It’s late June 1970 and I am scared to death. I am miles from home lying on the bottom bunk in a closet-like room at Muskoka Sands Inn outside Gravenhurst, Ontario on Lake Muskoka. I was supposedly hired as a bellhop – a job that would have paid me minimum wage but with the added bonus of tips – instead when I reported to duty I was told that I now worked for the grounds department and was a junior gardener. They asked if I had experience in gardening and I said ‘of course’. My first day on the job I got hammered drunk. Why? The head gardener was a raging alcoholic and invited me back to his room shortly after 10 am to partake in a couple of bottles of ‘Light and Easy’ apple cider. Mowing that afternoon was a less than pleasurable experience. My mower – that I affectionately called the ‘Harley’ – was the most deafening machine on earth and being slightly hung over from drinking for 2 hours in the morning didn’t help the situation. I spent the next few hours aiming for every rock and stump I could find hoping the kill the ‘Harley’ so I could go back to the more passive job of weeding not that I was much good at differentiating between weeds and flowers. The ‘Harley’ had to go for another reason. It was so noisy that if I shut it off for an extended period of time the silence was deafening and managers and supervisors would appear from all quarters of the resort to discover why I wasn’t working. Needless to say the ‘Harley’ had to be put down and I spent all my days trying to figure out how to do it.
