Termination Shock

In the summer, Chinook salmon came in from the ocean and swam up the rivers to spawn. This had had the unintended but, to his parents, desirable side effect of lengthening Deep’s school year. His family operated gas stations. They’d started in the 1960s with a single one near Chilliwack, but now had thumbtacks spattered across the map of British Columbia, conjoined by a web of kinship and financial ties. Deep cross-correlated the thumbtacks with topo maps showing the courses of rivers and cajoled his father into taking him on summer expeditions. Father would drop him off by the side of some river with a net, a fishing pole, and lunch, and then go hang out in the back room of a gas station with a cousin or a brother while Deep rambled up and down the riverbank figuring out where the salmon were, and attempting to catch them. By that point in their life cycle, they did not make for very good eating. But as he got older, and these trips lengthened from day hikes to overnight camps, he ate them anyway, cooking them over smoky fires that he taught himself how to kindle in wet wood.

It was on the return leg of such a trip that his uncle Dharmender bestowed on him the nickname that stuck. Deep had come into Dharmender’s gas station smelling of fish and smoke, and been dubbed “Lox.” In Punjabi it was rendered “Laka” but pronounced similarly. It was a weird nickname. But he needed one, because there were a lot of people in his world named Deep Singh—three of them in his elementary school alone.

Laks’s father was a pious and loving man who never quite bounced back from the realization, which came to him when Laks was about twenty, that his son was never going to get any formal education beyond the high school diploma he already had. Laks’s interest in fish was not going to lead to a career as a wildlife biologist. Fisherman was more likely. He took summer jobs on commercial fishing boats up and down the coast: basically unskilled labor, perfect for a brawny and energetic teenager. At the beginning this was couched as “saving money for college.” But Laks was not college material. He was an exceptional athlete, but no university would award him a scholarship for the sports in which he most excelled: snowboarding, and the martial art known as gatka.

Father hid his disappointment well, but not perfectly. It was tough for him. He’d been the first in the family to earn a degree; grandfather had sent him to school so that he could pick up the skills needed to look after the books and handle certain legal affairs for the family business. Uncle Dharmender, on the other hand, took a more pragmatic view of how a young man such as Laks might make his way in the world. Without seeming to be overly judgmental he pointed out that working on fishing boats was dangerous, exhausting, and seasonal. Might it be just the lowest rung on a ladder?

If so, a next rung was within reach. Fishing vessels, like most other commercial ships, were made of steel, or sometimes aluminum. Repairs and improvements were made by cutting metal plates to shape using an oxyacetylene torch or a plasma cutter, then welding them together.

Laks learned how to weld. Uncle Dharmender encouraged him to take training courses and obtain the necessary certifications. By the time Laks’s high school classmates had made it out of college and entered the job market, he was already pulling down a solid income. He still worked on fishing boats when that was in season, but during the rest of the year he picked up welding jobs all over British Columbia and ranging into the oil sands of Alberta. The money was good. Laks had no loans to pay off, no dependents to support. He had all the time he wanted to go snowboarding in the mountains of British Columbia and to practice his martial art.

A foundational practice of Sikhism was the operation of langars: kitchens where any person of any religion, or no religion at all, could obtain a free meal merely by showing up at the appointed time. A typical langar operated on a fixed schedule and was based out of a gurdwara—a word usually translated as “temple” or “church.” From time to time, though, members of a gurdwara might set up a temporary, pop-up langar at the site of a disaster, or any place where a lot of people were going hungry for some reason.