Tales from St Anthony Part XV -- Wrestling Bedouin and a parallel universe

"Me against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousin, then my cousins and I against strangers."

The modern Bedouin travels in a rental van and not on camel through a desert.

According to the World Wide InterGoogle machine the above is a “widely quoted Bedouin saying” and while I will suspend my belief until irrefutable proof is presented, more than Wikipedia at least, it is the perfect description of the nomadic band of journeymen I witnessed last night – professional wrestlers.

A traveling troupe crisscrossing their way about Canada – Mainstream Wrestling – arrived with little fanfare in St Anthony yesterday, setting up residence inside a corrugated iron shed that doubles as the town’s ice hockey rink in winter.

Perched on the peripheries of a ring erected inside the freezing stadium about 400 people, mostly kids, watched on as good guys and bad guys belted each other senseless for more than two hours.

A montage clearly showing Josef Von Schmidt, a wrestler supposedly from East Berlin and whose MySpace page attests a desire to "resurrect the Berlin Wall" and proof of a love tryst between Dolph Lundgren (circa Rocky IV) and StreetFighter's General M Bison and Sagat. 

Sometimes the hits hurt, other times they missed all together but still inflicted a certain amount of injury and pain; such is the wonder of wrestling.

When the show finished and the crowd, with lungs aching and cheeks hurting, filed into the car park, the showmen packed up their own merchandise tables and the troupe disappeared south down Route 430 through the fog, past the moose onto the next town, onto the next show.

When Em first told me about the wrestling, I remember laughing, snobbishly.

I can’t remember the exact details of that exchange but I imagine when Em broached the subject, I was inside my ivory tower at the time sitting on a thrown made of intertwined strands of hair from the fabled golden badger, stroking my pet thylacine, ordering my thralls to track down more wine.

I probably then threw my head back and chortled at the idea proclaiming with a booming voice that would put Brian Blessed to shame something like: “I have been to international sporting events the world over with crowds reaching up to 100,000, what folly is this?”

In instances like this I’m either in my ivory tower or on my high horse, named Garry. 

Either way, I admit I was a fool, treated the concept with contempt, and as such I would like to issue an apology.

Because I have no-one to apologise to but myself, I hereby accept my own apology, acknowledge I have a lot still to learn and promptly move on.

Now here’s a question, is it culturally insensitive to draw parallels between a formally nomadic Arab ethnic group, the Bedouin, and spandex-clad fringe wrestlers? Maybe it is better to compare them to Fred Brophy’s travelling boxing tent in Australia, however I fear the latter is far too bloody and a lot less theatrical.

I’d imagined this group as muscle bound circus carnies, charlatans, who left town in the middle of the night with all the towns peoples’ hard earned money, everything not bolted down, perhaps a cat or two and a couple of stowaways with dreams of the big lights of WWE.

But that wasn’t the case – not by a long shot.

"Me against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousin, then my cousins and I against strangers," is the perfect way to describe last night’s performers.

Each day they travel to a new town, set up their traveling show, fight each other then move on.

The Bedouin entertained through folk music, dance and poetry, these guys do the same although thrash metal has replaced the sullen tones of the al-rababa, their choreographed war dance (ardha) ends in moves subtly titled brainbusters and powerbombs and the poetry was more monologues about the wrestlers own greatness mixed with crowd tauntings of “no, you suck”, rather than the traditional ghinnawas, two line emotional poems similar to haikus.

Am I drawing a long bow? Maybe, but one certain thing is that last night was all about the kids.

I think it’s fair to say that entertainment options are limited up here on the Northern Peninsular.

The closest cinema is six hours away and while there are a couple of playgrounds, a lot of open land and several sporting groups, live show experiences like this don’t come around every day, in fact it was four years since the troupe last came to town.

Four years.

Let’s be honest, the show wasn’t professional wrestling on a scale of WWE but who cares?

Watching all those kids and their parents yelling, screaming, cheering, booing and watching the wrestlers exacting every ounce of effort and strength from tiring bodies courtesy of a strenuous tour, the show was nothing short of inspiring.

Last night, those kids might as well have been inside a stadium of 100,000 baying fans.

Hell, I even cheered and whooped it up.

I felt a surge of passion for the entertainment, not because of what it was but because of what it did.

Sometimes those hits really did hurt. Really, really.

It made people happy, it made people forget.

For a couple of hours kids got to be kids and parents could forget about a failing fishing industry, the imminent removal of their air ambulance, mortgages, shopping bills and simply sit back and watch their kids laugh, smile and holler.

Some of the parents’ smiles were as big as the kids’.

Since coming to St Anthony I have learnt that living in a place where even getting basic things can be tough, a night of entertainment provided by a modern band of Bedouin can do wonders for morale.

There are plenty of parallels between wrestling and the Bedouin, there are plenty of parallels between that show and the fighting spirit of Newfoundland but then again you can draw parallels between any objects with a bit of imagination.

Tales from St Anthony Part III -- Just ask the janitor

A house near the most northerly tip of Newfoundland near L'Anse Aux Meadows, where Vikings first landed in North America.

"Do you eat meat," my landlord Ken asks me as we stand next to a chest freezer in the basement of what will one day be his dream home.

At the moment it is a gutted two storey house, age unknown, located at the front of a large chunk of land near the fish processing plant.

A seemingly abandoned fishing punt, replete with a large hole in its stern, dominates the backyard that is also home to a rake, a bit of fishing net and several large chunks of snow, remnants of one of the warmest winters on record.

From the outside it looks like it should be scuttled, but Ken is a carpenter, electrician and handy man. A scan of the work done so far you can tell he's a good one too.

He's also a good bloke.

"Do I like meat," I parrot, "of course."

Ken swings open the lid of the freezer, which will one day be replaced by a queen sized bed in what is to become the master bedroom.

"Ever eaten moose," he asks and seemingly already knowing the answer he rummages around in he bowels of the freezer producing a pack of Italian herb moose sausages and two moose steaks plonking them into my hands before reaching down again to retrieve another another plastic bag.

"Moose heart," he says revealing the contents of the bag, "we stuff it then bake it, it's quite nice really."

Having eaten heart during my time as a butcher, I strongly doubt it.

"You can tell the weight of a moose by the weight of its heart," he tells me balancing it in his left hand like he's a human Salter scale.

"This heart here is about five pound so the moose was about 500 pound," he puts the heart back in the freezer before pulling out another bag, this time I know exactly what is coming.

"Do you eat fish," he asks, "here take this it's cod, dad and I have got heaps, more than we can eat."

What he asks me to take is about 10lbs of frozen cod fillets, far too much for Em and I to eat in a year so we come to a gentleman's agreement and head back to the truck and jump in.

Every time I meet a local talk soon turns to the future of the town.

"If you want to know what’s wrong with this town, just ask the janitor,” Ken says as we round the bend near the processing plant.

"The problem is when things go wrong in a town like this they ask the wrong people what needs to be done," he continues.

"All you need to do is talk to the janitor or the labourer on the job site digging holes, doing the hard work. They’ll tell you what’s wrong with the place and how to fix it."

He's right. If you want to know what ails the population and how to fix it, just ask the people on the bottom rung of societies ladder.

No point asking the ones with the money, they'll just tell you how to make them more money, although I don't get that same feeling in a town like this.

In sporting parlance, St Anthony has a serious case of the yips, a form slump if you will.

The town is facing a troika of trouble -- the fishing industry (cod, crab and lobsters) has gone belly up, the seal season is similarly slow and the government is in the midst of relocating the air ambulance, the biggest issue of the day here.

Just a few years back they tried to relocate the trade school but that failed and while the future of the hospital seems certain considering they have invested a whack of money into it, the air ambulance is seen as a life line that is being yanked from the slippery grip of the people by the government.

"I’ll give you this," I say, "you Newfoundlanders are a hardy bunch, you’ll pull through."

He looks at me and laughs.

"Oh ya right, we are hardy," he says, "stubborn too."

Not far from his house, moored along the docks are rusting hulks, a few men mill around a big black Chevrolet truck.

"They’d go out if it were worth it but it ain’t," he says.

"What do they fish," I ask.

"Anything that will pay the bills. They'll stay at it though, they'll find a way."

You know what? I believe him.