The Haida Gwaii Detour

By Alfred Cool

Ethan moves to this most intriguing and spiritual of place on earth, Haida Gwaii. His bold story brings to life in the dazzling setting the unforgettable characters he encounters on the misty isles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alfred Cool
• Release date: Jan 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781775250128

Alfred Cool

Since 2010, the author has won awards in short story contests, has published e-fiction, and his short stories are published in three Canadian anthologies. He attended Simon Fraser University to pursue English as his major. Al enjoyed a lengthy career as a computer systems analyst and taught privately and as a college instructor. He is a member of the Federation of BC Writers and the Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Authors Association.

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1. Ghosts

This is more than a ghost story — but spirits do walk among these pages.

Ethan, your reluctant hero,¹ once asked me, How could anyone breathing or otherwise qualified sit anywhere but on the spiritual fence? Faith? I have faith the sun will come up every day in the east, because I’ve seen it. I have faith politicians, priests, and generals will enslave us for the same reasons. Do our chains rattle when we try to think freely? But I still wait to see a man walk on water or escape the grave. So what, exactly, is the message?

Here, without the benefit of any backstory, and although you have yet to travel a single mile with Ethan, your narrator begs your indulgence. I have to interrupt the lineal flow of this story to relate the event of Ethan’s first spiritual experience on the islands. He says such awakenings are common in Haida Gwaii and that each is important, unique, and intense, although his first visitor freaked him … right … out. Ethan sent me these pages, confident of the content. The sentiments are precise, he said, but he apologized for the language and tone; he was alone and in his new trailer. These are Ethan’s original words ...

I love a storm, but for three successive days it has been the same, and this last day is too much. Each bleak dawn, witch Hecate’s² disheartening landscape of boiling, grey-green turmoil and cascading rushes of white foam has materialized. Her voice is deep and leviathan below a piercing treble wail as she shoves logs, rocks, and wavy, textured sand runnels across the closed coast highway. White-capped combers stampede along the miles of beachhead before the gale, like an endless herd of monstrous beasts. Seashell spume streams inland, raking the flooded pastures with persistent yet chaotic wind. I have become too cautious to venture far from home, and no one has visited for days.

But this night! Another sleepless, starless, moonless eternity, the perfect canvas for Hecate’s outrageous brushstrokes. An avenging demon empowered by the darkness, she is relentless, driving forth waves of torrential rain; she wars across all the islands, but it feels like She discharges the brunt of her fury on our secluded community. The first intimations she had awakened came as whispers, but now she screams with violent hysterics, pummelling the exposed sides of my flimsy shelter. Here, atop the dune, spruce and cottonwood trees have twisted amongst themselves, bent low before her will, and flailed for days and nights to all points of the compass, but still she bares her teeth in wrath.

Since the disappointment of dusk fell away to night, I have had to grip my table twice with both hands to remain in my chair. I am tormented and exhausted to the bone. Dangerous gusts, her most powerful overtures yet, rock my trailer on its foundation and threaten to roll it over the bank, toward the river. The curvature of the sand dune and the backstop of trees on the far bank create a powerful swirl, a flanking vanguard that complicates the already potent maelstrom advancing with even greater force, fuelled by the incoming tide. I curse my affinity for Edgar Allen Poe’s vivid imagination. Surely this is the kind of withering tempest at the ends of the earth (or after nightfall) worthy of his notice.

I can discern her subtle changes, as if I am in the state of mind manifest during an evolving tragedy when the action turns to slow motion. I calm my nerves when the main strength of the wind lifts above my trailer and is aimed away from me for brief periods before she slams me again. Her thunder produces explosive echoes, a cacophony that arrives from distant miles. When this happens, and it seems to develop in cycles, the incessant treetop swordplay awakens my senses. Broken limbs torn from trees crash to the ground, and some hit my trailer; the interjections rise pointillist above the witch’s shriek, as if someone — or something — is drumming on my walls. I feel as if I am a recluse, that I suffer malarial hallucinations in one of Poe’s otherwise abandoned slaver mansions, startled awake by each bang of an unsecured shutter.

But the strains of this lonely night have developed a different tenor; an eerie, heavy melody plays a melancholy, withering dirge on the strings of my soul. In the cracked mirror, my Duchamp³ cheeks are hollow and my eyes sunken and withdrawn; my shoulders are uncollected. I will myself to seek equilibrium. As though unbalanced on an event horizon, I struggle against imagined gravitational forces. I rely on the tenuous logic (but with diminished resolve) that the trailer has so far withstood the storm’s worst.

Mentally, I have succumbed to distraction, although I still attend to, or rather fidget over my modest collection of letters and poems. Sitting at the small table at the windward end of the trailer, I am distressed that my windows leak. Again, I need to wring out the towels sopping up the water. My back is bent; I hover over my powder-blue portable typewriter and watch keys at my fingertips snap at the near-empty wash of white paper. I squint at the few inadequate words through the Pantone light thrown by the kerosene lantern. The coals in the small wood stove are turning to grey ash, but I am reluctant to stir outside to fetch more firewood. Instead, I covet my tepid mug of tea, fortified by the sweetness of Canadian whiskey and hoping for sleep.

Mine is the only light visible through the thickness of the storm, and though it is adequate to cast a weak illumination through the windows, it fails to penetrate the gloom of the black hole at the far end of the hallway. Always there, the open bedroom door menaces my musings. I fight my imagination until the persecution reaches a critical level. I am compelled, then, to break from my writer’s trance, gaze past the page, and focus on the storm.

Outside, an unexpected movement catches my eye. I stare at the window and see a contorted, shadowy face pushed up against the glass and then watch it fade back into the night.

I shiver; the hair is prickly on the back of my neck. An irrational terror paralyzes me, as if I am locked in a medieval torture device.

The indistinct face was inhuman.

I stare for some seconds, I’m unsure for how long, to give the uninvited visitor time to depart. When I can move one hand, fortune smiles on me; my slick palm and fingers still grip my tepid mug of tea mixed with whiskey. I gulp the rest, keeping my eyes on the windows. Despite the earthy reassurance of the strong drink, my forehead is wet with sweat and my shirt clammy. The fire in my belly makes me braver. I will have more courage, I decide, after I pour another whisky, then I will chase away mischievous neighbours — from any dimension — who play country tricks on me. I suppress my shock with numb logic and another gulp of whiskey before I gather the fortitude to investigate.

I retrieve my weighty flashlight from a kitchen drawer, but it fails after a brief flicker from the worn-out batteries. I improvise and second its functionality as a weapon. Steeled by another gulp of whiskey from the bottle and armed with my improvised club, I shoulder the outside door open wide. In return, the gale gives epic voice, barring my exit. I reel backwards, thrown almost off my feet. The force pushes the frame off its levelling cedar blocks and heels the trailer over to a dangerous angle but fails again to roll it completely over. I lunge for the table. I regain my balance and secure the wood stove until the extreme force relents and the floor assumes a more or less even keel. Unanchored now, it and the walls toss in every aspect as if they are loose, canvas sails. It occurs to me, as these moments of adrenal-charged clarity can appear during times of heightened anxiety, that my door opens to the west. How, I wonder, could such a strong wind prevail from the direction opposite the gale?

Someone — or something — is here. I feel it.

I am past timidity. The whiskey has fortified my resolve, so, again, I venture out with empty valour to reclaim my space. If I am dared to show myself outside, I accept the challenge. The lantern still throws light that illuminates massive raindrops blown on the horizontal past my open door. My legs are as heavy as bags of cement when I take my first tentative steps into the viscous, drenching downpour. I tighten my grip on the flashlight, and my shirt flaps whip at my arms and back. Drawn from my cover, I anticipate a violent confrontation, a growling emergence from the sand of an enraged spirit in a black and scarlet feather shroud, its bare claws digging at my flesh while its raven-head beak tears off vengeful, bone-deep bites. I stand outside my door, pushed around in the wind and soaked to the skin, but no evidence materializes to validate my suspicions of a haunting. Surely, I rationalize, if I walk around my home, my domain is mine to recover. But this is no night for rational dismissals; the same deep terror confronts me as I round each successive blind corner.

Having circumnavigated the trailer and failing to encounter an agent from another dimension, I am left to consider only a finite set of other, anticlimactic possibilities: the invasion might have been one of Monk’s free-range cows seeking shelter from the storm.

Monk, you asshole. I curse like a madman from the bottom of my strained lungs into the gale. Look at what you’ve done to this place.

I hurry to gather an armload of firewood before I return inside. My hands tremble as I loop a secured rope around the inside doorknob. I turn the kerosene lantern up full, light both propane lanterns, and am quick to strike a match to every candle I find in the bedroom. Eventually, an impressive luminous intensity radiates out of all the trailer windows. I am ashamed and embarrassed, but still I draw all the curtains closed.

I sit in front of the stoked wood stove and enjoy two more full, fortified cups of hot herbal tea. Once my jangled nerves have calmed, I remove my wet clothes, towel myself dry, and change into dry clothes. I even laugh at my folly. Then I decide to try automatic writing to conjure up a more agreeable muse.

When the visitor reveals himself, he has no shape and arrives without malice to fill me with calm conjecture and wonder. He speaks, or rather I sense a gentle, soothing rhythm that resonates with the approximation of a confident Scottish brogue — after the fashion of Sean Connery in the movie Marnie. I have the absurd notion that I have conjured the voice from within myself, but, as if dosed with Haitian zombie powder, my will has surrendered. I scrawl his message on my pad of paper. When finished, my highland visitor fades quietly away into the stormy night, and in his wake, I am left with this dictation:

This is a playground, a place in time, abundant in reality where others still hunger for more. Real people take roles in masques and can bewitch themselves.

And …

No one is guaranteed a stereotyped role, a spotlight, or even a script, and no one is immune from the final plot twist, and no one is guaranteed an encore.

Sure …

Youth and passion must be celebrated in radiant bloom. Invest your ration completely; it can end forever at any moment. Death’s strong first cousin, Life, draws us outward, where each of us earn our first breath — so enjoy it until your last. Life is the precious substance closest to your soul.

…and blah-de-blah blah…

I decide these musings are only my own sophomoric creation; I never liked Sean Connery in that movie anyway, so I crumple the pages and throw the paper ball into the blazing stove. The flames flare, the words glow neon orange, and then the white ash separates from the ink and drifts up the chimney and into the gale. I douse my lights and retire to toss through the remainder of the night, listening to the demented witch vent her outrage despite my humble offering.

• • •

The storm persevered well into the next day before it blew itself out. I toured Sçid Çándl on foot to survey any local damage, of which there was very little, before I was finally able to enjoy a decent meal and regenerative sleep. It took three days for a crew to clear the downed trees from the highway and two more before the electric power returned, but there were no reports of anyone lost at sea.

• • •

Thank you, dear reader, for your tolerance. By now you are well introduced to Ethan’s story. The next pages will continue true to Ethan’s heart and faithful to his experiences, which are the aspirations of any scribe. For the purposes of authenticity and presenting the plain truth, Ethan instructed me to remove his voice from the narrative wherever possible and produce all events in their natural order of occurrence. We can now return to the past, where the present seems so real, to the day Dan came to visit.

2. Visitors

When invited to visit for three nights, tell your host you can only stay for two, advises a Muslim maxim, but then depart after a single night and you will always be invited back. Dan stayed at Ethan’s house at the top of Capital Hill in Burnaby for three nights.

• • •

Two knocks on his basement suite door brought Ethan from his writing desk. Ethan opened the door to see his good friend, Dan, filling the frame.⁴ They formed and held a handshake and shared a confirming look of mutual approval. Dan was impressive, seemed fit, light on his feet, and taller and larger than Ethan, although most would consider both to be tall men. Dan was both brusque and physically understated, but he carried the strength of a wrestler with the finesse of a gymnast. Ethan had the lean, long-muscled build of a light-heavyweight boxer. Dan presented as a purposeful, blue-eyed mountain man; Ethan had evolved a more reserved reaction to the world, less a Hercules wielding his sword to solve the Gordian knot and more the quick wit who takes the time to unravel the tangle.

I see you still haven’t domesticated that red beard of yours, said Ethan.

Dan, whose shoulder-length ginger hair framed his ruddy complexion, stared at Ethan with steady eyes and nodded slightly. Well, do I have to stand here all day? Ethan threw his arm over his friend’s shoulder and escorted him inside.

Dan was the latest issue of centuries of stalwart Picts, the blue-faced Caledonian warriors who had battled Roman legions two thousand years before; the same rampaging devils who descended from the highlands above Aberdeenshire to pillage the farmers’ huts along the river Dee, snatch up their daughters and wives, and spirit them away to the lofty grey crags and deep green glens, where they lived Spartan lives but raised children free from the Roman yoke. It was those centuries of history, Ethan had said, that gives him his girth.

Dan was comfortable within himself and held quiet sway beyond his physical dimensions in any room; he observed and listened more than he articulated his opinions. To compare the three of us on those attributes, Ethan was the entertainer, Dan was the involved audience, and I was the scribe. A casual observer might see in Dan only the rugged outline of a powerful man, but beyond these twigs, Dan shared a delight for life, his humour, and his kind yet poignant point of view. Of course, Dan sloughed off this sort of description in self-effacement, but one enduring truth is that all great oaks stand on their roots and have solid heartwood.

Dan had come to the city to complete two tasks. He meant to purchase a specific one-ton truck, business he concluded on the first afternoon of his visit. With that transaction complete, Dan applied all his attention to Ethan, determined to convince him, within three nights, to drop everything, including his English classes at Simon Fraser University, and move to the mystical Queen Charlotte Islands.⁵ But the idea intimidated, even revolted Ethan, who considered such a bold change too experimental.

At supper the first night, the cafe was noisy and filled almost to capacity, so Dan, me, and Ethan sat at the bar at The Only Seafood eatery on Hastings Street in the heart of Vancouver’s skid row, feasting on raw and deep-fried, floured oysters after sharing several pitchers of palatable draft beer at the Anchor Inn. Between bites of the lemony delicacies, Ethan said, Thanks, Dan, but I’ll stay where I am. I’ll finish my English degree and become a journalist. For the first time, I’ve mapped out my future, and I’m sticking to my plan. He refused to entertain Dan’s or anyone else’s distraction from his goal. And for the record, said Ethan, it takes just as much guts, maybe more, to make a stand than it does to set off for the next horizon. Besides, I know how country life works: it looks good to a tourist, but there’s usually too little or too much to do, most of the women are pregnant and married by the time they’re eighteen, and almost everyone is out of work or working themselves into an early grave.

Don’t be confusing guts for laziness or fear of the unknown, said Dan. The rebuke caused Ethan to stop eating and his cheeks to redden. Dan held his palms up in front of his chest. I’m not here to fight you, only to rescue you. It’s just that life doesn’t screw you over, only making plans does. He made himself laugh (and I, Ethan’s faithful scribe, joined in), There’s plenty of logging if you want to work, but I do as little of that as I can get away with, and there’s lots of beautiful women there. Crazies, too. Dan’s eyes were confident and his smile genuine. Ethan resumed his meal. Some even have PhDs. You’ll fit right in if you don’t hold their education against them. I don’t know how you can stand it here. This ain’t you.

Five years before, Dan had emigrated to Toronto from Prince Edward Island. After a stint as a cab driver, he’d arrived in Vancouver with three friends who had pooled enough cash to buy a car and leave the Ontario city. They drifted into a communal house Ethan frequented on Union Street in Chinatown, across from Benny’s Market. Those artistic, rebellious friends Ethan (and Dan for a while) ran with, the Union Street crowd, considered holding a daily job the epitome of crazy. To them, the practice of domestication — a prelude to starting a family and suffering the day-to-day grind to pay down a mortgage — was the surrender of one’s purpose and freedom.

Ethan found his first forestry job in the same camp as Dan, where they shared a room in the crew’s bunkhouse. It was over those months that they solidified their friendship. I did not have the time Ethan had to become accustomed to Dan’s baritone (no trace of any heritage brogue influenced his speech), so I noticed he still invoked, here and there, a squeaky inflection into his charming East Coast accent — and he was prone to speed talking. His last comment sounded like Disainchoo.

I won’t go into one of those uptown joints, said Dan to Ethan, where the drinks taste like sugar and the men wear as much makeup and jewellery as the women. So, over three celebratory nights, we three intrepids visited Ethan and my own usual Gastown hangouts and notorious east end honky-tonks, consumed exotic Asian meals, and indulged in outrageous, enticing gossip. Dan stayed on theme, repeating his assurances that Ethan’s next move, if he still had the courage to make it, would prove fertile ground. The Charlottes will change your game, said Dan. School doesn’t teach what you need to know to write, does it? And don’t worry, no one will care if you’re crazy.

Dan’s challenge was blunt, but Ethan remained outwardly resolute and reasonable, and he disagreed with Dan on his second point: his unfurled idiosyncrasies sure as hell stood out.

Are you going steady with a gal now? Dan asked.

Just playing the field, nothing serious, said Ethan.

Then what are you waiting for?

Ethan respected Dan’s good intentions and his warm nature, which was why he gave so much credence to the barrage of cross-examinations. Ethan’s patience for his friend proved fertile ground for spawning doubts, which forced him to reconsider the consequences of his choices. Dan was right; despite outward appearances, Ethan felt under siege. I am getting old. I’ll be twenty-seven next year. That was the first time he admitted any anxiety over his decision to settle down.

Until he’d made that commitment, Ethan’s world was vital and adventure ruled the day, a truly intoxicating drink of immortality and recklessness only the young survive. He had entertained many of us with his stories, I recall with some envy, but he reserved for late nights his reflections on the women he romanced in his past. Wafting in the back eddy of Dan’s invitation was the doubt, a question, really, that troubled Ethan: was he still that person?

I’ve been dismembered on a creativity cutting board and murdered in pieces, he said, applying artistic license to the learning process. "I’ve been drawn and quartered; I’ve lost my own core because of too many tenured, ivory tower barnacles debating to impress themselves with esoteric bullshit like ‘the value of texture within the literary form.⁶’" Though Ethan had learned early in his first semester how to score high grades on their exams, Dan was right again: Ethan was uninterested in spewing back their formulated dollop.

On the third night, Ethan admitted he had banked his literary future on a worthless paper transcript available to anyone with the limited ability of a wild animal born into captivity to survive. So far, said Ethan, I’ve been trained to perform; all of my classes haven’t filled even one empty manuscript page worth keeping. The unintended autopsy had been performed; Dan’s surgical efforts had revealed Ethan’s uninspired body of work as a waste of time spent within the walls of a factory school.

Ethan expressed, with his rediscovered vulnerability, monumental doubts about personal dragons he might revive if he quit SFU. Did he still have the grit to escape that counterfeit version of his future? If he went, perhaps an island Circe would bewitch him and render him a captive and unable to return. A forestry job meant working in Hades’ shadow. The harvester of loggers, every hour of every day, kept Charon’s transport full to the sideboards with souls bound for the far shore of the River Lethe.⁷ Ethan eyes were open; the stakes of his decision were real: survive a half-life in the city or dodge hooded, frenzied Death slashing with his bloodied sickle at the human crop. But what investment in Truth could he claim, now or decades in the future, if he stayed his current course and slotted himself into the fold, if he failed to grasp this last opportunity?

If I started writing, who would I write for? asked Ethan.

The best and toughest critic you’ll ever have: yourself, said Dan.

When it was time, Ethan wished Dan safe travels back to his island paradise. Despite the wisdom of that visitation maxim (and no trite adage ever limited their friendship), whether for a month, a year, or three nights, Ethan’s door remained open to his friends. When they shook hands to say farewell, Dan said, You never answered my question: what are you waiting for?

3. Ethan Investigates

Ethan had already bummed around Europe twice. Before both tours, he’d refused to reread his European history. He teemed with the youthful combination of unseasoned scepticism and his desire to change the future and dismissed outright historical texts as the politics of reconstituted, conservative doctrine. Ethan would base his opinions on his own experience; he preferred his world unedited. He travelled to discover rather than to arrive with a preconceived, cultivated opinion. As a Canadian, he had more or less acquired the history of the world through the eyes of historians from Great Britain. He interpreted their justification of her endless European wars and internal strife as mere attempts (which he considered dishonest and feeble) to justify global imperialism and social engineering. Before he dropped one of his History courses, Ethan had submitted an essay to a professor infamous for issuing low grades to anyone expressing sentiments other than his own. Ethan’s essay on Oliver Cromwell began with the following controversial statement:

The sacrifice of innocents to religion has been required and perpetrated by zealot Puritans and Protestants of England and New England, the Catholics of Spain, France, South America, and Portugal. Transcribed texts since the earliest forms of written communication, whether Cuneiform, Sanskrit, Hieroglyphics, Greek, Latin, Mongolian Cyrillic, Persian, and including today’s dominating Anglo-Saxon, record how populations have always been tortured and murdered into submission and then enslaved. Roman legions marched across the known world, and before and since them, the warlords of China and Japan and the khans of Mongolia. Life was the same under the potentates of the Ottomans and the czars of Russia and deteriorated rapidly under the dictatorial oppression demanded by American Puritans until all was consumed by the Cold War, a deadly perversion of human rights perpetuated between the USSR and the American military and its corporations.

Youth has optimism, too, after surviving the nihilism associated with our adolescent years. Ethan wanted his higher education to be a daily search for its own grain of truth, for any salvation or confession found in any revelation that made sense of the world. He studied to make himself aware, if only in a rebellious sense, of the grandeur, the logic, the architecture, the art, and the connections between the ancient and modern empires. However, he struggled nearly alone and always in vain. He once coined a poetic, urban phrase, describing us all as imprisoned behind the veil of a Dark Ages fog, bound by feudal, corporate, and cultural chains.

After Ethan returned from his second off-continent backpacking trip, he wanted to know more about that world. He had attained untrammelled reality while he walked in foreign lands, but his ignorance had cost him missed opportunities for deeper insight. He read voraciously, carried about history books to catalogue opinions about where he had been and then compare that with his experience. Countries, then, still retained their own character, not yet homogenized by global corporations waging economic war on each other and spawning mass migration. Ethan had seen that Europe was reconstructed after World Wars I and II, but he still kneeled in respect to utter prayers on the beaches of Normandy and at Vimy. He had sipped red plonk at sidewalk cafés on the rue Jeanne D’Arc. He had enjoyed San Miguel beer in underground grottos and sunbathed on the beaches at Torremolinos, despite the intimidation of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía patrols. Armed with machine guns and their shoulders crossed with full ammunition belts, their mouths turned down, they followed Ethan with suspicious eyes. Before he toured Morocco, he climbed the Pillars of Hercules in Portugal. He walked the miles of cool, covered lanes in the ancient Fez market and feasted on lamb and couscous in the shadow of the Koutoubia Mosque in the Jemaa el-Fnaa souk market square in Marrakesh. He cursed the Roman amphitheaters and stood in rapture, humbled before the perfection and grandeur of the Parthenon.

Throughout Europe, he luxuriated before Art in the articulated salons of great palaces converted into museums. He lingered before wall-sized Goyas at the Prado and explored the humbling, inspiring Louvre, where he was struck by the original masterpieces of Monet and Cézanne and wondered at the fame of and the world’s fascination with da Vinci. Ethan ascribed crowning glory above all others to Rembrandt. He had enjoyed happy days in Amsterdam in awe of the architecture, Van Gogh, and of Heineken beer, and had, for a single night, revelled in dissipation at the Paradiso before he sailed across the channel to visit his extended family on the Isle of Wight.

Those experiences, and his inability to understand context, taught him that if he departed for the misty islands of Haida Gwaii,⁸ he had to know more about the destination, more than Dan’s rough outline of the archipelago, drawn on a beer coaster, after Ethan had pressed him about the islands where he lived.

• • •

Dan was returned to his life and our classes ended, so Ethan worked a steady nightshift driving taxi to earn his tuition fees. After ten weeks, he was only a faded version of himself. Our conversations were a litany of conflicts and arguments over the whimsy of Dan’s promises.

Every night, said Ethan, the wipers swipe the damn summer rain off the windshield of my taxi but can’t make clear why I’m still in this miserable city. Each day, he fell further into the waste of self-reflection, until he admitted he had reached his nadir. My life, my time, said Ethan, has become too heavy a sacrifice. I need a break. Paid out in seconds, my friend Ethan was waiting, he thought, for a future of little promise, a string of interminable nights and classes, and then desk jobs that will gut and drain me after endless years of dissatisfaction.

The latest wet twilight had settled over Ethan, just as so many had before, as one more empty, meaningless passage of hours, until it happened: his powerful revelation bordered on secular epiphany. My body actually tingled, he said. I had my old self back. His impulse was sparked by the white flash of inspiration; gone was his irrational worry about the future and his desire to further study the past. Once shed of that chrysalis, so unnatural to him, he was freed by another ordinary and yet emancipating thought: life is meant to be lived. What could be more natural, easy, and, yes, ethical?

The decision made, events fell into place without time for questions; there came a monumental, brisk succession of transactions that your scribe found difficult to assimilate. The next day, Ethan packed his beloved library into storage, gave away his furniture (I kept his desk for him to return to), and settled with his landlady. The day after that, Ethan left for the Charlottes. Before I saw him off at the airport, I made Ethan promise to diarize his experiences. Once again, I found myself envious and even a little afraid of his ability to change his life.

Ethan shook my hand while he looked me in the eyes. He said, Right or wrong, I want this. Without a shred of doubt, he hoisted over one shoulder his red and white hockey bag stuffed with clothes and his portable typewriter and slung his leather caulk boots over the other. He tapped the return ticket tucked into the shirt pocket over his heart, picked up his guitar case, and strode through the last door that barred his future. With just twenty dollars and his strong heart beating overtime, Ethan launched into his adventure.

When the frosted doors slid closed like two glass bookends, Ethan’s familiar form disappeared. I, your subdued but envious narrator, wondered if the last weeks of Ethan’s summer would evolve into a funeral pyre, a lifetime spent on distant shores, or if any of us left behind would ever see our friend again, and because of that, I vowed I would apply the best of my abilities, fueled by an unwavering devotion, to present this accurate account of Ethan’s travels.

4. Aurora

Just as Dan promised, Arnie, the bull cook⁹ and driver for M & B,¹⁰ met the plane. Folds of his belly protruded above the belt of his logger’s pants, held aloft by his strained red suspenders. His Captain Ahab beard performed inadequately to hide a fleshy face and neck. Impressions made in our youth stay with us, and Arnie seemed old enough that, as a cabin boy, he might have sailed on the Pequod. He refused to shake Ethan’s hand and made him sit in the back, but he did give Ethan a ride to Sçid Çándl via Queen Charlotte City, where they stopped briefly.

An hour later, they had stopped again on the highway across from the Sanders Ranch (Arnie told him that was where he would stop), which some considered the commercial centre of the Sçid Çándl universe. He pointed to the tree-lined lane across the road and said, The post office is in there. I gotta go. I don’t want to miss supper. He left. Ethan stood in the sun shards and shadows cast by the thin stand of storm-weathered beach spruce. He waited until the whining sound of Arnie’s tires on the asphalt vanished. Yeah, I know you don’t want to lose your spot in the supper line-up, so good luck to you, too, Arnie.

Ethan paused a minute to inhale deeply; his first steps in Sçid Çándl deserved his reverence. Dan was right, decided Ethan, his arrival felt incomplete, yet his expectations were not wholly unfulfilled.

• • •

Ethan met Aurora almost the moment he arrived in Sçid Çándl, and Fantine and Monk followed in close order, too, but even before he saw Dan or met anyone else, Ethan met Alice.

Both of Ethan’s feet were at last on the ground in Sçid Çándl, but he still did not feel there. He was disappointed that barking dogs, probably disturbed by his own arrival, shattered the anticipated tranquillity. He decided the driveway was as potentially deserving of a directional choice as any, so he carried his gear onto the Sanders ranch, aiming to find the post office and ask directions to Dan’s place.

Ethan emerged from the laneway into the open yard, which was protected from the onshore breeze by a stand of immature spruce trees. Walking out of the shade into the light, he felt the brunt of the late sun. Because the yard was protected from the breeze by the trees, the area smelled of salty manure. Several large green barns, two ranch houses, one a two-storey log building and the