We walked in about twenty-five kilometres. The land seemed to close off behind us, and I found the deep quiet unsettling. Walt was a strong walker, and I struggled to keep up. He rolled over the terrain with a bow-legged gait, while I kept my eyes glued to the rough ground. It was awesome country, though, and Walt stopped often to let me drink it in.
We settled on the shore of a small lake to make camp. Walt asked me to get a fire started, but once I’d gathered kindling he told me he wanted me to light the fire without matches. I laughed out loud.
“Everything you need is here,” he said. “You just have to trust the land.”
He led us on a search, and we came back to camp with a stick of dry birch, a palm-sized chunk of the same wood and a flattish length of maple. We scoured the shore line for cattails, and Walt showed me how to peel off their dried fibres. We gathered thin strips of cedar bark and enough birchbark to create a mat. Then he showed me how to fashion a bow from an arm-length sapling and a piece of twine and to carve a drill from the dry birch stick. The drill was bluntly pointed at one end when I was finished.
Carefully, Walt demonstrated the technique. He showed me how to string the bow and to place the birch wood drill into the palm-sized chunk. Then he taught me how to wrap the bow string around the drill stick. It was taut enough to hold it firm, but loose enough to roll along the drill and spin it when the bow was drawn back and forth. He set the point of the drill into the flat length of maple and began to saw the bow and turn the point of the drill until the friction had burnt a hole into the wood. Then, taking a knife, he cut a notch into the maple almost to the newly burned-in hole. He set the whole apparatus on the birchbark mat and went to serious work with the bow. He put his shoulder into the sawing; the drill spun hard, and it wasn’t long before a fine powder gathered in the notch of maple. Soon there was a mound of it, and he tapped it together with the blade of the knife, blew on it until it glowed and set it in the nest of bark and cattail fibres. He had a flame in no time.
Walt blew out that flame and turned things over to me. I struggled to replicate what I’d watched him do. The drill was wet with my perspiration. Walt was patient. It took me half an hour, but I managed to light that kindling.
Later, as we sat around a blazing fire, Walt told me stories of bush life, how my people had survived in that landscape and built a strong and resilient culture. He told me stories about learning things from his grandfather when he was young. The training he’d gone through had lasted years.
“Everything you need is here,” he said again. “You just have to trust the land.”
Walt and I went out on the land together a few times after that. He passed away when I was thirty. Though it’s been years since I used a bow and drill, I’ve never forgotten the time I spent with him or the central message of his teaching. It’s not the huge things that return us to who we are, it’s the magic of the small. Sitting out alone on the land, I remember.
A Crow Story
THERE ARE CROWS everywhere around our mountain home. I like to hear them cackling and cawing when I’m walking through the bush, and they can get quite resentful if the dog’s bounding through the trees disturbs them in their foraging. Crows are good companions on a hike. Their sound is ancient, and they lend a mystic feel to your time out on the land. They’ve been here a long time, and the example they offer us of a steward relationship to the earth is tremendous.
Crows are a planetary mainstay. I depend on their voices when I’m in the back country. Even when new snow densely coats the trees, and seeing anything is difficult, the crows can be heard nattering back and forth. I’ve always liked them.
In the Long Ago Time, when Creator sent Human Beings to inhabit the earth, she gave gifts to all the flyers of the world. The Eagle was chosen as the people’s messenger, to carry their prayers and thanks to Creator. The Loon was made the teacher of love and good relationships, the Owl the possessor of patience and observation. The Chickadees exemplified persistence and harmony. But Crow felt he’d been given nothing.
He didn’t have colourful feathers. He didn’t have a beautiful song. He wasn’t known for his strength or vision. None of the Animal People looked to him for special help or insight. Crow wondered what his role was in the circle of being. Every other creature seemed to have one. So he began to fly about looking for purpose. He flew far and wide, searching the world for one teaching that might become his own to carry.
Crow visited with Mukwa, the Bear, and asked for some of Mukwa’s teachings. But Crow was impatient, and when none of Mukwa’s gifts seemed to fit, he flew off again. For a time, he lived with Moozo, the Moose, and with Pizheu, the Lynx. He flew into the depths of the great northern woods to sit with Wolverine. One by one, he visited Wolf, Coyote, Beaver, Loon, Fish, Turtle and even the great Eagle himself.
Crow learned a lot on his travels, but he couldn’t find anything that felt like his very own. The humility and devotion of his fellow creatures made him hungrier than ever for some special teaching he could offer. Then, one day, as he flew by a hollow tree, he noticed Squirrel looking sadly out from a hole in the trunk.
Crow landed and gently coaxed Squirrel to talk. Lightning had struck the tree that had held her nest, and she had lost her babies, she told him. Crow nodded with understanding. Then he took Squirrel to see the Bear and the Turtle to receive their medicine.
After that, as he flew about, Crow encountered other creatures in need. Each time, he stopped, listened to their stories and then took them to the animal whose medicine was right for them. He became a respected listener and guide.
Crow was never graced with a gorgeous coat of feathers for his troubles. He was never endowed with a beautiful song. His grating call perturbed the Human Beings, but the Animal People always felt more secure when they heard Crow croaking in the forest. Crow’s gift, and his purpose, became the ability to communicate and to carry teachings and other medicines to help people.
When I heard the story of Crow, I thought it was simply a wonderful folk tale. I was young and in a hurry then, dazzled by bright and shiny things. Reflection was just what I saw in the mirror every morning. But the power of teachings is their ability to simmer beneath the surface. Now that I’ve reached middle age, I understand that Crow’s story is about working with others in the spirit of friendship and service. When we do that, we find our own sense of purpose. You only have to hear a crow cawing to be reminded of that.
Honouring the Story
ISOTROPIC IS A thousand-dollar word that refers to something being identical in every direction. Astronomers invented the term. In the starkness of space, there is no up or down, east or west. Everything is stars, darkness and the whirl of cosmic activity. It’s a directionless void, savage in its eternal beauty. Here on the frozen platter of the lake, with the mountains hulked up around me, I get a sense of that. Spring’s coming, and the dog and I have ventured out while the ice still holds, to see it all from the middle. White. Unbroken. The sky above us is grey, tufted with cloud. Turning, with my arms spread out and my head thrown back, the world is the same in all directions. It’s a heady and unsettling feeling.
A life can be isotropic, too. We’ve discovered that, Deb and I, in the years since she bought the rooming house. There’s room for fourteen people to live there, and we’ve seen many folks come and go, most of them unable to adapt to a routine, predictable life. A parade of the invisible.
Before Deb invested in the place, the rooming house had been allowed to decay. The structure was sound enough, but the building had atrophied from a decided lack of care. There was a glumness to it, a sad ambience that spoke of lives left to decompose. The yard was full of broken bicycles, discarded shopping carts, old clothing and glass from broken windows.
Deb was shocked when she saw the inside of the building for the first time. People were living in Third World conditions. Some had nothing to cook on; their stoves had fallen into disrepair, along with their small refrigerators. The place hadn’t been painted in dec
ades, and the thick yellow layer of nicotine cast everything in a hazy kind of light. The floors were filthy, and the bare concrete floor of the central hallway was thick with mould and mud. Some of the tenants were drug addicts. Without any custodial management, they’d grown used to treating their homes as disrespectfully as they did their bodies. Garbage was strewn everywhere, and the front and back doors of the house were left open every night. The place had become a flophouse. People regularly crawled in and out of the first-floor windows, and the address was a regular stop for ambulances and the police.
Some tenants were wrestling with mental health issues. In their obfuscated world, these living conditions were par for the course. They’d grown so used to not having a voice that the idea of complaining, pressing for even the most basic things, was foreign to them. Their battle was for daily survival. They’d been cast adrift by the agencies and institutions that might have helped them. If they were on medication, there was no one around to ensure they actually took it.
Even though I had spent parts of my life on the street, in dire poverty and under the lash of horrific substance abuse, this situation appalled me. I worried that the project was too daunting, too big, might be too draining. But Debra is an amazingly resolute and compassionate person. She set to work to change things: to provide essential services, to clean the place up, to renovate it and to offer her tenants a human presence in the wasteland of their existence.
When she first started showing up there, everybody kept their doors shut like sad, hermetic shutaways. Since it was December when Debra bought the place, she offered every-body a big Christmas dinner that first month. She stuck invitations under everyone’s door and prepared Santa bags for each person. The tenants who did show up for the meal ate quickly, silently for the most part, then retreated back to the safety of their rooms. None of them was comfortable being in company, having their back to an open room, having someone care about them. But gradually, as rooms were cleared of the violent and the actively addicted, as cleanliness and order became the rule, people’s doors opened.
We worked hard at cleaning the place up. We washed walls and painted, scrubbed floors and hung curtains, fixed stoves and plumbing, carpeted hallways and secured the outside doors. Deb screened prospective tenants carefully, looking for people who wanted a way out of their harsh lives. She enforced strict rules of behaviour and decorum and brooked no breaches. Word soon got around that the rooming house was now a lousy place to drink or fix.
But the most important thing she brought to her house was humanity.
No one had spoken to these people in a meaningful way for a long time. They’d grown used to remaining mute, shrugging their shoulders in silent surrender. Debra took the time to sit with them in their rooms and listen to what they had to say, no matter how garbled or outright loony it may have been. She really looked at them. She saw those people, and they responded as best they could. There was no miraculous transformation. People continued to get drunk, to fight with each other, to isolate themselves. Some had to be evicted. But over time the house settled. The first year, eighty people came and went in those fourteen rooms. We saw hope flare briefly in some and then die just as quickly, when their desire for change was overpowered by hurt and drugs and booze. But a handful reached out for what we offered. They began to embrace rules and order, to care about a place they could call home, many for the first time. They started to care about themselves.
We’ve learned a lot from this experience. Life can pulverize your spirit. Personal pain, private horrors and agonies manifest themselves in the problems we shake our heads at when we see them from the safety of our cars. The concrete of the street cements in the soul, and it takes time and mercy to reverse the process.
Hopelessness is isotropic: the view in every direction is the same. That’s the nut of it. It’s hard to change when everything you see looks identical. It’s hard to expect more from the world when expectation is the most painful feeling of all. It’s hard to learn to trust when you’ve had to shoulder the weight alone for years and years. But healing happens. We’ve seen it. People stuck on the street are more than statistics or shaded areas of a pie chart. Their spirits ache for the same things ours do, in the comfort and security of our sometimes splendid homes. If we really listened to them, we’d learn that.
My people say that each of us is a story, part of the great, grand tale of humanity. In the end, the story of our time here is all we have. When you offer a tale in the Ojibway manner, you do so for the story’s sake. If we could honour each voice in that way and allow it to resonate, what a wonderful clamour that would be.
Beyond the Page
I DEPENDED ON research to help me understand the world when I was growing up. During my late teens and early twenties, I practically lived in libraries. Whenever the grit of my days got to be too much, I found peace in the stacks, where there was material to help quench my raging thirst for knowledge.
I was ashamed of many aspects of my life in those days. I was a high school dropout, I had few practical skills and I knew next to nothing about who I was as a cultural or tribal person. Libraries offered me both escape from my feelings of inadequacy and entry into realms I never knew existed. I learned to interpret the world through what I read. Back then, it was achingly difficult for me to talk to other people, and books were my haven.
I’m thankful for all those libraries. The books I devoured made me employable. They let me build the enormous frame of reference that enabled me to become a writer. They helped me to discover the larger world that life and circumstance had deprived me of.
But book learning can take you only so far. Eventually, you need to step beyond the pages. That was illuminated for me again after Deb and I started running the rooming house. Even though I’ve been on the streets myself and have firsthand knowledge of what a struggle it can be just to survive, I quickly found out I was no expert. I’ve read sociological tomes, textbooks and research papers on poverty. I’ve audited university lectures on the subject. But when I came face to face with the people who inhabit the streets and alleyways and missions of Kamloops, I found I still had lots to learn.
Take a lady I’ll call Shirley.
The agency that sent Shirley to the rooming house told us that she had a mental illness. They said she could be difficult. But they didn’t share her diagnosis with us or give us a picture of what we could expect. They seemed to believe, as many agencies do, that the mere knowledge Shirley was incapacitated would enable us to provide secure, predictable shelter for her. But that wasn’t enough.
At first, Shirley was quiet. She took her time moving in and getting acclimatized to the rules and the sense of order we work hard at maintaining in the house. Gradually, she stepped out from behind her own door and began to interact with the other residents. That’s when things got difficult. As long as she was insulated, stayed private, Shirley could be fine. But when she stepped into the community, things got weird.
She phoned Deb and me at all hours of the day and night to tell us who was doing what and how disruptive it was to her sense of security. She complained harshly about the actions of other people. She yelled and screamed. She ranted. When we went over to our house to talk to her, she was usually bitterly angry. Sometimes she refused to open her door to discuss the situation. Instead, she screamed at people and insisted that we evict them, have them arrested and jailed.
Shirley’s anger was toxic. Even when she was sullenly silent, her cold rage was palpable. Often, the events that had precipitated such vitriol were insignificant. Some had not happened at all. It seemed to us that Shirley sought out reasons to rant. We wondered both why that was and how we could help her. As the months went by and the explosions continued, we considered the possibility of having to evict Shirley for the sake of the other tenants.
Then, one day, she confided in Deb. Shirley is an Aboriginal woman in her late fifties. She’s a grandmother. One of her sons had died from ingesting bad cocaine, and it was her overwhelming
, inconsolable grief that allowed a crack to appear in the wall she’d built around herself. My wife went into Shirley’s room and sat on the edge of her bed, holding Shirley’s hand, comforting and calming her. Shirley told Deb that many years earlier, when she was seven months’ pregnant, she’d been viciously assaulted and raped by three members of her family.
The story that came out of Shirley that day changed everything for us. We were horrified by what had happened to her, and after that, when we looked at her, we saw a totally different person. Shirley raged because she had to. Any slight allowed her to open the valve just a little and let out some of that stoked resentment, pain, fear and sense of betrayal. That anger was her only outlet. She’d never had a chance to heal. Most professional people had just tagged her as mentally ill and done nothing to help her find peace.
Now, when Shirley ranted and raged, we knew where it came from, and we sought ways to bring her long-lasting peace and calm rather than merely pacifying her in the moment.
Shirley eventually moved on, and she took her rage with her. She was too proud to face what she perceived as the indignities of therapy or professional help. The street had made her that way. When you’re out there, people apply tags to you all the time. You’re an addict, a drunk, crazy, violent, lazy, stupid, difficult, chronic, hard to house or beyond help. After a while, you start to refuse all of the labels, even if some of them might mean getting help.
Textbooks, degrees, work experience, shared life experience and even compassion can’t give you someone’s whole story. Only listening—reaching out from one human heart to another—can help you understand why someone is marginalized, impoverished, traumatized, wounded, addicted, drunk, isolated or chronically homeless. We are all created equal, and only circumstance and history make us what we appear to be on the outside.
One Story, One Song Page 6