Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  Praise for JILL FRAYNE’S

  STARTING OUT IN THE AFTERNOON

  A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year

  “Frayne is very much an original, with a bracing, vibrant style fresh as a gust of northern wind. Her memoir of a mid-life trek into deep wilderness is less travelogue than soul-revealing confession, a cri du coeur riddled with the complex, pulsing veins of relationship…. [a] fresh, windy, woodsmoky piece of poetry, so full of passion and vulnerability.” The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Transcendental, ecstatic, [and] as crisp and clear as Lake Superior in October…. Through words as carefully chosen and necessary as survival gear, [Jill Frayne] journeys to the heart of her wild self.” The Globe and Mail

  “A superb read …. Frayne’s account of her spiritual and physical journey is a fun, introspective look into the inner workings of a woman’s mind as she reflects on what has been and what is yet possible.” The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

  “Woven into the rich descriptions of rugged mountains, mammoth trees and powerful seas are the thoughts of a woman exploring her life’s journey…. The only downside to this work is that it makes the reader grieve for the fact that Frayne didn’t start publishing earlier in life.” The Toronto Sun

  “With verve, ambition and, it seems, very little fear, [Jill Frayne] conquered B.C.’s northern wilderness, bringing back stories of personal transformation at the mid-point of [her] life.” The Vancouver Sun

  To Marni, my old canoeing pal

  CONTENTS

  ONE Starting Out

  TWO Leon

  THREE Charlottes, Arriving

  FOUR Haida Gwaii

  FIVE The Inside Passage

  SIX Whitehorse

  SEVEN Bill

  EIGHT Galiano

  NINE Going Home

  TEN Later On

  ELEVEN Superior

  Acknowledgements

  One

  STARTING OUT

  The spring my daughter finished high school, I packed up the car with everything I’d need to live outdoors for three months, everything I could think of for travel by car, kayak, bicycle and ferry, glanced one more time around my yard, which would go unplanted that year, and backed out of the driveway.

  My first night I got as far as Georgian Bay, turning in at a provincial park—empty this early in the season—and setting up camp beside a bog with a huge dome of granite in the middle. I was too miserable to eat, the prospect of the journey closing my throat. I sat cross-legged in my tent, a nylon clam open to the white twilight, relieved to be out of the car, with its summers’ worth of paraphernalia: camping gear and groceries, feather pillows and books, backpack and rainwear. We stress ourselves in order to change, and this time I’d chosen solitude and wild land as the forge.

  After three days of driving I was still in Ontario. We think of the province as a pan of paved-over ground along the shore of Lake Ontario, a stretch of a hundred kilometres where most of us live, but the real Ontario is the Precambrian Shield—the great wastes of rock overarching tiny southern Ontario in an endless tract of elemental granite and pointed black spruce. The land up here is ponderous, orchestral, especially where the road follows Lake Superior, giving tremendous views of the hills standing up to their mighty shoulders in the sea. Once you leave Superior, though, and plunge into boreal forest—the dark, acid, interminable land west of Thunder Bay—the project of getting out of Ontario becomes daunting. This rock carapace is nothing less than the bulge of the earth’s raw core, scarred, disordered, primordial. The density and weight of the rock have an emotional quality that penetrates the mind. Time seems to clog in the runty trees and gravity tugs in a bold, unbounded way like nowhere else.

  When the prairie comes at last, it’s like emerging from a spelunking expedition, rescued by the sky, hauled up and out into the light. On the prairie there is no rock at all, no jagged angles, no glittering lakes, no lowering skies stabbed with evergreens. The morphology of prairie is round.

  Past Kenora, the heavy sky and cut rock of the Shield quickly give way to open Manitoba prairie, the road straightening and stretching till it looks like a drawn wire slicing into the horizon. I ducked south of Winnipeg and drove into the setting sun, the evening sky a violet shawl around me.

  West of Winnipeg the horizon was dead flat, the only feature the occasional picket of willows barricading a farm. Secondary roads ran along beside the highway with pinprick vehicles, miles off, raising plumes of dust. Farmers, still on their machines in the spring twilight, turned the black ground. Bugs loaded up and baked on the car grille, and any time I slowed, the cool fields filled with birdsong. I turned off the highway and, in the last mauve light of day, found a campground on Lake Winnipeg in a willow grove full of singing birds and shadflies.

  THOSE FIRST DAYS, driving queasily through the Precambrian scenery, unreeling the tender thread between me and home, I had doubts about my expedition, alone in a car on a three-month excursion to the Yukon.

  We all have spells of high suggestibility, and I was in one the previous September when I heard a radio interview with a painter, Doris McCarthy. She would have been close to eighty at the time, her voice cheerful and nicotine-cracked, her breathtaking Arctic canvases floating in my memory. At nine-thirty in the morning, while I drove to work from my home near Uxbridge, she and Peter Gzowski were reminiscing about Pangnirtung, a village on Baffin Island they both know. One of them recalled being there in July and, from a window, watching the freed ice move up the bay on the tide and out again on the ebb. Eyeing the approaching Scarborough skyline from my car, a fortress of upended concrete shoe-boxes under a bloom of smog, I was gripped by this image, by the elegance of this event, and I set my mind to go there.

  Ideas that lay hold like this have to turn immutable in the mind if they’re going to amount to anything. When I discovered that Pangnirtung is not reachable by car, I could not let myself be deterred. I gave notice at my job and started telling people I was going to drive up to the Arctic the coming summer.

  It was not so whimsical a resolve as it may seem. I’d managed a show of equanimity through my daughter’s adolescence and through a long renegotiation of terms with the man I’d been living with. I’d been seven years at a counselling agency fifty miles from home, where I spent my time listening to other harried families. I was watching for a harbinger of change. I believe in the accuracy of ideas that come in this way. After long suspense, long inertia, everything rushes together at once in a notion that has great force. This northern image had such vitality that I would go north even if I couldn’t get to the ice floes.

  JUNE 17, 1990

  The shrubs around the picnic table where I sit writing this morning are shaking with birds. I see kinds I thought had vanished—those darting ones that never seem to land—and a Baltimore oriole, his breast the colour of marigolds. Walking in the fields the other side of the thicket this morning, I saw a wedge of pelicans pass overhead, shining white birds rowing the sky without making a sound. They flew exactly in sync, their huge wings closing the air in slow unison. Beat … beat … beat … glide.

  I pack up finally, whisking shadflies off my tent fly, and retrace the route out to the highway. In spite of the heat it’s barely spring, last year’s fields still white and razed. Only the rims of ditches show a rind of green. The houses, in clouds of muzzy willow, are built tall with narrow, tree-blocked windows, and have a secretive, forestalling look. Pickup trucks tilt in the front yards as though the drivers had to get out fast. I conjure secret strife going on behind the walls in rooms of filtered light. There’s a dogged atmosphere to these places, as if people living here are pitched against an enemy.

  As the landscape empties, road signs get more f
requent as though to keep up contact with motorists as we drive beyond the pale.

  CHECK YOUR ODOMETER.

  START CHECK NOW. 0——1——2

  PUT YOUR GARBAGE INTO ORBIT. 5 KMS.

  ORBIT. 10 SECS.

  I BEGIN TO look forward to Saskatchewan, which can’t afford road commentary and garbage cans resembling spaceships.

  OVER THE WINTER, while the ice in the yard turned crusty and slowly melted, I put together a plan. I wanted to go north but west as well, to the rain forests and the Pacific Ocean. Someone at the yoga centre where I took classes a couple of times a week told me about Ecosummer, a touring company, environmentally friendly, that takes people to remote places they’d never get to on their own. South Moresby, in the Queen Charlotte Islands, had been in the news because of controversy over logging in Lyle Island. I looked at the region on a map, a fang of islands on the edge of the continental shelf halfway up the coast of British Columbia. I got Ecosummer’s brochure and spotted a fifteen-day trip in kayaks to the old Haida hunt camps and villages in South Moresby. The idea of thousand-year-old cedar groves on Lyle Island set me dreaming. I’d never been in a kayak or any small craft on the open sea, but the timing of this trip made it possible. I could be in Prince Rupert by the end of June, a ferry ride from the Charlottes. I could drive my car to the coast in time for the kayak expedition, and from Prince Rupert, when the trip was over, take the ferry north to the Yukon.

  TEN MONTHS after the radio broadcast, on a day in June, I was ready to go, my ten-year-old Mazda sagging with gear, a mongrel bicycle strapped to the roof.

  I started my adventure by backtracking south. My daughter, Bree, needed a lift to Toronto. When we got to the big residential neighbourhood at the top of the city, she stood solemnly in the street under the spring trees and bade me goodbye. She’d write her final exams while I was away. I’d miss her high school graduation. Alone in the car leaving town, sunk in misgivings, I ran over a sparrow and, like a starter’s gun, this dismal popping sound began my trip.

  BY NOW I have my travel legs. Somewhere out here thoughts of home begin to peter out and I stop keeping time with life back there. The queasiness has passed and I feel frisky, which I attribute to the out-and-out kindness of prairie. It lulls me, the roundness of every shape, every bush and stream clinging to the ground, bending and winding under the wind, the whole earth suppliant to the sky.

  Out here I’ve bedded down with the land, lock, stock and barrel. I thought I’d stop in restaurants to get a break and talk to people, but I don’t want to go indoors. A couple of times I’ve pulled off into some place and after the waitress brings the water, I get up and wander out, climb into the car and drive away. Down the road I pull over and make a sandwich on the hood.

  I thought I’d eat well. I brought my soup enhancers, camp stove and fast-cooking grains, but on the buggy Shield the coziest thing was to crawl into the back seat with my sleeping bag and open a can of baked beans. It’s such a liberty to be in my own company, queen of all my choices. Heaps of freedom, which is the allure of travelling alone in a car, makes me giddy. I whisk along, nestled in the car, avoiding buildings, eyes guzzling the passing landscape.

  Solitude is not what I thought, though. I expected to fall in upon myself, oblivious to the world, strike up an interior life looping back upon itself, a plane of thought sealed off from experience, like convalescence or retreat. But travelling alone through landscape is not that. It’s more like a relationship—not with a human, not as though one had company, but as intimate and insistent as that. The land exerts itself and has its effect. I’m roughed up or soothed, exhilarated or depressed, wholly prevailed upon from outside myself. I expected serenity, but I am labile and mood-struck. I change as the scene changes, as the sky clouds or clears. I conclude that nature is alive—if I hadn’t known it before—and she calls the shots. There is no counter to granite escarpment or a sky pouring light. I went away to be with myself, but instead I’m in a protracted, uninterruptible encounter with the out-of-doors.

  JUNE 18

  I’m drooped in a swing in an empty playground in Shoal Lake, Manitoba, mid-morning, four or five days from home. Why it’s called Shoal Lake I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a lake in a hundred miles. I was lured in by the glittering new paint on the monkey bars and slide, the mauve public washroom with yellow roof, turquoise picnic tables askew in the shiny grass. Even the parking stumps have been dabbed intermittently by some light-hearted townsperson with a bucket of paint.

  I’m adrift in thoughts of Bree. She’ll be writing her exams. I saw her graduation outfit before I left, a flared black skirt and creamy white blouse, as if she were going for a job interview.

  When I told her I intended to take a three-month trip, we were having coffee near her school. She doesn’t live with me. To do her final year of high school she boarded with a friend in downtown Toronto. My partner Leon—my former partner Leon—and I live in a schoolhouse fifty miles away, where we’ve been since Bree was eleven. We tried to entice her there when we bought it. We painted her room, put down silvery broadloom, hung sliding glass mirrors from Eaton’s on her closet. I found riding stables nearby and signed her up for lessons. She never moved in. She was living with her dad in Toronto in those days and disapproved of me buying a house with Leon and moving away. She would visit, though. She’d come on the commuter train as far as Ajax and I’d drive over the rolling farmland to meet her and bring her north. We got to know the landmarks on the drive: the fruit stand with the garage-size papier mâché apples out front, the ski resort that never got enough snow, the collapsed peonies in the cemetery, the solitary old maple where Bree once had me to stop the car while she buried a necklace, as a token, to find again when she’d grown up. Those long car rides helped us cling to each other when we didn’t have a home together, held us captive to each other through her teens.

  On the morning I told her I was going to drive to the Yukon, she looked out the window of the coffee shop at the streetcars chattering by on College Street and after a while said, “I’ve had this picture in my mind of a house—it’s where I live with you, the picket-fence kind of house. My bedroom’s always kept the same, my stuffed animals stay on the pillow, my books stay on the shelf, everything waiting for me, and I leave you, not you leave me.”

  People think that because it’s common for families to break up, children must weather it okay, but I don’t think they do. I work with families for a living, and for their sake and for mine I’ve held out against the idea that breakups are apocalyptic—but they are. For children, it’s an atom bomb going off, no matter how tactfully parents manage it. Family life, whatever the quality, is the medium children live in. They’re not separate from it. An individual self that can prevail, that can withstand change and loss, is a wobbly construct at the best of times. It’s theoretical or, if it exists at all, must come sometime later. Maybe by middle age we have a self. In a child it doesn’t exist. A child has no skin. When the adults come asunder, the child does too. They just do. I know this mournfulness in Bree.

  But she’s eighteen now, interested in independence herself. After a while she shrugs and looks at me, light in her eyes, her empathy for me swimming up. “Go on, Mom,” she says.

  I hoist out of the swing and get back in the car. I’m disoriented. I’ve lost my bearings on this enterprise for the moment. I didn’t expect to fall out of the trip and into memory like this.

  I HAVE TO DECIDE. I’ll be in foothills tomorrow unless I turn off, north or south. This is deep prairie now, deep poverty, the place all in. I pass a faded baseball field, the diamond barely traced, the batter’s net drooping on its poles. I see abandoned farms, the houses black and hollow, marooned in cut wheat as though their owners just walked away. There’s a hovering, dusty poverty here.

  The day is breathless. At Langenburg I decide to head for the badlands at the bottom of the province, a grassland region, pristine prairie, the land so hard and poor they never bothered to plough it
. I leave the Yellowhead Highway and drop southwest toward the Qu’Appelle Valley, driving straight through the heat with a stop for lunch in Esterhazy, a square, four-street town, blank and dazzling as Mexico. This town is another world, the café white and glaring in the sun, trucks angle-parked at the curb. I get out stiff and shy, my Ontario plates and big plans embarrassing in a town so poor no one’s going anywhere. The patrons of Esterhazy’s air-conditioned café are teenage moms feeding their babies french fries and young men propped over coffee, chain-smoking, the sexes strictly ignoring each other. I order chop suey, which is not the gummy dish you’d think. Chinese Canadian restaurants in even the dinkiest towns out here interpret chop suey as fresh vegetables, barely stir-fried, with steamed rice.

  The restaurant is cool and shady after the fry-pan prairie. Some boys across the aisle ask about the bike on my car roof.

  “Where you going to ride that?”

  “Oh, the west coast. When I get to the ocean.”

  “Bike won’t do you much good out there.”

  I KNOW I’VE REACHED the Qu’Appelle Valley when the land drops into an east-west bowl, the bottom full of water and blurred farmland, the hills a splay of knuckles down either side. The valley hums in mid-afternoon sun, broad and spacious, and I drive with all the windows open, stopping every few kilometres. Climbing up a scabby ridge, I can see the valley roll away along the Qu’Appelle River, the ground around me grizzled with tiny, wind-clipped flowers, wiry shrubs in bloom, glacial rock hazed in lichen. I climb in the soft air till my car is a dot.

  It’s a blissful afternoon. I take pictures of bereft farmhouses and, like everybody, try to figure out what it is about the light. Prairie light washes down, streams white, incandescent, from the whole sky, rather than flowing from a particular sun. At eight o’clock tonight it lies down in sheets across the land. Men out on their tractors make long silhouettes on the black earth, the dust behind them cartwheeling prisms in the slanting brilliance.