They stretched outside the car, electric buzz of fluorescence, nocturnal insects pattering the tin eaves above them, the lights so overswarmed with them they were foaming. It was Melissa's turn to stand at the nozzle, Annette's to pay and refill their Thermos mugs with the syrupy and jitter-inducing “gourmet coffee” that was found in push-button machines at every roadside gas stationâMochaccino, French Vanilla, English Toffee, bastardizations so far removed from their originals they'd become a creation unto themselves. She was also going to ask for the closest and safest paid campground, a cost, they'd agreed, they were willing to swallow.
Melissa pulled a sweater and the road atlas out of the car, slammed the door in the humming quiet, and ran her finger along the red line of the highway as if to measure how far they were from Thunder Bay. Just then a sizeable moth plopped onto the map next to her hand and became instantly still, probably sensing that there was something large and breathing hovering over it. The moth was pale green with a delicate maroon outline and a set of discerning eyes painted onto its wings. Two long lobes dropped from the mimicked face like tusks, the insect's body in the centre making up a kind of furry nose. It was the most striking moth Melissa had ever seen, and she found herself looking up at the lights, as if to find more of them there. Once, her friend Nathan (some might have referred to him as her old boyfriend), who was a great collector and retainer of factoids and useless trivia, had told her about the way moths had evolved to navigate by the strongest celestial light: the moonâif it wasn't newâor one of the brighter stars, Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri. Which is why, he'd said, when they pass by an artificial light, naturally assuming that it's going to stay in the same place in the sky, directly above them, for example, they have no choice but to circle it in order to keep it there, at that one fixed point in their vision. They're not, contrary to popular belief, attracted to light; they just can't seem to get past it, disoriented by their only means of orientationâlike an arctic airplane heading continually west in a spiral around the magnetic pole. They're drawn into danger by a set of intuitions that they know only how to trust, into a blindness by the very way they see. And there was some aspect in that, considered Melissa, folding the map as the moth flew away to bounce off the lights again and Annette stepped out of the store, that was really, and quite wonderfully, human.
In the car she adjusted her Petzl headlamp on her forehead and picked up the spiral-bound notepad she kept near her feet, a pen slipped into the spine. As they pulled out onto the dark of the highway, Melissa started scribbling.
“The lady inside said there's a campground about forty minutes away. Cool?” asked Annette.
“Sure,” Melissa said indifferently.
Annette flicked on her brights, checked the gauges. “So what are you writing?”
“Uhm . . . a journal,” Melissa mumbled, though was obviously lying. Annette, slightly affronted, made a point to never ask about the notebook, or what it was for, again.
The next two days the road cut through mounded terraces of spruce and stagnant lakes, chiselled through brief walls of marbled granite, and straightened out through a stretch of aspens that dispersed into open fields and the red of granaries. Nunavut had just been christened its own territory only a month earlier, inspiring travellers to raise an inuksuk atop most of the prominent outcroppings, boulders, and benchmarks along the Trans-Canada Highway, a gesture, the two girls had agreed, that was somehow touching.
They crossed the Manitoba border into Saskatchewan, where Melissa, whether driving or as a passenger, fastidiously watched the landscape, finding the flatlands to be far from boring, a common complaint of people that traversed the country. It was true that there wasn't much to look at, but that, for her, only served to highlight what little there was to see. Whether it was the deviations in the geography: the buttes, eskers, draws, and coulees; or the manmade structures that seemed to stand out as a kind of proclamation, a defiance against the overwhelming expanse and isolation, even if they were in the very act of being defied: rusted and squeaking windmills above settlers' water wells and flattened homesteads, barbed wire draping along tilted fencelines, abandoned barns and farmhouses canting over in sagging parallelograms. The new generation machinery was painted in bold and resilient colours but was already dusting over with doubt. During her shifts as a passenger, Melissa never slept, not wanting to miss so much as a half-hour.
“This is like . . .” Annette broke one of their rare no-music-or-radio silences just after Medicine Hat, “it feels so Canadian, you know?”
“What does?” Melissa put her bare feet up onto the front of her seat, sipped from her half-litre coffee mug.
“I don't know . . . just . . . this,” Annette gestured out in front of her, a hand sweeping the windshield. “You know, driving these huge distances with vintage tapes of Blue Rodeo and The Hip, grain silos and roadkill and irrigation sprinklers. All this stuff. Don't you think?”
But what Melissa thought was that she was about to come across as a humbug again. Because to be honest, she'd always hated the question, had never seen the point of it reallyâall the literature and art collectives, the radio programs and television documentaries that explored the query of what it meant to be Canadian. In our scrambling need for an identity, thought Melissa, we'd opted for the worst way of acquiring one: namely by working backwards. We started with the naive idea that we could find a parameter for us all to fit inside, trace a silhouette with all the things we are and aren't, define a “we” by using the paltry measure of our few, few common denominators. Why should we care about the shape of the one paper-thin shell that might encapsulate us all? What kind of culture would be driven by such a manic search for its own confinement? If we spent half as much energy not in concentrating on what this fictitious capsule might look like, but instead on filling it, on cramming it with original art and thought and science and cuisine, on driving forward unimpeded by our own backward clichés and questions, those blurry lines would draw themselves. The truth was that Melissa didn't feel very Canadian, didn't feel moved when she saw her flag rippling in the wind. But she did feel that she liked the wind. And it's there, she knew, that the drawing should really begin. Right there. At the beginning.
“Well? Don't you think?” Annette repeated, a little impatient.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” Melissa switched on the tape deck, turning it up a bit, rolled her window down farther, and went back to watching the fields as they moved past, fields strewn with hay bales now, like course-haired creatures, she fancied, hunched over and sleeping, oblivious to that exceptionally wide-open sky and the elephantine clouds that padded along the prairie with their shadows.
In the evening of day five, after they'd decided to take the shorter, though less scenic, southerly route through the Rockies, they passed through a city that Melissa had heard the name of innumerable times growing up. When she saw the first exit ramp slide away from their lane, she tried to look through the chain-linked fences that were choked with tumbleweeds and plastic bags, and over the concrete sound barriers into the town proper, as if straining to see something in particular.
“Are you looking for a restroom pull-off or something?” asked Annette. “Or you wanna get some orange juice for tomorrow morning again?”
“No,” Melissa shrunk back into her seat, almost managing to look guilty. “It's kinda weird. This is where I was born. But then we moved to Toronto when I was two, so I have no memories of it.”
“Really? Whoah. Well . . . I dunnoâdo you wanna stop or something?”
“Uhh. Not really.”
“Whoah. So do you, like, still have family here and stuff?”
“No, not that I know of. My mom's parents moved to Burlington a few years after we did, and my dad's folks were killed in a car wreck when I was eleven, on some country road around here, I imagine. The story goes that my granddad was famous for falling asleep at the wheel. Something you can only be famous for for so long, I guess. So if I do have relatives here, they're distant ones. I remember my dad flying back every once in a while, just for weddings and funerals kind of thing, so, who knows, I might. But if I knocked on their doorâI mean, what would I say to them?”
“Yeah, right,” Annette acceded, doing an over-shoulder check and changing lanes. They'd driven past most of the exits to Lethbridge now and were cutting between the coulees, crossing a broad river valley where Melissa watched an extensive railroad bridge as it ran parallel to the highway, towering pylons as black as the coal it was initially built to transport. It struck her as one of those industrial eyesores that had since become quite funky, in that chic-urban steampunk kind of way. She was about to comment on it but didn't. They drove up the other side of the coulee where the highway opened onto a yawning skyline and a road-gridded carpet of prairie that unrolled all the way out to the Rockies. They found a cheap-enough campground just as the peaks started to rise and shoulder into the wide panorama that their eyes had become used to. It was near the site of a devastating landslide that had buried part of a town in 1903, the sprawling boulderfield so barren it could have happened yesterday. They clambered to the top of one of the larger rocks and ate submarine sandwiches for dinner, talking disjointedly about all the houses that had never been excavated in the wake of the disaster, the homes that were buried beneath them.
Two days later, after a ferry ride and a flat tire, which a brusque middle-aged woman had pulled over to help them change, counselling them on car maintenance and emergency preparedness as she did so, they pulled into Tofino. A few icebreaking activities transitioned smoothly into the orientation of their sleeping quarters, live-in policies, and the whereabouts of the cleaning supplies. Annette effortlessly fit in with the other staff, the rally of small talk and niceties, anecdotes of alcohol and university bashes. Melissa nevertheless felt herself budged out onto the wayside. She was beginning to come to terms with the fact that she was more socially awkward than she'd ever imagined herself being, more reserved, introverted. She reminded herself, however, that she hadn't come all this way for the party scene, for the marijuana nebulae and beach fires. She'd come here for the beach itself. Or for the ocean anyway.
It was the first time Melissa had ever been to the seaside, let alone lived on one. Everything she looked at was a surprise, or bizarre, seemed to have sprouted directly from the pages of an implausible science fiction novel. She was most taken with the tidal pools, stepping out among the green anemones and their orifices of filament tentacles, the tiny sculpins invisible in their camouflage, shore crabs scuttling into recesses, limbs tucking tight, the hiss of seagrapes. She liked the tracks and traces in the wet sand that adjoined the pools, the life that had ventured out of them. And the purple, orange, and maroon starfish that clung to the rocks in expressive positions, their reaching arms, shrugging shoulders, hanging heads, splayed out on the barnacle-sprinkled surfaces like sailors having just crawled onto land from a shipwreck, limp and exhausted, reduced to ragged stickmen.
Sometimes, falling asleep to the swelling rumble of the surf, she would think about the waves on McKenzie Beach, the campground's own, about the way they rolled in so consistently, insistently, unyielding, undying. She would lie in her tiny room that smelled of particleboard and new paint (which was already losing the battle against the mildew) and consider how long these waves had been rolling in for, in exactly the way they were then. And exactly as they are now. Right now. Rolling onto the sand, turning over in the sun, in the dark. Like they have for millennia. Like they will for millennia. Whatever way you stood beside it, the sea had a way of reshaping, of eroding, your humility.
Melissa would call home to tell Julie about most all of this, talking from a phone booth in the parking lot, leaning against the glass door to stare up at the lamp in the one streetlight of the parking lot, the bulb aswirl with a snow-flurry of moths. But enough about her, she would finally say, how about you, Mom, how are things over there? You enjoying your pottery classes again? What do you mean you talked to Dad? Yeah but, why bother? Seriously. A groan while hanging up the phone, the mood of her night suddenly soured.
On her days off she would walk into town, grey skies, drizzle brightening the colours of the yellow sea kayaks on the water, of the orange of the customers' survival suits aboard the whale-watching zodiacs. Girls on long skateboards steering clear of puddles; bicycles with surfboard racks, riders' arms drooping from the handlebars in a wet-dog slouch; organic coffee shops, soya sprouts in every sandwich; all while abrasive float planes bore down on the village overhead, with their pontoons like skis dangling from a blaring chairlift, the artists in their boutiques seemingly deaf to it, some of them white illustrators wearing crystal pendants, specializing in Haida art.
Looking back, it was more like the dog found Melissa than the other way around. She'd been reading on the beach one evening, with her back to the butt-end of a driftwood log, when it stepped out from behind her and sat down well within arm's reach, wagging its tail and watching her with a familiarity that suggested it had known Melissa all its life. While petting it, Melissa had looked around for the owner, assuming that, whoever they were, they were sure to be nearby. But after a long scratch that progressed to an ecstatic belly rub, no one had come forward or even seemed to be looking at her. She read on, a hand on the perky-eared mutt, a black mongrel that was lanky and long-haired, its fur salt-clotted, sand-speckled. An hour passed and still no owner. Then two, three. She finally walked the length of the beach, expecting the dog to spot its master for her, but failing to do so, she circled the entire campground with the dog in tow, hoping for the same. Nothing. The poor thing, she thought, looked to be pretty hungry too. She rummaged up a bag of chips and some milk-soaked bread and spilled it all out on the tarmac near her room. As night fell, wondering what she should do with it until the morning, where it was going to sleep, the dog suddenly stood up and sauntered off, back toward the beach, conversely, as if it had never met Melissa in its life. But the beach is where she found it the next evening, after it had spent most of the day with another prospective adopter. The pattern was set. Sometimes the people the dog had spent the day with would ask if Melissa was the owner, as it lay down next to her in the sand, as soon as she'd finished her shift. She would shrug her shoulders, say that no, it was a complete mystery who it belonged to, and both of them would look down at the dog, who would then jump to its feet and trot out to the waves to chase shorebirds. Melissa bought it some dog food in town and tried to guess its name, shouting common canine-sounding monikers out over the beach, watching for a reaction, and deduced that it was something that had a few syllables and ended with an “ah.” A guess, she would learn, that was right on the mark.