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Family Legend

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Campire Stories

A little twist on the Family Legend assignment from the Daily Create let me bring this neighbourhood legend to the Camp Magic Macguffin campfire. 

They had come from Burnaby, had the MacDonalds that came to reside on Garcia Court, and beyond the neighbouring suburb were from points across the breadth of Canada and back into Europe. Both branches of the family we knew reached the old countries of England and Scotland eventually, but had each traced vastly different routes across Canada to the coast.

Mr. MacDonald’s family had splintered out of a line of Joneses in Ontario and settled in southeastern British Columbia near the American border where towering mountains are ringed by lingering smog of a half-century’s smeltering. Mr. MacDonald’s father had worked in that smelter, and he and three siblings were raised in a narrow two-story house near their elementary school. The family lived above the gouge of the Columbia River and knew well the hoards of river moths that owned the dusks and dawns of summer with a singular and biblical tenacity.

It has struck me each time I’ve heard it told that Mr. MacDonald never passes over the subject of his hometown in conversation without mentioning these moths. His eyes sharpen and he pointedly engages each person within eye and earshot in his narration; there is no mistaking the onus he places on the regular emergence of the hovering pests.

“You have to drive with your windshield wipers on,” I have seen him marvel. “And the town hides itself indoors, sure to seal every window and door – even though you could at best keep only ninety percent of them out!”

Listeners cringe at this image, and Mr. MacDonald relishes their discomfort. “Oh yeah!” He often repeats important details for effect, stalling and indulging brief cul de sacs and dead ends before continuing with the story. These productions never seemed scripted until I began to hear these various narratives told and retold by Mr. MacDonald, and then also by others on the street, word for word.

This particular story of the onslaught of minuscule beasts wobbling as they rise from the Columbia River Valley inevitably meanders to the recounting of the childhood of Mr. MacDonald’s youngest brother, David. (No one fails to mention, in this telling, that Brandon bore such a resemblance to his father’s brother that once Brandon had reached the age of fourteen, they were christened “DavidBrandon” for the duration of several family gatherings that spanned almost a decade.)

It is told that as a child David never harboured the town’s apprehension for the river moths, and would await their nightly coming tide at the crest of the bluffs above the river. Standing bare-chested toward the setting sun, he would watch the air thicken above the flat pools on the Columbia and hear the million hatchlings popping onto air. The hum would drive in a cloud toward him on the hill and his heart reportedly raced as the million moths reached and engulfed him before sweeping over the bluffs like a humming wave. They would fly through his hair and glue their wings to the sweat of his arms and legs, and he would let the ones that could land and begin to crawl, trekking his skin and covering him from head to toe. Only once the night’s flight had subsided would he walk the steep grade of the hillside and descend slowly into the freezing depths of the river. The moths that resisted at the surface of the water would come unstuck once submerged, and David would rise from the water clean, washed with the first boilings of the next night’s hatch.

I heard this story for the first time at a cul de sac barbeque at the end of my driveway. Mr. MacDonald had put his silver beer down to do the telling, and as many as fifteen of us looked on as he reached the dramatic finish, painting his brother as a shining martyr of these moths. Perceiving that I was perhaps the only one present who had yet to hear this tale, he nodded to me for what I assumed was my appraisal of the tale.

I said meekly, “Didn’t anyone ever go out there with him?”

Mr. MacDonald laughed and said, “DavidBrandon always wanted to know the same thing.”

Theater of Wild

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DSC02050 Theater of Wild by Bryanjack

The year before I graduated university, I spent six weeks working as an assistant aquatics director at a Boy Scout Summer Camp in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, in Arkansas. An internship component of an academic scholarship I had won the previous year, I spent that summer sleeping in a canvas tent under the watchful eye of the Airforce National Guard, who used to use our pool and lakes as laser-target practice for their C-130 bombers, and living immersed in the particular strain of Americana that spends its weekends and vacations marching to chanted troop slogans, saluting the flag and praying before meals.

I had been a transplanted Canadian in the south for three years, running on a track and field scholarship at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and had made a place for myself among the urban college scenes of Little Rock and Fayetteville, acquainted myself with Memphis, New Orleanes, and the dirty-vegas facsimile of Tunica, Mississippi. But this was my first prolonged excursion into the wilds outside of town, and after four years in Little Rock, quickly became what I still consider my southern home (I returned to the camp as Aquatics Director the following two summers).

The friends I made in those woods, and the things that the Quawpaw scouting community taught me about myself and the world and my fellow man were a culmination of my university education, and a perfect synthesis of my British Columbian and southern roots, where we would be swimming lengths before dawn in the mist of the pool, and watching heat lighting accompanied by the buzz of cicadas. It is all much more than I can hope to capture in words: a densely peopled time in my life that left such deep marks upon my heart and mind that without any deliberate effort the characters from these stories continue to create my daily life and living.

We’ve talked a lot in TALONS the last few weeks (or I have at least) about the Precious, an unspeakable love and adoration the classroom community passes in held hands and knowing glances, in laughter and tears, a bond and affinity that stems from a flowering seam of wilderness and wild that the Gus Blass Scout Reservation helped light in me those many years ago now, and which I will never forget.