they are these days. Seems to be going on a whole lot more as time goes by.
Anyway, we just poked around on them and took them whichever direction they were headed. I did get lost a few times. Imagine an 11-year-old boy walking up to you and saying, “Excuse me, sir, but do you know where I am?” HA! (I shouldn’t laugh. Now that I think on it, I remember clearly doing that very thing.)
Getting on was the fun part—hiding out, chasing it down, the timing and all. Sometimes getting off when you needed to could be a bit tricky—knowing when and how to jump, how to land, how to roll. I never really got hurt, but I sure had the wind knocked out of me a few times. Got a few good scrapes and bruises too.
We actually did the things you see people doing in the movies. You know, running full tilt, jumping from car to car on top of a freight train that’s going well over 60 miles an hour (that’s like, fast, for you youngsters). Shoot, we were waving at the cars the train was passing on the highway as we ran along the top of the railcars. It’s actually easy to do. TV just makes it look all dramatic and stuff. Just don’t trip is all. I did. I don’t recommend it.
Doing it though, at 12 years old, howlin’ right into the wind at the top of my lungs, owning that train—it’s a hard memory to forget. I think railing is actually a form of … madness? It took about 20 odd years after I stopped riding before I could cross a rail line and my stomach didn’t pull all kinds of weirdness on me. Personally, now, at my age, I think the moment any child can both walk and talk at the same time they should be immediately declared legally insane and put under guard until age 20!
Anyway, two things happened to me on one of these trips that I’m still trying to understand. One thing’s sure: like the rest of what’s coming, they were pretty strange. Both had a huge impact on my life and played a major role in shaping me into something I certainly don’t understand.
When I was just turning 12 some guy about my age I’d never in my life laid eyes on before called my name as I was walking home from school. He walked right up to me out of the blue just like he knew me and says he and a friend of his were going to run away from home and did I want to go with them.
Now why in the world this character figured I’d go with them I’ll never know. It was only my second day at that particular school, so I knew that this guy couldn’t know too much about me. I was just a little puzzled as to why he would ask me in particular. I mean, did I have a blinking neon light on my forehead that read “Complete Total Whack Job” or something? But what surprised me even more (and I remember this very clearly) was how quickly I said, “Yeah, sure! When do we leave?” Just like that! I didn’t even think about it—as in, zero hesitation. (I was just like that in those days … hormones, maybe?)
Perhaps it was because I’d never done anything like that before—I mean run away for real—and at that age there really wasn’t very much I wouldn’t try to add a little drama and adventure to my life. What I couldn’t have known was that on this little adventure I would discover things about myself that would forever change my whole way of thinking and, in a very real way, define my existence for many years … well, for the rest of my life actually. Again, and I want to be crystal clear about this—I didn’t have any choice about what happened. I did nothing to seek this out. It was like all of it was there already, just waiting for me, marking time till I was ready for it to pop up.
At any rate, we all met and started to chew things over. After we had hashed things out we came up with what we figured was a good plan. It was bold and decisive, and the proof was in the pudding. It worked. This scheme of ours involved Greyhound buses, stealthy backtracking to throw off pursuers, hitchhiking, and hopping two different freight trains (by moonlight) and was just complicated enough to placate three young boys’ thirst for intrigue and adventure—a secret mission, to which we all swore undying allegiance. At its end, it would leave us on the outskirts of a humble northern Ontario town called Malachi (which I thought was very cool). Once there we would hop our last freight to a small isolated cabin on the shore of a frozen lake. That this was in the middle of February didn’t even enter the equation. We were Winnipeg boys! We didn’t even sneeze in Ontario weather!
Now, at the time I didn’t know it, but God caused the weather we encountered on this little odyssey (my very first time hitchhiking) to suddenly and quite unexpectedly turn unseasonably warm. Everyone we met kept commenting on it. “Well, we sure weren’t expecting weather like this right now!” I was, of course, completely oblivious to this little coincidence. All was simply as it should have been, as it always was. It was in fact a beautifully enchanting night.
It was perfect out, with not a single cloud in the vast night sky, and that far north the heavens indeed proclaimed the handiwork of God. All was black and white and sparkling silver. Not a breath of wind stirred, and the tall evergreen forest lay silent on all sides. Quiet. Still. Peaceful in a way I had never before known. The stars shone brilliantly all about us. Even the asphalt highway sparkled with every colour of the rainbow, reflecting in tiny treasures the bright moon above us. Diamonds—everywhere I looked! Riches beyond my wildest dreams! All I could hear was the muffled breathing of my companions and the quiet scrape of our boots on a black highway that stretched, it seemed, for an eternity before me. And oh! How that road seemed to call to me, stirring inside me a sense of freedom I had never before experienced and suddenly realized I had always longed for. That night the highway bore a child … and that naked soul was me. I had been reborn and belonged heart and soul to the road—like I was bewitched, enchanted in a way that moved me to my very core. For the first time in my life I felt freedom! And it was this feeling that kept me returning to the highway like my lover. It was as though I had been unchained, free to explore a vast new world.
Or so I thought … as things were to turn out, the highway was to become a most horribly cruel and diabolically treacherous mistress, and I would be lashed down that insatiable road into a deeper and deeper bondage, year after year—to my very death, and then back again. Hindsight is always 20/20.
At that time, Malachi had no population listed. The only thing that even gave it a name was a train station situated about 15 feet away from the rail line. So, with no roads into my friend’s cabin, the only way to get to us besides train would be by ski plane, or so we thought. Antarctica was overpopulated compared to this place. As I think on it, if any of us had been hurt up there …
I have no idea what in the world we were thinking. Three 12-year-olds way north in the deepest part of a northern Ontario winter with nothing but a few canned goods and an old .22 rifle? I think we actually had some hazy idea we were going to hunt all winter. The great woodland hunters! We actually did shoot a squirrel (with a .22?!), triumphantly carried it home, skinned it, and tried to eat it. I think we scraped the pitiful bits of flesh that were left on the poor thing into a can of beans and tried to convince ourselves how good squirrel stew tasted. Yep! We nailed that varmint’s hide onto what we finally declared to be “Squirrel Wall” (after much debate) and vowed there would be many more to join it. I put the tail in my cap, of course. Somehow, I think that as mighty woodland hunters went, we were just a tad short.
Now you know how we got there. What comes next is where it starts to get really interesting.
Remember the plane crash that killed everybody? That my brother, my mother, and my father all knew would happen? Well, I think I probably knew when I was inside my mom, ’cause this story is kind of like that only there’s no airplane in this tale—but there is a helicopter.
We’d been there about four or five days. One morning I was awakened out of a dead sleep by a very powerful jolt, and suddenly I knew beyond any shadow of doubt that “they” were on the way. I had no idea who “they” were, but I was absolutely certain they were coming for us and that whatever was going to happen was going to happen quick! ... It almost felt like some sort of emergency shock buzzer alarm button got pressed somewhere way down inside me—an extremely
