Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  1959

  Mike comes in for work at the marina with a great sparkling sweep of water as his seaflea comes off plane near the dock. He steps out of his little boat with a shoebox under his arm, signaling to me to quit the gas dock and meet him in the motor shed. I finish refilling the case of quart oil bottles, wipe the labels clean and stack them in the rack. I walk landward on the long wooden dock toward the shack where we repair motors and water pumps.

  I love that greasy little temple to guy stuff — love the oily black planks of the floor and workbench, the silvery glow of the chrome vanadium sockets, wrenches and drivers, the dirty light seeping in through the panes, the hanging gaskets and the big white girls caressing tools on the calendars.

  Mike puts the box on the bench and motions me over. He’s conspiratorial. “Fell out of a tree last night on the Rez.” I knew he’d gone home overnight to see his folks on the reserve. His mum needed some support.

  He starts to pry up a corner of the carton; I hear some scratching inside. He slips his hand under the lip, fishes about and withdraws a really ugly little chick in his hand. Sensing that I’m under-awed he stage-whispers, “It’s a baby hawk, stupid.” I look more closely. Is he shitting me?

  “Mike, what are you going to do with it?”

  He doesn’t say, “We, honky,” but I can tell he’s thinking it.

  “Go in the store and buy something for it to eat. We’re gonna raise a killer.”

  Jeez, now I gotta go in the marina store and skulk around under big Edna’s X-ray vision. She’ll be right up front, a huge lump in a bright dress, sitting behind the cash. I pass her by and go to the back of the store where they shelve the pet food. I don’t know what hawks eat but I figure this one’s gonna be a pet so that’s how it’ll eat. I chose a flat can with cute kittens on it. They’ve got pink ribbons around their scrawny, fluffy necks. Edna’s watching me.

  “What you boys up to?”

  “Nothing much. Changin’ the plugs on the Simpson’s motor.” I add that so it’ll sound like work.

  “You gotta pay for that,” she says beady-eyeing the kitty can. “I don’t want no cats peeing in the store. You better give ’em away or drown ’em.”

  I slap down a dime and she sweeps it into the till and looks out the window toward the gas dock where I’m s’posed to be.

  I go out to the motor shed where Mike pries open the can lid with a screwdriver. He takes the spark plug gap gauge off the bench and uses a flat feeler to spoon out some food. The little chick that’s been squawking up till now clamps its beak shut. It’s not gonna eat this shit.

  “Go get something else!”

  “Jeez Mike that tin cost a fucking dime. You give me the money.”

  So for much of the day, between customers’ boats, we tried feeding that little-squawky-bitty-thing different stuff so it could get big and vengeful.

  Nothing.

  Edna’s eagle-eyeing us but says dick-all. We’re blowing all our beer money on different tins — tuna, cat and dog, even those teeny cocktail weenies. Ugly little head always turns away. Edna’s moving the merchandise so she don’t care. She likes getting the money back that she give us — we’re the day’s big customers. She still doesn’t know yet what we got.

  On toward five o’clock I got sent back into the store — remember Mike’s older than me — to try one more thing before going home. Only thing left is something called Devilled Ham. Turns out that the little bugger loves it. Now what we gonna do? This is the smallest tin in the store and the most dear. We got stuck with some sort of elite hawk.

  Next morning when Mike and I get in and check the box on the bench Edna shows up in that dirty shed. She knows a baby hawk from a chicken — she’s more Native than Mike who’s only a 50-percenter.

  “I can order a case for you boys. Save you some money.”

  We’re committed now — up to our eyeballs in hawk shit. We say yes if we can we pay on time.

  That little bugger grew real fast. I got in one morning and Mike was banging up a perch for it — put it between the store and the shed for our baby’s future. It wasn’t long before that bird was using it to supervise our work out on the gas dock. And customers were coming to admire the hawk what didn’t fly away. It was only nearly a lifetime later that I learned about hoods, jesses, creances, bells and bewits — all those falconer’s fancy terms. I didn’t even know that raptor meant robber even though I was taking Latin at school.

  Once hawk could fly it got interesting. When we were coming in to the marina he’d fly out to escort us in. He’d also send us off at night. Soon he gave us rewards. When the big American cruisers came in for a final fill-up before off-shoring it to Killarney they’d see Mike or me with hawk on a shoulder running the gas pump. They’d pay us to pose for a picture — two Native guys with their pet eagle. You’d think they’d know from their own propaganda that hawk was no bald eagle and I was just a Scots/Irish Canadian choirboy but they didn’t. I thought they were dumb racists but took the money anyway. Hawk had to eat and we needed beer. Come summer’s end Mike took hawk back to the reserve where he’d have more authority and could be his self.

  ***

  A column of Canada geese has been solemnly cruising down the inlet for weeks. They debuted as a family of six — four goslings steaming tandem between their parents. Every week or so the parade shortens as predators and disease take out the young. Only a week ago the parents were protecting a single gosling. Today the elders swim by alone. A season has been lost.

  1964

  Students always need money. While my fellow undergrads drive cab, wait or wash dishes, I work as a pair of eyes. On Huron Street, near the university, an old Chinese Canadian, Mr. King, runs an entertainment service from the living room of a Victorian semi. He books singers, dancers, musicians, comedians, magicians and jugglers for conferences, conventions and corporate parties. He manages to run a successful business despite being totally blind. I’ve been called over on this wet November evening to accompany him to the Imperial Room of the Royal York. He’s booked a new act.

  We’ve phoned Co-op Cab — he’s a socialist. I help him into his coat and guide him to the door. I pop his umbrella and help him down a set of slippery, foot-worn wooden steps and out to the curb and the cab. This is reversed at the hotel. Once we’re in the Imperial Room we stand together at the back of the hall. When his act comes on he leans toward me.

  “Is the lighting nice?”

  “Yes, they’ve got a blue spot on her.”

  “Is she attractive?”

  “Yes, Mr. King. She’s a redhead with a full figure. She’s striking.”

  “Big boobs?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “What’s her dress like? Respectable? It’s not too low at the top is it?”

  “No, Mr. King. It’s right up to her neck,” I lied. “It’s dark blue with sparkles.”

  He relaxes a bit and listens to her sing.

  “Are people watching? Can you tell if they like her? It’s very quiet.”

  “That’s because they’re all listening. Don’t worry, they’re paying attention.”

  Applause.

  I guide King to the washroom then find a few of his friends for him. Soon I’m back describing the rest of his acts. He wants to know every detail of their dress, their presentation and reception. He requests an exhaustive description of the room. This job is teaching me to be visually alert, choose my words carefully and be a storyteller.

  At 5 p.m. every weekday I trudged across King’s College Circle to my undergraduate job at the main University of Toronto library. We were a group of perhaps a dozen students and indigent scholars who convened every evening to enter new acquisitions into the cataloguing system. As it was the mid-1960s the system was still based on paper file cards that required accurate sequencing in banks of varnished hardwood drawers. We filed in many languages includin
g Mandarin, Greek and Arabic. There were also three different cataloging systems at play — the Library of Congress, Dewey Decimal system and a unique U of T system left over from the Upper Paleolithic. It was a nightmare.

  The group was entirely female but for two males, me and a garrulous Eastern European, middle-aged scholar named Dr. D. Upon arrival each night we were each given a stack of cards to file. The women flicked through the files efficiently — it was like knitting — while Dr. D. and I bumbled through the various languages and systems. We always finished last, me due to basic incompetence and Dr. D. because he was always distracting the group with lectures on the glories of Hungarian history and culture. It seemed that all human advances, from agriculture and animal husbandry through writing and rocketry, were the invention of Hungarians. The Greeks, Romans, Incas and Aztecs, Brits and Americans were all brainless slackers. No Hungary, no civilization.

  While I daily distinguished myself by being last to the last card, I soon discovered that this job also helped me to be first. After a year of filing I understood how the system worked far better than any of my fellow graduate students. I could research in circles around all of them. And I did.

  A final thing. One of the attractive female filers had a most curious name — Felicity Pickup — delightful but I never did.

  Filing cards in a paper card catalogue is now an obsolete skill, one of many jobs victimized by technology in my lifetime. When I worked one summer in my grandfather’s cigarette company there was a guy in a suit who once a week toured the offices disassembling the big black telephone handsets in order to disinfect them. That was his profession — telephone disinfector. He’s gone as are the blacksmiths I used to visit, the bell-ringing gypsy knife-sharpeners, boat caulkers, gas pumpers, typewriter repairmen, X-ray shoe fitters, elevator operators, locomotive firemen, gandy dancers, whistle punks (I’ve been one) and bromide men — the guys who worked the big commercial black-and-white darkrooms. These old jobs shaped the cityscape. In the west end of Toronto, between College and Davenport around Dufferin, the late 19th century city maps reveal that narrow, block-long buildings used to occupy the lands that are now back alleys. They were rope-making sheds where workers did Maypole-like dances up the blocks pulling hemp strands. I’m sure it was hard work but the idea is beautiful.

  Four

  The Discovery of Photography

  “A photograph is a secret about a secret.”

  Diane Arbus

  “Photography fascinates the greatest minds and yet can be carried out by any fool.”

  Nadar

  In 1952 I was given a Kodak box camera for Christmas. It had two viewfinders, one for taking vertical photographs and a second on the side for horizontals, like landscapes. The lens board had a vaguely Art Deco design screened in black on its nickel-plate face. The balance of this primitive machine was covered in black simulated leather. A small red window at the rear allowed you to see the frame numbers printed on the 620 film’s backing paper as it scrolled through. With its fixed focus lens and lack of any shutter or aperture controls it was as basic as a working camera could get. I loved it.

  For a reason known at the time only to my nine-year-old mind I decided that my first picture would be of my father. As it was too dark inside for my slow lens and film we had to go out for this freighted portrait session. I say “freighted” for a reason. My father, a man never easy with his family, himself or even the world, didn’t want to pose. My mother fetched his long dark wool coat and fedora and pleaded with him to indulge me. It was also freighted because years later that first photograph became the most troubled photograph I ever made.

  We stepped out into the tarnished pewter light of an overcast December. A cold and hostile wind tore at our coats. He stood on our gravel drive and I framed him between our brand-new yellow brick house and the Beaver Lumber kit garage that he’d erected that fall. That house was just an 18-month stopgap while he found a location for his new business. He hated the house, the raw postwar development it was in and the future Toronto suburb to which it was attached.

  My naive, full-length portrait of a gray man on a gray day in a dark coat under a shadowy fedora proved to be a transparent witness to his deep unease and unhappiness at that time. His ambivalence about his life was reflected in his face. Each side was different. Two people were struggling behind it. The women of the family all remarked on it in whispers.

  He knew it too so when years later I used it as a component of a new image he hired a lawyer and threatened to sue me even though only five people in the world — his immediate family — knew the image was of him. The reborn photograph became part of a widely toured one-man show, it entered the collections of several museums here and in Europe and, worst of all, became the cover of a very successful American rock album. It was suddenly everywhere, even life-sized, in London and New York record store windows. It was another lesson in the potential power of a photograph.

  ***

  I’m awakened at first light. It’s barely past five and already everybody’s at work. A beaver pair churn around an abandoned dock behind the cabin, assessing its potential as the basement for new lodgings. Twenty feet away a hooded merganser protests, a heron lumbers overhead and a merlin shrieks. But none of these creatures is the reason I’m awake. As usual I’ve slept with the exterior door by my bed wide open. Only a light frame and screen separate me from the world of the woods with its many smells and voices. One of them has pulled me from sleep — a large and glossy black bear. It calmly eyes me as it chews its way through the only small tree between me and the water. I grab a camera as I rise and quietly open the screen. The bear shows me its backside as it casually saunters away becoming a black hole in the landscape.

  Think about how radical photography is. You point a small black box at the subject of interest and the appearance of that moment is instantly preserved in time. Without the photograph one’s memory may eventually drizzle the event with maple syrup or smear it with shit. However, the photograph can stand as memory’s rebuke and corrective. You recall graduation as happy and heroic but the photograph shows someone looking rumpled and insecure. The new car you were so proud of now looks primitive and stupid. Myth and memory are skewered by fact.

  The California photographer Edward Weston believed that photography was basically an honest medium. Hard work and devious ingenuity were required to make it lie. Weston’s position reflected the medium’s analogue period. Digital imaging has made that assertion much easier to challenge, not only because of the ease with which pixels can be manipulated in post but also because of the very nature of image capture in a digital age. The process involves considerable extrapolation. You might liken the lens-based image captured on a digital array to a sketch on a napkin. That sketch is then processed and interpreted by embedded software that “guesses” what probably happens between the recorded pixels and then fills in those spaces to construct the much larger file recorded on flash memory. As a result, a significant portion of a digital photograph is made up, is guesswork, is actually a fiction. In any other medium this level of evidence tinkering would never be accepted in court.

  ***

  Several bass boats mutter past my island. Their occupants hunch over the screens on their electronic fish finders. Little pixelated fish symbols hover as the Bay’s jagged bottom scrolls by. This is their reality: cartoon fish, a graphic bottom, not the freshet rippling the water, the screech of gulls or the intense blue of the sky. We inhabit a world of symbols and images.

  Photography just had to be. For centuries Europeans had been toying with simple imaging devices like the pinhole-based camera obscura. Rival devices such as the camera lucida employing mirrors or prisms were soon developed and in time lenses replaced the original’s pinhole thus dramatically improving the sharpness and brightness of the camera obscura image. However all of these instruments simply projected what was before them as ephemera. They could not freeze and fix the image. The �
�gentlemen” who tripped out across Europe to record the sights with these gizmos were limited to using them as a drawing aid. They weren’t yet photographers: they were tracers and copyists.

  When Fox Talbot, the future English co-inventor of photography, took a camera lucida to Italy in 1833 he described his experience with that instrument: “For when the eye was removed from the prism — in which all looked beautiful — I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.”

  Many tried to directly fix what Talbot called “fairy pictures, creations of the moment and destined as rapidly to fade away.” By the 18th century it was well understood that certain materials, especially silver salts, responded to the light of the sun. However the images captured using them were as evanescent as a passing bird. By late in that century the race to cage that bird was on — Western culture needed and demanded it. How else could we record the developing individualism within the masses, market the products of the industrial revolution or celebrate foreign conquests and globe-spanning empires? Advancing science and increasing materialism required the visual exactitude that only photography could provide.

  Curious and inventive minds, like the son of English potter Josiah Wedgwood, came close in the late 18th century, but, as far as we know, the earliest surviving photograph was made by France’s Nicéphore Niépce in the mid-1820s although he claimed to have fixed an image as early as 1816.

  As with any urgent idea whose time had come there were simultaneous inventors in many places. Aside from Niépce’s work at Chalon-sur-Saône, the Parisians Hippolyte Bayard, a civil servant, and the showman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre both developed their own successful photographic processes. Bayard’s direct positive method was a paper-based system as was Talbot’s contemporaneous but negative-based process in England. There were even successful experiments as far away as Brazil.