It was a strike against the house, then she added, ‘But the shower pressure is strong.’
Norman confided, ‘There’s a vent above the window.’ He caught the realtor off-guard, and then she suddenly understood. He went into the bathroom and opened the vent.
A fan whirled in a funneling suck of air like the house needed to exhale.
25
IMMENSITY WAS THE mistress of all. This Nate understood in his aloneness against the advance of his own passing, and yet there was hope in the remotest of places, something more readily apparent when facing the anonymity of a world outside a hotel window. Nate had the run of it in his head, what he would do after Norman Price stopped banging on his hotel room door at The Drake.
He would put his trust in the socialism of the Canadian healthcare system and not in the Philippines. He knew it better, Canada, the Wild, where, for years, industries had always flourished, then petered, where life was never a certainty.
He could better navigate this unknown. This is what he knew, the assumed history, first the natives, then the trappers, then men come up from the south in search of quick fortunes in the mines and forestry, and nearly all finding, eventually, the summer too clotted with black flies, the winter too cold and long, and the wages not profitable in the way they had anticipated. He felt the flux of hardship in the mere conjuring of it, this history.
There were the most desperate always, the newly arrived on the continent. Of the immigrants, though, in the latter part of the twentieth century, few did not know the hazards of the North, so the Canadian North became the province of men like Nate Feldman, men escaping civilization for any number of reasons — the law mostly — men who settled with the understanding wages were paid through a system of credit at a company store, so there was little real saving, and those who came were consigned that this was the best it would get, this allotted freedom, when it might not have been secured elsewhere, so they were safe from the reach of the law and bureaucracy of provincial and federal governments.
You could not take a picture when Nate Feldman arrived in Grandshire, because of the native superstition that, in doing so, you captured a soul. Ostensibly, it was the reason given, when it was more about eluding the law, so there was no definitive identification of who existed up there. It predated, of course, the proliferation of cell phones, this willful and respected détente between authorities, that this life up there was perhaps banishment harder than prison, but, on one’s own terms.
Of course, it had changed, the largesse of a natural bounty, the great wealth of resources, with the emergence of fracking, the advent of chipboard and plywood, the resurgence of new growth cutting, the rise of impermanence and the lightness of life, in the way a house might now be furnished in faux-wood-finish panels, a kit assembled with an Allen wrench, in a world where there were no longer heirlooms, where nothing lasted, and everything needed to be made, or made again, recycled and rebought, and this constituted the illusion of progress.
The great and ancient woods were again protected in an emergent eco-politics that was essentially anti-human, or, at best, it vilified what humans had done, and were still doing, to the planet, a movement that ran counter to the collectivism of Marxism, to that old-world view that all human activity was about class and economics, so it was obvious, how the serviceability and truth of ideas changed with the times.
And yet, Canada distinguished itself. It kept a hold on certain values. Economically, the provincial governments abided by a socialist policy, without overtly referencing the rhetoric of compassion, because there were still few enough to share, and there were boom towns, like Edmonton, and the Pacific influx of the Hong Kong expatriates to Vancouver.
The reach of the Empire was not the curse it was in the heart of London, but something else. In Canada the land was too vastly big, its isolation, its disconnectedness, its greatest virtue, so all that came before was put in the context that nothing survived. It staved a certain fanaticism. It set human existence against a greater presence.
In the intervening years, he had seen the change. He was under no illusion, going back across the border. There was more attention to school board meetings and PTA meetings, so you might think there was progress and enlightenment, when it was all bureaucracy, and education was more a holding pen for the great majority, an institution that sapped what youth represented once, a revolutionary force.
Nate Feldman felt the maudlin sense that he was of another age. He put his hands to his face. He had lost the love of his life. He missed her so very much. It was a white man’s curse to want to seize and take hold and possess.
Ursula told him this many times, but he could not let it go.
*
The Canadian Border Authorities were almost as insistent and inquiring in letting him back into Canada as the Americans had been in letting him into the United States, this, part of the great interconnectedness of the terror threat.
He thought he might be done then, caught for taxes he had not paid the American government. Perhaps there was a warrant now out for him. The three lawyers had seen to it. His papers were checked. His Pakistani son-in-law was, no doubt, a great liability, or so Nate felt. If there was an indictment on suspicion of tax evasion, he would be connected with his radicalized daughter, even though they had not spoken in a long time. It was suspicious in and of itself. He could, in fact, if pushed, imagine her as a suicide bomber and imagine further the RCMP advising him of what had happened.
How could mounted and police be used in the same breath concerning law enforcement, and in the twenty-first century, for God’s sake? There were moments, expressions and realities that would always seem strange. Oh, Canada! Despite appearances, he was the outsider.
Nate drove along the 401 toward Brampton, waited at a Tim Horton’s for the early light, entered the rush of traffic descending on Toronto, then turned onto the 400, going north, when everybody else was heading south.
It was premeditated, timed in the cycle of urban life. Nate wanted to more readily understand it. If there were a great disaster ever, most would die in their car. It was a terrible thought, though, if an enterprise could be pitched just right, a survival camp specializing in how to survive, it might attract a strain of people committed to the prophetic destiny of End Times.
He had the specs on a wooden lodge with a field stone chimney, a central cabin, along with more rustic cabins, all with rights to fishing.
He had priced at one point the added expense of a hydroplane to deposit avid fishermen at any of a number of lakes, remote and inaccessible, where wrangling of the heart and contradictions were best contemplated and settled once and for all.
It was an old idea, come upon first as Ursula lay dying. She had the restlessness of a spirit wanting to go further north. There was a history book opened at the time related to the discovery of the Gaspé Peninsula on the St Lawrence. Nate had read it to Ursula.
They had a name for those who ventured inland, Coureurs de Bois, meaning Runners of the Woods; white men who took their wives from the native tribes in what was described as à la façon du pays — after the custom of the country.
In reading it, to explain it, he fell on how it took a multitude of languages: the native language, French and English, and sometimes the non-translation of French when a term or word was not fully translatable, and how certain ways of knowing were the exclusive province of a time and a people, and all that could be ever known was the hint at what was then lost.