Life / My Generation
Chapter 4: Exile and Exploration
Just for the sake of argument, let's put it not in this old cabin, for old cabins decay in time, and decaying old men have no longer the stamina (though, at last, all the time in the world) for putting things back together again - filling the woodshed, pruning the fruit trees, dusting and washing all the surfaces exposed to time and insects and dust, hauling feed and manure, digging out waterbars on the driveway, servicing the truck - not that any of those jobs is impossible, but the load of keeping up with it all . . .
So we find me in the city - not just any city, but a nice one, a relatively clean and congenial one, comparable to a San Francisco or a Portland or a Seattle or Vancouver in their better days of I don't know when, or even a Prince Rupert or Nelson or, let's be realistic, the old folks capital of the world (no, not Tempe, Arizona): Victoria, BC Within walking distance of Butchart Gardens and the salt sea, in touch with that genial pace of olde Englande, and the warming trends of the Japanese current . . . There I sit in my small house with a surviving wife or live-in housekeeper, or in my room in the nursing home . . . sure, let's take it right down to the end, like that. And the young fellow living in the house that I built on the site of New Roots Land Settlement Society, 1980s, comes exploring for the old pioneer, wondering what went wrong.
"Charlie and Jan," he tells the earnest young fellow who looks and acts like he's just sprung from journalism school, "had all the dreams in the world to kill on that particular piece of property," the old man begins by way of answer . . .
But no, that's my story to tell, by now well ripened and ready for the eating. Let us reserve, rather, for the old man the stories of my life prior to that failed experiment (though in a sense my life is a series of failed experiments; for how else would I have been motivated to move on toward improvements, both external and internal?). And let me be that earnest young man (though I am neither young nor earnest any longer, but rather middle-aged and lackadaisacal about any such venture smacking of a mission to discover the truth about anything, even myself . . .
Thus I arrive, playing the quester. "Old man," I begin, mocking him in his tattered blanket and wheelchair, as he sits wheezing in the salt air on the edge of his deck - for a moment I'm tempted, just to hear him croak, to give him a shove toward the edge - "who are you, anyway? Was it worth it, all the effort you put into living all those years? Can you make any sense of it now? Could you have done it all differently, and still ended up where you are now?" I know all the answers to these questions, but I goad him, just to hear how he decides to handle me.
He smiles, his eyes twinkling out of a mass of wrinkles. "I remember," he begins, "standing in front of the mirror in my parents' bedroom when I was eight years old . . ." The tales of his life begin. Now I've got him started. So I can surreptitiously slide around behind him and out the door; I've got business to attend to elsewhere on the island this week, an article I'm writing on the preservation of the last stands of old growth forest. He'll be fine. He'll ramble on, like a talking doll when you pull the long cord once. He doesn't need me anymore.
But as soon as I leave the room, he nods off. It's a controlled environment of sorts: dreaming.
He rolls up the windows to reduce the airflow: too turbulent for the interior music, turning it to gray noise. He turns up the sixties jazz, and cruises past the Balfour ferry turnoff, just catching as he passes the likeness of Thomas and son, Guatemalan refugees of long ago who now watch the Canadian traffic in all its cloudy glare and blare, and committed to his modern motion, leaves them in the dust.
He glides past the burnished lake, surrounded in the golds and rusts of
the waning year, with the day of doom approaching, the warlord-stinkbug-king
of a cowboy president leering . . . he doesn't care any more. He has found
his own society, where he is going home: the crowned gravel road in fast
forward full of walkers, skiers, horse sleigh, pony cart, donkeys plodding
or horses galloping, rattletrap cars and funky old trucks, tractors, mail-vans,
hay loads, joggers and cyclists . . .
The jazz starts twisting into sounds of a generation not yet born, but rattling
into the future nevertheless in an old
green car on wobbly wheels and engine primed for speed. The sky clears
to a frozen vault high above, sending down shafts of icy air . . .
. . . to come, to come. Gone, the lazy days in goat pens and garden paths.
Gone, last spring's streams in silent snow. Now already, falling leaves
and bitter buds, and searching sweetness in the call and laughter of young
things brought on the breeze. The eleventh hour. Still time.
The muscles tensed, the bodies poised, in mid-air, straining, stretching,
motionless, powerful, light and graceful, balancing.
Down at the theatre steps last Thursday, as it were, in San Francisco:
we thought the car was lost, or stolen: only we were too drunk to find it.
Called the police even. No, it hadn't been towed. They found it finally,
or it found us. Ain't it fun?, we said.
Back into the water he plunges, swimming: the long transcendental crawl out toward the middle of the lake from Bulmer's beach, surrounded by mountains and sky; floating above hundreds of feet of depth which seems to match the reach of the sky above; kicking spray up into the air, savoring the warmth of the surface, four weeks in the making in a mid-summer hot spell; with the bathers all pink-skinned and unclothed on the now-distant beach, the kids playing on log-boats. Alone he floats, held upon the wide breast of the waters, buoyant as a human feather, under rippling sun. The depth and breadth of it goes so far that he can feel his distance from all earth mass and solid rock. He is suspended at a far greater height than over any ocean shelf, hundreds of feet perhaps, as he heads out to the middle, where the molten metallic surface stretches all the way to the horizon southward, and ends in the glaciers to the north. Meanwhile birds circle overhead, waiting for him to turn into a small fish. Then -
He walks along his driveway, choosing green again. The bright yet dark hue of the small leaves of kinnickinick and prince's pine smile up at him, joined by the darker-yet brilliance of the oregon grape, the already-September paling of the thin grass blades, the overhead needles of fir and the mottled texture of cedar swaying fan-like over his head. More subtly, because half-hidden, the pads of moss here and there, underneath things, beckon him. He floats through the lacy bracken, and the furry leaves of thimbleberry, and the little coin-shaped shuddering leaves of the long-stemmed dogwood. Farther down the cleared dirt drive, his mouth is drawn toward the tender shoots bearing leaves of the Douglas or vine maple - like the thimbleberry in shape but smoother, with a glossier patina; then the two-toned raspberry, the thickly frilly fronds of asparagus gone to seed. Lightly now he weaves through the varied shades of the fruit-tree leaves - cherry, apple, peach, apricot, pear and plum; eyes the dark low leaves of the drying strawberry plants, in wildly profuse clumps; and then he finally lifts off and soars into the distance, toward the darkened waves of fir on the ridges across the lake, which send up a jagged sentinel line against the western sky. He wonders, will I clear it, or will I fall short?
