by Abi Andrews
When she had gone I felt a relief I could not put my finger on.
You take care now, white girl.
I don’t think she meant to seem like she was helping me begrudgingly. She did not take the money and she wrapped my foot up kindly. It seemed like I called something home for her. Like probably she knows somebody that something much, much worse happened to.
Well, yeah, duh. She was a prostitute. Probably knows a lot about it.
For a few minutes I felt intensely sick at myself for such an ugly thought. Was I actually put out that Rochelle had not acted like what had happened was a big enough deal, for not taking me to the police or suggesting I should go?
Of course she didn’t suggest it. What the hell would I say to them? Something bad maybe nearly happened to me, not sure what something. Rochelle is just a really nice lady that took me in when I was in trouble, she is an angel. When I was not, even. Because nothing bad has happened.
THE LICHENS OF MANITOBA
Rochelle was right: nothing had happened at all. Although maybe I came close enough for it to mean something. Perhaps my abstract statistic has been accounted for now, so I am pretty much invincible. In a way, I could say that I am a real woman, a real vulnerable woman. An invincible woman.
I have been thinking probably he was not being malevolent, probably if he had known I did not want to he would have tried to make me stay anyway, that he must have thought I was up for it and been surprised when I was not or else he would not have let his catch go so easily. When he realised his mistake he let me go. I reiterate this in a way that sounds both beat and resolute, a promise no one’s sure they believe in. Does he still have my shoe?
I stayed in my motel room with comfort food and watched daytime television and started to see about how I get out of here but it gets more complex now as I am leaving the Trans-Canada Highway somewhere just after Winnipeg.
GREEN IS THE NEW RED
I took time in the motel to Skype Larus, seeing as he has been feeling so neglected. He had been explaining what has been going on with fracking in the UK while I was away. I got a bit down while he was talking, thinking about how far away from it all I am, and the area where the kids hung out behind the reservation, and how I had been avoiding checking home news in too much detail since I left. My home town has been marked out as one of the possible areas to be fracked. There are not even otters in the river like there should be, and the anglers that actually eat the fish are seen as tramps. I think they are smart. Why pay money for a fish bred in a cesspool and pumped with hormones when you can get one with equivalent danger levels of chemicals from the river, for free?
Our rivers are already lifeless and inert, so the threat of chemical contamination is met with a shrug and well, there is nothing to destroy anyway, we need the energy! There is no mass resistance in the UK because not enough people can see anything worth the bother of saving. The environment was smuggled off a long time ago, as far back as the Enclosure Acts, when the peasants were denied the right to graze or forage so the land could be exploited more efficiently and the peasants had to leave en masse for the cities so that they could lube up the Industrial Revolution with whale oil, and begin the colonisation of the New World. The upheaval can still be seen now where I am from, where the abandoned towering furnaces of industry still cast their shadows. They are immortalised by J. R. R. Tolkien: that exodus from the green and balmy shires of the Midlands to the fiery forges, the slags and the mine pits of the urbanised Black Country (or Mordor; elvish for ‘dark land’).
The Environmental Protection Agency in America is downplaying the dangers of fracking and of leaking pipelines. The EPA was started because of the legacy of Rachel Carson. I told Larus about my weird dreams about her. This got Larus on to telling me Rachel Carson’s saga.
Rachel Carson worked in a very masculine field, but at home on her 65-acre family farm she was surrounded by women. From a young age she liked to write and read stories about animals and the ocean. Her dad died when she was young and she took over as the provider of the family, supporting her ageing mother. She spent all her time working in biology and looking after her ill family, who just kept dying, taking her two nieces in when her older sister died. She still loved to write and did write many beautiful and scientifically important essays and books about the ocean. She started a strong friendship, which may or may not have been romantic, with a woman named Dorothy Freeman. Dorothy was married and their friendship was mainly through letters, which Dorothy had to share with her husband to prove they were not having a lesbian affair.
A lot of the Big Dogs did not like Ms Carson because they saw her attack on Big Chemical Corporations as a threat to the paradigm of Scientific Progress in post-war America, and also because she was a woman. A jealous man scientist wrote a letter to President Eisenhower in which he said that because Rachel Carson was physically attractive and not married, she was probably a communist. After working really hard to save the planet she died of cancer at the age of fifty-six, and she never made a deal over the fact that her cancer was probably from the pesticides they sprayed over her home. She kept her cancer secret while she wrote Silent Spring. Rachel Carson knew very well that her body was not her own, its health in the hands of chemical corporations.
So I was already feeling emotionally fraught when Larus asked me what had happened since we last spoke. There was a big cavernous hole in my narrative so I had to tell him about how I ended up at Rochelle’s. I just told him, really casual, no emphasis, and at first he found the thing almost a little funny. He asked me to send him over some of the videos from the lorry. I sent them while we were talking about other things then he opened one up and started to watch. After a minute or so he rubbed his eyebrows in the fashion of someone tired by the weight of something heavy and spherically shaped and difficult to hold.
Larus speaks a little Russian from a fleeting obsession in his twenties while trying on communism for size. The man was speaking Russian. He might have been Siberian. He most likely spoke English. How could he be driving through Canada if he didn’t speak basic English, Erin? Either way Larus said he could tell the driver understood me by the way he was talking.
Then Larus ran through the clips with me and translated. What’s wrong, little sourface, are you a long way from home? It was after that that I started to have what I think might have been a panic attack; something sat on my head and stopped me from breathing, the room went bright as though the walls and ceiling had exploded away from me and I felt simultaneously this gravity and this weightlessness, like falling and floating both at the same time and every breath empty of air.
‘Erin?’ Larus’s voice came at me. ‘I think you’re having a panic attack, calm down, breathe slow, sloooooow,’ and my breathing got shallower but had more substance to it. Because he could not hear me gasping any more Larus freaked out, raising his voice, saying Erin, Erin are you still there, are you okay, can you hear me? It was all very embarrassing.
Because he could not look at my face he looked directly into the webcam, a serious look that wavered the longer he tried to hold it. It only lasted about five seconds but that is uncomfortably long to hold a look on webcam if you think about it. Slowed down by the lag it went through micro-cycles of intensity, reasserting itself. It said, Look into my eyes and see how serious I am. My face is saying it so hard it can’t even keep it up, like it’s a wet bar of soap or something. Like, we are that close now. I can be your rock.
‘Erin, I’m really concerned about you and I have a suggestion.’
‘What?’
‘I have some time now I’ve finished with the whale data. Let me come and meet you.’
Is he mad? At first I just laugh, but with time for it to sink in I get a little angry. Why is everyone concerned for me? Why is everyone stifling me? Apart from Rochelle, who maybe is trying to liberate me with her cool indifference. TO WALK FREELY AT NIGHT!
‘You aren’t infallible, Erin.’
I told him that if I were a
boy he would not be dwelling on my in/fallibility. He said that’s the point. I think if I blur the driver’s face I can probably still use it in the documentary.
INTO A WORMHOLE
I do not think the tight feeling in my chest, the struggle breathing, like my lungs were filled with tar and every breath in and out was sucked and pushed through this viscous liquid, I do not think it had just to do with the lorry driver.
It is everything. The lorry driver was just the shake that rattled like passing debris, so that I felt the shuttle’s fragility. The documentary is my shuttle and it keeps me going, it is the only vehicle for carrying on with purpose-propulsion-direction, it stops me from floating aimlessly into the ether, it keeps me on track towards that shining light ahead and the feeling that comes from it.
The rattling of the debris made me look around and realise the enormity of this task, my journey, its sudden height and distance. A kind of vertigo, a very sudden awareness. But this is just a dizzy spell. Because if I do not have this project as a vessel to move me forward, then what the fuck am I doing and where am I going, what authority do I have being here?
Today I want very badly to call Mum and Dad, but if I did I would likely burst into tears, and what for? Imagine how much it would upset her. She would freak the fuck out. There was nothing she could do about it from home, so what was the point in putting her through it?
They say in emails that I never call, that they want to speak with me more often, but they do not understand that I can’t do it that way. We can’t carry on in tandem; like the Voyagers dividing from their rocket engines I had to break away completely in order to use the break-off as a kind of propulsion too. I feel bad but it is the way it has got to be.
I checked out coaches and car shares but there is nothing any time soon. I really need to leave Winnipeg so I can catch the carpool I have arranged out of Saskatoon. Then I am staying on a farm outside Edmonton and they are picking me up from outside the town hall on Monday at 4 p.m. The only thing that seems viable is that I hitch again.
I know this is the kind of thing I wanted to prove should not stop women exerting their right to individual freedom.
That is the spirit.
MUSHROOM SPORES MAY FLOAT IN OUTER SPACE
So I stood again in a little layby on Portage Avenue at the city limits extending onto the Trans-Canada Highway, with my thumb out. A lorry breached the road; as it got close enough to see me I dropped my arm. The lorry sailed past; like holding out a titbit of meat for a falcon at the country fair and baulking at the last second of its swoop to your gloved hand. I thought of Jules and her white van. I swore to keep my arm up the next time.
After half an hour another lorry appeared and as it drew nearer I noticed it was slowing. I said to myself, Come on, let’s not be stupid, you just need to get back on the horse, remember.
Roy chatted on about his home town Allgood in Alabama, US, how he had a little baby girl and had to be a trucker because it paid well and he wanted his baby to go to a good college. But he did not like being a trucker because he was sad about leaving his baby and his wife. He showed me a picture of his baby and wife. His wife was called Amelia, which he said ‘Melia’, unless that was just what her name was, and his baby was called Jade. I was thinking a guy who comes from a place called Allgood can’t be that bad, and I kept telling myself that. I sat awake daydreaming about how to deal with the recent events when making the narrative of the doc.
There is not much footage of Rochelle; she has been more or less the only person to not be enthusiastic and obliging. And the problem is: how do I show it so that I can make it real like it happened? I have enough that I worry I might inadvertently frame it like she had more significance to what happened than she did, something I do not want to do. I can’t figure out how to use her when I edit, without it seeming like I latched on because she had said something that made her sound like a wise old Mother Willow. It was only because of an accident that she happened to me. Just an act of decency or maybe of obligation to humanity.
But I need something to tie the story together, from running in the night and onwards, a bit of narrative over the top of some of the story-less shots of her and the reservation. I thought I might as well play my feelings out with Roy, seeing as we would never meet again.
‘Oh, those natives are touchy folks.’
Like he was letting me on his team in a kind of us versus them. I was not sure whose team I was more on, Woman vs White? But it made me think, do I have more of a propensity to feel self-conscious as a kind of voyeur making this film? As a woman, knowing already what it feels like to be an exhibition, to feel eyes on my body? Like the embarrassment I feel when I look in on the glass boxes of taxidermy, towards the possessiveness of ‘collect and display’.
I am doing this for you too, Rochelle!
You are doing this for yourself.
Before this trip I had a pretty obscure idea of what an Indian reservation would even look like; horses, totem poles and alcoholics, based on what I had seen on a programme on the National Geographic channel once. Mum had come in with the vacuum and stood looking a little perplexed at the TV for a few minutes before saying, ‘You know, I didn’t realise that Indians still existed,’ and I had not even thought that was very strange. I do not want Rochelle to be so much a part of the narrative that it seems like I am yoking my feminist problems with hers, even if we share some.
In the late afternoon, where the highway met Regina, I said goodbye to Roy and hopped down from his lorry into a sodden layby a walkable distance from the city. The rain had stopped but the air was damp and clung to the smells and made them sticky; cloying diesel fumes, turf, and the wet on wet of the lakes as I skirted round them.
TAMING THE SAVAGES
I had a dream about Ms Carson again last night. She was underwater conferring with a concerned-looking delegation of fish who held in their wafered fore-fins tiny hermaphrodite fish infants. The Queen of the Fish was distraught, she wanted some answers.
In all these millions of years the ocean hasn’t changed, now there is a new taste in it, she said. The taste came after your people came so you must have brought it, sour, sharp and fizzing. What is it? Rachel Carson told her that the taste that made the babies hermaphrodites was called synthetic oestrogen and her Womankind had been taking it because they were made to think it would emancipate them but what it also had done was to take their bodies from them, mechanised and controlled, warped to fit the jigsaw.
The Fish Queen did sympathise. She said, ‘As fish we know of the Man tyranny that your Womankind face because we are also subject to the tyranny of Mankind, have also been subdued and controlled, but we must come to a compromise.’ Rachel Carson promised to be an Ambassador of the Fish to the dry world of above. Like Thoreau casting off the sins of the flesh to attain greater spiritual purity, she swore her chastity to the Fish Queen in order to best fulfil her role as ambassador and prove her devoted kinship.
It is funny that, how a woman denying her biological breeding function is abhorrent, yet men like Thoreau or the virginal Isaac Newton denying their biological breeding functions are chaste, as though theirs were an admirable choice. What this says is that a woman’s body is not her own to choose to keep from a man.
She swore she would never take the pill because it a) would cause the decline of the Fish Kingdom, which could have a knock-on effect on the rest of the underwater realm, her favourite realm, and b) ruined the integrity of the Fish Queen, and she liked the Fish Queen. Plus the pill was made by Bayer, who were disappearing the bees with their neonicotinoids. The Fish Queen swore her in as Ambassador of the Fish.
In Regina I look at a map of Canada and it reads like a pictogram of clusters of neurons. The shape is uniform; where the lines might have been pliant and organic they are neat right angles. The states of Canada are divided in horizontal strips as if Descartes or someone threw down a quadrat and declared it an enlightened territory. Illuminated and user friendly like the satisfying
angularity of Enlightenment taxonomies of life; rational flow charts of stable and quantifiable kingdoms that can be pinned to a table and dissected, taken apart and reassembled.
Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald was the father of the Canadian Pacific Railway, built from east to west in four years from 1881. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company sold the land around its railway in cheap little acred packages marketed and sold to European homesteaders as a Dream of a similar model to the American one. The Wild West was crazy and big and scary but rapid subdivision into super-manageable chunks made it easy to domesticate. Everything within each quadrat was quantified, named, tamed, land and natives included. From their new stronghold of the south-western cities, the CPRC could frontier-bust again into the north, where they built cities on the Gold Fever of the 1890s.
The dawn of railways in Britain brought about the invention of Unanimous Time. Some anthropologists think that marking time was the first step in the construction of the symbolic world, before language, before art. Because, like Einstein said, time is not something absolute. He said different observers order an event differently in time if they are moving with different velocities relative to the observed event. A seemingly simultaneous event can occur differently for other observers (also true of history). That means all measurements involving time as a constant lose their absoluteness.