TBT #34: Human Interest Story

I got lost on my way to Colin Sanderson’s house. He lives just outside of Somerside, a small town known mostly for its annual cattle shows. I was told to turn right at the house with an old and broken fishing boat lying on the lawn. There were no less than three houses with old and broken fishing boats laying on the lawn off the small rural route road, and none of them had right-turns anywhere near them. I turned around a few times, circled back, considered for a second that maybe the middle-aged woman with grease on her face who had given me the directions didn’t know the difference between right and left, but then felt bad for stereotyping a rural population. I went back and forth between this guilty feeling and one of justification for several hours, as I tried several turns. As the sun touched the horizon and the unlit road turned black, I began to feel as if I were out in the literal middle of nowhere. And that, I thought, would help me relate to this man I was to interview. This man who was going into space.

When I finally did find Colin’s house, I was three hours behind schedule. The Best Thing Ever for March 21, 2005 was going to be late.

Colin Sanderson’s house was built so close to the surrounding forest that it has almost become a part of it. The trees around it seem to be an integral part of the structural support of the modest building, which is coloured a splattered boat-paint green. The shutters on the windows are uneven or falling off. The front door creaks, sticks and shudders. He has wind chimes.

Colin greets me before he sees me, yelling my name from inside the house as I get out of my car. I open his screen door carefully. The house is only one floor. It’s divided into three rooms - with a small bathroom off the kitchen –, with walls that don’t quite come to the ceiling. The foyer is his bedroom, a fact I find odd.

“Used to be living room was out here,” he says, emerging from the back room that I alter find out is the kitchen. He’s wearing gray paint-stained sweat paints and a “No Fear” sweatshirt. He has not shaved in weeks, and his frizzy beard is seeking to devour his whole face. On his head, he wears a hat with a cartoon whale across the front. “But shit,” he continues, “it started getting that I got so tired working outside every day that I’d come in and just fall asleep on the sofa. So I thought, hell, why not put my bed closer to the door.” It’s an argument I have no answer to.

Nobody Really Knows Colin Sanderson

And up until a month ago, that was just the way he liked it. Colin was born in Somerside on a July day 45-years-ago. His father, Dale, was a farmer, like most people in town. Only the Sandersons did not own a farm, and had not owned a farm for several generations. Dale spent his days working odd-jobs, often going out to the nearby harbour town to assist in the packing and unpacking of legally-questionable items, and his nights drinking.

Colin will not say much about his father.

His mother stayed home with Colin and his brothers and sisters, of whom Colin says he had “a shitload.” He shows me picture after picture, pointing out seemingly random people as related to him. “People’ll say it’s fucked, but I honestly got no idea. I’m out of touch,” he tells me. “I was out of touch then and I’m out of touch now.” His mother, whose name is not known, died when Colin was seventeen.

“She was gutted by wolves,” he says. “Was out with my father - he tried to save her. He told us he tried. But they got her and that was it. Never saw her again.” We are sitting in his bedroom foyer. He’s on his bed and I’m on a small desk chair. He takes his hat off now, revealing thick but patchy brown hair. “Guys tell me I’m stupid to believe that’s how my mom died,” he adds quickly. “Never figured why it would be better to think otherwise.”

His father quickly left town. Colin and his brothers and sisters quietly disbanded. “It was like we all sort of realized that, hey, we ain’t shit as a family, so why even try? Might as well go off and try to do something on our own. Nothing’s happening here.”

What happened for Colin was the publication of the groundbreaking poem “Leaves On This,” a work that heralded Colin Sanderson as an artiste, on the cutting edge of post-post modernism. In 1996, it was adapted into a hit song by the pop group “Dynamo Fuse.” It topped the charts for several years, appeared on the soundtrack for several films and, like the original poem, was nominated for several awards.

The Lost Years

“I could not leave Somerside,” he tells me. “I wanted to. Goddamn, did I want to. But I’d get as far as the ocean or Felixtown or Waterford and once or twice the city. I’d get there and just couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t get anything started. Never felt like home. I’d realize that. And I’d hate it. I hated realizing that.”

The poem was written in a small park in one of the surrounding towns, though Colin can’t remember which one. “I know people will think I was doing drugs or whatever, but I wasn’t. I barely even drank. I didn’t go for any of that - didn’t have the money for it, for one thing. But mostly I just couldn’t let myself be that.”

The genesis of “Leaves on This” is much simpler. One afternoon, coming off a bad job interview, Colin was sitting on a park bench. It was autumn, and he noticed the leaves. “I liked them,” he says. “I wrote some shit down about them. Amy - this girl I was with then - she was always giving me papers and pens every morning, usually with the shopping list or whatever on it, I never really figured out why. I guess it was good, though, ’cause without it I never would have written that poem.”

The poem was published in a local paper, after Colin sold it to a man on the street. “I was doing anything for money at that point,” he says. “I hated begging, so I tried to sell people stuff. I guess the thing got around town, and somehow got in the paper which wasn’t a big deal because the paper in that town published all these ass articles about anything.”
It was a big deal, however, as it started what would lead to the unlikely career of Colin Sanderson, poet. It was a career that lasted exactly one poem.

“For a while it was like I was some sort of superstar, I guess. Everyone was talking to me and wanting to interview me and whatever else, you know. Famous people stuff.” Colin’s part of the world had not seen a literary figure in almost a hundred and fifty years. His presence was heralded as the possible start of an intellectual awakening.

“Then some guy in a men’s room called me a faggot,” notes Colin. “He saw me, recognized me, glared at me and called me a faggot. Happened at a Subway down the road. I could not write another poem after that.”

Colin refuses to elaborate, apologize or regret that action. Instead, he stands from his seat on his bed, his knees cracking quietly as he does. He chuckles for some reason, and tells me it’s time to see what I came to see.

Written almost 10 years ago, “Leaves on This” is showing its age. It’s rarely held up as an example of good poetry. In fact, it is rarely ever even remembered. The more well-known — but still mostly in the past — song it was adapted from is better known. Adapted from Colin’s words, it starts like this:

Shallow underpinnings of the schoolyard best,
Lost in the shadows of God’s own behest,
Long doorless hallways and days nocturnal
A blinding love ravaged, so false external
A forever candle burns and don’t exist
And I’m just wanting to kick leaves on this
Is this the standard insincerity of bliss
’cause I just want to kick leaves on this

Whatever happened to

We walk through his kitchen towards the backdoor. It’s a bachelor home, and the counters, and the dishes, show it. I stare too long at the bathroom, which connects off the corner of the room and lacks a door. “Seemed like a waste of time,” he tells me, reading my mind again.

After the poem’s national publication, and the song that sprang from it, everyone began to wonder what happened to Colin Sanderson. “I got a few calls for a while,” he says, as we step into the small backyard which is surprisingly free of trees. It’s dark, but the backyard is brightly lit with outdoor lights. We stand in a spotlight and talk. “Read a few articles about me in whatever. They guessed. Said I was up to this shit or that shit. Assumed I was on drugs. All my life, people have been assuming I’m on drugs. Never been on drugs until recently.”

Colin simply stopped doing interviews. He had, of course, stopped writing, so his decision was not without logic. He faded from the public consciousness rather quickly, with even the population of Somerside forgetting about Colin Sanderson, poet. He lived modestly, buying what was essentially an overbuilt shed and turning it into his home just outside the town where he grew up. For money, he’s lived primarily off of royalties.

“It’s the kind of life I wanted,” he says, gesturing to the sky and to the stars. “Simple. It all makes sense to me, this shit. When I was trying to find something - and not finding it - nothing was making any sense. So I just went with what I know.”

I have to ask him. “So why are you leaving?” I question, pointing to the machine he keeps in the centre of his yard.

He walks over to the contraption, and bangs his hand on its steel top. It’s a spherical metal pod, resting on a tripod base. There’s a single glass port window facing me, like a single deep blue eye. At its top, there’s a long antenna. Attached on the bottom, there’s what I assume is the rocket.

“It took you a long time to get to the spaceship,” he laughs. “I figured all you really want to know is why I’m going into space. Why I’m building a rocket ship in my backyard.”

I nod in the darkness, not sure if he can see me. He’s holding his hands on his craft like you would a child, simultaneously showing love and protecting from everything.

“I figure it’s cause I’m dying,” he says bluntly.

Bullshit expressions and I won’t reminisce
No, I just want to kick leaves on this

The Grand Scheme of Things

Colin never made it out to the doctor much during his twenty-odd years living at his house outside Somerside. He says it was because he was too busy, but really it’s because he never even thought about it.

A year ago, he started getting headaches. They’d start at the back of his head, and kind of work their way further forward, toward his eyes. At first, they were infrequent, the kind of thing everyone gets every now and then. But they continued, increasing in frequency. Eventually, he started to getting blinding pain right behind his eyes. Striking suddenly, it would last for less than a second before dissipating. This started to happen every hour, then every half hour, then every five and ten minutes.

“If I suddenly stop in the middle of a sentence,” he told me over the phone, “that’s just one of those hitting me.” It happens so often I get used to his stops and starts rather quickly. He estimates it happens every two-to-three minutes now.

When he did see a doctor, he was told he had a brain tumor. It was resting on his pituitary gland. It was malignant. And it had spread. Had it been caught earlier, there could have been possible surgeries. (”The doctor said they’d operate through my nose,” he says, incredulously) As it was, there was merely a timeline. Two-to-three months, he was told. And then he would die.

As he drove home from the doctor’s office, Colin remembers thinking about the doctor’s words. “Guy told me I had to get my affairs in order,” he says, still holding his spaceship. “And I got to thinking that damned if I have any affairs, with women or otherwise. All I got is this house here and there’s not even much in that.”

He also does not have a great love for space, which he calls “boring as a dog’s ass.” What he did have, however, was a surplus of metal, and a grudge.

“There were two things that made me build this,” he says. “Two things. Number one, I had all these old parts sitting around and I got to thinking that if I don’t use them now they’re just going to go to waste. Number two, that doctor guy was a dick. He was an asshole. He told me I had nowhere to go but down. And, you know, fuck him. Fuck that and fuck him. I found somewhere to go.”

But why space? Why not travel the world?

“Tried it,” he dismisses, “couldn’t leave. Couldn’t get away. All they got is trees and lakes out there, I figure. And we got that here too.”

He smiles, as if he expects me to laugh. I’m still standing a few feet from the backdoor, afraid to approach his spacecraft for reasons I can’t even begin to discern. His smile fades quickly. It’s really late now, and he motions that maybe we should continue tomorrow.

I walk through the house pretty quickly, ready to leave and collect my thoughts. The door creaks close behind me. Before I’ve even started my car, all the lights in the house go out.

Cradle’s cracking and things I should probably miss
But, God, I just got to kick some leaves on this

Denouement

It’s Saturday morning and Colin cannot get out of bed. I stand at the screendoor, watching as he lays motionless in bed. He seems grateful to me for blocking the light. “Need a few hours,” he struggles. “Give me a few hours. This happens, every now and then. Don’t worry. You can watch me work.”

I offer to call someone to help, but he firmly declines. Wouldn’t do any good, he says. And it might be that asshole again, anyway. I reluctantly leave him, and go around the house to inspect the fruits of his labours. The spacecraft looks less impressive in daytime. I realize that aside from the outer pod, which seems to have been carefully welded together from sheets of layered steel, the rest of the ship’s parts have been cobbled together using whatever he could find. Rain gutters make up the tripod base, and the rocket part of the contraption seems to have come from his car engine. He must have figured that he wouldn’t need the car anymore.

I find some high ground in the corner of the yard and make some phone calls. I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I find myself staring at the sky. It’s a clear blue that extends as far as I can put my head back.

Finally unable to just stand and wait, I take my car around the town, searching for clues to his past. Those who will talk to me don’t know or remember Colin. Those who won’t talk to me seem like the type who would. It’s an odd thing for a suburban guy, to see a small town where nobody knows, likes or respects anyone else. I thought things were different.

“When do you want to launch?” I asked Colin later. He reappeared shortly after noon. I was standing in his backyard again, staring at the ship. He had slept in his clothes and had not washed. He was a mere shadow of the talkative man he was last night.

“Soon,” he said roughly but quietly. “Very soon.”

He tells me gruffly that he’s been working on the rocket propulsion system these days, now that he’s done with the actual pod. The ship doesn’t need to do anything once it gets to space, he explains. It just needs to get there.

“I’ll probably burn up when I exit the atmosphere,” he tells me. “That’s okay. I’m okay with burning up in the atmosphere.”

Not thinking, I reply. “You just don’t want to die here.”

He’s surprised by my candor, and so am I. He looks up at me, from where he’s been lying under the rocket.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Don’t want to die here.”

He slides back under and begins fiddling with various parts. “Not going to die here,” he mumbles.

Fortune-telling on seaside piers
giving us far too many years
how long will all this hope persist
Because I just want to kick leaves on this

Billions

I don’t know how to end this story. It’s a sad story, about a man facing his own mortality. And, worse, it’s about a dying man so deluded that he’s become fixated on doing something before he dies that absolutely cannot happen. It will not happen. Colin Sanderson will not go into space, no matter how long he lives. And I think he knows that just as much as I do.

And yet I stood there for several hours as he worked. Tinkering with the rocket engine, walking around the pod, looking either approvingly or disapprovingly at his work, adjusting the antennae that served absolutely no purpose. At one point he opens the hatch on the top, and shows me in the inside. It dawns on me very quickly that I am looking at a tomb.

“Are you going to leave a note?” I ask him.

“Considered it,” he tells me, “But what would I write? ‘Gone to die in space?’ They’ll figure it out. Smart people out there.”

Is it even comprehensible? Can anyone out there see it? A steel-plated ball cutting through the sky, streaking towards the stars and inside there is Colin Sanderson. And he’s looking down through that window of his as the house he built from a shed is getting further and further away. And he’s watching that town he could never leave become a big green smear in the middle of a bigger green smear. He’s thinking about the billions of lives below him, the billions of lights, the billions upon billions of words he’s never read, of songs he’s never heard - all that world of trees and lakes he never bothered to see. He’s thinking about the stabbing pain behind his eyes and the lethal freeze of outer space. He’s thinking about the stars in his backyard and how strongly they’ll glow when he can almost touch them.

And then his head will explode, splattering his brains against the glass of the porthole window and he’ll slowly burn into crystalline dust.

Can’t see it. Won’t see it. I watch him work for a few more minutes, but he is no longer talking. I say goodbye quickly and leave without looking him in the eye. I don’t want to know your ending, Colin Sanderson. I don’t want to know you at all.