43 Ronnie and I

The Lambert’s were a family that was well established on Read Island long before my dad began his logging career.  My dad’s partner Jim Lambert’s oldest son Ronnie is one of my best friends today going back to my earliest days on Read Island.  He was just about my age and he and my sister Dawna and I used to play together from the age of four or five.

Even though I seemed to come and go a lot, Ronnie pretty much stayed on the island and was someone who I could count on  to be there as a steady friend.  Ronnie was in no way pretentious, and as an adult he has the rugged unassuming demeanor of a true outdoorsman and a regular sort of guy who accepted you for what you were.

As kids on the island, I spent quite a lot of time roaming through the woods and climbing the island’s mountains with Ronnie. The first thing I ever remember doing with Ronnie had nothing to do with roaming or mountains for that matter.  It all began one fine afternoon when Ronnie, Dawna and I were playing in the mud at the head of Evans Bay, where I lived until the summer I turned nine.  The island as I have mentioned had plenty of nice gooey black mud or gooey gray mud or if you preferred gooey brown mud.

It comes naturally for kids to play in mud.  I suspect it’s some kind of genetic thing as only men get over it at adulthood, women stay with it and it continues to manifest itself by way of mud packs and such things under the pretext of enhancing their beauty.

However back to my story, where was I, yes, as you might have already concluded, we found that nice gooey black mud, now what to do with it?   Of course, what any sane woman would do, or kid for that matter, smear it on your face, and that’s just what we did, but we didn’t stop there, we kept on smearing until our arms and our legs were all completely covered as well.

On reaching home my mother just about had a heart attack.  She couldn’t believe her eyes; we had literally covered every thing that stuck out completely with mud.  After getting over the shock my mother gasped, “What in the world do you kids think you have been doing?  You crazy kids get in the house right now and let me clean you up.” And that’s what she proceeded to do.

So after stripping off our clothes one by one she proceeded to scrub us down in the kitchen sink.  The kitchen sink was for weekday scrubs; the galvanized washtub was for our once weekly complete bath.

As Ron and I got a little older we used to like to roam through the island’s woods.   On one fine summer day Ronnie came by for a visit and my mom packed us a lunch and away we went to explore the woods behind our house and maybe a mountain or two.  Just in case we took some rope, a backpack and we always carried an axe when we went for a hike.  For Ron and I this was big adventure, as we loved to just take off walking through the forests of our island with a small backpack.  After wandering this way and that we discovered that we had left our property and were at the base of Mt William that bordered the west side of our one hundred and forty acres.   Ron and I decided that since we were there by whatever fortune of events, why not take up the challenge and climb the second highest mountain in our world, Mt. William.   A 1200 ft mountain is not much of a mountain by anybody’s standards but too, two fourteen year old boys it was a big challenge.

To make our accent of some challenge we chose the most severe terrain that the mountain could muster and that was a series of rocky slopes interspersed with the odd cliff.

The early part of the climb was just a strenuous hike over and through brush and moss covered rocks of all sizes.  It wasn’t until we reached a completely exposed area with big rocks that thing started to get tough.  We had gotten to the point that at least in my mind to turn back meant sudden disaster.  What I am really saying is that I was chicken to turn around so upward I went and Ronnie as a loyal friend stuck with me.

I remember at one point climbing over a large rock on my stomach, afraid to look down as the rock rocked back and forth, but I made it and so did Ron.

Now the situation really got scary as this put us on ledge with a sheer cliff that was too high to climb without real climbing gear.  We were between the proverbial, might I paraphrase, “wobbly rock and a high place.”  What to do?

Since our climbing gear, if you could call it that, only consisted of an axe and a rope.  We were in trouble.

As they say necessity is the mother of invention, but coupled with a dose of fear one either becomes paralyzed by it or perhaps resourceful.  We chose the latter and chopped a tree down and carried it over and leaned it against the cliff and climbed our way to freedom.

I can still feel the sense of relief as we escaped the ledge we were on.  I think God smiled down on two foolish boys that day as I am not sure what we would have done if there had been no trees growing on that ledge.