Kleinwalker

His name was Kleinwalker.  I’m sure he’s dead now – it HAS been more than 30 years.  He was the first mate on a tiny ferry I worked on as a deckhand in the summer after I turned 16.

He had an enormous belly, a great pendulous chunk of thick, hard flesh that closed so low over his overstretched, sagging belt, the bottom lip seemed to curl back under to touch his thighs.

He smoked roll-your-own cigarettes, the curly brown frays stained wet on short and stubby fingers burnished hard to tones of oak to mahogany.

I’d never seen anyone smoke a cigarette like Kleinwalker.  He had no teeth, but wore no dentures, so that when he took a drag, the burning ember would plunge to the back of his mouth as if pulled by an invisible string, the smoking ember almost disappearing before sprouting forward, spring-loaded.    The first time I saw him suck in that butt, I thought I was watching a cartoon.

He didn’t pay much attention to me.  As a two-month summer relief hire, my job was to make a good pot of coffee in the morning, clean the heads with a rag mop once a day, polish the brass fittings once a week, and stay out of the way.  That and raise the bar upon docking to release the cluster of workers leaning forward, impatient to drive home.  At the mill side I’d have to haul the chain across in preparation for departure.  It was a brain-dead easy, overpaid union job, but at 800 bucks free and clear in one month – a huge sum for a 16-year-old in the mid-70s – I wasn’t complaining.

Standing around the dock one morning with three other colleagues before the first shift of pulp mill workers stepped aboard, Kleinwalker was holding court.   Suddenly, he came out with this:

You know, this morning gettin’ up, I gave the wife a nudge ‘cuz I felt a little bit of a rise comin’ on, just a sec or two, but then I had to get up to take a piss and it was gone.  Damn.  I haven’t felt what that was like in years.

Just as I was absorbing the fact that this man was spilling to his colleagues things I’d never heard spoken of in my own home before, he turned to me and growled out: What about you, you young cunt?  You gettin’ any on it?

No, I wasn’t getting any on it, but I was too stunned to even stammer out the words.

The moment passed and we were soon taking up our positions on the ferry.  As he walked away to climb the steep metal stairs to his office, wheezing as he walked and straining to lift his enormous bulk up the narrow passageway, I remember thinking: no adult, not even – or perhaps, especially -  my father, has ever asked me that.

Are we raising our kids to be wimps?

The incoherent ramblings of a clearly disturbed individual aside, most parents would agree that defending a decision which resulted in sending a seven-year-old would-be airplane pilot plunging to her death is pretty stupid.

On the other hand, we don’t want our kids to grow up to be wimps, afraid to take risks, push themselves, put themselves in a little danger to see if they can come out of it OK.

See that cliff? The little red-haired girl climbed it as part of a five-day Extreme Adventures camp we booked her into before leaving on holiday in Canada.

It’s a good thing she had that day of rock climbing, one day where with good instruction and the right gear, she was tested to do her best in a risky situation.

Because the other four days of this camp were anything but Extreme Adventures.

On day one, the kids walked about 2km to the Squamish Adventure Centre, played some games, and watched a movie.

Day Two was for mountain biking, though it really wasn’t. They had them riding along crushed gravel trails.

Whoa.

Day Three was for wakeboarding, a sport like water skiing. They spent most of the day getting to a lake 50km away to bob about in a boat as each kid took turns pulling the one single wetsuit on and off, and then trying to wakeboard.

The last day they took them to a lake for swimming. Swimming! Not exactly Extreme Adventure, but at least it involves getting a little wet.

Ah, but before swimming in the lake, they had to put on life jackets.

What??? I know about lawyers and liability, but life jackets to go swimming?

I clearly remember having checked the box beside FISH on the form which asked Does Your Child Swim Like

a Rock

a Dog

a Fish

And if she swims like a FISH, she doesn’t need a bloody LIFE JACKET!

She’d been in a day camp with them before, so I knew the first few minutes of Day One I’d be filling out release forms. But this time? They handed me such a stack of papers to sign, paragraphs to initial and have witnessed to fully absolve the District of Squamish of any and all liability should harm come to my child, it took nearly 20 minutes to get through it.

“It’s because there are private companies teaching the rock climbing and the wakeboarding,” they said. “It’s for their protection.”

But even after virtually telling them they could dangle my kid by the ankles from a cliff before dropping her head-first into a bear pit and I wouldn’t sue – couldn’t sue, because I’d signed that right away – I still went away happy, eagerly anticipating great tales of Extreme Adventure.

Instead she got one good day of rock-climbing and four days of pissing around, topped off by five hours on the final day sitting on the beach for five hours because she refused – and rightly so – to swim with a life jacket.

Not that she minded pissing around. At the end of the five days there was an evaluation form to fill out, and she was generally positive about the atmosphere at the camp, the counsellor and the other kids, so what the hell.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that if this is the benchmark for what passes for adventure in a child’s life these days, we’re telling them it’s OK to be overly cautious in life, it’s OK to coast along without taking risks, it’s OK to be afraid of getting yourself in a little danger.

Life jackets.

I would start in on how hrrrmmmmfff when I was a kid before mountain biking, wakeboarding or bloody factor 45 sunblock was even heard of we’d tear out the back door without so much as a bottle of water, scamper up through the forest to find paths up through the rocks to the lake to go swimming and the only life vest was sitting miles away at the bottom of somebody’s boat under lock and key because who even bothered to wear one at all anyway?

Ah well. Even adults wear helmets skiing these days. Now that’s wimpy.

Back from British Columbia

But still heavily jet-lagged.   A couple of photos from my hometown are about all I can muster right now.

Now taking bets as to when this old shed finally gives in:

And one from around Kamloops, where my mother went to school during the war:

If you screw up, you could kill someone

By the time I was 19 and started training in McBride, BC, for my summer with the Canadian National Railway, I’d already racked up a long list of jobs from house-builder to ferry deckhand to supermarket stockboy, but none so far boiled down to this: If you screw up, you could kill someone.

That point was hammered home my first day of training with a jovial, red-faced, pot-bellied, silver-haired gent named Jim, who told me the story of why being precise in everything you do on this job was a matter of life and death.

In 1950 the Canadian army was sending troops over to fight in the Korean war.  The troops were often sent west to Vancouver by train, but one of those trains never made it.  It slammed head-on into a passenger train, killing 17 soldiers and four train crew.

Here’s how it happened, or rather, here’s how I heard it, because there are different versions out there.

The train order operator’s job was to pass messages from the train dispatcher to the trains, either at the station before the train left, or as they were rolling past stations down the line, so the train crews knew where they’d be meeting trains coming the opposite direction.   Much of Canada’s mainline train traffic is now double-track, but back then most areas were single-track, with sidings every few miles to pull off and let opposing trains pass.

We’d bang out messages – called train orders -  onto a form as the dispatcher dictated them over the wire, and repeat the order back to him.   The dispatcher would then give the OK that what we’d typed out was correct.  After the dispatcher was sure that all trains had their meeting points planned out, he issued a clearance to attach to the orders and we’d hand it over to the crew.  Back in 1950, even the high-traffic mainline trains between major Canadian cities were still being run this way.

One day an operator, after repeating back a train order, noticed he’d made a mistake, so he threw the order away and typed out a new one.

Unfortunately, he made two critical errors.  He not only wrote the wrong meeting point on the new order he typed out, he failed to repeat the order back to the dispatcher.  Had he repeated the order with the mistake back to the dispatcher, he and the other operators listening in to the repetition would have immediately spotted the wrong meeting point, and he’d have had to go back and type it yet again until he got it right.

As it was, he passed a message along to the passenger train to meet the troop train one station beyond the point the dispatcher thought they would meet.

So the troop train and the passenger train met in the middle – head on, around a curve, in the middle of the Rockies.

The train order operator, a young man only three years older than I was when I started my training, was charged with manslaughter.  In the trial, his lawyer argued that the man was actually being used as a scapegoat, and that the real culprit was the shoddy way the railways were being run.  Standing up in the courtroom, he held the railway rule book high over his head and ripped it to shreds, saying the rules by which the railway was then running trains were unsafe and must be amended.

That’s why on the rule book I was issued it said: Uniform Code of Operating Rules, Revision of 1962 on the cover.  They completely re-wrote the rule book based on that one disaster, resulting in a daily routine for train order operators from then on:

All train orders had to be letter perfect.  All times and all place names had to be spelled out letter-by-letter in the operator’s repetition back to the dispatcher.  And if a mistake were made, you could be charged with a criminal offense if it were found that you’d passed the order to the train without having first repeated it back.

The operator’s lawyer, by the way, was none other than John Diefenbaker, a man who later became Canada’s Prime Minister.

Caveat: I’ve re-told this story as I remember it being told to me.  When looking up for information on what’s known as the Canoe River disaster, you come up with several variations.

Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a trainspotter.