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.