I saw Superman once. But this Superman didn’t have a red cape, blue suit or big red “S.” This one had a black trench coat and a smart black fedora.
Mom and Dad were away on a winter holiday for a week or so. We four kids at home needed someone to look after us, the oldest of us being 11, which was me. Grandpa and Grandma were called, they came, and that was that.
I remember card games and crokinole games around the kitchen table. I remember grandma dinners and grandma suppers. I remember Grandpa carrying bales with me to the cattle in the northwest pasture. And I remember a storm.
Read Also
Canada’s rural crime problem far from fixed
Farmers on the Prairies are worried about crime rates and safety, but an effective approach to meaningfully reduce rural crime remains out of reach so far.
We used to get real snowstorms, the kind where wind blew so long and so hard that drifts built up big enough to go sledding down. The kind of drifts where you could dig out caves large enough to stand in. One afternoon, it must have been a weekend, I went outside to close the pole shed sliding doors. There was supposed to be a big storm. The wind was picking up, it was starting to blow, and I didn’t think the doors needed to be open, so said my 11-year-old mind. I ran it by Grandpa and assured him I could handle it. No need for him to get all dressed up for a two minute job. And this was my farm.
The shed was 100 yards south of the house. You couldn’t see the doors from any of the house windows. The wind was picking up and the snow was sifting hard. I got to the doors and unlatched the south door from the wall and started to pull it to the centre of the doorway to latch it into a telephone pole buried flush with the ground.
I pulled it about three metres before the wind practically glued the door tight against the east-facing door frame of the pole shed. I needed to pull the door another metre or more, but I couldn’t. I tried to reverse it. No go. I shifted my feet. I rearranged my grip. I tiptoed to the inside of the door and tried to push out and back. I screamed every swear word my 11-year-old brain knew.
Nothing worked. And I couldn’t let go because I felt the door would go twisting off and flash away like something out of the Wizard of Oz. I looked back to the yard and could barely make out the outline of the house. Was anyone going to see me? I didn’t know what I could do. Hours passed. No, it was minutes.
Then I saw Superman. He kind of materialized through the blowing snow like Captain Kirk does when Scotty beamed him up to the U.S.S. Enterprise. I couldn’t see the house anymore but I could see Grandpa’s black trench coat flapping in the wind as he got closer. And his fedora stuck to his head like it had been nailed on.
He reached me with a let-me-help-you smile, not a I-knew-you-wouldn’t-be-able-to-handle-it smile. He took the sliding door handle from me with hands as big as the anvil in the yard shed. He pulled the door closed and latched it, whisper smooth, and did the same with the north door. We turned and headed back to the house. By now it was almost a whiteout.
We walked in silence, side by side, to the house, me from my failure to do the job, and Grandpa, because grandpas know when it’s the right time not to talk.
