Windswept

Five hundred and forty-eight days.

Five hundred and forty-eight days since he placed his son in the car seat and headed down the hill to the grocery store. It was cold outside and his fingers couldn’t work the buckles around the bulky snowsuit so he just left the clips undone. It was only 700 meters. One traffic light.

He didn’t notice the other car. Didn’t feel the impact. Didn’t hear the breaking glass. All that he saw was his beautiful little boy rolling down the road like a crystal ball and shattering into a thousand pieces against the frozen curb. Then his world stopped turning.

His wife left him right after the funeral but that was for the best. Her departure saved them both twenty years of warfare. She didn’t deserve that. He did. But she didn’t.

He quit his job, sold the house and gave almost everything that he had to Mothers Against Drunk Driving because there wasn’t a Mothers Against Teenagers Using Their Cell Phones When Driving and he didn’t have the energy to make one.

Mostly he lived out of his car. For a while he just drove around his hometown in concentric circles like a bird tethered to a post. Unable to land. Unable to break free. He slept in back alleyways, parkades, industrial parks. He was afraid that if he left he’d forget the places that they used to visit together. Places like playgrounds and museums and bookstores. But seeing those things cut him so deeply that eventually he had to go.

Thinking perhaps that the ocean could wash away his sin he headed east to Nova Scotia and spent most of the summer hiking in the highlands of Cape Breton. He spoke only when he needed to and made no friends. At night he would lie awake and replay that day over and over again. It always ended the same way.

He came home at the beginning of September and spent a long sleepless night parked on the street in front of his old house. He could see into the upstairs window. The new owners had painted his son’s bedroom pink. Someone else was sleeping there now.

The next morning he fled north onto the bedrock of the Shield. He hung out in small French towns and picked fights with the locals. He deserved every fat lip and black eye that he got.

The first snow found him heading around Lake Superior. Just outside of White River he saw a sign that said that it was the coldest place in Canada so he stopped there for the winter. He worked the night shift at a service station pumping gas at forty below zero. Slept on a couch in a rented basement apartment. Rarely ate. Lost 40 pounds. Penance.

When the ice started to melt and it no longer hurt to be outside he climbed back into his car and continued west. He didn’t have a destination. There was no plan. No purpose. He just drove around aimlessly like a man lost in the forest. He stopped for a week in some nameless town past Thunder Bay. The motel room had a fridge for his beer and there was a restaurant on the other side of the highway that served naan bread and curry. It was the first time in over a year that he could actually taste food.

By the middle of June he found himself exploring the dirt roads of southern Saskatchewan. Once, in another lifetime, someone had told him that there was nothing to see on the prairies but he quickly came to realize that they had entirely missed the point. You didn’t go to the prairies to see anything, you went to see the nothingness. To stand under a cobalt blue sky and see the vast expansiveness which swallowed you whole. You could scream if you wanted to but no one or nothing would hear you. And scream he did. Loud anguished screams. Sobs.

He ended up near a little town outside of Grasslands National Park and stayed there for almost the entire summer. He lived in a canvas tent along the river and worked as a bartender at the local saloon. Each morning he woke to the sound of deer grunting as they wandered down to the riverbank for a drink of water and at night he fell asleep to coyotes yelping at the moon. He spent endless hours walking through the hills and coulees surrounding his camp and reading their timeless history. One day he found a broken wagon wheel buried deep in the grass. Another time, miles from anywhere, he came across a rusted licence plate from 1943 sticking up out of the dirt. Why on Earth was it there? But wherever these relics came from and whoever left them lying in the dust he knew deep in his heart that this was a land that belonged to no one. To be sure, it had been stolen from the Cree and the Assiniboine but perhaps even they had only borrowed it from the bison. Humans were just too small to lay a claim to this place and for all of our struggles, our joys and our sorrows, we were but a ripple upon the grass.

One morning he realized with a shock that he had finished his breakfast before the first wave of pain had hit him. A week later he caught himself looking up at the sun and feeling its warmth on his face. A few days after that he heard a bird as if for the first time.

He started to see life again.

He made friends with a family of field mice that lived under a rock by his car and he brought them sunflower seeds from town. He worried that the babies might get eaten by a snake. Fleetingly he saw foxes running after rabbits and watched hawks hunting squirrels from high in the air. He began to feel the deep, calm breathing of the world. Sometimes during his solitary walks across the plains he would come across overgrown buffalo wallows or ancient tipi rings from long-forgotten campsites. When the sun was just right on the evening horizon he could swear that he could hear the ghosts of those two partners, hunter and prey, whispering to each other in the wind.

The wind.

The blessed wind.

The silent, roaring wind.

It had done the impossible.

It had dried his tears.