“Hey Jimmy, For God’s Sake Burn It Down” – Sault Sainte-Marie, Ontario
‘Yeesh,’ the doctor says, looking into my left ear. ‘It’s a mess in there.’
Two days before, I felt moisture in my ear even though I am fastidious about keeping it dry. I probed with my finger and it came out bloody. In the ensuing time it has grown more and more sensitive to sound and I’m finally in a position to get it seen to. I have had on-going issues with my left ear, since an accident in a punt (a small aluminum skiff) sent me and two shipmates for an impromptu swim in frigid waters a few miles from here, at Christmas time four years ago. But bleeding like this, well that’s a new one.
It turns out I have an acute infection of the tympanic membrane which caused the drum to rupture. I’m prescribed drops, a course of antibiotics and seven days of ‘quiet duties’. On my way out, walking the corridors, passing the elderly and infirm and the ill in varying degrees of distress I remember being seen by a doctor when I was small. For some reason he was poking around in my ear with a metal hook. Later, we left his office and holding my mother’s hand, I got into an elevator. There was a large mirror inside and as we descended, I saw the blood drain from my face. Then I hit the floor.
I came to in the lobby. There was a whooshing in my ears and the room spun slowly. I was lying on a bench, my head in my mum’s lap and there was an old lady with a wrinkled face and too much make-up kneeling in front of me.
‘Little boy,’ she said. ‘Little boy, do you want an apple,’ she asked extending an arm with skin that sagged off it like a loose sheet from a clothesline, waving that red fruit in front of my face. I shook my head, terrified, and turned away.
***
I call for a taxi and wait outside the hospital, beside an emergency triage tent that has been set up for covid-19 cases. It is empty.
‘We’ve only had four cases,’ the driver tells me on the way back. ‘And that was two months ago and three of them were from outside the Algoma region.’ I’m sitting at the very back of the mini van staring at his masked face in the rear-view mirror and nodding in commiseration.
‘I employ 25 drivers and right now it’s just me and another guy. I’ve had to lay everyone else off. It feels like we’re being punished for Toronto’s problems,’ he says. The Soo has a border crossing and I ask him if it is busy there right now.
‘Only essential workers. Doctors, nurses. Some truck drivers. Otherwise nothing.’ Inevitably the conversation turns from the virus to the unrest south.
‘It’s just a shame the looters have to ruin it for the others,’ he says, and I can tell he means this and that it’s not some racist subtext and I wonder how you can expect a morality to prevail when the very people charged with upholding it are in this case the most obvious transgressors.
He waits for half an hour while I fill my prescriptions and then he drives me back to the ship. He seems like a nice man. A worried man. I wish him well.
***
The ship is unloading iron ore directly onto the ground near me. The water is too shallow for it to pull right up alongside so instead she sits 50 feet off the bank, secured by wires running to bollards ashore. I can see the boys readying the punt to come and get me.
Twelve years ago, I stood on a beach in the south of Malta and watched as a boat full of men, crashed onto the rocky beach. A boat rated for 8 people but there were 22 on it. They were so desperate to get ashore that nobody put the engine in neutral and as they clambered and dove and fell out of the small craft some of them were pinned between it and the rocks. Eventually the last man was safely ashore, and the boat and its 8HP engine, still engaged, tootled off empty and zigzagged into the sunset. Quickly, myself and my two friends and others who were around checked if everyone was OK. They were. A few scrapes and bruises and some dehydration. Their feet were in bad shape as they were all bare foot and had been ankle deep in their own waste, the boat being so over-laden that turning around to piss over the side was impossible.
‘How long have you been at sea?’
‘Two days.’
‘Where did you come from?’
‘Libya.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Congo.’
‘Sudan.’
One strapping young dude strode up to me. He had shoulder length dreadlocks and a huge smile.
‘Heyyyyy man,’ he said shaking my hand. ‘Where are we?’
‘You’re in Malta.’
‘Shit!’ He said.
Soon, they were all sitting quietly in a circle on the beach. Dozens of bottles of water sat around them, locals having cleaned out the nearby restaurant and rushed it down to them. Then the authorities came and took them all away in a bus.
My friends and I sat in the village kazin in Zurrieq afterwards and we ate ham and cheese toasties and drank strong tea steeped in an iron kettle behind the bar. We didn’t say much but we were all thinking about the kind of desperation that would move a man to get into a woefully ill-equipped and under-sized boat to undertake such a perilous journey.
***
I am aware of my privilege, call it white privilege if you like, call it big-nosed privilege, whatever, that’s fine by me. Privilege is privilege and I don’t know why it’s so galling for some to admit the obvious advantages they might have/have had, especially when at times like these the socio-economic divide is so plain to see, and when being a visible minority in some places gets you killed.
But then a clear symptom of white privilege, beyond the obvious, is the luxury of complaining about it.
Me, I’m a lucky mother fucker. If one of my more traumatic childhood memories is of a creepy old lady offering me an apple (Christ Nick, that poor woman was just trying to help!) I’d say I’m doing pretty God damn good.
***
The boys run the punt up on the shore and two of them get out and I get in and they enquire about my ear. It is my privilege to sail with a great bunch of guys, even if 90% of their political beliefs make me want to curl up on the ground and cry. Often they bore the shit out of me bitching about the current government and the taxes they pay and equally I irritate, amuse, and confound them with my ‘limp-wristed liberalism.’ And yet we all still get along.
Most of all, I am privileged to be able to get into a small boat that will ferry me 50 feet across the way to my ship, the place where I work, and not hundreds of miles across a volatile and ambivalent sea towards some unknown distant shore,
and a future that may or may not be certain.