I left Shane and Kimberley behind and drove on toward Fernie. Afternoon was turning to evening in the still-bright light of the height of summer. It was after six pm. By some accounts that’s evening, but by other accounts evening begins at sunset, still hours away. Do we need a name for those hours in summer when the sun is still high up in the sky but it’s after six? How about prevening? Pre-evening, get it? That’s the best I could come up with as I drove eastward along Highways 95A and 3. Mostly I was getting depressed how tinder-dry the trees looked. Here and there in the distance tell-tale smoke rose from wildfires. At least they were far back from the road.
I was getting more and more stressed because one aspect of the pilgrimage to Fernie was that I was likely to meet up with Randal, a local book publisher who had promised me he would publish Stag, like, five years ago. Yes, five years ago I was giddy with the news that a bona fide publisher was up for presenting my baby to the world. Okay, it was a tiny, obscure press out in the boonies, but still. It meant Stag would make it into book stores without me having to pay for the privilege. So I was stoked, but as the years rolled on, the whole promised project sank into semi-limbo. At some point it got typeset, and Randal agreed to my suggestion that Troy do the cover art, and he suggested Shane work on another edit, which worked out great because Shane is a fantastic editor with an MA in English lit who also hunts deer in the mountains every fall, to fill his freezer with meat. Doubly perfect for the job.
But then months and years accumulated without progress until finally I phoned Randal at his home number, not his cell, his landline, which I’d never done before and hated to do because this was business, and his wife answered, and I told her my whole sad story, and within a couple of hours he emailed me to admit that his publishing company was on life support and wouldn’t be publishing anything for a good long while.
Was I happy? No. But Troy had always defended this guy as a good guy, so I took this line:
Years ago I worked in the Toronto Public Library, back in the pre-computer days, if you can believe it. Paper all the way. People came to the counter with the books they wanted, and the clerk (me) would check their name on their library card, and then I’d dab my fingertip in a little moistened pad kept on the counter so I wouldn’t be licking my fingers all day, and then I’d rifle through a sort of elongated shoe box of alphabetically-arranged super-thin green carbon papers that were the overdue slips of people who hadn’t returned their books. (We’re talking the 1980s here, but I’m sure I sound like Bartleby the Scrivener or Bob Cratchit to anyone under fifty). One time a mom brought her five-year-old to the counter, and while I scavenged in the shoe box for evidence of overdues, her kid said, “What’s that thing for?”
I said, “That’s the bad people.”
Then the mom, with great feeling, said, “Not bad people; people who did one bad thing.”
She was right and I’ve always remembered that. So Randal is not a bad guy, but he did do one bad thing. And haven’t we all. So I’d forgiven him in my rational mind, but I still didn’t know if I’d remain all Buddhistic and magnanimous if I were to meet up with him face to face. Might just want to go Tarantino on his ass.
And then something very strange happened. I pulled into town and cruised down to the Arts Center, looking for the Wednesday Night Social, and who do you think was the very first person I laid eyes on in Fernie, taking tickets at the entry? Randal.
Yes Randal was being a model citizen and volunteering to help out at the Wednesday Night Social. I strode up to him and said, “Randal, it’s me, Brian Preston,” and his eyes went saucer-wide for a moment and he said, “Holy shit!” I shook his hand and that was it. He helped me pick a spot to stand with a copy of the poster for my reading the next night. A few people showed interest but I soon tired of standing there on the edge of the party, and just joined the party.
Years ago my friend Robert told me the French have an expression prendre un bain de foule, which is like bathing in a crowd, a more sensual way of saying mingling. I bathed in the crowd and after all the covid crap of the last few years it felt really good. If there was any negativity in the ether I didn’t catch it. It felt like 100 percent humans loving humanity. Fernie is a friendly town so I had no trouble chatting with random strangers about life, wildfires, and believe it or not, poetry. Not that I know much about poetry, but when I said I was a writer some young local dude started reciting his. With a couple of beers in me it sounded pretty good. Heartfelt, anyway.
The weirdest thing about the whole scene was, here were maybe two or three hundred people drinking beer and having a great time, but if you looked north up the alleyway you could see ominous dark grey, brownish smoke rising from a nasty, uncontained 800-hectare wildfire pigging out on the forested hillside near the town of Sparwood. Perfect metaphor for climate change– there’s a flaming hellscape on the loose just up the valley, but it’s not enough to stop the party. I shot a video of it on my phone, starting with the smokey plume in the distance, then panning around the dancing, chattering sunlit crowd oblivious to the raging conflagration mere miles away. The following three photos sum it up: Happy crowd, ominous smoke, picnic table littered with empties.
I texted the video to my buddy Zane, who was a ski bum and my BFF in Fernie back in the 90s when I’d lived there. I was depressed about humankind’s inability to face facts: the planet is on fire. Here’s part of our dialogue.
Next day I had my reading/book signing in the lovely tasting room of Fernie Distillers.
Beautiful drink, eh?
In the afternoon before the event, I wrote up a little speech about Troy that I wanted to make, a eulogy as it were, as I’d missed his funeral. Here’s an edited version of what I wrote:
Troy Cook was the first person I met in Fernie. I’d gone to the Royal in the afternoon to have a beer, and three stools over sat a big mountain of a man, scraggly-bearded and baby-faced. For a summer we were drinking buddies. To me it seemed he ruled the town in some ways. His funky cartoonish art was everywhere, most notably the mural at Rip and Richard’s, and he was a prime mover of the local arts scene. He was 26 and I was 39, but he was the mature one. He encouraged me to write some poems to read from the stage at open mic night at the Royal, and on the night in question the place was packed, it was hoppin’, the crowd was into it, and then I read a poem about child sexual abuse in Sparwood, based on a true story a woman had told me, and suddenly the crowd went all “oooooooh,” all hushed and still for a minute, like I’d gone too far, but Troy asssured me it was a good thing to do, to bring it out into the open like that. Typical Troy. He was an extremely virtuous man who hated to see injustice, or exploitation, or any kind of wrong behaviour by humans. Before he passed, I’d told Troy a number of times my fantasy was to do a book tour/music tour of BC with him, me reading and him singing his songs. It never came to pass. What can we do? Just raise a glass, and say, “Here’s to Troy.”
Turnout to the reading/signing was rather modest. How many? Don’t pry, as my dear departed mother would say, and already did in My Book Tour: Part 1. Don’t be rude. If I wanted to tell you, I’d tell you. Troy’s widow Deb did her best to round up some people, but the evening eventually became Deb and me, which was actually nice because a one-on-one conversation is always more in-depth and personal than the watered-down dynamics of a group. The main things were, I got to pay my respects to Troy in a manner that gave me closure, and I got to bond with Deb in a new, deeper way.
Next morning it was time to head back home. I was feeling a sense of moving on with life, feeling like good things had come out of my trip, despite not selling a single book and having the world’s indifference to me as a writer shoved in my face. I’d spent the last 15 years or so writing four pretty decent middlebrow novels that never found an audience. Whatever. There are worse fates. At least I enjoyed writing them, and had the time and freedom to do it.
On the trip back I pulled into the A&W in Osoyoos and saw a massive nasty-looking brown cloud coming over the mountain just behind it.
Then I headed east up the mountain through flame-retardant material some helicopter or plane had spilled across the road.
When I got to the top of the hill the fire looked like a nasty one in the distance.
And indeed it was. This is a still from a video I took by the side of the road. Those are big thirty-metre trees bursting into flame.
It made me understand clearly and for certain that the world has a lot bigger problems than some guy who wrote a few pretty good middlebrow escapist novels that failed to get noticed. Not that that’s any consolation. It’s just how it is.