For Joshua (11 page)

In itself, that summer night would have been memorable. In itself, a group of people pitching in to see that everyone was taken care of would have made for a good memory, a good lesson, and a warm story. But something wonderful happened around that fire that night.

Once we’d digested that big meal, people began making short trips to their tents. Soon there was a fiddle, a guitar, a harmonica, bongo drums, a pennywhistle, and an accordion being tuned up amidst a lot of talk and laughter. We began
to sing. At first there were the usual simple campfire songs, as people relaxed with each other and got over their shyness. Then, one by one, my fellow travellers began offering more personal tunes and stories to go along with them.

The first were beautiful ballads from a Québec I had never visited but got a sense of that night. Sylvie and Luc were university students on their way to plant trees in British Columbia. They told us of hearing songs like the ones they sang on long cold winter nights around a fire in their family cabins. There was an old world charm to their songs, a waltzing sort of homesickness, that gave the feeling of rolling ocean waves and a land far behind—a land that called out to be remembered.

I heard sea shanties and Maritime ballads from Nova Scotia. They were sung by a pair of brothers from Sydney working their way back home after a year on the road. The guitar and the fiddle reeled around each other in a frenzy and the music seemed to capture the dynamic nature of the sea—lulling sometimes, calm, placid, then rolling, churning, crashing, and powerful. They were songs of a people in awe of the sea, humbled by its vastness, empowered by its gifts.

Then I heard foot-stomping jigs and reels from a Métis settlement in northern Alberta. Gabriel was a high steel worker and was headed to the skyscrapers of the United
States for work. The songs he sang that night were filled with a fire that was captivating. They were the songs of a people who celebrated the land, songs that reflected the trapline as much as they praised the furrows of farmland, songs that spoke of wagon wheels rolling across a sea of prairie grass, horses in full gallop, rifle shots, and the shadowed ghosts of the buffalo.

I listened in awe to farmers’ songs. Hummable ditties of animals, harvest, and land, and small-town dreams that call youth away from pastures and plowing to the fields of opportunity somewhere down the road. Len was a farmer’s son, raised in the sun-up-to-sundown world of a Saskatchewan workingman’s routine. He was fed up with it and was on his way to anywhere that might hold more of everything—lights, action, adventure. His songs ached with a longing for a life of promise beyond the unbroken line of horizon.

Then came folk songs about travelling, roaming, wandering. They were songs about pretty girls in towns a million miles behind, of railway tracks, highways, dance halls, and the loneliness you feel alone at sundown. Glen was a drifter. He’d been everywhere there was to go in Canada, worked a hundred different jobs, met a thousand different people, and was on his way to meet a thousand more. The songs he sang were thick with goodbyes, solemn and final.

I listened to them all. Me, I had no songs to offer, no tales to tell of belonging, of feeling tied to a landscape or a territory, no recollections of an experience that rooted me anywhere. But I listened. Between songs we laughed, made jokes, teased and toasted each other. As song after song was sung and the fire burned longer into that perfect still, warm night we became more and more familiar. Eventually, the talk changed. Now, between songs we heard about the life of a coal miner’s son in Nova Scotia, about the hardship, the ever-present feel of coal dust on clothes, food, and in the air, and about the disparity between that and the harbour with its slick wash of sea, the smell of brine and fish, and the skreel of sea birds. The nature of life with a rich Celtic vein on the gruff coast of Nova Scotia.

We heard about the Métis peoples’ search for a home, about generations of children that had got used to movement, a life without roots. We heard about twelve children, six to a bed, four to a spoon, learning to snare gophers, net fish, and stone partridges to feed themselves, and the quality of joy that could be present in tough circumstances. We heard about Saskatchewan fields that ran forever and land “so flat you could watch your dog run away for four whole days before he disappeared.” There were drought, grasshoppers, dust, and too many times of not
having enough to make life easy. And we heard of wild meanderings through the fishing villages of British Columbia, the lumber camps of northern Québec, mining towns in the Northwest Territories, and how roaming rootless through all of it, its glory, its quiet magnificence, and its sodden ordinariness could make you hunger for more and more of it, could keep you on the road forever.

I spoke of nothing. I had no stories, no quality that made the life I’d lived up to then compelling or entertaining, but I was fixed on everything that was said that night. One by one we heard about life. Canadian life. And if there was one thing more than any other that made all those words memorable for me, it was the sameness. The geography might have been different, and the fabric of the lives a varied texture, but there was a feel to every story that reflected itself in the tale that followed it. Back then I called it sameness—now I call it
kinship
.

Eventually, the talk died down. The silence between songs and between chatter got longer and longer and the fire grew smaller. We settled for staring into the dying embers until we felt our tiredness and filed off to our bunks. I don’t know about any of the others that night, but my dreams were of travels, of roads that basked in the sunshine, of fields glowing golden with grain, and a horizon that moved, inviting
me beyond myself to a place and a person I had never been. They were glorious dreams.

In the morning we said our goodbyes and headed off in our own directions. I never saw any of those people again, never wrote, sent postcards, or telephoned, but I remember all of them as if it was yesterday. Something woke up in me around that fire, something that beckoned to a part of me that wouldn’t be revealed for a long time, something that life needed to prepare me to find.

Night descended on my little circle on the hill, and as I considered the idea of being on the same level as everything contained within the circle I realized that the hunger I felt in my belly wasn’t just for food. I had a spiritual hunger I’d never fed.

It had always been so easy to get lost in the pursuit of full cupboards. I had been so focused on getting and having that I neglected the ache I carried for the real nourishment in life. The nourishment that comes from being a part of a circle of friends, part of a community, part of a people, and the potent vitamins of love, acceptance, loyalty, trust, and honesty that come from sitting around a common fire.

I had never really fed myself. The more I thought about it the more I came to realize that food is a great coming together. It has the ability to pull everyone we love around a table, around a fire or around a room, and as much as we feed our bodies at these moments, we feed our souls, our spirits, our beings as well. Even solitary meals could be like that. When we give thanks to Creation for its generous spirit, and ask for the food for our bodies to nourish our spirit, and for the strength of that spirit to be available to help someone else, we have fed an appetite no less aching than hunger.

I began to cry again. I couldn’t help but wonder why it seemed like tears were the price of admission to this ceremony. It bothered me. I didn’t like crying, but I cried through the baying of coyotes, the flicker of fireflies, and the dive-bombing of mosquitos. It wasn’t a weeping born of loss, nor was it a release of guilt or sorrow. Instead, the tears I was shedding were for the loneliness and isolation of a young man by the side of a highway in the warm rain of summer. A young man bent on being anywhere but wherever he found himself. A young Native man, scant yards away from the land that could define and sustain him if only he reached out to it, if he’d only known how. I cried for the feelings of shame, frustration, fear, anger, and melancholy that that young man carried, the feelings I felt rekindled within me. I cried
because travellers eventually get weary of the road. Nomads, seekers, and escapists tire of the constant motion and crave stillness—a settling down—but after so many miles they forget how to reach for it and their hands remain as empty as their hearts. I tried to imagine what I would tell that young man if I could—what messages of hope I might offer, what alternatives were possible, what was coming for him around the next bend in that road. But we are not graced with that ability and as I sat there moving into the depths of that second night I learned that it’s possible to hold the people we have been in our lives close to our chests and offer comfort. I held that young man a long, long time that night and I told him a story about a great coming-together.

In the Long Ago Time there was great trouble among the People. The animals had not come and the People grew hungry. With their hunger came anger, jealousy, and bitterness. Those who were fortunate enough to snare a few rabbits or net some fish were reluctant to feed their neighbours and there was deep resentment all around.

This time of scarcity was hardest on the men. Ojibway men are proud hunters and fishers and there is much honour
in being able to provide for one’s family and village. Watching their families suffer brought many heavy feelings to the hearts of the men. It wasn’t long before shouts, arguments, challenges, and fights broke out amongst them. Even friendships of many years were threatened by the anxious feelings in their hearts, and the villages were tense and the women and children feared the anger they could feel in the men.

As time went by and the shortage of food grew more and more severe, things grew more desperate. What little game was available came to be seen as something to be hoarded rather than something to be shared. Some men stole food from other villages, others destroyed the traps and snares of their fellow hunters. Gill nets were slashed and no one was praying for the animals or offering tobacco gifts to Creation for a good hunt. With the loss of their spiritual way of hunting, greed became the biggest force amongst the men.

The greed spurred them to fighting. Soon village was setting out against village over some injustice imagined or genuine. Blood was spilled and it seemed that the great circle of the People would become torn apart from within.

One night, as a council of men was meeting to plan an attack on a distant village, a strange thing happened. Beyond the trees they heard a sound. It was a sound unlike any they had ever heard before but it was also very familiar. It grew
louder and seemed to echo all around them until, at its loudest, the sound filled the entire night. The men were frightened. It sounded to them as if something very ancient and strong was coming their way.

Then a light was seen. A dim yellow light that shone against the tops of the trees. The men could see it moving from treetop to treetop as the sound grew louder and closer. And closer and closer. Despite themselves they shuffled together in fear. The light kept coming and the sound continued. Some of the men wanted to run but they were held in place by their pride. The light grew brighter.

Finally, they could see something walking within the light as it began to emerge from the forest. It was a woman. A very beautiful young woman in a dress of the purest white buckskin. Around her neck was an amulet of shells that hung in concentric rings so that it looked like the breast plate of a warrior. Braided into her long black hair were two eagle feathers, and on her feet she wore ankle-high moccasins beaded in a floral design of purple and orange. Purple is the colour of spirituality and orange the colour of old wisdom, old teachings, so the men knew they were seeing a holy woman. Her dress was fitted with beaded designs in the same purple and orange. As she moved
closer, the men could see that her eyes were closed and her face was raised to the night sky above with a look of deep reverence and peace.

In her hands she held a strange object. It was round and looked to be made of wood. Dried skin was stretched taut over it. The woman was beating on it with a stick—this was where the deep echoing sound was coming from. She walked slowly into the middle of the circle of men and continued to beat on the object. When she had reached the exact middle of the circle she stopped.