essaysbysean.blogspot.com
My brother and I grew up in the
rainforest—then we left. To make it sound Romantic, say: Snow Falling on Cedars, which is the title of a splendid book and
movie. Less romantic, say: Rain Dripping
off Hemlock. I’ve no love for hemlock: Instead of needles it has flattened
fronds. And when someone finally found a way to straighten its (then) useless warping
wood, he had to market it as “Alaskan pine.” I’m not going back. And neither is
my brother. Sayonara to the neon lights of coastal Vancouver.
To Canadians in the great white
north, the Pacific Northwest is as close to sunny California as they will ever
get. To them, their warmer west coast is “lotus land.” I won’t argue, but I
won’t go west, either.
Eventually I settled down to seek
my fortune here on the Great Plains: The total opposite of lotus land. Older Canadians
tell stories of childhood on the lonesome prairies and of having to walk miles to
school in deep snow. But out here what brands your soul is not the great
distances—measured, as in Texas, by hours, not miles—and not the great snow,
but the great cold. As the poet recited, “Talk of your cold! Through the
parka’s fold, it stamped like a driven nail.” (Robert Service, The Cremation of Sam Magee)
As for folks along the west and
east coasts—or by the coast of a so-called “lake” as Buffalo is—they can
experience mighty dumps of snow, but it’s not very cold, being below freezing
by only five or ten or fifteen degrees. Buffalo’s snow soon thawed. It’s far
worse back here when we get a foot of snow, coating the cement-hard ground like
dry white sugar, far from any ocean heat sink. To sound flat, say: Blizzards flowing
for miles.
As a young man out in Calgary,
under a pale sun in icy blue skies, I attended Mount Royal College, earning my diploma
in Rehabilitation Services. Back then the diploma wasn’t offered back west. The
campus was all one building: All day long you could cheerfully wear your
student uniform of blue jeans and T-shirt. One of my classmates was a tall confident
local guy who’d been the president of his high school student council. Two or
three times he told me a story of finding a green army surplus winter scarf
with a large panel of instructions: not for laundry, but for various uses, such
as covering your face at night. He couldn’t believe the army would print such
obvious-to-him advice. He always told me this with great derision, and I never
had the nerve to tell him of my great delight when I discovered that panel on
my own scarf.
I remember a pretty lady out in
Vancouver, recently from the Philippines, telling me of how strange it felt to have to wear a long coat
and hood with only her face showing. On the prairies life is even stranger: At
the bus stop I laugh to hold a travel mug, coffee steaming from the drinking
hole, with sloshed coffee frozen solid on the lid. Luckily for me, back when I
was a boy my mother had gone to the Queen’s Printer and come back with A Soldier’s Guide to the North. Memories
of the guide sure came in handy in my new hometown.
As for the Philippine Islands, (P.I.)
that’s where my brother finally ended up after leaving the rainforest. He’s
been at Subic Bay for decades, with a wife his own age, among Vietnam veterans
who ALL believe that post-traumatic stress disorder exists, although the goddam
government would deny it, and half the vets are on medication for PTSD. My
school president buddy says the suicide numbers among vets now exceed the
casualties in Nam. I haven’t had the nerve to go check the numbers for myself.
As for my brother, I’m confident that when he passes upward to that great climate
controlled cloud in the sky his death will be from old age. Recently he e-mailed
me of his vision of retirement, while lounging in the shade in the P.I. wearing
his straw cowboy hat with the side brims folded up to defeat the wind. He gets
a new hat every year because of the mildew in his hometown.
Mildew? I used the word in my
writer’s group and people leaned forward with interest. Such a nostalgic word back
here as our scrubby grass is khaki colored in summer—a short summer. During the
winter my plain-as-Stephen-King writer friends don’t exactly dress like
Eskimos, and no one wears ski pants or the equivalent. Just as the folks in Los
Angeles—at least on TV—don’t dress in bathing suits or Bermuda shorts, even if
they should. And all over North America, of course, junior high kids will be
especially silly. A writer laughed to tell us of a boy who got on the bus, sped
to the back, hurried to stuff his outer jacket into his pack, and then sat up looking
cool, just two seconds before other kids boarded the bus. Nobody in my group
writes about the cold; we take it for granted.
I remember one afternoon after
college playing with a young woman and her husky downtown on an island park in
the river. It was so frigid we had the pretty park all to ourselves in the virgin
snow. That evening the front of her legs were red, and I was spared a similar
fate only because under my jeans I was wearing stout bicycle shorts. Some folks
decide to wear long johns. Me too. I once went with some university students to
a conference in the city of Saskatoon, one time zone further east, even deeper
into the freeze-dried heart of the continent. This was in February. A lady in
our party looked at people on the sidewalk, and said, “Wow, they dress just as
stupidly as we do.” In jeans and running shoes. If you go yet another time zone
east then, according to my Winnipegger best friend, long underwear is sexy, a sure
sign of indoor intimacy.
My brother has adjusted. With more free
time and calories than the locals have, he and his wife are exploring hill
trails that link up although the paths are intended to be local. He keeps in
good shape. That he was once a medic, and still treats folks, provides him
enough protection from the bad guys. Also, his wife’s a healer.
I’ve adjusted; I’ve come to like my
hometown. In a tough climate my neighbors tend to be tough rednecks. Meanwhile,
some of my best friends are bleeding heart liberals, yet they aren’t the
majority—My brother-in-law says that when some Hells Angels came through a small
town a police escort was provided, to protect them from us.
Off in metropolitan Vancouver the citizens
tolerate a vast congregation of flea-bitten lotus eaters on Main Street, enough
losers to populate a prairie town. One of those long-haired addicts thought he
could slowly jaywalk in front of me as I steadily motored down the hill—until
he noticed my car front showed I was a frugal redneck: no license plate. He
hurried up.
The rainforest is still there. If
my brother ever left his sun-drenched P.I. for Vancouver drizzle he’d have to
wear a parka: Even so, he’d still feel a hades-horrible chill right into his
very marrow. And me, if I ever went back to the coast, I’d walk around feeling
twisted up from the high costs and cramped living.
As a boy, growing up 25 miles
inland, I would safely move cows across the Surrey freeway to graze the grassy median.
And now? The freeway is a solid train of cars, past Surrey and through Langley,
miles and miles of vehicles in first and second gear during a “rush hour” that is
hours longer than you would believe. I’m
not exaggerating: I drive a manual shift, I know which gears I was in—for
miles. They tell me you can’t just impulsively phone a friend to come visit:
the crowded traffic means socializing must be planned in advance. I wouldn’t
like it. As the poet says, “you can’t go home again.”
I believe a good man assimilates.
He goes to where the jobs are, and then he plays the cards he’s dealt.
Softly, snow is falling on cedars…
and two brothers are gone...
Sean Crawford
December
2014
Calgary
Footnotes:
~ 25 miles is 40 kilometers.
~In elementary school our teacher
showed us a photograph taken through the porthole of a ship on a great lake. We
all gasped—the lake had no shoreline.
~I reviewed a useful book for the
armed forces community on post-traumatic stress disorder, archived June 2012.
Needless to say, civilians can have PTSD too.
~My old best friend has her own
essay, archived June 2014 called God,
Guns and a Gay Mother.
~In everyday urban life, nobody
wears ski pants, quilted pants or zippered-up-the leg fleece. Meanwhile, common
waist-length ski jackets are like kilts: wearable for all levels of formality.
~The Fine Man, Fine Writer whom I wrote about in October is from
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He owns six parkas. I asked.
~Hells Angels has no apostrophe. I
once declined to buy a used British nonfiction book on the gang, when I noticed
the book put the apostrophe where it didn’t belong.
~In the incorporated “city” of
Greenwood, on the #3 Crows Nest Pass Highway, I went to city hall to ask why
the little town was so affluent, as I had noticed the paint on the buildings along
the main highway-street was so new, only a few years old. Turns it out it was a
movie set for Snow Falling on Cedars.
The library front window still has guilt writing for the fake town, but the
banner over the street had to be removed: Too many people were asking when the
Strawberry Festival was on.
~Today’s prairie kid will ride to school in a yellow bus with a
strobe light on top.
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