One Native Life (8 page)
It was 1973. I was fresh out of work and ready for anything. Pete took a shine to me right off the bat, and I was hired to help with the games, the funhouse and the roller coaster. Life as a carnie seemed to fit the restless feeling I moved in back then, and the sound of big truck tires humming down the highway late at night was like a lullaby. I loved the life and the work, but it was the Ferris wheel that attracted me most.
In those days the Ferris wheel still had romantic cachet. A guy could still get his first kiss from his favourite girl while riding the wheel, and there was something special about coming over the top of it at night and seeing the lights of the town spread out before you. The wheel was a carnival institution, and I was thrilled to be part of it.
Putting up the wheel was a team effort. Everyone lent a hand. It had to be erected from scratch, and it took hours to level the heavy steel plate that was the ride’s foundation, erect the twin towers, haul the axle up and then slide each spoke into place before hammering the pins in with a ball peen. The work was hard, but it was made easier by the shared effort of that tribe of carnies. There was no room for complaining, no time for grumpiness or whining. “Let’s get this thing in the air!” they said and bent to the work together.
Paul, the wheelman, had been on the road for more than thirty years. He was one of the last of his kind in the business. He’d seen the carnie life change, had watched as the simple romance of the wheel was lost to the speed and acrobatic flights of the more popular modern rides. Dime days, he called them, referring to the time when rides cost ten cents and the world was a slower, simpler place.
There was no room for daredevilry or risk taking on Paul’s crew. Moving heavy lengths of forged steel through the night was dangerous work, and we made each other aware of every move. We used shouts and humour. The teasing and name-calling we engaged in on those set-ups and teardowns eased the tension of the work. And we worked with passion. We built that wheel from the ground up, watching our sweat and toil take shape in the light of the generators, the top getting lost in the darkness. It was pride. Joy. Fulfillment.
I was the spoke puller. My job was to stand on the steel cylinder of the axle and pull each spoke into place with a rope, slide each tip into its slot in the hub and then, holding it in place with one hand, drive in the thick bolts. There was no room for a safety harness, nothing really to hook it to. I stood with nothing to stop me from tumbling thirty feet except a keen sense of balance. It was scary. Anything less than a smoothly delivered spoke would drive you off.
Covered in grease and sweat, I’d stand for a minute after tightening the last of the cables before the seats went on. I’d put my hand out to clench one of the steel cables and feel the thrum of it in my gloved palm. It seemed then as if the wheel was alive, impatient to take on its riders. I’d close my eyes and feel the empty space fill with the smell of sawdust, grease, horse dung and fresh candied apples. It always made me feel good, content. Working on that wheel meant I belonged. But it was more than that. I was in that particular state of happiness that comes with shared grunt and strain.
Getting that wheel in the air was my first experience with tribalism. I was the only Indian on the crew, but working that wheel taught me how sweat transcends politics, how common effort removes differences, how a common purpose brings everyone together. In that, I suppose, we’re all Indians.
. . .
ANOTHER BIG THING
happened to me the year I was seventeen: I hitchhiked across Canada for the first time. In 1973, the last vestiges of the hippie era still clung to the land. It was a marvellous time to be young and free and wandering. There were thousands of us. We met in youth hostels in places like Nipigon, Gull Lake and Wawa. There was a feel to Canada then. The country was on the cusp of a huge and wonderful reawakening, a reaffirmation of the meaning of its name: Canada, Huron for “our village.”
It was summer when I set off, and the first day I went from the Niagara Peninsula all the way to Sudbury. Standing there on the great rock spine that is the Canadian Shield, I looked west to a magical land of mountains and ocean and opportunity. The whole country lay before me. The charcoal stretch of highway at my feet was my map, and I felt as if I could make it to the coast in no time at all.
That didn’t happen. The northern Ontario rains came and left me stranded. I stood for days beside a railroad bridge and slept beneath it every night. Finally, a truck driver suggested I head to a place called Chapleau to catch the westbound train. I’d never hopped a freight, but the romance of it swept me up. Outside Chapleau I lurked on the brush, waiting for my chance to fling myself aboard like Woody Guthrie and the great hobo kings of the past.
I made it somehow, managed to claw my way onto a slatted stock car and settled in for the ride west. I wasn’t alone. There was a young man in the car named Mick Pocknell, a coal miner’s kid from Sydney, Nova Scotia. He’d never met an Indian before, and I’d never met a Maritimer, but we shared smokes and talk and a jug of wine. I learned about the hardships of an intertidal life, about empty nets and empty bellies. I learned about passion for the sea, how the salt against your lips tastes exactly like the blood that flows in the veins. I heard sea shanties sung low and drunkenly in the darkness. For my part, I talked about a life in the bush, about a people who had endured incredible hardship to build a thriving culture and a lush language. I talked about losing all that because of missionary schools and foster care, about how the bush had become strange to me because of it.
We talked a long time, and then we watched the moon rise through the slats of that cattle car. It was big and full and bright, and it threw hard shadows across the empty space. We were struck by its beauty. As the moon rose higher in the sky it seemed to race the train. It chased us into the depths of the night and across the great darkened hulk of the land. We watched it for the longest time, both of us lost in our thoughts and in the magic of that sight.
Then I heard Mick Pocknell’s voice through the shadow. “What kind of a God could make that happen?” That’s what he asked. I sat in the darkness and pondered it until sleep came and claimed me.
We separated in Thunder Bay. Mick went to a job planting trees and I headed for the highway to continue west. We shook hands, he wished me luck and he was gone. I never saw him again. But I think about him every now and then, and I’ve always remembered his question.
Oh, I know it was parallax or some rational principle of physics, but on the train that night, the Maritimer’s kid and the Indian were neighbours joined by a shared vision, whole and complete and shining. There were no differences, no skewed perceptions, no barriers. We were community, joined by awe and the power of the land.
There will always be cowboys and Indians, just as there will always be blacks and whites, Hispanics and Asians, engineers and labourers, professors and dishwashers. The soul of a nation is in its people, and the spirit of Canada is sublimely diverse. Our differences make us stronger, but what pulls us together, ties us into a shared destiny, is the straining of our human hearts—the secret wish for a common practical magic.
That magic exists. It lives. It sails across the sky once a month, as fat and round and free as a dream. You need to step out on the land to see it properly. You need to walk away from all that binds you to a city, to a desk, to a job, and stand where the wind can get at you. When that moon comes up and begins to sail across the sky, there will come a point, if you watch closely enough, when the earth starts to move, to race that moon, and you can feel our planet spin in the heavens. It doesn’t matter who you stand with or where you’re from. It happens for everyone. And what kind of a God, I ask, could make that happen?
A Hand on the Lid of the World
. . .
IN THE MORNING,
watching the light break over the lake and the trees and the long, sloping curve of the mountain behind them, I understand what my people say—that the land is a feeling. The silence is tactile. You can feel it on your skin. It becomes, in the end, as comfortable and familiar as an old pair of moccasins.
Life hasn’t always been like this. My search for identity, for meaning, for an Aboriginal definition of myself has been deafening at times. When I feel the mountains and the land like I do these days, I remember where it was that I found peace through all those desperate years.
Libraries have always been my refuge. As a kid I met Peter Pan there, Curious George, the Bobbsey twins and the great Red Rider. It was stunning to discover that they’d let me take those characters home. I loved the smell of libraries, too, a combination of dust and leather and the dry rub of paper mixed with paint and wood and people.
The library showed me the mysteries of the world. There was always something that I’d never heard of or imagined, and books and stories where I could learn about it. I read wide-eyed, tracing the tricky words with a finger until I could sound them out and discern a fragment of meaning. The library was like an enchanted forest. I explored every inch of the stacks, fascinated by the witches and goblins, fairies and trolls, great wars and inventions I encountered there.
Life changed as it always does. By the time I was seventeen I was on my own, struggling to find work and enough money to feed myself. Times were often hard and empty. But there was always the library. I spent many a cold and rainy afternoon hunched over a book they let me read for free.
Back then some libraries had listening rooms. The library in St. Catharines did. You could take a record album into a small room with a chair and put on headphones and listen and study the liner notes. I was reading a book about Beethoven, amazed that he could compose symphonies despite his deafness, could put a hand on the lid of the piano and recognize the notes by their vibration. I was curious about his music, so I took a record into the listening room.
It was a dull day in autumn, just leaning towards evening, and the colours and shapes of things were beginning to lose their daylight definition. There was a stillness to the world. I sat in the chair and waited for the sound to emerge from the headphones. When it came, the music was a trio for piano and strings in D major. “Ghost,” it was called, and it seemed like the perfect title for that time of day.
There was a burst of activity from the strings, with the piano underneath, and then the gentle waft of a solo violin before the cello took it away in an elegant note that was all melancholy, regret and yearning. The mathematics and the science that held the world together vanished in the cascade of notes from the keyboard and the wash of the strings. Something in the creative magic of Ludwig van Beethoven touched something in me, and things were never the same again.
After that, there was no stopping me. I first heard Duke Ellington in that listening room. One foggy Saturday I played Ella Fitzgerald, the Haydn symphonies, Hank Williams and a great group out of New Orleans called the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Once, when my money had run out, I listened to Big Bill Broonzy sing the blues, and my troubles became easier to bear.
I went back to the listening room as often as I could. I challenged myself to find something new, something different each time. There were always books about the music I heard, and the books and the music were doorways into parts of myself I hadn’t known existed.
I learned how to live through adversity in the library. I learned how words and music can empower you, show you the world in a sharper, cleaner, more forgiving way. I became a writer because of what I found in libraries, and I found the song that still reverberates in my chest. I’m a better man, a better human being and a better Indian because of the freedom in words and music.
And the quiet that descends on mountain mornings? It’s like old Ludwig’s hand on the lid of the world.
. . .
I’VE RECENTLY STARTED
to run again. It’s more than twenty years since I ran any farther than a trip around the bases in a slow-pitch rec league. Back then it was still possible for me to entertain the idea of running a marathon or competing in distance races. Today, chugging a couple of short miles, alternating between walking and running, is darn hard work. The scenery’s nice, and the air along the gravel road by the lake is invigorating. But I’m in my fifties now and starting over is tough.
Still, there’s something big in it, some promise in the sweat and burning lungs and concrete legs. Maybe it’s the possibility of reconnecting with the youth I was. Maybe it’s the idea of sticking around the planet a little longer. Whatever it is, it takes me back to a challenge I faced at eighteen.
As a Grade Ten dropout, the work I was able to find was less than fulfilling. Part of me craved more. I was afraid to be left behind without formal schooling, to appear stupid or unenlightened. One night, sitting in a bar, I overheard the knot of people next to me discussing a book called
Finnegans Wake.
They talked earnestly, and I understood that the book they referred to was important. They debated story structure and elements of the writing. I was impressed by the energy of their discussion as well as by the idea that a book could drive people to such impassioned heights.
I asked the librarian for it the next day. She gave me a quizzical look but retrieved the book from the stacks. It was huge. That was my first impression. There was nothing on the cover to indicate what kind of story was inside. Carrying the book across the library to a carrel near the window, I felt almost studious.
When I opened
Finnegans Wake,
that feeling changed.
The language of James Joyce was dense and quirky. It alluded to things rather than stating them. The first sentence was mind-boggling, and the first paragraph sent my mind reeling. I put the book down and stared out the window. I picked the book up and tried again. The language was daunting, unyielding. It seemed to ask something of me that I did not possess.
