A PREAMBLE:
The short story was written for my Muskoka as Walden site. It was inspired by this winter’s rather gentle sojourn, here at Birch Hollow, a period set aside to write and occasionally shovel snow. Published below is the result of this even mix of home maintenance and creativity explored.
I have remained steadfastly loyal to non-fiction. Since giving up the idea of being a novelist early in my writing career, I have been pre-occupied with nature, history, actuality, politics and story-telling in general. I was employed for many of those years as a reporter / editor and columnist, a position that should, of course, be as far from fiction interests as possible. Of course I’ve known and still do, a few scribes who come dangerously close to merging the two.
In my senior years, I have admittedly changed direction a tad. There are many ideas and personal ambitions in writing that frankly defy my old standards. Over the past ten years I’ve been dabbling in non-fiction, writing short stories that allow me liberties of opinion, and emotion non-fiction can not. At least the non-fiction I compose. While I’m still a long way from considering myself a non-fiction writer, or soon-to-be novelist, I have aspirations to continue this foray in creative writing. It’s how I began in University, having numerous Canadian poets as writing mentors, which did have an impact. I’ve never ceased writing poetry just not for publication. With my deep respect for legendary writers like Washington Irving and Charles Dickens in particular, I recognize that my influences will undoubtedly be the skeleton beneath the story-line. Truly, there are aspirations I have, as a writer that can not be handled by non-fiction alone. Even if my fiction attempts are confined to short stories, there is a newfound adventure in all this.....beginning with the reality that no fiction I could ever produce, will be totally divorced from my passion for story telling, and my insistence on incorporating as much truthfulness and actuality as I insist of my non-fiction authordom.
The short piece of fiction published below, is a reflection of my childhood infatuation with nature, and a wee lass named Angela. It is based on a memory of this period of my young life but it is embellished of course. In part it was inspired by my immersion in this beautiful region on earth, Muskoka, and this homestead, we call Birch Hollow, across from today’s snow-laden lowland known as “The Bog.” As a child however, growing up in Southern Ontario, my first paradise was a city greenbelt that abutted our apartment complex, on a street known as Harris Crescent. I spent every moment I could down along Ramble Creek, on its meandering run toward Lake Ontario, and it was my “sailing away” dream, to one day build a raft to make it all the way, out of this creek, across the lake, and out to the sea. I was always adventure-minded. Much less today.
The short story was composed while looking out my office window, and my passion for this hinterland, here in Gravenhurst, is the thread running through the piece, and all of them past, and I dare say, the common silken line in all of those creative jags planned for the future. When my wife and sons read the rough draft of this short story, they agreed, it was biographical with a trace of fiction. Truthfully, I nearly drowned four times in my life but only two are identified in this story.
I could never have composed this piece, or much of anything else, in a city environs, or working away from this place that has been so nurturing and fulfilling to my enterprise. While it is not a blog by definition, it is very much an honest re-telling of values, interests, devotions, love, sadness and an unyielding respect for the cycle of life; the existence of guardian angels, and the power of nature to evoke change, command attention, renew, restore, destroy and then grow anew. It is the awesome power of nature that draws me to this magnetic place, where I can most clearly watch the seasons in the rolling year, and never become bored or complacent with my surroundings.
I hope you will find this lengthy tome of some interest. If nothing else, it is a shred of a biography I’ve been meaning to write for decades. When I was writing it, I did, at my own convenience and inspiration, substitute feelings I have for people around me today, to seed into the characters of the story. It is a patchwork, composite piece that truly spans a half century. Some of my critics and friends argue that I’ve always been a strange confluence between fiction and non-fiction, a dreamer and soothsayer but by honest approach to every story, definitely not a liar!
Enjoy!
MY DROWNING IN RAMBLE CREEK
I was guilty of fatal neglect on the water. Of fishing in a calm little bay, at the bend in the river, forgetting how the silent currents can sneak up on a dreamer adrift. Re-coiling up from the murky bottom, striking sharply against the keel, as a viper first traps, then lulls its kill to an obedient surrender. A serpent’s lash, lifting up the canoe and then tugging it gently, at first, pulling more aggressively once beyond the shaded inlet, where I had first dropped a fishing line.
Without knowing it, I emerged into the final straightaway of the winding river, just above the small cataract and rapids, that I’d portaged around earlier that morning. What had been a distant, dull roar of river, washing down a small rocky decline of Muskoka landscape, was becoming a distinct rolling thunder that I couldn’t yet see, but felt as a tremor vibrating through the watercourse.
By time I was able to react, I couldn’t back-paddle fast or hard enough to change course, and decided the only escape, would be to angle toward the narrow ribbon of black water, over the brink, by paddling hard instead, in order to maintain the direction of my choice. My hope was to at least keep the canoe upright and miss the many smooth rocks I could see just inches above the surface.
The initial steep tip and first hard lurch to the right, should have been the violent end of the adventure but by some crazy fortune, the current spit me out into a shallow eddy to my right. There was no place to exit with the canoe, through the rugged canyon, so I thought that if I made it half way down the first level of white water, I could navigate the last thirty or forty feet of turbulence. There were a lot of precedents banging about in my head, each insisting to command my actions. I resisted them all.
I tried to ease the canoe from the calm eddy, slowly into the black water of the lower rapids. The current, after only two feet of immersion, jerked the bow down hard, and then abruptly right, then left, smashing against a submerged rock. I was thrown out before the canoe had actually capsized. A numbing series of heavy thumps against rock and submerged tree trunk, made the traverse a precarious spectacle of mortal frailty. I had no hand, at this point, in survival. There was no way of gaining control in that heavy wash down into the bay.
When I did have a final, weak thought process to exercise, I knew it was futile to panic. I needed to hold onto something. Find a rock or submerged branch to grab. Tumbling helplessly, head over heals down into the icy white water, I made a desperate attempt to set my feet onto the bottom to halt the fall. The top half of my body was always further downstream than my legs. The relentless pressure and pull of the current made anchoring impossible. If I was sucked down the rest of the rapids, I knew the turbulence at the base would have an undertow. A matter of only metres from the strongest current of the falls, my left foot somehow locked into a crevice between slippery boulders, at just the right angle and body spin, to correct my position, and eventually be able to stand up.
My hands were badly cut from the underwater rocks, and the foot-hold was precarious because of the slime on top of each. I felt as if my position could be compromised at any moment. The waist-high water was viciously determined to knock me down but as it was a matter of life and death, only winning this contest was good enough to preserve life. I could look out and see my life-jacket caught in the whirlpool below, with my tackle box and sealed lunch container bobbing in the ring of froth. The canoe had already hit shore half submerged. As a writer, I couldn’t have asked for a more poignant final chapter, even before I’d penned out the first line of the preface. It appeared someone else would be writing my biography. Better stated, my obituary!
I don’t know how long I stood in that frigid, beating current. All of a sudden, and not seeing where it came from, I was hit on the shoulder by a thrown rope, tossed out to me by some nearby campers, and then ungracefully tugged, almost a dead weight, up onto the sun drenched rocks. It was during that onshore rescue celebration, and wonderful hot coffee, my rescuers provided, that I mindfully sketched chapter one. A story set more than fifty years ago, two hundred miles from this terrible misadventure. I’d survived a half century between near death incidents. I began the rough sketch for a retrospective called “The Lucky Bastard I’ve Been For All These Years.” It seemed a good launching point in my life, to assess guardian angels. Why was I spared? A second time?
As I sat drying out on those hot rocks that day, I thought about angels and what role they’ve played in my life. These folks, behind me, my rescuers, didn’t think of themselves as angels. Just run of the mill weekend campers who happened to be on the campsite for my unceremonious shooting of the rapids. I’m the only one who knew just how close the end was, as I’d experienced it first as a school-kid, about a half century ago, in a creek so much smaller than the Muskoka River.
I sat with my hands back on the rock, stretching to look up into the bluest sky I’d ever seen. Being spared from death can cause this tingling of the senses, and sudden unyielding devotion to reclamation. Those sparkling diamond lights, sun rays filtering down through the thick cover of summer leaves, reminded of similar afternoons reclining along the embankment of Ramble Creek, in my old hometown. Almost a lifetime ago, I thought. It seems more of a short story, vaguely familiar, than a fact of my own life. It was then that I could see her outstretched hand, as if heaven-sent, to remind me of life unfulfilled. The life I was to continue, as a debt of moral gratitude to Angela, a childhood chum, who couldn’t make the journey with me.
There was always a constant pulsing gurgle of full-life, down deep in the subtle confluence of golden currents that smoothed in silken streams, over the flat bridging rocks of our Ramble Creek. It was mesmerizing, watching the twisting funnel of undertow, sucking away leaves from the eddy, along the shore, quickly pulling them below the surface. Propelling them invisibly, far out into Lake Ontario. We were all warned about the undertow that swam like a diving serpent, when the water flow in the spring heightened, and each drain in several abutting neighborhoods discharged raging white-water, into the limestone basin of the creek. We were all told about boys and girls who had drowned down there in the past, but none of us believed stories our worried mothers spun.
It was calming to sit along the grassy embankment and watch the waver of hardwood leaves make sunlight dance, off the deep black pools that held suckers in the spring, long silver minnows by June. For most of the year, this place was calm and gentle. An afternoon and weekend sojourn, for all us kids, who hung out along its banks, and fished joyfully for smelt and gathered up huge black tadpoles for jar-aquariums. We built roofless forts and climbed trees that were covered by thick vines of wild grapes. It was Kipling’s jungle adventure at our beck and call. We arrived home with sloshing soakers. Covered in mud and blood from well deserved injuries. Of course my mother had a lot to worry about. There lots of ways a child could die down in that ravine.
The kids of Harris Crescent played in the ravine for lack of a nearby park. Most days the shallow creek was gentle, only of consequence to those who couldn’t balance on the limestone slabs that allowed us to cross from side to side, up to the Lakeshore Avenue bridge. This is where the water was deeper and closer to Lake Ontario, and there was a smell associated with this locale, that stuck on our clothes like a huge stain. It wouldn’t take Merle more than a few seconds to identify, “You’ve been down to the lake, haven’t you?”
Angela lived halfway between my jumping-off point, above the ravine, just below the apartment complex where we lived, in that late, strange,1950's Peyton Place of fear and trembling. My parents lamenting at cocktail parties, and on euchre nights, about big bombs landing on our heads. Cold War threats and bomb shelter digs, accenting the gardens and shrubberies of neighborhood backyards. Everybody had a plan. Larders full to overflowing with enough food to survive an apparent eternity. A week anyway.
There were lots of homegrown ideas, how to escape and survive an atomic bomb. I was in love with Angela, and at times it sure felt as if I’d been whacked by one of those pulverizing Russian bombs. She glowed with radiation, in my eyes. I adored her from afar. That was our relationship. My vigils in the woods of Ramble Creek, watching out over her back swing-set, for when on these bright afternoons, she would take flight as is, of course, an angel’s heavenly privilege.
Frankly Angela scared the hell out of me. I was sure I’d piss my pants if she ever stopped to talk. When we’d pass each other in the hall, it was as if I might vaporize into a fine dust, to be then met by the janitor’s large sweeping brush. I only knew her from school and admittedly held a damning schoolboy crush, the kind that makes the love-sick seek out any number of coincidental, opportunistic meetings in the class and beyond. I’d followed her home one particular afternoon, in the beginning of our non-relationship, after she parted company with girlfriends, and found that her house was a familiar ticky-tacky bungalow that backed onto the creek. It was on the opposite side from where I lived but it was only a five minute walk down the narrow creekside path.
In retrospect, I suppose I was her childhood stalker. It was a compelling situation that left me worse-off day by day. I had no idea what it was, about this classmate that held my heart suspended, sending tremors of withdrawal through my body, when at the opening bell, she didn’t grace the desk next to mine. When she did arrive I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, and nothing was normal any more. I recall my mother being blown-away because I put on clean shirts and pants without command, and brushed my teeth twice before trundling out of the apartment each morning. I asked if I could have a comb? That’s right, Angela gave me reason to own a comb. My first. It was when I asked Merle if she would buy me a package of Valentines that year, she knew it was my first dance with the potentially catastrophic, “femme fatale.” She agreed with resignation, her wee Teddy was growing up. There were very few, if any, of my contemporaries, male or female in Mrs. Carter’s class, that year of atom’s threat, who weren’t penning piles of punched-out Valentines for their favorite mates, and promising others.
Slipping a romantic card into a paper pouch, hung off the bottom rung of the chalkboard, wasn’t all that profound, as most students got a full compliment. Except those poor gangly souls who mired in their own awkwardness, by choice or not, and always got lesser hits from Cupid’s bow. The same who were picked last in team selection, and who walked home alone every night wishing it wasn’t so. I was amongst this special group but we forgave ourselves with cards between us.
Angela’s poise put her above my outstretched arms. My attention would be undesired. All of a sudden I wished to grab up the card I put into her pouch, and run from the classroom all the way home. Of course you’ve felt this way. Embarrassed. Humiliated. Smaller than small!
Our teacher would hand the stuffed pouches desk by desk, and there would be a huge hush except for the sniffler and sneezer, amongst the anxious gathering. On that day, with what appeared a better haul than years previous, I violently ripped open the package just to find one Valentine in particular. I would be able to recognize it by the silken touch and a heavenly perfume all angels are naturally anointed. It wasn’t there. Angela had snubbed me. I was devastated and continued to look through the cards, on the floor, on my lap, searching for any evidence the card had simply been lost by misadventure, the result of nervous fingers. I had been stood-up. The one Valentine I’d expected was not delivered. There’s nothing worse, for the hopelessly lost in love, than to be denied a Valentine. I turned to look at Angela with visible disappointment, just shy of tearful complexion, and watched her fingering the now ridiculously large Valentine I’d saved especially for her. Not once did she look at me. For the remaining few minutes of the day, she never once glanced to her right, even when the teacher put a homework note on the chalk board beside me. I’d made a giant fumble of protocol, giving a girl who didn’t like me, such an elaborate card. Oh the humanity. I wanted to climb into one of those bomb shelters.
I couldn’t get out of that school fast enough. Instead of hustling down the Lakeshore road, as was my habit, I took the rear exit strategy, and disappeared like a phantom down the shady paths and back-streets, away from any one who would think of asking about my haul of Valentines. After a brief hiatus at home, feeling of lesser substance than the old budgie, “Tinker Bell,” flitting in her cage, I headed down to the only healing place I knew. The ravine. The narrow hollow of land, where this tranquilizing little creek washed away trepidation, and frustration, silently in its powerful, cleansing undertow. A water flow that beckoned to current me through the golden beams of sun, the silver crust of February ice along the shore, out to the expanse of lake where my dream-boat bobbed lazily in the diamond lights, all the way toward the open sea.
I sat for a long while that afternoon, in that Valentine thaw of premature spring, thinking about the fool I had become, the result of a simple infatuation I couldn’t possibly understand. It was beautiful here, alone, with thoughts of exploration whipping about the brain yet lost in the sickness of heart all foolish boys nearly drown in, at one time or another, before becoming cynical and disinterested in self-defense as a strategy of survival. It wasn’t long before I began rambling along the path, and it was no coincidence I wound up in a snow-laden thicket, offering a narrow view of Angela’s backyard. I saw footprints in a well trodden path across the property, leading down to the creek-side, and it was no problem at all, for me to imagine the golden-haired lass standing there, with her red knit hat, and long pink scarf, hanging loosely off her shoulders. It was her angelic aura, the blue twinkling eyes and beautiful lips that brought the watcher in the woods to his knees. How could she have been so cruel? Not getting a Valentine from Angela could ruin my life.
Angela never appeared that afternoon, and she was away for most of the week after, which made me wonder if my card had caused some sort of wild embarrassment she couldn’t face in our classroom’s side by side situation. Maybe she was going to transfer to another class or change schools, all because of one big ugly Valentine, sent to a love interest who couldn’t stand me.
She did return to class eventually but I couldn’t face the humiliation of any more rejection than already delivered that lowly winter month. I refused to look at her. At least when she was looking my way. I stole a lot of glances, when she wasn’t watching the board over my shoulder. I still half expected that she’d flip me a Valentine, from inside her desk, even though the occasion for giving such was long since over. I didn’t want to admit I was less love-struck but I was slowly recovering, and with the exception of sundry half-hearted daydreams, Angela wasn’t all-consuming any longer. Of course I was delusional. I had a profound, enduring love for her I couldn’t shake, no matter how many times she ignored that stupid, painted on smile over the exhausting winter of my discontent.
We had an early spring that year. The snow was being washed away by torrential rain and it was obvious winter’s back was broken. Amongst the neighborhood lads, we were hell bent on adventure seeking wherever it presented. My mates Ray and Bobby decided to help free Ramble Creek of the last bits of ice-cover that cloudless, warm Sunday morning in March. It was dare on dare all that morning. Ray and Bob jumped over every inch of that last black ice of the season, sending shards into the air, shattering down the snowbank. We had broken hockey sticks from the arena, to use as poker poles, to pound many new fractures into the ice.
There was one section of still thick ice, over a dark pool we knew, by experience, was deeper than we were tall. Merle had warned me to stay away from that part of the creek because it’s where the dreaded undertow dwelled. Hers was just a voice I’d learned to ignore. After both mates had failed to crack the surface, I gave it a whirl, jumping from a rock on the bank, dropping several feet onto its shimmering surface. Nothing could break that ice, except nature herself. Just as we were planning our next assault, my position changed in so many ways.
As I stood on the ice over that encased water, without warning it suddenly cracked through, and in a weird slow motion, I slipped down in stages through the jagged ice pushing up. In seconds I was up to my chest in frigid, fast moving water, trying to pull me under the ice. Without us realizing it, the heavy rain had brought about one of those seasonal peaks my mother warned about. We had only witnessed flooding conditions several times before, usually in the late spring and autumn. My snowsuit filled with water and it was impossible to lift myself out of the creek without the help of my mates. My legs were numb in seconds, and despite Ray and Bobby’s repeated efforts to pull me up, the breaking ice and my water-logged weight made it an impossible rescue. They decided to run for help, or out of fear, I don’t remember. But the last I saw of my chums, was the gyrating silhouette of their snow-suits, as they scampered up the hillside of Harris Crescent.
I had begun to panic and was losing a lot of energy trying to pull myself up onto the remaining ice sheet. Although I could stand on the bottom, because I couldn’t feel my feet due to the cold, I knew it was just a matter of time, before I lost balance on the slippery rocks on the bottom. Once that happened there would be nothing to stop me from being sucked under the ice by the strong current. It was clear to me though, in that jumble of thoughts and frigid reality that I couldn’t get out of the water without help. Unless the boys had gone to get Merle, I was going to have a short life with a tragic ending. There was going to be an empty desk at Lakeshore Public School.
I have long felt, over these many decades since, that I was very close to succumbing, and simply letting go of the ice crust, allowing the undertow to take me out to the lake. Everything was numb. Even my brain. I was certainly muddled and when I heard a voice initially, it sounded far away and fading, as my glazed-over eyes stared up toward our apartment, thinking it might be the voice of my mother yelling, “hold on Teddy.” It was someone calling “Teddy,” repeatedly, and I felt a tug on the hood of my snowsuit. “Teddy, Teddy, look at me,” was the directive, in a muffled voice coming from somewhere behind me. I couldn’t turn to see who it was, for fear of losing my balance, and that being the ultimate end of a failed struggle. I felt a severe pulling of my hood, and I began to panic about this new force on a conflicted, injured body. “Teddy, Teddy, it’s me....give me your hand.....now Ted, give me your hand.” I tried to raise my arm but it felt like rubber. I soon made a connection, of someone or something at my back, and then another sudden, heavy pull up on the shoulder slack of my jacket. I was being twisted up out of the water by forces unknown, and I remember feeling a sudden panic that my feet were leaving the bottom of Ramble Creek, and being helpless at that point to do anything more than follow the commands from persons unknown..
Up over the jagged ice that ripped the entire back out of my snowsuit, and roughly scraped about two feet of my skin, waist to shoulder, I recall seeing a revolving vision of water, trees and blue sky, as I felt myself being fully raised, and spun around from the rushing water, back first, onto the snow embankment, as two forms wavered above. I couldn’t recognize their faces. It took awhile before I could distinguish voices. “Are you all right, are you,” came an agitated voice. The light above was making their faces black. If I was dead, I was with company. The dead could talk. Maybe I’d even survived. Alive? Was I alive or not, because I didn’t know much about death or its expectations on the newly deceased.
When my muddle began to clear, and true fear and trembling overtook me, it was obvious I had been rescued from certain death. I was too cold to be grateful, and too scared that one of those faces might have belonged to my mother Merle. When I focused on the forms huddled over me, at first I didn’t recognize either person. It wasn’t until one of the two fell to their knees beside my head that I clearly saw the face of an angel. Her shimmering hair falling out from a red knit cap, and her heavenly blue eyes and enchanting smile. “Teddy, are you okay?” I couldn’t answer at that moment. I nodded. She seemed satisfied with my short but none the less clear response.
I was okay. I took inventory of my mortal parts, and they were all intact. I had been saved. Spared over, to live another day. To adventure forth to far horizons and challenge the world yet again. I sat up, let my rescuers haul me to my feet, and let the gallons of ice water drain from my snowsuit. I wasn’t out of danger just yet however, as I heard the familiar blood curdling scream from my mother, just then bouncing down over the snowy hill in that paternal instinct of rage and “damnation of Faust,” as she used to call it, that always ended with a rough snag onto the top corner of my ear, for an unceremonious, stumbling and crying trip home.
In our years of friendship, after this near fatal childhood misadventure, Angela never mentioned my Valentine’s Card that February 14th, or why she hadn’t stuffed one into my envelope. Angela had given me something even more remarkable, you see, when she and her brother hauled me from that watery grave of Ramble Creek.....of which I appeared to belong as human toll of the serpent undertow. And all that sunny, wonderful spring, she would invite me to cross the flat stones over the shallow, golden currents, softly gurgling away in such a poetic place on earth, at such a memorable time of life. To join her on the swing set in the backyard, where we shared our innocent fantasies about sailing away, one day soon, to traverse that dazzling jeweled lake in summer light.
I can still remember the soft, warm touch of her hand in mine, as we stood on the grassy shore of Ramble Creek, and the warm kiss she gave me on the cheek, just before I let go of her delicate fingers, to cross over on the limestone bridge still wet with my footprints. I couldn’t stop looking back at Angela, standing there alone in the late afternoon light, stumbling as I did, on the exposed roots and strewn rocks someone had pulled from the water. It was an experience, with Angela, I enjoyed many times that spring, swinging on that old creaking metal-works, talking about nothing in particular, especially about Valentines or the lack thereof. I do reminisce even a half century later, about the last day I knew Angela, holding her tiny porcelain hand, and looking at her tear-streaked face, pale in the low light of an old day. I didn’t know why she was crying. I didn’t ask. I have always felt dreadful that I didn’t understand our final moment, and why she didn’t want to let go of my hand. I realize now, she had fallen into her own deep pool with perilous undertow of which there was no chance for rescue.
I never saw Angela again.
We were told some weeks later, Angela had passed away peacefully in hospital, after a short illness. I heard my mother talking with a neighbor, that afternoon, and they used the word “leukemia,” that had apparently resulted in some local child’s death. That same night my mother had to come down the path with a flashlight, tripping along the perilously narrow creek-bank, to bring me home from my vigil, across from Angela’s house, watching pathetically for a light to appear in her bedroom window. I didn’t know what leukemia was, and I didn’t understand death. I understood about survival and that is what Angela had imprinted upon me. I’d somehow, by some physical weakness, let her get pulled under by the current here, and I was ashamed of letting go....., of letting her slip under the ice, away from me forever. It was just as the undertow had pulled those leaves from the shore, and pushed them far out into the lake where I could no longer see them. I knew she was out there, somewhere.
It was and remains the mystery of Ramble Creek. The undertow that nearly killed me. In that sepia aged memory, the recollection of that gentle child will always enchant the soul of the lone survivor.
My first chapter, well, it was also my last. I’m no writer. Just a survivor, that’s all!
