miners and manners

Amongst the lies we men tell ourselves that are designed to make us a king ...or at least feel like a king, there are sometimes foundational truths that make the lie possible by giving it something firm to sit on. Maybe "lie" is too strong a word to use ... "illusion" might feel a little less severe and allow us to admit we do this. the illusions we hold (or lies we tell ourselves) usually have something to do with our yearning to do something great. think about it for a moment. "I'll be in the NHL one day"... "some day I'll front the biggest rock band ever and change the course of rock and roll"... "I'll go down in history as the greatest PGA golfer"... "I'll save Africa"... "I'm the greatest lover since Casanova"... "I'll be wealthier than ...." "I am a fighter truly unbeatable..." and on and on they go.

Men get along really well with each other when they allow themselves to tell those lies to each other and each guy respects the other guys lies, each guy believes his own, and yet each knows full well that there are many lies alive in the room and everyone is cool with that. More than the cold Coors Light packed perfectly in Povey's homemade wooden first aid box, this sacred ritual keeps me and all the other guys on our Jail hockey team coming out and staying in the dressing room for an hour after every game -it certainly isn't our win-loss record that keeps us coming out!

usually when we as men are busted living smack dab in the middle of our lie (usually by the woman closest to us) we protest and are offended that someone has the audacity to think we would lie or live in an illusion. I think there are two reasons for this objection and protest. One is that many of the illusions and lies are not really as big as the one's I mentioned above and are actually not that far from reach -at least in our own minds. The other reason is that the foundational truth the lie sits on is really true and we can stretch the kernel of truth into nearly anything. As well, there might be a third reason we object to someone bursting our illusion bubble and I wonder if it has to do with the thing I have noticed about the benefit of having those lies around. They always seem to provide the occasion, or project, or activity that allow men to hang around together without having to say to each other that "we want to hang around together". In other words either we are self perceived kings who are better off alone -or just clumsy and don't know how to hang around each other without some goofy project or activity that brings us together without the focus being on something silly like our emotions or feelings. No offence meant here to anyone, but sometimes the women in our lives just don't get this about us. That's because these are man-manners and they are built into the fabric of our creation as men.

o.k, here's one of the foundational truths about myself I'll tell you that I can prove and I'll leave it to you to judge what I build on it. I am a registered Free Miner in the Province of British Columbia! I could pull out my Free Miner's certificate and I can go online to claim territory I've staked out in B.C. that I can purchase as MY claim entitling me to rights to the minerals I find in the ground. Once claimed they are mine and nobody else's. My Dad is also a Free Miner like me, as was his Dad before him (my grandpa) and likely his dad too back in England, and so on, but that's not my point. Me and my Dad spend time poking around in the mountains prospecting for gold, hunting for obscure creeks and panning in them when we find them. I got the miner's certificate last year for a trip the two of us made to northern B.C. and the Yukon to prospect. I am renewing the certificate each year and each year we plan trips to various creeks, now mostly in Southern B.C. as 36 hours along the Alaska highway (one way) no longer has the same appeal it had the first time. Cool hobby isn't it.

The thing I tell myself now that my foundational truth (I am a Free Miner) is in place is that one day I'm going to find the mother lode. Me! and my dad tells himself the same thing -I know he does. If he says he doesn't he's lying! He believes it more than anyone could. It's the story and the plan we share together, tell ourselves and each other... that one day, after enough panning and poking around we'll look where no one has and find the gold that the good Lord has placed in the earth and has sat waiting for a gazillion years for us to come and put our name on the claim.

Meanwhile, we pour over maps, we bought a good GPS and computer mapping program, we buy rubber boots, we talk to Uncle Hank about his diamond drill and how we'll need to pull it back into the mountains to a promising site, we design the best ways to load the back of Dad's Rhino so the shovels fit, and we argue over how much extra gas we need to pack in a jerry can for the ATV versus room for the chainsaw. Then Dad does his "witching" thing with a rubber hose and gold nugget wrapped onto it either towards a direction in the mountains or even over a map, and we argue over that since I tend to favor praying and asking God where we should look rather than his voodoo shit with a hose and a map. Then, since I've hurt his feelings, he goes and mixes a strong crown royal and disappears for a while. When he comes back (well lit) we pull out the map again and he tells me how proud he is that I "became a minister" and that perhaps I am right that God will lead us to the gold. that's when we go back to packing the rhino and truck and oh yeah, the shotgun since he's terrified of bears and I can't handle him being twitchy all day when we're back in the mountains. when plans are finalized and everything packed we know we are ready to get going early the next day. For us this is the ritual before the ritual of actually going into the mountains on any of our trips.

I should tell you it wasn't always this way or this good with my dad. They divorced when I was 10 and we had very little actual contact for the next 25 years except for occasional things like graduations, my wedding, and a little more often when our kids came along. Our Yukon trip broke the ice only last year and.... well.... you know, I guess it's complicated between fathers and sons at the best of times never-mind when you are really only getting aquainted and that as grown men! I've never really felt anger towards him, mostly gratitude when I'd see him followed by some sense of sadness when he left again because I still really didn't know him and whenever he'd leave again, it reminded me of the hole in my soul I still had because of him. But this last year thanks to my miracle working little sister we had occasion to really have some heart to heart talks where we told him we fully forgive him for being missing all those years and are just happy to be able to hang around so much now and perhaps only now we can understand what was in his mind that caused him to feel the need to run. He cried. I told Lisa I don't have a clue what the hell to do next, and she said relax you're both learning only now how to be around each other.

He lived with us for four months this summer which was awesome, weird, awkward, funny, complicating, and felt for me a lot like a railway accident constantly about to happen, yet you want to keep going because you like the ride and hope you can avoid the wreck. I remember when Carlin was born feeling terrified because I had no certainty on how to be a dad. After 15 years of being a father I don't fear that anymore but for the first time this summer I found myself realizing at 38 that I had no fricking clue about how to be a son. in 16 years of ministry I'd done loads of Bible studies, sermons, summer camp devotionals on the father heart of God and I'd read many books on it.... I could say a lot about God as a Father, but I knew absolutely nothing about the son-ship of men. Nor did I have a clue how minute by minute to be a son myself. I guess that's why I felt so awkward during those four months, he felt it too I could tell because he kept his bottle of Crown Royal handy so as to turn to it when he needed to take the edge off his own feelings of inadequacy or uncertainty. We found a rhythm after a while, and sure enough less crown royal was needed. Even amidst the awkwardness, it truly was a good summer and in a real sense the gift of God for both of us to get to really know each other (He's almost 60) for the first time ever.

We each kept our Free miners certificates and maps handy however, and would pull them out now and again when we didn't know what else to say so we'd stir up the conversation about where we would next go panning and how to get there. we made plans about buying a good canvas wall tent so we could really work a claim for days on end and drill a few samples with the diamond drill. Our current dilemma is how to get a hold of a small track hoe or tractor with a rear hoe bucket in order to dig down to the important three feet of overlay that sits on top of bedrock where most placer (pronounced "PLASS-er) gold is found. Since we go back far enough into the mountains by ATV the hoe is too slow because of it's tracks. But, and this is important, if a guy gets a hold of one of those little Kubota diesel tractors with a rear hoe bucket, then one guy can drive the rhino with the little ATV trailer loaded with our prospectors gear, followed by the other guy driving the tractor. We thought we could put a few jerry cans of diesel fuel in the front bucket of the tractor solving the space problem of where to put tractor fuel. That way Dad and I wouldn't need to argue much and swear at each other over the lost packing space taken up by fuel. We agreed it was a brilliant idea and would set us up to do enough digging to get a good idea on how much placer gold was in a claim and indicate if we should pull the diamond drill there on the next trip to do some drilling. Dad figured he could do the digging since he does it for a living (oilpatch guy) and he is an expert on reclamation which in B.C. is important as you must leave the ground exactly the way you found it after you dig. The other thing is that he insisted I could then man the shotgun since there would certainly be a grizzly bear hiding only thirty feet away waiting for the time to charge given all the noise we were making with diesel engines, chainsaws, arguing etc! These are important discussions you know.... and worth the occasional argument in pursuit of the dream of the mother-lode.

man-manners have their important God-assigned place in the heirarchy of creation. They are the crucial oil that smoothens the machinery of men interacting together.... it's true with fathers and sons and its true with men in general. Some people might be tempted to call them lies and illusions or show-offy male competitiveness -comparing who is actually the bigger legend in their own minds. But those people forget how much we need those man-manners. Without them I'm not sure we know how to really interact with each other. I'm not saying that we don't tell each other the truth... not at all... especially between good friends and certainly amongst Christian men. But I've noticed that I often find it harder having good friendships of any depth with Christian men because somehow the ridiculous and dishonest church circles we were dragged into taught us that to be godly men we should not engage in exaggeration, or unrealistic dreaming, and instead should only speak biblical truth to each other. I have no issue with talking biblical truth (certainly given my profession), but have you ever noticed that Christian men often don't get the chance to talk about some of the real issues going on in our lives because we feel tied to this forced "niceness" that renders us unable to talk for example about the latest stunt by the notorious workplace idiot who everyone knows was only promoted because of his ass-kissing skills and not because of merit or trust given to him by the other guys? Sometimes I find myself more at ease with the non-churchgoing guys who know this and feel free to say it than the church guys like us who were told never to talk like that and consequently never really bond because the necessary glue of real life issues was never brought up. Man-manners is what we do in light of those problems that we encounter in daily life that help us all to still realize our greatness and the fact that we still need to be kings, if only in the eyes of other men who know this secret and respect it since we allow it for them too. Man-manners is what allows us to be kings around other kings without needing to steal each other's kingdoms and defend our own.

So I am enjoying owning my Free Miners Certificate and that two kings like my Dad and I will spend important time together in search of the mother-lode, and in knowing it is only a matter of time until we find it and become wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, take care of a lot of people, he'll finally find a damsel in distress to rescue (in actuality it will be the reverse) and I'll go on leaping tall cathedrals in a single bound. When he's gone one day I'll be really glad for the time together planning trips, packing atv's, panning creeks, arguing over fuel, and marking up maps because it is the only way a clumsy son knows how to enjoy his clumsy father when both don't know what to do next. The other thing I'll do is carry on what turns out to be a family thing that goes back many generations and is in the blood and connects the line of kings in this family. I see it in Dad's face when he's prospecting -he's honoring grandpa and he feels the connection that began when he was taught how to look for gold as a child. It just seems to be this way with men.... our manners are unique with one another and probably it should be that way since it is unique amongst kings.