that very moment! I remember jumping wide-eyed out of my bunk in a complete panic and immediately yelling really loud at my pals, “Get the heck up, you guys. They’re on their way for us … RIGHT NOW!”
They thought I’d gone starky—that I’d completely lost it. I started rushing wildly around the cabin, stuffing clothes in my bag, madly hopping around on one foot getting my boots, hat, and gloves together and trying to figure out how to erase all evidence we had been there all at once—and was still screaming like a mad man at the boys the whole time, “Wake the heck up … NOW!”
They thought I’d gone mad with cabin fever. At least that was the response I got. They told me more than once, “Cabin fever, Kev! It happens!” And then began telling tales of trappers gone insane, killing and eating their buddies and running madly off into blizzards naked, never to be seen again.
They just didn’t understand, and I had no way of explaining it to them. All I knew was that they were on their way. By the time I was ready with my hand on the doorknob my pals were still talking about breakfast!
The certainty I was feeling was getting stronger every moment, and I was becoming frantic because no matter how many times I told them “they” were coming—now—the two of them kept dawdling around and asking stupid questions I couldn’t answer. By the time they were finally ready I was screaming that I would leave them behind, “’cause I’m going, with or without you!”
I told them to shoulder their packs, opened the door just a crack, looked out, and then shut the door real quick. I remember very clearly looking at my two pals and shaking my head with a frustrated sigh. Then I threw the door wide open. Racing across the frozen lake straight toward us was a black and white helicopter. It only took a few seconds to make out the OPP markings. A few more and all of us could hear the megaphone blaring, “It’s no use running, boys! We have the rails blocked off at both ends. Stay where you are until we land!”
As I stepped through the door, I recall looking over to the woods and the rail line. I knew it wasn’t blocked, and that day I cussed myself out for being an idiot and not leaving. I knew that had I left when I should have, they would not have found me. Not until I wanted to be found. Now they knew we were in the area, and there was no place to run. It really didn’t matter anymore. Me being me, I would have run anyway, but I didn’t need to. Knowing that I could have was enough (for the time being). Of course, the OPP returned us to Winnipeg, first by helicopter to a city, then by plane to be met by our folks.
I don’t remember exactly what all happened, but I know I was gone again within a week.
Even though what I had felt was urgent and powerfully alarming, it felt almost normal. Natural, like it was a part of me and not from outside of me. I didn’t even question it. Not really. Once recognized, it seemed somehow as if it had always been there.
The others wondered. After the OPP brought us home, my friends asked how I knew the cops were coming. I had no more idea than they did, so I just told them I could feel my nose turning red when cops were around. After a while my friends started thinking I was kind of weird, and they didn’t want to hang around me too much. I think it made them uncomfortable.
I learned later that I could kind of control it. I experimented with it for a while and I was pretty accurate every time. It was easy. All I had to do was extend my spirit. Just push it out there and check things out—sometimes over quite some distances, sometimes over several hundred miles. Then again, some of it was just common sense and intuitiveness. But there was far more to it than just that. This knowing was not just limited to police. I could sense other things as well … in people.
I think after a bit I just got bored of it and stuffed it into the kit of survival skills I would come to accumulate over the years. But this … “thing” that had so suddenly popped into my life did not lie dormant. As time passed, it became far more refined and much more—useful.
Here is just one example of exactly how refined and how useful it could be. By this point, I’d had years of practice, though.
Before you read this, please try to understand what I’m trying to do here. I’m going to take only one example from each kind of weirdness in my life that best describes what it is I’m trying to comprehend. I’m trying to figure out what in the world these things are, where they come from, and what they’re there for. You know, the reason for them—why they happen. I have ideas, but that’s all I have.
Anyway, anyone I ever hitchhiked with knew about this little … oddity of mine. For quite a few years I travelled around Canada with a road partner I will call Bruce. He could keep the pace and was good for his word. A real hard one, he was. We had already hiked coast-to-coast trips several times and made more quick trips over the Rockies (Vancouver to Calgary, or vice versa) than I can keep track of. Nine or ten years we blew around the highways all over Canada together with not much in the way of downtime at all. On one of our later trips we picked up some baggage in Ottawa. Bruce went and found himself a girl, tough as he was.
The three of us were all hard-bitten highway trash (rather rare really), a peculiar breed, preferring the highway and the life and quietness it afforded to the crowded filth of the cities with their violence and insanity. Personally, at the latter part of my hiking I rarely ventured past the outskirts of any place unless it was pretty darn small.
We had been kicking it around for about four or five months when we decided to hole up at an abandoned cement factory on the outskirts of Regina. We thought we’d take a break, rest up, and get good and drunk for a while. Believe me, we made a pretty curious looking trio. All of us were road-hardened, well-seasoned hikers, and let’s just say we looked it.
Bruce and Norma made a rather unusual couple. He was a six-foot-six lanky Scotsman, with long curly reddish-brown hair, from which he was forever pulling various twigs and grasses, and Norma was a short stocky Native girl who prided herself on being stronger than most men. (She was, too!) She would just laugh in derision when guys would try to shoulder her green army duffel bag, full of our wet dirty laundry, she so proudly toted. Norma pulled her load and asked no quarter. A few years later, though, our lifestyle finally drove her almost out of her mind—literally. It made me very sad to see it. Actually, it drove two women half-crazy. There was nothing we could do about it. I … we … lived in a very strange world where strange things happening were simply a part of the whole. You had to accept things as they were. There were only a few who could handle the kind or amount of stress our life created.
Even though I had more experience on the road than the two of them put together, they were still top-notch highway folk. Far better than most I’d travelled with. The facts were, I couldn’t afford to travel with lightweights. The highway had been my path for many years by the time I ran into Bruce, let alone Norma, and I couldn’t afford to babysit. That could get real dangerous. Unless you could completely trust your partner to keep aware, it could get a guy dead.
It was hard all the years I travelled alone. You see, I loved people, but there just weren’t a lot of folks who could keep up or could even stand it for that matter. Believe me, I’ve had a number of folk try to travel with me only to watch them get hurt, tossed in jail, or just fade out on me. As I said, real road trash are kind of a dying breed. They’re almost extinct now. It was all in the temperament I guess. We were folk who knew how to sleep in a snowbank and not freeze to death. You got real creative on the road.
One of the most important attributes any highwayman can have is a real good sense of humour in real bad situations (among other things I won’t mention). Norma was always easy to be around—funny, smart, tough. She could see a bright spot on the dark side of the moon and would be quick to point it out when things got tough.
She had an infectious grin and, once you got to know her, a cheerful easy-going
