A Child's Christmas In Wales
One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.
It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, although there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slide and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes.
The wise cats never appeared. We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows—eternal, ever since Wednesday—that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder. "Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.
And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, towards the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.
Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.
"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.
"They won't be here," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.
"Do something," he said.
And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke—I think we missed Mr. Prothero—and ran out of the house to the telephone box.
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance."
"And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires."
But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said: "Would you like anything to read?"
Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."
"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards."
"Were there postmen then, too?"
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells that the children could hear were inside them."
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."
"There were church bells, too." "Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."
"Get back to the postmen."
"They were just ordinary postmen, fond of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles...."
"Ours has got a black knocker...."
"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out."
"And then the presents?"
"And then the presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs.
"He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone."
"Get back to the presents."
"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles's pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."
"Go on to the Useless Presents."
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by a mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any color I please, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknel, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakesand-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."
"Were there Uncles like in our house?"
"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas mornings, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swathed town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading, scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddled their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edges of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."
Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two curling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.
I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinseled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Aunt Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, then when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.
Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge deep footprints on the hidden pavements.
"I bet people will think there've been hippos."
"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?"
"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail."
"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"
Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow towards us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house.
"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snowball through his letter box."
"Let's write things in the snow." "Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."
Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?"
The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.
Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe web-footed men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.
"What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"
"No," Jack said, "Good King Wenceslas. I'll count three."
One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.
Good King Wenceslas looked out On the Feast of Stephen...
And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.
"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.
"Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.
"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.
Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. -Dylan Thomas 1952 -in the Public Domain
That, ladies and gentlemen, was a remembrance of a Christmas around one hundred years ago in a coastal village in Wales. It was originally recorded by Dylan Thomas for the BBC five years before I was born. Though it was written as a child’s recollection, if you listen carefully to the English-rendered Welsh sensibilities and observations, you may pick up enough material for a lengthy discussion on the after-effects of forced colonization and culture destruction.
Before the European-style Christmas as it has been practised in our own lifetimes, there were other festivals and rituals that occurred at approximately the same time of year, give or take a few days or weeks according to the solar or lunar calculation of time of the culture involved. Indeed, in some cultures December 24th was simply another day to experience.
In my life thus far, it has been several times the case that the stars aligned in such a way on this holiday, as to resemble the plot of an episode of the Twilight Zone or One Step Beyond. Two decades after Dylan Thomas recorded his masterpiece was one example. This Christmas of 2019 was another.
Back in the early Seventies, my family had moved from Texas and were settled into a rental on Kilmer Road in Lynn Valley. I was in Grade 10 and my youngest sister was in Grade 4. Our elder sister had made the journey with us but departed for University in Texas a few months later, after attaining legal adult age. I missed her much more than I had expected to. A few months after her departure, Christmas was upon us.
A day or so before Christmas, my mother and I decided to go to London Drugs and pick up a few last minute holiday items. Left at home were my father, my young sister and the family dog, Saki, an attack Malamute my father had caused to be trained by army trainers at a facility in Sugarland, Texas a few years before we moved. He claimed at the time that his workplace was being robbed several times a week. I confirmed this through one of his co-workers to be the case.
That his other activities necessitated protection was evident to me even though I was never given any details. It was the company he kept, the people he brought home, the trips he took and the quality and quantity of the hashish he had access to. There was also a surveillance team in an upstairs apartment across from our apartment’s front door. My father told me to wave at them, when he first pointed them out. Nothing was explained and I never knew if they were watching him and gathering evidence or if they were watching the people he ran with. If he was in fact working undercover, he became the character he was portraying par excellence. I found a Louisiana State Police Special Agent badge in a safety deposit box in Vancouver’s Chinatown after he died with no will, thus it is a working hypothesis. The fact that my own rental was ransacked and that badge was stolen a few weeks later only thickened the plot.
The dog was trained to understand German commands and had three serious modes. Pursue, hold and kill. Sit, stay and heel, rounded out his schooling. The training was done at too early an age, in my opinion and this caused the poor creature to snap randomly, attack the nearest human and then whimper under the kitchen table. Canine PTSD, if you will. I observed the training session once and it broke my heart to see a magnificent animal’s spirit broken down and converted into an adrenaline switch. Prior to the Christmas in question, Saki had lashed out four times. Myself and a neighbour in Houston, a neighbour in Lynn Valley and a neighbour in North Van all had trips to the Emergency Room.
My mother and I wandered the busy aisles at the London Drugs store and gathered up wrapping paper, Scotch tape, Christmas cards, gift candies and cookies and the like. We were gone for perhaps two hours. We pulled into our driveway with a relieved feeling of having accomplished the minimum acceptable commercial expectations of the holiday. Now we were ready.
First to the door was me. It was pitch black inside save for the bluish light of the TV struggling to cut through an epic soup of hashish smoke. Oily blue-green waves of Afghani Black hash smoke curled through the open door and lost themselves in the crisp breezes that swayed the cedars which lined the driveway. I imagine that it looked as if the house was on fire to my mother, who was still gathering up our remaining bags from the car.
I could hear Saki, whimpering pathetically in the kitchen but could see nothing through the funk. I flipped on the light switch. It was like turning on one’s high-beams in a heavy fog. My father was seated on our couch in his pyjamas, pipe in hand and my little sister was sitting next to him in her sleeping gown. I opened a window and the smoke began to clear out the door.
As it did, I noticed that my sister was covered in canine puncture wounds and that the blood had already dried. She wasn’t crying and sat quietly, her complexion a ghostly pale. My father looked at me stupidly and mumbled some version of what had occurred. My mother entered about this time and my anger went to a place on the far side of the sun where I had been trained by my father to bury it. My mother was too hysterical to drive when she saw her baby and moments after arriving, we were on the way to Lions Gate Hospital with me at the wheel.
None of the wounds proved to be overly severe and we were eventually sent home with instructions for their care. I found the dog under the kitchen table, still crying. My mother tried to give an ultimatum to my father regarding the animal. The balance of that Christmas escapes my memory as to details of the celebratory portion thereof but I distinctly remember coming in through the front door one afternoon during the school holiday.
I heard a strange whimpering sound, this time coming from the direction of my parent’s bedroom. I didn’t think it was Saki but was unable to imagine what else it could possibly be. I walked slowly down the hall and entered the room, dimly lit by the Winter afternoon overcast. I saw my father sitting on the edge of his bed, a 38 pistol in hand and his fists jammed into his eyes. I had never seen him cry and had been trained by him not to cry myself while he beat me as a small boy.
Sitting next to him, I pulled his gun arm down and removed the pistol. I placed it on the night table and asked him what was wrong. In a voice, I had never been privy to, he recounted how he had just moments ago returned from taking Saki up Mountain Highway, walking him out into the bush and shooting him in the head. I comforted him as best I could and told him that had he not done something, I would have. I can never forget that Christmas, for his eyes when washed with tears, betrayed a human I had never been allowed a glimpse of.
Over the years of raising our child, my wife and I slowly diminished the amount of decorations we used at Christmas and used the money we saved for the feast. Eventually the tree was replaced with only a homemade wreath. At one family Christmas gathering at our place, we took turns reading from Shakespeare and Robert Service in various accents and danced in the living room.
Another time, at a Yuletide gathering held at my younger sister and brother-in-law’s apartment, we were serenaded by my youngest son and his guitar. I looked around the room at my nephews and the current spouses of my kin and a kaleidoscopic parade of all the ever-changing faces from my memories started like a newsreel in my head.
My mother began to recount a humorous story from a Christmas past, in Houston, Texas, that happened during the time of the attack Malamute and the surveillance post. The room began to swim as if I was on a merry-go-round. I became intensely upset and my state of being was the epitome of fight or flight. It wasn’t the story in itself but rather the innocent turning back of the dial to a time of total angst.
I chose flight and departed for home soon after with my wife and sons, muttering and cursing through the heavy fog. It took several days to settle down internally and I wrote copious letters to my family in an attempt to communicate that Christmas held too many negative triggers for me and that I was fine to celebrate it with my own wife and offspring but was getting too old to endure the emotions that were likely to be stirred up when I was in a family setting with my mother, step-fathers and sisters.
Christmas was changing countries, changing schools, moving away from friends, enduring a drunken Canadian stranger my father invited over and gave my bed to, having awkward audiences with temporary step-siblings, visiting an ER, cramming French to avoid repeating a grade in school, writing out Christmas cards in lonely basement suites to people who never wrote back, working two full time jobs in order to buy presents for children, working overtime delivering metric tons of mail, missing my eldest son each year due to the custody arrangements in place after a nasty divorce.
Christmas was getting an acoustic guitar one year in the early Sixties, building a balsa wood scale model Mitsubishi Zero, being invited to spend time with a high school chum and his teen-age wife at their fish and chip trailer in Lynn Canyon, unwrapping a cherished book, eating marzipan and pfeffernusse, drinking good coffee laced with good whisky. It was walking through cedars in the snow smoking Drum tobacco. It was watching my young sons playing with their toys and eating my wife’s delicious food.
Forty-seven years had now passed since the Christmas of Saki. 2019 was going to be a special one because my wife and I were going to have our son and his girl friend over for a few days and we were also going to see my eldest son and his fiancée down in Vancouver after four long years.
We went to pick up our son, Miggy and his new girlfriend, Aileen to bring them to Lillooet for Christmas dinner. Daniel, my eldest son and his fiancee, Rebecca had just bought a condo apt. a few days prior in Richmond and we met them there for a tour of the place before walking to a nearby restaurant for an exquisite Chinese feast for the six of us.
On our way home, on Christmas Eve, around 8:45 pm, my Suzuki went over black ice on Izman Curve, about thirty minutes from home. The SUV slid off the road on the mountain side, went into a shallow ditch, laid gently on its passenger side and slid about ten feet. There were a few moments of total disorientation as the only doors accessible were now overhead and swathed in side airbag curtains. We managed to get out into the frosty night and check each other for wounds. There was no blood and only one small cargo space window had been broken. There were some bruises all around due to the airbag explosions.
I carry extra blankets and parkas and we had a gift basket of food delicacies as well as water. That patch of road has no cell phone coverage but the young folk's cell-phones made good flashlights. As I tried to get everyone bundled against the cold on the tailgate and decide on the best course to take, a lonely car with two Lillooet men passed by and stopped. The very kind driver offered to try for a tow truck when he reached Lillooet and agreed to take my loved ones to our trailer while I waited with the car. If a tow could not be found, he promised to come back for me. I later learned that he took everyone to Lillooet hospital to be checked for any injuries or concussions. I never got his name during our chaotic meeting but learned that he lived not far from my place. God bless him.
Awhile later another car stopped and the driver let me sit in his car to warm up. God bless him. Then he took some pictures of the Suzuki for me and offered to go home and get his own truck and a chain so we could try to right my car. I declined the offer because of the promise I'd already made to wait at the scene. He left and I paced back and forth in the night wind, measuring the distance of the skid and feeling the fine compact sand that had jelled on the roadway.
This was the first time in all my dozens of transits of that hairpin that I realized there was a creek flowing down the mountain right at the kink of the curve. I suddenly thought of bears and coyotes and began to gather the scattered cookies and candies out of the ditch where they decorated the snowy rocks along with my music CDs. A fire truck, an ambulance and a police cruiser soon arrived from Lytton, twenty minutes to the South.
The cop spoke to me, “Have you been drinking tonight?”
“No, Sir.”
“Well, I sure smell something on your breath.”
“Dude, we just had a ten course Chinese feast in Richmond about four hours ago and one of the dishes was a big old lobster smothered in chopped garlic and chilies. I ate a whole claw.”
The ambulance guy checked me for concussion and left. The fire truck left after ascertaining that there was no danger of fire apparent. I sat in the back seat of the police cruiser while we waited for the hoped for tow-truck. I overheard one of the firemen telling a colleague that there was an easy ten thousand dollars of damage to the intrepid Suzi as they walked toward their unit.
The constable and I had a very good conversation about life, police work and coping with the stresses involved. My son Daniel, a relatively new Corrections Officer had just told me about a very bad day at work when he had been unable to save a young inmate from hanging himself. The desperate inmate expired in his arms. After some time off for therapy, Dan returned to work and was confronted with another fresh young corpse, bled out on a cell floor moments before starting his “ease back into work” shift. The Lytton constable told me that some people can handle that life and some cannot. He assured me that my son will figure out whether or not to pursue the course he’s on.
Over thirty years ago, I told him, I had to choose between being a letter-carrier for Canada Post or a Vancouver City Policeman. I chose letter-carrier and yet I saw many strange, disturbing and violent things during my thirty years beating the streets.
After some time, a tow-truck appeared like a ship through the gloom. As it turned out, the operator lived two blocks from me, although we'd never met prior. He was an expert and had the Grand Vitara righted, loaded and secured on the flat-bed within thirty minutes. I tried to express my gratitude to him for his kindness, expertise and good company. We talked about dogs and wives and tobacco as we wound our way homeward dragging my vanquished steed. The good policeman headed South into the night.
The tow driver dropped me at home and let me clear most of the stuff out of the Suzuki before taking the vehicle to his storage yard. God bless him. I joined my loved ones inside the warm trailer and asked about their conditions. Everyone was OK and in their pyjamas and there was a big plate of dinner for me which I ate with the gusto of a wolf.
ICBC was contacted that night around 1 AM to report the accident and in that conversation, I realized that it had been more than forty years since I had made a similar call. The true Christmas miracle of no one being hurt started to sink in by this time and took precedence over all other considerations on the topic.
Next morning, I phoned the tow business owner and he told me he would be away until the holidays were over. He said he would have the broken window taped up by his operator and that I could retrieve the vehicle on the second day of the New Year. He was a kind man and waived the storage fees that would be incurred over those nine days. God bless him.
My wife prepared a beautiful dinner on Christmas Day with hot German potato salad, which is a concoction of potatoes, apple vinegar, bacon, mustard and spices. There was fall-off-the-bone turkey and a big old pan of Southern cornbread stuffing. Served by her with a pot of four peppercorn gravy. God bless her. We watched a humorous kung fu video after dinner and played Scrabble with the young couple. Miggy and Aileen were stranded but managed to arrange a set of bus tickets from Whistler to Vancouver. My wife phoned a friend and the lady offered the use of her husband’s new Ford 150 Crew Cab pick-up truck to drop the young ones off at Whistler. God bless them both.
The morning of our departure we awoke to powder snow and a gorgeous blue sky day. A colour the St’at’imx call kwazkwaz. We had a good breakfast and coffee and set out. The truck was black, massive and accessorized with high-tech knobs and dials that I could only guess at the function of. I knew I had to "get back on the bike" after the accident, so I grit my teeth while my friend showed me how to work the key-less entry. We bid him farewell and drove to the Lightfoot Gas Station as the truck only had a quarter tank of fuel. I pumped a hundred dollars into it and it was still a quarter shy of being full.
We had a magical journey through the most beautiful country you've ever seen. The clear water of Cayoosh Creek flowed under crystal sheets of ice. The trees were festooned with powder snow and appended with icicles. Just like the expensive Christmas cards one gets from an Uncle and Auntie that never visit, write nor phone.
We arrived at the Whistler bus depot where Miggy and Aileen decided to take a room for the night and use their bus tickets in the morning. I hugged them and headed home, so I could arrive before dark. I stopped in Pemberton to read the truck owners manual as to how the headlights worked on that Ford, in case I needed them without accidentally leaving them on after dropping it off at my friend’s house. Inside the gas station, I bought some tobacco, a coffee and noticed a very great tee-shirt. It depicted an SUV firmly lodged between two impossibly steep peaks. The caption read, “Confidence is a feeling you have before you fully understand the situation.” I put it on and drove the final leg of my journey, and although I had been grinding my teeth a bit, I was starting to feel somewhat better overall.
When all the dangerous curves, inclines, drop-offs and the spot where my father’s corpse had been found forty-one years ago by a hiker, had all been traversed, I saw Lightfoot Gas looming into view and decided as a courtesy to go ahead and fill the tank right up. It took sixty dollars more and I nearly felt violated. It was like watching one of my wife’s nephews eat dinner. I climbed aboard and set off on the remaining four kilometres that stood between me and my hearth. After about fifty yards, I saw articles of women’s clothing scattered all over the highway. Sad shoes, muddy pants, manic underwear, twisted socks and battered shirts.
In my time on Vancouver streets as a mailman, a sight like this was usually an indication of a pedestrian struck by a vehicle and subsequently having their clothes cut off by paramedics, so I was expecting a scenario along those lines. Another hundred yards or so ahead I saw the figure of a very large, relatively young, totally naked First Nations woman kneeling on the asphalt in my lane. It was a posture of supplication with arms and palms up to the sides, which connoted the seeking of help, either from God, the Great Spirit or mortal man. The temperature was minus 3 Celsius. It was growing twilight and the breeze was picking up.
I drove slowly closer, stopped and rolled my window down to ask if she was hurt, injured or in need of assistance. She stared at me, sprang to her feet and clapped two strong hands on the hood of the truck and began ranting a pain fuelled, hate-filled diatribe and implored me to “finish it.” There was no alcohol slur to her speech, nor goose-bumps on her skin, so I knew she was either under the influence of drugs other than ethanol or just having a psychotic episode.
I slowly backed away and she ran up to pound on the vehicle’s hood, screaming like a Greek Fury. I tried to go around her and she nimbly, blocked me with her body. I backed through a shallow ditch into a small trailer park and accelerated far enough away that she didn’t follow. I looked skyward myself and said, “Dude, are you serious?”
The lady returned to her original position in Highway 99. God bless her. I watched her and thought about the ghosts of all of Canada’s missing Indigenous women. I thought about the many predatory people silently nourishing dark secrets of foul deeds. I thought about a speech I had recently heard by a Swedish Sami minority woman warning that the mining operations being conducted in her traditional lands were disrupting the reindeer herds, the major food source of her people. I thought about the Hopi Prophecy which describes human existence as a cycle of peace and plenty that degrades into imbalance, chaos, madness and want due to the avarice of man, ending in the widespread destruction of most life for a time until the next cycle begins with a better balanced set of humans.
As I sat pondering these things, I saw a clutch of three vehicles coming off the Duffy Lake Road behind me. Those cars and trucks simply went around the woman in the road, as if she were an inanimate object that had fallen off the back of a truck. I decided to try again, so strong was my desire to reach home, send help and return my friend’s truck.
As soon as the lady on the road saw my truck move, she was on her feet like a cat with eyes that swallowed the remaining light of dusk. We wound up in the same Mexican standoff as before. This time she verbalized more pain and hate than before and ripped the long chrome rock deflector off the hood with her bare hands, bent it and tossed it onto the highway. I began a slow retreat and she ran up, braced her palms on the hood and screamed at me again to “finish it.”
Next, she came around to the driver's door. I wasn't familiar with the door lock and there were many buttons to choose from. I did not want my friend's new vehicle to suffer further damage, I did not want the lady to get injured and I did not want to be in a collision with another vehicle. Mostly I kept my eyes on her face a few inches beyond the glass and her hands as she yanked on the door handle. Her expression resembled that of a triumphant otter when it has successfully ripped the claws off a crab. When she was well off to the side of the vehicle and well behind the side-view mirror, I gambled and accelerated enough to break her sweaty grasp on the door-latch.
At the St'at'imx Tribal Police Office, I reported the shit-show on Highway 99. As I spoke to the lady dispatcher, we could hear on the radio that the RCMP were on the scene. Blood-chilling screams and heart-wrenching wails of human pain, frustration and anger poured through the speakers. I spoke to a lady cop on the radio as she tried to contain the volatile situation. God bless her. I returned to look for the piece of chrome in the failing light to no avail. Next, I returned the truck to my friend’s house and walked to his workplace to tell him and his wife the strange tale.
They took the news as well as I could have hoped for and I told them that I would pay for the repair or the deductible, whichever way they wanted to go. As I walked home, I remembered that I almost never, ever borrow or lend anything as a matter of principal. After reminding my wife of this when I reached home, I ate a pound of meat, a bucket of cornbread stuffing, a pot full of gravy, a jar of black-currant jam that had survived the crash and washed it down with a very strong three grain double distilled Belgian beer. God bless those moon-shining monks over there.
Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke coloured snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other trailers in our park and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the lamp off, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
I dreamt of saving a duck that had been cruelly wrapped in cellophane and tossed in a garbage heap to suffocate. I unwrapped it and brought it home to Nisa, whereupon it recovered and thrived. I awoke soaked in sweat and decided to check my e-mail. The fellow who had taken the pictures of my vanquished Suzuki on Christmas Eve never did send them.
The weather began to grow double digit cold a few days after a six hour power outage. My intrepid cat, Dusty Bones woke me up at three am one morning just as our water pipes were beginning to freeze. God bless him. I then remembered a friend telling me to leave the water running when the cold snaps come. I did so and after about thirty minutes there was a gurgling hammering sound and she began to flow.
As the policeman on the highway the night of the crash said when he drove off, "You got the best Christmas present of all. You got to walk away." And so I did, safe in the hollow of Her Big Bosom.
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