Downtown Hamilton was slightly off-limits for the teenagers who lived on the Mountain. Our parents never told us outright to avoid the girls and the bars and the roughnecks coming out of second shift at the giant Stelco plant on the shores of the lake. It was just assumed we would. Where I had come from just before this sojourn in Canada – a tiny town called Prinsburg on the plains of Minnesota – the parents would have declaimed in school board meetings and the Ladies Aid against the sin festering in a big city such as this, as if banging pots would keep the wolves away. It didn’t work there. The prairie kids just drove out of town to meet their wolves, in roadhouses and deserted back forties. In Hamilton, Ontario, in a country less ideologically frantic and in a community still fresh from its Dutch emigration, the people went more quietly about their missions. They gave money to the Stelco unemployed, and served dinner and Bible readings to the furry beasts homeless on John Street, and their children stayed on the Mountain. I don’t think I went downtown more than a couple of times in the two years we lived there, maybe to visit Dundas Castle, maybe to drive my mother to John Street. It certainly isn’t familiar to me now, when I visit some 40 years later.

I’m sure a few of the kids in my high school partook of the Canadian fleshpots. Some of the Grade “11B” girls were rumored to be fast, and even one or two of the geek boys in 12A spoke unconvincingly of Saturday nights in Missassauga. As for me, I hardly knew what a fleshpot was. Whatever they were, they had been banned in Minnesota for the likes of me.

I didn’t actually shake the dust from my feet when we left the plains in 1966, but I should have, my whole family should have, we should have made a ceremony of it, Principal Peter, Helpmeet Kathryn and their three little Calvinists-in-training whooping and dancing to get off the reservation. As it was, we just drove out of town in stolid Dutch silence. The school board perhaps gave a moment of appreciation and a clap or two at my father’s last meeting. The minister’s wife might have made coconut bars for our trip back East. I don’t remember any invitations to farewell parties. We had regrets only. And in this stiff, well-starched 16-year-old, the reason of a mind battled the hormones of a body as we drove away:

“Canada won’t be any better, every time we move it’s worse. Look what happened here,” I mumbled to myself, looking back at the little town, dusty already at the end of May.

“But it’s a city, for cryin’ out loud,” I answered back. “There are loose women in cities, and bars. Fleshpots!”

If we had stayed….my God. I would have spent all my teenage years, my whole junior and senior high school career, on the prairie. I might have come of age there. That is, I’d have gotten my driver’s license there, which in America is the same thing and leads to everything else. Admittedly, staying in Prinsburg would have saved me a lot of consternation later, worrying about conscience and the inner life. I might have gotten it out of my system early, assuming, of course, I ever did get a date and took her out in the car and Questioned Authority. Which is highly unlikely. Probably I would have dried up and twirled away like the dust devils of August, or exploded all over those perky cheerleaders at a pep rally.

As it turned out, I had to agree with God for once. He had called my father again, and it hardly mattered which desperate school needed us this time. Anywhere but Prinsburg, Minnesota would do. That it resulted in the mountaintop, quite literally, and in another country to boot, was a considerable bonus. We arrived in August 1966 to take on Hamilton District Christian High School, my father’s fifth school since he had married my mother in 1949 (only two more to go before he was done).

Hamilton remains curiously split. Half of the city is conventional suburbs, the Mountain, resting on top of the Niagara escarpment, made of straight streets and neat houses, flat and safe, just like it was when we joined the polyglot of landed immigrants and the lower middle class, rented our tiny bungalow at 189 South Bend, and waited, somewhat nervously, for the natives to appear. The other half is dangerous, downtown Hamilton, covering the flood plain from Lake Ontario to the base of the escarpment like a dump, full of steel mills and tailings and taverns and fights and parking lots and Petula Clarks if it was your lucky night. I wonder now if the city’s sin slid up from the lake like sea serpents evolving, or slid down from the Mountain like Adam falling. It probably didn’t matter when your acquaintance with sin came mainly from books.

Where it largely stayed. Mine was to be a quiet passage into the mysteries of adulthood, nice and normal, elevated slightly above the riff-raff, dabbling. I needn’t fear the hypocrisy of Prinsburg anymore, or the stigma of being a principal’s kid in a place where anything unusual was picked at like a scab. For this move wasn’t to be the same as before. We were to be tortured no longer. We were welcomed to Hamilton with very-near-to-open arms.

Apparently, it didn’t matter that we were Americans, authority figures at the school, large in size, a bit puritanical. When a problem arose with our little house before we could move in, the president of the School Board immediately volunteered his lakefront cottage. My father’s schemes for expanding the school were enthusiastically embraced. As for my brothers and me, we skulked and twitched for a few weeks, in classroom and hallway and church, on school days riding in with my father in the morning and leaving right after school for the long ride down to the north shore of Lake Erie, living in a kind of limbo, as if Canadian Immigration were isolating us until the American xenophobia had been excreted from our systems. Then our house on the Mountain was ready for us, and soon thereafter, I received a call of my own, from one Peter Bulthuis, inviting me to spend Sunday afternoon at his house. This hadn’t happened to me for years. Someone wanted to be a friend. Unheard of! What had happened to the prairie principles against social miscegenation? Canadians and Americans together – what was next, Roman Catholics?

That’s all it took, one friend, and I was away, launched into the community, released from bondage. And what does every prisoner do upon release? Fall in love (pursue sex). My victim was a lovely young lady with an ungainly name. Nelly van Wyngaarden from nearby Brantford had an unusual beauty, of dark hair and almond skin that looked almost Native American. It appealed deeply to me, the ultimately inexperienced teenager who up till then only had gazed from afar at blonde Dutch girls, never had a date, so therefore never tried to kiss on a first date, and that straight-haired, stately, 15-year-old sophomore, with a wisdom beyond her years, gently pushed me away and said that although she could see that there might have been an attraction, she was much too young to pursue it. This gentle rejection of the ideal did not deter me. Indeed, confidence was building (first a male friend for the first time since sixth grade, then an almost-wife but for an accident of maturity) and the injection quite naturally led me to a more conventional beauty, Ellen Winter, also from Brantford, a sweet blonde my own age, with whom I went steady for all of senior year, holding hands, kissing in the school hallway in defiance of my father’s decree, and petting heavily in the Chevy Bel Aire on deserted lookouts on the Mountain. I promised I’d come back to her when I went off to college and she stayed home for Grade 13, and the promise lasted well into the first scary semester, a kind of proof to the city guys in the dorm around me that I was no rube from the prairie anymore, I was a man holding a woman’s tenderness in trust. It lasted all the way to Thanksgiving, and by that time distance had become measured not only in miles. When I returned home and had to tell her it was over, that it wouldn’t work out, she cried, but not copiously. She had known from the moment of leaving. I hadn’t. I had kept her sweet picture on my desk as if it were a talisman.

Hamilton afforded a few of the other manly vices too – trial smoking in the garage behind our house, defying authority by hanging out at the Millionaire Drive-In down the street from school, wasting money and time on burgers and fries, an unauthorized and unreported boys’ night out to Buffalo, following our 18^th birthdays, where the one bar we eventually found had weak draft beer and no loose women. But the main vice was sex, or as close as I got to sex. This is still hard to believe in a community of Dutch Calvinists; back on the prairie, listening on the radio to “Michelle, ma belle,” I had resigned myself to the prospect that sex would have to wait until marriage, if anyone would have me, or until a different life intervened, say in a Parisian hotel where God didn’t exist.

It’s because the people in Hamilton weren’t really Dutch Calvinists in spite of their names (Farenhorst! Hoogeboom!) and their Christian Reformed Church affiliations. They were first-generation immigrants of the mid-20^th century, and not American. They brought over some of the easy-going permissiveness of the Netherlands, which didn’t yet have time to harden into the kind of moral density I was used to. They were friendly, provocative. They took us in, which couldn’t have been easy, allowing this tall, aloof American family to run their school and date their daughters.

Being conventional was absolutely delicious: the taste of vinegar and salt on the fries at the Mill; the sight of Niagara Falls and the motels lined up in front of it like tacks on a chair; the smell of a bar, sweat and cigarettes and beer; the sound of applause as you break away for a lay-up; the feel of a girl’s small, light fingers underneath your shirt. You were allowed to have senses. It wasn’t always a sin to desire. Say hello to your body.

Moses went to the mountaintop and received the Ten Commandments. I went to Hamilton to bend a few of them. I believe this was the secret to happiness, bending, not breaking, those last five commandments against the body, for those who break them in high school get broken in turn and end up as model Christian citizens, and those who only bend them can swear and drink and fornicate in college, when they are old enough to process sin and have a proper religious rebellion and an inquisitive life thereafter.

****************

Now, in a weird kind of chronological boomerang, I’ve come to Hamilton on business, and will be doing so frequently. It’s the first time I’ve been back; downtown is just as gritty as I always imagined it to be. I’m chagrined to say that when I lived here for my junior and senior years of high school, I don’t remember downtown at all. On the Mountain there was plenty for nice Dutch boys to do: burger joints and basketball and church and school and soccer and girls and cars. We just didn’t do the bad stuff, drinking hard and dancing hot and smoking weed and lying with women, not downtown, not even in the very big city, Toronto, just 40 miles away. My summer between junior and senior years, when I might have gotten into trouble, was spent away from the city, chastely and responsibly, by working in a supermarket in Baldwin, Michigan and trout fishing in the river that ran past our cabin in the woods. And the summer after my senior year, when trouble should have been spelled with a capital T, I was bundled off to another city; unfortunately, it was Grand Rapids, Michigan, center of the Dutch Christian Reformed universe, where I lived in my grandmother’s house and worked in a hospital, the proper preparation for pre-med at Calvin College and the brain surgeon I was to be.  No grit was allowed.

I’m staying at the downtown Ramada Plaza, on East King Street. It’s January, and lousy weather, and I arrive too late on the first day to see much beyond the immediate neighborhood. I stand at the window, listening to the sleet on the glass, looking at the businesses on the block across from the hotel. In a kind of frivolous, anti-suburban mood, I write down the names of those businesses, west to east:

1. You and Yu
2. (vacant)
3. Worldwide Beauty Supply
4. Canadian Institute of Dental Hygiene
5. Twenty-Fo-7
6. (vacant)
7. Hair It Is
8. Leather Giant Discount Warehouse
9. Hoya Japanese-Korean Restaurant
10. Pizza House

Only the restaurants are obviously open. The rest look so abandoned – waste paper swirling in doorways, blinds blocking dirty windows – that it’s hard to tell if they are still in business. Above the storefronts are two or three stories of, what? Apartments? Fleshpots? A few months ago, in career despair, I might have tried to find out, making up for the deficiencies of youth, but in this new year, this new job, probity continues to rule.

The plan is for me to fly in from Boston and work in the office for a few days each month, and occasionally have dinner with the boss, whose eponymous company graciously has taken me on as a full-time consultant. There’s something for him too in the deal, of course. I have a certain small reputation in the industry, after all, but right now I’m mostly grateful, even if it means working in downtown Hamilton.

At lunchtime the next day, I stop in at the Tourist Information Office. The two old ladies tending the counter and keeping an eye on the racks of brochures advertising attractions mostly not in Hamilton rather desperately make sure I sign the visitor’s book, and when I look at it, I see perhaps one or two entries a day, and in the column that asks how long one is staying in town, several have written “5 minutes” in innocence or social commentary. I get a map and a “Go Hamilton” brochure that frugally lists events for the whole year and go to Jackson Square, a dank indoor mall that draws customers like hands to a fire, for a burrito. It seems to be the only lively place available.

But I don’t need lively, I need memory and that evening after work, the weather is not terribly cold, nor is it snowing or sleeting, and there’s still sunlight for an hour or so, and before meeting the boss I walk down John Street all the way to the lake, the opposite way from the Mountain.

Away from King Street the land is occupied mostly by parking lots (Three Loonies Parking, $3.00 a day). One cross street seems entirely devoted to cars: used car sales, tire shops, repair shops, gas stations, Auto Parts Cheap. A very large sex shop occupies the next corner. Neighborhoods appear, small houses packed together, large dusty cars parked for eternity in their driveways, porches falling into the street. No one is about; I can’t tell if this is a slum or just normal poverty. A school is partially boarded up. Next to it a gaggle of pre-teens stands around in the snow, a polyglot of whites, blacks, Asians. A man in dirty, high-water, flared dungarees and fake fur hat, walking on the balls of his feet as if he is used to balancing against the influence, makes his way across a vacant lot to the Community Center. The lakeshore is shut off by industrial development. A few high-rise apartment buildings perch gingerly nearby, looking out over the corrugation at the water.

I knew none of this kind of desolation growing up. People like us stayed safely on our mountains, raised slightly higher, but not too high, above it all. You could argue I never have known it, except for a stint in Peace Corps Korea, a young man losing his callowness in humble circumstances, if not exactly poverty; my Calvinist background of hard work and responsibility turned out to be highly suited to career success and a life in the suburbs. The sight of the chain-smoking, over-weight, gap-toothed patrons of Jackson Square is a shock. The sight of the giant Stelco plant, mostly shuttered now by capitalism’s pursuit of profit overseas, is a shock. And yet this place represents a lifeboat to me against another shock: getting fired from a company that I made successful, under whose aegis I experienced 16 joyful years of marriage and children and houses, because of whose salaries I could dream of an early retirement and a second career in Maine.

Downtown is a sobering state of mind. I’m mostly afraid of it, afraid that the dark, despairing doctrine of the prairie might be true, afraid that lifeboats leak and founder, afraid that a fake fur hat might be in my future. The boss could let me go any time. Markets could fail. But at least I can dream of heights again, after the worry of the last few months, and I think about going up to the Mountain in spring, when the weather’s better, to review happy conventionality first-hand, especially that drive to and from Brantford on Saturdays, to experience again how it felt to be released from bondage, to be thankful for what’s given, what’s gained.

I spend my last night this month at Hoya Japanese-Korean Restaurant. The waitress smiles behind her hand when I try out some Korean, asking, “Do you have seaweed, you know, ‘kim’?” I want to fold the nori sheets around rice and kimchi and eat with my hands like the poor folks do in Korea. I want to be simpler again, bridge that split between hope and despair. It’s no accident that foreign places have provided my real education, after the fumbling and worry and agony of growing up Calvinist in America, before the brutal business of pursuing a career in America, and I finish the barbequed eel and doodle some more on my Palm Pilot To-Do list and go out again refreshed into Canada, where my path to freedom began, whose lessons promise to rescue me once again.