The Seaway Hotel Tactical Withdrawal of '87

November 1987. I was laying commercial carpet tile in Sault Ste. Marie. Pure desperation. A concrete man has no business touching glue-down synthetics, but the economy was soft.

I was staying at the Seaway Hotel near the bridge. I met a woman in the lounge who drank rye and water and talked extensively about her ex-husband's bankrupt snowmobile dealership.

Naturally, I hid my seventy-pound burgundy Snap-on box in the bottom dresser drawer of my room. You do not leave grip-in-mold steel in the back of a truck in the Sault overnight. That box held my father’s offset driver and a ball-peen hammer cracked perfectly up the middle.

Things escalated. Around 4:00 AM, the woman suggested we move to Wawa and start a commercial laundering business. I realized I was in immediate danger of a second marriage.

I executed a tactical withdrawal. I quietly laced up my boots, grabbed my jacket, and walked out to the idling six-cylinder before the sun came up. I did not look back.

By the time I hit Batchawana Bay, the adrenaline crashed. Cold reality set in. The dresser drawer.

I had left my actual limbs at the Seaway. People ask if I ever think about the woman. I don't even remember her face. But thirty years on, I still wake up in a cold sweat, reaching for a fish tape coiled perfectly like a set of rosary beads.