Late Nights on Air (30 page)

They gave up waiting for the ice to improve and on June 28, they set off again, battling their way down Artillery Lake, skirting ice, or hauling themselves up and across it, or paddling in any open leads. Harry boiled over at the incessant headwind and slammed his paddle on the ice, almost breaking it, and he didn’t care.

“I almost broke my paddle,” he stormed.

Eleanor looked around from the bow of their canoe. “Slam your head into the ice instead, not something we depend on.”

He refused to go on. They were considerably behind the other two, in what would become their standard pattern, but he beached the canoe and stood next to a rock. Eleanor stood beside him. He said, “I’m not going any farther till the wind dies down.”

She felt an involuntary smile come up on her face, so she bent her head and walked to the canoe.

“Say something,” he said.

“I will. I’m just thinking.”

She said it might take a long time for the wind to die down. They hadn’t moved for two days. They all wanted to get ahead.

He didn’t answer, and they went on.

At Crystal Island the treeline cut diagonally across Artillery Lake as visibly as a long dark pencil mark on a blank page. They passed over the line into a world without walls, a land of rolling plains as exposed as the open sea. Their backs were sudden trees. Their hats were leaves the mosquitoes rested upon. Birds flew past their shoulders, like familiars. And at night their quiet talk around the little bannock fire was similar to the voices of the trees that spooked the early Eskimos, who ventured down in search of wood for their sled runners, but never stayed longer than ten days among the whispering, groaning wood spirits.

That evening they fell into recalling their first memories. Hers, said Eleanor, was of being blamed unfairly by other kids for breaking the eggs in a robin’s nest, and this was an English robin, smaller than Canadian robins, with bluer eggs. That might be why a recent thought had taken the particular form it took: the robin in the egg doesn’t know the robin’s egg is blue.

“Meaning what?” asked Gwen.

“Meaning that we’re blind to our own blind spots.”

Gwen nodded slowly, picturing the robin inside the blue egg and herself inside her small world. “Like my blind spot about religion.”

“If you want. Or like being in love with someone and not knowing it.”

A pause. “Who are you talking about?” asked Gwen.

But Eleanor wasn’t prepared to say, and then Ralph was confessing a first memory so personal and out of the ordinary that her point got lost for a while. Ralph’s first memory was taking the dry little turds out of his diaper and lining them up in a careful row on the windowsill. “I had a collector’s eye even then,” he laughed.

“But what was your mother feeding you?” cried Eleanor.

Gwen remembered a piece of white satin fluttering in her grandmother’s mahogany wardrobe, though it might have been a dream, she wasn’t sure. Eleanor suggested that perhaps she was seeing the future. Her own grandmother was a little girl when she dreamt about a soldier’s cap, then years later she saw the cap on her daddy’s head as he lay in his coffin.

They were carrying wood with them, having left the trees behind. Gathering up whatever driftwood they could find, keeping an eye peeled for any dry sticks. Gwen, Harry noticed, looked like a young girl in her red wind jacket and running shoes, one pant leg turned up, bending over the fire or gathering wood. One evening she sat on a rocky outcrop above Ralph, who was fishing from shore. Ralph set down his fishing rod, turned around, and began to pelt her with snowballs. She giggled and shrieked, hands in front of her face, then scooped up the same snow and fired it back at his head. Soon afterwards he gave up fishing and went over to the fire. Gwen came down off the rock innocently: Ralph? Want any help? No, he was just letting the fire burn down to have coals for bannock. Then a blood-curdling yell as he felt snow shoved down the back of his shirt and rubbed against his bare skin.

From his perch several yards away, Harry lit another cigarette. The spit spit of tobacco off his tongue. He heard Gwen offer to tend the bannock so that Ralph could take his evening hike. Ralph leapt at the chance and Eleanor went with him. Then it was Gwen and Harry by the fire. Every evening one of them made bannock, a thick, wide, pancake-biscuit of flour, salt, baking powder, powdered milk and water. They cooked it slowly, patiently, in melted lard in a frypan, providing themselves with a ready-made and speedy lunch for the following day.

Old worries had followed her into the Barrens, Gwen confided to Harry, lifting the bannock with a flipper to make sure it wasn’t getting scorched. Being all alone on the tundra—as exposed to the weather as she’d been exposed on the air—made her brood about certain things, like the flimsy shelter of personality. She was beset by radio dreams, she told him. She would be on a bus leaving town, for instance, and suddenly remember she’d forgotten all about preparing her program and she’d have to phone the station in a panic and tell them to play music.

“There was another dream,” she said. “About Dido.”

Harry lifted his head. “What about her?”

Gwen didn’t answer. She looked down at the soft-green lichens adhering to the rock, impervious to any wind, at the little twigs clinging to her wool pants. She was seeing the two loons that swam ahead of them earlier in the day. Most elegant red-eyed birds. Dressed in black stockings, it seemed to her, soot-black, pulled over their heads and down their long necks. And the white of their breasts, where breast met water, so white they might have been pushing snowbanks ahead of them.
Immaculate, until they opened their beaks and sounded like nothing else you’d ever heard. Sorrowful calls that reached to the horizon. Or rippling, demented laughs.

“What about Dido?” pressed Harry.

“Just that she’d taken all my stuff out of the filing cabinet and replaced it with her own things.” It sounded pathetic. She gave her shoulders a shake.

“She can’t take what you have,” Harry said quietly, “unless you let her.”

Such a lot to unpack from that slender gift of a sentence. Harry was on her side, but only if she was on her own side, and there were no sides, really, unless she chose to look at it that way. But Harry understood the dream and didn’t blame her, which was a comfort.

The contrast between comfort and discomfort was their daily bread—the pain of portaging and the bliss of lying in the evening sun, warm, fed, rested. A slight wind to keep the flies somewhat at bay.

But the sun wasn’t shining, and hadn’t been for days.

And then it was. On June 30 the sky turned blue and a canal as wide as a wide gateway (three canoes wide) opened in the ice on Artillery Lake. They paddled forward and it seemed biblical, blessed and childlike all at once. A pathway opened up through life. Winds couldn’t trouble them here, where there wasn’t enough open water to allow for any waves. For one enchanted hour the lake was less ice-infested than ice-enriched. On the bottom of the lake were stones so clear to the eye they could count every one of them, on either side was
the endless surrendering ice, beyond them the canal snaked around the very corner that would take them where they wanted to go, while above, in the blue-blue sky, one low and narrow cloud hung close to the horizon, a soft repetition of the ice on either side.

Cool air came off the ice and mixed with warm winds offshore, a combination that recalled for Gwen a summer job sorting strawberries inside a refrigerated truck.

Pieces of loose ice crunched under the canoe.

And then they were beyond the ice. The colour of the water changed—deep blue, violet, green—platinum where it was shallow over sand. The two canoes pulled apart. Gwen and Ralph, always in the lead, continued at the same pace, while Harry and Eleanor fell far behind. Bewitched by the bright shore of white sand, they stopped to photograph a line of small green clumps of moss on which tiny pink flowers described a pattern. Pale-lilac, and Eleanor identified them as moss campion, a cushion plant. “Look how it protects itself from the wind. So clever,” she said. “So persevering.” She looked up and smiled at Harry with such affection that he felt restored.

They paddled on. The open water was calm and shiny, the mosquitoes abundant again; in the bow Eleanor felt like a splattered windshield from all the bugs knocking into her. Gazing into the clear water she and Harry spotted a big trout with a silver lure hanging from its mouth. Also, a goose walking across the ice—walking, walking. Was it hurt?

By evening the two of them were at the far end of Artillery Lake, looking for the exit. Rain clouds had blown in. They could see where it was pouring to the left and right.
Around them the country was the same as it had been for some time, low and flat, except now they were working their way through back channels, and they were lost.

They’d last seen Ralph and Gwen quite a while ago, and the maps were in Ralph’s canoe. Ralph had misplaced his camera bag a few days back, setting it down on undifferentiated ground as he stalked a ptarmigan; it had taken half an hour of searching by all of them to find it. And to her chagrin, Eleanor had forgotten Dido’s medallion while bathing one morning. She’d removed the chain from around her neck so it wouldn’t slap against her skin, then not thought of it again until lunchtime when they were miles beyond where she’d bathed. She tried not to see the lapse as a bad omen.

They’d come too far. Or so they thought. They turned back and retraced their route and became even more confused and alarmed. Harry confessed he had no sense of direction. He told Eleanor about the infamous night in Toronto when he went to play poker at a buddy’s house for the umpteenth time, but walked into another house entirely, on a different block. “I was hanging up my coat when the owner came out of the kitchen. I figured he had to be the new poker player. So I said, ‘Where’s the booze?’“

Eleanor took the compass out of his hand and studied it herself. But it seemed wisest to stay put and let themselves be found. She suggested they pitch his tent in order to make themselves more visible. They did that, and the bright yellow material fluttering in the air reminded her of what Ralph had said the other night about the frailty of arctic explorers. Dehydration was the biggest danger, the desiccating winds. If they lay down, said Ralph, it was “bye-bye butterfly.”

A raven croaked as it flew overhead. Eleanor was grateful for the company. She asked, “Why is it that ravens don’t turn white in the winter like ptarmigans?”

“Ptarmigans are like us,” said Harry. “They need all the help they can get.”

An hour passed and a grim fear worked its way into his bones. He pulled his flask out of his jacket pocket, unscrewed the lid, and handed it to Eleanor.

“Your secret supply,” she said.

He told her about hearing a scientist say that cold, in the form of snow and ice, can be stored, but heat cannot. “He forgot about this,” he said. Taking it back from her. “To our wives and sweethearts. May they never meet.”

The liquor felt wonderful in every part of him.

Eleanor wrapped her arms around her knees. They were completely alone, apart from that passing raven. “My father told me his hair turned white when he was fourteen,” she said. “But I hadn’t the wit or the curiosity to ask why.”

Harry said the same thing happened to Amundsen when he was twenty-one. He spent a winter on a whaling ship in Antarctica and the experience was so appalling, all those months of darkness, that his hair turned white.

“So his white hair was a source of light,” said Eleanor.

Another hour passed. Beside him, Eleanor was quiet. “Are you praying?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Good, thought Harry.

The flask was empty. In an act that would ensure his entry into heaven, he had given her the last swallow.

“They’re waiting for us to show up,” she said.

“How long will they wait, do you suppose?”

“I wonder.”

Her prayer was ongoing and free form. At the moment she was talking to her father. She was saying to him, I’ve never asked for anything before, and now I am.

Aloud she said, “Maybe this is what happened to Hornby. Maybe he got lost. Maybe that’s why they took so long to get to the Thelon.” Then she said, “That goose wasn’t hurt. The one we saw walking? It’s moulting, that’s all. Moulting geese can’t fly.”

Harry put his arm around her. He hadn’t forgotten his boyish sense of a world filled with a divine presence and with many lesser spirits, especially in the woods, especially in the dark; he still believed that just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, or—more to the point—just because something
is
there doesn’t mean it’s seen. Here they were, he and Eleanor, completely exposed, pathetically visible, but unseen, lost. “We’re like Adam and Eve,” he said, and with those words he began to laugh, for an old limerick had lit up his mind.
In the Garden of Eden lay Adam
, he recited,
Complacently stroking his madam, And great was his mirth, For on all of the earth, There were only two balls—and he had ’em
.

Later still, they made a fire with what sticks they could find, and went on watching the water and a sky that normally was
too light for sunsets. But tonight, the prolonged colours of sun under dark cloud echoed the shades of the tiny pink and white flowers near at hand. There grew in Eleanor the sense that no matter what happened it was a privilege to be here, to see this vast tundra landscape that produced one-inch flowers and immeasurable skies. She thought of the Japanese artists who stood out in the weather for hours, simply observing, then went back inside to make their prints of the floating world. We’re being visited by the possibility of utter disaster, she thought, but what swept through her was a sense of joy: of dependence on a great personal Being somewhere far off yet nearby, and
our lives are in Your hands
, she thought.