My father-in-law died mid-morning on May 5th, 1998 in the hospital just blocks from his home in Sechelt, British Columbia. His name was Lorne. Three days later I stood on the deck of Molly’s Reach, a restaurant in neighboring Gibson’s Landing, high above the docks, watching as my wife, her three siblings, and their mother stepped onto a motor launch and carried his ashes across the sound and out of sight behind Keats Island. In a modest ceremony that I was not privy to, they scattered the gray dust that weighed so heavily on their hearts yet was lifted with such capriciousness by the freshening breeze, into the swell and chop of the channel. It was not precisely what Lorne had asked for, but his survivors had deemed his request too modest.
I had a few companions on the deck, mourners from the service who were free of more pressing affairs and chose to wait to share a buffet lunch with the family. We exchanged few words, each lost in his own contemplation of mortality, I suppose. Lorne had died of lung cancer and I noticed that all of his friends as they stood staring off at the ocean or down at their shoes, or following the gulls as they careened about on the afternoon breezes, were drawing morosely on cigarettes, lighting one from another so never to be without a breath of it in their lungs. I quietly acknowledged my own vice as I took another swig from the Labatt’s Blue I was nursing, then settled it onto the railing and concentrated on the point of land about which the ceremonial craft would shortly emerge.
Suddenly it was twenty-five years before on a summer evening and I was sitting with Lorne on the deck at the side of his house in Prince George. We were alone, he with a Cutty Sark and I with a beer, and I’d just said something that had made him laugh. He was shaking his head. “Geez”, he said. When Lorne said “Geez” you knew it wasn’t a reference to Jesus. It was somehow both nasal and guttural and larded equally with laughter and disgust. “You think that’s bad,” he said. “Did you ever hear about me and Bowen Island?”
When Lorne had been a kid in high school he and his buddies had often spent summer days out on Bowen Island, which was a short drive and a ferry-ride from Vancouver. His face seemed to melt with the memory, his eyes grew soft and a distant smile enveloped him. Boy, did they have fun! He was sweet on this girl, he told me her name, but I’ve forgotten it, and this particular weekend he’d heard that she was going to be on Bowen with her folks. He had decided to buy her a ring and give it to her there on the Island. He didn’t say if it was an engagement ring, a school ring, or just a gift. I don’t know, but it was a big deal to him at the time. He had the ring in a little white box in the pocket of his swim trunks and he was hanging around the cabin above the dock when she showed up. He started out to greet her, but then got a case of the nerves, and decided he needed to go to the bathroom. Well, the bathroom was an outhouse behind the cabin, so he went up there, pulled down his trunks and sat down. He fished the ring out of his pocket, extracted it from its box and began to rehearse for the hundredth time what he would say to her. He held it out as he sat there, and mumbled the words to himself a few times. Then he imagined her extending her hand, and he carefully slipped the ring onto the pinky of his other hand, giving his most winning smile. Anyway, eventually he finished his business. A stack of shredded newspaper served as toilet paper, so he took a piece and roughed it up a bit to make it softer then wiped himself. As he was doing so he felt the ring slip off his finger. Christ! What an idiot! He’d left the ring on his pinky while he…
He leapt to his feet and peered into the hole. Such a stench! It was pitch black down there and he couldn’t see a thing. He kicked open the outhouse door to get some light, lifted the toilet seat and stuck his head right into the hole. All he could see was a great pyramid of shit littered with scraps of newspaper. He held his breath and kept looking, and finally he saw the ring off to the right, about halfway down the slope. Of course he couldn’t reach it, but he got his head and shoulders through the hole and imagined that he was getting close. Cursing and gasping for air, he slowly inched forward until he had his chest and belly into the hole. He’d lost sight of the ring by now because he was completely blocking the light, but he groped around, trying not to touch the stinking mess he was so close to. A little further, a little further. He felt his hips against the rim of hole. He hadn’t taken time to pull up his trunks before he’d embarked on this venture and he started to giggle, thinking of what he looked like with his bare ass in the air and the rest of him down the shit-hole. He was brushing his hand along the shreds of newspaper where he was sure he’d seen the ring, but he wasn’t finding it. Maybe a little further down. Suddenly his hips were through the hole and he plummeted. If his feet had not been snarled up in his trunks he’d still probably have been able to save himself, but he couldn’t spread his legs and he slid headlong into you know what.
It was an old outhouse, very deep and well used. He was completely immersed in shit. It took him several seconds just to find his feet and surface, gasping for air – the foulest air one could image. He spat and shook his hands as clean as he could, then wiped the shit out of his eyes. Thigh deep, he couldn’t reach the opening. Every time he leapt for it he sunk further into the morass. It was like quicksand. He struggled to more solid ground at the edge of the chamber and after several acrobatic minutes he managed to get a hand through the hole. He had been skinny in those days, but strong, and he pulled himself up high enough to get his head through the hole and he hung there for a while, spitting and coughing and gasping for air. He worked one elbow out onto the bench, then the other, and was finally able to kick and slide out onto the outhouse floor. Unfortunately, he’d lost his swim trunks in the endeavor.
So there he was, stark naked, covered in shit from head to toe with the love of his young life and all of his friends just down the hill. There was only one thing to do. He burst through the door, across the lawn, past the cabin, almost bowling over his girlfriend and her parents, down the gravel path to the beach, between his buddies, lounging on the sand, out onto the dock, and off the end into the ocean. They had heard him coming, they had smelled him coming, and the whole place erupted in cries of glee and disgust. Lorne thrashed in the water, ignoring the hoots of his friends, scrubbing his hair and wiping himself as clean as he could, then made off around the point with his briskest stroke. He found a wooded bit of empty shoreline and skulked back through the woods to the cabin, sneaked in to grab some clothes, crept to his car and escaped back to Vancouver.
When he saw the girl at school the next week he avoided her, was too embarrassed to even try to explain. She apparently had similar feelings, and they never exchanged another word. At the end of term she went off to University someplace and he never heard of her again.
Lorne drained his Cutty Sark and shook his head while I picked myself up off the deck and tried to control my laughter. He gave me a rueful smile then sighed the sigh of ages. He must have been in his early fifties then, and his sigh was freighted with thirty-five years of long-lost youth, of never quite quenched regret, of what-might-have-beens, and you’ll-never-knows. But also, perhaps more importantly, were thirty-five-year-old golden memories, coddled and savored, of the reckless innocence and hapless bravado and stupidity of those youthful summers on Bowen Island. He looked at me from under his wooly brows and cracked a crooked smile. “But, geez, did we have fun!”
From the deck of Molly’s Reach you can’t see Bowen Island. It’s right there, only a few miles away, but Keats Island blocks the view. I squinted into the reflected sunlight and rising breeze, then headed back into the bar for another beer.
I was visiting Lorne about ten days before he died, just before his final, precipitous slide. He was still at home, and was sitting in his easy chair, wrapped loosely in a terrycloth housecoat, looking pretty rough. He was telling us that all of his affairs were in order, even the funeral home had been paid in advance, the casket chosen. He didn’t want a funeral, he didn’t want us to call in all of his old friends to make useless speeches, and he didn’t want to be stuck in a hole in the ground so his daughters could come and weep over him for the next fifty years. A quick, small service would suffice. In fact, he insisted on it. He would be cremated and his ashes scattered into the ocean. It was his only request. He was speaking to his daughter. “After the ceremony, when you’re on the ferry on your way back to Vancouver, take the box of ashes to the railing, and just where the ferry is closest to Bowen Island, scatter them into the waves. Dump them into the channel, from where I choose to believe some of them will wash up onto the beaches of my youth.” His gravelly voice cracked and failed him as tears welled from his eyes. “Oh, Christ!” He brushed at them impatiently with his sleeve. Then he shook his head and gave us that wistful smile that I recognized from all those years before. “Bowen Island, I haven’t been there in years. My God did we have fun there when we were kids!”
Taos, April 2002