During His Last Sixty Years Wiley James Met Only Eleven People

During His Last Sixty Years Wiley James Met Only Eleven People

         Extreme-Dancing Douglas Riveter

Some men find city life dull, and the people dull who live there. They find themselves dull, too, when they imagine how it might be if they could reflect on their circumstance, take a new bearing, and change direction. Wiley James was one of those men who had grown, through constant constrictions at his place of work, weary beyond endurance of the city. He delivered auto parts for Piston Ring. His boss seldom showed up but criticized his employees when he did. 

          One day on Higgins, at Polluck's vegetable and fruit distributors, a grader left Wiley's car stuck in two feet of dirty snow. He shovelled it free. He stopped at home for some gear and a thermos and headed east along Highway One. He picked up his sled at Wharton's in Sioux Narrows. This took some time since he was alone. Back at the turnoff to Highwind Lake, he stopped his truck, backed up to a drift, and hauled the machine off. He drove his truck along the side road until he found a likely spot to leave it, hidden from highway view. A few minutes later he was on his way across the frozen lake to a cabin of which he knew. A man on Christmas tree island had some years ago lost his wife in childbirth. The cabin stood empty as far as Wiley knew.

         Islands drifted by in the snow-blowing white. A storm built. Shoreline looked faded and distant. Then suddenly near nearby and hazy. The roar of the motor muffled in the denseness of wind and snow. Soon in this purity of being Wiley felt only a floating of spirit and the rush of slow motion. All the sadness of the city lifted from him in those twelve miles. The skies above, as the snow below, and as the forest itself, contained only two colours, gray and grayer. The snow gray and graying blew with purity over his helmet. The trees nearby, waving past in silence, appeared from out of their hundred year placement in a gray of a slightly darker shade. His inward being itself turned to a welcome and cold gray that responded to nothing as much as the thought of a wood fire blazing and the glimmer of candle light on the old brown gloss of the log cabin walls.

        Christmas tree island came in sight, the sled slowed, the cabin materialized out of the gray light, the land lifted him out of the lake and then all motion stopped before the door of the dark abode. Wiley stepped off the sled. He heard the silence in the sudden noise of wind. He stood in the middle of her peace and strong being. Being here was. He mounted the steps to the veranda. He tried the door and found it locked. He felt about until he found a key behind a box of kindling. He stepped through the door and into the damn cold room. It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon. The day was drawing to a close. He saw the stove. He took kindling and placed it around a page of newspaper he fished from an inside coat pocket. He lit the match, which flared and gave his immediate surroundings light.The paper took, the kindling began to crackle, and then to flare and burn. He added larger wood chunks and rose to look around. This would be his home. Here he would be happy. A moose head mounted above the living room couch smiled down at him.

         At last the house was warm. It not taken two hours. The temperature outside was thirty below. Now he took off his jacket and sat on an easy chair in his shirt sleeves. He drank coffee and ate biscuits that he had brought from home. He spread butter and raspberry jam on them and dipped them in the steaming liquid. The wind returned from silence and become loud and insistent in his ears. He put some toilet paper in each ear to get himself acclimatized to the noise around him. In the city he had not heard a thing. Cars honking, traffic slowing, engines surgeon, twenty people talking aloud in a room, the TV blaring, all had been silent to him. Here, the creek of a bow above the roof drew itself into his ears like it had been shouted. At night he lay there thinking, considering Winnipeg, considering Calcutta. Nearby, a wolf howled. Its sudden presence made the hair lift on his neck. It called again and again and came to stand beside his cabin where it spoke twice more before disappearing.

         In the morning, hungry, not having brought food, he opened a can of peaches from the pantry, thawed it on the stove, dipped biscuits in the sweet juice and made coffee. Afterwords, he dressed and headed back across the lake towards his truck. He drove into Sioux Narrows and to the grocery store there. He bought bacon, flour, sugar, both evaporated and powdered milk, syrup, tea, coffee, yeast, and fishing line, and returned to his sled and across the lake to his new home. For two weeks he did little. He knew the pain of not working. Not working is man's hardest job in this Puritan world. Then he grew accustomed to the routine of living as he pleased. He set up traplines. He hunted. He fished. He ate and slept. This is how he lived the rest of his days. Wiley never returned to the dullness of city life again.

          

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