by Ivan Coyote
Last week, my sweetheart and I got caught in a snowstorm driving home from Seattle. A giant tree had fallen across the highway and trapped us in the middle of miles of motionless cars and trucks. Wind whipped and branches bent and swirling snowflakes strangled what was left of the daylight.
There were abandoned vehicles everywhere, some nose-first in the ditches, even more half-buried and littering the exits. The guy on the radio was advising everyone to stay off the roads, but had little advice for those of us who were stuck on them.
I did what I have always done when staring down a potential emergency: I took inventory. I had filled up the gas tank just before we left Seattle, so we had plenty of fuel. We had a cellphone complete with charger, and a transformer that plugged in to the cigarette lighter. The storage container on the roof was full of camping gear, so we had blankets, sleeping bags, a Coleman stove, propane, pots, coffee, tea, sugar, and canned milk. In the trunk, I had a shortwave radio and spare batteries, a down jacket, and wool socks. My friends like to tease me about my Ford Taurus station wagon, until they go camping with me. I’m always the only guy who remembers to bring a battery-operated latté whipper. I watched the other drivers slide and skid and spin their tires. They gripped their steering wheels, lips tight and knuckles white. They looked scared.
I reached across the seat to grab my sweetie’s hand. While we were in Seattle, we had picked up a little something I had been looking for for a while. It was a portable shower unit that ran on propane. You put one end of the hose into a lake or river, fired it up, and toasty hot water came out the other end. I smiled to myself. Everything was going to be just fine.
Up Here
If you were to leave Vancouver and travel 2,697 kilometres to the northwest, you would be in Whitehorse, Yukon, a little city of 23,272 souls spread out on or around the Yukon River. This is where I grew up. If you were to leave Whitehorse and travel another 536 kilometres to the northwest, you would find yourself in Dawson City, a much littler city of 1,781 folks clustered into a corner where the Yukon River meets the Klondike. This is where I am living for the month of January. Peace and quiet. A lot of time to write. A lot of time to think. A lot of time to think.
The sun came up at 11:16 a.m. today, and will disappear again at 3:38 p.m. Dawson was built in the shelter and shadow of the Midnight Dome, a peak that looms 2,911 feet above the town. The Dome offers a great view of the landscape it surveys, but it also blocks any direct sunlight from striking the faces of Dawsonites for most of the winter. There is a glowing patch of mountainside on the southwest edge of town where the afternoon sun manages to slide around the side of the Dome and light up the pine trees and snow for a while. I like to watch this little patch of sunlight stretch and spread like butter across the horizon. I imagine that if I were to trek across the frozen river and crunch through the snow to the sunny spot, it would be warm up there. This is an illusion. It is minus 26 degrees Celsius today, and when the sun disappears for another twenty hours, it will drop to minus 38.
Going outside is a bit of a production. I can see the only gas station in town through the frost-flowered window in the kitchen, but to get there I have to don wool socks, long johns, jeans, a T-shirt, a long-sleeved wool shirt, my parka, a neckwarmer, a fur hat with ear flaps, the moosehide mitts my mom got me for Christmas, and my newfangled snow boots. They’re a lot lighter than your classic Sorrel skidoo boots but almost as toasty. My gran calls this bundling up, and to me it’s like wrapping my head up in memories of my childhood: my own breath, warm and wet, trapped under my nose by the taste of wool, the whistle of parka sleeves and snowpants, the dry squeaking complaint of northern snow announcing every footstep.
People in parkas are pretty much genderless. Parkas cover up curves and boobs, or lack thereof. Scarves and toques mask moustaches or plucked eyebrows. Mittens hide a manicure or hair on the backs of hands. Bundled up, we are all the same. This affords me a strange kind of freedom. When I walk into the grocery store in my cold weather ensemble, the old woman behind the cash register can’t tell that my hair doesn’t fit my voice, or that my hips don’t belong on the body of a teenage boy. I am a stranger, but other than being new in town, there is nothing strange about me. I am dressed for the cold, just like everybody else.
Today we went to a fur show. Urban lesbians, this is not what you are thinking. I’m talking about pelts. Beaver, sable, fox, wolverine, wolf, coyote, and lynx furs, all spread out on folding tables in the community centre gymnasium to be judged based on thickness and colour. The whole town was there; you could barely find a parking spot on Front Street. Mountains of parkas piled up on empty chairs and packs of little kids screeching and sliding around on the gym floor in their sock feet. Free moose stew and bannock, plus all the Tang and drip coffee you could drink. Door prizes and a fur fashion show. The whole nine yards. A guy from the Fur Harvester’s Association gave me a bumper sticker that said, ‘Kids Who Hunt, Trap and Fish Don’t Mug Little Old Ladies.’ I tried to imagine some of my vegan friends from the city here, sitting stricken on a chair in the corner, trying not to breathe in the almost overwhelming smell of freshly tanned hides. It would be hard to argue against the merits of wearing fur when it is forty below outside. A lot of big city politics might die of exposure halfway through a Yukon winter.
I’ve cut back on my cigarette smoking quite a bit, what with the weather outside and not being allowed to smoke inside and all. This gives me a great get-rich-quick idea: I could rent a house in Dawson in the dead of winter and open a Quit Smoking retreat. People could pay good money to come here for two weeks and stay in my very non-smoking bed and no breakfast. I would provide them with thin nylon windbreakers and open-toed slippers, and if they were desperate, they would be more than welcome to smoke outside on the uncovered, unheated deck, conveniently located on the windy side of the residence. I run my new plan past a friend of mine over a dinner of rice pasta and tomato sauce with caribou meatballs. She is convinced that this scheme won’t work, that the real nicotine addicts would gladly freeze their asses off instead of going without a cigarette. I concede that maybe my plan has a few kinks that I have to work out. I will need to think on it all some more. Fortunately, I have a lot of time to think. Seriously, a lot of time to think.
The Future of Francis
The first time I wrote about my little friend Francis, the little boy who liked to wear dresses, he was three years old. The middle son of one of my most beloved friends, he was the fearless fairy child who provided me with living, pirouetting proof that gender outlaws are just born like that, even in cabins in the bush with no running water or satellite television. He confirmed my theory that some of us come out of the factory without a box or with parts that don’t match the directions that tell our parents how we are supposed to be assembled. Watching Francis grow up taught me that what makes him and me different was not bred into us by the absence of a father figure or a domineering mother, or being exposed to too many show tunes or power tools at an impressionable stage in our development. We are not hormonal accidents, evolutional mistakes, or created by a God who would later disown us. Most of us learn at a very early age to keep our secret to ourselves, to try to squeeze into clothes that feel like they belong on someone else’s body, and hope that the mean kids at school don’t look at us long enough to find something they feel they need to pound out of us. But Francis had a mother who let him wear what he wanted, and Francis had evidence that he was not alone, because Francis had me.
He is eleven now, and I got to hang out with him and his brothers last January, up in Dawson City. He doesn’t wear dresses anymore, and I didn’t see much of his younger self in the gangly boy body he is growing into. He is a tough guy now, too cool to hug me when his friends are around, full of wisecracks and small-town street smarts. He can ride a unicycle, juggle, and do head spins. He listens to hip-hop and is not afraid to get in a fist fight. He calls other kids faggot, just like his friends do, but only when his mother can’t hear him.
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bsp; I can’t help but wonder if the politics of public school have pushed him to conform, or if he has just outgrown his cross-dressing phase and become as butch a son as any father could hope for. I try to imagine what it would be like for him to be the only boy in a dress on a playground full of kids whose parents are trappers and hunters. To be labelled queer in a town of 1,700 people and more than its fair share of souls who survived residential schools, families with four generations of inherited memories of same-sex touches that left scars and shame and secrets. I don’t blame him for hiding his difference here, for fighting to fit in.
I walk past his school one day on my way to buy groceries, and watch him kick a frozen soccer ball around in the snow with his buddies. He sees me and stands still for a second, breathing silver clouds of steam into the cold. When he was little, he used to fling himself out his front door when I came to visit and jump on me before I was all the way out of my truck. He would wrap his whole body around my neck and hips and whisper wet secrets and slobber kisses into my ear. Now, he barely returns my wave before he turns and disappears into a sea of snowsuits and scarf-covered faces. I find myself searching the crowd for a boy I barely recognize, a Francis who has outgrown my memory of him. I miss the Francis he used to be, the boy-girl who confessed to me when he was five years old that I was his favourite uncle because we were the same kind of different. Now, I can’t tell him apart from all the other boys wearing blue parkas.
I realize later I am doing to Francis exactly what I wish the whole world would stop doing to our children: wanting him to be something he is not, instead of just allowing him to be exactly what he is. I don’t want Francis to spend his lunch break being tormented and beaten up. I remember growing my hair in junior high and wanting everyone to like me, and I will never forget the blond boy from school who walked like a girl, and that time in grade eight someone slammed his face in a locker door and gave him a concussion because he wanted to try out for the cheerleading team. By grade ten, he had learned to eat his lunch alone in an empty classroom and wear his gym shorts under his jeans instead of braving the boys’ change room, but everybody acted like they were his best friend after he shot himself in the head with his stepfather’s hunting rifle during spring break the year we all graduated. They hung his school photo up in the hallway, and all the kids pinned paper flowers and rest in peace notes to the wall around his picture, but nobody wrote that they were sorry for calling him faggot or sticking gum in his hair or making fun of how he threw a ball.
I made a silent promise to Francis the day I left Dawson City to always love what he is right now as much as I loved who he was back then. Whether he grows up to become a textbook heterosexual he-man or one day rediscovers his early love for ladies’ garments, I will always be his favourite uncle, no matter what he’s wearing.
Rat Bastards
The first couple of times I heard the noise above my head, I thought it was raccoons on the roof. It was definitely some kind of four-legged activity of the rodent variety. I took to racing up to the attic with a broom or hockey stick in my hand to give chase, or at least catch a look at my rivals before they scampered off, but I never once caught sight of a raccoon on the roof.
Probably because it wasn’t raccoons I was up against; it was squirrels, and they weren’t on my roof, they were inside of it. If you think I am an idiot for mistaking the sound of a tiny little squirrel going about its annoying business for the much larger but no less pesky raccoon, then obviously you are lucky enough never to have had an entire extended family of the filthy little rodents take up residence in the ceiling directly above your office.
Now, I was born and raised in the Yukon, and though I have been an urban dweller for some time now, it is quite possible that deep down inside I may still hold onto a few outlooks that are more bush than I would like to believe. The first option that came up for me with regard to my uninvited houseguests was to simply dig out my gun and shoot the little buggers. Not all of them; I’m not a monster or anything. My plan was to just pick off one or two of the leaders, the fattest and most confident-seeming of the brood. The rest of them would hopefully take the hint and seek alternative shelter elsewhere.
But then I made the mistake of mentioning my plan to one of the women who lives in the suite downstairs.
“You will absolutely do no such thing. If you shoot even one single squirrel, I swear I will tell every vegetarian and/ or lesbian in all of East Vancouver. Slowly you will become known as the squirrel murderer, and you will eventually be so ostracized that you will never work in this town again.”
I stared at her face, searching for any sign that she wasn’t completely serious. I couldn’t be sure. My career is still in a position such that I can’t really afford to risk even a halfhearted part-time PETA boycott, so I reluctantly put my pellet gun away. At least until she and her girlfriend go to Costa Rica this spring or something.
One of the good old boys from up the street spotted me unloading a supposedly more humane live trap out of the back of my car a couple of months ago. I had already briefed him about my rodent problem. He looked confused as he bent down to give my old dog her now expected biscuit from the stash in his coat pocket.
“Thought you were planning to just shoot the little fuckers? Those traps are time-consuming. Plus sometimes if you don’t relocate them far enough away, they just come back.”
“My downstairs neighbour won’t let me,” I lamented. “Says she’ll tell all the lesbians on me and they will quit coming out to my shows.”
He nodded sympathetically, and shrugged silently as if to say, well, what can you do?
“What are you going to do with them once you have them in the trap?”
“I’m gonna put tiny little squirrel-sized blindfolds on them so they can’t see where I’m taking them, then I’ll drive them over to Queen Elizabeth or Stanley Park or something and I’ll let ‘em go.”
He shook his head sadly. “Then they’ll just dig holes in someone else’s attic. Become some poor other guy’s problem.”
I nodded sympathetically, as if to say, well, what can you do?
A sly smile stretched across his face, and he curved one hand like a bracket around the side of his mouth and whispered, “You know, they’re way easier to shoot once you’ve already got them in the trap.”
We both laughed for a minute, and then he and his inherited geriatric hound turned and headed slowly for home.
The thing is, I don’t hate the squirrels in my attic just because they’re noisy and selfish about keeping it down when I’m trying to concentrate and get my work done. I don’t just hate them because they dig little holes in the dry-wall and get plaster dust all over my printer. I don’t just hate them because one day last summer I left the window in my office open and came home to find one of them sitting on the keyboard of my laptop. Then he had the gall to give me quite the huffy little attitude when I chased him out the window and tried to knock him out of my flowerbox.
It’s the fire hazard that bothers me. Squirrels really like to chew on electrical wires, and many a fine inferno has a fried little critter as a culprit. Already having had one house burn down makes me all the more reluctant to relive the experience.
My downstairs neighbours already think I have possibly unhealthy conspiracy-slash-survivalist sort of end of the world tendencies, just because I once suggested a house meeting to ensure we have at least seventy-two hours’ worth of fresh water and non-perishable food supplies in case of a natural disaster.
Then I had to go and reinforce their fears by trying to shoot stuff on the property.
I didn’t want to be right, but just before Christmas, one of the rodents finally bit the wrong wire in the wrong place at the right time and bit it for good. It blew the main breaker in our suite and I had to run a temporary extension cord out the back window and plug our deep freeze in downstairs. Until I have time to fix the wiring, and the squirrels, for good. Relax, I’m going to call in a professional, and have him live trap the
m and relocate them safely out of my range. I love my downstairs neighbours. It’s the ones upstairs that have to go.
Something Old, Something New
I was never one of those little girls who dreamed of my wedding day. The lacy white gown, the flower girls, the handsome groom, the silver embossed napkins: I knew at a very early age that none of it was for me.
I come from a large and unusually fertile Catholic family, so there were a lot of weddings to attend. The ladies would get their hair done and buy new dresses, and the men would squeeze themselves into their good blue suits and dusty dress shoes. My Uncle Dave used to be a biker prior to becoming a priest, and before he got up to lead the ceremony he would yank down the sleeves of his robe to hide the faded tattoos on his forearms so he wouldn’t ruin the photos or alarm the new in-laws. My Uncle John was always the bartender, and once the reception was in full swing and no one was looking he would slip a quick shot of rum into your Coke if you swore not to blab to anyone or puke on yourself. Weddings were fun, but I never wanted to be the blushing bride. I wasn’t even cut out to be a flower girl, and everyone knew it. I ducked when the bride threw her bouquet so it could be caught by someone who wanted it. I liked the cocktail wieners and the Jell-O salad. I enjoyed watching my uncles get drunk enough to dance or hug or arm-wrestle each other, but the love and marriage part never impressed me.