Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland
Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland
Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland
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I was appalled. "How could you use extortion when you were doing something so ... sacred?"<br />
Allison turned toward me, amused that I didn't get her punch line: "Well, my dear, I'm broke. When<br />
you're my age, you'll understand."<br />
She was still on the floor when I got up and left. I drove home and put Jason's list of instructions inside a<br />
jumbo freezer-size zip-top bag in order to protect his pencilings from rubbing away completely. I<br />
removed my shoes and belt and fell into bed, holding an edge of the bag up to my face, and sleep came<br />
easily.<br />
Part Four<br />
2003: Reg<br />
Jason,my son, unlike you, I grew up amid the dank smothering alder leaves of Agassiz, far from the city.<br />
In summer I could tell you the date simply by chronicling the number of children who had drowned in the<br />
Fraser River or been poisoned by the laburnum pods that dangled from branches and so closely<br />
resembled runner beans. I spent those summer days on the Fraser's gravel bars, watching eagles in the<br />
tall snagged trees browse for salmon, but I wasn't in the river just for the scenery - it was piety. I believed<br />
the maxim that should I lose my footing, God would come in and carry me wherever the river was<br />
deepest. The water felt like an ongoing purification, and I've never felt as clean as I did then. That was so<br />
many decades ago -the Fraser is now probably full of fish rendered blind by silt from gravel quarries, its<br />
surface pocked with bodies that somehow worked themselves loose from their cement kimonos.<br />
Autumn? Autumn was a time of sorting out the daffodil bulbs with their malathion stink, brushing their<br />
onionskin coatings from overly thick sweaters knit by two grandmothers who refused to speak English<br />
while they carded wool. Winters were spent in the rain, grooming the fields - I was raised to believe that<br />
the opposite of labor is theft, not leisure. I remember my boots sinking in mud that tried to steal my<br />
knees, its sucking noise. And then there was spring — always the spring - when the mess and stink and<br />
garbage of the rest of the year were redeemed by the arrival of the flowers. I was so proud of them -<br />
proud, me . . . Reginald Klaasen - proud that they loaned innocence and beauty to a land that was never<br />
really tamed. Proud from walking in the fields, inside the yellow that smelled of birth and forgiveness —<br />
only to stare north, out at the forest and its black green clutch, always taunting me, inviting me inside,<br />
away from the sun. Hiding something - but what?<br />
Perhaps hiding the Sasquatch. The legend of the Sas-quatch has always been potent in my mind - the<br />
man-beast who supposedly lives in the tree-tangled forests. It was the Sasquatch I'd always identified<br />
with, and perhaps you can see why: a creature lost in the wilderness, forever in hiding, seeking<br />
companionship and friendship, living alone, without words or kindness from others. How I hoped to find<br />
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