The Island Monkey

The South African Vervet Monkey

Our time in Durban was short. Our time everywhere was short. You might think that doing a circle tour of a fairly large country would be a bit too much to chew. It was. And it was exhausting. I’d averaged about five hours of sleep a night, and that was taking its toll. I was nodding off on the bus, despite my wanting to stay awake, soaking in the landscape as it rolled past. An Asian American girl on our tour slept every chance she got. I thought she was sleeping her life away, and told her so, but she disagreed. “It’s too much,” she said. “You can’t possibly see it all. And besides, I’m tired.”

As for alcohol, we’d pretty well reached our saturation point by the end of the first week. Go figure.
One of the high points of Durban was that our hotel had a laundromat. That might sound ridiculous, but we were all thrilled. Clean clothes! Everything in my pack had begun to get a little musty, everything being jammed down its length, the damp with the dry.

We took the time for much needed down time. And good-byes. A third of us were leaving, some for Zimbabwe, some for Mozambique. That also meant new people would be joining us.
I found the German girls leafing through our newest itinerary pages, noting our agenda for the coming week, noting the list of participants.

“Good reading?” I asked.

“Did you see this?” they asked. I hadn’t.

“We’re getting an Island Monkey,” they said. I had no clue what they were talking about and said so.
“An English,” they said. I shrugged. They explained.

“There are two types of English,” they said. “There are BBC English, calm, eloquent, upper class; they’re just assholes. Then there are the Island Monkeys, ill-mannered, hard-drinking, football hooligans. Most English are like that; get a few beers in them and they’re jumping up and down on tables, throwing things, breaking things, hitting things.” The predominant continental opinion, apparently. Or so they said.

“What about the twins,” I countered, referring to the two English girls already on the tour. They weren’t twins. They weren’t even related. But they dressed the same every day. If one wore a black T and khaki shorts, so did the other. It was almost like they had shopped together for this trip.

“The twins are BBC English. You wait and see: Island Monkey.”

Goodbye Dolphin Coast. Hello Cape Coast. Hello Garden Route. We flew to Port Elizabeth from Durban. No bus, thankfully; I don’t think any of us could have endured another fifteen-hour marathon. We arrived at our hotel and met the new people. We met the English guy. At first glance, he seemed BBC. He was polite. He was quiet. He was a little shy. I felt sorry for him. It’s hard to break into a close-knit group, and we’d had a week to bond and close ranks. Stepping into that can be a little daunting. That said, he’d had a few by the time we rolled in. I didn’t hold that against him, though. I’d had a few too many my first day a week ago, and no one held that against me.

The weather was foul. A hard rain fell, colouring everything a steel grey. We huddled close, watching a few souls brave the surf on their boards despite the weather, maybe because of it. The surf was high that day, we were told. It looked high too, or so we told ourselves. The breakers were a ways away, hazy at such a distance, mottled by the beads cascading down the picture window in ribbons.

Our new people wanted to hear about our first week, so, we told them about it. There was a prevailing theme: beer, bus, excursions, beer, bus, excursions, etc. The new, quiet English guy thought it all exciting. He must have expected a party that evening, but he was disappointed. We were all lightweights that evening. Too much booze, too many late nights, no little sleep, too much fatigue. He, on the other hand, was fresh. He proved himself to be less than a lightweight. He outpaced us in no time. He called us a bunch of wankers and pussies, not winning him many fans.

I arched my eyebrow at him.

“Easy,” I said, my sympathy ebbing faster than any riptide.

The German girls arched their eyebrows at me. "See," those eyebrows said: "Island monkey."

Apologies to all you well-behaved Islanders.

Afrikaans

Safaris compete, we disembarked for Durban, stopping first in Kruger for a night, then through Swaziland before arriving in Durban on a Dolphin Coast. It was a long haul, two days all told, fifteen hours of that on the road.

The first hour hour brought us to Kruger. We saw none of it. The sun had begun to set as we entered the Park, and was but a memory when we rolled into the Park Lodge. We booked in, collapsed into our cabins, and caught up on much needed sleep. If Karongwe had been dark, Kruger was utterly black. We did not roam.

We were on the road to Lesotho first thing, leaving the bushveld behind and climbing higher and higher into the sky, arriving five hours later just before lunch to the welcome of monkeys howling from the high canopy. We found our bunks and were to congregate in the camp common first for lunch, then for our excursion. I was the first to arrive, lingering outside for some fresh air and a smoke, and thus, the only one to witness Jan’s deeply grained racism. He called out “Hey boy,” to one of the groundskeepers before realizing I was present. He started when he saw me. I knew then that he’d broken the rules. I suspect Contiki Tours had little tolerance for racism. He stammered some, trying rather unconvincingly to smooth the moment over by explaining that “those older Africans expect that,” he said, “they don’t know any better,” ending with, “he doesn’t mind,” as if that made it all alright. I didn’t respond, not liking what he’d said, but I didn’t interrupt him either. I offered him a cigarette, instead, as a peace offering. We both knew that were I to complain, it would cost him his job. And what would that have accomplished? I’m not stupid. I know the ways of the world. I understood that it would take years, if not generations for Apartheid to be exorcized from South African society, if ever. Were Jan sent packing, another just like him would take his place. And Jan was far more progressive, I’d discover, than other Afrikaans I’d meet. If anything, both of us being slightly older than everyone else on the tour, Jan and I got on. Jan was alright.

I’d begun to hang out almost exclusively with the English and the Germans on the tour. The two Albertan engineers and I didn’t get on much, and those Aussies along for the ride seemed to prefer their own company over others. The exception to this was Tanya Jesberg. A petite, short-haired blonde, she had an extra-large personality. She spoke her mind, voiced her opinion, drank like a fish, and took no shit from anyone. Her family owned the White Horse Tavern in Charters Towers, a rough and tumble outback town five hours from anywhere; that might explain how she came to be; that might explain why she and I got on so well. I came from that same town, half a world away.

We had our excursion. We had a sumptuous dinner. We partied into the night. There was a great deal of hooking up that night, I discovered, afterwards. I was oblivious. And I had a room to myself. I was excused the discordance of snoring for once.

Another five hours brought us to Durban, or just outside Durban. North Beach? South Beach? Selection Beach? I don’t know. I loved it there. Our Cabins were right on the Dolphin Coast. The sun baked the beach. The surf rolled in. Again and again. The monkeys howled and screamed and barked.

When I unlocked the door to my treehouse cabin a monkey barrelled past me, almost knocking me over the rail and off the ramp in his haste to escape. He was a brown blur to me, a fairly solid blur, but little more than a streak until I regained my balance and saw him race up the nearest tree. He stared back down at me, fear, loathing and anger in his eyes.

“Well, I didn’t lock you in there,” I said, before giving the room a once over to see if he’d broken anything while captive.

We stripped, threw on our bathing trunks and hit the beach. It was glorious. Until then, we’d had to wallow in tepid baths, otherwise known as pools. We wondered how well they were filtered, how current the chlorine might have been. I tossed a fouled ball cap that got drenched and wouldn’t release the reek it had absorbed. Not to worry in Durban. The ocean was clean. The ocean may have been full of sharks for all we knew, but that didn’t stop us from diving into the high breakers that crashed down onto us.

We didn’t see much of Durban. We went to a shopping mall. I discovered that toilets in shopping malls in Durban aren’t graced with seats, or at least those weren’t. They aren’t particularly graced with paper towels, either.

I got face to face with a few Afrikaans that evening who had the good grace to call me a fuckin’ Yank while I was buying a round for Tanya, the English girls, and the Germans. The Afrikaans were brave while I still had an armful of beer, less brave after I handed them off to the girls, braver still when the Germans resolved behind me. I jest.

“What you call me?” I asked.

“Yank.” Not fuckin’ Yank, anymore; just Yank.

“Idiot,” I said. “I’m not a Yank.”

“No?” they said. Apparently, my having three Germans at my back made my being Canadian better than my being a Yank. They even offered to buy me a beer. I can’t say my opinion of them improved much.

There was no formal dinner that night. We had a barbeque on the beach beneath a bonfire that launched streams of red flares into the swath of Milky Way that glowed overhead. Jan brought out a boom box and a box filled with cassettes. It wasn’t a guitar, but we were thrilled just the same. We sang, we lay flat out of the cool sand.

We thanked our lucky stars.

Or at least I did.

 

Karongwe

There was quite a lot to see in Karongwe, and not a lot of time to see it, so the days were full. We’d breakfast, pile into the Forerunners, and hit the game trails till lunch. We’d stuff ourselves, then do a walking tour before once or twice being shuttled off to some other “zoo” to see hippos or rhinos, respectively. There was so much wildlife within the reserve, I might have missed sighting a few of the 299 species of mammals and 858 species of birds, not to mention the myriad millions of insects; I didn’t even see all of the Big 5. I didn’t see a leopard. I didn’t even see a rhino, and we went to a “zoo” that specialized in rhinos. The problem with wildlife is that it’s wild. It’s not just hanging about waiting for the tourists to arrive so that it can put on a show.

What I did see were impala. They were everywhere. The locals called them bush burgers. Everyone ate impalas, they said. Even grass ate impalas after the lions and hyenas had their fill of them.

I was rather surprised to stumble across a dung beetle on one of our walking tours. Nobody else saw it. Nobody else was looking. It was a Contiki tour, after all. I’ve been on two Contiki tours, and I came away with the impression that the under 35 set doesn’t seem that interested in wildlife or history when on tours dedicated to wildlife sighting, or ancient history viewing. What I found was that the under 35 crowd was more interested in partying, drinking, and hooking up. That said, I saw a dung beetle. I also spotted a Greater Kudu as it crossed the path we were following. I’ve no idea how they missed it (granted, if you blinked you’d have missed it), but if you’re more interested in gabbing and sourcing out your next hook-up, you’re bound to miss a lot.

Some things are hard to miss. Hippos, for instance. One charged me while on a causeway. The others scattered, running the last stretch to be away from it as it lunged through the water at me. I did a quick calculation. I considered how tall a hippo might be, I considered how high the pool could possibly buoy it up once it finished charging me. Lastly, I surveyed the height of the causeway. It was a pen, after all. I crouched down, watching its approach. I watched it rise up. And I watched it fall back without having reached any closer than eight feet from the lip of the causeway. I stood as it bellowed, then walked back to the others who were watching me throughout. “I thought you were engineers,” I said to the arrogant duo from Calgary who’d led the panicked rush. We were never on very good terms after that, but their being engineers and I being a lowly miner, we were never on good terms before, either.

Being challenged by an elephant was another matter. I stood my ground as it charged me, but only because I was frozen in place. He rushed me, his ears a-flair, his jaw thrust out and bellowing. Then he stopped, bellowed again, and his point having been made, sauntered back to his harem. I could have pissed myself. I suppose I looked brave; the English girls commented on my being so; so, I didn’t bother to correct them on that point.

Being face to face with and no more than 6 feet from a lioness is another thing altogether. We’d been chasing a cheetah that had been stalking and chasing an impala when we came across a pride that had already made their kill. Their muzzles were still red with having gorged their selves. We’d always been told: “Don’t stand up in the Forerunner. So long as you remain seated, the animals will think you are part of a big petrol smelly beast; but if you stand up, they’ll know that you’re not some big petrol smelly beast; they’ll know you are lunch.” A girl behind me stood up to get a better picture just as the lioness was opposite me. She, the lioness, snapped to, her eyes catching mine. My sphincter pulled up into my throat. The guide pulled his rifle into his shoulder, the driver pulled the stick into reverse and we were twenty feet back in a shot.

“What…the fuck…did I say about standing up in the Forerunner?” the Afrikaans spit at the girl once he was sure that the lioness had settled back down.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “I almost had to kill her, just now. I’ve never had to kill any of my girls, and I don’t have a mind to do it now. So, once again. Bums. Seats. Got it?”
I think she got it.
Later, we were on our way back to the lodge. I got the seat right behind our Afrikaans, as close to shotgun as one got. The sun had plummeted below the horizon and the world became as black as pitch. We were clipping along at a nice pace, the Forerunners headlights cutting a near panoramic swath before us. Supper was nigh and we were a little late, having got wind about a leopard in a tree, and we’d yet to see a leopard. Leopard sightings are rare. You’d think they were solitary, reclusive, and stealthy. You’d think they didn’t want to have a bunch of tourists about, scaring away their quarry. We arrived too late. She’d moved on and we were still shy a leopard sighting. Almost back at the lodge, we caught wind of a scent. It was strong. It smelled like shit. I’m not being allegorical. The heady aroma of feces rolled over us. And as we rose over the next rise we found out why. We were tracking a hyena. She was lopping along the cleared track just ahead of us.

Our lights became high beams. The flood lights above them flared up, as well. It was brighter and whiter than a welding bead.

We closed with her, she looked over her shoulder at us, and without seeming to, she picked up speed. We kept pace. She dove from left to right, each time tossing a look back at us to see if we were still with her.

She decided to lose us. She dug in, leapt right, and entered the bush at high speed, not losing any speed as far as I could see.

“Follow her,” our guide ordered, and the driver cranked the wheel, almost spilling half of us from the truck as we bounced off the track after her.

I held on tight. We all did. There wasn’t much else we could do under the circumstances.

She looked back, marked our pursuit, and I suppose she decided she’d had enough. Either we were in hot pursuit of a meal, her, which must have scared the wits out of her (she did live in a kill or be killed world), or we were just having sport with her, which we were, and either way, she was having none of it, anymore. She tore off like a bullet. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything move that fast above water.

First she was there. Then she was a low burst of speed. Then she disappeared. She was indistinguishable from the bush, lost to sight in the black beyond our high beams.

I’ve got to hand it to our driver. When he received an order, he followed it. We went crashing into the bush after her. Branches and foliage spun around us, snapping off like the crackling of a bonfire.
“Whoa,” the Afrikaans bellowed.

We whoaed.

We laughed.

“That was so cool,” I said.

The Hyena

I don’t think I ever slept so well in my whole life. I must have had about eleven hours of uninterrupted sleep.

I woke, disembarked, collected my bags, got my passport stamped and stepped out onto the soil of Africa, and was shuttled to my hotel in Sandton City, a suburb of Johannesburg. I checked in, collected the envelope left for me informing me of the planned meet and greet at such and such a time. Suppertime, I thought. I had something to do before that, though. I checked the time, discovered I still had a couple hours before the meet and greet was to begin, so I deposited my bags and made my way up the hill to the shopping mall a block away.

I needed hiking boots. I know what you’re thinking. How could I come to Africa for a safari vacation and not bring hiking boots? There’s a simple answer to that. I forgot. It’s as simple as that.
I found a shoe store and wouldn’t you know it, it being Africa, and right next to a fairly large hotel, they had an abundance of them. I tried on just about every type they had before I found a pair that satisfied me. Before I found the one pair that actually fit me. Almost fit me. Beggars can’t be choosers.

I walked back to the hotel, just a block away, and had to walk past a newly formed pack of young toughs that hadn’t been there when I scaled the hill. My hackles rose. I’d read more than a few dire passages in my trusty Lonely Planet Guide, warning of potential violence in Jo’burg. Don’t wear jewelry, they said. Don’t carry money. Don’t walk the streets by night. Don’t walk the streets by day. Don’t be alone. Lock your doors. Don’t carry a gun. Do carry a gun. Kill anything that moves before it kills you. Run away. Don’t come to Jo’burg! I exaggerate only slightly.

I was not mugged, despite the scrutiny they gave me. The fact is, they probably only gave me the old up and down because I, the pasty white boy in shorts and golf shirt, was obviously a regular curiosity, a tourist. I tried not to look back as I passed. I tried not to hurry past. I tried to keep my cool. I think I did. But they could probably smell the fear radiating from me. Note to self: try not to read scary shit in travel books before arriving at your destination.

The meet and greet was fun. We were supposed to eat, or so I gathered, it being held at what I considered suppertime, but we didn’t. What we had was cocktails. Too many cocktails. When I say we, I mean me, others as well, I imagine. Long story short: no food. Some of the others decided to head up to the mall for dinner and shopping. It turns out I was not the only one to arrive sans hiking boots. I wanted to go; I wanted to get some food in my belly; but jetlag had taken its toll and I was too drunk to do anything except go to bed. Which is what I did, getting another twelve hours of sleep before boarding the bus for the first leg of out journey around the Cape.

We had a long haul ahead of us before arriving at Karongwe Private Reserve game lodge, our first and one of our primary destinations. It took us the better part of the day to get there, steadily climbing into the rising rocky terrain of the Drakensbergs. We stopped for a quick lunch in Witbank (some fast food chain, as memorable as any other), arriving at the Reserve about six hours after departing.

It was a hot ride despite our bus being air-conditioned, arid hot (it took a little while for the air to fully condition the space, but dry is dry, cool or not), necessitating our need to buy water along the route. My still being somewhat jetlagged and a little hung-over had little to do with the decision; everyone had need; everyone clambered off the bus to buy some when the opportunity arose. The time passed quickly, though. There were thirty or so of us to meet, in spite of the meet and greet. One can only absorb so much in a couple of hours.

We arrived and were shown to our cabins. I couldn’t have asked for better. They were modelled after kraals, the round thatched huts the Zulus lived in. Exteriors aside, they had all the necessities: bathrooms, porcelain washbasins and ewers (if one were inclined to use them and not the working shower), and mosquito netting. The rooms were air-conditioned, but air conditioning has never been much a deterrent to mosquitoes, and there were mosquitoes. We were camped along a tributary of the Koronge-We and Olifants rivers, and wetlands were aplenty about. I discovered that mosquito netting doesn’t breathe as well as one would hope. I used it that first night, but thereafter I tempted fate and trusted in the screen windows and my malaria shots.

Don’t get me wrong. It was quite posh. I loved it. But there were few lights illuminating the yards. We had to be guided from the common hut to our rooms by a groundskeeper, who invariably looked like he’d have rather been abed rather than escorting we inebriated tourists to their rooms.
We needed to be escorted, though. There were no fences. There were no walls. Anything could wander on through the Lodge at any time, as we would soon discover.

We were drinking with the staff. And when I say staff, I mean the white staff. Apartheid was alive and well in South Africa despite it being put to rest. The Blacks were still kaffirs. And the Blacks still held all the menial jobs, where the whites held the better paying guide positions. After a few hours of drinking games, we were all a little askew, the staff even more so than we were. Two Aussie girls left to go to the loo, strategically placed outside the front door. They weren’t gone for long.

They hurried back in yelling, “Hyena! Fucking hyena!”

“Where?” we asked.

“Literally right outside the door!”

The staff leapt up and ran to the entry, fumbling with the snaps holding their pistols in place. The guide behind the bar fished out a rifle with a scope before following, careening off the doorframe as he passed through it.

“Where was it?” I asked. “What was it doing?”

“It was just sitting out there, like a dog, right beside the loo.”

I’m not sure what worried me more, the hyena running loose out in the yard, or the guides running about looking for it, pissed to the gills and armed to the teeth.

Amsterdam

I had about twelve hours to kill in Amsterdam. I could have put them to better use, but I didn’t know the city and was way too paranoid about when I should be returning to Schiphol for my flight. I was also exhausted, and growing more so by the hour despite the sunrise having reset my internal clock. I spent a lot of time in cafes, alternating the occasional beer with coffee, talking to a lot of baristas and bartenders, with the odd backpacker mixed in for variety’s sake. I read. I wandered the warrens, realizing after a few circuits that I was retracing my steps a lot. There are only so many blocks to wander within De Wallen. Thrice I found myself being gestured to by the same voluptuous black woman, who became brazen enough by my repetitions to open her glass door and call out to me, telling me not to be afraid, that she’d take care of me. I’m sure she could have. I smiled and waved back, thanking her, but saying “No, thank you.”

I steered clear of the cannabis cafes. I had no desire to be singled out for a special search. I’d already had to endure one while en route to San Francisco when I’d been nosed by the dog passing U.S. customs while in Pearson Airport. I’d felt a nuzzling up my butt while preparing to walk through the metal detector, brushed at whatever had been pressed up there, but having found nothing, I thought nothing more about it. But upon passing through the metal detector, American Customs Officers directed me to follow them. I found myself at a table before another Customs Agent, my backpack between us.

He gave me the tired spiel: “Mr. Leonard, have your bags been out of your possession since you packed them?”

“Of course they were,” I said.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“Air Canada had them. This is the first I’ve seen them since I left Timmins.”

He was not pleased with my answer. I guess he thought I was being a belligerent asshole. Which I was. “I don’t care what you do in your private life,” he said, “but in the U.S. we take a dim view of drug use.” I was taken aback. “If you hand the stuff over to me now, there’ll only be a $500 fine; if I have to search you bags to find them, there will be a $5,000 fine when I do.”

I wondered what any RCMP on the other side of the doors leading to the inspection area might have to say about said possession were I actually in possession of any said drugs, fine or no fine.

“Go nuts,” I said, nudging my backpack towards him.

He began unzipping and un-cinching the bag, shifting articles, removing large, neatly packed and stacked zones of clothes, unfolding them and spreading them out. I watched the clock, marking the minutes, noting the passage of seconds, inching their way towards my potentially missing my flight.
“You missed this spot,” I suggested, once or twice, pointing out this pocket or that, hoping to spread up the process.

“This is a really nice bag,” the Customs Agent said.

“Thanks,” I said. What else would I say? I didn’t trust myself to say much else.

Then he leaned towards me and whispered, “I know you don’t have anything, but my boss is over there watching and I have to go through the motions.”

“Take your time,” I said, not really meaning it, noting I still had thirty minutes to boarding time.
I noticed then that every inspection table was occupied, and there had to be at least twenty people in queue for their own personal attention.

Either someone had smoked a joint in the washroom, contaminating everyone who passed by, or the dog had had a cold. I’m only thankful they didn’t strip search me in the back room. Randomly.
So, while in Amsterdam, Amsterdam being Amsterdam, I had no intention of having a repeat experience. I stayed clean. I wandered about and took snaps, lingered over bridges, soaking in the sights and smells along the canals, marvelling how many riverboat apartments there were moored along their lengths, how many bicycles there were chained to the wrought iron and the stands, how tiny some of the delivery trucks were weaving through the pedestrians, and how warm it was in the sun, yet so cold and damp in the shadows. And how every red lit alleyway was bounded by the most garish and suggestive graffiti. Like I said: I read. I bought some souvenirs. I nursed beers, sipped espresso, chatted with those inclined to do so, and when the time came, I made my way back to Centraal Station and Schiphol.

I returned too early. There was little to do past security lock-up. There were the usual pubs and cafes and restaurants charging extortionary prices for far too insubstantial portions, there were book stores, there were plastic seats. There were bold and not particularly beautiful carpets one expects in all airports.

I was thoroughly exhausted by then. I’d been up for over 30 hours and was feeling the effects of sleep deprivation. I could not concentrate. I reread the same passages without processing the words. I was freezing. I dug my fleece insert out of my three-in-one and zipped the neck to my chin, despite watching passers-by parade past in t-shirts and shorts. I embraced myself. And I still shivered.
I boarded. I found my seat, pleased that it was a window seat, pleased that I’d have the opportunity to rest my head in the nook between the headrest and wall. I’d tried and failed in the past to sleep when in the middle seat, and dreaded the prospect of being awake for another ten hours of flight, and another eighteen hours afterwards. I’d be a wreck.

I need not have worried.

I set down, clipped on my seatbelt, and decided to close my eyes for a moment or two while the rest of the passengers shuffled to their seats.

Someone nudged me.

What the fuck! I thought. I was pissed. Leave me alone. Let me sleep.

“Hey buddy,” the guy beside me said.

I opened my eyes and glared at him.

“Are you getting off with the rest of us,” he said, sliding to the edge and standing, pulling down his carry-on.

I looked around. The plane was almost empty. I’d slept through boarding, the taxi and take-off, the ten hour flight, all meals, landing, the taxi to the Jo’burg terminal, and the disembarking of most of the passengers.

Best flight ever!

De Wallen

I decided I wanted to go to Africa. It was the mythic land of Johnny Weissmuller and National Geographic specials, of lions and leopards and lizards, oh my!

My travel agent was confused. But there’s no scuba diving in Africa, she said. A lot she knew. There was loads of diving to be done in Africa, in the Red Sea, along the Ivory Coast, inland at Malawi, and round the Southern Coast. But I didn’t want to go scuba diving in Africa. I wanted to go on safari.
I chose South Africa. Apartheid had fallen with Mandela, but I suspected that South Africa might not be safe after the Great Man had passed on. So, the time was ripe, I thought. No time like the present.
My travel agent was at a loss. Apparently, she had little experience booking holidays outside of corporate travel brochures, something I was beginning to suspect after two years of pulling hair and teeth. I suggested Contiki Tours, pulling that stored nugget from my memory. Contiki catered to travelers under 35. I was 34. I qualified. We found a two-week circle tour of the country, beginning in Johannesburg, ending in Cape Town. I signed on the dotted line, checked my passport, and boarded the plane.

I’d never travelled east before, to the Far East yes, but that was heading west. This would be my first experience flying to Europe, into the sunrise. It’s only an eight-hour flight. Getting enough sleep on a red-eye is hard enough without the prospect of such truncated rest. It can be even more problematic with a screaming babe within earshot. Even more so with six. And me without earplugs.

I alit in Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam without having slept a wink. It was 5 am local time, and I’d been up for about 18 hrs by then. My flight to Jo’burg wasn’t until 10 pm. I was a wee bit tired, and the prospect of spending seventeen hours in the airport seemed an exercise in misery, so I decided to take the train into Amsterdam. Why not? I thought, who wouldn’t want to see De Wallen, the Red Light District?

I passed customs, caught the train after studying the timetables for exhaustive minutes, deciding when the best time to return was, so as not to miss my flight, and I was off. I arrived in Metro-Centraal Station before the sun had risen completely, the early morning still basking the city in a ghastly damp grey. Pigeons roosted and strutted, but not many people. In fact, the only people up and about seemed to be those who’d disembarked with me. I followed them, thinking rather holistically that they knew where they were going. They led me out onto Stationsplein and then to Damrak Street. I found a café, just past the Sexmuseum, that was only just then opening, the waiter’s key still jiggling the lock.

“Coffee?” I asked. He nodded and let me in, gestured for me to sit anywhere I liked, and thrust a menu in front of me. I pointed at what looked like a full breakfast, and said, “Coffee!” again, this time with more certainty, adding, “Juice?” with less. He nodded. I ate, the sun rose. Damrak woke with me, brightening, taking on much needed colour. I found a pad of city maps in the café, so I peeled one off and stepped back out into the newly lit city. Streetcars rolled up and down the street while I continued strolling south. I had no clue where they were going, indeed, I had no clue where I was going, so I watched them pass without caring where they were headed. I noted the District was across from me, just across the canal and made for it, crossing a bricked causeway, still slick with dew.

I crossed at Oudebrugsteeg, smelled the Grasshopper Café as I passed and began threading my way through the warren of De Wallen. It was not at all claustrophobic, if it was narrow. Three and four story buildings, all pressed tightly together rose up from the cobbled ways, giving the impression of a rabbit’s warren. But by and large, the streets were wide, easily accommodating the delivery trucks that were already flitting to and fro within, replenishing the prior night’s excesses. Terraces spilled out onto the streets. Flags of all nationalities hung limp from all manner of bar, café, hotel and hostel. Small signs, neon glass and wrought iron inched out from their fronts. Windows and menus advertised what lay behind and within. But at that time, almost everything was asleep.

I wandered up and down its narrow streets until I saw what I sought, the fabled shopping windows with their overhung red neon rights, made famous long before Sting wailed to Roxanne that she didn’t have to turn on the red light. Where in one, a scantily clad lady of the early morning night in fishnet stockings stood statuesque before the cluster of young men transfixed by her very presence, and I suppose working up the courage to solicit her; in another, a middle-aged woman toiled with the door open to another such den, changing sheets, hoovering up and wiping down the leavings of the night before. I peeked. It was long and narrow. A tiny single width bed, no larger than a cot, stretched back from behind a drawn-back curtain. That room looked so horribly lonely to me. It didn’t hold even the hint of romance. It’s not supposed to, I suppose.

A family of four strolled passed me as I looked in. The mother held up a map, and was tracing their path upon it, the father behind her, dragging their children along hand in hand, hot in pursuit of her as she dashed through the debauchery. I decided to follow.

I spilled out into Oudekerkspein, a wide circle of courtyard surrounding a church. A church! Der Oude Kerk, in fact, Amsterdam’s oldest Parish Church. In the middle of the Red Light District. I could not believe my eyes. I had to remind myself that this had not always been a haven to toking tourists and red lit prostitutes. It was once, and probably still was, a place of all sort of commerce and residence. Who else was likely to fill those other three floors above the street? Tall stately trees burst up from the cobblestones, their leaves dappling the cobblestones with green and gold.

My eyes darted here and there, taking in its red bricked expanse, its iron works, its stained glass.
That’s when I saw it: a single brass cobblestone amid the multitudes of green and grey and red directly in line with its entrance.

It was moulded in the shape of a hand clutching a breast. 

Payner

I prowled the night alone for more than a few years, more a ghost of my prior self than an active participant. I’d arrive, slide up to the bar and engage whomever in conversation if they were open to it, moving on if they weren’t. I was rarely content doing it, preferring to hang with a crowd, but my crowd had left, my crowd was moving on, becoming couples, getting married, buying houses and cottages and beginning to pump out kids. I wandered in here and there, looking for people I might know. I rarely found anyone, no one I wanted to find, anyways. Sometimes it was.

Sometimes that person was Dave Payne. Payner.

Payner was always fun. He was loud. He had a ready laugh. He was always surrounded by a lot of people. Everyone wanted to be his friend. And he always seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

I’ve known Payner a lot of years. He was a bartender at Casey’s during its heyday. He was bartender at one or two other places too, after that. He always talked with me. He even lent me money to get home one night when I stupidly fell in love with a girl who took me for all I had on me. He began scuba diving about the same time I did, as well, although he and I never dove together.

Once or twice I spotted him in the Standard Tavern as I ducked my head in wondering what the big deal about the place was, always amused how the floor warped and twisted this way and that, making the uninitiated stagger like they were drunk when headed to and from the head. I approached him amid his friends and attendees, asking him how he was and asking if I might join him for a beer. He always said yes, gesturing to those around him to make room for me. Like I said, he always seemed genuinely pleased to see me, but he’s likely like that with everyone. Everyone loves Payner. Payner has a big and generous personality.

One weekend in the dog days of some summer, I crossed paths with Payner in the eleventh hour of the night. We shared a beer. We shared two beers. Then he declared that he was off to some party out at Kamaskotia. He asked me if I’d like to come.

“I don’t have any beer,’ I said.

“No problem,” he said, “I got shitloads of beer.” One of the Casey’s waitresses was going too—not Louise, Payner’s girlfriend, I had no idea where she was just then—but another, and she too required beer.

We piled into Payner’s van and were off. I did not have a seat, just a tumble of crushed boxes in the back to sit on. I tried crouching up near the front for a while, clutching the seats to keep stable, but I cramped up and settled back down in the back. I slid here and there when we took corners, however gently we swung through them. It was all great fun.

We arrived and made our way to the enormous bonfire that threw embers up into the stars. Led Zeppelin rose up with them, Jimmy Page’s hard driven blues rolling out across the yard and the lake. The beer was warm having sat out in the back of the van all night. I sipped at it, but I’d had enough. The ride out had spun my head and I was feeling queasy. The smoke followed me wherever I went, drawn to me like moths to a flame, hot, acrid, the embers stinging my jeans.

We mingled. Payner seemed to know everybody. I didn’t know a soul. One beer followed another and the night passed faster than I imagined. Before too long I was drunk, my head spinning with beer and smoke. My gut was unsettled. I’d begun to reject the warm beer I sipped, just wetting my lips and not actually able to swallow it. What can I say? I’ve drank, but I’ve never really been a drinker.
I should never have come. I’d had my fill even before coming across Payner, but invitations had grown few and far between.

The eastern horizon had begun to resolve into a pale grey as we made our way back to the van. I slid in the back, falling into the crushed boxes, and before long we were bouncing along back to the highway. When we burst out onto it, the van began to slide. Payner began to correct but before completing the move he began to enjoy the sensation. He howled and laughed and stepped on the gas and the van went round and round. I hung on for dear life. It was fun. It was nauseating.

“Dave,” I said, dragging myself back between the seats, “pull over.”

“What?” he said over the racing engine.

The world went round and round.

“Pull over,’ I said, in what I hoped was a calm and reasonable voice, “I got to puke.”

Our donut came to an abrupt halt. I ripped open the side door and hung my head our over the highway.
“Sorry,” I said once I had finished, still waiting for the world to slow down and my gut to settle.

“No,” he said. “I ought to be the one to say he’s sorry.” Then he laughed. “I’ll take it easy from here on. I’ll give you a smooth ride.”

Tobermory

I had to explain to my travel agent there was more to life than scuba diving. I wanted to experience more of the world than just an isolated panoramic view of the ocean. It’s not that I didn’t like dive vacations. I did. What I liked most about them was the new friends made, the guaranteed camaraderie. There’s just so much more to see and do in the world, and I wanted to see and do some of it.

I didn’t stop diving. Henri and I still dove. But there was precious little variety in diving Northern Ontario kettle lakes. They’re cold, they’re deep, they’re black. We even went so far as to do a few road trips to Tobermory to dive Fathom Five National Park.

The first year we went, we did so without making any plans. That was stupid of us, but we were young and hadn’t really travelled about Ontario much then. We had no idea that Tobermory was a popular tourist destination.

We drove right round Georgian Bay, coasting through Wasaga, Collingwood and the Blue Mountains in the dead of night, booking into the Pinecrest Motel in Owen Sound around midnight. It wasn’t much to look at, but at that hour we weren’t much concerned with ambiance. We ought to have been. It was in need of restoration. It was in need of beds without sheets of plywood under its mattresses. I survived. This is not to say that I slept. I was so tired when we rose that Henri drove the final leg up the Bruce Peninsula.

We rolled into Tobermory without a reservation, without even a clue as to its layout. We drove straight through town, finally pulling into the Bruce Anchor Motel, right on Lake Huron. We were lucky to have found a room. We registered, threw our bags into our room, and drove back to the harbour, finding ourselves in front of GS Watersports, reading their plank of upcoming dives, finally inquiring within. We were in luck. There was a boat available. We could go right then if we liked. We signed up for a two-wreck cruise, the first dive deep, rated advanced, the second shallow and easy. We took advanced to mean requiring our having taken the advanced diver’s certification. We were wrong.

The first dive was way too difficult, considering the state I was in. Firstly, the conditions were not ideal. It was windy out on the lake, the water choppy. Secondly, the dive was way too difficult for my experience at the time (I hadn’t dove the Great Barrier Reef as of yet). The first wreck was deep, sunk in a narrow channel ripping with current. And we had no idea how cold the Great Lakes were.

We dropped over the gunnel, fought our way to the anchor line. As I said, the current was strong. We dropped below the surface, following the line. We should have gripped the line and repelled down it, but we wanted to impress ourselves with our skill, so we didn’t. We followed it. Or tried to. I never saw the line, not once. Sediment flowed past my mask, dimming the already darkened, overcast depths. Already exhausted from lack of sleep, I grew even more so fighting the current. I was cooking in my wetsuit, despite the water’s icy embrace.

I nudged Henri. I shrugged. Where the hell are we, I was asking. I gestured that I was heading for surface. Just as I was ascending, Henri spotted the silhouette of the wreck. He kicked hard, harder than he originally thought necessary to gain the wreck, and barely laid fingers on it before being torn off it. Then he too ascended.

I looked for Henri when I broke surface. I grew anxious when I didn’t see him right away.
Where the hell was he? I wondered. Did the current carry him off? I ducked my head below the surface and still couldn’t see him, but by that time, I really didn’t know where the wreck was anymore, or where to look. When he did surface, he asked me what happened.

“I lost all strength,” I said. “I couldn’t do it anymore.

I still had to fight my way back along the hull of the boat to the ladder. Henri climbed aboard first. Then me.

I was so wiped out I puked over the side of the boat. I told Henri I couldn’t do the second dive. Then I told the Captain. We spent the rest of the day getting the lay of the land, finally settling into the Crow’s Nest Pub.

I fared better the next day. It was sunny. The wind had died down. We asked about and booked dives that had a far lesser difficulty rating. There were more divers. It turns out that most divers stayed away the day before, owing to the conditions. We also noted that most wore dry suits. Thankfully it was the last weekend of August, when the water is “warmer” than usual; had it not been, our “arctic” wetsuits would have been unequal to the task and we’d have locked up with the cold down there. As it was, we came off alright, looked cool, gained some much-needed experience. We considered investing in dry suits. We never did, but we considered it.

The lake had calmed to glass after our second dive on our second cruise. Our voices echoed off the high rocky escarpment. We felt great. It was the first moment I thought Lake Huron looked beautiful.
We vowed to return, and we did.

We were better prepared for our second trip. We returned in September when the water was “warmer” still. We were there even longer, that time, granting us the time to explore the town a little more, the luxury of leisure. We stayed up the peninsula at the Tobermory Inn and Suites, actually booking ahead that time. It looked alright when we booked it. It looked a little worse for wear when he booked in. Every nook and cranny grew spider webs. It was a little damp. But once we aired it out, it was fine. It also reminded us of residence: someone pulled the fire alarm on our first night there. I woke to its fire bell clamber, having fully travelled back in time: it was the weekend; Res; someone got drunk and pulled the alarm for shits and giggles again.

“Who the hell pulled the alarm this time?” I wondered before realizing where and when I was.
When I mentioned that to Henri, waiting out the fire department in the parking lot, he laughed. “Me too!” he said. Funny, we thought aloud, nobody looked drunk.

We took the time to relax on terraces, soaking up the sun, soaking up a beer of two with baskets of fish and chips. We marvelled at the yachts moored in the marina, some declaring as far as Florida as their port of registry. Some were sailed, some even sorting a couple masts. Once or twice we spied yachts that dwarfed our houses, big enough to sport crew and security, Mrs. Evinrude’s, for instance. We weren’t allowed anywhere near those.

We finished up our second trip in Tubby’s Lounge, playing pool with a local dude. He was a sight to see, cowboy hat, starched white shirt and jeans, trim beard, hair cascading over his shoulders. He had a foot-long Bowie knife and a carnation sticking out of his back pocket. He claimed to have been born on Flowerpot Island, as though that made any difference to us.

Flowerpot treated us with contempt at first, tourists having invaded his homeland. Which we were. He kicked our asses at pool, kicking us off the table. But despite his obvious contempt, he hung around. And around. And around. He warmed up to us over time, even asking Henri to partner up with him on the pool table against all-comers.

I lost interest in him and in playing pool after a few beers, preferring to hang out with the other divers who shuffled in shortly after us

But Flowerpot wanted to play pool. With everyone. Henri finally threw a game, hammering an easy 8-ball so hard it flew off the table. “Enough pool,” he told Flowerpot after that, “I’m too drunk to play anymore.”

Henri’s having hung out with Flowerpot panned out, though.

Flowerpot manned the ticket booth for the MS Chi-Cheemaun, and he only billed us the minimum allowable. For one crossing we were two seniors in a compact.

Days of Welcome

I decided to buy a computer. I’d put it off long enough, not knowing what I’d actually do with it. Everyone I knew who had one just played videogames with them, or signed up on ICQ (the messenger of the time) and talked to random people around the world about the weather. I had no clue why anyone would want to do that. Why not spend the energy getting to know the people you knew, or people who you met who you’d actually see face to face.

Granted, the internet was relatively new. I suppose it wasn’t by then, it was 1998, and the internet had only been around since about 1992, but you had to seriously know what you were doing with a computer back then. Windows 95 and Netscape changed all that. So I bought one. And pretty well just played video games on it.

But I began to see other uses, too. I discovered that there were dating sites on the net, and since the prospect of my meeting women through my friends was bleak at best, I thought I’d give modern technology a shot. There weren’t a lot of local women on them, not by comparison, but we were only just beginning to dip our toes in the modern age, or at least I was. I crossed my fingers and dove in.
Not much happened for a while. Slow start, small steps.

Neil had dropped out of university by then. He too was floundering. Like me, he was getting on, relatively speaking, and still had no clue what he wanted to do with his life. We hung out more and more, struck up a D&D game, grasping at the past as we were unsure about the future.

He was doing a little better than I was. Many of his friends were still in town. He was dating Sharon (not Martin, St. Jean). He may not have known what sort of career he was striving for, but he was firmly grounded.

He introduced me to the Welcome Tavern. I knew it existed, but I had never been in it. Not true. I’d been in it once, back when I was a student. My car pool of students had met up there once to bid farewell to the summer, years ago. It had been an old guys’ bar then. As far as I knew it, it still was. I was wrong.

Wayne Brown had bought it, and had transformed it by happenstance. Wayne put in a new Jukebox, banishing all country except the outlaw sort, Cash and Jennings and the sort. He began to bring it bands. Small bands, up-and-comers from down South, local bands with small followings. The university crowd, unhappy with the usual favoured establishments, heard about Wayne’s and what he was doing with it and opted to make his their own, much to the chagrin of the old guys who were finding themselves being pressed out.

Neil dragged me in there to see Babelfish, a little local band slapped together by his friends, John Huggins, John Tunnicliffe and Lee Hannigan. I was impressed. The Welcome was exactly as I remembered it, yet it was completely different. A few old guys still scowled at the trespassers from the dark corners, but it had a whole new vibe. And the price was right. The price of beer had rolled back by a decade.

I still began my weekend evenings at Casey’s (I’ve always been one for misguided loyalties), but I vacated it a couple hours later to walk down the hill to that shabby old Welcome, where even Dawson and crowd had begun to frequent, owing to Wayne Bozzer’s attendance. Bozzer and Brown were old friends. And Dawson had toiled alongside Bozzer at the college with SAC to book bands for the college pubs, so they were all one big happy clique. Another I’d joined the hazy peripheral vision of, one I was not afforded the privilege of being taught the secret handshake to. Not a problem. I knew where I stood with them now. I was filler at a party. I was a fallback when all plans fell through. I was their failsafe.
But not with Neil. Neil called me. Neil made plans with me. But Neil had also begun to work with the MNR, fighting fires by then too, so Neil was beginning to be away, hanging his duffel in Chapleau a lot.

I rekindled a few tentative friendships from Haileybury while at the Welcome, with Scott Smith, with Peter Kangas, with some of their hangers-on. We had a shared history, even if we’d never been friends while there. We recalled the Matabanick Hotel, the Haileybury School of Mines, survey classes and chemistry labs. And school sponsored curling bonspiels. I recall us sitting together after my match, nursing beers, watching Boston play “More Than a Feeling” on MTV when they, Scott and Pete, decided to pool their resources. They bought twenty bucks worth of Nevada tickets and won a hundred. Pay-dirt! Their weekend had been funded. They tried that same trick the next weekend. They pooled what bills and change they had, collected their tickets, and began to rip open the perforated tabs. Hope slipped away as the pile of lost chances piled up on the table before them, and then deserted them altogether when the final two came out losers, too. They lost what was left of their weekly budget on a whim, they skulked home wondering who they could hit up for some beer.

Neil called me one week to say that Ron Hawkins was coming to the Welcome.

“Who?” I asked. My synapses weren’t firing.

“Ron Hawkins,” he said. “Ron Hawkins of Lowest of the Low!”

We bought tickets early. Good thing, too. They sold out in no time. It’s not like the Welcome was a big place.

The night came. We arrived at what we thought was an early hour. And found the bar already full to the rafters. We carved out a spot along the back wall, bought our beers and awaited Ron and his new band. It was the Rusty Nails. But they’d yet to record anything. Ron was touring his solo material he’d just released: The Secret of My Excess.

He came down from his fleabag rooms upstairs and inched to the “stage.” We’ll call the space cleared of tables a stage. We were no more than twenty-five feet away, directly in line with the speakers.
Need I say that it was loud? ‘Nuff said.

Between sets Neil and I pressed forward to meet the man. He was amicable, he thanked us for coming out (the usual cliché heard from all performers when met). He was likely stoned. He admits now to the unlikelihood, and miracle, of his survival of that period of his life, and he must have had really high tolerance when we met him, because we couldn’t tell. I bought his solo CD. I got him to sign it. Neil bought his cassette. Ron signed that, too. We made small talk. He was eloquent. We shook his hand. He promptly forgot our very existence.

I think my ears rang for a week.