When Is a Man (24 page)

Sometimes at night, on his way back from the bathroom, he would pop into his storage closet for a minute or two. If he was greeted with dead silence, he would return to the bedroom. If he heard any noise, even the low rumblings of music or conversation, he would linger to see where things were headed. It was juvenile and creepy, so utterly unlike anything he'd ever done that he found it easy to disassociate himself from the weird guy under the stairs and not feel guilty when he shared coffee with Jory and Sonya the next day. One night after he'd been upstairs working on transcriptions with Sonya, he was rewarded—if one could call it that—with the steadily increasing pulse of bedsprings and, afterwards, the padding of feet toward the bathroom and the running of water. Her voice had been largely absent except where Paul imagined it. Only Jory's loud, enthusiastic gasps and exhortations made it into the mix. Paul scavenged on the auditory leftovers, the discarded sounds of their good sex.

Maybe desire had been present all along, existing in different forms. How else to explain his vigour thumbing through documents and texts, the delight that thrummed through him after a decent interview? Or his sudden ability to bring people together, drag three men out to a snowy field to look at tombstones? This was nothing like last winter, when his blood had stopped moving and his body became a stagnant, tepid pool where cancer quietly germinated.

He was riding a buoyant surge of momentum, and a particular urgency. His research was rooted in the past, and the past was disappearing. An event occurred, formed a community, and then time worked to erase its every member. Most of his participants were aging. How much longer would Agnes Hutchinson live to remember long-vanished steamships and orchards, barn dances?

Other things pushed him onward—disturbing dreams, lucid memories of Caleb Ready's corpse, that brief glimpse of pallid flesh. Ready emerging as the valley's sinister legend. Either his death was a bizarre, cosmic act of karma—or just irony—or someone was lying to Paul. There were voices missing from the tapestry. Like Hardy's. There was no chance Cyril or Billy would talk to him again. That fact alone made Hardy Wallace essential, unavoidable.

FIELD NOTES:

The metropolitan creeps into Shellycoat. The ubiquitous iPods, Lululemon yoga pants, designer fleece tops, designer dogs (almost surreal next to the malamutes, shepherd-wolf crosses, and mountain dogs). Australian ski bums serving tables for a quick buck between backcountry trips. Real estate prices within town artificially inflated by wealthy Albertan oil and construction barons looking for vacation properties, former Torontonians who ski all morning and run their online enterprises by afternoon. “So why are you here, exactly?” they all ask me.

It's a paradise here, at least above the tree line. Below that, it gets a bit complicated.

A chance encounter with Lucy Wendish downtown. She points out a yarn and crafts store that used to be a dry cleaner's back in the seventies and eighties. No one from Bishop would take their clothes there, even though it was the only one in the valley: a rumour the owner, a former resident of Lambert, had received an “inexplicably large chunk of money for a scrappy piece of land.” But how many people from Bishop, I wonder, needed dry cleaning anyway?

Back at the McCulloch Dam viewpoint today. Most female participants remember the ugly side of the dam's construction. The hillsides and shoreline stripped of topsoil, ripped apart and compacted, bedrock blasted out, the constant sound of dynamite echoing up and down the valley. The fill piled in heaps, mercury and contaminants seeping into the river. Dangerous work, building the body of the dam. A wonder so few people died building it: six altogether, three from carbon monoxide poisoning, one from heat exhaustion, the others falling to their deaths during the installation of the penstocks.

Most men recall the construction with grudging admiration, the difficulty the crews faced fording the heavy machinery, the excavators and cranes, across the narrows. How they used barges on the upstream side to dump five hundred tonnes of fill. They compare that work with the modern hydroelectric projects in Quebec and Ontario, where engineers drill mile-long underground tunnels to divert water and the tunnelling is done so quietly it can't be heard or felt above ground. The men have made themselves knowledgeable about dams. Whatever else they feel about the past, they are unabashedly fascinated by the engineering, the sheer scale of these projects.

On the surface, my ethnography is a study of displacement and adaptation. The true project, though, is a mapping of the hidden continuity of emotions, the invisible but animate circuits that come together to affect the everyday. Time heals all wounds—wrestling with that old cliché. Generations of the displaced happily drive their motorboats over the submerged foundations of their own history. This doesn't mean anger or resentment can't still surface, the mind being less solid than earth, less solid than water.

In the winter cold I feel my surgery scars, a hollow clenching that could be all in my mind. The air around the dam is moist, an icy mist. Sheets of ice hang from the rocks above the stilling basin. Along the wall of the dam, weepholes weep icicles.

Talked to a very old man in a red Chevy at the viewpoint. This is what he chooses to do with his last years as a driver, what his truck means to him: he comes out here alone to watch the morning sun hit the top of the hills opposite the reservoir, or look at the colours of light on the water or migrating flocks of ducks. He remembers this view from a different, lower angle, when his hobby farm sat at the water's edge. When he's forced to give up his licence, he'll lose these mornings. It might just be the end of him.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, Paul prepared to embrace his first Christmas alone, without family, lover, or friends. He invested in decorations and ornaments, hung strings of lights on the back porch and along the kitchen window. Most of the town's Christmas trees had been harvested from beneath the dam's transmission line right-of-ways, sold outside the grocery store to raise money for the local junior hockey team or the Salvation Army. The young spruce he'd picked up for twenty dollars drooped under the weight of blinking lights and dime-store baubles—a Charlie Brown Christmas. He'd bought himself a single bottle of red wine, a small roasting chicken, some yams and frozen vegetables, and magazines to spend a day with on the couch.

Jory and Sonya dropped by in the early afternoon before driving to Jory's parents' house in Christina Lake, and when they left, he felt lonely. His parents, knowing Paul wouldn't make the journey home on winter roads, had flown out yesterday to an all-inclusive south of Puerto Vallarta. Snow either drew people together and enclosed them or else offered an excuse to stay apart. It was strange not to mind being alone while most people his age were all about family, or at least the idea of it. They'd procreated and made their parents into grandparents, or filled their apartments with pets or other things, and felt like their lives had come full circle.

He came across an article about run-of-river dams in one of his magazines. There was a picture of a small powerhouse beside a placid autumn river in New York State, a nineteenth-century milldam resurrected and modernized to supply hydroelectricity to the adjacent neighbourhood. The image was quaint: the preserved character of the antique brick-and-mortar powerhouse perched above the old millpond, the river continuing unabated. Of course, the reality was more complex—the article wouldn't have been written otherwise—but beyond the pros and cons of small hydro, what was fascinating about that particular dam was how it bridged and preserved both the past and present.

He had copies of photos of Lambert in the wintertime, Christmas in the valley. Black-and-white pastorals: snow stained by dung and scattered hay; roads and driveways plowed by a helpful neighbour; cattle, horse, and sheep pressed up against fences, browsing for winter grasses. Bleakness and desolation pressing at the fringes of each image. The photos were one way of tracking the physical losses directly caused by the dam—the homesteads and farmland, the milder climate and shelter of the valley bottom. But wasn't the lost intimacy of their community—the growing alienation between neighbours, between people and the landscape—the inevitable course of progress, regardless of the flood? Maybe Joseph Kruse was right, and the dam had only hastened the inevitable. To simply vilify Monashee Power would be to judge the actions of a man's limb separately from the man himself. He wondered what a contemporary Immitoin Valley would look like without the reservoir. Lambert had been a place desperately wanting to remain in the past.

He heard an engine, the sound of tires crunching snow against the curb. A few moments later, someone knocked. He walked through the kitchen and opened the front door. Gina and Shane. She gave Paul her usual grin, as though she'd only vanished for a day or two and not the better part of a month. Her chapped bottom lip was split and showed red. Everything about her looked parched and washed out, her hair dry and frizzy, a dusting of dried skin on her forehead and cheeks. He honestly couldn't tell whether she'd been beaten or was just on the tail end of a bender. Behind her, the back seat of the truck was packed to the top of the windows with boxes and bags. Shane looked as if he'd been crying, but now he squirmed from beneath her hand, happy enough to be somewhere he could set down his armful of toys.

She said, “I'd understand if you didn't . . .”

“Come in,” he said.

Shane kicked off his boots mid-march through the kitchen, then tossed plastic railroad ties onto the living room carpet. The boy flashed him a quick, shy glance, and when Paul gave him a solemn thumbs-up sign, he sat and played, his chin tucked against his chest.

“Tea?” Paul asked. She nodded, and he walked past her and put the kettle on. “I left messages,” he said.

“I know.”

“You've been staying at Billy's.”

“Sometimes he stays with us. He comes around the apartment at all hours. He gets like that.”

“Must be confusing for your son.”

“He doesn't really say how he feels.”

“Probably doesn't know what to feel. Do you think spending Christmas with Billy would have made things simpler for him?”

“Billy's not much fun during the holidays.”

Paul chuckled without humour. “I'll bet Grandpa Cyril's no barrel of laughs, either.” He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. Warmth from the stovetop crept up his back. She sank into a chair, her elbow on the table and her hand propping up her head. Shane had edged closer to the tree and tucked himself under the lowest branches, involved in a silent game, tracing invisible things on the carpet.

Paul said, “If it's because I can't . . .”

“Don't be stupid. I don't care about that.”

“You don't have to care about anything. We don't owe each other anything, I know.”

“I could have gone to my mother's place.” She scratched at her forehead and then studied her fingernail. “I didn't want the I-told-you-so speech from her today.”

“Or from me either, I guess.” He smiled sourly. “Speaking of your mother.” He told her about the pamphlets, how her group had used his work to further their agenda.

“I hope you don't think—I didn't have a clue. Good Lord, Mother.” She laughed weakly.

The kettle hit full whistle, and he moved it off the burner, then laid out boxes of green, black, and herbal teas on the counter. “I knew, this whole time,” he said. “I was worried. I still am.”

“I'll try that hibiscus one.”

“That's why I left those messages.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

He poured water in their cups and watched the deep scarlet flowering from the tea bags in upward-reaching spirals.

“So can we stay?” She'd sat up straight, slightly turned toward the door. In the living room, Shane was still crouched under the empty Christmas tree, surrounding himself with toy trains. He'd turned Paul's magazine into a floppy sort of tunnel.

“All right,” Paul said.