| Author: |
Robert Ziegler |
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Friday, April 08 2005 @ 05:00 PM EDT |
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2242 times |
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Winter was a warden and winter was a wizard. Winter stripped away mobility, enforced confinement. It slowed motion. Because the snow was waist-deep, only beaten paths were passable: down to the frozen lake to chop free pails of water; over to the woodpile and chopping block, or to the A-frame outhouse with the red flannel glued to the frozen wood seat. The trail out to the car became occasional, used only to drag the toboggan and car battery in to thaw by the stove on the day before attempting a ferry-run into Burn’s Lake. By mid-winter even that was done, and the Chevy joined the Mercedes, an abandoned shell for future hikers to speculate upon.
Bone-warming heat became a memory, a mirage, a wish. The damp green wood from the soft aspens gave off little heat, so we huddled daily round the stove, reflecting on our choices. The warmed air visited briefly, then vanished through the tarpaper. An army blanket draped across the warped door partially blocked the wind-driven snow blowing through the cracks and chinks, forming small pyramids along the floorboards each morning. Like monks in a windy monastery, we went about our tasks: grind the grain into flour, bake the bread and eat it, deposit the remains in a frozen hole. Actions were stripped to essentials: morning coffee, toast and porridge, write until lunch; feed the stove, listen to the hiss and sizzle; cluster round the stove as the sun went down, then light the mid-afternoon kerosene lamps (and from what culture did that kerosene come, whose technology made those lamps?); drink cups of home-made rice wine; go to bed in sweat suits & sox; shiver awake by 5:00 a.m. and do it again.
The lake was a giant jewel on sunny days, and just beneath the crust of drifting snow, lay clear black ice, up to three feet thick. With an axe I’d chop a circular hole until only a large, diamond-like prism remained: blue, gold, black, green sparkles of brilliance in a setting of white, and suddenly the blade would shatter the gem, and glacial water, sweet as the cup that Leroy had offered, rushed up in a swirling pool. In that utter silence, the frozen air hanging out over the lake clear to Nadina Mountain tinkled imperceptibly, like glass chimes. White, white, white, beneath a dome of unearthly blue. The absence of color suggested all color. The absence of sound was the foundation of music. Sudden splits in the lake-ice shot like a rifle between our feet and disappeared, leaving a vacuum echoing the droll scolding of huge ravens.
All that sweating and chopping to wash diapers! Baths were a weekly luxury, squeezed like a canned ham into a galvanized tub we sat, chills shaking out from the marrow of our bones. And it was good. The edges of gratitude for small things began to emerge: the teachers were unyielding, the learnings were fundamental. Some nights the incandescent wavering of silvery green feathers washed across the northern skies. Along the trail a sudden tiny explosion of snow would materialize into a startled grouse taking flight. Hallucinated memories of copper-colored meadows rimmed with orange paint-brush and purple fireweed arrows flashed forth against the curtains of snow.
Just before Christmas, just after dawn, a Winchester rang through the steel air. It sounded close, and, shortly, a mittened hand knocked softly on the door. A red-faced man grinned toothlessly, plumes of steam and cigarette smoke surrounding his black hair.
“I shoot a moose down near your place. Seen’r from the lake but there she’s still standin’. Come from up the other end on my snowshoes an only had one bullet left. We’ll go back an finish her with your gun. She’s on your land.”
Down she went with one shot and her calf ran off through a hollow of swamp alder and willow. I’d never seen a moose before; didn’t know where to look. As time went by, my eyes shifted from printed words and street-lights to subtler movements, the moose, as if by magic, appeared before me, as did rabbits and hawks, coyotes and wolves, weasels and warblers. Tommy’s knife slid like a surgeon’s scalpel, and her hide fell away like a fur blanket beneath her bloody carcass. His blade passed between her big joints effortlessly; hind-quarters, front quarters, falling away like tree limbs did for me. And this teacher said nothing; the lesson was demonstrated. Was it several hours that we knelt together in the cold? When we rose, the cow lay in portions neat as any butcher shop. Tommy gestured to a hind-quarter that was ours: was this one hundred and fifty pounds of meat on my shoulder that I was carrying home? Tommy took the remains for his 11 children: the prized nose, the tongue, the intestines for sausage casings, the gut for snowshoes, and the hide for tanning. The ravens scooped the digested shoots from the stomachs and ate the blood, leaving the ancient altar as empty and white as eternity.
Meat shouldered onto our one-legged table, elbowing aside peanut butter and beans, joining with brown rice and onions into a myriad of new mouth-watering dishes, returning an almost magical power to my body. Our pale heat seemed to be supplemented by internal BTU’s, enhancing our sedentary routines. Besides writing poems, journals, and long letters, we made candles and carvings, quilts, and drawings. Bunny’s baking became more and more creative, including cinnamon buns, cookies, whole-wheat fruit cakes, and braided loaves. I sent poems and premature manuscripts off to publishers whenever we got to town. I waited anxiously for acceptance, anticipating remuneration, receiving instead, a steady stream of rejections. Too ornamental, too surreal; this was neither literature nor fiction; keep trying. I did, for the next seven years.
That Christmas we hauled a toboggan-load of home-made gifts out to the general-store post office, and hauled in a heap of presents from our far-away families and friends. Wealth was now salted nuts, good coffee, new socks and mitts, waxed wheels of cheese, Southern Comfort, and store-bought toys for Rachel. The most incredible gift came from Bunny’s mother, a warm, wise woman who would eventually visit us. Unknown to her career-colonel husband, she’d saved enough money to send us plane tickets to visit them at their home in Hawaii in February.
Time shifted gears in January; from a near stand-still to a near blur. Animals were placed with local farm-friends, decent clothes were sewn and packed, birth certificates organized, border alibis fabricated into passport facades, and suddenly it was February. Snow was falling and hitch-hiking was cold. Rachel, bundled in her blue snowsuit, we hoped would be our ticket to ride. Hours passed and we grumbled about what kind of people would stare incredulously then drive past a couple with an infant in a snowstorm. Our eventual savior was a guy reeking of alcohol, but going all the way through to Vancouver. We were freezing, his car was warm, and we were soon speeding crazily south.
At a coffee-stop I persuaded him to let me drive and he nodded off, his Vodka bottle empty on the floor at his feet. At three in the morning we arrived in Vancouver, caught a cab in the balmy night, and slept that night at Rick Ehle’s house. Rick was an old friend from Penn State who’d also resisted the war conscription, and settled in Vancouver on the downtown East side. In the morning he drove me to the draft-resistance headquarters, where I was warned, under no conditions, not to attempt re-entry into the States. Custom’s officials now had Black Books at every border crossing, complete with all names, in alphabetical order, state by state, of the draft dodgers living in Canada. A warrant for our arrests had been issued, and many who had already been caught, were serving a minimum of two years in jail for treason.
I felt paralyzed; we’d come so far, made so many preparations. Our plane was departing the following afternoon, and I was not hitch-hiking alone back up to that ice-box in the woods while Bunny and Rachel recuperated on the beaches of Hawaii. I was a compromised man, a desperate man who was going across that border, too. The people at the resistance headquarters rehearsed me in what not to say, how to dress, walk, breathe. The rest, they said, was a crap-shoot. Rick drove us to the airport, said he’d wait outside for the final say-so. There I stood in ankle-high work-boots and worn corduroys, hand-trimmed hair, a sally-ann tie and a back-pack. Who was I kidding?
It must have been Rachel, beaming like a cherub in her frilly pink Christmas dress that turned the tide. My mouth was dry. I forced a face of nonchalance. The Custom’s official studied our papers as I scanned his desk for the Black Book. I heard my own voice fabricating a story about my recent stay in Canada as a visiting lecturer of English poetry, and how well my seminars had been attended, and how we were now stopping over in Hawaii so Rachel could visit her grandparents, and how her grandfather was a colonel in the United States Army.
He waved us through. He waved us through! Just like that, a wave of the palm, like a tree in a breeze on the sandy beach of Kailua. That’s all there was to it. Rick was waiting outside the metal gate, beyond the Black Book that had my name in it, and here I was going back through, down the escalator, and Rick said okay he’d pick us up in 3 weeks, and the voice is suddenly announcing the Flight to Hawaii is boarding now, and I’m hurrying down the very long hallway in a near-run with my eyes on Bunny and Rachel who are hovering just behind the Custom’s man’s head when I hear a crash near my feet which have kicked over a knee-high standing-ashtray with a sand-filled metal top that’s spinning loudly as a flung-hubcap through the marble hallway whose incredible acoustics are now picking up the additional clanging of the ashtray-base also spinning across the hall-floor and which I manage to stop and set back up, then deftly scoop the now-still metal frisbee-top in one hand, some sand in the other and place it back on the base, all the while, like a seasoned vaudevillian, remaining unflappable for the amused audience and for the Judge who has the Book and can snap off a palm-tree just like a hurricane wind but the endless moment is over as suddenly as it began ten minutes, sixty seconds ago. and the man in the uniform wipes a tear from his eye, and tells me to have a good trip.
Then we’re over the ocean, hurtling through time-zones, air a velvety-black outside the windows of the jumbo-jet, free beer, salted nuts, and a turbulence that, though it shakes the jet around like a metal ashtray, is nothing compared to the Black Book at the gate. When we left the cabin it was 40 below; when we stepped off the plane, it was 34 above. The temperature difference and the jet-lag, the border-crossing, and the high-altitude beer left me rubber-kneed. The air was damp silk and the profusion of exotic flowers wrapped me in a dream. People with lays and gaudy shirts gathered round us; soon after we were asleep.
Three weeks passed by like a movie. Bunny’s father had been away, and when we met him the next day he was entertaining a military figure from Hawaii. His jaw dropped. Bunny saluted him, addressed him as Sir. His severe eyes softened and he exclaimed “Miss Bunny!” Drinks were served, and then some more as Colonel Joe nodded to the Hawaiian business associate while diplomatically re-framing our cabin saga into a phase of the “American Northern Homestead Project,” which was in the process of developing alternative training for advanced American military procedures. I corrected the story, but his eyes squinted down; it was how he had to shape the world, how he thought and imposed meaning on experience. He had lived his life as part of the military intelligentsia, installing communications systems in the Philippines, Japan, and Hawaii. Bunny’s mother placed her finger on her lips, winked, smiled. I yielded.
That night some of Bunny’s old friends arrived with Paca Lolo, got us stoned, and took us to a Janis Joplin/Grateful Dead concert. I thought I heard them singing my name, my name as the psychedelic light-show flashed. I hallucinated the faces of her friends, leering like carnival masks, felt Bunny and her old boyfriend secretly connecting. I was totally paranoid. Our sex life had been non-existent and I was coming apart at the seams. One night, after consuming copious quantities of vodka-fruit drinks with her father, I spilled the beans to him. His eyes widened, grinned, and dismissed the story like it was a clever joke. I stumbled off to bed, and awoke to find Bunny mounted on me, briefly, riding the tropical waves of passion, then sliding off into sleep. From that quick coupling our second daughter, Jessie, was conceived.
Before we left, I had the great good fortune to be invited on a twenty-mile hike by a group of botanists who were involved in staking out a natural park preserve. At 5:30 in the morning, Bunny’s brother-in-law and I waited in a vacant parking lot, the engine running, our headlights on, when a police car pulled up next to us. The officer requested I.D. and I stammered I had none, had left it at home, at the home of Colonel Joe, of the United States Military. The botanists arrived then, and backed up my story, and I was released with a reprimand for traveling without I.D, at all times. My heart started beating again when we mounted the trail, and the towering bamboo groves, banana trees, and red Hibiscus, the hoof-prints of wild boars, pressed into the mud, served to restore me to normal. By noon we stood on top of a mountain, and from that aerial view the verdant greens stretched like a glimmering mirage out into the blue-green sea, while just beneath that illusion of lushness and monkey-puzzle vines were ridges of volcanic rock, razor-sharp. Beauty and tranquility on the surface, razors below; I was beginning to sense a pattern.
We hitched out of Vancouver on an overcast February morning. A light rain had turned into a down-pour, and we stood with our backpacks and Rachel, shivering and soaked for hours. A series of short rides left us in a snow-storm in the Fraser Canyon. Our clothing began to freeze and Rachel was sneezing. Late that night we reached the cabin, and Rachel had a temperature of 105 degrees. I felt like a reckless hippy who had lost sight of reality. We rushed her to the hospital where she was x-rayed by a man who later became one of our best friends. Jeremy was a draft-dodger from Illinois who worked at the hospital to support his true love: painting. Three days later Rachel was home safely, and Jay invited us to an evening of wine, Bob Dylan records, and spaghetti.
Aside from three weeks of “R & R” in Hawaii, we’d weathered our first winter with just enough wood to get us through the last bites of chilly weather. Wild flowers were blossoming and birds were returning, along with humming clouds of black-flies and mosquitoes. We anxiously awaited the arrival of an old friend of mine from Penn State, and his wife, who had written from California, and who intended to build a cabin near us on the lake; however, two months before they came, friends of theirs, whom they’d told of our wilderness paradise, arrived at our door with their three kids. A huge bloody lake, with lots stretching out in all directions, and this guy decides to build 200' from us!
Ray was a big Bolshevik of a man, a poet of social-anarchy, with a red beard and a strong body odor, a hardened politico who plucked the flower-vision of the New Age movement and squashed it under his hob-nailed boots. Yet another teacher, Ray was an excellent poet, a blend of Robinson Jeffers at his Shine-Perishing-Republic best, and the sparse, tough lines of Gary Snyder. Ray scorned my writing, declared it flowery, saccharine, flaccid, and hopeless. More than once, at a shared reading, he slammed my cabin door with a disgust so huge that the thin windows shook in their casings.
Ray was direct and opinionated, hard on his wife and daughter, indulgent with his sons. With his chainsaw shattering the silent afternoons, he was building a big cabin for his family, and he did an enviable job. His wife, Lonnie was a good woman, lean and hawk-nosed, with high cheek bones; she moved in a slow lanky way, like a fox in a weeping willow. She was a loving mother who could make 20 different dishes from the same jar of beans, each of them tastier that the night before. The whole family farted and worked uncomplainingly through spring.
I’d already begun gathering firewood for the next winter, and suggested Ray might want to do the same. He’d pack his pipe, lay back in the sun with a copy of Tolstoy, humor me, and read. In a curious way, it was pleasant to have them there, despite the continuous invasion of privacy: Lonnie’s litany of Ray’s abusive explosions, the kid’s daily visits, Ray’s pompous, scathing discourses on authentic living— how I should be keeping current with the news, not living like an ostrich. They, like we, were just people trying to make it, and sometimes we all did it well. In his calmer moments, he offered constructive criticism that helped me re-assess the antiquated lyricism in which I’d been taking refuge. It was sometimes a relief to relax in their larger, more spacious cabin. Rachel had playmates when Lonnie and Ray left their kids with us, while they went to town for weekend retreats in rented hotel rooms. Lonnie’s father owned a newspaper in California, and though he and Ray never spoke, he continued to send her installments from her future inheritance. Ray, apparently, was able to compromise his disdain for the bourgeoisie when it stood to benefit his own independence.
That summer was a blur of changes: goats and chickens abounded; Brown, our coyote-dog, had pups; Lonnie got cats that bred. A man on a diesel-cat clanked like a tank past the cabin one dawn on his way down the lake shore to level off a hilltop where, he said, wealthy Germans were eventually building another lodge, and to appease my outrage at his invasion, he agreed to plough open a garden-plot for us. And Dean and Vera had sold their place to an American couple from Idaho. Extensive renovations had already begun, changing the formerly, quiet road through their meadow into a buzzing hive of construction workers. Bunny was pregnant and sex was even farther from her mind. Then Todd and Suzanne arrived, their Cherokee jeep easily climbing over the rock out-cropping. Suddenly, there they were, parked in our “backyard.”
Todd had a tipi strapped to the roof; inside was a Whole-Earth- catalogue of tools, everything technology could offer to make going-back-to-the-land a total success. I was so glad to see Todd again, and to meet his young wife, but I soon realized that the Todd I remembered was much more than I’d known. Todd was a practical man, a perfectionist who did things right or not at all. Having been raised by his grandfather, he had an elderly air of correctness, a vest-pocket full of fountain pens and a myriad of small black notebooks, in which he kept notes about every occurrence. He was a superb photographer, and a well-informed naturalist who carried Peterson’s books on birds and flora wherever he went. A walk through the woods with Todd transformed my former vision of my surroundings; Todd brought into focus minutiae.
Suzanne, whom he’d met in a library, was ten years younger, and he treated her like a bumbling child. He’d charmed her with his ice-blue eyes and his story telling. She was attractive, moon-faced, with a frivolous laugh like a mountain stream; she was insecure in his grandfatherly presence, and soon joined with Lonnie, to share with Bunny, her feelings of oppression, and her unsatisfied sex-drive (something which Todd, apparently, had no interest in fulfilling.) Todd was busy identifying plants that were medicinal, and setting them aside for future illnesses, recording facts, identifying sparrows. With several cameras slung around his neck and a backpack full of lenses, he whistled over the hills, zooming and telescoping. Todd took pictures of dewdrops on twigs at sunrise, of the almond-shaped, evil-eyeball of the goat, of the blood-fire in the paintbrush, the swollen bug-bites on the children’s faces. Todd caught the cusp of the moment with the accuracy of a sniper. He shot holes in the tangled anonymity of the wilderness, and he pasted his slices of eternity into a scrapbook for the baby Suzanne was begging him to give her.
With the winch on his 4-wheel-drive jeep, and a block and tackle, Todd demonstrated how smoothly the ratio of log-weight could be re-distributed in a commensurately proportionate reduction of human effort. Those logs floated up into place like feathers. Todd owned he had no intention of posturing as a purist, not while technology had made available so many useful tools. The wheel, obviously, had already been invented. He smiled amusedly at our rustic little cabin, then fired up his chainsaw, and went at it again. The former bird-songs were replaced with the scream of the saw and the whine of the winch snaking big logs through the brush.
The Cherokee daily drove in and out for supplies, and soon cut deep grooves into the old soft ruts that the berry-pickers had, in a century, barely marked. Three weeks later, a solidly built, L-shaped cabin was nearly completed; he and Suzanne moved out of the tipi. One month later, and nearly broke, they would depart for Washington to pick apples, but because they, like Ray and Lonnie, had never become legally landed-immigrants, they were strangled by the red tape at the border re-crossing, and although they managed a brief return visit, they would never live in their cabin again.
By early August, a stream of California hippies began to trickle into the woods. Some moved into the tipi, some pitched tents between our cabin and Ray’s, other’s camped down by the lake. Dudes with pony tails, chicks with halter-tops, rolling up doobies down on our plank and log dock. New rumors began to circulate at Ab and Lulu’s general store in South-Bank. Forestry officials appeared, investigating how many teepees were actually dotting the hillsides, whether the reputed herds of sheep and goats were destroying the trees. RCMP officers arrived to inspect our garden for the marijuana crops we must be growing. Word had spread to the hunting lodge, and red-necked fishermen with country-music blaring from their boats, whooped past the dock to take a boo at the top-less hippie women sun-bathing on the dock.
I didn’t want Bunny down there with them. I didn’t want them hanging around our fire-pit at dinner time. I didn’t want to smoke their dope together; it made me paranoid. I felt insecure, felt her slipping away. Our life together was unraveling fast, our intimacy wholly gone. We were, at best, friends. I had gone to the woods to escape the establishment, become a writer, raise a story-book family. Bunny wanted a commune, to cook, eat and drink together, get stoned, sing, swim, play together. I was East and out-numbered; she was West and evolving, pregnant, connected. She was becoming an Earth-Mother. I was up-tight. I drank strong homebrew, became sullen and self-pitying, angry and accusative, isolated and withdrawn. East and West were not, yet, to meet.
Lonnie began to visit every evening, to share her fear that Ray had it on for Monique:
“That little slut with the tight little butt hangin’ out of her cut-offs. Give me a break! She’s not even 20; wouldn’t know how to light a fire or wipe her own ass in the winter. Takes her along to pick up groceries, sticks me with the kids. 5 friggin’ hours to run in for the same stuff it takes us 2 to do. I don’t friggin’ think so.”
I could identify with Lonnie’s fears of abandonment, and began to enjoy her company. She verbalized that discomfiting energy that rippled under the surface of communal couples, that “what’s the big deal, bro! We’re only folks, sharing love, down here on the land.” It chipped away at me; it hammered away at Lonnie, and she was dead on the mark. The firewood lay in the forest while Ray trailed Monique through the thickets, until September when the flock of wannabe’s flew back south for the winter. By mid-December, Ray had flown the coop, too.
The memory of last winter’s wood drove me into an ever- widening search for decent wood, so I built a wooden wheelbarrow; a simple affair, with a tapered wooden box, two sturdy saplings for handles, a round slab of wood for a wheel, and a wooden axle. I loaded it down with 3' lengths, and sweated triumphantly through the falling leaves for two days, before the axle snapped. Carve another axle. Snap. Another. Soft wood, no good. I sawed a length off the broom-handle. Then the ash wood axe-handle. Very hard wood, harder, actually than the softwood wheel, whose soft core widened as the weight of the box bore down on the axle. A new wheel with a cut strip of galvanized metal tacked inside the axle hole was a temporary solution, until the metal edges chewed through the axle. I was re-inventing the wheelbarrow.
I needed a metal axle, a metal wheel, ball bearings. I needed a metal wheelbarrow! Had I just imagined the idea of a metal wheelbarrow or had I not seen one, rusting darkly in the weedy corner of the meadow out behind the White House? I seemed to remember, as we’d pass by that work-in-progress, seeing one out in their meadow, so I walked down the trail and into their clearing. There it was, straight from Vulcan’s Forge: the original metal wheelbarrow, the key to a winter of crackling fires; our metal passport to a cozy survival.
All I had to do was march, hat in hand, past the new pick-up truck and the spanking new Mercury with American plates, under the fluttering American flag, onto the plantation-style porch, and knock on the door of the White House. So, with Bunny by my side, and Rachel in her goatskin snuggly, I lifted the heavy brass knocker and let it fall three times. A blonde woman in her mid-thirties opened the door and warmly invited us in. Betz chatted away in a syrupy southern drawl, as she made tea and laid out hot biscuits and Saskatoon-berry jam.
“Them Saskatoon booshes was near-pitiful, loaded down with all them old berries. Ah wuz fairly milkin’m inta mah pail,” she shared.
Their Colonial furniture, frilly gingham curtains, and classic, chrome wood-stove oozed with that good old American hospitality I’d struggled to leave behind. Plush new carpets travelled the expanse of the hardwood living room floors and up the stairs. Our frayed pants, muddy boots, and dirty hands stood in stark contrast to Betz’s tailored country-look. About the wheelbarrow, Betz suggested I go out to the main shed and talk with her husband, Wally. She’d planned to put Petunias in it someday but didn’t care all that much one way or the other. I left Bunny and Betz to chat about Rachel and pregnancy, and went into the barn-like shed.
A 400 Hp. generator stood in the rear of the shed, a D-9 dozer and a baby Bobcat hunkered outside, overlooking the lake; below, bobbing beside the dock, an aluminum outboard and a Pleasure-Cruiser. A shadow slowly moved along the work-table among the rows of tools. Light from a bulb glinted off the bald leathery skull of a skinny man in coveralls. His back was to me, but he spoke first.
“How do. Reckon y’may’s well come on in.” Same southern drawl as Betz.
“Figur’d ya’d a been here b’fore now, seein as ya been drivin through fer several months now. What kin I do ya for?”
“I, uh, wondered if that rusty old wheelbarrow’s for sale?”
“An y’r name’d be?”
“Robert. I live in the cabin down in the woods. Me an my wife and daughter.”
“Y’r one a them fellers what run from the war, ain’t yu?”
“Conscientious objectors, yeah. Not a war I wanted to get involved in.”
“Which kinda war would yu see fit ta get involved in?”
He was sharpening a blade on a grind wheel and glanced up occasionally from the shower of sparks, bringing up the edge, teasing out a conversation.
“Well that wheelbarrow’s been sitting in the meadow since Dean and Vera lived here, so I wondered if you want to let it go?”
“Myself, I was in a P.O.W. camp after them gooks bombed Pearl Harbor. For about 19 months, 2 weeks, 6 days, give or take a few.”
His head swiveled towards me and he fixed his thick spectacles on my eyes. His prominent Adam’s apple rose and fell in his buzzard neck as he worked his lips back over his teeth. Betz told Bunny how he’d suffered a bitter digestive disorder ever since his long internment in the concentration camp, and how he’d become a shrewd and successful heavy-duty machinery salesman in the southern states, a millionaire within 5 years of his release.
“Well, I guess we could work out some sort of a deal over that there wheelbarrow, Rawbert. Tell ya what we’ll do fer now, is that yu just take’r away an we’ll settle on down the line a’ways.”
And he went back to sharpening his blade. Log lengths rolled easily out of the hollows, and the stacks of winter wood began to grow. Betz would wave us in on a sunny afternoon and serve up tea and biscuits, while Wally sat silently rolling cigarettes in the living-room. Outside, the workers on the scaffolds would wave and grin as we went in.
“Gawdamn warhoops,” said Wally. “Never did meet a Tommy-hawk who could finish off a projeck. Start up, drink down, an gone, is their way.” Just on the skin-side of a living skeleton, Wally had never taken back his pounds of flesh from his captors. The millionaire from Missouri was now the North-Wood’s gate keeper through whom we miscreants were, sooner or later, forced to pass. His movements mimicked the living, but only his body had escaped the barbed-wire compound.
In October Bunny went to the hospital. We’d dreamed of a home-birth but were advised against it. Rachel had been a complicated delivery, resulting in a mid-night caesarian birth. Our doctor warned that it would be foolish to risk a mid-wife delivery so far from the hospital, and we agreed. Bunny decided she wanted no more caesarian sections after this, and elected to have her tubes tied. A practicing intern who requested being present was, after a private consultation during the delivery, given the opportunity to remove Bunny’s appendix, as the organ was, apparently, of no value anyhow; besides, it provided the practicing intern with a useful experience.
On October 15, 1970, Rachel had a sister and we had a second beautiful daughter: Jesse Elizabeth. She had the chocolate brown eyes and fine features of her mother, and was given Bunny’s proper name: Elizabeth. Bunny was bed-ridden in the cabin for three weeks. I boiled water, scrubbed diapers, cooked, attended, and fed the family proudly. We were now four.
During this period, three new couples from California had moved up onto Uncha Mountain about six miles from us. Ab Beaver had informed me one day at the store that some of “our people” had moved up on the mountain (“another passle of new-comers”), and that evening we followed his directions up the muddy switch-backs that criss-crossed the mountain. It was dusk when we parked and began to hike the final half-mile of rutted, rocky terrain. A plastic hut lit by a kerosene lamp sat, like a Chinese lantern, down in the middle of a foggy meadow. Two figures sat inside.
“Halloo” we called from a short distance. “We’re friends from down on Uncha Lake. Are you up for a visit?"
A man with a chest-length beard stepped into the doorway, and his partner, Joan, shook hands warmly with Bunny. Both of them admired Rachel, who sat smiling in her snuggly. Mike opened a quart of dark ale and poured it into two handmade Viking-mugs.
“I’m from a little town in Pennsylvania that you’ve probably never heard of ” he said, “named Bethlehem.”
“Bethlehem! I’m from Allentown!” Two absolute strangers in a mountaintop meadow in northern B.C., born and raised ten miles from each other! He knew where my father’s nursery was; I knew where his high school was! We bonded instantly. They were the first of the Hill-People to arrive. Mike was building an octagonal log-house, and by the time it was finished, the other couples had arrived.
Between Uncha Lake and Uncha mountain lived Clem and Marie, an ex-patriot couple who’d moved to Canada, for reasons of their own, long before the war. They’d raised their daughters to live off the land, drive tractor, shoot moose, taxidermy owls and red-fox, lynx and big char; both girls could also paint, and wild horses, rearing wildly in lightning storms, or with hooves slashing at bears, adorned the faded wallpaper of their old farm house. The Krantz’s taught us about goats and breeding, gave us a lamb and a turkey, and invited us for Thanksgiving.
Clem and Marie’s daughter’s, auburn-haired Mary-Ann and brunette Teresa were going to marry two young men from the Skin-Tyee family, members of the Carrier Nation, and we were invited. This was not only the first double mixed-wedding in the area, but also the beginning of our relationships with the local First Nations community. They were being married in the Grassy Plains community hall, and we were invited. The hall was full and alcohol flowed freely. It was our first pot-luck dinner, and the tables fairly sagged with moose-stews and roast fowl, beaver-tail and fish, loaves and berry breads, and a home-made, 5-tiered wedding cake. A huge man strode to our table, introducing himself as the father of the grooms. His hand engulfed mine like a grizzly paw round a small salmon, and, grinning, he informed me that I had been chosen to make the opening toast. Silverware clinked on glasses, then stopped. I rose. The whiskey loosened my tongue and I must have said the correct things, because the hall burst into applause, and we were accepted. As I reflect back now, our life was such a flurry of comings and goings, that I can barely chronicle the flow of events. All of those northern people were in some way significant, and influenced both my own personal growth as well as our life as a couple.
Just before Christmas Ray ran out of wood and burst red-faced into our cabin. His eyes were wild, his cabin was cold and there was no firewood! He’d been digging deadfall out of the snow, and they were freezing. He was, as the old-timers named it, “bushed.” He bellowed that he was leaving, alone, for California, Now! And he slammed out into the snow. Lonnie followed in his wake, declaring he was planning to shack up with Monique, and she had to go, too, to keep the goddamned marriage together. Would we please please keep their boys until spring, as their daughter could stay with a couple in the town, and she had no money to take them along. Bunny agreed; I was reluctant, but the wheels were in spin. Three days before they left, a shot rang out at dawn, and Lonnie was at our door again, breathless. Ray had shot a moose up on the ridge, but didn’t know how to skin it.
I’d watched once and that would have to be enough. The weather was already way below zero. The blood was freezing on my hands. My knife slipped, puncturing one of the four bloated stomachs, and the half-digested willow-browse gushed green slime everywhere. The stench was over-powering as I scooped the entrails out onto the snow. Tommy had made it look easy; I had made a mess of it. Ray drilled holes in me with his red eyes, then passed a bottle of Southern Comfort. By noon we were dragging legs and parts out through the woods on our old toboggan. By nightfall we were gorging on moose steaks. By morning Ray was ready to leave. He labeled the brown-papered packages of meat and gave us permission to use a portion to feed his children; the remainder he expected to be there when he returned in the spring. Lonnie hugged Bunny and me; Ray cast a withering glance at our good-will, for it had thrown a monkey-wrench into his rendezvous with Monique. Then they were gone. Letters were all we heard from them until the April-thaw.
The cabin closed in; now there were six. A fence of frozen, board-like diapers criss-crossed on in-door wash lines each day at dawn. When the fire was again crackling, the diapers would thaw, dry, and make room for Ritchie and Donny’s piss-wet sleeping bags to divide the cramped space until they dried. Fortunately, mid-winter days were quite short, the sun like some aging rock star, doing a brief set of thin material, then exiting in a private jet. There was no space, only an aisle to walk in; kids played under or on our big bed, a ring of warmth radiating only slightly farther than the first winter, our wood a slightly higher grade. Outside, the steady lake wind turned eyelashes and moustaches to instant ice, no place for little kids to play.
The man we’d met in August, roared up on his snowmobile one early February morning. Quentin Sharp had been a bow guide in Dakota, later moving to Canada. He was teaching school in the town of Burn’s Lake, and having gotten wind of us, drifted out one day to inspect. In August he had toted in a huge frozen Steel-head he’d caught over in the Skeena River, presenting it as a gift, a preface to his request to do a photographic study of our life, which he said he yearned to, but did not have the courage to live. Nor would his wife ever give up luxury. Quentin said he envied my freedom, and that in exchange for photographic freedom, he’d agree to provide for us during our meatless months from his last year’s cache. His wife was tired of moose meat, and because he was still a hunter, he needed to hunt, although he was, reluctantly, substituting the camera for the rifle.
Quentin had once met the half-dozen Hill-People, Ray and Lonnie, Todd and Suzanne, at our cabin, and had openly expressed his disdain for their illegal status, and for the fact that they departed for the southern climes just when the snow fell, and the tests of winter began. Marijuana was illegal, wasn’t it? What about schooling for the children? And bath-tubs? And insurance for their van? Who covered medical expenses if one of them drove into his wife?
“You drifters are basically playing boy scouts in the backyards of Canadian farmers!” And that was the gospel, according to Quentin. The Hill-People pegged him for an undercover narc. Their collective vision was paranoid and, despite the fact that Quentin was an ex-patriot American, he was on the other side of the fence. He moved quietly and kept one ear to the ground. He was suspect, but so were they.
Some of the Hill-People had made a whack of money in California when computers were first being introduced into banks. By subtracting just a penny from people’s statements they had, over a decade, funneled thousands of dollars into a communal account, and with that loot had bought a Canadian mountain-top. Johanno-Ai , who once described himself to me as a “cosmic jeweller” who “read the many facets of the universal mind.” He dropped acid daily and did Tarot readings. One winter night we all dropped together and, as usual, I went out of my mind. Sitting in the candlelight of his dome, I glanced into a mirror and a timber wolf stared back at me. When I stepped out into the starry brilliance of the winter sky that night, I saw five moons. Johanno-Ai grinned at my blown-mind and concluded that now was the perfect time to do my Tarot reading. My primary card was The Fool, and Death manifested itself in all my surrounding cards. The Burning Tower signified my ending.
Bizarre and New Age as they seemed to be, they were also among my unorthodox teachers. Diego had been a lawyer for Black Panthers, had lived with his wife Suzie in a California Red-wood stump for several years in a commune, learning about herbs and healing. They taught us how to work leather, utilize cayenne pepper against colds and the cold, and gifted us with a wild goat with the curled horn of a mountain sheep. She had run wild with horses and had been used as a bell-mare, and was now our bell-goat, a defiant and fearless creature who lead our herd out through the forest to graze, then returned them again at milking-time.
Diego and Suzi lived in a hand-made tipi, grew garlic and herbs, built a sauna for purification, and had their baby in the tipi with the aid of a midwife. These people were knowledgeable, courageous, and generous. They were radicals who were dedicated to tearing down the Evil Empire. I admired them and I feared them. The men, especially Diego, hugged me whenever we visited, and even that made me uncomfortable, highlighted my uptightness. They smoked dope freely, handled it easily, laughed uproariously. They brewed excellent ale, made pottery and stained glass that sold down in California outlets. I was caught between them and Quentin. On the one hand, what he said about them was true; on the other, I agreed that the old order had to fall. But, in the middle of winter, when the moose meat was nearly gone, and the mountain-top and our woods were empty except for us and four kids, there was Quentin, grinning from the seat of his sputtering snowmobile:
“She’s a skookum day. The ice is rotten over where Binta Creek empties into the lake. Tie your toboggan to the back of me, and put the kids on. You could use a change of diet about now.”
Quentin tossed handfuls of Steel Head eggs into the open patch of water; chumming, he called it. Soon one after another plump rainbows flapped about on the ice. Two hours later, thirty trout, averaging one and a half pounds, were bagged and laid into the laps of the laughing children. We zoomed back across the lake, and Quentin was gone.
When Ray returned in April he was furious. One small box of moose meat remained.
“What did you do with it all? Feed your dogs? Jesus Christ! “ Todd and Suzanne were soon to follow. They had been denied Landed Immigrant status at the border, and had only a 30-day visitor’s permit, when they would return to do battle again with their nemesis, Senior Officer Cavendish, who, apparently, had a vested interest in tightening up the Borderline. Ray and Lonnie had filched on numerous debts, and had no intention of tangling with the red tape; they simply slipped through.
The leaves were green, the flowers unfolding, and by June the Hill-People floated back onto the mountain. Wally and Betz were back. Several goats had kidded. And then, out of the blue, my brother John and his wife Mary and her brother Jimmy arrived in a VW Beetle, all the way from Pennsylvania! He’d written that they were planning a trip, but money depended on our wealthy friend, James. Now they were here. And among the lures I had used to bait my brother, was the possibility of a fishing trip in a remote, virgin northern lake. He was, as usual, using a 3-pronged hook. We would be guaranteed big fish and it would not cost us a cent. He would pay for the plane flight in; he would provide the food; he would furnish all the equipment. He was still a guide and he had connections. His purpose was to make a documentary of salmon spawning. We would carry the under-water camera equipment and act as assistants; we would set up and strike camp; we would do all the cooking and dishes. Oh, and one more thing. No one would leave until the filming was complete, no matter how long it took. John and I leapt for the lure, bit down hard. Mary wasn’t so sure.
Jimmy stayed behind in our cabin to feed the animals while we went chasing rainbows with Quentin. The final connection with him was typically unceremonious: a quick run-down of last minute equipment, how much weight we were allowed for air-transport, and a re-clarification of our part of the deal. When we pulled to a stop in a dusty cul-de-sac, Quentin was already unhitching the boat trailer and barking orders. We were on a tight schedule, needed to be there before the plane, to guide the pilot to the drop-off site. And then we were roaring up-river, Quentin’s tiny eyes narrowed for rocks and dead-heads. Along the shores, stranded salmon flapped in shallow shoals. Quentin caught my eyes, which he flicked with a nod towards a lightning-struck tree, branched like a candelabra. 20 or 30 eagles sat hungrily on the bare limbs just above the carrion-feast. Occasionally one unfurled dark wings, dropped down with talons gleaming, then rose with the weight of a dying salmon hanging from its claws. Their alabaster heads shone in the still sun, and the air stank of death.
It was a silent hour up-river, then Quentin revved the boat up onto a grassy band and moored it, in a single motion. The marine plane was just circling the lake when Quentin waved. Right on time. Tents up, firewood gathered, bannock cooking, beer tasting fine, food being chewed, mosquitoes coming on heavy, dishes being scrubbed and put away, Quentin sitting in a folding chair, watching, grinning, like a man who knows something that no one else does.
The woods were damp, and dusk dropped a dense web of moisture over the tent. The air was humid, and the steady hum of mosquito-gangs, just outside the netting, were discussing turf: whose blood was gonna be whose, an who’ll slip in to the tent when someone goes out to pee; how many kamakazi will go down in mosquito-coil smoke, or maybe be the ones who survive to strafe ears, all night long; to dive at sleeping eye lids and drink deeply, lay bloated in a sock, digesting, then rise again to sip at wrists and throats. Mary began to buckle; this was not her idea of a vacation.
Morning was sunny and Quentin was impatient in his chair; there was no fire yet, nothing cooking, and perhaps a tad of clarification was in store, in the timing-department. His chest was puffed and his thick fingers drummed impatiently on the arm of his chair. John and I were skilled eaters of crow, having learned at a young age how to simulate the down-drawn mouth of one wincing at the bitter taste of our father’s frequent disapproval. I’d started a thousand fires by now and had one crackling immediately. Bunny got the bacon sizzlin,’ the eggs a’fryin,’ the toast a crispin,’ the coffee perkin,’ and Quentin a ’grinnin.’ He scooped a hefty rasher of bacon and three eggs onto his plate, leaving the remains for us to divide. It seemed like his plate lay empty on a rock and the boat motor purring, before I’d finished my breakfast.
“Ready for Rainbows? They won’t be there all day.”
John and I, torn between civility and adventure, wiped our lips, hugged our wives, and jumped into a boat that was already moving before we’d even settled into place. A plume-like wake arced out behind us, and the camp shrunk from sight. Ahead was a lake without description; maybe that was why Quentin said little and carried a camera. He jabbed a stubby thumb towards the cliffs that rose sheer above the lake, to mountain goats suspended on narrow shelves above the mist. A tiny glimmer crossed his eye, like a camera shutter opening and closing. I felt he had snapped a picture of my awe. Already he was looking away for something visible only to him. Apparently, he’d located it because he cut the throttle, thrust the rods to us, and directed us to feed out line.
John’s hit first, bending his rod-tip to the water, screeching line off his reel, nearly knocking his toque off his balding head. His blue eyes danced like sun-diamonds on the water, and he played that big boy like he played Chicago blues harp. Silver and green and reddish gold flashed under the boat and disappeared out the other side. Quentin was on his feet with the net, balancing on the bow. He guided John’s line alongside the boat then scooped in a flash, his net lifting the flapping, white-bellied, ice-cold Rainbow. A stunning blow from a fish-club stilled the commotion in the boat-bottom; then, silence. His finger through its gill, John hefted a sparkling three pound rainbow as the shutter clicked. Before the colors had begun to fade, Quentin returned John’s lure to the lake, and nodded that I could fish again. And thus it went all morning, everything flashing: fish, lures, eyes, shutters, water. Quentin’s fishing would be done with cameras, starting at dawn.
In the morning a blanket of fog rolled in and camera conditions were prohibitive, leaving Quentin in a sullen mood. After cleaning camp, we were apprized of several new stipulations: because food had been packed for only four days, bacon and burger were only available at designated meals; peanut butter would now be our staple. Fine. Cookies, pickles, and cheese were off-limits, beer was allowed only in the evening, just in case the fog suddenly lifted, and we had to move quickly with the cameras. Bunny could get some buns baked for dinner, and we should fillet the fish now. And, as there was enough fish for now, we would be fishing either from the bank or in the canoe, within calling distance at all times.
Then it began to rain. It rained slowly and steadily at first, but by evening an unrelenting downpour forced us into a dripping bunch beneath the dripping tarps. Quentin downed several of his Heinekens, and, after a snifter of brandy, retired to his big tent to sit comfortably reading, warmed by a lovely little Coleman heater. We went to our pup tents, squeezed four into one, dealt out the cards, and sipped our last remaining beers. By midnight, the sound of rain was replaced by the humming of mosquito-biker-gangs. Those boys meant business. We slid down deep in our sleeping bags for protection from the insiders; then, soaking with sweat, crawled back out to cool down. It was a toss-up; doze and boil, or cool down and get worked over. The third morning they were waiting outside the tent in pockets of humid fog. Mary wasn’t coming out. She was a free citizen, not a captive. She had always preferred solitaire to fishing, camped only when necessary, and John could bring her coffee to the tent. Quentin could eat his own bacon.
According to Quentin, the spawning had already begun; valuable footage was slipping by, and the contract was mulled over again, while big drops of rain plinked down on the still surface of the lake, making concentric bulls-eyes, and shattering the camera-surface. Big trout arced everywhere, gulping down blood-filled mosquitoes. Then there were no more spaces between the bulls-eyes, just a mirror splintering from falling pellets of speeding ice-water, which had condensed from the snow-capped mountains, locking us into the basin.
As the damp cards were dealt, we conversed conspiratorially about our condition. Mary was the most outspoken, and clarified again that she would not, would not be held hostage by a fanatic in that rain-soaked, mosquito-ridden hell-hole. Quentin’s tent was absolutely silent. Meals were silent. Mary refused to eat Quentin’s fish. She was willing to give it one more day, fulfill our four days, and then Quentin would have to take us out. I knew what Quentin’s response would be, how he would interpret the contract, but as Mary said, screw him. She was my sister-in-law, and she was beginning to lose it.
Nighttime, more mosquitoes, maybe up from Panama, like miniature chainsaws about to rip through the rain-soaked nylon. They were pissed; they smelled blood; so did Quentin. Wet firewood sputtered that morning as we broke the revised plans to Quentin. He glowered sourly. Mary stared straight at him but Quentin looked away. He had the patience of the hunter, combined with that of the photographer. He knew how to out-wait the prey, and eventually Mary left the smoking fire. Quentin motioned John and me into his General’s tent. He poured himself an ample snifter of brandy as he glared at his aide d’ camps. There would be no turning back. We’d come too far at too great a cost (to his wife), and besides, only a fool’d attempt to predict the weather in these parts. Tomorrow could be sunny, the clouds appeared to be breaking up in the southwest, and the window of film-time for spawning was narrow. There were still four more days of hatching happening, and if we had to stay the four extra days to shoot it, we damn well would. That’s all, men.
Mary wouldn’t hear it. She was outa there tomorrow, if she had to go on foot without a map through the wilderness. And if she got hurt or lost, it would be Quentin’s responsibility, and she’d see him in court: abduction, being held against her will. Again it rained all through the night; John and I prayed for rain in the morning, the better to argue our case.
Fog, a thin blanket of fog. No rain. Clouds breaking loose in scudding clusters. Quentin’s eyes twinkled with victory. Mary’s were adamantine, and John went toe to toe with Quentin. I stood next to John, and Bunny set our packs by the damp fire-pit. Quentin cried mutiny. Quentin cried foul. Quentin cried the blues. Then, so be it. Because, he said, the river was swollen with rain, we’d go only part way by water; therefore, we’d be forced to go four hours on foot through the bush, to the launch. Quentin would carry the compass and a rifle in case of grizzlies, we would carry, besides our children and packs, this and that and these and those, because of the lost time, there would be no rests. Understood? Into the boat!
Not one word. Like a fiercely-carven Viking bowsprit, his chiseled face dead ahead, Quentin roared recklessly through the rushing river. At a break in the trees, he moored, jumped from the boat, and set out cross-country at a deadly pace, often disappearing from view, and refusing to answer our calls when we got turned around in the seemingly pathless bush. We’d come upon him leaning against a pine, breathlessly straggle into place, and then he’d disappear again. I carried Rachel across my chest and a pack on my back. Bunny carried Jesse, and a smaller pack. John labored beneath a mess of miscellaneous equipment, and Mary, fragile and furious, bore her difficult dignity through the grizzled tangle of God’s Country.
Soaked and exhausted five hours later, we were given further penalties for having reneged: the boat trailer tire was flat and had to be repaired. Financial remuneration for additional boat-gas and wasted time would be calculated and settled at a future time. While we were jacking up the trailer, Quentin Sharp melted, like a guide, back into the bush.
That night the cabin seemed a mansion, and we ate all the cheese we wanted. We drank a bottle of wine, ate no fish, had chocolate. The spell was broken; we were adults again! The occasional mosquito minced around, took a moderate sip, then split, and we slept like babes in a wood.
John and Mary and Jimmy had planned for a two week stay. Todd and Suzanne were leaving earlier than scheduled for their final shot at the Border. Todd was hesitant to start gathering their winter wood until they acquired legal status. So they moved out and my brother’s family moved in. He and Jim were going to help me raise the roof on our cabin another storey. We needed room. Because I’d felled the trees in spring, before the sap had risen, they were seasoned and ready to notch into place. Three days of chopping and lifting, three nights of guitar music and singing, and as suddenly as they’d arrived, the fun came to an end.
We called him the Fat Man because he was. He strode into our cabin site, flanked by two tall men, all of them wearing suits and ties, and carrying attaché cases. This was the only time I wished the suited strangers had been Jehovah Witnesses. But they were Custom’s officials. The Fat Man’s henchman wore shoulder holsters, visible when they unbuttoned their coats. It was August, hot, and the Fat Man repeatedly mopped his round red face. He’d been informed, he informed us, that my brother was visiting me, and he suspected that his seven-day visitor’s pass was likely out-dated, since he’d heard that John’d been here for nine days now. And was this so? Yes, this was so. Then that left him no recourse but to issue orders for deportation, unless, that is, John jumped into his car first thing in the morning, and reported at the Vancouver border by nightfall.
After checking my papers, the three strode over to the cabin next door, for inspection. Ray and Lonnie were given three weeks to acquire legal status, and then they, too, would be deported. And then the three Officials headed off to Uncha Mountain, where the Hill-People would receive a similar deadline. So John and Mary and Jimmy left in the morning. It had been two years since I’d seen him and it would be another five till I saw him again.
My spirits slumped but there was wood to be gathered, work to be done. We had run out of money for window glass and were forced to stretch double plastic, which led to the shootings of several cats who repeatedly clawed their way through and in. The Krantz’s had traded us a cream separator and were making goat cheese for winter. I had read how, by running knitting needles through a cheese and wrapping it in a damp cloth, then placing it into a wooden box underground, to make blue cheese. Bunny was making garlic and caraway cheeses. We waxed them and laid them up in a root cellar I had dug into the side of the hill. Cabbages were starting to head, beets were rounding, and the Saskatoon berries were bulging with purple juice; if we didn’t pick them soon, the black bears would.
More than once I’d seen their steaming scat, purple with berries. Neither the children nor their mothers felt safe to pick berries anymore. Black piles of half-digested berries had begun to encircle the cabin sites. What was equally interesting to me at that time was that I was, serendipitously, reading Faulkner’s long, rambling story, "The Bear." The story meandered, doubled back on itself, like a bear might do; and, the bear in the story remained unseen, its absence a presence which gradually accumulated more reality than the bear itself had; more and more power over one’s vulnerability, until eventually its presence was everywhere, and Fear grew big as the forest itself. Finally, one could no longer step out the door without wondering if the bear was waiting on the porch. My reflections on these parallels were interrupted when Bunny yelled from the cabin door, that the bear was in the tree just beyond our fence, between Ray’s cabin and ours.
I grabbed my rifle, aimed nervously at the head peeking round the trunk at me, and squeezed off a shot. Missed. And the bear dropped down ten feet, staying hidden on the opposite side of the tree. I fired again and missed. He dropped to the ground and stepped fully into view. My heart pounded and I shot again; this time the bear let out a roar and fell to the ground, where he thrashed weakly. With the .22 rifle poked to his head, I finished him off, just as Ray came running through the trees.
“Jesus Christ”! He screamed. “You near shot me. I heard a bullet whistle past my head and thunk into a tree just behind me!”
Then he saw the bear. I was still stunned by the suddenness of it all, still thinking of Faulkner’s bear, and wondering how the story had ended. The children stood back, uncertain if the bear might suddenly rise again and eat us all. The mothers stood with their hands resting protectively on their children’s shoulders. The bear was dead, and heavy. I cut a sturdy sapling and nailed it ten feet up between two trees. Ray and I hauled on ropes together to hang the bear high enough to skin it.
Skinning that bear was very different than the moose, perhaps because a bear can walk upright like a human. Once the black robe had been removed, hanging there on that green cross, with penis and testicles exposed, was the body of a man with the head of a bear. The whole experience was mythical, and I drank a quart of strong homemade ale to get through the job. I was acutely aware of the strength of the bear. It was an animal of power, a medicine animal, and I felt I was dismembering The Sacred. My hands were covered with its blood, the knife blade was long and silver, and the ribcage was curved like a human’s. I cut off his head, cut out his heart, rolled up the robe of the sacrificial king and built an altar fire.
The forest was again safe for the children to pick freely. In a time when grouse were raising their young and meat was absent, the bear seemed a gift sent from above, descending a tree from a hole in the sky, an offering.
That night both our families ate barbecued ribs around the fire-pit. We drank beer smoked our pipes, and told stories. The kids each held a claw in their hand, for power. We seemed, if only briefly, to become closer that night, a community made whole through the bear.
Over the next few days, I built a tripod from saplings, which I placed round a fire-pit. I strung strips of bear onto thick thread, dipped them into a bucket of brown sugar and salt solution, then draped them over a low smoky fire. The hide itself I draped round the tripod, like a tipi, where I sat for the next four days, smoking the bear. The smoke-pit was my introduction to sitting still, not-doing, staring at smoke, tending embers. At this time I had begun a new set of readings, which also shaped my spirit.
The Back Country, by Gary Snyder, was a series of anthropomorphic essays that examined the original meaning of wilderness and wildness, encouraged a periodic immersion in the wild, to clarify our humble role in the Eco-system. Snyder widened the meaning of Tribe to include the West-Coast Communal movement, the natural human tendency to gather together. He clearly articulated our indebtedness to the ancestral keepers of this sacred wildness: the First Nations People.
In the following weeks, as a result of my introduction to his work, I ordered a series of related texts through the long-distance lending library. The Winnebago Cycles opened up the Trickster Creation myths from the Great Lakes People, which led me to the Coyote Trickster tales from the Southwestern tribes, and eventually to Raven Trickster from the people of the Northwest. These images and rhythms informed my thinking and writing with a fresh symbology that also provided a context in which to locate my personal journey, as a person on the fringe of the larger, mainstream culture. This helped me to reframe the concept of Exile into a more positive light, lent credibility to the stance of opposition, and validated the small acts of resistance against a culture that valued technological progress, at any cost.
As the remains of the Bear deepened to a reddish golden brown so, too, did a new awareness enter me, through a ritual of smoke. The Bear was my first medicine animal, and was to gradually guide me towards the Red Road over the next twenty-five years.
After ten days of red tape tangos with Senior Officer Cavendish, Todd and Suzanne conceded defeat, stashed their tipi and tools, and re-crossed the border one last time on a visitor’s permit. They returned to clean out the remaining possessions from their cabin, just in time to say goodbye to Ray and Lonnie and their kids. The Fat Man had made a clean sweep. The Hill-People had already gone, leaving their livestock and an ailing chainsaw with me; the remaining equipment, they locked in their buildings. Rumors later spread that their dome and octagon and A-frame had all been ransacked and looted.
When the dust settled, we were the owners of fourteen goats, forty chickens, seven dogs and seven cats. The woods were again quiet, funereal. The cabins, for a time, resembled log- mausoleums saturated with memories. One day, the Fat Man’s two henchman returned to verify the purge had been permanent. From Todd’s cabin we heard a dozen shots and hurried down to the cove. They grinned foolishly; they were having target practice with their pistols, shooting holes in the trees around the cabin.
Penniless in early September, I walked toward Wally’s plantation. I’d snow-shoed past in the winter, and driven by with others in the summer, but had avoided much interaction. Several men from the Skin-Tyee band had visited our cabin, drank homemade beer and laughed about the blondy who was milking the old skinflint for all the gold she could get. They predicted she’d be gone by snow-time.
Wally was scraping a future garden patch with the shovel of his ‘dozer when I waved. He choked off the diesel engine and put a cigarette between his lips.
“How do, Rawbert. That ol’ wheelbarrow got ya’all through the winter I see.”
“It was a big help Wally. Couldn’t have made it without that barrow.”
“Which brings me ‘round to payment, Rawbert. Betz’d like a telephone into the house, an likely a t.v. too, and them Hydro fellers’ll be glad to drop a dozen poles an string some wires if we kin clear out that strip’a cottonwoods’n aspens alongside the road ta the house, see.”
He walked me over to the strip and gestured with his boney finger. The Carribean sun had tanned his gaunt face, browned his skull.
“I’m guessin’ you could use a little extra pocket money right about this time’a year, Rawbert. Them Hippy friends was glad to have a little money under the table. Sorry to hear they all got their walking papers."
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founders of ScrollinSpace for encouraging me, at a crucial time, to continue
with my outobiography, to clean up the text and submit it to their recently
founded publishing site. In particular, Dee has been continuously
encouraging of my (and many others) writing process, and as I look back to
that evening 5 yrs. ago, I see it as a serendipitous thump on the back.
My book, The Draft Dodger Dues: A Banquet of Crow, is now published at
Trafford Pyblikshing Company, Victoria, BC, and those interested in the
complete book can access my web-page there, (under the title of the book).
Rob Ziegler