Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  Today I’m behind the first ridge of mountains, and there’s surprisingly little traffic on a Saturday in late June in postcard-land. The weather’s fitful and so am I, longing to see someone I know—anyone. I stop in the gravel by the side of the road, completely ringed by mountains so impressive they must be fake. Green-and-black water jitters in front of me. A loon passes, calling, overhead. There was one this morning where I camped, swimming solitary on the lake, just a trace of sliding wake, playing or practising. I watched him for twenty minutes or more. He’d beat his wings, rise like a phoenix splattering arcs of water, claw across the surface fanning and sputtering furiously, drop down and settle into flawless swimming again. Then he’d water-run again, repeat the whole commotion, till at last he climbed the sky and flew off down the lake, loosing that unearthly cry.

  THROUGH THE ROCKIES, Highway 16 follows the Fraser River, a jade green ribbon looping west through alpine valleys. I drive all day in meadows waving daisies and Indian paintbrush and, after a long gas-stationless stretch, pull into Purden Provincial Park, a spruce and hemlock forest with a proper Saturday-night crowd. I find a campsite backing into dense bush, and when my tent is up I put on my bug hat and take a walk. There’s a spicy sex smell of pollen in the air, and I see the lake has a fine scuzz of gold dust. Little by little my car is covered in it.

  A tent and an ordinary car are the exception here. British Columbians interpret weekend camping on a different scale. They’ve come freighted with the comforts of home: campers that puff up into living rooms sprouting awnings and Astroturf steps, motorhomes equipped with generators to power microwaves, TVs and hot water tanks. I glance in a tiny window as I walk by at dusk and, sure enough, there is the blue eye. Outside are scooters and bikes, lawn chairs arranged under tarps, twelve-by-sixteen mesh tents rigged over picnic tables. Sheltered under these contrivances are rotisserie barbecues, propane lamps, camp stoves, coolers the size of doghouses, twenty-litre water barrels. Motorboats, squeezed ingeniously into the sites, bristle with fishing gear. I notice a practice of keeping a leaping campfire going at all times, even if everyone’s inside.

  Tonight I lie in my tent reading up on no-trace camping, including a chapter on defecating in the wilds. I sleep wonderfully in my purple cocoon and dream of being murdered.

  JUNE 25

  I am descending today, car and river tilting into the ocean, accompanied by Garnet Rogers’s soulful fiddle music in the tape deck. Tonight I camp on Lakelse Lake, 145 kilometres from Prince Rupert, the end of the line. The climate’s turned coastal, the air thick and moist, the vegetation maritime and right out of hand. Devil’s claw sports leaves the size of placemats; spruce and cedar soar to the sky. There’s a red beach by the lake, the mountains on the far side lost in cloud. I get up on a picnic table and sniff the sea.

  I’ve been out here before. I came to see friends in Victoria a year ago and, spewing black smoke out the tailpipe, drove their ancient van up to Pacific Rim Park, a rind of trees on the west coast of Vancouver Island, one of the last temperate rain forests on earth. The eye-popping size of things out here is almost cartoon. It’s as if the whole coast is on steroids, every living thing pumped colossal by the climate. I recognize the trees, these spruce and hemlock, the long-skinned cedar and its way of spinning on its axis. But trees back home nurse on acid soil and rock and wait out winters six months long, while these coastal relatives are doused in rain and mild sea air year-round. They grow six times the size.

  This place clobbers you with the environmental message. The living world is on such a scale you can’t miss it. The city gardens burgeon in February, shrubs improbably green, bushes stuffed with flowers. Vancouver has a downtown park that’s a marvel of the world.

  The destruction is unmissable too, the procession of logging trucks pulling timber out of the mountains, the mountainsides a patchwork of clearcut, the deals and hypocrisies plain to see. The first time I saw a logging truck on the highway hauling its booty—coastal timber, the live cuts huge and wet—I cried. You’d think the wretched chainsaws would wilt in the loggers’ hands confronted by such trees.

  I spent a week out here and went home swooning. A fabulous place with disaster on its mind.

  JUNE 26

  I reach the coast with a day to spare before the ferry crossing to the Charlottes. The kayak trip leaves June 30 and I have some time to nose around.

  Rupert is a blustery town dealing in fish and softwood, the stink of pulp and paper wafting up the coast and sticking to the wet air. The iron docks, driven straight into rock and sea water, are testimony to the insane dauntlessness of pioneers. Prince Rupert looks like it shouldn’t even be here, the whole town clinging to a soaked, black mountain.

  I like it. The rain-slick streets ripple uphill from the dock, fast-moving skies push in, the atmosphere is bracing and rough—a port town with a hard-used beauty. My guidebook says it’s Canada’s most northerly ice-free port, a depot for halibut and salmon fishing, and for marine traffic up and down the coast. From here you can take a ferry across to the Queen Charlotte Islands or go north up the Alaska panhandle or south to Vancouver Island. I’ll be doing all three before the summer’s out. This is where I’ll leave the car for the next six weeks. Prince Rupert is home.

  Prowling around, I find everything I need: a Haida museum facing out to sea, a muddy campground near the ferry dock, a fish restaurant on the wharf.

  WHEN MY TENT is pitched in the usual throng of motorhomes, I plod through town to visit the museum. There are posts in the yard, totems with the strong, sleek cuts, the crowded, bulging shapes the whole world knows. The Haida collection assembled here is my first encounter with an Aboriginal artistic culture strongly in revival. Inside, the objects of a hundred years ago are mixed with modern elaborations on the same themes and designs. A century-old serving bowl is placed beside a sharper-featured version carved a year ago, their proximity spanning the rent that history made. Haida artistry, faltering for a century, now comes back strong.

  My reading about Haida Gwaii says the islands were named the Queen Charlottes for an English king’s consort who never laid eyes on them. They’ve been the homeland of the Haida for thousands of years, a dagger of islands out in the choppy sea, famous for sheer cliffs and ferocious storms. In their time the Haida were a fierce, exalted people, “a people apart,” Leslie Drew’s little handbook calls them, raiding their coastal neighbours in open boats, rich enough, well-fed enough to outleap the drudgery of physical survival and build up an elaborate culture. Their wood, metal and argillite carvings are renowned. There is one of their canoes in this museum, enormous but graceful as a wing. All their tools and implements, the villages themselves, were made of cedar, endlessly adapted, the bark woven into all-weather garments or bent into watertight boxes, the tree trunks fabulously carved and erected whole in front of the houses, offering homage and defiance to the sea. The Haida used prisoners rounded up from their raids along the coast for subsistence tasks. When the Europeans came, they traded fish and fur for iron tools, using English wedges to push their art even further, till smallpox put an end to it.

  I stand in the amber-lit rooms of the museum and try to envision their lives. Strength was prized. The young women would run backwards on the cobble beaches to build up their legs, racing each other. I can see them, their smooth, hard legs snapping back, their hair blown over their faces, throwing themselves against the low, dark sky.

  Prince Rupert is a white man’s town, built on fish and trees, but the centrepiece is this museum, a live heartbeat in a place thrown together for commerce. The totems in the yard, animate and exotic, merge with the fog and take the violence off the raw lumber.

  TONIGHT I’M IN the clutches of anxiety, worse than when I left home two weeks ago. It’s focused on my car. How can I move out of my car and walk onto the ferry tomorrow with nothing but a backpack? I glance around to see if anyone else in the campground is in this predicament, scaling down, pallid with fear, but the couples and families nearby lo
ok possession-fat and oblivious. My car is parked by a picnic table, never suspecting I’m about to leave it and virtually all its contents in it in a Quik-Mart parking lot for six weeks.

  Before I left Ontario, I read up on what to take backpacking on the coast, and part of my quandary now is trying to get that small. The touring company will supply food and equipment, but I’ve got to think about clothes and weather. I found a book about travelling in the Northwest geared to the exposed traveller—long on thermodynamics and short on restaurant ratings. The authors described the fog-soaked mountains and fjords of the panhandle, stressing drizzle and sudden cold.

  As for equipment, I’d had to upgrade. Over the years I had acquired an arsenal of homey, low-tech camping gear: bulky cotton and down items, perfect for sunny Algonquin canoe trips, feather sleeping bags patched with Elastoplast Band-Aids, cashmere sweaters speckled with moth holes, a shapeless canvas rucksack that pushed me to my knees on portages. This inefficient gear had great charm for me, as well as mishap-repelling powers that are hard to pinpoint. I hated to part with it. I was impressed, though, by what I read about feathers clumping when they’re wet and the convection powers of the new synthetics. My reading recommended a polyester sleeping bag for the rainy coast and polyester apparel to “wick away” sweat. Even with the force of science I was slow to convert. Garments with these -phyll and -tex labels are chemical confections, repellent to a generation devoted to wool and feathers and a whole earth. In the end, though, the lore of insulation, conduction and convection, the diagrams showing vectors of perspiration exiting through invisible breath holes, won me over.

  In the outfitting stores back home I consulted experts my daughter’s age, hikers and mountaineers doing retail gigs between treks to the Himalayas and the Nahanni. I bought a used three-pound tent from a woman upscaling to a two-and-a-half. She came to my office in Scarborough in a crash helmet and Day-Glo bicycle suit and we set up the tent in the parking lot. I bought an American-made cookstove that fits in the toe of a sock and a tiny stainless steel pot for one-dish meals. I chose a nylon backpack with an internal frame moulded to my spine and a vast purple polyester sleeping bag (which proved strangely luxurious wet or dry).

  Deliberations over rain gear took the longest. I knew I would be in rain all day in the panhandle, so my dilemma was what kind of wet to be: wet with sweat in a sealed raincoat or wet with rain, eventually, in a “breathing” fabric? In the end a balky loyalty prevailed. Bill Mason, my old canoeing hero, wore a sealed rubber raincoat in Song of the Paddle, and so would I.

  Into my pack in the Prince Rupert campground, for better or worse, I put my tent, groundsheet, sleep mat, voluminous new sleeping bag. No pillow. I take Eddie Bauer silk long johns, an old cashmere pullover of my father’s, a caramel-coloured gabardine shirt, nylon wind pants, heavy-weight cotton shorts, Kettle Creek long pants (strong weave, dirt-resistant, shape-keeping), yellow neoprene rain gear, face cloth doubling as towel, thick wool sweater with zipper, underpants, wool socks, shoes to wear in camp, sun hat with brim, wool toque, mitts, bandana.

  There is just room for a small toilet bag carrying Band-Aids, aloe gel for burn and bites, arnica tincture for bruises, my journal, and one precious book, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. I also take a belt pack to wear in the kayak, containing a Swiss Army knife, three metres of nylon cord, sunglasses, scribbler, pen, and a bottle of sunblock around which I wrapped several turns of duct tape.

  Everything else has to stay—all the miniature cooking utensils I am so attached to, all my favourite clothes, books, tapes, pillows and scarves.

  Graham Greene writes, “The more bare a life is, the more we fear change.” I had only a few items on the trail; now I have to go even more spare. I go to bed with a lump in my throat, setting my travel clock for five o’clock to catch the morning ferry to Haida Gwaii.

  Two

  LEON

  I met Leon in therapy, the perfect place to meet someone. You know what you’re up against. You know who the other person takes after in your family and what dilemmas you’ll be reconstructing. That’s the way with attractions. You never fall in love with a stranger.

  This was not therapy therapy, with a professional, a stranger. We were a group of old friends—old lovers in some cases—all of us working as therapists and therefore obliged to have some kind of grip on our blind spots. We met one night a week in one of our basements, a rec room with carpeting and Indian print pillows and bolsters propped around the walls. Collectively we paid a fee to Madeleine, the one of us who had the most skill. Her job was to keep us to the rules and direct the dramas that were the therapy part.

  The format was from theatre. We re-enacted scenes from our lives, recent or long past, that were awful or unremitting in some way, events or relationships that wouldn’t calm down. We assigned parts and lines to one another, true to memory, then played the scene with as much emotional force, as heightened and dramatic, as possible. The idea was to fire up the feelings we’d had at the time and would have expressed then if we could have, if it had been safe or we’d had the wherewithal; if we hadn’t been children, most often. The other players would be as provocative and exaggerated as possible while staying faithful to the text. Hopefully, the provocation would produce an emotional response, “a blow”—the bigger, the better—and the protagonist, in the safety of the situation, would let go expressively, let herself be fully angry or heartbroken, whatever it was. When we were worn out howling and pounding on bolsters, we would repair the scene, play it again the way we would have liked it to go. It was tremendously noisy and unrestrained and, I think, did us a world of good.

  The theory is, if emotional safety can be established, if a person is not worried about being punished or judged but is free to go ahead and express emotions with great sincerity, the psyche is unburdened. Long-held emotions are drained off and the person, in a pliant, exhausted state, is receptive to a new experience, one that repairs the original. This repaired version has power. It comes as balm, and when it comes, lasting change is possible.

  Creating the safety to work this way is the main thing. In our group that meant no judgments. If we had a reaction to something another member said—which we did all the time—we had a format for dealing with it. The reaction you were having was about you, not the other person. We negotiated everything. We endeavoured to ask for what we wanted and gave allowance to others to say no. There was a value on non-coercion. Everybody took responsibility for their wants and for getting them met. It was how we wanted to behave in all our relations, not just within the group, but it took discipline. Taking offence, second-guessing, laying blame, are such normal, comfortable manoeuvres, it was hard to give them up.

  This was my lexicon with Leon. It was our scaffolding for dealing with each other. When we were arguing, we’d switch to this training like a second tongue and carry on, with murder in mind maybe, but at least blocked from saying awful things to each other. It was like being members of a small club. This vocabulary bonded us and set the rules of conduct.

  MEETING LEON in therapy, I had his history, vividly, very soon. He grew up in a small town near Chicago in the fifties. His was one of the few Jewish families in town, a conditioning he offers to explain the way he sets himself slightly counter to where any group is heading.

  He was the middle child of five. His father owned a store, employing the children as soon as they got tall enough to reach down stock. Leon was the younger son, the scrapper of the bunch, the one who took the heat, the strongest. No one in the family took his side. He thought it was because no one liked him, but he found out later his father admired his spunk. His father, Albert, tells a story about a time when Leon was three years old and ran across the yard where one of his parents had just planted grass seed. His footprints were clear in the soft dirt. When Albert got home from work, he asked Leon if he’d been through the yard. Leon eyed him and said, “Did you saw’d me?”

  Disappointed children often become self-sufficient, hard-to-please adul
ts. Leon is one of those. When I met him, he was making his living as a cabinetmaker. The margin for error in cabinetmaking is one thirty-second of an inch. Leon applied that kind of rigour to everything. You couldn’t beat him in an argument. His memory was flawless, his common sense relentless. He told me he’d been critical without mercy in his twenties and was easing off by his mid-thirties, when I met him. I hoped this trend would continue.

  The first time I met him was at Kristie’s, where we held the group. It was my first night. I’d been in a bad accident the year before, riding my bicycle, and I still walked with a cane. When I saw him in the hall, he looked like a storm coming, quiet in the eye, a slightly built man with broad hands and feet, black eyes and a blue-black beard dashed white at one corner of his mouth. He has a long, pale skull, bald since he was twenty. I said, “Boy, you’re handsome,” and he frowned.

  I watched him in the group. He was the King of Swords, interjecting, protesting every inconsistency, every assumption—partly to distinguish himself, of course, but an apt habit, useful to the group. We had some early feminists among us. This was 1981 and everyone regularly put their foot in their mouth. All of us ran athwart these two women sooner or later—except Leon. He never said a clumsy thing.

  I endured the barbed wire. I learned to pick my way. I grew more careful, listened better, and not just with him. And whatever you can say about someone, the opposite is also true. Leon soothed me. Back of the barbed wire was a zone I gradually got to know, a relaxed region, an unworried calm at the core that he must have been born with. As much as his ferocity drove me crazy, his physical presence calmed me. He was fat for my nerves.

  I remember a quarrel with my sister, a rare, terrible fight in the kitchen of a cottage we were staying at. Jesse is another one like me in the nervous wreck category, and we were taking a pounding. The only way I kept my head at all was that, over her shoulder in the living room, I could see Leon roughhousing with her small son, merry as could be, oblivious to catastrophe. He knew we were battling; he just wasn’t worried about it. Most grades of tension are subliminal for him.