Headwaters

A story in a single sentence:

Shaky after two days' release from the psych ward, she wants to "put it all behind her," as the genial yet guarded advice had gone, so she takes the Skytrain to go ask about rental costs at a nearby Enterprise office whose bleak geometry squats in a grim patch of stilted highways, loose rubble, and territorial chain link somewhere near where Vancouver borders Burnaby, but she gets cold feet at Renfrew Station, turns around and scurries back to the library near her home on East Pender, where she searches Google Maps and decides Swift Current is the loveliest place name she's ever heard, especially in contrast to that of its province, which is all brittle stalks and wheat sheaf angles (Sask-atch-ew-an), and wants to visit for that reason alone—Swift Current, that is; a name that evokes homecoming sockeye vigorous and sleek as distance runners' quadriceps—although the furthest she's ever driven was Vancouver to Hope, ironically when she'd been at her least hopeful, and even then she'd had a tire blow somewhere near Yarrow, nearly killing her, and the towtruck and repair costs had been so high she'd had to turn back, out by many dollars and by even more self-worth, given all her struggles with what some might call mental health issues yet she chooses to term emotional difficulties, since the former still contains a tiny jab of stigma, and dammit, it's hardly her fault, given her early life with Uncle Giorgio and then those grey-stuccoed group homes and weary, spiteful foster parents, let alone the haunted jaundiced nightscape of the Downtown Eastside and her disaster-recipe life with Gunther, he of the one-part lavish confectionary largesse and two-parts savage fists, but she is free now, aside from the medication she needs to remember, while something about Swift Current calls and calls like babbling headwaters to a downstream eddy, urging her to spawn, to take this step that might mark a new chapter in a thus-far chiefly sorrowful tale, one charged with the possibility of something other than grim nights shivering with cold or dread and warmer nights sleepless with mosquitoes or regret, so she finds somewhere online that calculates the cost of gasoline, which comes to a little over a couple hundred bucks for the three thousand kilometre round trip, and she feels a heartsurge of joy until she sees the carbon footprint she'll be leaving—one thousand three hundred and fifty pounds, to be exact—which sounds so appalling she immediately scratches out this new life at its source—indeed, guilt and eroded morale have long perfected her inner Scratch 'n Lose—erasing the evocative names of Shuswap and Salmon Arm, Golden and Banff, Dead Man's Flats and Medicine Hat from a future that might have held something other than the pitiless tidal ebb of try then turn back, try then turn back, the balance of which has always seemed impossibly, monstrously weighted.

Demon Eyes

When you're in trouble, it don't matter the exact location of that trouble, he supposed. Just the fact you're up to your neck in a deep mess and need to darn well fix it. Yet it still bothered him that home was a damn sight more than a hop and a jump and a skipped rock away and lookit, there were no goddamned people on this godforsaken island, apparently. Which, he had to admit, was kind of the point.

Okay, obliterated ankle and apparent blindness aside, let's back up here.

Grant was a proud Texan, lord of all he surveyed, which actually wasn't much. But hell, he was lord of it. A salvage yard and a used car lot, to be exact, just outside of Lubbock. Between the two, he and his crew brought them in lame and sent them out new, as the saying went. Or if you prefer a more Texan flavor: brought 'em in sinners, sent 'em out right with God. Well, almost new, almost right, close enough for Jesus to turn a blind eye. Small time as his little operation was, it nonetheless provided him with enough enticing glimpses of a world in which movers moved and shakers shook that he pretty much craved a piece of that world every waking minute. This hunting trip was the end product of some complex favors involving at least a couple bribes and even more meaningful nods and winks between connected associates and their high-powered acquaintances. And money. Which went without saying, was the way of the world. All so Grant could solo-stalk some private island off of the coast of British Columbia and bag himself a timber wolf or two. Or black bear or cougar, maybe. No doubt he'd owe somebody something when he got back to civilization, but still. If he brought back the head and pelt of a wild, grizzled mutt, his wan star might rise somewhat, and he was damn sick of being the one who had to constantly bow his own balding, blocky head in company.

Fucking Canada. Swell idea on paper, and he still treasured the memory of the six hundred pound grizzly he eventually took down somewhere near Jasper, Alberta, but it was always either too cold or too damned wet for regular folks—a godawful place, truth be told, filled with mosquitoes, ice, socialists, and black flies, where no one gave you eye contact and too many self-described hosers repeated sorry and thank you instead of aiming for the top, most of them drinking piss-weak beer and pretending to enjoy grown men exchanging punches on a flat rectangle of ice, so's they didn't have to think about their overall predicament—the predicament being that they're an entire country that's basically Minne-fuckin-sota. 

And apparently the place was also home to attack plants. And it wasn't only the lord Jesus who turned a blind eye, no sir. Right after he'd identified his quarry—a ghostly, damn-near white sonofabitch, and big too, well over a hundred pounds—Grant had stumbled, grabbed something greenish and upright to prevent a fall, then—relieved he hadn't taken a tumble and intending to do a double take at the spirit wolf—had rubbed his eyes with his palms. Worst decision of a bad decision day. But why the hell hadn't anyone warned him there were killer plants in the neighborhood? Took him a while to make the connection, but it had to be some kind of plant. Poison ivy? Nah, he knew poison ivy. Someone had even warned him about grabbing on to devil's club, so that wasn't it, either. He vaguely remembered some tall stems topped by parasols of whitish flowers. Come to think of it, maybe one of the early briefings had mentioned them? An "invasive species"? Giant something? Guess it didn't matter what the fuckers were called or who invaded what-all—hell, he was an invasive species himself right now—what mattered was he'd done manhandled those puppies and now he couldn't see. His eyes burned something awful and his hands were tight-swole with what felt like chemical burns, and that wasn't even the whole of it; to add injury to insult, he'd hightailed partway out of the hollow in a momentary panic (which shamed him in retrospect, boy did it ever), then went and plunged his dumb ass down the same gulch or ravine or whatever they called them in this god-abandoned place. He knew it was bad when he both felt and heard the ligaments in his right ankle rupture with an audible pop that actually echoed among the trees for an appalling second or two.

And after that, silence. Lying still as a newborn after some calamitous birth, waiting for the pain in his lower leg to catch up to the fierce agony in his eyes and hands, barely able to distinguish light and dark. Disbelieving. Until he heard the twigs breaking right up close and the sounds of canine breathing. He went cold and still, reached for his rifle and went colder still. What kind of hunter drops his rifle and neglects to even notice? Worse still, as he reached he actually felt the animal's breath on his throbbing hand. He snatched it back and scrambled away, knowing he was only ruining his weirdly flaccid ankle more by moving. He didn't care. The wolf made a low sound deep in its throat. Grant felt around for his rifle, desperate. The beast was right there, its carrion breath assailing his nostrils, and Grant lashed out with his burning hand, catching its wet muzzle, eliciting a mutual yelp.

"This ain't a fair fight, ya flea-ridden heap o' mange!"

The wolf answered with a brief whine.

Then more silence. Grant's entire body was a tuned receptacle: for sound, for smells, for the briefest of movement. His skin, its fine hairs swaying like antennae, could feel the wispy fall of a single seed head, the tiny ripple of air in the wake of a lacewing's bright flutter, the soft exhale of the vast sleeping forest. Oddly, he'd never felt this alive, as he waited here in this place of solitude for his throat to be torn out, to end his days gargling his own lifeblood.

A hot rank tongue raked down his cheek and he actually screamed. But the teeth didn't follow. The animal had stepped away. It whimpered again. Stepped away further.

"You want me to foller you? You know I cain't walk, right?" Talking to the overgrown mutt only made him feel more stupid than ever, but dignity had dropped precipitously down his list of priorities at this point.

He heard the wolf scrambling in the forest detritus and for a mad moment imagined it finding his rifle and bringing it to him, and he almost laughed at that, but then he felt the damp splintered end of a branch and realized the goldarn brute had indeed brought him something: a crutch. For a moment he was amazed, must have looked like a sightless imbecile sprawled amid the needle-rich dirt and the waxy salal with his jaw hanging loose as an old-timer's drawers, but even a blinded Texan with a busted foot knows not to look a gift wolf in the general direction of its mouth, so he accepted the unlikely offering and began to pull himself to his feet.

Using the rudimentary crutch, he began to shuffle in the path of the timber wolf, who made a low chuffing sound, as if in encouragement. Then all of a sudden, Grant got wise, woke the hell up. What made him think this beast was leading him somewhere good? Who's to say it was on his side, this alien biped from a distant land? No doubt it could smell his strangeness on him. Nature's a bitch, always was since the wily old serpent made a naked chick eat an apple, and always would be until the sun went huge and red and time stretched to some kinda impossibly thin strand, and he of all people should fucking know better. This white monster was no friend of man, and somewhere in the darkest forest its dark companions waited, no doubt drooling and pacing some shadowy den. He knew coyotes did that, lured cats and small dogs away toward the waiting pack, and what was a wolf but a damn coyote on steroids? Hell if he was gonna go meek and stupid like some dumb house pet.

He recalled some latte-loving treehugger a couple days ago telling him the wolf had been unfairly "demonized" throughout history. Well fuck that with a giant fucking lumberjack dick. He sincerely begged to differ. And besides, everyone knows history's a tale told by the winners.

Grant stumbled and lurched in the opposite direction of his newfound spirit guide.

He felt a surge of elation, a sense he'd outsmarted this backward place, called the endless sly bluff of the world, until he stepped hapless into cool space and, as he fell, heard the last thing he'd ever hear on this busy green earth: a single forlorn and terrible howl desolate enough to make all the dead, faraway and near, predator and prey, shudder within their eternal sleep.

For Shame, a Becoming

So there's this thing, I don't want to call it a game, but maybe that's what it is, a drinking game, let's call it, where we shame ourselves by admitting the truly awful things we've done, or the tackiest, or perhaps the meanest, the dumbest, or the most plain humiliating. So, here's mine.

Think I was truly having a breakdown, or a midlife catastrophe, right at the turn of the millennium, that cusp of memory and forgetfulness, a fulcrum upon which, in Kathleen Edwards' words, "you spend half your life trying to turn the other half around." And sure, I've already told the later chapters of this tawdry little tale, in which I embarked on my ten-thousand kilometre transcontinental vision quest, even published a short book about it, but never this. Not until now.

Before that idea even occured, it was a particularly bleak winter. Not gonna get too emo here, but you know, aside from all the overt angst and the hot, roiling subcurrents of shudderingly wrong memories still only suspected at this point, my overriding feeling was fear. Fear of myself, of the future, of others, for others, of GETTING THIS WHOLE THING DESPERATELY, IRREVOCABLY WRONG. Whatever. Just fear. You feel me?

So in January of 2001, I went and spent some time alone in a cabin. In the region of British Columbia laughably (in this context, anyway) called The Sunshine Coast. 'Cause there ain't no sunshine there back then, not for me, not that winter. And I mean that entirely subjectively. Wait, no. Objectively. Whatever, I always get those mixed up. It felt especially cold as I stayed in a cute but paperthin cabin where cedar branches sagged under their frigid burdens beside the icy turbulent waters of Skookumchuck Narrows, where the tide waters are forced through the narrows forming the Sechelt Rapids. It's wild in every sense, but especially in January.

And yeah, I might still have thought I was going back to working with the street kids who had broken my heart (not their fault), and I was playing with writing again, having had an article published on the website of one of my remote, austere heroes, but what was I thinking... and what would I do? The thing is, I know exactly what I was thinking, at least: that not only could I heal some odd, male part of me through the solitary simplicity of living a handful of days in a remote cabin held in winter's grip, but I could begin to live the life, adopt the trappings, wear the elbow-patched jacket of a... Real Writer™.

Yes, I know. But it gets worse.

I'll just blurt it out, pass it off as if I'm gagging: Dostoyevsky. Uh-huh. A copy of Crime and Punishment, an acoustic guitar, a pre-iPod era boombox with a limited selection of CDs, one of which was OK Computer, I kid you not, and a large notepad (with rollerpoint pens) since I didn't even have a laptop back then, for shame. You need to say this next bit in Nigel Tufnel's humble voice: So what will you be paying for, sir? Oh yes, the wannabe writer's budget package. Cold, isolated cabin? Check. Raging waters nearby? Check. Heavy Russian reading material? Check. Dystopian UK music about alienation? Check. Acoustic guitar? Check. Forty-pounder of rum? Check. Hiking boots? Check. Hatchet? Check.

You get the picture. Some Kerouac bullshit, right?

But here's the funny part, the unexpected twist. It kind of worked. I wrote. I wrote scads. It's still there, in that notebook. Mostly crap, of course, many spidery lines of abandoned poetry and philosophical musings that would embarrass a fourteen-year-old. But still, however much I cringe at the posturing of it all, I found I'd grown into a slightly different skin after all was said and done.

There was a moment. A song played, but low volume, an insectile murmur. I was whittling cedar with gloved hands into kindling for a tiny wood stove that burned up quality birch and alder stovelengths way too fast. I had a beer beside me, and more than one inside. The air was clean, like the cool hush of an ancient Triassic rainforest, so clean it made me want to cry for all the worlds we won't ever get back or even see. And maybe I did cry for a moment. Yet wrapped up inside of all that was thankfulness. That I was alive. That although my fingers ached with the cold and I couldn't even play my damn guitar, I had all the things that make us happy, and that the final pieces in the jigsaw are the friends and family we choose, and that I'd see them soon, however content I felt in that moment, in that splendid isolation.

Yeah. Maybe that's all that needs to be said here, and I'll surely get gone now.

Where It All Begins

So back in 2001, I was having a rough time of things and decided that the only way I was going to shake my head back on straight was if I drove the 10,000 kilometres from my home near Vancouver, British Columbia to New York City and back. For the life of me, I don't remember why this seemed so imperative, other than it was a solo road trip over a hell of a long distance and I had a friend in Brooklyn as well as friends along the route.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I picked a date pretty much out of a hat, a random date that will now be remembered for a long time... and not because one small person began a trip that day. It was, of course, Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Well, I witnessed many things both during the journey and at its destination, eerie post-apocalyptic scenes, jarring contradictions and touching moments. It was both cathartic and humbling, putting into perspective my tiny trauma against such shattering global events. All of it went into a short book I wrote soon afterward and eventually published as an ebook. The cover is a photo I took on the trip itself, and I chose it because to use a shot of Ground Zero itself would have seemed crass or at least insensitive so soon after nearly 3,000 people had perished in such an appalling way.

My book wasn't political. It largely avoided judgment. I wanted it to be about the sometimes strong too often tenuous connections between people and not a diatribe against America or the Middle East.

Well, ten long years went by and I couldn't avoid the impression that what had been an opportunity to forge something positive from that terrible wreckage had been passed by in favour of ideological ambition, fearmongering and a servile media.

But if I were to be fair, I would have to retrace my steps of ten years earlier and be in New York City on September 11, 2011 when the anniversary was in full swing, if only to feel the changes up close and personal for the first time since those surreal days a decade before.

So, once again I set out on a late summer/early fall day and drove that vast distance and had a new, different adventure, possibly even a darker adventure, certainly a more extreme one in its implications. Which is all going to be laid out in the sequel, as yet untitled, currently being written.

So this is the blog that begins to chart that journey; not the journey itself, but the writing journey that emerged from the physical one. It is and will continue to be a story of movement, of restlessness, and of migration. Restless spirits, the movement of words, the migratory impulse in the physical realm and in the artistic/creative.

If anyone joins me for all or—more likely—part of the ride, all the better. Solo road trips are great, albeit incredible tests of one's capacity for loneliness, but shared journeys are more colourful and redolent of possibilities, potential... and yes, even hope.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.