-Chapter 20-
At a particular hour in the twilight of early summer, the lights of downtown Vancouver coalesce into some sort of neon lava flow, the damp fog keeping it all molten and surreal. As I walked up the somber gray façade of West Burrard Street on my way to work, I studied the distant snow-shrouded peaks of the coast range with unconscious respect. Regal and watchful past the north shore; they were to be my new Norway, my escape from the building weight of the city. It wasn’t that the city was unlikable; quite to the contrary, I thought. It was a place now partly my own, and I felt my work meld unconsciously into the creative and economic fabric of this rainy urbanscape, letting myself be both a number and a singularity.
I now seldom saw Angelina; she was transfixed with her new Czech girlfriend. I regarded her as someone flighty and transient in both our lives, though I knew this was only my own sophomoric reaction to their love. Peder was juggling several vaguely awful yet tolerable jobs, his connections to a more esteemed academic post hinging on the circuitous path to legal immigration he now faced. I sympathized with him, but also saw myself increasingly detached from their troubles. My own path had begun to diverge from theirs as soon as the wheels of the tired 747 threw up smoke across the damp runway tarmac some four months prior. My job now gave me purpose, though I never thought it would be so. While I tried in youthful vanity to resist letting it define me, the confines of schedule and paycheck were pleasant insulations most of the time. I increasingly admired my boss, the charming Mr. Beckham of strange maps and incongruous euphemisms. I felt he had begun to exert some arcane paternal influence over me; such was my desire to please. Pleasing someone else was easier than pleasing myself these days.
I kept waiting to stumble on someone wonderful, and the bland pretense of unrealistic expectations kept my mind away from the past. The gray curtain that floated omnisciently over the Coast Range’s lifted one late June morning, and I thought the resulting landscape to be the most sublime coincidence of mountains, ocean and forest there could be. Landscapes aside, Peder was still a close confidant. When I saw him though, our stories of mutual past horrors where increasingly replaced by the mundane details of daily life- the bus schedule, the weather, the bargain of integrity for paycheck. Often we would meet for tea and cheap Russian cigarettes, sitting like the tired raven’s atop the little rooftop pool veranda on my building, the city spread out like a pixilated x-ray. Peder would bring up Max occasionally, but I always averted the discussion. It was more out of apathy than discomfort; I’d be the last to admit.
To have to compromise the finality of physical separation seemed unfair. I saw Max in a snowstorm, on one of the rare and sublime clear powder day’s at Whistler the previous March- his face had appeared in the trees, wonderful yet tinged with it’s own fragility, it’s steady shift to mushy, fog-shrouded slopes. Once I took a backcountry ski trip up to the silent, menacing peaks past Terrace with a few coworkers. The steep pillows spilled down through the pine trees like snowy ghosts, reminding me of how unsuited humans were to nature of this scale. It scared me, the fear coursed through my veins, warm and viscous, drowning the awful doubt that plagued me in times of solitude. We’d rented a little log cabin up against the sudden imposition of mountains that crested like a tsunami over the smooth river valley, the dull silver clouds giving way to fantastic alpine visions as we skinned above treeline. The soggy slush soon turned to waxy, buttery powder, the sort of snow that clings to skis like fine winds in a sail. Descending alone through tight thickets of birch and alder, scruffy spruce and noble Douglas Fir, I’d felt nothing could hurt me, everything was shrouded in frozen crystalline safety, mine forever. Max was like a ski turn through the silent glowing flakes, something loved and gone so quickly one scarcely knew its weight.
A few weeks later, my wanderlust temporarily tamed by the brutish insistence of the workday, so I’d thought, temptation again appeared. I had gone to sleep the night before exhausted, so weary from the lifeless repetition of steel weights in the gym that I felt my body sink through the thick mattresses and concrete slabs of underlying floor and into the warm, moist earth itself. My mind felt bright and whitewashed, filled with pleasant static and the refusal to recognize tomorrow as valid. Slowly, rising from the sea like Atlantis, I saw the little isle of Jacques de Marquee, its ragged green palms and shell beach framed by burnt limestone cliffs. I had just arrived, that was clear, and I carried nothing on me. Clad only in bleached, torn corduroy shorts, my pockets empty, I was barefoot and unusually weathered by the sun.
I saw the little red cabin on stilts beyond the point, and walked toward it instinctively, though it held no special significance to me, no memory. Entering through an open door, I found the interior sterile and empty, devoid of furniture or any of the warm accoutrements of the living. Against one wall lay a skeleton of a man, bleached in the sun, ancient and apathetic-looking. I regarded it with the indifference one might reserve for a particularly belligerent vagrant, a compassion so strong it regresses into disaffection. Just then the sun began to descend from its steely apex such that the room was lit with blinding light. The walls fell away silently, melting into the sharp limestone. My body stood upright and silent through this strange procession; my skin soft and smooth despite the solar oven the little isle cooked in. Feeling a sudden call to action, I knelt amidst the former shadow of the cabin and touched the hand of the skeleton, which had remained fixed and lifeless, just another token of the bizarre.
It pulled me towards the ground with unexpected intensity, morphing quickly into warm flesh, the creases between his fingers absorbed in some translucent material, neither man nor bone. The skeleton, now a ghoulish apparition of various faces that had visited me yet failed to transcend my ego, fell away into a rifting chasm. The chasm grew until it parted the solid gray stone and the sea beyond it like Moses in the new apocalypse, and I fell into it instinctively. Gradually though, falling became a sort of apprehensive lift. I felt my trip played at high speed in reverse; rising though the concrete slabs and tawdry carpets of my building until I reappeared in bed, the alarm signaling morning’s return. My face was tight and knotted with the suppression of tears, but just when I figured I’d call in sick to work and languish for no particular reason, a note of austerity forced me into stiff office clothes and the East-bound 7 bus.
That September, I resigned. I’d never seen Mr. Beckham go into a rage like that before. ‘You know, I used to be naïve and restless like you… before I realized life isn’t all fucking around’ he said, rapidly pacing the parquet floor of the boardroom. I wanted to cry. I wasn’t sure of anything, wasn’t completely committed to the idea of buying another boat, cancelling my lease, and setting off for the south. I knew it was imperative though, like the Arctic tern who barely touches down on the grassy hummocks of Labrador or Ellesmere Island before alighting again to the South Pole, I had to keep moving. It was the only way to stave off that feeling, the hopelessness. ‘Clark, you’re good’, Mr. Beckham pleaded. ‘We need guys like you. You might not be the most brilliant or charismatic guy on our team, but you get your work done more efficiently than almost any of them, and I can’t afford to lose you. It’s been eight months. Hang on for your one-year review and we’ll see about a raise.’
‘Mr. Beckham… I can’t. I’ll be back, that I’m sure of, and I don’t expect to be offered a job again. I know what I’m doing seems rash, foolhardy, crazy even…’, I trailed off. ‘Well, you’re telling me. I’m sad things have to end this way, Clark. You can still say no and I’ll take you back, no questions asked.’ ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Beckham. Actually, I’m not sorry. I need to do this. But, I regret that you can’t understand why, and that I’m hurting others in the process. Guess I never really did care about anyone but myself.’ I turned before Mr. Beckham could reply, and the tall oak doors of Imperial Resources closed behind me, their inward sweep a sort of deathly exhalation.
The secretary, Marissa, pretended to blow her nose while wiping a few tears aside. Her new floral silk blouse was specifically for my eyes, for my hands, I knew. We’d been to lunch several times in the past few weeks, after the initial months of smoldering glances and feigned officiousness. I’d told her about Max in the first few minutes of our lunch date, but she didn’t believe me. ‘Clark, all young men have thoughts like that. Plus, you had the physical connection, right? And you went on some pretty unbelievable adventures together… you never really loved him though.’ It was only when she mentioned her own upbringing in an evangelical Christian household on the ragged, windswept Manitoba prairies that I forgave her.
Packing up the apartment, noting all the little household items of stability that I’d acquired; cheap art pieces, fancy kitchen appliances, a space unequivocally my own amidst all the rushed uncertainty of the city, I wondered why I’d wanted all this to begin with. It was such a compromise- security and adventure always must be mutually exclusive, I knew. I’d played their game, supported myself; basked in the modest immortality a 9-5 and a good lease afforded. Yet in the end I knew it was my primal fault- my inability, or perhaps just refusal to play by someone else’s rules. The rain had returned, and truthfully I dreaded the idea of solitude in poor winds and dull gray curtains of fog on a little boat, bound for somewhere sunny and half-real to the South. I’d had some modest luck in finding a good boat. In actuality, the search had been an incessant distraction from both work and play the whole of the previous summer. My morning runs down Point Gray Road past Kits Beach to Jericho Park were really just an evaluation of the shiny nautical real estate laid out in little slips and marinas for my eyes only, the luxury yachts of the executives and little fishing skiff’s belonging to Chinese immigrants alike.
It was the islands that did it, that pushed me over the edge. They visited me almost every night now. When I woke from the dreams, often with cold, glassy beads across my forehead and the mattress damp and expansive across the black cube of my bedroom, I saw their shapes across the ceiling. Some I had visited; some I knew only in his mind. One in particular had fascinated me, its private horrors so compelling because I knew they were real. It was pedantically called Clipperton Atoll, and lay some thousand kilometers off Baja Mexico. It was the creation of untold numbers of humble sea creatures whose skeletons massed on a sunken volcano, forming a ring of brilliant white phosphate. Briefly annexed by the French in another show of misguided 19th century imperialism, it was now uninhabited save the tens of thousands of bright orange land crabs, or so the little ‘Atlas of Remote Places’ I kept on my bed stand said. Their eyes were comical and omniscient atop little black stalks, their forms coloring the isle’s perimeter sinisterly.
It had been victim of the sort of desert island mutiny story that makes one cringe at the violent disposition of man, the soulless reversion to basest instincts or perhaps just our nature. I chose not to think of it, the cruel irony of a place christened ‘Ile de la Passion’ by the French where a gentle woman would be raped and killed by a maniacal lighthouse keeper who crowned himself king of the isle. Later he would have his face smashed in with a hammer by the handful of other woman whom he kept in quiet terror on this little piece of burnt coral and ragged palms in the endless, flat Pacific. ‘Mare Pacifico’… the placid sea. So had the Spanish in their limitless exploitation dubbed this expanse, this cosmic bathtub where the scrum of man floated to the surface like shipwreck’s wash ashore.
The atoll had a history that seemed both predictable and irreverent, the endless imperialistic scheme’s never quite conquering the orange crabs and fluorescent reef. Discovered relatively late in European man’s awful Pacific manifest destiny by two wayward Frenchmen in 1711, it had become a lonely outpost of the Parisian empire. It was a colony only in name, where a handful of semi-enslaved natives and irreverent Frenchmen wrought phosphate from the pale earth. Shortly after the turn of the 20th century a tragedy of almost comic horror unfolded on the atoll. The result of this penultimate folly was a cessation of human presence that had continued until the present, save my plans. There were no lush stands of fruit trees, no bubbling springs or teal streams, only the blinding white sand and drip castles of toxic bird shit, piled so high that they breached the unruly sea around the crater rim of a sunken peak. There were few photos of the island and after I spent the better part of a morning in the musty cabinets of the University of British Columbia map collection, I was convinced I’d seen all recorded evidence of the place.
The appeal of a place half-realized, existing on a map like some cartographic typo in the middle of the Pacific was undeniable. I tried to imagine why the atoll had visited me in the dreams, why it had appeared first as a shadow and then given an identity, a name such that I felt certain it was in fact this place. I imagined myself overrun by nature, its presence loud and demanding, raucous gulls and scuttling crabs. I realized I could fathom the staleness of such a place, provided he had food, clothing and shelter. I knew though from my own oceanic travels that these things seldom staved off the madness of isolation. They only brought lusting for past excess, and I envied the distant natives of the shadowy tropics, content in their own ignorance or perhaps denial of modern man. I wanted to be king of the atoll with no subjects, to be subject myself only to the watchful eye of the sun, the stirring green palm fronds and the untold little black eyes of the crabs. Few had reached this isle unassisted, and few had tried, but I felt that the process would unfold and explain itself without prompting. Just as the endless green swells of the North Atlantic had pushed The Stranger to her destiny, so would this next trip build.
I set off from Vancouver on September 22nd, the new vessel a 44-foot wooden sloop built in the old character of northwestern sailboats- strong, slow, and generally invincible. I named her ‘Terra Australis’, after the mythical southern land, a place that had captivated both learned and restless men for centuries. She was wild and strong-willed, restless after 2 years of wallowing ungracefully in a little patch of oily water in a rundown east end marina. Her owner was an ancient logger, a man beaten by the cold, damp elements of the B.C coast and rewarded with a modest house in the half-slums of east Vancouver and a nice sailboat to call his own.
He seemed pleased with me, with my uncertainties and romantic ambitions, and the modest price I paid, $25,000, seemed part of a secret pact of adventure between us, the whole of my savings poured into both of our futures. The old man said he’d seen all the world he wanted to see, and now needed a decade or so to think, read, and watch the somber green mountains past his neighborhood progress through the indistinct southwestern B.C seasons. The money I’d paid him would suffice, he winked good-naturedly, and we shook hands with somewhat sad finality. I brought the boat out to a marina my friend worked for on the west end under power. The rain and fog were a late-September blur under the watchful, rigid eaves of steel and green glass as I passed north of downtown. I’d placed most of my possessions in a cold, vaguely moldy storage container way out in some new subdivision west of Chilliwack, where the shadow of Mount Sleese loomed like a sentinel of the nearby U.S border.
My work visa expired in a few months anyways, I rationalized, but I knew Mr. Beckham would have helped me with the naturalization process if I’d stayed. My charts were old and inadequate, a yellowed set of 1:24,000 topo’s with scant nautical information. Just the occasional sounding, and as one approached Seattle, an increasing density of ominous little green asterisks denoting sunken ledges and submarine cables. I’d packed so incongruously; I thought irritably as I guided the boat on her first real tack in years out across the broad bay the separated Vancouver proper from the marshy subdivisions of Abbotsford and Richmond to the south. I’d brought sweaters but neglected long underwear, carefully arranged t-shirts but stored away half my jeans, labored over which books to bring, then forgotten my reading glasses. I felt I had to accept everything as I’d done before, to see things in the even light of the experience again. There was one place I had not seen in my dreams, a place perhaps too visceral and ominous to have infected my thoughts.
Paradox Island. To end Max’s tyranny over my thoughts, I needed to go. Not just because it was real or mysterious or convenient to my journey. I knew every disconnected segment of the past half-year was tied to this; was a step built upon the steep hill to this place. I imagined myself walking through the fog, the deafening silence of the mossy green woods that ringed the little isle closing the path behind me. I’d appear before the cabin, Max’s cabin. I would open the door, the hum of the damp, rainy delirium now as real as the fog, and I would strip naked, the covers of the little bed above rough wooden floorboards swallowing me up forever.
Three days later, I steered though the thin, foggy passage between Friday Harbor and Lopez Island. The ubiquitous foul-mouthed diesel fishing boats were absent, and the occasional hollow cry of an overhead gull was the only sound. The chart which lay dewy and thoughtful on the aft deckboard’s told me where the island lay- it was straight ahead, just to starboard of S40E, a mirage watched indifferently by orcas and sea otters. I lowered the sails mechanically and without thought. The winds were weak and inconsistent here, but I easily ridden my present momentum to the little cove where the cabin lay. I felt weak, vulnerable, aged. I coughed, shook a little, and then steadied myself on the wheel and thought only of the next day, the pleasant fluorescent lights of Seattle filling the awful void of Paradox Island.
The fog lay like suspended thoughts in a surreal but typical inversion, the sun shining bright and unobstructed perhaps 50 meters overhead. I felt insulated by the muffled light- like the dull lights of my old office, it balanced the extremes of thought and encouraged a bland productivity in its place. I anchored the boat in several fathoms of murky green water, the bottom providing surprisingly good purchase. The fine, rounded gravel Max had spoken of longingly ran along the islands edge. Rowing into shore, I strained to see the geometric edges of the little cabin beyond the dark pines, but instead there were only lifeless shadows.
My shoes echoed with the stifled sound of round pebbles against each other as I walked up the beach. Glancing back at Terra Australis reflexively, like the child who looks once more through the closet door before entering Narnia, I was surprised to see a little motorboat tied up neatly some fifty meters distant along the shore. It looked old and tired, probably abandoned by some summer visitors, I though. I imagined the laughing college students, drunk and reckless, swimming back across the little passage to Lopez Island at 3 AM after the motor failed to start. On the edge of the chipped wooden seat of the motorboat, caught against a worn steering wheel, was a little fragment of patterned gold fabric. The wind gusted slightly, dispersing the last of the fog, and I looked back to find it gone. Just an apparition of the sun, I thought absently. Even if it had been real, it meant nothing more than a fragment of memory in the wind. The cabin now appeared out of the haze, just as I knew it had to, yet a few feet in front of the crooked, mossy door stood a man. A young man, framed in the building silver light of mid-morning, smiling and physical. For a minute I lost him, the shadows of the trees swallowed the image, but then it reappeared, stronger, running, yelling.
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