The Haida Gwaii Detour

2. Visitors

2. Visitors

When invited to visit for three nights, tell your host you can only stay for two, advises a Muslim maxim, but then depart after a single night and you will always be invited back. Dan stayed at Ethan’s house at the top of Capital Hill in Burnaby for three nights.

• • •

Two knocks on his basement suite door brought Ethan from his writing desk. Ethan opened the door to see his good friend, Dan, filling the frame.4 They formed and held a handshake and shared a confirming look of mutual approval. Dan was impressive, seemed fit, light on his feet, and taller and larger than Ethan, although most would consider both to be tall men. Dan was both brusque and physically understated, but he carried the strength of a wrestler with the finesse of a gymnast. Ethan had the lean, long-muscled build of a light-heavyweight boxer. Dan presented as a purposeful, blue-eyed mountain man; Ethan had evolved a more reserved reaction to the world, less a Hercules wielding his sword to solve the Gordian knot and more the quick wit who takes the time to unravel the tangle.

“I see you still haven’t domesticated that red beard of yours,” said Ethan.

Dan, whose shoulder-length ginger hair framed his ruddy complexion, stared at Ethan with steady eyes and nodded slightly. “Well, do I have to stand here all day?” Ethan threw his arm over his friend’s shoulder and escorted him inside.

Dan was the latest issue of centuries of stalwart Picts, the blue-faced Caledonian warriors who had battled Roman legions two thousand years before; the same rampaging devils who descended from the highlands above Aberdeenshire to pillage the farmers’ huts along the river Dee, snatch up their daughters and wives, and spirit them away to the lofty grey crags and deep green glens, where they lived Spartan lives but raised children free from the Roman yoke. “It was those centuries of history,” Ethan had said, “that gives him his girth.”

Dan was comfortable within himself and held quiet sway beyond his physical dimensions in any room; he observed and listened more than he articulated his opinions. To compare the three of us on those attributes, Ethan was the entertainer, Dan was the involved audience, and I was the scribe. A casual observer might see in Dan only the rugged outline of a powerful man, but beyond these twigs, Dan shared a delight for life, his humour, and his kind yet poignant point of view. Of course, Dan sloughed off this sort of description in self-effacement, but one enduring truth is that all great oaks stand on their roots and have solid heartwood.

Dan had come to the city to complete two tasks. He meant to purchase a specific one-ton truck, business he concluded on the first afternoon of his visit. With that transaction complete, Dan applied all his attention to Ethan, determined to convince him, within three nights, to drop everything, including his English classes at Simon Fraser University, and move to the mystical Queen Charlotte Islands.5 But the idea intimidated, even revolted Ethan, who considered such a bold change “too experimental.”

At supper the first night, the cafe was noisy and filled almost to capacity, so Dan, me, and Ethan sat at the bar at The Only Seafood eatery on Hastings Street in the heart of Vancouver’s skid row, feasting on raw and deep-fried, floured oysters after sharing several pitchers of palatable draft beer at the Anchor Inn. Between bites of the lemony delicacies, Ethan said, “Thanks, Dan, but I’ll stay where I am. I’ll finish my English degree and become a journalist. For the first time, I’ve mapped out my future, and I’m sticking to my plan.” He refused to entertain Dan’s or anyone else’s distraction from his goal. “And for the record,” said Ethan, “it takes just as much guts, maybe more, to make a stand than it does to set off for the next horizon. Besides, I know how country life works: it looks good to a tourist, but there’s usually too little or too much to do, most of the women are pregnant and married by the time they’re eighteen, and almost everyone is out of work or working themselves into an early grave.”

“Don’t be confusing guts for laziness or fear of the unknown,” said Dan. The rebuke caused Ethan to stop eating and his cheeks to redden. Dan held his palms up in front of his chest. “I’m not here to fight you, only to rescue you. It’s just that life doesn’t screw you over, only making plans does.” He made himself laugh (and I, Ethan’s faithful scribe, joined in), “There’s plenty of logging if you want to work, but I do as little of that as I can get away with, and there’s lots of beautiful women there. Crazies, too.” Dan’s eyes were confident and his smile genuine. Ethan resumed his meal. “Some even have PhDs. You’ll fit right in if you don’t hold their education against them. I don’t know how you can stand it here. This ain’t you.”

Five years before, Dan had emigrated to Toronto from Prince Edward Island. After a stint as a cab driver, he’d arrived in Vancouver with three friends who had pooled enough cash to buy a car and leave the Ontario city. They drifted into a communal house Ethan frequented on Union Street in Chinatown, across from Benny’s Market. Those artistic, rebellious friends Ethan (and Dan for a while) ran with, the Union Street crowd, considered holding a daily job the epitome of crazy. To them, the practice of domestication — a prelude to starting a family and suffering the day-to-day grind to pay down a mortgage — was the surrender of one’s purpose and freedom.

Ethan found his first forestry job in the same camp as Dan, where they shared a room in the crew’s bunkhouse. It was over those months that they solidified their friendship. I did not have the time Ethan had to become accustomed to Dan’s baritone (no trace of any heritage brogue influenced his speech), so I noticed he still invoked, here and there, a squeaky inflection into his charming East Coast accent — and he was prone to speed talking. His last comment sounded like “Disainchoo.”

“I won’t go into one of those uptown joints,” said Dan to Ethan, “where the drinks taste like sugar and the men wear as much makeup and jewellery as the women.” So, over three celebratory nights, we three intrepids visited Ethan and my own usual Gastown hangouts and notorious east end honky-tonks, consumed exotic Asian meals, and indulged in outrageous, enticing gossip. Dan stayed on theme, repeating his assurances that Ethan’s next move, if he still had the courage to make it, would prove fertile ground. “The Charlottes will change your game,” said Dan. “School doesn’t teach what you need to know to write, does it? And don’t worry, no one will care if you’re crazy.”

Dan’s challenge was blunt, but Ethan remained outwardly resolute and reasonable, and he disagreed with Dan on his second point: his unfurled idiosyncrasies sure as hell stood out.

“Are you going steady with a gal now?” Dan asked.

“Just playing the field, nothing serious,” said Ethan.

“Then what are you waiting for?”

Ethan respected Dan’s good intentions and his warm nature, which was why he gave so much credence to the barrage of cross-examinations. Ethan’s patience for his friend proved fertile ground for spawning doubts, which forced him to reconsider the consequences of his choices. Dan was right; despite outward appearances, Ethan felt under siege. “I am getting old. I’ll be twenty-seven next year.” That was the first time he admitted any anxiety over his decision to settle down.

Until he’d made that commitment, Ethan’s world was vital and adventure ruled the day, a truly intoxicating drink of immortality and recklessness only the young survive. He had entertained many of us with his stories, I recall with some envy, but he reserved for late nights his reflections on the women he romanced in his past. Wafting in the back eddy of Dan’s invitation was the doubt, a question, really, that troubled Ethan: was he still that person?

“I’ve been dismembered on a creativity cutting board and murdered in pieces,” he said, applying artistic license to the learning process. “I’ve been drawn and quartered; I’ve lost my own core because of too many tenured, ivory tower barnacles debating to impress themselves with esoteric bullshit like ‘the value of texture within the literary form.6’” Though Ethan had learned early in his first semester how to score high grades on their exams, Dan was right again: Ethan was uninterested in spewing back their formulated dollop.

On the third night, Ethan admitted he had banked his literary future on a worthless paper transcript available to anyone with the limited ability of a wild animal born into captivity to survive. “So far,” said Ethan, “I’ve been trained to perform; all of my classes haven’t filled even one empty manuscript page worth keeping.” The unintended autopsy had been performed; Dan’s surgical efforts had revealed Ethan’s uninspired body of work as a waste of time spent within the walls of a factory school.

Ethan expressed, with his rediscovered vulnerability, monumental doubts about personal dragons he might revive if he quit SFU. Did he still have the grit to escape that counterfeit version of his future? If he went, perhaps an island Circe would bewitch him and render him a captive and unable to return. A forestry job meant working in Hades’ shadow. The harvester of loggers, every hour of every day, kept Charon’s transport full to the sideboards with souls bound for the far shore of the River Lethe.7 Ethan eyes were open; the stakes of his decision were real: survive a half-life in the city or dodge hooded, frenzied Death slashing with his bloodied sickle at the human crop. But what investment in Truth could he claim, now or decades in the future, if he stayed his current course and slotted himself into the fold, if he failed to grasp this last opportunity?

“If I started writing, who would I write for?” asked Ethan.

“The best and toughest critic you’ll ever have: yourself,” said Dan.

When it was time, Ethan wished Dan safe travels back to his island paradise. Despite the wisdom of that visitation maxim (and no trite adage ever limited their friendship), whether for a month, a year, or three nights, Ethan’s door remained open to his friends. When they shook hands to say farewell, Dan said, “You never answered my question: what are you waiting for?”