"So, you're happy, huh?" he says in disbelief. He asks me this question several times during our two-hour get-together, trying to understand how I could feel so much happier about my life than he ... [+]
Born in Welland, Ontario. Lived in Australia & backpacked the world. Survived the 1979 Grenada. Spent 32 years with Edmonton Fire Rescue. First author to write Canadian firefighter novels. He swam with a marlin in Honduras, climbed the Great Wall of China, was accused of throwing eggs at an Aussie PM, and survived the Grenada revolution. "Ponos Road" is in Short Circuit #14, Short Édition's quarterly review.
PONOS ROAD
PONOS was the personified Greek spirit of hard labor and toil.
The wide, gravel path snaked through a scrub meadow joining two working-class neighborhoods. Every kid in the neighborhood walked it, back and forth to school. It was shared with men heading to smokestacks visible on the near horizon.
The men funneled onto the path like clockwork, as though gripped by a great magnet—a cycle as precise as the movement of the sun. Some walked alone, others in groups, talking boisterously, occasionally laughing. Their black or stainless-steel lunch buckets, heavy with sandwiches a