top of page
Writer's pictureMichael Hawes

Proper Ground For Pondering

On the front wall of my trailer hang five ears of Indian corn. The colours range from deep purple to brick-red and wash down to straw-yellow. It was October when I bought the rig. Harvest time, my Texas Cherokee grandma's favourite time of year. I thought of her while shopping at the Buy Low, knowing that she was smiling at my piney woods home to be. I bought a red ear of corn and hung it up in my empty trailer. My wife and I came up frequently from the Vancouver on our time-off from work. Once, when it was Halloween night, we arrived after dark on a cold night.


When we got inside Nisa began cooking a leg of lamb that we had brought from Vancouver to have for our supper. Meanwhile, I unhappily discovered that the toilet water had frozen into a great stalagmite, as had a chronic drip in the bathtub. We were fortunate that no pipes had burst. I installed a new set of kitchen taps while the lamb roasted in a cloak of lemon, garlic, pepper and oregano. We dined on the floor of the kitchen, eating with oregano-scented hands as we watched shadows climb the snow-dusted canyon walls.


The electric heater soon had us cozy and then our door-bell rang. We had forgotten about Halloween! A little St'át'imx girl and her dad were waiting by the porch. I smiled when I realized that I had purchased a jumbo box of Raspberry Wagon Wheels and a case of Blue Sky Root Beer earlier to last us through the weekend. I put two Wagon Wheels in the little darling's bag and she smiled.


Within an hour, the Wagon Wheels were spent and I started to hand out the Blue Sky. Most of the kids thought it was real beer and looked askance at me and then at their father's for the go-ahead. When their dads told them what it was, they grinned like little possums. We learned to keep our heater turned on low even when we were in the city paying our work dues. The next October, I hung up another ear of corn.


By the third year, I got the idea to count down the years to my retirement with the ears of corn. When seven ears were up on the wall, I would hang up my Canada Post letter-carrier mail pouches and we would move on in. As it happened, I made it to Lillooet after only five corns had been hung up. The story of how that happened is called, Tip-Toeing Into The Extraordinary.


It had become common for our new friends here in Lillooet to ask us, “How many more corns until you moved in permanently?”


My wife, Nisa is an accomplished cook. She has cooked professionally for a Filipino Air Force General married to an Italian woman. She also cooked for a wealthy Singaporean lady. Her native Filipino cuisine was broadened to encompass Italian, Southeast Asian and Singaporean Chinese styles. I define a cook as a person who can walk into a situation, eyeball the equipment and ingredients on hand and then concoct something healthy and delicious without having to send someone to the store for a long list of ingredients that a book said you need. Once I killed a grouse with a sling-shot on the way home from Shalalth, that Nisa had spotted. After we got home, she had it plucked, gutted, spice-rubbed and in the oven before I had washed up.


When I was young, I worked as a prep-cook and broiler-man for the Keg N Cleaver, as a sous-chef at a seafood restaurant and as a short-order cook at a truck stop in the Fraser Canyon. I did all the cooking in my first marriage. My second wife could cook from any cook-book and make the dish come out just like the picture but she had to keep buying ingredients and cookbooks all the time. Since I married Nisa, I haven't cooked except for my traditional Texas Seafood Gumbo, Ecuadorian stew, truck driver's breakfasts and a few such favourites.


Once, when Nisa had been away visiting her family in the Philippines, Dusty Bones (our beloved cat) and I had to reconnect with our cooking skills. First, we took in all the produce of our trailer garden. After a half-hour, we had a big pile of Roma tomatoes, some fine bunches of celery, a dozen big red carrots, a basket of yellow squash, a bowl of green beans, a pile of jalapenos, and a stack of stout green onions. I rolled a smoke and looked over the harvest while Dusty chased the grasshoppers.


The answer to my thoughts was easy. I had before me, a big gumbo and a big beef stew. I lacked only bell peppers and potatoes. After a quick trip to the Buy Low, I was loading the bags and water jugs into the Suzuki and I happened to gaze up at the mountains to the West. There, about four hundred yards away, was a big jolly black bear, snuffling around the gravel pile where a road on the next bench had cut away a piece of hill.


Some St'át'imx boys here told me once with a grin that if you see three bears in one day, you'll get laid that night for sure. I nervously wondered if one six-hundred-pounder counted. Then I settled on it being just as well if it didn't. The irony of hefting my food bags into my vehicle within sight of something that could easily eat me; had a philosophical effect on me and I would add that the experience was both humbling and simultaneously capable of putting a person's feet on proper ground for pondering their existence.


I have always brought music to any kitchen that I ever cook in. I couldn't imagine building a dish without soaking its soul in a little Rock N Roll, basting it in Paco de Lucia’s flamenco, peppering it with bagpipes, sprinkling it with Irish lady sopranos, roasting it in Beethoven, folding in some Motown and slow cooking it to Lata Mangeshkar singing ghazzals. This night was no different.


As Dusty Bones, Esq., my intrepid feline did that skank walking that his kind do to make themselves look bigger, I chopped, peeled, sliced, whisked, sautéed and even played some air guitar when Ten Years After came on the Sansui. I had more fun than a year-old raccoon with a beach-ball under a full moon after eating a pile of fermented blackberries. Freedom comes from inside and there ain't anyone or anything that can bestow it on you.


My gumbo that night had scallops, shrimps and pseudo-crab. What made it great was the celery. The celery in our garden grew thin as whiskers due to the heat and the darkest shade of green I have ever seen, due to the mineral content of the soil here. In the Gold Rush, not many years in the past, all this land was ancient river bed. While men took the big nuggets and a lot of the dust, the molecular gold is still being sucked up the xylem of the plants in our garden. That celery rendered down into a 24 carat roux that would tan a rhinoceros hide into something soft enough to use for underwear.


The stew was made great by the carrots. Nisa and I hadn't tilled the soil very deep when we planted them and thus the poor roots had to push like dull tent-pegs into the packed black sand. The resulting vegetables were as thick as radiator hoses and a deep brilliant orange-red like a brand new boxcar. When I chopped them, the ends sprang several feet away and smelled like medicine that you want to take. If it had been a million years earlier, I would have certainly rolled in the greens. After I let Dusty smell one of the pieces, he shook his head till his ears flapped, did a flip, ran across the floor sixty feet and then back again. Then he plonked down on the linoleum and began to lick his hindquarters. It was the first time he'd ever done that.


We slow-cooked those two pottages and the trailer filled up with a soul satisfying incense of meat, vegetables and fish, as the whisper-quiet exhaust fan sent the lion's share of the scent off to the North hills to spark the imaginations of the bears and bachelors downwind. In the morning, I gave the first bowl (as is East Texas Gumbo tradition) to a neighbour in the trailer park. It turned out that his Mother was an Arkansas gal and she used to also make gumbo. The chances of that happening near the banks of Cayoosh Creek were better during the gold rush than they would be today.


Over the next few days, we dined like Kings, Dusty and me. It was his very first gumbo and now he walks a little bow-legged like a boy does when he's showing off his first new truck. I thought about trains while I ate the stew. Where I stand would still be a very different place, if not for the iron horse. I sit on the hill above my trailer park and watch the long metal snakes crawl the canyon. They carry away the mountains and the timber and bring in tourists and manufactured goods.


A brief study of any handful of railroad tycoons would lead one fairly quickly to an understanding of how the world really works. That's how I started to unravel it when I was a boy. A Dutchman from America, for example, had the idea to advertise in China for workers to build the railroad here in North America. It was a ready source of cheap labour and the already established opium habits of many of the men was a boon to businessmen oceans away who controlled such commerce from club rooms over cups of Earl Grey, and all of whom were happy to expand the drug trade that they had established in Asia.


It is not widely known that the paltry wages that the Chinese coolies received in Canada, although roughly ten times less than a Caucasian’s wages, were several hundred times more than they earned at home. They were not the shy little men often caricatured, nay, they came from a tough place with no equivalent “opportunities”.


We are told who the important men and women are in newspapers, books, magazines, on TV, radio and at school. Those aren't the most powerful. The most powerful don't sell their pictures or their names. The most powerful don't get their own hands dirty and always build at least three facets into each endeavour that they direct their underlings to undertake. The news that filters up-river at the speed of the returning salmon will get one through the day. Most globally significant “breaking” news has been planned or discussed somewhere long before it occurs.


So, why is it news? Because people in each region can be told who to hate, who to support and why their bills and taxes will have to go up. The same way I tell Dusty that cars are dangerous, birds are food, people are OK (if I touch them first), dogs are dangerous and guinea pigs are not food. The difference is, that being a cat, Dusty doesn't buy into the part about guinea pigs. He takes in my tuition and rejects all that is not logical to his own instinctive understanding. He is able to do this because he skipped Bible School, Kindergarten, Grade School, Boy Scouts, High School, College and Church. Most of us cannot make this claim and thus have a harder time discerning the truth of what confronts us.


We walked the railroad tracks last week and discussed these things while expanding Dusty's vocabulary. At present he knows some Swedish, some Tagalog, some English and a variety of hand and audio signals. The poor young creature walked sores into his back pads and so we took a few days off. They regrew in 48 hours, pink and pretty as bubble-gum. I decided to resume with a short uphill walk to T'it'qet. First we put a big pot-roast in the clay baker studded with garlic, rolled in black pepper and marinated in some red wine. It would be ready next day just about when the gumbo petered out.


I carried the kitten in my small back pack and he poked out his little head. We drew a few smiles from working people and we smiled back. It reminded me of my favourite poem by Han Shan of Cold Mountain in which he is laughed at by a rich neighbour lady after giving up his job with the government and becoming poor by choice and he in turn bursts with laughter at the folly of her life of being a slave to her money and thinking herself superior. Those two howled with laughter at each other until Han Shan climbed up a mountain and took up residence in a cave. Some people on my walk saw a silly old man and a cat. Some saw a lonely old man with a cat. Others saw a lazy old man with a cat. Yet others saw a poor old man with a cat.


I was neither poor, silly, lazy nor lonely. I was sixty-two, married and could still chop my firewood. I am living off money put away for my pension. It will be years before I dip into the employer's portion of those contributions. By design, I am expected to die before that day comes. I am content to eat, sleep, walk, read and live with my wife in our little house. I see people pouring their life, sweat, blood and tears into other people's coffers trying to realize other people's dreams, worrying other people's worries and fighting other people's fights.


I decided as I walked with these thoughts, to let Dusty practise catching birds in a field of tall grass. After a few miles, I found a moose carcass of which only a few bones remained. It was so sun-bleached and wind-scoured that it had no scent. We walked on another hundred yards or so and settled into a patch of ground between two roads that was full of tall brown grass and Ponderosa pines.


I sat down on a pine log and let Dusty off his leash. He circulated within a few feet and kept returning to mark where his daddy was. After an hour or so he widened out his patrol to a few yards and returned for grooming a little less often. I threw a few little pine cones around for him to practice stalking and pouncing. It was a delicious temperature and the fresh East wind carried the scent of an alpine lake down to our sandy retreat. With a belly full of gumbo, it wasn't long before my eyelids grew heavier than a city girl's suitcase. I felt Dusty come up and lick my hand from time to time and I heard him return to a little nest he'd made in among some fire-downed pine boughs.


It was a truck motor that woke me. I watched a blue pick-up make a dust trail on my left toward Cayoosh Creek. The vehicle went up about a hundred yards and then turned around. It came back my way about thirty yards and then stopped. Several St'át'imx men in the front cab started to bark and growl like animals. Others laughed like schoolboys and clapped their hands. They kept the motor running and didn't budge.


I wondered if they thought I might be sleeping off a drunk and were trying to shoo me awake and out of their territory. Then I realized that they couldn't have seen me laid out under that tall grass behind a fallen log. I rose slowly and circled about looking for Dusty Bones. I found the little one snuggled up in the tangle of pine logs and deep in cover. He was out of the chilling wind and shaded from the sun in a hastily dug fox hole. He had both eyes open and his ears were cocked back at the truck sounds. As I gathered him up out of his lair, I saw a big mother black bear. She was West about seventy yards, halfway up a medium size pine.


Her muzzle was light brown and pointed straight at me and Dusty. Her jet fur covered up about four hundred pounds of maternal instinct. She ignored the shouting, growling men a few feet to her right. About ten feet above her, sprawled on a pine bough, was her chunky mocha coloured cub, evidently tuckered out and having a little rest.


As I moved back to my pack and put my fur baby inside, the lady bear started down the tree a few notches. I donned my hat and calculated that after two more hand holds, she could cross the seventy yards to my position in the time it would take to wring out a mop. I wished the men in the truck would hush up but I was glad that they had raised an alarm in the first place.


Like he had read my mind, the driver sped off and I walked backwards slowly to watch. Mama bear went back up to her cub. Baby bear kept on looking at the ants marching along the branch that he straddled. The mother was clearly settled down now and she resumed her passive baby-sitting duties while the youngster did his homework. Dusty and I quietly walked away from this scene in the gathering mountain twilight.


Dusty had already learned the words, car, ibon (bird), wind, train, people, dog, cat, bug, alibongbong (butterfly), jump, pacem (peace). To these he now added the word, bear. His facial expression on our way home was that of a woman returning from a new hairdresser. Nope fellas, we never did see a third bear on the way home that night.



fin

Comments


bottom of page