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4 | (continued) One such balmy afternoon, probably the most restful of the entire idyll, I lay in the breeze off the fields, supine in the tent, naked behind the mosquito net, but with the flap of the vestibule thrown back, just reading, without a single distraction or interruption. It was almost semi-tropical. Given a little love and a bigger tent, it would have been paradisal. It was on this morning I think that I caught the faintest whiff, from a house that must have been at least a third of a mile away, of fresh coffee and cigarette smoke. Odors carry amazingly far. In 1958, when I was in the Navy, we could smell the open sewers of Japan (“benjo ditches”), well before we could see the land itself. They’ve long since been modernized. I was probably feeling generally good about life at the moment because I had worked the previous day, and was up a few bucks. It shames me to admit how meaningful money has become in my life—the ultimate psychotropic substance.
I rarely stayed in the woods for the whole of every day; the sense of isolation was far too difficult to bear. But there was one day in summer, brilliantly sunny, when I decided to do some chores of the occasional kind, like washing the ground sheet in the river. The ground sheet was just an 8x10-foot rectangle of orange woven polyethylene, which I had bought for my first canoe trip in 1976. A ground sheet is supposed to be a protective barrier between the tent floor and the earth, a kind of sacrificial membrane to save wear and tear on the tent proper, which is far more expensive to replace than a sheet of plastic. The state of my mind being what it then was, I recall the half-hour or so that I spent in the river that day with a vividness out of all proportion to its duration or outward significance. Along that stretch of the river—just upstream from the railroad bridge—the river flowed due south, and the sun was then at its zenith, or as close to being overhead as most Canadians would ever wish it. Its radiance lay upon the foot-deep water, the bottom gravel, the grasses, the forested shores and myself, standing in the warm, shallow stream, squinting in the glare, with the true taste of summer in my soul for what seemed the first time in many years.
After the first few such attempts, I spread it out and looked at it. Still muddy. I would have to scrub it. On such a day, in such a place, this I didn’t mind. I laid it on the riverbed and weighted the corners down with rocks, until the whole thing looked like a failed attempt to signal a search-and-rescue aircraft. I don’t recall what I scrubbed it with, probably my shorts, since I couldn’t have been more secluded north of 60°. First one side, then the other, 160 square feet of mudguard, down on my hands and knees in the riffling currents. It all sounds tedious, but compared to sitting in a laundromat, listening to machinery instead of birdcalls, it was a gloriously timeless experience. I felt like an ancient fisherman, preparing his net in a jungle stream. Had I been obliged to stay there until dusk, I would not have complained. Though I would probably have gone back to the tent for my binoculars.
I had brought with me the first and second drafts of a novella, and to occupy my time, when Boss had nothing for me to do, and to relieve the agony of total inactivity (reading, for me, is never guiltless during normal working hours), I would lie in the tent on rainy days and slowly revise the second draft. The greatest irony of the whole experience, however, has never occurred to me until this moment: the days were much lonelier than the nights. I expect to be alone at night; I have slept alone every night for all but about twenty months of my adult life. It’s during the day when I normally have the chance to be around other people. |
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I drew the muddy tarp under the water, then up overhead several times, until I thought it was clean. Not the simplest of gestures, this—as it passes beneath the surface, the tarp envelops |
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