Fifty Shades of Black (10 page)

 

 

Cuts Like a Knife

I
once saw the oldest knife in the world—well, the oldest one we've found, so far. It was in a British museum and came all the way from a gorge in Africa. It was just a chunk of volcanic rock chipped with another stone until it was roughly triangular, rounded at the top for a handhold, tapering in two sharp edges to a dagger point. Custom fabrication by some nameless prehistoric toolmaker a million and a half years ago. Didn't look like much, but in terms of human evolution it was as important as fire, the wheel and E = MC
2
. That knife was our equalizer. We didn't have teeth like a shark or talons like a lion or speed like a cheetah or muscles like a bear. But we had a knife, and before long (in evolutionary terms) mankind would have spears and arrows and, in another blink of the evolutionary eye, hunting rifles and fish-finding radar.

Knives continued to evolve, too. Today we have penknives, jackknives, Barlow knives and Bowie knives. On the sinister side we have bayonets, stilettos and switchblades; on the utilitarian side we have machetes, pruning knives, paring knives and potato peelers.

Knives aren't the only things that have evolved. So have knife makers. On my island, Salt Spring, lives a man who is a natural descendant of that Stone Age African craftsman who smashed rocks together to make an edge sharp enough to cut flesh nearly two million years ago. The descendant's name is Seth Cosmo Burton and he is a maker of knives. Cosmo knives, he calls them. He often uses rock too, but only for the handles of his creations and only the finest of rock—jade, lapis lazuli, marble, sodalite and Salt Spring flowerstone.

As for the blades, they're in a class by themselves. Burton started out making steel blades the conventional way, but—well, he evolved. Now he uses a process called crucible particle metallurgy to smelt his metal on his own forge. It gives a sharper, harder, purer edge to the steel.

Burton's made all kinds of knives, from pocket to hunting, but he seems to be turning to chef's cutlery now and chefs seem to appreciate his attention. Chef Bruce Wood says his Cosmo chef's knife is quite simply the nicest one he's ever used. Anthony Sedlak, who hosted a show on The Food Network, said Cosmo knives are as much works of art as they are quintessential culinary tools.

And he's right—sometimes it's hard to get past the beauty of a Cosmo knife to realize that it exists to do what that stone chunk in the British museum—the most basic tool man ever made—was created to do. To cut. Go to Burton's website,
www.cosmoknives.com
, and click on the video that shows Burton slicing through three hanks of inch-thick hemp rope lashed together, suspended. The knife goes through them like a laser through butter. In one swipe.

Makes you wish the paleolithic artisan sweating over his chipped rocks in that African gorge a couple of million years ago could see what he started.

 

 

Saskatchewan Floyd

T
his a story about Saskatchewan Floyd. I don't know his full name but that's what he's known as down at the coffee shop. Rangy kind of guy, thirty, maybe forty, carrot-coloured hair, smiles a lot, walks on the balls of his feet. Showed up on a spring day a couple of years ago in a beater Ford pickup with rusted fender wells, a block heater cord sticking out of the grill and Saskatchewan plates. Said his name was Floyd and he was looking for work.

Nobody said anything out loud at the time, but I think a lot of us placed our personal subconscious bets on how long Saskatchewan Floyd was going to last.

Prairie people don't always fare as well as they should on Salt Spring. Oh, they handle the summers fine—who wouldn't? It's like the Mediterranean here. But then there's the other ten months of the year, which lean toward grey. And wet. All that downfalling moisture tends to erode the esprit de corps of somebody raised under the big sky and blazing sunshine of Saskatoon or Swift Current or Brandon.

Actually, the winters get to a lot of Salt Springers, native and otherwise. That's why each fall there's a mass migration from these shores—not just hummingbirds, Canada geese and robins and finches—featherless Salt Springers too. They borrow the wings of United and Alaska Airlines, Air Canada and WestJet and take off for Malaque, Manzanilla and Maui, where the living is easy, sunny and dry.

Some of us don't migrate of course. We have to stay home and work. Like Saskatchewan Floyd, who surprised us. He was still here the next spring and the spring after that. He was still driving his beater pickup but the Saskatchewan plates had disappeared and BC plates had taken their place. Now three, maybe four years later, he's a fixture down at the coffee shop most mornings before he goes off to work at whatever he does.

I was behind him in the coffee lineup the other day, about the third straight day of rain we had. I asked him how he was doing with the weather. His eyes lit up, he laughed, went into a squat and drew a circle with his forefinger about a metre across on the coffee shop floor.

“Back in Maple Creek,” he said, “if we were out on a job and the sky turned dark we'd draw a circle like that in the dust.

“Soon as we counted thirty-five drops of rain in that circle, we were gone. We didn't work in the rain. Hell, it was so dry out there our tools would disintegrate in the rain.” He shook his head. “First winter I spent in Vancouver, we had fifty-nine straight days of rain.”

I asked him, how come he stuck it out? How come he was still here? “Well, it wasn't easy at first,” said Saskatchewan Floyd. “I'd heard about depression but I'd never really experienced it. Then a friend of mine said I should get into gardening. I did. And it's made all the difference.”

I said that gardens didn't do much better in a Salt Spring winter than folks from the Prairies do. Gardens turn brown, lose their leaves, go dormant.

“Not mine,” said Saskatchewan Floyd. “I ain't got but one plant in a pot. I keep it in the living room. Under a grow light. Every morning before I go to work I get down on my knees beside that plant, I look right into that grow light and I say, ‘Come on, Mary Jane, grow—you can do it.' I don't know how the plant's gonna turn out but I feel great.”

Saskatchewan Floyd and his one-plant grow op. I think he's gonna fit right in.

 

 

How Old Is “Old”?

W
hen I read the details of the survey my first thought was: what would Satchel say?

Satchel being Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige, possibly the greatest pitcher ever to throw a baseball. Joe DiMaggio said he was the best he ever faced; Bob Feller said likewise. Hack Wilson, a power hitter from the same era, said a ball thrown by Paige “looked like a marble” when it crossed the plate. Paige had names for his pitches—Bat Dodger, Midnight Creeper, Midnight Rider, Jump Ball, Trouble Ball—but the experts say they all really came down to one pitch, a near-warp-speed fastball that batters could hardly see much less hit.

We'll never know just how good Paige was because he was a black man, barred by the colour of his skin from Major League baseball for most of his career. He didn't break the Major League colour barrier until he was old enough to be retired. But Paige wasn't ready to retire. He became the oldest rookie to play in the Bigs, debuting with the Cleveland Browns at the age of forty-two.

Paige simply refused to act his age. He played like a teenager, bouncing around the so-called Negro Leagues for decades. He also played ball in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic before finally putting in nearly twenty years in the majors. He started his pro career in 1926. He was still fanning batters for the Kansas City Athletics in 1965.

It's a pity Satchel's gone to his reward because I'm pretty sure he would have had a belly laugh if he'd seen the survey I mentioned earlier. It was a telephone poll of 2,969 Americans conducted by the Pew Research Center, a Washington DC “fact tank.” The main question the survey posed: how old is old?

Not surprisingly, the answer turns out to be—it depends who you ask. Respondents who were born around the Second World War opined that “old age” commences at about age eighty-one. Baby boomers thought it was closer to seventy-seven. Generation Xers, whose birth year falls between 1964 and 1970, expected to get doddery around the age of seventy-one, while Generation Yers, a.k.a. the Millennials—that's what they're calling pups born in the 1980s and 1990s—figured they'd start losing it about the age of sixty-two.

I'd snort, except I can remember back in the '60s hearing a California student activist shout into a bullhorn, “DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY!”

And I remember thinking: Yeah, that sounds about right.

I was approximately twenty at the time.

Satchel Paige? He was around in the early '60s, too, still winning ball games as a closing pitcher for the Kansas City Athletics.

By coincidence, Paige was in his early sixties as well. The man simply would not act his age.

He didn't just baffle batters. Paige also drove sports reporters nuts by adamantly refusing to reveal his birthdate. When cornered for the umpteenth time by a newshound asking the age-old old-age question, an exasperated Paige retorted, “How old would you be, if you didn't know how old you was?”

Shaky grammar; rock-solid philosophy.

 

 

Can't Lose If You Don't Buy a Ticket

M
y friend Arnie is an investment speculator. Every time he buys a pack of Marlboros he scoops up a handful of lottery tickets as well. “I figure it's only a matter of time,” he says.

Did I mention my friend Arnie is an optimist? Subspecies delusional? Any Vegas gambler could tell him he's got a better chance of dying from cigarette-induced lung cancer than winning a lottery jackpot, but Arnie isn't looking for reality; he's Dreaming the Dream.

Still, chasing moonbeams is better than catching one. Buying lottery tickets is a harmless-enough waste of time, the real trouble starts when you win. Ask Jack Whittaker.

Unfortunately it would cost you fifteen thousand dollars just to ask Jack Whittaker the time of day. That's what Whittaker charges now to talk publicly to anyone. Not that anyone's lining up to pay.

Jack Whittaker doesn't need the money. He knows all about winning lotteries. He's the king. On Christmas Eve back in 2002 he bought a one-dollar Powerball ticket at a convenience store in West Virginia. He woke up the next morning to discover he had just won the jackpot—$315.

Followed by six zeros.

Did it change his life? Well, I guess. He was already a moderately wealthy man with a plumbing business and over a hundred employees, but still. Three hundred and fifteen million dollars . . .

Actually, after taxes and opting for a one-time payout rather than thirty years of instalments, Whittaker's take withered to about ­ninety-three million dollars—but hey!

First thing, Whittaker gave a hundred thousand dollars to the owner of the convenience store where he bought the ticket. Then he bought a brand new Jeep for the clerk who sold him the ticket. And what the hell? He wrote her a cheque for $123,000 so she could buy a house too.

Ninety-three million dollars? Whoo-ee! He donated seven million dollars to build two churches; another fourteen million dollars to the Jack Whittaker Foundation, to help the needy. He paid for a Little League park to be built. He bought himself a helicopter, sent his wife on a trip to the Holy Land and bought his beloved granddaughter Brandi not just one new car but five of them.

The money brought a lot of changes to Jack Whittaker's life. It also fostered attitudinal changes. Whittaker had always been a flamboyant party guy in his trademark Stetson and braying laugh. Ninety-three million dollars ramped “flamboyant” up to “obnoxious” and “party guy” to “troublesome drunk.” He got arrested. A lot. Mostly for drunk driving but also for disorderly conduct and unlawful possession of firearms. His reaction was always the same. “It doesn't bother me because I can tell everyone to kiss off. I won the lottery.”

His wife of forty-two years did kiss off, filing for divorce after Whittaker had been exposed too many times in too many strip clubs next to women who weren't Mrs. Whittaker. His former friends drifted away too, replaced by foxy ladies, good-time Charlies and other riff-raff of the leech persuasion.

For Jack Whittaker, everything went south after he won the lottery. Even his beloved granddaughter Brandi turned sullen and bitter. As the favourite relative of the biggest lottery winner in history, she also became a magnet for opportunistic low-lifes. At sixteen Brandi went into rehab to treat her addiction to hillbilly heroin—OxyContin. In 2004, barely two years after Whittaker's win, Brandi's drug-riddled body was discovered wrapped in a plastic tarp and stuffed behind a junk car.

Jack heard about it over the phone. He was in rehab for alcohol addiction at the time.

Now it's ten years later and Whittaker, surveying the ruins of his life, says he wishes he could travel back in time to tear up that ticket and throw away the pieces.

Good deal for the folks who run the Powerball lottery though. They made sure the papers and TV stations got great photos of Jack receiving the monster cheque; and of Jack riding through New York City in a stretch limo; and of Jack and his wife, Jewel, being interviewed on the
Today
show the morning after. That's the kind of publicity that sells a lot of lottery tickets.

As for Jack's business, his marriage, his health, his dead granddaughter, well . . .

What was that phrase the US military used to use when they accidentally bombed a few Vietnamese or Afghani or Iraqi civilians?

Oh, right: collateral damage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Four

Home Sweet Salt Spring