The Life of Hope

I first came to Hope early in the evening of my thirtieth birthday, which is July 22nd. I arrived half-stewed and given my druthers would have been completely stewed. The train from Toronto, however, only took a little over two hours. In that time I’d managed to consume several bottles of beer and three shots of whiskey, the whiskey being supplied by Brian, a nice man who did something with computers and was eager that I have fun on my birthday. “Especially your thirtieth birthday,” Brian had said. “It’s the big one.”

“All grown-up now,” I’d mumbled without conviction.

At the same time as I was celebrating aboard the train, my friends back in Toronto were arriving at my apartment heavily armed with food and alcohol. They’d planned a surprise party for me, one I’d known about for weeks. Elspeth, I imagine, met them at the door grimly. She likely said nothing, just glared at them, or maybe she said two quick words, “Not here,” or “Fucked off.” Elspeth has an economy with words and communicates mostly with facial expressions. I’m sure the expression she assumed for my friends was a doozy, guaranteed to shrivel.

But I’d had big fun on the train with Brian and the Lorne Baxters. Lorne Baxter was a large man who, having introduced his wife and himself as The Lorne Baxters, immediately demanded that I call him Bosco. Mrs. Lorne Baxter, Bosco advised, I could call whatever I wanted.

It saddened me when I found out that Brian and the Lorne Baxters were traveling all the way to Ottawa. I was the only one who disembarked at Hope, and not really there either, but rather at the only town of any size near it. From there I’d taken a taxicab fifteen miles to the east, to Hope.

I studied the back of the cabdriver’s neck for a few minutes and then informed him, “It’s my thirtieth birthday!” Maybe he had a bottle of champagne in the glove compartment. Maybe he’d say, “That’s the big one,” and stand me to drinks in some
roadside tavern. He hadn’t done any of that. The driver mumbled a strangely accented version of “Congratulations” and whistled the first few bars of “Happy Birthday to You.”

The countryside was gentle and rolling, cut quite often by small rivers. The farmers all seemed to cultivate the same crop, a plant I didn’t recognize, being a city boy. “What do they grow out here?” I asked the driver.

The cabbie had just finished a cigarette, tossing the butt through the no-draft. He pointed to where it was bouncing along the highway behind us, and I was made to understand that the big crop out Hope way was tobacco.

We passed a small church (Established 1889, a sign told me), and I was immediately filled with shame. After a few moments I felt better.

My destination lay two miles outside of the Hope limits, but the road went straight through town. Hope seemed a nice enough place—although the large green entry marker placed the population at a meager 1,000, I spied no less than three bars. My kind of town.

“Do you live in Hope?” I asked the driver.

The driver shrugged, perhaps misunderstanding.

Suddenly, and surprisingly, we passed a huge factory, a colossal thing surrounded by barbed-wire fences. A sign on its lawn announced UPDIKE INTERNATIONAL. The U had been fashioned to resemble a fishhook.

Then I was at my new home, or at least what was to be my home for the next little while.

I found myself (having paid the driver, tipping him extravagantly—sometimes I suspect that God invented alcohol to ensure that waitresses, bartenders and cabbies make a decent living) in a small valley, a basin surrounded on all sides by tall trees. In the middle of this green bowl was a pond, a small lake really, about the size of two football fields placed end to end. It was the gloaming, and the only sound in the air was that of fish flipping above the still surface for their dinner.

I turned around to look at my dwelling. The house was built up a piece from the pond, where there was enough flat land to accommodate not only it but a monstrous and ancient barn. I’d seen the house before, in one of those glass paperweights, the
kind you flip over and it looks as if snow is falling inside. It was the same house, except it was now the middle of the summer and the house was nestled among trees, fat weeping willows and tall spruce.

Outside the front door was a wonderful flagstone patio, ideal for the consumption of mint juleps and gin and tonics. I studied it briefly, trying to figure out the best place to put my chaise lounge, to maximize sunlight and minimize the journey to and from the house. As I was doing this I noticed that years before someone had taken a stick to the wet cement and painstakingly dug out “GEORGE.”

This wonderful place was on loan to me by Professor Harvey Benson, who teaches English Language and Literature at Chiliast University. It is Harv’s belief that I am a young writer of great promise, and it’s good he has tenure if he’s inclined to believe such things.

“But in Toronto”—this is Harv’s standard speech—“there are too many distractions. There’re all the
bars
, and all the
girls
, and there’s that bitch you’re married to!”

“Harvey,” I say sternly at this point, but that’s as far as I go.

“But I have this place out in the country, and I hardly ever use it, and if you want to finish your second novel, you should move out there and goddam write!”

So when the shit hit the fan late the night before (I’d just officially turned thirty, although you’d never have known it from the way I behaved) I phoned Harv and said, “I’m going to Hope.”

Now, someone had been taking wonderful care of the place, and you can bet it wasn’t Harvey. His place in Toronto is squalid to say the least, a one-bedroom apartment filled with books, term papers and filthy magazines. This country home consisted basically of four rooms: a large kitchen/dining room area, a living room (with a huge stone fireplace) and two bedrooms on the second level, the second level being achieved via a set of stairs leading up from the kitchen. The bathroom was built under this staircase, and contained a wonderful old tub that had legs and feet like a dog’s. Everything about the place was so clean and neat that I suspected that the house had been used in some competition for prissy ladies—it looked like a horde of
old biddies had rampaged through, gathering up particles of dust for bonus points. I remembered that Harvey had given me some sort of note concerning the upkeep of the place, and I removed it from my shirt pocket and read:

Thereupon followed a list of more precise instructions—how to prime the pump, how to check the generator, how to start any number of machines out in the barn (a lawnmower, a chainsaw, a weedwhacker, a tiny tractor), what mixtures of gas and oil I needed to fuel them (how did Harv know all this stuff?), and how to operate the moped, the wonderful little vehicle that was to spirit me in and out of Hope. Nowhere on the list did Harv tell me anything crucial, such as where he kept his liquor. However, a quick check through the kitchen informed me that the booze supply was kept in a cupboard immediately to the left of the big white fridge. There was a healthy collection there, and I selected, as a special treat on my thirtieth birthday (the big one), a bottle of Glenfiddich. I poured some into a tumbler and went back outside.

The sun was setting, burning the tips of the trees. A few frogs had started to croak, warming up, gingerly testing the equipment before getting down to some angst-ridden, truly horny bellows. The swallows were flitting above the barn, frantically using the last minutes of light to find some food for their peeping broods. And somewhere deep in the woods to the south, some dogs were screaming as they ran down a deer. I recalled Harvey’s strange bit of advice: don’t be alarmed.

The pond on my property was a section of a stream called Round River, and this stream continued past the property, building in size and power, eventually feeding into Lookout Lake. I could get to Lookout Lake quite easily on my moped, it being about two miles away by gravel road. The fishing there, Harv assured me, was magnificent. Harvey seemed to know what he was talking about, and he confused me for almost an hour with a discourse on various techniques and stratagems. The walleye, he said, like minnows and tiny jigs (I nodded sagely, visualizing myself executing a subdued stepdance by the side of the water) and the bass like almost anything, being huge and piggy, but for the really big fish, Harvey concluded, what you need is the Hoper!