About 13 miles from Fort Erie just south of a town called Ridgeway is a village called Crystal Beach. It was basically a cottage community, many of which were owned or rented by people from Buffalo which was just across the river from Fort Erie. It was also the home of what was, at that time, a fairly good-sized amusement park, which was open all summer long.
Bird was about sixteen and finished with caddying. Instead, he got himself a part-time and summer job with the IGA company. In the winter he worked at the Fort Erie store and in the summer he worked in Crystal Beach.
Bird tried riding his bike to Crystal Beach but it was a long slog, especially in the summer heat, and on a daily basis, it got old after the first time he tried. So instead, he rode his bike over to the Peace Bridge and stashed it in the backyard of a friend’s house. Then he walked down to the highway and hitched rides.
This, of course, would have been in the mid-sixties, before hitchhiking turned into the high-risk venture it is today.
The people who picked Bird up were usually dads who were, for one reason or another, commuting between their cottages and their work. A lot of people picked him up because they knew he worked at the IGA, because it was the only grocery store in town.
Any free time Bird had, he spent in the amusement park that was the main attraction of the village. Here he got to flirt with a lot of the American girls, who loved nothing better than heading down to the darkened beach to fool around.
There was no real sex involved, but there was a lot of what they used to call heavy petting. Bird always thought that term made people feel like animals. But people hardly ever used the term so it didn’t really matter.
Bird would work almost full-time in the summer. He slept and showered in a room at the back of the store where there was a full bathroom and a small bed. Every so often Bird would hitchhike back to Fort Erie, pick up his bike and check in at home, and get some fresh clothing. His mother was preoccupied taking care of her new baby girl that she and her boyfriend had created. He had moved in after Bird’s dad moved out and eventually got himself transferred to Ottawa.
Bird and the boyfriend, who was kind of an old-school Italian guy, didn’t get along very well at all. He fancied himself an enforcer and tried to make rules for Bird to follow. This was something completely new and quite alien to Bird, who had been free to do whatever he wanted for his entire life. So Bird basically ignored him. One of the rules was that the doors would be locked at 11 PM every night. But the new guy totally underestimated the breadth of Bird’s network. He had all kinds of places where he could sleep, and he used them all quite regularly.
After a while, the boyfriend gave up and realized that the best way to deal with Bird was to leave him completely alone. That was fine with Bird, and they got along pretty well after that, although Bird preferred to have nothing to do with him.
The amusement park in Crystal Beach covered several acres and had all the usual rides. Bird didn’t care much for the rides. For him, it was more about the people watching. He would sit with a couple of friends for an hour in the evening, sipping Cronfelt’s Loganberry and watching people. They would make up stories about them. Bird really enjoyed that, because his friends were both from Buffalo and a couple years older than him. They were fraternity brothers in something called Kappa Tau. Apparently, most schools in America had fraternities and were the precursor to modern-day networking groups. They all used Greek letters but never figured out why and none of the frat brothers he knew could ever explain it to him. But they both had cool jackets and were real preppies.
Preppies were guys who wore casual pants or chinos as they were called with cuffs, penny loafers with no socks, and light blue shirts button-down collar shirts under their frat jackets. Throughout that summer, Bird took a bus to Buffalo and bought himself a couple of different preppy outfits at AM&As. Then he went to Thom McCann’s a bought a pair of penny loafers. This became his uniform for the last two years he was in Fort Erie.
Bird thought that dressing like a preppie was kind of superficial, but the change of outfits brought with it a whole new wave of American girl attraction. And very quickly, he transitioned from hanging out with frat brothers to Buffalo girls.
Any girl Bird met and hung out with for any length of time in Crystal Beach invariably invited him back to the cottage they were staying in. Bird, of course, knew all the moms, because back then they did all the shopping. The dads all commuted from their jobs in Buffalo, since it really wasn’t all that far to go.
Later on when Bird ended up married with children and living in Toronto, going to the cottage was at least a three-hour drive up into the Kawarthas or the Haliburton Highlands. So, in retrospect, a Buffalo to Crystal Beach run was nothing to get worked up about.
Most of the Buffalo dads liked football and hockey and so did Bird, so he got along really well with all of them. And he got more than a lot of free barbecued meals to boot.
Sometimes in the evenings, Bird and whoever he was hanging out with would go to a place called The Ebb and Flow Coffee House. This is when Bird first got exposed to the music of people like Bob Dylan, Eric Anderson, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell and started to understand that there was a whole lot more to music than all the Top 40 Bubblegum stuff that the radios played pretty much non-stop.
He sensed, even as a teenager, that there was something different going on out there and he found himself attracted to it, mainly because of the writing. These people were singing about real issues and not a bunch of feel-good crap and silly love songs. It had a major impact on him. At first, it threw him for a bit of a loop because he had never really heard anything like this before. But he also felt very strongly that this was more than just a musical direction. it was a movement that was just going to grow and grow.
The guy who owned the Ebb and Flow felt pretty much the same way and he and Bird and some pretty interesting conversations about it. He was much more plugged into it than Bird was. He had come up from New York City which was the centre of it all.
Bird made up his mind to dig deeper into all of this. In fact, he dug in so deeply that it became pretty much his whole musical life.
Bird liked a lot of the popular music that was on the radio, mainly because that was all there was, but his dad was also a music lover and had records by people like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. He also had country music by the two Hanks, Snow and Williams. So Bird had been exposed to a lot of that early on.
But when he heard Bob Dylan singing Mister Tamborine Man for the first time, something happened inside his head. It was like this guy was from another planet. There was a real country roots feel to some of his music. There was also a powerful folk music feel, but it was jumbled up and presented in a very unique way. It stuck in your head for a long time. You had to listen carefully and work out what all the metaphors meant and you had to realize that this guy was the tip of a massive iceberg that would change the entire music business, a lot of the radio industry and it would spill over into all kinds of other areas as well including the countercultural movement which was just in its infancy.
Bird understood that this was basically music for people who didn’t just mindlessly tap or hum along with a song. It was for people who actually listened and hopefully, it widened their view of the world.
Up until he was exposed to this music, Bird was happy to just take the world as it came. He had just turned seventeen and really didn’t have much of a stake in it. But once his awareness began to develop and his writer’s curiosity began to grow, he started to see that there were a whole lot of things that were starting to go haywire. Not so much in Canada but definitely in the country next door.
The other thing that his exposure to all this new kind of music did, was inspire him to write more than just little poems. It took a few years but he taught himself how to write highly structured lyrics and more sophisticated poetry. Because the more he listened to the music he had fallen in love with the more he learned about how to write in that same vein. He might never be another Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, but it gave him immense pleasure all the same.
Over the course of the last summer, he spent in Crystal Beach, a lot of his frat boy pals were now starting to get seriously worried about getting drafted and shipped off to fight in the war that was shaping up in Southeast Asia. Most of them had never even heard of Vietnam or Cambodia and unless they were really lucky, that’s where many of them were headed.
Three days before Labour Day, Bird got a call from his dad who was living in Ottawa. His dad told him to get packed and that he would pick him up in three days to take him back to Ottawa where he would do his grade 13 and college if he wanted to go and live with him, his new wife, Diana, and her daughter, 12-year-old Mary.
So from one of the smaller towns in Canada to the capital of the country in one fell swoop. Bird was excited and promised his family that he would come and visit whenever he could. The day before he left Fort Erie, he went to North Tonawanda a suburb e of Buffalo, and said goodbye to his most recent girlfriend, Sandy. Of all the girls he had met so far in his life, she had come the closest to being the ideal. But obviously, Bird wasn’t there yet, or he would have stayed and saw where it went.
As it turned out Sandy who was very bright academically, got a full-ride scholarship to Northwestern University in Chicago. Bird considered himself lucky that he had not turned his dad down, because visiting her in Chicago would have been about a thousand miles each way.
He decided that his chances would be a lot better in Ottawa, so off he went into Phase Two of his young life.
On the way to Ottawa, they stopped for lunch in a town called Perth. They ey ate at a picnic table outside the restaurant. After lunch, Jim’s dad, stepmom, and stepsister took a walk through the downtown area to stretch their legs. Bird stayed behind, got out his notebook, and wrote a poem he had been thinking about for quite a while. Later on, after he got settled in Ottawa, he messed around with it some more and then typed it out. He also realized that he was no longer Bird, but a guy named Jim.
I WRITE
I write to let the demons deep inside me out to play
I write just like the dog who demands to have his day
I write until I feel my aging wounds being to heal
I write until my hands become unstuck from the driving wheel
I write when the sun goes down and all the world has gone to bed
I write to clarify the crazy notions in my head
I write to make myself feel something, anything at all
I write to answer all the ghosts that nightly come to cal
I write to build my words into a house of brick and stone
I write to keep myself from feeling lost and all alone
I write because I always have and likely always will
I write because I have no choice…it is my only skill
~The writer formerly known as Bird
