by Neil Peart
Steven and I did stop at Mr. Christensen’s lumber yard to talk to him, and I learned that he was an American (in his 40s, I would guess) who had been in Belize for 13 years; he said he couldn’t take the “political correctness” in the United States. Once again I wished I were a more inquisitive reporter, for I would like to have known what that meant to him.
Although disappointed I didn’t want to sell my bike, he invited me to drop by his home and have a look at an older R100GS that he had completely rebuilt, and he also let me change my oil under his lean-to garage.
Another interesting character Steven and I talked with in the town of Placencia was Larry, a dreadlocked local, who told us the story of his “lady” who lived near Toronto, in Scarborough, and how he had flown up there and driven her car all the way down to Belize, even though he had no driver’s licence. Hard to imagine how he pulled that off.
Then there was Alva, the young black waitress at the Luba Hati who had been cheerfully bantering with us the previous evening, but when I saw her at the bar that afternoon she was in a foul mood, and said she wanted to “shoot somebody.” I told her, “If you’re not careful I’ll tell you all my troubles!”
She was overworked and underpaid, no doubt, and seemed mad at everybody, but especially at some man — the one she wanted to shoot. I told her, “It’s not worth going to jail for some stupid man,” and she said maybe she would go out and kick a dog instead. I said, “Yeah, how about you kick all the dogs, and I’ll kick all the cats?”
Then Alva got her back up at the manager, Lynne, who wanted her to set the tables for dinner as well as tend the bar, and she huffed and puffed as she bustled around, grumbling and mocking Lynne’s cheery chatter to some arriving guests. When I told her that Steven and I would be leaving the following morning, Christmas Eve day, because there was “no room at the inn,” she snapped back, “Well, at least you’re not pregnant.”
Good one, Alva.
The next morning Steven followed me back up that horrible muddy road again, and we spent a cheerless Christmas Eve at a rundown little resort in Dangriga called the Pelican Reef Beach Club. Then we travelled hard all through Christmas Day, keeping ourselves distracted by being on the move, riding and driving up through Belize City and back to Tony’s Inn and Resort in Corozal, where our travels had begun.
Early the following morning, Steven and I said an emotional goodbye, having survived yet another bad time together. Steven was driving the Jeep back to the airport in Belize City to fly home to Ohio, and I was on my own again, crossing the Mexican border and riding with a desperate urgency for Mexico City.
Now that Christmas was behind me I could not wait to be home again, back at the house on the lake, and I thought of nothing else. By the afternoon of the second day I had made it all the way to Mexico City, dropped the poor smashed-up bike at the BMW dealer, and checked into a room at the Four Seasons. I felt excited just to have made it that far, even though my flight was not until the following night, but this time luck was with me. There was a seat available on a flight that night to Toronto, with a connection to Montreal. So after a couple of celebratory drinks and a fine room-service dinner, I checked out around midnight and taxied to the airport.
Home. I wondered how much snow there would be outside. I thought about the rooms in the house, and how they would look. I thought about the photographs of Jackie and Selena everywhere, and wondered what it would be like to look at them now. I thought about all the memories, and wondered how they would feel, up close again like that.
I had been away for four months and one week, and I had travelled 46,239 kilometres, 30,748 miles. It had been a long journey, in every way. Had I changed? Had I “healed” at all?
Part of me was certainly excited about the idea of being in that house again, but there was a ghost of a doubt there too. I was certainly carrying a homesick fantasy with me about how it was going to be to be back in that house again, but I couldn’t be sure the real-life experience would end up being a good one. Thinking about what I had said earlier about the fantasy of “travelling,” I could just as well have been talking about the fantasy of “home.” As always, I couldn’t tell how I was going to feel until I felt it.
At that point in my odyssey, all that mattered to me was to feel that I was still moving forward, still willing to try, still finding the strength to face the shadows and the ghosts, every morning and every night, on the Healing Road. Still believing that “something will come up.”
The evening plane rises up from the runway
Over constellations of light
I look down into a million houses
And wonder what you’re doing tonight
If I could wave my magic wand
I’d make everything all right
PRESTO, 1990
Book 2
HOMEWARD ANGEL, On THE FLY
I had a dream of a winter garden a midnight rendezvous silver blue and frozen silence what a fool I was for you
PRESTO, 1990
Chapter 9
WINTERLUDE
play of light — a photograph the way I used to be some half-forgotten stranger doesn’t mean that much to me trick of light — moving picture moments caught in flight make the shadows darker or the colors shine too bright
AVAILABLE LIGHT, 1990
Photographs and memories. After nearly 20 years of family life, a long row of photo albums filled the shelf of the hall closet in the house by the lake. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to browse through the pages of those books again, unless I really wanted to torture myself, but among the many framed photos that filled the house, there were three that I especially loved — and hated.
One of them was a black-and-white shot taken by Deb, from the Tuileries Gardens of Paris, of Jackie, Selena, and me sitting on a bench. Taken from behind, it showed me in the middle with my arms spread across the back of the bench, enclosing both of “my girls,” and Selena’s face in profile, looking toward the two of us.
Another was a color shot taken on the very last morning, August 10, 1997, by Jackie’s Uncle Harry, just before Selena set out to drive to Toronto. It shows the three of us standing on the deck, with trees and lake behind, and the white, furry mass of Nicky laying in front of us. On one side is a smiling man with a shaved head (my pattern used to be to shave it on the first of July and let it grow the rest of the year), and an “Area 51” T-shirt and shorts. Jackie is also summer-casual, barefoot in shorts and T-shirt, hair a little wild from sun, wind, and water, and Selena in the middle, looking young, strong, and beautiful. She had exercised hard all that summer, swimming, walking, taking golf lessons, and pounding the treadmill while she watched reruns of “Perry Mason” and “Green Acres,” and it had paid off; as she headed back to Toronto to start university and take on the world, she looked great.
The third love/hate photo was another black-and-white shot, this one of Jackie and me, taken by Andrew (the Los Angeles Andrew) on the occasion of the three members of Rush receiving the Order of Canada (Canada’s highest civilian honor, something like a “good citizenship” award) in 1997. Me in my Armani tuxedo, sporting my Order of Canada medal with a proud smile, and Jackie in black dress and elegantly groomed, leaning toward the camera with a wide smile and shining eyes.
Photographs and memories.
When I flew back from Mexico City, arriving on the morning of December 28th, 1998, after four months of travelling across Canada, the western United States, the width of Mexico and the length of Belize, I knew I was flying back to face those photos again, and everything else that filled that haunted house.
Keith picked me up at the airport and delivered me to the house on the lake — though by now that lake was frozen over and buried under the same deepening blanket of snow that covered the house and the trees all around. It all looked so wonderful to me. My soulscape, in my soul’s season of winter.
Keith had been busy during my absence, not just keeping the place up to his usual standard of perfection, but work
ing with his friend Pierre, a fine carpenter who had helped build the house back in 1992, to remake Selena’s bedroom into the Selena Memorial Library. Just before I left in August, I had met with the two of them and drawn some pencil marks on the walls, and now those hieroglyphics had been translated into a three-dimensional realization of maple bookshelves, a glass-fronted cabinet opening through the wall into the hall, and upstairs in the loft, an arched doorway to connect with the loft of my office. They had done a beautiful job.
Over the summer and fall, Keith had also been ferrying occasional pickup-loads of treasures from the Toronto house. Sister Deb and I had already gone through the personal stuff there, boxing up what we thought ought to be saved (hard to guess about that, for you tend not to care about things too much, so you end up saving whatever seems significant or relevant to the lost one — or ones, in our case). Other than that, there were only a few paintings from the Toronto house I knew I wanted to keep, and the books — the hundreds of books that had once filled the high shelves in the family room there. So that would help to keep my restless mind busy for the first few days, emptying the pile of boxes on the floor of the Selena Memorial Library and filling all those brand new, empty bookshelves.
During my stay in the summer, I had told Keith about my plan of making the house a kind of statement of “rebellion,” an expression of my new persona as “bachelor with a vengeance.” I mimed this attitude for him with a fist raised to the sky, and the defiant shout of, “I’ll show you.” Meaning Jackie and Selena, of course, for “abandoning” me.
Beside the photographs of each of them on display all over the house, I often placed one of my fine model cars or motorcycles, or something “manly” like that, and I also deliberately violated Jackie’s taste for uncluttered spaces by filling the living-room shelves with art books and African carvings, and every stretch of wall with a painting or two, even hanging them salon-style, on two levels, on the high walls.
Keith lived in a small town nearby, and while I was home I tended to have him come by every few days to do the chores, and to help me with my “redecorating.” As a rule, he tended to share Jackie’s more austere taste in interior decoration (or call it more “tasteful” taste), and one day while I had him up on the ladder hanging pictures, I said to him, “You know, Jackie would just hate this. She’d say it was cluttered.”
Without looking my way, Keith muttered, “That’s one word she might use.”
“Ha,” I laughed, raising my fist and my eyes to heaven again, “I’ll show you what happens when you leave me all alone!”
In truth, I think Keith kind of sympathized with my bachelor-with-a-vengeance stance, for I had half-jokingly mentioned that I was thinking of putting my Ducati 916 (one of the most beautiful of motorcycles) in the living room, and when I got back from Mexico, I laughed to see it sitting in the front window, flagrantly shiny, red, and so unfeminine.
My brother Danny, Janette, and Max had spent their Christmas with Janette’s family in New Brunswick, and after visiting some friends in Montreal, they drove up to visit for a few days after New Year’s. Danny and Janette had often visited that house, in happier times, and they seemed to feel the weight of the “ghosts” pretty heavily. Danny wrote me later that he felt I was “a little farther along in the grieving process” than they were.
At first, I felt a twinge of offence at that comment, for I sure didn’t feel all that “far along,” but then I realized that, in a way, it was true. To a degree (which varied every day), I had grown used to the idea of being alone, and part of me had simply accepted that this was how it was going to be now. Thinking about my relative stage in the grieving process, I realized that I had been a full-time, professional griever for a year and four months by then. Focused entirely on loss, survival, and the state of my little baby soul through every minute of every day and night, I actually did seem to have made some degrees of progress, regained a little strength.
Perhaps the Healing Road had done its job, after all. Maybe all along my motion had actually been two steps forward, and one step back.
Now that I was giving up the gypsy mode for awhile and returning to the hermit mode, I knew that I still had to protect myself from the pitfalls of too much solitude, too much “reflection.” The first thing I decided was to take advantage of my friends and family by making them come and visit me, maybe every week or two, so I wouldn’t be in danger of falling too deep inside myself.
Another protection I prescribed (griever, heal thyself) was to continue my “writing therapy.” Just as writing letters had proved to be a good sounding board during my travels, I resolved to spend some time at my desk each day telling someone how I felt, what I had done, what I hoped to do. Ventilating.
Brutus would still be my main “audience” (and I his “house band”), but there were also a few other friends I wanted to reach out to — those who had fallen out of touch during my recent troubles, but who had written along the way to let me know they were thinking of me.
I can see in retrospect that this was another measure of my modest healing and tentative return to life, that I wanted to open myself up to a wider circle of friends again. Certainly not as wide as it used to be, for in past years I had kept up a fairly steady and fairly prolific (if sporadic, during tours and travels) series of letters to distant friends, but I didn’t have the “enthusiasm” for all that anymore.
At this fresh juncture in my life, with its tabula rasa (for good and ill), I would choose those people I was sure I still wanted in my life, and invite them back in. If they were willing.
And able. For obviously it wasn’t that easy to be the friend of an all-time loser like me, to be willing to share the reality of such awful tragedies, and I wasn’t blind to that either. Still, some good people seemed able to put up with all that, to my constant surprise, and I was certainly grateful to them for that true magnanimity — greatness of soul.
Inevitably, my first letter from the house on the lake would be written to my poor imprisoned friend Brutus, whose request for bail had finally been denied, and who was now waiting until an acceptable plea-bargain could be negotiated. The federal authorities were offering him a deal if he was willing to “spill a few names,” but he knew that idea would not be good for his health, or his family’s.
The house on the lake had always been a special place for Brutus too, in fact, he had been the one to discover that beautiful area, and to show it to me. Back around 1990 he and Georgia had been visiting us at our log cabin on Lac Echo, about 10 miles away, and every day Brutus went driving around the southern Laurentians looking for a piece of property to buy. One day, he came back telling me about a lake he had found which was just being opened up to development, with only three houses built on its thickly wooded shore, with water so clean you could drink it right out of the lake.
The next day, we loaded a canoe onto the roof of his Jeep, and Selena and I drove with him to have a look at this paradise. The owner of the land around several lakes in the area, Louie (later my neighbor and woodland mentor), was also selling a few islands on this lake, and Brutus, Selena, and I paddled around for half the day going ashore to explore the islands as well as we could (we had to “bushwhack” through the dense underbrush to try to see the lay of the land), and cruising along the shore to look at various lots that were available.
The islands were small, none of them larger than an acre, and they would not be practical to build upon (given the autumn freezeup and winter thaw, for a start), but they were still tempting from the point of view of our “inner child” — how exciting to have your very own island! We decided to be sensible, however, and within a week we had each bought a piece of land along the lakeshore — and an island.
Unfortunately, with everything else that was gone from there, Brutus’s land had been sold back to Louie a few months ago to pay some of his lawyer bills. But just as Brutus was the one who could best understand my feelings about motorcycling and travelling, he could also best understand my feelin
gs about the house on the lake.
Jan. 7, ’99 Lac St. Brutus, Que.
Hey there Blunderbuss!
It’s a bee-yoo-ti-ful winter morning here, sun just clearing the trees behind Louie’s house, with a crisp -12° [10°F], and about 10 inches of fresh powder overnight. A fair blizzard was blowing last night, and before I went to bed I turned off the inside lights and sat up for awhile to watch the ever-popular “snowglobe effect” in the outdoor lights.
The winter fantasy I have been carrying around with me day and night on the road all these months has come true, just the way I imagined it, and I have sure been digging it. (Well, actually Keith’s been digging it — I just admire it and play in it.)
As I told you on the phone, I spent the first few days here happily indoors, wallowing in simply being here (for so long all I wanted was this: to be alive and here, and I’m not taking it for granted yet). With the Selena Memorial Library successfully organized and somewhat decorated, and the living-room shelves filled with all the books on art, cars, motorcycles, and birds (a most righteous combination, I think), I gradually started to reintroduce my scooter-softened physique to outdoor activities once again — not that I had a choice, with the ever-active Danny and Janette visiting. One day I was snowshoeing with Danny in the morning, then cross-country skiing with Janette in the afternoon, so I’ve been getting some “fresh air and exercise” alright.
There’s nearly two feet of snow on the ground now, which is just perfect for snowshoeing, and at least enough for cross-country skiing on the Aerobic Corridor, so I’ve been exploring my woods pretty widely on the ’shoes, and driving down to the village once a day to ski on the Corridor, going a little longer every day.