Final Fire Read online

  Final Fire

  A Memoir

  Michael Mitchell

  Contents

  Excuses

  One

  The Edge

  Two

  Callow

  Three

  Get a Job

  Four

  The Discovery of Photography

  Five

  A Tarnished Little Revolution

  Six

  Filth

  Seven

  A Bestiary

  Eight

  Dreaming

  Nine

  Facing the Light

  Ten

  Fire

  Eleven

  Wandering

  Twelve

  Just Desserts

  Thirteen

  Jamaica: Soon Come

  Fourteen

  Bad Daddy

  Fifteen

  The Dead and the Not Yet

  Sixteen

  A Slender Summa

  Seventeen

  The Waiting Room

  Eighteen

  Belief

  Nineteen

  Final Fire

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Sheila, Jake and Ben

  Memories are not carved in stone but scratched in sand.

  “There are three sides to every story, yours, mine and the truth. No one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.”

  Robert Evans

  “We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.”

  Alice Munro

  “Though nothing truly escapes us, memory and mind from the moment of our birth are notoriously, almost hopelessly, selective, elliptical, and inventive. And memory and mind, for expression, perhaps for their very existence, depend upon language — than which, of course, there is no more evasive and deceptive a medium.”

  Russell Banks

  “Copying the truth may be a good thing, but inventing the truth is better, much better.”

  Giuseppe Verdi

  Excuses

  “We are the guests of life.”

  Martin Heidegger

  “The blues, the blues ain’t nothing but a cold gray day, and all night long it stays that way . . . the blues is a one-way ticket from your love to nowhere; the blues ain’t nothin’ but a black crepe veil ready to wear.”

  Duke Ellington

  The big question is: how to live? We all take our own paths. This book is about mine. Several times in my life I arrived at a doorstep leading to a secure and predictable future. Each time I hesitated on the threshold but didn’t enter. I chose, instead, to be a cowboy with a camera and a keyboard. It has been a rough road for decades but I survived and, best of all, I was never bored.

  This is also a book about the corollary: how to die. Most of my friends have made wise and patient exits but a few have destroyed the quality of their last months or years by being irritable, angry and fearful. They left a mess.

  While this is a book about being a photographer, a worker in a medium with an important role in memory, it is also a book about losses — lost times, lost landscapes, lost animals and, above all, lost people.

  I would have liked to have written a book that runs like a Swiss watch but life and death are really messy and much of that mess has spilled onto these pages. I wrestled with them for several years and can’t really claim victory. However the great thing about attempting to write a book like this is that it gives you a chance to try to be bigger than you are.

  “There is no answer.

  There never has been an answer.

  There never will be an answer.

  That’s the answer.”

  Gertrude Stein

  “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

  James Baldwin

  One

  The Edge

  “It was exciting, confusing and scary. It was all the good things in life.”

  Melissa Franklin

  1984

  “Canadian photographer, we’re coming in the dark to cut off your head.”

  A slash of static from Contra Radio, some broken martial music and then the return: “Canadian photographer. we’re coming in the dark . . .” Cut to martial music and repeat. The three Sandinistas sleeping beside me on a rooftop, a mere mile from the Honduran border, are fast up and wide-eyed. They roll for the roof edge with our radio and vanish over the eave while waving me back. Gone. My Jeep driver’s face reappears and he skids a hex-barreled pistol toward me. “Sleep well corazoncito — little heart —” He smirks before vanishing again. I’m alone for another long, dark Nicaraguan night. The gun he leaves is pitted with rust.

  5 a.m. A teenaged Sandinista fighter prepares for the day’s combat on the Honduras border

  ***

  A quarter century has passed. I stand by a small northern Ontario river that descends to Georgian Bay not far from the French. It’s in full melt-water flood, glassily snaking over a pair of abandoned bridge piers on its race to the Sweet Sea. A big hemlock torpedoes out of one fork and vanishes around a curve. A white pine soon follows. The spring river’s big shoulders can’t be contained — it bullies whole trees out of the banks. I skid my aluminum skiff into the current, secure it to a tree and begin to load.

  In Nicaragua, far to the south, Daniel Ortega, once a sleek revolutionary in designer sunglasses, is now a balding, middle-aged social democrat, reconfirmed Catholic, accused estate embezzler and pervert. He’s now struggling to hold onto power. We met several times but circled like strays. Now we’re both tired and dogged by time but still alive.

  I ease the boat into the current and drop it into gear. Eddies work the hull making it torque and twist while gathering speed on the run down to the Bay. We’ve all made it through another winter. An illusion of hope and promise lies ahead.

  A mixed forest of leafy scrub and small conifers slowly unrolls and shifts along the banks as I descend. Three miles down the first great pines thrust above the bush — a small Temagami. In time I will watch them burn.

  Two

  Callow

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire!

  Your nose is longer than a telephone wire.”

  Children’s chant

  “It ain’t braggin’ if you really done it.”

  Dizzy Dean

  1955

  Our little gang slouches home from school, circling around the girls, torturing and teasing, laughing. At the top of the hill descending beside the town’s buckle factory, Ronny peels off from the group to enter his house, a shabby old red-brick tragedy on the corner. He runs in the open front door and climbs the stairs to his parents’ second-floor apartment. His dad slumps in a press-back wooden chair at the kitchen table with a gun barrel in his mouth. We are in grade five.

  School 1958

  I pull a wide plank of clear white pine from stock at the end of my high school’s wood shop. While the girls across the hall bake cupcakes in home ec. the boys are each charged with building a fireside bench. Wood shop followed a drafting class that was easy. There, in collective secret, we’d combined our shabby skills to produce a single technical drawing of the Arts and Crafts bench we were each now building. One by one we’d go to the head of the class to present th
e same drawing and get our grade. Brecky, our short fat shop teacher chain-smoked, so his teeth were baby-shit yellow and his breath stank. He made each of us sit on his knee. “Now Mikey, what nice little picture do we have from you today?” Both of us were looking at the name box on the sheet of drafting paper. It was not only now smudged gray like a November day — I was already the tenth person to erase a classmate’s name and block-letter in my own — but it was getting flocked, like fancy wallpaper, from so many erasures.

  As Brecky bounces me on his knee I glance back into the shop classroom. The left wall is a row of full-height industrial lockers. While I undergo this ritual humiliation my classmates have retreated into those narrow cabinets. By folding the doors back against each other they had created a series of little triangular hideouts. Their feet poked out the bottoms while columns of smoke rose from the tops — we were all hooked on Exports or Players Plain. We and Brecky were caught in an ageless game. We cheat. He knows we cheat. We know that he knows that we cheat. He knows that we know that he knows. It’s our collective dance of pretend — the real-life lesson of the classroom. We will all eventually be future small emperors in our gotchies bravely, or not so, faking our way through grown-up life’s many performances.

  ***

  2011

  I have slipped out of the city and settled in for the long hum north on Highway 400. Light industry gives way to suburban crescents of foolish facades — Tudor, Georgian and veneer Victorian. It’s another world of pretend — where crown moldings are made of petroleum derivatives, square windows have function-free stucco keystones and garden rocks are made in molds.

  Soon the last real estate signs are behind me and free-ranging cows feed on new grass. The highway loops over the moraines, heedlessly slashing through the Holland Marsh before climbing the gravel hills again. In an hour the gneisses of the Shield will hump up beside the road and the first great pines will soldier through the second-growth bush. My skiff awaits me on the Reserve where the little river slides to the Sweet Sea. I park there and load.

  On this trip down my boat disturbs a heron. It takes flight downstream, running just ahead of me, banking through the turns of the river’s course between the trees, waiting for me to give up the chase. Finally it escapes the channel through a break in the alders walling the banks and I finish the little journey alone, reach my cabin and build a fire. The dark will drop soon — it could last a few hours or prove permanent.

  Our woodworking skills are even shabbier than our drawing ones. The end gables of the bench have scalloped cut-outs between the feet and an elaborate handhold in the centre of the board that is also scalloped. It will have to be cut by hand with a coping saw. Tricky. However the biggest challenge proves to be getting the end gables and the side rails all at the same height in order to support the top. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that none of these members are perpendicular to the floor — they approached it, by design, at a rakish angle.

  Well, not a single one of us managed to get it all level. One foot would always be shorter than its mates. The top of one end gable never lined up with the rails that led to the other. Brecky’s rule was that everything had to be done with a sharp tool — a chisel or a plane — never a file. As soon as he slipped out for a smoke we’d be at those suckers with an industrial belt sander. It could take down an offending gable in seconds. In fact it would always overtake. Then you’d have a vigorous go at the rails to get them to match the newly reduced end member. We had to work quickly before Brecky returned. Each session was timed by his burning, unfiltered roll-yer-own. The piles of sawdust got higher. The benches got lower. There’s an old carpenter’s saw about how he’s measured and cut this damn board five times and the sucker’s still too short. It was just like that. At the end of term when Brecky made us put our pathetic benches all in a row they made a roller-coaster line that looked like those performance graphs you get from your mutual fund provider. Our families would each get a view of their burning home fires from a different perspective.

  We moved on to metal shop. As I kept many tropical fish and had never been able to afford more than a five- or ten-gallon tank I decided to weld me up a hundred-gallon number so that I could get into some seriously vicious fish. It was a bit like making the bench — getting all those pieces of angle iron to line up perfectly to evenly support the big sheets of glass was tricky. But by the second last day of term I’d pulled it off. After all the caulking and sheets of glass were installed I filled it with water to test for leaks over night. When I came in next day to get my grade the whole shop was flooded. So lemme see: Latin’s finished, a woodworking career is out, I won’t be a draftsman, I failed as a glazier and I’ll never earn a living welding. What’s left?

  ***

  This week we’re running two new docks down to the island. A big flatbed from a lumber company in the Sound slowly backs down the muddy ramp to the river. Its hoist swings 32 feet of heavy, floating dock down to the water. I tie them off to a tree, slide an eight-foot length of pipe through thick galvanized eyes on their ends and join both docks. We’re ready for the run.

  My older son has come to assist. He’s a vegetarian cook, activist and landscape architect. My other helper, Danny, directs an executive program at a university business school. I know I’ll never be able to tow these docks and maintain steerage, so we’re going to rely on spring runoff to ferry both docks miles down the river. It’s our Canuck homage to Huck Finn — two wooden rafts on foam billets. The rapids run so hard around the first bend that we have to line the docks through them from the shore. After that success Danny and my son, Jake, board the docks while I run interference from the skiff.

  We make magisterial progress down the river — so stately that this trip will take four hours instead of the usual twenty minutes in a fast outboard. The intricate forest on both banks slowly unrolls like a pair of scrolls. A muskrat crosses our path and dives. A jay calls. We round a bend and a river otter reclines on the north bank. It calmly watches us drift past. Cumulus clouds are building in a blue sky. Swallows flit across the river. A snapper sunbathes on a deadhead.

  But my son Jake and Danny see little of this from their positions at opposite ends of the raft. Jake attacks corporate globalism while Danny mounts a vigorous defence of free-market capitalism. A bear peeks at us through a screen of alders. The two Hucks are getting louder. One of them slams his steering oar on the dock’s deck to better make his point. They’re now shouting at one another. The big raft thumps against the bank and the debate stops. A northbound V of geese honks overhead. A mink dives from the bank. There’s a minute of silence. Then it begins anew — youth versus middle age, left opposing right, ideal against the real, a father versus another’s son.

  Our little gang is wading up 10 Mile Creek in the ebbing spring flood. We have all been to see the town blacksmith and put down our paper route money so he’ll make us new trident spearheads. We now carry them upstream fixed to the ends of stout six-foot cedar poles that we have cut ourselves and stripped of bark. An old Chinese couple trails us by several hundred feet. They carry burlap sacks.

  Ostensibly we are here to kill lamprey eels, those supremely ugly parasites that have been devastating the Great Lakes fishery ever since the Seaway let them in. In truth we kill absolutely everything that moves — suckers, eels, mudpuppies, muskrats, frogs. The big carp-like suckers race up the rapids as we splash through the shallow waters in our rubber boots in excited pursuit. After lancing them we toss them on the banks and leave the thrashing coarse-scaled bodies for the Chinese to recover. None of us wants to think about what they do with them. We all drink cherry Cokes and eat mysterious dishes in our town’s only Chinese restaurant.

  After several miles of wading in bone-chilling water we encounter a half-dozen strands of old barbed wire sagging across the stream. We duck under them and are now on the farmland of one of the guys. Donaldson is a big-boned country boy with awkward movements and huge raw hand
s. His dad grows corn on the flats above the river valley and raises sheep down where we shuffle through the mud. They also have chickens scratching behind the mean little brick Victorian their large family lives in. They’ve got to be three or four to a bedroom but none of us knows for sure. We’re never invited in.

  Pete spotted it first — the cop cruiser creeping along the concession road parallel to our upstream trudge. What we are doing is illegal. The round light on the cop car roof illuminates and begins to rotate. The car stops just upstream of us and two cops get out and wave us over. Donaldson puts his big foot on the shoulder of his trident and pulls up hard on his pole. The shank slips out of the wood. He signs us to do the same. We follow him up to the car with our sticks on our shoulders leaving the spearheads buried in the muck. The Chinese disappear in the thickets.

  We all tended to think that Donaldson was not the sharpest axe on the woodpile but sometimes he’d come out with a good one and fool us all. This was one of those times. After getting the conservation lecture from the cops Donaldson told them that we were all just poor shepherds tending his father’s flock. There’d be hell to pay if we lost any sheep so we’d have to excuse ourselves and get back to work. His dad’s temper and violent rages were legendary. Nobody wanted to confront him for confirmation, not even the police. They glared at our poles. We kept the ends with the telltale shank holes down in the mud beside the road. The lead cop finally closed his book and climbed into the driver’s seat. His red-faced partner gave us an evil eye and climbed in beside him. We were left to do God’s work on the banks of our tiny Jordan River.

  ***

  It’s early June but the river still runs high. When I bail out the skiff it’s got minnows and huge water bugs in it. I load quickly and set off down the river. The banks are screaming with invisible life. It’s as lush as a tropical forest. Four miles down I bank around a bend in the river and encounter a mother bear rushing her cubs up a Manitoba maple. They go higher and higher with their mum in panicked pursuit. The impossibly slender top branches sway and bend under their weight. Mum watches from the last fork on the way up. They’re smart animals. They push limits hard but always seem to know what the branches will bear. After I pass all three shimmy down after this close call with a noisy, dangerous hateful mid-sized mammal — me.