5

Escaping a Terrible Fate

I CONTINUED TO THREATEN MY existence on a daily basis in my pre-teen years, as I considered myself quite the daredevil. Evel Knievel was a huge star at the time. I had just seen a live broadcast of his aborted attempt to fly across the Snake River Canyon in a rocket-powered motorcycle.

I had hungered for attention all my life, and I figured if some redneck could become famous for doing stupid shit then I could pull off a brainiac stunt in dramatic fashion as well. I was too young for a grownup motorcycle like the one Knievel used, and my parents refused to buy me a minibike because money was tight and food was more important to the family than my glory. So I decided I would have to do an equally terrifying stunt (for the wow factor) on my old “pop-a-wheelie” bicycle.

Bisecting the town was a little river we called Shit Creek — my own Snake River Canyon. It was about fifteen feet wide with a ditch about ten feet deep. Since the water at the bottom of the ditch was only eight inches deep and full of old tires and shopping buggies, I would be sure to kill myself if my jump fell short. Definitely good for the wow factor.

I would have to build a ramp to launch my bike over the Shit Creek gorge, so I asked my dad if he would build me two ramps, one for take-off and one for landing on the other side.

“No,” he said.

“How about just a launch ramp then?” I could land on the rocks and maybe blow a tire or break an arm, but it would still look great.

“No.”

“Okay, forget about ramps. Can I borrow a couple of planks and a cement block or two?” I was hoping he wouldn’t figure out that I was planning to construct a makeshift ramp for the jump on my own.

“NO!” Dad had figured it out. Damn.

Dejected, I went to my buddy Lennard’s house to hang out for a bit. Across the street from him was a pink house where Donald, a boy a little younger than me, lived. His parents were super-strict and wouldn’t let him out of the yard to play cops and robbers and stuff with us. From the vantage point of my buddy’s place, I could see that this oppressed young man had been bitten by the Evel Knievel bug as well.

A load of gravel had been dumped next to Donald’s house (I guess his dad was going to make cement shoes or something for the family). I saw Donald fashion a ramp out of the gravel with a shovel and then get on his bicycle. I figured he was going to jump the fence, much like Steve McQueen did in The Great Escape, giving his henpecking parents the finger as he soared over the barricade to freedom.

He eyed the ramp for a second or two, then started pedalling towards it like a bat out of hell, hitting the ramp at probably twenty miles per hour, sending him into the air. I should clarify: the kid went into the air while the bike hugged the pile of gravel. Our next-door daredevil was still holding on to the handlebars as he hung upside down for a second, then descended at rapid speed, mashing his nuts on the crossbar of the bicycle. Donald crumpled as the bike cartwheeled and crashed into the chicken-wire fence, ripping open his nose. At the precise moment when his face smashed into the fence, I looked into his eyes and we connected on a sort of cerebral, telepathic wavelength. Don’t do this, he seemed to be saying. I decided that the daredevil life was not for me.

THE YEAR I TURNED SIXTEEN and got my driver’s licence, some school friends were working for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources as junior forest rangers during the summer. The job entailed cutting brush and making firebreaks around small communities in the province. Older kids — they had to be at least eighteen and had finished school — worked on the forest firefighting crews. They got paid a good bundle for slugging hose and eating mosquitoes for weeks at a time.

The provincial government had set up forest fire–fighting stations around Ontario. Since Geraldton was part of the James Bay Frontier, right in the middle of the bush, it stands to reason that fires would burn in the forests around the town. My dad worked as the groundskeeper, facilities manager, gofer, and all-around custodian of the Ministry’s air base, just outside of town; he was lucky to get the gig after the mines closed. One of the jobs he performed was driving the fire gear, pumps, hose, and whatnot up to the fire camps when forest fire season started. There were always fires burning throughout the province every summer, unless it was an unusually wet and depressing one.

At the end of the summer Dad got to take home all the unused (read: uneaten) canned goods. This was the only time we had awesome things like Jell-O pudding in the house. We kids prayed for a summer of few fires, not because we were averse to the idea of the town being consumed by a firestorm, but because we would get fruit cocktail cups for lunch.

ONE MORNING LATE IN THE season (August 22, 1979, to be precise), I was walking to work in town when I saw the Ministry bus taking my friends with the junior ranger jobs to their last day of work before school started up again. I wanted to be with them, but the Ministry of Natural Resources had a nepotism clause: no family members were allowed to work together. So, I had spent the summer doing odd jobs.

I waved to my friends, wishing Dad could have gotten a job somewhere else so I could have been on that bus and making the big coin. I walked home for lunch that day and was cooking up a can of soup we’d scrounged from last year’s fire season when Dad came in.

“Something bad’s happened. The radio’s going crazy.”

I asked him what had happened and he said he didn’t know.

After the soup and fruit cocktail, I went back to work. As I was walking home after I’d finished for the day, the town had a strange pall over it. Dad was talking to Mom when I walked in the door.

“Seven people dead,” he said to me.

“Jesus, what happened?”

“Doing a prescribed burn. Got caught inside,” he said, with his head down. “Terrible screaming. Terrible.”

A prescribed burn rids the forest of dead and diseased trees so there’s less fuel for a potential forest fire. The year after a burn, new saplings are planted to regenerate the woods. To execute a prescribed burn, a fire is set in a large U shape. As the fire burns towards the middle, the top of the U is lit and the fire burns against itself, clearing an area for future planting. It’s dangerous work that requires two or more crews working in tandem.

What went wrong in this case, the inquest revealed, was that the top of the U had been lit before the crews had got out from inside it, trapping eight people. The supervisor, realizing what was happening, ran through the flames, getting severely burned before jumping into a pond. He pleaded with the others to run through the flames to the pond but they, all teenagers, didn’t follow his example and perished. Four of them were good friends of mine whom I had waved to that morning on the bus: Ken Harkes, seventeen; Colleen Campbell, sixteen; Wanda Parise, sixteen; and Andy Thompson, sixteen. The seven kids were found in a pile, the boys on top, trying to shield the girls from the fire — a last act of gallant bravery for these young men. The disaster became known as the Esnagami Lake Tragedy.

The town was numb. A group of classmates converged at someone’s house that evening and we just looked at each other in disbelief. All of us shed tears. That feeling of invincibility I had as a sixteen-year-old was shattered. What if I had been one of those kids on the bus? Had I cheated death again?