If you're going thru hell...

His August of house-sitting for a girlfriend’s rich, West Vancouver, parents had dwindled with that relationship. Christine was starting to feel sorry for him and that didn’t help the old self esteem much. He found it harder and harder to be “fun to be with”. Although, Amos mused, he never did perform well under pressure.

The last of his Worker’s Compensation claims paid for one last Physio treatment. He’d twisted his back pretty good throwing boxes of tree seedlings around on the tree-planting crew that spring. Painkillers had gotten him through the rest of the ten week planting season. In the mountains, living in tents, a crazy instant community had formed among the treeplanters. They shared the same food, weather, and work. The different social scenes they came from didn’t seem to matter up there.

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

Turns out the crew played just as hard as it worked. On the way to their third block, they came down out of the mountains like bees and swarmed the only pub in a little valley town. Avola had a gas station and a post office and not much else. Except – there was a great little picturesque log pub. Not fancy but far from a dive. It had a warm and inviting character, a good rockin sound track, and was almost empty on a Tuesday evening.
The crew knew each other pretty well by this time and were really letting loose and crazy. Ten days of pushing themselves to their physical limits required a response of pushing themselves to their alcoholic limits. The twenty of them managed to clean out the bar’s fridges and kegs, and were working on the booze when the owner showed up and cut them all off. It was in the fun and hilarity of that night that Christine and Amos had fallen together as a couple.
The thin mountain air; the stunning views from their hillside workplaces; the tough conditions and hard work, made Amos feel very alive, and very happy. He was not a great planter. The ground was a long way down and he lacked an athlete’s trained inner push. His natural inclination was to find a way around the pain and meet up with those who had a talent for suffering on the other side.
No, Amos had more of a talent for fun. He could make people laugh – not as a joke-teller or clown, but with timely little bits of wit thrown into a day that made things roll along; poking the fire to make it burn a little brighter. He wouldn’t often take the lead, but he would go along with anything, or anyone, for a ride and a laugh.

He was especially attracted to anyone who would laugh at his sense of fun and Christine’s laugh was strong and light. It gushed out of her clear and tumbling like a mountain stream. She found Amos fun to be with and he was more fun when she was with him.

It was on the first day of the third block that Amos wrenched his back. He was helping Bill throw boxes of seedlings into the back of the pick-up when he felt that familiar sharp twinge about a handspan above his tailbone. Amos had injured himself this way before. Two summers ago he’d done a number on his back swinging bags of concrete for a pool company. He limped through the rest of the day. Every bend to plant a tree was accentuated with a searing stab of pain in his left lower back.

The next day he went to town and picked up pain-killers and muscle-relaxants at the clinic. When, at the end of that plant, the pills had failed to free him from the pain, he and Bill agreed on a plan to get him through the rest of the short tree-planting season.

The crew’s productivity was good but the government inspector was finding a high percentage of rejects – seedlings with exposed roots, roots not planted straight down deep enough but with a bend, trees planted too close together. Bill would keep Amos on the crew as a tree-checker doing quality control for fifty bucks a day. Amos realized that he wasn’t going to make the bundle of cash for his first year of law school in Ottawa like he’d planned, but, what else was he going to do? He was having the time of his life with this mountain family – take away the sweat and toil and it would be like getting paid to camp and hike in the mountains.

Amos soon found that he enjoyed telling others what to do and how to do it. He did his best to not be an asshole - use his humour and diplomatic easy ways to encourage them along. He’d approach the planters with a big smile if it was a beautiful morning - or a sympathetic grunt and complaint if it was raining. His approach was to make a common enemy of the Ministry of Natural Resources Checker. He’d point out their mistakes through her eyes.
Verna was a local girl; a mountain woman; earth mother. Even though he demonized her a bit to the crew, he actually felt honoured to be following around the mountainside quizzing her about life in the Rockies. She was so healthy and so mature. Verna wasn’t a decade older than Amos but she seemed to belong in the natural beauty that still felt like living in a postcard to him. She was a mountain lioness to his city alleycat.

To the crew, Amos was so obviously afraid of coming across like a picky, power-tripping, jerk that they ended up wanting to help him out. They slowed, sacrificing speed (money) to plant more carefully. Poorly planted trees would look bad on him –not to mention the fines their company would get hit with from the Ministry - and he sought out their help in a needy, little brother, kind of way. It was surprising and a little disarming. For such a big, strong, smart and happy guy, Amos’ watery eyes were always searching you out for approval.

One night it happened that the crew’s women found themselves alone in the mess tent and conversation turned to Amos. Christine wasn’t there so they started in about the couple – how good they seemed together but - Amos’ bad boy eastside rough patches were a strange mix for a rich girl West Van debutante like Christine. Darlene laughed “Oh, that Amos can adapt and swim in most waters. He just might be able to pull it off.”

Barb nodded, she wondered out loud if the others had noticed how much of a chameleon Amos was?
“What do you mean?” they asked digging for the goods, leaning in, curiosity peaked.
“Well, I first noticed it when he started talking to Claude with a French accent.” Barb smiled as eyes widened and heads slowly started nodding. “Then I started watching him a little closer.” Barb was a doing her Doctoral work in Languages and Semiotics. “He can change his diction, his vocabulary, even adjust his dialect to fit yours.”
“Wow, what a phony!” scoffed Olga.
“It’s actually a highly developed social talent.” explained Barb “he uses it to put you at ease and make you feel comfortable. He makes you feel at home - like you’re talking to a family member. I don’t think he even realizes that he’s doing it. It’s kind of endearing.”
There was a moment of thoughtful silence in the circle.

“Of course,” Barb continued, “he could also use it to con you and suck you in.” The hairs on the women’s necks raised in unison as spines stiffened and they pulled back from the huddle.
“Will he use his powers for good or for evil?” Barb teased them and with a “hmmphh” or two the subject shifted and they carried on dissecting the crew’s interplay, intercourses, and social evolutions. It was a dirty job – but – as Bill liked to say - someone had to do it.



The season was coming to an end with the arrival of July’s blistering heat. There were no more misty mornings where the crew woke up and ate their breakfast in the midst of a soggy mountain hugging cloud. The curtain of mist was pulled back and the sun was with them from the time they first threw back their tent flaps to the time the crawled back in dirty and weary and a little richer. This was their last block. And it turned out to be the worst. Instead of the jungle-gym tangle of left behind scrub trees to climb over and through, this block had been burned clear.

A controlled Ministry burn had left a blanket of black ash an inch thick over the whole clear cut. By midday, the sun would take the surface temperature up over 100 degrees. Even in early morning, the ground was throwing off a low heat.

This meant that the ash would fry the tree seedlings before they’d get a chance to start growing. So, the planters would have to scrape away a 12 inch circle clear of the ash. They’d get an extra 2 cents per tree for their trouble but it slowed their progress considerably. The heat of the sun would suck the strength and sweat out of them as if with a straw. It seemed an especially cruel way to end a physically grueling season.

Amos was truly happy that he wasn’t planting. Even though he was gonna end the season with only a third of what the others had made, he’d loved the time spent with this mountain ragtag family. His back still stung with every step but the pain seemed worth the pleasure. As sorry as he was that their mountaintop high was coming to an end, he was also really looking forward to traveling down to the coast with Christine and Chuck and Hannah. Christine had invited them to stay at her parent’s condo at Whistler. She said they could probably also visit the summer cottage on the Sunshine Coast if it wasn’t being used by her parent’s friends already.

Bill had him carrying extra water from the camp up to the crews. On his third run of the morning, Bill pointed him up over a ridge towards the east side of the block where he’d find Barb’s team planting. He put the jugs into empty tree bags, slung them over his shoulders wincing with the extra weight, and started his ascent.
At least there were no fallen trees to climb over with this burned block. The ash crunched under his boots like gravel and sent up little puffs of black dust with every step. The sun was heavy on his back and neck like a hot hand pressing down. The tree bags bounced and tugged with every step. He put his chin down and leaned into his trudging Sisyphus task.

He broached the ridge and discovered a further obstacle. A thicket of black burnt trees lay in a little gulch between him and slope ahead. They’d been scorched of their foliage but not incinerated. The fire must have swept up across the gulch, leaping it for better fuel on the other side. He could make out the crew up, almost at the top of the clear cut, another half mile up. The thicket ran all across the mountain’s ridge maybe thirty, forty yards deep. He could try to walk around it – although it stretched right into the forest with no end in sight. Or, he could push his way through. Extend his suffering in long walk around, or intensify it with a quick push through.
He pushed forward. There was no obvious path through. The short, thick, poles stood dense together like burnt stakes in the ground. Their branches were brittle and broke off easily as Amos forced his way. There was just enough room to get your body past each pair of stakes, then you’d have to sidestep and push ahead through the next space. No straight rows like the tree planters left behind – this was Nature’s chaotic maze.
Sadistic Scientists couldn’t have come up with a more cruel psychological game to put rats through. Amos pushed his way forward into the test. The charred branch stubs scratched at his exposed arms and face. With every step they’d catch at his sweat drenched T-shirt and pants causing him to have to stop and unhook himself from their clutches. The tree bags of water would also get caught on a branch behind him and he’d have to spin around and tug them free. About halfway through the thicket, Amos began to stop stopping.

A fury had got hold of him. Like a bear swarmed with bees, he began thrashing at his attackers, throwing his weight forward against the branches, no longer caring about the tears at his clothes and flesh. The heat had toasted the patience right out of him. He was in a senseless place, he’d passed beyond reason and care and an animal fury had taken his mind and was driving his body against care of self or soul. Control was somewhere ahead of him and instinct took from him the option of stopping. To stop would be to resign himself to hell’s eternity there. “If you’re going through hell – keep going” was the voice in him – human or animal or holy – he couldn’t tell. Nor could he stop to wonder what he’d done to deserve this. His purpose had never been so focused.

“If there is a hell” he muttered through clenched growling teeth “I must be in it now.” By uttering this complaint, he now felt the attention of the spirit world upon him. He’d named it and by the power of word, had called forth the presence – at least in the presence of his own mind - the angels and demons that were taking bets on him. Did he have the guts to keep it together? Or, would he lose it? Would his soul let slip his mind’s grip? Let his sense evaporate - sucked like so many drops of sweat up into the sun’s thirsty atmosphere – dropped into dust and ash at his feet?

The voices asking these questions, stopped him in his tracks. Amos took a deep breath. There was something sweet in that breath - different from the hot panting breaths he’d been sucking. Attention paid now - Amos thought he could hear the rustle of a falling stream. He took six careful steps and stopped again. The sound was like a drink. He could feel the cool sound touch his mind and find his cerebral cortex. It trickled down his spine and found his balls slowly filling gut with calm and hope.
The hope of relief transformed him and he shook off the burdens of skin and muscle. This renewed strength hurried him on. It wasn’t the mad dash that had driven him before. He was still catching more scratches than he would have with a slower, steady pace, but the growing sound of water tumbling over rocks and into his ears drew him with calm instead of the panic driven into him by the heat.

The last few yards of the thicket, when he could see clear ground ahead, he started kicking over the poles in his way – snappin them off with the force of his whole weight in each kick. “Get the fuck out of my way” his boots were telling those trees. Clearing the thicket – finally – fuck! - he peeled the tree bags and his slimy torn shirt and boots and socks and pants off his trembling limbs. He stepped into the stream; into water that had started the day as snow. The stream grabbed his feet and the sensation was pure toe to head orgasm. He turned facing down the mountain, looking back at his torture-test and dropped his naked butt down onto a rock only twelve inches under water. It pushed the hot breath right out of him. He let it out in a crazed laugh-yelp-hoot of victory. He lay back, up into the stream, across sharp wet rocks as if it were a cool green lawn. The ice-water tumbled over his shoulders and swept away the last of the heat and hurt. He tilted his head back into the tumble and the freezing water filled his ears and eye sockets and open mouth. He lifted his head and spat it out – a newborn spitting embiotic fluid from its lungs.
And that was how Barb and Mike and Renee found him. Naked as a baby, giggling with a shameless wide grin on his silly face. They’d heard his holler from the midst of the thicket and had quickly trundled down to see what’d happened.

“What are you laughing at?” it was Barb’s voice full of delight at this sight of Amos finally vulnerable and free. Amos pulled himself up to his elbows. “You all look like fried shit.” They had big grins on their faces – apparently they found his naked near-corpse amusing. He climbed to his feet and after splashing them all - up onto the bank beside Barb. He reached over to the tree bags by his discarded boots and pulled out the bottles of water.
“I brought you guys some water” he explained – waiting for his hero’s welcome. Mike stepped forward grabbing the offered bottle. He twisted off the lid, took a sip, and turned it upside down at arm’s length. Amos’ jaw dropped with the falling water. Mike stepped over to the stream, and filled it up. Then, he lifted it high to his mouth and poured it down his throat letting it splash down his neck and chest and lifting the last of it up over his head for an ice-cold shower. Barb was killing herself laughing. Mike looked over chuckling at Amos’s sorry expression “Thanks for the drink man. We found this stream on our way up this morning.”

There was one final crew party but it was subdued. Members of the crew had already started to drift off to their next destinations. Some hoped to get on with fire-fighting crews deeper in the interior. Others were heading back east to Ontario. Amos knew that if he was going to pull together enough cash for a school year, he should be doing the same - heading home and looking for more work fast. But he wasn’t ready to head back to Ontario yet.
He hadn’t come this far without making it all the way west – as far as he could go. There was more adventure in the trip yet – he knew it. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find on the coast. He knew that he was running from his future as much as he was running for it. But he didn’t let that voice talk much. It could be shut up with beers and plans for the next day’s road trip.

Treeplanters

The treeplanters formed a family for a season. At its head, Bill Williamson, was the benevolent pirate captain. He kept his crew fed and safe but always hungry for the treasure of gold to be made planting trees. Bill was a tall and lanky farmer’s son of unquestionable integrity; strong enough to wrestle any bull-headed idea to the ground. Mythical tales were circulated about Bill lifting a man off his feet with one hand and shaking him til he was scared-silly. The man had kicked Darlene’s kitten. Darlene and Bill had been sweethearts since highschool. Together they’d trained as church educators but Lawrence had led her out into the mountains and she’d never got him back into church again. Every summer he’d rule his crew like a young Moses – a pirate Moses - leading Israel to the promised land.

The promise of big bucks for backbreaking toil drew a crew of mostly university students to Bill and Darlene’s mess tent in the Rockies. Half the crew had done a season or more already with them. Success had brought them back. The most seasoned of the planters was Joseph. He and Marie towed a trailer with kids and a dog and cats and a bird and kept mostly to themselves like the gypsy aunt and uncle of the crew.

There were a handful of women in the crew which tended to keep things a little more civilized. Barb was a graduate student that’d been with Bill and Darlene three seasons already. She was intelligent and kind; a big sister who laughed easily and enjoyed the antics of her wild, younger brothers.
Colleen was a theology student who was preparing for her first Ministry post by going way out of her comfort zone - and way beyond her physical abilities - to let the mountain wilds test her, break her, or season her for any challenge.
Olga, was a big, strong, cowgirl blonde from Calgary. She’d also joined the crew to test her strength and got an extra daily stipend as the crew’s nurse. Christine showed up a week late in her own little green Pacer. She was an athlete; short and sinewy and the youngest member of the crew. On days off, she’d bounce up the mountain roads for morning runs just to burn off extra energy.

Claude was last season’s top planter. He had the Voyageur spirit of a Quebecois – quiet (he was working on his English) but quick to laugh and join in a story or song. Frank was studying to be a Chiropractor. He’d practice on anyone who’d admit within his earshot to having a sore back. Steve was the muscle-man. He’d pump weights before breakfast. At mealtimes we’d catch him flexing and caressing his arms and chest.

At the first camp bush party, once the block had been planted, Steve challenged the crew-boss to an arm-wrestle. Bill was pretty liquored up and feeling no pain. He turned his cap backwards, stuck his smoke in clenched lips and dropped his elbow onto a forty-gallon diesel drum. He let Steve –pumped up and deadly serious - give it his best shot. Bill calmly finished his hand-rolled smoke. With his free hand he put it out on the drum’s side and, to the crew’s delight, gently pushed Steve’s pride down to the drum’s top.

After that, Steve still pumped iron every morning, but the caressing subsided. Craig was another farm boy from southern Ontario. He was cut from the same genetic cloth as Bill. Their families knew each other. He and Amos and Chuck had arrived at the camp together, driving Amos’ “fleshtoned” Dodge Dart.

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

“I’ve never been so scared, or run so fast, in my life.
The speed might have had something to do with the fact that I was running down a mountainside but the fear – the fear was all about the bear. I should have been afraid of turning an ankle or wiping out against one of the logs that crisscrossed the clearcut forest, but there was only one thing on my mind. Putting distance between me and that big fucking bear.”

It was only our first day out. Chuck and Amos and I had been assigned to plant a section of clearcut on a mountainside overlooking the Caribou Valley. We were so green that we’d plant a tree or three and then stop to admire the view. I couldn’t get over how beautiful it all was.
I grew up on a farm, so I was used to the outdoors, but I had never felt so surrounded by its wonders all at once. Mountain peaks lined up in a row up all down both sides of the valley. Their stony heads pushed up above the tree line that draped their shoulders like green robes on royalty. Their toes cooled in the wide, white, river that ran the length of the valley. We were way up on one side of the valley. It’d taken us a couple of hours to drive Amos’ old Dodge Dart up the rough logging roads to find our camp.

He’d picked me up at my family’s farm just south of Orillia a week before. We’d both just finished our exams; me at Guelph and him at Trent. Our new boss, Bill Williamson, had told me to catch a ride with this guy Amos. Treeplanting promised good money for hard work. Hard work I was used to. I’d been picking stones from my Dad’s fields since I was old enough to lift a football sized rock. The idea of making $200 a day sounded too good to pass up. I had another year’s tuition to pay and the more I could keep that student loan down the better. As a farm boy, I knew all about carrying debt.

We’d taken turns driving his Dart across the country. This Amos guy was a laugh. He was a big boy. I’m six foot and close to two hundred pounds but he had several inches and more than a few pounds on me. He had flab, but there was muscle beneath it. And he had a big grin that he wore on his face almost all the time – at least when he was with you. On those long stretches of road, he’d go off to another place and his face would drop and he’d get all serious and sometimes mutter to himself. I could tell he was a more complicated kind of guy than he let on. Wasn’t into sports at all so we couldn’t talk about that. He studied literature and philosophy and I didn’t have much to say about that.
That was the kind of stuff that chicks and artsy guys took but he didn’t seem too artsy to me. Sure he listened to that art rock, King Crimson, Eno, Talking Heads, type stuff I’d never heard til I got to university. This guy Amos was a bit of a mixed bag. He had the body of a Jock and the head of a Nerd. On the outside he was a Hoser. Jeans and construction boots, plaid shirts, long hair. And then, with a closer look, a serious, sensitive side would surface.
– like this one time I was knocking gays and he got all angry-defensive-like and his eyes watered up. Just when I thought he might cry - he turned it on a dime and pretended to make a pass at me – staring at my balls and stroking my thigh and saying in a fag voice “I couldn’t help but notice you’ve got a nice set there.” I turned red and told him to fuck off and we both laughed – almost hit a deer - except I swerved onto the shoulder and missed it.

Mostly though, Amos was just into having a laugh. He had a small stash of grass with him and we’d do a toke or two every day just to help with the monotony of driving along. It always made the car stereo sound better too – even the art rock was tolerable then.
We’d been traveling across the top of the States on two lane highways through Michigan and North Dakota. Just when we were ready to head north into Saskatchewan, we hit a snow storm – a blizzard really. Kind of surprising for the last week of April. The roads got so bad, and the radio reports so full of warnings, that we decided to pull off for the night and shell out for a motel. Everyone was off the road, even the truckers and the motel was full up – we got the last room.
Next morning, the radio said the roads were closed between Saskatoon and Regina. We were still an hour or two south of Saskatoon. Amos said we had to pick up Chuck at the airport in Edmonton that night. It was like the roads were closed for ordinary folks, but not for Amos.
“Let’s hit the road Craig.”
“But the weather guy is telling everyone to stay off the roads.”
“Good, then there’ll be no one for us to hit.”
The transport trucks, and us, were the only ones on the road that morning. We got our tires into the grooves the transports made and were making progress. The snow was so deep, you could hear the Dart’s belly, the oilpan and undercarriage, dragging along the snow ridges between the tracks. Amos just kept slipping and sliding along. He put on a country station, rolled the windows down and sang along at the top of his voice. It was contagious and I had to join in.
We made it up to Saskatoon and cruised right through the downtown and out the other side. By the time we got to the outskirts, the roads had been cleared and the sun was shining. Amos put the hammer down and we were off – we’d make Edmonton on time no problem now. Then - the car engine died. The motor just quit.
We pulled off to the side, got out and lifted the hood.
What a laugh!
We were looking at a snow bank!
The snow was jammed up all around the engine so tight that you could even see the imprint of the underside of the hood in the snow. A pick-up pulled over and a couple of old farmers in baseball caps trudged over and they got quite a chuckle out of our predicament.
“Dig out your distributor cap and dry off your wires and give ‘er a try then.” they recommended, “See what happens.”
So, armed with windshield scrapers we chipped the snow out all around the motor and found the distributor cap and took it off and wiped it with a rag. We pulled and wiped down all the spark plug wires, and Amos jumped in the drivers seat, and started her right up.
“Let’s go man, we can still make Edmonton in time if we boogey.”

We picked up Chuck at the airport just in time. His exams hadn’t finished in time for him to make the drive out, so he’d had to shell out the extra cash for a plane ticket. Chuck and Amos had gone to high school together in Scarborough. The presence of Chuck in the car was like adding a little high test to Amos’ engine. All signs of the sensitive, thoughtful Amos disappeared. With Chuck he was a full out, rock n roll, better to burn out than to fade away, maniac.
We met up with Bill late the next night at the Clearwater Hotel. After a few beers and some tall tales, he told us to meet him in the parking lot next morning at 6am. We didn’t want to mess-up our first day, so we crashed early. Next morning, we met a straggly crew of about twenty treeplanters. Everyone was in good spirits as we got introduced around. By the look of them they were mostly students like ourselves. Mostly guys but there were women in the group too.
The Dart pulled in behind a convoy of two trucks and a van. Like I said, it took us a couple of hours winding up those logging roads to get to our lot. Logging trucks would thunder down the road past us filled with the pines we were replacing. We shook our heads at the speed they traveled and wondered what would happen if we ever met one coming around one of those hairpin corners. The Dart bounced and shook and roared fishtailing under Amos’ heavy foot. He showed that little fleshtoned granny car no mercy as we drove it up, up, up into the steep forests.
The camp was already set up. There was a big canvas mess tent with two long tables for us to sit and chow down at. An old school bus carried the cook stove, propane fridge, food and water supplies. Bill’s wife Darlene, and her sister Hannah, ran the kitchen. We were told to find places to pitch our tents, get ourselves set up, and then help with unloading the boxes of tree-plugs ready for the morning.
At dinner the stories started. A good planter could do at least a thousand trees a day. This was considered pretty rough territory to plant in so the price per tree was higher than the flatlands of Northern Alberta or Ontario. Looking up the mountainside from camp we could see that a clear cut block was anything but clear. As you negotiated the pitch of the hill you had outcrops of rock and boulders to climb over or around. The loggers had taken the best trees but certainly not all of them. Hundreds of trees were cut down but left behind - not considered worth taking. In places, they were like piles of pick-up-sticks strewn across the hectares. A planter had to climb over or under them to get at a patch of dirt to plant the plug in.
We were issued short, narrow shovels and instructed in the craft. First, scrape away the topsoil. Then, stab your the shovel blade into the earth up to its hilt. With a shove forward of your arm and a simultaneous kick of your boot, you’d push the earth forward to make room for a tree-plug. As you bend for a toe touch, your other hand is reaching into the bag slung around your shoulders holding several dozen young trees. Each one was maybe four inches of tree and four inches of root in a plug of dirt. It was important to push the roots straight down into the earth – no folded roots. Each tree was to be planted no closer than 8 feet from another. If the Ministry Checker discovered folded roots or trees too close – we’d be docked pay. Too many bad plants and the whole crew could be fined or even pulled from the contract.
“Plant them fast and plant them right.” was Bill’s final words of instruction. The experienced planters nodded their agreements and exchanged knowing smirks, tilting heads and rolling eyes at us green recruits.
The first day was brutal. It was still dark when Lawrence barked at our tent doors “Time to get up.” I couldn’t believe how friggin cold it was.
I crawled out of my tent onto a crust of frost and new snow. At the mess tent every new planter that joined us was shivering and bitching about the cold. The experienced planters finished their oatmeal and eggs quickly and grabbed their bags and shovels and headed out to pick up their trees and assignments for the day.
I was teamed up with Chuck and Amos for the day. Bill showed us our line to follow up the mountain – a piece of orange tape was tied to a limb or a young tree every fifty feet or so. “Follow that line up over that ridge and start planting at the top of the ridge. Plant til you get to the edge of the clear cut at the tree line. We filled our two bags with seedlings two hundred per bag – a bag across each shoulder bouncing off each hip as we headed off like paper boys with Saturday morning deliveries to make. We scrambled up over the criss-cross of fallen trees, around the rock outcrops and through the patches of underbrush left untouched by the loggers. Three southern Ontario greenhorns, laughing and joking and bitching our way up to our first day on the job.

Like I said, we were off to a slow start. We’d plant a bunch of trees and someone would make a joke…
“Nine hundred and sixty-five still to go”
“When’s our first coffee break?”
“Bill and the snack wagon should be by any minute.”
“Wow, will you look at that view eh?”
“Yeah, awesome!”
We’d stop to wipe our brows and look around again at that British Columbia picture postcard perfection in every direction we could see. By mid-morning, we were still maybe a hundred yards from the tree line when we heard it.
“Crash, crash, crash” it sounded like a huge boulder had come loose and was crashing down the mountain. We all three looked up at the same time. It was no boulder but it was just as terrifying - and it was heading straight for us. We three looked at each other, and as if on cue, shouted in unison…
“A BEAR!”
“What do we do?” asked Chuck in a panic.
“RUN!” shouted me and Amos together.
We turned on our heels and booted it down the mountain with the sounds of a charging bear in our ears. I took one more quick glance behind me as my legs started pumping. It was the biggest, brownest, fastest, bear I’d ever seen. I’d seen some fair sized black bears around the farm, and in Algonquin Park, but this bugger was way bigger and it was crashing down the mountain straight at us like vengeance on delivery.
Running wasn’t exactly a straightforward effort. Not only did we have two heavy bags of trees on either hip that bounced with every jog, but there were those boulders and fallen trees to get across. It was a boot camp obstacle course with live ammunition being fired at your back to keep you moving. Over my shoulder I saw Amos jump up on top of a tree and run down along it. Chuck was a step or two ahead of me and we reached the edge of the ridge together and went flying over it like a couple of rabbits, our tree bags bobbing like bunny tails behind us.
Chuck and I kept running down that hill. All I could think of was getting off that mountain as quick as I could. We only noticed that it was just the two of us when we started slowing down at the bottom of that ridge. We heard a shout that pulled us both up short. It sounded kind of like….
“FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUCK AAAAAWWWWWFFFF”
We looked at each other and Chuck’s eyes grew wide. We both turned and started shouting…
“AAAAA-MOSSSSS, HEY AAAA-M-O-S-S-S, AMOS, ARE YOU OKAY? – AMOS – AMOS-S-S-S “ we stopped shouting and listened.

Nothing.
Nothing but silence.
An awful, dread-filled, silence as it dawned on us.
Amos was somewhere up over that ridge with a big fucking grizzly bear. What was even worse was that we were going have to do something about it. The thought of going back up there with that bear sent a chill through me. It started down in my bladder and went up into my skull. Chuck looked at me again.
“A-MOSSSS – AAAMOSSS - HEYYYY - ARE YOU OKAY? But it was no use. The only response was sound of the blood pounding in my head and the heavy breaths still pumping in and out of our lungs. That beautiful wild mountain had now turned cold and deadly on us. We stood there still and listening – it seemed like time had stopped. It was like my feet had turned to stone and my legs were planted in that rock. I knew we had to go back and find him. I just didn’t know where I’d find the courage to do it.

And then we saw him.
Standing on the ridge, grinning, and swinging his shovel over his head. He was hooting a victory howl like a friggin Maple Leafs fan.
I was never so glad to see anyone. Chuck looked at me and we both started laughing – relieved and happy and surprised as hell.
He started down the mountain towards us and we started up.
“You guys won’t believe what the fuck happened.” he blurted out to us as soon as we were within earshot.
“I don’t believe you’re alive.” I admitted.
“How did you get out of that one Amos” laughed Chuck.
He told us that he had wiped out running along the top of that log I’d seen him on. He said he hit the ground and looked back and saw that there was no way he was gonna out run the bear. It was getting really close.
He said that’s when he remembered that bears have bad vision.
“They hunt with their noses right. I knew that if I zigzagged I just might have a chance of that bear losing my scent.”
So, instead of heading for the ridge, he ran at a right angle and when he looked back, ready to make another turn, the bear had stopped fifty feet behind him.
That’s when we heard him shout “Fuck Off” at the bear. What we thought were his last words was in fact the effects of adrenaline and fear and anger coming out of one totally freaked out Amos.
He said the bear just looked at him when he did that.
“Maybe she thought I was crazy” he laughed, “Probably, she just figured that she‘d already scared the crap out of us - showed us who was boss. So why bother further with a crazy human screaming and shaking a shovel at her?”

What was truly crazy, was that we went back and started planting trees again. I don’t know if we were so determined to make our $200 bucks that day, or if we were more afraid of disappointing Bill. Anyhow, we only lasted maybe ten minutes. It was hard to plant trees with one eye always on the woods above us. We finally came to our senses and headed back down the mountain with only a few hundred trees planted but one hell of a story to tell.

They dropped us in a cage

They put us in the cage and dropped us deep into the earth. Twelve of us at a time standing belly to bum, shoulder to shoulder, pressed in much tighter than men would stand together if it weren’t for the money. The cage operator ushered the long line of miners into the cage. Each of us crossed the threshold, leaving behind personal space, family, daylight, safety. As different as we all were on the surface, in the cage we were all the same.

Same hardhats with the same little lamp on our foreheads with the same electrical cord snaking down to our belts where ten pounds of battery was the light of our life. As the steel door slid across with a slamming clang, we were all imprisoned in the same battle. Each shift we took new ground. Tearing iron ore out of the earth’s belly, sending it to the surface where the Company turned to it gold. In the alchemy of that process our lives were the by-product. Paycheques in exchange for a living; for dreams worth risking limb and youth for. The Cage man rang his long warning bell and pushed the lever that released the brake holding the elevator cable. We left behind those lives and dreams.

When the cage drops we’re all at the end of the same steel cable. That steel cable is our umbilical cord as we drop into Mother Earth’s womb. The Company’s no Mother. This is no elevator taking us gently to our floors of work – we drop free fall – stomachs still full of breakfast sucked up into chests, daylight snatched away, we all become suddenly lighter on our feet – somehow appropriate – we’re as close together as queers on a dance floor.

Of course we were scared shitless at first. Five university kids looking to mine the tunnels for danger and come up twelve weeks later with enough cash to cover tuition and rent for another year. We were there to cover summer holidays for the regular crews. After a long winter in Snow Lake, the few weeks of warm weather and sunshine kept the men sane and their wives content.

Snow Lake was the end of the road. There was no more road going any further north into Manitoba. You had to travel a long ways to get there. It wasn’t a place you’d just wander to – like ending up in Vancouver or Halifax. No, if you were there – you were there with a reason. And your reason wasn’t the fat paycheck waiting for you at week’s end. Your reason was what you’d left at home. There was a farm’s debts to cover. Hospital bills to pay. There was a house full of kids waiting in Portugal or Newfoundland for their chance in the land of malls. Most of the men were there on their way to somewhere else. Only a few hundred had made this place their home. Their trailers had porches with swings and flower beds – evidence of women and children. Women were rare and single women over the age of 15 were non-existent.

The old timers were slugging it out in hopes of a pension that would keep their wives going long after their husbands’ lungs and livers gave out. The middle aged guys would try not to think about their own dreams anymore. They listen instead to their teenagers’ dreams of escape. They see us university kids here to earn a ticket to take them somewhere else. They know it’s a pit stop for us. Some pat us on the back. Some try to trip us up. They have their fun telling us to watch out for the Stope Rats down below.

The cage drops each crew to our Drift for the day. With a sudden jerk like pull on the leash, the elevator stops at the level – 200, 400, 600, all the way to 2400 feet. From there the horizontal Drifts start zig zaggin down on a decline all the way down to 3600 feet. All the mined ore gets dropped to that bottom before being hauled up the processing Mill on the surface.

Have you ever seen an ant farm? You know – dirt between two panes of glass with ant tunnels through it? You see the vertical tunnels – they’re called Shafts. The horizontal tunnels are Drifts. The excavated areas where the ants live and the miners’ work are Stopes. The opening of every Shaft was called a Grizzly. Sometimes the Shaft would drop 20 or 60 feet from a Stope down to a Drift. On every Drift opened the main Grizzly where ore was dropped to the bottom. Lose your footing here and your end was – well – grizzly.

Big Al McAllister was our kindergarten teacher. He was a lifer. He was the boatman who took us across into Hades and showed us the dark secrets of underground mining. In his fifties, he was solid heft. You knew that he could easily lift any one of us off the ground. He’d been injured – not bad enough to stop mining – but bad enough to give him the job of schooling the green recruits. He had the bark of a drill sergeant, but he loved nothing more than to bite off and chew over a big story from his years of mining. He was a storybook character. We all loved him immediately and wanted to impress him with our miner’s hearts. After some safety instruction, he’d let loose with a ballad of dangers gone by, of close calls and tales of warning. Told us that all of our wages were paid just from the traces of gold smelted from these black rocks. And he told us about the closet full of fool’s gold they’d discovered in one young dreamer’s room.

The Drill Crews were the real Miners. They were the front line in the battle. The progress of their drills was what we were all there for. Unlike Drift mining where the drilling was done from wheeled, motorized tanks, Stope mining was all hand, legs and back work. Stope Miners were the Infantry. They packed in their heavy machine-gun like drills on their backs. Set the drills up on tripods. Hauled and hooked up the hydraulic hoses that powered them and opened fire on the rock face.

Every shift they’d drill their holes, fill them with dynamite, and run their electric detonation wires like spiders connecting threads to a web. Once every man was on the surface a single electric switch would be thrown detonating the charges in the dozens of holes all through the mine all at once.

Eight hours later the next shift would trudge through the settled dust and begin dragging the debris to the grizzly’s mouth. With winch, pulley and cable, small bulldozer like blades would be engineered, again with hydraulics and air power, to drag the rock across the Stope to drop down the hole. Grizzly fed, they’d set up for the day’s drilling.

Al told us tales of men whose lungs had filled with gas before they knew what’d happened. Their would-be rescuers had dropped one, two, three bodies down before an older hand figured it out. They’d struck open a fissure of gas - it was snatching the breath out of them.

Al told us of friends lost to loose rocks let go from the Back. The Back was the roof of every Drift or Stope. Loose was the rock that might let go at any moment crushing the life out of you like a mosquitoe slapped by God’s hand. He drilled into us how to watch for “loose” in a Stope that’d been blasted the shift before. How to test it with an iron bar and an ear tuned for the drum beat that told you there was a crack of air behind that rock.

Our classroom was a brightly lit oasis down a well lit shaft at 1600 level. It’d been a shop in the days when 1600 feet was the bottom of the mine. Now the mechanics worked another 1000 feet below us. When Al tired of teaching us the rules and dramatizing their rationale with his stories, he ‘d give us small assignments out in the dark hallways. First, we’d all go out together to clear rubble and lay rail down a shaft that would probably never be used. Then, when we’d proven to him that we wouldn’t flip out in the dark, or buckle under the workload, he’d start assigning us as helpers to the men who were making money for the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company.

My brother Pete was apprenticed to a train driver. They’d empty loads of rock from the Stope grizzly into their train of bucket-cars. Positioning a bucket car under this grizzly, they’d hit a lever and WHOOSH the rocks and boulders would tumble down. If you didn’t close the hatch in time, the bucket would overflow and you’d have to clean the spilled rock by hand. Every so often you’d throw the switch and nothing would happen. The rocks would be jammed up in the hole in their hurry to drop. With a steel bar in hand, you’d stick your head up into the hole and poke away until gravity once again took over. Hopefully you’d be back out of the way before the avalanche hit.

Then, they’d haul those buckets of rock down the main drift to the big mother grizzly. There might be three or four Stopes on a level but the train crew could only keep up with a couple at a time. The mouth of the Mother Grizzlies was about six feet across – further than you’d want to have to jump. The Shaft dropped hundreds of feet, maybe a thousand depending on where you were in the mine. Over beers in the town’s only bar, Pete would tell us tales of his workmate jumping around the edges of that hole like a warrior daring a dragon to swallow him hole. He was in too big a hurry to hook his belt line to the safety anchor. His nonchalance at dancing with death would raise the hair on the back of Pete’s neck. He’d shake his head telling us about it – getting it off his chest and drowning the fear with another beer.

From the bottom of the Mother Grizzly it’d be hauled again in massive dump trucks built low and long. I never worked this part of the mine – and it wasn’t part of Big Al’s orientation - so had to just imagine the huge elevator that pulled the rock up to the surface. I can’t think of that part of the mine without also thinking about the man who fell to his death there that summer. In mind’s eye I see his body lying on top of the rubble waiting to be lifted. With a slip of the foot he dropped. Never again did he see the surface where his hopes waited and withered.

On the surface the Mill did its crushing. The valuable minerals would be extracted from the pulverized rock leaving only a sandy residue of waste.
That sand was recycled. Mixed with water it was sent back down into the Mine through snake holes drilled in the rock. This slurry would be piped to the Stopes in 8 inch PVC plastic pipe. As the miners blasted away at the monster’s “back” the roof would tumble down and be hauled away.

The muddy contents of the pipe – appropriately named “Fill” would fill the Stopes back up, raising the cavern floor to where the miners’ drills could once again bore up into the Back. The water in the Fill would drain away into the bowels of the mine leaving a beach of black sand for the miners to stand on. The work of filling up the Stopes was giving to the “Fill crew”. That’s where Al assigned me.

I’ve often wondered why I got the beach detail and Pete got the death-defying dirty son-of-a-bitch job. From what I’ve seen so far, the job of a big brother is to break the hard ground. The younger brother watches and learns and gets to know the easier paths to take. Did Al know that? Pete was the alpha dog and he got the toughest jobs. All the summers we worked together he’d be given the shitty end of the stick and I’d sit back a bit and watch and learn. It wasn’t fair. I’d feel bad about it knowing Pete was risking his life while I sat on the beach watching fill flow from the pipe. It was the way it was.

There were three of us on the Fill crew. One guy was given a radio walkie-talkie that connected us with the Mill on the surface. At the start of the shift we’d radio for the Fill to start. If, after an appropriate time delay, the Fill was flowing then it was just a matter of positing the end of the 8 inch pipe so that the Stope filled up uniformly.

But, if the Fill didn’t flow, or if it stopped at any time during the shift, the guy with the radio had to call in to halt the flow. If that sand and water wasn’t flowing where it was supposed to be - it meant a pipe had burst. Somewhere in the mine a drift was filling up with sand. A drift full of sand meant trains got stopped - meaning Miners might get backed up with no where to put their loads of ore. The gravy train would come to a stop. And that couldn’t happen.

The other two guys on the Fill crew were sentries. They patrolled the miles of drifts on every level. In every drift there were the places where the Fill’s snake holes emerged. Steel pipe would provide safe passage through the drift down through the next 200 feet to the level below. On the level where the Fill was needed plastic pipe would direct the flow horizontally along the drift to a Stope. The Fill crew was constantly checking those pipes for weak spots or potential new leaks.

Preventing a burst pipe meant saving time and effort. If the guy in the Stope suddenly realized that the flow wasn’t happening, he had to get on the radio and stop it immediately. Every second counted. Sixty seconds of Fill flowing into and active Drift could take hours to clean up.

Once the Mill was alerted, the hunt began. Where was the leak? If it was on an active level where trains ran we’d hear about it pronto. If it was one of the dozen or so inactive levels, it could take us some time to hunt it down, repair it, dig out the mess, and get things flowing again.

When the Fill was flowing, the job was a breeze. Once in a while, the guy in the stope watch would have to re-position the pipe to “fill” up a different part of the cavity. But for most of the eight hour shift, it was like watching a huge bathtub fill up with water. It was a day at the beach – just no sun. I took big fat novels with me in my lunch bucket.

The sentry duty was just as enjoyable. We’d split up and cover different parts of the mine. Instead of bothering the Cage Operator to take us between levels, we’d find our way down through abandoned Stopes on wooden ladders. Every level was connected by these ladders once you found your way. You might step down a ladder for a hundred feet through a hole only big enough for a man - only to come down into a Stope so huge your headlamp got lost in the dark before hitting rock face.

I’ve climbed a hundred feet up into a Forest Ranger’s Tower. That height is terrifying. It’s not the same when you’re in the dark. If you can’t see how far you might fall, your imagination has less to go on. It’s like youth. When you haven’t fallen from heights before, you’re not afraid to climb. What you can’t see – can’t hurt you.

Roaming the Drifts, climbing the Stopes, we’d run into fellow Miners. More often than not they were happy for some diversion and they’d stop what they were doing to shoot the breeze. We had kind of a Social Convenor, Morale Booster role as we’d hear their beefs for the day or get a taste of what they were looking forward to that weekend. We’d hear the speculation about what Stope was opening up next and where the Drill Crews would next be assigned. A miserable Fill crew member could spread a lot of misery throughout a mine in a day.

The head of our Fill Crew was Ray. He’d been in the mine for a few years and knew the ropes. His way of shifting from a dead earnest telling of his world’s philosophy to a clowning good humour reminded me of Ross Hudman - my early teen friend and guide. He was a tall and skinny sewer rat of a guy well suited for work in this strange world. He was Ralph Norton of the Honeymooners. He was full of wisdom sayings like “you don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you.” He was curious about my life and would ask about University and what I hoped to get from it.

Ray didn’t talk a lot about himself. He seemed content to work away at this chosen trade – shared no big dreams with me - resigned maybe to a place in the world he’d found that suited him. He kept to himself. Didn’t hang with any crowd in the dorms or in the bar. Was friendly with everyone but no one’s friend. Solitary man. I guessed at a broken-heart story that sent him down away from the pain and into the hard-rock mines. He wanted nothing from anyone and took only what life offered today.

He was a different guy in the bar. Much cooler. Much more business like. Under the cover of dark, underground, there was an intimacy – a brotherhood - a willingness to talk more freely, to share ideas, away from watchful eyes. In the bar, you had to watch your back – always aware of the potential for public shame – a test coming your way in the form of an insult or fistfight - getting caught in the drama of someone else’s pain. In the mine you left that surface world behind. You could work out your thoughts on the day before. You could try out new thoughts or old philosophies on someone worth swapping ideas with.

One morning we walked into a Stope, returning to the place where we’d been sitting all day the day before -.to discover a rock the size of a house where we’d spent yesterday’s shift lounging in the sand. These were the pink elephants you tried not to think of as you went about your day’s work. It did kind of put life into a dark, stark, perspective. You never know when something gonna let loose and – it’s all over.

Everyone says that. People always say “you never know” but you also never really think about it. You go on with your day in the bright sunshine distracted by a thousand things to see and do. But in the dark, sitting there in a black Stope for hours, you can focus and such things as life and death.

Once it happened that the five of us students met up underground. We stopped and had a smoke and shot the breeze. We got to talking about what it felt like to be in a pocket of air with miles of rock surrounding you. Pete came up with a game. “Let’s all turn off our lanterns. We’ll see who’s the first to turn their light back on.”

I’ve never experienced dark like that. The absolute absence of light. In every dark room I’ve woken in – sometimes it’s taken a few seconds to get my bearings – but your eyes adjust and you can make out where you are. In that black hole the primeval fear of the grave that holds no promise of further life rose within us and our hands were quick to snap those lanterns back on as soon as the first of us had weakened.

While Pete slaved away feeding the grizzly, I sat back and feasted on the finest literature. That summer I devoured Dostoyevski’s “Brothers Karamazov” smorgasbord. I chewed over Melville’s long idle wanderings of muse in “Moby Dick”. I reread Conrad’s spicy “Heart of Darkness”. I tasted “War and Peace” but didn’t have an appetite for Tolstoy. On that black beach, I had hours to read slowly. On those black Stope walls I could project the stories and let them take my heart and imagination into the expanses of a starless sky.

In the art of those words. In the power of those ideas pictured and turned into tales. In the world of meaning they painted, I found a resonance, a note, a chord was struck deep within me. I knew that putting together words was why I‘d been given breath. I knew that what those guys did with those novels, I could do. What God had given the world through those men’s hearts and imaginations, God was picking me up like a pen to do again.

Those hours on the Fill crew provided me with a footing, lifted me up to the place where I would mine out of the earth my work and purpose. A song was written in me that resonated with everything I’d seen through my child’s eye. It was the word spoken to me in the womb. It was the tuning fork that every thing that life through at me struck against. In that black cave, this little light of mine, blazed bright.

But on the surface, in the sun, among men and lives lived hard, I was a boy. How could I dare to sing a song to such men? Their songs were wild and tough and truer than I what I could ever capture. What they’d felt, I hadn’t even touched. What they’d seen, I hadn’t even noticed. In the light of day, on the surface of things, my song dissipated into silly daydreams. The note that was struck remained deep underground. Stored away in a treasure chest. Visited only in dreams. Forgotten with the morning’s occupations.

On the surface we lived and ate and drank hard at it. We enjoyed the fantastic northern fishing and did several canoe treks into the wild lakes surrounding. But beer was our main surface occupation. In August there was a crisis. The truck drivers were on strike and the Hotel, the only source for a case of beer, declared no more off sales. That meant you could only get a beer in the Hotel bar. We declared it a conspiracy and a corruption of the monopoly that the Hotel held over our lives. We never considered quitting drinking.

By August the heavy drinking schedule and the heavy dreaming schedule down below began to play on my mind. The two worlds were becoming blurred. One day I found myself looking in the dorm closet for my shoes. To see into the dark corner, I tried pointing my head over and down – as if it had a lamp on it. That’s when I knew I was starting to lose it.

Around the same time I stepped into the dorm room to see Anne standing there waiting for me. In the blink of an eye she vanished. The young beauty who’d seduced me into her bed the year before had become a vision. My literary imaginings were surfacing and getting a little too real. I pushed them back down below where they belonged.

The drying up of the beer supply caused tensions in the town to run high. We heard tales of domestic squabbles rising. Of course the trailer town and the dorm were two separate worlds joined only underground – and in the bar. One of the biggest and wildest of the Miner’s decided that he had a hate on for one of us university kids. Newf, called after his homeland, was a known troublemaker and brawler. Derek had been assigned to him for a day and had somehow pissed the big Newf off. At the bar, Newf let it be known that he was gonna “get” Derek.

I don’t know if he was just toying with us or if he had really chosen Derek as the next outlet for his steaming brewpot. But we did get a few chuckles out of Derek’s gymnastic manouevers – avoiding running into the Newf at all costs. He quit going to the bar. Which meant that he quit drinking and peered around every corner before stepping out. Of course it would have been much less painful to just confront the bully and let him give him a pummeling. But I had sympathy for Derek’s fears. I joined in with the teasing of him, but I also carried with me the same fears of facing the bullies – letting my written words get pummeled in public.

The town dried up in more than one way. There was also very little rain that summer. Forest fires were raging through the northern Jack pine. Rumours of them coming our way were spreading through town just as fast. We didn’t care. We had nothing in town to care for. We were told that if the fire hit town we’d be recruited to fight it – with fire pay on top of our miner’s wages. Sounded good to us.

We were drinking at the Hotel one night and it was unusually empty. Just a few of the hard core alkies and us. At closing time we walked out onto the main drag – to find smoke in the streets. Car horns were blaring through the usually silent night air. We climbed the hill up to our dorm and could see that the lights were on in all of the trailers below. People were packing up and leaving town. We had no where to go and nothing to pack. One of us came up with the brilliant idea of climbing the town’s water tower to get a better look.

Up we went the five of us. From the tower, we watched as the ants below scurried to get their kids and wives and photo albums and TVs and stereos to safety. There was a never before seen traffic jam as a line formed to take the one road out of Snow Lake. From where we sat it was all pretty entertaining. As the night wore on, the smoke got thicker and we could see the night sky light up with the fire’s glow just over the next ridge. That extra pay was practically in our pockets.

We figured we better get back down to the dorm where they could find us for fire duty. We sat and waited and wondered why they weren’t showing up. In the wee hours of the next day, when daylight mixed with the smoke in the streets, we finally crashed and found our pillows.

The seven a.m. breakfast bell rang and we shuffled down to the mess hall. “What was happening?” we asked and the kitchen crew told us. About 4 a.m. the wind had shifted. The wind that had been blowing the fire into town was now blowing the flames back. Back into the forest it’d already run through - and so it was burning itself out. The crisis had passed.

Work in the mine was halted that day while the Miners brought their families and possessions back to the trailers untouched by disaster. We weren’t so greedy that we were sad that their homes hadn’t gone up in flames. But we did enjoy the holiday from a shift at the mine.

Such was our perspective on the world. Young and care free. No strings and no worries. Working just to pay our way through school our lives had an up in the air, ungrounded, way about them. Even though we dropped in the same cage every day shoulder to shoulder with those Miners, our lives on the surface were up in a tower. Maybe not an ivory tower, but a tower of youth and priviledge and bravado that kept a distance between us and the “real” world.

With each passing year I would climb another few rungs down that ladder. Down to earth where wife and family and photo albums waited to be filled. But that treasure chest hidden deep below the earth that I found that summer remained buried. Not forgotten. The memory of purpose found fed by words written by others on pages in the past. My own pages remained empty. And in me, there remained a vast empty Stope where the hard rock mining of God’s work waited.

working and sinning

I took my first job when I was twelve. Not many of my peers had jobs at that age but my dad was raised by a farm boy and considered it his duty to make sure we were saddled with a strong work ethic early on. My older brother had been a carrier for the Toronto Star newspaper for several years. He’d amassed many prized possessions that he was now willing to sell me – for cash. My parents weren’t about to buy me these important consumer items – stereos, records, bicycles, basketballs…so I put the bit in my mouth and slung that bag over my shoulder and began the lifelong trudge for cash.

Not like Tyler Trap’s parents. He lived two doors down, was an only child, and got whatever he asked for. His dad had worked for Canadian Tire since high school. He’d always taken the stock options on his paycheque instead of Christmas bonuses. It meant that by forty, he was financially secure enough to retire to a career as a Postal Carrier. Working for Canada Post in those days was like retirement with four hours of daily exercise and a good paycheque. I dreaded going over to Tyler’s the day after Christmas. It took the shine off of my consumer high to see the loot his parents had laid out.

Tyler’s mom was a full time church lady. She had a big smile, big hair, big boobs and a big old car with batmobile fins from the fifties. She sang in the gospel choir at the Baptist church. I went along with Tyler once – only to find that I was a statistic in a recruitment campaign. The worship was fun and everyone was excited – especially about the prizes for the most new recruits. Not unlike bringing in new customers for the Toronto Star.

No, I was in the same boat as Ross Hudman. He lived across the street from Tyler. His parents were German immigrants and made my parents seem like spendthrifts. His older brother was a few years older than my big brother. Roman would soon quit school to start working the bar and nightclub scene. Ross had a younger sister like me too. So we’d sympathize over the latest cruel inequity our family’s had come up with to make us miserable as the three of us, Tyler, Ross and I, walked the mile to Fairmount Public school.

Ross got up in the dawn hours and delivered the Globe and Mail to our suburban Scarborough neighbours. I delivered the Star after school. Ours was a middle middle class street. A few streets to the east were the blue collar middle class homes and a few streets to the west were upper middle class homes. Roy’s route took him further west where mine took me further east. I had it better because the distance between homes decreased as you went east - and the tips increased. Ross’s reward for climbing to the big homes on the hill was a pat on the back and regular pay. I might get stiffed the odd week but at least I could cut across the lawns – no high fences and big hedges between homes on my route. Less to protect but more to share seemed to be the way of things in the cross section of life that was my world.

Ross was new to the neighbourhood. His parent’s thick German accents were the first non-anglo voices I’d heard. Tyler and I had been fast friends since my family moved in the summer before grade one. We were attached at the hip, liked all the same things, watched all the same TV shows and re-enacted them daily. Whether we were fighting off intergalactic Romulans in his basement wreckroom, or wrestling Tarzan’s white hunters in his backyard pool, the bad guys all had German accents – just like Ross parents.

The Hudman family moved in at the end of our Grade Five year. Ross wasn’t into pretend games. He introduced us to the art of playing practical jokes on neighbours – mostly just Nicky Nicky nine door – which was about how many times you could ring someone’s front door and run away before they came out in a rage to chase us. But Ross was definitely the third wheel in our trio.

But other things were changing in my world that year too. My body was becoming large. And not just tall. I was still the tallest kid in the class – even though I’d been “accelerated”. Me and six other kids had done grades 4 and 5 together. So, not only was my body accelerating me into a fat, goofy-looking, uncoordinated kid – but my brain had pushed me into a nerd status among the tough kids.

The tough kids shared common ground with the good boys in their love of sports. Sports had changed that year too. They were no longer games we played. They had acquired a competitive edge that meant if you sucked at sports you’d be cut from the team – cuts that went deeper than who won and lost. If you were a brain and good in sports, the bad guys left you alone. Without status on the field – I found I was a target – a big one.

The last day of grade five, out at the bicycle racks, the guys gathered to see who was in who’s class next year. It came down to who was on the class team that would help beat the other class’s team. Bruce and Steve, the guys who always did the playground team picking, were taking stock. When Bruce got to me he said “Amos you’re in our class? Well you suck at sports so you’re no help.”

He wasn’t being particularly cruel. Just stating the facts. I’d been assigned a seat on the bench marked “Loser”.

Getting fat that year was really bad timing. Not only had something changed about sports but over that summer the fairer sex had somehow transformed from pests to sex objects. We were all obsessed with breasts. And I don’t mean just the boys and girls of our class – girls with the purchase of bras and boys with the budding fruit they held. No, our whole world was titified. The sexual revolution was in full swing. Playboy mansion scenarios were becoming mythologized in the media as if it were Mount Olympus. Teenage beach movies filled our pubescent heads with the idea that “Life’s a Beach”. Our mothers even brought porn into our living rooms. Cosmo magazines were the next best thing to Playboys to a hyper-inquistive twelve year old – and beat the underwear section of the Eaton’s catalogue by a mile.

Tyler had always been really happy to see me return from the family cottage in September. But that summer, he’d spent the long Scarbro days hanging out with Ross Hudman. They’d developed a repertoire of inside jokes and had some fun teaching me their new games. It didn’t take long to discover that the object of the game was to ditch me.

My active imagination was now put to work with a new task – pretending that I didn’t care about being ditched. Pretending to laugh along as a wobbly third wheel. Pretending while learning to protect my dignity with a brave face. Tears wouldn’t do. Temper tantrums might get my parents sympathy when my brother would pull such tricks on me. But I was swimming with sharks now – I found that my friends had teeth and would tear me apart at the slightest taste of blood.

Tyler’s betrayal of our “best friends” relationship was a kick in the nuts. But what are you gonna do? As a kid your social choices are limited to your neighbourhood. You get along with whoever is within bicycling distance or go it alone. I chose to go it alone.

I pulled back into my own world. Like I’ve said – it was a well-developed world of books and scenarios of one adventure after another. It was a world full of excitement and risk. It was a world that tested our limits in life and death missions. It was a world I’d shared with Tyler. But now I shut that door and kept it to myself.

The door had been closing slowly – pushed shut as my peer group put away first their stuffed toys and then their GI Joes and finally their Hot Wheel cars. Imagination was longer “fun”. Fun was to be found within the rules of the playing field. Only girls and gays would spend time playing without rules. Rules defined how to keep score – who were the winners and losers – and that was how you “played”.

Probably my greatest liability in that game of life - that game we all must play – the sport of survival – is that I have always taken things very seriously. To me, at the heart of it all, GOD is watching and always measuring my capacity for passion. If I can’t be passionate about what I’m doing. If it doesn’t matter – really – if it isn’t about life and love and a sacred purpose that makes risks small and the blood pump – then it isn’t really worth my time.

If I played soccer or football or streethockey, GOD was watching. If I wasn’t playing a heroic part. If I was, in fact, a liability for the team. Then I was wasting my time. Might as well waste it by myself than waste it with friends who would sideline me.

If I talked with a girl, it was about whether we would spend the rest of our lives together. No - I wouldn’t actually talk with a girl about that – I wasn’t mentally ill. It was just that I was always watching my self through GOD’s eyes. And GOD was passionate and full of purpose and deadly serious – even if HE did enjoy silly kids’ Sunday school songs – it was really all about those slow trudging sacred straight-faced hymns.

My Mission Impossible – should I choose to accept it – was to go undercover. I would play along as best I could with whatever scenario life presented – public school, piano lessons, Sunday school, hanging out with friends, spending time with extended family. Only I would know that I was in fact pursuing a purpose worth risking my life over. Only I, me and GOD, would be able to measure the progress, the slow careful patient steps that would result, in the end, after sacrifice and suffering, in GOD’s justice and mercy.

Ross Hudman was Mephistopheles. The demon sent to tempt and test and train me. Little did he know. Little did I know. I was a double agent. While Ross dragged me down to the devil’s ground - out of the high and mighty clouds that a minister’s son lived in – GOD was preparing me to live in a world of deception and betrayal. I learned that my mission, my secret purpose, could be and would be pursued in any circumstance. The straight and narrow path of a good Baptist boy was not for me. My road would wind and curve and dip and peak and get mired and muddy. While many eyes might see it as wrong, GOD and I would keep the faith.

It was the paper route that eventually drew Ross and I together. Slowly Tyler came to take his turn as the third wheel in our trio. There were several factors. I had accelerated grades ahead of Tyler so that now Ross and I were going into grade 6 while Tyler was still in the 5th grade. It didn’t make a big difference but it mattered.

Tyler was good at sports. He joined in after school sports teams. I had my paper route to do instead. Ross was even worse at sports than me. I was fat and uncoordinated. He was skinny and equally uncoordinated. That was another factor that made a difference.

Sin was maybe the big divide that Tyler couldn’t cross. Ross had taken to smoking cigarettes. At first it was a big secret. One of those big secrets that he and Tyler shared that kept me on the outside. But for Ross, the best part of sinning was sharing it. He told me and swore me to secrecy. The parents couldn’t’ know.

Ross would smoke on his early morning paper route. At first he’d steal a smoke from his mother’s pack. It helped him to wake up in those early morning hours, he explained. Soon he was buying his own pack at the corner store. I remember the thrill of the adventure, Tyler, Ross and I going to the corner store to buy his first pack of smokes. We shared in the risk he was taking - to see if he the people who’d been selling us candy and pop and comic books for years would now enter into this conspiracy of silence between us and the adult world.

We hurried down to the woods of the ravine and watched Ross light up his first purchased cigarette. He got me to take a puff but Tyler wouldn’t touch it. He’d been warned about GOD’s wrath for sinners. The United Church GOD that I served wasn’t too worried about such trespasses. In the end it was theology that split up our trio.

Tyler couldn’t take GOD with him into sin and I could. Tyler’s world was divided into GOD’s world the THE world. I’d been taught that GOD is love. Love, of course, is to be found everywhere. I didn’t see sin as a deep pit, or high wall, that separated the saved and sinners. Maybe it was because I knew so many ministers and knew that it wasn’t the lack of sin that made them saints.

It was the kind of lesson I couldn’t put my finger for you - just something within the way my dad taught me, the way he talked about other people and treated people. I never saw sin as anything more than the clothes you chose to wear. Sin might define who you hang out with. But GOD could see us all naked in our birthday suits and couldn’t be fooled by behaviour. GOD was love and even smokers could love.

My parents were worried though. They asked me if Ross was smoking. I knew immediately that Tyler had told his mom and his mom had told my mom and now I was being put to the test. I told my parents that just because Ross was smoking didn’t mean that I was gonna start.

They were worried, just like Tyler’s mom, about the bad influence he might have on me. Tyler’s mom put a wedge between her son and Ross. But I asked my parents about whether they didn’t think that I could be a good influence on Ross, they were able to see things upside down. Ultimately, they trusted me. Even though they never knew whether I was on that secret mission from GOD or not – they trusted that I was.

In the years to come I gave them lots of reasons to suspect differently. I took a puff of pretty much whatever Ross offered me after that. While I never did take to smoking, I did get into pot and porn and rock and roll and bars and well, I never did get laid - but that’s another story.

The worst part about the paper route was also the best part. Both Ross and I hated going “collecting”. So, we’d go together to keep each other company and give each other courage. Knocking on doors and shaking people down for the week’s paper money could bring out all kinds of strange reactions in folks. Some were cold and stiff. Some were rude and would treat us like pests. Some were terrific. Some were just strange.

Roy would do imitations of each of them as we approached. He could nail the character of every and any customer and have me splitting my sides laughing by the time we got to the door. If it was my turn to collect he’d make little side comments while the customer dug in purses or pockets that would produce guffaws and strange, annoyed looks from the adults.

After collecting we’d buy pop and chips and head for Ross’ basement. Inside the lid of his parent’s old stereophonic cabinet Roy would put record after record on the turntable. My brother had Beatles and Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkle records. Roy’s brother was a few years older. He was into much heavier fare. I was introduce to the funk of Bad Company; the rage of Black Sabbath (I knew I shouldn’t be listening to such obviously satanic-driven art but it rang true with something in me). Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention broke taboos and Alice Cooper made a circus of it.

And Led Zeppelin. We knew their first album well – every song - and I remember getting excited by Roy’s anticipation as he played me their second offering. Roy’s enthusiasm drew me in. Before there were DJs, Roy was my own personal tour guide of rock and roll music. The hours I spent reading he spent listening. It was like he would pull out the best chapters and verses and delight in the sharing of them. We just sat and listened. It wasn’t background – it was a taste of the life waiting in our foregrounds.

Roy would offer comments and cues – “listen to this part – - - don’t you just love that?” And I did. The heavy rocking thunderous rolls of sound drew out my adolescent, hormone-raging angst. The sexual energy of the Lemon Song made us laugh and squeezed out of us our own sensuality. The driving sorrow of “Heartbreaker” made me love the Blues before I’d ever heard them. Jimmy Page’s peels of guitar made your guts soar – taking your anger and throwing it to the stars. Robert Plant’s vocals; his moans and cries and the way he put everything into every song was heroically inspiring. John Paul Jones was the invisible master adding the bass lines and synthesizer that held it all together. But it was the drumming. The drumming of John Bonham that pulled me in and makes me a lifelong fan. Led Zeppelin provided the beat that I walk to - to this day. This music – its variety and range unique and unduplicated by any others - is the Beethoven of our age.

Ramble On would seduce you into a gentle country rhythm that starts like a Crosby Stills and Nash song but bursts into heavy surges of metal only to take you back to a gentle rambling.
I’ve got to Ramble On
I’ve got to find the Queen of all my dreams
How years ago in days of old when magic filled the air…

Those basement jam sessions brought me, more than anything else – more than girls, more than pubic hair and deepening voice, more than parental or peer pressure – into adolescence. I found in the music the expression of the wide-ranging emotions, thoughts, fears, taboos, and guts that it would take to live life fully. I knew, or felt, in some uncanny way that this music was the safety net that I could always fall into when the tightrope-walking act I practiced every day failed to suspend me.

My closest friends have always been people who could turn me on to new music. Sometimes I find stuff I like on my own. But mostly I rely on the passions of others. When I find someone who has searched out and dug deep into an artist or a genre with passion, I love to hitch my wagon and get taken for a ride. Nothing yet however has replaced my first love – the tortuous courting and friendship of Ross Hudman who broke my hymen and opened up my soul to rock and roll.

Lets go for a spin

It was a sleepless night in the Otonabee residence. I lay there waiting for the escape of sleep. My first year of university was in mid-flight, mid-winter, mid-term exams. I was already tiring of the routine. Feeling like a rat in a concrete maze walking the hallways down to the cafeteria three times a day. Running on the exercise wheel of classes and performing tricks on paper for the trainers. Where was this taking me? Was it preparing me for another maze to run my adult life through? I wanted open roads. I needed open roads.

Staring at the ceiling, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a tiny red glow just outside my window. I sat up and pushed the large sliding window aside. Along with the winter chill, three large Scarboro boy-men climbed through the ground floor window.
“What are you guys doin here?”
“We’re on a road trip. You comin?”

I’m sure that responsible thoughts must have crossed my mind. Thoughts like “you’ve got studying to do” or “you’ve got an exam in two days”. But I’m also sure that I was dressed and out the window with my old high school buddies before even Dave had time to finish his beer. It was a matter of honour. To turn down a road trip would be a both a slap in the face to my old comrades and an admission that I was becoming soft in the academic cushiness of Trent University.

Chuck was driving his 1972 Lincoln Continental and the four of us piled in. Why he’d bought that old boat was beyond me. The cost of keeping it in gas was astronomical. But Chuck had the cash. Instead of being a poverty stricken student he’d opted to work downtown at the Lever Brothers plant where his Dad was a supervisor. Of course a Lincoln Continental is a perfect road trip vehicle. It sat six with elbow room. Eight could cram in when necessary. Leather seats, lots of leg room, and Chuck had added a wicked stereo system. Add beer and weed and it was a party on wheels.

Dave and Doug had cracked under the pressure of exams at Western University in London and escaped back home to Scarboro to regroup. Chuck had come up with just the thing – a road trip to Dave’s family’s Pigeon River cottage. It was the site of many long drunken philosophical discussions among this band of Pigeon River Pirates. On this night they were all excited about some new adventure they’d come across. On the way out of Peterboro they explained.

On their way to pick me up the Lincoln had ventured out onto the ice of Chemong Lake. At Bridgenorth there’s a boat ramp and cottagers had created a snow road to cross the Lake.
“You have to check this out Amos, you’re not going to believe it!”
Chuck turned off the road and steered down the steep incline. First his front fender bumped onto the lake – kissing it hello - then the rear fender dragged down the last bit of snowy shoreline – like clenched fingers trying to get a last hold on safety.

Before the Lincoln stopped bouncing Chuck stomped the gas pedal to the floor. As the beast lurched ahead we got sucked a little deeper into the upholstery. Dave turned to look at me and Doug in the back and we must have mirrored the big wide grin on his face. Surging into the night across a darkened lake I could feel my blood increasing speed with the car. It raced up to the tempo of the Led Zeppelin on the stereo as Chuck leaned forward and gave the volume a crank. We lowered the windows and let the freezing night air sweep away whatever remained in our overstuffed university heads.
“You loving this Amos?” Chuck asked over his shoulder.
As the only suitable answer - I let out a long whooping war cry.
“Yeah? – well check this out.”
With his left hand he switched off the lights. His right hand at the top of the steering wheel suddenly dropped to the bottom and with only a moment’s hesitation the great steel coffin went into a spin. I was pinned to the door like a wet leaf on the windshield. We spun like a top into the black night.
“WHOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” was the Pirate’s unison cry – our fates joined together tempting death to take us all right now.

As the ride slowly lost velocity and came to a halt in a cloud of snow. Doug, Dave and I said together “Do it again!” urging Chuck on like 3 year olds. Chemong Lake is a big long lake. With the lights back on Chuck headed back down the lake, got the boat up to speed, and cranked her again. And again. And again.

Young men have great imaginations when it comes to thrills and adventures. And Chuck was just getting started. It was like he had diagnosed what ailed us and was doling out a remedy to suit. We’d stopped for a pee break and were checking out the stars. He popped the trunk and said “Get in boys”.

Dave and I took the first shift. The trunk was so huge that even I could stretch out between wheel wells. There was plenty of room for the two of us.
The anticipation in that trunk, building as the mighty V8 roared into the night, building as Dave and I muttered oaths and prayers, building until finally the ton of steel, leather and rubber spun wildly round and round. Being locked into a frozen blackened box, racing through the night waiting to blindly spin out of control could be a great form of psychological torture. Testing the limits of fear (and stupidity) made life worth living – or so it seemed to our adrenaline driven brains.

The problem with defying death is that the adrenaline becomes more addicting than nicotine. Like smoking, smart people never start. Life is short enough already – right?

What makes this story fun to tell - instead of tragic - is the simple fact that we survived. How many young men have done equally fun and stupid things and ended up as casualties? Just take a look at auto insurance statistics for young men and you’ll get a good idea. Telling and retelling these adventures to each other over brews by the fire in years to come, we’d get philosophical and ask “why?” “Why would we survive when others perished?”

I suppose such musings have always been the by-product of the road traveled from testosterone to danger to adrenaline. Whether that road is traveled because of events beyond control like war or weather, or whether bored young men take to that road just looking for opportunities to test the power of testosterone, it’s a road we crave. Our generation was born into a time of peace but it sure didn’t stop us from digging up our own kind of brave and pointless battles.

These battles were diversions from the thing that really terrified us. The straight line of our lives that lay ahead. School, jobs, marriage, family, mortgages. They lay on the road ahead as sure as death. The wild freedom we had just won as young men was slipping quickly through our fingers – like the night turning to day just over the horizon. Spinning through the dark out of control was a perfect antidote for such linear inevitability.

Chuck was driving and I was co-pilot now. The guys in the back were yelling “go nuts! go nuts!” so Chuck kept his foot down as the speedometer past it’s midpoint. “Go nuts! go nuts!” cheered the cargo and the car became a hurtling bullet through the night.
“What’s that up ahead Chuck?” questioned the trusty co-pilot.
“What? I don’t see anything.” answered the pilot letting up on the gas. And then, the dark blur up ahead came into focus.
“IT”S THE SHORE!” we screamed together. We hit it like Evil Kneivel hitting a ramp. Chuck stomped on the brakes but that had as much effect as our screams – we were in the air. As the Lincoln took flight I saw us crashing through a cottage picture window. It could just as easily have been a stand of oak trees we hurtled into. No need to fear the future. The future had just compressed into a super-natural breath-taking instant - now.

The Lincoln landed like a cat on all fours with a thud that bounced us off the roof. It seems we’d landed in a parking lot. Chuck spun the wheel, booted the gas down and steered us back over the embankment and onto the lake before I could even compose my prayer of thanksgiving.

The muffled yells from the trunk were a little less enthusiastic now and a lot more angry. Looking at each other and just giving our heads a shake Chuck stopped the car and we got out and lifted the trunk. Doug and Dave sprang out at us like Lazarus from the grave. The air was as blue as their bruises.
“What the fuck happened?”
“Well, you guys said – go nuts.” protested Chuck.
“We were saying – donuts – do more donuts” they swore, “we wanted you to spin the car in some more DONUTS!”.
“Oh” we said.

What were the chances of us hitting a parking lot along that cottage shoreline? Why were we so lucky?

“You go when you’re times up - when your number’s called.” is a popular proposition. “We’re spared because God has something important for us still to do.” is another good one. “Guardian angels guided us.” is one I like. But “Who knows?” is one of my favourites. It’s often followed by “but I sure am glad to be here!”.

The Cottagers probably called the cops on us. But as our cups of luck, or fate, or grace, were full that day, we headed home before having to answer any tough questions. It was time to get back to the books. I suppose I didn’t have all the facts that might have been crammed into my head – ready for that exam. But I do know that I couldn’t have been in a better frame of mind.

I was having a hard time giving a Shit

I was having a hard time trying to give a shit myself. I mean, if no one else really cared - then why should I? Ms. LaFreniere was on my case and she was the one teacher in the place I actually respected. Not that she was the only good teacher at R.H.King Collegiate Institute, it was just that she was someone you could be honest with and know that she wouldn’t lay the whole teacher should/must/can’t trip on you.

For example, her English classroom looked out onto the Smoking Lounge, an outdoor space where students were allowed to smoke. It was an alcove out of the wind. There was even an open space under a second story Science Room so you could get in out of the rain. This was the seventies. Being cool and smoking went hand in glove. Today it’s funny that the best outdoor space would be designated as the Smoking area. Probably everyone smoked there out of the wind and the rain and the School Administration figured it was simpler just to go with the flow and make it official – like they actually had a say in it. I didn’t smoke tobacco – it turned my stomach – but reserved my lungs for a finer herb.

So there we were in Ms. LaFreniere’s grade 12 English class discussing one of her whacked-out books. Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, and Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” were a few of the pieces she gave us to chew over.

A high point of that year was when I said that “On the Road” could be summed up with one word. When Mrs. LaFrenniere agreed that “it” was it, Tracy Fish flipped out. Tracy was a jock and a bully. I’d been the brunt of his treatments before. He couldn’t let this little victory of mine go unchallenged. He said there was no way a whole book could be summed up with just one word. I just calmly said “either you get “it” Tracy or you don’t.” It was my own version of browbeating – revenge - and it felt great.

So anyway, this one day I spotted Tracy Fish out in the Smoking Lounge lighting up a joint. I went over to the window and yelled at him “Hey Fish – quit skipping class and get in here.” thinking I was being pretty funny. He yells back at me “Hey Brown - why don’t you get out here and help me smoke this?” So, recognizing a chance to befriend a bully, I jumped up on the window sill, climbed out the window, hopped to the ground and strolled over to join him. Before I could get a good toke, three other guys had followed me out the window. What can I say? I suppose I have some natural leadership tendencies. Mrs. LaFreniere wasn’t impressed and stood at the window yelling “You guys get in here!” in her best shot at being angry while trying to hide the amusement in her eyes. Fish and I developed a mutual respect from that day on.

She wore long hippie skirts but I couldn’t picture her as a full-fledged psychedelic flower child. She was way too smart to be too far out there. I could see her at Rochdale though. Rochdale College, just around the corner from Yorkdale’s hippy haven was Toronto’s version of Haight-Ashbury. It was a ten storey, University sanctioned, experiment in communal living. The guy we bought our Mexican $20 an ounce weed from had told us stories about Rochdale. Those were the legendary glory days of free love, turning on and dropping out. In 1976, long after the doors of Rochdale were welded shut, we were still getting high on the waves that followed those sixties tsunamis.

As kids, we’d watched it all go by on television news and seen the pictures of naked youth in LIFE magazines in the dentist’s office. By now, made-for-TV movies were presenting a cheesy version of it all for our consumption. I wasn’t allowed to go see the Woodstock or Easy Rider movies and there were no home rental videos back then.

As I think about it - its more like we were in the trough between waves. The late sixties summer-of-love wave was the big one. The early seventies produced the most amazing music as artists took the freedom unleashed by the sixties and ran with it in all kinds of amazing directions. But now, in the mid-seventies, the Beatles had split up. Hendrix and Joplin the guy from the Doors were dead and the big waves had passed by.

The hippies were in their thirties now and dropping back in – getting jobs as high school teachers for example. The times were like a hung-over re-hashing of the big bash the night before. It was like stargazing and someone says “Wow – did you see that? That was the most amazing shooting star I’ve ever seen!” And all you can say is “Really? That’s great man.” and keep looking up at the heavens – waiting for something to happen.

The Sex Pistols and The Ramones hadn’t hit my radar yet. If it wasn’t on CHUM FM, I hadn’t heard it. The mood hadn’t turned Punk-angry yet. Things were still simmering in a depressed and lost discontent. We had no cause to fight for. No anti-Vietnam or Civil Rights high ground to hammer away from. The Sandanistas’ powder keg was yet to be ignited. Beer kegs and no shortage of narcotics kept things dampened down and dazed. All we had to rebel against was our own priviledge and prosperity. Not a very inspiring target. Self-defeat was where we were at. Angry, young and bored were the punk lyrics waiting to be written about us.

The one extra-curricular activity I risked getting involved in was Student Council politics. Teenage culture meant that anyone who put themselves out trying to achieve something – sports, academics, arts, fashion, school council, or dating – automatically became a target. Every move was scrutinized, criticized, mocked. If you were really good in sports you might achieve something close to social status.

I was useless in sports and good in class, so I didn’t have much of a reputation to risk. Student Council ran the school dances and raised money for sports uniforms and was supposed to carry the school spirit. My brother had been School President three years earlier and had had great successes hiring local big name bands like Lighthouse and Fludd and even Rush to sell out crowds. Once there’d even been a small riot afterwards with Scarbro toughs taking on the boys in blue from 51 Division in the parking lot.

Things had definitely cooled off since. We could have school dances again after a year’s ban on them but then the teachers went on a work-to-rule strike that meant all teacher-led sports and clubs got dropped. That year’s School President was a real freak. Dillon Donaldson wore thick glasses, scraggly beard, and hair down to his belt. At a Grateful Dead concert, he’d fit right in. In Scarborough, he was out there. He ran a cynical election campaign on the platform - “If you think this school’s a joke – vote for me.” and won by a landslide. He moved into the Student Council office just off the stage of the auditorium. The smell of dope smoke hung in the heavy stage curtains where the Student Council meetings were held.

I’d managed to get elected as the Grade 11 representative, due to a lack of competition and my brother’s reputation, and got to know Dillon just a bit that fall of 1975. Things were going okay. Dillon was very smart and had a quirky sense of humour. He was getting things done and we ran a fairly successful dance – it wasn’t a flop. Then, just after Christmas, he hung himself in the Student Council office. I remember hearing the news from our Vice President Paul before it was announced and it was unreal. Death hadn’t crossed my suburban footpaths before and suicide seemed like something that happened in other places but not here. I was playing a minor part in the first drama on the school stage that wasn’t amateur. We had no idea how to act this one out. An aura of doom descended on the school like a heavy wet wool blanket. We got used to it but it pretty much lasted for the rest of the year. If a school could become depressed, we were wading through it.

The Vice-President was a good guy. He was smart and sensible and I realized he was probably pretty much running things for Dillon anyway. Paul showed me something about leading in tough times. When others would have just said “fuck it”, he stood up and stoically got the drum beating again. He brought a sense of dignity and responsibility into the Student Council meetings. The edge had come off of the cynicism and self-satire of what we were doing. I did what I could to help him organize the last big dance of the year. When the dance was over he took me into the inner sanctum of the S.A.C. office and convinced me to run the next year for President. It was basically the “it’s a dirty job – but someone’s got to do it.” speech.

I recruited Steve Miller to run as my Vice-President. He’d always been funny and popular and a good athlete and I knew I’d need the votes he could bring in. I thought it was game over when Billy De Marco announced he was running. Billy was a really funny guy. He’d been our football team’s drunken mascot the year before and was a natural clown. He could get us to work up some school pride without making us feel like we were getting all American about it. Having pride without acting proud – the measure of Canadian cool. The school was ready for a good comic laugh.

I would have voted for Billy myself. But I knew enough about the Student Council to know that it’d take more than laughs to make it work. I couldn’t see Billy actually getting things done. With an uncommon sense of responsibility - and totally prepared for failure - I organized my campaign. I knew that I had almost zero popular coinage to work with. I also knew that I had almost nothing to lose. Just the attempt at the office meant being labeled a super-loser for the attempt. Every time I thought about that, terror would rise up like a cliff-edge out-of-control dream. Maybe it was the terror that finally pushed me into it. I decided to go big. If I was going to fall on my face in front of the whole school, I might as well make a show of it.

Steve talked up all the grade nine and ten girls who thought, as he did, that he was hot stuff. I recruited the conscientious girls from the Student Council and we got them to help make signs and poster the school with them. We hung a huge banner in the school cafeteria – something that had never been done. Our slogan was “IF YOU GIVE A SH*T, VOTE AMOS FOR PRESIDENT”. We didn’t ask permission. We just borrowed the ladders from the janitors and put it up after everyone had left for the day.

First class next morning Steve and I got called out of class down to the principal’s office. A.C.Burr was a big square-headed, deep monotoned voiced, subtle-humoured man. He was probably an excellent administrator but as far as we students were concerned he was a huge humourless cop. His presence in the school had a dampening effect on the raging hormones of teenage boys. He was not amused by our banner.

“You have to look at it this way sir” I began, “It’s a challenge to the student body. You know how bad student morale is at this school. That’s why they brought you in isn’t it Mr. Burr? If Billy DeMarco gets elected you know that things are only going to get more out of control. That banner is a test whether - deep down – beneath the jokes and the cynicism – those students actually care. Do you believe that our students really care about this school Mr. Burr? I paused and he replied in his slow, low, monotone… “Wellllll, ummmm, yes I do believe that our students care about this school.”
“Then I need your support Mr. Burr.” I picked it up again. “If you take that banner down, it’ll show that this is your school – which it is – but that we students have no say and there’s no reason to really care. But if you decide to leave that banner where it is – it’ll show the students that you and I have a working arrangement. That we’re in this together and we believe in them. Do you believe in those students Mr. Burr.”
“Welllll, ummmm, yes, of course I believe in our students.”
“I thought you did sir. Thanks very much for your support. I think that together we can do some good things with this school next year.” I stood up and put my hand out to shake on it. I glanced back at Steve. He was sitting there with his mouth open. I jerked my head to get him standing too while Mr. Burr was pondering whether or not to shake my hand. He did. Then he shook Steve’s hand and wished us good luck with the campaign and we were out of there.

The fact that the banner stayed gave us some credibility for sure. And it made them think. Not that anyone would actually admit to giving a shit about the school - but maybe someone should eh?

I was still sure I would lose to a Joker. I figured we could probably get the conscientious vote. But Billy would get the stoners and the Italian vote. We were definitely outnumbered. Steve was ready to bail. He wanted to drop out of the race before we were humiliated. His idea was that we could save some face by making a joke of it – “who gives a shit about being President anyway” right? I had to threaten him to stay with it. I told him if he quit he could forget me helping him with his essays. He was a good talker but a terrible writer. He depended on me to keep his grades where his parents would let him out of the house to date his latest true love.

Talking Steve into it helped me convince myself that we had a chance. Part of me really wanted to be school president. I knew that I could do a good job at it. But I also knew that winning school elections was not about who could do the best job. It was a popularity contest pure and simple. I believed in our cause and somehow, from somewhere, got the guts to keep going. Even though I was sure we would lose, I suppose there was a streak of faith in the student body – that they could do the right thing. Or, maybe it was my religious upbringing – a combination of a hope for miracles and a passion for lost causes.

The voting happened right after a whole school assembly in the cafeteria. Candidates gave their speeches and then everyone went and voted. All the Athletic Reps went first. They were all jocks and got lots of cheers and jeers and everyone knew that the best athletes would win the offices they wanted. No geeks bothered trying for the Athletic Association offices. Then the Grade Representatives went next. Each grade elected two reps to the Student Council. The speeches were pretty much what you’d expect. There wasn’t a lot of competition for office and both the grade 9 and grade 13 reps got in because no one else was running.

The School President speeches were saved for last. Billy was going first. As he approached the podium there was a buzz of excitement that ran through the cafeteria. What outrageous things would he say? Just looking at Billy made you smile and everyone was ready for a good laugh. But he wasn’t hamming it up in front of the bleachers now. As soon as he started talking you could tell that he was really nervous. Maybe the fact that he was sober had something to do with it. The audience went silent. Billy was reading his speech like he was stumbling through Shakespeare – awkward and stilted and totally unsure of himself. It soon became painfully obvious that these weren’t his words. As he stumbled on the auditorium rumbled with comments. Billy noticed and stopped reading and gave a weak laugh but didn’t know what else to do except keep reading. Watching this natural funny man read a dull speech was sad – like seeing a wild animal on a leash.

Billy’s flop was the door that opened up for me. I just had to walk through it now. And I did. As nervous as I was, I was not afraid. I knew that I could deliver a good speech and I trusted my message. The speech had come together for me in the early hours of that same morning and it was sitting in me like something heavy. It weighed me down and grounded me so that when I walked to the podium, it was like I belonged there.

I unloaded the speech on them. I made them laugh. I played up the “Giving a Sh*t” thing and really pushed the angle that I wasn’t afraid to stand up to our Neanderthal School Principal. I referred to him as “Big Al” with him sitting right there on stage – not smiling as I looked back to him. It was perfect. He looked pissed off but did nothing to stop me. My speech caught those who had already written me off by surprise. They had to look again - there was some wit, and some rebel spirit, behind the geeky exterior.

Steve’s speech was unusually self-effacing and not cocky at all - and very short. We sent them out to the voting polls with a laugh. I later found out that Billy’s speech was written by his cousin from another school. It got his cousin elected and it got me elected too.

I have to say that it was an incredible high getting elected School President. It totally went to my head. I loved the fact that as I walked the school hallways people looked at me instead of through me or past me. Sure, it also earned me a fair amount of ridicule from the too-cool-for-school lads. But now I was a geek with an office. My own office with a key. As they jammed their coats into narrow lockers, I threw my stuff on my couch or desk while I made calls on my Presidential phone. Now there was an edge of jealousy in their jibes.

They would groan as teachers would excuse me from yet another class for important Student Council business that needed attending to. I would cruise the halls memorizing where all the beautiful girls were at which time of the day so I could bump into them at the end of class.

I wasn’t all show though. We got the year off to a good start with another crowd pleaser. Student I.D. cards were the big fundraiser of the year. It filled the coffers for the year’s sports expenses and set the operating budget for the Student Council expenses. Selling school spirit was tough. The cards would get you discounts at dances and sports events. But why spend ten bucks on a card if you’re never gonna use it? After last year’s depression, no one was sure whether it was cool to care or not.

So I introduced for the first time a laminated photo Student I.D. card. Instead of the usual cardboard business card that you’d lose within a few days of buying it, you could now possess an official looking pice of identification. We hired a company to come and do the photos and they gave us the job of typing the names and birthdates on the cards and running them through the laminating machine.

We did a grade a day starting with the senior class. In those days, Grade 13 students were 18 years old and eligible to drink. When word got out that we were producing laminated photo I.D. with your birthdate of choice under the plastic, there was an enthusiastic line-up of under-age drinkers happy to pay $10 for such official looking fake I.D.

Public drunkenness was way more socially acceptable in the seventies (before mothers got MADD) and bars and Liquor Stores would take any reasonable excuse to sell booze to minors. We raised a record amount of funds for the S.A.C. coffers that year. Our teacher advisor Ms. Lafreniere was very impressed. At our next meeting, the rest of the Student Council reps gave some knowing smirks as she sang our praises, but no one spilled the beans.

The next challenge was the first Dance of the year. This would tell whether we were worthy of the office – or not. We were conservative in our choice of a Band for the first school dance. I didn’t think we couldn’t pull off the attendance needed to pay for a band like Rush. It was a heady experience for a 16 year old to go through the glossy photos and marketing mailings from every bunch of musicians in Toronto.

We decided to go with an old reliable. Liverpool was a Beatles cover band and had pulled in a crowd at our school before. They weren’t cheap, but weren’t looking for the big name bucks either. We pulled in just enough to pay the band and the cops and the cases of beer for our student volunteers in my office afterwards.

At sixteen, I managed to pull off a high watermark of confidence that I haven’t seen since. I look back with admiration at that kid and wonder where it came from. A smart operator emerged from behind those geek glasses. A set of contact lenses, being known by everyone in the school, and keys to my own office made me king of the world. Except for getting rejected in my stab at dating the school’s most elusive beauty – that was a real kick in the nuts – I was riding high.

Did the power go to my head? Definitely! I got called in to the Principal’s office halfway through the year. He told me that I had the highest class absentee rate of any student in the school. Because I was a good student, teachers were willing to let me off classes to attend to Student Council business. Often, I would just wander the hallways or hang in my office.

Sometimes I’d drop in to chat with Kiki Mohammed the Guidance Counsellor. He was as bored as I was and we’d have long philosophical talks about how education should really be done. He assured me that as long as I got a B+ average, I could get into any university. “No future employer will ever look at your high school accomplishments”, he assured me, “so why knock yourself out?”. Being from Pakistan wasn’t very popular in those days. Paki jokes were being told on FM radio. I, for one however, thought Kiki was pretty cool and took his professional advice to heart.

My power-drunk attitude, combined with a general lethargy among students that winter, made me wonder “what’s it all about anyway?”. I’d finally relented to our Social Convenor’s demands for a disco dance. He was from one of the two black families in our school. We were a working-class hard rock school and I tried to tell him that it would bomb but he was insistent. I fronted him the funds to hire the DJ but told him he’d have to pay the cops from the take at the door. (Notice how this was now a personal decision and not a Student Council vote?)

I personally refused to attend the dance not wanting to tarnish my reputation – keeping a good ten-foot-pole between me and the Disco scene. I got a call at home that night. He didn’t have the cash to pay the cops. I showed up with the chequebook and rescued them. There were about two dozen girls, one black guy, and one gay guy dancing up a storm under a glitter ball. Me and the cops just shook our heads and wondered at this strange culture transplanting itself into Scarboro turf.





Enthusiasm was in short supply. My initial burst of adrenaline had run out. High school is life’s first endurance test. Learning to deal with the boredom of classes from teachers who’re bored with their subjects and impatient with students who don’t totally suck up to them. Almost as bad as the boredom of the daily drama of who’s in and who’s not. As if it mattered. Sticking it out meant finding something to get you through. If it wasn’t sports, or academics, then drugs were an interesting option. But really, they were just another distraction while you put in your time waiting for puberty to wear off and adult cares to kick in.

Mrs. LaFreniere was on my case. She was typically so easy-going and supportive that this “get-serious” talk kind of caught my attention. Like I said before, she was my English teacher and I think she managed to pose the lifting-of-school-spirit as a quest.
On the quest there is always a point where the hero loses track of his sense of direction. He is waylaid and distracted. He forgets who he is and why he is pursuing the holy grail. I was in that place – mired down in the game-playing of high school and forgetting that I was there for a reason.

How she did it, I don’t know. But she got the juices flowing. I went home angry at her for pushing me – but knowing she was right. That night out of the soup my universe I cooked up a plan to launch a talent show.

It wasn’t exactly an original idea, but it hadn’t been tried in years. I knew it’d be met with resistance by the rest of the Student Council. So, I pitched it as the start of a new school tradition. We’d call it “The Annual” and this was to be “the First Annual Annual”.

The big night came. We’d rented a stage, lighting, and a sound system for the gymnasium. The classy old auditorium had been torn down the year before – did I mention that? Yeah, the classy old brick building that was the first secondary school in Scarbro had been condemned as a fire hazard and torn down. They’d built a new structure clad in corrugated steel. It looked like a factory from the outside and felt like an antiseptic medical institution inside. Are you starting to get the picture of what I’m talking about? What it was like to try to create a wave in a millpond? Well, the talent show made a splash.

Steve and I rented tuxedos as the evenings’ Masters of Ceremony. Surprisingly the seats filled up. There’d been a bit of a buzz around some school talent. A couple of brothers had pulled together a rock band that covered Rush tunes. Rush was homegrown Toronto rock and very solid music. The Santern brothers had to have talent to cover those tunes – and the school came out to see them. Would they crash and burn, or could they pull it off?

We gave the opening act to Bernie Fitzgerald. He was a member of the computer club in the days when you had to know code to use a computer. In other words – a real geek. I knew that he was a major Bob Dylan fan and a bit of a head. Being a geek myself, I had sympathies with Bernie and his crowd and they convinced me he was good.

He took the stage and gave us his best Bob Dylan impression - a performance with heart. He banged out the tunes, blew a harp attached to his guitar and sang with as raspy a voice as any teenager could. The performance earned him a healthy response. It was the first surprise of the evening.

The next act was even a bigger surprise. You know that scrawny little guy in your class that looked like he was three years younger than everyone else? You know how he got picked on in gym class? You remember his bone-white legs in white shorts looking like two sticks holding up a marshmallow? Well, we discovered that night what he did at night. Instead of wasting time at strip malls and drinking in basements like most of us, he was working up a comedy routine. On the stage that night, he transformed himself into Rich Little. His impersonations of Richard Nixon and Bill Cosby were really good – and the jokes behind the imitiations were funny. The humour - and the surprise of this guy pulling it off - combined to generate cheers from the audience. These students were actually impressed. It was like they were saying “Hey, maybe this school has something worth appreciating.”

The Santerns were on next. Pete was the drummer and in my Functions and Relations class. He was a good guy I thought. His older brother Frank was definitely a dick though. In the negotiations for this evening we’d bashed heads as he made one demand after another. This was their debut at their own school and as far as he was concerned it was all about them. To me, they were the evenings big act, but also a big risk. I thought Frank was asking way too much and pushing it. We both thought we were doing each other a big favour. Turns out we were.

Frank got all the money and the fame and I got the satisfaction of pulling off something they said, and I thought, couldn’t be done. The boys rocked the place. Steve pulled off Geddy Lee’s high pitched wails and Pete did a very decent job of putting down Alex Lifesons’ rhythms. Lorne’s older brother put out the bass line with competence. We were impressed. They even did a tune of their own that didn’t suck at all.

They did a full set and would have done more if I hadn’t pulled the plug on them. It was getting late and we had one more act. I encouraged people to stay in their seats because we had yet one more surprise for them. Mr. Manesh, our new long-haired Egyptian Chemistry teacher was going to give us a song. Mr. Manesh was very young, very hip, and pretty timid about being a teacher. He used to beg us to stop cheating during his tests. We knew he was way too cool to actually discipline us. But we had no idea just how cool he was until that night.

He took the stage with his guitar and in his broken English introduced his song “Castles in the Air”. It’s remarkable that I can remember the title of that song. Usually, I can’t remember names and titles for shit. But Mr. Manesh made a memorable evening remarkable. After the loud, hard-rocking tunes that spoke to us of where we’d come from, he put out a quiet, sophisticated ballad that told us where we still had to go.

Students were still talking about that night weeks later. I got a lot of credit for making it happen and it seemed to get the school spirit through the slush of a Scarboro winter. There was one more dance in the school year. The “Greasball Boogey Band” was a gang of guys who pretended to be greasers from the 50’s. It was popular to have a 50’s dress up day back then. All the guys got to do their best greaser tough guy imitations and the girls dressed up either as either cheerleaders or sluts. The band put on a big act and the dance was another break-even affair.

The year almost slid away into oblivion and it was me this time that got things whipped up into leaving the year with a finale. I re-wrote the Student Council constitution; creating a more cooperative and less hierarchic system. I limited the powers of President and broadened the Counicl so it wouldn’t be open to the kind of exploitation and single-minded decision-making I’d exhibited. I called a whole school assembly to explain it and have the student body vote on it. I think they voted for it because they didn’t really understand the difference and when you are a teenager “change is good.”

Somehow we convinced the Principal to give us a day off at the end of the year for a School Spirit day. We organized games and music at the newly created Bluffer’s Park at the base of Brimley Avenue. An amazing number of students actually showed up and participated and we raised money – leaving funds in the coffers for next year’s Council.

Grade 13 was an exercise in stamina. High School had no more lessons to give me – I was sure. I didn’t run for Student Council again. I’d outgrown it. Been there – done that. The teachers were out to prove that they were “on to me” and felt they had to give me a tough time after letting me have such an easy ride the year before.

I’d spoiled my own reputation with the new Student’s Council by spreading a rumour that Steve and I had gone skiing in Quebec with S.A.C. funds the winter before. I got a kick out of seeing the rumour spread and my reputation trashed. I was into self-abuse in a big way. I got a real satisfaction out of confusing people, keeping them guessing with their misperceptions and assumptions about who I really was.

I love to play with those perceptions I guess because I really do care what people think of me. I care way too much and that really bugs me. As much as I work at only caring about what I know to be my own truth, my feet remain glued to this earth with the gravity of communal judgment.

This telling of this tale of my political career is, I suppose, a combination of pride and expose. I have to say that I got a swell of pride (without being proud) when my daughter’s youth group leader told me about her performance in her high school talent show. I already knew that she was attending the R.H.King newly named – “Academy”. I’d heard that they’d brought in a new regime complete with school uniforms and mandatory extra-curricular performances and it had whipped up a demand from parents looking for some spit and polish from their education dollars. She probably wondered, and I didn’t tell her, why I got a big grin on my face when describing this annual talent show, she called it “The Annual”. It was a nice surprise. Maybe I really did give a shit after all.