October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  “What kind of social life do I have, anyhow? There’s nobody to talk to most of the time except a few old fishermen.”

  “At least the fishermen don’t gossip.”

  “Like hell they don’t! Ha ha!”

  “Stop shouting. The janitor’ll hear us, or somebody’ll complain…Well, at least we don’t hear them gossip.”

  “I’m not shouting any louder than you are. And you know perfectly well they gossip as much as anybody. Don’t be sentimental.”

  “They’re away half the year. And the summer people kept mostly to themselves, except for the Fairhavens, who’re swell, and what about Sigbjørn and Primrose Wilderness? And I thank heaven we did get to know so few people! and it’s you yourself who are turning this into an obscene quarrel and making me say all sorts of things I don’t mean. That’s what your wonderful civilization does to a fellow! And get this. I’m not an enemy of human consciousness, simply of—”

  “I simply cannot understand you,” said Jacqueline dreamily, lying down on her back and looking at the ceiling. “What the hell has that got to do with the argument?”

  “It’s no use asking me why I love it,” Ethan said after a moment. “I can’t tell you. I’m not sure I know. In fact, I don’t know that I don’t hate it as much as you do.”

  “It seems to me your attachment to the place is really insane!” cried Jacqueline, sitting up again.

  “—and if there’s something pathological about his attachment,” Ethan said, laughing, in his father-in-law’s accent, “not to be attached, considering how much they got for nothing, would be more pathological still.” He took Jacqueline in his arms again, but this only made her more angry and she shook herself free.

  “All right,” she said in the staccato tones of someone who has made a final decision. “If you want it so much, why don’t you fight the eviction? You’re a lawyer, aren’t you? Then find some law.”

  “Oh, Lord…”

  Yet here Ethan was involved in another paradox. It wasn’t a field of law in which he was well versed, though he could easily enough look it up, but certainly it seemed to him there was little legal basis on which to fight such an order should it come, and certainly not before it came, squatter’s rights, if not fishermen’s privileges, having long since been abolished; and even had he “found some law,” by which to delay the eviction, it might only have imperiled those few fishermen whose houses, having been mounted on rollers against just such an eventuality, could be towed away to another government-owned beach where they would possess delimited foreshore rights, but which, alas, by no means posited another Eridanus, more likely beneath the railway tracks. No, to fight might even bring down in addition to an eviction order on those left, a writ of fieri facias, or something or other even more ghoulish, for some huge and unpayable amount in back taxes. In fact, Ethan sometimes thought, it was as if almost their life had argued the presence in the background of some beneficent tolerant spirit, behind the intolerant civic facade; it seemed ungrateful even at the end to confront this with any insistence on legal rights, even had it not been true there were none, unless love itself could stake a claim.

  “Our garden! Our little boat…” Jacqueline was sobbing.

  “Don’t grieve, honey lamb. We’ll find somewhere, you’ll lead us to it, as you did before. You’ll see.”

  “But it isn’t a question of just somewhere.”

  “Well if we can find anywhere to live at all, not in absolute limbo, where you can have a garden, with conditions as they are we’ll be lucky.”

  “Perhaps we should live on Vancouver Island…Ethan,” Jacqueline suddenly stopped crying and sat up, blinking excitedly, like a child, “I’d almost forgotten about Angela. Maybe she’ll know of something.”

  “Doesn’t she live on Saturna Island, or some place with a Saturnine name like that?”

  “Gabriola…it’s a lovely name.”

  Jacqueline jumped out of bed and ran, naked, without stopping for a robe, into the living room where he could hear her pulling out drawers in the desk; she came dancing back in a moment, making triumphant leaps, waving the maps, and excited as a little cookstove when the kindling catches in the morning and you have to turn down the damper. She snapped on the light and got back into bed where they rested their elbows with the maps between them.

  “Then in Gabriola perhaps,” Ethan said at last almost hopefully. “We wouldn’t be too far. You wouldn’t be buried. We can get all the books we want posted out to us from the Victoria Provincial Library under that new arrangement. And Nanaimo has a good chamber orchestra, I’ve heard. And we could easily come to Vancouver for a weekend. And who knows,” he added, invoking with mock grimness an old private joke—for objectively this conversation sounded truly dreadful—“we might even sometimes treat ourselves to a flight to Bellingham, in the good old U. S. A.”

  “Nanaimo. That’s where we have to go to get the boat for Gabriola, see…Darling…darling…”

  Ethan, wrapped in a blanket, was standing tiptoe on a chair to see if he could catch a glimpse of the ship whose siren had just sounded from the bay, maybe the Nanaimo ship itself. But all he could make out were those ventilators on flat roofs that looked against the evening sky like the head and shoulders of Easter Island idols and beyond that the sky was very clear to the west with a few long gold and vermilion streamers, dove-grey and wild magenta clouds in three layers were blowing overhead with a few whisking off at an angle: in the east it was very dark with rain falling in perpendicular sheets at right angles to the billowing blue-grey clouds. King Storm whose sheen is fearful. But in fact there was just this one isolated shower in a clear sky.

  And then, against the door, the thud of that disastrous evening newspaper.

  “They want to turn this whole place into a vast bloody great Black Country, a Lancashire, or Staffordshire of the Pacific Northwest,” Ethan said, giving her the second half of the paper. “Or another Ruhr or something. The curse on British Columbia used to be that it had too many miners and not enough farmers, well, the same curse is turning up now in another form.”

  “But just now you were blaming everything on shortages and a coming depression. And only two percent or something of the country’s arable anyhow, isn’t it—Oh, dear, don’t let’s take the paper if it’s going to spoil everything every evening. Why don’t we just tie ourselves to the bed and never do anything at all?”

  “But it’s the boom we’ve really got to fear,” Ethan said grimly. “You’ll see, Jacky. That’s coming in a few years, together with the inevitable revived war economy for the next war. Your poor little bit of property won’t be safe from desecration no matter where you are. And then, when they’ve totally ruined most of the beauty of the country with industry, and thoroughly loused up the watersheds and the rainfall, and the last old sourdough has traded in his gold sifting pan for a Geiger counter and staked out the last uranium claim—as it says here—some jeezly fool will drop an atom bomb on the whole business, and serve them damn well right too! It’s a pity this paper hasn’t got that character of Flaubert’s—what’s his name, Pellerin?—on their staff of artists. The only thing lacking is a picture of Progress in the form of Jesus Christ driving a locomotive across a virgin forest.”

  Ethan’s hatred was perhaps expressive of despairing love. Quite against his better judgment he believed that some final wisdom would arise out of Canada, that would save not only Canada herself but perhaps the world. The trouble is, the world never looks as though it’s going to be saved in one’s own lifetime.

  —In Gabriola perhaps. Ethan looked thoughtfully out of the bus window at the Gulf again; after the quietude of the inlet, with its silent flux and flow, after Eridanus, what would Jacqueline make of an island shore exposed to the full smashing fury and monotony and idiot clangor of the more open sea? What if, once there, she couldn’t bear to live by the sea at all, and wanted to live inland?

  “Kelp—” a voice was saying in the bus and Ethan listened a moment. “W
hen they put their heads up and shake their hair that means the tide is slackening…tangle like a head…grew the opposite way about…I was watching for slack water…hadn’t the tide with me…If you went two feet that side you’d have the rocks…I stood there looking for the rocks…The banks were filled with bracken and hay…where they came up and shook their heads I knew I was safe…twenty-five or thirty feet long, alongside a wicked rock but where they grow there’s deeper water…Too strong for a little boat like that…”

  Yet—in Gabriola perhaps. In Gabriola he hoped. Sometimes he felt—this was no doubt why he kept thinking about the “lot”—that the only way he could console himself would be to build a new house, himself, with his own hands, that resembled the old. Some times when he remembered the small lost objects, those lares and penates left behind, as not worth removing, the old wheelbarrow, the watering cans, the bookcase he’d made of orange boxes, their usage once dear to them as a continually renewed benison, it seemed still a betrayal on his side of the lonely cabin itself to think about the skipper’s house, as if, should Jacqueline’s loyalty have to fade, he must, for both their sakes, keep his alive. And deploring this childishness at the moment, on the bus, it was only to find himself thinking about the lot again. Lot. The human lot. And Lot’s wife too…Yet why not the house? It would save much intermediate trouble and anxiety. And poor Jacqueline would be thinking again even now, at this instant, yes, as if he were the same man, and he was the same man was he not? that at the skipper’s house there would, after all, be plenty of work for him of the kind he enjoyed most. And in a way she was right; he could build on a room, two rooms, put up shelves and cupboards where they were needed, reshingle the roof: the skipper probably had a vegetable garden, but they might plant fruit trees, and if they could move in right away, he thought with a sudden access of tenderness, it wouldn’t be too late for Jacqueline to set out bulbs, so that by next spring, besides the skipper’s flowers there’d be daffodils, snow drops, Stars of Bethlehem——

  “In Sonora Island I came upon dwarf rhododendrons—they were on the logs drifting down—a common purply color like I saw them in the nunnery…There’s a lagoon I could show you there. But the British navy doesn’t know it’s there…Charlian Harbor…You could see evidence of cougar excreta…the deer hair, they don’t digest it…don’t spit on your hands, Jimmy, that will put blisters, he said so anyway…And all along I was gathering flowers. I had a girl at this time…At Port Grenaugh I’ve gathered wild daffodils…And all round that shore French currents growing and the water, the edge of the water, was alive with salamanders—”

  “What makes a bad sea in the Irish sea is the seas fighting one another.”

  Ninebark, birdfoot clover, would they find those on Gabriola? Ah, the happy day they’d spent yesterday at the Botanical Museum in Victoria. Happy? And Christ the pathos of this, the brave pretense on Jacqueline’s part that it was all just like their old life again when nothing could perhaps better symbolize their fall from grace than those hours, enjoyable or not, for had not that life—as Schopenhauer—Schopenhauer?—might have said, become like a running away from nature to look at a museum of dried plants or a landscape in copperplate and pretend you were enjoying it more: yes, and enjoying what more, might one ask too if Swedenborg—Swedenborg?—were right and nature herself were dead, no more than a reflection, less than a museum of dried plants herself to that which she reflected?…Ah, Wake Robin, Sea Rocket and Ocean Spray—Blazing Star and Love Lies Bleeding. Why should he always think of wildflowers?

  —Death Camus and the Destroying Angel.

  Chapter 27

  Useful Knots and How to Tie Them

  THE BUS DREW UP at a grade crossing to let a log train pass. A full minute later it was still passing and, Jacqueline noticing some seats now vacant on the driver’s right, the Llewelyns edged forward to watch the timber piled on the open cars slipping away from them. It was a very long train, clicking along slowly.

  “It’s nothing but knots.”

  “—I’d hate to have a house built of that stuff. It’d just fall down.”

  “Why do they bother to cut it?”

  So ran the encouraging conversation between two men across the aisle. The cars did indeed seem full of impossible snags; the train was booming, a soft continuous thunder of trampled boards above which you could hear the crossing’s little comment as the wheels rolled over the metals: clunkety-clunkety-click-clunkety-clunkety-click. Ethan now became aware of another agitation, closer at hand, less loud, but more insistent. A mountain mist had suddenly swooped down on the Greyhound, their bus having turned inland, a slight drizzle, and the driver had set his windscreen wipers in motion on the two front windows immediately ahead of the Llewelyns. Though the two wipers, which working in opposite directions, together possessed a consistent rhythm, they did not perform in exact unison, the right pendulum having swung to the leftward limit of its arc always an instant before the left pendulum had swung to its rightward limit. Sometimes it looked as though the left pendulum were trying to catch the right one, to trap it, at some always elusive moment of conjunction. The commotion this made was, to Ethan, first interesting, then stupefying, at last, in concert with that of the train—that now appeared at least a mile long—with its diminishing cargo of sad snags in the open cars under the mournful drizzle, and the wholly alien rhythm arising as each car trundled across the road itself—absolutely maddening.

  “De-clock de-clack de-clock de-clack de clack de-clonk de-clonkety-clack!”

  “—clunkety-clunkety-click clunkety-clunkety-click—”

  “De-clonk de-clack de-clock de-clank de-clack de-clonk de-clonkety-clack!”

  “—clunkety-clunkety-click clunkety-clunkety-click!”

  Ethan now became aware of something else. He had a hangover. The snags in the cars under the drizzle were more than sad. They said horrible things to him. Not that it was a bad hangover. Six or seven small beers in a pub last night, less than a pint of gin, well diluted with orange juice, shared with Jacqueline before turning in, and he hadn’t been aware of it when he woke up—

  “De-clonk de-clack De clonkety clock de-clack de-clock de-clockety-clack.”

  “—clunkety-clunkety-click clunkety-clunkety-click!”

  Of a hard-drinking profession, Ethan had been used to drinking fairly regularly, but moderately, most of his life. About once a month he had liked to get pretty tight: so, for that matter, did Jacqueline. But at Eridanus, little by little, without deliberate discipline on this point, he found that he had dropped the habit, “walked away from it” as they say, altogether. Simply, he found his happiness where he was and in what he was doing, even though he still kept liquor in the house, Jacqueline still liked to drink, and himself to see others drink—indeed most teetotalers he suspected of secret crimes. “One may be happy watching others though one drinks no longer,” his father-in-law would say, on one of his occasional visits, paraphrasing Voltaire and pouring himself and his daughter a huge Scotch and splash. “It is an obscure feeling resembling the fantastic passions retained by the dead in the Elysian Fields!” “Yes, with the difference that it’s perhaps the first time I’ve been really alive,” Ethan laughed. But ever since they’d left and gone to that apartment Ethan had been drinking every night again, not much, less than he used to, but still too much, and sometimes in the morning too.

  The worst part of it was that the desire for a drink had suddenly overlaid any decision, or thought of any other goal, save a pub. A glass of beer—to be frank at least six glasses of beer—now seemed more important than a house. Even than Gabriola. And that such might be a sympathetic enough human feeling didn’t make him tolerate it the more in himself. He wished his own quitclaim to the whole tyranny—though since he was not an alcoholic and never had been (had he been it would have been quite a different matter, of course), why the word “tyranny” should have occurred to him was not quite clear.

  But perhaps it all came back to Eridanus again. The moment he beca
me conscious of a hangover these days, however slight, his persistent suffering at the loss of their old life interacted within the misery to create something like a physical force, like a cold wind rushing through him. This suffering, which he hadn’t been able to conquer save by alcohol, was somehow more a tyranny than the alcohol itself, which, while it made it worse finally, he could conquer.

  Anyhow, apart from this cold wind, his condition was nothing to speak of, was it? First the noises of the windscreen wiper, and the freight cars continually crossing the road, that were now lulling him, had exacerbated him. Then, a moment ago, so far as he could recall a moment ago, there had been nothing but that faint sensation of overexcitement, of needing a drink too much. Just now there had been a feeling as if a tiny wheel that had been coming loose in the machinery of his brain had dropped off, nothing painful, but inducing a sense of unreality, as if he were strapped into his seat, and upon a plane, not a bus.

  No, it was more as if a needle had quietly, unheededly, fallen out of a soundbox in his head—an apt image, for now he scarcely heard the windscreen wiper, the endless passing train, the pattering drizzle. And now—was it once more?—there was this vacancy in the brain, this blankness behind the eyes, that immediately it became aware of itself, as at this instant, seemed peopled with mental threats and anxieties and terrors, projecting themselves through into the outer vision—imposing themselves on reality there—with glowering fading shapes of ruin and catastrophe and sadness. Medicine might contradict it, but it seemed possible to look the picture of health and even be in excellent shape while this kind of thing was going on, Ethan reflected. Besides, he hears no voices. His hands are steady as the Ripple Rock. With them, unaided, he proposes the heroic plan of building a house…And, equally, he knew it was not the desire for a drink at all, but a longing, a longing that every day grew a little less, for a swift swim in the cold inlet; and how he had loved Eridanus at this time in October, when the tides were high in the early morning and early evening, so that he could dive into deep cold water before breakfast and dinner, dive even right out of the window, into the inlet where the clouds were reflected six miles deep in the water, and it was like flying among these clouds, half fish, half bird, deep among the minnows and reflections of pines and kittiwakes—and ah, the white light on the sea these early October mornings, the clouds rolling away, the freshness, the newness, the sparkle and cleanliness—A longing for the pure intoxication of sobriety possessed him—