Down to the Woods

My Birthday. I worked today but luckily from home, started early and finished early. I was thinking about my round trip yesterday, to the Okanagan. Ninety-seven minutes on a plane and at least five hours in the rental car, a Ford Focus, not to mention the two taxi rides to and from the airport. In the taxi on the way back home I told the taxi driver about my highlight in the OK: a black bear crossing the highway half way back to Kelowna from Rock Point, the junction of Highways 3 and 33. Coming toward me was a light blue pickup, then the bear broke out of the forest on the right and lumbered between us across the highway into the forest on the left, and the driver in the blue pickup up slowed down, and so did I. The bear was gone into the bushes and I couldn’t take my eyes off the road for too long. I didn’t look at the other driver, and put my foot on the gas. I remember saying, Hey, to myself, when I first saw the bear, and the way it gauged how fast it needed to run, like it wasn’t scared.

On the way down to Rock Point and further to Grand Forks, right around Beaverdell, the forest opens out to the right and you’ll get a glimpse of the most beautiful, pebbly creek flowing through the woods and under the highway. Then a Rest Stop. So you pull over and park the car and get your bag and step out into the sun and breeze. You lock the car and head to the outhouse, and use the outhouse, no details necessary, other than the wooden door slams when you close it and you’ll jump. Outside again there’s the dappled parking lot and grass and the trees to the right, and what looks like a path to the river, so you think, Why not? So you head down the path through the woods, to the sandy shore, which makes you realize this creek, more a river, has been here a long time. And you look at the beautiful pebbles and rocks and water and trees on the opposite bank and some kind of factory on the other shore, high up and back. The colour of brick. And you look at the water and the pebbles and think, Why not? So you step off the sand onto the rocks and stop at the water’s edge and bend down and dip in your hand. The water’s cool. Then you dip in both hands, then stand up and pat your hands dry on the back of your coat. Maybe you stand there for a while and soak in the sun, maybe you get out your cell phone and take pictures. At some point you’ll turn around and head back to the path through the woods and the parking lot. Maybe when you’re on the bank you hear the sound of the bathroom door slam, and realize you’re not alone.

It’s only a day later, today, that I realized the potential danger. That there could have been a bear on the shore of that river, or someone. And what that would have been like. Good or bad.

Getting to the Point

Because I’ve worked for two magazines, Geist and Prism International, I imagine I gravitate towards reading magazines. But not strictly literary ones, rather Vogue and Vanity Fair and Harpers. I love that time in the waiting room, before the uncomfortable drilling, examination or worse, to choose a tacky magazine from the rack and jump in to a story about an actress or a designer or politician. And to look at the ads! Magazines are dense with fascinating tidbits and longer exposés than a typical book of fiction would ever be able to match. Exceptions noted. David Foster Wallace. My list of reading preferences is: magazines, non-fiction (autobiographical or historical), reference books, recipe books, poetry, pamphlets, Winners flyers, fiction. On the other hand, my reason for such a reading order may simply stem from a shortfall of patience.

Dreaming of Bears

I enjoy it when my dreams contain animals. The most powerful ones involve bears, Black, Grizzly, Polar. I'm usually in a generic wooded area and notice the bears walking through the woods a distance from me. Sometimes one's heading right for me, and my reaction is usually to panic.

In the mid nineties I took a trip to Churchill, Manibota, partly by car and partly by train (because the road ends), seeking out polar bears on the shores of Hudson's Bay. We bought tickets for a ride on the tundra buggy, and spent a whole day out on the tundra in the big bus sitting atop huge wheels (to protect us from the bears), but saw not one. It was still beautiful, though, and hardly a waste of time.

The next day we heard that a few bears had been messing around in the city dump and that one was now in the bear jail in town, to be helicoptored out soon enough to a remote spot. I wondered how it would know to make its way back to its family, or whether it was a loner and this didn't matter.

Last night I dreamt, along with a polar bear approaching me in the woods, of stairs. Shaky, awkward stairs in a stairwell that led from and to what, I don't recall. Usually in my dreams of stairs I succumb to the terribly scary task of climbing them even though there are no railings, or I have to jump far over gaps, with the risk of falling down into a black abyss. Last night, for the first time, I decided in my dream not to climb the stairs. This has never happened before. When I woke I took this as a good sign, that I've decided to follow my own path, one less risky perhaps, but clearly my own.

Dreams prepare us for the risks and failures of everyday. They let us work through our actions without the reality of falling or failing. They lead us to forge our own path, where stairs can be avoided or climbed, bears observed from a distance or confronted. The trick is to remember the dream once awake.

Here Boy

Burnaby, June, 1999

On the way home from work today the bus got stalled in traffic. Dead stop. Marine Drive. Not Marine Way, the newer highway closer to the river, but the older Marine Drive that winds through the woods and past houses. One lane each way. A police car with lights flashing ahead and a fire truck to the side of the road. Yellow tape. We’re stopped for so long that the bus driver opens the front door and steps out. A woman in front of me stands up and heads for the door and I follow her because I start to feel claustrophobic.

The air outside the bus smells like it does right before it rains and the sky is low and gray. The driver talks to a police officer. A bunch of firemen stand on the far sidewalk. One of them looks at me and I point to where he’s standing and raise my eyebrows. OK? I ask. He nods his head, so I start walking. Might as well walk the rest of the way home.

Something’s burning. Rubber maybe. Something metallic. When I reach the firemen I ask him if it’s OK to walk on the sidewalk, and he says, Sure, just keep to this side. So I walk past the houses and the fire truck and then I see the car in the ditch to the right, its trunk angled up. A burgundy sedan. The driver door is open, but no one’s inside. The front dash is burnt plastic. The front of the car is smoking slightly. A broken traffic pole leans over the hood of the car and the road, and a guy in orange overalls is standing high on a gurney, fixing the electrical line.

I keep walking and end up at the intersection. I look up at the hill at the cross street and see a dog trotting down the road towards me. More like a Husky. Like a wolf, white and gray with blue eyes. Trotting down the middle of the road, right towards me. I kneel down and say, Here boy, good boy, and it slows down and it’s just about to sniff my outstretched hand when a woman behind me says, What was it?

I stand up and the wolf shies away and crosses the road. What? I say and look back at the woman. It’s the woman who got off the bus before me.

What was it back there? she says, and I say, I don’t know. An accident. I look across the street but the wolf is trotting away on the edge of the other side of the road between the shoulder and the ditch.

The woman and I keep on walking and walking. There’s no traffic at all and no bus stop in sight. The houses have changed to warehouses and farms. I notice a pay phone up ahead in the parking lot of some kind of church and turn to the woman walking behind me and ask, Want to split a taxi? And she says, Sure. So I go to the pay phone and dial 411 to get the number of a taxi company in Burnaby, and just as it’s ringing the woman says, Hey, look. And coming down the road heading towards us is our bus, and the driver stops and lets us on even though there’s no bus stop and the woman and I sit down in the same seats we sat in before the traffic stopped, and it’s as though we never got off the bus at all.