When Is a Man (32 page)

Disoriented (but not displaced),

Dr. Elias Tamba

4

They'd worked up a good sweat on their afternoon ski, and after shucking off their wet socks and wool long underwear in the bedroom, Gina jumped in the shower, leaving Paul to gather up his digital recorder and notebooks to prepare for the evening.

It had been spectacular out there, the trees shaking off their loads of snow, sending shimmering flakes like lace curtains gliding across the blue sky. He'd kept pace with Gina as she sped along ahead of him, her skis slapping the groomed corduroy runs, and toward the end he'd finally gotten a feel for the glide and had felt near weightlessness out there, performing levitation over the frozen bogs, his momentum addictive and heady. The leg cramps came after, in the car, but he'd had his victory.

The phone rang while Paul was stripping off his thermal underwear. “It's Cliff. You busy?”

“Just got back from a ski. What's going on?”

“We were right about Ready's claim. Kind of.”

Paul, distracted and hungry, wandered naked through the kitchen looking through cupboards. “Basket Creek?”

“Farther up. Starts at the mouth of Dalton Creek.”

Paul was pulling out a bag of wagon wheel pasta from the cupboard. He stopped. “Above the Flumes, you mean.”

“The Flumes?”

“A set of rapids. Jory and his friends launch kayaks there.”

“Is that the old mill site? Didn't know it had a name.”

“Frederic Wentz and Donald Wallace built the mill. Ready's claim would be right beside it.” Paul went back to the bedroom and pulled a sweater and jeans out of his closet. “How recent was the claim?”

“Don't know yet. I'm getting copies of the mineral rights sent up from Victoria.”

“So what do we do next?”

“Right now? Not much, unfortunately. We could snowmobile there, but I don't see how that'll help.”

“Help who with what?”

“Us. You and me. Find some kind of clue, for Christ's sake. We'll have to wait until spring, though, so don't hold your breath.”

The Spry Creek town meeting was held in the local theatre. Representatives from Monashee Power were on stage right. A young man scrambled to set up a laptop and white screen, while a middle-aged woman and two stocky bald men sat ramrod-straight in their chairs, leafing through notes. Gina pointed out the mayor and council on stage left. Between the two groups stood a lone microphone, and in the centre aisle, down among the theatre seats, someone had set up another microphone and lectern facing the stage. Near the front row, Elsie Hubert bustled about with a handful of men and women—the Friends of Spry Creek, ready to hand out their pamphlets. With five minutes to go before the meeting, the theatre was nearly packed. In the crowd, he picked out Molly and Joseph Kruse, and a few biologists and technicians, including Daryl and Tanner, who sat inconspicuously at the rear of the theatre.

Paper rustled, and there were pockets of low muttering among the audience as the mayor stood at the microphone at centre stage. He thanked everyone for coming out and introduced those on stage. “This meeting,” he said slowly, assessing the room, “is to announce the application for an official environmental assessment review of the proposed Spry Creek Hydroelectric Project.”

More rustling, renewed murmuring. He pressed on, a short speech about the potential economic benefits of the project and the province's need for clean energy, and then turned over the mic to the woman. She echoed his promises of high revenues and local employment and emphasized the dam's minimal impact on the creek. No water would be retained, only diverted to run through turbines before returning to its original course to the Immitoin. There would be some new road built, yes, but not much, since the Spry Creek logging road provided access. The transmission line corridor would be as unobtrusive as possible. The audience shifted restlessly. Paul, thinking of academic conferences and difficult lectures, found himself sweating on behalf of the people on stage.

While the representative spoke, images appeared on the screen behind her: charts and graphs, photos of turbines and cables, improbably clean-cut men in hardhats, knee-deep in rubble. There were also picturesque riparian scenes, untouched wildernesses, colourful pebbles under clear running water, alders hanging over dappled pools. He had to admire the rep—she managed to drum up a few pockets of applause with the promise of jobs, at least. When she was done, the mayor invited members of the audience to ask questions. He did not say, “Begin protesting,” but judging by his tone, that was what he anticipated.

The people who stepped up to the microphone were not always whom Paul had expected. A slender woman in her early fifties asked about sufficient water levels and the need to dredge and disturb the main channel, the ramifications of glaciers receding in the future. A teenager with dyed blue hair, reading from notes, raised the issue of grizzly bear habitat, while a slouching, articulate man Paul's age angrily pointed out the number of new transmission line corridors needed and the spread of invasive plants. A paunchy fishing guide, followed by a paunchier fisherman, wondered about the cutthroat and bull trout. A woman the spitting image of Paul's grandmother said the provincial government had been handing out water licences like candy. Who would be accountable if anything happened? A scar-handed mill worker liked the sound of new jobs, but asked if this would be like last time—short-term gain for long-term pain.

That was the first time someone had alluded to the flooding of the valley, but Paul sensed an underlying, old anxiety in each speaker—remembering, maybe, their own helplessness, or their parents' impotent protests at the town hall meeting in Lambert forty-five years ago. They had adapted, over time, to one vast change, and now they were being asked to adapt to another. Were they wondering how much ground they would ultimately have to give, how much change before everything changed, until all that remained of the original valley was stacked in Elmer's archives?

He thought about why he'd agreed to come to the town meeting, other than wanting to be polite to Elsie. Maybe it was symptomatic of being trapped in a dark valley the entire winter, but the work he'd done, the scribbled notes, the recorded and transcribed interviews, had started weighing on him. Would it really mean anything to anyone who didn't live here? Outsiders like him could only relate to the valley's flood and people's displacement in the most abstract way, and that was partly because they'd heard this type of story so many times, they'd become desensitized to it. Tamba had already pointed out a disheartening number of similar events, and he'd barely scratched the surface.

He'd always taken pride in finding unusual material for his ethnographies: international students using parkour to adjust to their surroundings, or the complex tensions within a peloton of high-strung middle managers. Stuff that had a pop culture appeal. Now he worried he'd been digging himself into a hole by monkeying around with the overused, tired theme of displacement. It was a subject that might come off as quaint and old-fashioned not only to most academics but to general readers as well—more history, more memories and sorrows, all the old clichés. Another study dabbling poetically and inconsequentially in the past. And located somewhere too regional: remote but not exotic. As good as he felt about the effort he'd made, the amount of data he'd gathered, in the end, it would all end up lying inert on the page.

But the meeting was making him realize a small truth. The participants in his previous ethnographies had always chosen their quirks and obsessions. For them, the stakes weren't high—broken bones, wounded pride, minor jealousies. They were interesting enough as subjects, but they'd risked little. Some people here tonight had lost a great deal and were afraid they'd lose even more. The palpable anxiety in the room was urgent, collective, and modern. How could he properly bottle the faint note of fear he heard, connect it to his ethnography, and make it resonate with anyone who read his research? He looked around for reporters, video cameras. If tonight made the news—not just the local papers, but the
Vancouver Sun
, maybe a quick spot on
CBC
—that would help give his research some weight, some relevance.

A husky man with a robust grey beard and cowboy hat stepped up to the lectern. “I live in Grand Forks now,” he said. “In the sixties, my family gave up our farm to make way for what's now called Lake Koocanusa, so I understand why people are protective about their rivers.” He paused to clear his throat.

“Thing is,” the man continued, “creeks like Spry have to do all the compensating—habitat-wise, wetlands, spawning beds—for what was lost to the mega-dams. And in some ways they compensate for what people have lost as well. Something to consider.” He shrugged and stepped aside.

Elsie Hubert finally approached the lectern and introduced herself as a representative of the Friends of Spry Creek, which got the cheers going again, the placards raised and waving.

“Someone earlier mentioned short-term gains. Speaking of which, if your run-of-river dam can't store power, then how does it address the problem of capturing energy when we need it the most?” Her voice wavered, but with that first question out of the way she seemed to shake off her nerves. “Where is this power really going? Who really benefits? The local economy? Or a foreign company shipping our power and resources elsewhere?” It was a clever question—talking about money and ownership might bring the loggers onside with the environmentalists, and she had a certain drawl that made her sound down to earth, trustworthy.

“You just heard someone talk about how his family was relocated to make way for a dam. Today, in the Immitoin Valley, we have someone conducting an ongoing study on our own displaced citizens. Paul? Could you stand up?”

His pen, which he'd been using to take notes, slipped from his grasp, and he watched it roll out of reach beneath a seat.
Oh, Christ
. He rose slowly, and his eyes locked on Elsie, trying to shut out the stares of an entire theatre. Gut it out, he told himself. Think of the classroom, the lecture hall. He'd been a solid, though not naturally gifted, lecturer at university. Coherent and energetic, with the requisite amount of arrogance for a doctoral student. Apparently that arrogance too had been cut out and scraped away.

Elsie was reading from her notes. “His research is a story of the way we were taken advantage of back then, and I think it also speaks to how we're not going to let that happen today. Paul, could you maybe add to that?”

“Well. Sure,” he said, blinking sweat from his eyes. He hated the way she'd appropriated and twisted his work, but he couldn't risk humiliating Elsie or coming off like a cheerleader for the dam. She'd left him without much to say.

“It's tough, putting these interviews, these narratives, together. Someone said to me last week, ‘It's a myth, you know, the story of that man who set fires for Monashee Power. It's a myth that's told in every place where something like this has happened.' Maybe that's true. But why does that myth carry on? What gives the story its power?” He paused, and promptly lost his train of thought.

“Everyone makes the best of a bad situation. They adapt. But it doesn't mean, um, doesn't mean.” He shook his head, tongue-tied. “You have to be careful,” he said to the company reps and politicians sitting on the stage staring at him in uncomfortable confusion. They looked the way he felt, clammy and dying in their sweat-crinkled button-ups. “You have to be careful with people.”

He sat down heavily. Elsie reclaimed the lectern and was speaking again. Gina patted him on the leg, leaned into his shoulder and gently bit his sweater—to suppress her laughter, he supposed.

Elsie brought her speech to a close. “To Monashee Power, all I can say is, I'm sorry for all the dollars you've spent on this proposal so far. I would urge you not to waste more money. Because there's no way in hell we'll let you build this dam!”

More applause, and the people nearest him stood with their placards and posters. Someone a few rows back started a chant that others took up and continued after the councillor adjourned the meeting. Paul and Gina made their way over to Elsie, who looked dazed from the buzz of the crowd. People drifted by to congratulate her—way to give 'em hell, you got 'em on the run. Others, like the man from Lake Koocanusa, wanted to speak with Paul. Some had grown up on farms along the Immitoin before the dam. Others had families who'd been similarly displaced from other places, like Arrowhead and Burton. He traded numbers, e-mail addresses, and business cards, and forgot his earlier embarrassment.

“Tonight should make the news,” he said. “Elsie? Don't you think? Anyone from the news talk to you?”

She was watching the crowd as they filed out. “Hardy didn't make it,” she said to no one in particular, her brow furrowed. “It's very odd.”