The earth gave a gentle shudder. “They’re blasting,” a kid said.
We were boys at play in a friend’s yard, pushing around the miniature metal cars and trucks called Dinky Toys in the crevasses between the rocks while ants, whose territory it was, scrambled to get out of the way. My father was more than a kilometre below us. I thought of him when the earth trembled.
Miners had their world and we had ours. One day the worlds intersected. We saw three men come over the rocky outcrop at the end of the street. They strode past us, up Third Avenue, not looking our way, still in their underground gear, hatless, in boots and rubber overalls covered in reddish muck up to the bibs. This was a revelation because my father came home as clean as when he left for work. Miners showered and washed their clothes at the end of each shift, then they hoisted them on chains to the change house ceiling, open to the outdoor breezes that dried them. But these young men, maybe farm boys from the south, had left mid-shift, had probably quit or were fired on their first day. A disgusted shift boss must have let them return to the surface. They were filthier than anyone we had ever seen, a rebuke to our laundry-burdened mothers who were forever warning us to stay clean. That was impossible, but there were limits to dirtiness and these guys exceeded them.
There was one thing as bad as getting dirty. That was getting soaked. In late April, when warmer days finally came and freshness was in the air, melting snow filled the swamps to overflowing. It didn’t stop us from visiting our usual haunts, but one slip off a log while crossing a swollen creek and you were soaked in the numbingly cold water – rubber boots filled, pants wet to the crotch. I suppose our mothers were afraid we might drown. We feared at least a tongue-lashing or an actual beating. One way to avoid that was to clamber up a rocky ridge above the vegetation, where, with backs against the hard brown wall, we perched, pants stripped off and boots turned inside out, letting a mellow sun dry our clothes and warm us while we talked about what we knew in the limited way we knew it.
We had to name things to give them meaning. First Rocks was a basalt outcrop at the end of the street. It folded around the back of our house, while the next upwelling where we were sunbathing was Second Rocks. In between First and Second Rocks, there was the creek, where soakings happened. There was also Third Rocks, but it was practically terra incognita, visible but hard to reach, rarely if ever visited.
The nomenclature was simple but pragmatic, conforming to our understanding of an unchanging landscape. Along the highway into Flin Flon are Payuk and Neso Lakes, exotic sounding in Cree, but translating as “One” and “Two.” They are part of a chain that runs all the way to Naosap Lake, “Fourteen.” The Cree had been here before us.
My childhood friends and I were explorers by instinct and not easily thwarted. But we could only go so far. To the west of town was impenetrable forest, south led to a trackless swamp of waterlogged muskeg where getting soaked was inevitable. East was more promising. There were rocks and trees, paths, places to build forts, catch bugs in the rotting stumps and tadpoles in the creek. Once we found a boundary marker that separated Manitoba from Saskatchewan. The rocks and scrubby bushes looked pretty much the same on each side.
We were restless for more than rocks and bush. The real adventure was north, in the Company wastelands. Here was Acid Lake, as we named it, the puddle left behind when most of Flin Flon Lake was drained. Its blood-red tint gave rise to myth that its waters would eat your skin. Not true. It was just the copper effluent the Company had poured into the lakebed. But it made for a good story with which to impress younger kids. We rafted on Acid Lake in summer, occasionally getting soaked, and played hockey on it in winter.
If you went far enough and looked beyond a wire fence you came face to face with the Company itself, so all-pervading in the life of the town that it needed no other name, its smokestacks rising from the smelter and a wall of brooding refineries. Beyond the fence, there was the open pit, deeper than imaginable, from which Flintabbatey Flonatin had emerged and shook the gold dust from his whiskers (more on him in the days to come). To children it was an abyss more legendary than real. It was risky to get close to the mine works. There were guards who might nab us. They were men too old to work and too poor not to. The Company in its paternal benevolence assigned them to keep the likes of us away.
Years later – actually only a few more than a dozen – I met a young gringo on a plaza in Oaxaca, Mexico. He lent me his copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I opened the book and read one of the most enticing first sentences a novel could have: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Ice I grew up with and knew well, but that firing squad – I wanted more.
Then: “The world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” A current ran through me. Gabriel García Márquez was describing my childhood.
I understood the newness of his world and the remoteness of Macondo, his fictional hometown. He describes “a messenger who crossed the mountains, got lost in measureless swamps, forded stormy rivers and was on the point of perishing under the lash of despair…”
In my earliest perception of the world, there was no beyond, only wilderness. I was the messenger.
Missed this. Glad you retired to focus on your real and substantial talent. Brilliant stuff!
Childhoods. So specific. So universal. Thank you for sharing yours here, Bryan.