I caught the ferry from the Island at 7 in the morning, unloaded in Tsawwassen at 830, and started driving east. A few hours later there were fires burning near Kamloops, and Salmon Arm was all smoggy because smoke from other fires was trapped in the bottom of the bowl of mountains that surround Shuswap Lake. I kept driving toward Golden. Yet even more fires made it smoggy as hell. The picture above is just west of town. You can see the brown smoke of a big fire coming over the mountain and dropping down into the valley, smudging the sun. It was unseasonably hot and the locals were depressed. One of them told me, “This is a ski town. We’re winter people, we like snow and cold. Screw this heat!”
Next morning I found refuge. An oasis. Bacchus Books and Cafe, a lovely little book store in Golden, is staffed by super nice people like Maddie and Caleb. I got there early and had breakfast in the cafe upstairs. Good coffee, and avocado and egg on a bagel. Yum! With time to kill, I got out my notebook and handwrote a little reminiscence about another time, years ago, that I’d passed through Golden, on a weird road trip with my Auntie Peggy. Here’s what I scribbled:
My family have never been natural storytellers. Tight-lipped people. Very little of my family history has been passed down to me to enrich my sense or understanding of my ancestors. My mom’s parents both died before I was born, but if I asked her about them, I generally got some variation of “I don’t know.”
“Weren’t you curious?”
“I didn’t like to pry.” One of my mother’s favourite expressions.
Here is what I do know. My mom’s mom was from Govan, the dockside part of Glasgow, Scotland. At the age of 16, she was shipped off to Canada, alone, on a one-way ticket. Her mother had died, then her dad married an evil stepmother who wanted her out of the picture. Essentially she was banished for no crime. Get lost, kid. We will never know what misgivings haunted her father as he sacrificed his own daughter to the principal of Happy Wife Happy Life. Only one piece of advice that he gave her survives: Beware the Man with the Cross. This turned out to be prescient, because she was was barely off the boat in Halifax before she was preyed upon by a man of the cloth. She also had her steamer trunk with all her possessions stolen. A 16-year-old girl came to Canada alone and ended up sometime later (not clear to me how long) in Dauphin Manitoba, working in a beer parlour. One fine day my grandfather asked her to marry him, and she said yes, on the condition that he never touch alcohol again. And he never did. They became tenant farmers on the northern edge of the Manitoba prairie, working someone else’s land, and they raised three kids. My grandpa died when a team of horses backed up and crushed him in the barn, and my grandma died about ten years later, four years before I was born. That is pretty much the sum total of what I know. Oh yeah, one more thing: when they lived on the farm, granny refused to leave it all winter, convince that if she did, a blizzard would swallow her up on the road to town.
One time I was in Manitoba writing a story for Vogue magazine about pregnant mare urine, basically horse pee which is loaded up with estrogen that is used as a supplement for menopausal women called Premerin (they farm it almost the way milk is collected from dairy cows). After visiting some farms I thought I’d take a spin up to Binscarth where my mother’s sister lived. Auntie Peggy was my favourite of all my aunts and uncles because she was outgoing and talkative, and also when I was about ten years old she gave me a Garry Lewis and the Playboys album, which was the first album I ever owned, and as an aside, I would love to meet Jim Keltner some day, because he drummed on that album as well as albums for three of the four Beatles, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder and a million other artists, up to and including present day people my teenage daughter likes, like Phoebe Bridgers and Lana Del Ray.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Auntie Peggy was always garrulous and chatty compared to the rest the family. So when I went to visit her and she announced that she wanted me to drive her from Manitoba to the west coast to see my mom, I thought, This is fantastic, I’ll be able to ask her all about the grandparents and get the full story on the family history.
Except it didn’t turn out that way. The conversation went like this:
Me: What was your dad like?
Her: What do you mean?
Me: Like, his personality, what was he like?
Her: (Irritated) Oh, we didn’t have time to think about things like that! He was a hard worker.
Me: Well where was he from?
Her: I don’t know. Ontario, maybe. We didn’t have time to think about things like that!
Me: I thought he was Irish.
Her: Maybe. He was a hard worker!
We made it from Binscarth to the ferry terminal in Tswassen in two days of driving, with an overnight stop in Golden, and during that time I learned almost nothing new about my ancestry. But I did learn that Auntie Peggy greatly admired the Ukrainian immigrants who came to till the soil in the farms around hers, because those Ukrainian women gave birth to their babies out in the field, wrapped them up, kept them close, and got right back to work. “Hard workers!”
Enough nostalgic scribbling; now it was time for my book reading/signing. Maddie brought me a stool and a bistro table, which we made level by sticking a used copy of Ronald Wright’s Time Among the Maya under one leg. As customers came in, I tried to get their attention by calling out, “Hey there, how’s it going?”
It’s amazing how people can pretend you are not there, even after you’ve greeted them in a loud, clear voice. The very first customers of the day were a fifty-something heterosexual couple, and when I called out to them, the man ignored me, but the woman looked my way, so I followed up with, “Hey, does your husband read novels?” The guy emitted a weird strangled whelp, like he was choking on something, so he’d obviously heard me, but still never turned his head to look at me. The wife gave an embarrassed shrug, like, What can you do?, and they continued on their merry way into the store. This pretty much set the tone for the day.
Women are more receptive than men. Men can stand three feet in front of you while scanning the bookshelf just behind your head, and never make eye contact with you. You feel transparent, invisible, ghost-like. Women will apologize for looking around your head to read the titles, then allow you to proceed with your on the theme of “Check out these awesome books I wrote all by my lonesome!” They hear you out, then get embarrassed because they’re not actually going to buy the thing, and feel bad because they’ve made you waste your time, and try to remove themselves without hurting your feelings. There is a small subset, however, who subtly let you know it’s you who’s wasted their precious time, for example a Calgary trophy wife with two entitled daughters in tow, who walked away right while I was in the middle of a sentence. It’s humiliating, and humbling, but I’m plenty humble already, and don’t need more tossed my way, thank you very much. Reminds me of the song by Rodriguez in Searching for Sugarman: “They told me everybody’s gotta pay their dues, and I explained that I had overpaid them.” Probably it’s unfair of me to pigeonhole her as a trophy wife, but when you decide you dislike someone, you think the worst. She could have been a renowned neurosurgeon for all I know.
Despite not selling a single book, I enjoyed my two hours in the front window of Bacchus Books, listening to their trippy music, watching the patrons come and go, eavesdropping on them saying things to the staff like “Who’s that guy Reacher? Jack Reacher! Got any Jack Reacher books?”, thereby making me wish I was Lee Child. I had several decent conversations, including one about art with a Québecoise who recognized the painting of Judith Slaying Holofernes on the cover of A Lady Under Siege, and another with a jaunty American woman from Boise Idaho, up here rambling around, as she put it. Americans are much better than Canadians at talking to strangers.
By now it was about three in the afternoon and it was time for me to hop in the van and head toward Kimberley, where I was still considering trying to squeeze in my Crad Kilodney Cranbrook Kimberley Street Sale Competition, or whatever the hell I was going to call it, before I needed to be in Fernie for my reading the next night.
On the way I saw fires, fires, and more fires, marring an otherwise beautiful sunny summer day.
I pulled into Kimberley and it was deader than a door nail. Why door nails are considered deader than other nails, I can’t say. Probably to do with the alliteration of deader and door. Google could tell me, but I’m busy right now trying to tell you this story. Anyhow Kimberly was deserted. Not a single solitary citizen to be seen. I’d forgotten how in small towns they roll up the sidewalks at night. There was no way I could do that Crad Kilodney Cranbrook-Kimberley Crash Kompetition I’d fantasized about (see the Crad Kilodney post earlier).
Thank God I had another reason to be there: it’s the hometown of Shane, the guy who did such a fabulous job editing Stag for me. I went over to his house and, considering I’d been driving past forest fires all afternoon, he had a perfectly apropos book just lying around in the chaos of his toddler-conquered living room. Fahrenheit 451. That’s a book I never read, so when I got home I picked up a newer copy that had a Neil Gaiman introduction, warning modern readers it’s a book from the 1950s and reads like it. I read about twenty pages and agreed. It was hard to keep going because I knew the story. I read more nonfiction than fiction anyway, which is normal for a man my age but abnormal for someone who loves to write fiction. I remember reading Lord of the Rings when I was about fourteen, and my dad saying, “Why would anyone want to read something that’s not even true?” Maybe I’m turning into the old man.
Shane told me there’s a big event in Fernie in the summertime called the Wednesday Night Social, which is a huge outdoor party, right in the heart of town. A kick-ass live band sets up on the platform of the Arts Centre, which is an old train station, and hundreds of people, tourists and locals, but mostly locals, gather to dance, gossip, drink beer and listen to music. Here it was, 530 on Wednesday afternoon, the Social started at 700, and Fernie was 90 minutes away. Shane said I should hustle my butt over there and try to publicize my reading and signing, which was set for Thursday night at Fernie Distillers.
That sounded like an excellent plan. I hopped back in the van and headed to Fernie.