Travelling Light (12 page)

The idea is a precious seed Daddy gave me, and all the night and all the travelling will be sure to land me at the one, the only place.

At night out here, outside Visalia, when Johnboy rolls over and presses me against the wall, snoring, I crawl out from under and go stand at the window just to check that it is off the latch. I can see orange lights out on the highway. I look back at Johnboy's bulk on the bed, asleep in pyjamas, hear slurp and sloshing of the waterbed when he rolls again, and the sound of trucks out on the road. Sleep, baby, sleep, I whisper to him.

FATHER'S
SON

When my father had his first heart attack, the winter I was fifteen, I felt relieved. I thought it might weaken him a little, even the scales between us.

He was still in the intensive care unit when a massive snowstorm shut down the city. As his only son, I thought it was my duty to ski across Montreal that night to see him. I felt like a
coureur de bois
traversing our silent, boreal city. Stars sparked above Westmount Mountain. My skis left fresh, frail tracks on buried streets: the Boulevard, Côte-des-Neiges, Pine Avenue.

I found him on a narrow bed in the
ICU
,
wires glued to his chest. A cardiac monitor spat green light in the room. An intravenous feeder was plugged into his forearm, plastic tubing shoved up his nose. He was so glad to see me. I don't think I had ever seen him unshaven before. The white beard rasped my lips when I leaned over to kiss him. At that moment, in his helplessness, I loved him as much as I ever had, or would.

The
ICU
nurses adored his elegant manners, weird ice-blue eyes, beautiful hands. In a hospital bed my father looked nothing like what he was: an executive in a midsize conglomerate that manufactured industrial chemicals and newsprint. No, he was an old Viking. A
comitatus
elder. An ancient warrior with the North Sea flowing in his veins—along with the IV glop.

He was sprung from
ICU
at the end of the week, briskly dealing with office paperwork from his private room in the Royal Victoria Hospital. He bounced back fitter, twenty pounds lighter, and I came to understand that I had to get away or he was going to eat my life. Nothing grisly, only a kind of painless ingestion. Afterwards I might be spat out at business school, law school. If I was not sharp enough for the practice of law, I would doubtless prove capable of some position requiring a well-tailored suit. Something respectable, reliable, and offering total security. A job that didn't really exist, outside my father's imagination.

The ranch was where my life started. Everything before that felt like someone else's history.

On my first morning I was introduced to the top hand. A loose-limbed, sun-flayed man name of Rick Bean. The first cowboy I ever met. I had expected a big hat, tooled leather boots, spurs. Rick Bean wore spurs, but they were strapped on over Canadian Tire rubber boots. Instead of a Stetson, a nylon mesh cap from a farm equipment dealership in Red Deer.

He stood beside the corral, rolling a cigarette. We solemnly shook hands. His posture was awkward, tentative, as though he had broken bones that had never quite knitted together. His hand felt big, bony, and dry. He hadn't shaved, and his chin was covered with silver stubble. He licked the cigarette and stuck it between his lips. I struck him a match. He asked to keep the matchbook, from a Montreal bar
—
Sweet Mama's,
on Mackay Street
.
He wanted it to show to his kids.

Everything he did superbly was done from horseback. Rick Bean, I learned, had no feel for machinery. He distrusted loud noises and gearshifts. Brake levers and starter buttons never seemed to work for him. In the operator's seat of a swather, the machine buzzing and clattering like a giant insect, his eyes narrowed to worried slits. His brown face wrinkled in all its creases.

He had been a rodeo cowboy, had raced chuckwagons at the Calgary Stampede. He had won many events, taken some bad spills, and married a waitress met in the Stampede beer tent. She bore six children, not all of them his.

The Beans wintered at Pincher Creek and came up to the ranch every spring. They arrived in a smoking Plymouth Belvedere crowded with skinny children, towing a horse trailer, car and trailer crusted with pale grey mud. They settled into an old squared-timber cabin. The rancher advanced wages so Mrs. Bean could buy groceries. The local store did not extend credit to the Beans.

Rick Bean's horse was Prince Hal, a handsome chestnut gelding, a quarter horse with elegant thoroughbred lines. Prince Hal was by far the best cattle horse on the ranch, just as Rick Bean was by far the best horseman, the only really skilled cowboy, the top hand.

A few days after the arrival of the Beans, we were to drive six hundred head of cattle from spring to summer grazing. The cattle belonged to three or four ranchers who shared a Crown lease. I had no experience with cattle drives, and no one had time to teach me. An old, slow, fat mare was cut out, a saddle thrown on. I was given a leg up, and that was that.

To reach summer pasture, the herd had to ford the James River, a tributary of the Red Deer, milky green, chill, and silty with glacial runoff.

The cattle had been grazing in densely forested hills. Finding them was like a game of hide-and-seek. I concentrated on staying aboard the mare — her name was Buttercup — and getting my legs out of the way whenever she chose to scrape her fat sides against a tree trunk. Buttercup was slow and greedy. She kept stopping to graze and I had to jerk the reins and kick desperately with my heels to keep her moving.

We were a dozen riders advancing in a ragged line through the bush. I was thrilled, frightened, and anxious not to make a fool of myself. The strategy was to comb the hills slowly, gathering the cattle ahead of us, until we had collected the herd against a barbed-wire fence. Then we would move them down the fenceline, out through a gate, and down the road, headed for the river. Once the cows were on the road, all we had to do was keep them moving. Parked at every crossroads, women and children would keep the animals trotting in the straight line that would eventually bring them to the James. With riders keeping up the pressure, the lead animals would take to the water and the rest would follow. After fording, they would pick up the road on the other side and peacefully walk another mile or so, until a station wagon blocked the route and women carrying willow sticks waved the cows through a gate into a pasture where wind rippled waves of silver-green grass with a noise like bedsheets tearing. That was how it was supposed to happen, anyway, but of course it didn't.

The previous winter, still living with my parents and sisters in our Montreal apartment, I had obtained a list of ranchers from the Alberta Stockmen's Association. I wrote half a dozen letters begging for work. My father had no objection. I was trying to jump-start a life but he thought it was merely a question of a summer job. And he had his own lurking fascination with the West, in some ways deeper and loonier than mine.

He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1910. His mother was Anglo-Irish, his father German. When war broke out in 1914, his father was arrested and interned for four years at what was called a “concentration camp” for German husbands of British wives, at Alexandra Palace, a failed exhibition hall in north London.

My father was baptized Hermann Heinrich Lange, an uncomfortable name in wartime England. His Irish grandmother started calling him Billy. She had a son, also Billy, who had emigrated, joined the North West Mounted Police, and disappeared into the wilds of Canada.

My father left Great Britain for the first time when my grandfather was deported to Germany in 1919, after the Armistice. The family went first to a borrowed apartment in a rat-infested castle in Saxony, then to an apartment in Frankfurt, where Hermann/Billy, the Anglo-Hiberno-Teutonic schoolboy, taught himself the language of Goethe by reading and rereading the best-selling Wild West stories of author Karl May. May had not set foot outside Germany when he wrote them, and he never got farther west than Buffalo, New York, but his best characters — Winnetou, Old Shatterhand — roamed the boiled plains of Texas and the painted deserts of the Southwest, a country more passionately imagined than any Zane Grey described. May wrote of tribes, quests, warrior codes — matters close to the German heart, transposed to a different key, transferred to a North American Wild West. He was Hitler's favourite author.

In Montreal, fifty years later, my father could still hear the song May had been singing. He could imagine that he understood my longing to go west. He thought the West would toughen me. So did I — we were both German Romantics, I suppose — and one May morning I finally left home, with a friend, in a battered Ford Pinto we had picked up at a drive-away agency and promised to deliver to a used-car dealer in Calgary. My father was happy to see me go. Did he ever grasp that I was running away from him?

My bedroom at home was supposed to be the maid's room. Set apart, off the kitchen, it was the smallest room in our apartment. Pressing a button in the dining room sounded a buzzer in my room, but my parents never had a real maid to ring for, only a succession of part-time nursemaids and
au pairs, and by the time my youngest sister was four, the last of the hired help was gone and I inherited the room.

The morning I left home, he handed me fifty dollars and warned me not to drive at night, when all the nuts would be out on the road. My friend and I covered six hundred miles that first day, stopping long after midnight. We got a six-dollar room in a flophouse above a tavern. Lugging our rucksacks along the corridor, we passed open doors and men sitting on their beds in dingy
SRO
cells, drinking rye whisky and playing cards with women who were, we imagined, whores. Pronounced
hoo-ers
in Canada. The women called out to us with scratched, boozy voices but we were too shy to answer them. It was as far from home as I had ever been.

His beautiful suits were tailored in London or Hong Kong. His shoes, handmade, were arrayed in his closet like a leather regiment, each shoe polished to radiance and rammed with a wooden shoe-tree.

We were Catholics. One of his rules was Mass on Sunday
.
A supplementary was jacket and tie
.
He selected my tweed jackets and chose every tie. On Sunday mornings when I walked up the church path, he walked beside me, throwing me frustrated, compulsive blue-eyed glances. I always tried to ignore them. My mother stood waiting for me to open the door. As I reached for the handle, he got behind me. He made his move. I felt his fingertips on my neck — he couldn't stop himself, he never could. My spine stiffened, my shoulders twitched. My father turned down the collar of my overcoat and smoothed it flat, and I shuddered, twisted, ducked into church, smouldering with resentment. Hating his touch.

I do not remember much about the Canada we crossed that spring, only its emptiness and strangeness. And the cowboy boots and lime-green jeans men wore at truck stops in southern Saskatchewan. The coolness of rubber floor mats against my bare feet. The litter of maps, torn and badly folded. My arm hung out the window, my palm cutting and planing on the seventy-mile-per-hour breeze.

We slept the last night in a field outside Medicine Hat, reached Calgary the next day, delivered the Pinto, and split up, as planned. I caught a Greyhound up to Caroline, Alberta, where I had been promised a job.

The oil boom of the mid-seventies had created a labour shortage in western Canada, otherwise no rancher would have hired someone like me. Boys raised on farms and ranches were all in Calgary earning twelve dollars an hour as union carpenters on condominium projects, or up on the Athabaska tar sands, operating backhoes the size of buildings.

It would be understatement to say that I was unprepared for the ranch. In our family there was no masculine tradition of physical labour, craftsmanship, or even general handiness. I never saw my father grasp any tools except a pen and a cigar clipper. We lived in an apartment, with a janitor to fix anything that went wrong.

I had expected a mythic landscape: stark plains, vast skies, plateaus, knobs of red rock. A singing wind. I'd seen the John Ford movies, and the West I had constructed was, of course, a spiritual condition, not a place.
Get tough. Get lonesome.
Get hard.
It wasn't Alberta I was aiming for, it was independence. Separation. The freedom to make my own moves, even if they were disastrous.

I was disappointed that the foothills around Caroline were small and tight — forested demi-mountains not unlike the Laurentian hills north of Montreal, where my father rented us a farmhouse every summer. I had come two thousand miles to be a cowboy in a landscape that could have passed for Quebec without the ski resorts, without the joie de vivre.

But Caroline, it turned out, wasn't much like home after all. The foothills were blanketed with aspen and lodgepole pine, not Laurentian birch and spruce. The James River — speeding, narrow — was heart-shockingly cold, a liquefied glacier. Standing on the roof of the hay barn looking west, I could see the limestone wall that was the Rocky Mountains front range.

The foothill ranches were small and many of the ranchers were poor. The district had the classic lawless flavour of marginal hill country. On remote sections we would find dead cows on the road with their hindquarters butchered off. Any driver who hit a cow and happened to be carrying an axe or knife in his car would help himself to free beef. Sometimes it wasn't even legitimate roadkill. We'd find carcasses of animals slaughtered and hastily butchered a hundred yards inside the fencelines.

Handguns were rare, this being Canada, so people in the beer parlours felt safe to let off steam by brawling. I saw a woman walk up behind her husband, who was sitting at a table — provincial law forbade anyone to drink standing up — and crack his skull open with a bottle of Coca-Cola. There was little traffic on the section roads, which were muddy and hazardous. Cows roamed the roads at night. Firebirds and Trans Ams, driven by nineteen-year-old rig pigs back from a season of drilling on the Beaufort Sea, smashed into ditches, rolled, threw up brilliant scherzos of flame. Pickup trucks —they called them half-tons
—
flew off bridges and bumped downstream on the current, crunching ashore upside down on gravel bars, spilling drowned cargoes of cowboys and their underage girlfriends. I saw an old man break a horse by bucking it down the main street of Sundre, Alberta, while dragging a couple of truck tires for ballast. This was the middle of the afternoon on an ordinary weekday, and I was the only person who bothered to watch.