Garibaldi, imposing and snow-capped, sat in the distance across the water, skirted by fluffy grey cloud. Howe Sound stretched from the mountain down towards and past us along the bottom of the slope and beyond down to Vancouver. Ray’s electronic music filled the carpark, spilling from the open doors and windows.
Spread out on the asphalt were his belongings: climbing ropes, climbing shoes and an assortment of shiny metal climbing pieces; numerous pairs of tights in lively patterns; two wide-brimmed hats in a dandyish style; a waistcoat; a poncho; a guitar in its case; a collapsible fire stick; numerous semi-consumed food containers. The carpark was at the base of The Chief, a set of five hundred meter rock faces that climb out of the pines, granite that Ray had spent much of the summer on the face of, hanging hundreds of meters above the trees.
Our lives have diverged somewhat since we were at university in Wellington. We used to live together, first in Aro Valley, in a damp flat tucked into the side of the valley, and then on Cuba St, on the fifth floor of a building with a permanently broken lift, accessed through a door pasted completely over by gig posters, just down from the Burger King on the corner where the punks hang out.
Last night we sat together in the minivan that has been his home for these past months, using the Wendy’s wifi. Shortly before he left Wellington he and James discovered rock-climbing and in an instant two of my best friends had a new love, a relationship that took their hearts and minds, and one that I would be permanently excluded from. Excluded not because of my congenital fear of heights, or any physical impediment, but because of my crippling inability to give a shit about rock-climbing. My cross to bear.
Now in autumn the nights had drawn in and the cold condensed the water in thick droplets on the windows of the minivan Ray was living in and you would be hit with the freshness of the morning air as you opened the doors to release the fragrant cloud of your night odors.
His savings were dwindling, accrued in New Zealand working alternately as a hiking guide and caregiver for the disabled, and he was flying out the next day to Australia to meet a girl, maybe climb some more rocks, and perhaps find some work.
When I first saw him yesterday coming through the bus station doors he was wearing tights, a loose floral-patterned shirt, a scarf, a fedora and a nose ring. We hugged and he kissed me on the cheek and in a flurry of excited information exchange he told me he needed to sell his minivan before his flight on Sunday and so we had to drive up here to Squamish to meet a Chilean couple who had expressed interest.
With his stuff laid out, Ray started calling out to the hikers emerging from the trees, offering his stuff. “Tights!? Does anyone want free tights? Pyschedelic tights?”
I had come from Seattle on Thursday after three weeks with Jake and Brooke. Three weeks in the back seat, feeding and playing with Saioa on the long drives through the western United States.
A baby changes everything, doesn’t it? Everything is conditioned by the little bundle of helplessness that is in your care. You time the drive to coincide with her nap. Her nap needs to be timed so that it doesn’t affect her sleep that night. You don’t drive for too long or she will start getting restless and cry in the ear shredding and irrepressible way only a baby can. The right food needs to be found. At all times poisonous things had to be kept from her mouth and sharp things from her hands.
It was a wonderful time for me, of course. The back seat was my domain and I became an authority on what Sai was enjoying eating and what she wasn’t. I was familiar with all her little signals, what she was trying to say (“Yes, Sai, I absolutely agree, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really has gone too far hasn’t it?”) and we had little games that only we would play, the sounds I could make that I knew would make her giggle. Dressing her up as a pumpkin at Halloween in Blackfoot was magical. And I know as deeply as I know anything that I want kids one day. But being a tourist in Parent Land is more than sufficient for now.
Bouncing around from friend to friend is to be submerged in one world after another and be desirous of all of them. In a day I was yanked from the harried domesticity of a young family on holiday to the itinerant existence of a climbing bum. A week later I would be sitting on a mattress on Adam’s floor in Seattle, between crates of vinyl records and a towering pot plant, listening to his stories of captaining a salmon boat in Alaska, exploring the outer Andaman Islands, teaching for two years at a high school in south side of Detroit. It made me want to do all of those, to chase the adventure of those experiences.
To sample my friend’s lifestyles is to shine a spotlight on my own choices. Could I be freer, like Ray? Could I get closer to the edge, like Adam? When I’m around Dan, with his iconoclastic and original thought, questioning everything, reasoning his life from first principles, I feel like I’m conventional, buying into society’s assumptions. I have a pre-organized volunteer teaching position in Mexico starting February. Why didn’t I just decide to show up in a village and offer to teach people English if I can stay with them? That would have been an authentic experience. The thought, suggested by Dan, never occurred to me. Really I’m kind of structured. Conservative. Wimpy.
Ray’s life is defined by freedom, and it illuminates the conservatism of my own choices, kind of. I have a plan, which extends about two years into the future. He has none. I often project five years into the future, imagining where I’ll be. He doesn’t.
My pack, tidy and self-contained, everything inside divided into packing cells, was propped up against the back wheel. Ray was muttering to himself. He had just found an empty condom wrapper in the space below his bed base. “So that’s where it got to,” he said, to no one in particular.
He had to decide what would stay in the van and what we would take. I don’t think he intended to change the sheets. The plastic flowers in the cup holder would remain. The little bag of medicines in the glove box would come with us.
A car alarm started going off. A hiker, embarrassed and flushed, was urgently trying to jam his keys into the lock. At the siren’s sudden end the birdsong seemed tiny in a silence as big as the bay itself. The woman doing downward-facing dog in the sun on the concrete in front of her car changed positions.
Following this life of Ray’s boundless freedom, as inscrutable as the blue water stretching out below us, will come California, then Mexico, then Brazil. Different worlds, one after the other.
