Where Your World Ends

By John Kuti

This is the story of two men from different cultures; a 40-year-old native guide and a 73-year-old white man kayaking the ocean passage between the two great islands in Haida Gwaii. They each bear the scars of their personal and cultural history. Jack Hawk the native guide, whose parents had their culture ripped from them in residential schools, whose ancestral village was burned to the ground so his people could be relocated is trying desperately to hang onto his culture. The old white man he is leading.has lived estranged from the rabid individualism and materialism that began with his own generation. Both men have found purpose and meaning in life by establishing a deep connection to nature. Jack lives with nature every day. The old man lives with a metaphorical connection to nature through poetry.
Instead of being on a journey to the heart of darkness, these two men from different cultures, are on a journey to find a personal redemption that transcends their two cultures.
They are on a journey to meet Jim Moncrief at his wilderness camp, a white man who has come to terms with what it means to be a human being by reestablishing a connection to nature through native culture. Twenty years before, when Jack Hawk came out of prison for stabbing his brother, he changed Jack Hawk's life by teaching him how to protect himself from the toxic narratives of whites society and white privilege. Fifty years before, in a three hour conversation in the student pub, Jim Moncrief change the old man's life by letting him see the problematical future of materialistic liberalism. This is the story of two men working through the pain of what modern culture had done to their lives. It is the story of how they came to understand that in each other, and realize that their journey would become an initiation into a greater meaning in life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Kuti
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005840181

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Where Your World Ends

By John Kuti

Published by:

John Kuti at Smashwords

© 2021 by John Kuti

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Where Your World Ends

The Left Side … The Right Side

Between two great islands

Endless ocean tides

Sweep in opposite directions.

‘Where your world ends, mine begins.’ That’s what Jack Hawk said to me when we pushed off in our sea kayak. When I thought about it, I realized that was probably truest for him. But it was also true for me, in a way. And in the end it’s probably true for everyone. Like his world, we are all islands with an ocean passage that divides us in two. Left …right; left… right. What’s left for us? What’s right for us? In my 73rd year, I had come to Haida Gwaii looking to find what might be right and what might be left of my elusive relationship with life.

This morning, the inner passage looked like cobalt glass; behind us the perfect V shape wake on our weathered Old Town double ocean kayak follows us like a single, silent parenthetical. Circles spread from where our paddles touch the water. The water sound beside us is pure and musical. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. It’s perfect autumn weather. It’s a perfect day to be alive. And like most of my kind, the lottery winners of life, it still isn’t enough.

Jack and I are traveling west on the long ocean channel separating his two great islands. Because of my age and physical condition we make numerous stops to rest when we happen on a place to pull up among the weathered stones. And unlike all my friends with fat pensions and the exploratory gene, this is the first traveling adventure of my life, and even I recognize how bizarre it is. I’ve come 3000 miles to seek out a man I met 50 years ago and spoke to for 3 hours in a bar.

To say Jim Moncrieff made an impression is clearly an understatement. He’s perhaps the only pure genius I ever met, an unconstrained performance artist before I knew there were such things, way back in 1968. He had a doctorate in philosophy and was moving furniture for a living because he had come to the conclusion that we are different from other animals only in our ability to make up stories and believe that they are true, and he didn’t want to be a part of preserving and passing on the countless stories that separate us from who we really are, clever apes living in a zoo of our own making. He was as uncompromising in his own way as the rest of my generation back then. We believed our pure idealism was the key to a perfect world of our own making.

Jim Moncrieff had turned the simplistic, self-evident truism, ’It is what it is.’ into a philosophical principle that I could never really get out of my head. A was never B…B was never C. A was always A, no matter how many stories you told, no matter how many stories you believed that said it wasn’t so. He’s the only person I’ve ever known who believed that stories are never true, and believing they were the source of all our problems. I would soon learn his entire world view had changed and he had become a living master of some of the world’s great stories.

Why was it so important for me to find him after all these years? Perhaps because I needed to find out if he had come to believe that there were some true stories. I needed to know if he had sold out like all the rest of us and found some kind of peace in the absurd reality of our bottomless consumer culture. After a lifetime of my own made up stories, I wanted to see what had become of the one man I had ever known who I believed had started his adult life as a stone cold realist. That was my story about him.

Like most of my closest lifelong friends, having begun my life with the flower child romanticism of boomer youth, I had come to find greater and greater happiness in letting go of transformative political utopian dreams for the real and simple pleasures of life. Utopian world revolution had become a locavore diet and self-affirmation. It was crazy, but I had to find out what Moncrieff had made of this and his own life. I wanted to show and tell my story. I suppose I wanted the approval or judgment of a man I barely knew. My journey wasn’t into the heart of darkness, but rather into the selfish guilt I felt for the inexpressible joy of being alive. At least that’s what I told myself when I set out across Canada in my impeccably restored 1974 Westfalia camper Van.

Every month in the summer, Jack Hawk would deliver and retrieve two young native people from Moncrieff’s wilderness camp where his task was to turn their lives from bitter to sweet. Moncrieff called this exercise, ‘natural rebirth’. Jack had told me this when I hired him. He had at first refused to take me to see Moncrieff until I assured him that I had been invited and explained to him how I could have received such an invitation.

That was an amazing story. Because she still lived in Waterloo and resumed her maiden name after her divorce, I had found his sister’s phone number very quickly. She too was reluctant to give me any information about Moncrieff when I tried to explain why I wanted to find him. Trying to find someone you knew for a few hours after 50 years opens a whole lot of questions and his sister wasn’t convinced about my motives. I asked if I could take her to lunch and explain myself and my interest in her brother, and that was why we met in Waterloo the next day. After I told her the story of meeting her brother all those years ago, she could see that I knew her brother but was still struggling to understand why I would want to find him. I had to tell her a lot more about myself and how the world had nearly, kind of, pretty much broken my heart. I told her that there was innocence in a poetic heart like mine that would not surrender itself to an unjust world, but that innocence was harder and harder to sustain.

The reality of mortality comes with its own distinct pressure. I can feel my heart closing to the world as I feel myself opening more and more to the inexpressible beauty of nature. I told her. And that seemed to make an impression.

I think he came to that very place years ago. He’s not the person that he was when you met him. she said, My arrogant and brilliant brother became my humble and brilliant brother 30 years ago when my eight-year-old daughter died of a brain tumor and he guided us both across that river of horror. He was never the same, and the two of them gave me an appreciation of life I could’ve never found without them.

That was enough of the back story to get Jack to take me to Moncrieff. I didn’t tell him the rest of the story that was so tragic and beautiful, the way it is when life and death become intertwined.

The story came rushing out of his sister over lunch, as if it had been waiting all those years to be told to someone who might hear it in a way that