by Jill Frayne
We made a report to the RCMP. They came out to the campground and interviewed us separately. I was dressed by then and had a glimpse of how I must appear to the officer, a middle-aged tourist shacked up with a local man Acapulco-style.
Bill said one time, in the hesitant way he had in the daytime, “I think women like a man who’s—umm—a little bad.” I liked this bad, sinking man with everything I had.
HE WAS PRETTY DRUNK a week ago, the afternoon I got back from Atlin. An oncoming car on the Atlin road had thrown up a ferocious spew of sharp gravel, putting out both windshields, front and back, of the rental car and scaring me half to death. Bill loopily taped garbage bags over the shattered glass and squeezed my waist. That night when he locked the gate I was still in the office, and he lit the stub of a candle and took me behind the sagging drape to the mattress where he slept. I kept my underpants on and made a night of kissing him. It’s hard to find a man who’ll kiss you for hours. When I finally gave him up, he threw his arm across me, knocking the breath out of me like a felled tree, and went to sleep.
I was a fairy on the road to town next morning, weightless, beatific. My lips were thick and numb, my whole skin chafed, every hair rubbed backwards and alive. I thought every step I’d come since leaving my driveway, every rain forest and croaking bird and soapberry bush and strung-up pack and sighing turn in my sleeping bag, was heading straight to this, straining me and working me to this breakout, like a thing incubating in a pond.
He does not return my ardour. He is on the other side of the moon, dulling out, the duller the better. I fascinate him, though, like the gleaming nurse who comes to the sickbed. He likes my health and enthusiasm. He told me I remind him of Audrey McLaughlin. He’s a reckless choice, I know that, a person in the process of suicide.
I’ve been rehashing all my time with him on the wretched drive down here; the first night was the fabulous one, when he fit himself to my pleasure completely and kissed my mouth as long as I wanted.
WE HAD A QUARREL two nights ago. The yoga workshop I’ve signed up for in the Gulf Islands starts on August 19. With time running out before I had to leave, I got jealous of his drinking and threatened to go sleep in my tent if he kept it up. I wanted him reachable when we lay down together, but I didn’t put it that way. When I warned him, he gave me a squinty look and proceeded to drink himself unconscious.
“Easy come, easy go,” I said, and walked away.
For good measure I went off with another camper, a sweet boy who isn’t interested in me at all but needed a drinking pal at that hour. We hiked to the power dam and listened to the roar, passing peach coolers back and forth till it got light. Then I didn’t know what to do, so I hitched a ride to Haines Junction, two hours away, and hiked in the Kluane mountains until I was dying to see Bill again and begged a ride back and got there humble and eager just as he was closing the gate.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
He glanced at me.
“Does it mean you don’t trust me?” I asked.
“Well, it changes things.”
He took me back. He even made love to me, without lighting the candle, pulling me astride him with a sigh and letting me ply him sorrowfully.
But he’s done. It wasn’t that I mentioned his drinking. It was setting terms.
Or maybe we just had to jump hard in the puddle, break up the tender reflections, because it was time to go.
I sat across his lap this morning, a little panicky, my hand trying to take the print of his chest through his shirt. He couldn’t match me. When I told him I’d miss him, he answered carefully, “I’ll think of you.”
And courteously he drove me to the shuttle in town, though it stops right at the gate, and no longer covering up, we watched each other coldly out of sight.
I DON’T KNOW where he is in Carmacks or even if he went there, and it is the way of things that are missing or lost that you can never finish with them. The amethyst earring rolls under the sofa and disappears, and every few years for as long as you live, you toss the living room looking for it.
And there’s the suspense about his life, the juggernaut he’s set rolling. You can’t stop and retrace when you’ve gone that far. It isn’t possible for Bill to go back to being a husband, to just turn in the driveway and be a dad again. He is taunting an avalanche. Some crisis is necessary, some catalyst to end or turn aside his fall, like coming into a lot of money or rolling his truck and putting out an eye or losing a father.
And not knowing how that pitch he’s reached will resolve, how can I let go?
AUGUST 13
Ah Bill, farther and farther gone. Out of my need I picked you. I barely had you, barely had begun, and you’re already gone. I close my eyes to keep the sight of you. Your wide-across, narrow-through body, flat and presenting like a shield, the chest the receiving plane. Turmoil there, compressed and hot, with a deep hollow at the sternum, so much agitation. Stone limbs, the muscles under the skin engorged and taut. Your cock a slender, mobile snake.
A low walk, long arms loose and shoulders hitching forward, something hopeless or exhausted there, some collapse, some grief I wanted urgently to soothe.
Your head a little small, pulled down into your body by the neck. Deaf in one ear from a blow. Straight hair clinging to your skull, a haze of grey over the brown. Your face all eyes, not large but absorbent, the weariness spread out around them. I liked your face, your glowing, steady eyes. A Scot’s face, pointed, tight reddish beard, wide clamped mouth, ground-down square teeth.
Not the oldest son, not speaking from authority, your voice low, holding your words in your chest, not elaborating. Speaking without inflection, for yourself alone, if necessary, or to draw the other away. It made me ill at ease how much you preferred me to speak. A strong man living in a wall, your whole aspect still and ready, receptive to balm or injury.
You drew me, your stillness, the constant cigarette, your body jumping with addiction, the curl of your hard hand, your habit of brief speech, your calamity. You opened when I swarmed over you and closed when I withdrew, and no second chance. Remembering bends me like an ache.
My grief is also this, the loss of me, strummed and used and blotted up in love.
Now I’m expelled and listless and have no eyes for anything. How do I recover my own skin? I don’t know where it is. Nor do I want it.
I miss the sight of you, the skin of your breast, your raking breath. Too short a time.
Eight
GALIANO
AUGUST 14
Lonely. Setting up my stove tonight put a stone in my chest. Such a short reprieve. I feel like a TB patient who got to go to Arizona for a week; now I’m back with my sick lungs. I’m in Lakelse Provincial Park, east of Prince Rupert in a converted rain forest. It’s a big campground, a suburb cut out of the trees, each avenue with its tidy gravel sites, each site with its firepit and shellacked picnic table and circle of screening trees. Only two days ago I was walking in Kluane and still had hours to go before falling through the floor.
When I left Whitehorse and took the shuttle south, time started speeding up and compressing like star travel. Leaving was like being KO’d, stunned by a blow. Nothing to do but drop.
I rode down the Inside Passage on the ferry—express this time—in a numb cocoon with a companion whose name I never asked, some telepathic woman who slept beside me all the way to Rupert and kept me company at the rail when the loudspeaker summoned us to look at orcas. I fell into Rupert again, into reunion with my car, whose door I’d unwittingly left unlocked for a month without losing anything, and into a dismaying explosion of possessions, then letters from Leon at the post office and a phone call to him where we barely remembered each other.
I couldn’t find anything in town to hold me and drove out in a panic, following the Skeena River east, back to coastal trees and to this campground that I remembered from the trip out, hoping to compose myself among the thwacking axes and family barbecues. In these huge wet trees I’m
like an animal wandering in a whiteout. I miss the frail spruce and vibrant Yukon peace.
I miss Bill and I miss myself—the woman springing over the ground with the high-stepping exaltation of living light and lavishing herself on a lover. I’m off that extravagance cold turkey, and it takes my breath away.
AUGUST 15
Leon fished me out of limbo today. I rode my bike through the fog to a phone booth by the lake and his voice came for me, plodding through the snow like a St. Bernard, bailing me out of the slide and setting me back in my skin again. Inserting me in a life.
He’s rented the schoolhouse. This was always the plan. Without him and without the anchor of my job, there’s no reason for me to stay there. I don’t want to weed the driveway in his absence, or keep the garden going. I’ve thought about where to go. It’ll have to be north. I can’t live in Toronto again. I’ll go to our bushlot. I’ll be all right there.
We have two weeks to pack when I get home, then I’m moving and he takes off on his own adventure. There are Ontario details that claim me. The diver in free fall finally sees the X rising up to meet her.
It’s raining and nothing like the Yukon. I like my campsite in the big cedars. I make my oatmeal and write to Bree. She’ll be out to meet me in a few weeks. The park attendant tells me about an unadvertised hot spring in some alders nearby, and I ride my bike down to find it and loll in the steamy trench for an hour like a convalescent, the silt slowly settling on my skin.
I’ll be all right now.
AUGUST 16
The unsung and reclusive Canadian Inside Passage between Prince Rupert and the northern hood of Vancouver Island is just as eye-catching as the Alaska panhandle. I drove my car onto one of the B.C. Ferries early this morning for the sixteen-hour run to Port Hardy. The ferry growls down a narrow, silky strait, the wake sending elegant swells to both shores. Low timber hills on either side bump gradually toward each other, leaving a shallow trough of sea for our passage. Clouds wind over the water like scarves and drift off the hillsides as if the trees breathed them. I sit out back in a reverie all day, taking in the landscape like food.
There’s a pleased and tranquil mood on the deck after supper. The sun’s making a last appearance below thick clouds, lighting the water silver and steel blue and turning the bumpy hills navy blue. They’re spread wider now and we plough along, making a highway of foam. Well-dressed people walk about chatting, and look-alike couples smooch and enjoy themselves. When it gets dark, I go indoors and read the same page of my book twelve times, trying to picture Bill.
AUGUST 17
Port Hardy, on Vancouver Island. I wake up in a dripping campground newly hewed out of the bush to a view of raw stumps and fresh gravel, invisible when I came off the ferry late last night. I eat my cereal in a dry creek bed. Despite the downpour last night, there are signs it’s been a dry summer. I don’t really care. I’m still in a plummet that leaves me witless.
Today I’ll get to Victoria and from there catch the ferry to Galiano Island, the bottom of my run. It’s been a fast, hard drop.
I take the eastern shore, the lee side of Vancouver Island, heading south. My destination is a two-week yoga workshop I signed up for from home last spring. I’m not thinking about it. Yoga’s an old ally. It’s as good a place as any for me now.
Till noon the drive is fair, leading through a valley of fine timber, shimmering with colour after the rain. I pass many stages of regrowth, advertised by MacMillan Bloedel signs along the roadside: Forest Forever. Replanted in 1974. What a snow job. Everyone knows we do not harvest trees the way they do in Europe, taking only patches every hectare. In Canada we clear-cut sections so huge the land cannot hold the bared soil. Rain and wind strip it from the slopes and leave the ground too thin to support anything, till the cycle of fireweed and alder has done its humus-building. The fir sprouts that MacMillan Bloedel drops in the barren gravel will not thrive. Or if they live, their trunks will never reach the girth of trees they’ve harvested.
Ranting to myself and huffing carbon monoxide out my tailpipe, I drive past acre upon acre of fireweed, a soothing veil over the stumps.
South of Campbell River the shore goes into ruin. Suburbia all the way to Victoria, a fast, single-lane highway with irritating stoplights and instructions on how to interpret signals. I have noticed this about B.C. highways, the officious guidelines, as if we all don’t take the car out much. To the east, the burdened water beyond the shopping malls roils brown and sulky.
It’s deep twilight at eight-thirty on Swartz Bay, while I wait for the ferry. My body feels thick. I must be growing armour. It isn’t safe any more to walk around with my senses basking on my skin.
AUGUST 18
Galiano. I wake up in the campground parking lot pitched next to a parked truck—all I could find in the middle of the night. I groped around for half an hour, but every campsite showed the loom of a tent or the yellow eye of a late campfire. I now see there’s an available meadow fifteen feet away, but in the pitch dark I couldn’t tell.
The park is a small harbour, deeply curved, like lobster pincers greeting each other. There’s a trail that follows an eroding bench of ground above the shore. Several arbutus trees lean dramatically toward the slack tide; some huge spruce have already toppled. Stretches of the beach are recognizably middens, patios of tiny smashed shells built up from two thousand years of Aboriginal picnics.
The place is parched.
I circle the shore in drizzle, spotting a heron fishing and some diver waterfowl. Not loons—too high in the water for loons. Many varieties of fine bleached grasses along the trail, shivering stiffly in the low-tide breeze. I’m in love with the arbutus in spite of my resolve to stay glum for the rest of my life. It’s an undulating, slinky-limbed tree with its own seasons. Now is its fall, and it is elegantly occupied shedding tough gold leaves and splitting its skin. Thin tatters of orange bark peel off to reveal a pale nudity, slippery and human-looking.
AUGUST 20
Second day of the workshop. We’re on an afternoon outing to Bodega Ridge, which forms the spine of this nineteen-mile island. Getting off the property is a nice break from the density of yoga, even after two days.
Galiano is one of several Gulf Islands, all in the throes of lumbering and development. The location, just off Vancouver, is perfect for commuters, the wildness of tides and sea air an hour’s ferry ride from the office. People on Galiano are well-informed and conservation-minded and know how to mount a fight. Bruce Carruthers, our teacher and host, says they’ve just won a battle to save this ridge from logging.
It’s a gorgeous rise, covered in swishy brome, old hemlock and pine. Bruce points out Garry oak, gnarled and spreading, and manzanita (“little apple”), a witchy, tangled shrub with a purple heart and crackled outer growth, like a brittle, old-fashioned birdcage.
From the height of the ridge, to the east, we see the far-off smudge of Vancouver, and to the west, past the blue tops of firs and coasting eagles and vultures, is the hazy line of Vancouver Island.
It’s a secluded place, a timbered, narrow island with the houses set secret and invisible along a narrow road that bisects the island from the ferry dock at the southern tip to the north end, where Bruce and Maureen built their house. This time of year it’s all parched air, big conifers and arbutus, high drifting birds, raccoons and spiderwebs. It’s the ridge, though, like a spike-backed reptile, that makes the island wild.
MAUREEN CARRUTHERS is a round, powdery woman, barely five feet tall, still British, with a beautiful bald head fizzed with white down. Her hair fell out in an attack of shingles when she was eighteen. She’s a senior teacher of Iyengar yoga, a brand of hatha yoga named for an irascible Brahman teacher, B.K.S. Iyengar, still alive in Pune, India. Maureen and her husband were Iyengar’s students many years ago, before Iyengar was famous. He would come and stay with them in Canada. They feel free to interpret his style of yoga in their own way. They have a mellow, experimental style of teaching that retains the
exacting Iyengar form but lets breath, lightness, into the poses. Their attitude makes for a relaxed class.
We work in a splendid two-storey room with a wood floor smooth as an ice rink and glass doors that slide onto an open porch full of west weather and ocean views. The trees have been trimmed to leave a few contemplative silhouettes, then the prospect plunges to the sea, wrinkled and glinting in the distance. On the horizon is the rolling line of Vancouver Island.
The house must be the masterwork of their marriage, love’s project, since there were to be no children. The design is Japanese, every detail anticipated from the bottom of the driveway to the rooftop. It stands on a rock hill, the garden lying in planes below it. You enter the yard through skinned cedar portals, climbing an arc of flagstone steps to the front door. The line of the house is long and low, at ease with the ridge. Clay tiles on the roof shed rainwater into barrels, ingenious pipes sprouting from the barrels to feed water into the garden.
The interior is simple, the whole of the house visible from either end, the walls effaced, the effect of light and quiet coming from the glowing floors and from space left empty. Outside, the west wall is all porches and views. Raked gravel inside a low wall makes a monastic perimeter before the drop over the treetops. The east side is the yard and garden—Maureen’s real yoga. Continents of flowers, weltering and profuse inside their borders, are set around stone benches and stunted trees. Below them, where the ground is flat, are framed beds of splashy vegetables in black, imported soil.
