The story of how I awoke to the most basic truths of the world’s most perplexing riddles is just shy of miracle. Several women once suggested that, in fact, it was a miracle. An ex-catholic bishop said the same thing just weeks later. But those who know me won’t stand for that kind of language. They know I’m as practical as I am in touch with the cycles of your life. What they’re not saying, though, is that it probably was a miracle. But since it was just me out there that July morning 1980, I can’t prove it. And I don’t feel comfortable suggesting it was anything other than the single most important thing to happen. Consider the facts:
Fact 1
At age ten I was abandoned in Bella Coola, B.C. by my sack-jangled mother. She was a drugged addler and way loose below the belt. She left me in the care of her ex-husband bush pilot who I was told to call “Mr. Ted.” I tried to call him other names a couple of times but I didn’t after that.
Fact 2
The next three years I worked intensely toward my desire to hurt a lot of things. I was a troubled youth headed for the stockade. I mistook other’s property for my own. I smeared boundaries all over the place, and thought nothing of crafting “F” words.
Fact 3
I was the first one in Bella Coola to sense that Mt. Saint Helens was about to blow. I was never credited with the discovery.
Fact 4
Two days before I turned 14, Mr. Ted took me fishing with him to a lake that was previously unknown to me (although after some fact digging I now think it was a small tarn off the Ingenika River). “Get in the plane, we’re going fishing,” he said. We flew for 2 1/2 hours, in some cases just inches above the tree tops and backwards. I craved Pop Rocks.
Fact 5
Mr. Ted landed the plane violently on the first try. He rammed the pontoons up the gravel shoreline and told me to go back in the woods and grab some supplies from a shed he built there. I was confused, and reeling from the stench of moss and decomposing eagle feather eyes. I couldn’t find a shed. I couldn’t think straight. Then I heard a sound that reminded me of a DeHavilland DHC-2 Beaver float plane.
Fact 6
It totally was.
Fact 7
Mr. Ted left me at the lake with no supplies, no fishing gear, no pancho, nothing. I was pissed and beside myself with the urge to chew a tree in half and toss it javelin-style so far in the air that it would pierce Mr. Ted’s Beaver and cause him to spiral, bloody, to the sharp dead trees hundreds of meters down on the ground.
Fact 8
That night I tried to run back to Bella Coola. It was too far. Then I ate a pine cone, mistaking it for a Mackintosh toffee.
Fact 9
It wasn’t. The afternoon of the second day found me stripped of dignity and hollow. I pasted strands of moss on my face with mud and pretended I was Canada’s greatest warrior. That evening I caught a frog and ate it.
Fact 10
The frog blood made me broken and delusional. I stumbled away from the lake to fashion a smoke house out of sea stones. But I only made it as far as the prettiest little meadow you’ve ever seen. Then I passed out into a coma blanket, still among the dying loon cries and promise of rutting bears.
Fact 11
That night I leg wrestled a loam spirit to the point of exhaustion. I broke many parts of him and myself. He was joined by a white bear that pinned me down and threatened to arrest me for shoplifting. I called his bluff and he devoured me. Within three hours he had eaten all that I was. I came to under a pre-dawn tarp of stars wearing the body of an infant teen. I had just turned 14.
Fact 12
I saw them before I heard them. Swollen blue-green tongue tips dangling from a decayed tree. I focused on three of them, believing them to be discarded wads of Bubble Yum. Then I was leveled by an excruciating volley of chirps and crees from the bellies of the 60 crickets glowing before me. They stopped and flew beyond my ability to reason straight.
Fact 13
I knew things. And I could do moves that help people. I was a master of The Sixty Crickets.
