Tough

Tough

     by Laughing Leigh Litesum

The years between 18 and 22 (22 was when I met my wife to be) were turbulent ones for me. I have often wondered about the fact that I had very little general understanding of how I fit into life and the world. I didn’t even know much about life in my own village, the village of Altona, let alone how to discover something meaningful in an urban place like Winnipeg.

      My friend Terry and I had for two years lamented the meaninglessness of life generally (he invented a term for our specific angst: “pafism,” an amalgam of pacifism and fatalism). It didn’t help that our older brothers both attended Canadian Mennonite Bible College and brought home stories of their readings in existentialism. We, that is the two of us, hearing its definition (that is, existentialism’s), felt that it fit how we saw this world; as a place where the pursuit of money and the acquisition of lots of possessions seemed to mindlessly dominate the minds of everybody around us. Those were the days when the word “conformity,” and “little boxes all in a row,” and “anti-establishment” typified our restless, anti this and that longings and desires, our despair.

     Yet, I was full of the joy of eating, drinking, thoughts about the bodies of women (although not their minds, I must admit), delight in books (I was a passionate reader), and exuberance over anything that smacked of adventure. Like most of the male adolescents in the entire world, I would venture to guess. For some reason I was more footloose than the friends whom I felt close to. These friends, Terry, Gordon, Norman, Ron, Alvin and Joe all exhibited, upon my reflection now, a stronger grasp of the need for a man to grow up into his society. I simply wanted to leave it. I wished for nothing more than a new place to find myself at, anywhere in the world, somewhere far away from southern Manitoba, far away from the Bergthaler church, and far away, far away from my parents.

     Sure, it happened that, philosophically-constructed as I was, I chose to follow two friends to CMBC because it seemed the only place in my small world interested in greater ideas than making a living. Things didn’t go that well for me there, however, and by the beginning of December, 1965, I had decided that I had to strike out on my own. I would have to leave the college and spend the rest of my student loan on travel and, once that ran out, on finding some sort of paying work somewhere, to put food in my stomach. 

     I told my father, who had co-signed my student loan, about my intentions. Not a pleasant task. I collected many of my books (I must admit that there were a fair number of Zane Grey cowboy novels among them) and bought a Lee Enfield .303 rifle. What the heck did I want with a high powered rifle? But it did announce to anyone interested (and I didn’t think anyone was) that my raison d’être had about it quite a measure of eccentricity (call it foolishness if need be).

     I bought a one way CN train ticket and headed for Vancouver. West, as young men have done since Canada became. On the way I met a very tall, thin, 30-year-old British person who conned me into playing blackjack to pass the time. I lost all my money to him except enough for a few meals and a bus ticket to Prince George. When I got there I took just enough time to discard most of my luggage in a locker in the bus depot (which, as far as I know may still be there waiting for me to return) and left immediately for Prince Rupert, further north and on the coast.

     I followed a lead I had received on the bus, that transients could stay at the Prince Rupert Friendship Center. When I got there, I saw 100 beds all lined up tightly together in a huge single massive room; rows and rows of them. To my astonishment, I  was given a bed in a separate room with only thee bunks in it. I thought I’d struck pay dirt. That night, when I got back to my room at about, let’s say, 10:00, the stocky little guy with whom I shared a bunk admitted that he had drunk my bottle of Raleigh’s lemony aftershave lotion. This was my second indication that the people I was to meet on this foray were not exactly the sort I was familiar with, were not the kind I’d grown up with in rural Manitoba.

     While in Prince Rupert I scouted out the employment agency every morning and found good work, mostly. Good daily work, that is. One day I loaded lumber onto a ship from across the ocean and made the unheard of sum of $27 an hour. Other days I was a sweeper, or a dishwasher, or anything that required doing by hand such as shoveling gravel in a new house-build. Once I got a two-week stint working for BC Hydro. Each morning we, a crew of three young men, were flown by helicopter deep into the mountains where we did various tests on ground density for the construction of future BC Hydro power lines.

     By the end of February I was lonely for home and scrounged together the dollars to buy a bus ticket back to Winnipeg. I had just enough left over to buy a sandwich. Actually, it was not a sandwich but a loaf of bread and a jar of jam. When I got to Winnipeg, uneventfully this time without gambling away all the money I didn’t have anyway, a record-breaking winter storm had shut down the entire city. Somehow I managed to get myself into a room upstairs with a couple of other equally scruffy hippies I’d never met before who got me to buy them beer (we’d pooled our money), encouraged me to get drunk with them and then proceeded, once I passed out, to steal whatever I had left in my wallet, which was not much.

     I worked in Altona at the bowling alley around this time. Actually, the bowling alley happened a little later when I enrolled in WC Miller high school to finish my senior matriculation. I still needed one credit and it happened to be a Canadian history course I chose. Before that, however, I worked in Winnipeg at the Northern Flyer Bus Lines for a few months cleaning rusty buses and doing various other odd jobs.

      That year in Altona I’ll never forget. My experiences working in the bowling alley, being suspended from high school for two weeks (Al Schmidt caught Roy Abrams and myself lighting our cigarettes just inside the back school doors out of the wind), which I spent in the Altona Sunflower Pool Hall and willy nilly meeting a few girls who wanted to have a good time but with whom I had absolutely no courage to do anything more than sit there. Nothing in my life till then, and very little since then, seems to have taught me anything. I am now a senior who happens to have an empathetic heart and for the most part an empty head. That is not entirely true, I suppose, but there are times when I wonder about myself.