Lands and Forests

by Andrew Forbes

In three weeks the water would rise. How would it change us?

  My house was already gone: smooth, chalky earth lay where it had stood. I was living in a motel. The few belongings I couldn’t wear—tools, mostly—were in a distant cousin’s garage, ten miles up the highway.

  That afternoon, Lester Smart told me in confidence that his business was growing scarce. It was a trend that had continued for some time now, Smart said, as though people didn’t trust the government’s assertion that the water would spare the dairy, and the roads necessary to support it. Then he paused, as though unsure he should be telling me these details. He continued: “I lose money. I’ve never lost money at this. But I stay, Holland. I couldn’t think of doing anything else.”

  I asked, “But how long can you continue to support that? Staying open for the sake of it?”

  “Not for the sake of it, Holland, for the sake of the people. And I can sustain it long enough, don’t you worry.”

  I knew immediately that Smart’s wasn’t the only business so afflicted. Even the towns above the flood line were dying. It bolstered in me the desire to leave. Leave and take Poppy with me. I knew it earlier in the morning, in the sagging bed, but could not say it to her. I feared her reaction. I knew she felt tied to this place, securely moored in its slow current, and that staying was, for her, an act of loyalty to Alex, to his memory. But I wanted her to feel, as I did, kicked loose, adrift.

  ***

  On the first of July, 1958, they blew the last cofferdam. A crew foreman stood nervously by as the prime minister rose on a temporary stage before a large crowd and a battery of cameras. The Right Honourable John Diefenbaker bent at the waist and, using a prop plunger, co-operated in creating the illusion that he was an expert in explosive demolition. A quarter of a mile away, two engineers, crouched next to a dump truck with a radio link to the foreman back on the stage, used real plungers to set off a series of charges that weakened the seemingly haphazard pile of rubble which held the river at bay.

  A confused sound rose from the crowds assembled on both sides of the river, well back from the edge behind lines representing the shoreline of the seaway being born before our eyes. It was a mix of cheers and sobbing, of thrill and disbelief.

  For months the date had been fixed in our minds. Everything on hold, everything waiting. Now it came, amid the hum of idling machinery, maybe the far-off rumble of rising water, and even the birds seemed nervous, darting, as before a storm. The crickets stopped their droning.

  Downriver, where they had cleared away whole towns—the trees and spires and telephone poles, as well as the houses, schools, barns, shops—sat old foundations, like floor plans drawn in stone, silently awaiting the water.

  I stood very still. In my heart mingled elation and fear. Poppy was at my side, twisting her feet in the dry earth, and Evey was leaning into her mother’s leg. We made our way through the murmuring crowd back to my Dodge and drove to the Sturges house.

  We were silent for a long while, sitting again in the kitchen while Evey played quietly. Something in me was ratcheted up, some tension, a fear that the water would soon overtake us. I felt it on my skin. I was bothered, you might say.

  “I don’t see a single damn reason to stay, Poppy,” I finally said. It was the latest instalment in a conversation we’d been having for weeks, one that tended to start up again at dispersed intervals and, since it had no clean solution, end quickly.

  “I can’t go,” she said. “I can’t take Evey away from here. It’s all I know.”

  “You can know more.”

  “Please, Holland. So you get this uncle to get you a job and you’re set up. Wonderful. What do I do in Toronto? The name alone scares me. What kind of a life does Evey get?”

  “Something new. There’s nothing new here.”

  “Be fair, Holland. I can stay at Smart’s and you can open a garage. There’s chances.”

  “And we can watch all those chances float by us, day after day. Before long we’ll die here, Poppy, and nothing will have changed.”

  “And that’s the worst thing in the world, is it? Maybe having you in my life is all the change I needed.”

  That night the temperature dropped, as though the still-rising waters brought with them a new climate. I woke early and crept downstairs, the hair standing on my neck. I opened the window above the kitchen sink. Half-eaten crab apples, chaff scattered in the wind. I stood at the sink, filling the coffee kettle. It was an unarticulated belief of mine that the nature of a given day was determined in large measure by the quality of the first sip of coffee. On this cool Wednesday, I made a large pot so there would be some left for her. Upstairs, she and Evey slept on.

  That afternoon, from a pay phone off the highway, I called my uncle.

  ***

  Inundation took three days. Three days to wash away better than a hundred years of enterprise.

  At the end of those three days, there was an enormous lake, and a new waterway. In the new towns the sawdust still hung in the air. It was no biblical deluge, no great, sudden wave, but a slow and deliberate editing of landscape. You could check it in the morning and go away for a while, and when you looked again you might not be certain the water had risen, until you began to remember the things you had seen before that you could not see any longer. Gradually it rose, ineluctable and ordained—a flood decreed by legislation, enacted by determination.

  On the third day, I left.

  ***

  There is nothing to call it but cowardice. Cowardice and panic. I let those things guide me west, to Toronto.

  I started in the McCowan Yard in mid-August, maintaining streetcars, the big shed there like the inside of a blast furnace. By the time the leaves turned, my life felt like a separate existence, completely turned over, not much connected at all to the one I had left in Loucksville.

  I was distracted, at least, in Toronto. I repaired streetcars. I lived alone. I ate alone. The exigencies of constructing this new life for myself didn’t allow much time to reflect on the question of happy or not happy.

  My time with Poppy was an unresolved note. I expected she was hoping I’d return, and I hoped she would join me in the city, simply ring my bell one day. But neither of us capitulated. I came to believe that it had been too great a time—two months which had felt like two years—and it no longer seemed possible to contact her at all. That’s how it is when life is complicated by too many details.

  I did not see, right away, how my life would feel in the days afterwards. Laid out like a plain, spreading. A delta.

  I came to it only later, gradually.

  I was in a bachelor apartment on Bloor Street, preparing coffee. The water from the faucet was cloudy. My mechanic’s coveralls hung on a hook by the door. The streets were still quiet, the light soft. The grounds were stale.

  And I saw that I had lost everything.

  That every last thing of value had ebbed from my life, been swept clean away. Gone in the hard way of losing, as of things washed down in a flood.

  But so, too, had ten thousand other people watched the land they knew get covered over. And now they watched international shipping glide overtop their old lives. Towns were gone, new ones had been built. Cemeteries were either moved or lost. Businesses relocated or simply ceased to exist.

  In the downriver run of a life, rushing from the source to the great, limitless whole, there are innumerable turns, changes in course. A decision, or a missed opportunity. For the most part they are inexplicable. They simply are.

  The new waterway had given me a new life—one I hadn’t wanted. But it was the one I had. And though I was well installed within it, it did not prevent me from picturing how things might have otherwise been.

  I could imagine myself still in Loucksville.

  I could see Poppy there, and Evey.

  The three of us in the kitchen of Poppy’s house, where from the window above the sink I could just barely see a sliver of the water. Silently, in the bluster of an autumn afternoon, a freighter
slipping west, loaded perhaps with ore, on its steady way to Duluth, or to Detroit, there to be made into something new.

  The Outlet

  IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON when they motored into the Outlet, on an aluminum fourteen-footer they’d put in at the north end of Charleston Lake at seven-thirty that morning. A Friday at the end of June, just ahead of the long weekend. The roads and waterways would soon be choked with celebrants, travellers, families.

  Weston Hill was quietly anxious to get the weekend started. But first he had to finish creeling the anglers’ hauls. It was an exercise aimed more at training his tagalong for the day, a summer-student hire named Cara Franklin, than at collecting any useful figures. Hill understood this was an opportunity to shepherd a future Natural Resources employee. It would require a bit of talking, and he was better at showing than saying, but he would call up the words as required.

  One of the first things he said to her, before she had a chance to take her first sip of coffee, was, “I knew your dad.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cara said politely. “Lots of people did.”

  “He was good. A good CO.”

  “I know he loved it.”

  “That was clear,” said Hill. “It showed. In what he did. The way he did things.”

  ***

  Cara was an only child, born when Bob Franklin and his wife, Geena, were both nearing forty. Bob took retirement at fifty-five, when Cara was busting to get her driver’s licence, and he kicked around the house awhile, going fishing more mornings than he didn’t and getting home as Cara was leaving for school. Then he had a heart attack one afternoon and died in the ambulance.

  Whereas her mother hobbled on like it was a leg she’d lost instead of a husband, Cara spent a year or so in utter despair, thinking there really wasn’t any way to recover. Then suddenly, one day, she discovered that there was. She knew, without knowing how she knew, that weathering grief was just something a person did. The fact of it began to pull at her like a gravitational force, bending her trajectory toward biology and conservation, until she realized that what she intended to do was to follow her dad’s example and become a conservation officer.

  Two years into a biology degree at Queen’s, she applied for a summer position with the Kingston area office of the Ministry. On the phone she was slick and confident, and during the interview she was some best version of herself, assertive and quick to display her fresh knowledge. She was hired, of course, though there were other good candidates, many of them from her program. For all this bureaucracy’s avowed blindness, knowing someone or being someone’s kid was still the best way to find yourself more or less where you wanted to be.

  ***

  They spent the morning intercepting fishing boats, asking about the anglers’ catches, how long they’d been on the water, and in most cases checking the coolers and tanks where the landed fish were kept. The sun charted across a flawless sky. Flies skimmed the water and tried to find their way behind the lenses of Cara’s sunglasses.

  After a bagged lunch, eaten while they were adrift out on the flat water, Hill expressed a desire for ice cream. Cara, assuming he was speaking in the theoretical, offered what she hoped might be interpreted as a polite giggle, but Hill crumpled up his brown paper bag, downed the last of a warm can of iced tea, and swung his leg across the bench so that he was astride it. Then, in a short and violent motion, he pulled at the cord. The Evinrude outboard choked and sputtered and shook, and then caught, jiggling to life beneath them. He throttled up and they were underway. Which was fine with Cara—ice cream sounded good about now.

  “Spot called the Outlet,” Hill said. “Little summertime place.”

  “Great,” called Cara.

  They skipped across the lake’s surface for a few minutes, engine in full whine, until the land began to close in around them. Hill eased off the throttle and they crawled slowly over more shallow water, the treed and rocky shoreline quite near, the occasional building—small shacks and cottages, old boathouses on rotting logs—slumping into the water. After a passage so narrow that wheat-coloured reeds rasped against the boat’s aluminum sides, the water opened up a bit.

  They entered what seemed like a small harbour, maybe thirty or forty yards across, its shoreline crowded with boathouses. At the far end was a public dock, quite busy. On a boat ramp next to the dock, a mean-looking craft was being backed in on its trailer; several more trailers bearing cruisers and bow riders and bass boats waited in the gravel lot just behind. Past the ramp and dock, a small bridge carried a narrow two-lane road over Wiltse Creek, which snaked its way over from the Gananoque River to meet Charleston Lake. This, Cara surmised, was what gave the outlet its name.

  They tied up at the public dock—Cara taking extra care with her clove hitch—and climbed up onto the wooden platform. The dock’s planks were new, its edges clean. She nearly tripped when she caught the toe of her boot on the spare oars stowed against the side of the boat, but recovered herself and stood erect, removing her sunglasses, tucking her floppy green cotton ball cap embroidered with the blue-and-green Ontario Parks logo under her arm. She reached up with her right hand and wiped a flat palm across her damp brow.

  Hill led her up a short path to the side of the road. They waited for a hydro truck to rumble past, then crossed to the combination convenience store/ice cream counter/café, which sat beside the spot where the creek became the lake. As they mounted the three wooden steps at its entrance, the screen door creaked open and then clapped shut. Two teenage girls in bikinis and aviator sunglasses burst out, cradling cold two-litre bottles of Pepsi. They looked local, Cara thought, watching them cross the road in their bare feet. Something about their ease. One of them wore a camo trucker cap, its brim folded severely into a peak, her ponytail pulled through the semicircular hole in the back. Country girls.

  Inside, they waited in line for a family in matching cargo shorts and Toronto Blue Jays tank tops to order soft serve, then bellied up to the glass cabinet to look down at the tubs of ice cream there. Cara went first, at Hill’s silent insistence—a nod of his reddened head toward the counter—and asked for one scoop of pralines and cream in a small cone. Then Hill stepped up, ordered vanilla, two scoops.

  “On me,” he said.

  They went out a second screen door onto a deck with a southern exposure that stood over the creek. There were three plastic tables with faded Coke-branded umbrellas, around one of which sat the family they’d just seen inside. Cara sat down at another, closest to the store’s blue-stained wooden siding, while Hill stood by the flaking white wooden railing and looked out toward the lake.

  She thought he looked more than a little ridiculous. Hill was an enormous, ruddy, thick-legged man in khaki shorts, green rubber boots halfway up his shins, an olive short-sleeved shirt, wraparound angler’s sunglasses, and a broad-rimmed hat on his head. Yet he was bent reverentially, deferentially, over a very small ice cream cone, taking small licks from it, a white dot of ice cream visible on his tongue for a quick moment before it disappeared into his mouth. In his large and toughened mitt, it looked like a kiddie cone.

  The still, warm, slightly rotting scent of the lake came to Cara then on a small puff of wind. It struck her wrong, expecting as she was to smell the cool sweetness of ice cream.

  “Hell’s bells,” Hill said, and took another lick of his cone.

  Cara looked about, as if he was somehow sensitive or perceptive to something that eluded her. She was still at an age where she felt it right, much of the time, to defer to the supposed knowledge and experience of her elders; she hadn’t yet learned better.

  ***

  The truth was, Hill was often uttering quips or non-sequiturs that meant something less than what people might assume. He’d long ago identified deep within himself a nervousness about this inability to register piercing or insightful observations about the world. It was a feeling made worse just now with Cara being as young as she was, and with their professional relationship arranged the way it was, and with her
being Bob Franklin’s kid, and with Bob Franklin being dead. She would be looking to absorb his wisdom, he felt. A kind of surrogacy.

  In general, he found the presence of young people—even his own daughter—moderately unsettling. Such encounters forced him to recover a piece of the person he might once have been. Either he would find the younger person insufferable, or so dazzling as to make plain the difference between his own younger self and the person he had become.

  It was not gradual. Aging. It did not occur piecemeal, but rather came all at once. He woke up one morning and suddenly realized that youth was a thing apart. A distant province—or worse, because at least provinces could be accessed. No, youth was a memory.

  He was already forty-seven and counting the days, literally the days, until retirement. And here, in Cara, was the very sort of person—one so totally unlike him—who would eventually supplant him. It was negation that he feared, at the bottom of it all.

  And his only defence was to make remarks about the weather.

  ***

  A slow-moving cloud—the only one—scudded the sun and seemed to break Hill’s attention. He gobbled the last of his sugar cone, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and wadded it up. Cara, who’d already finished her ice cream, stood and, out of habit, turned to see if she was forgetting anything. Then she followed after Hill down the deck’s wide steps and across the road toward the dock.

  “She’ll be a perfect weekend,” he said. “Sunny. Twenty-five, twenty-seven. Made plans?”

  Shyly, she answered, “Toronto. To meet some friends.”

  And, truthfully, to get a little high.