Chapter 21
Go West, Young Man!
AND SASKATCHEWAN AND SASKATCHEWAN and Saskatchewan: said the train: and Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan. And Manitoba and Manitoba and Manitoba. Five thousand miles at thirty miles an hour. Five hundred miles of prairie were ablaze. Beyond the Great Divide, they looked down on the wild beauty of lakes and ravines and pastures of British Columbia with all the boundless and immeasurable longing in their gaze of two children of Israel shading their eyes before a vision of the Promised Land. And when from the Rockies they had descended through the Fraser Valley, the first thing they saw of Vancouver was, from the train window at Port Moody, across the water on their right, a swift-flowing inlet, a fisherman’s shack, built on piles, blazing…
Chapter 22
“A Little Lonely Hermitage It Was…”
OH, HELL!…ETHAN OPENED his eyes and smiled. He nudged Jacqueline. A man was getting off the bus, carrying a brown suitcase, on which, in gold letters, were inscribed the initials R.I.P.
Once more the Llewelyns exchanged their knowing smiling nods; once more their faces reflected in the window took on that look of hope and excitement, as of two strangers.
Even though here came old Safeside-Suicide again, boiling and sputtering past: to be overtaken this time without difficulty; while the man with the suitcase, falling behind in the dust, grinned and waved his hand…
For it was a glorious day after all, if here in Vancouver Island too, this weather could change with explosive suddenness. And the blue gulf had opened below to their gaze again with its green islands, and Mount Baker in the distance on the American mainland, and for a time they watched this lovely view almost gratefully.
A man knocked his pipe out on a garden wall. To their left another man went through his gate into his house. A woman, hanging washing between two trees, clothespins in mouth, stared after the bus. A child lay, elbows in grass, gazing dreamily out to sea while his father pointed. Youth of Raleigh.
Rest in Peace…R.I.P. and rip was also a body of water made rough by the meeting of opposing tides and currents. It was to become torn apart or split asunder. It was to divide or separate the parts of something by cutting or tearing. It was a rent made by a seam giving way. It was a tear. And to go ahead or proceed headlong. And to break forth into vehement, often profane utterance. Yes, and a mean, vicious or worthless thing or person. Riparians, that’s what they were too, for had they not lived on tidewater, on—or half upon—the inlet bank? Were they not riparians moreover—ex-riparians—of the very regions at which they were so hungrily gazing, across the Gulf, beyond, even, Gabriola Island—or at which he was so gazing, as to gain one moment’s peace from torment, never mind an eternity of it?
They were. And how could one not remember it? For they had been travelling as it were along the upended base of a triangle of which Eridanus itself on the mainland could roughly be considered the apex, an apex that was a great deal nearer Nanaimo than Victoria (despite everything, their decision to visit the island capital first had been a decision to postpone as long as possible making any decision at all about the house in Gabriola), so that, by drawing close to Nanaimo in their journey northward they had also drawn so much closer to their old home that those very peaks and ravines of the mainland across the sea, distant as they still were, now possessed the terrible familiarity of ancient landmarks to the heart.
Yet it hadn’t always been easy to explain how their existence on the beach over there, under those mountains (the illusion too, of whose nearness was growing more uncanny by the moment, for the mainland mountains, above which swam a few peaceful sunlit clouds, Michelangelesque, were now extraordinarily clear, whereas the intermediate Gulf Islands were blurred with haze or smoke) could possibly be accounted an improvement, let alone so ideal. The factors it contained of the “primitive life” had often seemed to Ethan himself, until that life came under attack, however mild, a subject for satire more than anything else. Tommy, in his vacations (for he was at an “English boarding school,” St. Jude’s, in Vancouver, which occupied his emotions to the extent that he sometimes flatly refused to leave the place on weekends), simply saw it as so much rather rugged “camping.” And although there was no questioning its hardship, at least in winter—how beautiful it could be then, with the, snow-covered cabins, the isolation, the driftwood like burnished silver—the wonderful excruciating absurd shouting ecstasy of swimming in freezing weather—there had often seemed to him at first something false about it, especially from his point of view, since a disproportionate share of the real burden fell on Jacqueline, who, humiliatingly, proved in many respects more practical and adaptable than he, moreover, to play the game seriously, perhaps they should have had no money at all.
“Back to nature, yet not all the way. Rousseau with a battery radio, Thoreau with a baby Austin,” a friend had said.
“No, we haven’t got a car.”
They had never bought another one, and this was indeed the key to a certain apparent hypocrisy arising from the situation, for while Ethan proudly argued, Jacqueline loyally agreeing, that this preserved their “independence from the machine,” he knew, to the contrary, this tended to make them too often yet more dependent on it in the shape of buses. What he really wanted was to be free of the whole false view of life, false comforts constrained by advertisements and monstrous deceptions, what more valuable gesture could they have made in this age? But Ethan could not expect Jacqueline to share the courage of his convictions, when he was not in full possession of those convictions always himself.
Nevertheless, he maintained they’d found that due to their new life “even a car could be dispensed with.” The real reason was more complicated: and in no obvious way, involved with fear, for they’d both virtually stopped drinking before they’d lived a month on the beach: to Ethan perhaps a car represented a residual responsibility of an alien world best left behind, a world where, with oneself at the wheel, inexplicable disasters might be expected to happen.
“As every nature-lover and hitchhiker knows, Ethan,” his merciless friend had pursued, “who’s ever begun a walking tour in Detroit…Besides, even at best, if you ask me—you’re right—it is damned unfair on Jacqueline.”
“You don’t know her father, old boy.”
As a matter of fact The McCandless had paid them a surprise visit late their second May, arriving in the top of his form, a gigantic volume of anogogical research into Gothic literature by a Finn, half hidden by his Gothic cape, under his shiny coat sleeve, and as he reached the end of the forest path, and their house with the inlet came in view below the steps, greeting them with (indeed they heard this Spenserian incantation going on in the bush some while before they saw him):
“A little lowly hermitage it was
Down a dale, hard by the forest’s side Far from resort of people that did
pass—
In travail to and froe…A little wyde There was a holy chapel edifyde—”
The McCandless was pointing straight at the Chic Sale and it was at this point they caught sight of him. “Daddy, you wretch!” “Ha ha ha, my children!…
“Wherein the hermit dewly went to say
His holy thinges each morne and
eventyde
Thereby a crystal stream did gently
plan
(it was true a stream ran by their path but by this time of year it was a mere trickle)
From which a sacred fountaine welled
forth alway…”
All in all they might have thought he was being yet more sardonic than the friend who’d gibed at them about Thoreau. But it seemed The McCandless could quote nothing later than the early nineteenth century. Not that they didn’t appreciate the joke. Nor that, for his part, during his stay, he probably meant to impugn their precious beach life. His point seemed to be, as if that new life involved a task he’d magically conjured up for them himself, their own attitude was one in question. For him Eridanus apparently wasn’t a pl
ace to be enjoyed, so much as another test of their love, to be endured heroically, come through. Ah, they were coming through all right too, and how cynically proud of them he sounded. It didn’t seem to occur to him, no matter how often they insisted on this, to what degree they might genuinely exult in their life, or if it did, he was at pains to conceal his feeling. Perhaps he had some real prescience of what was going to happen in the end and discouraged them for that reason. Unfortunately, right from the start, there seemed all too much tactile basis for his kind of congratulatory discouragement. Their inlet they were so proud of had, disloyally and hurtfully, chosen that afternoon of his arrival, due to someone having opened the wrong valve of an oil barge moored at the refineries distantly visible citywards on that opposite bank, to become sleeked for miles with a vast scum of crude oil. Simultaneously, the weather turned chilly, and it rained intermittently every day during his whole visit, though it stopped each evening just before sunset. That first afternoon too the coal stove fell apart and the roof leaked. Even the forest, with their beloved pines and cedars and swaying alders, did not escape The McCandless’ cheerfully commiserating sarcasm as, the first night, they sat on the platform after dinner beneath the gloomily dripping great trees towering over them to watch a ghostly feeble Ryder moonrise and he said in sepulchral Scottish tones:
“ ‘The tops of the lofty forest trees waved mournfully in the evening wind, and the moonbeam, penetrating at intervals, as they moved, through the matted branches, threw dubious shadows upon the dark underwood beneath.’ ”
The works of people like Mrs. Radcliffe seemed to hold a peculiar fascination for The McCandless, though truth to tell, the fantastic Gothic literature book he’d brought with him (which, the work of an erudite Finn, Aino Railo, and called The Haunted Castle, he had ceremoniously presented to them as a belated Christmas gift) abounded in analecta of this grandiose nature, usually having some mystical significance, many he appeared to have learned by heart for the occasion, perhaps to impress his daughter with the knowledge that English literature, at least of the romantic period, which was Mr. Railo’s point too, was not wholly devoid of the profounder implications of “holy gibberish.”
That they were succeeding in living rent-free, however, commanded his unequivocal Scottish admiration (in a place which, for all its lack of conveniences, must have, if in America, set them back in summer at least $500 a month).
He stayed with them a week, maintaining throughout this hilarious, half-hurtful and mock-esoteric mood, drinking quantities of Canadian Scotch, seeing omens and cabbalistic paths everywhere, posting letters to them from a neighbouring village and delivering them himself, stamped and postmarked from the store an hour later, pretending this was magic, setting, in the rare bursts of sunlight, glasses of whiskey on the porch tables to “radiate the creature,” picnicking with them on an island they’d rowed out to between showers, thinking to escape that relentlessly ebbing and flooding oil, only to find themselves at high tide completely encircled by its viscous peacock feathers, an island where nevertheless he sportingly affirmed that he was Prospero, and themselves Ferdinand and Miranda; it having become now his favorite thesis, no doubt also thanks to reading Mr. Railo, that The Tempest had been consciously based by Shakespeare upon certain ordeals in the Eleusinian mysteries—cutting himself a hazel wand at midnight. He insisted on sleeping each night, drunk as a cock on blackberry brandy, and with no more covering than a terrycloth dressing gown and a couple of horse blankets, upon the bare boards of the platform.
Next evening, as they sat on the platform, the inlet was still covered with that gruesome carpet of dirty oil spreading everywhere over its surface. The tide was at high slack, the breeze only a fluctuant cat’s-paw. Voices were audible for miles across the water. Part of the trouble was the colossal stench arising from that oil slick at this stage of the tide. It was something that contrasted weirdly with the blasts of heavenly fragrance wafted, at the least shifting of the wind, from the forest—a contrast resembling and not less improbably than that between floating ambergris and its distillation in perfume. The perfume permeated partly by the scents of Jacqueline’s spring flowers, but drawn out by spring showers and the blossoming trees in the depths of the forest, from wild cherry and wild crab apple and wood violet and wild rose there, as though the whole woods had undergone a saturation of perfume stronger than heliotrope or night-scented stock, at the same time nothing cleaner or fresher could be imagined, unless it was the salt sea smell of the inlet itself when it was running clear and pure.
Every bit as peculiar, and twice as terrifying, as this olfactory contrast was that between the sense of relatively ineffable peace otherwise on their side of the inlet, a quiet broken only by the dripping of water from the trees, or the beginning notes of the western nightingale, and the unholy, plangent yet strident and ever-increasing tumult now arising from the other side.
The short stretch between, two miles distant, and half as long, was thus all they saw of that other bank and the refinery had become to them, as it were, its ideograph, as well as that of all this “new activity” upon it, which, so far, having consisted in the refinery itself being expanded into a little town with, of late, a name on the map, Shellco, had all seemed marvelously innocent. Not merely had Shellco seemed quiet and unobtrusive enough but once accepted as part of the landscape, as an entity aesthetically pleasing, even a cause for outbursts of lyricism by Jacqueline; with its cylindrical aluminum retorts and slim chimneys like organ pipes against the green grass a “fairy city of dawn,” of “rosy metal of an unearthly hue”: while at night, though it showed a little constellation of a few tasteful and colored lights, it slept still and soundless beneath these as an innocent toy model city beneath a Christmas tree—as, specifically, that toy model of Moscow Ethan’s father had not finally given him, albeit it more resembled a toy New York. But now, as if it had happened overnight, or behind their backs, and just for The McCandless’ benefit, its aspect, and with it that of the whole opposite bank where unfamiliar demonic magenta lights were abruptly winking on and off, seemed frighteningly to have changed. Gone all of a sudden was the innocent little constellation, the quiet lights gleaming ashore at Shellco. A few nights before, an oil-waste burner that had suddenly started fountaining like flambeaux over there on the refinery town’s slope had prompted them to think an unbidden fire had started and, when it died down, had been put out. But tonight, suddenly as if just now, this same sword-shaped pyre had reappeared, only looking ten times fiercer and taller, so that a fiendish lurid light coruscated from the whole refinery, each of whose cylindrical aluminum tanks reflecting the flambeaux in descending degrees of infernal brilliance, in turn sent those reflections wavering deep within the dark stream, wherein too, when a cat’s-paw ruffled the surface, all the reflections in the water dithered together with the image striking down directly from the fiery torch itself, the reflections and the reflected reflections all wriggling and dithering and corkscrewing frenziedly together diminuendo like red-hot slice-bars in a stoker’s nightmare. Those luminous digladiations gave at first the impression of taking place in sinister silence but in fact there was a hellish if magnificent din: from the oil-waste pyre came a whishing, whistling, consistent rushing roar, mingling with a noise like rattling giant chains which appeared to come from behind the oil tanks, sounds of machinery, half-submerged in the high lament of huge invisible saws in far sawmills northwestward. While they watched and listened, a coarse cerise light switched on, illuminating in large capitals erected against the grass slope below—someone having omitted to supply the initial S—the word HELL: on top of this, to The McCandless’ grave delight, the moon came out…
And the twin beams of searchlights from the forgotten legions of the city began to sweep, attenuating themselves to a vast height, crossing and recrossing the low cloudbanks like broom-bewildered ghosts on stilts, or mounted on falling fire-ladders down the sky. While beneath, good God, here was their city of “rosy metal of an unearthly hue” with
a vengeance! In place of their well-behaved Meccano structure some lurid flickering City of Dis indeed, suffusing all the lowering sky westward with a bloodshot volcanic glare and firing the windows and mirrors of the little cabin, and, as now with the moon’s arrival the wind began to blow strongly and steadily out of the refinery’s quarter, from the southwest, overwhelming them from across the water with a new and deadlier assault of unique oil-smells, bringing on their gusts an added wild clamor, this time probably from the city too (though again seeming to suspire to the refinery alone), a tumult, steadily increasing in volume, like the plucked strings of a thousand Jews’ harps, and the flexitone winnings of flailing metal, and a moaning rising to a pitch and then falling and dying to reascend again, surcharged now, in a lull of the wind, by those immediate coastwise concussions, zinzulations of shingle-mills, Byzantine warnings, chimes and chuffing of engines along the railway lines, wails of locomotive steam-whistles, and harmonium chords from diesels.
All this being punctuated at intervals, as the wind shifted slightly once more, by the clear pure fluting—first the introductory note, then the clear flutelike rising carolling song—of the hermit thrush sitting in the wet dogwood tree behind their woodshed.
“It was the nuns at a convent chanting the requiem for a soul,” The McCandless observed.
The requiem continued a little longer. “I don’t think there’s a convent but there’s a monastery over there somewhere,” Ethan said.
But the next morning it was as though the doleful noise had never been.
“And,” The McCandless was saying, “Satan—or one of the others—to be the personification of that which tries simply to intercept you in the course of performing your higher will?”
“Mmm,” said Ethan, whose handsaw, at the moment quivering, became trapped by the imperceptibly loosening sections of the dividing log. He found a wedge—one of the kind they knocked into cleats to secure the hatches on shipboard—and hammered it into the now splitting wood until the saw was freed. But now the wedge itself was driven in too far without the job being done, so he found a carpenter’s hammer and brought it down with a crash with such a mighty blow that the sawhorse itself collapsed. And still the log had not split.
October Ferry to Gabriola Page 16