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
