While Eunice slept in her bedroom, or lay awake savoring her memories of Jeff – and perhaps both – Eric was busy at the computer, but not doing very well at writing what he wanted to say about his long-time friend.

It was not that Eric was not a writer; in fact, he was a fairly good one. In his younger years part of his income had been from the sale of stories about some of his travels. Sometimes those stories were in places like Alpine Journal or Summit, which paid a pittance if they paid anything at all. But over the years, he’d made some big sales, too – three times to Outdoor Life, a couple times to Argosy, and a small series in Cruising World, among others. It had been years since he’d done any serious writing about his adventures, although at times he’d kicked around the idea of doing a memoir. He hadn’t bothered since he doubted if anyone besides Jeff and Eunice would have wanted to read it. Now Jeff was out of that picture, so half of his very limited motivation went away right there.

Although Eric tried to keep his mind on what he was doing, he wasn’t being very successful at it. For some reason the vision he’d had that morning before Eunice had wakened him, of a distant river kept coming to his mind. There was no telling what river it must have been, if it represented anything real at all, but he’d spent a lot of time on rivers over the years.

He was pretty sure, though, why the vision kept coming back to him. Several weeks before Gary Dovecote had called him up one day and asked if he’d like to do another river trip for old time’s sake. Eric had to turn him down, of course; he didn’t feel like he could leave Jeff and Eunice, but at least the desire had been strong enough to ask why Gary wanted to do another wilderness canoe trip at his age – now over eighty.

Gary had told him that it wasn’t intended to be much of a trip, compared to those they’d done over the years. He explained that he had a couple grandkids who had expressed interest in doing something like the wilderness canoe trips he’d made in the past, and he was exploring the idea of doing the lower section of the Albany, in northern Ontario. The idea he had was to put in on one of the rivers along the Trans-Canada Highway that fed into the Albany, and float down to James Bay, fly to Moosonee, then take the train back to the Trans-Canada and shuttle cars around to get back home. From Gary’s research, it was mostly flatwater, with some mild rapids, nothing very challenging.

A good many years before Eric had done that section of the Albany with Gary, so he knew he was right about the flatwater part. “That’s a hell of a lot of paddling for old farts like us,” Eric had protested. “Hell, it was a lot of paddling back when we were young farts, too.”

“That’s very true,” Gary had agreed. “And we couldn’t expect the kids to do all the work, either, since neither one of them knows one end of a paddle from the other, so us old farts will have to teach them what to do. Besides, they can only break away for about three weeks, which has to include to and from time, so I figure the way to do it is to take some square-stern canoes and outboard motors.”

“That doesn’t sound like the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” Eric had agreed. “If it weren’t for Jeff, I’d be real interested. It’s been too long since I’ve been out in the backcountry far enough from a highway to not be able to hear truck tires or something.”

“Hey, you and me both. I know we can’t do some of the stuff we used to, but at our ages, this is something that we can do to make it one more time.”

It had been an interesting idea and Eric had thought about it off and on ever since Gary had brought it up. Maybe now that Jeff was gone he could still get in on the deal. It might be possible, although he hadn’t talked to Gary for some weeks. He made a mental note to call Gary first thing in the morning to pass along the news of Jeff’s death, and maybe somewhere in there he could plant the idea that he was now interested in going along on the trip.

Gary had been one of the good things that had come out of Eric’s somewhat-regular permanent part-time job at Harrington Oil, and later Harrington Gas and Oil. That job had come along almost as accidentally as Jeff’s offering to allow him to stay in the guest cottage, and one had been part of the other.

Tuesday, November 7, 1961

While most of the time things went smoothly at Harrington Oil, occasionally they didn’t. Because of the way things were slow in the summer and busy in the winter, the company didn’t keep a full staff on year around, but hired several oil truck drivers to get them through the colder months. The temporary help was usually made up of farmers who had things slow in the winter and who could use the extra cash, but not all the time. Some of the temporary crew was the same from year to year, but there were often changes, too.

One day in November of 1961, Jeff called one of the temporary drivers who’d worked for them the previous year to ask him to come in for the season. But the driver said he couldn’t work for them this year; he’d found an indoor and higher-paying factory job. Of course, it had to happen on a day they had a full order list, so Jeff had no choice but to get in one of the trucks himself and try to catch up on the backlog. It was something he’d done in the past, so it was no big deal, but they couldn’t go on very long that way, either. Getting someone to drive that truck for the next few months was a problem that was going to have to be solved quickly.

It was late that afternoon before Jeff got the truck back to Amherst, and he still had some paperwork he had to drop off in Wychbold, so there was no choice but to go home the long way. He called Eunice and told her he was going to be late, then got on the road in the Rambler. Everyone had left the Wychbold office by the time he got there, so Jeff just unlocked the place and left the paperwork on his father’s desk, then started for Blue Lake in the gathering darkness. About halfway home he saw a figure trudging down the road, wearing a rucksack and carrying an Army duffel bag. Since hitchhikers were just about unheard of on this road, Jeff quickly braked the Rambler to a stop. “Hop in,” he told the dark figure. “Where are you headed?”

“Blue . . . holy shit, Jeff! Fancy meeting you here!” Eric smiled.

“Good God, guy, it’s good to see you!” Jeff replied as Eric tossed his rucksack and duffel bag in the back seat. “I had no idea you were back in the States.” It had been two and a half years Eric had been gone in the Army.

“Only a couple days,” Eric replied. “I had just enough cash on me to get a bus ride a little way out of New York, and I’ve been hitching ever since. I was just hoping I wouldn’t have to try to find your place in the dark.”

“It’s not obvious, so it’s lucky I caught up with you. So how was your trip back?”

“Slow,” Eric replied. They spent the rest of the drive back to Blue Lake catching up on each other, and the rest of the evening as well, with Eunice right there with them. It was the first time Eric saw the Blue Lake house.

By this time dinner was over with, the dishes had been put away, the drinks had been refilled again, and they’d clustered in the living room as Eric went on with his story. “It sure sounds like you had fun,” Jeff said.

“Do you have any prospects for a job?” Eunice asked.

“Not really, but I haven’t even thought about starting to look. Right at the moment, the best idea seems to be to get done with what I need to do around here, then hitchhike my way out to California.”

“Eric, if you’re interested and you can meet a couple qualifications, I might have a job for you that would work,” Jeff said. “It could be an obvious answer to a couple problems for both of us and would give Eunice and me the chance to keep you around for a while.”

“What’s this?”

Jeff went on to explain about the temporary oil delivery drivers. “It’ll last till the weather starts to warm up pretty good,” he told his friend, “maybe March, maybe into April; it depends on the weather some. The pay is not bad and I really need someone. I could have used someone today if anyone had been available.”

“It sounds good,” Eric replied. “What are the qualifications?”

“You need a chauffeur’s license, but that’s just paperwork. Beyond that, you mostly need a clean driving record, and some time spent driving trucks. I’m not talking about semis, I’m talking about our delivery trucks. You know what I’m talking about. Have you ever driven anything like that?”

“I drove Army five-tons quite a bit, and I’ve never had an accident or a ticket, so I suppose I fit those qualifications. But what about a place to stay? Even renting a room someplace is going to be eating up money as fast as I can make it. Then I have to eat on top of that.”

“I suppose you could move in with us,” Eunice offered.

“Maybe,” Eric replied, sounding doubtful. “But I really don’t want to intrude on you. It’s not quite like when we were all in college. The two of you are married now, and you deserve your time together. It could work for a while, maybe, but I’m afraid you’d be awful tired of me before spring gets here. I mean, I knew even back in college that the two of you were pretty sensitive about your privacy, and something tells me you haven’t eased up that much. Don’t get me wrong, thanks for the offer, and I’ll probably take you up on the job if we can work out some place for me to stay, but I don’t think we should push things too far.”

“You probably have a point,” Eunice conceded. “Jeff and I, well, we value being alone with each other. But still, we’ve seen so little of you for the last two and a half years that it would be nice to see more of you. Besides, I’m sure you have more stories than the ones you’ve just told us.”

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

That was when Jeff had come up with the idea of Eric moving into the guest cottage, Eric thought. So much had come of a couple casual suggestions that evening! Of course, Eric hadn’t realized it at the time, but in the long run they’d changed his life forever. With occasional breaks when he was doing something else, Eric had been one of those seasonal drivers ever since he’d gotten back from his summer in Europe in 1961.

It had been the perfect job for him, one that kept him busy in the winter and gave him all the free time he could ask for in the summers. It might not have worked for anyone else, but Eric had usually been able to make ends meet by being very careful about his expenses. The nearly free use of the guest cottage was a big help and part of the reason he hadn’t tried to push his life on beyond it in other ways.

In fact, Eric was still working for Harrington Gas and Oil on an occasional basis, right up through this winter. Alec Hammond knew Eric couldn’t work very often or for very long because of having to take care of Jeff. Still, when someone got sick, Eric was glad to fill in for a day or two, if for no more reason than to get out of the house and take a breather. Jeff hadn’t minded – and if there was one thing he understood, stroke or no stroke, it was the need to keep people’s houses heated in the winter.

Thinking again of the possible canoe trip, Eric had first met Gary back in the sixties sometime, before that pattern had fully developed. Maybe it was the winter of ’66 – he wasn’t sure right now – but he could probably figure it out if he had to. He’d had to deliver a load of fuel oil to Gary’s house, and for once it was a nice winter day and he hadn’t been too busy. Gary had come out to chat with him, just for the sake of being friendly, and had invited him in for a cup of coffee. Eric had figured that a few minutes wouldn’t matter much, so had taken him up on it, to find that Gary’s kitchen table was covered with maps and books. “What’s all this?” he asked.

“I’m planning a canoe trip in Canada for next summer,” Gary told him. “It won’t be a short one. It could take over a month. I’m still looking for a guy or two to go with us.”

“Sounds like it might be fun,” Eric admitted. “I’ve only been in a canoe a couple of times, but I’ve done a bit of sailing and had a little backcountry experience, along with a pot load of climbing. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about this.”

“Why don’t you drop by after you get off work?” Gary suggested. “I know you’re tight for time now, but if you’re free this evening we can talk about it then.”

“You know, I might just have to do that.”

Eric went back over to Gary’s house that evening, and the two traded outdoor experiences for hours. The two were quite a bit different, of course – Gary was somewhat acrophobic and couldn’t even manage stepladders very well; needless to say, he couldn’t begin to comprehend Eric’s big wall climbing exploits, but appreciated the sea-level nature of sailing.

Over the course of the evening, Gary detailed the plan for the trip, and showed Eric some of the maps he’d collected. It was going to be quite a trip, close to five hundred river miles down the Albany River from Onsaburgh Lake off Ontario 599 down to the river mouth on James Bay. One of the problems was that Gary could only clear away a little more than a month to do it, maybe a few days more if absolutely necessary, and then as now there was an awful lot of flat water on the trip – which meant an awful lot of paddling.

Eric thought a lot about the proposed trip the next day while he was out driving the oil truck again, and that evening he called Gary. “I’ve got a way we could make the trip on your schedule,” he announced. “Take some saplings, or maybe some conduit and lash two canoes together like a catamaran. Then rig a way to mount a little sail on it, something like you’d find on a sailboard like a Sailfish, or even just a simple square sail. The prevailing wind would mostly be behind us, and while it wouldn’t cut all the paddling, it would ease a lot of it.”

“Sounds like it would work,” Gary replied thoughtfully. “But you said ‘we’ and ‘us,’ right?”

“Yeah, why not? It’s not like I have any other definite plans for the summer. I’ll probably do some climbing out west somewhere, but I haven’t worked out where or when yet. Something like this could make a nice break from that.”

It turned out that Gary had only one other guy lined up, and he needed a total of four to make the trip work. That one problem kept the whole trip touch and go for months, until one night Eric had the bright idea of dropping a card to his climbing buddy Chip, who proved to not be doing anything important that summer either and was ready for something new. Eric even managed to recruit Jeff into driving the whole gang and their gear way up to Onsaburgh Lake in late June and picking them back up in eastern Ontario a month later. The put-in trip was three days one way by itself, and two days one way on the return.

All in all, the trip went off very well. It was real wilderness, days away from anything, and the trip, as advertised, was mostly flatwater, so Eric’s limited canoeing skills weren’t all that tested. When it was all over with, Eric was hooked. “This was a ball,” he told Gary as they were waiting for Jeff to pick them up. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

“Talked me into it,” Gary agreed. “You need to pick up a little more whitewater canoeing skills, but that just takes some practice.”

Thus it was that for the next several years, Gary and Eric often spent spring weekends after the heating season tailed down driving to whitewater rivers here and there, and Eric was able to pick up some more skills on his travels elsewhere as well. Eric had to miss Gary’s next big trip – he was out on in the Pacific on the Hawksbill – but he made the one after that. It was five years after the Albany River trip and a much more ambitious journey. The plan for this was in some ways similar to the Albany River trip; they put in on the Pipestone River on Ontario 808 to the north of Onsaburgh Lake, then through a series of rivers and lakes to the Winisk River. Four weeks later they came out on Hudson Bay up in the southern edge of the Barrenlands. This time they had enough rapids to keep them interested, and it was the first time Eric sold a magazine story about one of his river trips.

Gary had reasons involving a wife to not take a big canoe trip every year, but every two to four years for nearly the next thirty Eric was with him on one major canoe trip or another. They were always in the Canadian wilderness, always long and sometimes arduous, and usually with different partners each time. They’d run the Coppermine River down to the Arctic Ocean, and the Nelson down to Hudson Bay. One year they’d run the Mackenzie River from Great Slave Lake through the Northwest Territories to the Arctic Ocean; it was really the only mistake they’d made since it was long, dull, and not truly what they called wilderness. They’d run other rivers in the Northwest Territories too, in northern Quebec as well as in Ontario. Their last big trip, a dozen years before, had been a little less demanding, back in Ontario on the Otoskwin and Attawapiskat down to James Bay again.

For something Eric had gotten into on pure whim and “what-the-hell,” it had been a great deal of fun and very rewarding, especially as he’d gotten older and high-risk mountaineering had begun to pall on him. Even thinking back to them made for pleasant memories, of wild and lonely and often pristine rivers, clear blue skies without even jet contrails overhead, endless forests or empty barren lands. More important had been the feeling of being out by themselves, just his paddling partners and himself, dependent on their own skills and planning, and on being part of the team that was out to accomplish something. In many ways it was much like a big alpine climb – success or failure was their own responsibility, and the sometimes considerable risk made it exciting.

Now, while Eric could remember some events of the trips sharply, in a way they’d all blended in together, too, a thoroughly pleasant mishmash of long days with a paddle in his hands, rivers, campfires at night, packing things around some of the more dangerous rapids. Oh, there were some unpleasant memories too, things like rain and wind and mosquitoes and sore muscles, but they were part of the whole experience. It was those kinds of experiences that Eric had sought again and again in his life, and had given his whole life the purpose that it had. While most people probably wouldn’t have liked a life like that, it suited Eric to a “T.”

Had it been worth the things he’d given up to live the life he’d led? To do it, he’d had to give up things that Jeff had. Things like a home, a wife, a family, a career, comfort, and stability, but as he sat there reflecting on it, it seemed like it had been worth the price he’d paid. Those days were pretty much over for him now; he was just getting too damn old for some of the things he’d done when he was younger.

But still, it might be fun to get out for one final hurrah with Gary, to recapture at least a taste of the good days when he’d been young and had a lifetime of adventure to look forward to.

It’s getting to be too damn late, he thought. Eunice was right; this day started early and has been one damn long one, and tomorrow might not be any better. He wasn’t getting anywhere on Jeff’s eulogy; his mind just wasn’t running in that direction tonight, and that was that. Maybe tomorrow he could start fresh.

Eric shook his head, and used the mouse to start the computer shutting down. But before he got up from the desk he took a pen and wrote a note to leave on the keyboard: Call Gary.

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