AS THE EARLY September darkness continued to melt like chocolate around the house, and the world of mortgages and bills and social noise required me once again to enter a classroom and stand at the head of it, I put on my Buster Keaton deadpan mask in order to hide my mounting anxiety, in order to keep the cornered animal from snarling and lashing out. Meanwhile, the encounter with the little comedian kept returning me to my own beginnings, as if some ur-projectionist had reversed the reel.
I spent my entire childhood in the same small bungalow, literally a stone’s throw from the banks of a great river, the wild, 850-mile-long Fraser. My immediate family – parents, two much older brothers and a slightly older sister – made a subsistence income in the salmon fishing industry. It was not as
