October Ferry to Gabriola
Page 8
Chapter 13
The Tides of Eridanus
ALREADY ETHAN AND JACQUELINE had exchanged glances, much as they had at the headline about Poe, betokening their half-comic acceptance of this phenomenon, the warning sign ahead affixed by the joggling sedan, knowing glances accompanied by the same half-smile now and nodding of their heads that said, as in a musing drawl, “Yes, yes, they’re on the job again,” glances, in which there was even some perverse jocose pride, that could have meant either “This was put there for me,” or “That was put there for us.”
But now as the sedan moved over to the right, the bus putting on speed angrily swept past it, Ethan closed his eyes, leaning his head against the back of the seat, but as if suddenly not there, so carried away was he down a whirlwind of his own anguish.
No, he absolutely would not, must not allow himself to think like this. For some while now, though remaining barely conscious of the physical cause, he had been aware of a slow, stealthy, despairing deepening of the medium of his thoughts. This too was like a high tide of Eridanus coming in. It was as though he had been watching, on a dark still day, one of those immense black afternoon tides of autumn slowly brimming up beneath the windows: and now were trying not to watch it, on the same day grown gradually a blustery turbulent one of southeast wind and murk and rain, with the branches murderously crashing down in the forest behind the cabin; one of those tides that rose ever higher as they approached, say, the October full moon, that full moon which was tonight, he remembered, the tide already beginning to come in now too in the gulf below them to their right, the invisible tide in the invisible gulf, that same tide they must battle, or whose ebbing treacheries would carry them perhaps, this afternoon, one way or another, on their ferry to Gabriola; yes, and now not so much brimming as lashing and driving up beneath their windows, and with a venomous roaring, devouring, grinding sibilance: it wasn’t that the house was endangered by tidewater, for all the cabins were built just to surmount the highest tide, and only once had it happened apparently, when an onshore gale blowing for days and nights and heavy rain had obstructed the normal ebb, that some of the cabins were flooded; but that these tides at their highest might dislodge and set afloat one or other of the huge timbers, left stranded all summer on the beach by the previous spring or winter tides, great writhing snags of roots, usually impossible of demolishment into firewood, which, however, being a menace to navigation, for they could sink a ship, you were legally forbidden to remove yourself by other means, when that could be done, as with a block and tackle, and push or tow out into deep water: for only at the moment that the foundations of his own cabin were threatened with disaster from one of these sudden derelict juggernauts, guilelessly quiescent for the last six months, set floating off by nature at the flood and tearing downstream on the ebb, then maybe, by some converse behavior of the inshore currents, to turn and bear straight back down on his house like an avenging sea-monster, under which, trapped by the cross-braces, in its frantic efforts to escape now, it could become a thunderous battering ram—only then had the fisherman strictly the right to protect himself from it: Ethan and Jacqueline’s case was no different, and in wild weather, with the greater velocity of the seas piling up those high tides one was as powerless as Canute to stay, which were already licking hungrily at the flanks of those snags, the danger was far worse: and being so powerless there seemed nothing left to do finally but pray that, if the tide would not, at least that worst of all snags would remain where it was, or if they all must drift, drift in any direction except one’s own, pray, and meantime, standing in the back room watching neither timbers nor mounting seas, attempt to suppress too the base but irresistible panic that rose in the soul at that chuckling and hissing and thunder of the fearful water outside one knew lashing up on the surface and beneath welling and creeping inch by inch upon the cabin, perhaps to loose the snags down on it, to attack and destroy its foundations, creeping up inevitably as each hour of each day since the threat of eviction seemed to creep up on the uncertain day ahead of the eviction itself and bring that doom closer.
Ethan felt seized by panic now in the bus. For he’d remembered he never had felt that way in Eridanus about the high tides of October. (Scarcely this October when they hadn’t been there at all, and he’d been trying not to think about the tides: nor any other October, least of all their first, nor of the yet higher and more dangerous winter tides. Some fear, yes, he might have felt of those in the past as of the winter itself on occasion, those dark, fogbound, snowblinding caliginous spells, of Jacqueline and himself getting lost in the forest, and at the beginning for a long time he had remained afraid of fire) but never that helplessness in the face of fear, never that panic. A current in his mind had gone awry, played him false, a freak thought confused his mind’s direction; but without invalidating the power of the emotion it carried that seemed projected, yet not vicarious, as if some part of him at this moment were actually haunting the place. But it was also projected back in time and the time he was thinking of, was, of course and once more simply this last summer again, the tides as they seemed “since the threat,” in reality lesser but sometimes menacing flood tides of July and early September when they’d had some bad weather; it was true, and serious threats could arise, and things hadn’t been made any easier by a badly sprained ankle. To mention only one added difficulty. But what struck panic into him in the bus was to realize how short a while it was before that he had felt himself a complete stranger to anything like panic, and when summer was a time of sun and joy. Nothing could have brought home more bitterly to him the devastating effect that threat of eviction had had on both of them than their changed attitude, particularly his, toward this other kind of threat from the tides. In their former days on the beach it had been very different. High tides in summer were for picnics on islands, not disaster to the house. Used so long to their lake, either stupidly unmoving or bellowing with shallow catastrophe, even the high tides of autumn and winter usually delighted them, snags or no snags, in fact the higher and stormier and more besnagged the better. As for the snags themselves, inexperienced and poorly equipped though they were to deal with them, and not taking their danger too seriously, since no one else seemed to, least of all the harbor official supposed to patrol the inlet in a motorboat to see there were none there, stranded on its beaches, or mark their position so that they could be officially towed away on a higher tide to some golgotha of snags, they had almost exulted in their challenge.
And they never doubted they would win: for the first time they had both acquired, though they didn’t know it then, a complete faith in their environment, without that environment ever seeming too secure. This was a gift of grace, finally a damnation, and a paradox in itself all at once: for it didn’t need to seem secure for them to have faith in its security. Or the little house itself didn’t need to. The very immediacy of the eternities by which they were surrounded and nursed; antiquity of mountains, forest, and sea, conspired on every hand to reassure and protect them, as with the qualities of their own seeming permanence. The house in Oakville might go: the Barkerville burn down: whole cities, countries, be wiped out; but Eridanus, with its eternal fishermen and net-festooned cabins bordering that inlet of the same name, whose ceaseless wandering yet ordered motions were like eternity, looked from its very air of unobtrusiveness too in winter and rain, lack of the consciously picturesque, as, when a child, poring half asleep by the fire over a picture book with drawings of the Disciples and the Holy Land and modern maps to show where everything is, imagines the Sea of Galilee at the end of the world, somehow transported straight to heaven, its commerce uninterrupted. Eridanus was. The most hardboiled side of Ethan, as if untaught by experience, was fooled by this at first: that nature of his as trusting as it could be quick to suspect. What if their little house was knocked down or washed away? he’d asked then. A retreat was not forever. They could always, with a little resource, build another on the same spot and what had they to lose? They’d lost n
early everything already. Not that, he thought, they ever seriously dreamed of losing the cabin but if they did, to begin with, they never dreamed they’d care. That was part of the charm.
For where else in the world was the existence of your home so dependent on the elements (except for fire, never think of fire), why, your very life in it was rendered possible only by gradually achieving harmony with the elemental forces around you, which, one had read, was a human end in itself.
That, among other things, between the cabin and themselves was a complete symbiosis. They didn’t live in it, Ethan said, they wore it like a shell.
For in fact they used to welcome and burn most of the driftwood that came their way. Sometimes they’d been dependent on it for months at a time. Logs gathered from the beach, or plucked from the sea, and Ethan’s wintry plunges, as Jacqueline’s assistant dexterity, had had more often intentions of gay salvage, than of salvation: yet it had been hard necessity too, with the lumber mills on strike, and no wood to be got from the forest save with the sap running, and no other way to heat the house. And salvage of two-by-fours and cedar planks for building and repairs about the house too, or for their porch, to this day left unfinished…
While truth to tell, very large logs, even those nearly in the class of “menaces to navigation,” could sometimes be secured to the house itself from the beach, left to be sawn up later, so that, unless they broke loose there was scant danger to the foundations.
But at least they had still been there. And the beauty remaining never two minutes the same. For one fine morning near high tide they would rise to see a great wheel of carved curling turquoise with flashing sleeked spokes sharp as a fin three miles long sweeping around the bay: crash, boom: the wash of a steamer coming in under the mist—paradisal result and displacement of that far distant and most malodorous cause, a dirty oil tanker which, with all its flags strung diagonally aloft above its bridges and catwalks, looked like a huge floating promenade. Was he wrong and the whole world divine, could the future change the past, would the wash unloose the snags, and those last forgotten, threat of eviction forgotten for the moment, Ethan dived, sprained ankle and all, Jacqueline following him, into the great turquoise wheel, to emerge renewed. Reborn, for five minutes at least.
Now there was only this tide of his mind still rising, and deepening, reaching out toward those other grislier, more menacing timbers that were fears, anxieties, obsessions, horrors, it had not yet set afloat, where they lay still beached, in some cerebral niche, flung hence by some ejecting force, out of reach of the normal tides of consciousness; he knew they were there, would all be coming downstream too. Well, he’d deal with them later. No! he reflected, still with his eyes shut, God damn it, even the beauty of old Barkerville really had been a sort of defunct beauty, it was a bit like a museum, and indeed tourists sometimes asked to be taken through it. This was partly also because by some suspension of descendability between Trisaieul Llewelyn (as Jacqueline liked to call him, thinking great-grandfather sounded better in French) who’d been left it by the last grand-uncle, and Aïeul Llewelyn, the house had actually passed out of the family altogether and had been, in what one wrongly thought of as the last stagecoach days, a notoriously wild pub; whether it was thus it had acquired its name, or from his grandfather himself who, having been obliged to buy it back into the family rechristened it laconically after the spot in British Columbia where he’d made the cash to complete the purchase, or from a coincidence of both, there were no records to show and Ethan though usually fascinated by such things had somehow never bothered to ask his grandmother, when she was alive. Nonetheless Ethan liked to believe that its period as a pub was the time the house liked best. It endured their tasteful embellishments but contained itself in dreams of riot. Scornful of the age in which it yet lived, it died consciously and furiously, whatever the immediate cause of——