Up and Down (17 page)

“The
RCMP
had suspended the search after two weeks. Officially, he was presumed dead in a plane crash, even though there was still no sign of wreckage anywhere along the route to
his friend’s lake. It was odd arriving back here and finding the cabin just as my father had left it before his last flight.”

Landon got up and walked to the fireplace. I assumed she was going to stir the fire, although it was still burning nicely. Instead, she reached up and brought down the old leather notebook that was opened on the mantel. She sat down beside me and placed it on the pine box so we could both see it.

“This is my father’s. It’s a combination diary and flight log. He got used to recording his flights in the Great War and never gave up the habit. Here’s his final entry, almost certainly the last words he ever wrote.” She gestured towards the page.

I leaned down and read the words penned some forty years earlier.

“Earl Walker was clearly in a hurry that day. Earl Walker never saw my father that day, or ever again.”

Landon reached in one of the bookshelves, brought out an empty pill bottle, and placed it on the pine box.

“I found this on the kitchen counter when I arrived that day.”

I picked up the bottle.

“Nitroglycerin? Isn’t that an explosive?” I asked.

“It can be, but in this form, it’s a very common heart medicine my father was evidently taking. It’s a vasodilator, probably used to treat angina. But the bottle was empty when I found it. Just another piece of the puzzle.

“So I took over my father’s remote practice and spent every other waking moment searching for him. I mapped out his course to Earl Walker’s place and then drew a circle demarcating the huge swath of territory my father could have reached that day, based on how far the Beaver could have flown with full tanks. With a range of about 450 miles in any direction, the search area is more than 635,000 square miles. I’ve spent the last 40 years covering every inch of that vast expanse and have found sweet nothing. I even looked beyond the 450-mile range in case of heavy tail winds. But nothing. It’s hard to miss a downed plane with a 48-foot wingspan, but I seemed to have managed it.”

I shifted my position on the couch.

“You’re about dead to this world. I can tell,” Landon said. “Let’s stop here and pick it up in the morning. You’re in that bedroom. The bed is made. We’ll talk when you’re conscious again.”

I had been caught up in her story but realized she was right. I was exhausted.

“Thanks for sharing your story with me. You’ve had quite a fascinating life. Quintessentially Canadian.”

“Well, there’s more to come,” she replied.

I looked around the cabin and realized I hadn’t yet discovered a bathroom. That wasn’t a good sign.

“Um, where might I find the bathroom?”

“You can brush your teeth in the kitchen,” she said as she reached for a flashlight and handed it to me. “Otherwise, head out the back door and turn left, down the gangway and you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

I did as I was told and stepped out into the night. To the left, the flashlight illuminated a wooden catwalk of sorts, elevated above the ground. I learned the hard way that it was narrow, with no railing. When I climbed back up onto the catwalk and confirmed that I had no broken bones, I stepped carefully along the wooden planks to what I hoped would be a newly renovated brightly lit bathroom with a full shower and Jacuzzi. Nope, just a classic one-holer outhouse. At least there was a door. I did what I’d come to do, aided by the sound of rushing water somewhere nearby.

Ten minutes later I was horizontal in a single bed with a mattress that I figured was manufactured before the Leafs won their last cup back in ’67. Not that it mattered. I was so tired I could have slept perched on a fence post. The mattress sagged and squeaked as I searched for a comfortable position. I eventually found one and started to drift. Landon stuck her head in just as I was heading under.

“I aim to be on that shuttle, Mr. Stewart.”

“I know.”

Despite how exhausted I’d been the night before, I awoke as usual at 7:00 … Toronto time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in Toronto but on the shore of Cigar Lake in northern B.C. where it was 4:00 a.m. and still dark. I lay there drifting in and out of sleep until about 6:00 when the sound of Landon’s voice floated up from the dock. I extricated myself from the mattress that predated the Industrial Revolution, and planted both feet on the hardwood floor. Standing there in my boxers I stretched for about thirty seconds, doubling the duration of my standard weekly fitness regimen. Then I peeked out the window. Bad idea.

Landon had just hauled herself out of the water and back onto the dock and was talking to someone. I couldn’t quite figure out what she was wearing until I figured out she wasn’t wearing anything at all. It’s fair to say that I was not expecting to see my seventy-one-year-old host starkers on the dock. I snapped my head
away from the window with such violence that I feared a cervical collar might be in my future. She was still talking away but I was too far from the dock to make out what she was saying. I waited until I heard her come back into the cabin and start rooting about in the kitchen before I dressed and eased my way out of the room in stealth mode. I peeked through my fingers like a horror film rookie. All was well. She had donned a garish and reddish terry cloth pull-over robe of some kind, which made for a slightly more welcome sight than the one still seared in my memory from a few minutes before.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Well, good morning to you,” she replied, while cutting a cantaloupe she’d pulled from what I could now see was a propane fridge. I could see the tops of two tanks through the kitchen window. “I wondered if you were ever going to get up.”

“It’s only 6:10 and barely daylight. I’m normally down for at least another hour.”

“This is my favourite part of the day. The lake is glass, and relatively warm at this time of year. You really should take a dip before breakfast.”

“Um, thanks, but I think I’ll just take a shower instead,” I proposed.

She just looked at me for a moment and then very slowly shook her head.

“This isn’t the Hilton. I’m happy to tip a watering can over your head but that’s as close as you’ll come to a shower.”

I’m an idiot. A cabin equipped with a propane fridge and a catwalk to a single-seater outhouse is unlikely to offer shower facilities.

“Right, sorry, of course,” I stammered. “I’m obviously still waking up.”

She nodded and turned back to the melon.

“By the way, while I was waking up, I heard you chatting with someone down on the dock. Did we have company this morning?” I asked.

“Nope. I was probably just talking to myself,” Landon said. “Actually, that’s not quite true. I talk to my father as if he were still here. I have for years. I think it helps keep me sane.”

Sane? In my mind, talking aloud to someone who wasn’t really there wasn’t exactly compelling evidence of sanity. But I kept that thought to myself. I was standing next to the pine box and could see her father’s short and final entry in the logbook, still opened where we’d left it last night.

But in the light of a beautiful morning, I had to admit that Landon’s story was growing on me. It was just so Canadian. There was drama, a vast and harsh land, mystery, perseverance, and the resilience of the human spirit. I thought she was quite a viable Citizen Astronaut contest winner – except for the “seventy-one-year-old skinny-dipper who talks to her long-dead father” part.

When Landon was finished in the one-person kitchen and had gone to her room, presumably to change out of her red muumuu, I splashed some water on my face and brushed my teeth. Then
I braved the outhouse again and the resident mosquitoes, who clearly understood that an outhouse is the perfect hunting ground. There tended to be plenty of exposed flesh and the victim’s hands were, well, often occupied, having to contend with belt buckles, pant buttons, and the need for a steady and sustained aim, at least for the male species. Believe me, the “steady and sustained aim” part is tough enough in the dim light of the outhouse, and rendered even more challenging when smacking mosquitoes. I heard Landon rattling about nearby. On instinct, I reached for the flush handle. There wasn’t one. Then, on instinct, I reached to lower the seat. There wasn’t one. Okay, I guess that’s it then. I unhooked the door and started back up to the cabin. Then, in the blink of an eye, I was back in the outhouse, breaking several land speed records in the process. I also suffered some temporary hearing loss by shrieking at the top of my lungs in the close confines of the wooden stall.

The bear on the catwalk was halfway between the outhouse and the cabin. Still in my morning stupor, I’d been a third of the way up before I’d noticed him. Yes, he was actually on the wooden decking, standing on his hind legs sniffing the air, just as they did on all the nature shows. Back in the outhouse, I looked through a crack in the latched door and saw that the ferocious grizzly was still standing and someone was still screaming. Me. The outhouse was actually the perfect refuge given my suddenly tenuous control over various bodily functions. I saw Landon burst from the back door of the cabin banging a wooden
spoon on a pot. It sounded to me like she was ringing the gong to announce that dinner was ready – and waiting in the outhouse. I expected to hear “Come and get it!” but she went with something else.

“Go home, Hector! Go on!” she shouted. “Git!”

She kept up the pot percussion and I had the presence of mind to stop my crazed shrieking, though my ears were still ringing. I snuck another peek through the crack and watched as Hector lowered himself to all fours, stepped from the catwalk down to the ground, and sauntered off toward the woods. The beast was utterly unperturbed, stopping once to look back at Landon.

“Go on! Skedaddle!”

I smoothed my clothes, patted down my hair, pushed my heart back down from my throat to its traditional location, and opened the door.

“Oh, hello, Landon. I see the bear seems to have departed,” I remarked, feigning nonchalance while my knees knocked. “Was that you making that banging noise?”

She looked at me. She was not buying what I was selling.

“Right. I’m amazed you could hear anything over your bloodcurdling screams. I thought you were being probed by aliens,” she replied. “Mercy, you nearly gave poor Hector a heart attack.”

“That fierce, gigantic grizzly was about to attack,” I protested. “He was salivating and getting ready to rush me.”

Landon laughed. That’s right. She held her pot and wooden spoon to her midsection and laughed.

“Mr. Stewart, Hector probably didn’t even see you. He’s a very small, very old, nearly blind, somewhat senile black bear that you could probably take if you had to. Did you not see the grey on his snout? In bear years, he’s older than I am, and far more arthritic,” she explained. “I pose more of a threat to you than that ancient bear does.”

“Well, I didn’t really get a good look at him before retreating to the outhouse,” I said, feeling a bit sheepish now.

“Hector’s been visiting me for more than twenty years. He’s more curious than anything else.”

“Yeah, well,
curious
Hector looked an awful lot like
hungry
Hector to me.”

Twenty minutes later, after breakfast, I’d managed to bring my heart rate down to almost normal while keeping a weather eye out the window for a flash of fur. We sat down again in the same spots we’d occupied the previous night. Landon began:

“I’ll pick it up where we left off. I’m almost done. By 1983, I’d been living here for nearly thirteen years. Still, not a trace of my father or his plane could be found. By then, I was the only one still looking for him. Many assumed he’d gone down into a lake somewhere between here and Earl Walker’s place, but the water usually gives up some sign of a crash. A piece of wreckage, a broken paddle ripped from a pontoon, an oil slick, something. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That must have weighed on you.”

“Still does. Anyway, 1983 offered a distraction from it all. You probably weren’t yet born then but the National Research Council –
NRC
– started accepting applications for the first group of Canadian astronauts.”

“Right. I wrote about that in a speech a few years ago for the Science and Tech minister I worked for. As I recall, it was commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Marc Garneau’s first shuttle mission back in 1984, I think.”

“Yep. October 5 to 13, mission
STS-41-G
,” Landon interjected. “Long before the creation of the Canadian Space Agency, it was the
NRC
that selected our first corps of astronauts. Well, I was one of the more than four thousand Canadians who applied.”