One Native Life Page 4

  I went back to that tree every day, keeping vigil. I loved the thin oo-keet, oo-keet of the female’s voice through the trees. Oh, those ducks knew I was there, but I stayed quiet and they came to accept me.

  Something happened to me there. Braced in a tree above a flooded bush, peering through shadow and hardly breathing, I came to fully occupy the space I was in for the first time in my life. There was no need for stuff, no need of other people, no need for anything but that nest of eggs, the boggy smell of that place and the feeling that I know today as perfection.

  I watched those eight wood duck chicks hatch. They emerged one late afternoon, and I saw all of it. A day or so later I saw them drop the three feet to the water and begin to swim with their parents. When I left them for the last time, I didn’t feel the sense of departure I’d learned so well in my life. Instead, I felt joined to them, related, like kin.

  The birds on the lake today are busy in their springtime energy. There are nests to build, eggs to lay. Soon, there’ll be a brood of young to teach to swim. I’ll be here every day to watch it.

  Freeing the Pike

  . . .

  AS A BOY I loved nothing better than a solitary wandering along the serpentine lengths of a river. I’d study the water, searching out the places where fish might be hiding, or lie on the riverbank, lost in thought under an endless blue sky.

  Back then a river felt like an opportunity. Within it lay the lunker fish of my dreams or the magic passage away from the world that had me snared. Only in the aloneness the land and rivers represented could I find the freedom to dream and create. Many of my stories were born along a river.

  In my adopted home there were no fishermen. Nobody spent time in the outdoors. Camping for that family was a travel trailer parked on a cultured lot with a convenience store a short walk away, laundry facilities and public showers. I could walk for miles through the bush. I could sit for hours in a thicket of trees and watch things. I could feel at ease with nothing but the land. They could never do that.

  So I fished alone. What I learned on those solitary jaunts I kept to myself. No one was interested anyway, so they never knew how much I learned of life and nature and the universe on the riverbanks of my youth. More importantly, they never understood how the land, rivers in particular, fleshed out my insides, soothed me, comforted me. They would never know that I was born into the Sturgeon Clan, or that the teachings of that clan membership would define me and give me purpose. Instead, they found me odd and left it at that.

  We camped once beside a river outside a southwestern Ontario town called Tara. The family parked their trailer in a small roadside area along a gravel road. There was an iron bridge over the river, and I stood on it reading the water. It was shallow and weedy without much current. I could see cow-pies and horse dung along the rocky shore. It didn’t look hopeful except for the clumps of lily pads dotting the surface whenever the river got deep enough.

  They laughed when I said I would fish it. But that didn’t matter. It was a river. Along the shoreline on the opposite side of the bridge I turned over rocks and logs looking for insects. There weren’t many, so I opted for worms.

  I cast to different parts of that river. About a mile downstream I reeled in a few small bass. That excited me. Even as a kid I understood that the presence of small predator fish meant the presence of huge predator fish. I moved on, rounding a wide curve where the current carved a trench that looked dark and promising. Submerged timber angled into the depths. I chose a bobber and a long leader that would allow me to drift my bait along the entire length of the trench. It was about three feet deep, just over the top of those fallen trees.

  My first casts came up empty. But on the fourth cast I watched an enormous shadow glide out of the darkness and aim for my bait. The fish gulped the hook and swam off almost casually. The weight of it arched my rod, and when it felt that pressure the fish exploded, threatening to tear the rod right out of my hands. I backpedalled to get more secure footing.

  That fish gave me the fight of a lifetime. It breached the water four or five times, jumping clear and rattling the bobber in the air. The splash it made when it landed was awesome. When it sounded, as it did a half dozen times, I could feel its weight like a truck pulling away. Reeling it in took forever, and whenever it got close enough to the shore to see me it took off again.

  I had to step into the river finally. I couldn’t lift the fish over the bank without snapping the line. Standing thigh-deep in the water, lifting a pike far longer than my arm, I felt totally alive. As I removed the hook and rested the fish against my other palm, I knew I’d landed a monster. I shook with excitement.

  But something happened to me then that’s taken years to fully understand. Seeing that huge fish gulping at the water, straining for life, its power ebbing, its beauty already beginning to fade, I lowered it, let it rest in my hands and then watched it swim away.

  I never spoke of it, even though they laughed when I came back empty-handed. I ate supper silently, and when I got to bed that night I thanked that fish for the challenge. They would never have understood. They would never have appreciated the enormity of that encounter or how sitting on the riverbank, after it was over, I could cry and feel incredible joy at the same time.

  That river pike was freedom in my hands. When I chose to let it go, I chose life. For the Indian that lived in me, that fish was honour and respect and love. They never would have gotten that, either.

  My Friend Shane

  . . .

  THERE’S A ROMANCE to the feel of cold floorboards under bare feet, just as there’s a romance to the snap, crackle and flame of the morning fire in the wood stove. The first tendrils of warmth poking outwards are a hearkening to a new day.

  In winter the morning chill is sharp in the cabin, and making the fire has come to be special for me. I watch the flames lick their way upwards, sip at my coffee and marvel at how life sometimes becomes art. It’s a Rockwell painting. The citified man sits before a crackling fire, cradling a mug of coffee with the hint of a smile at the edges of his mouth. Behind him, the sun casts a slice of orange across the top of the mountain. Rustic. Charming. Perfect.

  It all reminds me of a friend I had when I was twelve. His name was Shane Rivers. He was older than me, with bulging blue eyes and big ears, a sort of pre-Muppets Fozzie Bear. But he was funny, and he seemed to know a lot more about the world than I did. He and his family were poor folk.

  We lived in Mildmay, Ontario, by then, an area of farms handed down through generations, established, progressive, predictable. The kids I went to school with seemed to lack for nothing. Shane and his folks were renters just like we were. My adopted father was a policeman, though, while Shane’s dad had to labour for a living.

  Unless you were a farmhand, there wasn’t much work around there. Shane showed up at school sometimes without a lunch, and he wore the same clothes for days. He got ignored by kids because he was different and odd and poor. But I liked him, and we became friends. We took turns staying overnight at each other’s homes, and I still recall the looks of horror on the faces of our schoolmates when I left the bus with him.

  You could tell that things were hard for the Rivers family. Even as a kid I could see that. The cupboards were mostly bare, like the fridge was, and there were curls and tears in the faded linoleum. There wasn’t much furniture, and there was no TV. The house was dilapidated and cold and damp. There were none of the shiny things I’d come to take for granted.

  But Shane’s family gathered around their wood stove for meals, suppers of cabbage soup with dumplings, Wonder Bread and margarine, and the talk they shared was different from the talk around our family table. Mr. and Mrs. Rivers took the time to ask each of their five kids about their day. They asked more questions about what they heard, and the meal passed with everyone being listened to and looked at—even me.

  Later, the kids did homework around that fire. Mr. Rivers made a game of sneaking in on tiptoe to add a clump of birch to
the blaze while his kids worked. We made hot chocolate in a pot on top of the wood stove. In the morning, when the cold floorboards on my feet woke me up quickly, they gathered around the fire again for porridge. Everyone was sent off to school with hugs and good wishes, even if the lunch sack was small or missing.

  I’d look back at that worn old house from the end of the driveway and think it was the warmest place I’d ever been. I felt welcomed there, as if my presence really mattered, as though I was family and had stories that needed hearing. The Rivers family had that fire, and it burned strongly with birch and pine and love.

  We take so much for granted when we live a privileged life. We expect good things and good fortune as though they were a right. Even so, there’s always something to complain about.

  I’ve been on Indian reserves where you have to chop a hole in the ice for the day’s drinking water. I’ve been to others where one wood stove heats a small frame house where twelve people live. In the cities, I’ve seen single rooms bare of everything but a cot and a hot plate. I’ve seen people living in basement rooms with no windows, mould creeping its way down the damp walls. I’ve seen poor folk of all ilk living lives far removed from anything I would call comfortable.

  Shane Rivers and his family taught me that some things are more important than discomfort. I’d have given anything as a kid for half the heart that was shared around their fire. I’d have given anything to be heard, seen and validated every day of my life. Maybe an empty belly can be eased some if you’re loved enough. I don’t know. I never had to go to bed hungry.

  But these days when I light that morning fire I remember Shane Rivers. I recall warmth that chased the damp and chill and brought everything into sharper relief—just like in a Rockwell painting.

  Chasing Ricky Lark

  . . .

  THERE ARE MEMORIES that inhabit you like light. When you revisit them the world changes by degree, and you become the one you were when you created them: younger, nimbler, stronger, more beautiful perhaps. In the space they illuminate you’re graced with the ability to dream again, to become as naive or hopeful or determined as you were back then. That’s the gift of living long enough. You get to see yourself in all kinds of lights and, if you’re lucky, if you’re very, very lucky, you smile a little wistfully at the people and the places you’ve been along the way.

  Ricky Lark was the fastest kid I ever met, and for a time he was my best friend. Rick’s mom was single, and she and Rick and his sister, Rebecca, were in their way as unusual to the staunch farmer families around us as I was. The mutual feeling of being outsiders brought us together.

  Ricky Lark could flat-out run. I never saw him lose a race, and on the baseball field he stole every base he tried. We loved baseball. For us, at twelve, baseball was the only game in the universe. Ricky and I collected baseball cards, read baseball books and magazines, and talked on the phone while watching the Game of the Week every Saturday. We worked hard at learning the skills of the game. There were hours and hours of throwing and hitting and sliding. We needed speed to be the best at baseball, and Ricky took it upon himself to give that to me.

  He’d come to our house in the country and we’d race. The driveway leading to our rented farmhouse was a couple hundred yards long, and we’d run it until it got too dark to see. The driveway had an upwards cant, and the running was hard, but we raced until we couldn’t breathe. Every time, I’d stumble towards the finish line to the shouts of Ricky Lark. “Come on, Rich, it’s the bottom of the ninth and we need you home!”

  I never beat him. I never even came close. But Ricky never allowed me to quit, never made it easier for me by slowing down or easing up at the end. Instead, he challenged me. In the chasing after him, in the sweat and the grunt and the game of running, I learned to endure and to persist.

  My adopted family moved again when I was thirteen. Ricky Lark was the first best friend I ever had. But then we moved, and after a while the telephone calls got further and further apart. Our friendship faded into the hubbub and turmoil of adolescence. I only saw him once more after that. It was winter when I visited, and running was difficult. As I walked away that last time I found myself wishing for summer.

  Since then, I’ve been the only Indian in a lot of situations. I’ve lived and survived most every facet of the life we call Indian, Ojibway or First Nations. Along the way I’ve reinvented myself a number of times, trying to snare that elusive quality called identity. For a while I took up the nomadic lifestyle of my ancestors, living in a score of towns and cities, looking for a place I could feel at home. In my travels I saw and felt the hand of racism, and I learned to practise the same politics of exclusion—that curious twist of thinking that says only those who look like me are part of me.

  It’s a natural enough reaction, I suppose. There’s some degree of protection in surrounding yourself with sameness. There’s a measure of safety living in a closed community. If you carry a feeling of being lost, it can be slaked some by the proximity to people who look like you. The paradox is that, when no one different gets in, your world lacks colour. The process of exclusion only made me lonelier, bitter sometimes, and wondering what it is that makes us feel different from one another. Or makes us need to be.

  For a time when I was twelve, there were no white men and no Indians. There was only baseball. There was only life, and the friendship of a blue-eyed kid who could run like the wind. When I go back there now, there are only the subtle shadings of the love of something beyond ourselves and the joy we found in that together. That’s the thing, really. Learning to love something beyond yourself. When you can do that, when you can expand yourself to include something foreign, you find parts of yourself you never knew existed. In that we’re all the same.

  And the reward is that one day, when my eyes close for the last time, there will be the voice of a blue-eyed kid shouting at me from the finish line. “Come on, Rich, it’s the bottom of the ninth and we need you home!”

  Taking Flight

  . . .

  THE SKY THAT TRACES the curve of mountain today is an impossible blue. Cloudless, it is at once near enough to touch and as distant as a star. You could fall into it. That’s how it feels. Perhaps there are cosmic particles deep inside us that make us one with sky and space. I wonder if, as my people say, Star People graced us with teachings once and part of us recalls that.

  When I was thirteen my adopted family moved to the city of St. Catharines, Ontario. The move there was fraught with anxiety for me. It would be my fourth move with them in four years. I never got the chance to settle, to experience the measure of refuge that comes when you can wrap a home, a place, a geography around you. Leaving our farm was a tragedy of acute proportions, and there was nothing I could say about it.

  What saved me was writing. I don’t know how many stories and poems I committed to paper those first months. It was summer, and school was out. Without a circle of friends, I was incredibly lonely and sad. But I had writing.

  My adopted parents were pragmatic, concrete thinkers. For them, there were no grey areas. There was no room for flights of fancy or imagination. Everything was regimen. Everything was obdurate discipline. For them my poetry was “flowery.” Cause for a giggle, a boy penning silly verse. My stories were wild, they said, not worthy of consideration beyond a belly laugh.

  They never got that I found freedom in writing. In my wild stories and flowery verse, I could capture the feelings of worthiness and equality I experienced on the land and under the sky. They never got that what was left of the Indian in me had its expression in creativity, or that if I could imagine permanence, I could believe it existed.

  When I entered Grade Eight that fall, I was ushered into the world of city teens. The farm kids I’d known had had little use for fashion, pose or attitude. Their world was simple and straightforward. But here life was a jumble of motion, of necessity, of learning the code and adopting it.

  So I did what every lonely, scared kid does in order to fit in.
I did what everyone else was doing. I hung out on the corner and smoked cigarettes. I talked trash and acted hip. I paid more attention to the acceptance of my peers than to my marks. But the more I worked at fitting in, the greater the trouble that brewed at home.

  My life became the walk to school and back. Then it was four hours in my room each night to study. Except that I didn’t study. I wrote. I wrote stories and plays and poems about the kind of life I imagined every other kid was having, a life that wasn’t restricted to the cloister of a small room. My stories were filled with hopes, dreams, happy endings and skies.

  And I never showed them to anybody.

  But my teacher that year was a man named Leo Rozema. He was Dutch and still held a smidgen of the accent. He had a big nose and grey hair and all the kids made fun of him. His white shirts leaned to dingy. His ties were out of fashion and he smelled of cigarettes. But there was something about Mr. Rozema that I trusted. Maybe it was because he had to work so hard at being accepted. He had to fight to be himself, too. So I showed him my stories.

  One day there was a brown envelope on my desk. When I opened it there was a letter. Mr. Rozema had written out in longhand a poem called “High Flight.” It described a pilot’s fascination with the sky.

  “And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod / The high untrespassed sanctity of space / Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.” That’s how the poem went, and Mr. Rozema’s letter said my writing reminded him of that. He called me a great writer because I could make him feel things. He praised me and told me to keep going. I did.

  I am a writer today because of Leo Rozema. He was the first adult in my adopted life who actually saw me, heard me, got me. From my words he gleaned the ache I carried, and he offered the salve of praise and recognition. He was wise enough to separate the kid from the report card.