I am away most of tomorrow, so this is early --

Yesterday I heard in a roundabout way that Andy Johnson (not his real name) was dead. It brought back so much to me that I felt that there was something worth saying here, if depressing.

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I went to work in Canada's Northwest Territories as a laborer for the summers, unloading trains and loading up barges at a place called Hay River for the restocking of communities up the Mackenzie River into the Arctic. We worked with young Slavey indians (the tribes around Great Slave Lake), who were the last hired, first fired, drunk a lot, but also great fun, fine, handsome young men who, when they decided to work, shamed us all with what they could do, nonstop for days on end, laughing, pouring on the work.

Late in one summer, one of them was drowned in the local river, while drinking, and the whole tribe came down and camped by the riverside until his body was dredged up. It was Andy's brother.

20 years later, I was walking down a street in Toronto, and as often happens, I was accosted by an Indian, who was mostly drunk, wanting money. I was brushing by, when I stopped, horrified, to see that it was Andy -- much older, sunburned, nose in disrepair, most of his teeth beaten out of him, in bad shape. I stopped, and after some time, he recognized me, and we went and had coffee, and he told me one or two of the terrible things that had happened to him, and how he was in Toronto "just looking around". At the end of it, I went to my bank and got out some money, and gave it to him. I never saw him again. It turned out, by accident, a couple of years later, that I got to know an Ojibway artist who knew his sister. So that was how I found out he had died miserably over the winter up North.

I tell this because of the pity of what is still happening to young Native men in Canada. I tell it because it reminds me of how undeservedly lucky I have been in life: he was my age. I tell it because it reminds me of a summer when I was nineteen, and when he was nineteen and so beautiful that the women could barely look at him.