Uncharted

by Graeme Connell

  She loves this drive through the mountains and through the Rogers Pass to Golden. Today the clouds seem to hang like giant veils. The light drizzle beads on the windscreen, catches light in vein-like rivulets. Whap! The wiper blades swish across, and they’re gone. Start again.

  Life is about starting again, sort of every day. Why doesn’t Brewster get this? He’s the sort of fellow she’d like to get to know, but he’s so self-absorbed. If he could just pull himself out of this, he’d have a lot to offer. She admits he did come out of his shell up at the Meadows, but he turtled when she raised the issue of what was so different about his loss compared to what others experience, herself included.

  She wonders if he’d continue to head west or turn around and return to Revelstoke for another night before the trip back to Calgary. An odd but nice fellow, thoroughly depressed and so full of a pain he did not know how to handle.

  “At least you know where and what happened to your wife. Tragic, yes,” she’d said. “Me? My husband just did not come home. I’ve no idea where he is, what he’s doing or even if he is still alive.”

  Mark had wanted to do more than work in the oil sands, and that was what led him to find a six-month assignment as a volunteer with an international agency after an earthquake in Asia. Letters, cards and even photos had populated her mailbox weekly. With her tacit approval, he’d renewed his contract and stayed away.

  “‘This is my life’s work,’ he told me in one of his last letters. Slowly his letters became less regular. After five months, my letters were returned, address unknown. I panicked,” she’d told Brewster. “I called embassies, politicians and agencies, and then: ‘Don’t worry, Irene. I’m okay here. Mail and stuff is very irregular. There’s a big call on my engineering and communication skills here. It’s what I need to do.’

  “He never came home. He never wrote. Eighteen years or so now, married to the only man I’ve ever loved, ever wanted to love. Yet he left. As our savings dwindled, I sold the house and went back to university.

  “So, Mr Brewster, what’s different? I had to make a new life all the while thinking that maybe one day he would come home. I made sure—well, at least I thought so—that he’d always be able to locate me. I kept in touch with our mutual friends, our university, our neighbours. But nothing. I always prayed for his safety and his return.”

  It’s like Brewster is in the car with her. She’d suggested over dinner last night that he should get counselling. It is how she herself had overcome her own misery and made the decision to get on with her life. Mark was not going to control her. Armed with a master’s degree in geologic engineering and her undergraduate civil engineering degree, she said goodbye to the oil patch and focussed her expertise with a consulting engineering firm based in Vancouver. What’s more, she loved her work with the railway from her new home in Calgary.

  Her work and her life with the church were more than enough for her, she’d told Brewster. “I love being on my own, independent and fulfilled. Sure, I’ve thought often about whether Mark would walk through that front door, and whether life would ever be the same again. I supposed I could have got some legal advice, but I never bothered. I enjoy the life of a bachelorette. I have a great circle of friends.”

  Funny thing, he didn’t ask her about children. Just about anybody she came across asked if she had children or had counted down with her biologic clock. Might have been different if Mark was still around, but in her heart she’d never considered a need, want or desire to be a parent. Her times with children revolved around her friends. She got her enjoyment as aunty or godmother. She even had some of these youngsters stay over when their parents wanted a time out. She’d happily built a life without her own children and without Mark.

  “I haven’t altogether been a saint either,” she told Brewster. “Yes, I’ve enjoyed some special relationships, but I prefer my own life. There’s a richness to it that few people recognize. It was tough for me until I completed my master’s. Then I became involved with the church through a recovery program, and through Christ I was able to work through my grief. I quit drinking and discovered myself.”

  The rain eases as she reaches Golden, where she turns off for a coffee and lunch. Relaxing in the restaurant, she reflects on how she’d opened up to Brewster after he’d told her about his journey through AA, and how he and Melanie had rekindled a new life together. He’d volunteered something of his past, but she could tell he was withholding huge parts his story, especially his marriage. She guessed that he’d only volunteered this because she’d put the wine list aside and asked for a tonic with a lime twist.

  It was odd that he, a first-timer to Revelstoke, had found what must be the most exquisite restaurant in the town. It was one that, in spite of her many visits, she had never encountered. He chose wild salmon and she chose wild sablefish. They’d shared a delightful dessert platter, enjoyed good coffee and talked until they were the last to leave. Who knows if they’ll ever make contact again?

  Irene checks her fuel before swinging out into the traffic to climb the big hill and enjoy the run through to her next stop at Field for a review of some remedial work she’d initiated on the Spiral Tunnels tracks.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hello José,

  Sorry it’s been a couple of days since you emailed me. Yes, I am away. Drove west through the Rockies for a bit of a change of scenery and a holiday. My car broke down last Monday, and I spent a relaxing time in Revelstoke. Nice place; lots of history. Give me a couple of days, and I’ll call you.

  I’m heading home today, and I’m keen to learn what these developments are that you talk about. At the same time, I’m very hesitant that you might be wanting more than I can give. It’s possible you might want to do more with Melanie’s project than what we originally agreed. It sounds like there’s a change in the air.

  Looking forward to speaking with you directly about any future plans.

  Cheers,

  Brewster

  He deliberately avoids any mention of his distress over the email he received from the artist. He trusts his park contacts and wants to give them the benefit of the doubt. Through his trade and business interests, he’d become a stickler for agreements and contracts, whether on paper or with a handshake. And who knows, this deaf woman might be just trying him on. Now that he’d put that aside, he was confident the issue was out of the way.

  He updates Hannah and Harris and gets a note off to Joel and Jo because he realizes he’d not told them about his sudden plan to disappear from Calgary for a while. He reminds himself to be more diligent—to get with the program, as the kids would say. He used to always be on the ball, but since Melanie, he’d withdrawn into himself. From his time with Jim and Doris, he recognizes his unsociability is an expensive by-product of his grief.

  Out on the highway, heading east, he watches the heavy grey cloud draped across the mountaintops and mulls Jim’s bluntness. “Just remember, Brewster, it’s not your friends who have forgotten you, as you say. I think you bailed on them whenever they reached out. Look at it that way: Jesus hasn’t left you either; you’ve just pushed Him aside.”

  Jim had certainly offered a new perspective. Trouble is, he’s not sure if he’s really in the frame of mind to accept it. “Yeah, sure, Jim. I hear ya,” he says to the Jeep. “But I don’t feel or see anything. I still wake up on my own in the morning. I still don’t have the thrill of spending my day with a truly exciting person.”

  “But I think you have to turn it around, Brewster. You are wanting to know what Christ might do for you.”

  “Jim?” Brewster says. “Jim? Where are you?” He is alarmed at hearing the voice. It’s as if Jim is beside him in the car. He turns and looks out each window, checks the rear view mirrors and tries to focus on the road ahead.

  “How about asking what you can do for Him? You know where Melanie is; you know that. Now, what is it that Christ has in mind
for your life? You’re in the middle of a battle. Jesus is Lord. Do you agree? And if He is, then there is no other—it is not me, it is not you, it is not money. Trust in the work of the Holy Spirit. You and I speak on the surface, but the Holy Spirit goes much deeper. People are not the enemy. I know you can figure that out.”

  A sermon in the car? But I’m all alone in here. What is this? Did I really just hear that, or is this some sort of divine extension from what Jim, or maybe Doris, said in the car after Craigellachie, when he’d conveniently tuned out of the front seat conversation.

  The voice has faded and Brewster calms down. He understands what Jim said. It’s straightforward, probably the best words he’s heard since the accident. No hedging.

  “What do you think, Melanie? Am I losing it, or are you trying to tell me something?”

  He slows to the loss of daylight as he travels through the first of several avalanche tunnels in the Rogers Pass. Then another, and another. Is this the analogy? Out of the darkness and into the light? There’s another couple of tunnels. Out of the darkness and into the light, out of the darkness and into the light. “I get it. I get it already,” he yells. “I get it.”

  The radio offers mostly static. He switches it off. He doesn’t have a CD either. He tries thinking about the railway, the engineering and surveying to forge a way through these mountains. The men, the cost, the political gain. And always he thinks of the ones who didn’t make it home.

  Around a couple of big bends, the sky opens, and he finds himself with the wipers full on, trying to cope with a driving rain squall ripping through the valley. He pulls his speed down to match the flooding asphalt. The mood changes, and he’s in a hurry to get to Golden for a coffee, a bowl of chilli and a chocolate donut. Change the subject. Give me light.

  Then there’s a small sound deep within his subconscious, feeding a different hunger. “Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so.” He used to sing that to Hannah and Harris. Now they sing to him. He hears their little voices as if they are in the car, like when they used to go on trips—camping, perhaps. “Little ones to Him belong. They are weak, but He is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me …”

  By the time he reaches Golden, the skies have opened to blue. He lunches at a picnic table outside the restaurant. Jet-black crows sneak across the grass scavenging as usual. How would they get on if humans weren’t so messy? The gutsy throb of a big diesel loco pulling westward drowns the voices he heard in the car. The trains—they pick up, they put down, they haul in, they haul away. Moving, always moving. Was this the expectation those 100-plus years ago? The lost men, their breath is in the tunnels and their sweat on the rails.

  #

  Modern engineering, machinery and practices have carved a smooth and fast thoroughfare through the wilderness. He winds his way through the Kicking Horse Pass, passes Field and overtakes the semis hauling their laden trailers up the Big Hill. It’s such a giant effort, just like having to go home. He doesn’t want to be there, or to have to part with his photographs or work with the park.

  He follows the lead of other travellers and pulls in behind a stream of vehicles parked along the shoulder. Beyond the wildlife fence, a black bear wanders along the meadow, minding his own business. This is his second bear sighting; Melanie would have been thrilled. He regrets the many times he got frustrated with her, having to stop to check on whatever she might see—bears, moose, elk, deer or even a flower. The bear stops, turns and looks up to the road. Brewster has the uncanny feeling that the bear’s eyes are on him, singled out from the crowd of shutterbugs.

  Do their eyes meet as Brewster hears the voice of the bear in his head? “You are watching me in my life,” the bear says. “What are you doing in yours?” Brewster groans, startling the excited young Asian couple next to him. The bear stands and puts his nose on the wind. “Yes, you,” it says. “Think about it.”

  Across the fence where the ground drops away from the highway, a small blue flower bobs in the breeze. The blue aster.

  Rattled by this encounter, Brewster gets back in his car, grabs a chocolate bar from the glove box and swings wide to miss others pulling onto the highway, almost clipping a big motorhome bearing down in the inside lane. The kilometres slip by. Is that Melanie’s voice he hears, or the bear’s? The stuff that has happened to him in the past few days alarms him. It seemed to start with the tunnellers and the history of human triumph and human loss. Then the motorcyclist’s company, Irene’s bluntness, Jim and Doris and what Jesus had to say about the whole business of life. And who was it talking to him about “out of the darkness into the light” as he passed through the avalanche tunnels?

  The rest of the drive is a blur. Traffic is heavy, yet he stays quietly in the right lane, leaving the speedsters to do the braiding back and forth, as if the horizon will disappear before they get there. The thrill of the westward journey has left him. He feels as though he is heading into a fog. The radio catches an Irish Tenors song, ordinarily one of his favourites, but it doesn’t push him above the take-home voices of his get-away-from-it-all trip. He switches off the cruise control and slows as he enters the Calgary city limits. The stop-start, slow and go of the city traffic brings back the “out of the dark and into the light” chatter. You’re in the middle of a battle.

  “Too much, too much,” he shouts as he pulls up at the traffic lights. He realizes that voices carry through open windows when he sees the alarm on the driver’s face in the car alongside him. He lifts his hands, smiles, pulls ahead and decides he’s in no mood to prepare an evening meal. It’s a meals-to-go from the new supermarket again tonight—prime rib or turkey, he’ll take what’s on offer.

  After the long journey with its manifold advice, he’s simply had enough.

  “You are watching me in my life,” said the bear. “What are you doing in yours?”

  #

  He passes a swank hotel and immediately vetoes the supermarket. He’s not going home to that awful, silent, empty house. He’s not going home to Melanie’s place.

  “Is that one night or two, Mr. McWhirtle?”

  “Just tonight, thanks,” he says. “Just tonight. You do have a room available?”

  “Let me check with housekeeping and see where we’re at.”

  He turns and sees himself in a mirror to the side of the black tiled check-in desk. Good grief, he thinks. No wonder she looked oddly at me. He sees untidy haystack hair, wild and stressed eyes, chocolate stains and coffee drips on his T-shirt, shorts and beach shoes. He’s only carrying an overnight bag. He’s near some sort of breaking point as he taps his credit card on the counter. The young woman returns with a man dressed in a white shirt, tie and black waistcoat. He watches them peer into the computer screen.

  “Mmm. We don’t have a standard room available, Mr. McWhirtle, but we can upgrade you to a king bed room with a Jacuzzi. It’s all we have left for tonight, and the room rate is $300. Let me see if I can get a reduced rate on that. Busy time of the week for travellers. Is it just yourself, sir?”

  “That will be fine,” Brewster says, looking directly at the young man. “I’m sure that will be fine.”

  “Just yourself, Mr. McWhirtle?” he asks again.

  “Yep, just me. I don’t really need all that, but if it’s all you have, I’ll take it.”

  The man keeps looking at him while the woman processes his Visa and readies his room key. Others are waiting to check in—travellers. He can hear the rolling suitcases clicking over the brightly tiled floor.

  Brewster slowly puts his credit card back into his wallet and stuffs it into his back pocket. He forces a smile, picks up his key and listens attentively as he’s given directions to the elevators. “Welcome, Mr. McWhirtle. We trust your stay with us will be restful.”

  The man nods to a valet who wants to carry his bag.

  “Thanks all the same,” Brewster says. “I think I can manage this just fin
e.”

  The valet escorts him to an elevator, and all the while he feels the eyes of the man at the check-in following him.

  “I guess I don’t look like your average guest,” he says to the valet as the elevator door closes.

  “You have a lovely room, sir. I’m sure you’ll like it,” The valet says. “Where’ve you come from today?”

  “Revelstoke. Feeling very tired and in need of a shower. Thank you.”

  The room is pure luxury. Guilt again. Why did I never treat Melanie to such opulence? She would have loved this but then she would have said, “Why spend that much money to sleep in a bed?”

  He drops his bag on the bed and inspects the bathroom and Jacuzzi. Should he or shouldn’t he? Ah, why not. He’s paid for it. He sets the taps flowing and watches the water foam. He listens to the water pouring into the tub as he strips to the nothing and pulls out a fresh shirt, underwear and jeans, laying them on the bed. He carries his toilet bag and shaver into the bathroom, adjusts the temperature in the tub and eases into the hot water. The jets are on, and he lies back into the bubbles as the high-pressure streams attack every fibre of his skin. The day slowly fades, and he imagines his guilt, grief and grumpiness being pulled from his body by the spontaneous miracle of bubbling water. After 20 minutes in the foamy warmth, he figures it’s time to get out before his skin wrinkles all away and he falls asleep.

  “I haven’t felt this good for a long, long time,” he says to the mirror as he puts on his fresh polo shirt before giving his hair a brush and a shake to end up with the clean, tousled look Melanie enjoyed. He can’t find any socks in his bag, so he slips into his loafers and then takes them off. It’s too early to go down for a meal. He powers up his iPad. Better make contact with a few people.

  Hello José,

  I’m back in town again, and as of this moment I have the rest of the week open. What did you have in mind? Should we just meet down at the park—say, Thursday around 10:00? Intrigued by your note and what you have in mind.