San Juans, Friends, My Son...

From Sunday until today ( Friday, July 27th ) I have been cycling hard in the San Juan islands with some old friends I get together with every summer (when I can) and this year, with my son Preston. The San Juan Islands are gorgeous . It is truly a group of inviting, quiet, pastoral islands set in a cool mediterranean climate. The guys I went with are people I have worked with at one point or they are friends or relatives of those people . I have been taking summer adventures with these middle-aged men for 10 years . In almost all of these trips some of our kids have been journeying with us. These are trips with some measure of risk involved. Our first trip was off the west coast of Vancouver Island paddling on the ocean in canoes to various islands off the coast. I took my daughter Meredith, who was nine at the time. She was terrified and wanted to go back to the shore, but as we reassured her, she began to notice the primeval beauty that surrounded us. We ended up on Vargas island where there was an endless stretch of white sand beach, dolphins, two other young daughters from some of the other guys and a turning point in my life. At one time , my generation of children ran free . In one sense , we lived at risk in adventures without the presence of our parents to watch us 24/7. That way has been lost...perhaps for all generations to come. I have often longed for some sense of risk and adventure for my children that would build a sense of awe, independence, and character. Somehow, these trips have garnered some important measure of that for those children . I realised on this trip for the first time that myself and one of my children will be taking these summer adventures as long as I am capable. 5 years ago my daughter Jillian went on one of these adventures with me in a double kayak throughout the broken island group off the west coast of Vancouver island . She was strangely quiet. My colleagues on the trip ( counsellors and educators among them) raised concern about what they observed. She came home and our family went through a time where we thought we would lose her. During that dark time, the relationship that had been created between us, father and daughter during our time kayaking together was in some part pivotal to her survival later on.
As I watched my 15 year old son this week cycle up a daunting set of hills towards a curving coastal road that would eventually take a drop towards the ocean , I felt a tremendous sense of pride that he was free to feel fully alive, and in his own eyes, to be a man. My friend Dave Derpak said it best over breakfast on the Victoria ferry after a 2 hour bike ride to get there today, " There is no replay on this time we have here , sometimes, because we are blessed or lucky , we get to do things that seem to put everything into perspective or back into balance again. "

The Prairie Boys...

When I was a young shiftless lout in some of the more idle moments of my life, My father would look at me and say " Hey , why don't you get up and blow the stink off yourself ! " For a long time I thought it was just a colloquialism found amongst the Greenshields and Hodgins farm boys from Saskatchewan . But I have since learned that others who have fathers with prairie roots said the same thing. Many of these men are gone . They came from even harder men who would be deemed rough and even cruel by any child care standards of today...and yet there was a strange gentility , even a humility and grace that could be seen in these men despite childhoods that knew some large measure of brutality. My father used to cuff me on the back of my head
when I was a misbehaving as a child, he would threaten to "ring one off my balcony" : my balcony being the back of my head. I always thought it a bit comical in later years when my father said that he would "never kick a child" As if hitting a child in the back of the head made him a humanitarian.

The comment he made though was in reference to the way he was treated as were most prairie children during his time. His father, my grandfather, caught my cousins and I when were 6 and 7 years of age touching some precious item on the farm and with less than a warning he began to kick us. I never forgot those moments in light of my father's childhood. I shudder to think about it now and I marvel at the measured moments of my childhood and those of many others I have spoken with. I have seen many of these prairie men as grandfathers in their later years and there is a care and gentility with children amongst them despite their personal experiences or perhaps because of them. Their faces always seemed to have a wisdom born from wars of decision, anguish, personal pain and a lack of control in their lives. I understand now where the comment came from. My father was no more energetic than many other men. he even told me he was as "lazy as the next guy"...I'd doubt it...But there were times in his life he had to convince himself to get up, take on an ugly, seemingly impossible task, and finish what he started.


Even now , many of us who have been raised by prairie fathers long gone would be happy to hear them say again " " "Hey! what kind of bullshit are you trying to pull now ? Get up and blow the stink off yourself !"
I miss those men in our world...