle. Whatever direction you choose, I am already there; with you, before and behind you. Wherever you go, I will use whatever you offer.”

Amos had thought he was gaining freedom by ditching his past. Now, his future offered him a freedom that finally lifted the weight from his heart. The burden of choice that had made his own free will a troublesome friend was now a gift. The Maker had assured him that the choices he would make and the directions he would choose really mattered very little in God’s big picture. God would use every dip of the wing, every decision – good and bad - to create opportunities for life and love abundant. Instead of a troubling responsibility, his freedom was a creative opportunity to play. He’d found the path back to the Garden. Amos was on his way.

Before darkness set in, he followed the path down the other side of the peak. The trail led him around and up another rise and just beyond that was a clear grassy spot overlooking a small mountain lake. Bigger than a pond it rested in the midst of a ring of hills. It’s surface was calm. In the night’s dark it mirrored the galaxy’s shining stars. And those stars seemed closer than they ever had before.

Amos started a small campfire, cooked up some grub and boiled water for a brew of mint tea. He stretched out and gazed over the dim dark outline of the lake. With bites and sips, he chewed over the gifts of the day. Sleep began to sneak up on him. The dreamlike quality of that day was drifting towards the dreams that lived at the bottom of that mountain lake.

Whether he dreamed it or not, he wasn’t sure. A glow appeared just beyond the peaks across the lake. As he watched it, it slowly grew in size and intensity. Amos wasn’t sure at first, but the glow seemed to have a green hue to it. To his surprise and amazement, a giant full moon slowly rose from behind the hills to totally bathe Amos and the lake and the hills in its mirrored light. It was as green as grass. If the moon is made of cheese – it had gone moldy that night.

Mold, of course, is new life emerging from the decay of yesterday’s food. For Amos, it was a sign; the advent of an adventure. It peered down from the sky, and also looked up at him from the lake. It was like two great monster eyes were regarding him sideways – amused - wondering - what will this small hero do?


Standing at the crossroads,
trying to read the signs,
to tell me which way I should go to find the answer.
And all the time I know
- plant your love and let it grow

let it grow, let it grow
let it blossom, let it flow
in the sun, the rain, the snow
love is lovely, let it flow

Time is getting shorter
and there’s much for you to do
only ask and you will find what you are needing.
The rest is up to you
- plant your love and let it grow

let it grow, let it grow
let it blossom, let it flow
in the sun, the rain, the snow
love is lovely, so let it grow

Eric Clapton’s “Let it Grow”



Back in the city, the next day, Amos invested the last of his cash reserves in a course to become a Vancouver taxi driver. He bought a can of dark brown metallic house paint and a roller and just like the guy in “Black like Me” gave himself a new colour of flesh. As he slapped the paint on the Fleshmobile in the beach parking lot in the late afternoon sun. A car whizzed by with a kid hanging out the window who let out a WHOOP! It sounded like ridicule. It sounded like a war cry challenge. Amos dipped the roller into the paint and kept at his crazy transformation. There was no turning back now. He was going native.

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.