When Is a Man (15 page)

When she was gone, he took the laundry he'd stashed in a cardboard box and washed it in the river, which was ice cold and beautifully limpid. The clouds had lifted to reveal new snow on the mountaintops. The hills ran yellow and crimson with changing huckleberry, false azalea, and mountain ash. He took the fish scope and explored Basket Creek. There were more redds, each one a patch of gravel more long than wide, plowed and turned by the female's tail, and lighter in colour than the algae-covered rocks around it. Males hovered in side channels, weary and resting. If he remained perfectly still, they brushed the scope's Plexiglas with their spotted and haloed sides. He imagined the first movie projectors, or the first person to look through Edison's kinetoscope: his intimate and startling encounter with light and motion, his primitive response.

Across the river, something moved on the hillside among the fall colours, a black bear foraging for berries. He and Gina had stripped all the bushes along the trails to the creek for their own breakfasts, and he was glad now they'd done so and left no food for animals. Later, a bull elk on the other side of the Immitoin lowered its antlered head to drink, and the rutting beasts bugled uncannily all through the night.

On a morning when he counted only twenty-four fish heading downstream, the female Hardy had shot appeared in the upstream trap. The missing chunk of flesh where the bullet entered still gaped, not quite healed. This time he put her in the anesthetic so that he could look at her on the measuring table. Most of her fins were tattered, her flanks scratched by branches or claws. But she had some weight to her: she had not spawned yet. She was the only female heading upriver that day. “You'd better hope someone saved you a male or two.” He recorded her number and returned her to the creek, and watched until she recovered and swam away. He never saw her come back down, though maybe she simply remained in Basket Creek until he and the fence were gone. It was possible she had to go farther than the others to find the place she needed.

The next day, sparse, slow flakes of snow fell. He drove to the Flumes one last time. Ideas and plans flickered insubstantially in his mind, and he hoped a return to the mill site would make them more real. As he went to turn down the narrow skid road to the bench, he saw a vehicle parked below on the landing. It took him a moment to recognize Hardy's truck. He thought about turning around, or driving on, but instead he pulled off to one side and cut the engine. He closed his door quietly and crept into the brush, keeping the truck in sight. Something moved near the crumbled foundations of the old mill, and he crouched behind a fir. Hardy waded through the dead grass, cloaked in a torn rubber parka, a fishing rod and a green plastic tackle box in his hands. He walked slowly past the axles and gears and sheets of metal, a slight limp in his left leg, and when he disappeared down the steep trail to the riverbank, Paul followed and watched him from the edge of the landing.

Hardy sat on a short log at the edge of the water, near where Paul had stood when Jory launched his kayak. A corroded metal band girdled the wood, and black-stained divots marked where nails had been. A piece of the flumes, maybe. The old man wasn't using a dry or wet fly, and the hook was bare. He didn't stand up to cast his line, didn't have much technique at all. The plastic bobber dropped into the water at Hardy's feet, and it took nearly a full minute before the current caught the line and pulled it taut.

The rapids had diminished somewhat, the boulders of the Flumes standing stark and dry above the water. The bobber drifted playfully through the whirlpools, then vanished downstream. Hardy reeled in the line, so slowly it didn't appear to be happening and let it back out, as if the fishing line were a finger that traced the contours of a material he owned, a familiar-textured thing like a favourite coffee mug or a beach pebble kept in a pocket.

He grew restless around camp, filled with a need to move, to do something. This had been a good refuge, and in many ways he didn't want to leave. But there was no real way forward here. According to
Dixon's Gold
, the word
immitoin
—from either the Shuswap, Kuntaxa, or Sinixt language, it didn't say—meant “sheltered place.” Before Dixon and the white settlers, the valley was mostly abandoned by late autumn. The different tribes and nations that had gathered for the salmon runs, or for the deer and elk, would have returned south to the more temperate Columbia River valleys or the Okanagan. This was a place to hunt and fish, to gather and collect, but not to dwell.

He read and re-read the newspaper clipping he'd kept from Gina's cook trailer. Even though it was a false image, the idea of a house or an entire town resting below the water had lodged in his mind. The people who'd been relocated—were they like Gina, harbouring bitterness? Or like Hardy, bewildered and half mad from loss? He certainly wouldn't be the first ethnographer to study people who'd been displaced, not by a long shot—but maybe that was a good thing. Or maybe this was just classic Paul, grabbing another idea out of thin air.

Deeper signs of autumn came: geese overhead, silhouettes in the narrow corridor of sky. Crossbills, jays, and finches appeared in the trees and shrubs by his camper, and he startled spruce grouse from hiding spots when he walked to the river. Frost hung on the fence and weirs in the mornings, and he could see his breath as he scrubbed the fence free of an astonishing palette of leaves: elderberry, alder, ash, cottonwood, red osier dogwood, birch, and willow. The Immitoin became sapped of light, the snow creeping farther down the mountains. At certain moments, he felt as if he'd already fallen in love and moved past heartbreak into an old, time-worn sadness.

He
was
sad, which, as Gina pointed out, was what he'd been going for the whole time. Yes, he'd come to the Immitoin to feel sorry for himself—maybe he should have savoured it more, really committed himself to being miserable and get it out of his system. But it was getting a bit late for that.

Each night, with the last fish tagged and released, he found his resolve. He drafted letters and a proposal, recalling the language and tone of academia. It was easier to consider his future at night, surrounded by a darkness he'd never grown accustomed to.

The morning before Tanner would arrive with the biologists, he counted only three fish. This was his last true day here. Tomorrow, he would have an hour or two of peace, and then the site would fill with trucks and a bunch of men standing around in a loose circle, sipping from travel mugs and laughing at inside jokes. He would be the stranger among them but also an object of curiosity. They would ask a dozen questions, examine the fence, and be disappointed there were no trout in the weirs. Tanner would say, “You should have saved us one.” Everyone would split into groups to walk the different reaches of Basket Creek and the Immitoin. Afterwards, he and Tanner would dismantle the traps, pull the rebar, and roll up the fence, and that would be that.

So he had lots to do on his final day. Take the fish scope up Basket Creek one last time, careful not to step on any redds. Find a stone from the creek, another from the Immitoin. Sit and drink something hot in front of the fire, roast his dinner in the coals, smell the woodsmoke, watch the ash drift. Feel the trout struggle in the net, all muscle, all willpower and motion.

Subject: Proposal for Ethnographic Research

From: Paul Rasmussen

To: Dr. Elias Tamba

Eleven hundred people were forced from their homes in 1970 by the construction of the McCulloch Dam on the Immitoin River. This is less than the estimated two thousand or so people displaced along the nearby Arrow Lakes and a far cry from the millions of people who will have been displaced by China's Three Gorges Dam upon its completion. Still, the Immitoin Valley provides a unique opportunity to conduct an ethnographic study of those who have been displaced by hydroelectric dam activity.

The displaced were farmers, ranchers, loggers, and veterans from both World Wars living along the valley bottom where the river widened into two lakes. Four hundred and fifty of them lived in the largest community, known as Lambert, which had resisted incorporation and had, for much of its existence, depended on steamships for transportation and access to the outside world. Unlike most nearby communities, including Shellycoat, Lambert began not as a mining claim but as a cherry orchard, planted by Dutch and German settlers. At its peak, Lambert's fruit production rivalled that of the Kootenays and the Okanagan.

The valley has undergone remarkable physical change. For most of those who lived in places like Lambert, the very landscape of home has ceased to exist. How did these rural farmers—many of them descendants of the valley's first European settlers—respond and adapt to this deep, irreconcilable loss? On the other hand, how have the children and grandchildren of these displaced citizens (as well as the displaced citizens who still live) benefited from the more modern communities created by the dam? These are some of the questions I hope to answer in my study.

One of the significant effects of the relocation has been the widespread dispersal of these people after the flooding. The government relocated many citizens to Bishop, which is now a ghost town. Thus, no concentrated population of displaced citizens can be studied through observation or immersion. There's no physical, tangible community, nor a virtual one (there's no forum or chat room for displaced Lambert locals, for example, and I doubt many would show up if one were created).