When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, he articulated a number of simple and aesthetically perfect ideas. Perhaps the most useful of these, from a layperson’s point of view, is that success is determined by adaptability. The earth is covered with various landscapes. If animals succeed in adapting to a landscape, they survive. If they don’t, they die. The map of Canada is dominated by the lakes, forests, and rocky outcrops of the Shield. It’s a harsh landscape, with very little soil and pronounced swings of temperature from one season to the next. Virtually every corner of it is raked by wildfire every few decades, and it’s populated by hordes of biting insects that can literally drain the blood from an exposed living body. If you’re going to make a living on the Shield, you have to adapt to it. The Shield is not going to adapt to you.
When I lie in bed, listening to the sounds of the night, I often wonder how I’m ever going to fit in here. Ever since I was a kid I’ve wanted to live here, or at least somehow make a place for myself. But so far, it’s been like digging at granite with a wooden spoon. I work as a fishing guide, which is an interesting and quirky sort of job, but no serious person would mistake it for a lifelong career. I have several cardboard boxes full of handwritten, unpublished fiction stuffed under my bed. But I’m only beginning to get a grasp of the novelist’s craft – plot development, characterization, and so on. I’ve been reading books on the architecture of fiction, books like John Gardner’s famous text, and I’m beginning to appreciate that my laborious novels are mostly just rambling disconnected stories with no noticeable beginning or end.
I still have my night job at the police station. But that’s not a promising career either, and it doesn’t have much to do with the wilderness. I came here on a kind of quest. I wanted to learn this country’s secrets, or at least engage it in some kind of dialogue. But the country is ignoring me. Lying here, watching Mars inch minutely across the window, I can dispassionately look at my life without vested interest, as a book critic might, and say that the stakes are definitely rising. In conventional novels, the character usually emerges triumphant in the final chapter. But the Canadian backwoods is inherently anti-heroic. Around here, the only thing that’s going to emerge triumphant is the landscape.
Tomorrow night is Friday night, which means I’ll have two choices for spending the evening – staying home, or going to the beer parlour. The beer parlour sits in the centre of town, luring bachelors like me from far and wide with its glowing windows. To hell with the wilderness, let’s get drunk. All the bachelors are hoping to meet a woman, a special woman with a pretty face and a great personality who perhaps has a good job, owns a new pick-up truck, and enjoys a bit of moose hunting. Everyone’s head swivels as if on gimbals every time the door opens, hoping it’s Miss Perfect, but she never walks in. Like every other Canadian backwoods town, Minaki suffers from a permanent shortage of women. Every autumn, as the north starts to empty out, men outnumber women by a factor of about ten to one. On a typical night at the pub, there might be a dozen people drinking beer and playing pool. And the only woman in the whole place might be Susan, the bartender.
In the beer parlour at night, women are so absent that their absence becomes a kind of presence. Their absence imparts gravity to the most mundane of moments. Standing in the bathroom, washing your hands, glancing in the mirror for a moment to comb your hair, you suddenly realize, I have no one. Playing a game of snooker, working on your fifth ponderous glass of beer, the most banal Elton John ballad seems to have taken on remarkable artistic insight and emotion. Out at the snooker table, or along the sombre rows of men at the bar, there are never any conversations about women. The bachelors don’t have to talk about women. Women are already the topic of every conversation they aren’t having.
Years ago, a lot of young people came here in search of Utopia. But no one is young any more, and there’s a widespread feeling that the party is ending. The community is fragmenting into tribes. The Married Tribe is composed of people who are settling down, building houses, and having children. As much as I grumble about my friends getting old and getting married, I have to admit that my resentment is fuelled partially by envy. Kelly and Sally are building a swanky lodge on the shores of Gun Lake. They’ve got their pilot’s licences and have purchased a float-equipped airplane. Pete and Trout are building a tourist operation with neat cabins they rent out for $1,000 per week. (The resort is known locally as Tax Dodge Lodge.) My friend Dave has become a wilderness outfitter. He likewise flies his own float plane, guides an exclusive clientele of wealthy hunters and fishermen, and is beginning to rack up a collection of true-life adventures, some of which have even been documented in magazines like Reader’s Digest (“Flight Into Danger!”). For the Married Tribe, moving to this little town in the northern Ontario bush was the best thing they ever did. Instead of soldiering away at some faceless corporation in the city, they’re launching remarkable and highly individual lives. They’re building splendid homes with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the wilderness. They’re installing outdoor Jacuzzis on their multi-levelled cedar sundecks and growing their own produce out back. I’m glad they’ve figured out some perfect formula for unlocking the secret of this country, but I haven’t. And I can feel the pressure incessantly rising, as though we were all back at university, in final exams. They’ve handed in their papers and waltzed out. But I’m still sitting here, stuck.
My comrades are the ones who are left behind: the Bachelor Tribe – a loosely knit group of oddballs, old-timers, fishing guides, carpenter’s helpers, away-from-home railway workers, drunks, bush pilots with voided licences, know-it-alls, vagrants, and disheartened puppy-dog police constables who still can’t quite figure out how they got posted to this hick town. They tend to gather every night at the beer parlour to commiserate, shoot pool, and tell absurd stories. (One of the new cops, for example, claims he’s engaged to Miss Canada.) I like them all well enough. In fact, they’re the most entertaining group in town. But I’m not quite ready to develop a serious drinking problem. So I spend most of my evenings at home, reading or writing, listening to the radio. Or else every couple of days, at about four in the afternoon, I dress warmly, load the boat, and cruise out to explore the wilderness, which is why I came here in the first place.
In the autumn, once the water gets cold, the risk of falling overboard and dying of exposure adds a kind of religious zest to boat travel, and I like heading down the river, banging across the charcoal-dark waves into the biting wind. Once I’ve caught a limit of fish (catching walleyes is easy in the fall), I pull up the boat on the shore and spend the last few hours of the day hunting for grouse. Walking along a forest ridge in some far-flung dead end of the river, you wonder if any human being has ever stepped on these granite hills. The last big thing that happened around here was the Pleistocene ice age, ten thousand years ago. Compared to four and a half billion years of planetary history, ten thousand years is not a long time. And it’s not even a long time in human terms. If you consider that an average human life lasts seventy-two years, the ice age ended only 138 lives ago. You could in fact quite easily throw a party that included someone from every generation in human history. You could hold the party in the Grand Rotunda at Minaki Lodge; it would be the ultimate masked ball. Marie Antoinette and Cleopatra would be comparing notes in one corner, while outside, Ernest Hemingway might be watching Turok, the Son of Stone, sketch a giant Pleistocene lion on the patio with a piece of chalk.
These hills are like the halls of time. Environmentalists are worried that the so-called greenhouse effect will trigger a catastrophic increase in the earth’s temperature. But a smaller group of scientists argues for a more dramatic and frightening scenario. They’ve been drilling core samples in the Greenland ice cap and have discovered that ice ages are a normal aspect of the planet’s weather cycle. Cold periods last about ninety thousand years; warm periods last about ten thousand years. We’re just coming to the end of a ten-thousand-year-long warm period. But that’s not the scary part. The onset of an ice age is usually preceded by a pronounced warm spell. The temperature of the planet goes up and down, but it stays within a manageable limit, regulated by ocean currents, which function as the earth’s natural thermostats. In the Atlantic the Gulf Stream, which pumps warm air into the northern hemisphere, shuts off if the weather gets too warm. During the 1600s, a prolonged hot dry spell caused the Gulf Stream to slow down, which plunged Europe into its well-documented ‘Little Ice Age’, in which the Thames froze. Over in the Pacific Ocean, the Christ Child or El Niño current functions as a temperature thermostat for much of North America. But that’s not the scary part either. What the scientists have discovered is that the onset of an ice age may be much more sudden than we formerly believed. Ice core samples suggest that ice ages are preceded by a steady rise in temperatures, followed by a pronounced correction: a cooling-off period that may actually bring on an ice age within a short period of time. Not millennia, not centuries, but decades.
Glaciers never go away. They just retreat. You can look at them on the maps, great packs of them positioned in staging areas across the north. They respond quickly to small variations in weather. Whenever the weather cools down, snow begins to fall. Under falling snow a glacier gathers mass, and its outer edges push outward. You’d think that a glacier’s rate of travel would be slow – “glacial” – but once they get moving they grumble and creak like bulldozers, grinding forward at an alarming rate, up to a hundred yards per day. Their undersides are crusted with frozen rock. During the last ice age, the glaciers that covered most of Canada and the northern United States were about a mile thick. Pressed down by such an enormous slab of ice, the raspy undersurface works away granite like a belt-sander works wood. This repeated rasping by glaciers is what creates the undulant granite contours of the Shield. And if you think your own life is a temporary thing, go for an autumn walk in the bush country and you’ll be forcefully reminded of the ephemeral quality of all living things. Everywhere on the smooth ground are the glacial striations, long parallel grooves resembling claw marks.
So even though I enjoy walking in the bush more than sitting in the beer parlour, it definitely reinforces the suspicion that time is not my ally. One cool October night I hooked an extraordinarily strong fish. It took five minutes to bring it to the side of the boat, and when I finally scooped it into the net I recognized it as a whitefish, a silvery thing with buggy eyes and clownish lips. I’d never caught a whitefish before and had no idea how to cook one, so I slipped it back into the water. The hook had cut its velvety gills and it was bleeding profusely. I shut off the motor and did a bit of CPR, pumping it back and forth in the numb-ingly cold water until it finally thrashed its tail and disappeared into the depths. A few minutes later, it floated back up to the surface, trembling, dead.
In the darkness of the autumn evening I carried the fish through town, trying to give it away. It was a big one, a five-pounder. But no one else knew how to cook a whitefish either, and with its overlapping scales it looked vaguely carplike and inedible. Finally I thought of The Prince, a well-liked but impoverished handyman who often strolled around town in a ruined navy blazer and beat-up yachting cap. The Prince was an active member of the Bachelor Tribe and probably needed a girlfriend even more than I did. He was living proof of the fact that men don’t do well alone. Women get along fine alone. They somehow acquire a proper place to live, decent furniture, and a nice little imported automobile. But men tend to drop through the floor of the world and keep going.
I knew that The Prince lived on the edge of town in a camper van. Being a van owner myself, I’d always felt curious about his setup, so I walked over to offer him the fish. It was getting dark. I picked my way through the weeds to the back of the community hall, where I found an extension cord plugged into the back wall. By following the yellow cord through the darkened woods, I eventually came to a grassy clearing and a Volkswagen van. Its windows were illuminated with the blue glow of a television, which explained the extension cord.
I knocked on the door and The Prince appeared. He was pleased to accept the fish. (“Well, I’ll make use of it for my Thanksgiving dinner! Thank you very much!”) He had polish. He had manners and, like many people occupying the lower end of the economy, didn’t seem to have a care in the world. He no doubt came from a good community somewhere, where he might have stayed and lived a normal life. But just like me, he’d rolled around the country until he’d wound up here. While I stood there talking to him it occurred to me that I didn’t know his real name, and I felt embarrassed by that. What if he died some day? How would we commemorate him? Would we just sharpen his feet and pound him into the swamp? Perhaps no one else knew his real name either. That was the way it was, in this town. If I stayed here much longer, I’d probably lose my real identity too.
We bantered for a few minutes and then he showed me his van. It was small, and I just peered in the doorway. It contained a rumpled bed and a massive Sony television. He’d rigged up a little wood heater in the corner, with a crooked chimney that fed up through a hole in the roof, and it was so hot inside that the side windows were half-open.
I declined The Prince’s dinner invitation and wished him luck with the fish. As I walked back out to the road, I glanced back at his campsite. The blue glow of the television filled the wooded clearing. He was back inside the van, and his bare legs were hanging out the window.