Running out into the rain: Remembering Bill Readings (1960-1994)

It has been twenty years since my friend Bill Readings died in an iced-up airplane that plummeted to earth in an Indiana soybean field. Twenty years since a phone call that Halloween night cancelled dinner plans, and turned our Montreal party into mourning. Twenty years since the world changed.

Twenty years is a lifetime, and no time at all. Enormous sorrow, but also every subsequent gift seems to flow from that catastrophic event; the finality of it has figured, one way or another in most of the major moves of my adult life, from the onset of an acute depression, to quitting my job, and an eventual recovery by and on the sea. I can trace back to that accident the fact that I've built an unusual but deeply rooted and sustaining family life, here, at the edge of my adopted country. I do not know if I would be a storyteller now, one who makes things with others, if that event had not interrupted the narrowing focus of my academic life and career, and derailed them. Now my life is filled with teaching, sure, but also with shared days and nights, fresh air, clouds or stars, frogs and owls, cats, dogs, poems, photographs, sailboats, sketches, videos, voyages, berry crisps, time to love, time to breathe, and walks with chickadees, who flutter by to feed from our hands.

Bill, I do not know if I would have had the courage to make those changes without the fact of your death before me, the stupidity of it, in a plane that had already been designated a "grave," on the return leg of an international academic commute, when what is routine turns suddenly deadly, and no fragment of you is ever recovered. How peculiar still to be thus suspended: we prepare for a meal to which you never arrive.

At first we waited. We thought you'd change your mind, come back from the dead. We thought we'd sit in your kitchen again while you pulled espressos and steamed milk from that machine that made you so proud, a salvaged restaurant-grade cappuccino machine you'd had plumbed in beside your kitchen sink. We thought we'd gather around your big glass table again, and drink and argue and eat exquisite meals (risotto with black truffles, seared squid, perfect greens), listen to tango, talk about politics and soccer, you with your slow deliberate French--your third or fourth language--carving enough room for all of us, no matter what or how we spoke. We thought we'd hear your reliable advice again, your homespun scholarly wisdom: the best way to pull down a grant, plan a trip, bend back the pages of a book so that it looked as if you'd read it.  You were expert at the rhetorics of the university, but you never let them master your zest for living. Until you died.

I remember one late meal on a cool fall night. Your house was full of visiting artists and scholars. One from Japan, two from Brazil, a friend from Switzerland, where you'd once taught, a scattering of friends from Montreal. I'd helped you cook dinner. You were telling stories about the first time you'd come to North America, on an open ticket that let you fly around the world. For a moment you were sober: I've taken so many flights in my life, you said, that sometimes I wonder if I've flown my number.

We all shouted you down: no, don't be silly! You're joking, right?

Two weeks later you were dead. And your comment haunted all of us who were there.

Would you have gone anyway if you had known how it would end? I know you hadn't planned to die; you'd come to see me just before you left. I'm sorry I can't stay longer, you'd said, but I'll be back next week. You were worried about your recent weight gain; we'd made a date to repot some houseplants, and to talk about something serious,  but what that was I no longer remember. How to survive the pressures of a long-distance relationship? Perhaps. Both of us had partners in the US and insanely large phone bills; we knew and shared those vicissitudes, the miscommunications and the loneliness of long-distance loves.

I remember one of the last nights I saw you. As I prepared to go and you hugged me goodbye, you clung to me, tearing, as if I were a life raft.

But that's what you had been--and continue to be in some respects--for me: the one who saved me from drowning, even as the storm of year death nearly sank me. Surviving that and the storms that have followed it have taught me what I know about strength and weakness, sadness and joy, living while and as you can.

Sometimes I still think I see you, tall form striding down a damp autumn street in your lemon yellow raincoat. You emerge from the crowd then slip back into it: ghost, old friend, guardian angel. Choose how you want to live, I hear you say; don't simply withstand. Reach out if you're unhappy; do something. Raincoats are so you'll run out into the rain.

I still miss you Bill; I always will. But now I'm putting on my coat and going out into the rain.

Notes
The first two pictures are copies of photos taken in 1994--of Bill's last birthday party, on a ski holiday with his wife, Diane Elam, and friends Annie and Carolyn, as well as me and my partner then, Kristin Bergen.

The last photo is from a collage of images of an early snowstorm in La Fontaine Park, which was near my house in Montreal.

Valdesca: On Cancer and Courage

 

"Fear is the field where courage grows"

Fifteen years ago, one of my best friends died in a plane crash.  We had been planning to meet for dinner that night; in fact, we and several others had planned a Halloween night party.  Instead, on the first leg of his journey, the plane, a turboprop used on short commuter hops, had been forced by a landing queue to circle in freezing rain for an hour.  Ice built up on the wings; the plane became unstable, flipped and slammed into an Indiana bean field.  Nothing larger than a bread box, it was said, could be plucked from the wreckage.  No identifiable portion of my friend's body was ever recovered.

In the weeks and months following this accident, I came, myself, disassembled.  The simplest things seemed difficult, even impossible; I did not know how or why I ought to struggle on.  I had not known death could strike so suddenly so near.  I had not known it would start to call me too.  I gave myself over to death in some way, even while it terrified me.

While I was in this state, another friend--an acquaintance really--came to visit and decided I needed a change of both scenery and ideas.  He packed a picnic lunch and drove us from Montreal to Lake Placid, in upstate New York.  There was someone there he wanted me to meet, he said, a man in his nineties, a veteran of the "Great War."

I don't remember much about that day--in fact I couldn't remember at all where we'd gone; I had to look it up in a road atlas and make probable guesses. I can't even remember either man's name: such holes in my recollection are signs of how terrible those days were, how far I'd dropped into sorrow.  But I remember the meeting--in the library of a private school--green and maroon volumes in wooden shelves ranged along the walls.  And I remember the story the old man told me, for it was about his own experience of grief.

He'd come home from the war, body intact, but mind utterly blasted, another shell-shocked survivor, unable to imagine how he might rejoin the legions around him simply living everyday lives and petty concerns.  "I knew nothing," he told me. "On my own, I would not have survived.  But there was this school here, and someone asked me if I could look after the primary students during recreation times.

I did not think I could.

Children terrified me.  They were fearless, wiggly; they moved erratically and asked questions.  They were energetic, alive, a kind of future--and I wanted nothing to do with them.  But standing with them while they played, that was my job.

At first I stood at the back of the playground, my face to the wall; I couldn't even look at those children.  But they would not and did not leave me alone.  They asked me questions, wanted me to throw a ball or look at a bloody knee.  And gradually, day by day, as they played, they returned me to the world. 

For you see," he said, turning to look me in the eyes, "fear is the field where courage grows.  If I was to live, I had to dare to walk there.  I was brave--I had been in the war--I'd seen terrible things.  And because of that, I was afraid.  I entered my fear like a shell and tried to hide there. But as the man who gave me the job of watching the children knew, I couldn't stay there and live."

When we left Lake Placid a few hours later, I felt as if I'd been delivered an oracle. But exiting the state I was in wasn't easy--it took years, in fact, of effort and therapy.  Grief casts a long shadow; once it touches you it never quite leaves, but always hovers just there, alongside you, over your shoulder, almost out of sight. 

Still, what I took from my meeting that day was a handhold, a grapple, a tool I've since used again and again when I've needed to haul myself back to hope, to reason, to the pleasures and accidental joys and engagements of life.

Often at sea I think of the old man's line--fear is the field where courage grows--and use it, like a mantra, to calm myself down.  For even if you set out feeling fearless, a match for anything, the sea will educate you otherwise.  An experienced sailor is someone who's been scared silly again and again but refuses to be paralysed.

Fear is the field where courage grows: you don't do brave things because you're somehow especially brave, but, in fact, because you're mortally afraid.

We go to sea in a stout, ocean-capable "blue water" keel boat packed full of survival gear and food and a watermaker and spare parts and tools and communications devices and elaborate medical kits--everything that Marike's lifetime of sailing experience and our combined foresight can imagine to put together. And still, often enough, I feel anxious, bounced around, at some edge.  So when I see people who embark on long voyages in kayaks or other small boats I am full of admiration--these people must be very courageous indeed.

One small boat in particular moves us--the Drascombe Longboat, a yawl-rigged open boat--in part because it is so pretty and so practical at once.  NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) operates a small fleet of these "teaching boats" in the Sea of Cortez, and it is a lovely thing to watch them come around the corner and into a sheltered cove.  They're versatile--one can attach a little outboard motor, or row or sail these 22-foot beauties.
  

This year, in San Juanico, we encountered another Drascombe, home for three months to Claudia, a geologist, and Tim, an artist.  Right away, Claudia asked for our story--how had we come to be sailing in the Sea of Cortez? What accident of life gave us the urge and the capacity to be away from Nova Scotia for a chunk of time and living on a boat there? Mix the feeling that life is short and not to be squandered--we'd left jobs we hated after too many friends had died and tried to make a new life-- with the wish for a boat, the chance that the boat we most wanted was for sale at a very good price in San Diego in 2003, and our story unspools from there.  Having answered, we turned the question around--how did you two come to be sailing a Drascombe here? we asked.

The answer was short, sharp, shocking and very clear: Claudia, a geologist who had worked for Los Alamos labs, had had three rounds of cancer.  Last April, everyone had thought she might soon die: she'd even registered for a place in a palliative hospice, so it would be available when the time came.  But then she got an idea. She'd quit her job and get into shape and they'd have an ADVENTURE in the Sea of Cortez, where she'd done fieldwork for her PhD. And that made her feel like living, which is exactly what she was doing. When we met her, she looked hale, tanned, strong; you'd never guess she'd so recently been so ill. 

In many respects, the way they were sailing took a lot more physical strength, planning and courage than the way we were sailing.  It could be much colder, much less sheltered; they were constantly closer to the elements, at risk of being swamped; they had to camp on the beach each night to sleep. But Claudia was clearly thriving--obviously much to Tim's relief.  To risk her life was, not to save it so much as to seize it and make it worth living; because she had courage, because they had courage, they were also utterly alight. 

Same lesson, different, thrilling, example.  Thank you, Valdesca, thank you.

Notes

For more on Claudia and Tim's adventure see

http://valdesca.blogspot.com/

For more information on the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and their sailing program in the Sea of Cortez, see

http://www.nols.edu/courses/locations/mexico/bajasailing.shtml