The Last of the Lumbermen (12 page)

Esther gathers the
dishes and, elbowing Wendel aside, begins to load the dishwasher
while I crumple the empty Chinese food containers and put
them in the garbage. Our talk, apparently, is over.

Well, not quite. Wendel quits his sandwich-building at six,
slices the pile into halves, and sits down at the
table with the plate in front of him.

“I saw you looking
at all those stupid team photos this morn- ing in
the lobby,” he says, eyeing me with a strange
friendliness. “They used to have tournaments here every spring,
didn't they? How come those stopped?”

Esther answers the question for me. “There
was a bus accident after the last tournament,” she says. “Five
players from the team that won got killed.”

“Four,” I say,
without thinking. “Only four players were killed.”

Esther glances
at me, and just as quickly looks away. “How come you know about that?”

“Gord told me the story. You know I've
got a memory for details.”

It's Wendel's turn. “Since when?”

“Hey. There's
a lot of things about me you don't know,
kiddo.” I'm veering dangerously close to the truth here.

“I was thinking,” he says,
“we should start up the tourna- ment again.”

“What in God's name for?” Esther and I say, as one.

“Why not?”

“I
just told you why not,” Esther answers. “The last time
we had a tournament four people died.”

“That was a long time ago,” Wendel scoffs.
“Who cares about that now?”

“Who'd want to sponsor a tournament?”
I ask, as if it's a rhetorical question.

Wendel doesn't
blink. “The City. Why wouldn't Snell go for something like that?”

“Because
it would bring in ten or fifteen teams full of
crazy shitheads to wreck the town,” I say.
“He wouldn't want the policing problems. It's bad enough around here when just the Roosters are in town.”

Wendel starts to argue his case, speculating that the
inde- pendent loggers might sponsor it, and rattling on about
the prestige a good tournament would bring.

I decide that it's better to let
him harangue his mother about this. She isn't as likely
to put her foot in it as I am. I
get up from the table and pull my leathertops and snowshoes from the kitchen closet.

“I think I'll take Bozo out.”

THIRTEEN

“
Y
OU'RE GOING OUT WITH
her now?” Esther
says, eyeing my snowshoes. “There's close to a
metre of new snow out there.”
I r
each into the closet again, this time for my wool
pants and mitts.

“It'll be okay. We won't go fa
r. And anyway, I rebroke the trails on Thursda
y. Back in half an hour or so.”

The instant Bozo catches sight of the snowshoes, she
begins to bounce up and down. Wisely, Esther and
Wendel clear out of the kitchen and leave me and the dog to our preparations.

Bozo splatters a mouthful
of saliva across the kitchen wall, and she's read
y. She prances up and down while I look for
my wool shirt, which isn't where it ought to
be. After a moment's cursing and fumbling around I find
it underneath a nearly full fifty-pound bag of dog chow
, with the pockets full of kibble. I shake the
bits out onto the floor and Bozo sucks them up.

By the time I'm ready to leave, mother and
son have settled down in the living room to watch
the video Wendel has brought with him. I lean
in just long enough to watch the credits. It's
one of his Sierra Club videos, with one of those
depressing, bearded yo-yos talking about the end of the
world in the same bland enthusiasm as a television announcer announcing this week's bargains at Canadian Tire. They don't stir when I
jam a toque over my skull, open the door for
Bozo, and follow her outside with a snowshoe tucked under each arm.

“Don't be too
long,” I hear Esther call as I release the storm
door. It shuts before I can answer.

THE SNOW HAS STOPPED
falling, and with
the skies already cleared by a southwar
d-bound cold front the temperature is plummeting. No
matter. The east side of the heavens are
star-filled, only slightly dimmed by the pink glow
of neon from Mantua. The moon is rising in
the southwest, the direction we're going, and it
is bath- ing the poplar meadows in brilliant silver
light. To the north, there's the faintest traces
of the Northern Lights — Aurora Borealis. It's
a pretty sight, and the snow muffles every sound.
The new snow has settled a little, and beneath
it is a full metre of compacted snow with a slight crust on it from last week's thaw.

The moment we clear the backyard both of us
abandon the trail and head out in our own directions.
Bozo proceeds with great pouncing leaps that leave
her, each time, shoulder deep in snow. If
I used her method of locomotion I'd be done in
a hundred metres, but I've seen her
keep this up for hours. Even with the snowshoes it isn't
easy going for me, and my brain begins to empty
with the effort. With each snowshoe I plant, the
re is a swish-crunch as the powder billows away
and the snowshoe's wood and webbing cracks the lower crust
and sinks another few inches. I listen, and the rhythm empties me.

By the time our half
hour is up, the dog and I are a
kilometre from the house, still outward bound.
I'm as much working my way into the tangle of new
facts in my life as into this winter landscape, but
Bozo is in paradise. My track is straight, meandering
only to catch the easiest topography and stay out of
the dense stands of poplars, human in the respect that,
even here, it's
going someplace
. Bozo's trail is a zigzag that intersects sociably every hundred metres or so
with mine as she checks in. I can feel the cold
against my face, making my cheeks feel thicker than
they are, but there's no threat in
this kind of cold, no hid- den bite, no life-sucking
chill. It's simply there, a precise and inviting cold, and I accept its invitation.

I
LEFT THE HOUSE
to escape, really. It wasn't
just the talk of the tournament, it's the whole spooky package
looming over me — the past pressing in, the
present doing the same, right down to tommorow's game
with the Roosters. I need this emptiness so I can find some sort of balance.

No,
I'm not a very Zen kind of guy. Despite
the perfect conditions, finding that balance is a
battle. While I'm breaking trail it slips toward it,
but after a hundred or two metres that
pinging in my chest returns. So I flip-flop, following the
the easier trail I made days ago, then back to
breaking trail. The irritable conversation with myself goes on and on.

And what's the conversation
about? Not what you'd expect. I recall what started me
snowshoeing several years ago, not long after I moved into
this house with Esther. I'd lived by myself for years,
and for a time being around one person every
day crowded me. With Esther being who and what
she is I didn't feel crowded for long, but
I've kept up the snowshoeing. The dog loves it and
it keeps me from having to buy a snowmobile, or
ever
having to go skiing.

Well, I'm sorry. I
don't
like snowmobiles, and I don't ski. Why? Too
much hot-dogging and high speed. I know, hockey has
both of those. Maybe I get enough there. But
snowshoeing, that's the opposite end of the universe. When your
shoes are a metre and a half long, looking
like a clown is easy. But it won't turn
you into an asshole. You're on your own,
the technology is minimal, there's no judges to
mark form and there are no safety supervisors reminding you to stay inside their boundaries. You're nose to nose with the elements, you have to pay
attention to what's in front of you and what you've
got inside of you — meaning you have to respect
your limits and nature's signals. If you're not
up to that you'll pack in your snowshoes in fifteen
minutes, because the payoffs are subtle.

When conditions are good
and your head is in the right space, you
bond with winter, almost. I say “almost” because if
you do bond fully, you're a popsicle — just
like if you bond with summer you're a skin
cancer patient. I prefer winter. It's the only
season in which you can go everywhere, and the colder
it gets, the heavier the snowpack, the better. A
forest you couldn't struggle your way through during
summer without a chainsaw and a gallon of mosquito
dope becomes a stroll through the park when
the snow is two metres deep.

I snowshoe alone, always,
except for Bozo. Esther isn't much for the great outdoors.
She never misses a hockey game, but she leaves me
to nature. She knows I'm not going to get
my head smashed against a sheet of plexiglass, and she's learned
I'm not one for getting myself lost. And of course,
it counts for something that while I'm out snowshoeing
she knows I'm not hanging around bars getting drunk
and watching the strippers, which is what most guys my age do for recreation.

With
tonight's bright moonlight I alternate, going on- and off-trail, letting
the inner talk return for a while on the
easier going, then pushing it back out by breaking trail.
When the trail I made days ago runs out,
I keep going until, at the top of a
long, upward slope, I stop and squat down on
my shoes, nearly emptied of thought — and feel the
conversation restart. Ah well. I've got things I ought to be talking to myself about.

Out here though, it's ha
rd to fuss — except about Bozo, who has gotten
nearly two hundred metres directly ahead, chasing a
rabbit she's flushed. I reach into my pocket and
pull out the dog whistle. A single, inaudible-to-me burst brings her
to a halt. Reluctantly, she lets the rabbit disappear into the trees and, lying down in the snow, waits for
me to come to her. It's her way of complying without quite obeying.

We tramp across the wide bowl of an open
meadow side by side, and at the next hilltop find
ourselves looking to the south along a gentle slope of mixed
poplar and pine as pretty as a Christmas car
d. At the bottom of it, a half kilometre
away, is the construction site of the university campus. We've come more than four kilometres.

Under
the blanket of new-fallen snow, the site looks like
a Christmas card too. But the reality — I
feel a mental hiccup as the conversation kicks to life again
— is the usual pipe dream. I remind myself
that beneath this particular Christmas card lies Mantua's curr
ent version of the monorail and the power dams, and,
except for the smaller scale, this one is as big a
fiasco as the others. When the campaign to get it
built began, the project boosters blew it up like it
would make Christmas every day for Mantua: business as usual in the North.

Stillness, stillness is what you came for. Stillness is
all. And inside it I see the pattern of things: light
and dark, mud and snow, brainlessness and graceful beauty. Where am I in this?

I'm at home, one of the idiots. I'm cut fr
om the same cheap cloth as everyone here. But the
re's something else, as of today. I'm now implicated
in this mess as much as it's possible to be:
not just a procurer and producer but a
father, like my father before me — wher
ever the poor drunken sonofabitch may be.

I'd like to stay here on this hilltop
and enjoy these airy thoughts, but this isn't a country
that lets you have those kinds of luxuries for very long.
A whiff of sulphur from the pulp mills,
carried southwest on the cold front, reminds me of
where it is I live. So does the
cold beginning to penetrate the wool that protects me.
My nose is running, and Bozo is snuffling impatiently at
my mitts, wanting to get on with it. She doesn't
care which way we go, but she thinks it's time to move.

On the way back the moonlight is at my back, and the winter-whitened trunks of the poplars are a ghostlier
silver than I can remember, etched with ebony wher
e the young boughs have withered and broken o
ff. Prettier than a Christmas card, even
if doesn't smell anything like Christmas. Maybe that's what I
came here to figure out: that I can't stand still.

It's after midnight by the time we
arrive back at the house. Esther and Wendel are
sitting at the kitchen table with pads of foolscap, furiously
making lists. Esther looks up at me as I enter
and smiles. She's unperturbed by my long absence, her mind
evidently — thankfully — on other things. I hope it isn't a hockey tournament. But if it is, I can imagine worse things.

Just barely.