“I hammered in my last shake just as it was getting dawn. I told everyone, if I’m up here, I might as well stick around, but that got vetoed, they claim I ain’t got enough staying power. They were drawing lots about who would go up there when me and Dog left to drop off the tools. Actually, we stopped off at Honk Gilmore’s, he’s got some primordial bud, man.”
Arthur’s anxiety grows with every word. “Pause here, Stoney. They were drawing lots? To go where?”
“We had about thirty people hammering away there. The Gap. Right in the middle of the road that ain’t going to happen if we got a breath left in us, right, Dog?”
Dog nods, half-asleep. They have now pulled up to Stoney’s two-ton flatbed. Arthur makes out, under a torn canvas, saws, shovels, grapples, pulleys, wheelbarrows, a generator.
“Let me understand this, Stoney. You are describing some kind of tree house?”
“Not some kid’s tree house, a fort, a real fort. We’re talking, oh, maybe eighty feet up.”
“Eighty?” That was the hammering Arthur heard.
“It’s a palace, man. It’s even got a chemical shitter.” He jostles Dog awake, and they get out.
“I suggest you fellows hide those tools for now, deep in the bush.”
He presses the accelerator too hard, and the Fargo bucks and spits gravel. He takes the old bypass, up by the deserted vineyard, a project surrendered to birds and broom. He senses that his worst fears are about to be confirmed.
As he approaches Centre Road, Margaret’s full-sized diesel Toyota passes the other way, Paavo driving, no Margaret. Distracted, swerving, he almost clips the Hamiltons’ roadside stand and its piled cartons of eggs. A hysterical chicken flaps past his front wheel. Slow down, he tells himself, everything’s going to be all right. Progress is retarded, in any event, by an empty logging truck that leads him on a winding climb. As he passes the old granite quarry, a glimpse in the rear-view reveals a fat figure astride a midget car-it’s Nelson Forbish, editor of The Bleat (“Covering the Island, Covering Up for No One”), on his all-terrain vehicle.
Centre Road climbs steeply to the Lower Gap Trail, where another logging truck sits, along with a king cab, a bulldozer, and an excavator. Down the hill is a straggling line of parked vehicles, curious locals approaching by foot. Arthur wedges his truck behind a fresh stump-an acre of trees is down, a field of amputated trunks. But the crew of Gulf Sustainable Logging are now standing by idly. As Arthur stares at the carnage, he feels a sickness, again comes that sense of helplessness.
“Hop on, Mr. Beauchamp,” Nelson says. He prefers to address Arthur formally, but after six years still mispronounces his name, anglicized beyond repair centuries ago as “Beechem.”
Arthur risks a perch behind Nelson’s ample girth, grasping the straps of his camera bag. Nelson goes slowly up the Gap Trail, his horn making tinny beeps, encouraging pedestrians to give way. “Press vehicle,” he calls out, then grumbles, “Nobody tells me anything till the last minute. Any idea what’s going on up here, Mr. Beauchamp?”
“I intend to find out.”
“You want to give me a good quote for later?”
“Not now, Nelson.” So many of Arthur’s quotes to The Bleat have been so garbled that he has begun creating fictions. Last month, Nelson printed his canard that the Northwest Nude Bathers Society was planning an anti-logging protest here on April first.
“How’s the program?” Arthur asks.
“I’m down to two hundred and eighty, and it’s killing me. I get hallucinations. I dreamed I was in chains and there was a pork roast sitting in front of me.”
After a few minutes they come to the narrowest part of the Gap, where sound is muffled by the forest and only an occasional spear of sunshine penetrates the canopy. It’s made darker still by the sheer rock walls. Here, Douglas firs rooted centuries ago, and found the sun-many are massive, covered by thick slabs of ancient bark. Delicate moss fronds hang from lower limbs, and tiny birds cavort in them, kinglets.
Slappy bounds up to Arthur, tail wagging, as he dismounts at a small clearing made soft by a carpet of needles, with cones and dead branches raked neatly to the side. Among those gathered here is Reverend Al Noggins, ringleader of the Save Gwendolyn Society. He’s in the far corner of the clearing, an alcove, talking with the attractive gamin Arthur saw hitchhiking, the five-foot-two hippie.
The star of this show is a venerable Douglas fir eight feet wide at the base, dwarfing even Nelson Forbish as he gapes upward. Arthur calculates the platform as not eighty feet high, as Stoney claimed, more like fifty, the height of eight tall men. It girds the entire trunk and is protected by a sturdy guard rail. A shake roof, supported by diagonal beams, is held to the trunk with foot-long bolts. Canvas rain blinds that can be lowered. Affixed to the beams, a fan of poles, sharpened at the ends like spears: the Dog-built barrier.
He calls, “Are you up there, Margaret?”
She appears over the railing, shouts down, “Here I am.” An expressive shrug, arms held out as if she’s about to take wing. “I didn’t plan it. My name was pulled from a hat.”
“And how long will you stay?”
“We’re provisioned for…well, three weeks. That’s the plan.”
Arthur stares up dumbly as the kinglets flit and cheep in the boughs above her. Two more heads appear. Cudworth Brown, the dissolute poet manque, and his teenaged current interest, Felicity Jones. Margaret gathers them in a hug.
“We have sleeping bags, a little Bunsen stove, books to read-I may finally get to War and Peace.”
“I’m not quite sure what to say.”
“I can’t hear you.”
He shouts. “It’s a shock.” What means her bold and naked smile? There’s no apology here, no misgiving.
“Arthur, I know this will seem extreme to you.” Extreme? To stable, steady Beauchamp? “I put my name in the hat with five others, I can’t renege, I have to do it. This is about finally taking a stand. If we don’t, we surrender. I can’t live with surrender.”
Nelson is transcribing every word. Cameras are also at work: Flim Flam Films, a Saltspring Island company. By now, fifty friends and neighbours have arrived. Trustee Kurt Zoller is here. Striding anxiously into the clearing comes the CEO of Garlinc, Todd Clearihue.
Last seen, he was giving a lift to the pixie. Arthur massages a crick from his neck, glances over at her, olive complexion under spikes of black hair. A row of rings in an ear and one in her lip. A jacket open to Che Guevara on her T-shirt, an exhortation: “Rise Up!”
“Three weeks, did you say, Margaret?” Though shouted over the increasing ambient noise, it sounds of snivelling.
“That’s the plan, we’re doing shifts. Will you remember to put out the bird food? The vet’s bill has to be paid, and you’ll have to get in some feed.”
“What about the kids, the goats?”
“Edna Sproule will help with the birthing. I want you to eat at the Woofer house. Kim Lee is a knowledgeable cook, and you ought to be on a vegetarian diet anyway.”
The hidden text: He’s helpless. He will be spoonfed lentil soup and tofu. Margaret looks proud and beautiful, Rapunzel in her tower. Removed, remote, unreachable.
Everyone is listening breathlessly to these disclosures of Arthur’s helplessness and dietary needs. He will seem a worrywart to boot if he broadcasts his fears for Margaret’s safety. Not to mention her mental health, after three weeks living with this pair.
Cudworth Brown is a former ironworker, runs the recycling depot. Most call him Cud, which is reflective of the slow, chewing motions of the ruminant creator that he is. He’s been writing poetry for the last dozen of his forty-two years, and has finally been published: Liquor Balls, a thin volume of lusty verse. The local literary celebrity has attracted, in Felicity Jones, his first groupie, an eighteen-year-old naif repeating her final year at Saltspring High.