A Quality of Light (33 page)

I also spent more time with Pastor Chuck talking about faith and belief, discussing the difference between being spiritual and being religious. We talked about the nature of prayer and its various manifestations around the world. We examined the things Jacqueline was giving me — the practical, vital spirituality that was inherent in everything. He encouraged me, praising me for the conclusions I was drawing and my growing theological acuity. By the time the summer of 1973 drew to a close I was becoming certain of the direction I would take.

On the last weekend of summer vacation I drove my parents and Pastor Chuck to Cape Croker. We sat at Jacqueline’s table as we did that first weekend, nibbling bannock and drinking tea.

“I think I know what it is that I want to do,” I said quietly, and they all looked at me steadily. “I believe that God put me here to learn how to live in two worlds — the Ojibway and the non-Ojibway. He brought me to my parents when I was a little baby because he knew that I needed what they had to give me. Then he led me here, to this reserve and to these people, because he knew that I needed what they had to give me too.”

They all listened attentively. As I spoke that afternoon I experienced a feeling that I would come to recognize later as
conviction.
It underlay everything I shared that day as elegantly as polished stone.

“I really believe that I was supposed to have the benefit of two sets of teachings all along. Each of them has led me to a belief and
a trust in a loving, kind and nurturing God — a Creator, a Great Spirit, Kitchee Manitou — just as each of them has led me to knowing myself.

“I’m the bones and blood and skin of my people. I know that now. But I’m also the heart and mind and soul of my parents
and
my people. I know that too. So, I think I want to do something that will honor both of them. Right now, I’m really not sure what that is but I’ve been getting an urge, I guess you could call it. I think I want to go to Bible school or something and learn more about God, maybe even preach someday.

“When the time is right and I learn enough, I would like to come back here. Being here has helped me see that I carry the sweat lodge, the pipe, the church and the Bible within me — I’m a combination of all of them. But there’s still a lot I don’t understand, and I know I gotta get an education, so I kinda think Bible school or something is a pretty good idea.”

As I heard myself speak the things that I had been becoming slowly aware of as true for myself, I realized that, for the first time, I was listening to my
self.
I was, after all, a singular creation, and as I looked around at Jacqueline, my parents and Pastor Chuck, I realized too that the only one missing from that small circle of influence was Johnny Gebhardt. I promised myself to talk to him as soon as I returned.

Jacqueline spoke first.

“No one can tell you that what you should do, my boy. Those who love you can only give you what you need to help you make that choice. You just told us what you believe and not what you know. This is a good thing. Believing is feeling. Feeling is the basis of the spiritual. One of these days, like you say, you
will
know when it’s time for you to come back here — to bring what you learned to help people. Only you will know that time. So, go to your school and see what it is that they can teach you. Go to ceremonies, see what they can teach you too. Whenever you speak about those things, speak what you believe, not what you know. Tell what you felt. That’s the only way to tell them. You’ll be a good teacher, my boy, because you’re a good student.” She hugged me deeply.

“Thank you,” I whispered into her neck.

“Joshua,” my mother said shakily. “When we brought you here I was very, very afraid. I was afraid you would decide that this was where you belonged and that you would want to leave us. I was afraid you would find out that you could only believe as an Ojibway believes. I thought you would resent us for keeping you away from your self all these years and that you’d find more of a home here than we could provide. But it all just brought us closer, made us more of a family. Gave me a vision of things I never had before. I am so proud of you and your decision.” And she collapsed into my arms.

“I always figured denomination was the size of a bill anyway,” Pastor Chuck said and thumped me on the back. “Believing’s believing. That’s what counts. You’d make a fine minister, Joshua. You obviously know how to speak, and with a name like Joshua, how could you lose?”

My father stood back and watched it all with eyes afire. When I looked at him he held my gaze for a long time, unblinking, pure and honest. The messages that passed between us in those moments never had to be articulated.

J
ohnny had never been to Hockley Valley. He’d heard my dad and me talk rapturously about it through the years, and he’d come along a few times when we’d ventured out to the Maitland River, the Saugeen or the tiny unnamed stream outside Tara that was home to ferocious river pike, but he’d never been to our version of an angler’s paradise. Until that autumn it had always been my father’s place — inviolable, sacrosanct. One of those locales you hold reverently in the warm chalice of memory, a place you want to believe you can return to always, a portal to your filigreed past. It seemed the perfect place for a disclosure of my intentions and my faith, and I invited Johnny to come with me one weekend in September.

Johnny was an adequate if heavy-handed bait-and-spin fisherman but he’d never been introduced to the delicacy of fly fishing. As I expected, he welcomed the idea of learning how to work a fly rod. There was just enough science involved to attract him.

“Hey, great,” he said over the phone. “We’ve got a Fenwick something downstairs that somebody ordered a few years ago but never picked up. Good-looking rod, and there’s a Hardy Lightweight reel with it, a few spools of line, leaders and a box of flies.”

I laughed. It was just like Johnny to stumble across a ready-made, top-of-the-line beginner’s outfit. My eight-foot Fenwick rod and Hardy reel were as old as I was by then and still more than adequate for my elevated skill.

“And I’ll check at the library for a good book on technique. I can practice on the lawn!” he said.

He showed up at school with
The Fly Fishing Companion
and a battered copy of
The Compleat Angler.
In our spare periods he talked about the hatching cycle of insects, how to fish the head of a pool, reading fast water for the best trout lies, and his proficiency with the roll cast, even if grass was hardly a substitute for placing a fly on water, and the relative difficulty in pulling off a good double haul. He was the old Johnny — on fire with science and technique and rampant in his enthusiasm. By the time we were ready to leave for our Saturday-morning rendezvous with the Hockley rainbows, he was filled with fly fishing lore and trivia.

“Hey, Josh,” he asked over the phone the night before we left, “since it’s fall I figure we should use a Muddler Minnow in the morning and a pale dun closer to sunset. Whaddaya figure?”

I laughed. “I think I’ll use a black gnat in the morning and a pale dun at night.”

“You think we should wet fly?” Johnny asked.

“Why?”

“Well, because it’s the closest we can get to nymphing.”

“Nymphing?”

“Yeah. I’d really like to try a Woolly Bugger.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A Woolly Bugger. You’ve been fly fishing all your life and you don’t know what a Woolly Bugger is?” he said gleefully.

“I
know
what a Woolly Bugger is, okay?”

“What is it, then?”

“It’s a relatively accurate description of Principal Holmes!”

We decided at the last minute to travel in his Mustang since it had the better radio and an eight-track tape player. We roared out of Mildmay with a clatter of gravel and the Band’s
Music from Big Pink.
It was around four-thirty in the morning as we sped down Highway 9 slurping coffee from our thermoses and gulping donuts from a sack Johnny brought. He was dressed in an oversized fishing vest and a floppy-brimmed hat adorned with a few dozen flies. A red-checked shirt, jeans and knee-high rubber boots gave him the look of a model in a pipe tobacco ad. He drove and drummed on the wheel and chattered endlessly about Izaak Walton, Lee Wulff and the spawning patterns of the brook trout. It was a far cry from the idyllic jaunts to the valley with my father but I loved it anyway.

We arrived in the splendor of a September morning, the sky a myriad of shade and lightness with mist rising over the gurgle and chuckle of the stream lending a mystical aura.

“Wow,” was all he said.

Yes.

We did everything as silently as possible. Johnny eased the trunk open and we cautiously assembled our rods, threaded the line through the guides and tied on leaders and flies carefully, ceremoniously. Johnny tied a blood knot like a pro. When he clipped the line as close as possible to the shank of the hook with fingernail clippers, I knew he’d studied the craft intently. Step by step, we approached the banks of the stream like prowlers, parting wordlessly in opposite directions. I could see his breath in the air from where I stood. I watched as his false casts described a narrow loop behind him, the line arcing out over the water almost perfectly. I wasn’t surprised.

I worked the stream for a good hour and a half, landing four rainbows, two of which I kept to cook for a late-morning breakfast.
As always, the stream provided great sport. The absence of any hooting from Johnny told me that for all his casting proficiency he still hadn’t been able to land a fish. I only hoped the pacific nature of the sport had satisfied him. He was tying on a new fly when I walked over.

“No luck with the gnat?” I asked.

“Nah, nothing like that,” he said dismally.

“It’s okay, you know. My first couple times I had to settle for learning the intricacies of casting and presentation before I actually landed a fish.”

“Josh.”

“It takes practice.”

“Josh. All I’ve been
doing
is landing fish. I’m changing flies hoping they’ll leave me alone so I can
practice
the intricacies!” he pointed to three big rainbows beside his vest on the grass. “I let seven go, for Christ’s sake!”

That really didn’t surprise me either.

And there is nothing in the world that tastes like trout, freshly caught, fried in butter and served in the open air. I’d packed tomatoes, potato cakes, onions, mushrooms and half a carton of apple juice along with the extra-large thermos of coffee. We ate hunkered down on our haunches, our rods leaned against a nearby tree, and watched the morning break around us. Neither of us spoke. Me, humbled by the grace of morning and Johnny, perhaps, by the pervasive stillness of things. We drank the last of the coffee, the steaming plastic mugs as warm in our hands as our friendship then, a comfortable thing.

“Too bright to fish,” he observed.

“Yeah. I figure we could either sleep a while or there’s a trail up the creek a ways that winds through the hills. My dad and I walked it a few times over the years. Takes about three hours. There’s a cliff over a small ravine about halfway. We carved our names in the rock when I was about nine.”

“Okay. I’ll throw some snacks in a pack.”

“Cool.”

The Hockley Valley is lush and rich. Verdant. In the early
autumn the display of colors is spellbinding. Interwoven through the dazzle are pastoral stretches of tilled land and abrupt rustic vistas. Here, a cobwebbed cabin reduced to crumble by the disdain of time. There, a sleepy farm anchored against a wooded hillside like a gnome’s cottage. We surprised a porcupine meandering his way along the trail and the look of utter surprise as he raised his snout in alarm was comical. The skreel of a swooping hawk, the whisper of the wind through the branches and the muted crunch of our feet against the roots and detritus of the forest floor punctuated the morning air like canticles. We were joined, Johnny and I, by an unspoken reverence for the omniscient hymnodist who’d composed it all. In such times language can surprise you with its irrelevance.

I led him down the fifteen feet of cliff to the narrow ledge where my dad and I had stood to etch our names awkwardly into the rock. They were there, smudged some by the invisible hands of wind and air but legible still.
Ezra and Joshua Kane, June, 1964.
He smiled wistfully, handing me a small chunk of granite with a scalloped edge. Grinning, I brushed clear a small area, and gripping the rock deep in the cup of my palm I etched the letters of my name once again into the stoic face of the cliff.
Thunder Sky.
He followed suit, and
Laughing Dog
appeared alongside, with
09/15/73
beside it.

And thus we become eternal.

We climbed back up and sat with our feet dangling over the edge of the cliff, looking down into the ravine.

“Brought me here for a reason, didn’t you?” he said quietly, offering me that pure, open blue-eyed gaze. “I mean, even I recognize finalities, Josh. Fishing. This place. It’s like you’re trying to write a poem, man.”