by Terry Fallis
“Fair point.”
As we circled, I quickly realized that it was not just the waves I could see rushing beneath us but the rocks below the surface of the lake as well. Then at the eastern end of the lake, the blue of the water suddenly deepened and the rocky bottom fell away and disappeared.
“That is one shallow lake,” I noted as we passed over land again and made one final turn.
“Yep. A glacier dragged itself through here gouging out a shallow trough except for the one end here where it somehow dug down deep.”
We turned again and were back over the east end of the lake heading west at an altitude of about a hundred feet or so. She pointed out a rustic cabin right on the eastern shore.
“That’s, um, the Percival place.”
Then we were down, touching the water in the middle of the lake, our speed taking us almost to the western shore, where we turned around and started the long taxi back to the Percival dock.
“Why not land from the other direction?” I asked. “It would save you taxiing the length of the lake.”
“You don’t fly much, do you? I have to land her into the wind. That’s how planes work. In this part of the mountains, the west wind is not just prevailing, it’s permanent. Every take-off and every landing brings me out here to the west end.”
“Do you fly here often?” I asked.
She smiled a little bit and nodded.
Ten minutes later, she eased us toward the dock at the “Percival place” and cut the engine. While we were still gliding through the water, she climbed out of her seat, out the door, and down onto the pontoon. She stuck out her foot to stop the float from hitting the dock and then stepped onto the two-by-eight planks, guiding the plane into position. It was a perfect parking job. She grabbed a rope already fixed to a cleat on the dock and snapped the metal carabiner to a steel eye mounted on the front of the pontoon. She did the same with a second rope securing the aft end of the pontoon. She flipped open the side hatch, reached into the compartment, and swung out my suitcase in one smooth, easy motion. By this time, I’d managed to release the safety belt and crawl out of my seat. I was reminded of my headset only when it pulled rather violently off my head as I made my way to the door. I stepped carefully down onto the pontoon and then jumped gracefully onto the dock. I would have preferred to have landed on my feet, but my knees and then back would have to do.
“Are you all right?” she asked, helping me up.
“Oh, I’m fine. That’s my standard float plane disembarkation technique.”
“I see.”
We stood facing each other. She didn’t seem eager to move off the dock. I looked up at the cabin expecting one of the Percival clan to emerge wondering about their surprise visitors. Nothing. All quiet. That was not good. I’d come all this way and no one was home. A red canoe rested on a wooden rack just beyond the dock, making me feel like I was stepping into a Tom Thomson painting. Doc Lanny looked out at the lake for a moment and then stepped toward me.
“Why don’t you and I start over?” she said, offering her hand to me for the second time in the last hour or so. She was smiling.
“I’m Dr. Landon Percival. This is my home. I’m the ‘L. Percival’ I think you’ve come to see.”
A raft of frenzied thoughts collided and collapsed in a heap in my head, which I guess is where thoughts traditionally collide and collapse. In no particular order:
He was a she.
She was certainly not twenty-one years old.
She wasn’t a young strapping lumberjack type.
My knees and back still hurt from my Beaver dismount.
How was I going to get back to Mackenzie after breaking the bad news to this old lady that she wouldn’t be going anywhere near the space shuttle?
Maybe our terrifying aerobatic routine on the flight here had nothing to do with a rogue air pocket.
Landon is a nice name.
Crawford Blake was going to hurt me. Amanda Burke was going to hurt me. It was quite possible Landon Percival was going to hurt me.
Despite “enjoying” the same lunch twice, once in a roadside restaurant and a second time in the plane, I was suddenly very hungry.
And I was dog tired.
“But … I thought you were a twenty-one-year-old ‘he,’ ” I mumbled. “I mean, your entry said you were twenty-one.”
Landon looked puzzled.
“No, it did not. I wrote seventy-one. And I don’t know why you’d assume L. Percival would be a man unless you just believe that only men would enter a contest to win a trip into space,” she replied with an edge, lowering the temperature on the dock.
She may have had a point on why I assumed “she” would be a “he.” I opened the front pocket of my suitcase and pulled out the file Emily had given me to help authenticate the winner. I flipped through it, extracted a photocopy of Landon’s original entry form, and showed it to her.
“See, twenty-one,” I said, pointing.
“Look again, eagle eyes. That’s not a two! Do you not know your numbers? That’s a seven. That’s how I make my sevens, with a tiny little tail at the bottom. See, seventy-one,” she responded. “I’m a doctor. Bad handwriting comes with the job.”
I was forced to admit upon closer inspection that it did sort of look a little like a seven. But it still looked a lot like a two. I guess I’d just assumed it said twenty-one and that no one in their eighth decade – and their right mind – would be looking for a ride to the space station.
“Okay. So let me see if I have this right. You’re Landon Percival. You’re a seventy-one-year-old doctor. This definitely is your official winning entry in the Citizen Astronaut contest. You live here in a remote corner of northern British Columbia and fly a plane.”
“That about sums it up.”
Fantastic. A wasted trip. And now I was marooned here, at least until morning. The sun had finally dipped below the mountains, leaving us in fading light.
“Why did you wait until we landed to tell me who you were?”
“Am I going into space?” she asked.
Awkward. I had to let her down gently.
“Well, that’s hard to say, and it’s certainly not my call. NASA has the final decision, but with the considerable liability issues around the flight, and given the absolute requirement that you pass the rigorous training program, I suspect that your, um, maturity, sorry, may make it a long shot. I’m sorry.”
“Now you know why I didn’t tell you until we landed. You would have asked me to turn the plane around and head back to Mackenzie,” she replied. “We both know that when you report back to NASA, I’ll probably be off the list and you’ll just draw another name. Well, now I’ve got you here and …”
“Do you really think abducting me will change anything?” I interrupted. “I’m just the PR guy.”
“Abducting you? This isn’t a movie,” she retorted. “We were running out of daylight and landing on water in the dark is an experience I try to avoid. I’ll fly you back tomorrow. And if that doesn’t suit you, you’re perfectly free to make your own travel arrangements.”
I looked around at this idyllic remote lake nestled in the embrace of the Omineca Mountains and remembered the trouble I’d had earlier in the afternoon hauling my suitcase from the car down to the plane. Dragging it 150 miles as the crow flies through untouched mountain passes, lakes, and wilderness might pose a slight problem.
Landon Percival was still standing on the dock in front of me with her hands on what I assume were her hips. It was hard to tell beneath her loose coveralls. Her eyes were closed for a time but eventually she opened them and lifted them back to me.
“Mr. Stewart, I’ve been waiting a long time for a shot at this. I’m just asking you to hear me out. You’ll be back in Mackenzie tomorrow.”
She grabbed my suitcase and strode off the dock and up the path to the cabin. I stood there for a time cataloguing my options. It didn’t take me long. Then I walked up to the cabin, too.
Lando
n was lighting kerosene sconces in various locations in the room when I stepped in. The growing light revealed what seemed more a library than a cabin. Built-in shelves on three of the four walls of the main room were full of books. For a bibliophile like me, it was an unexpected and beautiful scene. Wood and books have such warmth. A couch and matching easy chair sat in the middle of the room around a faded Persian-looking area rug. An old pine box served as a coffee table of sorts. A galley kitchen to the left off the front door featured a pass-through to the small dining area with a table and four chairs.
“Tea?” she asked, heading to the kitchen.
“Please.”
She’d put my bag just inside one of the two doors that opened off the main room. I figured they were bedrooms. With Landon in the kitchen, I immediately went to the shelves. A quick scan revealed how her library was organized. One wall was fiction, mainly Canadian, American, and British it seemed at first glance. One wall was non-fiction with lots of history and biography. The third wall was dominated by a stone fireplace with a raised hearth and neat stack of wood.
The bookshelves on either side of the stonework were perhaps the most revealing about Landon. Aviation dominated one set of shelves. There was an array of very old books about bush pilots and their experiences opening up the Canadian north. There was an entire shelf dedicated to books about the de Havilland DHC-2. I recognized the plane on the covers of many of the books as the Beaver now floating at her dock. Another shelf featured books on the history of flight, including biographies of the Wright Brothers and Sir George Cayley, and a small volume on Leonardo da Vinci’s examination of birds and his flying machine designs.
The set of shelves on the other side of the fireplace was completely dedicated to the exploration of space. That’s right, space. Landon Percival was apparently just as much a space nut as was I. In fact, we had many of the same books chronicling the space programs of the United States and the then Soviet Union. Sputnik, Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Soyuz, Apollo, Skylab, Salyut, the shuttle, the International Space Station, they were all there. There were also what looked to be more obscure technical and academic papers on rocket propulsion systems, space medicine, and astronaut training. A few of the books were written in what I assumed was Russian.
Finally my eye fell on the wide mantel above the fireplace. Lying flat was an old leather-bound notebook opened to reveal flowing cursive unmistakably written with a fountain pen. I was about to look more closely until I noticed what was sitting next to it. I have no idea why I hadn’t seen them as soon as I’d entered the room, but I hadn’t. There, in all its glory, was a well-read edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, the entire collection of Conan Doyle’s famous novels and stories gathered in one volume, published by Doubleday and Garden City Books of New York in 1930. It featured the famous introduction by Christopher Morley entitled “In Memoriam Sherlock Holmes.” It stood alone between quite wonderful black, onyx perhaps, Holmes and Watson bookends. I’d been on the lookout for the very same edition. It wasn’t a particularly rare book but you didn’t stumble across it very often, unless you were in the presence of a fellow Sherlockian.
“You have got to be kidding,” I said, just as Landon entered and passed me my tea in a large blue mug. “I fly clear across the country and find, in an old cabin on a remote mountain lake in northern B.C., the 1930 Doubleday edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I’ve been hunting for one of these for some time now. What are the odds?”
“You speak like a fan, steeped in Sherlockiana,” Landon said.
“A devoted and long-time fan. I’ve had a subscription to the Baker Street Journal since I was sixteen,” I replied. Both of us were smiling now, standing on our patch of common ground.
“I can do better than that. I’ve had a BSJ subscription since 1953, when I turned fourteen. And they’re all right here, every single one,” Landon said as she lifted the lid on the pine box with a flourish to reveal several neat stacks of the journals.
I had the full set of the BSJ on CD-ROM, but I’d never actually seen any editions of the journal older than the year 2000 when my subscription started. I sat down on the couch and put my mug on the floor.
“May I?” I asked, as I leaned toward the treasure chest of Sherlockian delights.
Landon abruptly closed the lid.
“After.”
“After what?”
“After you listen,” Landon replied. “If I’m to be rejected as the citizen astronaut because I’ve got a few too many miles on me, I want you to know who you’re rejecting.”
“Landon, I’m sorry, I’m sympathetic, but NASA’S going to say that you’re a nonstarter. The Citizen Astronaut program is intended to ignite a passion for space in a new generation of Canadians and Americans. We need to build support in the eighteen- to fifty-year-old demographic if we hope to secure adequate funding levels from Congress and the Canadian government. I’m supposed to be finding a youngish, good-looking, strong, charismatic archetype with a Canadian flag tattooed above his heart. As much as I’d like to see you win this, I just don’t think it’s in the cards.”
She slipped past me to the fireplace, moved the screen, struck a wooden match on the bottom of its cylindrical container, and bent down to light the fire that she’d already built. The fire crackled and was soon blazing. A one-match fire. She stood up for a few moments watching the flames before nodding her head and coming back to her chair.
“I know I may not be the candidate you had in mind when you cooked up this contest. But my name was drawn. I won.”
I sighed.
“Yes, your name was drawn. I know. But you didn’t win a canned ham at bingo night. We’re talking about orbiting the Earth. So the stakes and the costs are high.”
I paused for a moment before continuing.
“I’m really sorry, but it clearly states in the fine print that the candidate must be accredited and approved by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency even before the winner’s name can be announced and the training starts. They hold all the cards. It’s their contest.”
“But I’m perfect for this,” she said, looking into the fire. “Winning this contest was justice delayed, but it’s justice nonetheless, and I want it. Don’t change it to justice denied.”
“I’m not following the justice angle.”
“Then get comfortable and listen,” she instructed.
“Hang on,” I replied. “Let me get my notebook.”
I owed my colleagues and our client a full briefing on Landon Percival. I knew that Emily would insist on due diligence and a corresponding paper trail from here to the space station if we were going to reject our first winner and draw another. I unzipped another pocket on my bag and withdrew my trusty Moleskine notebook and my favourite Cross fountain pen. In my mind, Moleskines required fountain pens. I had this romantic image of Watson recording his friend’s exploits in a Moleskine-like notebook with a fountain pen. I was back in my chair a moment later.
“Okay. My pen is poised and the night is young. You have the floor,” I said, with a grand sweep of my hand. Landon adroitly caught the lamp my grand sweeping hand knocked off the end table beside me.
“No, actually, right now I have the lamp.”
She did not look pleased.
“So sorry about that,” I said. “I’m quite clumsy, if that isn’t already evident.”
“No blood spilt,” she replied, restoring the lamp to its rightful place before turning her eyes back to me.
“When you’re seventy-one, few stories are short. But I’ll try to tighten it up, so stay with me. It all comes together. Are you quite ready, Mr. Stewart?”
“David, please.”
She nodded, sat back, inhaled deeply, and began.
“Hugh Percival, my father, was born in Vancouver in 1899. By the time he was nineteen years old, he was a decorated flying ace in the skies over France in World War I. Against the odds, and a testament to his skill as a pilot, he survived when so many others did not. After the armis
tice, he returned to Vancouver and became a doctor. As was often the case for returning fighter pilots, he grew bored of seeing patients in his office, and pined for his plane. He struck a reasonable compromise and became one of the first bush pilot doctors in Canada. He bought an eight-year-old Fokker Universal float plane and flew all over northern B.C. delivering babies, setting broken bones, operating when he needed to in less than ideal conditions, and of course signing death certificates when there was no hope. He loved what he did with all his heart. He’d been liberated from the drudgery of a traditional urban medical practice. And he could still fly.
“He met my mother, Dorothy, a schoolteacher in Fort Nelson in 1934, and they were married in ’35. The newlyweds moved to this very cabin that he’d built with the help of some local carpenters who were also patients. The barter system was, and is still, alive here, as it probably is in most remote parts of the country. On February 20, 1939, my father delivered me right about where you’re now sitting. I’m named after my father’s best friend, Rupert Landon, who died over France just days before the peace in 1918. I don’t think my father ever quite got over Rupert’s death. Perhaps to honour his memory, my father taught me to fly when I was thirteen, and I’ve been aloft ever since.
“I was home schooled by my mother and finished the equivalent of high school when I was seventeen. My father flew me down to Vancouver when I was eighteen and set me up in an apartment near the campus of the University of British Columbia. I earned a Bachelor of Science in physiology and then went on to medical school. This would have been in 1962. I would go home when I could, but I spent most of the year in Vancouver. When I was twenty-four and almost finished med school, my father flew my mother down to Vancouver, where she was diagnosed with brain cancer. She never left the hospital. They knew little about how to treat that wretched disease back then. Dad was with her for the entire seven weeks of her precipitous decline and I was there for most of it, too. After she passed, I wanted to return to Cigar Lake with my father and put off my final year of medical school, but he flatly refused. I stayed and finished. Then one thing led to another and I found myself living in a much nicer apartment with a roommate, Sam, and taking over an established practice from another woman doctor who had been killed in a car accident. A doctor usually has to start small and build a stable of patients over many years. But I walked into what was already a very successful practice and before I knew it, five years had passed.”
