In the Drink by Mark Rice
In the summer of 1978 I travelled abroad for the first time. I was seven years old and flew with my parents from Glasgow to Vancouver, to spend a month in British Columbia with my Canadian relatives. My uncle Jimmy had drawn up an itinerary in which he had taken the bold step of segregating males and females: the women would stay in the urban sprawl of Vancouver, where they could enjoy such womanly activities as shopping, visiting beauty salons and listening to Barbara Streisand, while the menfolk would live deep in Nahatlatch Valley’s unspoiled wilderness, where we would do manly things like fishing and trying to avoid Grizzly bears.
Uncle Jimmy met my parents and me at the airport and drove us back to his house in Vancouver. Soon afterwards, a rusty blue van pulled up at the kerbside. The driver was my uncle’s best friend, a grizzled old geezer named Earl Steer whose log cabin would be the males’ home base. Steer was a fitting surname, since he looked like a thickly muscled hybrid of grumpy bull and weather-worn cowboy; only Earl’s hooded hawk like eyes suggested a third species thrown into the mix. His tanned face had the texture of a scarred old leather saddle.
During the drive to Nahatlatch, my cousin Neil and I chewed mint-flavoured gum under vast blue skies. Flanking the road, gigantic evergreens impaled the sky, blotting out the low-hanging sun. Slivers of sunlight filtered between branches, whipping my face with stroboscopic stripes of light. Juggernauts with wheels as big as our van rumbled past, hauling hordes of logs on their enormous backs. The smells of pine and fern filled the air. Twangy country music blared from the van’s speakers throughout the journey. I didn’t think much of the bluegrass tunes to which Earl Steer and my uncle Jimmy contributed with hillbilly gusto, while my father - a connoisseur of Scottish Highland music - shook his head in slow sweeps of disapproval.
I drifted into a deep sleep as Earl steered us along serpentine roads. A Native American girl with almond skin and pleated black hair visited me in my dream. She walked towards me holding a grey heart-shaped stone in outstretched hands. The crimson words True Love were painted on the stone in delicate calligraphy. Before I could talk to her, Earl gave me a thud to the head and announced, ‘Wake up, half pint! We’re at the log cabin.’ Unhappy at being called ‘half pint’, and at being wakened from such a promising dream, I decided to seethe in silence until a chance arose to get even with Earl.
The log cabin was the pinnacle of rustic, redneck chic: constructed from roughly cut tree trunks, and smelling of chopped wood, fried onions and coffee, it made me feel at home immediately. Outside, trees scratched the sky, dwarfing our dwelling. Just a wooden pier’s length away from the cabin, the crystal-clear Nahatlatch River thundered. Uncle Jimmy warned me that it was an ice-cold river with dangerous currents. As a result, my father forbade me from going close to the river’s edge.
After a hearty meal of salmon and vegetables I wandered outside, where I lay on my back and gazed up into the brightest and clearest blue sky I had ever seen. It felt like looking into forever (years later I would discover that in Buddhist theology, the colour blue represents infinity). The forest floor blossomed with lush greens and browns. As I lay in perfect peace, I began to understand my Uncle Jimmy’s affinity for the place.
On returning to the cabin, I discovered an unattended wooden table outside. A pint glass, full to the brim with cloudy orange liquid, rested on the table. I sniffed the glass’s contents; orangey, but with nasty impurities. Through the open door, I heard my uncle Jimmy asking Earl if he wanted a beer from the cooler. ‘No,’ Earl replied, ‘There’s a huge gin an’ juice outside with my name on it.’ Lifting Earl’s glass and smiling, I thought, ‘I’ll teach you to slap me around the head and call me names, you sonofa….’ Then, in one go, I drained the glass dry.
After fleeing the scene of the crime with my cousin Neil, my surroundings started to spin. Blues melted into greens which dissolved into browns. As I stood on the edge of a jetty, my legs buckled and I fell into the fast-flowing Nahatlatch River. Swept downstream, bobbing like a cork, I managed to grab the twisted roots of a riverside tree and haul myself out of the foaming water. Lying exhausted at the riverside, I puked river water, gin and juice all over myself, then passed out. When I came around, Neil was kneeling over me, his shoulder-length brown hair hanging above my face like a help-rope for a drowning man. His attempt to carry me back to the cabin failed, so he led the way home while I crawled a slow pursuit on hands and knees.
When I arrived back, sodden and too inebriated to stand up, the adults didn’t need to use much deductive thinking to figure out where the missing gin had gone. The evidence was sprawled in front of them, straight out of primary three and literally stinking drunk. My father said that it wouldn’t be right to punish me while I was in that state, but he promised that the following day my arse would be on the receiving end of a serious skelping. My gin thievery didn’t endear me to Earl, who stopped calling me Half Pint and bestowed upon me several more colourful nicknames.
I lay in my fold-down bed that night, a first-time drunkard at seven years of age, pondering the punishment that I knew would arrive on callused palms. Outside, as if sensing my plight, wolves howled nocturnal laments. The magnificent lunar lullabies of my lupine brethren wooed me into a deep and cleansing sleep.
