There is a restaurant in North Vancouver called the Tomahawk Barbecue. I think it has been around since the 1940's and one may still find it there today. It was one of the first places my father took me to after we moved to Canada. The other one was The Only Seafood House on Hastings Street in downtown Vancouver. He remembered them from his old merchant sailor days and likely had frequented them when on shore leave from the ship terminals. The Tomahawk was the last place I ever had a meal with my father and that occasion was the last time I ever heard him laugh or saw him smile.
It was a smallish place with a quaint stone front and a warm, cozy interior. There was lots of cedar and a log-cabin style architecture dominated the inside. There was a stone fireplace and a little koi pond. The ceiling and walls were festooned with a prodigious collection of First Nations artifacts. Carvings, totems, war bonnets, pipes, pots and many other items easily held your attention while you sipped one of the best cups of coffee to be had on that side of Burrard Inlet.
There was a bar with stools and a few snug booths as well as several small tables. The paper place mats depicted a comical map of Canada. It was from those mats that I first got the physical lay of my new land and the psychological programming of the popular stereotyping of the different provinces, cities and ethnic groups in Canada.
The hamburgers were all named for authentic Indian Chiefs that had befriended or had traded with the founder of the restaurant. The pièce de la résistance was an item called the Yukon Breakfast. A venerable plate that could have inspired a poem by Robert Service or a novel by Jack London, had either of those men chanced upon it in their day. I had read both authors as a boy and my imagination was running through the spruce when I first spied that menu item back in 1969.
Just below the description of the meal, a bit of small print caught my eagle eye. It was a challenge, and to a boy like myself, it was a challenge that I intended to meet. That plate was the most expensive and the most expansive on the menu and the proprietor promised any man who could finish it, that he would waive the fee. I smiled inwardly, having been long accused of having both tape worms and a hollow leg by my grandfather. I figured this was going to be my lucky day, so I asked my father if I could give it a go and he answered in the affirmative.
The waitress returned a few minutes later with his meal and another ten minutes later with mine. I sat regarding a platter the size of a truck hub-cap before me. I wore the same look I would wear many years later when negotiating the last few hundred feet of the ascent of the West Lion. First, I just admired the beauty of the mountain. Then I looked at the rock I had to climb.
On an oven-warmed ceramic platter had been placed four big squares of Texas Toast dripping with real butter. On top of that base and completely covering it was a matrix of perfectly caramelized pan-fried hash-browns. The next ply was one of protein in the form of thick sliced Canadian back bacon, the number of pieces which was dictated by how many it happened to take to completely cover those potatoes.
Lying atop this platform of delectable pork protein was a roof made of jumbo eggs, done over easy, so that four of them hid the back bacon entirely. I had my coffee re-filled, doused the eggs with Tabasco and put a moat of Worcestershire around the rim of the plate, crossed it with maple syrup and put several strategic dabs of marmalade around the middle, in case the going got rough. After dusting her down with salt and pepper, I attacked.
The toast was what thwarted me on that day. I absolutely couldn't put that last piece down and I have never been too fond of breads in the first place. It was the protein I was insatiable for. My father was a gentleman about my failure and kept his remarks in the realm of respect for my having done my best. I vowed to try again and again, until I could accomplish the Lumberjack rite of passage. I remember that occasion as being the first time I ever realized that perhaps not everything is bigger in Texas.
Years went by and my folks split up. I kept in loose touch with my estranged father. He eventually had a girlfriend, whom he claimed was the daughter of an old shipmate of his. She was near my own age and he said he had found her on the downtown east-side streets where she turned tricks for drug money. He claimed he was working hard to get her clean and eventually did find her some employment as a waitress on Lonsdale Avenue across from the Burrard Dry-docks and Shipyards at The Mayflower Café. They lived together with a cat named Shiva in a succession of basement suites and I used to visit once in a while and play my guitar for them.
One Sunday morning my father phoned me and asked me to accompany them to the Tomahawk for breakfast. I was seventeen and hadn't eaten breakfast there since I was twelve. Remembering my failed attempt at the Yukon, I knew that this time I could pull it off. I walked to their place and we drove over to the restaurant. It was a lovely, sunny day and the eating house was packed to the rafters.
Tourists, families and old North Shore hands of every stripe filled every available perch. All during the drive over, my father and I had been talking up the place to his girl and she was excited to see what a real lumberjack breakfast looked like. I assured my father that he had definitely just saved some money because I was bigger and hungrier than I ever had been before.
He grinned and said, “We'll see.”
After joking around outside waiting our turn, we were seated at a table right square in the middle of the dining area. We were all decked out in our best jeans and shirts and I had never seen the poor girl looking healthier or happier than on that day. She had gained enough weight to begin to look nourished and colour was coming back into her skin with the returning strength of her youth. Her hair was clean, nicely brushed and she smelled as good as a cottonwood bud. She laughed a lot, but now it was a ladylike laugh and the sarcastic edges were dissipating.
I immediately checked the menu to see if the deal was still in effect for a free Yukon Breakfast to anyone who could put one down. It was! I got ready to put on a show for my father and the girl. It had been almost six years since I'd first tangled with the Yukonator. This time, yours truly was determined to win. I even contemplated having some apple pie afterwards since the meal was surely going to be free. I set to eating like a she wolf after nursing ninety-nine pups.
We were all having the best time that any of us had had in a very long while and our happiness spread throughout the joint. Soon, other people were offering jokes and encouragement to me to get my job done. In good time, to borrow a metaphor from baseball, I was rounding third and heading for home. Learning from my past mistakes, I had cleverly eaten the Texas toast first and rendered it down with several cups of coffee. The hash-browns were as easy to eat as air is to breathe. The back bacon and the eggs were taken alternately. In that way, each served as a reward for the other, to my overwhelmed palate.
An egg and a half, plus the corresponding bacon away from a clean plate, two feet shot into my lap, nearly knocking the stuffing out of me. Three coffee mugs flew onto the floor and the water glasses tipped over, emptied and rolled to join them in pieces. My plate levitated but came down again intact with a solid thud. Directly across from me I could see that the girl was perfectly horizontal and stiff as a two by six. Her neck rested on her own chair back, which listed at a critical angle.
My father told me in a clear, soft voice to grab her wayward shoes and take hold of her ankles. As I gathered her footwear and gripped her legs, he dropped a wad of cash on the table, pocketed a bottle of Tabasco sauce and got a hold under her slim shoulders. We wove our way through a sea of horrified Sunday morning diners. Like a crack first response team, we trudged out to the small parking lot.
As I was tried to form the words to ask what in the precious hell had just happened, my father told me to put her feet down and lean her against the car. He reached inside his car and pulled out a bottle of water and a small bottle of Valium pills. He poured a bunch of the pills into his hand and worked open her mouth. The gal swallowed them like a goldfish gulping cornmeal and as I stood watching, her seizure melted right before my eyes. She apologized and with perfect, lucid control of her faculties, got into the car and explained to me what it's like trying to break through that kind of addiction.
When my mother re-married, her and her new husband happened to rent a house directly across the street from the Tomahawk. My father had moved to another town and I never saw him again. When I was twenty years old and newly married to a gal fro the USA, my young wife and I occupied a spare bedroom in that rental. My wife got her first Canadian job as a waitress at the Tomahawk and a few months later at the Mayflower Café on Lonsdale. She never met my father and I never told her the story of those two establishments. Four months after our wedding, my father was dead.
Many decades later I was waiting for my Suzuki to be serviced a few blocks away from the old Tomahawk. I was in my fifties then and hadn't been inside the place for over thirty years. Something drew me over that direction. I had a smoke in the parking lot and regarded the old house I'd lived in when I'd gotten married the first time. I went in the restaurant and noticed how much smaller everything seemed. I smiled when I saw that the place mats were the same and that the Yukon was still on the menu.
Only two things were different. The prices would have raised the eyebrows of a corporate attorney and the free Yukon challenge was gone. I decided to do what had to be done, regardless. When my plate came, I saw that a third thing had changed. The dimensions of the legendary meal had dwindled to a point whereupon it no longer deserved to carry the name it bore. I scarfed it up with only two cups of coffee as solvent. Most letter-carriers I know would have needed two of those plates just to make it through to lunch in a stable mood. It didn't really bother me though, and as I paid the bill remembering that bottle of Tabasco my father had palmed, I figured we were all square now.
fin