It took twelve years before I made the break.
My twenty-fourth birthday found me enrolled in the University of Manitoba, in a master’s program in English literature, and lacking only two more courses for my degree – Old English (Beowulf ) and Practical Criticism (with an emphasis on semiotics). My plan was to finish those courses in summer school.
When I was a kid, I never imagined that I’d be spending my adulthood in seminar rooms with form-fit plastic chairs and acoustic tile on the ceiling. I never imagined that I’d be spending my evenings hunched over a desk, trying to decipher the turgid prose of Jacques Derrida and Edmund Spenser. I imagined that I’d have some kind of exciting job like bush pilot or forest ranger. I wasn’t quite sure what forest rangers did all day, but I thought the duties probably involved having a green truck, a pet timber wolf, and a pretty girlfriend in a checkered blouse. Silly as they might sound, those were my expectations. Everyone has expectations. Mine didn’t work out for a variety of reasons, the most important one being that I got sick.
After getting home from my camping trip to Rosena, my lower back became so painful that I could barely walk. My parents took me to the hospital in Kenora, where the doctors looked me over, shrugged, and sent me to Misericordia Hospital in Winnipeg, where I spent three weeks getting X-rayed, probed, and paraded in front of different medical teams. They cut open my chest and chiselled some bone out of my clavicle, sent it to the lab, and found nothing. They conducted every blood test in the book, and checked my heart for viral fever. They stuck periscopes up different bodily openings and had a look. Finally they gave up and sent me to a larger hospital in downtown Winnipeg, where I spent another three weeks going through the same tests and various new ones.
One of them was a bone marrow biopsy, a procedure so crude that it’s best compared to the medieval technique of brain trepanning. They wheel you into a room and freeze the skin of your lower back with a horse needle. Assorted broad-shouldered assistants circle the table, murmuring calm reassurance and getting ready to hold you down. Then a doctor uses a power drill to punch a hole into the flat bone of your lower back. Once he’s drilled into the inner pelvis, he draws out the marrow with a plastic tube. The vacuum tube makes a festive gurgling noise, and the aching sensation of the marrow drawing out of your body gives you a sudden surge of panic, as if your vital juices were being drained by an enormous spider.
After taping a padded bandage onto my lower back, they sent me back to my room to await results. The results came back the next day and showed the same thing as the other tests – nothing. Medical people with clipboards came to my room and conducted long interviews. Doctors are a bit like cops. They distrust each other’s investigative skills and want you to retell your story from the beginning. Eventually too, just like cops, they begin to suspect that you’re making it all up. One day an orderly took me to the office of a young psychiatrist. He asked me questions designed to determine whether I was crazy. (“The nurses say that you refuse to take your afternoon nap. Do you resent authority?”) After talking to me for a while, the psychiatrist confessed that he had no patience for hospitals, either, and sympathized with anyone who rebelled. “I don’t know why they sent you here. But I guess we’ve got an hour to kill. Do you want to go get a bite to eat?”
The psychiatrist turned out to be a good guy. Like me, he was an aspiring adventurer who hadn’t had any adventures, and we ended up swapping tales of our single camping trip. Hospitals, being pressurized environments, tend to reduce people to their essence. For every petty despot, there’s some decent soul who is spending his or her whole life trying to help people. Patients are in such distress that the smallest act of generosity can burn itself into long-term memory. I know, for example, that I’ll never forget the anonymous nurse who materialized at my bedside in the middle of the night, when a sudden assault of pain snatched me out of the world of dreams and flung me gasping and wideawake into my hospital bed at three o’clock in the morning. In the dark, while the night-sounds of the hospital and the far-off city murmured around us, she rubbed my bare feet with her warm hands and told me stories about her dog, her dad, and her cottage at the lake. Then there was George, a campy middle-aged homosexual nurse, a man with perfect hair and hands like a jazz piano player, who could whip off a bandage or slip in an IV needle with such deftness that you never felt a thing. I first met George when I was getting ready to go into the O.R. for the shoulder bone biopsy, lying alone on a stretcher with a tube in my arm.
There’s a kind of fatal gloom to the decor and lighting of the surgical wing, and as I lay there, I pondered all the things I was going to miss about life. I was going to miss the fact that I was never going to have a girlfriend. I was going to miss riding through Europe in a train with her, or canoeing the Oiseau River in northern Ontario, and sleeping together while the rain pattered on our cozy tent. I was going to miss a lot of things. And I couldn’t figure out any way to get them back, because I’d never had them in the first place. Worst of all, there was no one I could summon for help. I had always been raised to believe that in times of crisis, you could go to an adult, who would chuckle and explain that you were mistaken, and there was actually nothing to worry about. But this was the real thing, and no human being could save me from it, not the doctors, not the nurses, not even my father, who knew everything, and was afraid of nothing, and approached all problems with the calm, sauntering purposeful-ness of Gary Cooper in High Noon. This was a bogeyman I had to face alone.
I was therefore searching for a perspective of some kind, a little psychic amulet that I could clutch when it was time to go into the operating room, when a great hulking furry-browed gorilla of a man with a voice like Judy Garland sashayed into the room and spotted me lying there. “How are you doing, chum?” he asked, patting me on the shoulder. He checked my IV line and glanced down at my face. “Are you doing all right?”
What kind of a question was that? Being a homo, he must surely know that I was not doing all right. Like him, and like everyone else in this hospital, I was definitely not doing all right. But he was one of those people who have mastered the knack of taking the tragedy of life and flipping it over into repartee and humour. You could tell by the bounce in his walk. He adjusted my intravenous line and winked at me. “You’re going to be fine,” he said, with the authority of an old campaigner. He said it with a confidence based on inside knowledge. He promised me I’d be fine, and I believed him. And still do.
The operation, of course, turned out to be no worse than getting a tooth pulled. Every time we go into a hospital we think we’re going to die, and we never die. Life goes on and on. It’s like one of those films they make in Sweden. The results came back from the lab and showed the usual non-results. This was getting to be a real mystery. Or at least that was the way I preferred to think of it, as a gumshoe investigation, rather than the comic tale of a physical reject. Every night my family would troop into my room, brothers and sisters, cousins, and of course my mother, who would have camped at the foot of the bed if I had let her. But I didn’t encourage long visits. They created the impression that I was a mere boy, a wheelchair-bound poster child, rather than some gallant young Hemingway type who’d taken a few slugs in the shins while holding off the fascists. So I usually feigned grumpiness and exhaustion until they left, then spent my evenings talking to my buddies on the payphone. One evening, after another round of tests had produced another round of non-results, my father came to visit and said he’d decided to take me to the Mayo Clinic to see if they could sort it out. It must have been expensive to fly me down to the United States and book me into a first-class American hospital, but my dad didn’t seem bothered by it. And I wasn’t bothered by it either. I saw it as an opportunity to go for a ride in an airplane. As soon as my dad left, I went down to the payphone and called my pal Kenny to tell him the good news.
“We’re flying down to the States!”
“So they don’t know what’s wrong with you?” Kenny asked.
“Nope, they’re stumped.”
For some reason Kenny thought this was rich, and between coughing gales of laughter, kept asking me if it was really true that they didn’t know what was wrong with me. He acted like this was one of our Johnny Horton Appreciation Nights in his living room, and I’d just told him the funniest story he’d ever heard.
I regarded myself as a fairly seasoned traveller. I’d been to Niagara Falls, for example, and on different occasions I’d taken automobile trips to Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and Fargo, North Dakota. But I didn’t ride airplanes every day. In fact I’d never been on one before. So in preparation for the trip I dressed in a suit, necktie, and private eye-style trench coat. At the Winnipeg airport, we boarded a sleek and ultra-modern Trans-Canada Airlines four-engine Vickers Viscount turbo-prop and took off for Minneapolis. The Viscount was a first-rate ship (we seasoned aviators like to use nautical terminology). Her turbine engines were smoother than the radial engines on the old DC-3s she replaced, and in a recent big international air race from London to Christchurch, she had beaten her nearest competitor by nine hours. TCA ran a pilot school in Winnipeg, and Viscounts were always flying over our house. One day my brother Danny and I noticed a Viscount flying over the house with a dead engine, and its propeller spinning lazily. After spotting it, howling in alarm, jumping up and down, we sprinted into the house and grabbed my dad, who knows about these things, and he told us that it was only a training exercise. The pilot was probably practising landings with a dead engine. I’d always been an airplane-fetishist and had a home-built plastic Mustang, a Zero, a Catalina flying boat, and even a scale-model Viscount hung on threads from my bedroom ceiling. The Viscount flew proudly among those warplanes for several months until it became soaked with lighter fluid one day and crashed, full of screaming passengers, into my backyard.
After a month at the Mayo Clinic, they diagnosed me with an obscure condition called anklyosing spondilitis. Its genesis is complicated, but in essence it’s triggered when your body gets invaded by a very smart little bacterium. We already have billions of bacteria inside our bodies, and most of them do good work. So when a new bacterium enters our body, our immune system reviews its documents to see if it’s a friend or foe. Enemy bacteria are always trying to figure out ways to slip past the guards. In my case, a bacterium called HLA-B27 entered my body wearing the disguise of a human cartilage cell. A patrolling antibody arrested the suspect and, after a bit of confusion, decided to err on the side of caution and destroy it. The antibody dispatched a description of the suspect to the central immune system, and it relayed the information to the other patrols. Antibodies are well intentioned, but they aren’t noted for their ability to think outside the box. They just follow orders. Other antibodies soon discovered other cells that resembled HLA-B27 and destroyed them too. Trouble is, they weren’t enemy bacteria, they were cartilage cells. This destruction of natural cartilage caused distress and inflammation to my spine, which in turn triggered a more aggressive response from my immune system. After two months in Winnipeg hospitals and a month at the Mayo Clinic, the whole lunatic feedback cycle began to settle down, and I could walk again.
My doctors told me that my prognosis was hard to predict. They told me that I should avoid heavy lifting and overexertion. They said I might totally recover, and on the other hand, I might have recurring episodes and wind up with a stiff back. With most victims (the syndrome occurs in only one of ten thousand people) the prognosis is somewhere in between. I hoped that I’d be one of the lucky ones.
When I got back to Winnipeg, I reviewed my options. It seemed that I wouldn’t be able to seek a career as a trapper, lumberjack, or some other type of outdoorsman, so I decided to become a pilot. I figured that it couldn’t be a physically arduous job. My new buddy, Chris, had the same ambition, and while we walked the streets of River Heights, we played a game where you had to identify the name and model of airplanes flying overhead by listening to their engines.
Chris was a little older than I was, and by the time he was sixteen he was taking flying lessons. After he soloed, he took me out flying with him. As most people do, he was learning to fly on the Cessna 150, a little trainer that aviation schools rent out to students. On spring evenings, instead of studying for our Grade 11 final exams, we’d go out to the Winnipeg Airport and practise stalls and spins. You weren’t allowed to practise over a built-up area, so we’d fly west and level out at 4,500 feet over the great checkerboard of fields beyond the city. Practising stalls and spins is a required part of every pilot’s training, and it sounds more dangerous than it really is.*
≡ Although some planes have a scary plaque riveted to the instrument panel – Do Not Intentionally Spin This Aircraft.
To incite a spin, you first have to incite a stall. Most non-pilots think that when an airplane ‘stalls’ the motor cuts out. But in aviation, the term ‘stall’ refers to a wing that has lost its lift. To stall an airplane, you pull the stick back and commence a steep climb. It’s like ascending to the top of the arc on a playground swing. The plane pauses, shudders, and then tips over and nosedives. As it’s falling, it begins to corkscrew. With your stomach hovering up in your throat somewhere, you shut off the throttle, push the stick forward, and apply hard opposite rudder, a kind of kicking motion that draws the plane out of the spin. Chris let me try all these manoeuvres too: stalling the plane, spinning it, landing it. It was illegal, but he was my buddy.
As soon as I turned eighteen, I paid $25 and went to have my medical at the CNR station. To loosen up, I gobbled a fistful of aspirins ahead of time, but the doctor was a wise old fellow who sensed that something was amiss. He made me jump up and down and touch my toes until he ascertained that I seemed to have some kind of stiffness in my lowest three or four vertebrae. The stiffness was, of course, working its way up my spine. But I was involved in the full zest of teenage denial and believed that the doctor should just sign his name on that sheet of paper, and I could go off and become a Class One commercial pilot. He flunked me, of course. And the last I heard of Chris, he was an Air Force major, flying Starfighters in Germany.
Once again, I considered my future. In high school, the only course I’d ever excelled at was English. I’d always been an avid reader, and my schoolteachers had sometimes complimented me on my creative writing – stories written in scrupulous longhand, bound in Duo-Tang folders, and illustrated with coloured pencil (Curse of the Rabid Wolverine ). I wasn’t producing these stories out of some long-term ambition to become a writer. I knew that most writers were rich American expatriates who lived in places like Cuba and Paris. I was writing them because it offered the same creative satisfaction that you might get from puttering away on an intricately detailed model airplane. For as long as you focused on the project, you were free. It was just like flying, except you didn’t need a pilot’s licence.
I therefore began writing stories, and after graduating from high school and starting university, I decided to specialize in English literature. I thought I might eventually become a university professor. I didn’t know much about professin’ work, but I imagined that a professor’s duties involved wearing comfortable old tweed jackets, reading great novelists and poets, and showing a willingness to become the confidant of numerous flaxen-haired young coeds in black turtleneck sweaters.
Over the next few years I discovered that I was misinformed. The leftist intelligentsia had formed a sort of unofficial polit-buro that set the tone on campuses across North America. Under the new regime, nobody studied great poets any more. They studied great theories. Poems about nightingales and graveyards were written by DWEMs (dead white European males) and were therefore passe. To become an English professor under the new order, you had to know your ‘semiotics’ – structuralism, deconstructionism, or one of the many other isms, most of which regarded classical literature as a sort of appalling remnant of colonialism. Instead of sitting in my study carrel pondering Tintern Abbey, I pondered passages like this:
Saussure focused on linguistic signs, whilst Peirce dealt more explicitly with signs in any medium, and noted that the relationship between signifiers and their signifieds varies in arbitrariness – from the radical arbitrariness of symbolic signs, via the perceived similarity of signifier to signified in iconic signs, to the minimal arbitrariness of indexical signs.
I hung in, thinking that once I got my Ph.D., I could get a job teaching on Vancouver Island or some place where they hadn’t yet heard about the Death of Literature. I’d buy a rambling old house by the sea, acquire a Jeep and a dog, and settle into a rustic literary life. During my four-month-long summer vacations, I’d do some writing and perhaps build a boat with my own hands. But as I advanced into graduate school, I also began to notice that everyone avoided one question – would there actually be jobs available when we graduated? My professors acted as though the subject of employment was beneath them. And if I couldn’t ask them, who could I ask? Some of my fellow students might have been studying semiotics because it was just so darned fascinating. But I wanted to get something out of my degree, and I was worried that there might be nothing more than a brown envelope and a diploma waiting for me when I finally graduated. University enrolments were dropping, and some of my seminar groups had only a handful of students. One seminar consisted of exactly one student – me – and the professor who ran the class made it clear that she’d lose a third of her income if I dropped out. I had three more years of this ahead, plus a thesis. And by the time I hit the job market, I feared that my doctorate in semiotics would qualify me to drive a cab anywhere in North America.
So that bright green summer morning in June, as I cruised down the road towards the University of Manitoba, I suddenly experienced such an intense attack of ambivalence that I pulled over to the side of the road and sat there with the turn signal blinking.
What should I do? Should I quit school and try something else? Or should I keep a stiff upper lip and finish what I started?
The logical half of my brain suggested that I should carry on, or live forever with the knowledge that I was a craven quitter. I’d signed up for graduate school, and it was my duty to finish it. Apprenticeships in any field are designed to weed out the weaklings. And nothing is easy.
The other half of my brain – the half that always got me in trouble – argued that it wasn’t a matter of being a quitter. I’d given university a good shot, and it wasn’t working out. The longer I stayed, the worse it was going to be when I finally bailed out.
I felt that I was sitting at a major fork in the road. Each choice seemed equally plausible and unacceptable. At times like this, people tend to fumble around for some tried and true formulaic way of making decisions. And as I sat there, pondering my future, I recalled a tiny bit of allegorical wisdom from my old hardcover wilderness survival book, I Live in the Woods. The author, Paul Provencher, had spent his whole life working as a timber cruiser in northern Quebec. He never explained what a timber cruiser does all day. (I guess we’re supposed to know that.) But he spent a lot of time explaining how to avoid getting lost in the woods.
People get lost because they get caught up in the details. When you’re down in the underbrush, climbing over deadfalls and detouring around thickets, you quickly lose your sense of grand direction. You can’t see the forest for the trees. According to him, you have to ignore the immediate environment while you’re travelling, and concentrate on following a line, which you maintain by keeping your eye on distant landmarks. You pick a tall, odd-looking tree that’s a mile away, for example, and move towards that. At the same time, you maintain a sense of the path behind you. You stop, once in a while, and look back on the distant landmarks you’ve passed. When you lose sight of where you’re going, you have to look back at where you’ve been.