The pilot-book nicely reinforced the point made in the essay “On the Cultural Track of the Sasquatch” by Wayne Suttles. “I do not think we can assume that Indian categories are the same as Western ones. I see no evidence of a dichotomy of ‘real’ vs. ‘mythical’ or ‘natural’ vs. ‘supernatural’ in Coast Salish thought.” Between familiar creatures like the bear and the mink, and fantastic ones like the thunder-eagle and the double-headed, flying sisiutl, there stretched a smooth continuum of increasing rarity, ranging from seen-most-days-by -ordinary-people to seen-very-infrequently-and-only-by-persons-with-special-gifts. The sasquatch lay somewhere mid-continuum, and quite often was glimpsed by lay observers. Beyond it lay the pantheon of even stranger beings; animals capable of instant self-transformation, and likely to wreak havoc in human affairs.
Suttles wrote: “A description of Coast Salish culture that is truly ‘emic’—that is, organized by native categories—should describe whales and bears, sasquatches and two-headed serpents, all under the same heading as part of the ‘real’ world of the Coast Salish.” It’s a modest, commonsensical statement, yet no anthropologist of the Boas generation recognized its obvious truth. Even Claude Lévi-Strauss, the great cultural relativist, leaps for the word “supernatural” whenever he meets a creature in an Indian story that doesn’t fit with his rationalist, Linnaean version of nature.
That sasquatches and two-headed serpents should coexist on equal terms with other more common animals—in a white pilot-book as in Indian tales—was endemic to this landscape of fogs and mists, long twilights, dense forests, thick soupy water, and mysterious, utterly inaccessible mountains and deeps. Identifying creatures on slight and fragmentary evidence, by imaginative guesswork, was always an everyday activity here. You had to act on a sudden displacement of the shadows in the trees, seen from the corner of your eye, or on the large, vague gleam of something moving in the water below your canoe.
An 800-pound brown bear, seen standing on its hind legs as it craned to reach a bunch of high berries, would be a manlike hairy giant in anybody’s book. The moment you assign a separate verbal category, “giant,” as distinct from the category “bear,” you are well up the road that leads to two-headed serpents and thunder-eagles. The art and stories of the Northwest Coast, with their marvelous beasts and beings, reflect the inevitable mind-set of a people who spent a great deal of their time peering apprehensively into the dark wood and the hidden depths of the sea—and saw their fears take monstrous shapes, in that region lying just beyond the limit of normal twenty-twenty vision.
Outside the shelter of the island, the water was like a bolt of gray silk, lightly undulating in the first intimations of the ocean swell ahead. Soon the swell was regular and well-defined; rhythmical pulses of energy, like rippling muscles, moving at speed through the windless calm. The boat was pitching easily as it rode the low hills. I switched on the VHF to catch the 6:45 A.M. forecast and the weather reports from coastal stations.
There was disquieting news from Egg Island—the halfway mark between Vancouver and Calvert—where the lighthouse-keeper was estimating the offshore wind at twenty knots, a high figure for so early in the morning. Such a wind might easily build to thirty or forty knots by 11:00, which would put me in serious trouble. I called the lighthouse on channel 9 to make sure that the keeper wasn’t being misquoted.
He wasn’t. “It looks to be getting a little blowy out there,” he said.
“That’s funny. Where I am, there’s no wind at all.”
That was typical, he said. Sometimes he’d have a flat calm at Egg Island, in Queen Charlotte Sound, while a regular gale was tearing up the strait just a few miles away.
I got the pilot-book from downstairs. Miles Inlet, on the mainland shore, promised “shelter from all winds,” and there was no mention of mythical beasts. I charted a zigzag course to get through the clutter of islands, rocks, and shoals, and set out for the inlet. During the ninety-minute passage, the wind began to fill in strongly from the northwest; by the time I had McEwan Rock abeam, running blind on a heading of 042° for an entrance that was perfectly invisible, I was jittery with relief at having aborted the crossing of Queen Charlotte Sound. The swell, sharpened by the wind, had begun to break, and surf was growling round the stern of the boat as I clung, trustfully, to my magnetic line.
A troop of Dall’s porpoises elected to escort me into the harbor. They came up, chuffing explosively, on both sides of the cockpit, then dived ahead of the bow in strict scissor-formation. This had happened to me before: a difficult entrance made unexpectedly companionable and easy by porpoises who appeared to present themselves as local pilots. Coincidence, of course; it had to be. If I believed that of the porpoises, I’d soon find myself believing in sasquatches and sisiutls.
Too many submerged rocks bordered the compass course for me to make the necessary experiment, of deviating from the heading to see if the porpoises tried to correct my mistake. As soon as the dark cleft in the woods declared itself, a cable away, they went back to sea, leaving me with the spooked sensation that I was turning into an inadvertent animist. When you’re alone out here, I thought, it’s hard to resist the temptation to put two and two together to make five. Yesterday, I’d laughed at John Chappell for his family of sasquatches; now I had to laugh at myself for my porpoise-pilots.
The entrance channel was a long straight aisle of water, no more than two boatlengths’ wide, flanked by massive inky cedars. A doe and fawn scarpered at the sight of me: I listened to the snapping of twigs and the metallic clatter of hoofs on rock. The channel dead-ended in a narrow pool as still as syrup, despite the wind in the tree canopy. The only disturbance was a tidal waterfall, at the pool’s north end, that wheezed and chuckled amiably in my ear as I let the anchor go.
At nine o’clock, the day still yawned ahead of me, its hours like dusty miles. I hadn’t faced such leisure in weeks, and was afraid of what it might bring. I scrubbed a bit of deck, drained a fuel filter in the engine, splashed around the pool in the dinghy, tried to read, tried to write, ate an early lunch, and watched the rising tide drown the waterfall and climb the sheer earthen bank; the exposed rocks and roots, welded to their reflections, formed another fine totem pole of grimacing faces. I lost ten minutes to photography. Five hours gone. Too many still to go. I would have liked to move to another anchorage, just for the moving’s sake, but I could see the cedars’ topmost branches thrashing in the wind and didn’t dare to budge.
There was no avoiding my father now.
In the last two weeks he’d somehow broken free of the constraints of time. Before, he had inhabited each period in his life so fully and with such conviction that it was difficult, at any given moment, to imagine him ever having been otherwise. He’d brought to dying the same conscientious regard for form and performance that he’d given to being a soldier or a priest. Now, suddenly, all the people whom my father had been were with me, all at once. One could view him, simultaneously, from every angle and in every guise, like a dismembered killer whale on a painted chest—argufying from the left, preaching from the right; in his forties, twenties, fifties, thirties; bearded and clean-shaven; in battle dress, and cassock; swaddled in blankets in a wheelchair, and playing cricket on a windswept Cornish beach. For a returning ghost, if that is what he was, my father was disconcertingly lively and paradoxical.
Not for the first or the last time, I feared his arrival on the scene.
An interminable morning, in the autumn of 1945. I was three—a few months younger than Julia was now—and each minute was taking hours to pass. I’d played in the sandpit, digging holes. I’d visited my guinea pig in his cage in the potting shed. He was a creature of disappointingly low emotional wattage, and no use as a confidant. For elevenses, I’d had one of the last of the season’s tomatoes, skinned by my mother, with a few grains of rationed sugar to sweeten its soft and bloody pulp.
Trains came and went on the line that ran within half a mile of
the house, but none was his train. I kept on hearing their whistles, the heavy breathing of the locomotives, and the percussive rumble of the wagons on the rails.
“Only goods,” my mother said through the open kitchen window. She was a stranger to me that morning: her friendly jumper and slacks were gone, replaced by an ironed cotton frock and high heels. She was wearing scent. Her lips were rouged a dark scarlet.
I could remember meeting my father once, as a visitor on a brief leave: he had made no great impression on me. Now he was coming to live with us “for ever and ever,” as my mother said. I found her joy perturbing. I thought that she and I were happy as we were, and needed no third party in our life together; though I was much excited by the idea of meeting the train.
Our village, Hempton, had its own railway halt on the far side of the green, where the slow trains from Norwich made their last stop before Fakenham, a mile farther up the line. More hamlet than village, Hempton was a crossroads of farm workers’ cottages with a scattering of 1930s bungalows. Just up the road from us lay Mr. Banham’s flour mill; beyond that, the camp for German POWs. A few miles to the south was an American air force base. Convoys of military trucks, laden with Gypsies and “DPs,” American airmen and German prisoners, gave wartime Hempton the illusion of busyness and importance. In the dead of night, long before the clopping hoofs of the milkman’s blinkered horse, I’d hear trucks crawling past our windows in low gear and the songs of drunken soldiers.
In 1942, my parents had paid a few hundred pounds for a whitewashed, flint-fronted house on the village street. With three bedrooms, it had at least one more than most houses in Hempton, and was grandly named The White House, Hempton Green. This out-of-the-way corner of rural Norfolk had been chosen by my father because it was far from any target city but conveniently close to the European theater of war in which he expected to serve: from Hempton to Nazi-occupied Holland was barely two hundred miles along the flight-path taken by the American bombers. In the event, after the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 and a period of training in Scotland, my father had been posted to North Africa, Italy, and Palestine; places from which there was no nipping home to Hempton at weekends, as he’d ingeniously planned.
At last, my mother announced that it was time to go, and we set off across the green—a hillocky wasteland, overgrown with gorse, and veined with narrow forking paths. A wooded enclosure at the center of the green held a plain Victorian chapel. Nearby, the idiot was tethered to his stake. In fine weather, he was put out to grass like a goat; a boy-man, dressed in hand-me-downs, with an oversize tweed cap on his head, who yelled and pointed, dancing up and down on the end of his rope.
“You mustn’t say ‘idiot,’ ” my mother said. “That’s rude. He’s simple.”
But everyone called him “the idiot.” He had no other name. I thought him more monkey than human, but was captivated by his clumsily waved hand and his big grin, which exposed irregular teeth, yellow as cheese.
“Come on, J.—don’t stare.”
“Yah! Yah! Yah!” The idiot gibbered encouragingly at me, trying to make friends.
“We’ll miss Daddy’s train.”
I had forgotten my father and his train. I had to be carried across the rest of the common to the halt, where we stood on the platform for another age of waiting. Wind sifted through the tall grasses by the side of the empty track. Then came a faint muttering in the rails, which grew steadily and more urgent, until the clock-faced engine showed, trailing long disheveled tresses of steam. As it approached, it took over the world with its commanding heat and stink and noise. The brakes hissed. Carriage-couplings clanked and shuddered. Out of the din and swirling smoke, my father was born, like Jupiter manifesting himself in a thundercloud.
He was an angular giant, tanned to the color of a horse chestnut by the Middle Eastern sun. As he and my mother embraced on the platform, and my eyes stung with smuts, I knew that a phase of life had suddenly ended. Till now, I’d been the star of the show; henceforth I’d be a supernumerary, the family spear carrier.
His belongings were packed in a khaki army kitbag with his name painted in black letters on the side: MAJ. J.P.C.P. RABAN R.A. For months, my mother had been teaching me to read, and I pored over the inscription. My father’s army rank was an intriguing palimpsest: beneath the MAJ. lay the scrubbed-out remains of the word CAPT. I couldn’t begin to guess at the meaning of this puzzle, but the old and new letters, on the nubby canvas weave of the bag, suggested to my mind (or so it now seems to me) some dawning notion of doubleness, ambiguity, danger.
As if in an afterthought, my father unbent himself—in sections, like a crane—to lift me up level with his face. The ascent was dizzying for me, the ground plummeting away beneath my feet. He was all bristles; his chin blue from the journey, his uniform as rough as cornstalks. I dimly recognized the fruity smell of his pipe tobacco. Riding insecurely on this giant’s shoulders, I was seized with panic.
I had no physical substance worth speaking of, thanks to a chronic disorder of the intestines known as celiac. In snapshots from the forties, I look made of sticks and string. But what I lacked in weight, I made up for in ego. I knew I was the object of unusual interest and concern. My diet was monitored meal-to-meal, and I spent much time throwing up into the toilet bowl, my forehead cradled in my mother’s hands. By the time my father came home from the war, I considered being cosseted my right, and realized, as soon as I set eyes on my father, that he wasn’t the cosseting type.
My father at 27 had little experience of dealing with children, sick or well. His idea of play was roughhousing of the sort he’d enjoyed at boarding school and in the officers’ mess. So he set out to get acquainted with his son by introducing him to games that subalterns might have played, after the silver was cleared from the mess table and the Loyal Toast drunk.
On the afternoon he came home, it was still warm enough to have tea in the garden. My mother laid out places on the lawn. My father had changed from his uniform into his old school cricket flannels, with a white jersey and open-necked shirt. There were scones straight from the oven—my mother must’ve had a private arrangement with Mr. Banham’s flour mill—and pats of rare butter. My parents couldn’t stop touching each other. I sat, scowling and excluded, munching scones.
My mother cleared away the tea things. My father scooped me up and looked around the garden, searching for a suitable celebratory game.
A water cask stood at the back of the house, where brick and flint gave way to ancient creosoted wood. I couldn’t see over the top of it, but had sometimes been held up to peer into its black depths. Wriggly mosquito larvae bred there—pollywogs, we called them. Full of ugly life at its surface, the dark and dusty water promised much bigger, nastier things living farther down.
Hoisted by the heels into the air, I found myself staring, in terror, at my father’s laughing, inverted face. His mouth was opening and shutting as he talked nonsense, some kind of man-to-man language for which I had no dictionary or primer. He was dangling me over the brimming barrel and all its gray, squirming creatures.
I tried to scream, but it turned to a retch as I threw up, profusely, into the water.
We got off on the wrong foot, my father and I.
I could hear the links of anchor chain redisposing themselves, one by one, along the mud bottom, the boat swinging slowly around to face the new flood tide. It was nearly dark. The wind overhead had died, and the only sound in the inlet was the fiery crackle of the waterfall, 150 yards at my back.
I hardly knew whether I was in Norfolk in 1945, or British Columbia in 1996; in a double exposure, one landscape was superimposed on the other. I opened a can of leek soup and chopped mushrooms for an omelette. I was now exactly twice my father’s age then—and as a father to a three-year-old myself, I saw myself standing in his shoes, and felt the pang of appalled helplessness that must have seized him at that moment. The war had robbed him of the chance to learn to be a parent. Co
nfronted with that strange, sickly, resentful child, he summoned up his courage and, like a shy man making an inept pass, lunged.
I sat in my mother’s lap, sobbing and swallowing the taste of vomit, while my father, crouched on his knees in his cricket clothes, tried to make amends.
How keenly he must have looked forward to his homecoming; he cannot possibly have anticipated this miserable domestic scene, in which his only child’s most fervent wish was that he’d go back to The War, where he belonged.
Memories of early childhood are never trustworthy. Memory always has its own dark purpose, often hidden from the rememberer; and it is a ruthless editor, with a facile knack for supplying corroborative detail. It’s impossible to draw hard-and-fast distinctions between deep-dredge memory, retrieving material directly from the silt in which it has lain for many years, and the shallow-dredge variety, in which one remembers only an earlier act of remembering. Freud warned: “Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused.” In fifty years, I’d had ample time to revisit the day when my father came home—going there on each occasion with a different agenda.
Now that my father was dead, I wondered if the scene might not be a work of self-serving fiction. Yet the horrible depths of the cask, the kit bag, the arriving train, the gesticulating idiot, the taste of sugary, overripe tomato—these were as real to me as the blackening cedars of Miles Inlet. Approaching the memory for the nth time, with a new agenda, I wanted to fault it, but could find no flaw except, perhaps, those pollywogs. Do mosquitoes in Norfolk really breed in November?
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