Free One Native Life by Richard Wagamese Page B

a story could elude me. Each time I picked it up I had to force myself to stick with it. Each time I picked it up I was confronted again with the thick hodgepodge of idea and image, and each time I fought my way through. Eventually I bought my own copy. It took me more than five months to read it.
    The day I finished it was amazing. I’d allowed that book to take me over, and when I closed it I was shocked to realize that it was autumn. It had been late spring when I started. I understood then why the people I’d overheard were so smitten with Finnegans Wake.
    It wasn’t that it was a rousing story. It wasn’t that it was a captivating read. It was because James Joyce had taken language by the neck and shaken it. He’d treated form and structure like pieces of a Lego set to create something odd and fantastic. He’d shown me in the course of six hundred pages what it was possible to do with words.
    I read other challenging books after that. I read Homer and Aristotle, Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, Henrik Ibsen and Shakespeare, all the writers who had influenced James Joyce in the writing of Finnegans Wake. I went on to read Beckett, Borges, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac.
    Reading Finnegans Wake proved to me that I had the intellectual mettle to tackle anything. It allowed me to construct a dream that I too might create worlds upon a page. It took everything I had to finish it, but by the end, I was bigger, hardier, full of grit and eager for the next challenge.

Driving Thunder Road
    . . .
    THERE’S A POETRY to life that’s easy to miss. You get busy, there are bills to pay, changes to navigate, sudden tragedies, the minute details of keeping yourself on the straight and true. But the poetry is there nonetheless. You just have to live some to learn to see it.
    My first car was a 1964 Rambler. It was the Typhoon model, with a 232 in-line six motor and the word “Typhoon” in script along the side. When I got the car in 1976 it was not wearing its age well. The original solar yellow was faded, and the black roof was spotty and easing to dull grey.
    The car was rusty, and its seats were torn. It smelled a little funny. The exhaust kicked up smoke, one bumper rattled, and that classic engine took forever to get up to highway speed. The Typhoon sat low on its suspension, causing it to resemble those clown cars you see in the circus. Turning corners I sometimes expected the doors to fall off. But it was my first car and I loved it.
    I worked at a place called Seneca Steel in St. Catharines, as a labourer on the foundry floor. My job was to push carts filled with metal plates over to the punch press operators for fabrication, then empty the discarded metal into bins. It was hard, heavy work, with a lot of overtime, and I slept in that car a lot of nights. Truth was, it was my first job in quite a while, and I lived in that old Rambler until I could afford a room.
    There was an eight-track cassette deck in the car, and I splurged on music. I drove around the streets of town with The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy pouring out the window. I was twenty-one, working in a steel plant for minimum wage, with no roof over my head and no real direction in my life. But I had a car. That made all the difference.
    Summer evenings seemed to last forever back then. Friends and I would cruise for hours, as long as I could afford the gas. We’d lean out the windows shouting at girls or drive to Port Dalhousie beach, where there was an antique carousel, and lean against the hood, drink beer, smoke and listen to music. That car was our clubhouse. Every night we went somewhere.
    When everyone had tired out and there was only me and the car and the road, I found an exotic, irreplaceable freedom, a mix of asphalt, headlights and music. I drove into the heart of those deep summer nights, cruising secondary highways and back roads with the windows