When Is a Man Page 2

  “Stories?” Paul licked his lips. “Oh—well, good drive here. Feel fine.”

  “Yeah?” Tanner kept nodding, eyebrows raised. “Whole new outlook on things, I imagine. Second chance at life and all that.”

  “I guess. I pee myself sometimes, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well, that’s a start.” Tanner pointed up the street. “There’s the theatre.” He rubbed his hands together. “Man, I’m just—hope you’re around for this, it’s going to be—Iceland! Did I tell you that? Two films from Iceland. Haven’t even seen them yet, but that’s the kind of thing I hoped for. First year, and we’re already international.”

  “Great,” said Paul. “So, groceries.”

  “Right. Sure thing.”

  Paul followed him to the store, where they bought enough supplies to last him a week or so. Then they drove out to a storage unit facility near a gas station just outside of town to pick up the trailer and the materials needed to construct the fish barrier: rebar, a roll of wire fencing, and wood for the upstream and downstream weirs. They loaded the materials, hitched the trailer, and headed out.

  The highway ascended gradually toward the monolithic concrete wall of the McCulloch Dam. At the bottom of the spillway, whirlpools foamed and churned against gigantic, jagged boulders, rip-rap enclosed in heavy metal mesh. Past the dam, on the reservoir, a marina docked a few dozen boats, most of them small and rudimentary day-cruisers, although the occasional cabin-cruiser or sailboat towered above them. The marina office itself was old and poorly kept, all chipped paint and rusted metal. On the other side of the highway, unpaved roads disappeared into the hills or led to houses and fenced fields that pastured horses and cattle. Everything became more desolate by degrees, which somehow served to lift Paul’s mood. He was withdrawing, and was just beginning to savour this sense of exile when they turned the corner and were met by a cop’s raised hand and a crowd of sickened faces.

  2

  They left the flashing lights and commotion behind and continued on to Basket Creek. Another policeman met them at the top of the narrow side road that led from the main road down to the site. “Almost wrapped up here and I’ll let you drive in,” he said, then jogged down to a levelled clearing among the trees where a second officer was jimmying open an old truck. Paul and Tanner stood outside and leaned against the trailer, facing the sun.

  “Strange place to drown,” Tanner said.

  “Could be someone else’s truck,” Paul said quietly.

  “No, it’s his. The owner wouldn’t be far away otherwise.”

  A few moments passed. “What do you mean, strange?” Paul asked.

  “Just strange.” Tanner checked his watch. “Riverbank isn’t that high, and it’s stable. Water’s shallow at the edge. No real hazards, unless you’re some drunk teenager on an inner tube, or a child. Or stupid.” Tanner started to grin, probably on the verge of cracking some joke, but stopped. Paul shuddered, still queasy.

  Over an hour passed before the officer decided there was no harm in letting them set up their camp. The vehicle in question, a grey pickup, was pressed against the shrubs at the far edge of the clearing, one wheel sunk in the soft soil and moss. Paul parked and then helped direct Tanner, who backed the trailer into a shady spot beside the remains of a campfire enclosed within an old truck tire rim. They silently unloaded the bundles of wire and rebar, tarps, and wood slats and stacked them on the ground. Wary of straining himself, he took embarrassingly small armfuls. But the two officers ignored them, tramping circles through the woods, and disappearing again toward the river.

  Straight ahead of the trailer, obscured by trees except for flashes of silver light, was the Immitoin. To Paul’s right, twenty metres beyond a wall of alder, willow, and other bushes, ran Basket Creek, the delicate glassy notes of its running nearly overpowered by the jumbled roar of the larger river. Tall firs and cedars loomed over them, the forest sloping upward past the main road and into the foothills of an unseen mountain range. The sky above the site was a narrow blue eye that winked half-shut whenever the treetops dipped and swayed in the breeze. As he worked, Paul stole glances at the pickup.

  They made several trips down the path to Basket Creek, stacking their materials on the gravel flats beside scrub willow and trembling aspen, some fifteen metres from the mouth of the stream. The banks gently sloped to a small pebble beach along a restful pool. As they returned to the trailer for the final haul, a second police car drove into camp, followed by a tow truck. “Why don’t you sort our stuff at the creek,” Tanner said. “I’ll stay, see if they need me.”

  Paul wandered down the path and then into the trees. He unzipped his jeans, checked inside—he’d thrown his pad and underwear into the woods earlier but felt even more disgusting without their protection. He looked around. So this was now home: where a man had fallen, or possibly thrown himself, into the river and died.

  As he finished separating the bundles of fencing wire, he heard the low rumbling of the tow truck driving away. Tanner appeared, carrying two sets of neoprene chest waders. They would walk part of the stream before building the fence. Paul, following Tanner’s example, took off his shoes and pulled on the waders, the coarse, tacky material rubbing against his leg hairs. “Hope I got your measurements right,” Tanner said. “It’s like you got both skinnier and fatter.” Tanner, Paul grudgingly admitted, had never looked fitter or more comfortable in his own skin.

  There were no dead fish anywhere. Paul had anticipated, with a kind of morbid satisfaction, a scattering of carcasses on the banks, the bodies accumulating, grey, eyeless flesh piling up against the fence until he was ankle-deep in the rot. For the next forty days, whenever he stepped out of the trailer, he would face a siege of scavengers: grizzly and black bears, crows and ravens, coyotes, a type of lush destruction. On the coast years ago, he’d seen a river that roiled with sockeye salmon and had been surprised to see even innocent-looking birds, dippers, sparrows, and wrens, pluck the eyes and bits of innards from the carcasses draped over rocks and logs, fats, oils, and proteins fed to the forest by the smallest mouths, the most innocuous scat.

  He’d forgotten that trout were not salmon and didn’t die after they spawned. He admitted as much to Tanner. “The journey’ll do some in,” Tanner said. “There were salmon once, before the McCulloch Dam and the rest. Four species of them.” They’d travelled from the Pacific Ocean, up the Columbia River, across three States and then north, to spawn in the Columbia’s many tributaries. “Pioneers and First Nations used to joke about walking across the river on the backs of salmon. Although I’ve heard the same joke about different rivers, so who knows.”

  The creek wasn’t deep, or all that fast. His waders were fitted with cleated soles for extra grip. Even so, the going was more difficult than he’d anticipated. The water buffeted his shins and knees, while the stones and gravel—round, polished, and slick—gave way beneath his feet. He pulled himself forward, trying to power through the current. Compared with him, Tanner could have been dancing, the way he lifted one foot and then hopped forward, finding solid ground and quieter water, striding with his long limbs past the riffles and treacherous pools. Paul stumbled and struggled along, head down and panting.

  The way people negotiated obstacles or incorporated them into their routes: this had been a major theme of Paul’s dissertation. A progression of boulders led upstream to where the bridge crossed the logging road, and he imagined that the cocky Tran Minh or the self-effacing Xi Bai, two key participants in his ethnographic study, could have gone from here to the bridge without touching the water, jumping effortlessly from stone to stone. He even imagined his old self capable of doing so. Or maybe not. Despite the hours he’d put in, the rigorous discipline, he was never a real traceur. Nor was that supposed to be the point of his research. Still.

  For his ethnographic study, he’d placed himself in an informal group of youths and adults who practised parkour on the university grounds, around Kitsilano, and downtown. Parkour, everyon
e in the group had told him many times—because parkour was easier to summarize than properly explain—was about getting from Point A to Point B as quickly and efficiently as possible, regardless of what stood in the way, using only the body to conquer each barrier. Any man-made object counted as an obstacle. Parkour was both a celebration of architecture, of materials and texture, and a benign war against urban confinement. Walls, stairwells, and turnstiles were meant to corral the body into uniform, pedestrian channels, but parkour changed this by expanding the possibilities. A thin, decorative ledge could become a ladder, a means of travel. A wall of coarse brick or inlaid stone with protruding edges was easier to surmount than vinyl panelling or a stainless steel veneer.

  The leader, a whip-thin political science student named Nathan Cook, picked out their routes or found structures where they could spend their sessions honing certain techniques—balances and crawls, leaps and landings, tumbles and rolls, vaults and climbs. Nathan practised parkour for the philosophical aspects as much as the athletics. The youngest mostly wanted to emulate what they’d seen in movies. But even then, obsessed as they were by escalators, rooftops, and terraces, the teenaged traceurs and traceuses (there were three women in the group) were as likely to slip into the same esoteric jargon as their older counterparts. They spoke of reclaiming space, of a new interaction with their urban surroundings. Some called it the art of displacement—a bastardized translation, Paul understood, of the French term l’art du déplacement. A park bench, a concrete fountain, a fence: these things stopped being themselves, or only themselves. They also became pathways, blank objects redefined by the body. A psycho-athletic re-envisioning of architectural space.

  Which came across as total pretentious gibberish to most people, of course, but for Paul it was pure gold. How else to convince his department, or any source of grant funding, that he was studying something more than social misfits playing Spider-Man?

  Shadows flicked past his feet, olive green, brief iridescence. “They’re already here,” Tanner shouted. “They’re staging in the pools.” His friend became more animated—crouching low to squint into the riffles and then springing ahead, his feet finding the sure ground among the loose rocks and whirlpools. The bridge and the embankments of the logging road loomed in front of them, but for all of Paul’s flailing, he came no closer to it. The weight and play of the water tugged his feet down into the gravel. Worse was the rubbery constraint of his waders, beneath which his jeans had slid off his hips while the legs rode up, so that all the material gathered in goiter-like lumps around his thighs.

  Paul: swaddled like a gigantic infant. Hauling himself upstream to stagger on the spawning grounds.

  3

  Once the sun was down, they returned to the creek, and Paul hung his lantern on a hook screwed into the frame of the measuring station. There was no moon for light, only a glow in the southwest corner of the sky, the bounce of Tanner’s headlamp on the water. The stream muttered and gurgled strangely in the dark. Where the current ran slower beside the beach, they’d installed the two box weirs assembled from pre-fab frames and cedar slats, each uncovered and designed with a single opening that faced either upstream or down. From the second weir, the fence ran the width of the creek, held in place by the rebar stakes they’d laboriously pounded into the creekbed.

  The measuring station was a simple frame of pine poles and two-by-fours, a square of plywood and a tightly fastened tarp for a roof. A wooden folding table took up most of the space, along with a large plastic cooler in one corner. There weren’t many scientific instruments, thankfully nothing complicated or intimidating: a weigh scale, a measuring tape, a waterproof notebook, and plastic bottles marked with millilitre increments and filled with amber-coloured clove oil, a few drops of which had been added to the water inside the cooler to serve as an anesthetic. Another tool looked like a pricing gun at a retail store, loaded with transparent filaments tipped with round, blue plastic ends, each marked with a five-digit number.

  “Bring the lantern so you can see what I’m doing.” Tanner stood at the edge of the creek with his headlamp. Dark things thrashed and churned inside the weirs—fish jockeying for position as they tried to continue upstream. Their meaty backs and slender dorsal fins bisected the inky surface.

  “Just a handful,” said Tanner. “None in the downstream. They’re starting to head up now, you see. By the end, it’ll be the other way around.”

  He focused his headlamp onto the middle of the creek, where an unnatural ripple bumped against the wire fence. “He’ll be in the weir by morning.” He pulled on a thin pair of latex gloves and motioned for Paul to do the same. “Otherwise your hands take the slime off their body, which is bad. This won’t take us long,” he added. “But you’ll get the idea.”

  Tanner netted one from the upstream trap and held the thrashing prize in front of him as he scrambled up to the station and dropped the trout into the cooler. The fish bucked against the white walls at first but quickly calmed, moving its tail in steady flicks. The smell of clove oil clung to Paul’s shirt. A minute passed, and then Tanner nudged the fish and provoked a sluggish reaction. He rolled it on its side. “See how he’s all hook-jawed. That’s the kipe.”

  There it was, the cold, nocturnal creature that would be his only company for more than a month: the lean, toothy jaw, the muscular olive-green back, white and reddish spots haloed with blue along its sides, the white-tipped pelvic fins, the belly flushed orange and red. The trout, its face reptilian and mechanical as a plumber’s wrench, filled Paul with a quiet despair.

  Tanner lifted and cradled the fish over to the table. His friend was deep in his element, almost jubilant with familiarity, muscle memory carrying him easily through each task.

  “How it’s done,” grunted Tanner. In a few smooth motions he jotted the fish’s weight on the lined waterproof paper, then held the measuring tape from the farthest tip of the tail fin to the knobby end of the kipe and recorded the length. He grabbed the tagging gun, lifted the dorsal fin between thumb and forefinger, then punctured the fatty area below the fin. “At an angle, not deep.” The blue plastic jutted from one side. “Write the tag number down, and you’re done.”

  With the trout back in the net, Paul followed Tanner down to the weirs again. In the shallows on either side of the fence, they’d arranged piles of rocks to create a breakwater where the fish could recover from the anesthetic away from the current. “One hand beneath its head, the other at the base of the tail. Rock him gently back and forth in the water. Get the oxygen moving through his gills.”

  “Do bears ever come down at night?”

  “Nope. I don’t know, the noise and the lantern probably scares them.”

  “Maybe you’ve just been lucky.”

  “Maybe. Okay, let him sit now, he’s fine.”

  He watched Tanner process another trout and envisioned a typical night’s work. At its best, the gratifying rhythm of skilled labour, like carpentry; at its worst, the monotony of the assembly line. He lifted the third fish from the cooler, and the body pulsed and quivered in his hands like a spastic muscle. The cold seeped through his thin gloves. He tried the tagging gun, hit too high up the fin, and the rectangular end of the filament stuck out the other side. Tanner snipped it off with cutters, pulled the tag free, and Paul tried again.

  The next two fish already had tags in them, yellow ones, the numbers buried under a slick of green algae. “The yellows came up two years ago, you’ll see lots of those. Any red tags, that’s last autumn. Always amazes me, the ones that make it consecutive years. You’d think they’d take time off. It’s a hell of a trip.”

  Inside the camper, they had stuffed Paul’s gear into the overhead fibreglass cabinets and stacked canned goods, toolboxes, and batteries in the storage space under the seats. They wiped down the counters and the inside of the bar fridge, and then piled blankets and sheets on the sofa bed at the front of the camper beside the closet. The table at the back of the trailer could be collapsed into a
single bed when the night’s work was done. The upholstered white walls behind the gas stove and countertop, the thin beige drapes, the narrow windows—it would be like living in an egg.

  They sat at the table and transferred data from the waterproof paper onto a spreadsheet on Tanner’s laptop, while outside the generator rumbled and stuttered. Tanner poured a glass of scotch, and Paul sipped herbal tea, a blend that had the unfortunate slight taste of cloves. The whole process had taken them just over an hour.

  “It’ll get busier,” Tanner said. “In a few weeks, the run will hit its peak. Just enough so you won’t get bored. You’ll work for three, maybe four hours straight, not including the data.”

  “Hope I’m faster by then.”

  “You’ll get there,” Tanner said. “I noticed your laptop—you have your own stuff to do?”

  “I don’t, really.”

  “Thought you might be picking away at your dissertation.”

  Paul traced his finger along the edge of his cup. “Not anymore.”

  “No more parkour?”

  The trailer had an ugly fluorescent light that made Paul’s arm look jaundiced and stick-thin. He flexed his bicep and made a wry face.

  “You should go back to Sweden.” Tanner laughed. “I love it—chasing Vikings and bog mummies.”

  Paul wanted a drink, a nice beer, so he could pretend this was like old times, yakking it up in the campus pub. Nobody said booze was out of the question, but it somehow made sense to deny himself the pleasure of alcohol’s comforting lassitude. Less likely to pee himself too. “When I got back,” he said, “I tried to salvage my research, tried to stay interested . . .”

  Tanner nodded. “So you’re done, then? In the department?”

  Paul shrugged. “I told Dr. Tamba about this job. He said, ‘Since you’re near Castlegar or Grand Forks, why not do something on the Doukhobors?’”