"Great things in business are never done by one person, They're done by a team of people"
Steve Jobs
The boy was out there in the trees and thunder with the animals, sensitive and elusive, waiting for me, dressed in shadows wild and lovely. I still catch him sometimes, spying on me longingly from the mystic, alone, through darkened windows.
It was close to bedtime when I lifted the wooden sash of our upstairs bedroom window and allowed the fresh night air to sweep in off Toronto harbor. There was still a faint tinge of blue in the western sky, with tiny flickering stars peeking through the lingering twilight. Against my baby brother’s sleepy eyes and whiny protests I stole away like a coon into the warm summer night.
Carefully lowering myself down from the sill onto barely a foot of roof overhang and sticking to the wall like a spider, trying not to glance down and keeping my chin pressed tight against the peeling paint, I inched around the dormer and scrambled up what was to me a steeply pitched roof.
Duck walking warily along the roof peak, arms outstretched against the ecliptic, heart pounding in sensual delight, I felt I was floating like a winged cherub, until a late and tired robin cried out her objections to my intrusion as she flew to her nestlings with their last snack of the day. Sliding down a hip valley on my butt to a tall TV tower conveniently bolted to the backside of the house, it was then just a simple matter of climbing down the tower rungs. Having made this passage many times before, all I had to do now was keep my head down and sneak by my parents’ window as they burned the midnight oil.
There was no turning back, and if I were caught I would be in serious trouble, so I threw caution to the wind and headed for my appointed rendezvous. With feelings of negligence, I’ve often wondered what my little brother did when I was away. Did he cry himself to sleep? Did he ever consider or attempt the dangerous climb himself? Did he tell on me? I still berate myself for not being a better older brother to him, but there was so much of an age gap between us that it was hard to find things to do together. I've often wished I could have taken him with me.
I headed first to my secret stash to get my cheap corncob pipe and sweet Virginee tobacco, peashooter, and bag of stolen peas that I kept buried in a rusty old cookie tin along with baloney and mustard sammies I had hidden earlier in the evening. Ducking down and keeping to the shadows like a common thief, I ran along the open grassy lawns of my neighbors, enjoying my freedom and the cool wet dew on my bare feet, knowing they would soon be warm and dry on the concrete streets that were now releasing the heat of the day.
Excited, I felt I was on sacred ground, as it would be strange if I were seen at this hour, yet I was thoroughly invigorated and felt highly privileged prowling around in the grown-up hours. My route took me along Seneca, and the dark mirrored waters of the Toronto skyline, lit like a giant Christmas tree. My youthful Pan figure silhouetted against the deep colorful reflections of the city front, resonating their magical yellows, reds and blues in the black waters in long lazy wavy fingers. I sat on the newly built seawall, and had a quick daydream as I was temporarily lulled and captivated by the soft distant droning of a motorboat.
Although I had sat on this wall a million times in broad daylight, late at night the quiet lapping waters took on sinister magical tones. A cool breeze rippled and darkened the water’s surface, breaking the spell, and the black waters seemed foreign to me now. These were the waters where dead men’s faces bobbed up to grab you from the black depths. I knew Chris was allowed to sleep in the screened front porch of their bay front cottage during the muggy weeks of July. Filling my mouth with peas and readying my peashooter, I quietly made my way to his summer bedchamber. Seeing the coast was clear, to get his attention I sprayed his little coop in ricocheting peas. As they rattled around I knew I had achieved my desired effect when I heard him quietly mumble “Starchy!”
When I joined him he was listing to a cool rocket ship crystal radio set with a little telescoping antenna in the nose cone and a wire ear plug. It was able to pull in a few local stations, in which we became absorbed until sounds of his mother coming to check on him sent me on my way. Being too closely maternally guarded, he couldn’t join me that night. Later in life I discovered that dear Betty, his mother, and my mother were in cahoots and knew of my midnight ramblings. Only children and criminals think they’re getting away with something! Making my exit, the wild spirit deep within me escaped and in synthesis we made our way through back yards, gates, under hedgerows and over fences, following secret paths and openings that only the local kids and cats knew and traveled.
I made my way to the edge of Wyandot Avenue, in David Barrett’s yard. Which borders the dark woods and marks the division between the pretty cottages, streetlights and manicured lawns, and the blessed dark primeval solitude, of the wilderness. To children this was the frontier, the great unknown, and what was beyond the wilderness and over the waters to the city, could only be guessed at by us. Hiding in the shadows and watching, while trying to acclimatize my eyes to the wall of pitch blackness looming before me.
The large hawk that had been drifting high over the wilderness on summer thermals like a kite all afternoon had left the stage of daylight and was now fast asleep in his woodland perch somewhere. The black night had by now fully absorbed the western twilight and the stars hung bright and low, as if suspended from the celestial sphere on invisible wires. A Cheshire moon smiled low over Lake Ontario as night hawks buzzed and trilled in dazzling daredevil courtship, in sweeping dives and turns in love high above the treetops. While a family of tiny bats that spend the day in the AIA clubhouse air vents, silently darted in and out of the darkening under-story, gulping gnats and midges on the fly.
After checking for any late strolling adults, I bolted from the safety of the shadows across the last vestiges of cultivation and out into the darkened wilderness and my hidden root-bound tabernacle. Night sounds predominated and seemed to be amplified in the wilderness. My strong eyes had not fully adjusted to starlight and I hadn’t gone far when my toe caught the stem of a ripening milkweed pod, knocking me off balance and sending a fandango of parachuted seedlings into the cool night air, at the same time spooking a sleeping bird that whistled off, complaining in falsetto into the night.
We had built our underground palaces by expanding big holes in the ground and covering these overgrown foxholes with remnant materials we had stripped from the above ground forts abandoned by the older boys before us. We overlaid these excavations with thick branches, covering them in turn with unrolled four-by-eight sheets of galvanized tin that had been pilfered from a huge surplus piled near the Sea Hawks training boathouse. Well… to us it was surplus and now rightfully scavenged under the international rules of finders keepers. On top of the tin was laid a thick covering of earth and sand and any local camouflage to match the surrounding topography. Once patted down and feathered out they were unseen and strong enough to walk over, with each dwelling having its own secret entrance-way, to foil any curious outsider or girl.
A few forts including ours had been dug deep enough to allow us to crouch in, however most were nothing more than crawl spaces, with barely room enough to sit upright. Because of the low water table in various places. In these murky repositories were kept matches and candles melted down onto jar lids. A good supply of punk wood was always on hand in case our precious tobacco ran low. Some of these strange earthen hovels even had elaborate interconnecting tunnels—some, depending upon the resourcefulness of their owners, even the extra luxury of a coal oil lamp. Still others had the outrageous extravagance of a complete working, but leaky stove, and carved-out shelves in the earthen side walls.
Auxiliary surplus was always on hand, and easily procured from past wilderness civilizations. With quickly growing roots of weeds and black poplar oozing from the walls, each hut had its own charming subterranean character. Usually a table made from an old fruit crate would be the sole piece of furniture. To get about in them one had to crawl or crouch around on the deep cool sandy floor, which was heavenly to stretch out on in summer. Our fort had been greatly expanded by building upon the efforts of past labor. Dave Barrett and Peter Lye had done most of the grunt work of expanding on the abandoned trenches, of the older boys before us. And had dug deep enough to almost stand up in.
Never again have I felt such a supreme sense of achievement and property ownership as I had in those old forts. At the time I wouldn’t have traded them for all the clean sheets in the world. Cozy as beavers, we spent blissful hours in those hallowed temporal closets, mostly during weekends and summer holidays, and at times late at night at great risk to our behinds. We were continually repairing and expanding our forts upon the fashions of the older boys who, turning traitor, had cast them aside, and moved on to liking girls. Sadly, much to their loss, they never set foot in them again, and these rare exotic treasures were automatically bequeathed to the next generation of grubby diggers. In them were stocked the endemic produce of the Island gardens along with goodies pillaged from kitchen cupboards,at home.
Creating never-ending strange mysteries for many Island moms. Our nocturnal activities took us all over the neighborhood, raiding berry patches and fruit trees and in between were played midnight games of Nicky-nicky-nine-doors, which gave us the most excitement and fun we could possibly know as we descended like locusts on some hapless garden or front porch. Teasing and terrifying one another with stories of getting our arses shot with buckshot only added serious spice to the experience. The evening usually ended atop the Algonquin Bridge, with pipe smoking, spitting, belching and peeing contests that were conducted off the top, disturbing the barn swallows asleep only inches below our feet, happy in their well-crafted mud nests. This was a place where solid nicknames were born for life, never to be changed nor challenged. They evolved either naturally or from some prowess of the individual boy, like Dink, Gronk, Weasel and Drake.
A faint chilly wind arose from over Wards Island in the darkness of the eastern sky, bringing my thoughts to my warm bed, and all the good little boys and girls safe and sound asleep in their warm Island cottages. Lightning flashed low on the southern horizon somewhere far over the lake and soft distant thunder spoke of summer rain in the Americas. Free from the infection of city lights, one by one we sauntered home to beds under a twinkling Van Gogh sky. Rubbing sleep from my eyes and retracing my steps back to my waiting warm bed, I inched around the dormer to my bedroom window only to find it closed and locked by my father.
With my little brother curled up like a squirrel, sound asleep in his trundle bed, I could only await my cruel fate. I spend the rest of the night like a little owl shivering, and smoking on the roof, watching the night change shifts with the morning. In the fetal position with my empty pipe I pulled the rhinestone pilled graying sky over my shoulders, and sat on the roof’s edge like a gargoyle, listening to robins, and mourning Doves, bringing in the new day. Wondering if I should move into my fort, and light the stove, for it looked even better to me now than it ever had.
