But I’ll use it anyway
I’ll be a child of the wind
Till the end of my days
Little round planet
In a big universe
Sometimes it looks blessed
Sometimes it looks cursed
Depends on what you look at obviously
But even more it depends on the way that you see
Hear the wind moan
In the bright diamond sky
These mountains are waiting
Brown-green and dry
I’m too old for the term
But I’ll use it anyway
I’ll be a child of the wind
Till the end of my days
“CHILD OF THE WIND,” 1989
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/67.
17
Early in 1990, with Jenny approaching the age of fourteen, I got a phone call from Kitty. She was worried. The two of them were in a pattern of dispute that, a few times, Jenn had punctuated by running away from home—not for long periods, just a day or two at a time, but long enough to allow the imagination to go where you’d rather it didn’t. Jenny would vanish into the downtown street scene, sleeping in squats, hanging out with an assortment of homeless young people. Some of them, like her, were kids with homes whose teen frustration and sense of adventure drove them to try out life on the street. Others were escapees from disastrous, abusive backgrounds that left them little choice but to be where they were. It was a dangerous, violent milieu.
In a weird way, I was proud of Jenny. That did not diminish the worry, or make Kitty’s life any easier, but I admired her willingness to take risks, and I prayed that she would know when to back off. Her panhandler friends were tough, or aspired to be. Some played in punk bands; others were self-professed Nazi skinheads whom Jenny was convinced she could convert from their racist delusions. She liked hanging out with this crowd. Collectively, they were nearly as covered with spikes as the Arizona desert. Sometimes I’d run into her on Queen Street, panhandling in front of the Much Music building. I think I was supposed to be embarrassed by that, but I enjoyed the cheekiness of it. The running away, though, was disturbing.
The disagreements, as far as I know, were mostly the typical teen apron string–cutting kind, albeit atypically expressed. The intensity of emotion between Jenny and her mother was wonderful when they were on the same side. Otherwise, volatility reigned. The stories that Jenny brought home were full of anarchic violence, actual or pending: kids getting their heads kicked in when squabbling over PCP or a lover, creeps harassing panhandling girls. One time she said, “Hey, Dad, you interested in buying grenades? There’s a biker in Kensington Market selling them for fifty bucks each.” The more we learned about some of her friends, the more frightening it was when she would disappear.
Kitty’s call sent me searching for my daughter through the night streets of Toronto as if I were Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, garish Chinatown neon reflections slithering over the windshield of the battleship grey Suburban I was driving at the time. I had no idea what I would be up against if I found her in a tight spot. I prepared for any eventuality, but on the two or three occasions this happened, I never found her. I prayed she would turn up alive and well, and she always did.
In the midst of this teenage chaos, I had parted ways with Jennifer Morton. Our respective outlooks and intentions were markedly different. She wanted us to buy a house together, start a family. She had a fully developed vision, notwithstanding the short duration of the time we’d been together, of a future in which I couldn’t recognize myself. I didn’t relate to babies. I had survived the breakup of two long-term relationships. I dated little as a youth. I was looking for more casual companionship. Between Judy and Jennifer, I had kept company with a few different women for short periods. They were smart and attractive, fun in the moment. I was not thinking of settling down with anyone but was exploring, learning. A few things I learned: There is no such thing as casual sex. One partner is likely to want something more or different than the other, or to fall in love when the other doesn’t. There are always tears. With Jennifer, I learned what it felt like to be the one who pulled the plug. That experience gave me empathy with my two former long-term partners.
One day in the course of a riding lesson, my instructor at the time, Sue Franklin, asked me what was wrong. She could see my sadness, and I told her what had happened with Jennifer. We went to dinner and found common interests beyond horses, and in common a desire to replace lost partners. Mutual loneliness and mutual opportunism pushed us together. On my part, it was clearly time to reestablish contact with the land. Before the date with Sue, I’d begun looking for a house to rent in the country. I was not interested in taking on the burdens of a landowner. I wanted privacy and breathing space. I wanted to be surrounded by sounds other than those of the cityscape. Sue, as it turned out, wanted to establish a horse farm. That wasn’t the direction I had seen myself going in, but it seemed a close enough fit with my aspirations that soon we became unlikely partners, both in intimacy and in attempting to raise and train show horses.
Sue was a top-level competitor in the jumper ring, but she didn’t have the horse to match her skills. Her idea was to find a place with a barn, buy young horses, and train them. Once she had a shining example of equestrian prowess, she would sell it for a tidy profit, basically financing her expensive horse habit.
We found a forty-eight-acre farm in Halton Hills, north of Milton, Ontario, an hour west of Toronto. The frame house was old, painted white, and separated from a busy two-lane highway by a wide lawn on which stood a single weeping willow tree. Twenty yards behind the lawn, the land sloped sharply to form a large open field with a hedgerow of wild vegetation and a small island of brush surrounding a tall pine in the centre. That made up most of the acreage. A skyline of Godzilla-scale hydroelectric towers marched across the property immediately to the south.
A gravel laneway led from the road, past the house, and down the hill to a grey steel building that housed stalls for a dozen horses. We leased the property from a pair of brothers from what was then still Yugoslavia, who had bought the land for investment to sell it down the line and make serious money. (Which I guess they did. The place is now a housing development.) They were the sort of hands-off landlords that I’ve always preferred.
We started off with five animals of our own. The remaining stalls we filled with boarders (horses, that is). Before long we had a boarder of a different sort. By summer, Jenny had become anxious to free herself from the street-kid scene. She had witnessed too many beatings and saw her number coming up anytime. She needed out of the city. The rural setting would offer a healthy distance from the enticements of downtown. She moved in not long after we did.
This created a certain pressure. Sue did not see herself as a mother. On her scale of enthusiasm, housing a troubled teenager—especially one who would compete for my attention—ranked somewhere between a neighbour’s vacation slide show and a root canal. She understood the urgency of the situation, though, and my responsibility as a father. She gave it her best shot. Up to a point she could communicate well with Jenny, who enjoyed the horses and showed a modest enthusiasm for the sport.
Sue was a tense and highly competitive person. Toughness and fragility commingled in the mindscape of a nearly perfect misanthrope. She was a top-notch trainer and rider who, with the right horse, could have competed in show jumping at the World Cup level. Of course, we never had the half-million dollars or the extreme good luck to get a horse that could win at such a level. Our horses were far less costly, but a not-so-expensive horse—say, a one-year-old with the bloodlines to make it a good prospect—still might run ten grand. We went through many of these lesser steeds, but none had talent enough to compete at high levels. One that might have been a winner slipped and broke its ankle while training at another facility.
We put in a sand ring across the laneway from the house, which ate up some money, but far less th
an would have gone into building an indoor arena. The trade-off was that we couldn’t use it during the winter. Sue gave riding lessons on the side. We took in boarders (horses, that is), which slightly mitigated the cost of feed, veterinary services, blacksmithing, show entry fees, and transportation. The horses that sold barely fetched a price equal to the cost of getting them ready. The tap was open, and the money flowed freely into the muck behind the barn. As the months, and years, wore on, and the cash drained unrestrained into our equine affliction, this particular tension became grave. Sue had seen me as the rock star with Scrooge McDuck’s money bath to draw from. I was doing all right, but I couldn’t sustain the outlay needed to maintain a horse habit at the level she would have liked.
Like most relationships, ours began in hope. Though I was closer to Toronto than I had wanted to be, I was getting at least a semblance of the proximity to nature I had sought. Sue was getting an opportunity to build her horse business. It seemed we were pushing in the same direction. There were some strong threads of compatibility, as well as a rush of newness in the horse shows and shooting competitions, my sabbatical, and our joint assumption that all this added up to love. Predictably (or at least it should have been), these thin threads became frayed as the years passed. Until then, though, it was easy to miss the deeper differences that actually defined our relationship. Early on I found our life together enjoyable, and there were times when I even felt—to use a word that rarely shows up in my lexicon—happy.
Evening sun slants across the road
Painting everything with gold
I’m headed for home, got a woman there
I can barely wait to hold
Got wind in my hair, got the heat inside
Heart jumping up and down
An empty head and a messed-up bed
I’ll be floating just above the ground
Great big love
Sweeping across the sky
Seen a lot of things in the world outside
Some bad but some good stuff too
Felt the touch of love in the works of God
And now and then in what people do
Never had a lot of faith in human beings
But sometimes we manage to shine
Like a light on a hill beaming out to space
From somewhere hard to find
Great big love
Sweeping across the sky
I ride and I shoot and I play guitar
And I like my life just fine
If you try to take one of these things from me
Then you’re no friend of mine
Got a woman I love and she loves me
And we live on a piece of land
I never know quite how to measure these things
But I guess I’m a happy man
“GREAT BIG LOVE,” 1990
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/68.
Ironically, our compatibility did not extend to music. I’d walk into the house and Sue would have Journey or Bon Jovi blaring from the stereo. Or “Stairway to Heaven,” played continually to meet her obsessive need for immersive stimuli. She’d spin the same song over and over, ten or a dozen times, sometimes for days, until she got from it whatever was needed. On the other side of things, after waking at five in the morning to work for several hours with the horses, Sue would come in and find me in the living room on the hand-me-down exercise bike my dad had given me, drowning out its roar with Eric Dolphy or Nine Inch Nails. The mutual accommodation carried within it a mutual attrition.
There was a genuine curiosity on my part about the world of horses, and on Sue’s part to live the dream of owning a horse farm and a champion steed. We held a genuine affection for each other, but we never could reach that deeper love that might have bound us.
Now and again, perhaps subliminally aware of that missing element, Sue would wonder out loud when I was going to produce the impassioned, romantic piece that songwriters necessarily pen for their sweethearts. I don’t write on command. Not well. Nor was I, the emotionally cloistered chameleon, feeling the charge necessary to come up with such a song. Being the gifted trainer she was, though, Sue knew how to cajole. And I wanted to please her. I gave it a lot of thought, and eventually wrote “One of the Best Ones.” It’s a song about God’s many gifts, a loving relationship being one of the best ones. I was pretty satisfied with the way it turned out.
The song was not well received. Sue said, “One of the best ones? What kind of shit is that, ‘one of the best ones’?” She wasn’t thinking about God; in her mind, I was depicting her as some sort of favourite in my stable of women. Of course, there was no stable. Eventually she came to understand the universality of the lyrics, just as she understood that the song did not express what she hoped to hear. Every now and then, she’d bring it up as a dig: “Oh yeah, that must be one of the best ones.”
Guess I’d get along without you
If I had no choice
It’s taken me this long to find you
Done a lot of getting ready for this
Some things we learn so slow
But look at you, you’ve got plenty behind you
There’s lots of ways to hit the ground
Not many answers to be found
We’re faced with mysteries profound
And this is one of the best ones
There are eight million mysteries
In the naked body
Can’t even sight on some distant horizon
Like the nine billion names of God
Don’t bring you any closer
To anyone you can simply set eyes on
But in the same way it’s as real
Don’t always recognize what I feel
But of the dancing scenes that life reveals
This is one of the best ones
Say what you will
There’s no snake oil or pill
Can make love less painful or fine
There’s no theatre
Even of the absurd
Can express what goes on in this meeting of hearts and minds
Guess I’d get along without you
If I had no choice
But please never make it so I have to
Paid a lot of dues to get here
And after all this life
I’m a loser if I don’t live with you
There’s lots of ways to hit the ground
Not many answers to be found
We’re faced with mysteries profound
And this is one of the best ones
“ONE OF THE BEST ONES,” 1990
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/69.
I worked hard at the farm and sweated out some stress. Learning to relate to the giant beasts, riding, jumping, competing, mucking out stalls and saddle-soaping leather, blasting holes in targets at the shooting range—it was a pretty good life, and the taut-line of tensions I’d accrued through the eighties began to slacken. Once Jenny arrived, the interpersonal angst escalated—not due to anything Jenny did or didn’t do, though I found I had a very limited tolerance for adolescent sass. The three of us simply weren’t a good fit, especially since Sue and I weren’t such a good fit in the first place.
Jenny went to school in nearby Milton. She was the only punk at the school and quickly acquired as a boyfriend the only skinhead in town. The boy had come by his bigotry honestly, directly from his parents. In other respects, he was a decent kid. Jenny actually succeeded in weaning him away from his racist views, and he became as reasonable a person as a teenage male is likely to be. They lasted a year. By then, Jenny had had enough of Sue and me and the farm. She moved back to Toronto and in due course got her own apartment, sharing it with a twentysomething man who was the subject of a Canada-wide arrest warrant. He had walked away from his halfway house with six months left to serve of a five-year sentence for armed robbery. Though not well endowed with judgment, he wasn’t a bad guy. He was very protective of Jenny, except when crazed on PC
P. He was imposingly large and muscular, so I didn’t worry about my daughter’s physical safety when they were hanging around the street. Nobody would mess with him.
One day I suggested to Jenny that she might like practical shooting. We went to the gun club. I put up some targets, gave her the safety demonstration, and set her up with a Yaqui Slide holster and my Colt 1911 .45. She gave me a look that said, “Well, what do I do with this?” She had just seen Reservoir Dogs, so I said, “Just do what you’ve seen them do in the Quentin Tarantino movies.” She did. Jenny was surprisingly fast and accurate with the pistol and my short-barreled Remington 870 shotgun. She was a natural shooter who could have been competitive had she pursued it. She enjoyed herself, but for some reason we never again went out shooting.
Not long after returning to Toronto, Jenny landed provincial funding and enrolled in an alternative school. She told me she was going to graduate. I made encouraging noises, but I didn’t let myself count on it, given what I’d seen. Not only did she dedicate herself to a radically independent program of study—meeting with a teacher once a week in a café—but she applied to and was accepted at Concordia University in Montreal to study anthropology. I remained skeptical—needlessly, as it turned out, because after she graduated from Concordia, Jenny earned a master’s degree, at the same time building a life for herself in Montreal with a new man and having a baby. In 2013 she completed a Ph.D. program, little more than a year after giving birth to her third child. Today she’s a woman of great energy with a deep capacity for compassion and love. She is still edgy, and wise. I’m very proud of her.
That first year at the horse farm was also my first, and only, extended break from the music scene since I had started performing in the sixties. Before leaving for the Arizona dude ranch, I had announced to Bernie, and everybody else who might be affected by it, that I was going on sabbatical beginning in the New Year. As 1990 rolled along, I declined dozens of performing opportunities as well as invitations from various NGOs to travel, including a trip to survey the destruction of the Borneo rain forest and another to Russia, just after the Soviet Union crumbled, to meet Russian artists and travel along the Volga River on some sort of music barge. I said no to all this, no matter how tempting, because I needed my year off. It worked. Beginning with “Child of the Wind,” the creative current swelled to its original strength. I wrote a lot of songs that year.
Rumours of Glory Page 34