Saint Christopher

A little over a year ago I spun you a tale about the perversity of the universe.

Well, really, more than one. But this one in particular, where that perversity was applied to my experience at the tender age of sixteen, I kind of left hanging.

Despite the colossal lack of clamoring, here, in second-person to help you live it, is the next 90 minutes in the life of Ananke's Well-Aimed Rock.

October 23rd, 1983

N 49° 44’ 43” W 114° 53’ 18” 

You know the water is freezing; it’s late October, for one, and the river is cold at best in the summertime. Glaciers feed the Elk up in Elk Lakes Provincial Park, seventy kilometers to the north.

You also know that the boy is standing on a shelf about an inch wide, and that rock face extends at roughly the same eighty-five degree angle another twenty feet under the water. There is very little keeping him from sliding all the way in from the weight of his clothing and boots.

All of this, and the realisation that he needs Help Right Now flashes through your mind in a nanosecond, just after you've already started running, and whole seconds before his friend looks up from his futile attempt at pulling the larger boy out, and asks from a hundred yards away in a voice tinted with desperation “Can you help us?”

Time stops for you. You're a machine.

You hear the drum of the sound of your footfalls on the seventy-year-old deck timbers on the trestle bridge.

You look up, and you’re already there, task one complete, task two queued up; time to descend the treacherous three-meter (10 feet) of cliff face to the river's edge without kicking rocks or debris on the boys, or falling in yourself.

You've detached. You hear your own voice barking orders to the boy who is still dry. Get his dad, you say. Tell him to bring his truck.

In your mind, this makes perfect sense - everyone in the Sticks has a Dad. Every Dad has a truck. It’s the natural order of a mining town. The wet boy will need somewhere warm to sit when you get him out.

There is no if.

You strip off your coat and leave it at the top of the cliff - to keep it dry so the kid has something to wear. Good thing you attached the sleeves.

You pull off your belt too, maybe you can loop it around… oh, to hell with that, you think, and toss it aside. You don't have time to waste on finesse.

You move down the cliff face like a shadow might on a sunnier day, ending up in place just over the boy's head.

You ask his name, as you know you should so that you may more readily set him at ease. He gives it to you. You tell him to take your hand. He holds up something that feels rather like a brick of cheese just taken out of the fridge… and you note that it has about the same grip. He confirms this by saying he can’t hold on.

Okay, you tell yourself through the adrenaline burn, time to rock and roll. Squatting on your right heel, you stretch your left foot down to just touching the water's edge, simultaneously grabbing a handful of something stable on the granite face over your head.

Good thing you're tall - you cover about eight and a half feet of the cliffside extended like this.

You take the boy by the jacket, center chest, just below his armpit line with your left hand and make as hard a fist as possible, holding his coat.

You know you only get one shot at this or you’re both going swimming – and with everything you have, you stand on your right foot, catapulting the waterlogged 12 year old, scrambling, out of the water, and up to the safety of the ledge overlooking the cliff.

You follow him, noting that whatever you’d used as a handhold is still in your right hand.

Evidently it wasn't that stable.

At the top of the hill the boy sums up his experience, telling you “Shit, Thanks,” as you strip his jacket off of him, replacing it with your own - advising him that his fishing career is probably over once his parents show up.

The adrenaline is bleeding off now, used up in a rush.

You consider getting him out of his sopping jeans and boots, but decide of the side of propriety, and you send him up to the bridge to sit on the concrete piling on the sunny side – it’s also out of the breeze - and wait for his ride to show up, while you put your discarded belt back on.

Scant moments later as you are collecting scattered fishing gear, you hear the pounding footfalls of someone running on the bridge deck, followed by a hysterical woman screaming, “Where is he!” over and over.

You realize that they cannot see their son sitting where you placed him, so you shout back that he’s on the bridge. You climb the short path to the bridge deck and note with a little irritation that his father brought a rope, not a truck.

Introductions are perfunctory and hasty. The man gives the same name the boy did… which makes the boy Junior.

You think you know the name, but don’t recall why, and you decide it’s not important.

Your jacket is returned to you because mom, even in her panic, thought at least far enough ahead to bring a blanket. The man offers to pay for dry cleaning – which you laugh off, stating that it's a wash and wear jacket, but thanks anyway.

You can almost see an inclusive bubble close around the three at this point, and you decide that your presence is really no longer required. You walk away without another word, not wishing to interrupt, or, really, call further attention to yourself.

You will later find that no one saw you leave – by all accounts, you vanished.

It's 50 meters to the crest of the incline with the bridge at the bottom; that crest is your target as it also holds the trailhead you want to take to get you to the CP Rail line and bridge to get home.

Upon reaching that crest moments later, you turn back to look once more at the reunited family unit, only to see another member crossing the bridge.

This one you recognise; she's the new girl in your grade 11 class.

Okay – that must be why the name is familiar. You put it out of your mind.

Completely.

Your walk home is the usual forty-five minutes and is entirely uneventful.

You walk in the front door of your home just as Dad hangs up the phone in the front room and stands up to face you as you step out of your shoes.

“I know what you’ve been up to,” he states, wearing his usual sardonically inscrutable look – a half smile you’ll recognize in the mirror in years to come.

Your mind flashes panic as you know that the CP Rail lines are technically trespassing, and the train bridge you crossed is inherently dangerous.

You brace for trouble, and it probably shows on your face.

He takes your hand to shake it. “That Phone call was from the new Staff Sergeant in command of the RCMP detachment. He said he’s called every Johnson in the phone book trying to find the parents of the boy who just rescued his son.”

Right, you think. That’s where you've heard that name before.

Lessons

I taught myself to ski when I was 17 years old.

You tell people that you grew up in the mountains in British Columbia, and they make assumptions. Truth is, I've been skiing maybe a half-dozen times in my life, and I'm not very good at it.

All my contemporaries growing up in the Sticks skied, or played hockey, or whatever. I never did. I always presumed it was because the gear was too expensive. For one reason or another, we grew up poor-middle-class, but that's a story for another time.

We could actually skate on the street most days in winter. The snow was usually compacted to the point of ice, and the plows didn't scrape it down so as not to rip up the gravel shoulders of the streets. The Municipality installed gutters on the streets in the early 80s, and that signaled the End of That.

At the time, not skiing and not skating didn't really bother me. Well, that's not true; the not skating kind of did. I had Dad's old hand-me-down skates and they obviously fit me horrendously badly. I tried going skating on my own a handful of times in the Sticks... but those stupid skates had nothing for ankle support, and were more a detriment than anything else.

At least I always thought they were Dad's; they may have been my brother's once - that would certainly make sense. Suffice to say they were very old, and a little too big.

I suspect that a good skate swap for kids - like we have practically everywhere now in North America - would have really done well for me. It's one thing to build a bike out of spare parts... but there isn't much you can do for skating.

Looking back, I know for a fact that if I really wanted skates, I would have got them. But, as stated - I didn't care enough.

We've been taking the little kids out to Brimacombe for skiing lessons on Saturdays.

This is something I'd never did as a kid - organized lessons in a sport - except for swimming lessons at the wading pool at Kin park when I was five. I rather like the fact that we are able to provide things for our children that I never had... but then I think about it.

I spent winter weekends icefishing. And snowshoeing. And hunting. Snowmobiling. Sledding. Shooting. We played shinny on frozen ponds with rough-cut hockey equipment that dad made on the fly. Meals involving roasting home-made elk sausage on willow sticks over the open fire (yes, lit with One Match). Winter drives to explore. Camping occasionally.

Whatever my childhood lacked in financing sporting lessons - my Dad more than made up for in time and effort. Nobody could ever complain about that.

The result of that breadth of experience, courtesy of Dad, is that I've done - and am comfortable doing - things that make some of my Contemporaries go all bulgy-eyed. Butchering an elk on the kitchen table and making sausage comes immediately to mind - but I digress.

So I taught myself to skate on rollerblades at 27. I bought good ones. I still have them. Funny thing - the difference between Ice Skating and Rollerblading is Hills. I believe I still have the scars...

But when I was 17, I went on a school skiing trip to Fernie. As I indicated, it was my very first crack at skiing. It turns out they teach kids what they called "snowplowing" - nowadays they tell kids it's a pizza.

I never did that. Couldn't for some (knees) reason. I went straight to the proper turning method by watching people who knew what they were doing - and mimicking them.

Of course the down side is when you're a novice, they set your bindings to come off the boot really easily so you don't hurt yourself - even if you are roughly gorilla-shaped. They don't expect you to turn properly. I sheared my skis right off my feet a couple times before I figured that out.

I'm hoping that in a year or two my eight-year-old will be a better skier than me. It's not much of a stretch.

Maybe he'll teach me how to ski backward. In the mean time, the Saturdays out have been excellent.