Four Strong Winds
(Tyson, Ian) Performed by Neil Young
Think I'll go out to Alberta, weather's good there in the fall
I got some friends that I could go to working for
Still I wish you'd change your mind,
If I asked you one more time
But we've been through this a hundred times or more
Four strong winds that blow lonely, seven seas that run high
All those things that don't change, come what may
If the good times are all gone, and I'm bound for moving on
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way
If I get there before the snow flies, and if things are looking good
You could meet me if I sent you down the fare
But by then it would be winter, not too much for you to do
And those winds sure can blow cold way out there
Four strong winds that blow lonely, seven seas that run high
All those things that don't change, come what may
If the good times are all gone, so I'm bound for moving on
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way.
Still I wish you'd change your mind,
If I asked you one more time
But we've been through that a hundred times or more
Four strong winds that blow lonely, seven seas that run high
All those things that don't change, come what may
If the good times are all gone, and I'm bound for moving on
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way
Okay, back to the proper timeline: three weeks ago now, I left off with me getting on a plane to Alberta. My brothers have stories about how much fun it was for them to live in a hotel when they first got to Lethbridge -- splashing in the indoor pool, eating in the restaurant: all things we had never done in Ontario -- but those aren't my stories; and I'm sure I wouldn't have preferred their experience over my three weeks in Ireland.
I have written before about what a palace we kids thought our house in Stouffville was when we first drove up to it -- as small as it actually was, it was definitely a move up from what we had known in St. John -- and when my parents first brought me to our new Lethbridge home, I could see that it was a step up, too. As an up-down split, this house had six bedrooms (none terribly large, but even the idea of six bedrooms made me think "mansion", lol: it wasn't) and the lower level had the exact same footprint as the upper: where upstairs had an open living/dining/kitchen area, that same space downstairs was a huge family room; the two bathrooms upstairs (I was suitably impressed that my parents now had an ensuite) sat above the lower bathroom and laundry room; and the three bedrooms up were directly above three bedrooms down.
When we first entered the house, I was shown to the room that had been assigned to me, and immediately the lack of choice rankled me: Ken got to choose the large basement room that was directly under my parents' room (so, essentially, a second master bedroom) and Kyler had the second largest basement room, under mine. I wondered aloud why I couldn't have the third basement room and that annoyed my parents: they didn't want all their kids in the basement as though we all wanted to sleep as far away from them as possible. I wonder if it wasn't more a Rapunzel situation: with large above-ground windows, it was very easy for my brothers to sneak out of their rooms at night -- which they both did -- whereas I was trapped in my tower room in the sky.
Here's another upgrade: in every house we had ever lived before, my mother had painted all the walls white, and even in our bedrooms, we kids weren't allowed to put up more than one poster on the walls. True, this was the fourth province I had lived in by the time I was fourteen, but my parents had always acted like we could be transferred at any time, and even though they had always owned their homes, my parents expected us to treat these houses as temporary; as though we were renters hoping to get our deposit back. As impersonal as this made our homes, bad luck with the real estate markets meant that none of these houses sold quickly when we were transferred, and besides, the company always had a safety net for transferred families and carried these houses until they did sell: living like renters had always been for nothing. So, imagine my surprise when my mother immediately said that she wanted to take me to a paint store, where I could choose anything I liked for my room. When we went, I picked some heavy vinyl wallpaper with large, raised palm trees on it and a coordinating blue-grey paint colour. Mum said no way. She did offer to compromise on a similar wallpaper with smaller, raised fern fronds, and while that was a totally reasonable offer, I was never unaware that I didn't actually get to choose "anything I liked".
A bit more about this house: when my parents told me that the house was a "ranch style", I thought that that had something to do with the thick wooden slab siding that it had: this house would definitely have fit onto the Ponderosa Ranch; which I found totally suitable for an Alberta home. The kitchen had a breakfast bar that only fit four chairs, and even though my parents' antique dining room furniture was right at our backs, we always ate at the breakfast bar -- which meant that if we were all at home, my mother ate standing up and the rest of us were in a line that hampered conversation. Even after Ken was gone and there were only four of us, Mum would eat at the counter facing us, and that always bothered me. One of the selling features of this house had been that it was built by a contractor for his own family, which my parents took as a sign of quality, but the decor was pretty dated: when you first walked into the small foyer, there were stairs going up to your left and stairs going down to your right. That meant that there was a two story wall on the right, and it was covered with gold foil wallpaper with black flocking. The basement family room had wild floral carpeting, and the rest of the house had gold shag. None of these '70s touches were updated until the year before my parents moved back to Ontario: they may have been ugly, but they were "quality". There was a raised wooden deck off the kitchen in the back and I thought that was a sign of upward mobility; we had never had a deck before and I used to love laying out there with a book. We finally had a proper garage where Dad worked on his projects, and in addition to the driveway out front, there was a parking pad off in the alley in the back (where I would eventually park my own car). Thinking back on this house now, it was fairly unremarkable, but for Lethbridge at that time, it was considered somewhat prestigious -- for a town that actually had a "wrong side of the tracks", it was certainly on the "right side".
One thing I discovered nearly immediately: When I asked where my bike was, my brothers explained that they had decided to take all three of our crappy old ten speeds and make "one good one" out of them. But there was nothing wrong with my bike! I loved that bike! I certainly didn't want to share a bike three ways, but as it turned out, the piles of bike parts sat in a corner of the garage until Dad threw them out, and I was never bought a bike again.
About school: What my parents didn't know about the Lethbridge school system when they agreed to let me go to Ireland for the second half of August was that they started school halfway through August there (they also end the school year at the beginning of June: I think it has something to do with the farming/harvesting schedule). When Mum brought me to school to register for classes, they were already three weeks into the semester and the Guidance Counsellor didn't like my chances of catching up. Mum remembers this as him thinking that I should repeat grade nine (she insists on this, but it doesn't even sound plausible), and I remember it more like he thought I should enter the basic stream instead of the academic. In the end, he let me take the classes I wanted, but my schedule was a bit messed up: Academic Math, for instance, was full and I couldn't take it at all in grade ten; I ended up taking it in the first semester of grade eleven, which forced me to take Math (my least favourite subject) three semesters in a row; each time with my least favourite high school teacher. Yech. I was also unable to take the required Social Studies and I needed to be in summer school the next year to catch everything up. As it turned out, the Guidance Counsellor needn't have been worried: after finding grade nine challenging after a rural elementary school experience, grade ten in Lethbridge was like being in the sticks again; in most subjects, I had already been taught much of what we covered in grade ten, and as for French, I took it through grade twelve and never learned anything new.
That's all I have to say about setting up my courses, but naturally, that's not the most important part of the high school experience to a fourteen-year-old who is parachuted into a strange environment. In Ontario, grade nine was my first year of high school, but in Lethbridge, the grade tens were the freshmen; I needed to start over from the bottom once again. One bonus of starting late: CCH had a pretty hardcore froshing tradition -- from seniors forcing the newbies to walk around in diapers and leashes to sending them over to the rival high school across the street to sing the CCH fight song in their cafeteria -- and I was happy to have missed that. On the other hand, that had been a bonding experience for my classmates, and while they were now all nicely settled into their routines, I was the loser who didn't know where to find any of my classes.
And of course I was lonely. No friends. No community. No clue yet how to fit in. I would write long letters to my friends back in Ontario, often posting them as thick packets in a manila envelope. They would send me similarly large packets back, and those reminders that I wasn't truly alone were a lifeline for me. As the school year went along and I did find my tribe, these letters became shorter in each direction, and near the end of the year, Cora, Andrea, and Laurie sent me a surprise: they had been taking a guitar class at school together, and within those few months, they had all gotten really good and had recorded a cassette for me. In between them laughing and telling me funny stories, they recorded a bunch of acoustic songs -- including Four Strong Winds, this week's appropriate Tunesday selection -- and oddly enough, it was this cassette that let me know we had all finally broken our bonds: they were living in a different world if they could now play guitars, and as not one of their songs were by the Beatles, it felt like a statement; like they had moved on from our mutual childish Beatlemania. And that was okay: I had, by necessity, moved on, too. I'll get more into that next week.
Four strong winds that blow lonely, seven seas that run high
All those things that don't change, come what may
If the good times are all gone, and I'm bound for moving on
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way
