Chapter 12

    But the writing course was not the only great adventure of the summer. Before the class, because Toby hurt his neck diving into the university swimming pool, he ran into an inspiring moment with formal philosophy; and before that, while he was still working the day shift at the paper, he got himself a flight into the Kootenays, for his first look at the region, and even a spiritual sighting as a useful reference, as it would turn out, for a later time. He was able to see part of the diocese of Hastings, to fly into it, to walk around on a small part of it, while it was still under the guidance of a good and virtuous bishop. These events can often seem so ordinary at the time, like not being in jail, or not going hungry, and then comes the onslaught of disorder and deprivation that put the ordinary blessings into the perspective they deserve.
 
     It was the third time in his young life he had used the Sea Island airport facility. His very first flight had landed there, a mighty C-119 transport, built for carrying tanks as well as soldiers and other goods, bringing him home from his first summer at officer cadet school. It had been a great journey across the country from military Dorval, at Montreal, with a hold full of other cadets, a number of them French Canadian and awfully friendly as well as humiliatingly bi-lingual. The skies had been totally clear from central Canada to Alberta, where they had stayed overnight in the air force barracks, and then, in the morning, full of cloud almost all the way home to Vancouver. Calgary was invisible, totally, and the Fraser Valley clouded and wet until they were a few hundred feet above the tarmac. The entire flight, they had been told, was for the purpose of training a navigator, and obviously had not been wasted by perfect weather.
 
     His second plane ride had come two years later, when he and fellow members of Older Boys' Parliament from the Vancouver area had flown to Victoria. Just a DC-3 this time, with his return flight delayed because a mighty fog had come down on the Victoria airport, at Patricia Bay, and he had chosen to fall back on friends instead of switching to the night boat boat. He thus got to a very pleasant New Year's Eve party among the Victoria socialists - and pinker - during his surprise lay-over, which mention of prompted one hell of a right wing outburst from his father after being picked up at the Vancouver airport. Toby was quite shocked, actually, and not inspired to think much of a view of democracy that denied free association of people and ideas.
 
     He had quite enjoyed hearing about social construction of hospitals in Bulgaria, and for a long time afterward fondly kept a little wooden cigarette holder with the nation's name engraved on it, a sign of friendship given him by the raconteur. Toby's father had loudly insisted that this kind of conduct would have the RCMP investigating him, ruining his career as a lawyer.
 
     Toby thought that anytime the RCMP started behaving like the KGB the country was not worth having a legal career in. He had already had rather profound spiritual thoughts about the demise of Soviet Communism, as a personal project of his own, which he had not been able to share with his professionally irreligious sire. This little mission, which he did not totally understand, having had no ordinary instruction in the ways of the spiritual life, had been one of his graduation presents, although not from human sources.
  
    For this third flight, the military was again involved.
  
    The run-off from the snow pack in the province's mountains was the biggest since 1948, when Toby's father had gone to the dykes on the Fraser, to fill and carry sandbags, no doubt with memories of when he had filled and carried sandbags to stack around the anti-aircraft guns as protection against the shrapnel from German bombs. This year the Fraser flood was not that extreme, and his father had stayed in his office. But the army had been called out to the Kootenays, to shore up the dykes that protected the agriculture on the Creston flats, and by the time the soldiers had been at work for a few days the officer in charge of Western Command decided to fly in from the Coast and have a look. His public relations man called the Star to ask if they wanted to send a reporter.
  
    Toby was still on day shift, and not remotely near any stories that would require him to be in the city the following day. The city editor cupped his hand over the receiver and asked him if he wanted a plane ride.
 
     "Where to?"
 
     "Creston. The flood on the Kootenay that's threatening the dykes there."
 
     "But we already have a man there. I've been reading the Star."
 
     "You might find a different angle. Don't you like flying? Especially in a military aircraft?"
 
     "Sure. Crossed the country in a C119 two years ago, and came to no harm. I guess I can entrust my life to the air force once again. Where and when do I connect with this expedition?"
 
     "Be at the air force station on Sea Island tomorrow morning at eight."
  
    In the morning he talked with the co-pilot, who had stayed on in the service after the war. The pilot was prophetical. It was a cloudy morning, almost raining, and he told Toby that British Columbia was the worst part of the country to fly in. All the mountain ranges running north and south against the prevailing winds from the Pacific meant that every valley had its own weather system. From one mountain range to the other you never knew what you were going to run into. Toby said that he remembered this from his ride west in the giant transport plane.
 
     "We went on instrument somewhere between Edmonton and Calgary, and never saw any of southern Alberta at all, but we did see some of the Rockies, then cloud again, then a break in the cover that gave them sun and a view of an airport somewhere in the interior, probably the Okanagan, and then solid cloud until the plane dropped through the late August drizzle to five hundred feet above the tarmac at Sea Island."
  
    The co-pilot said he was all too familiar with the provincial variations.
  
    This time the weather was better, and Toby got a good look at the province. They were in a Canso, which meant he could look out the old machine gun or camera blisters on either side of the aft fuselage. The brigadier who was flying in to inspect his soldiers and their situation was swiftly airsick and stretched out on one of the hard bunks between the blister section and the cockpit. Toby, possessing only a single shoulder pip from his time in officer cadet school, naturally felt a deference as well as sympathy for the poor brigadier, but he was very much at ease with the reporter from the morning paper, chattering away either in the belly of the plane or the stern. The brigadier was too much under the weather for them to exchange anecdotes from their respective military careers.
  
    When they reached Kootenay Lake, the clouds were high, letting them turn above some place for which Toby had no name, and proceed south above the main lake, meanwhile beginning to experience some turbulence. It all seemed most adventurous, as brand new country always does, and Toby and the other journalist were both feeling pretty pleased with themselves, by this time getting a bird's eye view of the fiord below them and the mountains on either side, adventure tourists at the expense of the country and their employers.
 
     And then they hit an air pocket.
 
     In all his varied reading, Toby had seen mention of air pockets. He probably could not have told you exactly where - maybe in the Biggles episodes of his early, wartime, childhood; perhaps from a volume of Haliburton's travel stories - but he would not have been sure, and whatever he had read had not really prepared him for the reality. And certainly he had not heretofore experienced an air pocket, neither in the long trip in the C-119 from Montreal, nor the DC-3 flight from his home town to Victoria, for the sake of an Older Boys' Parliament gathering in the legislative assembly. So, with only a literary reference, and no experience, he had not the foggiest idea of what the hell was going on with the airplane.
 
     Suddenly, simply, it dropped, and by no means for a mere instant. There they were, with the clouds above, the mountains on either side, the lake below wonderfully visible through the Plexiglas of Canso's machine gun blister, all's well in the comfort of a conversation between two working journalists, and now they might be about to be killed. Their vehicle was falling out of the sky.
Afterward, the radio engineer said it was the deepest air pocket he'd ever experience, and he would carry the scar of a deep gash on his forehead as witness for the rest of his life. The brigadier, lying horizontal on the short, hard, bunk amidships, was thrown against the ceiling of the aircraft, and had a bloody nose. Toby and the other reporter became space men, floating in the aft cabin like balloons, until the plane finally regained normal air density and they hit the floor with a painful thump.
  
    In the lengthy interval, Toby saw clearly into his favourite sins and knew, although the thought he was going to die, that he wasn't ready to do so.
 
     But nobody died. The Canso righted itself and droned on down Kootenay Lake until it landed outside of Creston and an army truck took its passengers to their destination, the end of a long field surmounted, at its southern end, by the rise of a dyke. It was a respectable trudge to the top. Toby, from his minimal experience as a surveyor's chainman, tried to calculate. Thirty vertical feet? Fifty? At any rate it was one hell of a lot of dirt  - albeit nicely covered by grass - under his own journalistic feet.
 
     Now in spite of growing up in Vancouver, Toby had not actually had any great experience of dykes. As a schoolboy, he knew of their importance to Holland, busy stealing land from the North Sea, and he had his father's tales of the great 48 flood on the Fraser, and of farmers stealing sandbags. But a real dyke at flood time, even though one of his regular beats was the Richmond Municipal Council, he had not experienced. Thus, in his ignorance, he expected that when he got to the top of his mighty grass covered hill, he would find himself looking down, something like ten or fifteen feet to the surface of the mighty Kootenay River.
 
     It was not so. There was a foot or so of sandbags on the top of the dyke, laid down over a long circle by diligent soldiers, and the water was lapping at the very top of the sand bags, with only an inch or two to spare. And the water volume the dyke and the sandbags hoped to contain was not a mere river, but a bloody ocean, water to the left and right as far as the eye could see, spreading southward into the United States without a visible horizon. The sheer massiveness of it was a shock to the summer journalist. It seemed so much bigger than anything that could happen on his own native river, the Fraser. He turned to look back at the hill they had so ignorantly climbed. Well, he was ignorant. Perhaps the other reporter was more knowledgeable about dykes, being an older man by a decade or so.
 
     "My God," Toby said. "Would you look at that! I had no idea it was so big!" He turned around and looked back at the hill they had climbed. As always, from the top the height looks much greater than from the bottom. "Can you imagine what it would be like if this thing let go? The tidal wave would go for miles!"
 
     "Now I know how Noah felt," said the other reporter.
  
    They walked back down the slope of the dyke and were driven into town on the army truck. Toby told the other reporter he had learned to drive on a truck just like it.When they got into Creston Toby went to one of the banks, where he knew one of his friends from the old neighbourhood was working. The lad was not at the bank at the moment they told him, but at home for lunch. They gave Toby the address and he zipped off to the lad's rooming house, to have a visit and to learn that his friend was not really one for small towns and could hardly wait to get a transfer back to the city. Busily being overwhelmed by nature, Toby thought of the old fable about the two mice visiting, one from the city and one from the outback. Art said they should get together when he was back in Vancouver for Christmas.

    The flight home stayed utterly level, although at 13,000 feet the crew put on oxygen masks, leaving the passengers - no problem - to survive on their own. Toby could not really think of anything much to write about, the danger of flooding now being over, and he was not at all aware of the symbols the journey had left him with for the future, but it was always an adventure to see more the province, especially from the clouds. Vancouver might not be bigger than New York, but the province was, and he was a country boy at heart.