Harry and Bernice turned in for the night, accepting Buddy’s help creaking up the camper steps painfully. Then Buddy sat for a while by the fire, looking into the star-spangled sky beyond his towering audience of firs, cedars, and maples. They bowed over him, a shushing huddle of forest gods considering his fate. The campfire wavered and glowed cheerfully, licks of flame flaring up from the embers, the logs snapping occasionally, sending up swarms of sparks.
He had reserved the back passenger seat of the crew cab for his bunk: unfurled a sleeping bag, ready to crawl into; put a flashlight on the tray between the front seats, in case he wanted to read; and had his mobile set up with earphones and a list of downloaded Spotify tunes—a selection from his Deep Listening playlist, which Robbie and Glow teased him about, judging his choices a blend of Muzak.
Despite these preparations, he didn’t feel like turning in.
Midnight paddle?
He was tempted. He’d been out in Jenny’s kayak that afternoon and had left it on the beach. But he was no expert with a paddle, and there’d be no one out there to rescue him if he got into trouble.
Stay close to shore?
Besides, he didn’t really want to leave the warmth and flickering light of his fire and the imperturbable, ancient gaze of his hulking, arboreal companions.
Do it! he commanded.
Fumbling through the dark, he made his way down the path toward the lake. One of the things Harry and Bernice loved about Nixon Creek was what they called its ‘dancing trees’. A quirk of hydrology and geology had washed the soil out from under the cedars and Douglas fir that crowded down to the shore. They looked like clumsy dancers, standing on their toes, swaying in a gargantuan slow-motion ballet.
“Even when I’m looking the other way, out over the lake, I’m aware of them,” Bernice told him. “It’s as if they were alive the same way we are—that they watch us, think about us, and want to know us in ways trees can’t. I know it’s silly, sort of like believing in ghosts, but I can’t help what I think, can I?”
No, you can’t, Buddy agreed, stepping out from between the coniferous tribe and trudging down the shingle beach. He smiled, looking up again at the spray of the universe against the night sky. This is a place where trees can dance,’ he thought. A place where myths and legends still live and get born.
He took his boots, socks, and pants off. Out of habit, he knocked the boots together, folded his jeans neatly along the seams, and inverted one sock partly inside-out over the other, so the two were joined like ‘Siamese tootsies’. He dragged the kayak down to the water’s edge as if leading a fibreglass seal into its element, then got in and shoved off.
Stroke and glide, stroke and glide. Instead of following the curve of the shoreline, as he’d intended, Buddy made for open water. Stupid! he knew, but he felt his connection to solid ground receding with each thrust. When he was far enough out that he could no longer hear the whisper of the breeze in the trees, he let the kayak glide on its own momentum, breaking down the paddle and stowing its two halves under the bungee cords on the foredeck. Adrift, he hunkered down in the seat and let his head loll back so he was looking up into the night sky.
Why am I here? The question didn’t need answering but had to be asked.
“Why!”
His shout skittered out across the water, dissipating long before it even reached the shore. Had anyone guessed at the number of molecules that might exist in the vastness of the universe? Was there even a centre to the infinite, a place meaning might converge? He laughed at the profound absurdity of his speculations.
He remembered Robbie asking once why we shouldn’t steal. “Because it’s not a good thing to do,” Buddy had answered sagely. Why? “Because if everyone stole, we’d soon have nothing left to steal, because we’d all be too busy beating each other up to make anything new.” So? “You like our house, don’t you? And your toys, and having enough food to eat?” Why? “Because those things make you happy…” Why? Why? Why?
Buddy smiled, remembering Robbie’s mischievous grin at having stumped the in-house philosopher-patriarch.
The water lapped against the hull of Jenny’s kayak. He floated southeast, nudged by the prevailing breeze. How would I answer Robbie now? he wondered. “Now it’s not a game anymore?” Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, Omnipotence… They’d all become definitions beyond imagining. In the end, ‘why?’ always morphs into ‘how?’ Buddy thought.
He sat up, pulled the two halves of the paddle out from under the bungee strapping, and locked them together. He couldn’t say how far he’d drifted or where the camper might be along the darkened shoreline of Cowichan Lake. He’d head due south, toward the shadowy outline of the forest—point his vessel starboard from the distant glimmer of Honeymoon Bay. Then he’d begin coasting west, searching for the dancing trees, hoping there’d be a few embers still glowing in the fire pit for him to home in on when he got closer to Nixon Creek.
Next: First Sighting