When Is a Man (4 page)

Inside the camper, they had stuffed Paul's gear into the overhead fibreglass cabinets and stacked canned goods, toolboxes, and batteries in the storage space under the seats. They wiped down the counters and the inside of the bar fridge, and then piled blankets and sheets on the sofa bed at the front of the camper beside the closet. The table at the back of the trailer could be collapsed into a single bed when the night's work was done. The upholstered white walls behind the gas stove and countertop, the thin beige drapes, the narrow windows—it would be like living in an egg.

They sat at the table and transferred data from the waterproof paper onto a spreadsheet on Tanner's laptop, while outside the generator rumbled and stuttered. Tanner poured a glass of scotch, and Paul sipped herbal tea, a blend that had the unfortunate slight taste of cloves. The whole process had taken them just over an hour.

“It'll get busier,” Tanner said. “In a few weeks, the run will hit its peak. Just enough so you won't get bored. You'll work for three, maybe four hours straight, not including the data.”

“Hope I'm faster by then.”

“You'll get there,” Tanner said. “I noticed your laptop—you have your own stuff to do?”

“I don't, really.”

“Thought you might be picking away at your dissertation.”

Paul traced his finger along the edge of his cup. “Not anymore.”

“No more parkour?”

The trailer had an ugly fluorescent light that made Paul's arm look jaundiced and stick-thin. He flexed his bicep and made a wry face.

“You should go back to Sweden.” Tanner laughed. “I love it—chasing Vikings and bog mummies.”

Paul wanted a drink, a nice beer, so he could pretend this was like old times, yakking it up in the campus pub. Nobody said booze was out of the question, but it somehow made sense to deny himself the pleasure of alcohol's comforting lassitude. Less likely to pee himself too. “When I got back,” he said, “I tried to salvage my research, tried to stay interested . . .”

Tanner nodded. “So you're done, then? In the department?”

Paul shrugged. “I told Dr. Tamba about this job. He said, ‘Since you're near Castlegar or Grand Forks, why not do something on the Doukhobors?'”

“And?”

“I said, ‘I'm not in Castlegar. Or Grand Forks.' Anyways, he was being facetious. He thinks I just grab ideas from thin air.”

“Well, don't you?” Tanner asked and shot back the rest of his drink. “Like the parkour?”

“Maybe the parkour,” he admitted. “All right, maybe every ethnography I've done. It's great fun, it really is, finding out what makes these groups tick, what sustains them. I mean, what kind of grown man would belong to a parkour club for five years? But it's true I've never found something I could really latch on to, not the way you have with bull trout. I want to keep going. Somehow.” He was an academic, he'd lived so long on research grants and university money he couldn't imagine another way of getting by.

Tanner was staring at his empty glass. He suddenly laughed—a vulgar growl. “Fucking
bloated
. Like a grey balloon.”

“Let's not.”

“You have to wonder.”

“I don't.”

“Who it was, I mean.” Tanner poured another drink. “They ushered us out pretty quick after the corpse hit the stretcher. Once you were, you know, back from the woods.”

Paul flushed, a sudden surge of anger at the drowned man, the way the body had intruded on his life and made everything about the camp feel ominous and unsettling.

“Guaranteed I'll know him,” Tanner said. “Hopefully not well.”

“I'm not going to think about it either way.”

“So, what's the deal, then?” He gestured irritably at Paul's body, maybe because he wouldn't be suckered into talking about the dead man. “Didn't bring any booze or steaks with you, you're drinking tea. You look like crap. Are you okay or not?”

“They got all of it, for now. If that's what you mean.”

“How about . . .” Tanner pointed again, this time toward Paul's crotch. “I hear, sometimes with the surgery . . .”

“Yeah.” Paul fidgeted with his teacup. “I'm out of commission.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not a twitch.”

“Wow.”

Both men looked out the window. The wilderness all around them, the generator their muttering lifeline to civilization.

“Not for long, though, right?” Tanner turned back to him. “You're young, geez. Haven't even had kids yet.”

“I can still have kids.”

“Sure. Artificial insemination, test tubes. Fuck all that—the mechanics are what's important, right?”

“The doctors say—well, doctors say a lot of things.” He raised his teacup in a mock toast.

“So is that—you know—is that all right with you, then?”

Paul struggled for a moment to speak and ended up laughing, helplessly. “I don't have a lot of choice here. It's better than the alternative, I'll give it that.”

Tanner yawned. “Time for bed. And up early to count. Will the table-bed be comfortable enough?”

“Sure. I should warn you, I'll probably have to get up a few times.”

“Won't even notice. I'm more snug out here than at home, but let's not tell Beth I said that.” He winked, then paused. “We're trying to get pregnant. Figured it's time.”

“How about I go out and kill the generator,” Paul said.

“Sure, yeah. Get ready for the silence.”

4

Before he stumbled across parkour, Paul had been in limbo, having finished, with partial success, a study on cycling clubs. The overwhelming trend among Paul's peers at the university was ethnographies of the “sporting body,” a reaction against the abundance of netnographies, studies of online communities that saturated journals and publications. Or maybe a natural outcome of living in a city obsessed with recreation and its own greenness, or even the upcoming Olympics. Students conducted fieldwork among cultural groups formed by marathon addicts, competitors in extreme endurance races, or transgendered wrestlers. There was always pressure to find original, eclectic material, a community that occupied a very particular or unusual niche. Sometimes it felt like you were spinning so-called cultural groups out of nothing, just to keep pace with your fellow academics. But he enjoyed the challenge of identifying some obscure, tenuous cultural phenomenon and then mining it for publishable work that actually said something about society. There were risks, of course, like chasing an idea down a dead end—his master's thesis had come close—or simply becoming stumped for ideas.

He'd been dating Christine for a few months, and she was teaching him sport climbing. Her dissertation was a study of families who climbed at a gym called The Edge. Usually she worked with the binaries of broken or strained marriages: mother and daughter, father and son, and so on. Each parent had his or her own reason for climbing with a child, different values. Teaching him to rise to the challenge, a divorced father might say about his eight-year-old. Teamwork, the parallels to ambition and hard work. Companionship, a single mother would admit. To teach courage and independence.

Paul had his own reasons for climbing, one of which was the spectacle of Christine, the feline way she formed her body to the wall, fabric stretched against her, jaw taut with predatory grace as she reached for the next brightly coloured hold. A real beauty in her motions, not the ugly lunge that marked Paul's progress. He was all raw strength and desperate clutching. He admired her Zen-like poise, but the real turn-on was her competitive, almost hostile drive to outperform Paul in the climbing gym. Which she easily did.

He learned to trust the rope, his harness and the bolts and hefty carabiners that made up the anchor system at the apex of the climb, and he suppressed his fear of heights. But the equipment (minimal as it was) and the fear (unfounded as it was) distracted and took from his pleasure. He only wanted to think about the problem in front of him, the necessary series of moves, the crux he had to surmount. Mostly, he wanted to think about Christine.

They were alike in many ways, both of them ensconced in academia for most of their adult lives after brief, unsatisfying forays into the “real world.” After high school she'd been a waitress, then a bartender, while Paul had started in construction for one of his father's buddies before switching to retail during summers while earning his undergraduate degree. Neither of them had brothers or sisters, and both had spent their early, angst-ridden university years imagining the world as an infinite number of cultural groups, none of which they belonged to. They both preferred to think they'd outgrown that stage of their lives. She liked, he knew, his cleverness, the way he could connect obscure ideas and make something from nothing. He was ambitious but not serious. She was both.

When Christine joined her research participants in their climbs, Paul would retreat to the so-called Cave at the back of the gym, a room of overhanging walls, big, grippy handholds placed on a low, sloping roof, and a floor covered in thick crash mats. Different colours of tape marked the routes that traversed the room. To move from one hold to another might require an upward lunge from a near-supine position, or a long reach from one razor-thin toehold to another with only one divot crimp for his burning fingers to grasp in between.

In the Cave, he met the person who would become his first research participant, Xi Bai. Thin and quiet, the teenager had gone back and forth along the rear wall of the Cave several times without resting—Paul had to step off the wall to let him pass. He had an unorthodox style, showy and acrobatic, and went from hold to hold at a precarious speed, his wild swings threatening to rip him from the wall. Xi explained to him, in whispered, faltering English, that he'd decided to train here for parkour only because of the rain. What was parkour, Paul wanted to know, but the boy couldn't say. He invited Paul to the next practice session. If it hadn't taken place on campus, a few minutes' walk from Paul's office, he likely wouldn't have gone.

As a subject, Xi Bai didn't make for an easy interview. Or Paul was trying too hard to make immediate intellectual connections, forcing theories before the fact. “Do you think, maybe, that parkour is a means of defining a foreign landscape on your own terms?” Paul asked. “A way of claiming a space for yourself?” The boy looked blank, a little frightened.

“Fun,” Xi finally stuttered. “Have fun.”

Xi was not the only member of the group who found it difficult to articulate why he practised parkour. Paul's scratch notes, recorded in a small notepad, were filled with little more than comical macho posturing and weird cheerleader platitudes. From Tran Minh, international student: “To go higher, better, really kick the wall's ass. That's what I'm talking about.” Or Nathan Cook,
BA
candidate in political science: “Break out of those set rules of movement, the prepackaged, so-called reality of our surroundings. Reinvent.”

The group also had a desire for fame. They filmed themselves obsessively, edited and synched the footage to hip hop and heavy metal, and then uploaded it onto their own YouTube channel. Nathan, ever the purist, tried to lend an instructional bent to the videos by adding voiceovers, but most clips were all bombast and rhythmic jump-cuts, testosterone with a soundtrack. Filming his fieldwork proved to be a headache, and Paul quickly abandoned it—participants were too eager to be in front of a camera, it became a fetish object instead of an unobtrusive means of documentation. That might have posed some interesting meta-ethnographic possibilities worth exploring—except, really, he just wanted to play.

He spent the summer learning how to do proper rolls and tumbles on the grass, something he hadn't done since he was a child. Parkour wasn't meant to be competitive, but Paul found a friendly rival in Tran Minh. They competed at kong-vaulting picnic tables and ledges or muscling over walls, and taunted each other when a manoeuvre was bungled. But Tran also proved to be a willing teacher, perhaps revelling in the novelty of instructing someone much older than himself. By October, the physical enjoyment of becoming a competent traceur, of his own unexpected transformation into a faster, stronger, more limber man, far outweighed the pleasure of conducting interviews, writing up field notes, or instructing archaeology students. A fact that didn't escape the notice of either Christine or Dr. Tamba.

One evening after a long session with Tran and Xi, Paul went to the lounge where he often met and drank with a handful of instructors and grad students. He liked his department. They were mostly younger and, like him, still valued the academic life over family, children. Tamba was putting in a rare and unfortunate appearance and sat at the head of the table with Christine and the others gathered around him. In his late forties, smooth-shaven and blessed with Mediterranean skin that rendered him both exotic and ageless, Tamba was more charismatic than handsome. He never spoke loudly or with any real vigour, never intruded or forced himself on a conversation, but always caused a stir. The female students in the department, even Christine, cheerfully confessed to having a crush on him. He'd made his reputation at conferences lecturing on the participant-observer oxymoron and the ethics of conducting consumer, or mobile, ethnographies. In public he spoke with a self-deprecating tone noticeably absent when he met with Paul inside the confines of his office.

Paul slipped into a chair at the far end of the table. He sported a fresh purpling bruise on his forehead and a scraped chin. Dr. Tamba stared deliberately at Paul's wounds. He raised his glass—a clear alcohol, garnished with a sprig of mint and a lychee—and gave him a thin smirk. “I see you're going native,” Tamba said and made it sound like a bit of martini-dry humour. The crowd chuckled. It was, in fact, an old saying among ethnographers, an accusation that Paul had lost his objectivity and gone beyond the acceptable limits of participant observation. Everyone heard and registered the undertone of contempt.