Famous That Way

 Famous That Way
     by My Rich Uncle Douglas

    toast is better than the fat
    that hangs on various aging men
    that’s a tether that our mothers
    should have made us out of yarn
    when the tale is told in fullness
    all the angels will cry out
    and full laud the one who comes
    with glory ringing in his triumph

Michelangelo painted David when he was just sixteen, and now it stands displayed in the Musée du Louvre. Which brings me to my point. An old man of my acquaintance informed me once that a story that he had heard from his grandfather, with which he wished to bend my ear, would inspire me to be all that I could be. I declined to hear it if—as he prefaced his telling of the tale—it would contain no female characters. 
    The old man was my Uncle Douglas who began his working life digging basements with a spade and shovel and grew in time into the wealthiest Readymix concrete purveyor in southern Manitoba. At sixteen, Uncle Douglas told grandfather Gorman that the time had come for him (that is, Uncle) to leave the farm and strike out on his own. Grandfather understood such an inclination and did not demure since he himself had found his own family of fourteen overbearing female siblings cloying, so he had left home at fifteen to work as an itinerant and then eventually drifted into the ministry, at which he proved to be successful beyond his father’s expectations. Uncle Douglas kept right on as if he had not heard me, and despite my intentions to shut off my attention, I began to be interested after all.
     “There once was a young boy,” Uncle Douglas began, “whose stepfather intensely disliked him because he seldom spoke and walked with a limp, congenital, and surgically not remediable. Quiet and shy, this lad spent much of his time either lying on his bed upstairs reading books borrowed from a learned neighbour, or doing the same in a shady spot on the yard or in deep grass behind the hedges and windbreaks. Their neighbours all, to a man, kept each to himself and his family, indifferent to the wealth or hardship of those whose lives bordered theirs. 
     “Scotch communal instinct is exactly that, extinct,” Uncle Douglas said, with a small grin and a puff at his pipe. “All that was, except for Isaiah Blatherbee, a recluse of sixty some years whose six acres touched on the corner of the young lad’s father’s property. On the other side, the sea wall kept the wild water out. To the east, an arid stretch of gorse and bog made the land non arable, while to the west the fields sloped gradually, with rises of mound and hill, off to the city of Gradualeema, twelve miles distant. This detail of fierce Scottish antisocialism is only tangentially related to the story of the boy, however.
    “The boy lived secluded and lonely, for in those days, before the motor car, with only horses for transport, winter and summer, the extravagance of a visit to the city was not to be entertained. And the boy bowed to this wisdom, until one unfortunate day in October, after a long season of rebukes  from his stepfather (whose humiliation at his stepson’s ineffable gentleness made him cross about and critical of that individual), he rose one morning to milk the kine, and instead of turning into the barn door, thoughtlessly kept on along the cowpath over the pasture and toward the road half a mile away, which ran crooked toward the city of Gradualeema.”
     Uncle Douglas, now of course  himself an old man and smiling at the memory of the young lad’s misfortunes, continued, drawing a glass of barley beer from the wooden barrel on his wheelchair at his side. “The enthusiasm with which the young man told grandfather about his initiation into city life made me realize that, given the opportunity, he would have done it all over again, and twice if it came to that. 
     “What occurred when he reached Gradualeema must now be described, for it reflects on no one so cruelly as the man who raised him.” Uncle warned me, however: “Do not, by the way, think of me as an invalid. Just because I loiter in this little conveyance. If I were one, I would wish you to take that stout oak post there, the one for fencing, and tap me twice over the skullcap to temporarily put me out of your misery. 
     “No, think no more of me as an invalid then I thought, hearing grandfather’s story, of that coltish, mincing, wisp of a thing that the lad met on his arrival in the strange (for him) metropolis, as one when she made him pay the price for his rustic ignorance. Lord! I thought I’d seen everything when the Clydesdale came to the farmyard to service our Bay! But to hear granddad tell of it? Not even a breath of comparison. Not a whisper of a similarity! That fortnight this young boy became a man about town, and from then on you could not have paid him to think his future in terms of acres and seed. 
     “By the way,” Uncle added, “the painting that I intend to pass on to the next ‘lame’ one this family produces, done by one of the most respected artists in all of the Hebrides, will send its message to the progeny to come that the brush and the pen are welcome among the Gormans for aye and for aye.”
     He finished. He did add, however, the following arresting addendum with a look of mischief in his one good eye. “Now,” he said (and I saw the weariness that the retelling had visited on him), “the exact nature of the initiation that the young fella underwent in Gradualeema that energized both that first day and his days to come, I will not divulge to you at the present moment. Maybe on another day, if I remain hale and hearty and of good mind, and if—mind this ‘if”!—you bring me a little more ale in a barrel of the sort that sits here at my elbow, I will speak further, in clear detail, of the precise falling that he underwent and the colours associated with that falling. But, thank you for this barrel! It is of the best of liquors, my tongue tells me, and I will not let one minute pass in its consumption without remembering who brought it to me!”
      So saying, he wheeled his contraption to the outhouse nearby, the barrel now swivelling on a luggage rack behind him. He dragged himself through the biffy door, whistling. Before long I heard snoring inside. I left, foolishly on tiptoe, and vowed to return the next day with the gift of ale he had requested.
     Despite the playfulness in his eyes, or his eye, I should say, Uncle Douglas had appeared tired, though satisfied with the tale as it had unfolded. He’d become rather quiet towards the end of it. I had explained to him, before he ventured into the outhouse, that I had better get a move on. I needed to start with the work I had been assigned. I vowed to myself to return next day with something in my hand to exchange for more of the saga of the artist who had not known that he would paint and become famous that way.
     

Communications 99.090

[written in about 2005]

 Communications  99.090

     by Birdman Doug

What are the seagulls screaming when you hear them in the distance as you prepare at 7:34 AM for your remedial communications course for six indigenous students who are taking it for the second time? “Look! I found food! Look! I found food! Look I found food. Look! I found food… See! See! See food! See there! See there!! Food! Food! Food! Food! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Wow! Wow! Oh, wow! Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit! Rrrr! Rrrr! Rrr! Rrrrr! My! My! My! My! Ohhh my! Ohhhh my! Ohhhooo my! Piss. Oh piss! Ohhh piiiss! Oh piiiiss! Great. Great. Great! Great! Great. Me. Me. Mee. Me! MeeEEEee! Meeeee. Meee! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me mine! Mine! Miiiine! Min. Me mine! Meeeee! Give! Give! Give food! Give food! Food! Shit! Food! Shit! Give! Shit! Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shiiiit! Shiiit. Oh food. Food oh food! Food oh food! Food oh shit! Shiiiittttt! Oh food! Food oh shit! Shiiiitt! Oh food! Food oh shit! Shiiitttt! That’s what they are saying as I prepare the chapter on plural nouns and capitalization. With names of particular persons, places and things, it’s ed after ch, s, as, z and x. Words derived from proper nouns get capitalized. Words indicating direction are capitalized if they represent a geographical region, not a direction. Academic subjects are not capitalized. Words ending in f are especially irregular. O endings are less so. 

Outside the Room

 Outside the Room
     by Dirigible Doug (aka “The Gerbil”)

Our first year of marriage had about it so much of the odd and bizarre that it beggars belief. We wed on July 11th, 1970, the day after my oldest friend’s wedding (him already “motoring” toward the Grand Canyon in a less than reliable Vauxhall, the engine of which he personally “rebuilt” twice during the honeymoon trip), the hottest day of the summer and just five days before what would eventually be our first child’s birthday. 
     As I say, much oddness and bizarity! For instance, furniture. But, let me begin with employment. Hired by Frontier School Division, we found ourselves about to teach in Grand Rapids, MB Canada and the principal of the K to 8 was Werner Enns from the Southern Manitoba village (originally) of Rhineland, the region of my mother’s youth. Accommodations were provided for staff but they were quite small and rudimentary and they were strung along the village’s Main Street. However, when we arrived they were all already occupied so we were given a three room bungalow to rent some distance away in the “suburb” of Hybord occupied by Hydro employees and quite exclusive as teacherages went. Each boasted a fireplace and three bedrooms. 
     For furniture we scrounged graying boards and discarded gray wood boxes from a hydro throw-away heap nearby. Given money by the Frontier School Division, we ordered bedroom, living room and kitchen furniture from the Sears catalogue. The scrounged boards we made into various bookshelves and a coffee table. One weekend, our friends from Winnipeg drove the 250 miles of corrugated, twisting, turning, gravel “highway” (with nary a building in sight, so remote Grand Rapids) and also salvaged for themselves a bunch of the same weathered wooden planks and frames that they tied on top of their yellow Volkswagen bug and drove back to their home. Nothing was what we owned; and something was what we gratefully received from thrifting in nature. Well, in Hydro Manitoba nature. 
     In our first home, the fireplace refused initially to let smoke out anywhere but back into the living room until a kind neighbour pulled a duck from the chimney, where it must have, considering it’s cooked appearance, languished for at least a few years. In front of that fireplace lay a beautiful black bear rug and, once the smoke cleared, many a night we lounged on it together enjoying the heat of the fire, imagining the future of things for the two of us and engaging in dreaming about how we loved each other. 
     Teaching, too, had its marvels. For me it was 25 wonderful grades two and three kids. What facts I taught I hardly remember, but I supplemented the three Rs with daily singing periods. I’d call out, “Music time!” and they’d enthuse to the front of the room (where there was extra floor space) so they could get the best “seats,” nearest to my guitar. They’d scrunch in as close as possible around my feet and we’d sing for half an hour or more. In fact, these happy pupils sometimes even created lyrics and tunes, and I still remember one of them.
     Outside the room it’s snowing
     It’s such a cloudy day
     The winter wind is blowing
     The flowers have gone away
     Everything is white with snow
     The trees from wind are bending low. 
And pretty soon winter did come, considering that it often arrives in late October further north. The distance from Hybord as the crow flies to the elementary school, is maybe half a mile. But that would have meant striking off through tangled bush and waist-deep snow. 
     By road the distance quadrupled—we went west a half mile past the hydro dam, then south a third of a mile along a gravel and granite road, and finally a mile east down the Main Street through the Métis community of Grand Rapids. We parked the Volkswagen bug in our garage for the winter and walked, my new wife in her ankle-length, beaver-fur coat and matching fur hat (oh, she was that pretty!) and I in my beloved, knee-length Woods parka with wolf-fur trimmed hood. Many, many a minus thirty morning we trudged the two miles to teach and then back home at day’s end. One morning I saw Mr. Mecredi outside his little cabin, bareback in 30 below sawing firewood for the morning stove. 
     We bonded there on those walks. We got to know each other. We walked and talked and chalked up experiences over that year’s eight hundred miles on foot. We created “Doug and Marty” in those frigid hours and, like the conclusion at the end of the six Genesis days, we declared us to be very good!
      There were many more adventures in those first two years, like group sing-songs around my guitar and a campfire. There was the rafting one night on Lake Winnipeg, four of us on a huge, reclaimed ship’s wooden loading door that we’d found partly buried in sand on the beach.  Easily big enough and floaty enough, it held the four of us and a fire we built right in the middle of this strange and unexpected conveyance. We poled our way along, a hundred feet out from shore, under the stars, laughing, occasionally missing our footing and tumbling into the pitch dark, warm water. Whether it was the beer and wine or simply the spirit within us that pushed us into the drink, I can’t say.
     And there was boondoggling. That is, hours spent doing nothing around a campfire at the edge of Cross Lake, always with the guitar not only welcome but required, and performing its magic to the tunes of The Animals (“House of the Rising Sun”), The Beatles (“Since I Saw Her Standing There”), Dylan (“Don’t Think Twice”), gospel hymns (“Just a Closer Walk With Thee”) and folksongs (“Five Hundred Miles,” “The Tennessee Waltz,” “She’ll Be Comin Round the Mountain,”). Once, to our amazement, Sydney Green and Ed Schreyer, of NDP stripes, sitting with us around the fire, guzzling beer and singing lustily. 
     These memories were just the opening of the first few wedding presents, so to speak. The things we did, the blizzards we drove to Winnipeg in, the squalls we canoed through, the huge jackfishes we caught, the mouthful of teeth that a horse-doctor in Ashern yanked out of me, the dances we went to at the community center (“Aaaa…Joe Buck, maybe back off a bit! That’s my wife you’re dancing with!”), the timber wolves we heard, the pickerel we caught in the forebay, always for some inexplicable reason starting to bite exactly at 8:30 PM on the nose, and eating dozens of pickerel cheeks we saved up and then fondued…and so many more. All of them welcome presents at our wedding table! Presents we really only unwrapped for the first time as memories.

Records in the Basement (con’t)

 Records in the Basement (continued)
      by Recording Doug 
     
Children liked the game of pretending to be done harm, though not being the ones to whom the pretense was administered, since a certain shame still attached itself to the one thus chosen to suffer such painless hurt with sixty eyes (fifty nine, actually, since Robbie’s one eye went sideways) watching the meting out, excitement written on their pupils. 
     Robbie Battermann rode his trike to grade six in the seasonable times of the year, the red and white fluttering plastic tassels at the ends of the black handles visible before he was, since his height no one knew but guessed to be under three feet. He had a big trike welded up for him by his uncle Leonard, a shop foreman of great height and width, and it operated by push buttons and gears so he actually did not have to sit on the seat but simply stand on the back foot rest and operate the vehicle electrically. It was gas powered and could reach 50 miles an hour. Robbie had once passed the principal on a gravel country road and waved to boot. The man had almost hit the ditch. The principal drove very cautiously at all times. 
     The linoleum tile factory over the back alley smelled of glue when the wind blew from the south and Sandra had to call her mother to close the basement windows. Her new bedroom and rec room were down there and these accommodations entirely belonged to her. No brothers or sisters had come along with whom to learn how to share. Maternal difficulties aside, Sandra quite liked living below the level of the earth. She never went out. She watched television a great deal and her parents came downstairs if they wished anything of her. One day a group of her-age pupils dropped by to visit her and they all sat around Monopoly for a while as their mother had requested, and then turned to the television and watched it quietly till one by one they said they had to go home for supper. 
     Church was the problem. It wasted half the special day. That was the only day Sandra had when she could get out with just her family. Her father was a weakling, a man of 67 pounds and 6‘4“ tall. He suffered inevitably each day from some affliction of the joints and muscles. Though he worked at jobs that required no lifting or carrying, he still could not go a week without some terrible complaint that put him down on the couch for the entire evening, or longer. Her mother might have been more able, but how is a woman alone supposed to do what three men cannot? Even with many votives. Prayer doesn’t lift weights.
     Chelsea Robbins could not have been more than twelve the first time she had to make a grown-up decision. They—Chelsea, Bobright, Simelton, Danny, Beatrice and Singing Tim—had each received from their respective parent’s permission to sleep in a tent alone, each in their own backyard. Instead, they had all slipped over to Joshie’s back forty in the cowpasture where he had his 12 x 12 canvas tent set up. This after their parents had separately checked to assure themselves each of their kid’s actual presence, of his actual thereness, asleep and safe. Sandra had later heard that they had all played games and enjoyed themselves thoroughly. One game was Truth or Dare. Someone at one point dared Chelsea and Beatrice to kiss. No one seemed to recall if they actually had. After all, there were no electric bulbs in the tent, only candlelight. 
     A light shone on the records and the cardboard covers looked clean and new in it. Even the ragged edges took on a wholeness and a fine appearance in this light through the basement window. Sandra felt grateful that her parents had hired the delivery truck and the men for this Saturday. This outfit typically did not do moving on the weekends, but since her father had offered them four hundred extra to pick up and deliver, they had accepted and here she was at grandma’s house for the first time that she could recall.
     She felt suddenly happy. More happy than she could remember being before. She sang another song along with the record. “She wore an itsy-bitsy . . . .”  And then another, “They did the mash, they did the monster mash . . . .”  She moved the catheter a little because she was sitting on it. Going would be difficult through a squeezed tube. And she giggled, thinking about it bulging and breaking. It was not that bad, she thought. Nothing was that bad. Her special lifting chair was folded up at the wall for when the men came. They did not know how to lift 600 pound people without levers and all sorts of cranes. This first time they would assist in lifting her and her chair back up through the hole grandpa had cut in the living room floor above the rec room. That’s where she had to come down and that’s where she stayed sitting till need would drive a group of adults to hurry toward her to assist her. Her father, as mentioned, was not one of the lifters, not one of the helpers. He just called out instructions and cautions in a weak, excited voice.

Records in the Basement

Records in the Basement

     by Doug the Record Man

    My old man she ain’t what she used to be

    Ain’t what she used to be

    Ain’t what she used to be

    My old man she ain’t what she used to be

    Early in the morning

When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody’s gonna jump for joy. So sang Sandra under her breath. Twelve years old, she’d been listening to her aunt’s vinyl records in the basement. Her dog at home would be reluctantly nibbling at his dry dog food just about now, at eleven o’clock. The Brady Bunch reruns would be on if she were at home. 

     Avery’s family car next door would have arrived after breakfast to take him out. Syringe knew the time of day even if he wore no watch, somehow tallying in his mind the flight of minutes so precisely that he hit the mark within two or three each time. Their house one street over needed painting, and because his father drank, they didn’t have any mother. Their teacher this year made them do homework every night and the way it worked was that she spanked someone once a week at the front of the class, on the hand. She did not actually spank these weekly children, but told them that this is what they used to do in schools not too long ago and asked for volunteers the first time. No one offered until she promised them that it would not hurt, and she smiled to comfort them into doing the responsible thing and raising their hands. And it did not hurt. She used a ruler with card stock wrapped around it twice so that it only felt like a carton hitting your hand. Children liked the game of pretending to be done harm. 

(To be continued)

“Slave to This World” song

“Slave to This World” song

     by Sky Flyer Doug

When I’m dead and in my grave

I will no longer be a slave

To the troubles of this world

Of this world, of this world 

When I’m dead and I am gone

I will not have to travel on

Through the darkest corners of

This troubled world, this troubled world 

Chorus

When I’m gone, don’t pray too long

I won’t be dead, just travelling on

Get up off your knees and say

He’ll be alright, he’ll be okay

He’ll be okay

Well I’m moving, I’m moving on

My heart is yearning to be gone 

When I die I’ll be alive forever more

Forever more

I feel I’m leaving this old world

I wish I could be heaven hurled 

To the peaceful reaches of

Some distant shore, some distant shore

Chorus

When I’m gone don’t pray too long

I won’t be dead, just travelling on

Get up off your knees and say

He’ll be alright, he’ll be okay

He’ll be okay

I’m going, I’m moving on

I wish I could be long gone

Leave this place of endless woe

And sickness too, and sickness too

Chorus

When I’m gone don’t pray too long

I won’t be dead, just travelling on

Get up off your knees and say

He’ll be alright, he’ll be okay

He’ll be okay

When I’m dead and in my grave

I will no longer be a slave

To the troubles of this world

Of this world, of this world 

When I’m dead and I am gone

I will not have to travel on

Through the darkest corners of

This troubled world, this troubled world

Chorus

When I’m gone don’t pray too long

I won’t be dead, just travelling on

Get up off your knees and say

He’ll be alright, he’ll be okay

He’ll be okay

The Lawn Mower

The Lawn Mower 
     by Hot Water Leigh 

When I hit twelve my dad designated me chief lawn mower of our Altona Village yard. The half acre of land took enough time from my precious independence and restless self to make me wish to finish quickly. Especially in this case, since we were, as a family, leaving for Abbotsford, British Columbia the next morning. What with edibles to buy, such as chocolate bars and thrills and jawbreakers, and paraphernalia of one kind or another to gather and sort through, I had less than normal patience with the mowing. Almost done, with only the ditch fronting our yard to fiinish, having decided to mow it parallel to the sides of the ditch, and being on one of those sides at the moment, the mower suddenly became tippy and threatened to fall right over. This would have meant that sickening (to an under experienced boy) occurrence of the contraption turned over on its back, blade spinning wildly at unimaginable speeds, indecently, with the wrong side facing heaven and not earth! Without thought or hesitation I saved the day and kept up appearances, kept the machine operating as it should, right side up. But to do so I thrust my hand downward (still quite a tender young hand, of course) and grabbed the bottom edge of the mower platform, with my fingers and palm underneath. And got whacked by the blade, which still turned full speed. The cut I got from it extended from on my middle finger of the left hand down diagonally through almost a third of my palm. Blood everywhere, my little finger, my pinky, hanging down at a strange angle and pre adolescent Dougie howling for nurse. Roaring towards the house. Not that I felt much pain, but like the boy in Frost’s “Out Out,” when he reaches too close to the buzz saw and loses his hand, I felt quiet and calm while still yelling blue murder.
Once mother realized the severity of the injury to her second oldest she would have immediately rushed me to the hospital for stitches and surgical care, wouldn’t she? . No. Not Mary Reimer. She took the road less travelled by. Mother boiled water, poured it into a basin along with a quarter cup of Rawleigh’s Kreo (commonly administered to ulcerated cows’ udders and smelling almost exactly like the creosote on hydro poles and railway ties), and had me stick my hand into the scalding water and keep it in there. I did that. A half hour later, with my finger and wound the gray of boiled beef, she had me remove my hand and wrapped it with a strip of cotton, tied so the finger was lifted back up into place. 
    I have no memory of any pain, though I have many memories of Kreo healing various cuts and bruises and sores and bleeding’s in the family over the years. With my hand bandaged, though without having accumulated any treats for the trip, with my spirit still reasonably high and with the entire family gathered in our 1954 Mercury, off we went west in search of paradise. One month of joy and freedom, with not a single lawn to mow. 
     When we got to Banff, we made a decision to travel through to Radium Hot Springs. I was concerned that they would not let me into this pool. Oh! I wanted so badly to get into that steaming water. There was a guard, but he did not say anything even though he noticed my bandages. I held my breath walking by him but he hardly took notice. And we all went in. After a few hours of soaking, the family packed up and left. I do not remember where we stayed that night. It may have been Revelstoke, or Golden, maybe Merit or even Kelowna, but when I woke up next morning I felt that the wound had done some healing. I was certain that improvements had occurred while I slept. Sure enough, when we changed the bandages mother said, “Douglas, you are very lucky to still have your little finger and I think that it is healing very well!

Winter 2009

 

Winter 2009

     by Leigh Aventur

Back in the winter of 2009 I decided to do again what I regularly did once a year, spend part of my February break (from lecturing English at the University of Manitoba) at our cabin. The cabin nestled In a small bay on a remote lake in Northwestern Ontario. It was a small log building (16x26) built in the thirties as part of a fishing camp. Ten cabins of various shapes and sizes lay around the bay as well as a marvellous lodge, all built of redwood pine.  Each cabin was heated by a wood stove. Because they were all fairly small, heating them was no issue really, even in the coldest weather. 

     My cabin lay ten miles from the place I parked my car, as near as I could get. From there I would take my snowmobile (2001 Yamaha Phazer 500) with a bagged moose sized pull-behind sleigh loaded with food and other essentials (eg snowshoes, gasoline, tarp). The snowmobile was a new enough model to be reliable. 

     Being alone meant being careful. By the time I arrived at the parking spot for my vehicle, a blizzard had begun to blow. Being careful does not always suffice in such weather. I would have to be lucky, too. I needed to get going because the darkness was settling in and I had a half hour trip ahead of me. Maybe three quarters.

      I started the motor, made sure the sleigh was properly hitched and tarped, and headed out. A few minutes later when I got to the edge of the lake, I realized that I needed to change my contact lens. I should have done it back in the car! It had been irritating my eye (I only wore one) since I’d left home, and without it I’d be lost. Especially in the sort of weather this was building up toward. I had only one lens left and I opened the case, put it on my fingertip. Shielding it from the wind as best I could, I gingerly lifted it toward my eye and then, hurray! I got it in. It was only after it was in my eye that I realized how lucky I had been not to have lost it.

     A snowmobile ice trail crossed the lake marked every seventy five yards or so by wooden slats with small orange flags. In the wind and snow I could see them only when I arrived right next to them. Visibility, even in the headlight, was at best ten or fifteen feet. Now and then the wind let up for two seconds and I could see further. So, for the most part, the trail was invisible but I could feel my sled track bumping over its ruts. 

      Occasionally, too often, I felt myself veering off  and losing the trail and then I’d  have to make long zigzags back and forth, praying to cross the track again. I knew that I wouldn’t see it, only feel it. Each time fortune chose to keep me alive. When you find yourself in such danger, where a dozen mistakes are made, any of which can mean death, you simply relax and survive. Or not. You don’t have the leisure at that moment to be worried about such minor irritants as dying.  

     Eventually, half an hour on, the trail left the lake and rose up into the forest where the path was more visible and the wind much abated. Here the snow piled around trees and in branches. It settled on the sled, rocks and fallen logs, on the trail where now no previous sled tracks were to be seen and on the very sky above, it almost seemed to me then. All of this more sheltered world felt peaceful suddenly and my spirits rose.

     I was that grateful when I actually finally arrived at the cabin!  Of course, because it was about thirty below zero, my first instinct was to start a fire to warm things up. I knew it would take three or four hours before all the log walls were heated through and coziness started. I collected wood from the stack in the veranda, chopped kindling and then lit the fire with newspaper that we’d left there specifically for times like this. The sight of the fire taking hold and slowly building into an orange inferno inside the old Regency did most of all to dispel the anxiety I felt, anxiety that I always felt when I arrived here in winter alone. Would the fire take? Would the fire take? Would the place actually get warm?

       The problem was not that I couldn’t start the fire but that I shouldn’t have. Unbeknownst to me, the previous year the chimney had suffered damage up towards the peak of the cathedral ceiling where the stovepipe had rusted through. Ignorant of this, I had started this good blaze. I walked about to keep warm, I stamped my feet and hands and did a bunch of jumping jacks. I emptied the sleigh of food and bedding and what not and then ran back inside to see if I could begin to feel heat. I could, and within a couple of hours I knew that I would be removing my parka and snow pants.

      But what I did not know was that a danger lurked around the corner. It wasn’t too long before I began to feel slightly dizzy and headachy. I had brought with me a battery operated carbon monoxide tester. I turned it on, thinking to myself that all would probably be fine and that it was just my imagination. But sure enough, the monitor registered carbon monoxide.  

     What now? This was a serious dilemma. Head back down the trail to the truck in the blizzard, darkness already fallen? Then load the machine back up on the box of the truck, drive out down this very strange, curvy, snowbound narrow path called Edison’s Trail and make my way back almost two hundred miles to Winnipeg? 

     The last thing I felt like doing was driving this thing back down the trail and the truck back to Winnipeg. I decided to stay. I said to myself, “Doug, you can do this. Men have gone to the Arctic to explore it with each only one big Hudson’s Bay blanket and a bunch of dogs and they’ve survived many, many nights of forty and fifty below. They’d dig a deep hole in the snow, get down in it with their dogs and together they would keep warm enough to survive.” I knew that I had lots of blankets around somewhere in the cabin. I was just missing the dogs. 

    I collected all the blankets I could find, and because it was already dark, maybe nine or ten o’clock, I got into bed. I wore my longjohns, my jeans, a snowmobile suit, a hoodie, my toque and, over everything, a parka with hood. I had laid down half a dozen wool blankets for under me and once I was in bed I began to pile them over me. Over the top I laid eleven wool blankets of the Hudson’s Bay style and for half an hour I was cold. Then I began to warm. Eventually, I became quite comfortable and then fell asleep. Sometime during the night I got overheated and began to shuck off blankets and clothes. I know that I had felt fearful whether I would wake up in the morning. But, when morning came I was alive, I was not frozen, I had not to gone to an icy hell or heaven, and now the day with it’s thirty below was mine to do with what I wanted. I got a ladder, checked the chimney bottom to top, found the issue, took out a rusted section of pipe about 2 1/2 feet long, went back outside and scrambled under the cabin where, with application, I found a replacement section, took it back inside, jammed it up into the chimney hole above and then slid it back down over the stovepipe below so that it was properly in place again, and got back down off the ladder.

     I started the fire and waited four hours (checking for monoxide every once in a while). I took off one or two layers every hour until I wore only my shirt, jeans, longjohns, wool socks and warm boots. I was so keen and excited by the possibility that I had made it through this frozen night without a fire, that I had survived this icy challenge without any extra heat, that I had faced the blasting wilderness (blasted only in the sense of trees being blasted by storm), that I had finally gotten warm under my four inches of blankets and here I was in a warm cabin at what seemed like a hundred miles from anywhere, enjoying my cup of coffee made on the woodstove the way that I loved. I felt spectacular! I felt grateful, proud, humble because the winter could have killed me. I felt big because I was big. And I felt hungry, invigorated, blessed and immensely joyful at the possibilities that fire and flames handed to mankind each and every time a match was struck.

Trousers Forlorn (or, Pantagruel’s Brother)

[Written circa 2006. In the style of Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantegruel]

Trousers Forlorn (or, Pantagruel’s Brother)     
by Playing together by ourselves. 

William willied about at his grandmother’s side, then veered left with such suddenness she noticed him gone only after he’d traversed the entire length of the courtyard. She called after him, entreated him to show himself, begged in strong voice for him to unconceal his whereabouts, and when she fell down in exhaustion, she still had not seen him and never would. He never did discover his grandmere’s death and never inquired. Her treatment of him had been questionable at best, and he gratefully adopted his new lifestyle and adapted to it with a will and with pleasure. 
     His new lifestyle consisted of going where he pleased. Now, aged four and a half, he walked out of the courtyard door, over a short stretch of lawn, and into the surrounding woods that stretched all the way from Inverness to the city of Clovedairyfurt, where he survived by his wits alone until fishermen found him a year later, dirty, hot, hungry, bepissed and singing, singing a little ditty to himself as if he had not a care in the world. 
      He had met people on the way during that year. He was now five and a half years and quite capable, thank you very much, of taking care of himself and his bodily needs, such as toilet functions, self feeding, and washing when he happened across clean water. He had learned to approach a tree, look on the other side of it for strange presences, piss, shake before replacement into trousers and even effectively button. Trousers, I might say, which now looked rather ratty and forlorn, but still nevertheless served their purposes. Since it was cold and November, he had stuffed grasses inside them when his underwear gave out. These grasses stuck out at odd angles from his breaches and made him resemble nothing so much as a scarecrow, but one with a happy look and a penchant for travel.
     Tall for his age, he limped from a fall he had once taken, and that limitation he never overcame. Nor physician ever healed him of it. No spa managed to correct it, spiritual advisement did no good against it and even prayerful intercession failed to disturb its permanence. Lame, a begger, William sullied the air with his game gait, sallying forth from A heading for B at the most unexpected, and sometimes even awkward, times. 
     Once, within the kindly, motherly limbs of an armadillo that had protected him from the bites of savage wolves, he leapt up and left without any explanation. Another time, sleeping in a foetal position at the feet of the piano player, Billigan Jones, he sat upright, bumped his head on the underside of the instrument, swore, as he had heard others in the juke joint do, and wandered out on his own in the snow, never to be seen again by the people who had sustained him, body and soul, for the past three or four weeks. Time and again he simply cut himself off from further communications by taking up his belongings and heading down the highway.
     He preferred paths through the woods, shortcuts of various sorts, and hayricks if any were to be found. Once, sleeping under one such a four-wheeled contraption in widow Misrely‘s farm field, he awoke with a start, deeply anxious suddenly about the state of his health. His grubby shoes had not fit for some time and, his head still in by now filthy bandages, he knew he looked a sight, and he knew also that he had begun to limp on both sides. What a creature he must appear to others, he thought, to the good and the reputable, the sure and the certain, the secure and the saved. He determined forthwith, and from that very moment on, to never again go about in any gangly fashion, with no awkwardness of gait or dress. 
     Therefore, to bring his personal decision to fruition, he had either to cease walking or to hide his stumbling, and he had to go naked to keep from looking ragged. He presented himself in such guise tor the next two decades and practiced the skill set he had determined to master. Naked, he eventually cut quite a figure. Men, even, turned to look when he passed, whistling. Ladies, usually given to carefulness and propriety as should be, sang out their surprise upon first glimpsing him at a distance of even a quarter mile, called out for him to come to them that instant, spoke with clarion insistence that they were in need of him at the present moment, not withstanding the time of day, be it supper, or lunch, or breakfast, or bedtime snack. They wished to have a closer inspection of him and remained unsatisfied till they’d taken it.
     He obliged them rather than end up in trouble. This solved his dilemma of having to run as fast as his legs would carry him to get away. Solved also his dilemma of the great likelihood of getting crushed under the hooves of flailing horses who sensed their mistresses distress and bolted or, neighing, stood on hind legs, front hooves flailing, to master their own growing unease. Fixed things which tended to get out of hand when ladies did not get their way at the moment they wished to have it. 
     When William came over to them on the other sides of roads, or in hayricks, or in the covered appurtenances within which their husbands had left them waiting outside of bank or pub, they closely looked him up and down first for a full fifteen seconds, handled his sides and fronts with gloved fingers for the next twenty five or more, threw him roughly down between seats after a quick peep outside to determine the possible approach of husbands or beaus and, lifting dresses and drawing down drawers, rode breakneck along, the horses standing still, leaning  bravely over him as if they themselves were trained equestrians. That done, they usually let him go with the double remonstrance that they were ladies, and being so—that is, privileged—that he tell no one or come to great harm. 
     Still, naked improved on ragged. He preferred the former. Tired, he sometimes lay down on the ground only to wake with interference going on around him. Skirts twirled above him or trousers fell about his features in his sudden waking alertness. This and that occurred which he never initiated. His response was simply to bury himself deeper in the woods, further into impenetrability, much more out-of-the-way than his former approachability. So, eventually, he became a wandering hermit, seldom seen, never encountered and even less often the recipient of intercourse, regardless of the eloquence of the interlocutor. He came to no harm, and lived to a ripe old age. I should mention that when he turned thirty three, he gave up his retiring habits and re-entered society. He now works for Revenue Canada. He sweeps rooms, and cleans toilets and regales others there, in their stalls, males and females both, with accounts of his formative years. He smokes cheap cigars which smell up the place, but so what, he says, smiling secretively all to himself. 
     

by Trucker Travis T Teimer

Sniggles, Again (or, Courting Gravel)

[Written about 2000, edited this week]

Sniggles, Again (or, Courting Gravel)

     by Doless Graveheart

“Shameful!” That’s what the Reeve said. And the Postilion. No quarter given. “We are vanquished till the ghost of the Comptons is avenged to the last man jack of us.” So saying, he lit his pipe, sucking and dragging at it with intensity and vigor and, regarding the linoleum with fierce eyes, then flung it fuming into the garbage can. From which his secretary, smiling to herself, immediately retrieved it, billowing smoke, and handed it back to him who retook it as if he’d already forgotten the incident. All this fulminating had now and always over the years in the town hall in part to do with our (that is, the Sniggles’) family. We just could not be brought into line with the customs of the times. As you can tell, the narrative upshot so far, in the first paragraph of this piece, is that men in it are insolent, indolent and uncalm, while women (represented by one individual so far) remain reliablly placid and implacably competent. 

     We must recall the temper, that is, the relative elasticity, of most fiction when it creates characters. It quickly chooses the stock female fainting one and the male hero of steady emotion and strong will. But let us not, reader of this tale (and so many other readers too), be tempted by such logic. The real is not predictable nor is it attractive in any way. As we know, outside of the world of stories, women faint and fall at times, but men do so, too, and men admire the gift of insight more than they have it. So, get on the back of the real, pick up your paddle, and turn your skiff into flows you have no power to contain or direct.

     Travel to foreign countries was prohibited by the Sniggles’ father, our father, who thought that the only real journey a person ever needed venture on was the one into the skies when the soul left the body. He proved his practice of this to us by staying home all his life without leaving his six acres for any reason whatsoever during his seventy-two year tenure of the premises. He’d call to a passing neighbour when he wanted some grocery from town. He’d  hallow to the buckboard passing by to bring twelve gauge shells, he’d pay him well. Roustabout though he was, he was also adorable.  He made clothes pins out of willow for the Sniggles’ mothers and knitted socks for himself when they became too irate at his isolation to any longer indulge him, even in these most domestic of requests and necessities. He sang us to sleep evenings from his tick in the yard. Wherever we lay, we’d hear his gentle tenor voice comforting us to sleep. 

     Father hated the thought of travel because it was a thought, not because of any physical discomfort in travel. He disliked thought itself and said so now and then. We lived sixteen miles from Wainwright near Kaleida, in the western part of the province on the escarpment, near Crystal city and Mather and villages such as Clearwater, Snowflake and Fallison. Deer grazed with the cattle in the pasture. Split, dry oak heated the house. A fiddle and a guitar hung in the parlour and sometimes stroked the night. Pride ruled us and still does. We Sniggles would never give in.

     If she ever spoke I don’t recall it. My sister Sally silently made her way through this world, clad in her own silence, unafraid of her own unspokenness, I think, when I think of it at all, and able to speak with precision, nevertheless. 

     “Go to father and ask him for the loan of a needle for this darning,” her eyes would tell me in so many words and I would go do it and always she’d thank me profusely with veiled looks and movements of her fingers. She wore dresses upon that silly frame of hers. Dresses of a blousy, summery sort, filmy but modest nevertheless. She had no libido, so if you think I was going there you are wrong. She might have been a nun for all her interest in men. Animals were another matter. Often I came into the barn to find her affectionate with cow or calf, or even chickens. She liked geese for their long necks and chickens for their bobbing, red, leathery tops, she said. She petted and made much of them and it was a sight to see her hugging King, the Percheron. 

     “This one is a male,” she would announce about a gosling and I couldn’t have told one way or another if I was paid, though to please her I tried and she shook her head and giggled. That giggling was the only sound I ever heard her mouth make, except for crying once or twice. Nevertheless, she did love animals above all things, and so men who found her pretty might as well have courted gravel for all the headway they made. She lived on the farm all my growing up years and never once left it to go to town. She, too, like father, sent for necessaries and paid handsomely for them. 

     Six boys, seven girls made up the entire set of Sniggles siblings. Mothers we had two. The first was the most liked, the second the most loved. The first cooked the best soups, and the second, who still lives in the farmhouse but from whom I am estranged, continually prepared curry of such a pungency that father and the rest of us rarely entered the house at all except to eat and then get out the moment we’d finished and to our respective work or play. 

      We took, early in the tenure of our second mother, to sleeping anywhere but in the bedrooms of the house. Sally chose the icehouse, and kept quilts in it year round, even when the thermometer made the rest of us walk around wearing just enough clothing to not seem improper. Wiener-Eldon, the youngest, figured out that a hammock tied high in a cottonwood would keep others from hearing his snores and that’s where he stayed for many years at night, even after the accident. He now lives in Minneapolis and works for a high-rise company of some sort. Wango (his nickname only) slept near the pond within the perimeter of willows in order, he claimed, for the braibling of frogs to lull him to sleep. He rolled into the water one night, about which he will not speak except to Sally, who insists that she knows the whole story. Try as I might, she will not divulge it (even to write it on paper) and giggles instead until I leave off in exasperation. 

     All the rest also slept about the farmyard, some under machinery, one in a hole dug near the back fence close to the Wellbuilt-family side of our property. The Wellbuilts family is made up entirely of females, whose only male member had mysteriously disappeared many years ago. 

     Another, Ronnie Jr., made his bed in a car without wheels. Three boys and Linda chose the henhouse attic, father slept anywhere on the perimeter of the yard where he could lay his tick flat without any part of it on sloping ground, and the rest wherever. I learned to sleep sitting up, leaning on a wall, often on the blind side of the cow barn. 

     We all grew up grateful for what we had and now get together at the farm a few times a year to relive the past. This year I’m partially responsible for meals at our annual family picnic. For me, these get togethers cause a fair degree of anxiety and have ever since the accident. How do you make Jamaican jerk, does anybody know? I can’t locate a good recipe. Meat rubbed with it must be smoked with hickory, and the sauce itself must contain a generous quantity of Scotch Bonnet peppers and allspice berries, that much I do recall.