THE CANADIAN SHIELD October 29, 2013 Volume VI, Issue #44 _____ We were rough and ready guys, But oh, how we could harmonize... - Ben Ryan, Heart of My Heart, 1926 ______ The way we were... Heart of My Heart: Remembering The Lake Put the case that our town was pinned like a dry moth to the sere prairie dust bowl of Alberta all through the Thirties. Remember that for kids, there wasnt that much to do from the 24th of May until Halloween. We could snare gophers in the valley by the creek south of town. After Beau Geste played the local theater, we might fashion great heroic games in and around the yawning empty grain elevators that stood like watchful gophers along the CPR branch line. Three times a week each way, the mixed train would be there for us to meet: at its tail end, a single empty passenger car, as if as an afterthought, preceded by a string of mostly empty box cars. Except, occasionally, for a relief train, with boxcars loaded with slabs of salted whitefish from Great Slave Lake and rotting apples from B.C.s Okanagan. Box cars switched onto a siding and emptied by farm wagons in an afternoon. Leaning on his windowsill, Baldy Bell, the engineer would always wave to us, a glass of some strange amber liquid at his elbow. On Saturday night we promoted dog fights in the middle of Main Street or, as Ring Lardner chronicled, we watched haircuts. (Two-bits for kids, 50 cents for gents, ladies to be negotiated.) Winter was different, a surcease of inactivity; tunneling and creating snow forts, skiing on the hills south of town which in my childs eye of memory loomed in alpine dimensions. And the games of shinny on our open-air rink, culminating, after the ice went soggy in March, with the annual broom ball classic that matched the west side of town against the east - men, women, kids and dogs in unconscionable numbers - more hazardous and death-defying than a native game of lacrosse or that mounted Afghan sport where the enemies heads served as polo balls. And then there was The Lake. I can remember it as a frieze across my earliest childhood. I must have been about three, when my father swam, carrying me on his back like a baby seal, out to the anchored raft that held a diving board in perhaps ten feet of water. He deposited me on its safe wooden floor, ran up the diving board and launched himself into the water. I, of course, with no other frame of reference than parental devotion, ran up the board after him and belly-flopped in after him. Asphyxiated by the alkaline post-glaciel water before Dad pulled me out, Ive never totally been at ease in water since. My brothers, Bob and Jack, became excellent swimmers in our teens, able to swim across the lakes mile or so breadth to the Point that divided our lake from a larger stretch to the east. I never did, crawling, or side-arming or breast-stroking around the shore, pretending I wasnt interested in deep water.. Besides, as I just mentioned, it wasnt really water. An ice-age glacier had slanted from the Arctic across pre-Alberta, depositing a chain or honeycomb of alkaline sloughs, one of which became our summer paradise, so salinated or alkaline as to be so buoyant that even I could float on its surface, but the content of which would not only kiss, as with Audens lover, but strangle. Some early surveyor dubbed it Gooseberry Lake - not inapt, because of the berries that clustered around its shores. For us, it was just The Lake. The well-to-do of the town maintained cottages around the northern perimeter. Bare-framed, unfinished sheds with ancient kitchen stoves, simple beds or Winnipeg couches, makeshift tables and chairs. I remember an ancient phonograph in Reds parents cottage. There were two records, which we played endlessly. Marta, (rambling rose of the wildwood), and Goody-Goody. That last one sounds dumb - actually it was an excellent early jazz recording. And on that subject, The Lake later, as we entered teen-age, was the incubation agent for our little jazz band. Red on trombone, Hank on clarinet, Pebo with the drums and Johnny piano. Me with trumpet, of course. Because one of the highlights of the summer social season was the School of Community Life, an extension program offered by the University of Alberta, a surprising feature, now that I think of it, considering the abject depths of the Depression that encircled us. We called it The Convention, and it lasted a week in July. And all that week, every night in the Pavilion that housed lectures and seminars by day, our band The Hep Cats, would play our thin Canadian take on Dixieland jazz. Every night. For these dance gigs, Red and Hank and I camped in a tent the whole week. As I remember it, we were paid handsomely 25 bucks each night - Five dollars apiece for blowing our brains out for four or five hours. We thought wed died and gone to Heaven. Perhaps we had, when I remember every thing that was to follow. At mid-week, that week, that summer of 1943, my brother Bob arrived home from Royal Roads, the Canadian equivalent of Annapolis. Graduated and commissioned, he was 19 years old, cool in his black doeskin uniform with the Midshipman lapel patches, his half-Wellington boots and his Rolex wristwatch. He was on embarkation leave. And heres the kind of guy Bob was: rather than relaxing or looking up his girl or his friends or sleeping in, he borrowed the car from Dad and drove out to the Lake just to see me - the kid brother that most guys would have systemically ignored. But here he was, dumping me out of bed, pummeling me awake. Ill always remember that bright summer morning, because nine months later that marvelous guy was dead. Nine months later, just a month before D-Day, I was listening to the BBC News - I was fifteen and an expert on the War - and its description of an action in the English Channel; how two German destroyers had been engaged, sunk or run aground off Finistere. And then, as if an afterthought, there followed the brief conclusion, the throw-away line, the casual British paternalism: “The Canadian destroyer Athabaskan was lost.” Bobs ship. At the age of not yet 20, for Gods sake, he was gunnery officer. Thats why the Lake is so bound up in my memories of childhood and adolescence. Our campfires, where we held corn roasts after raiding Manley Coles garden. The baseball diamond where a traveling black team toyed with our local stalwarts, their catcher in a rocking chair and the entire infield shooting craps behind second base. I may have lost my virginity at The Lake, but memory tends to befog even that, after 70 years. Let modesty draw the veil. I do remember enough to know that The Lake was our sanctuary, our escape, much more importantly, our crucible. We were formed there, we really did learn to harmonize there. And then moved on.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 12:16:51 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015