Everything Is So Political

by Sandra McIntyre

  Such a small notion of ‘tree.’ “Where’s the cover in winter?” she scoffed. “You’re wide open to the wind, snow, whatever.” Vehemently shaking her head.

  And his sneer in response: “No sense of adventure.”

  To stop his crazy talk, she suggested a trip to the Cariboo.

  But the virus continued. Later it became clear it was her he needed to leave.

  * * *

  In the woods she breathes deep, listening with each stride to the whisper of boot cuffs against her shins.

  What she thinks is, You are who you are because of this land. The land with its rains and fogs and constant damp, the climate blown in across the sea towards steep coastal mountains. She stops, looks up, tries to see behind the trees to the rock face she knows is there, but the stand of forest is as tight as woven cedar withes.

  This is her home. She knows it in a kind of I’ve lived here all my life manner but still she asks, “Is this where I want to die?”

  So often, traveling to exotic lands and feeling in those foreign geographies another place to adopt. Trying the word ‘home’ beneath swaying palm trees, ancient green-covered hills, classic limestone architecture. Standing, finally, at the westernmost edge of Portugal on a cliff overlooking the stormy Atlantic, remembering the raw West Coast Trail and mouthing the word in the presence of that other ocean, trying to sense its fit: “Home.”

  But on her return from the alien shores, recalling her restless dreams of selling out and moving away, she wondered whether such thoughts signaled a betrayal of heritage.

  Which is, perhaps, what has happened to him: a sudden fear of dying in the only place he’s ever lived; an urge to travel taking hold and driving him toward the unknown. But why now, when he has never before wanted to be anywhere other than the rainforest? What has sent him in search of the new?

  Summer

  As the land warms she migrates toward the water. During the full heat of day the forest is her companion, but in the evening she is drawn back to the sea.

  Drawn to the shore’s ammoniac smells, the barnacled rocks loping down to the tide and the slimy weeds lurking as she reaches tentative toes, considering a swim in the dark water. Sometimes the answer is no, just sit and watch, see what the waves bring.

  She likes the sand, the grit between her toes and the sudden surprise when her molars close on a stray grain. Seated at the edge of low tide, she scoops a handful, watches the grains flow through her fingers. She wonders how to catch time, prevent its escape.

  As a child there had been camping trips to strange dark islands, landing on a beach somewhere far from home but knowing, intuitive, it was a beach like all the other west coast beaches of her life. Crabs, seaweed, and blue-shelled mussels clinging to wave-battered rocks. Scrambling over the slimed granite—Mother’s voice calling out, “Be careful…”—finding oysters or clams and being allowed to eat them if the month had an ‘r’ in it—“…don’t cut yourself on the barnacles!”

  And once her father’s boat breaking down in the middle of Georgia Strait, the land in sight but too far away to swim for, and anyway the fathomlessness of the black water with its lurking sea creatures waiting to bite her toes. Having to pee in a bucket in plain view of the world; knowing that, even asked to turn away, others could hear the hot pee plashing against the plastic sides.

  Wishing for years she could be like her brother and pee over the gunwales, aiming for a piece of driftwood. But whenever she had craned her neck to locate his penis, there was nothing to see, just the arc of urine shooting out to sea. And all of it—the sea, the sky, the birds—reminding her of a picture in her social studies book, Christopher Columbus on the Santa Maria, bound for somewhere.

  That was the picture she held in her mind during the last flight back from overseas. But as the jet dropped from the cloud layer high above the Fraser, her chest tightened in a rush of panic. She made herself look beyond the glinting wings at the wave-striped water below and when she saw the Georgia Strait with its tiny seiners and ferries zigzagging for the gentle green-treed land, a sudden rise of tears. And behind her tears the surprise of knowing.

  It was—it is—the trees. The giant trees and the water, the ocean flanked by the rainforest, and in the distance a horizon surrounded by water. And more water.

  She is woven into this west coast place, carrying it on her back like a shell, its presence an internal poultice.

  But without him—without the landmarks he gave her—she feels naked and exposed. Unforested.

  Fall

  How many times had she gone away before understanding home? It was not until that cliff in northern Portugal, leaning out over the crashing waves below, that she felt the tug of the west coast, the impossibility of adopting another landscape. Now she thinks, This is what he needs to do in order to return.

  Still he does not call. She wonders whether he will ever come back…

  When finally she’d come back, Vancouver was no longer in her, the blue ridge of mountains hidden behind the city’s concrete walls and metropolitan aspirations, the jack-hammers drilling like constant mosquitoes in her ears. Within a month she made another run in search of the land she remembered.

  And when she found it, the instant calm.

  But first she had shivered, huddling into her body at the sight of dense coastal forest, the lofty height of trees overpowering any sense of self. Still later the vision reinforced the idea that the land was her sentinel.

  In a cottage at ocean’s edge she found safe harbour and the little house became her haven, a place to remove herself from the confusion about what mattered and who cared. At night the floors and walls came alive with carpenter ants ravaging the wood. But seated by the window she felt the wind across the waves and the protection of the trees, and so she stayed.

  Sometimes during storms she’d watch the tugs working their booms in the lee of a nearby island. The orange and black hulls cajoling like oversized hens, lumbering back and forth among the rebellious brood of logs and nudging them into place with rubber-bumpered noses. In the worst of the storms, breakaways from the unruly booms leaped and thrashed at the edge of her deck, cavorting like summer seals. And that first year, when she forgot to lift the short stairway to the beach, the way the gales transformed her wooden steps into kindling.

  She learned to identify the tugs by their engines, the eighteen pistons of the Haida Brave throbbing in the distance an hour before she sighted it, and another hour as it drifted south for the city lights. Some days she sat at the window with binoculars, watching the tugs as night fell, trying to see the deckhands and their captain and wondering about the kind of men that lived such a life. In the middle of the night, waking up for no reason, she’d peek through the blinds and be comforted by the sight of the tugs’ running lights, the thought that someone else was awake with her.

  The scene outside like an ongoing movie, always something to watch. The spectacle of the late fall storms and the glory of the summer sunsets her reason for living.

  Until his arrival.

  Winter

  The fields around the house turn brown with the approach of the cold; the long grass, unmowed since he left, bows under the weight of morning frosts. November slides into December; he’s been gone seven months.

  In the cold months she is most aware of being alone. The season when her father died, his eyes burning at the end of a life, and afterward her mother’s similar sag into death. Her brother also gone early, still a boy. A boy who would not recognize his sister if he were to reappear now. She has become old in this world by herself, with only the landscape for family.

  The coast like a birthmark on her life, permanently staining her genes. Christmas and birthdays spent in the arms of the background forest, the succour of rocky seascape.

  Before him, the need for solitude had spoken to her like her father, reassuring and strong. Now—today—the aloneness
is a source of anxiety and the solitude a bitter irony, a reminder that she doesn’t know herself as well as the land.

  He came as a contractor to replace the ant-eaten floors.

  “You just moved?” he asked when he saw the boxes stacked in corners.

  “Come home,” she nodded. “I was away.”

  She unpacked as they talked and he worked and she felt something stir, but tucked it away when he mentioned a girlfriend.

  After the floors, he stayed to rebuild the beach stairs. When all the work was finished and he’d gone, she was glad for a return to her quiet solitude and an end to all the noise, the whining saw and thumping compressor that had wound her up.

  But as the next seasons passed and more weeks fled, time stretched into an indefinite distance. She began to see her life for what it was, disconnected and utterly alone. When she realized that his presence had been the last time she interacted with another, the recognition felled her, dropping her onto the floor to weep at her emptiness. The thought that there was nothing—not a thing—to look forward to overtook her mind and she thought about letting herself sink into the landscape, returning to the earth in the same way as the forest’s old ones.

  A season of gloom rode her heavily and then one afternoon she found his business card tucked in her door and the something she had felt in his presence stirred in her again. “Call me before the weather turns,” he’d written in round, schoolboy letters. “Let’s go hiking.” She could not remember what he looked like, but she remembered their talk of hiking.

  The card and his invitation a turning point.

  She had loved that he also loved the forest. After their hike, after a first winter of forest walks and beach fires, a hint of spring again: the understanding that his presence had revived her; the chance to talk and fight and love again.

  But in every land the barrens.

  She knew about his wariness for the sea, that he felt too exposed there and could not love it as she did. After their first few years, when he wanted to move, she went with him out of a sense of allegiance for what they had built together. On an acreage above the ocean he showed her how she could still watch the comings and goings on the water. But the new view was too expanded, too far away, and now when she stared out the windows it was mostly to gauge the approach of weather. Storm clouds and fog boiled down the strait in the winter, and if it was going to be another day of endless heatwave, she could see that too: miles of blue openness sat above the green-humped islands floating below them and nothing moved in the cerulean sky.

  They had come to where they could live closer to the land, hoeing the gardens and mowing the fields. Except in the worst weather, they’d sit on a bench at the far end of the meadow, enjoying the dogs and building bonfires.

  But at night she stared past the deck, straining to hear the waves and watching for the reflection of stars on water. Within a year she began to feel removed from herself, unraveled so far from the shore.

  She missed the water’s voice and the different shades of light reflected off its changing surface of waves and glass. At dusk she watched the mottled sea below, remembering the peculiar shades of black and orange that had rippled across the evening tide in front of the cottage.

  His chagrin when he found her outside: “What are you doing here?” The way he caught at her elbow to pull her away.

  Her averted eyes and mute refusal, reactions that angered him.

  “Aw shit—stay there, then. Get depressed.” The shake of his head as he turned to go.

  She could picture the sternness on his brow as he shut the door hard; the way he’d brood with long-legged stride into the woods. Sometimes, then, she would sigh and put on her boots to search him out, following the bark of the dogs to find his trail. When she caught them up she would say nothing, only wait for him to speak first, a sign that he had forgiven her. Then they would be a family again and she would pretend all was well.

  But during the day her private thoughts swirled. Always, it seemed, she had to choose between the land and him. Between being alone in a place that fed her, or with him in a place that suffocated. Killing herself with or without him.

  * * *

  Perhaps she had felt the signs all along, chosen to ignore them.

  She remembers how he sat with his back to her, elbows on the table, fists holding his head. In his voice the little death when he spoke: “It’s time to move.”

  The tightness in her throat as she waited for more. Asking finally, “Where?”

  “It’s too crowded here.”

  From the kitchen she turned to search his eyes but saw only the whorl of his crown. “You need more space?”

  When his fists dropped, he growled at her. At life. “Maybe I need my own place.”

  The scrape of his chair as he stood to leave, as her eyes found the army of trees through the window.

  * * *

  On the shortest day of the year she is baking when she hears the familiar trample of dog paws across the deck. At the door she buries her face in their furry necks and wet tongues and her tears blur everything. When she stands again, he holds her for a long while before the oven timer dings to interrupt them. He talks excitedly, laying out photos while she upends muffin tins. She brings a steaming plate to the table and finds a row of glossy prints waiting for her.

  “Saskatchewan,” he says. A hint of pride in his voice.

  She nods dumbly, stares at the waiting line of pictures.

  “A quarter section,” he breathes: “A hundred and sixty acres!”

  Now she remembers: he’d gone there before, returned completely smitten. “The hugeness,” he sighed. “The emptiness.”

  He stands beside her and the scenery in the photos bring a gone look to his eyes. He shakes his head and says, “You wouldn’t believe the quiet.”

  The first time he went to the prairies she welcomed the utter silence he left behind. Now she embraces his nonstop talk, the shattering of the emptiness as he describes the land he’s found.

  He saves the house for last. “Three bedrooms in these rolling hills that change colour through the day!” The landscape of southwestern Saskatchewan tugs at his bones as though he belongs there. “Sixty thousand dollars don’t finish a 20X20 cabin these days, let alone a place this size!” Shoving the picture into her hand.

  She holds the photo away from her, as though to see it better. “Stark,” she says of the empty scenery. His lip curls and he snatches it from her fingers. He scoops the entire row of pictures from the table, slides them into the top drawer of the desk.

  All evening she wanders about the house, seeing and touching the things they’d collected. Driftwood made into a lamp. Paintings of tugs. A maple table refinished together. Would all of it fit in such a big, open place?

  She is afraid of that prairie bigness, of standing in the middle of ancient grasslands and feeling the overwhelming proof of evolution. Dinosaur remains in every canyon, cattle bunched against the nonstop wind, harsh temperature extremes, and lack of water. And the people, another special breed, their interdependency in that wide open heartland.

  When he finds her on the deck later, his eyes are on fire. “That house here would be at least $300,000.”

  She cranks her neck to look up at him. “Is this about money?”

  “We could retire.” He looks through her to the ocean below, head shaking in disgust.

  He dangles another carrot.

  “No possibility of seeing your neighbours, let alone hearing them.”

  The list of items included with the property make him salivate, a child imagining Christmas morning with everything he wished for: “A half ton 4X4. A snow blower. A tractor.”

  He exhales loudly. “A simpler life,” he declares.

  All that land to get lost on, she thinks.

  She cooks dinner while the six o’clock news reports increased bre
ak-ins and muggings, deaths due to overcrowded hospitals. She blocks out the details of the Picton murders by wondering what must have happened to the man during childhood.

  From the computer room his voice wafts into the kitchen: “That’s the best kind of furnace.”

  She pads to the doorway. “What?”

  “A wood-burning hot water furnace,” he reads from the screen. “Best kind for heating.”

  She lifts her eyebrows then bounces her chin, a nod of sorts. She turns away.

  “And all those tools!” His enthusiasm chases her.

  She bends to look in the oven’s cavity then closes the door and leans on the counter, red lobster oven mitts at the end of each arm. She stares at the trees outside, sees them swaying. With laughter? She takes a breath then asks the question: “Are we moving to Saskatchewan then?”

  He enters the kitchen, eyes wide. “Yeah?” he asks, breathless.

  And she holds her own breath as he squeezes her in a bear hug. But something inside leaps and flips and she remembers the symptoms from before: on the cliff in Portugal; searching for trees in the city; leaving the ocean….

  Over dinner he is chatty, talking about cattle ranches in the hill country, long hot summers on the flats. How she’ll love the solitude and miles of walks through coulees, those dry, deciduous glens he wants to call home.

  She smiles at him but her heart rebels.

  Spring

  He will go first, set up the new home while she oversees the finalities of the house sale. The truck heads down the driveway and he waves out the window, dogs and furniture piled high in the back.

  He has been gone only two days when the letter comes. She stands in front of the mailbox, holding it, examining the curly writing from a Saskatchewan address.

  She carries it home and puts it on the kitchen counter. Every time she passes it by, the sky blue of the envelope looks up at her. Trying to be innocent, she thinks.

  He does not answer his cell phone when she calls to tell him about the letter. She leaves a message but neither does he call back. She waits a few days then puts the blue envelope away in the drawer with the photos he has left for her. To remind her where they are going.