Chapter Eight

      "Damn," Toby said. He was staring through the airplane window, on the port side.
 
     "What's the matter?"
 
     "I guess we're not going to be able to see Waddington. I wanted to be able to show Joanna." Their oldest was sitting on his lap, her little brother on his mother's. "To show her where Daddy once worked and all that. She'd be so impressed I'd never have to do anything remarkable again. But those mountains are all covered with cloud. It's clear enough here, and on the ocean side, but not over the mountains. No wonder. That must have been one of the wettest Junes on record. Remember when we flew down from Camden Falls, after the lighthouse? That was at the end of August and you couldn't see Waddington because of the smoke from the forest fires. Obviously my timing isn't very good."
 
     "I wouldn't fuss if I were you. You're a writer, not a photographer. You'll get to describe it all in words one day."
 
     "Maybe," Toby said. "I haven't been very good at it so far."
  
    "Was it a really high mountain, Daddy?"
 
     "Really high. 14,000 feet. Twice as high as anything close to the Flats. Second highest mountain in the province."
 
     "Did you climb that mountain?"
  
    "No. That wasn't part of my job. I just climbed the hills beside the river. And once went up a high ridge on my day off. But that wasn't near 14,000 feet. But I got to ride around in helicopters and a plane quite a lot. That was part of my job. The plane was a lot smaller than this one, and it took off from and landed on the lakes. This plane can only land on a cement runway. But you're only four and you've been in planes a lot earlier than I was."
 
     "So already you're more impressive than your father," Jelena said.
 
     "What's 'impressive' mean?"
  
    "It means that people notice you a lot, like the time we were at the piano recitals at the school and you piped up good and loud at half-time and asked when we were going to hear Beethoven," Jelena laughed.
 
     "Now you're going to have to explain what 'precocious' means as well, and admit where she got it from."
 
     "But you're pretty precocious," Jelena said.
  
    "Not when I was four, and only after I turned twenty-two and met you."
  
    "You met me when you were twenty-one."
 
     "I saw you when I was twenty-one. I didn't talk to you until I was twenty-two. When I was twenty-two I became precocious and wrote you a poem and then later I vaulted a counter in the Howden ball room and asked you to dance."
  
    "I think you told me I had to dance."
 
     "Like I said, I saw you and then became precocious. No wonder Joanna is precocious, because she gets to see both of us." He hugged the girl to him for a moment and kissed the top of her head. "Well, we don't get to see the mountain, but in a little while you will get to see your grandmother. She's kind of a mountain in her own way and she'll think you're terrific."
  
    "And precocious," Jelena said.
  
    "Is 'precocious' good, Daddy?"
 
     "It's very good. Your Mummy was the most precocious girl I'd ever met and that's why she had to marry me. She got so precocious because she read a lot of books. I have no idea what she was like before she started reading."
  
    "I was illiterate," Jelena said.
  
    "And so you should have been. You were only four. Most people are illiterate after thirty. That's why they're not precocious."
 
     "I thought the literate people were retiring. Into corners to read their books."
  
    "I think we have different meanings for 'precocious' going here."
  
    "That's what you get when you use three-syllable words on a child."
 
     "But her name is a three-syllable word. Jo-an-na."
 
     "Which you usually shorten to 'Jo-jo'. That's two syllables."
 
     "Your Mummy is very quick today. Maybe she's light-headed because we're so high in the air."
 
     "It's because I've got time to think because this one's asleep."
 
     But she might have well spoken the past tense, for the other three-syllabled child - Dominic - was waking up, in surroundings not at all like where he had been accustomed to coming to. He needed attention, and he got it, from his sister as well as his mother, and Toby was left to his thoughts, which had remained with the mountains in the clouds to the east.
 
     It had come back to him that while the summer in the Homathko Valley had been utterly magnificent from the simply natural point of view, the sort of working adventure to comment on and tell anecdotes from for the rest of his days, none of these ordinary wonders held a candle to the extraordinary events, none of which could be made plain to a daughter of four, and the most significant of which were intelligible to few souls over forty. Certainly at twenty even Jelena, for all her Catholicism and even a certain amount of reading in the great Teresa of Avila, had not always had a perfectly easy time with it all.
 
     Who could? Would anyone who thought of him or herself as a sane and normal person want to hear about a half-hour when a fellow human's brain had simply been quietly but steadily, and with no comfort whatsoever, been taken apart by a kind of interior hacksaw, while all the time, in that particular middle of the night, the moon shone brightly down from a completely clear September sky, and the river rumbled along thirty feet from the cabin door? Literally, a cabin door. The survey crew had lived in tents all summer, but at the end, on a nice little flat below Homathko Canyon, they had put up a couple of rough log shelters to serve the drillers that were to come later on. The moon had shone through the cabin door while Toby felt his brains attacked. And then, suddenly, they weren't, and he went to sleep. The next day they were helicoptered in turn up to the main camp on the lake, and the day after that flown out to Campbell River in a Beaver, to ride the bus south to Nanaimo and then the ferry to town. The working summer was over, and his brains, for what they were worth, had been sent back to the city and his family and any of his old friends who were left on the campus. As he was coming back for a fifth year, that would mean changes in the circle, and he had been enormously excited by the prospect of the months ahead, and he had been proved right to be so.

    But those were his student days, and the months leading up to his conversion, and God, as usual with newcomers, was giving him the time of his life. He was an old salt, now, sort of, and so there were difficulties.
 
     Difficulties like the fact that Jelena was really looking forward to getting back to Vancouver and he was not especially excited about it. In the months and years following their exodus, he had missed the place from time to time, of course. Until he was twenty-three and married, Vancouver had basically been the only city on earth for him. He'd tried others: Toronto, New York, Seattle. Even brief skirmishes with Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton. But Vancouver had been home and any and all challenges worth addressing. And then it wasn't. All of a sudden it had lost its spark, and the place he started to see in his visionary moments was the mere little town where Jelena had grown up. That was the problem with having your brains fried in the middle of the night. Somebody else had taken over your sense of direction, and They really had you, because they operated from inner depths you really didn't know much about, and they knew how to keep on operating, cutting, grinding, deeper and deeper, and more and more painfully, until you got the point, and went where you were supposed to go, for whatever apparent reason, or retreated from where you had thought you should be and then found reason not to.
  
    There was, of course, a certain long term existential safety in the process. The mistakes were short-lived, overcome and corrected before there was any lasting damage. He might find himself very unpleasantly trapped, but that made him realize some change was needed, and then he found the new situation, and regained his usual freedom and sense of buoyancy, and sooner or later could look back quite objectively and find the hidden values of the experience.
  
    It always worked. But it wasn't always explainable, especially around the painful parts. The world was full of amateur psychologists. One of these was his own father, and others had worn Roman collars. He was about to meet his father again, after a gap of three years, and who knew what priests lay ahead.