The Year of Broken Glass (10 page)

Fairwin' has chosen a life beyond reproach. He told me last night, as we were discussing the failure at Copenhagen this past winter, that his years alone on the lights gave him the clarity to see that we were beyond hope. There was something, some frenzy we stirred in one another that kept and would always keep us from coming anywhere close to the collective acuity necessary to come to terms with ourselves, and to live on the earth with dignity. His chosen path, he said, is the result of that understanding. Because, he said, given the slightest entry point the comforts of modernity are insidious, and the resulting ease breeds a laziness which the mind clings to covetously. Somehow, in his matter-of-factness and his accepting countenance, he related this without any tinge of condescension, regardless of the fact that I am, from his perspective, obviously one of the lazy who have chosen to buy into the collective mind's cheap delusions.

Which is fair enough, I suppose, though I'm not so certain all our innovations and efforts are to be so easily dismissed. Tidal power, solar and wind, geo-engineering and bio-mimicry, though they won't bring us back to the Garden of Eden—to Arnault's Lost Land of Mu—are certainly not to be scoffed at. I suggested to Fairwin' last night that he might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which he conceded, though he countered that my argument would be made irrelevant once there were no babies born but those of humans, and the earth and oceans were rendered toxic, scorched and entirely ugly, as we'd now become, with our desperate creations built of metal alloys and concrete and plastics.

“Don't flail outward any longer Miriam,” he'd said. “We're too old for that now. Turn the lights out and live in the darkness, as your precious whales do, and you will hear how saddened their singing has become.” Then he blew the candle on the floor between us out, said goodnight, and slipped silently away to his bed on the other side of the fort, leaving me to fumble my way to the heap of lambskins he'd set out for me, blinded, my eyes straining but unable to adjust to such an absolute, unfamiliar darkness.

Now Fairwin' leads the way back up his scraggy trail, which climbs like a stream in reverse, meandering upward. He hikes adeptly, the iconic mountain hermit, his feet unshod, over the mountain's loam and stone. I struggle on the steep sections, my feet sliding out beneath me. “The shoe is the root of our human ills,” he says. “That, and dehydration.” He leads me down a fork in the path, traversing the side of the mountain for a time, until we come to a spring, a small hole in the ground with a silty bottom and a foot or so of water held within it. There's a dented tin jug on a moss- and fungus-laden log beside the spring, and Fairwin' dips it into the spring and offers it to me. “This water filters down through fissures in the coastal range,” he says, waving his hand out toward the distant mountains we can see through breaks in the fir and hemlock branches. There is still a great plume of ash above the mountains to the north, though the westerly which brought with it the sunshine we've spent the day walking in seems to have broken it up, carrying it eastward over the hills, up the Fraser Valley, to the higher hills beyond. “It travels under the strait, then trickles back up here. It's as pure as it gets. Try it.” I take the water to my lips and it washes cool and complete through me, a great essence, an elixir.

The only rebuttal I can offer to Fairwin's very positional manifesto is one beyond reason, beyond words. It's what keeps me hoping, despite the dire daily evidence of decline and the very convincing arguments of futility, of
ignis fatuus
, set forth by Fairwin' Verge and the like. It's something I learned in pregnancy and in caring for my daughters. It's a very small and vital, a very elemental truth I would not expect Fairwin', whom as far as I can gather never fathered children, to be able to wholly grasp; and I wonder if any man actually, ultimately could. It has something to do with a deep interconnection—and by that I don't mean to invoke the scientific connotations so common in modern environmentalist dogma; I don't mean to slip into pat ideas about the air we breathe being composed of the same molecules Jesus once exhaled; don't mean to infer we're all walking on water—it's that underlying thing that interweaves us, like the mycelium to the mushroom, or rather the under earth which holds the mycelium. The rhythmic surge of the tides and currents upon which the salts and waters of the wide ocean fall and rise. Something like that, though perhaps without the poetic flare.

“There was this time, about a year into my first taking up qigong, a long time ago now, when I thought for a while that we as people might possess the necessary strength to evolve, with it all part-and-parcel, our technologies and luxuries intact.” Fairwin' takes the jug from my hand and bends down to scoop from the pool as he says this. I watch him, wondering if he's been reading my mind, or if there's simply something about drinking water high on a mountain from a deep-source spring that stirs such thoughts. We've spoken very little today, for two people walking together alone, and what conversation we've had has been about the earthquake and its aftermath, and Ferris. And the unfortunate timing of it all, him being possibly in downtown Vancouver when it struck—the last place one would want to be in the event of such a thing.

“I felt an energy upsurging in me,” he says. “Something I hadn't sensed before and didn't know the source of, something boundless and universal, and it felt so great it seemed conceivable that a shift could occur, something beyond ready explanation, some real spiritual awakening in humanity, and things could still be set right.” Fairwin' places the tin jug back on its log and begins the trek back up the path as he says this, and I follow. “But then I became accustomed to the feeling, it was simply that of my body's energy flowing properly, and the intoxication subsided and I realized that it was an individual discovery I'd made.” He stops there, as though that were the end of it, and quickens his step a bit, his arms hanging tautly at his sides, the two buckets of oysters riding against his thighs.

“Sure,” I reply. “But that implies it's a discovery that can just as easily be made by others.” Fairwin' scales the side of a steep abutment of rock, then sets his buckets at the top and scurries back down to retrieve mine. He leans in close to me as he takes them from my hands, his forehead and bushy eyebrows glinting with sweat.

“Yes. And no. A different mind might experience the same energy and make of it a conquering power, not one of healing. A corporate executive in New York might take up the practice of Kundalini and use the energy and newfound clarity to win a mega strip mining contract in Ecuador. It's an individual discovery, and each individual will make of it what their life's ground provides for. I was a hermit long before I chose to live in this way Miriam.” There's an intense resignation in Fairwin's eyes, not a sadness exactly, but an acceptance. “It was the most sensible and natural evolution of my being, but for another it might be to engineer rocket trips to Mars, or better ways to extract oil from bituminous sands. Which seems good for them, for their individual lives. But it's not so good for those whales you love. And it most probably won't be so good for their grandchildren either, though it's not going to be any spiritual awakening that's going to make them see that, not in the profound way necessary to realign things as needed.” Fairwin' takes the oysters and shoulders them up onto the rock, then reaches down and offers me a hand as I climb behind him.

“What is it then?” I ask. “What is it that's going to make them see?” I'm feeling frustrated with this now, this hopelessness Fairwin' has espoused.

“It,” he replies. “The actual damage. They'll see it when it's right before them. When the oceans turn and the earth's oxygen goes thin. When the heat comes and the famine. When those grandchildren can't properly breathe, haven't enough to eat—when the world's emptied of everything but us. But by then it will be too late.”

“But there are options Fairwin'. Radical ideas and possibilities for rejuvenation,” I contest.

“Yes, ideas and possibilities,” he counters. “And then there are probabilities. Which aren't easy, at this point, to live with, because they're awful and unthinkable and might mean you'd have to give up that fancy car of yours, hybrid or not, because regardless it's still made of metals mined and intensely machined, and plastics that poison those seas you so love. Our technologies are mind-boggling Miriam, I'll concede that. They're of the greatest complexity and accomplishment, but they're mostly damaging, and we've lost sight of what it means to live without them. We've lost the wherewithal to live in the world, with the weather, and the desire's not there now to learn.”

A quizzical look comes over his face and it appears as though he's going to burst into laughter. “Can I use your phone for a second?” he asks. I'm taken aback, it being an odd request at the end of such a diatribe. I reach into my pant pocket, turn on my cell and hand it to Fairwin'. He promptly hurls it from our perch to the forest below. As it lands with a crack somewhere beyond sight, he hoists my oysters onto the rock and resumes his brisk pace up the trail.

“What the hell?” I call at his back, but he doesn't turn as he hollers his reply.

“I just saved a bee colony. You'll thank me next time you drink your tea with honey.”

I scurry up the rock, grab my two buckets, and hurry behind him, not quite incensed, but agitated by his arrogance, his impenetrable certainty. I catch up with him just as we come to what I suppose you'd think of as his yard, the space around the base of his fort, a circumference delineated by the fishing float strands hanging down from the fort's underside. Fairwin' drops his buckets by a fire pit to the outside of the perimeter, a heaping pile of shucked shells already forming a midden beside it.

“What the hell was the point in that?” I ask him, indignant. “I might've needed that in the near future. We did just have a major fucking earthquake Fairwin'. My home was buried under ten fathoms of water yesterday, and that phone is one of the only things I've got right now.”

“And you won't make do without it?” he asks, and I can see by the cheek in his eyes that he's enjoying this now, my dander being up as it is.

“That's not the fucking point, you asshole,” I say, raising my voice considerably, and I realize that I'm enjoying this too. A good row. I also realize that this is what it was like the other night, us having sex, two lonely hermits taking it all out on each other. So I decide to dig in deeper. “You wouldn't have done that if we hadn't screwed the other night.”

“Perhaps not. But we did, didn't we?”

“Much to my displeasure, believe me.” I'm stomping up the winding staircase behind him now, raising my voice in congruence with the climb.

“That wasn't my idea was it, Mrs. Maynard?” He looks back at me from the top of the stairs, grinning.

“Well don't worry, it's not a mistake I'll make twice,” I bellow at him. “I'd rather service myself, thank you very much, than have your hairy heap of grunting sweat on top of me again.” I climb through the door as I say this and before me is Svend, presently bursting into hysterics, and behind him Ferris, laughing in a less gregarious manner, the Sohqui float cradled and glimmering in his arms.

The Eve of, or Deliberations

SHE
SAID, “WE should go.” This was like the parable of the forbidden fruit, but in reverse: she was proposing abandoning knowledge for bliss. He didn't fully know this, couldn't read her intentions, couldn't feel what she had felt all along, the insatiable pull of her to him, him to her, because his mind was like that of a long-caged animal's, desperate and withdrawn. She knew he needed the clarity of the offshore, with its seeming endlessness, to see her. So although she found her own words dubious, she spoke them nonetheless, and convincingly, because for her it was the understory beneath the words she was telling. She said, “And so Mu sank in a storm of fire and water,” and she was saying,
My body is an ocean. Dive.
She said, “Cursed to search the world over, for tens of thousands of years,” and she was saying,
I am your orb of perfect glass found, young fisherman. Break me open.