by Joe Denham
“Do you think if we keep feeding him he’ll keep following us?” he asks, an olive branch.
“That’s what old Coleridge says,” Miriam answers, “though I wouldn’t get too carried away, Ferris.” His old moniker seems appropriate to her here, an appeal to the more playful aspect of his nature. “We’ve still got a ways to go before we get to sing ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,’” she says, trying for common ground.
He smiles, and launches right in. “I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spied some land…” And she joins in too, right after he imitates verbatim Dylan’s false start on the original track, recorded in 1965, three years after Rachel Carson first wrote of a future denuded, defiled, without birds left in the sky for us to sing to or hear sing.
THIS EARTHQUAKE WON’T be any good for the salmon. Threefold. First of all, twenty to thirty million Atlantic salmon will have been released into the wild as a result of the tsunami damage to the fifty fish farms on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Of course, this is nothing new. As it is, there’s anywhere from fifty thousand to a half-million escapees a year due to storms and negligent pen-tending. But every Atlantic means a graver threat; means an invasive, non-indigenous species spreading disease and competing for what spawning grounds remain, which are always dwindling. There used to be over one hundred spawning streams in the Vancouver area, not including the Fraser and its tributaries. Now there are two: one in Stanley Park, and one in Port Coquitlam. They’re both stocked. Between forestry, mining, and hydro-electric damming and diversion, good grounds up and down the coast have been decimated.
Currently there’s some 750 creeks and rivers in development or application under the provincial government’s new run-of-the-river independent power project initiative. Plutonic Power, a General Electric subsidiary, is about to start building a 1,000-plus megawatt project just a few hundred kilometres north of my house. Green power, as they spin it. Two hundred and fifty kilometres of road, 450 kilometres of transmission wire, 140 bridges. They’ll drive their excavators into the stream beds at low water and build a few token groomed spawning pools. They’ll call it good stewardship. Then they’ll open the pipes and siphon up to 95 percent of the annual flow off seventeen different Bute Inlet tributaries. But the turbines will spin and the power will flow and everyone will go on using their energy-star approved hot-air dryers in the middle of the summer, comfortable knowing that their power doesn’t come from horrendous coal like those nasty Americans and backwards Indians and Chinese.
Then there’s the inevitable diversion of money and resources away from what little efforts are being made on the salmon’s behalf. The damage to our all-important human infrastructure will take precedence, and both government funding and community initiatives for salmon will be some of the first to be siphoned off. People will rebuild houses, not spawning grounds, and the government will be all too eager to accommodate the shift in priorities and energies back to one reflected in the markets and the tax purse.
A shift that will be indicative of the greatest problem, as I see it. Public sentiment. We’ve been fighting an uphill battle for a decade now to get even a fraction of the public to notice the salmon. It took the disappearance of an estimated nine million fish from the Fraser runs to land just enough front-page coverage and galvanize just enough public concern to force the Conservatives to order a judicial inquiry into DFO’s mismanagement of the salmon.
And now we’ve got it, and the earth picks this fine time to rattle. Mid-swing, in the midst of the public consultation process. And you can bet the government will keep the timeline clock ticking. Whole communities of people who were just gathering enough information and gumption to step up and speak for the salmon will be derailed, defused. It’s a near-miracle when any one issue takes hold with people these days, oscillating as we all are with a sort of low-swell panic. Our endemic fear. We flit from one issue, one cause, one solution to the next.
My husband—a bit of a misnomer as we’re not married, though it’s what he’d have me call him; I think of him more as Willow’s father, the man I co-parent and cohabitate with—Ferris, he took off the day after the earthquake on an insane wild goose chase to find some guy in Hawaii who he says is going to pay him a wad of cash for the glass fish float he found. That’s what I mean by low-swell panic. Everyone’s going from one desperate scheme to the next.
We didn’t even get off the ground with alternative energy, I mean real alternative energy, and emissions reduction, before carbon sequestering and geo-engineering became the order of the day. And in the midst of it all, who could really care about a few genus of salmon? Especially now that the earthquake’s made basic amenities an issue. Now that everybody, once again, has got bigger fish to fry.
•
When Ferris showed up the day after the quake and told me he was leaving right away for Lasqueti I just about packed his bags for him. All his bags. To be honest I’ve been waiting for him to pack up and leave for a while now. It’s not an easy place to come to, realizing that you no longer love someone, and for me it has been that much more difficult because of Willow. But eventually such a thing becomes undeniable, and I’ll always remember the night, the moment, it happened for me.
We’d been fighting fiercely all summer. To be fair I should say that fighting is nothing new for Ferris and I, but I can say for myself, and I think for him too, that there’s a critical point where it just becomes tiresome, a song you’ve heard a thousand times too many, and we’d reached it. Which is when it either stops, which it didn’t for us, or it becomes detached from all passions other than hatred. That’s where we’d gotten to. Then Ferris came home early off the water one day in late August last summer and told me to get dressed in my finest. Which is to say, my black spaghetti-strap dress and thin black sandals and the gold-filigreed silver leaf earrings my mother gave me when I left for university, all remnants of my school girl days when fashion and adornment still mattered. I protested, wanting to know what he was getting at, but he held steady to his secrecy, saying only that I was going to love it, and, thinking back on it now, I wonder if it was that word, love, which convinced me to go along with it. I’m one of those women who’s got the same figure at thirty-five as I did at twenty, lucky I suppose, so I slipped on my dress, brushed my hair out long down my back, and climbed into the Volvo.
As it turned out, Joni Mitchell was giving an advanced screening of her new film, The Fiddle and the Drum, at the Ruby Lake Resort’s outdoor amphitheatre that night. Ferris had gotten what he had understood were exclusive tickets, for one hundred bucks apiece, to dine at the resort restaurant with the owners, their close friends and Joni Mitchell herself. I should say in Ferris’s defence that I flat-out loved Joni Mitchell in my early twenties. I might even go so far as to say that if it weren’t for the fact that Ferris was the first guy I’d had in my bed who would lie awake with me listening to Blue and For the Roses, we might never have fallen in love to begin with.
The irony of it was, there we were almost fifteen years later, dressed to the nines, trying to salvage some shred of what we had shared back then, and Joni didn’t show. Not for dinner. And not till we’d stood around afterwards in a chilly wind and rain waiting for her to arrive at the amphitheatre for nearly two hours. When she finally did, she offered the hundred-odd people who’d showed for the screening some flippant excuse about running late in an interview with PBS and having to stop at home for a salad because she had been absolutely famished. Then they screened the video, one of the more sorry excuses for art I’ve ever seen. Joni’s been hit-and-miss through the years, but this was taking lack of discernment to a level beyond forgivable, an hour-long debacle of sappy song and ballet with that triumph of human spirit, courage and love over ecological disaster message the baby boomers all default to in the absence of their willingness to own up to the world of shit they’re leaving us.
But what made the evening fall flat on its face, and with it Ferris’s efforts to rekindle something that just won’t
be, was not all that. Even if Joni had been at the dinner and the screening had been amazing, it still would have failed. It was doomed from the start. Because the premise only worked to illustrate how much we’d diverged, and how little Ferris saw of who I actually had by then become.
I have no time for Joni Mitchell now. I put Blue or For the Roses on every once in a while when I’m home alone and feeling sentimental. I’d say they’re albums more suited in theme and tone to my life and to our relationship now than they were when I listened to them incessantly so many years ago, but it always irks me. How could a woman so capable of such beauty, and so apparently concerned with the state of the earth, how could she be building that ten-thousand-square foot mansion of concrete and glass she’s now having constructed just up the highway from here? It’s irredeemable. Paving paradise with her architecturally engineered palace. I’d like to be a fly on the wall of her mind when she’s talking herself into feeling good about that decision. I’d buzz my wings as loud as I could just to try and drown out the bullshit. I think I’ve said that very thing to Ferris. I’ve ranted on ad nauseum about the incongruence of Joni’s lifestyle and her message, but he doesn’t really hear me. I mean, he hears me, he hears me all the time. I’ve made very few friends in this town since we moved here. It’s full of old-school rednecks, retirees and forty-something urbanite yuppies who’ve moved from the city to raise their kids in “the country,” bringing the city with them.
So in the absence of any other sounding board, Ferris has heard my every diatribe under the sun concerning everything I can’t figure of how others are living their lives these days. But he thinks I’m just being angry, stubborn, unrelenting, and so his listening is like that of a patient parent’s—I’ve seen him do it with Willow, he stands a certain way, his arms crossed against his chest, his eyes wide as though attentive, but ultimately hollow, his thoughts elsewhere. He dismisses my ideas before I’ve spoken them because he’s prejudged them as adolescent. If he hadn’t, he’d have understood that the way back to my heart was not with some overpriced, decadent dinner and a glimpse of Joni Mitchell. But he didn’t understand that, and by the time we got home, I was furious for it.
Ferris had sent Willow to Svend’s for the night—“Uncle Svend,” the closest thing to family Willow has got in this town—obviously expecting romance. But I just railed at him, about the supreme indignity of expropriating the agony of other species’ dying for the sake of making art. About Joni’s arrogance and self-aggrandizement. And he eventually railed back, accusing me of being unduly harsh and equally arrogant.
I often wonder why he doesn’t just agree with me, like he used to, but he’s become incapable over the past few years of assigning blame where blame is due. Since he quit drinking he seems to have this need to forgive everyone, as though, on top of all the luxuries everyone takes for themselves, forgiveness is deserved, too. It’s not. All in all, we’re vile creatures, and our only shot at redemption is to admit it, to ourselves and to each other, and to get on with the hard work of setting our wrongs to right. He looks at me with disgust whenever I say so, and I know it’s why he hasn’t wanted to have another child with me. He calls me recalcitrant. I used to think it was cute when he’d use words like that, words beyond the normal range of his vocabulary. I used to find his intellectual limitations and his little attempts at obscuring or overcoming them endearing. But now I just find it pathetic.
I’ve heard it said that successful—which is to say lasting, possibly even happy—marriages are almost invariably comprised of two people whose IQs are within five points of each other. That’s definitely not the case with Ferris and I, though he’d never acknowledge it, and if I were to say so it would be just another example to him of my arrogance. Which is the reason why I haven’t wanted to have another child with him. Not to mention that it’s probably the last thing the world needs me to do, give it another human mouth to feed, another appetite of desire to satiate. What the world needs me to do is fight for it because it can’t fight for itself. As his mother, that’s what Willow needs me to do. To fight the corporate fascist state for a future not poisoned and oppressed by its toxic oligarchy. To try to pioneer a way around what we’ve become. It’s what he needs his father to do, too. But somewhere down the line Ferris capitulated, and our love was handed over in the terms of his unconditional surrender.
•
It’s been over three weeks since Ferris left and we haven’t heard a word. He should have landed in Hawaii days ago, though this morning we awoke to news reports of a massive earthquake there now, too, so what to hope for? That he didn’t make it in a safe and timely manner? That has its own potentially frightening implications.
The CBC reports that the lid has been blown right off the tallest mountain there, one of the volcanoes scientists had deemed dormant because it hasn’t erupted in over 4,500 years. All I can hope for is that Ferris arrived safely, tended to his insane business, and was already on his way home by the time the eruption began last night. Poor Willow. I’ll never forgive Ferris for not calling.
They’ve been talking all day on the radio about James Lovelock and Gaia’s revenge and ridiculous stuff like that. It’s just like people to cope with harsh realities with confabulations and self-delusion. By three in the afternoon I’ve had enough, I can’t listen to another inane minute, so I decide to head down to the beach to find Willow. He spends most of his summer days there. It’s heaven for him, out of school, out of doors, away from his parents’ watchful eyes. He’s a good kid, Willow, and I trust him to himself. One thing I can say for Ferris is that he’s capable. Street smart and sea smart. It comes down to him from his grandfather, or so Ferris has told me, and it has come down to our son, too. I’m glad for it. He’ll need it in the coming days. When things really do collapse. When things constrict. Which is to say, when it gets so incredibly difficult to be anything other than poor that the only dignified life for people of our class will be the one wholly outside of and completely non-dependent upon the urban system. This will occur in my son’s lifetime, and so I leave him to roam as much as I can, to teach him independence, emotional self-reliance.
I find him down in the estuary of Halfmoon Creek building a dam in the intertidal zone out of old driftwood and rocks. There’s a family of ducks drifting out in the bay, and there’s a young mother, an Asian woman, and her baby, nursing on a drift log set into the sand above high water mark. “Hey Bub,” I say to get his attention. He works so diligently and intently at his projects, a bomb could go off and he wouldn’t notice. (Hopefully a bomb never does go off…)
“Hi Anna,” he answers back. He gets this from Ferris, calling me by my first name. Ferris rarely refers to his parents as anything other than Cosmo—or Carl, if he’s expressing anger or resentment at who his father was, something he did often before he quit drinking, and seldom does since—and Alexi-Lynne. Willow has followed suit. “What are you building?” I ask him, trying to pry his mind from his imagination. Selfishly, because the truth is without Ferris around I’m lonely. Arguing or not, his companionship in the evenings takes me away from myself, and without him here I’ve spent too much time alone.
“A dam, like the ones you’re always talking about with Ferris. When I’m done I’m going to smash it.”
“Why would you do that?” I ask, already certain what his answer will be.
“Because that’s what you always say we should do to them. That’s the only hope.”
The only hope. Jesus. Ferris always says I’m going to turn Willow into some sort of eco-terrorist extremist talking the way I do, and I suppose here before me is his supporting evidence. Of course, eco-terrorism may be the only truly appropriate and courageous response to his world by the time Willow’s an adult, but that’s not a direction I want to lead him in. Truth is, I suspect it may be the only appropriate one now, though I’ll confess also to being full of piss and vinegar when talking of such things, but a chickenshit when it comes down to brass tacks. I’m far too timid to
actually act on any of it. I fight my fight with words and civil actions, without physical violence, because I ultimately agree with Ferris on this one point: you can’t fight fire with fire, not when what you’re fighting for is to put the fire out.
“I don’t really mean that when I say it Bub, I’m just venting,” I respond to my son, but I can tell he’s unconvinced. I suppose my rally-cries are a tad more persuasive than my recanting. Anger is a powerful passion. “Do you want to come up to the bakery with me for a cookie and a cool drink?” I propose, wanting to change the subject. Sometimes once a hole’s been dug with children the best thing is to let time’s detritus fill it in. At least that’s what I tell myself when I’m stumped with Willow.
I take his hand as we start up the beach, but he quickly shakes it loose, running ahead toward the marram grass and flowering blackberry brambles above the rocks and sand. When we first moved here, when Willow was still an infant, I used to come down to the beach to sketch the old houses and the shoreline and sometimes Merry Island in the distance. That’s when I still believed art had some transformative power, a position I’ve grown suspicious of over the past decade. There’s no shortage of artists addressing the woes of the world now, nor has there ever been, but if that’s contributed to its betterment it has obviously been in so small a way as to be negligible.