Chapter VII continued Springhill.

Both of my grandparents came from Springhill. Both are buried in the cemetery on the hill leading out of town,on the side of town farthest from the mines,beyond the shady part of upper Main Street,where you are least likely to notice the foul air.But both are from the other side of town,where you would never notice the scent of roses and lilacs,or warm fallen leaves in the grave yard.

Rose Elizabeth Davis lived in another town,farther into Nova Scotia,and by 1965,I still do not have much of a memory of ever having seen her.Her maiden name was Ryan.During the time of my fathers growing up,she was separated from her husband.They never lived together in my lifetime,though the times I'd seen them together,they were respectful enough of each other.

William Wallace Davis seems to have been named after Braveheart. He was a larger than life sort of figure,about who there was an abundance of outlandish stories.In the 1920's he ran bootleg rum,and entered into the depression a reasonably wealthy,though no longer prosperous man.

My grandfather came around to live with us for a short time,and he helped my father do some building.During most of my childhood he would shuffle about between family members in Nova Scotia or Alberta,and often lived in decrepit little rooming houses.

He was not tall,but sturdy,thick and square,and he dressed in archaic fashion:gray trousers,white shirt,a gray jacket of Harris Tweed,a gray tweed British racing hat all proclaimed that he'd never really left the 1920's.His face was lined,his hands hard and thick,with one finger gone at it's top most knuckle.A mining accident,he said.

I'm not at all certain how he viewed children.He seemed to work hard at presenting himself to us in a way that my mother would find acceptable,when in fact,he might have otherwise lacked that inclination,being of a rough cut mining breed.As it was,he might have had the slightest suggestion of a sneer when he tried to remain acceptably civil,and may have regarded my mother as being prudish.The suggestion was there,but he never said as much.So he would sometimes use expressions like"Son of a ...lady dog" or "pain in the ...sitdown",always managing to to stop short of cussing when we were around.Relating to young ones must have been a full time job for him,and mostly he did it well.

By trade he was a carpenter,a ships carpenter he said.He built things well,so that they would last,and he would take hours checking to be sure that things were level and square.His eye was steady that way,though it seemed he never worked quickly.

Chapter VII continued.Springhill.

My cousins lived out in the land below the hill.You could see the new prison from where they were living,a big building encompassed by fence and wire,and set aside from the rest of town.It was compensation for the loss of mines,where hard and hard up,largely unskilled men could draw wages.

They lived on a rough,gritty patch of ground,in an old and used up house without paint.Nothing much grew about there except some hay that went unharvested,and some trees,farther back.There was honeysuckle too,tangled among the other growing things,but unseen.It would vie with smoldering coal for the attention of the senses.

Uptown was pretentious,with it's town clock.It was the face town tried to show the world,pristine white churches and tended lawns,and decent,even grand houses and mature and ancient trees.But the land below the hill was a mining town,with coal no longer king,but instead a deposed monarch whose reign was past.

Feet told the whole story of town.My cousins were unshod,and I watched them,wondered why they were allowed to run about without shoes.Each toe pad collected small circles of blackness,each heel became a sooty crescent of ground in grime,each nail a tiny crescent moon,under which grit gathered,The ones fortunate enough to have well formed arches would have a splotch of white or pink down the middle of the sole.Skin,thickened and iron hard,before they ever went to school.

Later,in the car my mother asked"How do they run around like that all the time?" In my mother nothing sounded like disapproval unless you listened hard.You would miss the criticism,were it there at all.But you could detect the move of her eye to a naked and soiled foot,and later,the question,"How do they run around like that." And it made me think how every few months we would go down to Main Street,back in Moncton,walk into a shoe shop or two,checking for the best deal.In each shop a man in a modest suit would come out and carefully measure our feet,then hurry off into a back room,returning with a box of perfectly fitting shoes.And we would go out into the night,into church shadowed downtown,then ride off into our clean white house,returning again in another few months.

Coal burned all the time in the lower part of Springhill. Sometimes you could see the smoke hanging close to the ground,or like dust motes in a cars headlights.Even though coal was no longer coming out of the ground,it defiled the air.It drifted from a heap of mine slag,down where the mines used to be.Some time ago it had caught fire,and burned for years.At night it would glow,and I once asked my grandfather,while we were passing if that was Hell.Dark on a moonless night and smoking,it seemed Hellish to me,and I was always happy to pass.It's sulfurous miasma would rasp at my nostrils,causing them to flare,and,after a time a vice would tighten at my temples,unless we were gone to some other place.

I thought of the coal smoke as a kind of a ghost.Had I only known. Springhill felt to me like a deeply haunted place,with apparitions coming up out of the ground,and sailing around in the dark,on  thin clouds of smoke,looking down at passing cars and coal tarnished buildings and asking to be remembered.Asking not to be left nameless.

The living  too,seemed to wear a dark veil,not by choice,but because they could never really escape it.You could see it,spotting the leaves of garden vegetables,streaking painted houses,and settling darkly on cars after the rain.And all the dresses of the housewives appeared somehow darker,lank and drooping,unlike in other little towns all about.The young girls looked slightly rough and thin,and you would have to look hard for their prettiness,as they would stand about,smoking,seemingly saying,in the harsh,plain speech of miners "Black Lung,you can't catch me."Defiant.

Sometimes you would hear people cough.My grandfather would cough up black mucous,into a paper cup,hacking away lung cells,dissolved,sometimes streaked pale red.Men would gather,down by the liquor store,down in The Junction,and I could hear their voices,like sand paper,asking for a dime,bent in the back,and looking forward to what they had to look forward to.Their livelihoods gone,they searched for ways to ease the pain of being too old to change and not ready to die.Their backs were bent,their insides dissolving,and they could never escape coal,the deposed monarch.

All things that live,live in the shadow's  cast by other things,and so Springhill became a character,personified,and you could see and know the people it brought forth,and know why they were,and how they were.

Chapter VII Springhill

We entered a barber shop,my father and I.It was on one of the road trips.Usually we had our hair cut every few weeks at the barber school at the New Brunswick Institute Of Technology,because they provided inexpensive haircuts and were within walking distance of the house.Children's hair got cut for free,and adults paid a quarter.

There must have been a reason for this visit,aside from the cutting of hair.But I've never been clear on what that reason was,other than it was likely just a visit,for it's own sake.My father knew the barber,called him by his name,like he'd known him forever,and perhaps he had.

There was a building being torn down just across the street,a busy road with shops all along it and the hulking automobiles of that  day prowling up and down.My father sat in the chair and I watched bricks and boards fall to the ground through the barber's front window.It was a two or three story building,one of the larger ones on the street,and it was missing a big chunk of it's top left hand corner,as a piece of machinery kept poking away at it and little clouds of dust rose and drifted into the street.

The barber snipped hair with scissors and complained of the dust,and the noise.Snip,snip,"Damn I wish they'd finish.Just bring that building down." Snip,snip.And another board would fall into the street.The barber carried on a lively,good natured banter with my father as he clipped and buzzed and combed,talking about people I didn't know.But it was a small town and both my father and the barber seemed to know everyone in it.

The barber finished with my father,dusting away hair onto the tile floor,removing the ribbon of white paper from around the neck,and holding up a mirror so that my father could view the back and sides,and nod approvingly.

And then it was my turn.I shuffled through the pile of hair clippings on the floor all around the chair,and crawled up into place.It was a long way up into the chair and the barber had to pump a hydraulic lever to raise the chair so that he could reach me.The chair was ornate,of shining brass and pewter,and soft gleaming leather,the sort of chair that proclaimed the shop to be the exclusive habitat of men and boys.The barber was dressed as barbers then did,in gray pants and a crisp,clean white smock,not unlike that of a doctor.And he began to snip,trying to make small talk with me,asking me silly questions,afraid maybe that I would protest his efforts.

"How old are you?

"Four"

"Are You married?"

"No." Why would he ask such a question? I could see myself in his mirror,I could see all his instruments laid out on a counter beneath it-comb,clippers,scissors,more than one pair of each.If I stretched and struggled just a bit I could still catch sight of the building across the street out of the corner of my eye.I tried to make the movement with my eyes,so I could hold my head still,so as not to be poked by the tip of the barbers scissors,or cause him to make a crooked cut with his clippers.

My father walked around the floor,paced,really,though the place was small.He didn't sit in the chairs where people waited.He had no interest in the magazines laid out on a small coffee table.He was watching the building too."Sad to see that old building Go" he said as he paced.In those days he was slim and fit,carrying little body fat,his arms veined and sinewy.A bit short of six feet.About one hundred and fifty pounds.Neat,with his short,well trimmed haircut,his hair still dark,without a trace of gray.He was a picture of youth and health,looking as though he could do anything,looking as though he belonged,right there where he was standing,like that world belonged to him.

For fifteen minutes the barber clipped,until my hair was cut just like my fathers.I watched as little bits of it dropped to the floor,and I wondered how often the man gathered up the clippings,and what he did with them.Sent them away in the garbage I supposed,and it seemed strange that a part of what was once me was lying on the floor.At last he finished,and dusted away the final bits of hair with his brush,and lowered me to the ground.Those chairs seemed really high when I was so short.

We said our good-byes.

"Come again,Walter."said the barber."It's always good to see you."

"I will" said my father.But I don't recall ever being there again.

Down the hill we drove,the old town hall with it's clock tower on our left.Ticking away the hours.It gave the town a southern and Gothic look.Ticking away the hours.Maybe the tallest building in town,but not really on the highest part of the hill.It made the town look as though it was a place that mattered.Ticking away the minutes.It was an odd time,strange minutes to be passing,because the town was changing too,not what it had once been,looking for a different sort of existence.

I wonder,did those minutes seem to pass quickly,or slowly during the times of disaster,when the towns men were trapped beneath the ground.It must have resembled something other than the faithful,mathematical,measured movement of time.Too slow!"It's been too long."Or,"so quickly,the hours are rushing away,too many".It made no difference to the old town clock,none at all.

We went to the Sears catalog store and picked up a package for someone,though I'm not sure who.And we went across to the candy store,on the right hand side of the street as you go downhill.The owner greeted my father warmly,talking to him as he seemed to everyone,like they'd not quite left childhood behind,but that's the kind of place the candy store was.There were few people there that day.No children hanging about because it was early afternoon.It would be busy when the schools let out,busy with small kids each with a few pennies.

The shop owner scooped out three kinds of candy into three paper bags."Come again,Walter,It's good to see you,you need to come more often",the little man said,in thickly accented English.

We got into the car,with three bags of candy and headed out into the flats below the hill,where downtown was forgotten,where the air was bad,the houses dingy and the town's life blood once was taken from the ground beneath our feet.In past days.

And that is my first,my earliest memory of Springhill. 

Chapter VI continued

It seems as though we were always on the road,going someplace.Either the beach,or just around town.I'm amazed that my father wanted to go anywhere at all with all the driving he did back and forth to work.It was over two hours either way.

My mother drove the car,but most everywhere we went in town we went on foot,at least when my father was not at home.But my mother could and did drive too.At the time,though,we only had one car,and my mother would walk to work if my father was working too.When he was home,we would go off somewhere in the day,then pick up my mother after work.

When we first moved to New Brunswick,most of the roads were not so good.Even after we moved to the city,most of our end of town was still under construction,but the city started coming together.The roads were getting paved gradually.Even some of the driveways were being paved over,and it would not be long until my father decided to pave our's as well.For that he enlisted the help of my grandfather,who came to live with us for a short time.But we lived in a mobile age,an age of automobiles.Some of our neighbors were starting to get more than one car,but that was a ways off for us.Still,we drove everywhere,just about everyday we were driving somewhere.

We went a lot of places by car.But of course,the places we went most often were the two towns that figured most prominently in my childhood,my mother's and my father's hometowns,where my grandparents still lived.One was in Nova Scotia,one in New Brunswick,and they were both interesting places,in very different ways. Springhill,of course was well known as a mining town,but it was a mining town that was nearly finished with mining by the time I was able to recall and understand it.Dead Creek,and Canterbury,my mothers neck of the woods were dying towns too.There really were quite a few places like that in Atlantic Canada,owing to an economy that was never really robust.But I didn't know much about such things at the time.To me,there was a lot to see in these places,a lot to know about,and really,I wish I'd paid better attention.It's possible,too that my parents had attitudes about where they,and where each other lived as children,and I think that may have skewed how I saw each of these places.Still,aside from Moncton,both of these places were formative ion my upbringing,and I carry a bit of them with me even today.


Authors note:Yesterday I received a note,and had a subsequent conversation with an old friend from Moncton.She said that she didn't know I had a blog,and that she would need to catch up on reading it.So I would like to welcome Cheryl Hannah Nicholson along for the ride.Cheryl and I attended the same schools dating from the mid 1970's.Today she lives in Prince George,British Columbia and is a fascinating person,who has lived a life at least as interesting as my own.I have talked  to her often on social media over the past couple of years,and the discourse has always been time well spent.So welcome Cheryl,I hope you will keep reading,and I always welcome comments.

Chapter VI continued.

We went to the beach at Shediac a lot,but we went other places too.One of those places was down in Albert County.Rather than a beach,this place was a little creek,just the right size for children to play in.The water come up to my knees in most places,and we would wade around all day.We could go from one side of the stream to the other,either by walking right through the water,or by hopping from stone to stone,and trying not to get our feet wet,making a game of it.

This place had it's own kind of movement.And it's own sound.I think it's really the place that caused me to be amazed by the sound of water moving over rocks,singing through the woods.There were birds here too,and their songs,little peeping things,and feathered creatures both seen and unseen with their elaborate melodies.And frogs too.You could see them,shooting through the water,grabbing at flies,and you could hear them,all day long and on into the night.I loved to watch the dragonflies too,how they could almost stop in the air.Once,some older kid  told me not to get bitten by a dragonfly,because you would die.But then my father said,no,that's not true,and I was so relieved,because I didn't want to think such beautiful creatures could hurt you.They looked very much like helicopters in the way they could move,settle in one place,then dart away.And there were water striders too,a kind of spider that could walk right out on top of the water.Later,I heard kids call them"Jesus Spiders",but my mother would never have let us call them that.Still,they were incredible things to watch-they were the only thing I knew of that could walk on water.I wanted to catch one and bring it home.We didn't have an aquarium back then,but I thought I could put one in the bathtub.But,in a whole childhood,I never managed to catch one.

I much preferred the stream to the beach.I guess I never really became a beach person,but I could not wait to get into the car when we were off to the stream.It never took long to get there,though like everything else when you're a kid,it seemed like a long time.Sometimes we would go there for a picnic after my mother got off work.Other times my father would take us there on summer afternoons,before we went to pick up my mother.The woods there was not all grown over then,it had been thinned out and there were picnic tables among the trees.Really,it was the most perfect place to relax and play,a green,brown,mossy,birdsong water world,where there seemed not to be a care in the world.

chapter VI continued

One of our more frequent road trips was to the beach.I'm certain that proximity to the beach was a big selling point with my parents when they decided to settle in Moncton. Moncton was a bit inland,but it only took an hour,or maybe a bit less to get to the beach,even without a direct,multi-lane road like they have now.

My father loved the beach,almost to the point of obsession.That must have started when he was a teen living in Springhill. Springhill was the kind of place that people might like to escape in the summer months,but it was quite a bit farther from the beach than Moncton was.Once,while we were driving to our summer cottage,just as we were leaving Springhill,my father started telling me how they would all walk,or perhaps hitch to Heather's Beach,near the community of Port Phillip.I looked out at the land before us,at thickly wooded trees and I thought he must have loved the beach if he was willing to trek across that rough country.It must be about thirty miles.He said they would sometimes take two days to get there,they'd camp in the bush somewhere on the way,and kill some farmers's chicken for food.

The beach we used to go too was at Shediac,south and east of Moncton,maybe twenty five miles away in those days.A big part of that trip was through town,then out the old Shediac road,past a golf course until you got almost to the coast.The road wasn't all that good and you couldn't go very fast at all.

Once you got to the end of Old Shediac Road,there was a T intersection with a couple of gas stations and some seafood shacks.Beyond that you could see the town and the ocean beyond. Shediac is all about lobsters.My memory of the town is of a clean,white looking place.Modest white buildings,many of which would have a billboard with a lobster on it.They all had neat asphalt shingled roofs as well.Properties around the town seemed well kept,because,after all it was a tourist town,trying to look pretty for summer visitors.

Beyond the town,out in the water there were a lot of lobster boats,low at the back and high at the prow,and most often painted white,though I've seen them in all colors.The boats,and the little harbors that sheltered them were often scenes depicted on post cards from Atlantic Canada,scenes most typically used to identify the region in other parts of the world.

There were always stacks of lobster traps out on the wharf anywhere there were lobster boats.But most of the houses around would have lobster traps as well,sometimes large stacks of them,sometimes just one or two to decorate a lawn,cottage or small business.Once again,these are typical images of Canada's Atlantic coast.

When you got to the T intersection,you turned right to get to the beach.If you turned left instead,you would go up along the east side of New Brunswick,through all of the little villages,past where my father worked and where we used to live and beyond.But a right turn went to the beach.Once you were at that corner,you knew it wasn't far.

The first time we went to the beach we took plastic pails and shovels.My father had brought home two big bright colored beach balls,then gathered us all into the car for the trip.

I'd never seen the beach before.I don't know why we never went to the beach when we lived in Redmondville.It wasn't really that far off,but some of the beaches around are not that good for swimming.Some were rocky and others covered in thick,slimy mud.But the one at Shediac was ideal.Very sandy.In fact,there seemed to be miles and miles of sand along the coastline.We would go out in the water and swim.Or at least my father would.I didn't know how to swim.Still the beach was a new and wondrous place.All that sand and all that water.The place always had a sense of motion about it that I'd never seen anyplace else I'd been.The waves moving from far out in the water,then washing up along the sand.And seagulls overhead.Sometimes they would land  nearby,Near enough that I thought I should be able to catch one.So I tried to,but they could move away so fast.Then they would circle and screech,and dive into the waves,sometimes coming away with small fish.And there were other creatures too.Clams and crabs.Crabs had a strange way of moving,something like crawling.You could see the little trails left behind by little creatures trying to get back into the water after having been left up on the land as the tide went out.Tides went in and out,farther away,then closer.The thing about this beach world was that it was always moving,and almost never moving like traffic in town,or like people when they are walking to get somewhere.And I would move too.One of my favorite ways of moving was to walk right out to the edge of the water,parallel to the surf,then try to stay away from the waves before they caught my feet.But it was wonderful to be caught too,to feel that cool ocean reaching around my feet.And then I'd watch how quickly the waves could take away the footprints I'd left behind.My father used to say that the waves were taking my footprints away to Africa,or maybe China,and would leave them there for someone else to find.Moving.The beach was always in motion.

Higher up,away from the beach the sand dried out.It dried out gradually as you got farther back from the water,and when I was tired of chasing waves I could go up a bit to where the sand was still damp.Here I could dig,fill up my plastic bucket and make sand castles.I wasn't very good at making castles at first,but I did like to dig.It amazed me that once I'd dug deep enough,there would be water in the hole.Farther back still,all the sand was dry,and hot to the touch,unpleasant to walk on.And there was crabgrass too,big clumps of tall grass.My mother always said you had to be careful,that crabgrass could cut your skin,but it never cut mine.I don't know of anyone who was ever cut by it.

There was a hut that sold food at the beach. Hot dogs,hamburgers and french fries,and maybe local fare too,like lobster rolls or fried clams.Sometimes we brought our own food for a picnic,but usually we had hot dogs and fries.The thing about fries was,the gulls would sometimes chase you for them.There were always gulls circling around the food shack.I'm amazed that the Health Department never shut them down because of the gulls.My father would take a french fry from the cardboard container and pitch it up in the air,where a gull would catch it,fly right over the outside of it sometimes,without even clamping down on it with it's beak.And my father would chuckle,then toss another one up.I'd never seen any kind of bird do that in the city.But the beach was a very different place.



   

Chapter VI continued.

The town where my mothers family lived was over two hundred miles from Moncton,and getting there was a bit of an ordeal.Then,as now you cut right down through the  heart of New Brunswick.Only back then,you actually saw a lot more of the country.the road went right by towns,both large and small,through fields of cows,and a big farm near Sussex where if you looked out the side window you could see a whole field white with chickens or turkeys,or maybe both.Other than Fredricton,Sussex was largest town we passed on the way.It was farming country with pastoral views of gold colored Jersey cows munching on grass and unpainted covered bridges.There was a commercial strip along the highway in Sussex,and sometimes we would stop there at a bakery for cookies.The woman that ran the bakery was German,or Dutch,perhaps,and she was always kind and friendly,and loved children.My father loved the cookies and other baked goods there.All of the things that it took to make them came from the local dairy,and he said that the best butter and milk,or ice cream came from Sussex.In that,I believe he was right.but,for the most part,it was just good to get out of the car and stretch our legs,because the trip to our grandparent's farm was a long one.

We knew we were halfway there,or,halfway home,when we came to a big bridge at Jemseg.That is where it seems like all the waters of New Brunswick gathered together,many feet below.Grand Lake was located to the northeast of the bridge,and it met up with the Saint John River just under that bridge.You couldn't see the water really well,because you could never stop on the bridge,but sometimes you could catch a glimpse of boats down below.

Once we got past Jemseg,the land flattened out into river bottom.The river was  on your left side all the way into Fredricton,and it was lush,green,wet country.In places there were huge trees growing right up out of the water,and I always wondered how trees could grow in the water.There was a big island there too that had cows on it,Jerseys and Holsteins,and I wondered how they would come home for milking,or how the farmer would come to them.There didn't appear to be any house or barns on that island,but the trees were so thick,they might well have been hidden from the road.Across the river,there was an army base and sometimes you could hear the boom,boom,boom of artillery practice.You'd see a lot of army trucks sometimes too.

The land started to rise when you got to Fredricton.And the roads in those days started to get bad upriver of The Princess Margaret Bridge.They were building a dam upstream,so the roads would all have to be replaced with higher roads,and there was construction all along there,all the way to where we would turn off the main road about sixty miles west of Fredricton. Some of the roads were little more than cow paths,there was construction equipment parked everywhere,it was dusty,and sometimes you had to detour,or stop for long periods of time.

The place where we turned off the main highway to travel into the back country was called Crow Hill.It was usually very dark when we arrived here because we often arrived at night.if we were still awake,my parents would begin to make crow noises-caaaw...caaaw-to let us know the trip was nearly over.But I don't think I ever saw a crow there.

Sometimes we would start back home during daylight hours and I could see what Crow Hill really looked like.But it was many years before the significance of it dawned on me.In very few words,let me describe it as the place comedian Jeff Foxworthy warned you about.I'm eternally glad we never broke down on that road at night-"Drive faster,I hear banjos." Crow Hill would not exactly put your mind at ease if you were heading back into the hills,not for most people anyway.

I don't think Dead Creek,the place where my grandparents lived would have looked much different than Crow Hill to the casual outsider.The only real difference was that we knew most everybody who lived there. My mothers family lived in four farmhouses right beside,and across the road from one another.It was not really good farmland and a lot of the people who lived around there had begun to abandon it.It wouldn't be long until my grandparents moved int town too.

In 1965,when I was four,I was too young to have formed any opinions about Dead Creek.I suppose I could have developed quite an attitude about it had I been older before my grandparents decided to become townies.Much like the Bogeyman's hood in Nova Scotia,Dead Creek was the sort of place that could evoke negative feelings and ideas in anyone who didn't live there.But by the time I was able to understand comments about the family trees of people who lived in such places looking more like fence posts than trees,my grandparents had moved.Still,they were very different from people in Moncton.They looked different,wore different clothes,spoke and acted differently too.But I never regarded that as a bad thing.

There were a lot of isolated communities in New Brunswick at that time and Dead Creek was one such place. I've heard others referring to the the people who lived there as hillbillies. I've heard the area referred to as The Badlands,and I've heard references,only half joking,to ignorance and inbreeding.Nevertheless,that is where my mother's family is from,and,as far as I know,they were all decent people. Church people.

                       I"m proud to say that I've been blessed
                        and touched by their sweet hillbilly charm
                                                                             Dwight Yoakam,
                                                                             Readin',writin',Route 23

chapter VI continued.

We went to the beach at Parrsboro that day too,way up behind Ottawa House.It was not peak season for the beach.In fact it was very cold.My grandfather took a spade from the trunk of the car and dug some clams as we walked out on the sand.The tides there,at the head of the Minas Basin are very high and come in very fast.When the tide is low there is an expanse of sand that seems to go on forever,but when it turns,you have to pay close attention and get to higher ground without delay.

In the distance,a long way off over the sandbar,I could see a structure that looked something like a corral made out of tall upright poles and some kind of netting.At one side there was a small opening where you could walk in.The purpose of this device was to catch fish,which would swim in at high tide,then end up beached when the waters receded.Then the fisherman walks in and gathers up his catch.So,with fish still in mind we started off across the sand towards the corral.I have no idea if the corral belonged to my grandfather,but there is every possibility that it did not.We may have been raiding it,or it may have been that he had permission to harvest the odd fish from it.The later would seem most likely,as it would have been next to impossible to raid one of these corrals without being seen.Walking out to it,then back would have taken the better part of an hour and a person would be visible the whole time.

In the end it mattered not,as we were not able to make it to the corral before the tide turned us back.I was wearing rubber boots and somehow I managed to lose one while we were out on the sand.We visited a couple of more places that day and I recall my grandfather telling the people we saw how I'd lost a boot.

At last we came to a place that must have been somewhere near Five Islands or Economy,but not as far up as the provincial park.It was on the side of the road away from the water too,and the driveway went in in kind of a horseshoe  shape,with the house halfway between it's ends.There was a lot of junk there too,as there usually is in a fisherman's yard.Old rusted cars and small boats competed for room along with various nets,traps,ropes and buoys.It was on the side of a mountain too,so there was not much usable land.

We got out of the car ,and this time I went in with the two men.At the door an old man appeared and we inquired as to whether he had fish to sell.Indeed he did.Inside the house,in a large galvanized washtub was a silver fish,an Atlantic Salmon.To my eyes it was big enough to have been a whale.The tub it was in was the same size and sort that my mother would have used to bathe us when we visited her parents farm,so that fish must have been nearly as big as I was.It filled up the whole tub.I tried to lift it and found I could not.

By the day's end,it's likely that we had traveled fifty or sixty miles.I don't recall in the end what happened to the fish.Likely my grandfather kept most of it,but I don't recall taking any of it home to Moncton. Still,we may have because it was a very large fish for one person.

On that trip I got to see how,when either my father or grandfather wanted fish,nothing was going to stop them from finding it.Over the next few years,attempts to get fish,to coax or coerce them out of the water would range from pleasant afternoons by a stream with poles in hand,to trips to the fish market on the way home from otherwise unsuccessful expeditions,to some downright bizarre and nearly heroic efforts to bring home fish.Eventually I discovered who the best fisherman in our family was,and it surprised me when I did.

But when my father wanted fish,he would not be denied.Nova Scotian to the bone!A creature that belonged to a province where you cannot stand upon land that is much more that thirty miles from some part of The Atlantic.

chapter VI continued.

Success,as far as my father was concerned didn't stop with owning a house.By the time we'd been in Moncton a year or two,he must have already been thinking ahead to a time when he would be able to afford a small lot with ocean frontage.That was still some time off,but it must have been on his mind even then.

Nova Scotia was the province my father called home and that is where he had the appearance of most belonging.in fact,by imagining a stereotypical Nova Scotian,you could be said to be imagining my father.He loved the beach and the sea,the salt air,and fish.He claimed that you would never starve if you lived by the sea,as everything therein,including seaweed could be eaten.The only thing that he ever conceded that came from the ocean and could not be eaten were jellyfish.

Fish was one of my fathers favorite foods,and from early on it was served  often in our home.my mother would prepare salt cod in a casserole with potatoes and onions in some kind of a white sauce.Later,the onions would disappear as they bothered my fathers stomach.High in the cupboard there was a green and red box that contained dried,flaked salt cod.I once tasted it straight out of the box and it was the saltiest thing I'd ever had in my mouth.But,in a casserole with potatoes and onions,or formed into fishcakes it made a more than passable meal.

One of our early road trips involved a quest for fish,and my father was not easily deterred when it came to getting fish.On this particular trip we had no fishing gear of any kind,so I suppose the plan was to buy a fish from a fisherman.Or,they may have had something a bit closer to theft in mind.It was sometimes hard to tell with my grandfather along.This trip would have taken us all over the back roads around Springhill,to Five Islands and Parrsboro.

We stopped at a few different places that day,the first being at a tumble down shack out on The Lynn Road.There must have been a purpose to that visit,other than to get fish,as that stretch of road is inland,by Nova Scotia standards.I recall the place rather well,if not our purpose in being there.

The place where we stopped could only be thought of as a shack,though not a small one.It was even covered in tar paper,as were a lot of places in poor.rural New Brunswick or Nova Scotia at the time.

My father and grandfather were inside the house for what seemed like a long time, and they left me in the car no doubt thinking I might end up napping.But I didn't. And since I was alone for a long while,I got out of the car and started exploring the cabin's yard.First,this building was low to the ground and it only had one door,located in the narrow side of the house.It had a bathroom too,which was located outside,just to the right of the door.It was a small unpainted house in a bit of  a ravine,overgrown with weeds and brambles,and there were some hill and thick woods behind it.

To this day I have no idea who lived there.But,while I was sitting there,on a low set of steps,playing in the dirt,which,along with some thistles seemed to be about all the yard consisted of,a man I didn't know came outside with some kind of a big,black shaggy dog.He trotted over to the little house and disappeared inside while the dog sniffed around in the bushes.When he came back,I asked,"Where Did You Go?"
 "Just over to the little House",he answered.
"Can I go there too?"
"No,you Shouldn't go there"
"Why Not"
"Well,you see,the bogeyman lives in there.And there are wolves in the woods too."

That part about the wolves was most likely true,though it would have been easier to find a skunk or a porcupine.He was likely afraid that I could have gotten lost in that thicket,and I likely could have,rather easily.

But of course,since I couldn't go there,I wanted to.The man had not said that the hut was an outhouse,but what else could it have been.I needed to go,and not being allowed to was increasing the urge,so I just went over to my father's car and peed on one of the tires,which is what I always did when we stopped by the roadside.Pissing on my fathers whitewalls always made me laugh.

Maybe I didn't have a proper sense of danger when it came to the Bogeyman,but I wasn't afraid.And the big Bad Wolf was farther away,off in the woods someplace,so he barely crossed my mind at all.I don't think I had much appreciation of what either one was though,but I was familiar with the names from storybooks.So,I wondered,should I be concerned that I was sitting just a few feet away from where the Bogeyman lived? Maybe or maybe not.but I supposed he had to live someplace,and besides,I guessed if I left him alone,he would return the favor.There wasn't really much I could do,or anywhere I could go anyhow,with my father and grandfather inside the shack.nothing happened,except that I came to think of that place as being where the Bogeyman lived,even later,when I forgot where the house was and no longer believed in bogeymen.

The big dog was a bit of a different story.I was still working out exactly how I felt about dogs,wasn't really comfortable around them,but neither was I terrified of them.At that point,it could have gone either way.I wasn't sure I liked this one scenting me with a big wet nose and getting right up in my face,but the man said it would not bite.It didn't,but I was happy when he took the creature back inside.

When I think back,that was likely a very early experience with some of those people who would have required a perhaps uncomfortable explanation,had anyone been in the habit of giving those sorts of explanations.What's clear in my mind is that the people who lived there had a very different value system than what my parents were trying to encourage at home.They'd spent a good deal of effort getting free of things like bogeymen and outhouses and falling apart shacks with wolves living nearby,and perhaps even dogs.It might have been alright to read about The Bogeyman in a book,but my mother would have taken a dim view of someone trying to scare one of her children,by pointing out where he lived.

There is also the question of who those people were and why were visiting there.I only saw the one man,but I'm sure there were more people inside the shack.Most likely they were just people my grandfather and my father knew and who they had not seen in some time.It could even have been some variety of cousin or some such thing.But my father knew a lot of people,and it was not unusual to stop for a visit someplace,then never see those people again,or ever find out who they were.

It also could have been that they were visiting a  bootlegger.I didn't know it at the time but my grandfather had a fondness for the bottle,especially rum.He knew a lot of people too,most likely everyone in Cumberland County.He'd once been a bootlegger himself,and would have known just about anyplace where he could stop for a nip.

Whoever those people were,I believe my father did not want me to be too aware of their living conditions.He wasn't really embarrassed about such places or people,but I think he may have been a bit concerned about what I may say later,at the dinner table or some such place.He'd said that he knew people who kept chicken and even small animals like calves inside,but I'm not sure if this was the same place.Still,the people here were very poor,and a single glance at the outside of their house could evoke all those standard and stereotypical images of Appalachia.

Leaving a small child is likely to have concerned my mother too.Today,of course ,you don't do that,but it was rather common back then.In the city,in a store parking lot or some such place,and for a few minutes at a time.The times were such that there was no real worry.But an hour or more,especially at a place like this,with The Bogeyman as a next door neighbor,would have caused my mother some concern.But really,these road trips were about what we might today call male bonding.For my father,it was about taking his son and escaping the female world for a short time.So I'm sure he didn't mention a lot of the particulars about such places to my mother.It's not likely,though that she would have thought such adventures might involve pissing off The Bogeyman.No doubt she would not have approved.

Chapter VI

Once we were settled in Moncton,the road trip became a family ritual.Sometimes it was just out to the grocery store-you didn't have to go all the way downtown to find one,but there were not any really nearby either.The two we used most often were Dominion Stores and Sobey's,which were on opposite sides of Mountain Road,a block or two apart but still within view of each other.

We went downtown a lot too.That's where most of the stores were,and,the only real department stores.Main Street was the street where most of the stores were,right in the busiest part of downtown.Saint George street was the next busiest street.It was more or less parallel to Main Street,and it went out into the west end.That's where you went to get to the park,and in the summer time we were always off to the park,to the playground or wading pool.And in the winter,there were hill there for sledding.

Mountain Road was maybe the busiest street in town,even busier than Main Street,and much much longer.It began at King Street downtown,close to where King joined Main,in the oldest part of Moncton.Then it ran all the way out to the northwest end of town,past our street,Watson Avenue.It ran past the New Brunswick Institute of Technology,and by then you were nearly out in the country.But if you kept going you would pass a huge wrecking yard,with what seemed like acres of junk piled way back from the road.Follow it far enough and you came Magnetic Hill

Magnetic Hill is a bit hard to describe.As a child I didn't find it interesting at all,but it was about the only real tourist attraction Moncton was really known for.The idea was that you would drive down to this white post,put your car in neutral and watch it coast back up the hill you just drove down.Then you could watch all the other cars doing the same.Not very impressive really.

But Magnetic Hill had something that I was really interested in.There was an animal farm,or a kind of a zoo,with pony rides.At first there were not a lot of animals,maybe a couple of dozen or so,and they were all lined up in a row of cages which you could walk almost right up too.Most of the animals were local critters like skunks,porcupines,raccoons,pine martens,a few different sorts of weasels,a bobcat,a mountain lion and a beaver.I'm not sure what else,but I don't think there was a bear back then.They came along later and were kept in a big pit.There was also a big duck pond,and we all enjoyed feeding stale bread to the hungry ducks.

There were other birds there too.Of course all the local sorts of birds were around,but not in cages.They never went far though because there was always food there for them.Mostly,though it was just crows,chickadees and woodpeckers.There was the odd hummingbird too,and I loved to watch them because they were so different from the other birds.There were also pheasants,big gold and brown ones,and a flashy,noisy peacock.It didn't always display it's tail feathers,but it always made enough noise to wake the dead,two counties away.One day we were out someplace and when we returned home there was a big pheasant sitting right there on our front porch.I had no idea how it got there and we were all quite amazed.But my father said he'd brought it home in the car trunk.I thought we would have to catch it and take it back to the zoo.I didn't believe the story my father was saying because I didn't see him put it into the trunk,and I thought it would have made some noise if he had,but I didn't hear anything.So I supposed it had hopped all the way from Magnetic Hill,since they couldn't fly very well.Really though,it had likely been around in the neighborhood since it was still not well developed,and even recently,I've seen pheasants nearby.

The first car I recall my father having was an old Valiant.The kind with the funny trunk lid where the tire fits,and something like wings on the back.Not really big wings like some of the other cars though.It was white,with red seats.Then it was followed by an old Nash Rambler,dark blue.That was some time after we'd moved though.

Moncton was centrally located,and that likely had a lot to do with why my parents moved there.From there it was a bit closer for both of my parents when they wanted to visit their family.My mothers family still lived a long way off,but not quite as bad as before. Springhill,my fathers hometown was only about fifty miles away and the roads were decent.Not so going to my mothers hometown though.They were building a dam just above Fredricton,and for what seemed like forever,the road was under construction.The old road was to be flooded when the dam was finished,and for the first while when we were going up there the roads were more like a cow  path.But,once we got settled,we were always going somewhere in the car.

Interlude:some thoughts on religious teaching.

It's not just children who are limited in their understanding of religious ideas.Religion is really big.And God,and all those concepts which we connect to Him,is by far bigger than any framework we are able to provide with our minds,such as they are.We can generate and explain all that which we call Theology,but God always transcends,and ever will.The same applies to the basic natures of all that He has created.So no matter how old we are,what our state of intellectual development is,or how misled we are by the ideas of others,we will always have deep and profound questions about being.And,as a consequence of our limitations,we will be limited in the ability to instruct others.Ergo,God,and Creation will always remain a mystery.Certainly not something that can be easily taught to children.

When we are children,our parents seem all powerful.They provide for our needs and guide us along,however imperfect they might be.And we try to believe,and accommodate the things that they teach us.It is a simple model of faith,perfectly understandable to most who have had a normal sort of upbringing.But  things arise to challenge that faith,for such is the nature of faith.And the mystery inherent in God,that we will come to know later,is present there in our parents and teachers as well. I've come to believe that that mystery is essentially a good thing,one that apart from attaining a different nature we will never overcome.

But I find a lot of what is wrong with the teaching religion manifests itself in one rather profound fact.That we,as humans,often become confused between Our Heavenly Father,and our earthly parents.In many cases,this confusion causes people to literally be unable to believe,and to embrace Atheism as a default.I don't think I've met many,who,having perceived their childhood to have been unbearable,still accept Our Heavenly Father in a healthy,wholesome way.Those burdens seem to be an impediment to belief that only relatively few overcome,and none do  of their own ability alone.So it is critical that we make an adequate distinction between"Our Father" and "our father" because eternal destiny may be seen as riding on that distinction.

Still,in our formative years,we make the best of what we have.Our teachers recognize that we cannot understand deep theology,and thus provide us with simple,though hopefully adequate explanations of basic understandings.Still,they,working from their own limitations do not always get it right.But good teachers,parents who care deeply about their children,always open up the spirit of inquiry within those being taught.That began with our creation in  The Image Of God,a profound concept in and of itself.While I certainly don't understand that idea fully,It does imply in part that humans would always be endowed by a sense of wonder about God,and the responsibility to teach such to others of their kind.Moreover,I would say that through the ages,this part of God's plan has been carried out and preserved,such that it's core beliefs are,always have been,and will remain intact,and able to guide,guard and ultimately save.

In truth,my parents had their shortcomings in teaching us about God.But they made a good effort,and it wasn't wasted,even if they may not have believed exactly the same thing separately as they taught collectively.Their understanding of Hell for instance,is,to my understanding today,in error.But,in children it had or has the effect of creating a basis of moral imperative,and an effort to comply with established regulation.I don't think,for much of my life I've had an especially accurate or healthy idea of what Hell is.As I say,it always concerned me,but it never really terrified me.In a sense,when I think of the Hell I understand today,it really should terrify me,such as to make my desire to be pleasing God as fully as I am able,because I fear the unnatural state of being cast into a place where He is not.Yet,I would not have such a thing,such a doctrine bring about a terrified and neurotic existence to small children,such as it might when Hell is preached as it's own dogma to the exclusion of all else,even the eternal Love Of God.Thank God,his guidance was sufficient to see that this did not happen in our home.

I've always been astonished by the nature religion took on in our home.What I mean is,that I don't ever recall the actual words of the Gospel message being spoken.I never heard the words "Born Again" from either my mother or father,and this seems to be the foundation of Christianity to me.So the question has dogged me over the years:did we really live in a Christian home? And I don't profess to have any true or definite answers in that regard,for I'm convinced that we cannot really know the state of another's soul.That is God's alone.So ,in that regard I wish never to diminish His Glory.The best that is therefor possible,is to observe what my parents taught and how they lived out stated belief,or,in some cases,did not,as a purely behavioral construct.And while I can,and have been and will likely continue to infer certain things from that which I've seen,my own thoughts are not necessarily correct,nor should they be read as such.I find it impossible,though,not to wonder,for the mystery of such thing, both was and remains so very,very big,indeed as big as all Heaven,and very much beyond me. But I'm convinced that lacking the ability to know the answers as completely as I would like,it is still worth trying to know,that I might find things more knowable in some incremental,if  still incomplete way.

Chapter V continued.

It goes without saying,I think,that children have a limited capacity to grasp religious concepts.In looking back,that was certainly true of myself.But my mother and father both taught us what they believed were some basic ideas that would be understandable to us.For the most part they were,and I'm most thankful for the teaching.But I still had questions.

One big question came upon me more or less as soon as my parents began teaching religious things,and,more or less because of those teachings.It was something that was just out of my grasp when I was four,but it is something that is instinctual to humans,one of the great existential questions.I would not have been able to phrase the question then,but it was nevertheless there:If God is Good,and He can do anything,why do bad things happen?

Looking back I'm surprised how young I was when that thought first presented itself  in my mind.As a small child,I had not had much exposure to really bad,evil things at all.They all existed in what I call The World Just Beyond.They were there,never far away,but we were diligently guarded from them,especially by my mother.And I was barely aware of evil.But the idea of bad things seemed possible because of ideas like trespasses and the need to forgive,and,above all else,Hell.You could not even mention Hell by name,and were you to go there,you would burn forever in a huge fire.That seemed like a very bad thing. So I wondered how God,who was good and could do anything would ever allow such a thing.

Chapter V continued.

Heaven and Hell were not the only concepts that my father taught.He also taught us that "Prayer" was "talking to God",and he taught us two different prayers.The first was a prayer we were to say before going to sleep,it was simple and easily remembered even for small kids.It was very familiar to most people at the time,and a good many included it in their religious rituals.Back then we would say it every night."Now I lay me down to sleep..." And it went on to mention dying before waking up.and God taking your soul.I never thought much about it at the time,but later I came to think of it as a prayer that could cause anxiety in children,so I never passed it along.This would be especially possible if your comprehension of Hell was keener that that of Heaven.But really,I don't recall ever being bothered by it back then.

Along with The Bedtime Prayer,we were taught The Lord's Prayer in it's entirety.This one part of scripture was either something my father knew well,or felt was very vital,or both,because he went through it line by line explaining what it meant."Daily bread" meant "Food and water"."Trespasses"were all the wrong things we did to others,or,all the wrong things they did to us.To "Forgive" meant "To forget",subject of course to certain conditions,and "Evil"was something bad like sickness,or an accident,or bad people who hurt or even killed other people."The Power And The Glory" was something that belonged to God,things that,translated from my father's telling meant roughly that God could do anything.

Forgiveness was a concept that was especially meaningful to my father.When he explained The Lord's Prayer to us,he would stress the part about forgiving trespasses.How he explained the concept was,again, very basic,but essentially complete.We should try very hard never to wrong others,but at times we would,and they,likewise,would do us wrong.When we hurt someone,we were called upon to be sorry for having done so,and to ask them to forgive us.And  we must also forgive anyone who had done us wrong,and who was sorry and asked to be forgiven.The only part that he seemed to have left out was the part about God forgiving us for the wrongs we'd done to Him.

Chapter V continued

Just because my father did not observe religious rituals,at least within our view,does not mean that he was not participating in our religious upbringing.Clearly there was some understanding between him and my mother as to what religious teaching we would receive.Or perhaps it was just a simple agreement that we would receive Christian instruction without reference to it's particulars in a denominational sense.It seemed to work out well,with a minimum of tension,though what my father would have said had my mother chosen to practice Mormonism,Judaism or Catholicism I cannot say.

Both my mother and my father would read to us at bedtime from a volume called Bible Stories For Children,though I don't know that my father was presenting the stories as something that he personally believed in.However,he never openly attacked or ridiculed our mothers belief.

For a while my father would tell us about God too.In those days what he told us was rather basic,limited and easy to paraphrase:God made us and gave us a soul.God lives in Heaven,which is a wonderful place.But there was another place called Hell,where The Devil lived,and there was a huge fire that never went out.If you lived a good life,you went to Heaven to live with God when you died.But if you were bad,you went to Hell where you would burn forever.

Heaven,and God I did not really understand.I was told that the church was God's house,but I wondered why I never saw him there when I went to church.As far as Heaven went,it was something I could not really conceive of.I'd never seen Gold or Diamonds,or even silver,which were the things I was told that Heaven was made of,so there was no reference in my mind for what Heaven was,or why I would want to go there.So I asked my parents endlessly what I suppose are the normal question a small child would have about God and Heaven:Is Heaven far away?How long does it take to drive there? Why Can't I see God?What color is God?Which house does He live in when He goes home from church.Can I go over to His house someday and play with Jesus?

Hell,on the other hand was something that frightened me.Not to the point of absolute terror,but there was a concern almost ever present in my mind.It was such a bad place that you could not even say the word,for fear of going there.And while all the things of Heave were rather abstract,I fully understood the idea of fire and smoke and burning,even if the concept of forever was still a bit beyond my grasp.

To go along with all that,I understood being good as meaning to do those things which pleased my parents,while being bad  meant doing those things that angered them.The whole problem was,as I saw it then, that I did both good and bad things all the time.So then,where would I go when I died?A strange logic about this took root in my mind.It went something like this:Doing a lot of good things did not make one bad thing good,so getting to Hell would be kind of easy.On the other hand,I thought maybe it was the last thing you did that most mattered,so it would all depend on when you died.Of course,the idea of death is not really clear to most four year old  children either.So,if I were to eat all of my Lima beans without arguing or saying no,and were to die as a result,I would go to Heaven.But suppose I were to be hit by a car while playing on the street.Well  then I would go to Hell because I was not allowed to play on the street.Bot,of course,if both my mother and I were crossing the street at a light,and we were struck and killed,then we would both be Heavenward bound.

At four years of age I certainly had a lot to learn about religion and morality.But the bottom line was that I was convinced that I could never really be good enough to avoid Hell.Partly that was because Hell was a lot more real to me than heaven was.But it never really crossed my mind at the time that I might not have been getting the very best of instruction  in these matters.So I took in what both parents were saying,believing it whole hog,even though there were things about it that really didn't work out smoothly in my mind.It never really occurred to me that perhaps there were some misconceptions in my parent's minds that they had not fully worked out,and that perhaps that came from having been born into and raised up in certain places. Springhill more so than most other places.That was a place,with it's burning coal slag,and deep mines that had no natural  light,and hard work and danger,even death,and economic hardship when the demand for coal was low,that could make it easier to visualize Hell than it could Heaven.

What I didn't know then was that my parents were leaving out huge,essential parts of Christian theology.I'm sure they were doing the best they could,but they likely recognized limitations to our minds that would make certain concepts hard for us to understand.So I never heard words like Grace and Faith and Atonement.I never heard the word Salvation,except as a proper noun,when referring to The Salvation Army.And of course,salvation is not really a straight forward doctrine.Many adults have differing ideas as to how it works,so quite possibly it would have been beyond my ability to accommodate at the time.

Still it's clear to me now that some of our teaching was improper.It was providing us with a very odd view,a legalistic one,something that we were not really intended to have.Clearly there was a lot more to how God worked than his measuring out good and bad like we would measure water or flour or feet and inches.Two hundred bad things,and only one hundred and sixty good things.You go to Hell.Or,you shared your candy with your sister twenty times,and only ever killed one person.You go to heaven.At this point,it wasn't making a lot of sense to me,but my belief structure was growing.

Chapter V continued

Where my father went,or what he did on those Sunday mornings when we were in church,I don't know.But I can say that he almost never came with us.Certainly some mornings he must have been very tired,having just gotten of the midnight shift and traveled the eighty miles home.But I don't really know why,on those Sundays he wasn't working,he chose not to worship with his family.It caused me to wonder from an early age what he thought about God,and why whatever he thought was so different from what my mother thought.In fact,to this day,my father's beliefs remain largely a mystery to me,simply because so little of that belief was openly stated.And yet I'm certain he had beliefs,and that they were religious in nature.

My father's religious behavior also caused me some puzzlement when it came to my mother and her beliefs.If to her,God and Jesus and being a Christian was so important,why had she married someone to whom those things seemed not to matter?There was something very unsettling about this,though I could not have voiced those concerns then.It was not nearly the same thing as disagreeing about what color to paint the house or whether to have fish,rather than chicken for dinner.I knew that even as a small kid.Religion,what you though about God was important in governing what sort of things you did,and who you would become.That's the message I got,but only from one side of our home.

None of this is to say that my father was an unbeliever. Neither does it mean that my mother was not living an exemplary Christian life.But those two things seemed very odd to me at the time.Today I would call it cognitive dissonance.That's surely what it was.But interpreting how anyone believes,or lives out belief is,by the nature of belief a difficult,if not impossible task.That may not be true  where belief is openly stated and similar things are believed by all,but it was never like that in our home.

Chapter V continued.

The church that we had began attending was called Mountain View United Church,at the corner of McBeth and Connught,just up the hill from the hospital.Mountain View United Church was very much unlike the other churches around Moncton,at least in appearance.It had neither steeple nor bell,and,in fact it didn't reach very high into the sky at all,and never cast much of a shadow.I often wondered how,if our church had no bell,how my mother ever knew it was time to go.Most likely she just knew.If she'd have had to admit to taking her cue from the bell in the big Catholic Church,she would most likely have been somewhat embarrassed.

Mountain View United was not built out of stones. Instead it was a 1960's style modern building made of brick,wood and glass,and it fit right in with the surrounding neighborhood,which featured a profusion of expansive brick houses.To me,it was a wonder that after the area around our church was built,including the hospital and the Mounted Police station,there were any bricks left over anywhere in the world. When my mother,or a Sunday School teacher would tell the story of the Children Of Israel being forced to make bricks in Egypt,my mind visualized those bricks going to build all those stylish houses all about our church,rather than for pyramids.But our church fit right into the neighborhood.

Often we would drive to church,but sometimes in fall or spring,we would walk.We only had one car then,so,if my father was away at work,we missed church.It was quite some distance to church and there was really not a lot to see on the way,so most times the walk bored me.We would walk down to the end of our street,then turn right and walk along mountain road to an old B/A filling station.We walked past the two schools,Mapelton,the French school.which was a wood frame white building,and Beaverbrook,which was made out of whatever brick was left over from when they made...well,you know.There was a small store at the corner of Mountain Road and Hastings,but neither the Shell car wash nor the McDonalds had yet been built.We would cross over Mountain Road once we got to the B/A station,it never varied.Often I wondered why we could never walk down the other side of Mountain Road,but we never did.

Just before we got to the church,there was a knife sharpening business in an old house.He sharpened skates as well,and once he even had a sword that you could see through the window.A bit farther along,there was a kind of a strange looking house.It was a bungalow,but it was kind of bent in the middle and there was a balcony wrapped around a big part of the upper story.I though of it as more like a boat than a house,and I always wanted to live in it.Later I found out that the people who lived there were Muslims.

What I know about our church was that it started out as a tent.Some of the adults that went there were always telling that story.How anyone could attend church in a tent was quite beyond me at the time.To my mind,a tent was a small place for sleeping in.But if you ever got caught sleeping in church... A tent was just too small to be a church.I had no concept of a church being anything other than a building.I just could not see how my mother,my sister,the minister,the choir and all the ushers and all of the other people would ever be able to get inside a tent.The first time you jumped up to say Amen or Hallelujah, the whole church would be torn apart,and,if it happened to be raining,the whole congregation would get baptized.But,as it turned out the good folks at Mountain View United had a bit of an aversion to shouting,and open air baptisms.Their idea of a tent was likely more like a circus big top.

I wondered too,why our Church was called Mountain View United,when it was right in the middle of town.I never did find out the answer to that question.It could have been a reference to Jerusalem,or to Calvary,perhaps.Or,if you looked way off on the horizon,there was what I suppose you could call a mountain,though it was really just a hill.

And so,at the age of four,church became part of our lives.It was a mysterious sort of thing right from the start.But I attended for about a decade until I finally decided that what I really was was an Atheist.When I woke up from that idea,decades later,I opened my Bible to a random page and read:"I look unto the mountains,where does my help come from..." (Psalm 121:1).

Chapter V continued

I was beginning to view the world with a sense of wonder,because there was now the possibility of unseen things,aside from those things that emanated from the radio,that were said to be real in some far off place I'd never seen or been too.In terms of my reality,it made my world much bigger.

Downtown Moncton was shadowed by huge buildings,that towered over all and imposed themselves on all who passed.They were made from gray,aged but permanent stone blocks,looking solid and unmovable,and I wondered from an early age who had cut the stones,then placed them one on top of the other until they reached up into the heavens,competing with each other to be the tallest buildings in town.The height,the stony presence,the shadows impressed me,I held them in awe.Some were pointed on top,some squared off,but all seemed to say that they knew all,that there was nothing in Heaven or Earth that they could not speak of with authority.

At some point my mother began to speak of God.I'm unsure as to when,thinking that it must have been from the start,since she was in some form a religious person.But I don't recall much about the early part of it,much before 1965.Then talk of God and Jesus began to find it's way into our daily lives.At first,I think it was just stories.Stories from a book called Bible Stories For Children.

Church used to be a much bigger thing back then.It was considered odd if you said you didn't attend.Some people would look at you askance and you would know they were voicing unsaid questions in their mind.Bible Stories For Children was not just found by our bedside,where my mother would read from it in the evening.For years it was found on tables in the waiting room of nearly every doctor's office.It was even in the dentists office,and the optometrist's.It was a beautifully illustrated volume,or perhaps even two volumes.It's pictures were captivating:Men and Women and apples,a man inside of a whale,a young boy throwing a rock at a giant,a bearded old man holding up stone tablets.Time spent at the doctors always passed quickly,because I was carried away by those pictures.

Other unseen things were said to be as well.Santa Clause,The Easter Bunny.And my father,being partly Irish,from a poor background,Shanty Irish they might have called it in some other time or place,spoke of things like elves and fairies,leprechauns,small people,pots of gold,angel and demons,whether he believed in them or not,for poor Irish are a spirit haunted people.

My first memory of church is of being in the church nursery,with babies and toddlers.I was not really either,but nor was I truly big enough for Sunday School.For some reason I recall men and women dressed in crisp white uniforms,and playing great brass instruments.They were The Salvation Army,though we did not attend A Salvationist Church.But they played their horns and we sang some majestic sounding songs which I did not understand.Then we went home,to a lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches.