The Cop Next Door

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.

Crime and Punishment

By David Barnes

I’ll never do that again! Whatever it was that I did all those many long years ago I have no recollection. The details of the crime have been lost stolen and or blocked from my memory probably due to the trauma caused by the swift and immensely cruel punishment. Whatever I was involved with that created such over-the-top tit for tat retribution was no doubt by no means any fault of my own. To this day, I claim innocence and hope for a pardon. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. An innocent by-stander, I tells ya!

My cards of punishment were dealt by a fearsome chain gang foreman, a local farmer and the dad of my friend. Not just any farmer, but one of authoritarian tall standing, American values that were foreign and more dramatic than those I was accustomed, and he had a severe scowl. Fire blew from every pore of his abrupt nature if he was so riled as to direct his wrath towards us poor sweet innocent children playing in his fields under the bright sunshine of summer days. I have a feeling there were crickets chirping as well while we played.

It was a Saturday morning when I was summoned along with my fellow masterminds of crime to the farm on Maxwell Mountain. This well-known Salt Spring Island monument and is the gem set at the island’s midpoint offering wooded slopes, open grazing lands, a few homesteads back then and a backdrop a kin to anything you may find in the pages of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer adventures. The ‘woods’, what a word indeed that throughout my kidhood brought about a constant reminder of what was mysterious, dangerously out-of-bounds, and adventurous. Mount Maxwell was very much the definition of the woods. From the early to be forgotten days of suburban normal that I endured before my family moved to the island when I in my normal clothes with normal sneakers on my normal feet played after school on bikes on normal streets under the yellow glow of streetlights after supper, there was woods. The boundary land of my suburban elementary school was the woods. That line of scrubby alder trees lining the edges of one side of the playing field, the borderlands where if caught by a teacher one could simply assume the position of ignorance of where the school playing field ended and the ‘woods’ began. One step further and you were in no mans land. That glorious place of deer paths, tall bushes sneaky childish lifestyles and mischief.

I remember one large rock, a grey potato-shaped organ in that land where one could while away the school lunch hour as there was no time to make it to the proper woods and back in the limited recess break. That rock symbolized to all kids what defiance was all about. Sitting on that rock was a finger up the nose of any adult silly enough to tell a kid where to go and when. Sitting on that rock you were king. We would make lunchtime escapes like a platoon in the jungle, crouching, sprinting up the hillside to the train trestle, the ultimate forbidden zone to place pennies on the tracks.

The woods followed me on my travels to places like the rugged coastline beaches of Tofino on our summer vacations camping in a 1970’s red VW minibus. There the woods contained fearful creatures like wolves and bears and Sasquatch. The woods managed the magical trick of even finding me on this weird island with not so normal kids with not so normal kid names, wearing not so normal things on their feet, sandals for crying out loud! Yet, without fail no matter our differences, styles, backgrounds, religious beliefs of opinions on our favorite TV shows, we still had the woods. There were adequate woods around my home and across the street a forested area with a rough trail leading to what would later be my girlfriend’s backyard. That girl, boy oh boy did she have woods! Nothing would compare to my friend Walter, his brother John and sister Cathy’s woods. They had an entire mountain of woods to call home. Foxglove Farm was the base camp for many days adventures, and as it would transpire a day that would live in infamy.

As I recalled, the punishment was memorable and the crime was not. Although, as the years go by I wonder often if perhaps the reason for our summons to the farm that weekend was due to older brother Walt and his propensity to leading us younger lads astray. Most likely reasons for our entrapment was his gaining unlawful access to his dad’s liquor cabinet and offering the contents to the rest of us. I only suggest his involvement not as an accusation, but merely due to questions he asked later as so called grown ups about whether or not it was I that fell out of the tree drunk as a skunk some many years ago. I can say that it was not me, no matter how shnoggered I would be, I had never fallen from a tree. I was probably too shnoggered to climb! That being said, and whatever official story there may be it is lost to history, but the result was a firm, physiologically damaging stressful and eventually tearful consequence issued by Walter’s dad Tom, Mr. Gossett to the rest of you, came rumbling up from atop a tractor pulling an empty flat-bed trailer with a plywood box fixed to it. It had a smell of hay, urine and manure and engine oil. That sweet scent combo that to this day is a favorite of mine.

We stood there, the criminals not knowing what would become of us as the tractor thump thumped and chugged to a stop at the edge of the rolling field, the buckle holding the trailer loosely to the back rattled. Tom Gossett lifted his long frame from the seat of the tractor and without shutting the engine off, strode silently to the hitch and released the trailer to the ground. The buckle dug into the green grassy earth and pebbles and small sticks rolled and scattered to the lower end, and stopped. It would be our task to refill their supply. The rest of that sunny Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday would be spent bent over in the field like migrant workers picking up all, and I mean all the rocks and sticks by hand until the trailer was filled. He told us that he would expect the pasture to be spotless. Every stick, twig and pine needle. No stone untouched, no stone too small, or too large. Nothing was to be there by Sunday dinnertime but grass and the dark earth it grew from. We knew, he would get down on all fours with a magnifying glass and perform a thorough inspection and if he found one single chunk of sand big enough to be categorized as a stone we were in for it!

He got back on the tractor and rumbled down the rolling slope and even when he was well out of sight we could still hear the engine moaning and revving. He did not have to watch over us. He did not have to stand, rifle cradled over elbow like some guard on a roadside chain gang. He knew we were too scared of him to lolligag and goof off though for the first few minutes we tossed rocks around at each other and displayed some bravado. This was long gone later when Tom returned on the tractor with another, empty box trailer attached. It too was to be filled. He inspected our progress and shrugged with a firm scowl drawn on his narrow face. We learned that afternoon to hate Walt’s Dad. We didn’t deserve this!

For six grueling hours we collected little bits of nature and felt the stomach aching panic of leaving anything behind. Holding back tears by the end of Sunday afternoon when he shook his head at us while pointing to an area we had already combed relentlessly for hours and thinking it was clean he sent us all back there to do it again. How could there be so much tree debris in an open field? I swear he took all the collected bits and pieces from the first day and scattered it back in the field by moonlight so we would have to start all over again. I can see him now put putting along on his machine tipping out the contents of the box and then going to the trouble of driving the tractor all the way to the barn, detaching the trailer and attaching the rack to spread the rocks and sticks throughout the pasture, and laughing! I know he did this, I just know it!

Two full days of toil and two overflowing boxes of twig and pebbles later, all was forgiven. The lesson learned and not one bottom warmed, no one was grounded for life and we were then well-fed by his kindly wife Mimi who took pity on us with a devilish smirk that was so familiar when dealing with her ‘boys’ as we slumped at the dinner table, red-faced and humbled. The fact of it is this, our persecutor was not so evil after all. Tom was without a doubt a tough guy to mess with. He was authority personified. He was ‘old-school’ no nonsense but had a lovely manner and to this day it make me smile when he called me by my nickname, Barnsey. Respect was something we all had no choice but to offer. He was kind but firm in his intentions and whatever we did to cross him, well we never ever did that again. Or at least, we learned never to get caught.