Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  I never thought about dumping in the Pacific Ocean in Haida Gwaii, though there was a capsize on that trip. Even paired with the guide, it seems strange now that I did not. I’m amazed when I look at the photographs from the trip and see my life jacket stowed neatly on the deck and remember the currents and waves we blithely navigated, not one of us with a shred of experience. At the time I never thought of drowning.

  I do now. When I paddle, except on the calmest days, I always have fear slithering around in me, a dark fish under my heart. I’m afraid of drowning, and for years when I first used my kayak I treated it like a canoe, keeping to smaller lakes where I could see the shore, where wind could never whip up enormous waves. I paddled in Temagami and Algonguin, places that were familiar, gamely lugging my boat over the joins between lakes. I never thought about kayaking in open water; it was enough to have a boat I could handle without a partner. I would go out whenever I liked, paddle, camp, muddle through maps. I would go off-season when there was no one around—in the pale spring when snow was still wadded in the dogwoods along the shore, or late in the year, in November, when the lakes were black and silver and forming ice doilies at the edges.

  I like the speed, flashing along with my double blade like a drum majorette, easily outstripping a pair of canoeists. I like the kayak’s tidiness, the way it compels order. All baggage is stored below decks, not heaped the way you load a canoe. Bundles must be small as a sleeping bag, or smaller. For a three-day trip I would have eight or ten little parcels, each a different colour, all punched down and waterproofed. Above decks the rules are looser, you can be more idiosyncratic. Some people pay attention to aerodynamics and keep a sleek look on deck. Some don’t and stash all sorts of paraphernalia under the shock cords: billies, rain gear, fishing tackle, cameras. Even pruned to the minimum, a chilling assortment of equipment is strapped on deck as mere safe practice: pump, throw bag, sponsons (oblong air bags that can be inflated in foul weather or in a capsize to stabilize the boat), sea anchor, map, compass, spare paddle. Once the kayak is outfitted, kayakers get themselves arrayed head to foot: neoprene bathing cap, wetsuit, paddling jacket, spray skirt, booties, suction-pad gloves. Since all the big water in this country is ice-cold, kayakers are always rigged to fight death. This gives a sobriety, a formality to kayak expeditions that I both enjoy and resist, comparing it to the way, in a canoe, you put on your running shoes and jump in.

  FOR YEARS I loved my kayak without exploring its main purpose—big water. A few summers ago I ventured onto Georgian Bay, a natural home for a sea kayak, with unbounded water and a wonderful ecology, and once I started going out there, I had to learn some technique. Georgian Bay has jump-up weather and myriad look-alike islands. When I’m on the bay, I am problem solving all the time; this is the joy of it. Of the problems to be solved “Where am I?” looms large. I am not so proficient a map-reader that I always know. I have a good memory for landscape, though, and I use visual handholds carefully. Through the trip, besides paddling, I spend a fair amount of time estimating where on earth I am, proving myself right, or close to right, or dead wrong, paddling around lost for two hours. This is exciting.

  A change in the weather on Georgian Bay is probable, even within a single day. The wind shifts, waves come up or slack off, from one hour to the next, and this brings the occasion to change my stroke or tack, choose where I’ll go and what I’ll put up with.

  Balancing my ever-nervous state is exhilaration. Water and sky wheel, and I am completely taken up contending with them.

  Georgian Bay is a marvellous place, even under hard use. Offshore is a heavy necklace of bony pink islands, the rock fissured and whirling, great laps of smooth rock gliding into the water. Pine, juniper and cedar grow on the larger islands, the pine taking wind-bent, Group of Seven shapes. Poison ivy twines through the rock cracks, the last of the massasauga rattlers snooze out of sight, spiders set up their webs and egg sacs overnight. In summer the islands feel tropical, virtually treeless, baking in the sun. Waves boom on the shoals further out, and the air carries a scent like flowers.

  WHEN I TOOK my boat to the Yukon in 1995, I didn’t know the highlights of sea kayaking. I had been fooling around on canoe routes in Temagami. Over the summer I dipped into some of the smaller lakes around Atlin, stroking along the bright water, duck-hounding, floating under the mountains, never staying out overnight. Atlin Lake was too rough for small boats that year, whitecaps scuffing up every day, the wind rushing off Llewellyn Glacier in the south. The times I put my boat out, I stayed close to shore.

  I was unreconciled to being timid. I had a constant sense of nibbling the edges of the venture I really wanted to make. I would imagine crossing the distance to Atlin Mountain, some five miles away, seeing it rise above me, drawing into its atmosphere. I thought about travelling through Torres Channel, paddling among the mountains, leaving the town behind, and I began to long for the nerve.

  I believe this has to do with starting late. If I were a young woman, even a young woman afraid of drowning, I could take my time. I could paddle in Temagami and Algonguin, roll out of my boat into warm water, play in the little surf on Lake Nipissing beside the summer swimmers, brace in the easy waves. I could swim with my boat for years and it would be an easy move to colder water, to bigger wind and waves, to travelling with a load, to travelling in fog and in darkness.

  As it is, I have no time to wait. I have to go afraid or not go. Being out of doors—anywhere outdoors that has no buildings and bears no sign of our foolishness—is the best solace I’ll ever have. Therefore, on the return drive from Atlin that year, I stopped at Lake Superior, wriggled into my wetsuit in a hedge and put my boat on Old Woman Bay. The day was calm, but Lake Superior is an inland sea; it breathes. Following the face of the bay, my boat rising and falling on the swells along the rock wall, I felt like a mote sliding over enormous liquid lungs, allowed there on sufferance by some colossus. Paddling out of the gentle coves over the next few days gave me no better sense of acquaintanceship. The beauty of the lake, the looming cliffs and scarps of stone, the purity of the water, the folds of rock plain beneath me even in thirty feet of water, only added to the fearsomeness of the lake. Better an opaque surface than this spangled open vault over the side of my boat.

  I came back successive years, sampling the shoreline, thrilled. I am afraid, probably more afraid than most people stirring around these places, but I am also euphoric, snapped alive. I love my chipper boat, I love where it can go and everything that happens when I go.

  Jack sometimes paddles with me now. I go alone or I go with Jack. Jack has been paddling since he was a boy, and while I was nudging around Superior’s shore Jack was paddling alone to the Slate Islands, twelve kilometres straight out in a dense fog.

  Jack is my lonely twin. I’ve known him for years, since the first year I moved to my place in Powassan. We were both in a drawing group I used to go to in North Bay. I noticed him when he was telling a story, waving his arms around. He has nice arms, the skin smooth, the veins close to the surface, worming over the muscle. Jack has veins in his arms that nurses in a blood donor clinic would dream about. His story was about being camped somewhere and leaving the tent flap open and the tent blowing down in a storm that came up in the night. His manner conveyed that he is a person who doesn’t have to make a point of his experience.

  When I go with Jack I can get into the places I want to go, but I still have to get out on my own.

  JUNE 3

  Spring comes on in Atlin minute by minute. The buckbrush back of the playing field is out in lime green raindrops. Every view is pale green and purple. My hedge daintily fills in. The cotton-woods are sprouting pointy buds, their smell musky and sweet, wafting like a mist. The weather is stunning. My hand laundry drying on the fence gets the colour knocked out of it by a huge blank sun. The whole town looks bleached. It takes till nine o’clock at night for a little blue to creep in.

  I walked along the road out of town this afternoon to a turnoff that c
limbs Como Mountain, the road gradually showing long views down the lake, the day shimmering, the sun illuminating water in the air, the sides of the mountains like plum velvet. There is a house for sale at the crest, a plain house set back on a dirt driveway, the yard cut out of the bush and cluttered with projects—a pile of old windows, a pyramid of stovewood, loosely stacked, a mound of shingles under a disintegrating tarp, some rough-cut buildings, an animal pen empty of animals. The owner saw me looking and waved me in, a stout, middle-aged man in a worn flannel shirt, his face shiny red.

  “I’m not expecting to buy a house. I just saw your sign.”

  “May as well come in anyway. I’ll show you around.”

  He’s from Kapuskasing, a francophone. He told me the same story I’ve heard over and over in Atlin. He and his wife came here on holiday, bought property on the spot and moved here when he retired, full of plans. He’s done a lot of them, they’re around him like a brood: a greenhouse, a vegetable garden with brought-in soil, fences, an ex-pigpen, a workshop and guest house—the doors still to be put on, glass to be set in the windows—a tree house for the grandkids. The place looks like all the horses were let out of the starting gate at the same time and everybody’s just into the third quarter.

  “Have a look at the main house. I’m putting in a shower. About got it hooked up to the hot water tank.”

  It was a wonderful house, the kitchen chartreuse and turquoise in real Quebec style, the living room a crush of family photographs, crocheted afghans, trays of seedlings ready to plant. The porch by itself was worth the selling price, an open, plank floor with an old bench car seat suspended from the roof by heavy chains and the best Atlin view I’ve ever seen, a pure south swoop all the way to Llewellyn Glacier, shining like a pearl.

  “The only thing is, my wife wants to move. Now I’ve got this high blood pressure, she wants to be closer to a hospital. She’s got a sister in Owen Sound. We might try there.”

  “My god. How long have you been here?”

  “Seven years.”

  JUNE 5

  Home starts to loom, like walking toward a crowd on a lawn, the people taking shape and recognizable. How do we live with so many confreres, so many lives we’re following and woven into? I never solve this. I need to be entwined and I need to be unentwined. I have been wolfing down this time alone in Atlin.

  Too steep an arc, this trip. I was barely here, barely sprawling, brain released, before the countdown started. Five more days. Now it’s three. Going home has uprooted my sleep. I woke in the twilight this morning and it took a while to fall back. I thought of my niece’s dance recital, Jack setting off to Superior, a twelve-year-old I’m seeing at work. I begin to take it all up again even here.

  Yesterday I walked up Monarch Mountain. The weather was about to change. I left at four in white afternoon, in an unbroken outpour of sun, but soon there was a haze over the sky and a circle round the sun. Little by little the sky furred up. The sun was barely a burr by the time I came down.

  I never plan to climb Monarch Mountain. I don’t set it as a goal. It’s just that, once underway, it’s hard to stop. The climb has its own momentum.

  My body always wants to stop immediately. It is a short climb, Atlin’s local climbable mountain, but a steep one. Unless you’re a goat, you will stop, out of breath, often. All the way through the climb, however high I go, my body wants to stop. My lungs want to, my knees want to, but my senses never do. They are always lighthearted and always prevail. This time I had no snacks along and only half a litre of water. My stomach growled all the way, but climbing is wonderful, the perspective changing foot by foot. The lake and islands, flattened against each other at ground level, tip out and come into view as I climb. The islands in front of Atlin Mountain, the long lap at its base, the scattering of islands along the coast of Birch, Torres Channel, the current visible—all these details that are normally pressed flat, that I don’t know about from town, come into being.

  As I climb, the season falls back. Anemones have had their time at ground level but are blooming, exquisitely fresh, higher up. I pass arnica at its peak, the scent of budding poplars floats around again, there are flowers not seen at all at lower heights—mountain avens trembling on their stalks. It is spring, the variety wonderful and amazing, everything tumbling to life in this long-light place, succulents and ground covers, tiny, wind-outfoxing flowers.

  Gradually I leave the realm of air, the looking-out, held-in-the-air sensation, and enter the realm of the mountain, drawn into the mountain, an atmospheric change. A sea change. The mountain presents itself. I am in its breath, enfolded in a rare and dense environment, elemental ground, smelling of rock and earth. As I climb higher and higher, I come more and more to earth. The hidden mountain absorbs me.

  On Monarch it is a calm day and I would have liked to go on. I have the spirit for it. I am cautious, though, about being hungry, and about my knees. At a certain point I turn around.

  My feet are aching and fed up by the time I get down. I am glad for the loan of Tony’s bike to get back to town, in spite of its inhuman seat.

  JUNE 9

  I get up at five, as I have many times when I’m taking the mail truck to Whitehorse to catch the plane. I slept in my sleeping bag so I could leave Joyce with clean linen. I make tea, black because I gave the milk to Elizabeth last night. I rinse the cup, throw the last of the water out the door, close my duffle and backpack, and drag them to the gate. There’s no sight of Atlin Mountain this morning, cloud bundled on the lake. The neighbour has the key. I push the lock on the door and pull it closed, and stand in the road, listening to the sparrows frisking in the hedge in the grey morning. Pretty soon I see the driver’s lights coming along the road. Colin didn’t forget.

  Now comes the part that always feels low and frayed. I am neither here nor there. The mail truck takes the well-known road. I’m the only passenger. If I close my eyes for a while and open them, I still know exactly where we are. We come to Minto Mountain, squatting like a pyramid on the lake. We cross into Yukon Territory and I glance west to see the survey line. I do these things by rote. White Mountain on the right. I recognize the tower I climbed to the year before last. There was still six feet of snow on top, dripping off an eaten drift.

  I never leave casually. I never doze on this drive. It’s not that I think I won’t be back; I trust by now I will. And probably it won’t have changed much when I come. Probably the same dusty mail truck, the same three runs a week. It’s that it’s always such a time. When I come to Atlin I am temporarily at large. I swing by a rope outside my own life. I look in the windows, see how everything is going, swing free of it.

  At the airport there’s time to sit outside. I can hear the passenger call from out here. Sun is breaking up the high cloud. It might be a beautiful day in the Yukon. Maybe I will see Atlin when we fly over in an hour, tiny geometry in a huge white rumple of mountains.

  This is a nice flight, either way. It has a small-towny feel. You can guess who everybody is: teachers coming back from holiday, mothers with children going to visit relatives in the south, businessmen from Calgary or Vancouver. Passengers talk to one another as though this were the local bus. I sit next to a lawyer, plying through a court transcript. We pass too far inland to see Atlin.

  In Vancouver airport the pace picks up, and I am less moony. There are electronic problems, the computers won’t issue boarding passes, and the staff cope heroically in an airless waiting room, a planeload of Asian passengers fanning themselves patiently. I fall into a reverse prejudice in this company. What handsome people they are—slender, glossy-haired, smooth-faced. We Caucasians must look like a bunch of clacking chickens. Several impossibly young women are lugging fat, sleeping babies in their arms, two of whom, when we finally get on board, have seats in the row beside me. For five hours there isn’t a peep out of these babies, their mothers completely devoted to making them comfortable, anticipating their every need. I don’t see a single magazine flip open or headset
go on, not a single lapse in vigilance. I want to be a Chinese baby. In Toronto airport I see them greeted by ecstatic grandparents, the babies awake, refreshed, laughing at midnight.

  Outside I smell Toronto—the thick, moist, oxygeny air that broad-leafed trees exude—and feel darkness, strange and consoling, like being sent to bed at last. I get into the leather back seat of a limo and give directions to the silent driver, and in half an hour I am in bed, upstairs in my parents’ house, the house I grew up in, watching the leaves rock in the street lamp, listening to their whispering, slithery sound.

  I WENT WEST in my car in 1990 like a person burned down, but I came back with seeds in my pocket for the rest of my life. To go into these last places, to go alone or to go with the companion I have found, long after I was content to have no companion, is all I’ll ever need.

  Eleven

  SUPERIOR

  Jack asked me to go on a kayaking trip to Lake Superior the second winter we were lovers. I mulled it over all spring. The trip would be in late September, when any clemency in the weather would be over, October storms coming on. Our destination, the Slate Islands, is protected parkland, twelve kilometres out from Terrace Bay on the north shore of Lake Superior. Jack had been there in 1995, three springs before. He told me about a beautiful group of islands, steep and densely wooded, with huge, wild beaches facing pure horizon on the south side. He had seen caribou swimming between the islands. We would go with another couple: Graham, a friend of Jack’s, a good paddler and trained guide, and his wife Adrienne, a writer. Graham and Adrienne would take a tandem; Jack and I would paddle our own boats.