back Roads

back roads by Tawni O’Dell

Eighteen-year-old Harley got a crash course in adult responsibilities. His best friend went off to university without saying goodbye bringing him to the conclusion that their friendship had been based on propinquity and convenience. His Mother goes to jail for shooting his abusive Father and overnight he becomes a Legal Adult with three dependants--all girls, a social worker, and a state-provided therapist. Working two dead-end jobs is one thing but being the object of constant attention because your dirty laundry is being aired on the National News at 11 is quite another. Dealing with a pubescent female is any parent’s nightmare but how does a teenage ‘father’ cope? What can he say when his 12-year-old sister announces she thinks she just got her first period?

Where most teens wouldn’t think twice about replacing the toilet paper Harley has to figure out where Mum stored the supplies. Where is the cupcake pan to bake for his little sister’s school? Where are the spare lightbulbs stored? As role model Harley had a father who expressed all emotions with violence, even happiness occasioned backslapping and arm punching, an excuse to get drunk and destructive. If as his Mother’s eldest and only son he had an Oedipal complex Harley now can’t bear the thought of visiting her in prison though he has to drive his sisters there and wait. Opening the door to his parent’s room is akin to visiting his Father’s grave. Out of necessity he does drive his Father’s truck and wear his Father’s camo jacket. It is quite another matter to deal with the loss of Satellite TV which like so many other things in their reduced circumstance they can no longer afford. Since they aren’t on welfare they lack medical coverage.

Women are a mystery to most men, Harley has four to deal with three of whom are his responsibility. What should a father do when he discovers his 16-year-old daughter making out on the living room couch at 2:30 AM in the morning? Harley incinerates the couch, given his choices the least destructive means of dealing with his anger. Harley is not immediately a likeable character--it takes some time to warm up to him, but a young man deprived of his youth by circumstance deserves our sympathy, our pity would be rightly thrown back in our faces.

There are three parties to any family history of child abuse: the abusing parent, the abused child or children, and the parent and/or other adults in their lives that were aware of the situation and took no measures to put a stop to it. Add America’s gun culture and the potential for violence is obvious and it Harley who reaps the whirlwind. The horror of the trauma that completes this story will haunt my dreams for some time to come--this is not a book for young people or anyone with a delicate constitution.

The Wildfire Season

Andrew Pyper’s Wildfire Season interweaves 5 distinct storylines. There is the college-aged Miles whose job as a forest fire fighter blows up in his face killing a younger co-worker and scarring him physically and emotionally so that he runs away from his girlfriend of some years without even leaving a note behind. Six years later Miles is fire boss in a remote Yukon community and his girlfriend shows up with the daughter he wasn’t aware existed. His neighbour Margot is out hunting a grizzly as guide to a 70-year-old millionaire executive who wants to bag a ‘Boone and Crockett Grizzly’. There is the story of the Mother Grizzly and her two yearling cubs. And finally the wildfire--was it set by a firestarter? Miles and his four-man crew are sent out to extinguish that fire but it explodes overnight from a 5 acre smoker to a 500 acre firestorm that has already claimed at least one life and threatens an entire town.

The opening chapters seem awkward but once the stories gain momentum the reader is carried along like the fire that erupts at its core. A book with so many changes in point of view and timelines, real and imagined, demands a lot of its reader. There is no time to stop and daydream when a fire is racing toward you like the ‘Kid’ in this story. Whether it’s a grizzly that is tracking you or a firestorm there is no motive or emotion involved, just a force of nature. The overarching story here is that of the central character, the fire but Miles is the genuine hero. After leading the surviving members of the hunting party to safety through the middle of the fire and learning that his girlfriend and daughter are trapped in its path he charges back through the middle of that fire and leads them back out against all odds--the firestorm, a maniac with a rifle, and a marauding grizzly. To climb a mountain range and walk twenty miles through fire may seem foolhardy, to do so twice more super-human.

Kit's Law

Newfoundland has produced a parcel of young writers. The move from storyteller to written page seemingly a short distance. Alas most of them seem to need to leave home to embark on their trade. Nostalgia it seems is best engaged in from a distance. Donna Morrisey cunningly evokes the claustrophobia of outport life where outside males are brought in to keep bloodlines clean. There are few secrets in a small closed community, the sense of being under constant scrutiny can become oppressive. And it’s the secrets kept from one that can serve to cause the greatest heartache.

“It ain’t fair.
“No it isn’t. And the fault is ours for expecting it to be so.

“No! I’m done listenin’. I’ve been listenin’ to others all m life. And fightin’! Fightin’ to hold onto what’s mine. And thankin’ everybody for lettin’ me do so. Well, I’m tired of smilin’ for your blessin’s, all the time smilin’, feelin’ grateful but never proud. I want to live my own life, as I see fit.”

Charity may be good for the soul of the giver but exacts a burden upon the needy. Outport life is primal and complicated in its simplicity.