One Native Life (6 page)
For a time when I was twelve, there were no white men and no Indians. There was only baseball. There was only life, and the friendship of a blue-eyed kid who could run like the wind. When I go back there now, there are only the subtle shadings of the love of something beyond ourselves and the joy we found in that together. That’s the thing, really. Learning to love something beyond yourself. When you can do that, when you can expand yourself to include something foreign, you find parts of yourself you never knew existed. In that we’re all the same.
And the reward is that one day, when my eyes close for the last time, there will be the voice of a blue-eyed kid shouting at me from the finish line. “Come on, Rich, it’s the bottom of the ninth and we need you home!”
. . .
THE SKY THAT TRACES
the curve of mountain today is an impossible blue. Cloudless, it is at once near enough to touch and as distant as a star. You could fall into it. That’s how it feels. Perhaps there are cosmic particles deep inside us that make us one with sky and space. I wonder if, as my people say, Star People graced us with teachings once and part of us recalls that.
When I was thirteen my adopted family moved to the city of St. Catharines, Ontario. The move there was fraught with anxiety for me. It would be my fourth move with them in four years. I never got the chance to settle, to experience the measure of refuge that comes when you can wrap a home, a place, a geography around you. Leaving our farm was a tragedy of acute proportions, and there was nothing I could say about it.
What saved me was writing. I don’t know how many stories and poems I committed to paper those first months. It was summer, and school was out. Without a circle of friends, I was incredibly lonely and sad. But I had writing.
My adopted parents were pragmatic, concrete thinkers. For them, there were no grey areas. There was no room for flights of fancy or imagination. Everything was regimen. Everything was obdurate discipline. For them my poetry was “flowery.” Cause for a giggle, a boy penning silly verse. My stories were wild, they said, not worthy of consideration beyond a belly laugh.
They never got that I found freedom in writing. In my wild stories and flowery verse, I could capture the feelings of worthiness and equality I experienced on the land and under the sky. They never got that what was left of the Indian in me had its expression in creativity, or that if I could imagine permanence, I could believe it existed.
When I entered Grade Eight that fall, I was ushered into the world of city teens. The farm kids I’d known had had little use for fashion, pose or attitude. Their world was simple and straightforward. But here life was a jumble of motion, of necessity, of learning the code and adopting it.
So I did what every lonely, scared kid does in order to fit in. I did what everyone else was doing. I hung out on the corner and smoked cigarettes. I talked trash and acted hip. I paid more attention to the acceptance of my peers than to my marks. But the more I worked at fitting in, the greater the trouble that brewed at home.
My life became the walk to school and back. Then it was four hours in my room each night to study. Except that I didn’t study. I wrote. I wrote stories and plays and poems about the kind of life I imagined every other kid was having, a life that wasn’t restricted to the cloister of a small room. My stories were filled with hopes, dreams, happy endings and skies.
And I never showed them to anybody.
But my teacher that year was a man named Leo Rozema. He was Dutch and still held a smidgen of the accent. He had a big nose and grey hair and all the kids made fun of him. His white shirts leaned to dingy. His ties were out of fashion and he smelled of cigarettes. But there was something about Mr. Rozema that I trusted. Maybe it was because he had to work so hard at being accepted. He had to fight to be himself, too. So I showed him my stories.
One day there was a brown envelope on my desk. When I opened it there was a letter. Mr. Rozema had written out in longhand a poem called “High Flight.” It described a pilot’s fascination with the sky.
“And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod / The high untrespassed sanctity of space / Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.” That’s how the poem went, and Mr. Rozema’s letter said my writing reminded him of that. He called me a great writer because I could make him feel things. He praised me and told me to keep going. I did.
I am a writer today because of Leo Rozema. He was the first adult in my adopted life who actually saw me, heard me, got me. From my words he gleaned the ache I carried, and he offered the salve of praise and recognition. He was wise enough to separate the kid from the report card.
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.
. . .
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.
. . .
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.
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.