We live with pieces of the sky inside us. In our cells is the very stuff of space. The arc of our travel is wonderful to see, the trail of it incandescent, joined to an impossible blue.
A Kindred Spirit
. . .
THERE ARE FOALS on the range land. Against the high-sky heat of midday they are flopped on their sides, tails twitching, soaking up sun on their flanks. It’s a reminder, I suppose, of mother heat not so long past.
Driving by later, in early evening, I watch them cavort. They race about in bursts of speed that end abruptly, as though they’re suddenly puzzled at the glee that drives them to kick up their heels and run. They pause and look outwards at the road with their heads held high and still. There’s pride in them, nobility, and a staunch sense of identity that’s fractured by yet another crazed dash.
My people were bush people, and they never cultivated a horse culture. But there is something about the animals that has always appealed to me. Horses are called Spirit Dogs in some native cultures, and maybe it’s their loyalty and good-heartedness that makes them special to me.
I was thirteen when I learned to ride. My adopted family had left for a summer vacation, and I was dropped off to stay with relatives for three weeks. Uncle Wilf and Aunt Peg had a small farm outside of a southwestern Ontario town called Teeswater. I’d only been there a handful of times, and I felt out of place and alone.
But they had animals. It wasn’t a large farm, but there was stock, some chickens, a few dogs and a knot of barn cats. Uncle Wilf assigned me barn chores to do every day. Every morning I gathered eggs from the henhouse. I shovelled stalls in the afternoon and helped hay and feed the cattle in the evening. It never felt like work to me. The presence of the animals was comforting, and even the huge Hereford bull in the back stall didn’t faze me.
It was the pony that fascinated me most. She was a small Shetland cross. The first time I saw her she was dirty, with a knotted tail and mane. She started when I approached her, shrank to the back of the stall and eyed me nervously. Still, I felt drawn to her.
Aunt Peg told me that the pony’s name was Dimples. They’d bought her from a neighbour for their daughter Kathy to ride, but the neighbour hadn’t told them that Dimples had been beaten as a colt and so was unrideable. She was bareback broke and halter broke, but the heavy-handedness of her training had made her distrustful of people. They told me not to go near her, except to let her out into the big pen every now and then.
“She’ll bite you,” Aunt Peg told me, “and she’ll kick.”
But there was something about Dimples that drew me. I knew nothing of horses or ponies, but at thirteen I understood the feeling of being displaced and lost and frightened. I saw that in her, and I started to visit her.
At first I just stood by the rail of the stall and talked to her. She didn’t move, but after a few days of this she seemed to calm. Then I opened the gate and stood there, talking soft and low and gentle. It took another few days for her to get used to this. Eventually I moved a yard or so closer.
The day I touched her for the first time was magical. She shivered, twitched. I kept my voice low, moved slowly and rubbed her flank. I could feel her anxiety, but the more I stroked her the more she calmed and settled. Within days she let me curry comb her mane and tail, all the while talking soft and low.
Uncle Wilf showed me how to put the halter on. He had to demonstrate on a pillow, because Dimples wouldn’t allow anyone but me in her stall. When I came back alone, she let me slip the halter on. I led her into the big pen and walked her around it slowly. Everyone was amazed.
I got on her back the next day. I mounted off the fence rail, easing down onto her. She shivered, shifted her feet nervously, but she stood still and let me find my seat. We didn’t move. I sat and rubbed her and talked to her for half an hour and did the same the next day. Then I walked her out into the field.
Riding Dimples was pure joy. We walked around that forty-acre field for a couple of days, and she relaxed. Soon, I got courageous enough to push her up to a trot. And one day, after a week of this, she cantered for me. Coming back one evening she broke into a full gallop. It scared me at first, then filled me with glory.
I rode her every day of that vacation, and Dimples learned to love it as much as I did. Finally, she let Kathy ride her. Watching them from the stoop of the farmhouse, I felt like an adult for the first time in my life.
My adopted family moved away shortly after that, and I never saw Dimples again. But I still think about her whenever I ride. Riding her was a challenge that I met and won. But it was more than that. It was the first time I’d felt kinship with a creature, a joining that went far beyond mere domestication. It was a union of spirits that transcended earthly things such as loneliness, sadness and hurt. I felt like a healer, even though I didn’t have the words for that yet.
We heal each other with kindness, gentleness and respect. Animals teach us that.
Running after Werezak
. . .
I BECAME a long-distance cross-country runner when I was fifteen. In a life filled with turmoil, running gave me a sense of freedom. It allowed me to expel the anger, hurt, confusion and doubt I struggled with, and every heaved breath felt like an answer somehow.
After a notice went up on the school bulletin board, I turned up for the tryouts. We had to run three miles, and I finished in the top five. I’d never been particularly fast as a sprinter, but long distance seemed to suit me. I’d never been on a school team before, either, and the day I was handed my singlet, shorts and spikes and became a Grantham Gator was a small triumph. My family, a hockey family, didn’t understand that running was a sport. But I felt like a winner.
We ran every night after school. Our coach, Mr. Waite, was a competitive runner himself, and the drills we did were hard: running in sand, running up and down the steepest hills in the area, doing half a dozen half-mile wind sprints. Mr. Waite believed in training the body to its peak, then resting a day before each race. Every practice was a test. But I loved the feel of running, and it never seemed like a chore.
There was a local runner named Ken Werezak who ran for our rivals, the Lakeport Lakers. Werezak was a legend. He’d never been beaten; he was big and strong and set a pace that crushed anyone who tried to stick with him. Beating Werezak and the Lakers was all the team could talk about in the locker room.
When I ran I imagined myself running after Werezak, chasing him on a long climb uphill, passing him and coasting on to victory to the cheers of my teammates. Every practice session I imagined running after Werezak and beating him.
I trained hard. I ran faster and longer than anyone else. I ran extra sessions alone in the dark at night and first thing every morning. I ran home from school and I ran in the hallways. I ran and I chanted his name under my breath: Werezak, Werezak, Werezak. I was filled with a burning desire to pass him in a race, to see him at my shoulder struggling to maintain the pace I set.
The day of the first race arrived. A teammate pointed out Werezak, and I lined up beside him. He was taller than me, heavier, blond and intense-looking. I eyed him carefully, gritted my teeth and prepared for the running.
The gun went off, and I stayed right on his shoulder for the first mile. It was a horrendous pace. The next closest runners were a hundred yards behind us. He looked at me, maybe a little surprised to find someone so close, and when he sped up after that first mile I stuck to him. We ran uphill and down, faster than I’d ever run before. The runners who lined the course to watch were excited to see someone actually challenging the champion.
Werezak’s strength overcame my grit in the end. He just plain outran me. It was as if he had an extra gear, and when he pulled away from me there was nothing I could do but watch his broad back and the heavy, hard pump of his legs. I finished third that day and I never came close to beating Werezak again. Oh, I chased him. I ran with him race after race, stuck on his shoulder like a bug, but he was bigger and stronger and always faster.
&
nbsp; But there was a moment sometimes, during those races, when there’d just be him and me out ahead of everyone, our pace matched, shoulder to shoulder, sweating, heaving deep breaths as we ran. He’d give me a little look then. Just a flick of his eyes, a squint and then a firm nod before turning to the running again. That look was everything to me. It meant I was an equal. It meant that my effort qualified me and that I pushed Werezak, made it harder for him, made it a race. Even though I never won, Ken Werezak’s glance was my trophy ribbon. I’d shopped all my life for validation like that.
I didn’t know then about my people’s legacy of distance running, of messengers running in moccasins across the plains or through the forest to bring news of game or to herald a gathering. I didn’t know about the spirituality of running, about that detached Zenlike state the elders advised young men to seek, attain and hold. I didn’t know about the exhilaration of chasing a herd for days and days and returning with meat for the band.
All I knew about running was that it made me feel alive and powerful. If it didn’t erase the heaviness of my life, it at least smoothed the edges. It released me, and running after Werezak was the pinnacle. Lining up for the starter gun already makes you an equal, allows you the opportunity to try. Being first across the line isn’t the biggest thing. Letting them know you’re in the race is.
BOOK TWO
ISHSKWADAY
(FIRE)
AT THE CENTRE of our being, as at the centre of our Mother Earth, is fire. It burns within our cells, and because of that we are entranced by fire, drawn to it relentlessly. As we gaze into it, something eternal in its flicker and dance calls to us. In the Ojibway world, great stories and teachings were shared around a fire. The men and women we grew up to be were shaped by the tribal fires that burned in our villages. The embers of them reside within us today, patiently waiting to be fanned into flame. On this journey, I have sat by many fires, but it is only now, in retrospect, that I see how much I learned there, in those fires burning bright.
Lemon Pie with Muhammad Ali
. . .
IT WAS FEBRUARY 25, 1964, deep winter in northern Ontario. At that time of year the nights descended like judgements, dark and deliberate. I shared a room with my foster brother, Bill Tacknyk, and my bed was the lower of the two bunks. When bedtime came I always fell asleep to the sound of his radio playing softly in the darkness.
That night he was listening to a boxing match. Cassius Clay was fighting Sonny Liston in a place called Miami. You could hear the crowd behind the announcer’s voice. It was like a sea, roaring, then murmuring, then crashing into silence. The announcer was excited, and his words came out of the darkness like the jabs and combinations of the fight itself.
Clay was lightning quick as he pounded the lumbering Liston. He opened a cut over Liston’s eye and the announcer yelled that there was blood everywhere. The crowd noise was enormous. It filled the corners of our dark room, and when Bill’s legs draped over the edge of his bunk, I sat up too. We were galvanized by the details of that fight.
I swear I could smell the sweat of it. I could feel the thud of blows landing, and in my mind’s eye I could see the younger, faster Clay wheeling around the ring taunting Liston, hitting him at will. I began to cheer for him when Clay was blinded by something and Liston started to win.
Clay recovered, and as I rocked in my bunk, arms wrapped around my knees, I clenched my fists and willed him on. In the end, a battered Liston refused to come out and fight again. The crowd cheered and booed and raged, and Bill and I celebrated the new heavyweight champion of the world. My foster mother had to come in and tell us to get to sleep.
Cassius Clay changed his name about the same time I did. In my new adopted home I got to see some of his fights on television. He was beautiful. He was outrageous. He was a warrior poet, and when he crashed over refusal to fight in Vietnam I hurt for him. In my mind he was a giant.
But my adopted home was a fiasco from day one. No one had told my new family about the history of abuse I came from. No one had told them about the terror I’d faced as a kid and the horrific physical abuse I’d suffered. No one knew then that post-traumatic stress disorder wasn’t just a soldier’s pain; it could happen to a kid, too.
Physical punishment was the rule in that home, and it was the last thing I needed. When I was strapped and beaten, it only exacerbated the trauma in me. When I was banished to my room, it only embedded the isolation I felt. I found it difficult to fit in and become the kid they wanted me to be, and there were always clashes.
I ran away a few times and then, when I was fifteen, I emptied my bank account of paper-route money and found my way to Miami Beach. It was February and I wanted to be somewhere warm. More than anything I just wanted to be away.
I got a job in a cafeteria as a busboy and moved in with a pair of old hippies I met. We smoked weed and hung out on the beach, hitting up tourists and swiping drinks from tables. But when I couldn’t produce a social security number, the cafeteria let me go. I wandered Miami Beach lost and hurt and hopeless.
One day I went into a lunch counter at Fifth Street and Washington Avenue. They served lemon meringue pie, and I ordered a piece in hopes that a childhood favourite might make me feel better. It was marvellous. When a man came and sat beside me, I bent my head out of shyness. He ordered a piece of pie like mine, and the waitress asked him if he was allowed to have it. He laughed and said he could eat whatever he wanted; he was the Champ, after all. I looked up and saw Muhammad Ali beside me. His training gym was right above that lunch counter, it turned out, and he came in often.
He bought me a piece of pie when he ordered another, along with a chocolate shake. We ate together and he smiled at me and rubbed my head like a brother. When he was leaving, I asked him for an autograph and he signed my napkin. Muhammad Ali. A giant. A warrior poet. I was honoured. Watching him walk away I felt healed, like I could bear up. When the police found me eventually and shipped me back to my adopted home, I held onto the sight of him.
I left for good soon after, and my life became the road. Thirty-seven years later, I still remember the feel of his big hand on my head and the taste of that lemon pie. Finding Ali saved me, gave me the strength to carry on. I guess that’s what heroes do—imbue us with the gold dust of their courage. Ali made me a fighter, and I’ve come out for every round since then.
Up from the Pavement
. . .
MOUNTAIN RAIN is healing. Walking in it in the slate grey of morning you get the sense of what my people say—that rain is the tears of Mother Earth crying down a blessing. There’s a freshness to things then, a radiance, a sweeping rush of energy that means Great Spirit when you allow it to touch you. You feel the places you inhabit when you open yourself to them. They cease to become places then, existing in you as a vibration, a tone I’ve come to call belonging.
I went to the street when I was sixteen. My home life was a shambles, and it hurt too much to be there. So I left one day. I had a Grade Nine education and no sense of who I was. I was filled with anger, resentment and fear. I had no plan except to get out. There weren’t many opportunities for a high school dropout with no skills. The street was the only place I could go.
I worked when I could, but for the most part my life became the usual welfare dance of living cheque to cheque, trying to fill the gaping holes in my days. The places I found to live in were low-income rentals, small rooms in dingy buildings, alongside people much the same as me. There wasn’t a lot of hope in those dim hallways, just a keen sense of desperation.
Drugs and alcohol eased the hurts, and the loose company that came with them made it all feel less lonely. But the bottle always came up empty, the high always became a bitter low. The fast friends were always off to somewhere else where the supply was better. There is no loyalty in that life. Everyone is living for escape, and leaving is easier since you never truly arrived in the first place.
Sometimes there was no money for a room, and I lived as best I could with t
he concrete of the city for shelter. I slept in doorways, behind dumpsters, in parks and abandoned buildings and deserted automobiles. I woke cold, shivering hard, wet sometimes, the rain or snow slick on my face. I’d stamp my feet to regain a measure of warmth. And I was never alone. There were hundreds of us. We were Indians—Crees, Ojibways, Micmacs—and we were black—Jamaicans, Africans, West Indians. We were Romanians, Germans, Finns, Australians and Brits. Everyone, it seemed, was susceptible to slipping between the cracks.
You’re not lonely for people when you live like that. Neither are you lonely for a physical place. Instead, you’re haunted by a feeling, a relentless feeling you’re stumped to identify because you haven’t experienced it in a long time, if ever. It lives in you like a bruise. The stories you bring to the street are the baggage of a life, and you open that baggage alone, in private moments when there is no one to see your shame, your tears, your desolation. You don’t look down when you walk because of the shame. You look down to avoid the shining light of life, of possibility, of belonging in the eyes of the people you pass.
In the netherworld of homelessness and poverty, the commonality is a total lack of colour. There are no pastel tones to your world, only the immutable greys and umbers and purples of longing, hurt, hunger and lack. Colour taunts you always. It lurks on every street corner and in every neighbourhood. Colour. The look of possibility.
You become invisible when you’re homeless. You walk the crowded sidewalks, dodging busy passersby, and you understand what it is to exist as a phantom, a shadow, as irrelevant as the discarded newspapers that flap at your feet. Every chink of change you beg for contains the properties that haunt you. Every mission meal served on a plastic tray carries within it the fleeting recollection of another meal in another place, at a table in a room farther away than years. Every shard of laughter on the street pierces you. You find yourself hanging around parks and playgrounds as though you could soak up the innocence of childhood by osmosis.
One Native Life Page 5