The Haida Gwaii Detour

3. Ethan Investigates

3. Ethan Investigates

Ethan had already bummed around Europe twice. Before both tours, he’d refused to reread his European history. He teemed with the youthful combination of unseasoned scepticism and his desire to change the future and dismissed outright historical texts as the politics of reconstituted, conservative doctrine. Ethan would base his opinions on his own experience; he preferred his world unedited. He travelled to discover rather than to arrive with a preconceived, cultivated opinion. As a Canadian, he had more or less acquired the history of the world through the eyes of historians from Great Britain. He interpreted their justification of her endless European wars and internal strife as mere attempts (which he considered dishonest and feeble) to justify global imperialism and social engineering. Before he dropped one of his History courses, Ethan had submitted an essay to a professor infamous for issuing low grades to anyone expressing sentiments other than his own. Ethan’s essay on Oliver Cromwell began with the following controversial statement:

The sacrifice of innocents to religion has been required and perpetrated by zealot Puritans and Protestants of England and New England, the Catholics of Spain, France, South America, and Portugal. Transcribed texts since the earliest forms of written communication, whether Cuneiform, Sanskrit, Hieroglyphics, Greek, Latin, Mongolian Cyrillic, Persian, and including today’s dominating Anglo-Saxon, record how populations have always been tortured and murdered into submission and then enslaved. Roman legions marched across the known world, and before and since them, the warlords of China and Japan and the khans of Mongolia. Life was the same under the potentates of the Ottomans and the czars of Russia and deteriorated rapidly under the dictatorial oppression demanded by American Puritans until all was consumed by the Cold War, a deadly perversion of human rights perpetuated between the USSR and the American military and its corporations.

Youth has optimism, too, after surviving the nihilism associated with our adolescent years. Ethan wanted his higher education to be a daily search for its own grain of truth, for any salvation or confession found in any revelation that made sense of the world. He studied to make himself aware, if only in a rebellious sense, of the grandeur, the logic, the architecture, the art, and the connections between the ancient and modern empires. However, he struggled nearly alone and always in vain. He once coined a poetic, urban phrase, describing us all as imprisoned behind the “veil of a Dark Ages fog, bound by feudal, corporate, and cultural chains.”

After Ethan returned from his second off-continent backpacking trip, he wanted to know more about that world. He had attained untrammelled reality while he walked in foreign lands, but his ignorance had cost him missed opportunities for deeper insight. He read voraciously, carried about history books to catalogue opinions about where he had been and then compare that with his experience. Countries, then, still retained their own character, not yet homogenized by global corporations waging economic war on each other and spawning mass migration. Ethan had seen that Europe was reconstructed after World Wars I and II, but he still kneeled in respect to utter prayers on the beaches of Normandy and at Vimy. He had sipped red plonk at sidewalk cafés on the rue Jeanne D’Arc. He had enjoyed San Miguel beer in underground grottos and sunbathed on the beaches at Torremolinos, despite the intimidation of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía patrols. Armed with machine guns and their shoulders crossed with full ammunition belts, their mouths turned down, they followed Ethan with suspicious eyes. Before he toured Morocco, he climbed the Pillars of Hercules in Portugal. He walked the miles of cool, covered lanes in the ancient Fez market and feasted on lamb and couscous in the shadow of the Koutoubia Mosque in the Jemaa el-Fnaa souk market square in Marrakesh. He cursed the Roman amphitheaters and stood in rapture, humbled before the perfection and grandeur of the Parthenon.

Throughout Europe, he luxuriated before Art in the articulated salons of great palaces converted into museums. He lingered before wall-sized Goyas at the Prado and explored the humbling, inspiring Louvre, where he was struck by the original masterpieces of Monet and Cézanne and wondered at the fame of and the world’s fascination with da Vinci. Ethan ascribed crowning glory above all others to Rembrandt. He had enjoyed happy days in Amsterdam in awe of the architecture, Van Gogh, and of Heineken beer, and had, for a single night, revelled in dissipation at the Paradiso before he sailed across the channel to visit his extended family on the Isle of Wight.

Those experiences, and his inability to understand context, taught him that if he departed for the misty islands of Haida Gwaii,8 he had to know more about the destination, more than Dan’s rough outline of the archipelago, drawn on a beer coaster, after Ethan had pressed him about the islands where he lived.

• • •

Dan was returned to his life and our classes ended, so Ethan worked a steady nightshift driving taxi to earn his tuition fees. After ten weeks, he was only a faded version of himself. Our conversations were a litany of conflicts and arguments over the whimsy of Dan’s promises.

“Every night,” said Ethan, “the wipers swipe the damn summer rain off the windshield of my taxi but can’t make clear why I’m still in this miserable city.” Each day, he fell further into the waste of self-reflection, until he admitted he had reached his nadir. “My life, my time,” said Ethan, “has become too heavy a sacrifice. I need a break.” Paid out in seconds, my friend Ethan was waiting, he thought, for a future of little promise, “a string of interminable nights and classes, and then desk jobs that will gut and drain me after endless years of dissatisfaction.”

The latest wet twilight had settled over Ethan, just as so many had before, as one more empty, meaningless passage of hours, until it happened: his powerful revelation bordered on secular epiphany. “My body actually tingled,” he said. “I had my old self back.” His impulse was sparked by the white flash of inspiration; gone was his irrational worry about the future and his desire to further study the past. Once shed of that chrysalis, so unnatural to him, he was freed by another ordinary and yet emancipating thought: life is meant to be lived. What could be more natural, easy, and, yes, ethical?

The decision made, events fell into place without time for questions; there came a monumental, brisk succession of transactions that your scribe found difficult to assimilate. The next day, Ethan packed his beloved library into storage, gave away his furniture (I kept his desk for him to return to), and settled with his landlady. The day after that, Ethan left for the Charlottes. Before I saw him off at the airport, I made Ethan promise to diarize his experiences. Once again, I found myself envious and even a little afraid of his ability to change his life.

Ethan shook my hand while he looked me in the eyes. He said, “Right or wrong, I want this.” Without a shred of doubt, he hoisted over one shoulder his red and white hockey bag stuffed with clothes and his portable typewriter and slung his leather caulk boots over the other. He tapped the return ticket tucked into the shirt pocket over his heart, picked up his guitar case, and strode through the last door that barred his future. With just twenty dollars and his strong heart beating overtime, Ethan launched into his adventure.

When the frosted doors slid closed like two glass bookends, Ethan’s familiar form disappeared. I, your subdued but envious narrator, wondered if the last weeks of Ethan’s summer would evolve into a funeral pyre, a lifetime spent on distant shores, or if any of us left behind would ever see our friend again, and because of that, I vowed I would apply the best of my abilities, fueled by an unwavering devotion, to present this accurate account of Ethan’s travels.