My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  “Man,” he said one afternoon, after I’d treated him to a lengthy run-down on the dating and mating habits of the beaver, that pesky wood chipper whose fuzzy outerwear had started the whole ball of wax rolling, “you’ve turned yourself into one major expert on the fur trade.”

  It was meant to be a compliment but its limp wording didn’t acknowledge just how far I’d come.

  “Expert nothing,” I corrected him. “I AM the fucking fur trade.”

  2

  So much for solidarity. A few weeks into our boating regime my Sunday kayaking group started hemorrhaging personnel to the dragon boats. Those guys had more glamorous rigs and Szechuan snacks biked in from the restaurant next door to their Chinatown HQ. But the biggest magnet of course was that they were coed. Plus the girls on those crews were built. Paddling down the middle of the river to the beat of their on-board drummer their barbell shoulders could scrape both shores at once. And strong? One of those she-dragons could pick up any member of my group and spin him around over her head like the blades on a chopper. Which is great. If you’re into that kind of thing, I’m saying.

  My kayakers were strictly male, in keeping with the fur trade tradition of propelling canoes by paddles and testosterone. This was my decision as leader of our group. In retrospect maybe it had been a mistake. We were down to only four what with all the defections, and a sorrier group of mock-voyageurs you could hardly imagine. In fairness to ourselves, we were operating under tight restrictions. It takes major bucks to play-act that you’re a working shlub from the eighteenth century. For starters there’s the kayak rental, thirty bucks an hour for a boat that’s made out of Tupperware. Then there are the costumes. You might think that would be the easy part, but if you want to be a real stickler about it, meaning the invisibles matter too, underwear and such, then the costumes can run up a tab faster than a lush on a barstool since there’s no such thing as off-the-rack.

  Now much as I craved to be accurate down to the bone, with button flies instead of zippers and hand-stitched moccasins instead of Dollarama, my laughable weekly take-home from the museum didn’t allow me to be so particular. But I did all that was in my power to look the part. For every outing I had my tuque on my head, my arrow-sash at my waist, and my weekend-whiskers on my face. The overall impression I was aiming for did take a major hit on account of my glasses, but I tried to imagine them out of existence when I looked at my reflection in the water. The canal did me a favour by being so murky that it made a lousy mirror.

  The other guys? Well, they weren’t against a little dressing up, but authenticity wasn’t their top priority. Or their bottom one even. For some reason they figured that since they were out on the water pretending to be from old-timey days, that they should dress like pirates. I don’t know how they made that leap but they all came to the same conclusion separately. For our first time out, Sam showed up wearing a black bicorn with a skull and crossbones that he’d scavenged from his little brother’s Halloween rejects. Nick made a bit more of an effort with a red paisley bandana tied onto his shaved head at a jaunty angle, and a hoop earring to replace his usual stud. Renaud just dug a Pittsburgh Pirates cap out of his collection and considered himself appropriately attired. Without really being able to explain how it happened, I’d ended up out paddling every Sunday with Long John Silver, Jean Lafitte, and Roberto Clemente.

  “I brought baklava, home-made.” Nick offered it around. We’d stopped for a lunch break at a sheltered little inlet that gave the illusion we weren’t within spitting distance of downtown Montreal. The leaf canopy thankfully blocked out most of the skyline. I was lying on my back, arms under my head, in the shade of what I now recognized to be a jack pine. Before I started boning up on the natural world, I couldn’t tell a birch from a baobab. While I was tuned out beneath the greenery I conjured myself up a little daydream. It had us out in the bush way back when, resting our weary bones after a knock-down-drag-out with some rapids on the Ottawa River. But Nick’s comment bombed my white-water fantasy out of the water.

  “What’d you bring that for? Voyageurs didn’t eat baklava. We’re trying to be realistic here, as true to life as we can be. Won’t that ever penetrate your thick skulls?”

  “Don’t be so pissy. They were all out of pemmican at the Super C.”

  See what kind of lip I had to put up with? Although I have to confess to you, in the spirit of full disclosure, that the baklava was very good.

  “We could vote Nick off the island for his crime,” Renaud said. “Or else leave him here stranded. Or beached. Whatever it is.”

  “Jettisoned, I think,” Sam said.

  “For your information,” I said, “the proper term is marooned. Not that it has anything remotely to do with the fur traders. I’m just trying to educate you clowns. For the good of humanity.”

  “Leave it to you to know,” Sam said. “Still the brainiac. Just like back in school when you aced every test. Left the rest of us in the gutter.” I caught the other guys shooting him undercover shut-up looks but he rolled on, oblivious. He was wrapped up in the past just like I was, but parked at a more recent spot on the timeline. “Remember how our mothers all used to harp on us, ‘why can’t you be more like Benjie, why can’t you be more like Benjie?’ ”

  In the echoey silence that followed I should have kept my trap shut. A few more dead seconds and we’d have left the prickly subject of my egghead past behind, but true to form I felt obliged to open a mouth as my mother would say.

  “Yeah, well, that was then. Take a good hard look at me now. A major success story, wouldn’t you say?”

  They made a great show of studying their shoes because we all knew exactly when their mothers ditched their Benjie refrain. It was plunk in the middle of grade six that I lost my ranking as the local poster boy and turned into a cautionary tale. The rest of them galloped on ahead on their report cards while I was busy going off the academic rails. And now that they were racking up credits towards an MBA or a CA, what did I have to show for myself? Me, the prodigy who’d popped like an overinflated bicycle tire? I’d barely scraped by with a degree in the Humanities. The Humanities, Christ! I was not unaware that for a guy in my circle the Humanities were only one step up the evolutionary ladder from Early Childhood Ed., but that’s where I’d ended up once the dust settled. Mostly when we got together my old pals had sense enough to skirt around any references to my scholarly fall from grace. Today was an exception.

  To lift the cloud and get us back into it, I pulled out my favourite book of voyageur lore and lingo and flipped through the pages. “Okay, you shirkers. Time to get with the program. Five points for anyone who can tell me what a tump line is.”

  Renaud launched his hand into the air teacher’s-pet style. A trace of the suck had stuck with him over the years. “I know that one. It’s that leather strap thingy that you put around your forehead to help you carry a heavy load on your back.” The guys looked blank. His description wasn’t clicking. “Remember Antoinette Paoli back in grade ten?” he went on. “It’s what she could have used to hold up that humungous ass of hers. Like a sling kind of.” After this useful add-on the penny dropped.

  “Correctamundo, my good man. Sam, you got the score card from last week?”

  “Yeah, chief.” He pulled his golf pencil from behind his ear to check the tallies. “Including the five he just earned, Renaud holds the lead with eighty-five points, I’m next with sixty, and Nick trails with a whopping ten. Yes, you heard me right folks, that’s one-zero.”

  Nick’s basement score ticked him off. “Hey, don’t I get any points for bringing refreshments? That’s gotta be worth something. None of these other jokers brought anything to share.” Sam looked to me to adjudicate.

  “Okay. For some reason that feeble argument moves me. Mr. Scorekeeper, give Little Nicky five points for the food, but remember Nico, that if you bring us some period dish next time, something really authentic, it’ll be worth twenty to you, maybe more.”

  “Yeah,
I’m sure you guys will fall all over yourselves with gratitude if I show up with pea soup or pig-snout ragout or whatever the hell those guys ate. Maybe I’ll bring us some bark to chew.”

  “The bark isn’t to eat, dumb-ass,” Sam informed him. “It’s to get high on.”

  “It is?” Renaud chimed in. “I thought it was to clean your teeth with.” These technical debates could go on forever with them, based as they were on thin air. Next they’d have voyageurs using boiled-down bark pulp to remove unsightly body hair.

  Usually I was the one to hustle them off these tangents. Who else but me cared if we strayed? But today, out of the blue, Renaud did the deed by giving us a little impromptu performance. He climbed up on one of the concrete slabs that made up the breakwater and struck a bodybuilder pose. Then he flexed his right bicep to show off the walnut that had replaced the previous month’s chickpea. “This rowing is really paying off, I swear to God. I was able to open a jar of Bick’s for my mother last week. In the old days she’d have gone straight to my dad. Do not pass go.”

  We all mocked Renaud’s Schwarzenegger pretensions into the ground. But that was only because the rest of us hadn’t made half as much progress in the beefing-up department. Our arms still had the muscular definition of cooked spaghettini. And not even al dente. Renaud did go a bit overboard, though, when he timed his flexes against his watch. I could have blasted him for the digital anachronism gracing his left wrist, but I didn’t want to make a federal case out of it. I’d only end up having to defend my glasses. So I just let him wear himself out. Such was my life as a voyageur kingpin. You had to pick your fights.

  The Sunday after the baklava debacle I woke up to a downpour, one of those climate change super-soakers that puts a monkey wrench into any outdoor plans. Now, you don’t have to remind me that voyageurs were meant to share the same work ethic as mailmen, neither snow nor rain nor yada yada yada, but I tended to coddle my crew weather-wise. I would never push them to go out in sopping conditions like this. Hell, they were all I had. I didn’t want them to abandon me like the others had, leaving me to operate solo. Fur trading was by definition a team exercise. You couldn’t be a singleton voyageur any more than you could be a singleton volleyball player. There was no such animal. So I proposed an alternate activity. A field trip. To my museum. Dry and warm. None of them had ever been there before, a fact that put them in line with 99.9 percent of the Montreal population. The place was normally closed on weekends but the department store was open for business and I had the keys to my domain. We agreed to meet up on Ste. Catherine Street first and then I’d treat them to a private tour. It was my secret hope that this visit would accomplish what the kayaking hadn’t managed to do: set them on fire, boost them up the food chain from being pissant voyageurs to full-blown members of the tribe. Believers. Committed. Gung ho.

  Hah!

  Mistake number one. I unlocked most of the display cases so they could see the artifacts up close and personal without even any glass interfering. Mistake number two. Stopping off for beers on the way in. Actually that should probably have counted as mistake number one, but I didn’t realize the beers were a mistake till after I’d opened up the cases and by then the top spot was already taken.

  So the way the visit went down was this. I circulated around the place, my tambourine-sized key-ring jingling with importance, feeling like I was the guardian at Versailles. I was planning on removing a selection of my most interesting artifacts wearing the white cotton curator’s gloves I’d sprung for on the Internet. They made me look like Minnie Mouse, but I swallowed my pride and put up with them. Nécessité oblige and all that. I figured that I’d hold up a relic and using my best Morgan Freeman voice explain exactly how it served as a cog in the well-oiled machine that was the fur trade. In my imagination the guys would stand respectfully back so that the vapours spewing out of their awe-struck gaping mouths wouldn’t threaten my artifact with oxidation.

  But nope.

  While I was busy across the room fiddling with a stubborn lock, Sam reached in to one of the opened cabinets and pulled out three pipes which he then proceeded to juggle. Yeah, you heard me right. Juggle!

  “Hey, put those back! Those things are worth a fortune. And they’re fragile.”

  “You can trust me. You know I always keep the balls in the air. Remember my all-time record when I went for three minutes straight in my mother’s kitchen? You were there.”

  “These aren’t onions you moron. Put ’em back.” Even to me my voice suddenly sounded squeaky. Was I turning into Minnie Mouse? I didn’t dare try to pluck the pipes out of the air. Sam would lose his rhythm for sure and I’d wind up with a dustpan full of clay shards to explain away to the bosses. All I could think of was to find something soft to spread on the floor under his arms just in case. There was a full-length beaver coat in one of the cases. Plushissimo. That sucker would do the trick. I turned around to grab it to cushion the floor, but the case was empty. Nick had swiped the coat off its hanger to try it on and was strutting around like a runway model. He looked remarkably like Kate Moss if only she’d been born a rodent.

  Before I could run over to yank it off his back I was distracted by a shout of ye hah coming from behind me. Renaud was mounted astride the taxidermied grizzly that reared up on his hind legs near the back wall. He was riding the thing wild and one-armed like he was on a bucking bronco at the Stampede. His heels were digging in so tight he’d already scraped a couple of bare spots into the bear’s coat. Now a specimen like that, venti-sized, was irreplaceable these days. Okay, so the bear was a bit mangy, granted, and he did have a funky smell to him if you got up close, like he needed a good run through the car wash, but it’s not like I could go out and set an ankle trap for a new one if Renaud bashed this one up beyond repair. Still, I let him have at it and focused on the other guys whose pricier toys, if damaged, could have me in hock to the Bay for years to come. I could see my pathetic future rising up before me. The store would attach my wages till my hair and my teeth fell out to make up for the losses. I’d have to live out my days in a scuzzy basement apartment, eating cat food and shaving with the lids from the tins that would give me little cuts all over my face that would later get infected so I’d end up looking like The Fly. But I was getting ahead of myself.

  “Are you all crazy? I’ll catch so much hell if anything’s wrecked. Do you want me to get fired?”

  My freaked-out tone somehow penetrated their soused reflexes and the horseplay stopped dead. Or bearplay in Renaud’s case. Nick hung the coat back up and brushed off all the pretzel crumbs. He draped it in such a way that you could hardly make out the new rip in the side seam. Renaud clambered off the bear and returned the do not touch sign to its head, and Sam caught all three pipes in his hands without a hitch. For all that my blood was pumping I couldn’t stay angry at them. Clearly they were sorry. This wasn’t normal behaviour for them. They weren’t dudes. It was all the fault of the storm. If only it hadn’t been raining buckets, if only the water hadn’t been overflowing the holes in the manhole covers, if only the rainfall hadn’t filled the streets so it sloshed up in waves over the curbs, then we wouldn’t have hung out at the pub for so long and we wouldn’t have packed away way too many beers and none of this would have happened.

  My mind often swerved into the if-only rut. In fact it tended to get bogged down there, spinning its wheels till another line of reasoning came along and nosed it out. If only I hadn’t cut Hebrew school that day to go downtown. If only I’d taken the bus instead of the metro. If only I’d gotten off at McGill instead of Guy. A good bout of if-onlying could keep me occupied for hours on end. The world could go up in flames around me in the meantime but I’d be blind to it. I was a mess.

  The first of the three bells rang that announced closing time was approaching. Yes! I’d had it with playing the host. Even though we still had a good half hour before the final bell went off, I hustled the guys out of the museum, escorting them all the way down to the store’s
main door on Ste. Catherine Street to have the assurance of seeing it slam shut behind their rowdy asses. Me? I went back up and waited inside. Waited till the guard jiggled the museum door to make sure it was locked tight. Waited till the floor buffers stopped their whirring in the aisles. Waited till the last bits of banter between the cleaners faded away. Waited till the banks of fluorescents clicked off sector by sector. Waited till it was stone cold quiet and I was alone in the building. Except for the guard, of course. All but alone till morning.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d be pulling an all-nighter at the museum. I’d been doing it once a month or so when the spirit moved me. It gave me a chance to give my head an airing out and to catch up on my reading uninterrupted. And as a bonus I discovered it had an unexpected side benefit on the home front. It gave my mother some hope. She made the natural assumption, that I’d finally met a girl and had spent the night at her apartment à la Zach and Nathalie. She never said it in so many words, but I wasn’t her son for nothing. I didn’t tell her the truth of the matter. Let her keep her illusions.

  I slept on the side of the museum that was set up to look like the Hudson’s Bay Company’s retail operation back when it was in diapers. It had a general store-ish look to it. Along the one wall, shelves going all the way up to the ceiling were stocked with dry goods; your bolts of cloth, your blankets and such. A long wooden counter, waist high, ran parallel to the wall. It was topped with hat stands, wheels of lace trim, and an array of the petite stuff; buttons, thimbles, ribbons, corset stays. Notions, my Nana would have called them. Behind the counter, manning the fort, stood a plaster-of-Paris shopkeeper, frozen for all eternity in a may-I-help-you posture. In mannequin years he was about 150, dragged up from some sub-basement catacomb of passé store dummies of the kind that were primly manufactured without boobs or dicks so they could swing both ways. All that distinguished a Will mannequin from a Kate back then, uncontoured as they were, was the wig or the facial hair.