by Neil Peart
This pretty girl on the ferry dock in Haines, Alaska, looked to be travelling alone with her little dog, and if she was sending me some kind of signal, what should I do? Was this one of those “opportunities” I should think about, or just an overactive imagination? Whatever it was, I was not ready to deal with it, and when I didn’t encounter her again aboard the ship, I put the question out of my mind. Apparently, though, my little baby soul was harboring a spark of response to life other than highways, landscapes, and wildlife.
Sept 7 on board M/V Taku
After long, long wait in steady rain, then the anxiety of riding onboard over those slippery metal ramps and getting tied down (pathetic attempt, as usual; must learn proper knot for that), then a couple slugs of whisky and an exploration of the ship (all excited by then, by great little cabin with promised window and the thrill of being at sea, the prop wash surging out behind). Got to sleep about 1:00, then awake at 4:00 to see Juneau (not — terminal an island of light in darkness well outside of town), then sleep from 5:00 till about 8:00. Outside to cold wind, rain and “misty fjords” view of humps receding behind each other in paler grays, and gray, stormy looking, white-capped water.
Realize that Haines has completely changed my view of Alaska: black bear on Main Street, bald eagle, and grizzlies eating salmon. All for real.
[Later] Humpback whales frolicking!
[Later] Lovely lounging day, reading The Sea Wolf (a “ripping yarn,” as “elemental” as Conrad). [Also note the ship in the story was called Ghost], watching the passing cloud-draped coastline, deeply forested, dark and rounded in those hazy layers, and dozing.
Catching a couple of Forest Service interpreter Fran’s talks, and looking at baleen [called “whalebone,” flexible, plastic-like plates used by the whale to filter its food, and by Europeans for such purposes as corset stays] reflects what London writes of the gory massacre of the seal hunt: “All that slaughter for the sake of woman’s vanity.” Brutality in the service of vanity. Deep.
The ferry docked in Prince Rupert at about nine in the morning, and I rode off into heavy rain. I had occasional glimpses of high mountains beside the highway, but my view consisted mainly of slick pavement under streaming rain and low clouds. The day gradually cleared by around Prince George, but was never warm. A well-paved road curved gently through a valley of hay farms and low mountains, the forests noticeably greener now that I was travelling south, back into summer.
By Quesnel I’d covered 882 kilometres (550 miles), and circled the town for a place to stay. The best-looking place had no restaurant, and only two rooms available: a two-bedroom suite or the honeymoon suite, so I rode onward to the Wheel Inn, which I later noted was “cheap — and worth it.” Still, it was entirely satisfactory for this undemanding traveller, “clean, good shower, Weather Channel.”
A nearby restaurant in an old Hudson’s Bay store fed me well with beef stew, red wine, cherry pie, and coffee, and I took a post-prandial walkabout through the dark, empty streets. Quesnel was yet another town that had sprung up in the wake of a prospector’s strike — this one from the “Cariboo” gold rush of 1858 — and its downtown area featured an old bridge restored for the use of cyclists and pedestrians, a riverfront park, and tidy landscaping and flowers along the streets.
After a good night’s sleep at the Wheel Inn, I was back on the road by six the next morning, clear and sunny, but bitterly cold, as I continued south through scrub forest with occasional farms, some large lakes (Williams and La Hache), and small towns. I stopped for breakfast in a town whose name had always intrigued me on the map: 100 Mile House, which had been named by the Hudson’s Bay Company trappers for its distance from Vancouver on the fur-trade routes.
And though I was following a less-direct route, Vancouver was my destination that day, to visit my brother Danny, his wife Janette, son Max, and black Labrador retriever, Tara. Danny and Janette had always been more friends than family, and yet more family than friends, and they had come to help look after Jackie and me in Toronto after Selena’s accident, then again in London during our “exile,” and finally in Barbados, just a few weeks before Jackie’s passing. In past years I had often visited them in Vancouver while touring with the band, and after my recent period of solitary rambling, I was looking forward to getting off the road for a few days, and being with people who knew me and my story.
In Jackie’s final few weeks of decline she was chained to an oxygen tank most of the time, growing weaker both physically and mentally, less able to endure the heat of the tropical afternoons, but too feeble now to travel anywhere else. She and her sister, Deb, spent hours in the air-conditioned bedroom going over a list of her jewellery, which she wanted to divide among her family and closest friends. On one of my first bicycle trips, from Munich to Venice, I had bought her a pearl bracelet in Zermatt, Switzerland, then carried it over the Alps to Venice on my bicycle, then later bought her a matching necklace. It is said that pearls, being organic, become imbued with the essence of their wearer, and thus are the most personal of jewels, so it seemed fitting that they should go to Janette, who both of us liked and admired very much. So I had been carrying those pearls, carefully wrapped, on a delivery mission which now spanned 13,000 kilometres (8,125 miles) and almost three weeks.
But first, my route into Vancouver would delight me with a road I would later rate as one of the great motorcycle roads in the world. Highway 99 began among the dry hills of pine and sage near Marble Canyon, then after Lillooet it went snaking through deep forest, up and down past fast rivers and aquamarine mountain lakes. The sky remained bright, the air cool and delicious, and the sinuous road coming toward me was so challenging and rewarding that I was tempted into the adrenaline zone. Turn by turn my pace increased until I was riding with a complete focus spiced by the ever-present danger and occasional thrill of fear, racing against physics and my own sense of caution in a sublime rhythm of shifting, braking, leaning deep into the tight corners, then accelerating out again and again. I felt a charge of excitement I hadn’t known for many months, and found myself whooping out loud with the sheer existential thrill.
From first to last
The peak is never passed
Something always fires the light
That gets in your eyes
MARATHON, 1985
Chapter 5
FIRST CLASS SADDLETRAMP
I believe in what I see
I believe in what I hear
I believe that what I’m feeling
Changes how the world appears
TOTEM, 1996
At the time of writing those lines, in a time I can only describe as “before,” I had in mind the contradiction between a skeptic’s dismissal of anything not tangible (true agnosticism) and the entirely subjective way many people tend to view and judge the world, through the filters of their ever-changing emotions and moods. In the days following Selena’s death, I had learned for myself how profound and pervasive that syndrome could be, how a sunny day could actually seem dark, the sun totally wrong, and how the world around me, the busy lives of all those oblivious strangers, could seem so futile and unreal — as futile and unreal as what passed for my own life.
If some of the journal notes I have quoted seem ill-tempered, even misanthropic, this attitude should be understood as a kind of envy, which so often has a bitter aftertaste. In the wake of my devastating losses it was hard for me to accept that fate could be so unjust, that other people’s lives should remain unscarred by the kind of evil that had been visited upon me. The big question, “why?” was a ceaseless torment, as my brain struggled for meaning (Is this a punishment? A judgement? A curse?), and when I saw other people with their children, or with their lovers and mates, or even just apparently enjoying life, it wasn’t so much ill will that moved me, as it was jealousy, resentment, and a sense of cruel injustice.
When it came to those who had cared for me, though, these dark thoughts did not apply, for I felt affection and gratitude not only for their
help, but for their understanding, for simply knowing what I had endured, feeling for me, and demanding nothing more than that I continue to live. My only contact with those people for three weeks had been by telephone, as I travelled among strangers and carried the weight of that knowledge alone, so I was looking forward to visiting Danny and Janette in their little red house in Kitsilano, just across the bridge from downtown Vancouver.
Their guest room was comfortable, with a good reading light by the bed, and it felt good just to be in their home, away from motels, restaurants, and gas stations for a few days. I was hoping that staying in one place would be bearable if I kept myself busy, and if I wasn’t alone.
The first evening I was there, I fulfilled my mission of delivering the pearls to Janette, and she and Danny tried hard not to show how moved they were (knowing that emotion is contagious and I was still very sensitive, for they had seen enough of my tears in Toronto, London, and Barbados).
When they asked if there was anything I would like to do in Vancouver, I told them I just needed to stay busy, and they made sure I did. Danny had a demanding job as a personal fitness trainer and manager of several health clubs, and Janette as an ophthalmologist, and both of them juggled the care of Max, nearly two, and their dog, Tara. With nannies and babysitters to allow them time for work and play, they were the most active people I ever knew, and they included me in their energetic routines.
Danny and I pushed Max in his stroller as we walked fast through the streets on my errands of service and resupply; Janette and I hiked with Tara through the muddy wooded ravines (which the signs glorified as “canyons” and I disparaged as “gullies”) near the shore; and the three of us climbed the steep path (“Nature’s Stairmaster”) to the summit of Grouse Mountain, an ordeal also known as the “Grouse Grind.” We went rowing and kayaking in Burrard Inlet amid a rich backdrop of Vancouver’s cityscape, the dark woods of Stanley Park, and the high mountains to the north, and I rowed out alone across the heaving saltwater mass among the cargo ships, pleasure craft, and bobbing navigation markers.
A pair of seals seemed to be shadowing me, popping their dog-like heads above the surface on either side several times and just looking at me. I floated with my oars poised above the water, unable to resist the fancy that these two curious, amiable-looking seals were watching over me like two guardian spirits. Being a rational-scientific-skeptic at heart, I had never been one to believe in reincarnation, but in the same way that I found it difficult to dismiss superstitious notions of retribution and evil curses as a “cause” for my late misfortunes, I couldn’t avoid feeling somehow comforted by the notion that my lost ones might be still around somewhere. At the same time, I couldn’t quite buy the assertions of the “spiritualists,” cozy as those fantasies might be for the bereaved, when I pondered such contradictions as how a soul could pass into another life-form and yet still be available for our consultation in a spirit-channel or séance. The rational-scientific-skeptic might settle for such a logical dialectic on the matter, but my primitive spirit often had different desires.
In any case, my little baby soul had been soothed by six active, enjoyable days in Vancouver, and I felt ready to set off again (or maybe I just needed a rest). My motorcycle had been thoroughly fettled by a local shop; I had spent an afternoon giving it a loving clean and polish in Danny and Janette’s garage, and all of my baggage and equipment was refreshed and reorganized. With Danny and Janette rising early to wave me off in the pre-dawn darkness, I set off at 6:00 to ride through the empty streets of the glittering city to the ferry dock at Horseshoe Bay.
A short boat-ride across the Strait of Georgia from the city of Vancouver lay the long mass of Vancouver Island, stretching north and west into the Pacific Ocean. The only parts of Vancouver Island I had seen before had been on early Rush tours, when we used to play in British Columbia’s capital city of Victoria, which is as quaint and anglophile as its name (with teahouses, cricket pitches, and a newspaper called the Times-Colonist ), and Nanaimo, another small, less-pretentious city built upon mining, lumbering, and fishing. I had always pictured the rest of that huge, seemingly unpopulated island as a vast park of old-growth forest, and on this journey I decided to explore it more thoroughly.
As usual, my route was anything but direct, beginning with a ferry on the mainland side to Langdale, in an area called “The Sunshine Coast” (and it was, with high wispy clouds and views of mountains and ocean I could only describe as “massive”), then a short ride along a winding road to a second ferry from Earls Cove to Saltery Bay, another short bike ride to the pulp-mill town of Powell River (where I found a florist to send a “thank you” bouquet to Danny and Janette), and finally a third ferry across the Strait of Georgia to Comox, on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island.
As I followed the highway north from Comox through Campbell River, where I finally escaped the heavy traffic and had some good riding, my mental picture of Vancouver Island slowly began to erode. The mountains and surrounding ocean made a majestic frame, but the picture within was fairly grim: the island seemed to be nothing more than a big “tree farm,” with alternating woodlots of second-growth, third-growth, and no-growth gashes of clear-cut. Signs in front of each plot offered lumber company propaganda, giving the year that a particular stand had been “harvested,” “thinned,” “replanted” (sometimes overstated as “reforested”), and “fertilized.” Every town had a pulp mill belching into the sky, and a closer look at the map showed the spreading network of lumber roads. I passed logging trucks carrying tree trunks so large that a single tree had been cut into three or four pieces, and that one tree made a full load, even for a huge tractor-trailer. As a useful warning, I could always smell the trucks on the road ahead, especially in the rain, for they trailed a sweet perfume of fresh-cut timber, but I still felt sad to see the carcasses of these noble trees.
But when I found myself feeling too self-righteous and sanctimonious about this wholesale strip-logging, I only had to think of my living room in Quebec, with its beams of “B.C. fir.” Where did I think they came from? I was reminded of the Vermont politician’s joke about the difference between an environmentalist and a developer: the environmentalist has his cabin in the woods; the developer hasn’t got his yet.
Despite my early start, and what came to feel like a long day, I decided to head for the northern tip of the island and try to stay somewhere up there. This would keep me on the road a little later than I usually preferred (i.e., past cocktail time), and it was 6:00 before I saw the sign for Port Hardy (“Mining, Lumber, Fishing”). My expectations were not overly high, hoping only for a tidy motel room with a hot shower and a plain, nourishing meal, but unfortunately, at the end of that 12-hour day of hard travelling, I was to be disappointed even in these modest expectations.
The town seemed to consist of a handful of strip malls, so bland and characterless I wondered if perhaps the original town had been destroyed by fire, then replaced as cheaply as possible. My reconnaissance didn’t take long, and showed little choice of accommodations: one motel looked a little nicer, but the other had location: it was right by the town dock, which was lined with fishing boats and looked to be the “heart” of the town.
Fortuitously (I guess), the Seagate Hotel had one room left, and once again, it was “cheap, and worth it.” Furnished with what looked like Holiday Inn castoffs, the room had a nasty smell and a spongy bed with squeaky bedsprings (I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard that sound!). When I went downstairs for dinner, the salad bar had a distinctly brownish tinge, and surprisingly typical of many fishing ports on the Atlantic or Pacific, the only fish available was deep fried. I went with what is often the safest order in such places: steak. Accentuating the positive, I noted that it was “well cooked, with good charcoal taste.”
A few of the professional fishermen were gathered around one table, and I noticed that when they talked about the weather, it wasn’t in terms of the temperature or precipitation, but the wind: “Nor’we
st 15.” After dinner, I strolled out along the dock and watched the boats being unloaded into refrigerated trucks, and I noted that, “I like to see these places, these people; where they live and how they live.”
I felt low that night, and not just because of a disappointing reward at the end of a long day’s travel. I recognized the symptoms of the “post-visit syndrome,” which I had first experienced back in London. During our six months there, Jackie and I had a steady stream of generous visitors from home, friends and family who would come to stay for a few days, and while they were with us we would be entertained and distracted, our spirits would rise, and things would seem better for awhile. Then, all too soon the visitors would go back to their homes and families, while we were left once again with just each other: two sad souls unable to rise above our own bereavement and exile, never mind elevate the other’s spirits.
This time, I had left behind a warm family environment in the home of Danny, Janette, Max, and Tara, leaving them to go on with their busy and fulfilling lives, while I was left to go . . . well, back on the highway.
