Outdoor labour is satisfying. You’re taking care of things. It’s a step back in time to those days when our seasonal needs extended beyond putting winter tires on our cars.
Living in the city doesn’t offer you many chances to engage in that sort of work. I was a hunter-gatherer only on Seafood Day at Costco. My outdoor skills were limited to pooper-scooping on park trails. My sense of self was locked into the hustle and bustle of a cosmopolitan life, and the Indian in me, the tribal, cultural, one-with-the-land spiritualist, was buried under urban grit. The changing of the seasons was marked by new items in the sales bins at Walmart.
Here in the mountains, there’s always something that needs doing to keep life on the rails. That has been a blessing for me. It’s like being reawakened. I’ve tuned into the seasons of my own being and taken steps to ensure a safe passage. I’ve had to learn things I am still clumsy and inefficient at doing. I’m the Neolithic man discovering tools. I’m Oliver Douglas on Green Acres. I’m Canada’s Worst Handyman. I’m Survivor: Kamloops. But adaptation is the hallmark of our species, and bit by bit I’m gaining the skills I need, albeit with some minor injuries, a bashed-up ego and plenty of cussing.
I’m learning how to prepare for change, and that’s the biggest lesson. Caught up in our fast-paced lives, we forget how to stack and store, how to gather and save, how to build, replenish and plan. We lose touch with the rhythm of things. We forget that we live in the stream of Creation and that each of us is an indispensable part of it. We forget that we are all family, all kin. Once you step out where the wind can get at you, it doesn’t take long for the reawakening to happen. That’s the splendid thing. The earth is a healing entity, attuned to us and our needs. Somewhere there’s a stretch of open ground for each of us. Somewhere there’s a patch of green, a place of calm in our busyness. When we find it, we meld with the spirit of the natural world. I know, because it’s happened to me.
The woodshed is filled now, and so is the woodbox that sits by the cabin door. From the moment the chill of winter sets in, we’ll enjoy a good blaze and a warm home. Taking care of things is the very best work of all.
What It’s Worth
DEB’S LIFE AND mine underwent a huge change late last year. It was one of those unexpected things that rocks you back on your heels. We didn’t receive earth-shattering news or lose someone special. But a seven-year business relationship was terminated, and that meant a substantial hit to our income.
Deb and I are both self-employed. At least we were. Deb worked as a business consultant, handling the daily affairs of a psychiatrist’s office in Vancouver. She did it remotely, using a computer program that allowed her to access the office computer from anywhere. She kept track of appointments and cancellations, paid bills and maintained inventory. The arrangement was inventive and successful.
Whenever we travelled to my speaking engagements, performances and workshops, Deb trundled along her computer, office ledgers and journals. She managed that office from Saskatoon, Christian Island, Regina, Winnipeg and, one memorable time, from the front seat of a rental car on a stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway. She was a dedicated, loyal worker. The doc’s schedule was busy, and his practice was thriving. She spent long hours keeping his records straight, advising his patients over the phone and making sure everything stayed on an even keel.
And then, after seven years of doing the job, Deb was terminated by fax. The doc didn’t call to thank her personally for her years of work. The message she got was sterile and bluntly worded. That was hard.
I earn my living as a writer. My books come out regularly, although there’s generally at least a two-year gap between titles, and royalties on sales are paid twice a year. I freelance in radio and TV and write for newspapers and the occasional magazine and journal. But my money arrives in dribs and drabs, so we lost a lot when Deb lost that contract.
Luckily, my wife is a financial genius. Everything we do is budgeted for, and a significant part of every dollar that comes into our house is devoted to savings. Deb has made shrewd investments over time. Her ledgers are in awesome shape, too, so when her job ended, she knew precisely where we stood.
Our lifestyle is simple. We live rurally, with no need for trendy clothes, four lattes a day or toss-away shiny things we see in passing. We get our books from the library. We download movies. We eat simply but well, and last year, in a crush of conscience over my age and my waistline, I cut out soda pop. We chop our own wood and use the woodstove to heat the house in winter. We have workout equipment in the studio, and the land is a great place to stay fit with regular walks. I still buy CDs, because I’m a music freak, and we each pander a bit to our particular joys, but we’ve always kept our acquisitions to a reasonable cost. So even before the loss of income we were living a frugal, sensible life.
The tenants in our rooming house have also taught us a great deal about managing on very little. That’s really helped us to keep things in perspective. The people who live there have forged a community out of their collective poverty. They share cigarettes, food and supplies. They check on each other if they haven’t seen someone for a few days. It’s an amazing thing to watch, and it offers a view of marginalized people most of us never get.
In 2008, Statistics Canada defined the poverty line (they like to use the term “Low Income Cut-offs”) for a single person living in a major city as $21, 666 before taxes. Because they exist on social service payments, all fourteen of our tenants live on an income almost $15, 000 below that determinant. Take Lionel, for example. He suffers from a mental illness and is chronically unemployable. He’s so incapacitated he hasn’t managed to get a diagnosis. Disability status would qualify him for a higher payment, but Lionel wouldn’t allow anyone to label him as disabled anyway. So he exists on the monthly welfare payments he receives from the B.C. government, currently $610 a month. After paying rent, Lionel lives on $205 a month. If you do the math, that means he lives on $2, 460 a year. Even if he spends only $150 a month on groceries, less than what many of us spend in a week, he goes hungry a lot of the time.
Last year, we bought slow cookers for all of our tenants so they could fashion simple meals that would last a few days. Everybody has their own refrigerator, too. But there are some months when the welfare payments are five weeks apart, and when you walk into the house near the end of that long struggle, hunger hangs in the air. I never realized before that you could feel someone else’s starvation. Deb and I bought cases of food from Costco during one long month and left them in the common room. The food was gone in minutes.
Most of our tenants walk to the Salvation Army once a week for bread and pastries. There’s a St. Vincent de Paul kitchen not far away where they can get a hot breakfast, and a mission that serves suppers. There are people who say you can’t starve in Canada, but I’d challenge any of them to try and live like our tenants do for one month. Starvation doesn’t just mean not having food—starvation of the spirit is long, debilitating and lonely. Few people ever think about that.
But the people in our building survive with grace. They understand their limitations, and they live within them. They’ve learned to accept, with a grim sort of satisfaction, that as long as they have walls around them and a roof over top, they’ll be okay. They know they will likely never move up from where they are, but they appreciate small mercies and unexpected boons.
So, sure, Deb and I lost a lucrative contract. Our monthly cash flow has decreased. Our ability to be frivolous has been curtailed. But we feel gratitude for what we have. We’re thankful for our ability to be productive and creative. We’re overjoyed that our home is exactly the place we want, and we can’t abide being away from it for long. The true spirit of Canada doesn’t emanate from the glass and steel edifices of Bay Street, the tumult of the TSX or grand neighbourhoods full of huge houses. It doesn’t come from big business, corporate enterprise or the chest-thumping grandiosity of big oil. No, the spirit of Canada resides in those who struggle every day to be here. It rests
in the hearts of those for whom the poverty line is too high to even reach for, those who trundle home the day-old bread, comb the alleyways for bottles or limit the laundry to once a month to make their three changes of clothes last longer. That’s where the spirit of Canada really shines—in the will of the people who survive despite the deck being stacked so dauntingly against them.
So Deb and I carry on. We love each other, and there isn’t anything that can knock us off that foundation. Low on cash, rich in spirit. Our tenants have taught us that.
The Real Experts
IN THE WINTER of 1974, I lived for a month in a nativity scene. It was outside a church, set back from the sidewalk about nine metres. There was straw in there for extra bedding; the floodlights gave off warmth, and two plywood walls helped cut the wind. For me, it was salvation. I was broke and hungry, and everything I owned I carted about on my back. I was trying to avoid shelters, since it was easier to get robbed or beaten there than on the street. No one ever bothered me in the nativity scene. From the street, I must have looked like a lump of straw. I crept out every morning long before anyone else was around.
I felt a measure of comfort there surrounded by the wise men, the baby Jesus, his parents, the animals and the huge glittering star at the apex of the roof. Even though the biblical story meant little to me, lying in the midst of such a great promise to the world allowed me to believe that things would change. I prayed for that to happen, actually. Shivering in the cold, sleeping fitfully, I vowed to do whatever it took to get out of those circumstances.
I hit the streets every day, scanned the classifieds, joined a job bank, but it still took forever to find a job. It was tough to do so with no education and no appreciable skills. Finally, I landed a minimum wage job in a hide-tanning factory. I had to clean the hides when they arrived, which meant scraping flesh and removing hair and stretching the hides out to dry. It was stinky, foul, nasty work. Minimum wage in Ontario then was $2 an hour. It took me twelve weeks to save enough for rent and a damage deposit.
The only room I could afford was one of twelve in a three-storey rooming house. It was about the size of a jail cell, with a small window looking out over an alley. The floor buckled in the middle, and the only furnishings were a wooden chair, a bed, a lamp and a busted-up armchair. There was a one-burner hot plate and a small sink stained red with rust. The radiators clanked and groaned all night long. In the dark I would often hear something skittering across the floor. Still, it was a home, and I was grateful.
I spent many nights tossing and turning in that room, listening to drunken shouts and radios blaring tinny country music. I can still smell the urine, spilled wine and old cigarette smoke that permeated the halls. I lived on tuna, Kraft Dinner and day-old bread and pastries from the Salvation Army. I washed my few clothes in that rusty sink and spread them on the radiators to dry. Life was hard, but I had a roof over my head, and I had hope.
I thought about all of this recently, when I was asked to give the keynote address at a national conference on homelessness in Calgary. Of the more than six hundred delegates, the majority were academics: researchers, report writers, study instigators and journal editors. The only homeless people there were the street artists selling their work in the lobby. I was the only presenter who had ever lived on the street, which I found odd and unsettling. Instead of delegates hearing the genuine voices of the homeless, they attended workshops and seminars led by people who earned their livings courtesy of other people’s misfortune.
I’m guessing none of those so-called experts knew how concrete smells when you’re lying on it, or how it feels against your spine. Probably not one of them had ever experienced the sting of a morning frost on their faces or the incredible stiffness that seizes your joints when a winter wind blows over you all night long. Dozens of them were there all-expenses paid, with cash per diems in their pockets.
Every person deserves somewhere safe and comfortable to live. It struck me that homeless people and Native people have a lot in common—we’ve both had industries built up around us. Government departments, social agencies, social workers, police divisions, university departments, hospitals, media and the odd film crew all depend on us. If Native people or homeless people were to disappear, thousands of people would be out of work. But participants deemed the conference a success, and plans were begun for another.
Having been around Native issues for thirty years now, I’ve seen how often we’ve been researched, studied and Royal Commissioned. The end result of all that paperwork has been more paperwork. Only fairly recently, when Native people have begun speaking for ourselves have we gained any ground. It’s a similar situation with the homeless. Folks are so busy concentrating on the issue that they forget about the people. Homeless people should have a voice in any developments that affect them. It’s not enough to study, analyze, survey or count them. Homeless people need to tell their stories, and we need to listen to them. It isn’t sufficient to treat the symptoms. We have to treat the disease, and we can only do that if we get to the bottom of what causes it.
During the month I slept in that nativity scene, I didn’t hanker for a professorial voice to speak for me. I would have liked someone to hear me. I wanted someone to know how it felt to have only a burrow in the straw to call home. I needed someone to know what a desperate situation that was, how scary sometimes. To understand how hunger at 3:00 a.m. is different from hunger at noon. How it feels to wear the same clothes for weeks or to have to wear everything you own on your body at all times so no one will steal it from you. I wanted someone to know all that because I knew from my associations at the hostels, missions and soup kitchens that I wasn’t the only one who suffered that way. The spiritual comfort of that nativity scene was memorable because it was so rare, so elusive, so fleeting.
Part of our strategy should be employing homeless people to help end homelessness. They’re the real experts after all. They’re the ones who know how it feels, and that experience is worth more than all the conjecture, supposition and research dollars in the world.
New Shoes
THERE ARE NIGHTS I can’t sleep, even up here where only the yipping of coyotes disturbs the quiet. When I get up and gaze out the window, I can see the silver sheen of lake beneath the moon. The cabin creaks. The dog pads across the living room to rub her cold nose along my shin. I can see the shadowy darts and dips of bats as they hunt above the yard. A furtive house cat prowls the line where mountain grass nudges the cultivated space of lawn. On nights like this I read or write or sit in the rocking chair by the window to lull myself into sleepiness again. I’d rather be sleepless here than anywhere else in the world.
I haven’t always had a haven like this. Once, when I was homeless and in the depths of alcoholism, I woke up without my shoes. They were lined winter shoes, and I’d bought them with the last of the money I had. I’d set them at the foot of my blankets when I lay down to sleep, and in the morning they were gone. It was November in Ontario. Sleet was falling, and the streets were wet and cold. I made my way to a St. Vincent de Paul store. It wasn’t open that early, but when the man inside saw me standing in the doorway, shivering in my sock feet, he let me in right away. The warm air made me shiver even harder. The man made me a cup of coffee and offered me a blanket to wrap myself in. He fed me a sandwich and a bowl of soup, then led me down the aisles and made sure I found a pair of shoes that fit.
The man let me sit in the store until I had recovered my body warmth. We talked about hockey and some jobs he’d heard about that I could apply for. He was friendly, genuinely interested in me, and when I was ready to go he gave me five dollars and invited me to come back again for coffee and a chat. I left that store with a new warm jacket, dry clothes and a good sturdy pair of shoes. But I also left with a thankful heart and a feeling that I wanted to repay his kindness someday.
Eventually my life changed. I cobbled together some part-time work, and that led to a full-time gig in a warehouse. It wasn’t long before I had a
room and had pulled together a small pile of possessions. But I held on to those shoes. I wore them until the soles were thin and the heels canted severely to one side. Even when I could afford a better pair, I kept the old shoes on a mat by the door of my apartment, through several moves. Now and then I’d buff them up and wear them on a day I had errands to run. They were a symbol for me of how the world could be.
Many of the tenants in the rooming house Debra and I run are former street people. It’s a struggle communicating with them sometimes. Most of the people who are there are so direly poor and neglected that they’ve forgotten what they deserve from life. Many have lost the ways of graciousness and gratitude. Their speech is stilted and often uttered in whispers. But hardship can happen to anyone. In these turbulent economic times, a lot of us are just a few bad decisions—or a few pieces of back luck—away from being there, too. Remembering that brings us closer as a human family.
Helping someone else can be as simple as opening a door. It can be as easy as listening in a genuine way. And that’s the way we’ll change the world—one person, one situation, one act of kindness at a time.
Birdman
THE BIRDS ARE on the move. These days, they are the first sound we hear upon awakening. By the lake they’re flocked around the bushes and the saplings. There are dozens of species, and if you cast a keen eye you can see them flit and dart. They’re migrants, called by an ancient urge to fly north again after the winter. Red-winged blackbirds. Grosbeaks. Flickers. Water birds.
One Story, One Song Page 4