On the Road with Jake and Butch.

This is the first thing I ever wrote, the result of an adult extension creative writing course I took with Anne Michaels (Read her books!) the award-winning Canadian author, back in the late 90s.

I had dinner with my wife Cynthia the other night in one of those trendy little bistros that pop up or disappear in our neighbourhood according to some arcane rhythm, waxing and waning with the cycles of the economy. We ate an uninspired meal in arctic cold surroundings – mine reminded me of Tom McGuane’s old line about “baby guinea pigs in Bechamel sauce” – while Igor, our waitperson for the evening, sneered at us from behind the bar. As we were leaving, I said to Cyn, “I guess I’ll have to give this place the X.”

Cynthia arched an expectant eyebrow the way she does, and I began to tell her a story that had risen, unsummoned, from the depths of my memory, the instant I had mentioned the X.

One summer when I was about twelve, I talked my father into taking me along on a business trip he was making to Atikokan to look at a mining plant that he was dismantling. Atikokan is a little mining town, about 200k west and a little north of Thunder Bay, and about a thousand kilometers away from Cobalt, the little mining town where we lived. Cobalt is mainly of note for being the Silver Capital of the World, the former home of the great Habitant poet, Dr. William Henry Drummond, and, as the town’s inimitable theme song says, for being a place where “You’ll live a life and then some.”

Atikokan is one of the main entrances to Quetico Park, and today bills itself as Canada’s Canoeing Capital, but I remember my dad explaining it as being known for its vast iron ore deposits, which were of great importance back in the day, of strategic import during WW II, and economic import afterwards. Mind you, I was twelve, so all I knew was that the place was RED. The gravel roads were red, the cars were all covered with red dust, when it rained there were red-rimmed puddles and red mud, and every dog in town was red. They could’ve named the place Rustville. It all sounded hopelessly exotic to me, sort of like visiting Mars, which seemed nearly as far away.

My father was pleased that I was taking an interest in his work and after admonishing me that this was a working trip, and not some holiday jaunt – this is 4 days in the saddle, not a ride in the park! – he smiled and agreed to take me along. The next morning, about 3:30 in the middle of the night, my dad woke me, and quickly dressing and grabbing my Roy Rogers lunch pail (my mom had packed me some road rations), I ran out and climbed into the backseat of my father’s Buick.

“Morning’, Buster,” came a voice from a cloud of cigar smoke which hung over the driver’s seat. This was Butch, my dad’s foreman, sidekick, and most importantly, driver.

“Hi, Butch,” I replied, as my dad got in the front passenger seat and we set off. North.

Now, Ontario is an awfully big place. It is four times the size of Texas, which most people, especially Texans, think is really big. It takes three days to drive from one end of Ontario to the other, and two-thirds of the province is north of the highway and inaccessible save by bush plane or canoe. Jake (my dad) and Butch had driven from end to end and beyond so many times chasing mining deals that they measured distances in terms of how many tankfuls of gas they’d need. Atikokan was four tank trip, or, as Jake referred to it, four days in the saddle, as they only stopped for fuel.

North we went, past New Liskeard, through the Clay Belt and its dairy farms, past Englehart, which always made me smile (In school, we had a bit of doggerel that went, “Gene, Gene, made a machine. Joe, Joe made it go, Art, Art let a fart, and blew the machine to Englehart.” Like I said, I was twelve). We kept heading north, back into the Shield and past Kirkland Lake and Sesekineka and Ramore. North and west we drove, me watching the road and eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches, Butch and Jake driving, punctuating our passage with puffs of smoke from their Marguerite cigars. On we went, past Iroquois Falls and further north than I’d ever been, north to where the towns were small and kind of lonely looking, and had inappropriate names, like Moonbeam or Tunis. We drove and drove, stopping only for fuel. Past Cochrane, the jumping-off point for the Polar Bear Express, we turned west, the bush scrubbier and wilder. We saw giant prehistoric-looking ravens patrolling the highway, cruising for road kill. They looked like they could carry off a Volkswagen. I was glad I was in the car. We passed hundreds of lakes, some of them with unpronounceable Indian names so long they wouldn’t fit on one sign. Moose watched our passage from the side of the road. We stopped so I could watch them back. We saw beavers swimming and we saw where a forest fire had left a charred and barren swath across our path.

Every once in a while we would pass a run-down and forlorn-looking gas station and diner. They usually had signs that said things like “Eat here and get gas,” or “Last chance for gas for 150 miles.”

At one of the latter kinds of signs, Butch wheeled up to the pumps, and while the attendant (yes they had them back then) filled the car and scraped the bugs off the windshield, we stretched and visited the washroom.

Standing outside the diner, I complained of hunger. I’d exhausted the contents of my Roy Rogers lunch pail some time earlier and was eying a sign holding out the promise of cheeseburgers and cokes.

My dad shrugged and looked at Butch. “Think we should chance it?”

Butch spat out his cigar butt and ground it into the pavement with his boot. He hiked up his pants, wandered over to the door of the restaurant and looked at it quizzically. He came back to where we waited by the car and said, “I don’t think we ever ate here before, but if we did, there’s no X, so what the hell. We may as well feed Buster here as at the next place.”

Jake shrugged, and we went in. The place was done in a sort of pre-Formica depression mode. We sat on stools at the counter and ordered. I had a cheeseburger. Jake and Butch each had a couple. They weren’t very good, or they might have had three, it being at least another tankful of gas before they’d have another opportunity to eat.

On the way out, Jake stopped and lit another cigar. Butch hitched up his pants and, pulling a small piece of soapstone machinist’s chalk from a pocket, casually marked an X on the outside doorframe about 3 feet off the ground.

“What’s Butch doing, dad?” I asked.

“He’s giving this place the X,” my father explained, “so if we ever stop here again we’ll know not to eat here.”

Jake told me that the X was sort of a relic hobo sign from the Depression, when people without money or jobs would ride the rails looking for work. Hoboes would leave signs for each other with messages like, the people in this house will usually stand you to a meal, or, watch out, this guy will sic his dogs on you. Unlike hoboes, however, Jake and Butch left messages for themselves, because after as many tanksful of travel as they’d done, one highway pit stop looked pretty much like another.
I thought the whole idea of secret hobo signs was way cool, and my dad gave me a piece of soapstone so that I could put an X on the next place we found with toxic cheeseburgers.

After a lot more driving and a couple more gas stations, including one that had good food but got the X anyway because they had a black bear in a cage at the side and it made me feel as sad as the bear looked, even though it was still kind of neat to see one so close, we finally arrived at Atikokan, Mythic City of Red Mud. It was about 2 in the morning. We slept in a motel. Butch snored.

The next day after breakfast we went to look at a dormant iron mine called Canadian Charleston. We spent a few hours there, Jake telling his crew (who’d been working there for several weeks) which pieces of equipment to dismantle and ship back to Cobalt next. We wandered around for a while, Butch measuring conveyor belts and shouting out machine specifications, while I explored. There’s no better playground than a disused industrial site: Kids today don’t know what they’re missing. I found the old mine’s assay office, and my dad let me augment the Eaton’s catalogue chemistry set that I’d got for my last birthday, with whatever I could load into the trunk (which is how I got my first spectrophotometer, a Kipp’s generator for making my own hydrogen, plus enough dangerous chemicals and lab equipment to put me on CSIS’ no-fly list. By the time I reached high school, my basement “laboratory” which I’d installed in our furnace room, was better equipped than the school’s chemistry lab). Then we hopped back in the Buick and rocketed back to Cobalt, another 4 tanks of gas and several more X’s away.

That was, well, a long time ago. I live in the city now and shuffle money around over the phone in an office downtown with ten other people who talk on two phones at once and scream a lot. Butch died of a heart attack a few years back. And my dad has Alzheimer’s.

I went to visit him the last time I was home to Cobalt. He doesn’t know who I am anymore, but sometimes he says things that almost make sense for a minute. We were sitting and having a coffee at the Lodge where he lives now. There were some Oreo cookies on a plate. My dad picked one up and examined it closely, as if he didn’t know what it was. He cautiously separated the two halves, carefully peeled off the white stuff, and gingerly put the chocolate wafer to his lips. It didn’t meet with his approval, and he lowered it back to the plate, he rubbed his eyes repeatedly, something he’s been doing a lot lately, and said distinctly, “Better give this dump the X, Butch.”

A lump rose to my throat and the two halves of the Oreo cookie stared malevolently back at me through the silence that followed. I felt unconsciously in my pocket for a piece of soapstone. My dad didn’t notice.

It’s strange and unpredictable the way we remember things, and it is altogether miraculous that we can remember things at all; things tied together by strings of experience, filed away in our brains under a smell or a feeling, or the sound of a voice, ready to be called back by some nuance, some inflection, some piece of soapstone chalk that I take from my pocket as Cynthia and I leave the restaurant. And pause, just outside, looking offhandedly left and right, before marking, just to the right of the door, about three feet off the ground, a discreet X. Here’s one for you, Jake.