The old sergeant had us dead to rights as we emerged elated at our self-rescue at the crest of the shoreline cliffs below his house. To me he was old, very old indeed. He was to a 12-year-old’s mind what a faded and musty old book would look like as a person. Once a tall man with a long face, graying around the edges but still holding onto a fierce hard cover authority in his demeanor. I believed that he was most likely put out of sorts with the new sorts moving in around him. It happens when you gain age and have a solid lock on once was. Young families who would allow children to run boundless. The types who embraced a new hobby farming lifestyle with chickens running loose next door in the yard. Goats nibbling and dogs that sneak through the fence and into his beloved garden. To say that old man Shank was a curmudgeon might be entirely unfair. The Ebenezer Scrooge of our country street he was not. He and his wife led a quiet life and I can remember only a handful of encounters with her their gated driveway. Although, his house was avoided at Halloween not because he was terrifying, but because his spooky driveway was. Beyond the gate it swerved into the swallowing darkness of thick forest. He was a product of another time and he kept a friendly distance from the rest of us wild animals who invaded his small island from everywhere else.
After school I would trek home with books under my arm up the hill at the end of the harbour and stroll the twenty minutes to my house. This would have been the usual trip home but it was my birthday, my eleventh, and the first present of the day was that the tide had gone out. The run home was half the time, and twice the fun if the beach route was open. I was having friends over for the occasion and we doddled as we rounded the bend in front of the dark dank rotting boathouse which is at present the site of a local pub, and slid sideways skiing down the rusty but slick iron rails that angled down and into the sea.
The smell of the harbour was an intense mixture of stagnant stuff washed up and dead, sea weeds and fish parts left from gulls and eagles, opened shellfish and once even a baby harbour seal washed up with a nasty gash down one side most likely inflicted by a boat propeller. We hiked along side this seaside goop layer tossing rocks at the water and at each other as that is what ten and newly achieved eleven year old boys will do. In our staggeringly slow progress we had not seen the water was rising. It was no matter as soon we would reach my house and cake and fun and games and nonsense would ensue. However nature caught up to us and we cut short the hike just feet from the trail head on my homestead’s side of the line. There was no going forward, just up.
The line we could not cross without detection was directly in front of his living room window and imagine his surprise at watching four young lads panting and giggling from the epic climb to the safety of the edge of his garden. Moments later the laughter was silenced. We stood, sheepishly at the rust red-painted fence rail separating his side from our family’s property with old man Shank standing behind us like some sort of horrid, aged once gun-toting totem pole of our doom. We were innocent, we were just young at heart with no concept of the importance of property lines, or tide tables, or common sense.
Our trespassing was not at issue. Our scaling the cliffs into the neighbours back yard was not the crime we were now standing in the docket facing prosecution from both sides of the fence. It was all we four of us represented something to him. A new generation that would shape his pristine bucolic island into something that allowed kids and dogs to run rampant in his beloved sea view garden. He let out a whistle towards our kitchen where he spotted my mother passing the window, not calling to her by name but with a shrill tone which only added to our anxiety. He was summoning her, it was not a request but instead an order. This was real! Some long moments passed and we hoped against all hope that she would not emerge to face the oncoming storm. Then, to our heart pounding sadness she came out the kitchen door, red-faced as she understood the situation at hand. We were on the wrong side of the fence.
“Are these yours?” he asked gruff with that wheeze that old men get in their breathing by achieving a certain age after a certain amount of cigarettes are smoked. To this I believe my mother, according to the expression on her face was tempted to plead ignorance of my and my cohorts very existence. “What did they do?”
What we did was fairly straight forward and perfectly reasonable. Walking home from school on a narrowing strip of beach made from crushed clam and oyster shells. It should be noted that we were walking home on a garbage dump of sorts. The shells crushed, broken and tumbled over the ages were once packaging for the living creatures that the local native population thrived upon as sustenance. The middens of shells are scattered throughout the Gulf Islands. One man’s pop can is another man’s empty clam shell. Personally, I think the left over containers of the natural world are far preferable to the man-made floating debris islands our packaging creates in our time. The natives made beach materials, we make a mess that will never break down entirely and serve as little purpose after being discarded as before. I digress, but maybe that is what results in whiling away many days laying on a mossy rock staring at the clouds and admiring the miniature world within the moss under my head.
Where was I? Right, the crimes at hand. When walking on that narrowing strip of beach it did not occur to any of us why it was shrinking. At points it was becoming a matter of scrambling over rocks protruding rudely from the shore instead of wandering around them. The water had engulfed these slots as we goofed around and aimed our mischievous sights on a partly sunken boat just off the land near the base of the steep trail to my house. The small wooden boat that was once home to a notoriously horrible man about town who owned a pair of mean dogs who would later run afoul of my father and our family. Had I known what was to come in the next year I would have launched much bigger rocks at his abandoned craft. We four tossed stones at the wooden hull and pilot’s cabin that still remained above the water’s surface. It began as a game of skipping stones but when one pebble ricocheted off the bow, all bets were off and a volley of rocks targeted any part of the boat. Big points to hit the cabin, bigger points still to nick or break the then intact panes of thin glass or the cabin’s windows.
I don’t know who threw the winner that put a hole in the greasy glass knocking a layer of grime and film left in the inside of the window by that nasty soul. A rush of eager and urgent rock tossing followed in hopes of not only finishing off the glass entirely, but the other two dusty and intact panes as well. Smash, ping, clunk, yes! Number two was split in half and the remaining section of glass formed a triangle with one curved edge. The water rose up the hull and spilled into the cabin. Water was around our feet and the distance to the trail head now cut off by the deep. The only way out was up, and the only way up was a rounded segment of rock forming a cliff to some ledges and brush that could be used as hand and foot holds to gain the rest of the altitude needed. The tricky part was that we would be on the wrong side of the fence line with too much horizontal distance to accomplish. We began the accent and the rest as you know, history.
Old man Shank had no cares about us wandering into his gardens. He was once, so very long ago a boy as well and knew the folly of that state of being. What he could not abide, and I have to admit as a ‘grown up‘ that what we did was beyond just childlike abandon. We were jerks and vandals and it was all so much great fun! To him that was our crime and we were to be firmly punished that is if he could convince my mother who was not amused by the end of the tale and our “ya, but…” interruptions claiming innocence and begging leniency. After all it was my birthday, and we were not late getting home, and my shoes and socks were not wet, and…It was of no use. He released us into her custody pending hearing. We clambered quickly over the railings and into the kitchen without a single look over our shoulders to that old retired Mountie. We were in the right, we were defiant, and we were secretly losing our cool while watching the adults discuss what would become of us for five whole minutes at the fence.
She returned to the kitchen and told us that since it was my birthday the punishing would not happen until the next day. How to put the watering hose to a perfectly good birthday party. The phone would be involved. That damned wall-mounted rotary dial phone that was the cause of so much pain and anguish all through the years of my kidhood. From doctors appointments to dentist appointments to being invited to work for nothing all weekend for a family friend hauling wet firewood up some god-awful muddy slope to a wheel barrow that had a wobbling wheel and only one handle. I hated that phone and after my birthday dinner was served, and presents and cakes finished, she was on the phone to parents. The cabal of evil. On Salt Spring Island in those days it was virtually impossible to get away with anything and get home safe. Before the internet there was something faster than the fastest wireless signal of modern times. It was the Salt Spring wireless system of parents, the dirty rats who passed the time by passing on surveillance information about other parent’s kid’s activities, good and bad via rotary phones. I was grounded even before opening the front door on several occasions because of some rumour I took part in some foul deeds with my bady friends. As for old man Shank, I rarely ever saw him after that day. He was elderly and more so every waking day. His garden prospered as his chrysanthemums won prizes at the Fall Fair every year most likely due to the dog poop.
KAYAK WRITER 