Falling From Grace

by Ann Eriksson

  Paul and I exchanged a troubled look.

  “You must be mistaken”—I pushed away a mounting uncertainty—“We haven’t seen any group.”

  Paul handed the pamphlet back to the little girl. “We’ll help you find them tomorrow.”

  Dinner with Mary and her children tried my patience. When Paul handed Rainbow her bowl of canned tuna, rice, and cheese, she crossed her arms, pointed her nose in the air, and announced, “We don’t eat other animals. We’re vegetarian.” Paul cooked a new pot of our precious rice and served it with cheese and rehydrated vegetables. My shoulders ached with irritation, our meals planned down to the number of slices of cheese allowed per person per meal. The leftover tuna casserole would moulder in a garbage bag suspended in a tree or in the back of the car away from prowling animals until we managed to drive to town for supplies. I needn’t have worried though, Paul wolfed it down, apologizing to Mary and Rainbow for his barbarous ways as he licked the last of the sticky tuna off the spoon.

  We finished dinner in the dark. I lit the kerosene lantern and heated water for dishes on the camp stove. The orange glow of Paul’s headlamp shone through the translucent wall of his tent, where he played peek-a-boo in a sleeping bag with a delighted Cedar. Their silhouettes danced like puppets on the pale green nylon, Paul’s gear scattered on the ground outside the tent. I sloshed the bowls and cutlery around in a pot of water and biodegradable soap and slapped them on a log to dry. I didn’t dare to ask him where he planned to sleep. The car? A head too short for his six-foot frame. His bivy sack? The air smelled of rain.

  A shadow fell across my arm and I jumped. Rainbow, her finger in her mouth, stared at me out of dark pupils colourless in the glow of the lamp.

  “Don’t ever sneak up on me again,” I growled. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  Rainbow removed her finger and twirled a lock of hair around it. “You sweared.”

  “If you don’t go away, I’ll swear again,” I said. She didn’t budge. In contrast to her brother, I found her plain, with a nose too tiny and lips too narrow for her square face. Her brown hair appeared without substance, drab and flyaway, but her eyes, large and intense, burned with intelligence. I turned back to the dishes.

  “Mary says you’re not one of them.”

  I plunged my hand into the grey and greasy dishwater and hunted around for the last few pieces of cutlery. “One of whom?” I pulled out a cheese-caked spoon.

  “Snow White’s dwarfs.”

  I groaned. I worked in the wilderness to avoid conversations like this.

  “Mary says you’re a regular person, but small like me.”

  “And what do you think?” I glared at the child’s upturned face.

  “Do you want to play dolls?” Rainbow pulled two naked plastic dolls—one white, one black, each the size of a thumb— out of her pocket.

  “No, I don’t want to play dolls,” I snapped. I attacked the spoon with a wire pot scrubber.

  “Then you’re not like me.” Without another word Rainbow skipped off toward Paul’s tent, leaving me holding the spoon and the scrubber in the air, soapy water dripping onto my foot.

  I stared after her. Paul nudged my shoulder as he walked by with a second pot of water. “You’ve got soap on your boot,” he teased, setting the pot on the stove.

  I threw the spoon onto a plate, carried the dishwater a dozen steps away, and dumped it out in the middle of a sword fern. “I hope you’re making tea.”

  “Nope.” He grinned. “Diaper water.”

  Mary travelled light. Besides the lack of tent and food, she carried only two cotton diapers for Cedar. “One to wear and one to dry,” she explained. The woman failed to understand she had walked her children into a rainforest, a place where dry is a relative term. A place where three or four metres of rain falls each year. Where trees grow continuously in the mild temperatures, where it’s never too hot or too cold, where it’s too wet for forest fires. You’re a fool, I wanted to scream at her, can’t you see? Every surface dripped with life, green in a million shades, ankle thick moss, slime moulds, curled sheets of lichen, head high prehistoric ferns, cream and gold mushrooms at the base of every tree, bracket fungi clinging to mouldy trunks—dripping, creeping, clinging, crawling, sprouting, peeling, rotting.

  It turns out Mary had neglected to bring another item for her children. Rain gear.

  4

  I woke in the middle of the night to the plop of tentative raindrops on the tent fly. Within five minutes, the rain had accelerated to a deluge. I unzipped the door halfway and shone a flashlight beam around the clearing. Through the curtain of water I could make out the blue polyethylene tarp protecting the kitchen and climbing gear, and the second tent where Mary and her children slept. The afternoon I’d spent in my back yard in Victoria sealing the seams of the two tents meant we would stay dry. But Paul, curled up like a fetus on the gravel bank in his bivy sac—a cocoon of waterproof nylon— was exposed to the elements. He’d chosen the spot with his usual care, away from the trees that dripped water long after a storm passed, and well up from the winter flood level.

  “Why don’t you sleep under the kitchen tarp?” I had suggested when he spread his bedding out on the ground, flipping stones away with his foot.

  “You know I’m wild about stars. Besides, it’s only one night,” he answered.

  Thick, heavy cloud now hid the constellations. I aimed the flashlight at the orange bulge of nylon. In reaction, it folded in half like a caterpillar and Paul squinted against the glare from the draw-stringed opening, beard glinting with droplets of water.

  “Sorry.” I redirected the beam. “Are you okay?”

  He yawned. Water streamed from the slope of his hood and dripped off the end of his nose.

  I unzipped the door of my tent wider and held the flap open. “Get in here,” I ordered. “I’ll make room.”

  He disappeared back into the bivy sac, the cocoon writhing about on the ground like a giant worm. Could he breathe? “What are you doing?” I couldn’t make out the muffled answer. He stood—a shiny teetering phallus in a sheath of nylon—hopped across the clearing and wriggled out of the bag into my tent, naked but for a pair of briefs, bare skin luminous in the diffuse light. He drew his sleeping bag out of the sac like a rabbit out of a hat and spread it, still dry, in the space I had arranged between my bedding and my gear.

  “What took you so long?” I zipped up the tent door, shutting out the weather.

  He chuckled, his long body sliding back into his sleeping bag. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had to find my underwear.”

  • • •

  “What do you think about this protest?” he asked once settled.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, acutely aware of his body next to mine. “It’s possible. Environmentalists have been fighting clear-cutting on the island for decades. Remember the blockade at Clayoquot ten years ago?”

  “I was in Australia. Big news down under,” he said. “Lots of arrests.”

  “I’ll ask Roger about the pamphlet,” I said. Roger Payne, the PCF forester, had helped me select our sites in the buffer zone. “He’ll know. But I bet it’s nothing.”

  Paul drifted into sleep. I lay awake on my side, facing him, aware of his breath, the gentle hiss in and out of his nostrils, the smell of rain on his skin. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out the contours of his face, the high, smooth forehead, his odd nose with its narrow ski jump bridge. I knew the acne scar on his right cheek, the way the trough of his upper lip vanished into moustache, the colour of his beard, a riot of red, blond, and brown shifting from long to short depending on his mood. After two years of working together in the canopy, Paul and I had formed a close friendship; I trusted him with my life. I worked hard to keep myself from wanting more from him. Not only was I his boss, but Paul collected women. A continuous string of smart, gorgeous women—tall women—who never lasted, their demise a faint hope f
or me at best. After long stretches of time together in the field, I had become his confidante.

  “I don’t know what I did wrong,” he’d moan over the latest loss.

  We’d mull over the possibilities, the insecurities of the woman in question, the nature of his work. Or the one I never brought up: his lack of resistance to a shiny new treasure passing by.

  “Some women don’t appreciate nice guys,” I would assure him, unable—or unwilling—to complete the logical progression of my statement. The right woman will come along one day.

  “The right guy will come along for you, Faye,” he would say in response to my few unsatisfying stories about men. Les, my date for high school grad, an IQ of one sixty and an inability to maintain a conversation for longer than thirty seconds. A desperate and mismatched couple for one brief night. Bob, the brother of my one university friend Laura, who disappeared overseas to do aid work. Laura passed on the Dear Faye letter, a short hand-scrawled note I interpreted as, “I needed to go halfway around the world to avoid you.” Will, who asked me to dress up in child’s clothing the third and last time we slept together. All average-height men. I’d never met another dwarf in spite of the urgings of my mother. “There are organizations,” Grace had insisted. I hadn’t dated anyone since graduating with my bachelor degree. A master’s. PHD. Post-grad work and a tenure-track professorship. Ten years since I’d last felt a warm body next to mine.

  I longed to slide a finger through the brown mop of hair Paul seldom combed, but I didn’t dare, his behaviour toward me invited nothing more than friendship. Last fall, he invited a new girlfriend, Tessa, along on one of our research trips. A perfect match for him, up for anything, amiable, polite. She loved to climb. Tessa didn’t bat an eye when she met me. I couldn’t stand her. The nights were torture. Paul moved their tent a discrete distance away, but not far enough. When I couldn’t stand the grunts and moans, the sighs and murmurs any longer, I sat by the creek where the sound of flowing water drowned out their lovemaking. Paul always apologized in the morning. “Did we make too much noise, Faye?” he’d ask with all sincerity. I finally admitted to hearing them. On our next trip into the field, Paul strung two climber’s hammocks close together high up in the trees on the edge of the camp. He and Tessa ascended at dusk and didn’t descend until well after sunrise the next day. It was quiet, but I spent a sleepless night imagining what it must be like to make love in the canopy. I caved to Grace’s pressure and signed up for an internet dating service for persons of short stature. In a week I had my first email from Bryan, a geologist from Saskatchewan. His most recent message had gone on far too long about his dog. Not promising. I rolled onto my back, burrowed into my sleeping bag, and listened to the rain on the fly until the sound lulled me to sleep.

  • • •

  The rain continued through the morning. No climbing possible. Paul delivered oatmeal, powdered milk, and tea to Mary in the tent about nine. Rainbow, dressed in a green garbage bag with holes torn out for her head and arms, and a wide-brimmed rain hat of Paul’s, crouched by the edge of the stream and searched the pools for water walkers and frogs. After a frustrating hour spent adjusting the ropes supporting the kitchen shelter, I drove twenty minutes along the road to a spot where I had discovered I could get half-decent cell phone reception. The one tolerable use for a clear-cut. I organized my portable office—laptop wired to the cell phone—and turned on the system. It was a decent day for reception. A decent day meant rain. I sent a pointed message to Roger. Are you cutting in the upper valley? My inbox held three new messages: one from the biology department with a list of questions about my fall courses, one from Grace reminding me to send Patrick a birthday card, and one from Bryan with a lengthy description of an extremely rare rock he’d discovered. I’m thinking of coming out that way and was hoping we could meet. I resisted telling him the possibility was rarer than his rock; instead I thanked him for the photos of his dog, Mercy, attached to a previous email. At least Mercy was a living, breathing being. I’m not much of a one for dogs myself. I wrote. They can’t climb trees, although our neurotic border collie of my childhood used to run up the trunk of the apple tree in the yard and hang by its jaw from the lowest limb. I went on to say that we were discovering rare things too, dozens, possibly hundreds of new species unique to the canopy. We used to think temperate rainforests contained less biodiversity than tropical rainforest. No longer true. Bugs rule!

  I signed the email F.P., then paused, deleted the impersonal initials, and typed simply, Faye.

  The rain quit on my way back to camp where I found lunch ready, Paul eager to get to work, the sun filtering through the ragged fingers of mist rising off the soggy earth. We ate lunch in the sunshine, and Mary hung Cedar’s clean diaper on a tarp line to dry along with Rainbow’s wet socks. We cleaned up, organized our climbing gear and some snacks, and strung our food bags from a limb too high for bears. Rainbow hovered nearby while Paul and I checked and packed our gear.

  “Can I come?” Rainbow said. Paul and the girl both turned to me.

  “No,” I said. ‘We’ve got lots of work to do.”

  “Please,” the girl whined.

  “Mary could come,” Paul broke in and I swung around in surprise at the suggestion. He pointed hastily at the child. “For her . . . to watch Rainbow.”

  “Doesn’t Mary want to find her protesters?”

  “She’ll want to watch too. I know it,” Rainbow said. “And I’ll help carry,” she offered, a rising hope in her voice.

  “She has a point,” Paul said. A static rope long enough to rig a single tree weighed twelve kilos and filled a large hiking pack, not to mention the rest of the climbing and collecting equipment. A doctor once cautioned me against carrying a pack for fear of spinal compression of the neck. I chose to ignore the advice. But how much could a child carry?

  “Please, please, please,” Rainbow begged, palms pressed together, eyes pleading.

  What a drama queen. “Help?” I begged Paul. A jubilant smile spread across his face and I threw up my hands. “Okay, but I take no responsibility.”

  “No problem,” Paul said. “I got her.” Rainbow squealed and hugged his leg.

  “No asking a million questions,” I ordered.

  She waggled her head back and forth.

  “And no wandering off. Bears and cougars live here.”

  Her expression widened. “I promise.”

  “Your mother has to watch you.” I handed her a daypack full of carabiners and harnesses. “Paul and I have work to do. If you’re any trouble, I’ll send you back to camp.”

  She beamed, slipped her skinny arms through the pack straps, and scampered off, the pack banging low on her hips, equipment jangling inside. She returned minutes later with Mary, Cedar tucked into a sling wrapped around his mother’s torso. Paul handed Mary two water bottles. He himself wore a large pack weighing close to thirty kilos, the crossbow strapped to his back.

  Rainbow examined the bow. “Are you one of Robin Hood’s men?”

  “My old job,” Paul joked.

  “He was nice to poor people,” she answered brightly. She laced her fingers around her pack straps. “I’m ready.”

  Paul led the group into the upper valley on the park trail, then turned northwest to cross the creek to the far bank, where the trail to our site was marked by a limp strip of orange flagging tape tied to a branch. Single file, we started up the steep slope where the trail quickly deteriorated. Paul helped Mary and the baby up the incline, but Rainbow refused any assistance, soldiering along behind me until we reached gentler ground. We stopped to catch our breath. The forest floor ahead was a labyrinth of felled limbs, debris, and downed trees. Paul and I had not yet had time to clear the route of winter fall. Guided by occasional strips of flagging, we made our way over, around, and under logs, our boots caked with mud from slogging through pockets of bog filled with yellow-leaved skunk cabbage.

  An uprooted fir blocked our passage ahead. Paul climbed across with ease,
then turned around to receive my gear. I heaved my pack across the thick-barked crevasse between us. The orangutan amulet dangled at the open neck of his muddy brown T-shirt. He’d shaved off his beard a few days earlier and appeared far younger than his thirty-two years, his newly exposed skin untanned and smooth, the line of his jaw more pronounced. His pupils were always a deeper shade of green in the forest. A wave of longing washed over me.

  “Well?” Paul said, mouth upturned in an amused smile. “Are you coming or are you going to climb that sapling over there instead?”

  “Sorry, daydreaming.” I ignored the offer of a hand and slithered across on my belly, thankful I didn’t have to suffer the indignity of crawling beneath the log on my butt. Paul held out his hand to Rainbow.

  “I don’t need help,” Rainbow crowed, scrambling across on all fours like a bear cub. “I can do it like Faye.”

  “Dr. Faye to you.” I readjusted the pack, already feeling the weight in the small of my back after a winter away from hiking.

  “Wow,” Rainbow exclaimed and pointed ahead where an enormous trunk shot up out of the undergrowth, towering above us like a skyscraper. We stopped, sweaty and panting beside the colossal specimen. A second mammoth loomed out of a tangle of salal. Beyond it a third. Our study trees. We had twenty-two trees from the flood plain to ridge top marked on our site map, each tree numbered on a grid for easy reference.

  “Which one?” Paul tilted his head back and peered into the canopy.

  “SS-1-3,” I said. “I want to check the aerial traps.”