A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [5]
He remembered a journey he had taken a few years before on a train, a journey he was able to recall now only in terms of the images he had collected while staring out the window. Trains were vanishing from this vast cold province and were often half-empty, those who were there likely being too poor to afford the kind of cars he saw on the freeway that for part of the journey mirrored the path of the railway. He had been thinking about the early days, about vacations taken when his father was still relatively well, holidays that were spent in one provincial park or another, he and his parents crammed into a tent that his father had bought at an army surplus store. He remembered the sight of this tent, an ominous bundle strapped to the roof rack of their deteriorating car along with the bicycle that his father had given him and that he seldom rode. He also recalled the camp-fires his father had taught him to make, the configurations of which were named after architectural structures such as “the teepee” or “the log cabin.” It wasn’t until years later that he realized that the ignition of these constructions, made so that air might move more freely and carry fire farther, faster, was like the burning of the history of the country in miniature, a sort of exercise in forgetting first the Native peoples and then the settlers, whose arrival had been the demise of these peoples, settlers in whose blood was carried the potential for his own existence.
He recollected the cool mornings of these not-quite-real episodes in his childhood, how mist rose from the lake (though he could not recall which lake) in long scarves, and how his father, briefly enthusiastic, would insist on a dawn swim. As the day unfolded, however, the mists would evaporate, other campers and their hot dogs and radios would come into focus, and his father’s mood would shift down into irritability. He would begin to compare the spot unfavourably with the camp life he had known in the bush when the mine was still operating. “Is there no place left?” Jerome had heard his father whisper once through clenched teeth, just before he had begun to berate Jerome’s mother about the food she had brought, her recent haircut, the way she looked in a swimsuit. Then everything about the trip—the campground, the tense meal shared near a dwindling fire, his mother standing quietly by the water with her imperfect flesh exposed—became tawdry, embarrassing, something to be quickly discarded and forgotten. He would always respond to his father’s temperament in this way, would know that any attempt to create family joy would deteriorate in the face of his father’s disapproval, anger, or indifference.
It was the indifference that Jerome would try to take into his own nature: the combination of brief infatuation followed by an apparently casual lack of care. This, and the solid knowledge of the mutability of a world that came into being and then dissolved around him before he was able to fully grasp what it was trying to be, what it had been.
When the tracks had swung away from the highway, Jerome had become aware of the fencelines of the fields that were passing, one after another, by the train window. It seemed to him that these frayed demarcations made up of rotting cedar rails, fieldstones, rusting wire, and scrub bush were the only delineating features in an otherwise neutered winter landscape. The sole survivors, he had thought, glimpsing the irregular gestures of stunted Manitoba maples and listing wooden posts. (Is there no place left?) All of it in a state of heartbreaking neglect, destined to become the wilderness of asphalt, of concrete that he associated with the landscape of his later childhood. He had