Here Comes Trouble (25 page)

I had heard of guys doing things the night before their draft physical like drinking a gallon of coffee to raise their blood pressure or firing a BB pellet into their groin. That seemed a bit dramatic, and painful. Others forged doctor’s notes, some tried to act mentally retarded.

As I saw it, I had but three choices:

1. Sign up as a conscientious objector.
   This would require me not only to denounce all wars past and present but to promise that I would stand by and do nothing as my grandmother was raped and murdered. If they were convinced of my sincerity that I’d remain nonviolent while a ninety-year-old woman was being butchered, I would be assigned to full-time hospital work for two years.
   
2. Go to jail.
   This made no sense. “So, I’m not going to ’Nam, I’m not going to push a broom in a hospital—I’d rather have the broom handle shoved up my ass.” No thanks.
   
3. Escape to Canada.
   The Canadian government had agreed to give American draft dodgers and deserters a safe haven. This was a remarkable gesture for a country that spent most of its time trying to be our polite neighbor. We had many things in common, the Canadians and us, but the one place where we seemed to part ways was in the business of invading other countries. For some reason, the Canadians had little interest in imposing their quiet selves onto others. Why some of our hubris hadn’t rubbed off on them was a mystery to me, but they didn’t want much to do with killing people ten thousand miles away, let alone each other.
   

Though I lived an hour from the border, I knew little of Canada. I had not spent any time there as a child. My mother’s father was a Canadian, but as a young man he left Canada for Michigan, and so our contact with his native land was limited.

Our Canadian relatives would make the occasional jaunt over to see us, and we would go over there less. Maybe our parents were worried we weren’t ready for international travel? Maybe Canada didn’t have indoor plumbing yet? I dunno. It was a distant land, it was “foreign,” and the Queen of England was on their money. Beyond that, we never gave it another thought.

Because borders can’t stop airwaves (television used to be transmitted free of charge through the air), we got to watch a lot of Canadian TV on CKLW, Channel 9, from Windsor, Ontario. Most of the programming on the Canadian Broadcasting Channel consisted of nature documentaries and comedy shows in black-and-white with ironic humor we didn’t understand. There were Mounties and lumberjacks and lots of shots of prairies. They had a great Sunday afternoon classic movie show, there was the thrilling
Hockey Night in Canada
on Saturday night, and there was the Canadian news.

And it was there, one night as a youngster, that I stumbled across the truth. I paused on Channel 9 as I was turning the dial, and the news was on. They were covering the Vietnam War, but there was something wrong with what they were showing. They were broadcasting images, not from South Vietnam but from
North
Vietnam! The enemy! Why were they doing that? They were showing the destruction caused by our bombing civilian villages. One elderly woman was in tears showing her hut, which “the American planes had bombed.” No we didn’t! Stop saying that! We’re the good guys! They’re the Germans!

But not on this night. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the CBC after that. And I wasn’t the only one. If you lived within sixty miles of the Canadian border and had a decent antenna or set of rabbit ears you could get The Truth about the Vietnam War from the Canadians, right from the beginning. This messed me up a bit because I had no clue that our own government would lie to us. I mean, that would have been un-American. And yet, here was our boring, friendly neighbor whispering across the hedge each night that we were doing a bad, bad thing. I felt like I did when Santa Claus turned out to be just my dad, or when I learned that Cheez Whiz wasn’t really cheese—but at least both of those things still brought happiness to my childhood. This revelation was nothing like that. This was a smack across my tender sixteen-year-old face, and I didn’t like it one bit.

Thanks to the Canadian channel, I came to fear and hate this war. I felt like I was the only one in the neighborhood who had found the secret key, the buried treasure, and from then on I was hooked on never believing what I saw on American television, even if I still did dream of Jeannie or cheered for the Fugitive to get away.

By the summer of ’71, before my senior year, my mind was made up: if drafted, I would escape to Canada.

How one flees to another country and seeks asylum was not taught in Government class. But I had just attained the rank of Eagle Scout, and with that came the knowledge of many survival skills, earning merit badges in Tracking, Trailing, Animal Stalking, Marksmanship, Basketry, Plumbing, Fingerprinting, Beekeeping, Bookbinding, Signaling, Metallurgy, Masonry, Archery, Fruit and Nut Growing, and World Brotherhood. With a background like this, I could surely find my way across any border, keeping myself alive with a bow and arrow, a beehive, and some semaphore flags.

I had met Joey, Ralph, and Jacko at an antiwar demo I went to within days of receiving my driver’s license. Kent State was fresh on everyone’s mind, and Willson Park in downtown Flint was the hippie gathering place for rebels and malcontents and monthly draft card burnings. Joey was from Burton Township, where the poor white people lived; suffice it to say you didn’t find many of them at orgies of peaceniks. Although I am certain they provided more cannon fodder than any other part of Genesee County (except for the black north end of Flint). They backed the Vietnam War and President Nixon (though he was their second choice for president after Alabama governor George Wallace). Most of Burton Township was populated by families who had come from the southern states to work in the auto factories of Flint. Moving north did not dissuade them of their racial musings, and if you were not white, you knew it was best not to venture into south Burton after dark.

Joey had somehow escaped most of the attitudinal shortcomings of his neighborhood and yet had retained a pleasant hillbilly charm about himself that the city girls in Flint seemed to take a liking to. He didn’t have any particular political leanings, he just felt the war was “stoopid,” and he had no desire to see the world beyond the boundary of Maple Road.

Ralph lived in a Hispanic neighborhood on the east side of downtown Flint. His parents were from Mexico where he, too, had been born. He arrived here as a baby while his mother and father were summer crop pickers of sugar beets and blueberries.

Of the four of us, Ralph was the most intense. Angry at an early age from witnessing the treatment of his parents in an urban area that was all about black and white and no real recognition that brown played any role on the color chart. Ralph was also the strongest of us, and though he was the shortest, no one ever thought of messing with him. We assumed he carried some sort of weapon like a knife, but none of us really wanted to ask.

Jacko—we never knew what his given name was—came from a well-off family who lived in the area surrounding the community college and the Flint branch of the University of Michigan. He had hair like Blue Boy, but he was cunning and reckless and had no difficulty finding himself in trouble with the local police from time to time (trouble that his lawyer father had no difficulty making “go away”). If you came up with a crazy idea, Jacko would come up with a way to make it happen—and to top it off, he’d make it even crazier.

And it was one of those ideas that I proposed to them, on a Sunday afternoon in the early fall of 1971, for which Jacko was my perfect co-conspirator. We would call our idea “The Great Blue Water Bridge Escape.”

“I was thinking,” I said slurping down an A&W root beer that was perched on a tray hanging from the window of my dad’s ’69 Impala. “If I’m drafted, I’m not going.”

“Me neither,” said Joey. “No way.”

“Well,” added Ralph, “they’ll never find me. I’ll go underground and that’ll be that.”

“We’re not going underground,” Jacko shot back. “And we’re not going to jail. I’ve been there. Not for me.”

“We could sign up as conscientious objectors,” I suggested.

“What’s that?” asked Joey.

Ralph interjected. “It means you have to sign a piece a paper saying you’re a pussy—and none of us are doing that.”

“Yeah, I don’t really want to do that, either,” I quickly added, though not entirely ruling out the possibility inside my head. “Being a C.O. means giving Uncle Sam two years of your life doing something else for him that doesn’t require a gun.”

I paused. “How ’bout we escape to Canada?”

“Run?!”
Ralph said with surprise.

“No, not ‘
run
,’ ” said Jacko. “More like Steve McQueen in
The Great Escape.
Outsmart the bastards. Jump the fence to Canada. Live like kings!”

“Canada doesn’t have a fence between us,” I said. “It’s all water.”

Just how much water I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to correct him about Steve McQueen (whose escape attempt on that bike ultimately wasn’t successful) because I knew the Canadian plan was the way to go.

Jacko piped in. “I say we check it out. Whadda we got to lose?”

We made a plan for the following Saturday to drive over to the border and assess what our chances would be of getting into Canada. I was in charge of logistics. Ralph would head up what could best be called security (“No Canadian wants to mess with a Mexican,” he reassured us). Jacko would get some money from his dad for whatever we needed. And Joey would bring the boat.

“The boat?!” Ralph said. “What’s the boat for?”

“Mike said it’s all water,” Joey responded. “So, my dad and me, we got a small fishing boat we tie onto the back of our car to go up north fishing. It’s just sitting beside the garage. I take it out when I want.”

Jacko was all smiles. “
I likesy the boatsy!
I can just see us now, bookin’ across Lake Huron like James Bond!”

Ralph was not a boat person, but he could see he was outvoted on this. I assumed his opposition was because he couldn’t swim and the thought of dealing with any water was not a pleasant one for him.

The next Saturday, Joey arrived at my house. I told my parents I was going to the movies—and fortunately, they never looked out the window, which might have led them to ask why we needed a boat to go to the movies. We headed east out of town on M-21, through Elba and Lapeer and Imlay City, past the church in Capac whose steeple had been built by my great-uncle. I would often pass on these historical tidbits to my Davison friends at high school who humorously tolerated my I’m-sorry-to-be-so-smart attitude. These guys from Flint I really didn’t know that well, which made this adventure feel all that more dangerous and alluring.

In a little over an hour we were in Port Huron, Michigan. Port Huron, I had learned in preparation for the escape, was one of only three border crossings from Michigan into Canada—the other two were Detroit (which had a tunnel and a bridge) and Sault Ste. Marie in the Upper Peninsula. There also appeared to be a boat crossing on the Detroit River south of the city with a customs station on the Canadian side.

Port Huron was a small city, not known for much in those days, but all Michigan schoolchildren were taught that it was where Thomas Edison grew up. Those of us who attended antiwar rallies knew Port Huron as the place where a bunch of students from the University of Michigan, led by Tom Hayden, wrote the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) called the Port Huron Statement. None of us had actually read it, but we knew that just the mention of the letters SDS drove our parents mad, so we considered ourselves automatic members and prominently displayed copies of “The Statement” (which we acquired from the local head shop) in a place where a parent or an assistant principal might see it and turn red.

I had chosen Port Huron as our escape point not because of its historical significance but because it appeared to have the shortest distance of water between the two countries. The St. Clair River was only about a half mile wide, and on the Canadian side sat the city of Sarnia, Ontario. But when we arrived in Port Huron and looked across to Sarnia, it was truly an ugly site. Taking up what seemed to be the entire riverbank was either an oil refinery or a chemical plant (the large D
OW
sign, which could be seen across the river, might have been the giveaway).

There had been a point on the drive to Port Huron when Jacko had wondered if we could just swim across to Canada (I think he said this to piss Ralph off). But one look at the St. Clair River dispelled any notion of trying that, if it had in fact been a notion at all. It seemed like if you threw a match into the St. Clair it would light up like Cleveland.

There was only one way to take a car across to Canada, and that was over the Blue Water Bridge. Standing below the bridge we could see what appeared to be serious checkpoints on both ends of the crossing. These did not look welcoming. We decided that the bridge would not work. We would instead use Joey’s boat.

Our task then became finding a place to launch the boat to a spot straight across the river in Canada that looked desolate enough for us to not be caught. Immediately north of the bridge Lake Huron began, and it widened out so fast that within two thousand feet there was already at least five miles of lake between the two countries. Just south of Port Huron was a small town called Marysville. We drove there and found a city park with a boat launch on the river. There were no police or immigration people around. There was still a lot of industrial-looking muck across the river in Canada, but just to the north of that appeared to be a long stretch of fields and woods. That seemed to be our best bet.

Joey backed his car down the path of the boat launch to the edge of the water. Ralph was nervous about our chances of getting caught, and I kept my eyes peeled straight across the river looking for Canadians. I could see none, and the late afternoon sun from the west lit up the Canadian shore to reveal absolutely no activity. There were no border guards with binoculars keeping their eyes on us, no patrol boats protecting their sovereign territory. Just a half mile of river lapping up on our land in the same way it lapped up on theirs. Although this was just supposed to be a dry run, there was a part of me that just wanted to take that boat, right then, across the St. Clair and not return.