Courting Nanabush
by J.R. MacLean
In the summer of 2010 I decided to build a basketball court in our backyard. It was admittedly somewhat of a strange choice as our children had grown up and moved out years before. The hoop was already there, installed back in the late nineties when my son Jesse was still a young lad. He used it seldom though, as did I. Installed solidly, complete with concrete-filled post on sloping mossy grass, it remained something of a lonely beacon for many years.
Then in 2009 my literary leanings brought me, through a writer friend, to join the Peterborough Old Boys basketball league. This is a Sunday morning conglomeration of aging jocks and pseudo-athletes (I put myself firmly in the latter category) who compete throughout the winter for a motley collection of ramshackle trophies. Despite the fact that many of the participants are older and even more ramshackle than the trophies, I found that most of those old geezers had skills far in excess of my own. I wanted to hit shots, make layups, get to the foul line. In short, I aspired to be far better than I was. I wanted, and still want, to at least be an average player in that ramshackle league.
Any number of issues impeded my progress in that direction: lack of confidence, lack of endurance, lack of skill, lack of ability, lack of competitive spirit, lack of size, and lack of experience. What I do have, however, is spunk. A plucky willingness to beat my head against a stone wall until one or the other gives in. Some might call it stubbornness, pigheadedness, or being wilfully delusional. But I prefer spunk. The word has a nice ring to it. Like the sound of ripe fruit hitting a concrete surface. Which brings me to the apple tree in our backyard.
If I were to build a basketball court, part or all of the apple tree would have to go. Its trunk was out of bounds, but a good chunk of its foliage would impede any kind of baseline shot. The tree was not a top producer, yielding only a handful of hard little fruits suitable only for the squirrels. Considering all the facts, me and my hard little Darwinian heart went and got the big pruning shears. The tree remains, obligingly growing its remaining branches to the east, away from the court – a sacrificial monument to the first of many difficult choices yet to come.
Prime among these was where and how to begin the actual court. I was but one lonesome aging man, handy, even super-handy at times, but one busily neglecting his home improvement business in order to write that novel that we all feel we have within us. Finances were limited, but pent-up energy from hours spent tapping laptop keys was not. I would compose the court in pieces, one concrete square at a time. Like the journey of a thousand miles, like the building of Rome, it could only be begun at the beginning. My starting line was the foul line: a row of bright blue tiles traversing a two-foot cement square. This grew square by square into an oblong island that encompassed the vestigial beginnings of the three-point line several feet behind the foul line. By the end of 2010 I'd created another island of squares under the basket. Practice was possible if one didn't mind the crazy ricochets of the air-filled sphere into parts of the yard where no sane basketball should dare to go. Parts such as my wife's gardens, the ones she had lovingly built up over the twenty years we've been domiciled in this particular location. With about twenty squares completed, and a mere eighty or so to go, with the land still badly sloped, I was looking at a completion date of somewhere in the neighborhood of 2015 A.D.. But that reckoning did not take into account 2011, which became a year of lassitude and darkness.
A Dylan song lyric: "They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn". But in the summer of 2011 the brightest hour was right before the volcanic ash swept in, obliterated the sun, and rendered my world view into a dull grey murk. My novel, my beloved precious book over which I had laboured for so long, which, when finished, I had exulted over so excessively – mercilessly selling it to near-strangers – was not taking off as hoped. In fact, it never even sniffed the runway. Oh, the disappointment. The injustice. That my wonderful novel, reviewed so well, enjoyed by so many early readers, would suffer the same fate (wretched obscurity) as ninety-nine percent (at least) of the novels born into this world. There was only one course of action: to man-up, go into a shell, and be miserable. I would likely have done this more fully if left to my own devices, but there were still some niggling responsibilities, along with a disposition that does have a sunny optimistic side, that prevented me from sinking completely into a morass of self-pity, online poker, and self-medication with fine Belgian beer. Responsibilities such as being husband to a terrific wife, father to two terrific, albeit pretty-much-grown, children, son to an aging mother, proprietor of a home improvement business, and creator of the incipient awesomeness of an all-concrete basketball court. So, in a relatively robust moment, I ordered enough gravel to level the back third of our backyard and had it dumped in our driveway.
The mountain of gravel, delivered at the expense of a furrowed row or two worth of front lawn trashed by the dump truck's wheels, was so large that it blocked a good portion of my garage door. Even the dubious joys of the beer, the poker, and of wallowing in being an under-appreciated author could keep me from ameliorating this situation for only so long. In less than two weeks I was out there shoveling and wheelbarrowing this mountain of gravel into the backyard, spreading it into a plateau which one day would be my basketball court. But, as the book sales floundered so did the level of my industry. You might say that once the plateau was done my efforts...plateaued. Though a few more squares of concrete appered at sporadic intervals, by the end of the summer of 2011, the vast majority of the future court was still composed of gravel. Gravel in which, unbeknownst to myself, the seeds of an even deeper discontent were being sown.
Who would have ever dreamed that gravel could be so fertile? Who would have thought that by the end of May my future basketball court would become an 'unweeded garden' possessed completely by 'things rank and gross in nature'? Not only were the weeds that sprang up from the gravel rank, gross, and plentiful, they were also firmly on the gargantuan side. They towered over my wife's tulip garden like the spindly-legged invading machines from War of the Worlds. The death rays that emanated from those worthies were as nothing compared to what began to shoot regularly from the eyes and mouth of my beloved
and thoroughly exasperated spouse. Something had to be done. I exhumed the whipper-snipper from the garden shed. The 'war of the weeds' had begun. As I flailed about with the whipper-snipper, toppling noxious stalks left and right, revelling in a boyish joy of destruction, something awakened in me, something martial and determined, something akin to the aforementioned spunkiness that had inspired me to write a novel in the first place. I knew deep in my soul that this war of the weeds could not be lost. Victory had to be utter and forever, and this could only be achieved in one way: an impermeable concrete shield was the only thing that would deny the weeds forever. The basketball court had to be completed, and soon. In doing so I would bury for good the disappointments that had been festering in my mind and renew the playful creativity at the heart of my soul.
First, though, I had to get my wife off my back. As rightfully and righteously as she was pissed off, I could not fight this battle under her purview, much less her supervision. She had to be mollified, soothed, and distracted. The standard procedure of buying her flowers would be woefully inadequate. As long as she woke up in the morning, looked out the window or sat on our deck to enjoy her gardens, and saw a plateau of gravel speckled with weeds, however mown to a stubble they might be, I was going to be up poo-poo creek without a paddle. In a blaze of inspiration, doubtless much akin to when Michelangelo first discerned the figure of David within a block of marble, I realized what had to be done and did it. I built a nice white fence between herself, her gardens, and my basketball court. In doing so I not only invoked the timeless wisdom of 'out of sight, out of mind', I also created the backdrop where more gardens and pretty potted plants could be gainfully displayed. It was a classic win-win scenario. She had her idyllic botanical refuge and I had my fenced-in playpen. Relieved of the weight of marital imbalance, I was free to engage in that most manly of activities: to strategize and go to war. I picked up the phone and ordered more gravel.
I was making a quantum leap in concrete production. No more bags of premix to be opened, hefted, and dumped in the mixer. We were going back to the basics of concrete production: A-gravel, Portland cement, and a shovel. Shovelling meant less expense, quicker mixes, and the eventual expansion of my four-square-foot slablets into sixteen –square-foot monoliths in a single pour. Was there a downside to shovelling? Yes. One. It meant literally tons and tons of shovelling, one shovelful at a time. The new mountain of gravel in my driveway had to be shovelled into a wheelbarrow and moved to form yet another mountain in the backyard. This mountain had to be shovelled one scoop at a time, three scoops to one scoop of Portland, into the mixer which could hold about sixteen shovelfuls, then dumped into the wheelbarrow and rolled back to be poured into its rightful place in the forms that defined the basketball court.
My so-called friends in the ramshackle league all (or almost all) deftly avoided helping me, so I was quickly confronted with the necessity of dealing with thousands upon thousands of shovelfuls without lapsing back into the welcoming arms of Belgian beer and online poker. Arming myself after a modern fashion, I strapped on my trusty iPod Touch and listened to a book called The Power of Now to remind me again and again to be in the moment and experience the freshness of THIS shovelful and only THIS shovelful. Strangely enough, it worked. I began to enjoy the movements of my body as it swivelled, the subtle adjustments my feet made on the gravel, the crunch of the shovel as it dug in, the way I'd flex my knees to protect my back and try to take an optimum amount with each shovelful, building up skill to fling it ever more accurately into the wheelbarrow. Then there was the challenge of swinging the laden barrow through the narrow alley beside my garage, over the roots of the giant maple, and around the privacy screen where the cement mixer waited. Its weight and momentum were such that if I failed to pay attention, if I thought of this or that in the past or future, I could quickly find myself scraping an overturned load off the no man's land that was the grass of my backyard. It was somewhere in this process, after only one or two of the new, ever-growing-larger pours were completed, that I had another inspiration. I cannot recall when it happened, or where it came from exactly, but at some point amidst all that shovelling and wheeling, pouring and spreading, screeding and finishing, I had a thought that excited me so much that all the shovelling and work that lay ahead was no longer an issue. All that mattered was the implementation of this new idea, an idea that occurred to me with a good three-quarters of the basketball court yet to be completed. My idea was that my basketball court had to be embossed or inscribed with petroglyphs.
I arrived at Petroglyphs Provincial Park early, so early that the uniformed girl opened the gates for me and unlocked the doors to the climate-controlled enclosure which protects the glyphs. We had brought our children there many times in the past before they grew up and left home. I knew the park had wooden templates of many of the glyphs there, as well as sturdy crayons, so their images could be reproduced by rubbing a film of crayon over them, much as I had done in my own childhood with the silver dollars or fifty-cent pieces my grandfather used to give me. Photographing the glyphs was forbidden for spiritual reasons of the contemporary aboriginal Canadian population. So I sat there under the whirring fans of the immense glass structure, rubbing away, only stopping to bother the attendant once or twice for more paper, as other visitors to the park gradually filtered in. It was these rubbed-crayon reproductions that I intended to take back to Peterborough and somehow transfer to the concrete of my basketball court.
But how was this to be done? Paper, crayon, and wet concrete are not a good mix. I chose six glyphs from the eight I had copied: Nanabush (a warrior spirit with incongruous but noble-looking bunny ears), a wild boar (which might also be a bison or bear), a turtle, a wide-mouthed face with electric hair (somewhat reminiscent of Munch's painting 'The Scream)', a stick figure of the sun, and ONE MORE. I cut out Nanabush first, making a template that could be filled in with his figure. But the template had to be waterproofed somehow or Nanabush was going to dissolve into a soggy mess. I took him down to the local Staples store and had him laminated. The plastic coating worked perfectly. I had a permanent reusable template that could be placed on wet concrete so the outline could somehow be imprinted. I hit upon the idea of pressing the laminated template down into the wet concrete, then roughing up the glyph's outline – in this case the rabbit-eared Nanabush – by dabbing it with a paint brush. Then I would sprinkle and dab powdered black mortar colourant that I had left over from a long-ago job so that the glyph would hopefully stand out in permanent black relief that would not deflect the true bounce of a basketball. The idea, with the exception of some colour seepage around the edge of the figures (the boar figure ended up with a hazy, somewhat translucent, udder, which I hoped would be worn away with time) worked perfectly. As the long summer days unfolded to the rhythmic pebbly sloshings of my faithful Black Lynx concrete mixer, the basketball court, complete with creditable artfully-placed petroglyphs, came into being with surprising rapidity. It was around the beginning of August, with three of the six glyphs already in place, that things, surprising things, began to go wrong.
Foremost among these was that my trusty iPod could no longer be trusted. As earlier mentioned, much of my work time I had it strapped to my arm and listened to the Power of Now man Eckhart Tolle, or to my all-time singalong hits with classics roughly spanning the years 1955 to 1975. We can blame this proclivity on certain retrograde planets in my zodiac, or on the fact that I am one of the precious-few baby boomers who understand that there actually was worthwhile music in the days before rock 'n’ roll. Not just worthwhile but seminal, as in seminary, stuff that has a hint of religion in this thing called melody – something that more or less died with the birth of punk rock. One of the finer qualities of melody is that it instructs, even constructs, the spirit in subtle ways that we'll likely never understand. But I digress. I was speaking of my wonky walkman-like device. It began to act very strangely.
One fine day as I was pouring away, Eckhart's usually calm and dispassionate voice began shouting its truths in my ear, only to fade quickly to nothing. Now, an appreciation of nothingness is certainly part of his message, but I had no sooner begun to ponder this imponderability, when his voice gradually crescendoed back up into a scream, only to fade quickly again into nothingness. Thoroughly spooked, with eardrums painfully thrumming, I dropped the wheelbarrow handles and tore the buds from the portals of my ears. Pausing – one should never pause when one is pouring concrete because things tend to stiffen in ways that move well beyond the embarrassing into the irredeemable – but pausing nonetheless – I found myself staring down at the Edvard Munch-like screaming-head glyph with its wormy electric hair. Was that reproach I saw in those hollow oblong eyes? Had I transgressed? Were Nanabush and his fellow petroglyph gods beginning to extract their revenge because I was interloping where the uninitiated should not go?
It occurred to me that I had recently been having problems with my laptop as well, that it had been freezing inexplicably, while dire messages warning of overheating and of the need for immediate maintenance had been popping up on my screen with increasing regularity. Freezing? Overheating? Why couldn't it decide how it wanted to self-destruct this time? And why was my iPod behaving so bizarrely? The screaming figure I gazed down at offered no answers, but I was sure that there was no way I was going to bounce a basketball on its face until I found myself a medicine man (or woman) and got myself some answers. I decided to be very circumspect in my pouring operations until I had done so.
It was early fall when I made the journey to Curve Lake. Fall in the Kawarthas begins just after Labour Day, despite what the calendar and the various theories of the equinox might say. It was a pleasant drive, with puffy September clouds, and the roadside trees beginning to be tinged with shades of red. Curve Lake is a First Nations territory, just to the north of Peterborough and west of Buckhorn. I had decided that here was my best bet to talk to someone who could answer my questions. Petroglyphs Provincial Park is much further, and though there was usually burnt ceremonial sweet grass on the rock face beside the glyphs, there was no guarantee that anyone with the required knowledge would be present. Also, I had been to the Whetung Gallery some years earlier and bought some Christmas gifts, along with a dream-catcher for my van. While I was impressed by the beautiful gallery and artwork, what struck me most then was the magnificent stone fireplace in which burned a stout fire. In the glow of this, several of the people from very young to very old were hanging out. I quietly joined them on the fringes where I enjoyed the ebb and flow of conversation and silence in perfect comfort. This fireplace struck me as being a kind of refuge, the embodiment of an ancient warming wisdom which is mostly lost in our culture.
There was no fire this time, just a gentleman of late middle age reading a newspaper. We struck up a conversation readily enough, and I soon discovered he was the founder and owner of the gallery. The fireplace, which he was getting the wood in for the next day, was decades-ago the sole source of heat in what was a much smaller building. I rather haltingly explained my basketball court obsession and my use of petroglyphs, stressing as well as I could the artistic context of what I was doing. I refrained from asking for an on-the-spot exorcism of my iPod. The gentleman was quick to reassure me, and took me on a little tour of the various potteries, paintings, and books he had in the gallery that incorporated the petroglyph symbols. One of the painters had actually stayed with the petroglyphs for a number of days to absorb their inspiration. The owner spoke simply but glowingly of his experiences with the gallery, with his only complaint being that he never got to go anywhere while his brother was off seeing the world. What pleased him most was that younger family members were now involved in running the place, and I sensed an assurance that his work in the gallery would likely continue on for many more decades.
With my concerns about violating native traditions lightened, I did likewise to my wallet, buying a coffee mug for my son and some earrings for my wife. There was a gas station just to my left as I drove out of the gallery entrance. There, an attractive female attendant was pumping gas. She looked at me and smiled and nodded, not at all as a come-on, but as if to say, "Hey, it is good to see you here in our community". That welcoming gesture further warmed my heart as I drove the Curve Lake road back out to the Buckhorn highway. My thoughts went back to a Toastmasters meeting I had attended close to twenty years earlier when a similarly attractive First Nations young woman named Fern had spoken to us about native lore and how they viewed their encounters with animals and birds. She said that every such encounter had a meaning: seeing a fox would mean one thing, while seeing a deer would mean another. Seeing two deer would mean yet another. The time of day when one saw the creature was important, as was which way they turned or flew when they left you. These thoughts were still with me when I turned onto the highway heading back towards Peterborough. As soon as I completed my turn I noticed a very large crow flying some fifty feet ahead of me. He was perhaps ten feet in altitude above the height of my van, and he followed the road as I did.
I knew that crows have a very special place in First Nations lore. Like Nanabush, the mythological rabbit-eared petroglyph figure, crows are very powerful and something of a trickster, somewhat along the lines of the Fool in a Tarot deck. Thrilled that this one's flight coincided so closely with my thoughts, I hunched forward over the steering wheel, my old dreamcatcher swinging as always from the rear-view mirror. The highway was empty so there was no problem matching my speed to the crow's. I followed him for perhaps some thirty seconds in a state of mystified elation, wondering which way he would veer off and what it might possibly mean. The thought flashed through my mind that to the right was probably better, as a leftward direction had more connotations of trickiness to it, at least in my mind. The sun, lowering towards evening light, brought out the inky feathered textures of his wings, and deepened the greens and splashes of autumn colours in the roadside trees. Time seemed to suspend itself, with black wings painted against white clouds embraced forever by blue. I giddily thought that the crow might fly with me all the way to Peterborough. I could see the look on my wife's face when I introduced her to my new friend. But after a few more long exalted moments, the spell was broken. The huge crow turned neither left nor right. Instead he gained altitude, lifting up and up until I had no choice but to drive under him, and he was lost to sight somewhere above the van. Though I checked all my mirrors repeatedly, I did not catch sight of him again. His work, it seemed, was done, and his most stylish exit was to disappear.
It took a few more weeks to complete the basketball court. The problems with the iPod eventually cleared up without any overt intervention on my part. The laptop, despite the addition of a new hard drive, remains quirky, but barely on the good side of usable to this day. The court, though still in some need of fringe landscaping, is glorious. Though my reasons for building it were murky at best, I'm sure it will remain a useful fixture for many years. Perhaps, if I manage to stay vertical long enough, I'll eventually shoot hoops on it with my future grandchildren. The important thing is that something inside of me glows when I look at it or step onto it amongst the petroglyphs. Something timeless, quirky, and a little crazy, like a tiny glowing inner star that lights, however dimly, the path my soul needs me to take.
