AT SEVENTEEN

AT SEVENTEEN

At seventeen, having crawled out from under the street

and made my way through the culture shock

of my first year of an affluent university

with easy access to the sea,

I made my way north to a pit stop coffee-shop

on a lonely highway at a place

called Windy Point as I recall

northwest of Prince George.

I remember the tractor trailers full of strawberries

festering like hot sacrificial hearts

bruised by the quick summer,

and the electrically charged aura of bees and wasps

that hovered over them and hummed

like a powerline tuning up in the rain.

I was a young teacher assigned by Frontier College

to live and labour and teach

five hours a night after dinner on a work train,

lining, tamping, laying track on an extra gang

of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway,

forty miles as the crow flies into the bush.

I remember the impoverished trees

that grew smaller and smaller

in the immensity of their solitude and mine

as I was driven deeper into the bush

by two railwaymen who said about as much

to the long-haired hippie in the back of their jeep

as I’d said all year to myself in my sleep,

as the silence grew more aggressive by the mile

bumped along by the side of the track.

You him. Yup. Get in. And that was it.

That was as much of a welcome as I was going to get.

Or as far as they were concerned

I had a right to expect because

the illusive idealism of the sixties

was still an embryo in the matrix of a dreamcatcher

trying to jimmy the locks on the doors of perception

forgetting it’s just as easy as light

as it is for a thief or the moon

to get in through the windows.

The threat of their worst nightmare

coming unglued like the perfectly bound

paperback edition

of their unlovable orthodoxy

and unlivable reactionary redneck rectitude.

Flower power spread like fire

through the radicalized roots

of the underdogs, draft dodgers and drop-outs

fight for the right to cast its vote

like Japanese cherry blossoms on the wind

to accommodate a better more spontaneous world

to the portable Zen of their creative imaginations.

The hawks and the doves,

the fireflies locked in ice

and the snowflakes on a furnace

fighting over whose cosmic eggs

in a war of F-4s against

magic carpets with a flight plan

best measured up to the wingspan

of the winds of change

while down below their nests

in the highest crowns of the trees

dark wavelengths

hatched out of their black holes

like baby snakes

that had just passed through

the third eye of the needle

aspiring to win their wings

and become dragons of the air

by swallowing the eggs of either species

whole cosmologies at a time

and regurgitating the remains

like the collapsed parachutes

and used condoms of the moon

as if they could shed their skins

from the inside out.

Either extreme a fang in the skull

of a harvest moon in a year of famine.

And there were far fewer people

trying to firewalk their way to the stars

back in those days than there were

spiritual tourists trying to walk on water.

So I took the middle extreme of the dragon’s path

and grew a third wing down the spine of my back

like the keel of a schooner,

the dorsal fin of a shark

with the heart of a dolphin

or the tail rudder of a plane

just to keep things immensely balanced

like a phoenix between Icarus and the sun.

I oscillated like a wavelength of starmud

between the Himalayan apexes

of mystic contemplation,

the death valleys of meditation,

and the troughs where it got down and dirty

as the mysticism of action

that had to follow the blossom of insight

like water all the way up from the root

and then take it a step further, into the fruit.

And that’s why I volunteered

the sceptical lack of innocence

of my ambiguous idealism

to be brutalized by the wilderness

into the scar tissue of experience

as if I had just skinned a unicorn

and now I had to tan the leather.

And that’s why I was on my way

to bring education to the working man

in the wilds of northern B.C.

At seventeen, I was

the Johnny Appleseed of knowledge

armed to the teeth

with the revolutionary rose

of a virtuous cause

righteous as the thorn of the moon

in the side of the dawn.

I was the ladder out of the same snakepit

of poverty and ignorance I had crawled out of

like the skeleton of a hummingbird

out of a continental shipwreck

that had nowhere to dock in Atlantis but down.

One foot each astride two ties of a railway trestle,

nothing but a fifty pound iron lining bar

wedged under the track

as I pulled with all my might

backwards into oblivion

to align with one parallel line with another.

And through the gap between the ties

a hundred and twenty feet below me

a thin silver stream, tinfoil in sunlight,

wandering through the grey skulls

of a washed-out cemetery of insight.

The rocks I would be smashed upon

like an egg head out of the nest

if I were to suddenly fall like Icarus

through the gaps in the supine ladder

I was standing on,

or in the cruel grey eyes of the men

who were sizing me up

showed any kind of cowardice

to remind them how dangerous this was,

or if I used my education

like a parachute I could pull out of my ass

every time I was called upon like a bridge

to bestride the abyss like a man

and keep my shit together

as if courage weren’t a virtue,

but a gland I was missing from birth.

Gnothi seauton Socrates said in his Attic dialect,

as he was about to drink the hemlock.

Know yourself and I did well enough

to know as I often had in similar situations

when bravery might let you down

madness was enough to pull you through,

and for reasons they well understood

made me as crazy as they were,

I slowly won their respect

and one by one they came

to my little frontier school

where I bunked alone

coupled to my long, lonely train of thought

like a mutant gene

to a helical protein molecule

we went to work everyday with lining bars

to straighten out after

underground rivers of clay

had moved under them in the night

like flesh and blood drawn to a new idea.

I taught the Portuguese, who,

after working ten hours a day

would wash up, eat, play soccer till dark,

and then come to me

to learn how to swear back at bigots

like the low men on the totem pole

of British Columbians, Albertans,

New Brunswickers, Newfies and natives

in that hierarchical order of serfdom.

Exiles, outlaws, refugees, lunatics, outcasts,

who’d fill their pillows with modest samples

of the pubic hair of every woman

they’d ever slept with for years

or by four in the afternoon, every afternoon

when the timekeeper called a break

to let it happen, would shake their fist at the sun

and throw shovels around as hard as they could

that would kill you outright

if you ever got in the way of one

like a proofreader mistaking verbs for nouns

in an unknown mother tongue

that only the sun

and thousands of hectares of muskeg understood.

These were the mad ones, the ones

who worked like troglodytes all day,

arms sinewed like railroad tracks,

hearts beating like anvils in the hot sun

and said nothing,

as if nothing need be said

after forty years in the bush.

But come night in the separate cars

they each were assigned

to sleep isolated in the dark,

had raging conversations with themselves

like a treeful of roosting crows

so you couldn’t tell if you were listening

as I did every night in curious apprehension

the anguished echo of one voice

from another being thrown

across the room in rebuttal

by a polyglot ventriloquist

like Luther’s startled inkwell at Lucifer.

And then at four again, every afternoon,

shovels flung anywhere

like the hands of a clock

flying off like the petals of a propeller

as if they hated God for something

and for ten to fifteen minutes

at four in the afternoon every day

for as long as anyone could remember

felt compelled to start a riot

against the sun, the sky gods,

the wind, the wilderness, who knew,

but even they seemed to know

like crows at the highest pitch of their protest,

they couldn’t do anything about.

Nothing in the Norton Anthology of English Literature

nor a few weeks in a training session

at the University of Calgary

to see who would be posted where

had prepared me for this

but I winged it like a stone or an Arctic Cat

out over the open water of a lake

and soon I had several classes

of natives, Portuguese, drunken reprobates,

and a mix of curiosity seekers

more interested in being entertained

than educated on a work train

where nothing much ever happens

except extreme violence on a Friday night

and tragic accidents in the workplace

that could have been avoided.

And what surprised

and humbled me the most

two philosophers, one

from New Brunswick

and the other, Alberta,

who’d been out here so long

in the brutal isolation of the bush,

keeping their lives to themselves,

they made Henry David Thoreau look like a fake.

And for five months it went on like this

until UBC sent me the first film

to be screened on a work train this far north

and it turned out to be opening night

for the much anticipated premiere

of two teenagers learning about syphilis,

that immediately estranged a packed house

who thought I was talking down to them

as if they didn’t already know

everything there was to know about the disease.

Though I tried to plead with them

this wasn’t my choice of movies

but some idiot’s down south,

I knew my Socratic moment had come

to drink the hemlock of my idealism

and after I was knocked out in a bar fight

stepping out of a washroom in Prince George

I woke up back on the train

with a raging migraine that felt like

forty thousand hectares of muskeg

and a time keeper urgently insisting

I go back into Prince George without hesitation,

buy a thirty-eight from a friend of his,

and shoot the motherfucker who did this to me

to teach him some respect for the English language.

And that was it, time to go,

time to blow Windy Point,

time to thumb my way back to Vancouver

as if I were turning the pages of book

where art had failed to imitate life

convincingly enough to put a full stop

like a bullet hole through the temple

of some drunk logger’s head

which is what I had to do in their eyes.

Pick up a gun to prove I was man enough

to go on teaching them

about John Donne’s attitude toward death

and know from first hand experience

that left no doubt in their minds

I knew what I was talking about.

And of course I wasn’t and didn’t.

And for hundreds of miles

of black asphalt after that

I felt like a tractor trailer

hauling thousands of wounded strawberries

bruised by their own innocence

in a freak encounter with experience

to a hard empty free bench for the night

in the Camby Street bus station

that helped immeasurably in the morning

put all this behind me for awhile

like the wake of a ferry in the Georgia Straight

threading its way through the islands

wondering what just went down in despair

like another undermanned lifeboat over the side

of the flat moon society

rowing for all their worth

in a dead sea of shadows

that Sisyphus would have understood

balanced on a turtle’s carapace

like the skull of the earth

when it rises over the horizon

like a magic mushroom

or the podium at the head of a classroom

everyone pushes out of the way

to prove they can relate without barriers

to anyone eye to eye

without knowing whether

they really can or not

and whether the bond

is mutually reciprocal

until it’s way too late

way too late not to, brother.

PATRICK WHITE