For Joshua (10 page)

He died alone. I was out of town when it happened and when I heard, I dropped the phone and walked off down the road. I walked a long time. When the morning came I found a small, dark bar and had a drink for the old soldier. I had a lot of drinks that day and then I walked away, found another place, and drank some more. I hadn’t been a friend. I’d been a parasite who took advantage of an old man’s pain. I’d been a rebel and I had rebelled my way right past an opportunity to redeem myself in my own eyes. I let Old Joe die alone and I hated myself for that.

As I sat in my circle in the Rockies, I stared upwards at the endless sky and I cried. I wasn’t crying for Old Joe; he didn’t
need my tears anymore. I was crying for myself, for the lost young man that I’d been. For the rebel unable to see that he was needed, that he might make a difference. I cried because my fear had made me self-centred, uncaring, oblivious to other people’s pain. I cried because Old Joe had never needed me to qualify for his acceptance and friendship. It had been given as a matter of course and I hadn’t seen that. I cried because if I had seen it, known it, reacted to it honestly, I might have grown up on Cherry Street. I cried for old soldiers and old rebels bearing old wounds forever.

I started another tobacco pouch. This one was for the spirit of a lost young man walking slowly through established neighbourhoods, craving the warmth and the light spilling from the windows of the houses. For his ability to survive harsh nights on the street. For rising above the heavy sadness in his chest and for moving on despite confusion, desperation, and doubt. For Old Joe Delaney and the lesson he was able to teach me so many years too late. The tears kept flowing down my face as I thought about those years and my hands trembled in the darkness as I tied that pouch together.

Then the hunger came. My belly began to groan with emptiness. When the late afternoon shadows stretched out
late I could hardly think. All I could feel was the hard emptiness of my belly as it shrank in upon itself. The sun was a furnace. The humidity, with no breeze to move the sluggish air, made even the smallest breath hard to take. I stripped to my underwear and sat there with sweat coursing down my body. I wanted to swallow great gulps of water, but the canteen wasn’t a large one and there were more days still to get through. So I sat there, baked and miserable.

I tried sucking on some grass. I tried sucking on small pebbles. I drank a bit of water. Nothing eased the soreness that I felt spreading from my stomach through to my entire being. It was agony. I walked around the small circle, stopping here and there to try to lose myself in the different points of view. My belly almost rattled with emptiness. Then, as John suggested, I began to tell Creation about my hunger. I talked about how good a small morsel of meat would taste right about then and about my memories of bread, eggs, milk, soup, and pecan pie. The more I thought about food the less I felt the hunger. My mind cleared and I was able to recall special meals at special times. Like the birthday party I had when I turned thirty. My friends had baked me a great chocolate cake shaped like the console of a radio station because I was working as a radio producer. They had even fashioned a long chocolate microphone. When I recalled the
laughter and the friendship of that night my hunger eased even more. I went back further in my memory and recalled the great feast I had had with total strangers at a hostel on Highway 17 in northern Ontario when I was nineteen.

That summer of 1974 I decided to head out on the road again. I had hitchhiked across the country twice before and seen a lot of places. None of those places felt like where I was supposed to be and so, as all searchers do when they can’t find what they’re looking for, I headed right back to where I’d come from. That, of course, was St. Catharines, and I spent a long unsettled winter wishing I were somewhere, anywhere, but where I was. I wanted out so badly. Back then I thought it was the city and the life I led there that I wanted out of. But it was me. I wanted out of me because I was unhappy, unfulfilled, and empty.

I had nothing. When I worked at all it was only long enough to get a paycheque; then I’d be gone. I didn’t really live anywhere. I stayed on friends’ couches, slept at missions, or outdoors when it was warm enough. By then, I was already trapped in the hard rinse of alcohol. Booze still promised good times, friendship, romance, and the esteem of my
partying pals, and I always chased those things. But I wanted out and I really believed that somewhere else was going to be different. I really believed that another town, another job, another party, another somewhere was going to send the magic tumblers of the universe into the proper spin and they would open the door to the world I wanted to live in. I only needed to get to the place where that could happen. So when the springtime came I began to feel the urge to go. I resisted it at first, more out of a stubborn belief that I could change things by getting a job, finding a new girl, or partying with friends, than any real desire to stay. But by summer I was eager for the road.

So, one day in July, I left. All I had was a backpack with a few clothes, two books, a bag of oranges, and five dollars. I had no idea where I was going but I knew that it was west. In those days hitchhikers were more accepted and rides were easy to get. That first day I made it all the way to Sudbury, where the great barren hills testify to the presence of the huge nickel smelters. It seemed like my journey was blessed. Day two found me outside a Husky service station in Sault Sainte Marie when evening fell. I could have walked into town and found a safe place to bed down, but I chose to try and thumb a long ride around Lake Superior with a trucker or a night traveller.

Finally, at about ten o’clock someone pulled over. He was a fishing lodge owner named Earl and he was going as far as a place called Nipigon. Nipigon is a small town at the northwestern end of Lake Superior about a hundred miles out of Thunder Bay. For hitchhikers, getting a ride around that big lake is cause for celebration because there’s nothing between the Soo and Thunder Bay except for huge rolling hills and small lumber towns. Virtually no hope of a ride if you get stuck. Earl and I headed off into the night.

He talked while he drove. He told me about setting out with his father from Hespeler, Ontario, looking for land on a northern river. They were anglers. All Earl’s life had seemed to have been spent on the shore of one river or another, casting for whatever fish was in season. He loved fishing. He loved rivers. And when work in the factory became too much to bear any longer, he and his father decided to pool their savings and start their own lodge. They’d found the perfect place on the shores of Lake Nipissing. Earl talked about the effort to clear a road to the site, about the two years of building, about the harshness of the northern winter, and how sometimes they wanted to give up and go back home to the farmlands of Hespeler. But their dream ran deeper than the winter snows and they finished their lodge. For twelve years it had been his life and he loved it. “Gol’,” I remember him saying just before
I went to sleep, “that land just sorta cradles ya, makes ya giggle just like a baby to be wrapped up in it, makes ya wanna lie down in it forever. Guess that’s why it’s home.”

When I woke up it was raining. Earl pulled into a service station in Nipigon and bought me a huge breakfast before dropping me at the bridge with twenty dollars and a great big handshake. He was a good man and whenever I find myself on a river fishing I wonder whether the land still cradles him, whether he still giggles to be wrapped up in it. I always hope so.

It rained and rained and rained. All of that day and on into the night the downpour continued and when I finally crawled under that bridge to sleep, it seemed like it would go on forever. It almost did. For three days I stood there with my thumb out. No one stopped. Earl’s twenty ran out on the morning of the fourth day and I wondered what I was going to do. Desperation, when it becomes familiar, when it becomes a fixture in your life, only ever serves to feed itself. Nothing but booze can cleave it down to a manageable size, and that day in the rain there was no money left to get any. I thought of stepping into town to steal some money or try to stem some change on a street corner but you learn on the street to avoid putting yourself into conditions you can’t control. I had no knowledge of this town, how its police
responded to transients, how the people felt about strangers, or who was approachable. So I chose to suffer the rain. It seemed endless and I thought about how Noah must have felt, or the jungle peoples’ amazing patience during the rainy seasons. Rain. Rain. Rain.

Then suddenly it was gone. That afternoon it stopped like a train of thought derailing. And about twenty minutes later, another hitchhiker appeared from the other direction. He was walking out to where the cars could pull over with less danger and he waved when he saw me.

“Just get here?” he asked, offering me a cigarette.

“I wish,” I said. “I’ve been here three days.”

“Three days?” he said, whistling. “In the rain? Where did you sleep? Do you have a tent?”

“No,” I said. “No tent. I just crawled under the bridge.”

“For three nights?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you just walk to the youth hostel?”

“The what?”

“The youth hostel. It’s on the other side of town on the highway. Seventy-five cents, if you got it. Help with the chores if you don’t. No one told you?”

I laughed. It was perfect. “No. No one told me. Maybe I should go there now.”

“I would,” he said. “After three nights under this bridge you deserve a good night’s sleep. They have tents and bunk beds—sleeping bags, too, if you need one.”

I walked two miles across town and found the hostel right where the other hitchhiker had said it would be. I’ll never forget it. It was just a small house with four canvas army tents set up in the valley behind it. The man and woman that ran it, Fran and Syd—for some reason he was Francis and she was Sydney—were holdouts from the hippie days. They’d set up their hostel to help travellers like me, and it was all they really wanted to do with their lives at that point. Once they’d fed me some soup and sandwiches, they offered me the use of a steam bath. It was glorious. After three days in the wet, the heat and steam brought me back to life. I made it as hot as I could stand and when I hosed myself off with cold water I felt as alive as I ever have. When I walked down to the small valley where the tents were set up I saw that others had arrived.

There were eight of us now. At first we nodded politely to each other and went about the business of claiming our little piece of space for the night. There didn’t seem to be a lot to say. By the time everyone had been able to use the steam bath, Fran and Syd came down to talk to us.

“We’re glad you’re all here and safe. Glad everyone got off the road okay. We really wanna say ‘welcome’ and ask you to
make this your home. It’s cool to do whatever you want here, whatever you’d do at home. We’re cool with anything,” Syd said.

“But we sort of have a small problem. We haven’t made much money lately and we’re kinda short on grub. There’s ten of us tonight and we don’t wanna see anyone go hungry. So we’re wonderin’ if everyone can throw in whatever they have and we can all make a run into town and score some food.”

No one seemed to have any trouble with that. I had about fifty cents left over and I offered that. When everything was counted we had just over forty dollars and piled into Fran’s old Mercury pickup for a run into town. We hit the grocery store, the bakery, and the liquor store. When we got back we had pork chops, chicken, wieners, potatoes, corn, buns, marshmallows, wine, beer, potato chips, and fruit. Everyone was laughing and talking and we fell into preparing the fire and the meal happily. Once we’d eaten and the fire had been built up we sat on upturned logs, full, satisfied, and content.

There are few things finer in this life than a good fire on a deep, dark summer night. Something about the atmosphere created by sparks spiralling crazily in all directions, the lick of blue, orange, yellow flame at the heels of the dark, the smell of fine, dry wood burning, and the game of tag performed for us by shadow and light, seems able to settle us, root us, make us
comfortable again with earth, forest, wind, and the night itself. Maybe it’s the primal part of us that makes it so enticing. Maybe there’s still a reflection within us of nights spent huddled about a common flame, secure in the presence of family, the smell of fresh meat, and the roll of story from the old men and old women of our little bands. I like to think that. I like to think that when people around a fire disappear into their thoughts, their faces peaceful, reflecting light and memory at one time, their eyes dreamy, their hands absently poking a stick at the embers, that, in that moment, when they sigh suddenly and look deeper into the flames, they are reconnecting to that reflection, too. I like to think that because it tells me that we are all the same. Every brother and every sister from every part of the world has in common the undying reflection of fires in the night.