Speak to the Earth (6 page)

Iris rushed to the door and grabbed the knob, but did not turn it. She faced Bryan. “I’d better get on the phone to the committee,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “We’ve got to get organized, fast.”

“Mom,” Bryan said, “you were pretty hard on him.”

She let out a long sigh. “This can’t be allowed to happen.”

“Why not? I mean, half the people around here work in the logging business, one way or the other,” he said, thinking of Ellen’s family as well as his own. “It’s not like there aren’t enough trees.”

“That’s just it. There aren’t.”

“Are you kidding? Jimmy’s right, Mom. You’re exaggerating. The whole island is a blanket of trees. Who’s going to even notice? Besides, MFI replants the areas they log. We learned all about it in school.”

“Listen, Bryan. In the first place, the sound is public land. Or, if you’re First Nation, it’s native land. Either way, it doesn’t belong to MFI.”

“Yeah, but they’ve got the tree farm licence, the rights to —”

“They buy those TFLs for a song because their goons in the legislature help them out. Then when they cut, they pay ridiculously low stumpage fees.” Iris laughed bitterly. “And if the government changes its mind and cancels the TFLs, they have to pay the company millions of dollars in compensation. To get back the so-called rights to our own land! It’s all as crooked as hell. Look, son,” Iris said, calming down a little, “this isn’t just another logging project. Everybody seems to think the rainforest is limitless. That’s the way we treated the ozone layer, the air we breathe, the rivers and oceans. But those ancient stands of timber aren’t limitless. When they’re cut down, they’re gone. All I’m saying is let’s preserve what’s left.”

“But, Mom —”

“Take Vancouver Island,” Iris interrupted. Bryan
knew that when she was on a roll like this, the best thing to do was stand back and let her wind down. “There are about ninety watersheds bigger than five thousand hectares, okay? You know how many of the ninety
haven’t
been logged out?” Without waiting for his reply, she pounded her fist into her palm. “Five! There are five left, Bryan, and three of them are in Orca Sound! Some of the trees practically within sight of Nootka Harbour are a hundred metres high, way older than a thousand years. They can’t be replaced. MFI wants to turn them into logs to sell to the States and Japan!”

When his mother paused for a breath and a pull on her beer, Bryan said, “But, Mom, the government makes sure that the forests are protected, doesn’t it? I mean, look at the parks.”

“The government is at the beck and call of the big corporations. The government allowed the streams to be polluted by mining and pulp companies. The government doesn’t even follow its own laws. There are First Nation reserves right here on the island, which are under the control of the government, whose sewage systems don’t meet government regulations! These are the officials you trust to protect the forests? The
people
have to protect the environment
from
the government!”

Putting down her beer, she repeated, “I’ve got to make some calls,” and rushed into the family room.

Bryan sat at the kitchen table, staring at three plates of cold, untouched stew.

M
r Calder, whom his students called Nose Hairs because of the untrimmed sprouts that poked from his nostrils like reeds through the surface of a pond, told Bryan’s Science class one day about Isaac Newton. That physicist, famous for allowing an apple to fall on his head and thus demonstrate the immutable law of gravity, had announced to the world that time always flows by at the same rate. On the other hand, lectured Nose Hairs, Einstein argued that time passes at differing rates, depending on a number of factors that Brian, numb with boredom, promptly forgot.

All in all, Bryan allowed that he had to side with Einstein, because he knew for a fact that when he was with Ellen, the hours flashed by. But in certain other places, like Talbot Inlet Junior High, time passed with the rapidity of a slug travelling uphill.

Norm’s B&B provided excitement, but not the kind Bryan would go out of his way to find. Between his mother and his uncle, things were tense. Iris and Jimmy
weren’t trashing each other — their family love and loyalty was far too strong — but the line they had drawn between them was broad and clear. They conversed in toneless one-word sentences. They were silent at meals. For Bryan, living in his house was like walking barefoot through briars. So he spent a lot of his time at Ellen’s and, when her parents set her to one of the many jobs they always seemed to find for her, he went to see Elias, whose parents left him pretty much alone. Bryan also helped Walter out on a few more whale-watching trips and, when the migrations had passed by, Walter hinted around a few times and Bryan helped him crabbing. Walter was not one to fall into a routine, so Bryan concluded that here again Einstein’s theory of time won out.

Bryan’s mother was driving herself frantic, working crazy hours at the supermarket — what her boss called open shifts, which allowed him to classify her as part-time and therefore not entitled to benefits — and agitating against the government’s Orca Sound Ecological Preservation Plan. On street corners and outside the liquor store she could be found, in her sloppy pink track suit and green raincoat, handing out pamphlets. When she was at home she usually had the phone clamped between shoulder and jaw as she talked and made notes. It did not surprise Bryan that she was voted unanimously to be the chair of the
SOS
(Save Orca Sound) Committee. She went out and bought a fax machine, along with a dozen bundles of recycled paper, and it wasn’t long before the committee was in contact with
Greenpeace and other sympathizers all over B.C., the rest of Canada, the States and Europe.

Under normal circumstances Bryan might have been proud of her. But he had to admit to himself that he resented the unwelcome changes in his daily routine and the strained relationship among the three of them. He was irritated by the artificial silence of his home and embarrassed by Iris’s activism in the community. Around Jimmy he felt guilty because his mother was, in a sense, trying to take his uncle’s job away. Around his mother he felt culpable because he got on so well with Jimmy the tree-raper — and because, deep down, he thought his mother was going too far.

The logging was scheduled to begin in June. Meanwhile, Jimmy worked on a crew pushing roads into the Big Bear and Salmon peninsulas so the heavy equipment and lumber trucks could get to the stands of old-growth forest that MFI wanted to cut down. In the late spring, Greenpeace and some other groups challenged the logging decision in court, but they lost. Iris said that she was not at all surprised: MFI owned the courts as well as far too many politicians. Jimmy countered with the opinion that she was paranoid, that soon she’d claim there were MFI agents in the mailbox and under her bed.

Bryan tried to ignore the increasing tension at home and in the community as he began a new experience. With Ellen’s help he actually studied for exams. And he discovered, when reading the stack of whale books Ellen
had lent him, that when he was interested in a topic, the facts and theories connected with it stuck in his mind like burrs on wool, and when he talked about these theories and facts, he actually felt smart. But information in school books had an irritating habit of staying in the books: only seldom did it take up residence in Bryan’s memory.

And so the Einstein spring dragged on into June, and the first summer tourists trickled onto Vancouver Island. Strange camper-vans and RVs appeared on the streets; the restaurants bustled; the supermarket’s aisles seemed perpetually jammed. Elias got a part-time job at Pacific Sands Provincial Park, just down the highway between Nootka Harbour and Talbot Inlet, filling out camping permits and doing light maintenance — a job Bryan would have loved, but he was the chief housekeeper and breakfast cooker at Norm’s B&B.

Bryan, Ellen and Elias celebrated the last day of school by going out for burgers and making a nuisance of themselves in the restaurant — Elias like to chew his ice cubes, slurp his cola and perform other feats that threw Ellen into hysterics. Bryan, feeling the icy stares of the diners around them, figured that Ellen’s high-pitched giggles were the most irritating of all the unwelcome sounds emanating from their table. After the meal, the three friends went over to Elias’s house for a video binge: three horror movies in a row, all chosen by Ellen.

“What a rebel you are,” Elias told her.

While Bryan, his mother and uncle were having one of their silent suppers the next day, the phone rang. Bryan heard the switcher transfer the call to the fax machine in the family room. Iris rose and went to her little SOS command post by the bay window that looked out over Osprey Cove. Bryan and his uncle continued to attack their bowls of spaghetti. Iris returned to the table, a piece of flimsy paper in her hand and a happy look on her face.

“It’s all set. We’re going to blockade the bridge across the Big Bear River starting July first, Canada Day.” She sat down and twirled spaghetti around her fork. “I’m going to be there,” she said, “on the line.”

A deep silence followed. Bryan’s forkful of spaghetti remained halfway to his mouth. He looked at his mother, then at his uncle, not surprised to see Jimmy’s face flush and his jaw muscles flexing. Jimmy quietly laid his fork and spoon across his dish.

“Well, Iris, I guess I’ll see you there. Only, I’ll be on the other side.”

Bryan sat between them, immobilized by their determined stares, trapped in their silence.

P
ainting a fence was not Bryan’s idea of a patriotic act, but Canada Day found him on his knees at the edge of the driveway, resentfully slapping his brush against the first of 179 pickets that stretched away to the mailbox at the roadside. He had put off the job for weeks, and today Iris had put her foot down.

“It’s been dry and sunny for two days,” she had pointed out. “So today you get the job done before it rains again.”

First he had had to scrape the loose and flaking paint from the fence, a messy and cosmically boring job, not quite as tedious or messy as the actual painting, which he had just begun when the batteries on his portable radio had died.

“Damn!” he said, whacking the picket before him with a full brush that sent a spiteful shower of white paint splashing across his face. He jammed the brush into the paint can and wiped his cheek with a rag, smearing the greasy liquid all over his face.

“Damn!”

“Hey, son. Is this Norm’s B&B?”

Bryan turned, rag in hand, to the van at the end of the drive. There were two men in the cab. He nodded, getting to his feet.

The stranger drove up the driveway and parked at the house. Ontario plates, Bryan noted, watching the men step onto the porch at the kitchen door, knock and enter. These must be the tree-huggers Mom told me about — the ones who contacted her through Greenpeace, looking for a place to stay, close to the action. More work for me, making beds, vacuuming, doing laundry. Oh, well, we can sure use the money. He went back to his Canada Day job.

A few minutes later the men came out of the house and started unpacking the van. “Got a second to help us out?” one of them called.

He was a friendly-looking, muscular guy. His companion was tall and dark.

“You must be Bryan,” he said, shaking hands. “Iris told us about you. I’m Kevin Campbell, and this is Otto.”

“Hi,” Bryan said.

“Nice to see you,” Otto said, then slung a pack on his back and picked up a large rucksack.

“I’ll show you the way,” Bryan offered. “The door to the basement is around the other side. You have your own entrance.”

“Nice,” Kevin commented after Bryan had shown them the two rooms. “This will be great.”

“You’re from Ontario, eh?” Bryan asked.

“Yep. Drove all the way from Toronto. We wanted to come out and do our bit. You know, protest the logging. We’re glad to hear your mom is on the right side. We think it’s a crime, what they’re doing to the forests. Right, Otto?”

“Damn right. Shouldn’t be allowed.”

The last thing Bryan wanted was a conversation about trees, so he left his mother’s new supporters and got back to work on the fence. He had coated about a dozen more pickets when Iris came out of the house and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the job.

Far too cheerily for Bryan’s mood she said, “Good work, Rembrandt. It has a sort of quiet intensity, a sort of —”

“Bye, Mom. Have fun at the supermarket.”

Iris laughed and walked on down the drive, waving as she turned onto the road leading into town.

Not long after, Bryan’s labours were disturbed again.

“Reminds me of Tom Sawyer.”

Bryan looked up at Kevin, squinting against the sun high in the sky. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Looks like you could use a little help.”

“No, it’s okay. Thanks anyway.”

“Come on, where do you keep your paintbrushes? I feel like a little activity after all the driving me and Otto have been doing.”

Bryan found another paintbrush and Kevin started at the far end of the fence. For an hour they slowly worked toward one another.

“Your mom says you’re the chief cook and bottle-washer around here,” Kevin said when he had reached Bryan’s side.

“Yeah, that’s me.” Bryan smiled, happy to be almost finished the job and grateful to their new guest.

“You do the laundry, clean up the rooms, cook.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell you what. Otto and me, we’re not too fussy about starched sheets and dusted furniture, two bachelors like us. We both like our privacy. So let’s say we just forget about you cleaning up our rooms. And as for washing the sheets and pillowcases, we’ll just leave the linen in the hall outside our rooms once a week.”

“Well …”

“You’d be doing us a big favour.” Kevin smiled. “And naturally we’d keep it a secret between you and us. Okay?”

“If that’s what you want.”

The big man winked and patted Bryan on the shoulder. “Good man, Bryan.” He handed Bryan the paintbrush.