Life / My Generation
Exile and Exploration
On the Road Again
Preparing for the trip across Canada to Quebec, and for the possibility of living there at least for part of August with Joanne, I stocked my summer reading list with books written in French. But lacking the patience to work through the still-unfamiliar language word by word, my approach to the reading was more along the lines of the research-scan - skimming and swimming in the feel and flow of the language, just to hear the music and catch the drift.
Otherwise, the English-language titles I read formed a curious pastiche of hope and despair. On one hand was the sunny political tract by Presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? and Thomas More's original Utopia. Ranging into the ironic were Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and Joseph Heller's disappointing followup to Catch-22, a suburban tragi-comedy called Something Happened. Julio Cortazar broke formalistic ground with his randomly plotted Hopscotch; and I fleshed out the dark side of 1976 with Buried Alive (Janis Joplin's biography), and other such titles as In the Country of the Waking Dead and A False Spring.
Off we went in the Rabbit, through the mountains and prairies, all the way to Toronto with the leisurely but steady pace of a month's camping. Midway, in Winnipeg, we were treated to the spectacle of modern parliamentary democracy, in the form of a visit to the Manitoba legislature. The chamber was empty but for a dozen or so diehards, or should I say blowhards, who debated with catcalls and slander the proposition of increasing tourism through a giant statue of a blueberry, which invited odious comparison with the Paul Bunyan syndrome just across the border.
In Toronto my charmed path of synchronistic meetings cropped up once more. Joanne and I were in the middle of the city looking for the post office, when I saw an elderly man walking toward us on the sidewalk. As he approached he became more and more familiar to me, until finally when we were face to face I said, "Earle?"
"Yes . . . ?" he replied in a deep and sonorous voice. It was the voice of the poet.
I introduced myself, telling him that I had just done a master's with his work as my focus. He chatted with us briefly and said he was on his way to a screening at the National Film Board, right around the corner. A film maker had just done a series of shorts to accompany some of Birney's poems. He graciously invited us to come along for the viewing, and we happily accepted, exchanging addresses afterwards in order to continue a future correspondence.
Then it was on to Quebec, back to the unimportant plane of two travelers fresh out of university, looking for jobs and having a glimpse of the wide, wide land. Though Joanne had a plan in mind to focus her job search in Quebec in the end, we wanted meanwhile to see the easternmost provinces during our summer trip, so we continued on to New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia.
Our second day in New Brunswick, the good fortune of the encounter with Earle Birney came rolling around to bad fortune in the form of a minor car accident in Shemogue. Minor, in the technical sense; but the psychological effect on Joanne, with the damage to her precious pet Rabbit, was rather harsh.
There had been a bad thunderstorm the night before. In the morning we had a big argument. Were we going over to PEI today - or indeed at all - or spending the day instead touring down to Fredericton, and then . . . what? It was hard to get anywhere when Joanne was in one of her admittedly "perverse" moods. She seemed to genuinely relish the conflict, fighting for fighting's sake.
I had a strong premonition in the morning, that we should just stay put another day until the weather cleared and our desires became more harmoniously attuned.
But no, it was her car, when it came down to it, and she wanted to push on.
Actually I was my usual wishy-washy self until the end of the discussion, but when she pushed me finally into taking a stand, I opted for staying put. It was then that she expressed her preference for leaving, and threatened to leave me behind if I didn't want to come along.
So of course I agreed to go, but an hour later at a narrow bridge we stopped for a construction crew, and then proceeded cautiously across, but the big dump-truck operator didn't see us and backed right into us. The impact crushed the passenger door next to me, but the truck continued pushing us into the side of the bridge until finally the driver realized what was going on and stopped.
Neither of us was hurt, but as we sat there digesting what had just happened, Joanne started to cry. It was somehow my fault, for delaying our departure that morning, or not seeing the flagman at the bridge, or something. Did it matter? It was always my fault, even if Joanne was the driver.
That night we consoled ourselves by buying fresh lobsters for dinner.
In Quebec City my halting academic French was quite inadequate, but I quickly began replacing it with the authentic street speech I heard all around me. English was not particularly popular in the capital of PQ (Province du Quebec), especially in 1976, during the ascendancy of the separatist Parti Quebocois (also called PQ), whose chief platform was legislating the primacy of French over English in the province.
While there I applied for the most promising job opportunity to date, a teaching position with CSNQ, the Northern Quebec school board, in an Inuit village in the Quebec arctic. Aside from its exotic appeal as an alternative to the mainstream southern education system and culture, the salary was lucrative; and Joanne was applying as well since there were multiple job openings.
The chief obstacle was my US citizenship. By law the job had to be advertised across Canada for three weeks after my application, in case any other qualified Canadian wanted it. I raised the possibility of coming to the North with Joanne if she got hired and I didn't (maybe I could begin writing that great American/Canadian novel . . .), but again, she would have none of it. I had to take another look at my other basket of eggs.
Once my family in Baltimore informed me that I had been accepted at Washington State, complete with a teaching assistantship, the choice was clearly narrowed. The English department had even mailed textbooks so that I could get acquainted in advance with what I was going to be teaching.
Midway through August, with the CSNQ job still tied up waiting for a work visa clearance, I had to make a move to secure the Washington State possibility. I took the train to Baltimore. From there I used my old favorite family car, the green '68 Ford, to drive out West again, stopping by at Steve's house in Montana as a temporary base. Finally I completed the final leg to the campus, down the winding Lolo valley of Idaho, through the mountains and across the river to . . . wheat fields.
It was a rude Woody Allen joke. It was an alternate universe. It was . . . an impossibility. While I had presumed a continuous bioregion extending across the state border, in fact the landscape changed dramatically from mountains and forests to an ocean of wheat. Pullman, the seat of the WSU campus, was a farm town. There were rolling hills, but they were all covered, as far as the eye could see, with wheat.
I drove, dispirited, to the next town to get the required car insurance and plates. I called Joanne for any news of the teaching jobs. She had been hired and was due to fly north in a week. She wished me well.
I checked into the English department office to collect my teaching schedule, and met some of the other members of the department. They were all very nice, genteel, hospitable, and so on . . . but the rebel force within me was rising with each sight of tweed, each sniff of academic dust, each glance out the window to the wheat, the all-encompassing wheat.
Beginning to panic, I phoned Joanne daily. Still no word. The job was still unfilled, but the school board could not act until they had clearance from immigration. On the night of the full moon I hiked up a draw where I found a few trees, on to a ridge, looking for a sign of what to do. Simply to remain patient was untenable. There was more that had to be done.
I saw a tattered piece of cloth waving from a slender tree on the ridge, flying in the breeze in the full moonlight. This was, I knew somehow, enough to tell me my destiny. It was an emblem of freedom, the freedom I needed to extract myself from the safe and shuttered existence that awaited me on the wheatfields below.
The next day I phoned home, and my parents informed me that my work visa had cleared. With relief and determination mixed with some guilt and polite regret, I went to the English department to explain my decision. Though I had already signed a contract for the year, I pleaded for forgiveness under the circumstances. I had to be with my fiance, I lied; and the chance to teach in the Arctic was a unique opportunity I could not in good conscience turn down. They had sympathy for my case and let me go with good wishes, a week before classes began.
What they and I did not know was the coldness of the reception that would await me when at last I joined Joanne in Inoucdjouac, a thousand miles north of Montreal. The "hustle" mode that Joanne enjoyed so much was in full swing, with a couple of other single white male teachers already on the scene. Not that it was their fault. It was just the beginning of another chapter in the rocky romance, a symptom of the seven-year itch.
