Mastodons

Downriver there’s a ferry graveyard. Just the name “ferry graveyard” is enough to get me excited. Elephants washed onto the beachhead from some unknown roaming ground.

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While the village of Montrose had the equivalent population of Dawson it had only 2 stores: Roger and Barb’s Gas & Convenience and Dixie Lee Fried Chicken. A pretty static village there was little construction around town but the odd house did go up, especially in the newer, eastern end; employees of Cominco getting out of Trail’s barren slopes and moving up the more verdant mountainside for a more rural experience.

During the warm months I’d seek out newly framed houses, skeletons of dreams yet to be undone by the slow shuttering of the valley’s economy. Crossing the dry moat between lot and foundation on a springy two by ten, picking my way across the joists and plywood floors, climbing stairs that ascended, seemingly free of supports, to the second and third floor vistas. Leaping from the spaces yet to become windows down onto dirt piled around the foundation, these explorations were also an opportunity to scavenge. Workers often left loot behind and while the booty might be as little as a couple of empty pop cans those could be traded for their deposit and then traded again for 5 cent candies (2 Kraft Caramel squares for a nickel), occasionally the find was more impressive: a ball of twine, blanks from a nail gun or can of spray paint and sometimes actual tools. Claw hammers, robertson screwdrivers or a plumb line would be gathered up and brought home, hidden away and never used lest Dad see them and ask their origin.

Shannon recently asked me if I had a favourite memory from my childhood and to that question there’s no hesitation. Snowbanks were in full melting retreat as I pedaled back from Roger’s with a cluster of caramel squares in my windbreaker and a can of coke in one hand. I was riding a ten-speed, cruising along with the afternoon sun shining down, melting the snow and warming my forearms. The Coke was just opened and super-fizzy as I no-handed, feeling the sun on my flesh and the heat absorbed into my clothes. As much as that scenario sounds like a fake-indie commercial the truth is, I remember it with the clarity of happiness and temporary emancipation. Maybe it’s emancipation that gives me such joy. Letting go, reveling in my occasional luck at something, inexplicably, working out beyond all expectation. Not crashing on a hairy descent, enjoying a leisurely Americano on a park bench in the middle of the day, sprawled out in bed, telling stories and tracing a finger along a hip.

Arriving at the collapsing carcass of the Paddle wheeler I started rooting my way into the structure and those blissful clambers of half-built houses in Montrose came bubbling back. The smell of pine on a sunny day still gives that fleeting thrill of freedom and while this skeleton had no such smell – was a thing from an unknown past – it was also an echo of the future from my own youth. Like a suburban house caught in the gravitational pull of an event horizon, the paddle wheeler was held in a moment drawn out over decades. Slow collapse, splayed-out timbers like ribs, expanding village collapsing village, a kid and a ten-speed, this dialectic of possibility and entropy and, with each carefully placed step, the giddy rush of floating atop this mastodon.