Speak to the Earth

H
e was born in a ditch, and he spent the first ten years of his life among secrets and bones.

In the tourist brochures the land is described differently. An hour and a half northeast of Calgary, Highway 9 pushes across the rolling Alberta prairie under a phenomenon of sky. The green expanse on either side of the two-lane blacktop is patched with immense and dazzling oblongs of brilliant yellow rapeseed or purple-blue alfalfa. In that place, an eternity of wind presides.

Suddenly, there opens before the eye a deep canyon. A sharp descent between ramparts of grey-brown earth cuts off the horizon and leads to one of the most fascinating geological formations in the great plains of North America. Bryan called it a ditch.

Long ago, as countless centuries crept by, the Alberta Badlands were gouged into the prairie by retreating ice fields, scraped by punishing winds and eroded by the swift current of the Red Deer River. The steep irregular walls of the canyon, gutted and creased, are composed of
rock, clay and sand that crumble to the touch; and in their slow decay they yield a treasure of fossils unequalled anywhere on earth. A lot of people, Bryan often mused, seemed excited by this fact.

His home town, Drumheller, Alberta, was famous for two things, both of them related to fossils. The rich seams of coal that had appeared inexhaustible to generations of miners and their families had played out long before Bryan was born, leaving slag heaps and burned-out caverns. More dramatic were the remains of numerous species of dinosaurs that had disappeared under mysterious and hotly debated circumstances. Whatever the secret of their extinction, they must in the days when they lumbered, slithered and ran through what were then tropical swamps and grasslands, have seemed masters of a world that would continue forever.

To Bryan, it seemed that every building in his home town and along the Dinosaur Highway sported the image of a saurian: the T-Rex Café, the Brontosaurus Motel, the Dinosaur Children’s Park. He lived, with his mother and father, above the Albertosaurus Stop ‘n Shop, a convenience store attached to a discount gas station. While the other kids searched pointlessly for something interesting to do in Drumheller, Bryan pumped gas, cleaned windshields, gave directions to tourists and wished he didn’t live in a community where all the interesting things had occurred millions of years ago.

The Troupe family business made money in the summer — when the valley was flooded with waves of
tourists gawking at the “hoo-doos” down the road or crowding into the Royal Tyrell Dinosaur Museum up the road — and lost it all again in the winter, when the waves became barely noticeable ripples. So, while Iris managed the store and the gas pumps, Norm, a resourceful mechanic, found work in the oil fields. Bryan was under strict instructions to keep quiet about his mother’s ongoing battles with creditors and suppliers. “Your dad’s got enough to worry about,” she would say. When Norm was home he and Bryan put in many happy greasy hours assembling an old Harley-Davidson Electra Glide that Norm had bought in a box when Bryan started first grade.

One spring, when Bryan was ten, Iris got a phone call from northern Alberta. Norm had been working on a donkey rig when a cable snapped and struck him, splitting his safety helmet with the force of the recoil. Iris had to go up north and bring her husband back home in a plywood coffin. Two days later Norm’s bones were laid beside his parents’ in the Baptist cemetery in Drumheller.

Not long afterwards, Bryan came home from school to find his mother sitting behind the counter in the store, crying, an open letter in her trembling hands. Gently, Bryan pried the page from her fingers and read that his dad had left him and his mother two hundred thousand dollars from an insurance policy.

“No wonder the crazy bugger never had any money,” she wept. “He was saving it all for us.”

On his last day of school that year Iris told her son that she wanted to go back to British Columbia. She couldn’t stand Drumheller without Norm, she said. She wanted to sell out and go home. Her brother Jimmy would take them in. What did Bryan think?

“Do they have trees there?” he asked.

Iris laughed for the first time since the funeral. “I’m pretty sure they do.”

“Then let’s go.”

Three weeks later Bryan and his mother loaded up the Harley and pointed it west.

Bryan enjoyed riding pillion behind his mother, watching the prairie roll by as the Harley purred along the blacktop. Once past Calgary and the foothills, they were embraced by the shadows and mists of the Rockies. They rumbled through passes, along the banks of foaming rivers, powered up slopes streaked and patched by sun, twisted through Rogers Pass and made a camp outside of Kamloops.

They rode into Vancouver the following afternoon and caught the ferry to Vancouver Island. About twenty minutes outside Port Albert, the highway took a long curving climb up the side of a mountain. At the summit, Iris kicked down through the gears and pulled off the road. Bryan dismounted and shook the stiffness out of his legs as his mother leaned the cycle on its stand, shut it down and climbed off.

Before them lay a valley and the mountains beyond, a rolling sea of green, patched with moving shadows cast by clouds that sailed peacefully across the blue sky. The light breeze carried the scent of the forest. From the bush along the road, birdsong trickled. It was, Bryan thought, nice. As different from the arid Badlands as it could possibly be. The scene calmed him, and for the first time since he had left home he felt glad that he was going to live here.

Iris groaned. “Look what they’ve done.”

“What? What’s the matter, Mom?”

Iris pointed across the valley. “The loggers.”

“I don’t see anyone.”

Then Bryan realized what she meant, and his exhilaration crashed. What he had thought were shadows on the mountains were gigantic treeless scars, some of them hundreds of hectares in size, as if some malignant disease had stripped the slopes to the bone. The loggers had left nothing standing. The ground was choked with branches, snags and bark, pierced by thousands of blackened, skeletal trunks.

“That’s clear-cut logging,” Iris said. “It wrecks the ecosystem. See that road?”

Through one of the blank areas a road had been cut into the side of the hill, and from it irregular trenches snaked down the hillside, gouged into the mountain by wind and rain.

“Yeah.”

“Because there’s no vegetation left to hold the soil,
erosion and mud slides carry the topsoil down to the foot of the mountain and clog the streams. That destroys the spawning beds.” She sighed. “Jimmy told me in his letter that things would look different from the way they did when I left the island, but I didn’t imagine this. He said that near Quesnel there’s a clear-cut that’s fifty kilometres long. It’s a bloody abomination, isn’t it?”

“You mean the whole island is like this?”

“No, thank God. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

It was evening when Bryan and his mother pulled into Nootka Harbour, the fishing village on the Pacific coast where Iris had grown up. They found Jimmy’s house easily — a bungalow perched on the rocky shore well above the surf. Silence rushed in around them when the Harley’s motor died, and the air was heavy with a delicious brew of strange odours. Bryan would someday be able to identify: fragrances of the sea, the forests and time. They dismounted, stiff and sore. Jimmy wasn’t at home, but he had left the door unlocked and a welcome note on the kitchen table, printed in pencil on a piece torn from a paper bag. Bryan helped his mother unpack the Harley and push it out of the way under the car port.

The next day Bryan drained the oil, replaced it, bled the gas tank and fuel lines, threw a tarp over the Harley, and never looked at it again.

A
fter she had passed out the tests, Mrs Richmond sat at her desk and crossed her arms over her bony chest. “All right,” she cackled cheerily, “you may begin.”

Bryan took a look at the test paper. Oh, oh. She couldn’t have, he thought. The witch.

The night before, Elias had come over to study, bringing a few CDs, a bag of corn chips, but no books. Typical. “We’ll use yours,” he had told Bryan. The two of them had watched TV for an hour or so, until Iris chased them to Bryan’s room. He had made the mistake of telling his mother about the big test coming up.

“Richmond gave us three questions a week ago. One of them will be the test, and we don’t find out which one until tomorrow.”

“In other words, she wants you to prepare three good answers.”

“Right,” Elias put in. “She figures to get three for the price of one. But Bry and I are going to fool her.”

Iris stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. She
curled her hair around the end of one finger as she spoke. “Let’s see the questions.”

Bryan handed her the question sheet. “It’ll be number one,” she said after she had perused the paper. “Take my word for it. But, to be sure, you should get ready for all of them.”

“Nah,” Bryan said. “She’ll want to squeeze us on something new. There’s no way she’ll give us the first question. We already did a project on it.”

“You mean the one you failed,” Elias added from Bryan’s bed, where he sprawled comfortably, two pillows behind his head and the bag of corn chips open on his chest. Bryan was Elias’s best friend, but that didn’t spare him from the sarcasm for which Elias was famous. Elias was the same age as Bryan — fifteen — and the two had been friends since Bryan and Iris had come to Nootka Harbour. His dad was a Coast Salish artist who operated a gallery in their home, and his Anglo mom was a writer whose poems were often printed in the local paper. Elias himself liked to write songs and pick out tunes for them on his old Yamaha guitar.