Chapter 13

Nov. 26, 2011

As I backed out of our shoveled and swept drive way, a crisp, cold blue sky, the like that forms after black and purple snow clouds have passed on to deliver their disruptive and eventually life-giving cargo somewhere else, Carrie noted, “1:11.”

Ointment was packed to the roof in the back seat and a final sheet of paper could not be fit in her trunk.

As we rolled through Cranbrook to Highway 3/95, I pointed out how bizarre it was to know that the tire tracks we scudded over were ours. A light snow/misty rain flitted around us.

We drove west listening to one of Carrie’s mixed country music MP3s. Emerson Drive’s Moments was playing as we pushed beyond Cranbrook’s corporate limits and pushed toward God knows.

“This is getting easier,” Carrie said.

“What?”

“Driving down these roads.”

I said we were just becoming accustomed to our new world. Talk about stating the bloody obvious.

Passing by the Moyie Pub, a friendly old highway-side place 32 km west of Cranbrook, I suggested we stop for a round of drinks and Keno and we enjoyed a bonding laugh. It had been days since we laughed together. Warmth flooded through me as I relished Carrie’s company.

Her glacier ice blue eyes looked softly at me and she suggested we keep moving, noting she doubted the Keno would be working.

“Don’t want you shooting the bottles behind the bar or setting fire to anything,” she added.

I pulled Ointment into the parking lot, where two vehicles sat, blanketed in snow.

“Just want to take a look,” I said.

We stepped into the pub and were greeted with the now familiar scent of slow rot — from food stuffs that were left out. But it wasn’t too bad. The pub was cool inside. There was no power, we noticed.

I stepped behind the bar and grabbed a beer, hoping it wouldn’t be frozen.

“Ahem,” Carrie said.

“Oop,” I started, grabbing a large bottle of white wine and pouring her a ‘to-the-rim’ glass full.

We sat in our usual seats and looked at the dark Keno screen.

“Cheers,” we said, and clinked our drinks.

“Road trip!” Carrie whooped.

While we sipped at our drinks, I began snapping photos of the emptiness.

For some reason, despite the fact that both of us are photographers, we had not been chronicling anything since the disappearance.

I pulled my Nikon out for the first time before we left home and took a photo of Carrie at the front door.

It would become the first of thousands of images we’d take in the next year — images that would have won us both Pulitzer Prizes and other prestigious baubles related to journalism.

For some reason we lingered for hours at the Moyie Pub, even building a fire and cooking a meal, before I began to fret about having to drive in the dark.

It was the first place we’d stopped at that didn’t have electricity. I’d been wondering when power systems would begin to shut down without steady maintenance. Had to tip my hat to BC Hydro and other power providers, as two weeks after the disappearance, most places were still chugging along as before, keeping warm and lit — staving off the approach of winter within and building thin measures of hope for us.

But in the dark of the pub, with the orange glow of the fire keeping us grounded, I felt a renewed surge of optimism that we could manage. I may not be worth a damn when it comes to frigging with electricity or other generally accepted manly arts, but I could build a mean fire.

I’d always believed I was better suited for the times of yore.

As we departed the pub, first topping up the wood in the fire — just because — I said, “I sure hope we have power at the cabin.”

I doubted there would be power, seeing as how the cabin was several miles off the main highway.

Sporting a four-drink buzz and clutching fresh drinks, we slowly drove away from Moyie. We passed several crows perched on power lines and hopping along the roadside at Yahk . The sun was just setting as we pulled into the Shell station and topped up Ointment.

A piece of paper, jammed in the door to the station, fluttered in the breeze. I stared at the flapping paper as gas chugged into the vehicle. I thought about checking out the note but a crow, side-stepping along the eaves-trough along the gas station roof, screeched at me and then I found myself wondering what corvids would taste like.

May have to find out, I shrugged, clanking the pump back into its holster.

Being fairly adept at shattering silence with an imitation raven’s cry, I took a deep breath and barked “AHWWWWWW!”

The crow flapped its wings and leaped into the air, then settled back down on the eaves-trough and cawed back at me.

Darkness was beginning to settle over us as we drove out of Yahk, heading for the Kingsgate border.

The border crossing was dark and we had to carefully pick our way through the cars, which plugged the lanes at the U.S. crossing.

It gave me an odd sense of power to fart about like that at such an official place. It was delightful not to have to put up with some nosey, jarheaded Homeland Security adherant, asking questions like: “do you have any weapons or drugs?”

I mean, how many people would respond in the affirmative?

“Why yes, I do. I have a trunk full of high-powered rifles, handguns and other nasty weapons and, being a 45-year-old British Columbian, I have a really large bag of wheelchair weed. Not only that, we’ve got way more booze than you’d be comfortable letting us carry over the border and we have tens of thousands of dollars in cash that we have liberated from banks, bars, stores and purses we found lying around on sidewalks, in cars and in the Cranbrook Mall. Fuck me, that was a score there,” I said as we drove across the 49^th parallel.

Carrie, clutching a mini bottle of wine, said I was “crazy with craziness.”

I laughed and stopped the car. I reached into my shirt breast pocket and extracted a joint. I stepped out of the car and walked back to the window where a border guard would have once asked us questions about pets, fruit, green onions, firearms, professions and places of residence and sparked up the rocket.

I blew smoke into the still open window and gave the friendly smiling face of Barack Obama the thumbs up as I exhaled another lungful of smoke into the border station.

“Boy, you sure fucked up on your watch, me ole cheesegrater,” I said. “All George Dubya did was help send the world into a spiraling economic catastrophe.”

The weed began to feed my brain.

“No, you say you are going to solve this that and other. The economy, the environment and health care. Well, you sure solved a ton of shit, didn’t you? Don’t need any stinking health care now, do you?”

Carrie shouted from Ointment.

“What are you doing?”

I left the half-smoked joint on the stainless steel counter of the border crossing and walked to the car. I reached in and popped open the trunk.

“Now what?” Carrie demanded.

“Just a sec,” I said, guffawing, smoke leaking from my nasal passages.

I grabbed the .357, which was the most easily accessible weapon in the trunk, and walked back to the border station. I kept going to the stop sign, where a mini-van sat cold and snow-covered.

“You may not cross,” I shouted and fired a round into the windshield of the van. The explosive concussion of the handgun echoed among the dark American and Canadian border station buildings, eventually being muffled by the forest rising up the adjacent hillsides.

“What are you doing?” Carrie shouted from the car. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

As I walked past the U.S. border station, I fired another round through a window and bellowed, “Take that, America! I hereby declare war on you!”

Carrie said again that she thought I needed help as I plunked my butt back behind the steering wheel, the .357 tucked in my jacket pocket.

“Remember that time when we went to Whitefish and that border guard freaked us out?” I said, clunking Ointment into first gear.

“Yeah,” Carrie chortled. “That was truly bizarre.”

It was the first time we went to the U.S. together — a party weekend in Whitefish.

At the Eureka border crossing, a fatheaded, poor complexioned border guard, who had probably only been working for Homeland Security for a week, went overboard in his questioning.

Did he ask us ‘are you carrying weapons, drugs or other illegal things?’ No. The first thing out of his gob was, “Are you guys dating or what?”

We were gob-smacked. We weren’t admitting to one another that we were dating at that stage and we were flummoxed by the question, likely designed from his observation that we had different last names.

We looked at one another, cracked thin smiles and I babbled, “Uhh, yeah.”

“How’s that goin’ for you then?” the guard shot back.

Carrie, leaned over from the passenger seat and looked up at him. “Well, he lives in Invermere and I live in Cranbrook, so it’s working out great.”

His face cracked wide in a grimace-like smile and asked me for ID. I didn’t have a passport yet, though the paranoid crackdown demanding all land-travelers cough up passports before allowed to enter the U.S. was imminent.

I had to get my wallet from the trunk and stepped from the vehicle. The chubby little guard followed me back and snatched my driver’s license from me and shot a hard look at the picture on it — an image of me from another time, when I was fully bearded, wore glasses with fatter lenses and carried about 20 more pounds.

“Holy Grizzly Adams,” he laughed, walking around to Carrie’s side of the vehicle. “What do you see in Grizzly Adams?” he laughed.

I felt like launching an objection but then remember that American border guards had more powers than God’s assistants and if Carrie and I were going to get to Whitefish and starting frolicking, I best keep my occasionally sharp tongue holstered.

I let out a fake laugh and Carrie frowned.

At that point a stern looking woman of about 50 walked up and the young border guard handed my license back to me. “All right. Have a good trip.”

With our heads spinning, we drove away. The older female border guard seemed to be giving the young joker a lecture and I hoped it was a good old-fashioned tongue-lashing. Nazi bastard.

So you can understand why I felt inclined to pump a few rounds into the border station.

If not, I should tell you the story about how my blue-eyed, blond, half American daughter, aged 12, was denied access to an airliner at Des Moines Airport a few years earlier because of a hyphen in her name.

A year earlier she asked if she could take the last name of my ex-wife’s new husband, because his kids had it, her mom had it yada yada. I agreed, as long as she hyphenated my last name with buddy’s.

Well, when I purchased her plane ticket for our annual summer visit, I hyphenated her name. My ex didn’t tell me that she hadn’t hyphenated the name. She had my last name turned into one of my daughter’s middle names.

Despite the fact that all the names were included on the ticket, the Homeland Security ape at the Des Moines Airport denied her boarding privileges on the plane because the name on her passport was different to the ticket.

The American Airlines woman escorting my daughter, an unattended minor, argued that all the names were in the right order — it was just a hyphen and that American Airlines didn’t have a problem with her getting on the plane. Nope.

My pre-teenage daughter, flying out of America’s corn-fed breadbasket to Calgary, Alberta, was a threat to the homeland.

Heil George Dubya!

“I’m glad I shot the border up,” I cackled getting back into Ointment.

“Pothead,” Carrie said, taking a slug of wine.

Even though we shot our way across the border after I smoked dope at the border guard’s window, I still felt a rush of accomplishment as we crossed the Moyie River Bridge and began rolling toward Bonners Ferry.

I always felt that way when I smuggled drugs and weapons into America – which was, in all honesty, never.

The half hour drive to Bonners took almost two hours, due to two road blockages. We had to stop and get into a couple of crumpled vehicles, hoping greatly that they would start, and move them.

Each stop required more gunfire, too.

Eventually, we pulled into Three Mile Junction north of Bonners Ferry. Old habits. We used to stop there to get gas, beer and “gizzards for poppa,” as Carrie joked.

The lights were out at the station and I felt my spirits sagging. It seemed as though power suppliers in northern Idaho weren’t as officious as those north of the border.

We rolled through the large gas station parking lot and pulled away, south down the hill to the Kootenai River and over the bridge to the Kootenai Casino.

The large, usually glittering entry sign was dark but we could see lights on through the front doors of the hotel lobby.

Stepping into the building, our noses were invaded by a different smell — old smoke… plastic fire smoke.

The casino is broken into three sections, separated by the hotel lobby and, remarkably, despite the obvious traces of a small fire that must have broken out in the big room, located to the left when you walk into the casino/hotel, the VLTs blinked and twinkled, emitting their alluring siren songs.

Old habits: “Wine?” I asked Carrie.

“Certainly,” she replied.

We were both well on our way again. I shoved another reefer in my yap and sparked it and crunched over a thin crust of ice covering the carpet in the partly burned section of the casino, where the bar was located.

One of the things that always ticked me off about the casino was the lackadaisical nature of their staff when it came to getting me pissed. I normally didn’t gamble. I just drank, while Carrie gambled. I didn’t tend to gamble because I have the luck of a proudly Jewish person declaring their Judaism out front of their jewelry store at the moment the Nazi invasion of Poland rolled into their town.

I wondered how, despite the fire, likely started from a cigarette falling out of the mouth of a chubby, bad-hearted, Depends-wearing old goof spending his or her kids’ inheritance, that most of the gambling machines were still on.

Backup generator, I assumed.

I grabbed a bottle of white wine and a couple of beers and left the damaged casino room, crossed the lobby floor and entered the second largest casino room, where I found Carrie jamming $20 into a Monopoly slot machine.

“Any luck,” I said, puffing on a joint and handing Carrie her bottle of wine.

“Not so far,” she said quietly. “Evening is still young.”

Old habits: I went back into the foyer and withdrew my bank card and, just for the hell of it, and attempted to withdraw some cash from my bank account.

It worked! I howled like a drunken monkey that had discovered a new brand of banana.

“A-fucking-mazing,” I shouted.

I snatched the $100 from the cash slot and raced back to tell Carrie that the ATM worked.

“Why did you take cash out when we have thousands of dollars on us?”

I dropped the roach into the emptied can of beer I placed on an adjacent slot machine and declared, “because” before setting out in search of a poker machine.

“It’s your lucky day!” Carrie shouted after me. “Think positively!”

Ten minutes later, Carrie was frightened out of her soft and perfect skin when I let loose with my .357, firing four rounds into the face of the cheap prick poker machine that gobbled $60 and didn’t even give me the momentary tease of a few credits win.

“Motherfucker!” I shouted, whipping the revolver from my pocket and opening fire.

The elation that coursed through my brain was akin to a hallucinogenic drug peak.

“Would you stop fucking shooting things!” Carrie shouted from across the casino. “You scared the piss outta me!”

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “Drink?”

She said she still had three-quarters of a bottle of wine and that she believed she was good.

I told her I was going to go shoot more slot machines in the non-smoking casino room and while she enjoyed a bonus feature on the Monopoly machine and thrilled to the compilation of penny credits, I pumped heavy led rounds into Space Invaders, Cash Cows, Cleopatra, Gems, Titan, some Greek asshole thing and a few keno machines for good measure. By the time I was done, light blue gun smoke haze clouded the room and I feared I might start a fire. My ears were ringing and I was out of ammo, so I fetched another beer and calmly sat down at a poker machine to try my luck. Several of the damaged machines sputtered electronic death sounds and crackled vague wafting sniffs of smoke that hung below the gun smoke.

The gambling gods, fearful of another outburst, threw credits at me like never before and I was $120 ahead when I printed out my winning ticket. Old habits.

I felt wonderful when we left the casino to continue our journey south to the cabin.

Carrie announced that she was ahead and felt good about her turn at the casino.

I told her she should feel good because I relieved the place of all the cash I could find – roughly about $80,000, “as near as I could count, what with the gun smoke and inebriation and all.”

It was just sitting there in the drawers behind the cash counters. I found a wad of hundreds in a purse that belonged to a Wanda somebody from Creston, that dropped my jaw. Considering what had happening and was happening, or not, in the world at the time, it took something considerable to drop my jaw, especially when so much booze and weed was involved in the scenario. There were 100 crisp $100 U.S. bills. My thoughts meandered back to the border, where guards used to ask, “Do you have more than $10,000 in cash on you?” I was always tempted to shout, “I wish! I just got reamed in that goddamned casino again.”

The deeper we proceeded into this new world, the less considerate I became to other peoples’ belongings. My constant lashing out was actually bothering Carrie, who fretted that I was losing it. And I was losing it. I was pretty much wasted 24/7 now and the ‘child in a candy store’ thing had become rota.

Whereas Carrie went about her days with belief that the worm was going to turn, I entered every day feeling as though we hadn’t seen anything yet. Carrie wanted the light and the good and normal; I wanted to make lots of noise and shoot things.

I knew she was getting sore about my manic behaviour, so I waited until after we stumbled out of the casino, clutching large sums of cash and a box of booze, before unleashing shotgun fury on a row of VLTs. With Carrie belted into Ointment, I said I had one more thing to do and grabbed a 12 guage shotgun from the back.

It was a random attack; no particular game was targeted. Each 12-guage slug exploded into the blinking machines with a suctioning, shattering of glass and plastic and metal, followed by clanking, clunking spasms of smoke and particulate, and punctuated by my cackling delight.

An hour later we picked our way around the carnage of suddenly abandoned moving vehicles in Sandpoint, south to the long causeway that spans Lake Pend Oreille. Luckily, traffic had been relatively light at the time of the disappearance and we were able to traverse the causeway with just a few complete stops and scene surveys. The only vehicles that could be started had standard transmissions. The rest were out of gas or too damaged to move.

Half way across the causeway a semi-trailer had smashed through the guardrail and was dangling precipitously. Crumpled metal railing jammed into the undercarriage of the low-bed trailer was all that kept it from plunging into the dark, cold waters of the lake. I got the sense that if I gave the wreckage a kick, it would heave over into the water. The urge to stop and shoot the truck gnawed at me as we crept past the scene.

I stopped at the south end of the causeway and we looked back at Sandpoint, barely noticeable in the cold murk of the November night. Wind howled off the lake, knifing down our necks, creating an extra spike of chill to the scene. Desolation’s song played along.

The world was as void of obvious signs of its former life as it had been the past few weeks. Lights still twinkled on some buildings in Sandpoint and a few lights shone in windows of lakeside homes to the east of the causeway.

Looking back on it, I was more struck by the fact there was no snow, in comparison to Cranbrook, which was coated with the stuff, than by there being no signs of life anywhere.

It was 11:11 p.m. when we arrived at the cabin.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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