Morrie’s face was in perfect sync with his getup. Ever since Lena died he’d boycotted his razor so his beard had come in unsculpted and free-range, woodsman style. So bushy you could hang ornaments off it. If only my cheeks would be half so cooperative. Or my chest for that matter. But now wasn’t the moment to repine about my inferior shagginess. We had other fish to fry.
“Any trouble with the truck?”
“No. No problems. I drove at leaf-peeper speed the whole way. I didn’t want to risk being pulled over or anything.”
“Good thinking. Nice duds by the way.”
“Thanks. I thought an occasion like this deserved some special recognition.”
We sat on the riverbank for a while and waited for the sun to come up. Mother Nature must have been feeling pretty peppy that morning because she whipped us up a made-to-order sunrise, way heavy on the pinks and purples. Its beauty was beyond any words at our immediate disposal so we just followed its progress in silence. Which suited me fine because I needed to unwind, and bad. I’d raced straight over from my nightlong shift at the Bay. I was boomeranging between exhaustion and exhilaration. Morrie? He’d be wiped out I figured. After all, he’d spent the better part of the night inspecting the canoe from stem to stern and performing field surgery. He couldn’t have grabbed any shut-eye either. But somehow he looked like he’d just stepped out of a spa. How’d the guy do it?
“So the repairs, how did they go?” I asked him.
“Easy-peasy. This boat is one fine specimen like I told you all along. I just had to daub her a little here and there with some spruce gum, do a minor bit of patching and job done.” Spruce gum? But again I didn’t ask where it came from. Today we were in a no-pry zone.
I peeked inside the truck where the museum’s canoe sat waiting patiently to receive its new marching orders. “It was something to finally see the two canoes side by side last night,” I said. “Two peas in a pod.”
“We made it happen.”
“Nah, not me. I hardly did anything on that score. It’s you who deserves all the credit for the cloning, you with all your magic aging formulas. I wouldn’t have known where to start.”
“Come on, Ben. Take some credit where it’s due. You know I couldn’t have done it without you. You were the one who banged and battered all the newness out of the kit job. You were my main man.”
“Your only man, you mean.”
“Same difference,” he said. “We did it together. A team we were.”
With all this backslapping going on, leave it to me to be a killjoy. But this particular line of talk always swung me around to my ground-zero worry in all this. “Do you think they’ll notice the switch back at the store?” We’d gone over this territory again and again, but I needed to hear him run through it one last time.
“Listen. The Bay won’t have any reason to believe that it’s a phony on display. What do they know from anything? It’s the auctioneers who’ll notice something fishy when they show up. That’s a given. But I’m betting they’ll conclude that the store got shafted somewhere way back in the mists of time, and they’ve had a fake one on display all along. End of story.” I was always convinced when he put it to me that way. Till I wasn’t. But even if they did clue in that the original had been lifted somehow, how would they know where to send the repo man? I’d just have to keep my fingers and toes crossed that the trail wouldn’t lead back to my door.
“Son,” he said, “let it go.”
Letting go. Not my forte. When it came to worries and hurts I was cursed with a Velcro personality. They landed and they stuck. But if ever there was a time to move on, it was now.
Morrie set his hand on my knee. “The moment of truth is upon us Ben,” he said in a new, formal tone that carried me along in its confidence. “Shall we?”
We shall, I decided. We set the ramp up against the truck and gentled the canoe out and onto the scrub. With just the two of us on moving detail it wasn’t easy, but we managed without a fender-bender. The canoe sat ungainly on the ground, looking every bit her age. Maybe we should have fashioned her a sun bonnet of some kind. Back in the days when she was a working canoe UV rays hadn’t been invented yet.
It was quiet on the riverbank so early except for one insomniac trail runner who slowed down as he passed to give our canoe a good ogle. You could just tell he was sniffing at it, judgmental SOB. If it were up to him he’d probably feed it nose first into a wood chipper for a lifetime’s supply of toothpicks. Okay, so maybe it did look well-used compared to those slick fibreglass jobs he was accustomed to seeing on his runs, the ones painted up all twinkly in lip gloss colours. But those were the chick cars of the canoe family, beneath contempt. They didn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as ours. To Morrie and me our canoe was beautiful. In the same way we’d both seen Lena as beautiful. A guy like that, all microfibre, he’d never get it.
“Do you think we should say a few words first?” I asked.
“You do the honours.”
Speechifying. Not my thing. When I’d said we what I’d actually meant was you. I thought sure Morrie would want to be the one to officiate, giving the little homily that preceded cracking the bubbly over the bow. Metaphorically speaking that is. As feisty as our boat might have been, it couldn’t withstand getting clocked on the head with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. But I called it wrong. Morrie didn’t grasp that ring for himself. The assignment to hold forth canoe-side fell to me, so I strip-mined our history for commemorative material. It didn’t take long for me to hit on what I was hunting for. Not long at all actually. I bent my head and delivered my speech. Nano but heartfelt.
“Acabris, Acabras, Acabram.”
“Well put,” Morrie said after a respectful pause.
The ceremonials behind us, we slid the canoe into the water and held our breath. It bobbled a little at the start like it was on its first trip without training wheels, but then it got its groove back and floated straight and proud, its bed bone dry. Morrie grabbed me into a hug. It was all I could do to keep from crying. Crying wasn’t referenced in the voyageur handbook. But Morrie, he didn’t bother holding back the tears, just let ’em gush. We tore into the water and scrambled in, where we were always meant to be.
The boat was way too big for just the two of us, but it didn’t matter. She handled so smooth it didn’t feel at all like we were out paddling the Queen Mary. Morrie helped me rejig my kayaking stroke and once I had it down we made for the open water, singing our hearts to bursting. The fish must have been putting their hands over their ears, but we were in the mood to belt, and nothing could stop us.
The perfect weather egged us on. The day’s windsock was flaccid and there was a nice taste of warmth in the spring air, just enough to keep our limbs loosey-goosey. So maybe we didn’t manage the one-stroke-per-second standard, but damn near. Not half bad for a pair of rookies. Full speed ahead we paddled, so far out that we could imagine we’d made it up to Lake Superior. Water water all around. We paddled and we sang and we lived. When we were thirsty we cupped up H2O from the river (okay, so maybe not brilliant) and when our bladders hit full, we pissed over the side in festive arcs. I had so much adrenalin shooting through me that I wished I had some rapids to run to prove my mettle.
I could have gone on forever if not for my lungs. They finally lodged a complaint. All my training in a runty kayak was nothing to prepare me for this. Morrie must have heard my breath coming in coughing rasps. “Now would be a good time to break for breakfast don’t you think?” he said. He looked to be in fine shape for all our exertion, hadn’t even broken a sweat, which for a few seconds made me feel like the sissy boy of the voyageur world. But I understood that wasn’t his intention in suggesting that we turn back. At least not his main one. Morrie was simply abiding by the time-honoured schedule every self-respecting voyageur kept magneted to his fridge. Crews traditionally left camp in the wee hours of the morning on an empty stomach. They’d get a few solid hours of paddling under their belt and only
then put ashore for breakfast. That’s the way it was always done, and that’s what we would do too. So we turned around to paddle at a leisurely pace back to the cove where we’d laid by our grub, the current helping us on our way.
I’d whipped us up a batch of breakfast rubaboo the day before in the cafeteria kitchen at the Bay. Rubaboo, you’ve got to love a name like that. It’s kind of like voyageur polenta. See what they would do, they’d stir the ingredients into a big kettle of water the night before and then let it all burble super-slow over a banked campfire. Come morning, whoever was on breakfast detail would wrap it all up in a blanket to keep in the warmth and then load it onto the canoe where the rubaboo would get thicker and thicker as it sat. When a wooden spoon stuck in the middle stood straight up, that was the sign to clang the breakfast gong.
Truth be told, it was Rossi who did most of the rubaboo cookery. I was pretty much nul in the kitchen. We worked out a division of labour that had me supplying the groceries and Rossi overseeing the porridgy mixture’s progress even though its ingredients were an offence to his palate. And that was after I’d semi-modernized the recipe out of necessity. See, the dried peas and corn I could come by no problem at the natural foods store. Even pemmican was out there for the buying. But bear grease? Where the hell was I supposed to find that? Morrie, acquisitor par excellence of all things fur trade, would probably have known how to rustle us up some, but me? Uh-uh. The recipe did list pork fat as an alternative, but I was culturally unable to make myself buy it, so in the end we used Crisco tinted into realism with a glop of tahini (Rossi’s bright idea). Just watching it simmer I could feel my arteries gumming up.
“Is it ready you think?” Morrie asked me as I was lifting the pot out of the back of the truck. “I could eat a horse.” I took off the lid so we could check it out. Morrie rubbed his hands together as if he was genuinely eager to dig into what could only be referred to as glop, despite Rossi’s heroic efforts to crank it up a few gastronomic notches. I performed the official wooden-spoon test. The handle listed at about an eighty-degree angle. “Almost there. Another forty-five minutes I’m guessing. An hour maybe,” I said. Since that gave us some time to while away, I staked myself out a sunny patch of ground and laid down for the catnap my spent muscles were craving. Morrie, on the other hand, was buzzy.
“Let me take her out once solo since we have some dead time,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll tighten up.”
“You think you can manage that much boat all on your own?” I asked him. A born sailor he might have been, but our canoe would still be a handful for a single paddler.
“Yeah, I’ll take it easy.”
“Okay, let me help you push off. A fine repast will be awaiting you upon your return, sir.”
“I expect no less,” he said.
He paddled away with ease, the ur-voyageur. His image belonged on a postage stamp. Or on a Molson’s label at the very least. I settled myself back in on the grass after he disappeared from sight, pulled my tuque down for eye cover, and conked right out. It was a dreamless sleep for the first time in I can’t think how long, bottomless and deep. My sleep-demons must have finally squeezed every last drop of nourishment they could out of me after so many years and gone hunting for a new roost. I never thought the day would come. Life was good.
I might have slept the sleep of the dead till Morrie came back if not for the aroma that crept up on me and hovered over my head like my personal cloud. I couldn’t disperse it, not even using that reflexive black-fly swat common to all voyageurs. It clung there in the air above me, coaxing me back to consciousness. Once it had me good and awake it beckoned my nose snake-charmer style over to the pot of rubaboo and the rest of my body tagged along for the ride.
I plunged the spoon in to confirm that the dish was à point, and it stood up at attention. Done. I licked some off my finger expecting not a whole heck of a lot. It was just fuel right? But whoa! That taste. Rossi, my prince. He’d nagged and nagged at me to let him throw some herbs into the pot, legit ones that probably grew wild along the river back in the day. Likewise some berries. The full locavore. The result was out of this world, rich and tangy with a nice little sweet and sour riff going in the background. Layered, foodies would call that flavour, or complex even. This, my readers, was a whole that beat the pants off the sum of its parts.
What a revelation. I’d always understood that voyageur food holed up in the culinary doghouse with prison food. You had all those uninvited critters doing the backstroke in your bowl. Serendipity protein. Voyageurs stuffed down their gullets whatever was put in front of them. When you’re wrung out and empty, your tastebuds’ll give anything a pass. All the books said so. But now I had scientific proof that it wasn’t so. All that time they were feasting on ambrosia. Maybe some day with my discovery I could add to the literature. Behold my revisionist future.
I was dying to dig in. The last thing I’d eaten was a Kit Kat just before Nuit Blanche and a lot had gone down in my life between that chocolate bar and now. If I had to wait much longer for that rubaboo my stomach would start feeding on itself. But eating on my own would be a serious breach of voyageur etiquette. Or any etiquette I suppose. So I laid back down on the ground and clamped my eyes shut to try to trick my hunger into thinking it was fatigue, but it wasn’t so dumb as to fall for that. So I sat. Scanning the horizon for the blip that meant I could start doling out breakfast.
Or would it be lunch? Could have been. It felt to me like Morrie’d been gone a good few hours at least. Way longer anyway than the hour we’d agreed on when he took off. Now I didn’t blame him for breaking curfew. I’d probably have done the same if the situation had been reversed, out there slicing through the water in a real and true piece of history, unhitched from civilization, conditions perfecto. I wouldn’t have had my eyes on the clock either, not that there was one. If anyone had earned an extension, it was him.
Still, I had to pass the time somehow till Morrie pulled a U-ey and headed back. Since I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep, I paced up and down along the shoreline. And paced. So many back and forths that I eventually tamped down a whole new path in the brush where there wasn’t one before. Which got me to thinking again about how much time had gone by. Now telling time by the sun was an art I was a little shaky on, but I guesstimated it had to be high noon. A little past even. Ages since Morrie took off on his own. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call worried. I had a pretty fair idea of what was keeping him out there. The guy’d paddled so long and so hard he was too pooped to pop. Pulled in the paddles and drifted. Dozed off maybe. He’d be back once he treated himself to some R&R in the canoe.
I held out for what felt to me like another hour or so. By then clouds were starting to clutter up the sky so the sun couldn’t back up my hunch. I checked out the rubaboo under its blanket. My baby. Corpse cold. The wooden spoon stuck straight up in it all right. Like a flagpole planted in cement. The stuff was way past eating. Unless you had a chisel handy. I used my voyageur wits to deduce a thing or two. Rubaboo was designed to be forgiving, no? I mean it’s not like voyageurs broke for meals at set times. The stuff had to be able to sit and sit and sit till they got around to wolfing it down. If my rubaboo was by now so hardened up that I could climb up a tree and use it to bean a bear passing below, then a shitload of time had gone under the bridge since Morrie left. Okay, so now I was worried. Seriously worried. No, scratch that. Panicky is what I was.
The car. I needed the car. My cell was in there. I had to get the search going. Have Sûreté come out in their cutters and helicopters. Radar, scuba. The works. Enough playing around in the past. I wanted technology and lots of it. How many different kinds of idiot was I, waiting so long?
I shot over to where I’d parked the car to get my phone out of the glove compartment. Jammed. Dammit. I’d have to drive for help. Waste more precious minutes Morrie might not have. You could only cling to floating wreckage for so long. While I was struggling to get Mum’s junker to turn over, a knock on the side
window practically gave me heart failure.
It was Morrie. Dry. Safe and sound. I didn’t get how I could have missed him approaching when I’d had my eyes glued to the river all along. I got out of the car. I couldn’t make up my mind whether to hug him or sue him for emotional distress.
“Ben,” he said, “Join us. We have room for one more.”
“Us? Who’s us?”
He gave a whistle and one by one they materialized from between the trees to gather around him. Ten men by my count. We’d never once set eyes on each other but I knew who they were right away. I’d nearly made their acquaintance once before not so very far from here. I stared them up and down, trying to convince myself that some mondo hoax was going on, but they were the real deal, these guys. I wasn’t being had, no way. Lots of things were fakeable if they wanted to put something over on me, but there was no mistaking those eighteenth-century teeth. Shit! He’d found them. Or they’d found him. Whichever. They’d hooked up fully and completely this time. What were the odds?
“We came back for you, Ben. I couldn’t leave you behind. You ready?”
Excellent question. Was I ready? Back in the days when it all qualified as a pipe dream, I used to think that hanging out with my voyageur brothers up in that celestial green room, or wherever the hell they passed the time between earthly appearances, would be the very definition of ecstasy. But now that I had proof positivo that that other world existed, a previously undocumented slice of the universe wedged in between the then and the now, I was spooked. Most definitely. What I needed before I made the leap was a sneak preview of what it would be like, a trailer that ran through the nuts and bolts of flipping centuries.
Morrie wasn’t so gutless. Clearly he’d signed right up without even requiring a shpiel from the recruiter. He was ready and willing. Why shouldn’t he have been? What was the downside for him? Not to be too ageist about it, but he was on the downward slope. This would give him one final kick at the voyageur can, an unmatchable adventure. We’d been playing T-ball him and me, but now he had a chance to suit up with the Yankees.
My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur Page 20