Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  It wasn’t much of a choice.

  “It wasn’t much of a choice. I could go to a hot place where everyone shot at me, or a federal prison, or a cold place where everyone was friendly and decent. The day my draft board classified me 1-A, I crossed the border.” I sat sideways on the couch facing her, head cradled on my forearm.

  “You did not support the Viet Nam war.”

  “I never addressed the question. If people wanted to do that, they were welcome to. I just figured that if there was no person I loved enough to die for, then I certainly wasn’t going to risk it for an abstraction. My father being a military man of rank, it became necessary to go somewhere far away. Here I am.”

  “You are a pacifist?”

  “No, no, no. I am a coward. Cowards can’t be pacifists. Pacifism involves a moral commitment, a willingness to die rather than use force. I’m not certain any such people exist. I am certain I’m not one of them.”

  “You could kill in self-defense?”

  “And for no other reason I can think of.”

  “Would you kill for Snaker?”

  I hesitated. “Maybe. If it was the only way to save his life, yeah, maybe. Ruby too, I guess. Hard to imagine.”

  “Would you die for them?”

  “No, I’d like to think I would, but I wouldn’t. Friends are nice, but I can live without them. I can’t live without me.” I changed position, lay with my feet toward Rachel, looking up at the ceiling beams.

  “Do you think Snaker would die for you?”

  That one took me by surprise. I had to think a minute. “Yeah,” I said finally. “As his lights went out he’d be regretting it, calling himself a jerk—but if he didn’t have too much time to think about it, he probably would. There’s a lot of people and things he’d probably die for. Snaker can love, or can kid himself that he does, which comes down to the same thing.”

  “Do you wish that you could?”

  “Look what it gets him and Ruby. He loves her, and she loves him and the commune. One day soon she’s going to have to choose between them—and he’s scared to death.”

  “But you envy him.”

  “Sometimes. I used to more than I do these days. I’m pretty used to who I am by now. Simple intelligent self-interest seems to be enough to make me a decent neighbour. That’ll do.

  “But you, Rachel, what you’ve done I will never understand. Coming all this way, exiling yourself to a drastically shortened lifetime among strangers in a primitive time—to go through so much in pursuit of abstract knowledge—what drives you? I just don’t get it. Is it love, duty, fear, need, what? Is this a sacred kamikaze mission for you, or is it your punishment for horrid crimes? Or is it just that immortals stop fearing death?”

  “Some of all of those,” she said. “It’s like your Barbara. I won’t talk about it.”

  Which left me no comeback. The subject was dropped.

  It kept going like that, as Rachel worked her way across the North Mountain, “interviewing people for her book”: the people I had expected her to have the most trouble relating to were usually the ones with whom she established immediate empathy and mutual respect. Locals, as we hippies called native Nova Scotians, did not, as a rule, “take to” strangers quickly. Oh, they’d be friendly, more than polite—but they held back something, they didn’t really fully accept you into the community until you’d survived your third winter without quitting and moving south, been around a few years and shown some stuff, demonstrated that your word was good and your skull occupied.

  But Rachel was the rare newcomer who was taken nearly at once to the collective bosom of the locals. She shared something with them that my hippie friends and I did not, and I could not for the life of me pin down just what it was. The phenomenon was not always as strong and noticeable as it had been with Mona Bent, but it was pretty nearly universal. It was as though they looked deeply once into her eyes and saw all they needed to see; within minutes they would be allowing her to rub their necks, and chattering happily about The Old Days. And telling her the real inside story, too, as near as I could tell.

  There were exceptions, like old Wendell Rafuse, of course.

  How can I explain Wendell? East of Heartbreak Hotel lies the home of Phylippa Brown, whose husband inconsiderately died a decade ago and left her with two girls, Pris and Cam, and damn little else. When Phyl’s oil furnace died a couple of winters ago, the next morning two true cords of cut split stacked firewood had magically appeared by her front door, without waking her or the girls. That same winter, Wendell Rafuse’s furnace failed too, and he was a frail sixty-two—but Wendell was known to have cheated his brother out of a valuable piece of land, by misusing a power of attorney while the brother was in hospital. No wood appeared outside Wendell’s door. He could afford a new furnace…but he burned up a lot of furniture in the three days it took to get it delivered and installed.

  People like Wendell tended to decline to be interviewed by some kind of Chinese nigger woman who paid no fee.

  But even some of that type accepted Rachel, perhaps because her cover identity offered the hope of seeing themselves in print some day, perhaps simply because they were lonely.

  Most of the local people let her into their homes, gave her tea and cakes, answered her questions, talked about their lives, many of them accepted her offer of a massage—a great many as the word began to spread about how good she was at it. She did not ever repeat anything she had been told in confidence, however juicy; somehow the word spread about that too. Blakey Sabean said of her once approvingly that, “She don’t smile just to dry her teeth.”

  It surprised me how quickly and easily the local folk, both Mountain and Valley (and good books have been written on the subtle but important differences between the two kinds of people) took Rachel into their homes and their hearts. What surprised me even more was how easily the hippies took her into their beds.

  Not the fact itself. Rachel was an attractive female, with dark exotic good looks, and early Summer was the traditional time for the hippie folk to play Musical Beds if they were going to. What surprised me almost to the point of awe was how gracefully and painlessly she managed it.

  Her experience with Snaker and Ruby and me seemed to be typical. She had the mystic ability to enter a home, have sex with everyone in it, open them to new ways of loving, and then exit painlessly, leaving behind no broken hearts, no broken marriages, no broken trust, leaving relationships stronger than before.

  We had had sexual superstars pass through in previous years, attempting to seduce anything that wore clothes and often succeeding. But usually when such carnal comets blazed over the Mountain, they burned what they touched. This one left no trail of wreckage, no clap, no crabs, no regrets. Most extraordinary. This was the woman I had thought untantric.

  Part of it must have been her very straightforwardness. Anyone could see that there was no evil in Rachel, no guile. When she gave of herself it was not to rack up a score, not for reasons of power or manipulativeness or bargaining or mischief, but just for the joy of it. She was a noncombatant in the battle of the sexes, and she was temporary, as perhaps a more textured personality could not have been.

  Here is the closest I can come to explaining it:

  One winter I was on a Greyhound bus, returning to college after Christmas vacation. A blizzard descended; the bus driver was forced to leave the Thruway. We were stranded for a week, totally snowed in, miles from civilization, nearly five dozen of us in a single large room.

  A bar. All expenses paid by Greyhound…

  All the passengers were students, returning to assorted midstate colleges and universities. The male-female ratio approached parity. We had four guitars, a sax, a flute, and eight people who could play the house piano. We had unlimited food and booze, and adequate drugs. I guess you could call what developed an orgy. It was a vacation from reality. All the rules were suspended. You could create a new self, without necessarily having to live up to it. Everyone slept with everyon
e, without jealousy or pain. There were no fights, not so much as an argument. Amazing music was played. When the big plows finally came by we all found our clothes and boarded the bus and went back to our lives, and I do not believe any of us so much as wrote to one another. We had not exchanged names let alone addresses.

  Can you imagine that head-space, the dreamy accepting state of mind in which you have the vague conviction that this doesn’t count, that you are comped and covered and exempt and it’s safe to go on instinct?

  Rachel was that condition on two legs. And they spread easily.

  But not wantonly. Her judgment was fine. She did not, for instance, make a pass at Tommy, nor at the monks-in-training down at the Ashram, nor at any of the handful of other voluntary celibates among the hippies. She sidestepped around Malachi and Sally when they were having struggle in their relationship, presumably out of a sense that it would be a destabilizing intrusion—and yet she made it with Zack and Jill while they were squabbling, and they came out of it stronger. She got it on with bachelors of both sexes, and with couples married and unmarried, and with the three-marriage over on the South Mountain and the six-marriage over in Mount Hanley and the two gay men who lived together but weren’t lovers down in Port Lorne (when she left they were lovers). She did it with George and Annie from Outram a week before Annie gave birth—and was there for the birth, cut the cord I’m told. Maybe they had planned to name the kid Rachel anyway.

  Whether she had sex with any of the locals, I could not say for sure. Their grapevine worked differently from ours; they were more reticent about such things. But I’m inclined to think that she did not…or that she did so rarely and quite selectively. Most of the locals lived by a different moral code, which precluded “fooling around.” Extreme sexual openness tended to open hippie doors, but it would have closed most local ones. There were, of course, exceptions and borderline cases, especially among some of the younger locals. All I can say for certain is that the scandal I constantly half expected never materialized. No one shot or cut anyone—or even punched anyone—over Rachel.

  If none of this is ringing true for you, if your stereotype of country folk is that they are conservative, intolerant, stiff-necked and deeply suspicious of anyone or anything strange…well, you haven’t been to the North Mountain, that’s all.

  Rachel was extremely good at drawing them out, scribbling copious notes in an impressive impenetrable shorthand which she admitted privately was fake. Folks didn’t all bond with her as solidly as Mona had, there was something special about that relationship. But they all brought out their best china for her, if that conveys anything to you. I went along with her on her first half-dozen calls, realized by the third that I was superfluous, realized by the sixth that I was a hindrance and stopped coming along. She was launched.

  She used Heartbreak Hotel as a home base. Two or three days a week she would be there to help me with whatever work I was doing. Two or three nights a week she was there for me to have sex with, and held me until I fell asleep. In between she popped in for unexpected and always pleasant intervals, then disappeared again. She would tell me where she was going if I asked. Other than that I kept in contact with her mostly by grapevine. Fairly close contact, that is to say. I always had the sense that I was her Special Friend. But I never had encouragement or opportunity to be more than that, to come to depend on her in any sense.

  A few months went by.

  Those months were the ones that connect Winter to Summer in Nova Scotia. (We don’t get Spring.) That made them the most achingly beautiful time of the year—in a province which is never less than stunning—and the second busiest. (The busiest time is when Winter is coming on fast and you still don’t have your firewood cut or your house banked.)

  With the approach of Summer, people who’ve spent months marking time, caning chairs, battling cabin fever, all suddenly step outdoors, blink at the absence of snow, tear off their Stanfields and become whirlwinds of activity as they realize that they will have a maximum of four months’ grace to lay up enough nuts to last through the next Winter. To compensate them for this, the world turns warm and fecund and friendly; almost overnight the North Mountain turns into the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and people’s faces start to hurt from smiling so much.

  Fair-weather friends began to drift back to Sunrise Hill from all around the planet to help get the crops into the ground, repair the ravages of the winter past and initiate new construction. That year’s crop of Hippie transients began passing through, backpacked and headbanded and Earthshoed and fluted. Summer-resident property owners made their annual appearance from Halifax or the States, to take their Mountain homesteads down off the blocks and jumpstart them again. The stinking goddamned snowmobiles were silenced, and the equally grating but somehow more tolerable sounds of chainsaws and rototillers and tractors were heard in the land. Deer and rabbits and weasels and crows were somehow synthesized out of the defrosting bedrock of the Mountain and began to scamper around the landscape, which turned several hundred colours, nearly all of them called “green” in our poor grunting language. The Bay suddenly filled with vessels of every kind and type, small fishing and lobstering boats close-in (one popular model looked very much like a phonebooth in a bathtub), and big tankers and freighters farther out. Those people who earned their living by milking tourists began sacrificing to the gods in hopes of a good harvest, and calculating how badly they dared burn Americans on the exchange rate. Farmers and seeds began making intricate conditional promises to one another, both sides with fingers crossed behind their backs. A busy, happy time, full of square-dances and house-raisings, shared work and shared pleasure, new lovers and old friends, fresh food and fresh dope, fresh faces and fresh hope.

  Some of this I shared with Rachel—but as the weeks went by and Winter wore itself out, she spent less and less time at Heartbreak Hotel, and more and more time at her work, talking to the people of Annapolis Valley, resident and transient, hippie and local, asking them about their lives and the way they lived them, about the choices they had made and the choices they wished they had, what it was like here when they were children and how it had changed, the things they were most proud of and the things they regretted. And massaging them as they talked.

  On the morning of the day before the big Summer Solstice Celebration, I saw her for the first time in over a week. She’d gone to the South Mountain for a while, an area so upcountry and backwoods that it makes the North Mountain seem like suburbia. (I met someone there once who claimed she had never in her life actually seen an electric light up close. I believed her.) We had breakfast together.

  I remember the last time I saw Rachel in this life. I stood on the hard rock shore of the Bay of Fundy at low tide, spray at my back, rich shore smell in my nostrils, watching her walk toward me from my doorstep a hundred meters away, watching her cross the road, clamber down the four-meter hill, stride across fifty meters of scrubby marshland, pick her way with easy grace through the treacherous jumble of bleached driftwood that lines the shore, navigate the ankle-breaking rock of the shore itself without hesitation or awkwardness, walk right into my arms and into a kiss without ever having removed her eyes from mine from the moment she’d left the Hotel. “I have to go now, Sam,” she said. “I promised Ted and Jayne and David I’d help them get the rest of their garden in the ground before it’s too late.”

  “Sure, hon,” I said. “Give them my best.”

  “I will. I’ll come back tomorrow and help you carry things over to Louis’s barn for the Solstice Feast.”

  “Thanks, Rachel. That’d be a help.”

  She let go of me, turned and retraced her steps to the road. The process was as beautiful to watch from behind as it had been from in front. “Sweet night,” I called after her, and she nodded without turning. She turned right when she reached the road and started walking toward Parsons’ Cove, in no hurry at all. When she was out of sight around the bend I turned back to the sea and returned to my thoughts.


  And that was the day I had the thought that killed me.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE SUMMER SOLSTICE party was sort of Woodstock Nation’s Last Gasp, the sort of jamboree that, cynical travelers assured us, could no longer occur within the borders of the United States of America. There was nothing particularly structured, certainly nothing remotely commercial or professional about it. No organizers, no steering committee, no Board of Directors. No tickets; no steenkin bodges. It just seemed to happen every year: the annual Gathering of the Nova Scotia Hippies.

  Primarily, of course, it was a gathering of Annapolis Valley Hippies, for that was where the province’s hippie-density was highest. But New Age people came from as far away as Yarmouth, over a hundred kilometers west; from Barrington Passage, a hundred and fifty klicks south; from Amherst, nearly three hundred klicks’ drive away up around the Minas Basin; and from Glace Bay four hundred and fifty klicks to the east, out where Cape Breton Island thrusts its jaw truculently out into the cold North Atlantic. For that matter, random travelers came from all over the planet—but the above parameters roughly defined the boundaries of the Hippie Grapevine, and incorporated most of the people who could expect to be recognized, by reputation if nothing else, when they arrived.

  I remember an early Solstice with no more than fifty or sixty folks, held in a half-acre field out behind the Big House at Sunrise Hill. The year before this, there’d been well over five hundred, overflowing even Louis Amys’ stupendous dairy barn, the pride of six counties. (Unlike Max Yasgur—and possibly because North Mountain Hippies as a group still felt collective guilt over that poor Woodstock farmer—Louis swore he’d never had such a good time in his life; he had not so much agreed, as demanded, to host it again this year, and in all future years. No one had any objection. A merry soul, Louis.)

  What happened at a Solstice Festival (or Celebration, or Feast, or Party, or Thing—it’s indicative that the name was not fixed) was simply that several hundred Aquarian flower children got together and ate immense quantities of each others’ organically grown holistically prepared food, and drank immense quantities of each others’ organic cider and beer and wine, and smoked immense quantities of each others’ organic dope, and talked and sang and talked and danced and talked and laughed and talked and cried and talked and gave each other things. Two things perennially baffled the locals, who observed from a polite distance: that we did not break anything, and that there were never any fights.