‘

Arresting anecdotes from North

John Moore BOOK REVIEW

HAYWIRE. Jim Caplette. Harbour Publishing. $14.95

emember the uncle or ie randfather you always _ ft &loved to hang out wit -when you were a kid? The one your parents reluctantly gave permission for you to visit after consultations in “low voices in which the phrase “bad influence”. was whispered? The one all the ” “other adults in the family -seemed embarrassed or _ exasperated’ by and you could never figure out why?

. In his garage or workshop,

- . stuffed-to the rafters with toots and junk, you were a gate-crash- ing Ali Baba in the cave of The

“ Forty Thieves and he was the Mighty Djinn, the Genie who could fix anything from toys to tractors and make even more wondrous things out of the left-

. over parts, © _ ‘From him-you learned to.cuss. -

* since he seldom curbed his lan-. guage, and you'gat'a crash- course in life from nis endless,

».. mostly unexpurgater! stories. (Hence the “bad influence” rap.) But he never patronized you. “<The reminiscences of North

~, Vancouver writer Jim Caplette

Will transport you back to that

: (dusty old garage, scene of so

cMany projects, plots and pranks,

with every turn of the page. A self-confessed “bullshitter” of the old school, (Phd. HardKnacks Academy), Caplette lit out from the Saskatchewan dairy farm of his youth in the summer of ‘41 for the West Coast. On a bicycle.

» Discovering railroads in. *

’ Calgary, he sensibly. flogged the bike and hoboed the rest of the way. At various times, he worked for Burrard Dry Dock, the Canadian Armed Forces, Imperias Oil, and his own truck-

ing business in North Van. “Career” is the only word he’s never learned to spell, but then he’s been too damn busy to have one.

Now “sort of retired”, he can sometimes be found sipping chowder at the High Boots Cafe al the Mosquito Creek Marina, helping to build a fishboat to donate to impoverished Nicaraguan fishermen, when he’s not playing trumpet guitar or tub- bass in a bar or prowling his workshop “fixing” or “inventing” something. :

A child of the Great Depression, (who said it was “great”2) , he’s one of those guys who cries at landfill sites as if they wére funéral homes and

‘looks ata scrapyard the way a woman with a vali credit card looks at fdolt-Renfrew. He's been so far ahead of his time on some concepts, like récycling, as to be misunderstood. He never throws things away; not even rocks.

In ‘58, when they blew up Ripple Rack, a truck dropped a 200 Ib. boulder in front the ser- vice statiun on Dollarton Hwy. where he’ invented the “self- serve” concept 30 years too soon by spencling most of his time in the cafe a block away. He rolled the rack onto the lot and posted a sign: “Piece of Ripple Rock fell at this site, April 5, 1958.”

The rock became quite a tourist attraction, was kidnapped several times by maniacal friends and once chained to the frame of a car in a pub parking-lot, finally causing so much mischief Caplette reluctantly buried it out of harms way. Even when Pet Rocks were the rage, he resisted the temptation to dig it up. He

‘just gave his wife a new one. Il weighed eight tons and none of his like-minded friencls have been able to pinch it from the front yard.

A mix of stories, anecdotes, tall tales and acerbic observa- tions, Haywire is an autobiogra- ‘phy that puts to shame the pon- derous and pretentious memoirs of the “great” figures of contem- porary Canadian history. Caplette’s voice is the authentic growl of a junkyard pitbull; the

“ voice of the Turtle who sees no reason nol to race rabbits, the voice of the little guy who won't sit down and shut up, the voice from the corner stool at the cof- fee counter where you can still

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roll your own and smoke ‘em without some Birkenstocked spandex commando with a $30 haircut having an asthma attack about it,

Enthroned in the most private room of the house, Haywire is something you can read while you put the putative “Memoirs” of Pierre E. Trudeau to a more practical purpose in the spirit of ‘recycling’.

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