Travelling Light

by Peter Behrens

  Rick Bean’s horse was Prince Hal, a handsome chestnut gelding, a quarter horse with elegant thoroughbred lines. Prince Hal was by far the best cattle horse on the ranch, just as Rick Bean was by far the best horseman, the only really skilled cowboy, the top hand.

  A few days after the arrival of the Beans, we were to drive six hundred head of cattle from spring to summer grazing. The cattle belonged to three or four ranchers who shared a Crown lease. I had no experience with cattle drives, and no one had time to teach me. An old, slow, fat mare was cut out, a saddle thrown on. I was given a leg up, and that was that.

  To reach summer pasture, the herd had to ford the James River, a tributary of the Red Deer, milky green, chill, and silty with glacial runoff.

  The cattle had been grazing in densely forested hills. Finding them was like a game of hide-and-seek. I concentrated on staying aboard the mare — her name was Buttercup — and getting my legs out of the way whenever she chose to scrape her fat sides against a tree trunk. Buttercup was slow and greedy. She kept stopping to graze and I had to jerk the reins and kick desperately with my heels to keep her moving.

  We were a dozen riders advancing in a ragged line through the bush. I was thrilled, frightened, and anxious not to make a fool of myself. The strategy was to comb the hills slowly, gathering the cattle ahead of us, until we had collected the herd against a barbed-wire fence. Then we would move them down the fenceline, out through a gate, and down the road, headed for the river. Once the cows were on the road, all we had to do was keep them moving. Parked at every crossroads, women and children would keep the animals trotting in the straight line that would eventually bring them to the James. With riders keeping up the pressure, the lead animals would take to the water and the rest would follow. After fording, they would pick up the road on the other side and peacefully walk another mile or so, until a station wagon blocked the route and women carrying willow sticks waved the cows through a gate into a pasture where wind rippled waves of silver-green grass with a noise like bedsheets tearing. That was how it was supposed to happen, anyway, but of course it didn’t.

  The previous winter, still living with my parents and sisters in our Montreal apartment, I had obtained a list of ranchers from the Alberta Stockmen’s Association. I wrote half a dozen letters begging for work. My father had no objection. I was trying to jump-start a life but he thought it was merely a question of a summer job. And he had his own lurking fascination with the West, in some ways deeper and loonier than mine.

  He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1910. His mother was Anglo-Irish, his father German. When war broke out in 1914, his father was arrested and interned for four years at what was called a “concentration camp” for German husbands of British wives, at Alexandra Palace, a failed exhibition hall in north London.

  My father was baptized Hermann Heinrich Lange, an uncomfortable name in wartime England. His Irish grandmother started calling him Billy. She had a son, also Billy, who had emigrated, joined the North West Mounted Police, and disappeared into the wilds of Canada.

  My father left Great Britain for the first time when my grandfather was deported to Germany in 1919, after the Armistice. The family went first to a borrowed apartment in a rat-infested castle in Saxony, then to an apartment in Frankfurt, where Hermann/Billy, the Anglo-Hiberno-Teutonic schoolboy, taught himself the language of Goethe by reading and rereading the best-selling Wild West stories of author Karl May. May had not set foot outside Germany when he wrote them, and he never got farther west than Buffalo, New York, but his best characters — Winnetou, Old Shatterhand — roamed the boiled plains of Texas and the painted deserts of the Southwest, a country more passionately imagined than any Zane Grey described. May wrote of tribes, quests, warrior codes — matters close to the German heart, transposed to a different key, transferred to a North American Wild West. He was Hitler’s favourite author.

  In Montreal, fifty years later, my father could still hear the song May had been singing. He could imagine that he understood my longing to go west. He thought the West would toughen me. So did I — we were both German Romantics, I suppose — and one May morning I finally left home, with a friend, in a battered Ford Pinto we had picked up at a drive-away agency and promised to deliver to a used-car dealer in Calgary. My father was happy to see me go. Did he ever grasp that I was running away from him?

  My bedroom at home was supposed to be the maid’s room. Set apart, off the kitchen, it was the smallest room in our apartment. Pressing a button in the dining room sounded a buzzer in my room, but my parents never had a real maid to ring for, only a succession of part-time nursemaids and au pairs, and by the time my youngest sister was four, the last of the hired help was gone and I inherited the room.

  The morning I left home, he handed me fifty dollars and warned me not to drive at night, when all the nuts would be out on the road. My friend and I covered six hundred miles that first day, stopping long after midnight. We got a six-dollar room in a flophouse above a tavern. Lugging our rucksacks along the corridor, we passed open doors and men sitting on their beds in dingy SRO cells, drinking rye whisky and playing cards with women who were, we imagined, whores. Pronounced hoo-ers in Canada. The women called out to us with scratched, boozy voices but we were too shy to answer them. It was as far from home as I had ever been.

  His beautiful suits were tailored in London or Hong Kong. His shoes, handmade, were arrayed in his closet like a leather regiment, each shoe polished to radiance and rammed with a wooden shoe-tree.

  We were Catholics. One of his rules was Mass on Sunday. A supplementary was jacket and tie. He selected my tweed jackets and chose every tie. On Sunday mornings when I walked up the church path, he walked beside me, throwing me frustrated, compulsive blue-eyed glances. I always tried to ignore them. My mother stood waiting for me to open the door. As I reached for the handle, he got behind me. He made his move. I felt his fingertips on my neck — he couldn’t stop himself, he never could. My spine stiffened, my shoulders twitched. My father turned down the collar of my overcoat and smoothed it flat, and I shuddered, twisted, ducked into church, smouldering with resentment. Hating his touch.

  I do not remember much about the Canada we crossed that spring, only its emptiness and strangeness. And the cowboy boots and lime-green jeans men wore at truck stops in southern Saskatchewan. The coolness of rubber floor mats against my bare feet. The litter of maps, torn and badly folded. My arm hung out the window, my palm cutting and planing on the seventy-mile-per-hour breeze.

  We slept the last night in a field outside Medicine Hat, reached Calgary the next day, delivered the Pinto, and split up, as planned. I caught a Greyhound up to Caroline, Alberta, where I had been promised a job.

  The oil boom of the mid-seventies had created a labour shortage in western Canada, otherwise no rancher would have hired someone like me. Boys raised on farms and ranches were all in Calgary earning twelve dollars an hour as union carpenters on condominium projects, or up on the Athabaska tar sands, operating backhoes the size of buildings.

  It would be understatement to say that I was unprepared for the ranch. In our family there was no masculine tradition of physical labour, craftsmanship, or even general handiness. I never saw my father grasp any tools except a pen and a cigar clipper. We lived in an apartment, with a janitor to fix anything that went wrong.

  I had expected a mythic landscape: stark plains, vast skies, plateaus, knobs of red rock. A singing wind. I’d seen the John Ford movies, and the West I had constructed was, of course, a spiritual condition, not a place. Get tough. Get lonesome. Get hard. It wasn’t Alberta I was aiming for, it was independence. Separation. The freedom to make my own moves, even if they were disastrous.

  I was disappointed that the foothills around Caroline were small and tight — forested demi-mountains not unlike the Laurentian hills north of Montreal, where my father rented us a farmhouse every summer. I had come two thousand miles to be a cowboy in
a landscape that could have passed for Quebec without the ski resorts, without the joie de vivre.

  But Caroline, it turned out, wasn’t much like home after all. The foothills were blanketed with aspen and lodgepole pine, not Laurentian birch and spruce. The James River — speeding, narrow — was heart-shockingly cold, a liquefied glacier. Standing on the roof of the hay barn looking west, I could see the limestone wall that was the Rocky Mountains front range.

  The foothill ranches were small and many of the ranchers were poor. The district had the classic lawless flavour of marginal hill country. On remote sections we would find dead cows on the road with their hindquarters butchered off. Any driver who hit a cow and happened to be carrying an axe or knife in his car would help himself to free beef. Sometimes it wasn’t even legitimate roadkill. We’d find carcasses of animals slaughtered and hastily butchered a hundred yards inside the fencelines.

  Handguns were rare, this being Canada, so people in the beer parlours felt safe to let off steam by brawling. I saw a woman walk up behind her husband, who was sitting at a table — provincial law forbade anyone to drink standing up — and crack his skull open with a bottle of Coca-Cola. There was little traffic on the section roads, which were muddy and hazardous. Cows roamed the roads at night. Firebirds and Trans Ams, driven by nineteen-year-old rig pigs back from a season of drilling on the Beaufort Sea, smashed into ditches, rolled, threw up brilliant scherzos of flame. Pickup trucks —they called them half-tons — flew off bridges and bumped downstream on the current, crunching ashore upside down on gravel bars, spilling drowned cargoes of cowboys and their underage girlfriends. I saw an old man break a horse by bucking it down the main street of Sundre, Alberta, while dragging a couple of truck tires for ballast. This was the middle of the afternoon on an ordinary weekday, and I was the only person who bothered to watch.

  My father worshipped order because his early life had been a scattering, a chaos. When he and his parents crossed France in 1919, heading into Germany, into exile, their suitcases and trunks were looted by railway workers. Everything — silverware, baptismal certificates, clothes, books — was lost.

  My father looked everywhere for certainty and absolute security. He could not really believe they existed, but he couldn’t stop looking. He married a beautiful gambler, one of four famously gorgeous sisters, Montreal debutantes of the thirties. Raven-haired and devout, my mother had acquired a taste for cards and dice at her convent boarding school, the Pensionnat du Saint-Nom-de-Marie. She sharpened her skills by shooting dice at a barbotte, a Montreal gambling joint, and dealing blackjack hands with the redcaps, taxi drivers, and RAF pilots at Dorval Airport, where she had a wartime job booking VIP passengers on the trans-Atlantic bomber shuttle. Years later, kicking back a corner of the living room carpet and kneeling on the floor, she would persuade my sisters and me — we in pyjamas, she in an evening dress — to gamble our allowances, rolling dice with her before she and my father headed out to a ball, a poker game, a dinner à deux in the downstairs bar at Café Martin. She loved the tumbling dice, but she had married a man who would work for the same corporation for half a century. Who never bought a house because he thought real estate too risky. A man who counted the perfectly honed yellow Faber pencils arranged in the top drawer of the desk in his study and interrogated his children if one was missing.

  My father quit Germany the year after Hitler came to power and arrived in Montreal on his British passport. He tried to join the Royal Canadian Navy in 1939 and was rejected for being “too damn German.” His parents lived in Frankfurt throughout the war. In Montreal his business colleagues and German-speaking friends called him Bill. To my mother and her Irish-Canadian family he was Hermann, except when social circles overlapped. Then I often heard her make the shift. “Bill,” she’d say, “pour me another, would you?”

  I don’t know why he had to be Bill to the Montreal Germans and Hermann to the Montreal Irish. I read it as a sign. People usually found my father mildly exotic, slightly misplaced, some kind of elegant foreigner. Wherever he happened to be, it was pretty clear that he was from somewhere else.

  The bush was so thick and tangled that our first sweep of the hills gathered less than half the herd. Each time we pressed a group of animals up against the barbed wire, the friskiest steers jumped the fence and galloped off in all directions. This stirred the rest of the cattle the same way that a few people’s restlessness or recklessness can get a crowd seething and turn a peaceful demonstration into a riot.

  Cold, thick rain began. Horses slipped and skidded, thrashing in potholes so deep that they could be extracted only with ropes and winches. But forage was very thin on the winter side of the river, and the ranchers were unwilling to postpone the drive on account of poor weather, which might last for weeks.

  The rain had brought the James up quickly. By the time the first steers reached the ford, even I could see that the river was running so deep and fast that the animals would have to swim or drown. The riders pushing at the rear hadn’t comprehended the danger and so kept up the pressure. The lead animals were being pressed into a cold, fast current that started sweeping them downstream. I was on a flank near the front, staying as close as I could to Rick Bean, trying not to do anything to make things worse. Rick Bean spurred Prince Hal out into the river. Buttercup and I followed reluctantly. The horses struggled to keep their footing while drowning steers bumped past us. Their faces were tilted up, snorting plaintively, and their wild eyes showed how frightened they were.

  The James, which had been the colour of melted pistachio ice cream, was grey and thick now, a suspension swirling with gravel, tree branches, and mud. The silty water rasped like sandpaper against my leg. The horses kept their feet, barely. Urging Prince Hal across, Rick Bean used his horse’s strength to nudge one of the drowning steers to safety. He dropped a lariat over the stubby horns of another and towed him. I did nothing helpful, just hung onto my mare while the river ripped by us and more bellowing, drowning steers were swept away.

  My father’s politics could be liberal. He had been a refugee. He rarely fired anyone. He believed in taking care of people. He was quite capable of tenderness. I remember arriving in Montreal after driving cross-country, coming in at two or three o’clock in the morning, and finding him in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, waiting up for me. And saying nothing, not a word, only hugging me fiercely, and kissing me.

  He was also domineering, unable to escape his obsession with loss and his need for punctuality, control, certainty. He was ill-suited to raising children aboard an entropic planet. When he thought he was shielding us, he was blocking us. We weren’t getting any light.

  My sisters tried to escape the pressure by becoming best friends with girls from large, warm, tolerant, rich families. My sisters essentially got themselves adopted. We were all searching for ways to begin ourselves.

  My adolescence had been a fog, but during that first hard day of the cattle drives, everything that happened registered clearly. Everything had colour and weight. Aboard an old mare, midstream in the James River, I stepped into my own life.

  The drownings had spooked the herd. They were shying away from the dangerous river, turning, thrusting back up the road. The riders behind finally gave up trying to control them and got out of their way, and the cattle melted back into the bush like a successful guerrilla army.

  I can remember my adolescence without being able to see myself in it. But I can see myself very clearly that afternoon: a thin boy, scared, on an old horse in a fast river. I didn’t do anything brave or useful. I didn’t panic either. And midstream in that noisy little river I realized something: that the world, after all, did not belong to my father. It wasn’t exactly mine either, but if I could hang on, learn a few things, I probably had as much of a claim on it as anyone. At a washed-out ford, in the James River, I think I became a person, finally. Whatever happened from then on would matter. Whatever happened from then on would
stick. I could start accumulating my own history.

  Buttercup and I made it across, but there was nothing much to do on the other side, since no cattle had made it over except the pair of steers Rick Bean had rescued, grazing peacefully in good grass. It would take us days to collect the rest of the herd and try again. Meanwhile Rick Bean rolled two cigarettes from an Export pouch kept dry in his shirt pocket. Then we swam our horses back across and went home.

  At the end of the season I went back to Montreal to start college, but for the next decade my life was focused on the West. I was never away from it for long. My life had opened up like a book fallen off a shelf, splayed on the floor. I picked it up, started reading at the open page, and went on from there. Until I was in my thirties I earned my living from manual labour. Those years had their loneliness, boredom, and frustration, but there was always the next page.

  That tense warrior who was my father? Remember Max von Sydow in Pelle the Conqueror? People used to say that Max/Pelle was my old man in his seventies — the physical resemblance was spooky. In his last years he looked like an old eagle, tattered and fierce, with shaggy white eyebrows and wild eyes glaring out across the lives of his children.

  In my late twenties I began spending winters on the coast of Maine. It was cheap and I could write there. In the spring I would drive back out to Alberta and work for seven or eight months at another harsh outdoor job where I could save up another chunk of money. One year I picked up my father in Montreal and the old man made the long drive west with me.

  He was well behaved. Not too grumpy, even when his knees — ruined in a violent skiing accident in 1940, swollen with scar tissue — were bothering him. I did all the driving. It was thirty years since he had used a standard shift.