Dry Camp!: How I Survived the Deluge

By Alfred Cool

 

Two loggers arrive in the DRY CAMP just days before a record West Coast monsoon forces a shutdown and evacuation.  Stranded, broke, cold, and hungry they reach their breaking point only after the local outlets refuse to sell them a few cold ones.  Alleviating the situation demands epic acts of heroism, but their ingenuit

• Language: English
• Publisher: alcoolbc
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780995807716

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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DRY CAMP

Surviving the Storm

A novel by Alfred Cool

Copyright © 2020 Alfred Cool

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9798652012137

Imprint: Independently published

DEDICATION

Viva! To all those who won’t live indifferent lives and to the crazy shit we did when we were unafraid.

October 18, 1977, I withdrew stale and broke from English classes at SFU before completing my 5th consecutive semester. I took a logging job in Beaver Cove BC, on northern Vancouver Island, 3 days before the record monsoon arrived. I was no stranger to rain, but this storm took and still holds 1st prize. Records show that Port McNeill, just a short drive from our camp, received 458.7 mm (18) of rain that month, of which 304.7 mm (12) fell October 21-22. During that period, five feet of snow melted from the local mountains. In Port Alice, just over the hill from our logging camp, it rained 325 mm (12.7) during the same 48 hours and 661 mm (26) the same month. Bridges and culverts blew out. Massive holes in paved roads, all power failed, mudslides shut down the highways, every beer outlet closed for business.

From these observations, you might safely infer my motivation was to find a way to escape the North Island. And I did, with a lot of luck, a little grit, and a 1964 Vauxhall Viva. The only thing missing was having a couple of cold beers.

The rainfall record in Port Hardy for a single day is still the 22nd of October 1977.

DRY CAMP

For the record, it's true that everything stops when your immediate demise stares you straight in the kisser, giving you time to recall the little things.

We were lost on confusing, deserted back roads somewhere north and west of Campbell River in the forbidding snow-burdened mountains. Our fuel gauge hovered near empty. The sun, which I had not seen in weeks, appeared earlier through a crack in the dense clouds, briefly highlighting the orange peaks before it dragged a soggy quilt of late twilight over us. A coroner, if anyone ever found us, would likely declare our deaths accidental. But that would be misleading because we had no choice—we had to get across. We made our decision standing on the wrong, crumbling bank of the rushing sluice of angry water smashing submerged boulders together like we were at a five-pin alley. The raging torrent had no business still being there anyway, but after days of northern Vancouver Island monsoons, we expected flash floods, and this one became our business. We are me, a student in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Drake, our lost navigator riding shotgun. Drake’s hands grabbing the dashboard, his eyes bulging, and his mouth wide open, was screaming. Our critical situation was that we soared, sort of, in Drake’s vintage Vauxhall, three lofty feet over damn-near certain death.

*

I’ve hit my story pause button. Look, you've either got this in you, or you don't. Before you decide about yourself, another truth I’ll share about those seven short days is that insanity and reality worlds can intertwine and become one. So, if you come along for the ride, you can decide for yourself whether or not you’d be in that car with us.

*

It rained for months through the Vancouver summer and into the fall. Heavy, West Coast rain. Already drenched by the latest October squall, I stood in another downpour at Curtis and Duthie, hitching to Simon Fraser University classes. Enough was enough! I’d had it. Besides, no one ever gets rides in that crap, especially not drowned rats.  It was time to change my game.

I must have been an inspirational vision: thumb stuck in the road, head down, unsuccessfully trying to ignore the pelting drops that soaked the back of my neck. I carried a murder of heavy novels in a droopy pack slung over my hunched shoulders. Gravity, as they say, was winning. My books felt like an anchor. My pack repeatedly slid off my shoulder while I readjusted the strap again and again with awkward and frustrated shrugs. Already late, I tried to appear nonchalant to approaching drivers as if the ride meant little to me. I had walked two miles from my basement suite rental at the top of Capitol Hill, so my thoughts had time to morph from depressed to bleak. You never get rides in the rain.

Continuing with the thematic continuity of my dismal commute, I picked at the vulnerable, open-sore areas of my life, painting the most negative scenarios. Carleigh had left me a year before to be a vet for elephants in Luanda or someplace near there. Because they deserve to live, she’d said, and she was right. We agreed to split up, but today it felt like I’d been dumped. She had asked me to come with her, but her life called her to Africa, and my life was still connected to this coast. I needed to be where the mountains meet the ocean, not where the lions kill the hated hyenas.

I had no bus money and had dipped into the rent money, so I was almost out of beer money. I had stared my last plate of box noodles and powdered cheese in the face. I had to change things. I realized I could add to that litany my social anxiety that I might be talking to myself out loud in public. I wondered, casually, if that might explain why drivers had not stopped.

My fourth consecutive semester taking a full load of English courses had me in a financial vice. I reached my tipping point the day before, at the conclusion of four agonizing hours in a secluded tutorial. Eight uninspired students and a bored professor had spread out around a conference table in a windowless cement bunker serving as a classroom. Five of them might as well have been self-imposed mutes. They took that prerequisite class, I knew, to qualify for the popular teacher’s program. Neither could I blame them for their lengthy silences because I, too, failed to discover or learn anything relevant that piqued my interest in the tragic, dreary life of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Discussing that drudgery eventually digressed to a mild disagreement between two teaching candidates over the preventative benefits of prophylactics and their boyfriends' responsibility to use them. At the end of the class, our middle-aged professor ended the droll discussion to expose his enlightened insight into Thomas Hardy’s classic tale of conflict between class servitude and noblesse oblige. People, said the learned man, did you ever wonder if Tess had big tits?

Right there, I lost my ability to continue to ignore being herded between lecture halls and bunkers and back again. I was disillusioned and bored with the curriculum designed to mould me into a drone. Very few people in my classes seemed interested in acquiring an education—most wanted a job. Sure, I had been lucky enough to take courses from a handful of great teachers, but just try to corner them for more than an hour a semester! Undoubtedly, the same administrators who needed bums in seats to pay for their tenured lives hounded the profs. Higher education? Too bad that moron showed us so little evidence of any.

In so many ways, that prof reminded me that there was a Zen-simple life of hard work, simple food, good sleep, and fewer pretentious post-adolescent megalomaniacs sullying the potential for education with their personal hang-ups about sex. Christ, it's 1977, man. You wanna screw your willing students, go get laid.

That was the straw and why, in my dark mood, my resolve to finish what I'd started deserted me, drained from me like so many raindrops poured from gutters. I succumbed to my desire for liberty and realized I’d probably made a mistake not going to work this semester. But I could fix that one—I was out.

Relieved and elated by my decision. I started to consider my employment choices. I needed money—and fast. I briefly considered driving taxi again, knowing they’d put me on nightshift, but nothing kills your spirit like sucking income out of the dark, nether world of late Vancouver street trade, where armed (too many told me) transvestite hookers wasted on barbiturates work for a living and excitement. I nixed that thought immediately. I wouldn’t save any money in the city. I needed to be in a logging camp where I paid next to nothing for room and board, and I could bank my cheques for school. My theory was still sound, and my resolve strengthening. I'd let the camp momma take care of me until Christmas layoffs. I had little choice anyway; I would go back one more time to lace up the caulks and go get the wood in.

I made my decision. After finally getting a ride, I joined the sprinkle of staff and professors already in the campus pub belting back an eye-opener. I felt like I made the correct choice. I sipped a beer while drying off and cemented my decision. A couple of hours later, I had just enough money left to phone the Logger's Agency. I needed to find a logging job until Christmas, then do this all over again next semester with needed bucks in my pocket.

I withdrew from my courses and made the goodbye for now rounds to my friends, who thought, predictably, I was crazy. I tried to explain that I had snapped but was not necessarily crazy. Expressing their classic fears, I heard, But you might get hurt there, and you might not get your degree. So concerned about attaining the assigned Rosetta Stone and living off it, they meant well. But I dismissed them as blind Eloi to the reality the Morlocks provided their comfortable existence but eventually demanded the ultimate sacrifice. Thumbing back down the hill in the rain, I stood across from the iconic, wet, grey cement bastion of education. The self-ordained book-priests can have it. I would never (until next semester) be Morlock fodder.

From the bottom of the hill on East Hastings, I slogged up to