Large Fierce Mammal

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”  ~ Zen saying

Much has been written about what people believe in. This article is exclusively about something my life experience has led me not to believe in – coincidence. Too many times I have found myself, through a seemingly random sequence of events and apparently capricious decisions, at a place and at a time where I was obviously supposed to be.

Divine intervention? Destiny? Kharma? Every system of belief, ancient or modern, abandoned or currently adhered to, has its own descriptives but whatever you call it, observant, thinking people throughout human history have always been aware that many things don’t simply “happen”. So, dear reader, to illustrate my point, I offer you the story of a very important Snowflake.

A snowflake forms thousands of feet above the ground and makes its way, riding the many risings and fallings and seemingly random swirling pathways of the wind, to land exactly where it was meant to. In the practice of Zen archery, it is understood that as long as the archer does what is required in the moment, the arrow will strike its mark.

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While I could obviously go back further into history, I find it isn’t necessary and choose instead to begin this story on 22 August 1915, the day my maternal grandfather, Frank Winton Zinck, native of East Chester Nova Scotia, was approved for service with the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force, precipitating his embarkation for Europe where he immediately discovered that people he hadn’t even been introduced to were trying to kill him. To the right is the front page of his “Attestation Paper” filled out at the time of his medical acceptance as being fit for duty.

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Page two at left lists his height as 5 feet, 7 and a quarter inches, his chest girth when fully extended as 37 inches with a range of expansion of 4 inches. His “complexion” (sic) is listed as “Irish”, his eyes as hazel, and his hair as dark brown.

Signed by a Captain in an illegible hand, the medical officer declares, “I have examined the above-named Recruit and find that he does not present any of the causes of rejection specified in the Regulations for Army Medical Services.

“He can see at the required distance with either eye; his heart and lungs are healthy; he has the free use of his joints and limbs; and he declares that he is not subject to fits of any description.”

Ah, that this should be said of all of us.

Family history states that Frank Zinck was an exceptional marksman who was tapped to perform the function of “sharpshooter”. We use the term “sniper” today. This singular skill saved him from the madness of the human wave attacks that characterized the battles of “The Great War” by putting him in positions of concealment from which he took the lives of the enemy careless.

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The photo at right shows a German gas attack as seen from the air. German lines are clearly visible on the right; people like my grandfather are down wind on the left. On a particularly important day in his life, a preparatory bombardment by German artillery caved in a trench wall and buried him alive shortly before the follow-up gas attack swept over his position. Unconscious and nearly suffocated, but saved from exposure to the gas by the earth that had covered him, he was rescued by Canadian troops searching for survivors after the attack had been repelled, only because one of them happened to spot the sole of his boot.

On that day, and on many days afterward, I came close to nonexistence.