Kelly Cavanagh

Latin Serenade

how I nearly lost my boots in Livingston

      Time to go somewhere completely different. Laura and I had been in the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, including three months in Santiago Atitlan with our own hut on the shore of the lake near the town. Bliss! But that's another story, called Lago Life. Leaving the highlands we hitchhiked to the east coast of Guatemala. Night fell before we got there, so we camped in a field next to the highway, and gaped in wonderment as a myriad of lights arose from the ground and joined the stars. Fireflies! A gazillion of them. In the morning we discovered we had camped smack dab in the middle of the local elementary school playground. Waving and smiling to the kids, we quickly dressed, packed up, crossed the road and hitchhiked to Guatemala’s Caribbean coast.    
      In Puerto Barrios, Guatemala’s eastern port, we got a room in a fantastic rickety old wooden three storey hotel, verandas all round, everything all painted white, and all kinds of things going on. Breathing the sickly sweet smell of rotting bananas, we walked down to the port along the honky tonk saloon row, a hotbed of activity even in the afternoon. Later on we watched a couple of movies in the local theater. The first one filmed in English, it had an Italian soundtrack and Spanish subtitles. Never understood any of it. The second film Quemada! (Burn!) starred Anthony Quinn, in English with Spanish subtitles, about the slave rebellion in Jamaica. A brutal story we could understand very well and empathize with, but boy when we left that movie house we never felt so white.
      In the beautiful morning, we took the passenger only ferry past the mouth of the Rio Dulce to the town of Livingston. A place with no cars and only wellworn footpaths between gaily painted and haphazardly situated houses. No Mayans here, Livingston seemed far more like Belize (formerly British Honduras) to the north, also populated by black descendants of Caribs and Afro Americans, but here ruled by an elite of Ladino (Spanish) overlords. The town had a conspicuous absence of adult men, off somewhere working on plantations, leaving mothers with small children, grandparents, and young teens. I immediately fell in love with the coco bread, a delicious bun made with coconut and flour.
      We rented a one room shack, very basic, dirt floor, did some shopping and set up house for the first time since we left Lake Atitlan. Happily ensconced in our new abode, we watched the sun drop like a stone. That's when we heard the rustling.
     COCKROACHES! GIANT COCKROACHES!! Cockroaches who thought they could FLY! EVERYWHERE! Leaping off the rafters and BUZZING DEAFENINGLY across the room till they CRASHED into something, tumbled to the floor and skittered off. They ate everything we hadn’t covered up. Even Laura's beautiful glazed necklaces, which we hadn't realized were actually painted pasta. Didn't fool the roaches though. We bolted and went to the bar. It wasn’t till later when we returned home and laid down banana leaves on the ground to sleep (we had no hammock) that our real terror began. These giant bugs crawled all over us at will all night long. Even worse, in the morning we realized when we went to use the communal outhouse that’s where they lived during the day. I can still remember the sound of..... oh never mind. I don’t remember how many days we lasted, but we soon gave up and retreated to the one and only local hotel. Another antique wooden beauty, our second storey room had swinging shutters instead of a door leading to the veranda.
      During the day we went to the beach or hiked somewhere. Along the coast to the pools where we could wade about in a tropical paradise, watching magnificent butterflies larger than your hand waft over our heads. The ocean water itself was a dirty grey/brown from the river silt, and you had to watch where you walked because the locals would poo in the ocean at night and sometimes it washed up. But hey, we loved it.
      Livingston did not have electric power except for a giant diesel generator. Every night at sunset, along with the cockroaches, it would come to life with an ear splitting roar and ran what lights existed for an hour or two or till whenever they felt like turning it off. All pitch dark then. We went to the bar, like moths to the flame.
      Oh yes, the bar. Did I mention the bar? A giant thatched bamboo hut with garish lighting and cafeteria style tables and chairs, it had its own generator and stayed open till midnight. Main attractions, the light (fluorescently ugly), the beer (draft in plastic cups), each other (see below), and the jukebox (see further below).
       The bar attracted travellers like us, other foreigners living in town, some Ladinos, and the chief of police, el Jefe. A typical Latin American Official, uniform festooned with badges, medals and finery, a gun, and a licence to extort money from anybody to supplement his meager salary. His game? Spend every night in the bar, plying any single hippie girls with drinks until they would actually dance with him to the Mexican radio hits on the jukebox. Meanwhile scoping out which foreigner he would arrest next (on whatever charge), how much he could extort out of his hapless victim and his parents back home (usually a grand or so), and whether it might be worthwhile sending him up the line to Guatemala City for further extractions/fines. The cost of freedom from jail in Guat City? Fifty grand at the time.
       As it turned out we could feel safe for now. El Jefe had arrested a young American  just before we arrived and had only begun to spend his latest windfall. Doubly pleased with how quickly the unlucky one’s father had paid the “fine”, instead of guaranteeing a speedy release from jail as promised, this signalled that further “fines” could be applied to this case. The unlucky one already languished in jail in Guat City, and el Jefe would probably get a bonus from any further money collected. Anyway, if we left town before el Jefe ran out of money, we’d be fine.
       Did I mention the jukebox? The life of the party, it had two kinds of music on it. The Spanish language songs, the hits of the day, the most insidiously catchy melodies and mindless pop tunes I’d ever heard. I found this music difficult to enjoy. Couldn’t stand it. And yet numerous times a day I would catch myself humming one of them, making it even worse. Hated it.
       None of us would play these songs, so it fell to el Jefe to fire some coins into the jukebox, buy a round, and try to get some nearly legless hippie girl to dance with him. He’d get so intent on his mission he would forget to feed the jukebox. Then the other music would come on. At this point el Jefe scowled and cursed, threw more coins in the jukebox, and retired to the corner to wait for his Spanish songs to come on again.
       The other music? Jamaican imported from Kingston. Fabulous. I never heard anything like it before. Huge bass, crazy drumbeats, just wild underground stuff, fresh from the studios and record plants of Trenchtown.
       As the first note struck, the culprits would appear. A group of young black teens, all about six foot eighteen inches, would come bursting through the door from the street where they’d been hanging out while the Spanish music played. Wildly flailing their arms, kicking their legs, party on! And we’d explode onto the dance floor, keeping up with them the best we could. For five or six songs we danced like wild ones till the sound of an accordian brought us crashing back to earth. The teens would slide out into the street, and we’d collapse happily into our chairs, drain our drinks, order another, and wait till the Jamaican fire came on us again. The battle for the jukebox raged back and forth till closing time. Big fun.
       One night I stayed at the hotel. I felt muchas gaseous and didn’t think beer would help much at all. We had been lucky so far on our trip, no illness, no runs. A big part of our success came from being careful. I didn’t see why I should spoil her fun on this night though. We almost always did everything together, and our marriage did last fifteen years, and a few more before that. This time I told her to go on without me.
       Did I mention her beauty? To me, of course, Laura was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. We (mostly she) attracted attention wherever we went. Still I had no qualms about sending her off alone into the dark night. She knew how to handle pretty much any situation and had proved it many times. This made me somewhat unprepared for what happened next.
       After a few hours of me rolling around on the bed, trying to ignore an upset stomach and not sleeping, she returned. As she came to bed I heard a noise outside below the porch. Someone had followed her! As we lay in bed together, we first heard the strum of a guitar, then a male voice began singing in Spanish a gentle song of love and yearning.
       Rage! Fury! This ladino lothario had followed her from the bar, thinking her alone and single, and now attempted to charm my sweetheart away from me! In a fit I tried to think of what to heave at him. My boots! At the last moment I restrained myself. Yes he might go away but I’d never see my boots again. As I tried to work up enough energy to go out and yell at him, I actually began to hear the music.
       Man this guy had some talent. Maybe I didn’t hate Spanish music after all, just the crap on the radio and jukebox. I laid back in bed, held her maybe a little more tightly than usual, and we swooned together. He hoped and expected her next move would have been to sultrily sashay onto the porch, lean over the railing, and let him serenade her until he'd won her heart. Not gonna happen. But... he didn’t give up.
       No way Jose. He tried harder, becoming more passionate with every song. He poured his heart out. We began to get amorous with each other to this fabulous romantic soundtrack. He really gave it his all, pulled out all the stops. Now I don’t know if he heard us making nookie while he desperately tried to think of what surefire song he hadn’t played yet, or whether he finally did give up. But I do know that I heard a couple hours of the most achingly beautiful music ever. His final song oozed longing, sadness, and hope (still!). Then he slunk away silently into the night. We got happy with each other.

My Mother’s Forks

how to become two people
at the same time

    Christmas and I took dear old mum to my sister Clare's place down in South Carolina. I must confess to being somewhat Santa Claustrophobic, but this could be the last chance to have some time all together. We had a family get together when Clare and husband Bernie lived in Hilton Head, in their house with an indoor swimming pool. They now had moved up the coast to Beaufort (bee-YOO-furt), and a house with a wharf on the bayou. Mum and I would fly Toronto to Atlanta, then to Savannah where Clare would pick us up and drive the rest of the way. But first we had to get there.
    Early to bed the night before our flight, we awoke at four am to some three feet of fresh snow on the ground, and more coming down. A white Christmas indeed. Our taxi arrived and off we slid to the airport for our early flight. Or not. We joined the mild pandemonium there, with cancelled flights (like ours), rescheduled tickets (like ours, six hours later), and general chaos. We went for breakfast.
    After whiling away a couple hours, I thought we may as well check in and go up to the departure gate. Nothing wrong with being early, right? That’s when the fun began.
    Throngs of people now lined up at every ticket counter, but with mum in her wheelchair I managed to find one reserved for handicapped and we checked in. I didn't have much money and I knew they might ask me to show how much I had with me. I had asked mum if she could loan me some just in case, and she replied that she had forty American dollars in her purse! She wondered if her bank debit card would work in the States!! Next we had to clear immigration, security, and customs. The immigration crew seemed about to go on a break, but when they saw mum in the wheelchair they waved us on to the last open booth. Mum’s hearing aid acted up (maybe?), and every question the agent asked got answered with "Heh? What did you say?" He didn't ask me anything at all. Impatient for his break he swiped our passports and waved us on.
    Next up the security clearance. Slightly taken aback, as the first person to greet us wore Arabic clothing and a veil. Even that didn’t prepare me for what came next. The customs people took apart our carry on bags. The one in charge had a Russian accent thicker than Natasha’s from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. Rummaging through mum’s bag, czarina's eyes seemed to light up as she pulled out and held aloft my mother’s forks.
    Mum had inherited a beautiful and complete set of silverware, sequestered in its gorgeous wooden box with velvet lined drawers, only to be seen on special occasions.  She now bequeathed it piece by piece to my sister. The two forks were meant as Christmas gifts and mum thought to keep them safe she would carry them in her handbag. "Oh no", said czarina, "These cannot go on the plane with you", and handed the forks back to my mum. She sat there forlornly clutching them, looking like anything but a terrorist who planned to commandeer an airplane with two dinner forks. I went into action.
    What options do we have I asked. The forks could be confiscated and we could proceed right away. Not gonna happen. We could amalgamate what we needed into one bag, put the forks in the other bag and check it in. Mum protested that she needed everything in her already full bag. Anyway, at this point for all we knew we’d be checking in to a hotel in Atlanta without our luggage that night. Or any money. That’s when the light went on.
    What if I took the forks back and just checked them in as baggage? The rest of the customs crew now tried to be more helpful, perhaps feeling czarina had gone a little overboard. "Sure", they said, "Just get someone to box them for you, and we’ll give you a pass to get back here says you’ve already cleared customs and immigration".
    Down I went the secret back way, my pass in one hand and the forks in the other. Mum stayed behind at customs. I suddenly emerged from a door in the wall behind all the ticket counters, back into the chaos. Everyone too busy to notice. That’s when it hit me. "Just get someone to box the forks"! Who gonna do that?
    Off to the side of a counter nearby, one agent didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. He looked like my friend from Hawaii maybe, definitely on island time. That’s my guy! I explained the situation to him. He smiled at me and told me to wait right there. He soon returned with some flattened cardboard which he began carefully and methodically folding into a short, square tube of a box.  I handed over the forks and in they went. He then proceeded to wrap the box oh so carefully with yards and yards of tape. When he finished he held it up to admire it, smiled again, gave the box a shake and said done deal.
    Off I went to enter the United States for the second time in less than an hour. Same immigration guy just back from his break blinked at me, and in his confusion swiped my passport again and waved me on. Did that mean two of me had entered the country? Would I be reported to the Department of Duplication Department? When I returned to Canada would one one of me be left behind? These thoughts and others flitted across my mind, but none of them landed. No time.
    Mission accomplished! I rejoined mum and we proceeded to the departure gate. More delay. Our plane had arrived but needed deicing. Finally, a couple hours later, they allowed us on the plane. I sank back in my seat and hoped that everything would turn out fine now. Fully relaxed, I had almost drifted off to sleep when I realized we weren’t going anywhere. I looked out the window. They were unloading all the baggage off the plane! The captain made an announcement and explained the delay was due to the fact that one piece of luggage could not be accounted for, so everything had to come off the plane and be rechecked. It never even occurred to me at the time. IT WAS THE FORKS!
    With everything finally accounted for and stowed back on board we took to the sky. A nasty storm had blasted the northeast but the worst had passed. Many hours later we landed in Atlanta, a mob riot compared to Toronto. I wheeled mum through the crowds as fast as I could and arrived at the departure gate just in time to miss our connecting flight. This bird had flown. They told me we could be number five on the standby list.
    So began a long vigil. I didn’t dare leave the gate to call Clare for fear of losing our place. I HAD to get mum on that next plane. She’d been up for sixteen hours already and was flagging badly. It didn’t look good for a while, but as the time approached reservations began to get cancelled as people didn’t show to claim them. We got on! I wheeled mum onto the plane and a short flight later we landed in Savannah. Clare and her daughter Lisa met us. They had met the plane we were supposed to be on, then anxiously waited another two hours in the airport with no news. Relief all around. Our baggage had arrived on the previous flight, and Clare and niece Lisa had collected it for us and stowed it on a cart. I looked it over, wondering how it had made it onto the plane we had missed, and realized something. The forks! The forks? What about the forks! Clare had seen a cardboard box nobody had claimed... a short square tube... She ran back down and there it lay, unattended for two hours in the baggage claim of an American airport. My sister now has all my mother’s forks.

Spelunking at the Post Office

how to get paid
for having too much fun

    Christmas time and I took a temp job at the main post office in Toronto, the city where I spent my deformative years. I didn’t really want to work, but I really did want the money.
    Monolithic in size, the building thrust six storeys into the sky, and covered an entire city block near the lakefront. Inside, giant high ceilinged rooms stretched forever, and everywhere mail. But one feature caught my eye. A maze of tunnels hung from the ceiling, allowing supervisors of yore to secretly monitor their workers’ progress. They had been in disuse for many years. Curious. Must explore.
    Our temp crew met and got briefed on our duties. I looked around the group and wondered how they thought this would increase postal efficiency, hiring the likes of us. Meanwhile I plotted how to get into the tunnels.
    We had breaks mostly spent smoking in the washroom, and I noticed one break coincided with a general shift change on our floor. The second night I waited for the right moment. NOW! I snuck to the far corner of the floor. A door led into a tiny room which looked like it connected with the tunnels. I picked the lock. In I went!
    Dark. Very, very dark. I felt forward and yes, a ladder! I slowly and carefully hauled myself up and yes, the tunnel stetched before me across the room, intersecting in the middle with another tunnel going at right angles. Light came up through the plexiglass slits in the floor as well as the eye level slits that ran along both sides. I could watch anybody! No one would know!
    I walked the tunnel cautiously towards the center and yes, another ladder. Up I went. A whole other floor with a different configuration of tunnels. And up again. Same thing. Wow. I better get back.
    Once up there I could see everything going on. Easy to pick a spot to exit safely, even on a different floor, and get back to my crew.
    I’d fallen in with another temp worker on my crew right away, my new best friend Chris. Already tall, his mop of curly shoulder length hair made him even taller. He’d noticed my absence and asked me where I’d gone. Like I always say, a gift not shared becomes a burden. Well my Christmas gift to Chris would be how to go spelunking in the caverns of the post office, so share I did. I told him to come with me at second break tomorrow and I’d show him around. We went for a big explore. Everything up there all dusty and dirty, we found a table and two chairs in a little room, empty whiskey bottle. Like entering another dimension. And we spied on everyone.
    We wasted no time taking to smoking and drinking up there ourselves. The next night we noticed that one tunnel led right into the ladies washroom. Off we went to explore, with me in the lead. As we approached it grew darker and darker. Then darker than dark. I guess at some point in the past someone felt it inappropriate to allow male supervisors to lounge around peeping at the ladies and painted the plexiglass in the floor and covered the eye slits. I still forged on into pitch darkness, feeling my way. That’s when I fell off the face of the Earth.
    SMASH! went my shin on the edge of an open trap door, CRASH! went my back on the other edge, BASH! went my head on the first edge, and SMASH! CRASH! AND BASH! went a wooden folding chair I managed to dislodge and drag with me down the hole. It clobbered me all the way down, then fell with a deafening clatter to the floor below. At the last second I grabbed onto a rung of a ladder that led down from the trap door with my hands and hung dazed and confused in the pitch dark.
    As I dangled I only cared about being found out. How could no one hear such a racket? I let out a small cry for help but my new best friend Chris had vanished. Like the wind. Bolted. What if I had fallen all the way and broken my neck? Some friend. I got my feet on the ladder and realized this room had a door that led directly into the ladies washroom. Creepy. Gotta get outta there. Groggily I climbed back up the ladder and let myself out on a different floor.
     To this day I will go out of my way to avoid stepping on any kind of trap door, manhole cover, iron grille, especially the new fangled plasticky ones. I never want to fall off the face of the Earth again.
    One night my (still) new best friend and I tripped out so long up there the rest of our crew demanded to know where we went or they wouldn’t cover for us anymore. I said alright, tomorrow night, second break follow me. So off we went darting amongst the mail bags during shift change. I thought we were six, but maybe more tried to tag along? Anyway someone spotted the last culprit and all but me and Chris got caught. I raced up to the top floor and got out safely, he went down. So quickly did we do it we had witnesses to say we had been elsewhere in the building when all this tomfoolery happened!
    We didn’t care. For our last night the two of us had invested in a gallon of wine to celebrate. It had snowed heavily, maybe two feet. We wandered home up a completely shut down Yonge street, singing and drinking all the way.

Stump Farm Hippies

how it feels to be left all alone
at the top of the world

    My second trip out west I landed in Vancouver with no strings attached. After a peregrination of about a month in Alberta, I had a ride with my new best friend Dennis all the way to the coast, and he even let me stay at his place on Point Grey road while he took off out of town again. I tried playing on the street. Like the last time in Vancouver, I didn't make any money, but I did meet a girl and we had a wild fling. Even wrote a song about it, .....and That's How I Met Jane. Then after ten days or so, I took a ferry to the big island. Two years earlier I had taken the same ferry boat and then hitchiked to Long Beach on the west coast before they turned it into a park and kicked all the hippies off the beach. But that's another story, Sleeping in the Ocean. This time I now had three friends to look up that I had met back east over the past two years. First stop Gabriola Island to visit Paul, who I had played music with as a duo back in Toronto.
    A sausage shaped limestone sandbar reclining lazily at the top of the southern Gulf Islands, Gabriola could only be reached by a car and foot passenger ferry. Or private boat. Not having the latter available, and not having any idea where on the island Paul lived, I would first have to get myself to the Gabriola ferry dock and go from there.
    The big ferry docked some distance away from downtown Nanaimo. I set out walking on a fabulous summer afternoon along the busy waterfront road with my backpack and small suitcase which carried my mandolin. I began attracting a lot of attention. This place teemed with rednecks and greaseballs driving souped up cars and yelling at me about my hair and general hippieness. This made an already long walk even longer. I began to wonder if I'd made a big mistake. Later on I discovered I had landed on Bathtub Weekend. Once a year enterprising persons would race bathtubs fitted with outboard motors across the open ocean to Vancouver. Some never made it. This is STILL A THING. Meanwhile I'm thinking this being normal everyday behavior for Nanaimo, I could not have been more pleased to finally arrive at the Gabriola ferry dock. I promptly pulled out my mandolin and began playing to calm my nerves. This attracted other hippies. They knew where Paul lived, and one even offered to drop me off at his door.
    I arrived to find that Paul had left town, and wouldn't be back soon. Oops. This happened to me a lot back in the day, visiting people who weren't there. For me this always led to something else, often even more interesting, but not necessarily better. Clayton and Anne invited me to stay there anyway. A friend of my friend is a friend of mine. It seemed always that way with hippies. Except when it wasn't.
    Since I arrived on the coast I had already met seven people named Kelly, all female. Thinking it time for a change, I now introduced myself as Huckle to everyone. A friend back in Toronto called me Huckle because my patched jeans reminded her of a cartoon character from a children's book she'd read to her kids. She refused to call me by my real name. So now on the west coast, Huckle I became and I went by that moniker for years, till I eventually reverted to Kelly again.
    Clayton and Anne lived in a new subdivision, where a number of hippies had bought small lots and built houses of some sort, some quite imaginative. The local rednecks didn't like it much, they called it Smoky Lane. Them dadblame hippies! After a few days I set off to find my other two friends I'd met back east, and spent a glorious summer exploring the islands, eventually returning to Gabriola to settle down for the winter. A winter like I had never experienced. That's when the fun began.
    After such a mind blowing summer I felt completely unprepared for what came next. At one point, now living with my new girlfriend Sam and her year and a half old young son Jeremy in a two bedroom cabin with ten other hippies, she and I probably foolishly decided to rent the Stump Farm. Also known as the "hippie amputee camp" by the rednecks, the Stump Farm acquired its name because the logger who built it did so back when the island had been scalped of all its trees in one giant logging operation, and nothing but stumps remained. The land had been bought with money from a New Age cult which flourished on a small island close to Gabriola back in the twenties. That is completely and totally another story. The land included Gabriola's only lake and the Lake House nearby where my landlord lived. Then on the other side of the main road also stretched a huge undeveloped area in the middle of the island, including the Stump Farm at the end of a Mile Long Driveway.
    A one bedroom log cabin, the farm originally had a barn, chicken coop, and root cellar, all now collapsing in various states of disrepair, but the house still stood solid. No telephone, electricity, running water, or washroom of any kind, just an outhouse. Water had to be hauled in a bucket from a small spring, which dried up in the summer. Did I mention we did not have a car? Or that Jeremy still had diapers!? I went to work.
    It took about a month to get the house together enough to move in. Back and forth from Vancouver to Nanaimo to the farm I went, while Sam rented an apartment in Nanaimo. First I bought a new airtight woodstove, also known as a hippie killer to the rednecks, and got a ride from the ferry to the bottom of the Mile Long Driveway. Into the trusty wheelbarrow went the giant box containing the stove, and up the Mile Long Driveway I went. I made this trek so many times I'm astonished we never came up with a name for the wheelbarrow. Once I got Stanley (as the stove became known for no reason whatsoever) to the farm, I hooked it up and found some firewood, and the cabin got its first blast of heat in weeks. As I stood shivering over the stove waiting for the cabin to heat up, for the first time I looked up and saw the very wide cracks between the boards of the ceiling. At that very moment I made a very unhippie like decision to buy some pink rolls of insulation for the attic. And so I did. But later.
    Lovely Sam and her long golden hair, I called her Lady Goldberry after a character in a Tolkien book. She came from the suburbs of Toronto, and it took some time for her to get used to being a hippie. Came the day and we moved in with our meager belongings. We had both basically backpacked out west and didn't exactly have the furnishings to fill a house, no matter how small. Did I mention no electricity? We made dip candles in a one gallon olive oil tin full of melted paraffin wax on top of Stanley. We made our own light. What could go wrong? Even when not making candles we stood around the stove a lot, until I wheelbarrowed the rolls of insulation up the Mile Long Driveway and installed them. I quickly found out I did not buy enough rolls, and left the ceiling above the small pantry room uninsulated. This turned out to be a lucky stroke, as the cabin now became so hot with Stanley going full blast we would often have to open the blanket hanging in the pantry door to vent some heat. So we had light, good water, and as long as we had food we would only need wood for Stanley and the kitchen woodstove. Well we were surrounded by trees. But we needed dry wood. Right.
    I did not have a chainsaw. Horrible abominations, bane of any tree loving hippie. The whine of a saw off in the woods nearly as bad as as the muffled thumping of the Harmac pulp mill on the big island close by, which never stopped. Years later I began to hear a chainsaw as the sound of a man providing for his family, which helped somewhat. And like I always say, the longer he does it, the sooner he'll be finished. Eventually it became imperative to have my own chainsaw, but first we bought a cord of wood, then I basically hand sawed anything I could drag in from the forest.
    The final addition. Paul's beauty upright piano, named William, had to be moved from Smoky Lane to the Stump Farm. After that we had no room for anything else. This epic task proved to be the one and only time I involved myself in moving a piano. Never again. Once ensconced, William became the focal point of our musical jams, and we played and played and played. At one point Paul left Vancouver where he had been living, and moved in with us at the Stump Farm. We had been playing a weekly gig in the city which Paul organized at the Western Front Lodge, but now we could really work on each other's songs. I hadn't yet progressed to booking my own gigs, but I had lots of experience booking other people with Thog and Etherea back in Toronto. First I booked the Gabriola community hall for a boogie with the Sodbusters from Salt Spring, with Paul and I as a duo being the opening act. The next month I booked the hall again for Perth County from Ontario on their first west coast tour, and we did a duo set at that show as well. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
    About a month after moving in we had a house warming party, from which came the classic photograph of all of us standing out in the yard. Soon after we began to have visitors, some of whom didn't want to leave. Sally Sunshine and Alycin dropped by for a visit on the way to California, and stayed for weeks, with Sally eventually returning to live on Gabriola. I don't know where we put everybody! Years later I revisited the Stump Farm and could not believe how very small it was. Sam and I had our own tiny bedroom, with a small bunk for Jeremy, and we had numerous crashers most nights wall to wall sleeping on the living room floor. Then came busloads of hippie musicians. I loved it!

     When not playing music, we would often play Gigglebellies. My dad taught me as a kid, my little head on his giant belly, sometimes disappearing completely, and my brother and sisters making up the circle. You lie on the floor with everyone having their head on someone else's stomach. And the laughing begins, you can't help it. Excellent group therapy! Sometimes we'd do it at the end of a gig somewhere, with up to fifty hippies in a giant circle. I have recently learned there is now an actual group therapy organization practicing this, though they don't do it in a circle. My dad, always ahead of his time.
     Just one thing, we did have a redneck landlord. Once a month I'd walk down the Mile Long Driveway in the dark to the Lake House to deliver   my forty dollars a month rent. I never used a flashlight to walk the Mile Long Driveway or the old logging trails, and to this day do not know why. I think I just wanted to be one with nature? Or couldn't afford batteries? Whatever, the forecast every night called for darkness. Very great darkness. One dark and stormy night I arrived at the Lake House to pay the rent. The top half of the door had a plate glass window in it. Momentarily blinded by the light from inside, I knocked loudly. The Mrs, home alone, spun around to see this hairy creature at her door and let out a truly blood curdling scream. I almost ran away. Somehow, something interesting always happened when I visited them, not least of which being the old man sometimes sitting in the far corner of the room, the landlord's father. He had been the recipient of a great deal of the cult leader's money back in the day, for only he would ferry supplies from Nanaimo to the cult's island. The old man had since gone quite mad, constantly talking loudly to no one, usually about "Brother this, Brother that... " and the Mrs would shout at him to shut up, to no avail. I inadvertently heard many things not meant for my ears. Every visit became more difficult, and a greater pleasure to depart. Especially after the landlord had to come rescue the hippie schoolbus with his tractor. They managed to get the bus stuck in the mud on the Mile Long Driveway. And when my friend brought his three foot chainsaw and dropped a big Douglas fir for firewood across the Mile Long Driveway. And..... oh well, we didn't last much longer at the Stump Farm after all that.     
     I spent a great deal of my time exploring the island on foot. An extensive system of disused logging roads enabled me to go almost anywhere on the island without hardly seeing a road, car or any people. Just one thing. The dullness of daytime could only be outdone by the sheer darkness of night. Almost always cloudy, if not raining, the very short days gave way to utter blackness too soon. I would walk down the trails at night guided only by a thin strip of feeble light between the treetops on either side of the road. Sometimes I would see stuff. Once I startled some large animal that went dashing off into the woods, must have been a feral sheep or goat, with dirty, gnarly dreadlocks all over and dragging along the ground. Freaky. Another time, unable to hitch a ride from the ferry, I took the trail instead at the one point it intersected with the main road. The darkest night of the year, I fumbled along with minimal light from above, more keeping to the trail by periodically stepping on the edge and correcting. Whatever, no hurry right? At one point I veered off to the right and stepped squarely on a low bush. It exploded into shrieking beings which flew up around me in spirals like mad banshees and disappeared into the murk. Frozen like a statue, I had never heard anything like it before, and realized I would never ever know what had just happened. Wouldn't be the only time for that. On I went.
    No darkness without light. I used to climb tall trees. All the way to the tippy top. Halfway up the Mile Long Driveway, on the far side of a large meadow, stood a copse of very tall trees which had somehow escaped the previous logging armageddon of years past. Now, climbing a tall tree is generally not something done on a whim, and certainly not with time constraints. I would climb like a sloth, in no hurry whatsoever, and carefully planned each move for upward progress, and even more importantly downward progress later. Did I mention no one knew about me climbing the tree? No room for error. You would actually get bored watching me climb a tree. But eventually I would be hugging the trunk not far below the very apex, and thrilling to the view. I'd been told that, way back when this fairly flat island still had all its big trees, the highest point of the island stood open and treeless to the sky. You could see right down to the shore of the island all the way round. I don't know about that, but it's what I could see from my treetop vantage point, and over to the mainland, and the spine of the big island glimmering as the sun arced over it towards the west. Already mid afternoon, I realized I better start thinking about my descent soon, when something happened.
 From the corner of my eye I saw movement. In the tree next to me, a few branches below landed a golden eagle. It did not see me. For some time I quietly observed this magnificent creature up close, undetected. At some point it must have smelled me, cause I never moved a muscle. Ruffling its feathers mightily, it looked up at me contemptuously, as if to say "Human what you doing in my tree"?! The grumpy eagle soon leapt into the air and majestically flew off, leaving me all alone at the top of the world.