96. Highway 16, 1961: Four Ragtags I left school, and the four of us left Prince Rupert, presumably because the money ran out —what little of it my father had after the fire in the Boneyard. The new digs we retreated to, a block or two away, were more expensive than the Grand. We couldn’t […]
August 17, 2014
95. Prince Rupert. 1961: Milk Cans and Dinky Toys When they came to town, Marylou was 12, scheduled to turn 13 that November, and Irene was 15. Irene was a little too much older than me to bond with as a peer, and I was too snobby intellectually to accept her in a motherly, elder-sisterly […]
August 17, 2014
Part V. FAMILY, 1961-1962 94. Prince Rupert, 1961: Sideburns and Sisters And yet I can’t help but wonder whether the fire that burned down our shack in the Boneyard didn’t lead to what followed, and whether—ultimately—that was a good thing or not. What followed, in the course of things, was a misfortune, a kind of […]
August 16, 2014
93. The Boneyard, 1961: Mail-Order Fire, and Boots Too The fire in Essington happened near the beginning of summer, as the calendar says, though it is located at no particular time in my own memory of that Boneyard summer. As the summer progressed, some funds from fishing would have started to come in. That resulted in […]
August 6, 2014
92. July 5, 1961: Port Essington Burning Dates are scarce for most of the events in my life. Nowadays we get a date-stamp when we purchase milk at the store, but the dates I usually assign to matters from my early life are necessarily approximations. But one day I am certain of is when Port […]
August 3, 2014
91. The Boneyard, 1961: Peter Visits Of course, I knew nothing about my brother Don in 1961. The only one of Squires’ sons I recall meeting those days wasn’t Don but his brother Peter, who was about the same age as I. He came to stay at the Boneyard for a few days that summer, […]
July 20, 2014
89. The Boneyard, 1961: Knives, Guns and Porcupines While my father’s work for The Fisherman fatefully shaped my own relation to writing, I was meanwhile—knowing nothing of my future life, and only 11 years old, after all—much more interested in my pocket knife. It had a black shell handle and a single blade that folded […]
August 24, 2014
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