Mile 0: A Memoir (eBook)

Chapter One

1979

A lot happened that year which ultimately changed the path of my life forever. The year I turned five felt like the prime time of life. There were no worries other than to make sure you didn’t spill your Kool-Aid on your white shirt or accidentally snort a bug up your nose while running down the street. Who could ask for a better life with such childlike stresses? The second hand of life’s clock seemed to have paused slightly during that year. There was a changing of the guard, not only in my world, but also throughout the world. Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty; the British Empire freed Malta from their rule, as did Denmark free Greenland. Margaret Thatcher became the first female British Prime Minister; Joe Clark became the youngest prime minister in Canada; and Saddam Hussein became the new president of Iraq. It truly was an era of change, and only the future would tell if it was for good or for bad on all fronts.

My life prior to 1979 consisted of a humble upbringing at the logging camps where my father worked, and the neighboring trailer parks which allowed him to have close access to the camps without us living amongst their wildness. The wilderness of Northern British Columbia is where my life started, in a small place named Dawson Creek, population 700. The streets are fairly bare in this northern prairie land, and the provincial border of Alberta is just a few miles away. Dawson Creek is known as Mile “0,” as it is the start of the Alaskan Highway. What an opportune place to be born—Mile “0”. Either this was meant to be a prediction of what my life would amount to—absolutely nothing—or that my life was meant to become the starting place of a very long highway through a wilderness land where only the strong survive.

Throughout my early years in life, my father was the person who governed our family. My father was a gangling thin man, with a brown balding tuft of wavy hair, which, even at twenty-seven years old, could never lie flat, and so he regularly hid this mangled mess under an old, worn trucker hat, usually displaying the green logo of John Deere or the bright orange Kubota tractor. His bushy side-burns were his attempt to make up for the thinning hair, and they matched his light brown eyes, where he proudly claimed to be a lookalike of Bert Reynolds. My father was always a quiet presence, not a man of many words. His frame, just a couple inches shy of six feet, was still the leader of our small family. He led us all over Northern BC in pursuit of regular employment, from logging camps to construction and truck driving, to finally being a first aide instructor at the local college at our last residence in Prince George. We followed in absolute love and belief in his steady guidance. Dad was gone a lot during those early years with employment wherever it led him, usually further away from home, where we stayed waiting.

Mom was the strongest woman I could have ever had during those years of Dad’s absence in the northern wilderness. Her long, straight, brown hair and olive complexion were identical to my older sister’s, where I was the stand alone blue-eyed, blonde-haired kid who stood out in a family of brunettes, not to mention the dark brown of the massive forests of the logging world. My older sister by two years was the usual older sister: a confidante, an enemy, and the first-born child jealous of now having to share her mother’s attention. Although my young age of four seemed to condemn me to being left out of any friends until I officially entered Kindergarten, I was determined to not continue to be a bystander watching my older sister’s friends and her play, leaving me stranded by myself.

The summer of 1979, the dark green and brown blur never faded and the heat never cooled at our home. The pine scent became stronger in these dry summers and the dust smudged my face, proof of a hard day’s play. I dreaded the forest and its ominous size when I was four years old. I knew I could easily get lost, and I also knew better than to wander off too far. There were sightings of bears in our wooded trailer park outside the city of Prince George in Northern British Columbia. My parents said the bears lived in the wooded hillside cliff directly behind our trailer, and some were also spotted along the densely wooded trail to the school. There were times I swore I could see a massive swarm of bear’s eyeballs staring down on me from that wooded cliff behind our trailer. These bears were the same bears I would overhear the loggers at the corner store talking about getting into the camps and going through the garbage. Even worse were the stories of the bears attacking the logging camps and the bears needing to be shot.

The trailer park was packed tight with single- and double-wide trailers. Most had a simple dirt drive that led under the colored waffled, plastic-fiberglass carport covers arraying the ground with shades of yellow and green. Although ours was a simple single with a clear covered carport that had aged and now was glowing yellow beneath, we were parked at the very edge and top of the hill, right below the “bear’s eye” cliff. I always felt we had the best view of the trailer park—except the bear area. This landscape was barren except the metal tin roofs of the trailers and the fiberglass carports. All the trees had been logged out years earlier to build this parking lot for houses on wheels. Recently pavement had seeped in from the local highway, forming more permanent roads, which gave a sense of stability to our forest civilization. Trees grew along the outskirts, establishing the boundary to the wilderness or the main highway. We were a desert, bleached dry by the alpine sun, and I had the best view of it all at the top of my hill.

Walking to the school was a test of bravery. The trail was heavily wooded, and we had to walk through a large metal drainage tunnel under the highway to reach the school grounds. Kids commonly dared each other to walk it alone—it separated the babies from the older kids. Every time a pinecone dropped on the dry crunchy dead needled forest floor, one would jump, causing your heart to race even more than it currently was under this stressful passing, because the sound was imagined to be that of a bear following after you, echoing through the metal tunnel. Walking through the woods felt like being compressed into a funnel, with the large open playground field on the other side of the metal tunnel. I guess you could say, that was the reward for making it through the birth canal of the metal drainage tunnel—an open barren field, with the school building another couple football lengths still further to walk to. I hadn’t yet made it through the tunnel myself, and was regularly taunted by my sister and her friends.

Angie, my sister’s friend, lived a few trailers down from the neighborhood playground just around the corner and slightly down the hill from our trailer. She was the same age as my sister, but her mother smoked profusely. Her father wasn’t home much either, much like the rest of the fathers here in the trailer park. She and my sister would spend hours riding bikes around the neighborhood, letting their long brown hair whip in the wind, while I sat alone in the small, dusty playground. There was an old rusty swing, and black rubber tires for climbing, but they got too hot during the summer to play with. My palms would sting from the hot metal chains of the swings that would occasionally pinch due to the links becoming jammed. The warm air that was forced to be present only when there was enough momentum in swinging, would give little relief from the heat. The large black tractor tires that were half submerged in the dry earth, only gave shade within their bowels, if you didn’t mind the spiders and flies seeking the same retreat. My small hands traced the large waffle tread on the outside, and would pick at the cracking side walls, wondering what made them so strong that one could actually stand on them. I never went barefoot on these hot lava rocks protruding from the ground, their heat would burn my feet, but in flip flops the occasional side of my foot would scald at the briefest of brush against its surface. I would pretend that these massive rubber rocks of lava and the dry sands of the playground would be my island. At supper time, the little kids went home for supper, and that’s when the big kids took over the playground, their loud voices and errant behavior bringing the police on several occasions. The trailer park felt to me like a desolate island of dryness; I sat in its center while everyone else rode their bikes around me. I didn’t have a bike, but I had a plan.

One afternoon while sitting outside on the playground, Mom hollered for us to come and get some Kool-Aid she had just poured. Angie, my sister, and I raced to the top of the hill to the trailer, them on their bikes and me chasing behind on foot. As soon as my sister dropped her bike on the dry, crisp, brown grass in front of the trailer, I grabbed it as quickly as I could and hopped on. I had never been on a bike before; I had only observed riders while being circled in the playground. It began moving on its own, without control, until I realized that to reach the pedals I had to stand the entire time as the banana seat jabbed me in the center of my back and the cross bar caught my legs below. I was a little wobbly at first, but the breeze felt exhilarating. I didn’t even realize how far I had gone until I was at the corner of the trailer park by the trail to the school. I grabbed tight onto the handlebars, took a gentle turn right, and started heading down the...