“It’s Iraq you gotta worry about!” said the little man, “Iraq! They’re a whole different animal than Iran, those people—as likely to cut off your head as look at ya!”
It was 1976 in late October. Me and dad were visiting Jed Porter. Dad usually came alone to visit him. Sometimes I came along. Jed was old enough to have made his living cutting trees into lengths with a bucksaw. He would never stoop to use a chainsaw, he said. What others did was none of his business. So some of the wood piled outside below the lean-to had been chain-sawed, and he wasn’t guilty of it. This evening the conversation between him and dad was, as usual, about the price of gas, rising taxes, and Middle Eastern warfare. The interminable war in Beirut was always central, affairs in Iraq and Iran always touched upon in association with it. That war only seemed like it had been going on all my life because it was on the news every single night around this time. Jed’s cabin was about six miles off the highway in the bush, three roads of decreasing breadth leading to it. The unpainted cabin was twinned by a porch of equal size, to the side of which were neatly stacked rows upon rows of firewood—enough to outlast the lifetime of a dog, of which Jed had two. They were yellow mongrels of about forty pounds each, wiry and moderately fed, just like their master. There was no driving up the lane without them barking about it. This is why they were there: to warn and threaten. Jed would take care of the rest. Each time we visited him, he showed us the piece of wood that he had fashioned into a weapon in order to stop burglars ‘in their tracks.’ “Where would you hit ‘em?” dad always asked. “Right in the shins,” Jed always answered. “I’d break their willpower at the point farthest from the heart, just above the feet. And while they held their legs in agony, I’d put them out of their misery by bashes to the head.” After the conversation climaxed with that, I paid less attention, and let my eyes wander about the room. There wasn’t much to see: coffee cups black as midnight on their insides (used mostly for tea), the table and chairs, the woodstove, and the wood-box, which was always full of dry wood and green, side by side and ready for the gnarly weather. (That’s what uncomfortable weather was called back there back then: gnarly.) It didn’t look like there was anything for a burglar to steal, I thought, unless Jed had stored valuables in those dark rooms behind him whose doors were ajar. “Green birch on top of dry pine—burn all night if I need it to,” said Jed to dad as I looked aimlessly about. The subject of wood naturally led to a discussion of gas prices, hydro, and the cardboard covered wall that both dad and Jed remembered from their days in the lumber camp together, cardboard being the insulation that had been used to line the inside of the bunkhouse. Having stared at the cardboard each evening from their bunks, the words on it were fixed in their memory for all time: ‘White Westinghouse Lamps.’ After the mention of this cardboard, back around to the Middle East they went, trying hard to figure out how the war in Beirut had started, who the combatants were, and how the war would end. The newspapers at the top of the pile beside the wood had for their headlines and pictures the leading subjects and characters of the day: Supersonic travel, Hurricane Belle, War in Beirut, Nadia Comaneci, Son of Sam, Diana Ross, Rene Levesque, Yizhak Rabin.
Jed Porter was of a generation that distrusted politicians but trusted the news. People of his place, class, and time depended on neighbors, radio, television, or newspapers to figure things out. Stations on the radio were hardly picked up. Talk radio was either not a thing yet, or not yet popular. Channels on television were two. If you knew French, you could add one more. Newspapers of the sort that old Jed relied on were mostly local. Their writers distilled whatever they could from what they had gleaned from reporters on the national scale. Jed got most of his papers a week or more late and at secondhand. But he picked up brand new ones whenever he hiked to the highway and then into town from whatever ride he could thumb to get there. He had no car, only an old horse, an older Allis-Chalmers, and an even older leathern packsack. (‘Backpack’ was not a word in those days.) Jed’s packsack could hold several weeks’ worth of groceries. As old as he was, he had to carry his food all the way back from town when no driver would stop to give him a lift. Safely returned to his cabin, tucked in the backwoods of northern Ontario, his dogs nearby and his kettle on the stove, he carefully read his newspaper articles, believing that they would help him understand world events. But the facts that he needed never trickled down because the leading writers of news never poured straight truth into what they wrote, but ingenious prevarication instead. In consequence, what the local writers distilled from their national mentors was impure at the source, confusing and corrupting the minds of every one of their readers.
I’m a dozen years older than dad was during these visits to Jed back in the ‘70s. Dad and Jed have long ago died. The stacks of newspapers that Jed read have passed on as well, having been used to kindle the many fires that Jed started, their ashes blown away with the words once printed on their pages. Jed Porter didn’t seem like much of a romantic, just a practical man who liked to stick to facts. But what do we know about what goes on in another man’s heart? What I do know is that Jed Porter loved his country. He cared about whatever was going to be done with it, for it, to it, or against it. Canada was built by, and sustained on the backs of, men just like him—men you never hear about—men who lived on the meager earnings that they saved up from hard labor that is now performed by machines. I think of men like Jed Porter whenever I see a bucksaw hanging on someone’s wall for decoration. I think of men like him when I see a neat row of firewood. I think of men like him when I see a tractor old enough to sport a metal seat suspended on a spring. If anyone deserved to be told what was going on in the world, it was Jed Porter and men of similar grit. But he and they were unfairly dealt with all their lives. They were confounded taxpayers to a government that didn’t like its own country the way it was—a government that wanted, not what was best for the country, but what would profit politicians and their cronies. It is popular to be a victim today. Real victims, however, like Jed Porter—victims who would never call themselves victims—are seldom popular, and they are usually unknown.
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