Basecamp Rail

By Nick Peat

Having just graduated university, Wyatt Meisner embarks on an adventure across Canada bound for Haida Gwaii, on the northwest coast of British Columbia. Accompanied by his two closest friends, Billy Kidd and Malcolm Browne, they realize early on that the only way to do the trip with any poetic justice, is to do it on the train.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Peat
• Release date: Dec 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301522613

Nick Peat

Nick Peat was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1988. He was raised there, briefly, before he and his family moved onto a farm near Rosseau, Ontario, where he spent most of his youth. He was educated at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario where he earned his B.A. He has spent several years abroad and has worked as a deckhand/seafarer. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Basecamp Rail

By Nick Peat

Published December, 2012 by Adler Editions at Smashwords

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Copyright 2012, Nick Peat. All rights reserved.

For Matt and Jon

Prologue

Haida Gwaii, Spring 2009

In Queen Charlotte City there was a used bookstore that sat adjacent to the Yellowhead Highway, a single stretch of road linking the north and south of Graham Island, the largest island in the Haida Gwaii archipelago. The book store occupied the second story of what I remember to be some kind of health food supermarket — not a big place by any means; likely owned by somebody independent who produced most of the goods for sale themselves. I don’t know if the place still exists.

Up a crooked set of stairs I can remember entering an open room with exposed timber beams on the ceiling, and walls sided with white-washed wooden slats. Books of all kinds lined the white-wash so that only partial bits of the wall were visible between the shelves. I can remember my eyes scanning the four walls from left to right, once fast, and then once again, the second time thoroughly examining what specifically lay on the shelving. I was browsing the books in this store because I wanted to purchase something to read that could speak to the nature of the environment that I found myself in at that point. I was interested in something written about its history or people, or maybe something written about the islands’ mushrooms — information about which ones I could eat, and which one’s would surely make me mortally ill. The only condition was that the book had to be cheap. In the back of my head I also thought that should I find something good, when I was finished reading it, I could give it away as some sort of gift to my old man, a token of my thinking of him despite me being so very far away from home.

My eyes darted from left to right, shelf to shelf. Like a typewriter. In my head I heard an inaudible ding every time I got to the end of one shelf and started browsing the next one below. For two walls of the room I did this. Surely there’d be some kind of gem hidden amongst all the rough. There were cookbooks, mysteries, guidebooks, atlases. The search wasn’t fulfilling my specific criteria.

Then my eye caught something.

It was called The Black Canoe. I picked it up and opened to the front jacket. Upon reading the two or so paragraphs inlaid, I discovered this book was in fact a photographic chronicle of Bill Reid’s famous sculpture that sits at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. The name of the sculpture was the Spirit of Haida Gwaii. It was a perfect find.

I skipped back down the crooked stairs to the till intending to buy the book right then and there. I was prepared to pay a little more for it even though it was used, what with the hard cover and all. She rang it up at forty.

Cash was running low, and I had only taken out forty at the cash machine that morning, so I weighed the options: If I bought the book I’d have no money for food or liquor until I returned to where I was camped on the west end of town much later that day. My cache of food and a few beers were stashed there. On top of that I only had enough Drum for one more smoke… maybe a smoke and a half if I was lucky. The situation seemed dire.

I bought the book. I threw it in my pack and left the store. It was about midday and I wanted to get several other errands done before I started back to the camp and met up with the others I was traveling with. I didn’t read the book until sometime later… a few weeks later actually. I rolled the last of the tobacco in the pouch, lit it, and drew hard. I started back along the highway.

It wasn’t until I was somewhere in Saskatchewan that I finally did pick up the Bill Reid book. It was getting on to sundown and I figured I could leaf through a few pages and try and tire my mind in order to make the night’s sleep on the train a little more bearable.

There weren’t many words as I recall, just photographs and a written introduction. I leafed through the photos: big blacks and whites that covered every page. The author, Robert Bringhurst, had documented every step of the construction process of this sculpture. All fly on the wall style. The photos ranged from the carving of the scale model to the plaster casting of the life size model to the bronzing of the final sculpture itself… it was an amazing process that few observers of the final work would ever be privy to without the information contained within this book. It was a very good find indeed.

In addition to the photographs, the author included typed captions. These explained the mythology behind each figure in the canoe. In accordance with ancient Haida mythology, each figure that was a part of the sculpture held a certain metaphorical and symbolic significance. There was a beaver, a dogfish, a mouse, a human, a wolf, a bear; an eagle and a raven were also present, and situated prominently given their high status in the Haida lore. Highest in the whole order however was the killer whale. In the presentation, the human figure holds a staff, and the whale is on the end of this staff — highest object positioned in the whole sculpture. This goes in conjunction with the Haida myth that the killer whale is the greatest and highest being in all the order of existence. Apparently, the killer whale piece of the sculpture — the smallest of all the figures — took Reid the longest to create. I found this all fascinating.

Most of the photos in the book were devoted to Reid’s toil with the nature of the work; his struggling to create from cedar a small figure that would eventually stand at scale hundreds of times larger in bronze. I paused and thought about this for a while as I watched the sun setting on the plains. The train whisked by field, scrub, bush and town.

There was something poignant in the idea that Reid was immortalizing an oral tradition passed down for hundreds of generations into a modern, man-made medium such as bronze. Since time immemorial, Haida craftsmen sculpted their views on existence into cedar and the local black rock known as argillite. Never before, at this scale, had anything been done like this in bronze.

My mind stayed transfixed on this idea.

The train was coming up to a crossing and the clang of the crossing bell snapped me out of my train of thought.

I decided to read the introduction after viewing all the photographs. The subject matter contained therein was much the same as the photo captions: explanations as to mythology and significance, form and idea. However, somewhere in the essay there was a shift into the history of Reid’s own life. I knew that Reid had died some time ago, but I had nevertheless a vague idea as to who he was (a work of his appeared on the back of a Canadian banknote; my father had one of his paintings hanging in our house back home). All that said, I knew very little as to his personal history. It wasn’t his struggles with identity — he was half Indian, half white — that got to me, nor his struggle bringing Haida art into the mainstream. No. What was heartbreaking about the whole situation was when I read in this introduction that Reid was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease during the commission of the Spirit. Parkinson’s: a disintegration of the central nervous system. Goddamn. It would have been one thing if he’d come down with a virus or a cancer, but to be denied physical access to the motors that allow one’s artistic expression to flourish —

That’s biological and spiritual injustice all rolled into one big ball of shit.

Jesus. The man’s a sculptor and he’s suddenly watching his ability to sculpt slip away. Christ almighty, I felt terrible when I read that — I felt angry. I felt like the only right thing to do would to be to punch a bloody window open.

What I was feeling right then comes back to me now with pure distilled clarity. It was as if at that moment Reid and I had locked into some kind of transcendental understanding — his spirit relaying a message to me despite the fact that his body had died years before. His message was so simple: that everything is eventually going to go for a shit and you’re better off to go about pressing on the best you can, doing whatever gives you the most fulfillment, regardless of whatever anybody else says about it. It was a watershed moment in my life. It seemed at the time that Reid — a force outside of myself — had just affirmed the way that I had been living for the last month, and affirmed that this is a damn good model to live by for the duration of one’s life. I’ve never thought about things the same since. It was a moment of enlightenment. How could I have not come to this realization before? I was awestruck. Everything that I had believed in up until then; all of the convictions that I held to be true — they all bottlenecked into this reconciliation with the nature of life — the nature of our short time thumbing around before we cash in the chips. I took a deep breath, got up, and bought a club soda from the dining car. The bubbly crispiness tickled and popped against the back of my mouth as I drank it in three long sips — I was drinking club soda because I was recovering from the worst oral canker sore I had ever had. The pain went away slightly from drinking the soda and I descended back down from the borderline-mystic onto the train eastbound for Saskatoon.

Feeling dumbfounded and brilliant about my unexpected yet very significant moment of enlightenment, I returned to the seat where I was camped, put the book into my pack, and watched the sun dip below the western horizon. As I floated eastward, all I could think about were the definite things that waited for me back home. An empty bank account being one. Something about it felt like I was moving in the wrong direction.

Chapter 1: The End of the Beginning

Ben Keith always knew how to liven up a party. And the final night of our careers as students was no exception.

It’s been one hell of a ride, cabrone, he said to me, holding a girl named Liz in one hand — his exchange student girlfriend from Australia — and a beer and a joint in the other. He passed me the joint.

I took a long drag. Yeah man, hell of a ride.

Ben was a few years my senior but had decided to return to school following a long soul-searching tour of Europe after quitting his previous degree in medicine. Like most of the friends now in my kitchen, we had all been drawn together through a mutual love of being outdoors and away from the campus; all of us not really connecting with the traditional varsity social scene that most of the other students took part in.

I wouldn’t have called us an irresponsible or anti-social group, but we defiantly lived life against the grain compared to most others. We gave very little regard to our studies (at least I did anyway) and instead immersed ourselves in the little cultural unit that we had created. This most often took the form of getting together on school nights or on weekends; driving to remote places outside of town, having campfires, getting drunk, getting stoned, playing music, exchanging ideas.

At the core of the unit were probably ten or so of us, with at least another five to ten on the fringes who would drift in and out depending on how funky they felt. In a way we were like a big family.

It was a bittersweet party looking back, what with all of us having just graduated and about to all split our separate ways.

Wyatt, brother. You think we should open a window or something?

I was a little transfixed by the gravity of the whole atmosphere that was enveloping the room at that specific moment — my place, my best friends, school done forever. Ben’s words pulled me back into reality.

What’s that? I said, blinking a little.

Window man. Think we should crack it open a pinch?

I thought about this for a few brief seconds.

Nah. Let’s hot box this place. Tonight’s the night to do it. I want to leave the house in a right royal mess in the morning. Keith Moon-style.

We both laughed and I grabbed a beer from the fridge.

Out of the haze, smoke and heat of human breath contained within our airtight ten by ten kitchen, Malcolm emerged from his room opposite our deep freezer.

Wyatt! I thought we were gunna try to keep some semblance of order about this place before we ship out come morning.

I paused to consider Malcolm’s rationale before I offered my reply. He and I had become like brothers the past year as we were sharing the bottom floor of this old house just off-campus. Everybody referred to this area as the ghetto, being that it was a shabby, cheap, and virtually lawless neighborhood where only students resided. I’d entered into the lease on this place at the beginning of my second year of study, after nearly dropping out mid-way through my first. Malcolm didn’t come onto the scene until much later.

Wyatt, he said, his words trailing off.

My mind was in another place and I started reflecting upon key moments in my recent history that could serve to explain why the present assembly of characters were in my kitchen. Away my thoughts drifted, farther and farther back, recounting various blips on my historical heart monitor, trying to coherently trace the present to a point of some significance in the past. It didn’t take me long to realize that most of my current situation had a lot to do with my meeting one specific person.

Billy was a wildcard. Son of a reformed biker and a nurse from the Ottawa Valley, he spent his childhood running barefoot through the boreal forests of the north as his mother, the primary breadwinner, traveled amongst the various Inuit communities along the Labrador coast, servicing them with western medicine, once a month. If the Mississippi had run through those woods, I’m pretty sure Billy would have rafted it.

The first time our paths crossed was just before Christmas of my first year at school. At the time I was just starting to get sick and tired of the regimented, institutionalization of everything. Disillusioned with what I was studying and unconvinced that the education I was getting was going to take me anywhere, I’d put the call in to my mother and old man that I was considering pursuing other avenues.

Around this time, I happened to attend a seminar that a grad student was presenting on something to do with the effects of colored plumage in the mating patterns of birds. It wasn’t that I had a keen interest in the subject matter, but the seminar was scheduled when I had time to kill in between two of my lectures. There was free coffee and cookies available for those who attended. It wasn’t a hard decision to make.

The lecture hall was pretty packed, surprisingly, but there were still a few vacant seats available in the back. I squeezed into one of these near the wall with a large coffee and a whole mess off cookies. I paid no heed whatsoever to the presentation. Feeling good about having just stolen a moment from the Man, I put my feet up on the chair in front of me and chilled right out.

I was right on the edge of nodding off into a mid-afternoon nap when all of a sudden a guy sat down beside me, bumping me awake with his skateboard. This guy was goofy looking; real tall, a bit lanky, with hair not real long, but unkempt enough to show that he wasn’t any sort of prep.

Sorry, dude, he said.

He wore a thick white shoelace round his head like a headband, keeping the hair out of his eyes. For a jacket he wore an old army fatigue with a couple of chevrons obviously hand-sewn on the shoulder and another patch sewed on where the name and rank were supposed to be. That name patch simply read, Billy Kidd. I assumed it wasn’t his real last name but thought nothing of it other than it seemed pretty hip to be named after an outlaw.

No worries man, I replied. There was a long pause. I took a few sips of my coffee and pretended to look gripped by the slide show, whilst also attempting to look like I was disinterested in striking up a conversation. Billy decided to break the silence.

So, what do you think about this material, man? he said.

Damn. I was going to have to start to make up things to say about birds. Who was this guy? He looked like he’d be more at home on a playground with kids I knew in public school, let alone at a university campus. Whatever though, I thought. If the guy wants to talk, I’m game to talk. I decided to start with the truth.

Actually, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not really studying what they’re talking about.

That’s cool man. So, what’s your major?

What was this? Spanish Inquisition? Might as well keep rolling with the truth. Actually man, I’ll level with you, I don’t even have a major yet — you see, I’m still in first year.

Billy laughed. Ha, ha, ha. You serious? I would have taken you for a little older than you are. One question though: if you’re in first year, why did you to decide to come in here, to scam free coffee?

You could say something like that, I said, raising the cup to my lips and taking a drink.

Far out, he replied, taking a sip of his own.

After our first meeting I ended up being introduced to Billy’s whole clique of people; characters much like myself who were into the same music, same books, into hanging out in the dark, local pubs. All of them were a year or so older, and lucky for me had already all come to the realization that the whole school thing is just a game and if you acknowledge it as such you can actually have a pretty good time. At that juncture in my career as a student, those were exactly the type of people I wanted to associate with.

The year went on and I became real close friends with all those guys. It was around springtime that one of Billy’s housemates was leaving school, and a room in the house where they were staying became vacant. I hadn’t really made any plans about where I was going to live during my next year because up until a little while prior I was planning to quit!

Be that as it may, I had been spending a lot of time in that house, hanging out, listening to vinyl. It had fake wood siding on all the walls that gave it a ski-lodge sort of feel. On the floor of the living room was a brown shag rug, and in the corner a big pot of tiger grass. Around the room Christmas lights were draped, and in the stucco ceiling the caps of every beer drunk therein were pressed. Overhead was a cosmos, complete with the constellations Orion, Virgo, Cassiopeia, and the Big Dipper.

There was no question as to whether or not I wanted to rent the vacant room. As far as I was concerned it was an honor simply to be invited into the house. At that time, Billy occupied one of two downstairs rooms, while another fellow named Easy occupied the other. His real name was Steven. He was a professional dirtbike racer — I mean real good, the off-road type with rocks, trees, mountains and jumps. He was studying Human Kinetics on the side in case his sponsor dropped him. He actually had a sponsor! I guess he figured he could always get into sports medicine if he had to.

The vacant room was upstairs, and I took it. With the house made up like that, Billy, Easy and I became our own sort of fraternity, probably having the most fun I’ve ever had within one particular period of time. The number of the house was 359 and we always joked with each other that we were just one degree short of a revolution.

After that year, Billy graduated with a degree in biology and went on an internship down in Mexico to index various types of cactus for an upcoming Master’s degree he wanted to enroll in. Also during that second year, through Billy, I met Malcolm Browne. He was also studying biology but was a killer singer-songwriter to boot. He gambled too, and taught me how to play a mean poker. I must say, it was through Malcolm that I learned the true art of the bluff.

I was working at a marina and living with my parents that summer when I got word that something terrible had gone down. I got an e-mail from Billy, who apparently heard via Easy’s parents that Easy had been killed in an accident out in the Rockies. It was something real bad, because it involved being in a remote spot. Apparently, some rookie biker was venturing into territory he shouldn’t have been, taking Easy by surprise, forcing him to correct the course of his ride at the last minute. I don’t think anyone really knows how it all went down, but fact of the matter is that Easy lost control and hit a tree.

Easy’s family only lived two hours north of where my folks lived, so I took time off work and made it up there for the service. It was small, somber. Billy dropped the internship specially to be there — an act that was, in effect, like veering off his preconceived academic pathway. The character that showed… I admired him a great deal for it.

I’d never been to a funeral before and didn’t cry, which surprised me. The whole thing was just a big shock. I think Billy felt the same way. That night we bought a bottle of sixty-dollar single-malt and proceeded to get pissed, just like the Irish. We sat on a granite outcrop overlooking trees, water and sky.

Not a whole lot of words were spoken that evening. A lot of cigarettes smoked though, and a lot of scotch drunk.

It’s just so messed up man, I said, trying to find the words.

Billy didn’t reply.

I mean, how something so stupid can happen so fast and change the whole course of everything? It’s just so —

Dude, please.

I shut up for a long while and just watched the sun set, the world growing darker. I took another pull from the bottle.

I guess because Billy was a little older than me I gave him a lot of respect. That