Sympathy for the devil and to hell with the holy mob

This entry was originally published in the February 2011 edition of Off Centre magazine

"Do you mind if I as a tourist question?"

Cause we've already bought a lottery ticket, a newspaper, some snacks. Mostly I want to ask a question. They don't mind.

"Where's Grant Hadwin's house?"

I already know. Just up the hill from this wee general store. We just drove by the place. The description in John Vaillant's splendid book The Golden Spruce leaves little doubt.

"...the most imposing structure in Gold Bridge," he called the house that Grant built. "...three stories tall and made enitrely of hand-hewn logs... the capstone on the oversized river rock chimney is a mattress shaped slab of granite weighing more than four tons; the front steps, too, are a thing of massive beauty: chiselled from a single log set on an angle, the grain flows from risers to treads like a waterfall."

Hard to mistake. But I want confirmation. She points. Just up the hill.

"So what do you guys think?" I ask the store girls. "About Hadwin."

"Oh. I don't think he's dead. There's no way. He was such a, you know, outdoorsman."

Not what I meant. Of course he's fucking dead.

"Yeah but what do you think about what he did?"

What he did, of course, was cut down a genetically mutated tree. A tree which also happened to be a sacred symbol and a lot else as well, including a pretty damn good tourist attraction and an even better corporate PR prop.

The reaction to this is less definitive.

"Well I don't know if he should have done what he did, but, well, Grant was Grant, and..."

Here I have to interrupt.

"Did you know him?"

'Cause it would have been rather cool to have done.

"Oh, yeah." Like, of course.

Details followed. His wife and kids were mentioned. First names. And Grant. Well, Grant was Grant.

We made it to Gold Bridge on our second attempt. The first scuttled by the inclusion of my mother in the expedition.

They hang their roads where they have to hereabouts, which mostly means they hang 'em high. To high for dear old Mom. Too straight down. Down to a damn busy river, in this case, that fills the distant bottom. And you're hanging there with way more nowhere than you'll ever have to handle disappearing in every direction. The untrod Misty Mountains cold that are the Coast Range. And a little road, gravel mostly. Permanent like a footpath through the snow. Constant rockfall cleared endlessly.

Anyway; vertigo, nausea, panic, etc. So, of course we turned around. Back too Lillooet.

My parents booked it out of the Okanagan in mid-retirement a few years ago and embraced this smaller, quieter, cheaper, boringer neck of the woods. A great place to visit.

The next time we do, we pack up Dad, who's 80 and afraid of exactly nothing. He's made a habit of doing everything a little late in life. Marriage; turning on, tuning in and dropping out; dropping back in; and, yes, mid-retirement.

So we make Gold Bridge with Dad. And, yeah, the lottery ticket was his idea. He's set enough, in a humble way, but he hasn't reached the point where he wouldn't find something to do with filthy fucking rich.

Me, I've reached this point. Standing in this wildly growing, living, dying landscape that is so vividly made alive in Vaillant's book. Standing here aware of how this ecosystem could make you, I and all our traces less than memories in less time than I've been alive. And finding myself tipping my hat to Grant-was-Grant. Who could stand here, of all places, and understand that the smart money's always on the smart money. And, yes Bob, the dogs are barking and what's done is done. Don't matter how many buffalo you can see for now.

Hadwin had been in the logging industry all his working life, a timber cruiser, a logging road engineer. He'd almost literally paved the way for much of what he later came to see as the utterly careless destruction of B.C.'s forests by logging interests. So he walked out on a successful career and devoted much of his subsequent energy to agitating for forestry conservation.. Yes, he walked back to that career briefly, but not without taking the agitation with him. And, yes, all the while he was undeniably struggling with mental illness.

All of which eventually brought him (and his chainsaw) in 1997 to what's now known as Graham Island in Haida Gwaii and to the base of the Golden Spruce which had been standing there for 300 years or so. The strangely, and by all accounts profoundly beautifully colored tree figured importantly in the mythology of the Haida people who continue to call the area home. In recent decades it had also become a popular attraction for later arrivals to the region and for tourists from all over the world. Especially after MacMillan Bloedel, who owned the tirmber rights to the area at the time, put in a footpath and a bench. Now it was an easy jaunt from tour bus to comfortable viewing of this wonder of nature located just across the river from the ammenities.

The bitter irony, of course, was that the real wonder of nature, the splendid forest comprising the rest of that particular tree farm licence, had been logged by Mac Blo with such enthusiasm that, as Vaillant puts it, "...the golden spruce was one of the few mature sitka spruce trees still standing at the north end of the Yakoun River."

Which, it seems, was too much for Hadwin. The theme-parking of this one tree, conserved in a little "set-aside" surrounded by what he saw as the devestation caused by irresponsible logging practices made him crazy. Um, crazier. 'Cause let's face it. Whatever else he was, Hadwin was clearly a bit cracked. Which is too bad. Because the 'bit cracked' bit is a cheap distraction. The same one that's made it just as easy for such wayward but devoted souls as Timothy Treadwell and Chris McCandless to be efortlessly written off by mediocre lardasses incapable of a fraction of what they accomplished.

Hadwin, in addition to cracked, was an intelligent, caring, and hard-working man who had demonstrated at considerable cost to himself, a passionate commitment to preserving, not destroying, trees, and the forests that you'll see them in. Vaillant partially reprints a newspaper article from shortly after the tree came down in which Hadwin makes the following plea regarding the Haida people he had so greviously offended.

"They should see a person who is normally very respectful of life and has done a very disrespectful thing and ask why."

"But this," Vaillant acknowledges, "was asking too much."

Yep. Of everybody. The worldwide outcry following the act was heartfelt mostly, hysterical sometimes, ridiculous in a few cases. The response from the Haida community was one of absolute bafflement, trauma, heartbreak and terrible, sometimes vengeful, rage.

What the responses, almost without exception, had in common was their unconditional condemnation of Hadwin and what he'd down. Nobody really asked why. If they did, they never got past the cheap shot. A bit cracked.

So his protest was wasted. He made no statement, he just made a fucking mess.

What did he expect? More. And I don't blame him.

I doubt he was naive enough to expect to be celebrated but he did, apparently, hope people would take a moment to speculate about his motivation.

They didn't, so now I have a question of my own. Why not?

I'll tell ya. They never do when there's a colorful enough bandwagon rolling by. When there's a shiny enough distraction. Dangerous, that. Get you into wars and stuff.

I'm trying to stay away from the obvious cliche 'cause I usually like to pay a little more for mine, but how the hell do so many people get in such an uproar about one tree when they didn't have a damn word to say about the rest of the forest? Even many who participated in and profited from, the levelling of pretty much every other tree in the area - including many Haida - managed to get their ginch in a knot over this single, albeit oddly colored, tree.

Not that everyone who bitched about Hadwin knocking over the golden spruce was silent during the wholesale destruction of so much of this province's forestry heritage. Or have lapsed back into silence now that the mass outrage over the tree that mattered has died down. Just most of them.

Here's Vaillant one more time. "Hadwin had cut down what may be the only tree on the continent capable of uniting Natives, loggers and environmentalists not to mention scientists, foresters and ordinary citizens in sorrow and outrage."

Sounds pretty unanimous.

Actually, it sounds pretty fucking ridiculous.

I'm not going to offer the opinion that Grant Hadwin did a good thing when he cut down that tree, though I'm not convinced he didn't. But to the Natives, loggers, environmentalists, scientists, foresters and ordinary citizens: you did worse. Again.

You guys are depressing.

Out of Iowa: on the bus

When a winter wind sets to blowing across Iowa there isn't a lot to stop it or even slow it down. Just me, it seemed. Three days before Christmas, 1985. As I stood there with a hangover and my thumb out. Going home.

Going nowhere, though. Nobody had the slightest interest in stopping for me. Back then, I blamed 'em. Not in anger, sadly. The rejectioned deepened my lonliness, homesickness. Made the distance too painfully apparent. Half a continent. The thousands of cold miles between me and where I wanted to be.

So I said fuck it. Walked back into town and found the Greyhound depot.

To Vernon. In British Columbia, I told the girl.

She thought I wanted to go to South America. Y'know, Colombia. British Honduras sort of idea. Nope. Someplace really exotic. Canada. Which exists, we determined. After a bit of a search.

A hundred and fifty bucks. Three days on the bus. Now, $150 was what I had, pretty much to the dime. That's why I'd set out to hitchhike. Cause it's a damn long trip and I might decide I'd like to eat something, somewhere along the way. But, baby, it was cold outside. And you can't starve to death in three days. So into a nice warm bus and try to find a seat.

I say try cause it was three days before Christmas and I wasn't the only one going home. So, apparently, was most of the U.S. army, navy and air force. So I squished in with those guys.

All guys, back then, really dumb ones. Talking loud, laughing stupid and throwing shit around the bus like kids on a field trip. This was still the cold war (which I kind of miss) and these young fellows had never heard of terrorists. Nope, they said things like 'kill a commie for your mommy'. No, they really did. That's a quote.

The only person on the bus other than me, at that point, who wasn't a soldier was about as opposite as he could be. I'd call him a beatnik except those didn't exist anymore, even in 1985. He had longish hair, a turleneck and one of those ridiculous berets that artists wear in cartoons.

He was reading War and Peace, probably because he felt he should. Not that there's anything wrong with that sort of motivation. That's pretty much why I picked it up for the first time. Ain't why I couldn't put it down though. Oh, those Russsians. Rah, rah.

I remember that guy so vividly after a quarter of a century because he was such a contrast to the rest of the gang. For all that his uniform was just as precise. He kept his nose stuffed in his book and my impression was that he was so full of indignation at the multi-faceted wrongness of the rest of the boys on the bus that he could barely contain his skinny-ass little self but had the good sense to realize it'd be a really good idea. Prob'ly just my imagination though. Guess he's doin' something, somewhere theses days. Big old world.

So, tired, hungover to start with and sitting bolt upright as we bombed north into Minnesota. At each stop soldiers got off and a roughly equal number of identical ones got on. Yes, yes, I know they weren't identical. I know there are nuances. I know they were individuals. Seriously, though, you'd never fucking know it.

One of those stop and shuffle things where we got off briefly to get a little dark, cold great plains air and deisel exhaust (heady mixture) and then got back, sometimes onto a different bus. I found myself sitting next to an old man to whom I said nothing the rest of the way up to Minneapolis and don't forget St. Paul. At which point he said something to me, which was: "when was the last time you had something to eat?"

It had been a while, by this point, and the next time was another while out in front. So. "Let's go get you some dinner."

A big, full, hot meal in the crappy Greyhound restaurant, which are measurably less crappy in a big city like the twins.

I'm comforted knowing that gent didn't do it for the eloquence of my gratitude cause I was an exhausted, strung out, ravenous 20-year-old, and there was none. He's no doubt long gone by now, and, of course, there's no reward. But I haven't forgotten.

Minneapolis/St. Paul was the big layover of the whole trip. Measured in hours, maybe a large chunk of the unlit part of a winter day. There was stuff to do if you had money, like the soldiers. I didn't, so I watched them do stuff. In the bus depot and out on the sidewalks, lined with bars.

Finally back on. And on, and on. The rest, most of the ride, was a blur. Cause nothing changed. Until we hit Tacoma, the last town anyone's ever heard of. And so damn close to home. The town where almost all the soldiers got off and almost none got on. The town where I got two seats to my self and stretched out and really went to sleep.

No one's ever heard of Wenatchee. The site of my last bus transfer. That's where I woke up. In the quiet dark. Too late.

The bus driver was just gathering his shit and heading off to wherever they go at this point. Home, at one end of the line, I guess. Some Motel 6, or such, if not. Anyway, up I sprung, jabbering questions. With some naive Canadian expectation of being taken care of, I suppose. What I got, instead, was the door to the side of the road.

A much warmer road, I'll grant you, on the right side of the Rockies, than the one out of Osage. But, man, the unfairness. Now just a couple hundred miles from home. And having endured every fucking hardship that was in the story I signed on for. Broke. Starved. Still in the fucking States.

I found my way to the highway through the Christmas Eve darkness and stuck out my thumb.

All through the night... flyin'

Goin' through Winnemucca, bud. Through, through, through. Goin' to California. Open. Up. Your. Gol-den Gate... the way Tom Waits sings it in his Kerouac song. But that's tomorrow morning. Even Winnemucca is the middle of the night.

The sun's going down over Great Salt Lake and I'm about to undertake the single most glorious epic haul of my road trip career. Across, hands down, my least favorite state.

I haven't been everywhere, man, but I've driven over massive amounts of those United States of theirs. Half of them, so far, and for all but Hawaii I've driven myself there. Myself and whoever I was lucky enough to have along. In a few cases I've just bombed through a corner of a chunk but the ones I love I've criss-crossed and crosshatched and just generally buzzed all over.

California, I've pretty much cut to ribbons.

Texas, less conclusive strings of silk. Texas, home of the most courteous drivers on the planet. Like I'd know. Way more courteous than Canadians, though, and I've heard that's saying something.

Washington, of course. Six ways to Tuesday. Not sure what that means but it sounds right.

Montana may be the second ugliest and the second most beautiful state in that whole story they've got going on down there. From what I've seen. Which is half of 'em.

Fucking Idaho. Like a little concentrated best of home. My B.C. interior.

Oregon. Off I-5 and down the wretched Rogue River hell road to the ocean. And the dunes. A cool beach of a Sahara right on the Pacific.

Utah. Where you learn that those childhood Wile E. Coyote cartoons weren't inventing any landscapes after all. Down the Virgin River to sleaze pit Vegas. Cathedrals to everything the other churches vilify or at least downplay. Legal brothels like fast food joints with menus posted on the walls outside. No joke. Hit the low note.

But, yep, it was across this very same weird, amoral project called Nevada that time stopped all night on a highway with no one on it and everyone with me asleep. And not much for towns. Or anything else.

Just a beige-grey ocean that included the sky. And a highway that rode it's gentle waves. Windows down. Desert breeze and tumbleweeds. Still warm in the dark, except that we were flyin'.

Our skin still crusted with salt from our unseemly dip in Great Salt Lake. It's pretty much just not done, apparently. By normal people. Lots of them, in Salt Lake City.

"Oh, it's not good for swimming," they'll mutter, if you enquire. Add something about brine flies, maybe, if you push it with the obvious question. Why the hell not? Or just repeat that it ain't no good.

It's great for swimming, actually. Especially if you can't swim. Cause you can't sink in the damn thing. There's so much salt in there that you float like a cork even with your hands and feet stickin' up in the air.

Flyin'. Touch down in Reno for gas. Once again at a barren rest stop in the pre-dawn chill, somewhere in this endless, scrubby desert. Then it ends as the sun truly starts to rise, and we're in California.

It's a perfect blue day, and now we're climbin'. Cause there's always gonna be a mountain range if you want to make the ocean. Sierra Nevadas, then. Up and over. Past Lake Tahoe and down, way down.

The day heating up like the brakes. Now it's lakes and evergreens like home.

Only the brakes cool off as we flatten out around Sacramento. Transition to palm trees as we settle in for the last little pull.

Labor Day Traffic. It's a little more than a week till 9-11, in fact. Last sunny fun in that happier old world.

No idea that's all comin' down though. What's ahead for us is a little beach. We'll pass the Golden Gate Bridge like it's not even there and hit the ocean up towards the 101. Rinse away the Utah salt in the breathless chill of the Pacific.

Then, finally, rest on the sand after one pure haul. Soon. And it'll be welcome, cause now it's really hot. Except that we're flyin'.

Flyin' from the tepid, concentrated little Mormon ocean to the thinner, cooler solution of the fuckin' big Pacific. San Francisco. On the edge of absolutely everything.

The gates of ...

Once you're in, you're in. The lineup, that is. U.S. border crossing. Cars ahead, cars behind. Sometimes even on each side, although we usually aim for the boonyville crossings to get this shit over quick.

Americans fascinate me. And freak me out.

For all the superficial similarities between us up here and them there, I can never escape the impression that the civilization's lacquered on 'em pretty thin. The very institutions that structure their notion of civilization seem to exist only grudgingly. Their courts and their various levels of government in particular seem to perform every function with an unspoken but apologetic preface to the effect that they really have no business exercising any control over any moment of anyone's life.

Until they have your ass. Cause, weirdly, the moment you're out the wrong door of whatever bureaucracy has processed you with an unfortunate result, my take is that you're pounced upon by state and individual citizenry alike in a briefly healing consensus of savagery that presents as something like 'the best we can do for now'. From a watchful populace that worships nothing more fervently than the perfection of endless torture in an endless hell.

They worship many other things, as well. Course they do. They're a worshipful bunch.

Family, for instance. I've watched them pat my kids on the head in their diners and their Wal-Marts and ask them dumb questions that represent an incredibly powerful kind of love practised by dumb people who doubt nothing.

I've seen that these people would kill or die for my children with less hesitation than I would. The same lack of hesitation with which they'd roast the little buggers alive if god, good order and group dynamics required it.

A moment back I used the word 'weirdly' describing the riot that ensues when American people and American institutions transcend their uneasy relationship and get to rip someone to bits together. Well, of course, there's really nothing weird about it.

Not when we're talking about the powerful impulse to violence. And the tension resulting from the attempt to control it. Of, by and for a violent people. And about the release that results when it's suddenly made okay.

I've had my share of encounters with American cops. Highway Patrol, Border Patrol, State Troopers and, of course, the endless variety of municipal cops.

Cause it doesn't matter, down there, if the town was too small to notice that you just blew through it. It's got it's own police force. And it's own football team. And it's very own mythology that some there will take your ass down for if that's what's right. And do it slowly, so it hurts longer.

Oh, and I've never had a bad one. Cop encounter, that is. In fact I've always been treated with a kind of decorous respect that is unfamiliar to me up here where we all just kinda act normal.

And if I sound like I'm scoffing, I'm not. I recognize that this decorum is a small part of a value system they're heir to that means they'll protect me/mine and die doing it if they've gotta. And it sure ain't for the shitty paycheck.

I've had them knock on my window at 2 a.m. with my whole family crashed out in the van at a wide spot in the road, expecting to be sent on my way. Instead, an apology for disturbing my sleep.

Just making sure y'all were okay. Sir.

Made me feel pretty sure we were okay.

But I've never missed that coat o' varnish that was mentioned above. Cause it's down across the eyeballs of every one of them. And I've never missed that the respect and service are not really for me. They're for a codified certitude that transcends absolutely fucking everything, and for which they'd kill me/mine as righteously as they'd kill/die for us, with no measurable change in pulse. At least that's what they'd shoot for. They're human, after all.

So no Americans fascinate me and freak me out quite like American cops. And customs officials are no exception. I've got a disquieting hunch they're paid even less than other kinds of cops. And that it, equally, ain't about the money.

And when you're in, you're in. The lineup.

And Tammy got her lip pierced just before this particular trip. Same day we went down. Salt water, said the piercing chick. About the swelling. Organic sea salt, of course. This being B.C. Bulk.

Just a plastic bag with a few grams of an unidentified white powder somewhere back there in the van. I remembered. As we inched forward, surrounded.

Away from all things gentle and toward the gates of their wooly new Rome.

Hitchin' a ride

I never pick up hitchhikers so where the hell did I get off, on this splendid autumn morning, suddenly deciding to become one?

No problem. Cause I didn't expect anyone to pick me up. I'd agree with them if they didn't. And if anyone did decide to offer me a ride, I'd be happy for them that the chamber came up empty. Cause I'm a good guy. Oh, and Tammy's a good girl. Nobody's gonna get hurt.

We hit Trinity Valley Road a long way from our temporary home on the ski hill. Grubby folk, reeking of campfire smoke.

So. We'd thumb the majority of the 90-K loop.

The guy coming back from fishing let us hop in the back of his truck. The dogs that had been there were moved into the cab. Can't remember why he didn't just put us in the cab, but it wasn't weird at the time. Some practical consideration. He was going all the way to Vernon but had to drop us at the outskirts of Lumby cause now there's cops about and it's illegal to ride in the backs of trucks.

Not so, back in the day. My earliest associations with hitchhiking are from a time when everybody rode in the back, and picking up hitchhikers was mandatory. Mandatory, at least, in the hippy ethos within which I grew up. You didn't leave your brother on the side of the road if it was in your power to take him where he needed to go.

Nope. You jammed him into your crappy old vehicle with your unkempt kids and you journeyed down the road together. Maybe got into a heavy rap. Far out.

Our second ride was a short one. Lumby to Coldstream Ranch.. Not much further than we'd waded through the snow the night before. It was early afternoon by now and downright summerlike for the first of November. The German fellow in the spotless, air-conditioned SUV didn't seem to notice that we smelled like a couple of charred logs. He was full of enthusiastic questions about our route, lighting fires in the snow and wet, coyotes, bears, etc., when he wasn't yakking into the ether in hands-free German.

Then back out in the full sun. Crossing the tracks and pulling the little hill.

I used to pick up hitchhikers cause I thought it was my duty. Stopped doing it when I had kids. And had spent a few years covering court for newspapers.

That's where I learned useful things like what a voir dire was and that there are a lot of violent, psycho hitchhikers out there. To dispute that is simple ignorance. Yes I know most aren't but I'm not talking about those ones, am I?

Kids? Well, they can be hostages to more than fortune. And when you're driving you've kind of got your hands full.

This would certainly be seen as the worst kind of paranoid bad vibes by the dude in the little green pickup who passed us going the other way and actually fucking TURNED AROUND to give us our third ride of the day. Partly because we're all brothers and sisters, I think, and partly because he could see how much we'd love to hear all about his environmentalism.

Which was presented as being of the extremely active variety. He enjoyed dropping lines like: "As I explained to Elisabeth May...". Leaving the impression that they hung out, although I suspect he just tends to be that inevitable annoying guy at those $20-a-plate fundraising luncheons.

He got us out the other side of town, dropped us at the bottom of Silver Star Road and headed back about his business. Having lost about an hour and driven 30 kilometres out of his way.

What is amiss with my gratitude gland that I remember him only with irritation? Nothing, actually. He was really fucking irritating.

Ambling up the gentle slope on the bottom end of Silver Star Road, sweating in the glorious, late-fall afternoon.

Everyone was whipping by us without a glance. Just like I would. The rich yuppies who live in the foothills and the richer ones who have places up top. I applaud them. There is indeed a decent chance I might be the murderous lunatic they think there's a decent chance I might be.

Less so, I think, when I was a young lad scootching over for every shaggy fellow traveller littered along the roadside. There really was a brief time when, corny as it sounds, the way a person looked and dressed could tell you something pretty reliable about his values. And whether or not he was capable of violence. Within the brief heyday of the often imitated, never duplicated authentic hippy culture, that is.

Me, I grew up and realized I'm not a hippy. Indeed, If I may briefly quote good ol' Buck 65: "I ain't got no culture, nothin'/dirty words but that don't count." From his best song no less. Blood of a Young Wolf. Check it out.

Anyway, I like myself like this. Hippies were colorful and weird but, I was there and I can tell you that they were also all pretty similar. No less so than bankers or Rotarians or fundamentalist Christians.

Me I'm just Dennis. Similar to no one I've met. And I don't owe any of them a fucking thing.

Okay, I probably owe some of them money. But I sure don't owe them a ride. Or a heavy rap.

Which is good. Cause I generally have the universe inside my vehicle adjusted about where I want it before I round a bend and see someone standing there with his thumb out.

Still, I wasn't disappointed that the young feller in the little import on his way back from some sort of ski patrol course in Banff was a mellower dude than me. He hauled it over and hauled us up the hill in an agreeable fashion and dropped us at our borrowed door. Grand circle complete.

Now the bathtub, the fireplace and the wine.

long walk in the snow

It was on an odd whim that we set out on an unlikely walk in the snow. Tammy's idea. Let's dump a few things in the daypack and walk to Trinity Valley. Not a hot bath and lounge in front of the fireplace with a large glass of red wine.

We were spending a few months in a luxury condo at Silver Star Resort. One of the occasional weird perks of working on rich people's homes. It was Halloween and we'd just arrived back at the castle after a search and rescue training exercise. Weary and a little chilled.

Trinity Valley is our real home. A spottily inhabited gravel road through rolling, forested hills. Cut by creeks and rivers. Spotted with lakes. Typical B.C. paradise.

By road it's about 80 kilometres from Silver Star Village to the point on Trinity Valley Road where we hoped to stumble out of the bush. In a straight line through the trackless jungle it's about 12.

Not the evening I'd planned. Or the following day, for that matter. Better, though. In a less comfortable kind of way.

Tent, fire startin' kits, some extra clothes, bit o' food, sleeping bags. Compasses slung around our necks.

It took a while to get clear of the resort, cutting down and across the ski runs, stubble sticking through the start of snow.

From a few points on the Star you get a clear view of Bobbie Burns Mountain, the highest point of our home stomping grounds and, for the moment, a reliable beacon. So we took a compass bearing on the mountain, 72 degrees as I recall, and took note of it's position relative to the monster moon that was glowing brighter as the sky grew dark.

We'd follow these two moving targets through the black woods till we were too tired to take another step. And sleep wherever that was.

I say moving targets because moons orbit and because compass bearings only mean much if you keep yourself coming from the same direction. Between the two strategies, with a bit of seat o' pants calibrating, we managed to wade through ass-deep snow, over logs, up and down steep slopes for about eight dark hours that night in a remarkably straight line.

We hit a snowed-over trace of road early on, and it followed our route for a while. We continued following it for a while after it wandered astray. Finally facing facts, and plunging into the thick, black bush and ever-deepening snow.

And that was it for many hours through a perfect Halloween night. Which is to say bare branches against a cloud-whipped, moon-strobed sky were a perfect visual and as good if you closed your eyes. Moaning, creaking and the flapping, tall-ship wind. Fireworks in case we forgot. Just the distant popping. Lumby, Lavington, Coldstream? Just because you're heading in roughly the right direction doesn't mean you know where you are.

We stopped for the night at the bottom of yet another steep ravine. Slid and stumbled to a stop too exhausted to try to battle back up the other side. All the elbow room of the bottom of a V and that choked with snow and, of course, a creek.

Sought out a bit of flattish ground big enough for a two-person tent. And a fire, cause now that we're stopped, we're soaked and cold. Everything useful was numb and everything else was shivering. Tammy found a flat plank from the side of a hollow cedar stump and we built a fire on that or there would have been no fire. It would have sunk into the snow forever.

Everything was soaked. Hard hunt for wood that was close to dry. Try Vaseline-saturated cotton balls, shredded bits of inner tube and one of those dirt-cheap, bombproof Bic lighters. You will make shit burn.

So we warmed hands, feet and faces, made tea and rolled into the tent. Recently trained in wilderness survival, we had the comfort of knowing it was heat loss by conduction that kept us semi-conscious and shivering all night on the crunching snow.

We woke up as cold as we went to bed. Broke camp with the same fucked-up fingers with which we'd built it. And got climbin'. We got way too hot in no time. Way too steep and slippery, grasping at brambles and branches for a boost up the slippery slope or to keep from tumbling back. Finally topped out, expecting just more of the same. Expecting that scene from Alive.

Instead, a broad, white cutblock under a blue sky, seedlings poking through the snow. And the sun gleaming off the rock faces of Bobbie Burns Mountain. Dead ahead.

We're from here so we know something about cutblocks. Which would be that they have roads to 'em. Roads to towns with mills.

It was that infuriating kind of snow crust that holds you up just enough to keep you trying to stay there before it dumps your every footstep in up to your ass. That's slow, exhausting snow.

But this was a new day, the sun was shining and not much could piss us off. Very cool, to be up here.

We found the road pretty quick, and it wasn't buried. The local bubbas had already been up this far. The sun on their efforts had their wheel ruts down to gravel. Roads from cutblocks almost always go downhill, and we know what elevation loss does to gravelly ruts through deep snow. Turns 'em into gravelly roads without a lotta snow.

The morning moved along and it was a bright, blue day and only November 1, after all. So pretty soon it couldn't have been better. So we stopped where the wood was good and built a real fire and made huge hamburgers and coffee. Lazed in the sun.

Later we passed some firewood guys, expressed appreciation for some fine-looking camping spots, looked out over some magnificent views and generally experienced that quickening that attends the approach of an ending. Then one more downhill corner like so many and, boom, across the lower treetops. Power lines.

Trinity Valley Road.

Red dirt christmas

So tell me about Christmas, 2005. I know, remembering Christmas is easy. Any given year is hard. Cause they're all pretty much identical.

We tired of putting on the Christmas concert every year about the time the kids were old enough to start noticing we thought it was all bullshit anyway. I don't just mean Santa Claus, commercialism and all those more recent inventions. We're atheists, y'see, and think the jolly old elf is just as likely as any of that other mythological crap.

Not that I'm saying there's no god. Or no Santa Claus. As long as you get it. Like Francis Pharcellus Church. Just don't go literal on my ass or I'll go medieval on yours. Yes, Virginia, there is a Quentin Tarantino.

So for a few years, starting when the van o' kids ranged in age from prob'ly nine to 14 we made a better plan. Took all the money we would have spent on shipping containers of plastic-shrink-wrapped plastic and the same old cooking, eating, giving, receiving scenario that we'd always had a hard time taking seriously anyway and hit the road instead.

So let me tell you about Christmas, 2005.

Cause it ain't like all the others. It's as unique as one of them snowflakes we didn't see for damn near a month.

Actually Christmas Eve stands out. Cause the downpour was getting monotonous in the tents, with the safe zones centred more and more around the centre. And we were too ready for something other than the van to even consider that refuge, available electronic diversions or no.

We were in a campground just outside the same Meridian, Mississippi that Emmy Lou Harris made a touch famous in the title song of her 2000 album Red Dirt Girl. Y'know, just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian, you got it, sittin' on the front porch coolin' in the shade/singin' every song that the radio played, good stuff.

No need for coolin' that night though, stayin' warm and dry. Sitting on the dryer and laughing with the kids. Catching up on clumps of slept-on dirty road clothes. Pretty much owning this massive campground - amazed it's even open. While the machines hum and spin and a hard Mississippi rain does the dark drum all over this cozy cinder-block shack.

Big Day morning and we want to be Christmas tourists cause we're here, not there, and because we get it and we like a good old story. So we set about looking for a church, with some vague, probably objectionable in any number of inconsequential ways, notion of clapping, grooving choirs and general rootsy joy. Where people bring the magic and pass all the glory on to god.

Of course, we went looking for this as Canadian tourists with a timeline drifting about in our heads that started vaguely with the first slave ship and ended approximately now. Maybe with Cliff Huxtable. History being, of course, the story of how fucked up everything used to be before it all got fixed like now.

Course that's a lame joke even in squeaky little Canada. Let me tell you, it's an out-loud howl in Mississippi.

That was made clear to us that holy morning in church parking lots and fast food joints.

We went to churches first, a whole whack of them. Right about on time. As cars were emptying; buildings filling. Looking for a place where we could blend in just a bit and get a little culture - born in old pain and all fixed up just in time. 'Cept nothing's been fixed.

In the Mississippi we visited on Christmas morning there were black churches and there were white churches. And I'm talking unanimity here. Our attention to detail increased along with our slack-jawed disbelief and I can assure you we saw no exceptions. However urgently we looked.

So we didn't settle our condescending asses into pews in any Mississippi Christmas church. Not a black church where we would have felt like we should have brought a search warrant. Not a white church where the welcome would have made us need a shower.

We drove around till the cars were all empty and the buildings were all full. There was no snow in Meridian but there were a lot of inflatable snowmen. And santas. And reindeer. And religious iconography. Half inflated, actually. Maybe it was the rain. Toppled trashily on sodden lawns. Ready for roll-up in a day or two anyway. It was quite a tour though. And yes, here comes another song quote.

Pretenders: I went back to Ohio/But my city was gone/There was no train station/There was no downtown.

This one was downright eerie even though we were a long way from Ohio. Cause downtown Meridian is a blitzed-out grey mass of silent concrete and broken glass. All but abandoned. And the train station has found a way to outdo nonexistence. It's been turned into a museum. Commemorating the days when Meridian merited a train station. And right in the middle of it all is a cemetery. Overgrown and ignored. Where you can find barely legible wooden grave markers for soldiers who fell in the Civil War.

The Meridian of today is a plastic ring around the outside of this haunted shambles. Gas stations and Piggly Wigglys and fast food drive throughs and big box stores are alive and well. Bustling now with the after-church crowds looking for Whoppers to hold them over until Christmas dinner.

We join them briefly and discover a place where blacks and whites actually mingle in the same room. If you can call that mingling. All the employees are black. And they and their white customers don't even look at each other. We all notice this and comment as soon as we're back outside. It's nobody's imagination. There are black customers too, and that's a different story. But the tension in the restaurant is unnerving. 'Specially since it obviously isn't ending at the door.

We drove out of Meridian that night after breaking camp. Still in the pouring rain.

Crossed into Alabama and stopped for gas, unsure of where we were headed next. The gas station experience was just like the burger joint in Meridian. All black employees. This time us the only whiteys in the room. That slave ship was a long while back, but us and our string of pasty kids were apparently responsible for it and for everything since.

Next destination? West. Drive all night. Sunshine on the cacti by the time it rises. Palm trees dead ahead. We'll come back here some summer when everyone's in a better mood.