finding ross allen

Ross Allen was my brother Ted’s best friend. Tall and pale, freckled and red-haired, I remember Ross always grinning. Ross was great at guy things: hunting and fishing and building tree forts.

If I close my eyes I can see Ross standing in front of me, a head taller, reciting the classic fable Aladdin in French. A sense of delight shines in his eyes. Ross had just learned the story in French and he found something amusing to do with the newly acquired knowledge.

He spoke the words in French but added a perfect imitation of the familiar quack talk of Donald Duck. Donald Duck reciting Aladdin in French. He made me laugh.

Ross and Ted and their friends were two years and several steps ahead of me. I watched them from afar. I admired them. They seemed to do what they pleased. They rode their bikes to far away places, like Johnny’s convenience store, where they bought red licorice and 10-cent cokes with the money they earned collecting empty pop bottles. The bottles were left by the “workies” building the houses that were popping up like mushrooms in early-1960’s suburban Montreal. I was not usually invited to come along.

Ross joined our family one summer for a vacation in the rolling hills of Vermont, where we rented a farmhouse. We went woodchuck hunting one evening just before sunset. Ross shot a groundhog from a great distance. At least fifty yards. The groundhog was on the run and Ross was standing. Not an easy shot to make. His handling of the weapon seemed effortless. I thought Ross was magic.

Our families lived in the little town of Beaurepaire in Montreal’s mainly English-speaking area. The Allen’s modest bungalow was directly across York Road from our home. The Allen’s yard had Pyracantha shrubs and the little orange berries that arrived in the fall were hard and just right for flinging at the other kids in our after-school games of cowboys and Indians—or as they are probably called today, cow-management and First Nations persons. Yes, it seems to me, now, to have been a simpler time.

It was time I recall as being bathed in the golden light of an endless summer, a time without trouble or sorrow. It was a time that certainly had it’s share of both, as we would soon find out, but the mind is like a painter and memory colours the canvas in a ways that make us feel better about where we’ve been…

One stormy evening in the autumn of 1966, I was lying in bed listening to rock ‘n roll on my six-transistor radio. The sounds I was hearing were coming from Buffalo, New York, and the studios of legendary disc jockey Joey Reynolds. Reynolds introduced us to the music of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and the pride of Thunder Bay, Ontario, crooner Bobby Curtola.

The signal was part static and part rhythm and blues and it sounded like it was being beamed from the other side of the moon. Listening to the radio in bed was a safe and comforting ritual, but it was going to be the place where I was fated to learn, for the first time, the harshest kind of life lesson…

I heard Ted come running in through the front screen door, crying out in a terrified voice, “Ross is missing!”

Ted and Ross and some of their chums had built a fort at one end of Dowker’s Island, in the middle of Lake St. Louis, part of the mighty St. Lawrence River. The small island was in the middle of the lake, straight across from Beaurepaire.

Ross had boated to the island to go duck hunting with a friend, and when one of the boys bagged a bird, Ross set out alone in a dinghy, wearing hip-waders, to fetch the corpse. The waves on that normally taciturn lake could be pretty fearsome when the winds came up. Somehow, the little boat tipped and Ross fell out. His hip-waders filled up. Even though he was a competent swimmer and the water wasn’t very deep, the straps on the waders were criss-crossed over his shoulders and I guess he just couldn't get them off. He went down.

That’s the way it was in 1966, in Montreal and everywhere else…in our world, at least. A little hard to believe in these times of over-protected, over-organized kids who wouldn’t know what to do if you put a ball in one of their hands and a bat in the other. A 14-year-old kid from a typical middle-class Canadian neighbourhood told his mother he was going hunting. On a school night. With a shotgun. In a boat. On a big lake. On a dark and wild night.

Harriet Allen likely warned Ross to be back in time for supper. Not even a hasty: “Don’t forget your life jacket!” She knew his outdoorsman father had taught him well. She had faith. And not in a million years would any of her contemporaries have accused her of being an unfit mother…

Some of the neighbourhood men joined Ross’s father, Ned, and they went out in boats onto the choppy water that wicked night. On Dowker’s they picked up Ross’s friend, George Chiasson, who had been stranded for hours, shivering and soaked to the skin. It had been so dark, he reported, that he had not even seen what happened to Ross. He could only point the searchers to the place where the duck had fallen.

At our house no one slept, even though there would be school in the morning. I watched my mother looking out into the black night through our kitchen window, praying a Hail Mary. A few hours later, a police car arrived at the Allen’s, its flashing lights illuminating the pelting rain. For a second I was sure I was looking at red-haired Ross getting out of the cruiser. He was wearing his familiar bright yellow rain slicker.

I screamed: “It’s Ross!” But it wasn’t. It was his older brother, Dave wearing Ross’s raincoat. Hours later, Ned Allen walked in from the night, and he stood dripping in front of his wife and Ross’s brother and two sisters: “We’ve lost our boy.”

Our world changed. It sounds trite, but our childhood was over.
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The morning after Ross was lost, the traffic reporter from Montreal’s leading English AM radio station, CJAD, volunteered his helicopter to join in the search. The city’s English-speaking community was small and intimate then, as it remains to this day. I remember the reporter saying, as the chop-chop sound of the rotors whirred in the background, “There’s no sign of 14-year-old Ross Allen, but we’re not giving up hope…”

Ross’s boat turned up later that first day, a few miles east of where he had tumbled overboard. Hope was abandoned.

In the long days that followed, I often walked down to the lake shore and stood on the small boat launch at Angell Bay, staring across at Dowker’s Island. Waiting for Ross to come home. Death was something unfamiliar and unacceptable. It was like a cloud had arrived and blackened the sky. I stood there, on the dock, and looked through the haze for some kind of sign. The smell of burning leaves filled the air. Lake St. Louis no longer sparkled invitingly, the scene of so much of our summer fun. It looked deep, and dark and ugly.

I must have been in a dreamy child-like denial, because after about a week of my vigil my father sat me down and said: “John, Ross won’t be coming back…” My mother cried. “I can see him at the front door, that big grin on his face, asking ‘How are you today, Mrs. Daly?’”

On November 3, the very day a memorial service was to take place, Ross’s body was found. He had been in the water for almost a month.

For years afterward I dreamed I was searching for Ross Allen. In many of these dreams I was airborne, flying over the dark-green brackish water of the big lake. My quest continued up some unknown non-existent river, looking for signs that Ross was alive. I was not in an airplane. I had the power to fly. This was my wish. To have the power to rise above death and change it’s dictates. I never, ever saw Ross in those dreams. This is the power of death, and life, making themselves known.

When I could not locate Ross on the water I dreamed he had somehow survived and was alive, but was badly injured and permanently altered, hidden in the shadows of his home at 61 York Road. Still, I could not see him. And now I was no longer sure I wanted to.


And then the dreams stopped.
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Every January or February I leave the cold rain of my home in Vancouver for the much colder whipping winds of Montreal. I go there for a taste of “real” Canadian winter. It’s getting harder to find that taste. As often as not, these last few years, along with the snow and cold there has been rain and receding snow drifts, revealing the buried piles of dog shit that were, in the past, not seen until spring.

On my last trip, my oldest brother Mark and his son Bryan and I drove up to the Lakeview Cemetery. A few months earlier, Mark had been there with Ted, who was visiting from Victoria, and Harriet Allen, now residing in an old-age home not far from the house where she and her family once lived.

The grey granite and black marble gravestones pushed through the freshly fallen snow. Mark thought he remembered where Ross’s monument was, but we couldn’t find it. We drove back down the slope to the cemetery administrator’s house.

The man inside was helpful, friendly and concerned beyond what we might have expected. “What a tragedy,” he remarked, as I described the death of young Ross. He went upstairs and found an old ledger, from 40 years gone by. He set it down on top of his desk and when he opened it the spine broke.

His finger traced up and down the pages, scanning the entries handwritten in fountain pen. I asked Mark when Ross had died. Mark thought it must have been late September or early October 1966. It was hunting season. This information helped. The caretaker’s finger settled on a name: Ross Frederick Allen. He went back upstairs and brought down Ross’s file. He taped one of the three documents to the inside of the file so it would not fall out and be lost forever.

The date of Ross’s death was written this way: October 11-November 3, 1966. Those long sad days when we imagined and longed for an impossible outcome. I don’t think I noticed the colour of leaves that autumn. I don’t remember any colour that was not funereal.

The caretaker went to his computer and located Ross’s grave, in a section of the cemetery called Resthaven. “I can take you there,” he offered. We drove back up the hill and the caretaker motioned to a stone sitting between two green shrubs, in the second row back from the road. “There,” he pointed. He said Ned Allen had purchased four plots, and that Ned was here too, beside Ross, but his place was not marked.

I trudged through the snow, leaving footprints, and turned into the sinking sun and bitter wind to face the stone. Ross Frederick Allen. After all these years I’d found him…

I stood there and felt as if I was remembering another lifetime. I had to really try to conjure a picture of Ross in my mind. There he was, only faintly, reciting Aladdin. Even today I can hardly see him. There is no challenging time, or what it does to our bodies and minds and memories.

Ross is more than forty years into his peaceful dreamless sleep, beneath the frozen ground and a blanket of white. Even the sorrow is gone, or maybe it’s sleeping too. There is a certain light, at dusk, in Montreal, and it helps me to feel, in my body, what remains of childhood’s wonder.

Ross is in that place, safe and dry and smiling.
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