Late Nights on Air (29 page)

Harry couldn’t recall ever dreaming about Dido, which surprised him. Perhaps if all of your waking thoughts are taken up with someone, then your sleeping mind has to catch up. He found himself carrying the dream about Gwen through his arduous day.

But it was Ralph, who would bury his face in the tundra heather and say he wanted tundra tweeds, a full suit made of the stuff and bearing its array of muted colours and its smoky, subtle smell, it was garrulous, poetic Ralph who would score.

They moved across the wilderness like a ragged troupe of toiling actors, it seemed to Harry, transporting sections of a colourful banner, namely the tents and canoes and packs. Ralph the gentleman duke. Eleanor the wise Queen. Gwen the moody princess. And he, the blistered and bitten and disgruntled fool. After a mere four days, he was so stiff that to get up he had to roll on his side and push with his aching arms. He took the huge blisters on his heels to Eleanor, who bandaged them. Took his aching shoulders to Gwen, who pressed and rubbed and kneaded. Gwen he began to call Kate, “Kate like the hazel twig,” since against the backdrop of so much immensity her small body seemed not fragile but intensely delicate, her eyelids like petals, her small ears astonishing.

On the fifth night, he assumed a new identity, haughty chef Rodrigo. “Pork chops Rodrigo” became the first of many such dishes. “Grayling Rodrigo” and “trout Béarnaise” and “boeuf ha ha ha,” all served with flourishes of theatrical bad temper. “My kingdom for a garlic press,” he would snarl. Or, with a snap of his fingers, “The Great Rodrigo must have curry.” And he would rummage in his pack and pull out the unexpected spice, earning genuine applause for his gastric foresight.

Gwen burned her mouth on his bedtime cocoa. “That’s the point of cocoa,” he told her. “I’ve lost half my taste buds!” she said. “You have far too many taste buds anyway,” he told her.

Ralph had brought along Farley Mowat’s
Tundra
, a fine collection of excerpts from the accounts of great arctic travellers, and that night he passed it to Harry, suggesting he read them to sleep. Harry’s voice recounting the adventures of Samuel Hearne (who coined the phrase
the Barren Ground
for the arctic expanse of treeless plains that he toiled across between 1769 and 1772), Harry’s voice carried from their tent to the women’s tent a dozen feet away.
From the 20th to the 23rd of June, we walked nearly twenty miles a day without any subsistence other than a pipe of tobacco and a drink of water when we pleased. Early on the 23rd we saw three muskoxen, and the Indians soon killed them. But to our great mortification it rained before we got them skinned, and the moss could not be made to burn to make a fire. This was poor comfort for people who had not broken their fast for three or four days … The weather remained so bad, with rain, snow, and sleet, that by the time we were again
able to make afire of moss, we had eaten the amount of one muskox quite raw. I must confess that now my spirits began to fail me a little. Indeed our other misfortunes were greatly aggravated by the weather, which was cold and so very wet that for three days and nights I had not one dry thread on me. But when the fine weather returned, and we had dried our clothing by afire of moss, I endeavoured, like a sailor after a storm, to forget past misfortunes
.

From above, in the never-ending light, their canoes and tents looked like separate fruits on a flat tree espaliered against a grey stone wall. Gwen’s orange tent, shared with Eleanor; Harry’s, lemon-yellow, shared with Ralph; Harry’s red canoe; Ralph’s silver canoe. Aircraft, or anyone at a distance, would have spotted them easily, which was the point, and became the point.

They were proceeding from lake to lake in the string of eight lakes that comprised Pike’s Portage into Artillery Lake. Harry Lake then French Lake then Acres. “This is where we can get lost,” said Ralph, examining their map repeatedly. Then Kipling Lake.

By now they were moving into the Barrens. The north-facing side of Kipling Lake had stunted trees or none at all, and any leaves they saw were tiny. It should have occurred to them then what lay ahead, but by day it was so warm. Their faces and hands burned, their fingers and lips cracked and split. They tied the canoes together in the middle of the lake for lunch, catching the wind which kept away the mosquitoes, and drifted gently to shore, where they finished their salami, cheese, bannock, peanut butter.

After Kipling came Burr Lake, large and surrounded by round hills, all of a height and bare, except for a few boulders sitting on top, dropped by a retreating glacier eight thousand years ago. In the simplified landscape you could see a very long distance. It was rather like a kept golf course, thought Harry. Beautiful lines, beautiful details—silver-grey lichen, tiny pink flowers. Easy to walk on, the growth ankle-high.

That evening he watched Gwen wash her hair. She knelt on a rock and bent her head forward, exposing the tender ring around her neck formed by the chafing collar of her wool shirt. She dipped her head into the aching-cold lake, quickly swept water over her head with one hand, rubbed in shampoo, rinsed, lowered her head into the lake again, again swept water over it. “Still soapy,” he called to her, and with both hands she scooped water and splashed it more vigorously over her hair, then grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her head, achieving sweet and immediate relief as he could tell from the relaxation of her shoulders, which were bare, her upper body clad in a faded blue undershirt, soft from use.

Birds sang in the background, white-crowned sparrows. One called nearby, a long summer call, another answered faintly on the other side of the hill, declaring its territory.

“My little trout,” smiled Ralph when he looked up from the fire and saw Gwen.

“Quasimodo,” grinned Harry, thinking of her hunched shoulders at the edge of the freezing lake, and wanting to be contrary and humorous and remembered.

It wasn’t the change of scene that was making things easier, thought Harry, or the hard labour, or the distraction of
sore shoulders and a sore knee. It was being removed from all possible contact. No mail, no phone.

On their sixth day they reached Artillery Lake, only to experience what would be the first in a series of shocks ending in something far worse. The lake, fifty miles long, turned out to be covered in ice.

They were at the southern end, a narrow fjord of open water that turned an ominous white in the near distance. Ralph climbed a ridge with his binoculars and didn’t return for some time. When he came back he was subdued and would only mutter, “a lot of ice.”

They had moved still farther back in time to pre-leaf catkins, red-tipped, on the dwarf willows, and to the first subtle blush of green on the miniature birches and alders. Yet it was June 22.

At nine-thirty in the evening, Harry retreated to his tent, away from flies and light and consciousness, away from people and things to do, away from Ralph’s indefatigable drive. Already they were crossing swords about how early to get up each morning and when to pack it in each day. He heard more birds and a stream in the distance. Then Gwen boasting about the dessert she was cooking. “Come and look.” He didn’t stir. He wanted a drink, not a bloody dessert. But his bottle of Scotch, wrapped with care in a sweater, and siphoned little by little into his hip flask, was going to have to last the whole trip. He held off.

With fiendish energy Gwen had made a version of strawberry shortcake: sweet bannock scones topped with
freeze-dried strawberries boiled and sweetened and thickened with cornstarch, and topped in turn with thick cream from a can. She brought him his portion on a plate and he had to admit it wasn’t bad. He lay in a corner of his tent, by himself, out of harm’s way, licking his fingers.

But Gwen’s achievement was a direct challenge to The Great Rodrigo, and so he redoubled his efforts, concocting in the morning a deluxe porridge to seduce her, the confirmed porridge-hater. A bowl of oatmeal topped with freeze-dried peaches, brown sugar, a dab of butter, his own special cream of powdered milk and Coffee-mate, a sprinkle of cinnamon. She ate his “porridge à la crème pêche” out of kindness and wouldn’t be coaxed a second time.

The next day, their seventh day out, they took as a day of rest, exploring and photographing, napping and reading. Eleanor sat quietly, waiting for creatures to appear, fingering the Saint Christopher medallion, cool to the touch, and shaking herself every so often to keep away the flies, like a cow in a lichen pasture, she thought. She and Gwen had pitched their tent on a flat bed of lichen. When she crawled inside, the floor of the tent scrunched like wrapping paper. She lay on her thin mattress of insulite, away from bothersome mosquitoes, and listened. Harry and Gwen were drinking coffee by the fire, washing dishes, talking. She heard an intimacy beneath the banter, and saw without closing her eyes the landscape they’d been looking at for days—rocky slopes covered with all manner of lichens, silver-grey, mustard, lime-green, soft-green; the exquisite balance of boulders left perching thousands of years ago; tiny leaves, gold, red; and pink flowers in clumps, scattered, as were
antlers left to bleach on the side of the hill, and animal droppings. The air holding the warmth.

She’d been so very tired yesterday, especially around supper time, trying to drive tent stakes deep enough into the ground—quite a wind then; but now the air was perfectly still, and a second wind was inside her. Lying on the ground, being reshaped, was like lying awake beside a new husband. Inside the orange tent the light was eternal sunshine no matter the hour, her burned face and hands gave off rays of heat. She closed her eyes. Pink flowers against lichen flashed in a near irritation of feeling, an over-arousal; the wedding bed again.

At first, they stayed in the narrow leads of open water between ice and shore, making progress of a sort. Sometimes the leads turned into wider channels and they paddled in smooth water under a hot sun. Where the ice was tight against the shore, they portaged, or if the ice happened to be smooth, they pushed their loaded canoes across it, but carefully, wary of falling through. Whenever they could, they lined the canoes, guiding them forward with ropes through shallow water until they got caught up in rocks, and then once again they were carrying everything on their backs over uneven ground.

Impatience made them bolder. Instead of hugging the shore, they began to push their canoes over long frozen stretches of Artillery Lake farther away from land. Ice-canoeing, they called it: one foot in the canoe, the other on the half-rotted ice, they scooted forward, ready to hop into the canoe if the ice gave way, and once it did. Harry and Eleanor,
who always paddled together, managed to hop aboard in the nick of time. But then they were wedged in place, surrounded and pinned on all sides by ice. Eleanor leant forward, she was so tired, and cried for a moment. They got free, finally, by pushing and rocking and breaking up the ice around them until they reached a portion that was solid enough to take their weight. Then off they went again, pushing forward with one foot, like Scott and Shackleton and all the other polar lunatics.

Deep water below, and ptarmigan off to the right—in three hours the only sign of life. By late afternoon, they were exhausted.

In Harry and Ralph’s tent, the larger of the two, all of them huddled in awkward silence, since ten minutes earlier Harry had pointed a finger at Commander Ralph and told him to fuck off.

“Harry,
do
something,” Ralph had barked when he saw Harry standing immobilized. The rain starting to fall, their packs uncovered, Ralph busy with tarps and with stones to weigh the tarps down. “Do
something.”

Harry pointed his finger. “You, fuck off.”

And so it was ice, rain, headwind, bad temper. Harry’s felt hat, beaten about by the weather, no longer looked quite so dapper. Yet when they walked across certain patches of sun-warmed ground, they inhaled the perfume of small pink flowers and it was the lightest, most papery, most northern of scents. Harry stopped and breathed it in, burying his troubled mind in a tree full of apple blossoms. A fragrance as different from patchouli as anything he could think of. If it came to that. And it did. It was a sudden thought.

Inside the tent, out of the wind and rain, they risked making tea on their little butane stove, and Eleanor took a restorative sip.

“‘Sweet are the uses of adversity,’” she murmured into the tension-filled air.

“‘Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,’” continued Ralph, “‘wears yet a precious jewel in his head.’“

Earning himself a wide and appreciative smile. He had picked up and finished the quote, just as her father would have done.

Although they were locked in ice, the air flowed—the bright, bitter light of June. For two days they stayed put on Artillery Lake, hoping the ice would loosen and move away from shore. It was too cold for flies, that was the blessing. Rain fell, then slowed to a drizzle, then turned into low cloud, then lifted.

Harry climbed a butte and saw goshawks and cliff swallows, a hill covered in purple flowers, and through the binoculars endless ice. Eleanor knelt next to a rock to be out of the wind and pulled out her flower book: the purple was Lapland rosebay, while around her blossomed low white clusters of small-leaved Labrador tea. Gwen made doughnuts, her arm coming floury out of the bannock bag, her face delighted by the boisterous encouragement from all sides, the cries for jelly filling and chocolate icing. She rolled the sweetened dough between her palms, formed rings and fried them, several at a time, in melted lard, then rolled the hot doughnuts
in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar, and Harry offered up his joke. “So a guy goes into a restaurant and orders a hamburger. The waiter brings it to him and the guy takes a bite and pulls a long hair out of his mouth: ‘Hey, what’s
this?
So the waiter takes him back to the kitchen and there’s the cook pressing meat patties in his armpits. ‘That’s
disgusting!’
You think that’s disgusting? says the waiter. You should see how he makes doughnuts.”