All Gone To Rosie’s America

When my brothers and I were kids my Dad, who worked on long-haul tugboats, was gone a lot.

But, because his life revolved around cycles of three weeks on and three weeks off, he was home a lot too.

And the times he was home made up for the times he was away by, oh I dunno, how about we just say a billion.

Maybe more.

Back in 1973 (or so), just as I was about to hit adolescence, hard, we spent almost the entire summer at the provincial campsite at Bamberton.

And we made up just about everything. In a good way, which included snorkeling for moonsnails under their old tire-like dens on the sandy bottom and flat fish caught with self-manufactured fork tine-tipped spears at the edge of the drop-off.

And then there was staying up half the night after we’d had the big feast eating the day’s catch (although Dad was the only one who actually ate the moonsnails) doing all those things you do every night when you are camping. And then, after we finally drifted off to bed when the second feast of the junk-food and fizz-pop drink was done (“Sure you can eat it,” Dad always said, “That’s what I bought it for.”), I’d head for my pup tent to read all night, most of it junk that would soon mainline me to be the better stuff. I distinctly remember reading a massive tome of pro football semi-hagiography that summer called ‘Seven Days To Sunday’ because I thought it would be about Fran Tarkenton. Instead, it turned out to be all about a mediocre coach of the NY Giants named Allie Sherman. Of course, I gobbled it all down anyhow.

One early morning (it always seemed easy to stay up all night and get up early when I was a kid, but how the heck did Dad do it?) we were all down on the beach for low water mucking around in, if I’m remembering it correctly, a weepy rain. I think our youngest brother C. (who has the same moniker as my wife) noticed the cop first wandering out to towards us across the otherwise people-free sand. We thought for sure we were going to get it for shellfish robbery, even Dad, I think. Turns out that the nearby Shawnigan Lake detachment had gotten a call from our Mom who was stuck back in town working at the bank. Turns out Dad’s boss had called and they wanted him to come into work. Of course, this was way before cell phones and, perhaps most amazingly, surly Horseman.

Actually, that was a cheap shot. Despite their deeply-rooted institutional problems most Horsemen and Women are still fantastic, especially those assigned to small town detachments they want to actually be in. I would think that Shawnigan Lake, now as then, is one of those detachments.

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We got our first real record player, one of those little boxy things that we had before Dad went crazy with the various massive jury-rigged stereo systems that came soon after.

He got it for us for Christmas and he bought, maybe three records to go with it to start. I remember two of them, and all their songs, for absolute sure. One was Peter Paul and Mary’s 10 year ‘Best Of’ compilation and the other was Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. The latter’s compilation came later. And that is how we learned the song ‘America’.

Simon’s ‘America’, for me, back then, seemed kind of like it was about going away to college and then then drifting even farther away. I’m not sure why, because clearly it is not. I think it may have been the place names that evoked all that for me because from the perspective of a west coast Canadian boy they were all in the East, even Saginaw, and that’s were leaves and red-bricks and ivy leagues and lives of the mind and all that stuff I could only really imagine back then, and not really consider seriously were.

Anyway, much later, after I met C., my not-yet-then wife, we used to take much shorter camping trips with my Mom and Dad to Bamberton, usually around Labour Day, for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that it is the time of my Dad’s birthday. On one of those trips, just before C. and I left for ‘America’, both literally and metaphorically, I remember jury-rigging a sauna out of plastic sheeting and using fire-heated rocks to make the steam, all to amaze my then young and still pre-adolescent cousins.

It was the kind of thing my Dad would have just made up like it was always thus back when we were kids.

It is my Dad’s birthday, again, this Labour Day weekend.

And I will not embarrass him by saying how old he is.

But here’s the really telling thing….

Back when C. and I were living in our own private ‘America’ and we had our first kid back when I was still jury-rigging my entire life working for peanuts in my early 30’s as a purely academic junior scientist who had no idea what he would do to actually make a living my Mom and Dad came down to visit.

They drove all the way, and we had a great time.

And I remember, distinctly, thinking how my parents, who had just become grand for the first time, were now, officially, old.

And now I am pretty much exactly the same age they were then.

But, thanks to my Mom and Dad and all their encouragement I’ve got a real job and the living I’m making is just fine, thanks.

But I’m still jury-rigging most of the rest of my life.

And I’m damned proud of it.

We didn’t get over to the island for Labour Day weekend this year.

Why?

Well, little e. and C. were completely wrapped up in, and obsessed by, all that was the Vancouver International Tap Festival.

And Bigger E., my Mom and Dad’s first grand one, just left for a literal and metaphorical America of her own. In this case in Montreal.

So, here, with the sincerest of apologies to Mr. Simon, is my, and my dog Rosie’s, version of a not-quite Bambertonized, but fully jury-rigged, version of ‘America’ that we made yesterday for my Dad’s birthday…

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