Chapter 30

    The Greyhound finally started rolling south. Ah, it was so good to keep on feeling the kindness of all his other travels, every one of them an adventure he had been able to enjoy. Had he ever had one trip that had gone wrong? There was that time at the cadet camp at Vernon, after an almost entirely dry summer, when the projected outing to Mable Lake had begun very well and then collapsed in the rain because most of the cadets had never learned how to create a dry shelter, and so the officers who were leading them decided to go back to Vernon in four trucks, when they had come out in many more vehicles, so they wouldn't all catch pneumonia. Toby, from his scouting experience, had known exactly what to do with the materials at hand - slabs from an old sawmill site laid on a ridge pole wired between two trees to make a roof, and their military ponchos, rubber backed, to make the roof waterproof, with sawdust on the floor to sleep on - and one of the instructors said he was going to bunk with Toby's crew. But then at midnight the orders came to load up their duffel bags and get into the trucks because everyone else was getting wet. They'd been so crowded for the two-hour ride that Toby's leg had gone to sleep and it was a hell of a shock getting out of the truck. But that was about all the inconvenience of travelling he could remember. Until the trip north. He'd always been so happy travelling. It was so good, and yet so customary, to feel that quiet, contented, excitement again.

    But it was best of all, of course, to know that he was finally on the last leg of his journey to rejoin Jelena. Was all that pain and darkness coming north because he had been riding farther and farther away from her? It didn't matter that he had no idea what he was going to do when he got back to the city, other than to see her as soon as possible. He would arrive around noon, and then cool his heels at his grandparents' house and probably catch up on his sleep, then make his way into town and meet her when she got off work at midnight. The bus would stop, on Kingsway, just a block above their house, a couple of blocks east of Boundary Road. Jelena, in that first scrap so very early into their relationship, had scolded him vehemently about his rejection of symbols in literature. Well, she sure had the laugh on him for this one: what could be more symbolic than coming home from the North with his tail between his legs and going to sleep in a bed that lay in the midst of his childhood's history?
  
    And this especially after coming home nine months previous in precisely the opposite state of being. In that September of Septembers he had come home in what he could easily think of as total triumph. Not as a military conqueror, of course, like some old Roman general with bags of looted gold and a train of captured slaves and all sorts of other visible, sale-able items, but an overflow of interior wealth, a stronger sense of  personal achievement and self-worth. He'd had a very good time in the months before that return, and been useful, as a worker, a cook, and a troubadour. He'd made new friends, and, in their wilderness isolation, saved lots of money, and been very well set up for making a strong impression on the young woman who at the end of his fall term had kept showing up with increasing frequency, catching his interest and attention almost without, at first, his being aware of what was happening, as he'd had personal responsibilities, or so he thought, elsewhere.
 
     He'd also had a very good academic year, not in the sense of obtaining high marks and acquiring valuable credits, but in the sense of deepening his cultural knowledge and sensibilities, and of making good use of those activities and qualities that a university was unique in offering. It was for this he had returned, instead of following up an earlier idea of moving to Toronto to become a journalist, or maybe a freelance writer. He had decided, in the wilderness, that four years on the campus, more or less, had not given him everything there was to take. In that sense, he had certainly been no Hemingway, who never went to university.  In that sense he had been more like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and certainly more intellectually submissive than Charles Dickens, who had come from straightened circumstances and couldn't afford to go to Oxford.
  
    Ah, Dickens, yes. Oddly enough, Dickens was one of his reasons for studying Hemingway, in spite of Hemingway having been, unmistakably, the occasion through which he was made to understand, so vehemently, that he was a story-teller by vocation. In the end, he suspected, he would write like Dickens, with a lot of words. Life was not that simple, people were not that simple. Interpretation of characters and their intentions took time and patience and careful listening. Freud and the other psychologists had taught him something of that, and also of his own capacity for harsh judgement. You never knew what people came from. Much of the time Hemingway didn't seem to know either, and he liked stuffing people into preconceived molds. He, Toby Skinner, had tried that kind of writing, just to get a story out, to see if the words would come if he had hasty plot to string them on. But he'd enjoyed it only partially. What he enjoyed fully was taking all the time he felt like to follow a mental process, and also to go back into his own roots for ideas. Bringing those two elements forward was the most satisfying way to use a typewriter and give him a sense of honestly plying his trade.
 
     Especially when he could do this first thing in the morning, with the best energy of the day, without having to worry about going to work at some other job. He'd known that in the previous spring, before he went into the bush, for a lovely couple of months. A very lovely couple of months, although he also knew that none of what he wrote in that time was worth much. Certainly not publishable. And then he'd known it this year, before he had to think about money again. And then he'd had to think about the Church and finding his way into it, and also finding a way to fit in such a totally new kind of character as a priest.
  
    Good Lord. Twenty-two years old and having had nothing to do with priests until now. But now he knew two, and had to admit they were certainly interesting characters. There was complexity and shading for you. And he knew as sure as the Greyhound was rumbling down the Cariboo highway that he would write about them, just as he would have to write about his conversion. But when? How much more did he have to learn? He read fast enough, and when he did write he wrote quickly, with volume. But then there was that quiet little nag from his nice afternoon with some easy surveying on that lovely little bench on the left bank of Moseley Creek when the still, small, voice pumped into his sublimely appreciative view of the scene that it would take him twenty years to reach the knowledge of how to deal with just the summer he was spending. You couldn't just wave the voice away, or reject it out of hand; it was, after all, the same small voice that had interrupted the morning's writing the year before and sent him off to the university employment office so he could find the notice board offering chainman positions. The provincial power commission had intentions of building a dam in the Homathko Canyon, and the survey crew would approach through the Chilcotin.
  
    The Greyhound was not that far south yet, of course, but it would be. First there was Quesnel, which he's first heard about as a little boy from his grandfather, from some gold mining he'd been involved with near there, and then there was Williams Lake, the point at which the survey crew had turned west after travelling up from their morning start in Hope. When the bus went through Williams Lake - or would they stop there for supper? - how many memories would come flooding back. Their riotous evening dinner in the restaurant, crowded into two booths across the aisle from each other, and later, when those over twenty-one and interested in more socializing had gone on to the hotel lounge. And then the long day trip, through a brand new landscape, until they reached Alexis Creek. He had a good memory, as a writer should, and his recollections all rang pretty clear and worth notice, as they turned up, but no memories could speak to him more loudly than those of that summer, nor more happily. Well, the twenty year wait until he could write about it was a sobering note, but at any rate it would be interesting getting there.  And anyway he had lots of other writing he could do. There was this exercise in imitating Camus, for example, and he could try to analyze some of what his spring reading had done to him. That bloody Quiet American, for example, when Greene had shaken him with his intimations of American double dealing worse than anything Machiavelli could have thought up. And that national Catholic church? As bad as that old bastard Henry the Eighth.
 
     And then there was the catechism to study. That now, would be a brand new experience.
 
     Once upon a time he had thought of himself as a liberal Protestant. What had that meant? Certainly he had always possessed a sense that there was not only a Providence in his life, looking after him, creating magnificent opportunities to learn and to experience, but also that Christ himself was also present, and a light that came with him, sometimes brighter and more consoling than at others, and occasionally quite out of sight until he got his mind and/or body into gear and did something to get it back. But it had been pretty much a regular companion. There was no mistaking this habitual situation, no capacity for pretending that it had not existed, in general, and also in particular moments of decision. And of course it had brought him Jelena, six months ago, and six months later it was taking him back to her, and to his steadily increasing interest in that organized religion known as Roman Catholicism.