For the most part, I was a fairly normal kid growing up in Pender Harbour. I loved soccer and fishing and chopping down alder trees. But like many little boys, my friends and I also had a "healthy" fascination with toy guns and the imaginary shooting of Nazis. We’d set up elaborate mock battles with scrounged wood loosely resembling the weapon of choice: machine gun, rifle, flame thrower, bazooka — whatever would efficiently slay an opponent while remaining true to the specific properties of the battlefield terrain. We were incredibly knowledgable about our weaponry. Life depended on it — arguments always broke out about who was more dead in an open shootout. "At a 100 yards, a 12-gauge shotgun would have only maimed me but I hit you, like, 10 times with my M-16 and I was using hollow points so you’d be hamburger." Sometimes the gunfights turned into fist fights. I don’t reveal all this as a cry for therapy — we all grew out of this penchant for shooting each other — but to deflect responsibility for an overactive imagination. It was all the fault of the Pender Harbour Reading Room. (See story, page 12) My Grandma Clara volunteered at the "Adult’s Library," then in the corner of the community hall, and I’d stop in to see her sometimes after school. I was probably already bored with the kids books in the elementary school when I discovered shelves lined with exotic books of every description; all free for the borrowing. I was amazed to find I could just show up and take home books — up to six at a time. So I did. I remember there was a great coffee table book about guns. I probably checked it out a dozen times and the technical detail it provided made me a formidable force on the faux-weapon battlefield. Naturally I also read spy and mercenary novels to satisfy my 10 year-old lust for action and adventure but at some point I must have discovered a different kind of story. Maybe Grandma tricked me into reading a Michener novel with promises of gruesome carnage. Or maybe some of those books illuminated the human tragedy of war as well as the glory — some of the sombre thoughts that run through a soldier’s head as he races toward certain death. And maybe from there I began to appreciate the subtle benefits of a well-written story where, sometimes, the good guys lose. But it doesn’t really matter how you travel as long as you get there and the Reading Room had a pretty profound influence on my early life in Pender Harbour. As it moves into its 42nd year of doling out reads, I’d like to think that, right now, there’s another kid being tricked into reading by a coffee table book about guns.
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