Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  Moiling around with Bob in the ocean all day, I’m used to him, but I am never easy with him. Our routine is to check in briefly in the morning when we first get paddling—tell a dream or an idea about something—then lapse into an all-day silence. He asked me the other day during one of these morning exchanges what my life was teaching me. The ponderousness of the question made me nervous; I hunted around for an adequate reply. Certainly I am taking life seriously, but at the moment, foremost in my thoughts is sheer thankfulness at being physically up to the trip; I’m delighted not to be a gibbering wreck by two in the afternoon. I mumbled something to that effect and felt myself drop over the horizon of his interest. Bob isn’t a dynamo, but he is a set-up for fantasies, the way guides always are. All that casual skill.

  FULL MOON. That means bigger tides both ways, filling and emptying. Accordingly, the carry to the water this morning is interminable. When we land for the night, we lug the kayaks up the shore above the high-water mark so the boats don’t wash away in our sleep. In the morning, when the tide has been and gone, we carry them back to the sea. The feat of lifting loaded boats is managed one boat at a time. We pass five or six nylon straps at intervals under the boat, everyone taking an end, then hoist the kayak like pallbearers, and convey it to the sea. It’s a precarious ritual; footing in the cluttered intertidal zone is death-defying.

  Before settling into today’s paddle, we hike through an acid bog to visit a drizzling savannah, a vista of tussocks and gimpy bonsai trees, dramatic in the rain. We like the change—this wide, sodden Africa after a week of sepulchral forests and sea.

  When we take to the boats again, it’s an easy six-and-a-half-mile paddle through a glassy black channel to tonight’s camp. It’s my favourite kind of camp: huge. To the west the hills we left this morning still huff fog down their sides. To the north and east the horizon is empty. Salmon jump in the dim surf in front of us, and along the beach giant clamshells, chalky and stiff with age, glow in the dusk. I take some of these. The perfect small hole at the hasp is made when the moon snail mounts the clamshell and uses its tongue to bore into it to extract the flesh.

  JULY 8

  Many trips to the intertidal zone this morning, my bowels premenstrual. On one of these trips a bee stings my calf and Bob ingeniously supplies a hemorrhoid suppository to shrink the welt. Mentally I add Preparation H to my “What to Bring” list.

  Our muscles accept any job now, and we streak six miles across Juan Perez Strait to a cliff, which we ply around, lunchless, till mid-afternoon, examining the walls and fissures sloping into vaults of turquoise water.

  Tonight’s camp is a noble one: west-facing, the horizon well off and ringed with nippled hills. A cobble beach rumbles out of sight to either side of us, backed with drift logs and a vast lawn of moss and duff grazed dry by the sea wind.

  I bathe with the women in a pocket of rock out of view. I’m menstruating and sit in the sun absorbing the warmth and letting my blood run down the rock. We’ve reached a point where the paddling doesn’t take everything we have, where rest time is not filled with recovery. We have something left when the day’s exertions are done, and it is the loveliest sensation. Time feels available in a way I’ve never experienced before, welling and rich, full of possibility. This is as relaxed as I have ever been, as free from anxious future-thinking as I have ever managed.

  I get my stomach down on the baked round stones the way I’ve seen seagulls do. Out of one eye I see Mike fishing in the path of the sun and feel the breeze on the skin of my arms. All the women are menstruating, our cycles veering into a communal one and, having nothing else, I collect sphagnum moss to bleed into.

  HAIDA GWAII is a waterfall for the senses but murder on us physically. I’m losing weight, which I can ill afford to do. “See Abandoned Haida Camps in Drooping Clothes.”

  I’ve developed a habit of working my hands every time we stop, every break in paddling, bending my fingers back to stretch and loosen the tendons. The damp air fixes my fingers into claws. All day my hands are basted in sea water clutching that unlovely paddle, and they swell, hot and sore. The shaft rides on my thumb joints, on two small, aggravated points of bone. Bicycle gloves would help, but I didn’t bring any. I got blisters across both palms the first week and tried all kinds of remedies. I wore rubber washing-up gloves for a while, thinking they looked festive, but my hands hated being cooped up. I tried Band-Aid and duct tape arrangements that rubbed off. Mainly I just waited to toughen.

  Legs are another casualty site. All day we bang into hard objects. I have tiny red punctures on the insides of my knees and nicked ankles where there is no flesh to cushion collisions. I’ve acquired chartreuse welts down both calves from scrambling in and out of the boat and jamming my knees against the hull during hard paddles.

  My cotton shorts have a perfect bull’s-eye salt-stain around the crotch from the steady leak of sea water through my spray skirt. There is always a cloying dampness below decks as I rock along in an eternally wet seat.

  Everybody’s footwear is taking a beating. Those who brought polypro kayak booties have shredded them staggering up and down the stone beaches under the weight of the boats. My feet, in blue running shoes, have been dyed bright indigo. My shoes are disintegrating; the rubber has come unglued and the suede is turning to mush. I’ll get a last few days out of them by lashing the soles to the shoe with duct tape. My feet are dry only at night and look like light-starved ocean creatures.

  Nobody minds. None of us cares about the discomforts. Some who came on this excursion can’t touch their toes, suffer greatly from the regimen of sleeping on the ground, slamming into rocks and yanking on the wild ocean all day, but it’s the same for all of us. None of us cares. By now we’ve all released, given over to the life of the trip. We’ve all fallen to the pulverizing, tenderizing effect that exhaustion and landscape have on us—the helpless bliss that pierces us.

  The skies are often lavender in the evening. There are wistful sundowns, the sun taking leave without blaze or spectacle. I sit on the pale stones apart from the group and go into memory. I have no choice. There’s no turmoil to it. I think that part was past before I ever came out here. What’s left is having to remember, to bustle through the details for myself. Sometimes, sitting on the cobbles at sundown, I just tend memory. The scenes unreel, I watch and breathe. I take it as a part of leaving. I think it will be a long part.

  JULY 9

  This was a rotten day. We had two mishaps, and a hard rain that started at supper tonight is still drumming in the dark on our soaked tents.

  The day began with a stop at a hot springs on a low island bitten by shallow bays. Mishap number one came as soon as we landed. Rhee fell on some slippery rocks and had to rest for a couple of hours bundled in a blanket on some boulders. While she revived, the rest of us lolled around. Bob and Heather donned wetsuits and went snorkel fishing, slowly duck-diving for half an hour, filling string bags. When they came ashore and dumped their catch, I went over to look. Abalone resembles female genitals. Out of water, its lippy body strains to flip over to its protected back. Sea cucumbers are nubby peristaltic tubes. Bob cut the head off one, squeezed out the innards in a bloopy flood and slit the body to get at the edible part, the pale strips of muscle that line the inner walls. Heather served up the creatures for lunch on the Tupperware lid, their flavours too subtle to detect.

  We’d been anticipating the hot springs, a warm, freshwater soak after days of sticky sea water, but it was a luxury that fell flat. There’d been a one-time effort to domesticate the springs, probably from the days when there were whalers in the area. We trudged into the clearing over a slimy footpath and found a clump of wooden change rooms around the silty pools, dilapidated and smelling of rot. Maybe the dregs of habitation spoiled the springs. We submerged in groups of three or four, bodies wan in the grubby water, scowling for each other’s cameras.

  The wind was up mid-afternoon when we prepared to leave, purple clouds dragging in from the east,
the sky lowering. We made a broadside crossing, losing sight of one another in the drops and crests of the swells, waves flopping over the decks. After a desultory morning, the change in the weather snapped us to right away. When we turned tail to the wind, the going got even more raucous, the boats champing and pitching, the waves hurling us headlong. Sometimes our boat lifted clear out of the water and I’d swipe air with my paddle. Bob rigged a sail while I kept us squared to the rush of following waves, and once we were organized I gripped the sail between my spread arms, catching the wind while Bob steered. It was an exuberant, careening ride that swept us into camp in minutes.

  Just before we landed, mishap number two happened: one of the rigged boats dumped. Bob and I swerved to the rescue. When we came alongside, Rob and Jan had kicked free of their boat and were in the water gathering stray gear. Heather power-stroked to our away side and took hold of our deck to stabilize us while we flipped the overturned boat. Jan hoisted her way back into her seat, got her billy going and paddled to shore in disgust. Her partner, Rob, crawled onto my deck, his head in my spray skirt, arms and legs clamped to the hull, amid hoots from the cheap seats about bagging a man.

  WE ARE CAMPED on a point on Faraday Island. There’s an old garden here, gone to seed, awash in foxglove looking like a throng of bridesmaids. A thin, cold rain began at suppertime and everybody crammed under the tarp Heather and Bob strung up between the trees. Jan and Rob were chilled and rueful, probing their stuff sacks for leaks. At dinner we jostled for chili and warmth, anything that was going, competitive as crows.

  JULY 10

  I’m awake, though it isn’t day. Probably the rain woke me, the slight anxiety the tent won’t hold. The outside of my bag feels damp. I spread my rain jacket over it.

  I miss the smell of my bed at home, the cotton futon Leon and I made. That mattress took maintenance, one of us separating and fluffing the layers every so often, pounding down the ridge that would rise between us. The bed took the print of us, two slight ditches, within a few weeks.

  The rain on the tarp has a weary sound. I sit up and put my headlamp on and write.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO US? The impossible and hackneyed question. I feel myself click into a practised reply. Let me avoid that and wrestle it some other way. When love ends, you probe for a long time for an explanation and after a while it’s too exhausting to think about what happened any more and you sift down to some formulation, some bitter or blaming or incomplete idea you tell people. There’s no truth to it. The live fish of the two of you has long swum out of reach and was unknowable anyway.

  The undoing is so sad and monumental you think there must be a way to grasp it, get a rope around it, make it comprehensible, but I don’t think there is.

  What happened to us? I don’t know. Maybe we lacked intention. For a while there was so much to do. We had to tell each other everything, read all each other’s books, move in together, see Bree through her teens. We were swimming toward each other, and everything was toward each other, every effort to that end. Even fighting was to clear the way in.

  And then what? Did we draw too close? Was I frightened when I saw him in full detail? Did I think he’d sink me if I got so close? This is the theoretical part, because I don’t remember being afraid. Yes, I do. I remember panic in the fights—that we wouldn’t get through it, that I couldn’t reach him, soothe him, that I’d have to give my life. It felt colossal like that. Intimacy is regressive territory.

  Maybe it was ordinary terror. Intimacy with another person is always terrifying. I suppose if you mean to be intimate with someone, it’s a matter of living with that, being able to stand the oscillation between too close and too far away. At one pole you’re fused with your lover, engulfed; at the other you’ve pulled back so far you’re out of business together. The extremes are unavoidable, our thermostats ungovernable. The thing is to bear the emotion, the panic, at the far ends.

  Maybe this explanation makes the most sense to me. The terrors of the deep. In my relationship with Leon I was frightened at the fused end of the pool.

  Leon said he got tired after seven years—tired of working in the shop alone, tired of mothering me without being able to tell me how to mother him. What did he mean? I spread my dishes on the table; he ate sparingly. I wanted him to take what I had, what came easily to hand, not make me work so hard. This was our sticking point: his narrow receptivity, my anger over it. It set up an unclaimed, perfidious zone between us. He didn’t tell me how to reach him; I didn’t beg to know. I didn’t try to guess. Our own peculiarity, perhaps, his hang-up paired with mine, a trouble particular to us. If we’d got help, perhaps we could have braved it and gone on.

  Or not particular to us. Maybe we encountered a regular hazard of intimacy, a treatable dilemma. Maybe we reached an end to what we could risk that was only temporary, and accidently lost each other.

  It seems to me relationships are works of imagination. I don’t mean they don’t exist, just that what we make of them is theoretical, a mental construction. The experience is real and compelling, but what you can say about one you’re in is just a working hypothesis. It varies, it depends. It isn’t the same as a fact. A couple says, “It’s time to go,” and that’s one way to look at it. On the other hand, it might be time to stay, in a different way.

  Leon and I couldn’t rouse ourselves, couldn’t decide. I have an image for our quandary. My mother gave me a cedarstrip canoe for my fortieth birthday, a lovely eighty-pound craft that is like silk in the water. For a couple of years Leon and I took it out. In Temagami one time, at the end of a day of paddling, we made a portage over a dam and got into a dispute about whether or not to leave the canoe overturned while we went back for the packs. It was pouring rain. This was a point of canoe etiquette. I have a picture in my mind of how we resolved it: a green canoe balanced gamely on edge on the gravel shore, on three inches of gunnel.

  We were too long in this impasse. A space came between us, and though I don’t remember it, the sensation of it, it must have been there, some black muck waiting for Leon at the end of his tether, for me at the end of mine. Or maybe it was nothing dreadful, just what inertia creates, held long enough. Just a cooling. And in this cooler place, one thing led to another.

  I don’t think we stopped loving each other. We kept talking. We have no arsenal of unaired grievances. Neither of us imagines ourselves hard done by. We just let the line go slack. We stopped wanting to do whatever we were doing together. It seemed to take too much of us. We stopped swimming in and started to back-tred. We saw the water widen and couldn’t bring ourselves to stop it. Leon got interested in computers, bought himself one, dabbled seriously. About the same time, he started working with someone who had a method for conflict resolution, a man I introduced him to at a workshop. For Leon this was a way out of the woodworking shop and into his element, and he began to be away more and more, travelling with his teacher.

  I didn’t pursue these passions. I took up yoga and on weekends skied by myself in the hayfields around the house. I liked being outside. I wanted to take the canoe out more than Leon did, and it became a joke between us. I’d ask him to come paddling with me and he’d invite me, as a trade, to spend time on the computer. We’d let a little time go by, the choice would hang in the air, then we’d let each other off and feel grateful to be freed. I lay in bed one morning thinking about trading in my boat for something lighter, something I could lift by myself.

  In the last year or so before this trip, Leon would be away for weeks, in the Midwest or California, learning this mediation work. I was restless at work. Maybe it had nothing to do with work, maybe I was at some depletion point. I was in menopause, yanking my sweater off in the middle of meetings, going blank mid-sentence.

  I found a journal entry from December ‘87, two and a half years ago, sorrowful about Leon. Even then there was a way I couldn’t reach him, couldn’t tell the ways I was a pleasure to him or sustained him. I had started to resent him and close down.

&nb
sp; Our parting took this form—not recriminations, not someone else. We crept into ourselves. I was afraid of change. I am afraid of change, and I held still, letting things drift. I did my yoga and it taught me I’m alone.

  IN THE COURSE of my work I read about intimacy and autonomy in couples, and I like the idea that, if you last, you have to marry the same person at least twice. The first time is the easy one. You have being in love going for you and everything is the journey in, but you will encounter fear sooner or later—two years, five years. Somewhere the fusion, or lack of it, feels frightening and then you think about whether to stay or go. If you stay, if you remarry that person, it’s a clearer choice this time. You make it more differentiated. You see the foibles in your mate and you know your own. You make a choice to abide with the flaws or fix them. If you decide to leave, it’s the Rubicon uncrossed. You’ll pick again, another partner, or you won’t pick, and come to the same point.

  For Leon and me, losing each other was arbitrary. I think so. We might have avoided it if we’d been willing. We came to the choosing time, the occasion to remarry. We chose. When I said “Come paddling” and he said “Sit with me on the computer” and we did neither, we chose.

  THE RAIN HAS STOPPED. At eight o’clock it’s beatific. I feel quiet. I’ve worked this long enough. We haul the boats an all-time thirty yards over dry rock, then barnacled rock, then slithery sea lettuce, then a final welter of damp starfish and sea life.