One Brief Shining Moment

I had worked at plenty of jobs in my life that I considered hard, or sometimes even unpleasant. Deckhanding on commercial fishing boats, creek-cleaning, tree planting, and, worst of all, delivering junk mail for Canada Post, the first job from which I was fired. All of these travails ill prepared me for the two years I spent in Toronto framing houses during the mad building boom that gripped the region like some kind of gold-rush. Most of the houses we (my high-school friend Todd and I) built were sold before the foundation had even been poured. You couldn’t finish them fast enough, and it took a toll after awhile. We once worked a 15 day stretch for which I billed Todd for 171 hours. That was to finish up the three or four buildings we had going simultaneously so we could go home for Christmas. Toronto in December. On the nice days it would warm up to minus 15 or 10, on the windy days we were out in minus 30 for twelve hours at a time, spending nearly half that working in the dark under halogen lights. When I finally got back to the coast and had a minute to look in the mirror, there was somebody looking back at me, but I didn’t know him.

The morning I left all that behind was cool and clear. The end of May, when winter had finally surrendered the land to new buds and birdsong. I fired up the Mustang at about 5:30 and as I sat there listening to that irritable rumble, I felt all the frustration and pressure lift from me with the knowledge that I was not driving out to some mud-pit of a jobsite to start yet another endless day of hammering. I was going home, to huge fish and epic bike rides, friends and family, and, when summer was over, Taiwan.

On the trip out east I had been a good patriot and taken the Trans-Canada the whole way, getting nailed for speeding only once and enduring the tortuous stretch from the Manitoba border all the way to Barrie. That was enough to send me south for the return journey, through Detroit and Chicago, Milwaulkee, and then a left turn and a nearly straight run all the way to Montana. It was the Memorial Day weekend, or maybe Veterans Day, or some such holiday like that, but the effect was to clear the interstate of almost all traffic, including cops, from the middle of Wisconsin until I crossed back into Canada in Alberta. The road was mine, the music was loud, and the 5.0 ate up the asphalt with a gleeful howl. By the night of the second day I was already in Rapid City, South Dakota, where I found a cheap motel right next to a store called, no shit, Yeee-Haaa Likker.

There were only three things I considered worth stopping for in the American leg of the journey, and they were all parked right on the route. The first was Mt. Rushmore, which is a whole lot smaller than you’d think, and the second was Devil’s Tower, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” fame, which is as spectacular as you could imagine. The third was The Little Bighorn, still one of the best public attractions I've ever seen. The sky clouded over as I was leaving Rushmore, and a short time later the thunderstorms broke, dumping torrents of rain amid strobes of lightning and that ever so mesmerizing sound of thunder. It was with some haste that I made for Devil’s Tower, hoping to get there before the rain did. And then it happened, one of those truly sublime moments that you can and will never forget as long as you live. The deluge had just stopped as I crested a hill doing about 190 to see the rain-slicked road snaking off into the distance like a silver ribbon, disappearing into the one bright spot in the blackened sky as jags of lightning fell all around me. If you saw it in a movie you’d have sniggered at the fakery of it all, but there it was, in the raw, and still giving me shivers thinking about it four years later. My whole ordeal was paid off in that moment alone.

The rest of the trip, and the rest of that summer unfolded like a lazy dream, drenched in sunshine, until a phone call from my brother on the morning of September 11th telling us to turn on the TV quick brought me back to reality. Less than a month later I landed in Kaohsiung to begin an odyssey filled with new sights and sounds and smells, but that’s a whole other story…