Life - Part One
Chapter 2: New Roots
Charlie was four years older than Jan and had gone through the thick of the psychedelic revolution, the days of free dope and free love. Then he'd got his act together - going back to school, and even, for a while, becoming serious about a teaching career. Still, underneath the new leaves, lay the hidden agenda of the revolution: to get back to the land . . .
Jan, meanwhile, had gone straight from a middle-class family to York University, where she met Charlie. For graduation her parents bought her a brand-new Mazda pickup truck - her choice - with a canopy and a dynamite stereo system. After her graduation and Charlie's master's degree, they married, in Jan's family's church in Orillia. And they were hired for their first teaching jobs together, on an Ojibway reserve in northeastern Ontario.
To Charlie those were Golden Days. The pristine wilderness rejuvenated his hopes for the future, that had been fading through the late sixties and early seventies in an overcrowded and overdeveloped United States. Seeing how the native people lived off the land, as they had for generations, was a revelation to Charlie with his largely urban and suburban academic background. He and Jan became part of a tight group of young, like-minded teachers on the small reserve, who had good relations with most of the native Ojibway population. They felt they were doing their part, as educators, to help the world. They also wanted to fit in to the community, and were glad to buy native clothing and handicrafts with part of their earnings. In return they were accepted by the community. When they went to the local store to by groceries, strangers greeted them with broad smiles. They were invited on hunting and camping expeditions out on the land, and to parties and meetings and dances on the reserve. Small girls and boys delivered presents of wild meat and fish to their houses.
Idyllic as the situation seemed, Charlie and Jan came to realize that they would always be outsiders in a native community. After the first year, they took that long camping trip across Canada and discovered, by making a wrong turn off the highway, New Roots Co-op. From then on they wrestled with the question of where they most wanted to be.
It had seemed a dream-valley, wild yet cultivated, with goats grazing in the clearings, deer watching in the woods. There were legendary numbers and sizes of fish in the clear streams and large lake; a moderate climate giving at most a couple of feet of snow; mosquitoes not so bad if you were camped on the beach or behind screen porches or gazebos. Such was the picture that the friendly people at New Roots had painted for the travelers. In their dreams it became a Chinese scroll painting: a landscape sparsely populated by a few rustic figures hiking up to mountaintop retreats along waterfalls, unobtrusive in the corners of the canvas.
In the long and bitterly cold northeast Ontario winters their hothouse memories had flourished, transforming the vision into a living canvas with a full panoply of sensation. By day and by night they imagined themselves immersed in the seasonal cycle of southern BC: the cool freshness of new winter snow on the cheeks, with the temperature only a few degrees below freezing . . . the white-green stillness of the forest punctuated by the tock-tock-tock and the flashing sight of a red-emblazoned woodpecker. The smell of buckwheat pancakes cooking on the woodstove on a morning when it's the day to go out and plant peas, the first thing in the spring garden with the soil steaming amid the crusty remains of the snow. The throaty rumblings of a chainsaw biting through a sixteen-inch fir sawlog, vibrations filling the hands and traveling through every cell in the body. The palpable dustiness of summer, quenched in the twilight by the innumberable warblings and chirpings of frogs and crickets - or by the taste of a huge ripe peach just plucked from the tree, sweet and full of juices that trickle down the corners of the mouth and drip, as you lean over slightly, onto the dark green grass. The tug of a hooked trout on thin line, pulling and jerking and jumping . . . then free, leaving the slack weightless in the water. The sharp tang of a fall morning, or the crying of coyotes in an autumn full moon from their hungry loneliness on the flats. The view from the nearby ridge lookout where down the lake you can see for a hundred miles to the distant hazy peaks . . .
Still, it was hard to turn your back on seveneen thousand dollars a year, doubled.
Then one day, in March of their third year of teaching, their friend Johnny Oldone stuck his head in the front door and invited them to a "meeting" in the center of the village. One of the young band leaders was making an announcement, in Ojibway and English, with the help of a megaphone. "The Provincial Government has not recognized the rights of aboriginal peoples to have control of our lands and resources. They have announced plans for the logging companies to come and build roads through our forests; for mining companies to come and dig in our soil; for tourists to come and hunt and fish the animals we depend on. All of this stealing must stop. Today we are asking all white people to leave the reserve so that we can demonstrate to the Government our self-determination as a people. . . ."
"They've been coached," Charlie said to Jan.
"Hush." She glared at him. She was looking intently at the scene, her face darkened with concern. Was she worried about their welfare, Charlie asked himself, or the Indians' goals in taking this action?
He looked around at the other teachers. Pierre, the firebrand from Quebec, and Lars, the grade five teacher, both smiled at him - as did Johnny Oldone, standing nearby. There were no hard feelings; the action was anything but personal. It was strictly political and as such Charlie (and he assumed the rest of the teachers) would support it fully.
That assumption proved right when Pierre invited Charlie and Jan for a brandy in his trailer immediately following the proceedings. Charlie accepted, listened to Pierre exulting over the boldness of the native people (and the good fortune of an early summer vacation), and returned home on wobbly legs a few hours later to find Jan packing.
At first she was silent; surly, Charlie knew, because he'd been drinking and enjoying himself and she hadn't. Finally she broke down:
"How could they do this to us? Don't they realize what's going to happen to their children's education? There's two months left in the year! Lizzie Crow was just beginning to read on Friday. And what about our contracts?"
The school board agreed to honor their contracts to two-thirds of full pay for the lost months of teaching, in the agreement worked out with the union. The teaching year was effectively over, so Charlie and Jan happily took the free time and traveled a leisurely route through the southern United States, sightseeing and camping along the way, making a large loop back toward BC where they would try to establish themselves on that special piece of land they'd discovered in the summer of '78.
Nothing they saw along the way could compete. Their conversations were devoted to plans for gardens, orchards, animals, buildings; for swimming and hiking and snowshoeing. The passing scenes were overlaid with the rich colors of their remembered destination.
Still, they'd made their plans this way, to travel the long way around. As the trip dragged on, each blamed the other; but neither wanted to give up the itinerary. The fact was, both Charlie and Jan preferred to arrive at New Roots when it was nearly summer, so they could experience it as they remembered it.
While camping in Mississipi in a mostly deserted state park in early May, they met another Canadian couple traveling there, from Manitoba. Beth and her Arab friend, Mouloud. Jan took a liking to Mouloud right away (she was always attracted to the exotic or non-middle-class) and, for his part, Charlie found the way Beth sat in her sheer summer clothing rather provocative, and therefore appealing.
He recalled a lengthy discussion they'd had only days before, about extramarital affairs. Jan admitted to a few nights with Pierre and one with Johnny Oldone since their marriage, and other isolated occasions before that sacred compact. Charlie had been faithful since the wedding but incurred Jan's envy for his more wide-ranging experience in the years before their relationship. The upshot of the recent discussion was a clarification of where they stood: that either one was free, as a matter of policy so to speak, to have sexual relations with another person.
Now as Charlie watched the Arab's dark eyes darting more and more frequently to Jan, as he saw Beth with her spread legs and arching chest and as the conversation around the campfire turned to matters of relationship, he was convinced that the opportunity to try out the new policy had arrived.
"So you're, kind of just traveling together?" Jan asked, whether to Beth or Mouloud Charlie could not tell.
Beth had short, bobbed blond hair, blue-green eyes and a small, lithe body giving emanations of a Celtic sprite. She answered Jan, "We do kind of live together back in Winnipeg, off and on. Mouloud and I are both students there. We're not allowed to share rooms officially, but, you know . . ." Now Beth was looking at Charlie - such an innocent face, he almost doubted what her body was telling him.
Mouloud, meanwhile, had drawn himself closer to Jan, his arms around his knees. He seemed nervous, and kept looking at Beth. She was blase, as if nothing was going on.
Maybe nothing was. Maybe it was all in Charlie's imagination. He had a sudden inspiration. "Hey, have you ever tried Mezcal?"
Beth looked at Mouloud. He looked at Charlie, his heavy eyebrows hunched over a large, hawklike nose. "You, mean, the mescaline?"
"No," Charlie laughed. "It's just a kind of alcohol, like tequila. I think it might be made from the same cactus as mescaline, but anyway, it's not for tripping on - just having fun." Charlie got the bottle from the trunk of Jan's car. "See, there's a little worm in the bottle."
"What happens if you eat the worm?" Beth asked.
"Only one way to find out. But first, you have to get to the bottom. Do you want cups?"
The morning dawned foggy and humid, chiggers hovering at the mesh of Beth's tent. From the next tent Charlie heard Mouloud groaning. What was Jan doing to him? Charlie didn't care to guess. Beth took his hand and put it on a tender place. He rolled over to her. Sometime this little experiment was going to end - probably sometime soon. But for now . . . it was all Charlie could ask for. The have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too theory of life, proved firsthand.
Two days later on the drive out of Mississippi Jan snarled, "I never want to see chiggers again."
"What's the matter, you didn't enjoy yourself? It certainly sounded like you were. And I didn't see you out of that tent much."
"That's because you were too busy, yourself."
"What are you mad about?" Didn't we have an agreement?"
"Yeah; it's called marriage."
"Wait a minute - " Charlie swerved around a wild turkey crossing the road. "I'm talking about our discussion of a week ago - our new 'policy.'"
"Yeah, well, it depends on how you do it."
"What do you mean? How do you 'do it,' with that Arab?"
"His nationality has nothing to do with it. And besides, I don't 'do it' with him any more. It's past."
Charlie was really puzzled. It was hard to concentrate on the driving. On the other hand, maybe he was just hungry. Make me a sandwich, will you?"
"What am I, your slave?"
"God, what's got into you? We make each other sandwiches all the time while we're driving!"
"But it's how you ask. Not 'Make me a sandwich, will you!'"
"I didn't use that tone of voice."
"Anyway."
"Anyway, what?"
"Anyway, I can tell, you've changed, after being with that little bitch."
"Oh-ho, so that's it. It's fine for you to get fucked to your heart's content by some Arabian stallion or Pierre or Johnny or his friends or - "
"Fuck you! . . ."
They almost had an accident, during Jan's tirade. Charlie pulled the Mazda - Jan's truck, she reminded him - into the next rest area and parked, and began to make himself a sandwich. When the 'conversation' resumed it seemed clear that the new policy was going to need some fine-tuning. Until they could gain some perspective on the recent trial run, it seemed best to suspend all such experiments, in favor of conventional monogamy.
Just before arriving in the Galena valley, Charlie and Jan had another long discussion about their plans for the following year. The school board usually needed to know by the end of May if teachers planned to return the following year. They'd been out of touch with them since April, and it was now early June. Though their plan was to stay in BC if possible, they had no certainty of acceptance on the Co-op or in the Kingsley's school. If they really preferred BC, Charlie argued, they should let the other option pass: "We should just do it."
Jan took a more circumspect position. "What if it doesn't work out there? We only met the people once. There might be different people there now. And even if we are accepted, what happens if we can't work at their school? How are we going to make a living?"
"We have some savings. . . ."
In the end the obvious fact remained: they could not very well make a commitment to the Ontario school board if their intention was to stay in BC Charlie was ready to do just that to appease Jan's insecurity, but she felt it was too unethical and reluctantly she agreed to make the best of what came their way in BC
"I think I'm ready for a break, anyway, from that Indian band," she added. "It's time to find our own roots on the land."
