It's been awhile
I haven't written here in a helluva long time.
guess I should, I'm coming off being sick, shirked off the oppressive load of scool and I'm westbound with the hammer down once again. Is it like Eddy Rabbit and drivin' my life away? Or more like Dierks Bentley, and every mile a memory. Given the term thus far, it's Mike Curb Congregation doing 'burning bridges'. It's going to go up from here. If it goes down I'm married to a Newfie girl and living my life out in Hamilton Ontario. Lost 35 pounds since November.. yay team fat bastard! Now.. another 60 and I'm back to where I was when I hit undergrad... how about no? Lets see.. job sucks (my boss's idea of motivation is 'beatings will continue until morale improves').. school sucks (it is the intellectual equivalent of ditch-digging)... the result.. take a shitload of roadtrips! Like Big and Rich, I'll be comin' to your city.... without the atonal scat... anyways... anyone who wants to pair up in the July area, I want to do a new one. Yes, the Chignecto trail is going to be done this summer (august?) Heather... I'll have to buy another bionic knee brace. In the meantime, I'm going home, leaving a helluva lot unsaid and undone here, but this is as it should be. Props to Spencer for hauling me out saturday night for some rowdy rum drinkin... it's what I needed. Daily coffee consumption with Jamie keeps me grounded... what is it about a Mirimachi-er that makes ya feel like you should come back and join the real world? The river's still froze, so the boat stays under the deck. May 1 you can reach me by cell on the river, in class, or on my bike. I won't be home.
I think I finally polished up the memoir with Josh's help (he's my editor, he doesn't have a stranglehold on the bank or praise my sexual prowess, but damned if he ain't worried about my ego) enough to send it for input. It's almost entirely fact, with a few minor literary airbrush marks to make us all look better. Names have been published to punish the guilty!
Well, Nate's death kinda hit home, so here's what I remember.... of An Evening Ill-Remembered
Do you know that feeling when you are leaning back on a chair, but you lean back too far and catch yourself at the last second? That was the feeling I had on that Friday evening last January. Even though I had to work at 6 the next morning I was restless, and so I grabbed my old beat-up coat and climbed the stairs, and headed out into the freezing rain. As my pickup warmed up I wondered why I was going out on such an evening, whether it was boredom, restlessness, or just force of habit. As I backed down the driveway and dropped the transmission into drive, I realized that it was simply that I didn’t wish to spend another Friday night in bed early because of work. Maybe it was the feeling lately that I was getting old and boring since I moved to Fredericton from Waterloo; too much time on school and work. As I drove downtown and parked I promised myself that I’d avoid drinking all-together and only spend an hour or two at out at the most, and would be home by eleven at the absolute latest. As I stepped out of the truck I turned to face the river, wind driving freezing rain into my face, prickly needles on day-old stubble, the asphalt slippery underfoot. I turned up the collar of my coat and walked across the street, stepping into a tavern.
In the 70’s it would have been called a tavern, the kind of place with cigarette smoke hanging around the ceiling, sawdust on the floor, and something folky and acoustic on the jukebox. Those days are long over, replacing what could have been a fine opening setting for a story with something trendy and overproduced. The modern pub is like a courtesan, over-perfumed, overripe, and moribund. As I waited for my glasses to de-fog, I wandered towards the back and found some friends. I sat down across from Tony, and ordered a Harp. I had met Tony in a graduate seminar that fall. In the opening minutes of our first graduate seminar, he had regaled us with what came to be known as Tony’s Twin Taiwanese Tale of Tarts… or the Taipei Tale, or simply, A City of Two Tails. It is on the strength of this story alone that Tony was dubbed a ‘Legend in his Own Time’ among the grad students and faculty. At 6’7” and 240 lbs, Tony is a tall and rangy Marine, fiercely proud of his Mi’kmaq heritage and preoccupied with the cult of the warrior tradition. When I first met him I had the distinct impression that he was somehow mentally deficient, slightly unhinged; totally and utterly socially inept. In reality, he had very recently spent two tours of duty as a combat engineering officer in Fallujah. It wasn’t that Tony was odd, it was just that people weren’t lobbing rocket propelled grenades at him. He found this idea amusing and alarming at turns. At any rate, true to form, Tony was regaling us with a tale of an ensign in one of his squads who was, as he put it, ‘a touch light in the loafers‘, who bore the proud surname of Query (pronounced ‘queery’), so I can‘t claim I didn‘t know where his story was going. Needless to say, we were all used to it.
Beside Tony sat Zach, another MA candidate in the history department, who focused on the Concordat between the Spanish government and the Holy See. A cursory glance at Zach doesn’t reveal his origins as a native of Minnesota. Rather, he can most easily be identified by the remarkable shape of his head: a high, domed forehead usually reserved for clerics and professors of obscure phenomena in natural philosophy. Zach simply possesses the intellect and capacious skull that 19th century phrenologists might point at to advance their theories. Unfortunately, Zach had been steadily consuming liquor since lunch (incidentally a liquid one) and had reached a state of deep cerebral paralysis normally reserved for individuals in diabetic comas. A hallmark of this condition was his inability to articulate the simplest of ideas, and as a poor substitute for intellect he had taken to producing incredible amounts of saliva.
Across the table from Zach and beside me, sat Zach’s longtime friend and room-mate Nathan whom I had only met a handful of times. A warm and engaging individual, he was slightly built and stylishly dressed, with an easy smile that seemed to welcome everyone. He was playing “sober cab” for the evening, and was thus relegated to the role of Zach’s babysitter. After Tony’s litany of suggestive stories had been exhausted, I voiced the idea that I felt I had lost a sense of adventure since moving to New Brunswick. Nathan quickly suggested that there was no better time than the present to embark upon any sort of adventure, and since I had not yet seen their humble abode, nor the great metropolis of Harvey Station in which it was located, an expedition was in order. When I explained that I had a case of 24 yet-unopened Molson’s Export to contribute and fuel such an expedition, Nathan (a native Ontarian) found it difficult to disguise his glee. We decided to leave Tony behind because he had to get home to his Mom (with whom he lived on the reserve), and also because his pseudo-pornographic ramblings were beginning to unnerve us all. We quickly adjourned and jumped into our vehicles to make a detour to my home and make the beer pickup. When we arrived, we stood around the wood-stove in my basement; since the trip was long and some of us had as yet abstained from alcohol for the evening, we chose to lighten our load before carrying anything to the truck. Zach continued to slaver at an alarming rate; I began to fear he might perish from dehydration. While ingesting our ales we discussed the relative merits of wood as a heat source as men consuming alcohol in any proximity to a wood stove often do. Zach drooled.
Bottles were discarded, and without further ado, I piled into my truck, and Nathan and Zach into Nathan’s late-model Accord, and we were off like a shot. I suppose a shot is rather inaccurate. Once we made the Hanwell road, we launched like a rocket. As throttles opened, adrenaline climbed, and IQs dropped, the countryside rattled by with increasing rapidity and the stereo screamed out Steve Earle and how his ‘granddaddy ran whiskey in a big black dodge.’ Considering the recent freezing rain and the thoroughly dilapidated state of the road, I fear that we were quite reckless. As the speed of our advance topped one hundred miles per hour, I was grasped by a sudden moment of clarity. These two were outpacing me in an early 90’s Accord, while I was attempting to follow in a vehicle with roughly the power-to-weight ratio of an early 70’s Camaro, a situation akin to Gary Coleman punching Mike Tyson silly. The realization that horsepower and equipment is no substitute for fearlessness and an utter disregard for all human life was new to me, and brought a smile to my face. I wondered aloud “do you want to live forever?” and remembered my father’s admonition before my first start at the track to “drive ‘er like ya stole ‘er.“ I pushed my right foot an inch closer to the firewall and hurtled onward in the darkness.
The Hanwell Road at night is a curious place, not unlike Brigadoon: you get the eerie feeling that no living man has ever been there before. Much to our surprise, a mini-van was traveling at a much more reasonable pace in front of us and was clearly obstructing our advance. The Accord executed a deft but tricky uphill blind pass, and I decided to follow. The throttle was matted, my pulse raced, and I wondered just exactly why I was driven to attempt such an obviously foolhardy maneuver. I shoved the thoughts to the back of my mind, which stopped my thought process before it reached what the consequences of such a mistake might be. I crossed the center-line.
Remember that feeling I mentioned? Where you are leaning back on a chair, and you lean too far and catch yourself at the last second? I was getting that feeling again. When I realized that the rear differential, or posi-traction in General Motors parlance, had locked up, I knew why. The rear of the truck moved left, and I was left with the distinct feeling that it was going to swing all the way around. I was wrong. Sliding down the road nearly perpendicular to the direction of travel is something I have experienced before. I spent about a year after that exercising what I referred to as ‘my right to walk like a pirate.’ I still can’t drive a standard on a track for any length of time. That accident occured at half of the speed I was now traveling at.
Somehow, I knew that this was going to end differently. I felt fairly assured that when I entered the final danse macabre of a rollover that the minivan I had passed would get clear. At least I wouldn’t have to die with the burden of killing a suburban family on my conscience. I waited for the inevitable. A rollover at this speed is a slightly inaccurate term: it would have been several rollovers, let‘s say a dozen. I’ve rolled an ’81 Ford half-ton too, again, at half my current speed. When I woke up from that particular excursion I had to kick the mangled door out of the truck to escape the fire that spread into the cab from the ruptured fuel lines and tank. Remembering my father’s admonition that ‘they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.’ I envisioned what was going to happen. The truck would hit a piece of clear asphalt and flip over, rolling over seven or eight times, shedding excess body panels and glass, tires, plastic and fluids. The truck would land at about 3’ high, and since I’m not a regular on Little People, Big World, it wouldn’t work out too well. That would be if the unlined fuel tank didn’t ignite, going off like a howitzer on a Sunday morning. That kind of explosion would result in what is commonly referred to as ‘shovel and broom time.’ The most junior constable at the local detachment would spend the next week or so with tweezers, a spoon and a Ziploc lunch baggie finding enough to ship home to mom. Air cargo. Then something truly remarkable happened: the chair tipped forward onto its four legs, while my truck straightened out finishing up the pass. Steve Earle croaked a warning that I’d better stay away from Copperhead Road. I lit up a cigarette and wondered where I would find a change of shorts at this time of night.
As our rolling radio show rumbled down the hill into the sleepy village of Harvey Station, I wondered why in the world the settlement had sprung up. It turns out that free land for Scottish Settlers in the 1830s is the reason for Harvey Station. The Lougheed Pub provides the social nexus in the area when the curling rink and arena are closed. Stashing our vehicles in the deserted parking lot, we divested ourselves of our coats, and stepped into the bar. White light bathed the interior of the bar, the modern stylish faux art-decco décor in contrast to the white frame house exterior. The bar is the source and wellhead of the coldest Alpine known worldwide, cryogenically frozen in liquid helium and pumped directly to glasses at enormous pressure. The glasses may be handled safely with gloves used for low-grade radioactive materials or polar expeditions. Beer flowed freely into pint glasses to be emptied just as quickly as they were refilled. After an hour of this repetitive and yet entertaining monotony at Cheers-meets-Hee-Haw, we had gained another sturdy heart and strong liver who appeared to be dressed entirely in plaid flannel and denim. This sort of character is commonly referred to as ‘local color.’ Some of his dialogue should be included for the sake of novelty, but unfortunately, to my native Ontario ears it sounded like French with a Newfoundland accent. The beer may have also hindered my hearing slightly.
Since the Lougheed closes at midnight on a Saturday, we closed down the bar, divested my half-ton of its ‘liquid’ or ‘clinky’ accoutrements and made the short but brisk walk to Nathan and Zach’s home. Inside, we quickly discovered that Nathan also possessed not less than 26 ounces of rum, and being short of shot glasses we decided that it might be best to simply drink from the bottle directly. ‘Rum with a rum chaser’ became the rallying cry, and beer was consumed to fill time merely between jiggers of rum. We became fantastically, unbelievably tight; it left Nathan and I in an entirely esoteric mood. It also left Zach in a state where he had largely quit salivating because he had lost consciousness.
Nathan had heard me mention that I was off to see the Trews play in Halifax the next weekend, and as a result the retro-tinged Zeppelin-esque tones poured out of the speakers, making conversation almost impossible.
There's no sight she'd rather see
Than poor old broken hearted me
Her mission is my misery
Poor old broken hearted me.
We both leaned back in our chairs and smiled, I thinking of a long-distant but not forgotten girl I left behind in a light snow two days after Christmas, tears on reddened cheeks under a muted streetlamp. I don’t know what Nathan was thinking about, but judging from his expression, the memory he was rehashing was much better than mine. It could have been his longtime girlfriend in Saint John, or his successes in school, or something else entirely. He seemed to be the type of person who would have a lot of successes to look back on. The music level dropped and we moved to still more erudite conversation. As Nathan held forth topics of interest such as the increasingly altruistic society and whether classical philosophers and political theorists could be applied, I again got the feeling that he was slowly but inexorably pulling away from me. Since I had about a hundred pounds on Nathan, I knew that the liquor had to be having a lesser effect on my intellect, so I knew that the alcohol was not the issue. Nathan was simply quicker, and kept injecting humor to make me feel easier about being the dumb kid on the block. When moments came that I failed to comprehend his meaning and it showed, he patiently resisted the urge to enumerate or gesture with his hands and fingers. Instead, he patiently worked me through the concepts while I scratched my head with an expression like a lower primate doing calculus. As liquid levels dropped and camaraderie arose, I came to admire the man, not so much based on good times as the respect that Nathan’s easy manner and quick wit had engendered. Seldom have I felt so comfortable and yet so challenged outside of my own family circle. I let him amaze and inform me until the wee hours of the morning, feeling more comfortable and engaged than I had in years. I must admit, the details of the conversation escape me even now, as I was confined to nodding or wrinkling my brow alternatively. What is especially troubling is that were the conversation to be repeated verbatim, such a learned discourse would likely escape me today. In the following year, was loath to probe into the subject again, lest my simian facial expressions garner laughter from others, although a nice ripe bunch of bananas is always welcome.
I turned in on the futon with an alarm, and fell asleep in approximately 3 nanoseconds. When I awoke to the beep, I found that Zach had sleepwalked his way into the futon beside me as he sometimes is known to do, clad only in his undergarments. How charming! My instant gut reaction left me mollified. I stood up, said goodbye, and walked out to my truck. I dropped the truck in gear and watched Harvey fade away in the rearview. My headache kept time with the guitar as Everclear belted out:
We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die
A year later and here I am still thinking about that night. Tony’s getting ready to mobilize for another tour in Iraq, his third. Consensus among my old military grad seminar is that he has a 50/50 chance of returning without getting his head blown off by someone who can’t spell IED, but learned at age 4 how to make them. Nathan’s dead and gone. Somewhere he lost that sense of humor, which in turn cost him everything else. It cost us all something too, friend, guide, leader, counselor, although I haven‘t figured out what it has cost me yet. I tell myself I’m too busy now to bother, as I largely was in the year following our initial adventure. I suppose that the effect is most keenly felt on Zach’s part. He’s wandering aimlessly trying to figure out what happened, and likely drinking more than he should, leaving a trail of mucous behind like a character in a Hans Christian Anderson story. As for me? I’m coping I suppose. Remember that feeling I mentioned? When you are leaning back on a chair, and you lean back too far and catch yourself at the last second? I feel like that all the time these days.
Go n-éirí an bóthar leat.
Go raibh an chóir ghaoithe i gcónaí leat.
Go dtaitní an ghrian go bog bláth ar do chlár éadain,
go gcuire an bháisteach go bog mín ar do ghoirt.
Agus go gcasfar le chéile sinn arís,
go gcoinní Dia i mbosa a láimhe thú.
Síochán leat
Go maire sibh bhur saol nua.
The Lord May be Catholic, but he's definitely Irish
guess I should, I'm coming off being sick, shirked off the oppressive load of scool and I'm westbound with the hammer down once again. Is it like Eddy Rabbit and drivin' my life away? Or more like Dierks Bentley, and every mile a memory. Given the term thus far, it's Mike Curb Congregation doing 'burning bridges'. It's going to go up from here. If it goes down I'm married to a Newfie girl and living my life out in Hamilton Ontario. Lost 35 pounds since November.. yay team fat bastard! Now.. another 60 and I'm back to where I was when I hit undergrad... how about no? Lets see.. job sucks (my boss's idea of motivation is 'beatings will continue until morale improves').. school sucks (it is the intellectual equivalent of ditch-digging)... the result.. take a shitload of roadtrips! Like Big and Rich, I'll be comin' to your city.... without the atonal scat... anyways... anyone who wants to pair up in the July area, I want to do a new one. Yes, the Chignecto trail is going to be done this summer (august?) Heather... I'll have to buy another bionic knee brace. In the meantime, I'm going home, leaving a helluva lot unsaid and undone here, but this is as it should be. Props to Spencer for hauling me out saturday night for some rowdy rum drinkin... it's what I needed. Daily coffee consumption with Jamie keeps me grounded... what is it about a Mirimachi-er that makes ya feel like you should come back and join the real world? The river's still froze, so the boat stays under the deck. May 1 you can reach me by cell on the river, in class, or on my bike. I won't be home.
I think I finally polished up the memoir with Josh's help (he's my editor, he doesn't have a stranglehold on the bank or praise my sexual prowess, but damned if he ain't worried about my ego) enough to send it for input. It's almost entirely fact, with a few minor literary airbrush marks to make us all look better. Names have been published to punish the guilty!
Well, Nate's death kinda hit home, so here's what I remember.... of An Evening Ill-Remembered
Do you know that feeling when you are leaning back on a chair, but you lean back too far and catch yourself at the last second? That was the feeling I had on that Friday evening last January. Even though I had to work at 6 the next morning I was restless, and so I grabbed my old beat-up coat and climbed the stairs, and headed out into the freezing rain. As my pickup warmed up I wondered why I was going out on such an evening, whether it was boredom, restlessness, or just force of habit. As I backed down the driveway and dropped the transmission into drive, I realized that it was simply that I didn’t wish to spend another Friday night in bed early because of work. Maybe it was the feeling lately that I was getting old and boring since I moved to Fredericton from Waterloo; too much time on school and work. As I drove downtown and parked I promised myself that I’d avoid drinking all-together and only spend an hour or two at out at the most, and would be home by eleven at the absolute latest. As I stepped out of the truck I turned to face the river, wind driving freezing rain into my face, prickly needles on day-old stubble, the asphalt slippery underfoot. I turned up the collar of my coat and walked across the street, stepping into a tavern.
In the 70’s it would have been called a tavern, the kind of place with cigarette smoke hanging around the ceiling, sawdust on the floor, and something folky and acoustic on the jukebox. Those days are long over, replacing what could have been a fine opening setting for a story with something trendy and overproduced. The modern pub is like a courtesan, over-perfumed, overripe, and moribund. As I waited for my glasses to de-fog, I wandered towards the back and found some friends. I sat down across from Tony, and ordered a Harp. I had met Tony in a graduate seminar that fall. In the opening minutes of our first graduate seminar, he had regaled us with what came to be known as Tony’s Twin Taiwanese Tale of Tarts… or the Taipei Tale, or simply, A City of Two Tails. It is on the strength of this story alone that Tony was dubbed a ‘Legend in his Own Time’ among the grad students and faculty. At 6’7” and 240 lbs, Tony is a tall and rangy Marine, fiercely proud of his Mi’kmaq heritage and preoccupied with the cult of the warrior tradition. When I first met him I had the distinct impression that he was somehow mentally deficient, slightly unhinged; totally and utterly socially inept. In reality, he had very recently spent two tours of duty as a combat engineering officer in Fallujah. It wasn’t that Tony was odd, it was just that people weren’t lobbing rocket propelled grenades at him. He found this idea amusing and alarming at turns. At any rate, true to form, Tony was regaling us with a tale of an ensign in one of his squads who was, as he put it, ‘a touch light in the loafers‘, who bore the proud surname of Query (pronounced ‘queery’), so I can‘t claim I didn‘t know where his story was going. Needless to say, we were all used to it.
Beside Tony sat Zach, another MA candidate in the history department, who focused on the Concordat between the Spanish government and the Holy See. A cursory glance at Zach doesn’t reveal his origins as a native of Minnesota. Rather, he can most easily be identified by the remarkable shape of his head: a high, domed forehead usually reserved for clerics and professors of obscure phenomena in natural philosophy. Zach simply possesses the intellect and capacious skull that 19th century phrenologists might point at to advance their theories. Unfortunately, Zach had been steadily consuming liquor since lunch (incidentally a liquid one) and had reached a state of deep cerebral paralysis normally reserved for individuals in diabetic comas. A hallmark of this condition was his inability to articulate the simplest of ideas, and as a poor substitute for intellect he had taken to producing incredible amounts of saliva.
Across the table from Zach and beside me, sat Zach’s longtime friend and room-mate Nathan whom I had only met a handful of times. A warm and engaging individual, he was slightly built and stylishly dressed, with an easy smile that seemed to welcome everyone. He was playing “sober cab” for the evening, and was thus relegated to the role of Zach’s babysitter. After Tony’s litany of suggestive stories had been exhausted, I voiced the idea that I felt I had lost a sense of adventure since moving to New Brunswick. Nathan quickly suggested that there was no better time than the present to embark upon any sort of adventure, and since I had not yet seen their humble abode, nor the great metropolis of Harvey Station in which it was located, an expedition was in order. When I explained that I had a case of 24 yet-unopened Molson’s Export to contribute and fuel such an expedition, Nathan (a native Ontarian) found it difficult to disguise his glee. We decided to leave Tony behind because he had to get home to his Mom (with whom he lived on the reserve), and also because his pseudo-pornographic ramblings were beginning to unnerve us all. We quickly adjourned and jumped into our vehicles to make a detour to my home and make the beer pickup. When we arrived, we stood around the wood-stove in my basement; since the trip was long and some of us had as yet abstained from alcohol for the evening, we chose to lighten our load before carrying anything to the truck. Zach continued to slaver at an alarming rate; I began to fear he might perish from dehydration. While ingesting our ales we discussed the relative merits of wood as a heat source as men consuming alcohol in any proximity to a wood stove often do. Zach drooled.
Bottles were discarded, and without further ado, I piled into my truck, and Nathan and Zach into Nathan’s late-model Accord, and we were off like a shot. I suppose a shot is rather inaccurate. Once we made the Hanwell road, we launched like a rocket. As throttles opened, adrenaline climbed, and IQs dropped, the countryside rattled by with increasing rapidity and the stereo screamed out Steve Earle and how his ‘granddaddy ran whiskey in a big black dodge.’ Considering the recent freezing rain and the thoroughly dilapidated state of the road, I fear that we were quite reckless. As the speed of our advance topped one hundred miles per hour, I was grasped by a sudden moment of clarity. These two were outpacing me in an early 90’s Accord, while I was attempting to follow in a vehicle with roughly the power-to-weight ratio of an early 70’s Camaro, a situation akin to Gary Coleman punching Mike Tyson silly. The realization that horsepower and equipment is no substitute for fearlessness and an utter disregard for all human life was new to me, and brought a smile to my face. I wondered aloud “do you want to live forever?” and remembered my father’s admonition before my first start at the track to “drive ‘er like ya stole ‘er.“ I pushed my right foot an inch closer to the firewall and hurtled onward in the darkness.
The Hanwell Road at night is a curious place, not unlike Brigadoon: you get the eerie feeling that no living man has ever been there before. Much to our surprise, a mini-van was traveling at a much more reasonable pace in front of us and was clearly obstructing our advance. The Accord executed a deft but tricky uphill blind pass, and I decided to follow. The throttle was matted, my pulse raced, and I wondered just exactly why I was driven to attempt such an obviously foolhardy maneuver. I shoved the thoughts to the back of my mind, which stopped my thought process before it reached what the consequences of such a mistake might be. I crossed the center-line.
Remember that feeling I mentioned? Where you are leaning back on a chair, and you lean too far and catch yourself at the last second? I was getting that feeling again. When I realized that the rear differential, or posi-traction in General Motors parlance, had locked up, I knew why. The rear of the truck moved left, and I was left with the distinct feeling that it was going to swing all the way around. I was wrong. Sliding down the road nearly perpendicular to the direction of travel is something I have experienced before. I spent about a year after that exercising what I referred to as ‘my right to walk like a pirate.’ I still can’t drive a standard on a track for any length of time. That accident occured at half of the speed I was now traveling at.
Somehow, I knew that this was going to end differently. I felt fairly assured that when I entered the final danse macabre of a rollover that the minivan I had passed would get clear. At least I wouldn’t have to die with the burden of killing a suburban family on my conscience. I waited for the inevitable. A rollover at this speed is a slightly inaccurate term: it would have been several rollovers, let‘s say a dozen. I’ve rolled an ’81 Ford half-ton too, again, at half my current speed. When I woke up from that particular excursion I had to kick the mangled door out of the truck to escape the fire that spread into the cab from the ruptured fuel lines and tank. Remembering my father’s admonition that ‘they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.’ I envisioned what was going to happen. The truck would hit a piece of clear asphalt and flip over, rolling over seven or eight times, shedding excess body panels and glass, tires, plastic and fluids. The truck would land at about 3’ high, and since I’m not a regular on Little People, Big World, it wouldn’t work out too well. That would be if the unlined fuel tank didn’t ignite, going off like a howitzer on a Sunday morning. That kind of explosion would result in what is commonly referred to as ‘shovel and broom time.’ The most junior constable at the local detachment would spend the next week or so with tweezers, a spoon and a Ziploc lunch baggie finding enough to ship home to mom. Air cargo. Then something truly remarkable happened: the chair tipped forward onto its four legs, while my truck straightened out finishing up the pass. Steve Earle croaked a warning that I’d better stay away from Copperhead Road. I lit up a cigarette and wondered where I would find a change of shorts at this time of night.
As our rolling radio show rumbled down the hill into the sleepy village of Harvey Station, I wondered why in the world the settlement had sprung up. It turns out that free land for Scottish Settlers in the 1830s is the reason for Harvey Station. The Lougheed Pub provides the social nexus in the area when the curling rink and arena are closed. Stashing our vehicles in the deserted parking lot, we divested ourselves of our coats, and stepped into the bar. White light bathed the interior of the bar, the modern stylish faux art-decco décor in contrast to the white frame house exterior. The bar is the source and wellhead of the coldest Alpine known worldwide, cryogenically frozen in liquid helium and pumped directly to glasses at enormous pressure. The glasses may be handled safely with gloves used for low-grade radioactive materials or polar expeditions. Beer flowed freely into pint glasses to be emptied just as quickly as they were refilled. After an hour of this repetitive and yet entertaining monotony at Cheers-meets-Hee-Haw, we had gained another sturdy heart and strong liver who appeared to be dressed entirely in plaid flannel and denim. This sort of character is commonly referred to as ‘local color.’ Some of his dialogue should be included for the sake of novelty, but unfortunately, to my native Ontario ears it sounded like French with a Newfoundland accent. The beer may have also hindered my hearing slightly.
Since the Lougheed closes at midnight on a Saturday, we closed down the bar, divested my half-ton of its ‘liquid’ or ‘clinky’ accoutrements and made the short but brisk walk to Nathan and Zach’s home. Inside, we quickly discovered that Nathan also possessed not less than 26 ounces of rum, and being short of shot glasses we decided that it might be best to simply drink from the bottle directly. ‘Rum with a rum chaser’ became the rallying cry, and beer was consumed to fill time merely between jiggers of rum. We became fantastically, unbelievably tight; it left Nathan and I in an entirely esoteric mood. It also left Zach in a state where he had largely quit salivating because he had lost consciousness.
Nathan had heard me mention that I was off to see the Trews play in Halifax the next weekend, and as a result the retro-tinged Zeppelin-esque tones poured out of the speakers, making conversation almost impossible.
There's no sight she'd rather see
Than poor old broken hearted me
Her mission is my misery
Poor old broken hearted me.
We both leaned back in our chairs and smiled, I thinking of a long-distant but not forgotten girl I left behind in a light snow two days after Christmas, tears on reddened cheeks under a muted streetlamp. I don’t know what Nathan was thinking about, but judging from his expression, the memory he was rehashing was much better than mine. It could have been his longtime girlfriend in Saint John, or his successes in school, or something else entirely. He seemed to be the type of person who would have a lot of successes to look back on. The music level dropped and we moved to still more erudite conversation. As Nathan held forth topics of interest such as the increasingly altruistic society and whether classical philosophers and political theorists could be applied, I again got the feeling that he was slowly but inexorably pulling away from me. Since I had about a hundred pounds on Nathan, I knew that the liquor had to be having a lesser effect on my intellect, so I knew that the alcohol was not the issue. Nathan was simply quicker, and kept injecting humor to make me feel easier about being the dumb kid on the block. When moments came that I failed to comprehend his meaning and it showed, he patiently resisted the urge to enumerate or gesture with his hands and fingers. Instead, he patiently worked me through the concepts while I scratched my head with an expression like a lower primate doing calculus. As liquid levels dropped and camaraderie arose, I came to admire the man, not so much based on good times as the respect that Nathan’s easy manner and quick wit had engendered. Seldom have I felt so comfortable and yet so challenged outside of my own family circle. I let him amaze and inform me until the wee hours of the morning, feeling more comfortable and engaged than I had in years. I must admit, the details of the conversation escape me even now, as I was confined to nodding or wrinkling my brow alternatively. What is especially troubling is that were the conversation to be repeated verbatim, such a learned discourse would likely escape me today. In the following year, was loath to probe into the subject again, lest my simian facial expressions garner laughter from others, although a nice ripe bunch of bananas is always welcome.
I turned in on the futon with an alarm, and fell asleep in approximately 3 nanoseconds. When I awoke to the beep, I found that Zach had sleepwalked his way into the futon beside me as he sometimes is known to do, clad only in his undergarments. How charming! My instant gut reaction left me mollified. I stood up, said goodbye, and walked out to my truck. I dropped the truck in gear and watched Harvey fade away in the rearview. My headache kept time with the guitar as Everclear belted out:
We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die
A year later and here I am still thinking about that night. Tony’s getting ready to mobilize for another tour in Iraq, his third. Consensus among my old military grad seminar is that he has a 50/50 chance of returning without getting his head blown off by someone who can’t spell IED, but learned at age 4 how to make them. Nathan’s dead and gone. Somewhere he lost that sense of humor, which in turn cost him everything else. It cost us all something too, friend, guide, leader, counselor, although I haven‘t figured out what it has cost me yet. I tell myself I’m too busy now to bother, as I largely was in the year following our initial adventure. I suppose that the effect is most keenly felt on Zach’s part. He’s wandering aimlessly trying to figure out what happened, and likely drinking more than he should, leaving a trail of mucous behind like a character in a Hans Christian Anderson story. As for me? I’m coping I suppose. Remember that feeling I mentioned? When you are leaning back on a chair, and you lean back too far and catch yourself at the last second? I feel like that all the time these days.
Go n-éirí an bóthar leat.
Go raibh an chóir ghaoithe i gcónaí leat.
Go dtaitní an ghrian go bog bláth ar do chlár éadain,
go gcuire an bháisteach go bog mín ar do ghoirt.
Agus go gcasfar le chéile sinn arís,
go gcoinní Dia i mbosa a láimhe thú.
Síochán leat
Go maire sibh bhur saol nua.
The Lord May be Catholic, but he's definitely Irish