Balsam Sirens Page 26

  As she does frequently, Andrea surprised me.

  “Mark, I don’t want you to give up on what you do. You’re really good at it and it gives you a lot of satisfaction. But you do need to take a very different perspective.”

  I lapsed into silence at that point.

  After a few minutes, Andrea brought up the subject of George again, our representative Other.

  George.

  In many very real ways, our brother.

  Poor, defenceless George, sucked into a maelstrom by forces he could not resist, for reasons he didn’t understand, dragged down into a fearful darkness and a desperate final personal gesture of defeat, perhaps in response to the unfairness of it all, perhaps in despair that his brother had been deprived of any natural justice.

  Compared to what George had had to face, the impact on us was minor. But even so, it would take some time for us to recover from that impact, and in one sense we never would, never should. As opposed to being just intellectually aware of what is out there, this case had been a graphic visceral reminder that the world has its horrific side. We had seen it and couldn’t pretend that it didn’t exist. We couldn’t fix the world, protect people from all the possible downsides, and indeed could not even be sure of preventing horrors being visited upon us personally.

  But the world also has its exquisite, brilliant, elegant, subtle, and hopeful side. That was it. Hope. It really did spring eternal. It had to. Without some source of hope, we had, well, nothing. And while we had to hang onto that thought, we also had to know that the Good and the Evil are inextricably intertwined in events, in things, in technologies. And in people.

  We had attended a funeral of sorts for George. There were just four people there: Andrea and me, Mike, and Bent Cromarty. It was really nothing more than a burial, an uncomfortable goodbye to someone we basically had not known, someone whose life seemed to us to have been an unimaginable confusion, but someone who, for all that, had touched both Andrea and me deeply. But, even then, we didn’t know him.

  We had both made a new friend, John. And John had intrigued me by saying, obliquely, that he needed my professional help. I asked him for details, but all he would say was “in due course”. The events had brought Andrea and me much closer to Kate. We, Andrea and I, were also much closer now to each other. I had also caught glimpses of an unflattering picture of myself.

  My own shortcomings, serious fault lines that I had failed to recognize, or refused to admit, were now squarely in front of me. Once I mustered the humility needed to accept that, what I felt was relief. And release.

  In our last days at Largs, we met John and Kate three times at The Repose for dinner, and on each occasion we talked far into the night. John and I also had three long one-on-one sessions during the day. John became fascinated at my fascination over Balsam Lake and the area around it. John talked much more about his past, the past that had been unknown to him until just a few months earlier. He was discovering things. And the more John and I talked, the more I came to the hazy realization that in some strange and interesting way we, the two of us, were a microcosm of what was happening all around us. A larger historical reality was unfolding, and we were becoming aware about where we live and its pre-colonial past and about the betrayals and inhumanity that had been committed against the indigenous people over almost two centuries. To anyone who chose to see, it was blindingly evident that all this needed plenty of attention, some process was needed, and there was no clear or simple answer on where this process might lead or how long it would take. The only certainty was that the discussion had to occur, the whole business was messy, and it all had to be driven forward to some common understanding and outcome.

  Over a surprisingly short period of time, John and I had grown quite close, and I found that I had much more in common with him now that we were grown men. And one of the things we had in common was the path we were following through our personal lives.

  John kept being drawn back, irresistibly, to pondering the course of his life thus far as John Woodhouse. From his teen years, John had accomplished what he had expected to, and that accomplishment unfolded normally, naturally. While the path John followed was in public view and praiseworthy, it had been expected given John’s mental endowments. He had done well academically. He was considered successful by almost any measure.

  “But what if I had remained John Longfeather?” he asked. “What path would I have followed? Where would I be now?”

  There were others that John could have emulated. James Bartleman, for example. But would he have done that? Would he have been able to do that? Just based on the statistics, it was highly unlikely.

  And how was that fair? John Longfeather and John Woodhouse, apart from being on different tracks, would have been, in essence, the same person.

  There was a lot that needed fixing here.

  In the weeks after these events, Andrea and I spent more time at Largs than we had in previous years. It was partly Andrea’s newfound appetite for house repair. It was partly our shared deeply felt connections to the place. But for me it was also the recognition that this place, this area, its history and its essence, forms a central part of my own extended personal being. And this background was something I wanted to get to know better.

  It was now late August. The sunsets were just as spectacular, but they arrived earlier in the day. Over the summer, John had spent many evenings with us, both in Toronto and in Largs, and Andrea and I had also reached out to people in Rosedale and Coboconk, and in Largs, in ways that we hadn’t done before. The people we contacted in this way didn’t all become bosom buddies; not everyone is destined to become one’s fast friend. But we got to know their country rhythms, the things that made their lives tick, and the things from our world, Andrea’s and mine, that were too distant, too rarefied, too much lacking in meaning, to be of real interest to them. We got to know them reasonably well, and some of them became people we welcomed and spent time with. We also found people we had underestimated, interesting people, thoughtful people, and these people became regular visitors at Largs.

  And then there was Balsam Lake. It was simply there, pondering, reflecting, reaching out to us, almost a living thing, changing continuously, but seeming to be eternal, timeless. It was as complex, rough, and subtle as its surroundings, the Land Between. It laughed in the sunlight, brooded to match overcast skies that loomed above it, whispered lines of wonderful, luminous sunset poetry, lay bathed erotically in moonlight, and always reminded us that the great life force moves through everything.

  Gitchi Manitou.

  Andrea and I sat at our picnic table in the back garden. A late evening breeze ruffled the surface of the lake, the hesitant and clipped conversations of night birds rose and fell in the woods around us, and a loon voiced a long exotic air that no oboe, shawm, or any other musical instrument could ever duplicate, a cry that echoed hypnotically over the water, off the land and trees, and through the warm air.

  Andrea stirred beside me.

  “When I first met you, you talked a little about this place, and it sounded so wildly lyrical to me that I thought you must be nuts.”

  We sat silently for a few moments, looking out over the water, now metallic and brooding, over the fractal shadow that was Indian Point, toward the glow in the western sky, preparing for its grand finale.

  “But you were right. This is a magical place.”

  Another short silence.

  “What’s that German word again?” Andrea asked.

  “Dämmerung. Twilight.”

  “It had something to do with the gods, didn’t it?”

  “Yes. But that doesn’t apply here.”

  I looked out over the water.

  “In a way we’re lucky. We have an advantage over places like Europe. Being here, in this place, we’re not fenced in by a dead weight of minutely recorded history, not yoked to knowledge of land soaked in blood, not burdened by myths that are magnificent but sometimes oppressive. You know how irritated I g
et when anyone says we don’t have any history here. Everywhere has history. We have history here. It’s just not European history. Sure, we’re tied to European history. But there’s our own history too. It’s here. It burrows into our collective psyche. And it’s fluid, deep, subtle, numinous. I think that’s one of the things that makes this place timeless.”

  “And there’s no treasure in the lake?” Andrea said, half in question.

  “Oh! There’s plenty of treasure in the lake. It’s full of treasure.”

  Make no mistake about that, I thought. Make no mistake.

  “Where we’re most likely to go wrong, and disastrously wrong, it seems to me, is when we become too literal about things. Things like treasure.”

  I stopped and looked for a long time over the surface of the lake, now an incredible shifting artist’s palette of indigos, reds, pinks, golds.

  “Our first reflex is to turn to the European tradition. That’s natural, I suppose. But it’s not the only wellspring we have.”

  Another long pause.

  “Many people are obsessed by the spiritual drumbeat of things like the Lorelei and the Rhinegold.”

  The colours continued to shift and blend before us.

  “But they’re nothing compared to this.”

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to my wife, Maggie, a sure-footed reviewer.