lifts and shoulder shimmies of every accomplished dancer. It is the music of these that now clamours bell-like through Lynn Canyon from Moey’s blunt fingertips.
The jiggling bridge always intensifies his shimmies and makes him feel buoyant. It is a feeling to which he is rapidly becoming addicted.
Although only brief, his dancing routine drenches him in sweat. Panting, grinning, Moey finishes his last ribcage slide and pelvic drop and triumphantly zaghareets. The canyon walls echo from his tongue-vibrating ululation. A raven screams back from the treetops.
Perspiring heavily, Moey removes his zils and coin belt, replaces them in their respective pockets, then shrugs back into his ski jacket. Exhilarated from the dance, he does a samiha to the far end of the bridge and begins to hike to the Ninety Foot Pool.
The Ninety Foot Pool is not, in fact, ninety feet deep. In the summer when bikini-clad babes and testosterone-laden hunks guzzle beer upon its rocky banks, the Ninety Foot Pool is actually about thirty feet deep. That doesn’t stop anyone who is trying to impress members of the opposite sex from leaping off the numerous surrounding cliffs into said pool.
Again in its wisdom, the North Vancouver District changed all the signposts within the park, thereby renaming the Ninety Foot Pool the Thirty Foot Pool (which was what it was originally christened back in 1912 when the canyon was first declared a park). This didn’t deter the cliff-jumpers one iota, nor did it stop the rising death count. And locals still refer to the pool as the Ninety.
By the time Moey reaches the pool, his olive-toned flesh has cooled and puckered. With each breath, wisps of white flutter from his mouth. He perches upon his favourite rock, folds his firm, slim legs to his burly chest, and gazes meditatively at the waters.
He loves this park. A native of the Saskatchewan wheat fields, he loves the canyon’s abundance of water and greenery, of buckled land and scoured rock, which differs so vastly from the staid, fundamentalist prairie. For him the exuberant life bursting within the forest represents all that he wants to be: natural, wild, strong, sensual. Everything a belly dancer embodies. Everything his parents despise.
Port and Gemma Thorpe are the prairies: stoic, seamed, hard-working, unemotional, and predictable. They expected all of their six sons to become either farmers, carpenters, or mechanics (though an able man, Port often drawls, is all three). Moey became none of these. The Saskatoon Heavyweight Championship belt hanging in his rented basement suite attests to this.
He throws another stick into the water. The ripples spread outward until they touch the far bank and lap against the hooves of a white stag. Moey blinks and sits up straighter.
The white stag snorts steam from flared nostrils and placidly stares back.
You always make things way worse!
How could a child say such a shattering thing to a mother? Karen’s guts shrivel like a disturbed slug contracting in on itself. She certainly never said such a thing to her stepmom, Mei-ling (aka Petra) Woodruff, however many times it was warranted.
Karen blows Dilly’s tail fur out of her mouth, adjusts the cat’s position on her shoulders, and stuffs her hands deeper into the gritty wool pockets of her cardigan. She passes the headstone at the top of the stairs leading to the bridge, then, instead of heading across the bridge, turns left and descends a second set of slimy wooden stairs. A large bear-proof garbage can almost blocks these stairs from sight. The can reeks of dog urine; one patch on it is rust-pocked at cocked-leg height.
Few people take this trail, the purpose of most park visitors being to cross the suspension bridge and thereafter, at a loss on how to proceed, visit the Ninety/ Thirty Foot Pool.
Karen prefers this side of the canyon, the west, because it has less litter, fewer tourists, and fewer cliff jumpers. Unfortunately, this summer the odds evened a little in the last department; the western banks successfully claimed the life of a thirteen-year-old boy who tried to impress his buddies by diving off a precipice. Even now, rain-shrivelled cards and mildewing flowers mark the spot mourners designated as a shrine to his memory.
The sight of the withered bouquets sheathed in tattered plastic and piled up like so much garbage disturbs Karen. Every day she passes those sad cards and dead flowers and wonders when the park ranger will throw them out. It isn’t that she doesn’t feel for the parents of the dead child; it is just that the two-month-old shrine now looks like an abandoned grave. The boy’s spirit needs to be freed from that tether.
The stairs lead Karen down a narrow path cut between bulging, mossy rock. The rumble of the canyon to her right increases as the trail drops to creek level. Dilly remains motionless on her shoulders, bilious green eyes fully dilated in the gloom.
“How have I ever made anything worse?” Karen woefully asks the cat. In response Dilly sneezes out a strand of Karen’s frizzled red locks.
“I admit his last birthday party was a mistake. I’ve apologized for that. I knew it was a mistake from the start and I should have stood up to Morris on the issue. But damn it, Andy didn’t raise a fuss, did he?”
But, of course, he didn’t. Andy worships the ground his father walks upon.
No, the responsibility to prevent the birthday disaster fell upon Karen and Karen alone. But she stood by and did nothing, and then it was too late and all the kids in Andy’s school began snickering behind his back. Her subsequent attempt to fix things resulted in Andy being expelled.
Karen blames her father, Sandy Woodruff. Throughout her Anglican childhood he stertorously repeated, “You must trust all things unto God, pudding face. Trust all things unto God.”
“God!” Karen says scornfully, and immediately shoots a guilty look skyward. Just like her stepmom, Mei-ling, she feels the Almighty needs protection from the harsh facts of life. God, in Karen’s experience, couldn’t tie a shoelace correctly if He tried. But she would sooner be barbecued in Hell than let Him discover this awful truth.
This disparity between what she’s been taught by her father and what she herself believes has created within her a tendency not to act on a situation until it’s too late, and then to overcompensate wildly and futilely when God’s will proves disastrously different from what she hoped. Alas.
At a fork in the path Karen turns right and begins goat-hopping over the rock-strewn creek bank. The autumn chill carries the green smell of slime, pine needles, and moss. Up ahead at the Ninety/Thirty Foot Pool something plops into the water.
Karen barely glances up from her hopscotch progress along the creek bank; here in the canyon things always plop into the water. Bambi-cute squirrels shake loose hemlock seeds into the pool. Small fish that have survived the urine and beer cans of summer frequently flip from the surface to smack their gums around hapless water skeeters. Crows defecate into the pool with similar plops. Pebbles jarred loose from scrounging raccoons likewise plop into the pool. The surface of the pool is always going plop.
But this time Dilly doesn’t like it. It takes Karen a moment to realize that the nails of her feline companion are now painfully embedded in her flesh.
She immediately stops. Always dreading that her luck might run out and a pervert will catch her in the deserted canyon, Karen trusts Dilly to warn her of the existence of such deviants much as most women trust their overweight, arthritic Labradors to protect them should such a hazard appear.
Her eyes promptly fall upon the white hart.
That’s what she thinks as soon as she sees
