Nobody who knows my daughter would think of her as a rebel. She’s the cautious type, a natural pessimist who appreciates the value of a dollar. An old soul, my friend Clare used to say. I had her when I was young and unmarried, which may explain why the tensions between us resemble those between sisters separated by a big age gap. The rebel role was taken, so she cut herself a sturdy rut. Ten years as a waitress before landing a part-time job in a bank. She declared herself lucky to have a respectable job. Eight years with her first boyfriend before his desire for a child got a serious hearing. Even as the idea started making sense, she wasn’t sure she was ready for motherhood. “How about a wedding,” I suggested. “That’ll buy you a year.” So we did it, the whole nine yards of raw silk, a floor-length white suit. “I can wear it to openings,” she said. That’s the other piece of the puzzle: since early adolescence, when my daughter stopped wanting to be a hairdresser, all she has ever wanted to do is paint. Looked at one way, every particle of her life is about painting, and yet her talent and drive are so thoroughly grounded, they’re almost invisible. She’s neither temperamental nor particularly ambitious. Art is just something she does, all of the time. It is her work.

Whenever I see her after a long absence she seems smaller than I remember, although she’s taller than I am, and when we meet at Vancouver airport, heavily pregnant. It seems like an armful of something under her coat. “It,” because we don’t know the sex yet. That would be like opening your presents before Christmas, she says. Thirty years ago, I spent most of nine months convinced my baby would be a boy because the father understood women so poorly I couldn’t imagine him conceiving one. My intuition is often fierce and usually wrong.

In the airport parking lot, we head to a 10-year-old Subaru station wagon, which the parents-to-be found on Craigslist. The hood was badly damaged in a film shoot, but the motor and body are in perfect shape. My son-in-law hauls my suitcase into the trunk and tells me to sit in the front. “No, no,” I protest. “I’ll get in the back. I’ll get used to it.” As we ride toward downtown, I’m thinking, I will get used to it. Life on the periphery.

My daughter leans over the seat and shoots me a question. “What do you want to be called?” Granny. If it’s possible to roll the r, that would be nice.

Tabula rasa. One of the many great things about having kids is that for a while they believe what they’re told. Becoming a mother, you get to look at the world again from the ground up. For a decade, my desire to be a writer was ruined by the burden of a happy childhood; I thought I had nothing to write about. It all seemed so vague: warm summer days on the farm, skating ponds, pointless sibling squabbles and a few good jokes. Motherhood changed everything. Pregnant at 24, one of the many thoughts that ricocheted through my appallingly innocent mind was, well, finally, something’s happening. Deal with it. Make the best. Write about it, though I never have till now.

With virtually no parenting skills and no time to consult the literature, I embraced motherhood as a great adventure. Not a metaphorical journey at all, but a place we—myself and the unknown—were going together. I had no memory of life when I was not in school and so planned her upbringing according to the academic calendar. For the first six years, we moved every spring. After that, she spent the summers on the farm with my sister’s or brother’s families, hoards of cousins offering a boisterous experience of family life, which, as the eldest of six children, was the only kind I knew. Once, when I admonished her for not chewing her food slowly, she fired back: “Uncle Rick says, “Wolf That Food Down and Get Out!” Apparently my brother Dave used to chase them to bed with the fly swatter. Yes, that’s the childhood I remember, crowd scenes, learning by osmosis. Nothing much was expressly forbidden, though punishment did occur.

They’ve already been through a round of cramps by the time I arrive, and the due date is only a few days away so I unpack my suitcase in the spare room, thinking, “this could happen any minute now.” But it doesn’t. Instead, we spend a full ten days together, waiting, and I am overwhelmed to learn how much there is to know about childbirth. And faintly terrified, increasingly so. How did I ever manage with a cursory flip through a Penguin paperback and a few routine visits to the doctor? Obviously, I must have relied on female members of my family for information. It’s all a blur now. I have little to contribute to the subject of the day, though it doesn’t seem to matter. They’ve both attended an eight-week course, signed up to a midwife clinic, seen dozens of videos and Googled like crazy. Three dressers full of baby clothes, equipment, and gadgets await the unknown arrival.

It’s an unusually Montreal Christmas for Vancouver, one snowstorm after another. Twice a day my son-in-law shovels the car out and takes it for a test drive around the block. Pipes freeze, the upstairs tenants’ drain explodes, and nasty water falls through the kitchen roof, sending the already panicky father-to-be into near hysteria. It’s a blessing, really. Gives him something to do, and he copes very well. Christmas Eve, we open our presents. He has settled on a spa theme: creams and bath grains for me, a day-long retreat for the mother-to-be. He’s pleased to see she understands and appreciates the thought. This is their baby thumping around in herbody, taking his time, so when the incubation is over she’ll deserve to be pampered.

As the days click by, we become convinced we’re waiting for a boy. A girl surely would be here by now; a boy is clinging to a warm, dark place. But we still don’t know his name. Names float out, get discarded or added to the list, raised and demoted. Mom favours Oskar, Dad lobbies for Isadore. I like Leo, my father’s middle name, but it goes nowhere. “Never mind,” I venture. “You can’t really know if a name works until you see the child.” They don’t believe me, I can tell. I was convinced my baby would be a boy. When I saw her, I knew her name would have something to do with Ireland, the country where I would have left her, if certain events hadn’t happened that made it possible to embark upon the adventure with a measure of confidence. Shocking to admit now, but it’s true. In my case, each step of the way to motherhood was taken with uncertainty, but at the same time, a strange settling confidence that things would work out, as they did. Every birth is to some extent a coincidence. The nature versus nurture argument rages, but the minute you see a newborn, you know him/her. A somebody, no longer an event. The name is obvious.

Christmas comes and goes, and then we’re staring at New Year’s. A second visit to the midwife clinic, talk of inducement. I rebook my return ticket for the second time. Soon it is clear that nothing as unnatural as a prod will be allowed. Some website mentions spicy food helps get things going, so we hurdle off to an Indian all-you-can eat buffet, and hope. I crawl into bed thinking, maybe time has stopped, though this is not a thought that keeps me from sleeping. When I wake up at 7, the coffee pot is already on. Labour pains started at 11 p.m. The midwife will be called at 8. I bite my tongue and froth the milk instead.

At 8:30 the midwife phones back. She says she’ll swing by the dry cleaners and be over in an hour. Earlier, in a rare forthcoming moment, my daughter had confided they were glad to have me on hand “in case anything goes wrong.” True, I’m the one who gets handed the phone in a crisis. This time, I don’t wait to be asked. I state outright that the midwife should be called back and asked to postpone fetching her dry cleaning. This is a first baby, and anything can happen.

Lordy, lordy, there is no waiting room. This is Vancouver, the Women’s Hospital. We’re taken to the Cedar Room, a large, softly-lit double suite with a walk around bathtub in one end, a high hospital bed, a guest bed, comfortable chairs, a closet and water cooler. You are allowed to bring in snacks. By the time we get there, it’s early afternoon. I’m deep into internal sweating, trying to appear calm, which isn’t that hard because there is nothing happening that would disrupt calm, no peg for anxiety. We’re all glad to get the show on the road. The midwife, two nurses and a student nurse swing into calm, collected action and the whole thing starts to resemble a thoroughly rehearsed play, as if a new cast member is gently being broken in. They’ve done this thousands of times before. There is no secret knowledge. Father and mother know their moves. I am the only one on the edge of the loop. In the back seat, so to speak. Periphery. Get used to it, I tell myself. Grrranny. La périphérique. A ring road circling the downtown core of life.

I have nothing meaningful to say about what happened after that. Giving birth is awful, a truly violent, hideously painful ordeal. Of course it all blows over when you see the little thing. But before that, it’s wicked. My sister stayed in the room with her daughter, and said it was worse than giving birth herself. I only remember one image and one mental note from my one experience. Not even an original image—it was like passing a watermelon. I do recall a note-to-self: I don’t want to hear you say this was not so bad. It is bad. I am by nature an optimist. I tend to remember the best. As per note, it was bad, but no, not worse than watching my own grown-up baby suffer so much. At one point a nurse suggested I might want to step out into the hall, as my “expression” could prove “distracting”. I took a deep breath and smiled. Once the top of a tiny dark-haired head appeared, I turned away.

Sure enough, a boy, a perfect Oskar. Fiery, clench-fisted, a little old man with a big scream, shocked by thin air but eager to flex his limbs. All boy, and badly in need of a literary middle name like Isadore to get him into the right parties.

In the few days that followed his birth I circled around the ring road many times, observing this new family from several angles. Always, of course, with one eye inward on the self, the girl I was, the woman I have become. It is easy to carve out a place in a household containing a baby. Vancouver, 2009, I mastered the slow cooker, found a new set of kitchen taps, pioneered the knack of eating in the living room. By the time it was really time to go home, leaving seemed almost impossible.

My daughter cried at the airport. “It’s only hormones, mum,” she said. Once inside the terminal, I was sorely tempted to change my ticket a third time and go back. A myriad of excuses did battle in my mind, but I kept on walking, telling myself, my husband’s waiting in Montreal. They are a happy family. She’s fragile, but she’s also strong and the man she married is not a curly-headed charmer, he’s the kind who looks ahead to a day at the spa. No wonder I didn’t recognise the ripple of gold in him until that day in the Cedar Room.

A few months later, when I meet up with them again, they’ve settled into a delicious weird routine composed of all the latest ideas and some pretty novel inventions, and it hits me that actually being a grrrrranny is something one must learn.

“Oh, don’t grow up too fast, my little darling,” I hear my daughter coo. “Are you going to grow up and leave me?”

I almost blurt out, yes he will! But I don’t. She hears the thought anyway. But our eyes don’t meet. No need to. Our Janus dance is over now. We’re a circle, both looking down at Oskar Isadore.

“Welcome to America! But hey, don’t talk to him, he served in Iraq!”

Buddy ranted up and down in front of the Lake Street Bar for the first time today. Only the regulars knew that he would give shows again at 8 and 11, before rubbing one off and going to bed. Buddy had two stances: attack and jubilation. The former made him into a pit bull ready to lacerate, the latter—Angelina Ballerina full of herself and her potential. In truth I’ve never seen a drunk pirouette so well.

“Heyyyyy, that’s a nice suit. You got the job! Man, I’d hire you for dividends and a place on World Street … you know what I’m sayin’? World … Wall Street, with DIVIDENDS!” He had me by the lapels, his lips inches from mine. I was trapped and I hadn’t even gotten in the door.

His face reflected a second lifetime of experiences. You can see it doubled up in the eyes, sometimes, like misprinted type. As a younger man, I would have sidestepped him in a hurry, but now, well I can’t dismiss them anymore, those who’ve lived that much. He was in my way, but tonight, he was also a statue in the park whose plaque I needed to read and appreciate. Three feet from now this guy could end up saving my life.

His face was a milestone inside both of us, a spotlight on a big crack that shouldn’t be dismissed. Something not so much in the past, as put on the backburner and left to simmer. The life you intend to leave, the one you did leave when things began to shrivel up and, by automosis, turn on themselves to find their own death rattle. His lips shook as he rambled on, and in them I saw the verge of death. My stomach turned, in part contemplating his future, in part remembering where I’d seen it before.

I was nine years old when I came across the dog. A life ending in the middle of the road. A car that never looked back. Who knew man’s best friend could produce a sound so unearthly? As though the dead dog of the future had ripped through and squeezed the last imaginable sound from the gut of his gasping counterpart. With others it’s a crackle, like with bugs, lost in the exoskeleton parting juicy at the seams. With some, the ones who can’t stay still, it is no sound at all, but a bitter phlegm parked on the back of the tongue. With broken dogs at age nine, it’s a call note between now and things that make no sense.

Out this night Buddy was the first signpost on my way to the horizon, a broken Weird sister punishing me for my cushy life. He was sweating lager, and eventually wandered down the sidewalk to bend the ear of a broken chair. I got my beer, sat down outside, away from Buddy’s furniture monologue in progress. I couldn’t get comfortable, and watching Buddy—teary eyed and nearly en pointe—I wondered what it would be like for him, when the war was over.

As the cab negotiated its way to the airport in the suddenly crazy traffic of Fashion Week in Milan, I was going over all the recommendations I had gathered in two months of preparation. At the end of February, the city was already warming from the approaching sun and I was comfortable in just a shirt. But some three days and five flights later, I would be the farthest North I had ever been, boarding the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker sailing through the same Northwest Passage a group of five Norwegian explorers had navigated more than a century ago. It had taken the group, led by Roald Amundsen, three years to sail through the passage on a wooden sailing boat with a small auxiliary engine. In winter, they camped on the coasts to wait for the ice to clear. Amundsen’s diary of those days is a chronicle of patience, endurance, and self-confidence.

For a reporter at a large business newspaper in Italy, this trip was an exception. I was not new to covering environmental issues, but I had never spent so much time together with the scientists I would have to write about. And I never thought I would venture to the Arctic Circle in winter with only my hand luggage and a pair of Italian shoes. The rest of my luggage was stuck in Heathrow and this was all I had with me when I boarded my second-to-last flight to Inuvik, Canada’s northernmost town and the last stretch of land I’d walk on before flying out to the middle of a sea of ice.

The DeHavilland Twin Otter landed on a 200-metre strip of ice at 71°N, 125°W. The cabin is not pressurized and even with earplugs, I still feel all the plane’s movements right in my head. Landing on this strip of ice looks like an attempt at collective suicide, but it turns out to be much smoother than the bumpy landing of a large plane.

The Amundsen, with its 100 metres of steel and comforts ranging from satellite Internet and television, washing machines, and a little gym, was something the Norwegian explorers wouldn’t have been able to imagine. Nor could they have guessed at its task. The Canadian government had assigned the vessel to scientific research for the International Polar Year (an international, interdisciplinary scientific program focusing on the Arctic and Antarctic) in spite of, according to the rumours I hear on board, the government’s denial about climate change. It seems that not everyone is unhappy about the warming of the Arctic regions. That which is profoundly disturbing to these scientists is seen by shippers and businessmen as a future potential for new drilling opportunities and faster routes connecting Russia and China to North America and Europe.

As I’m walking on the ice—or pack as it’s known up here—towards the Admundsen, loaded with two cameras, a laptop, and a small digital video camera, in my Italian shoes, I can’t help thinking it was worth every mile. The journey alone is an experience. A few hours later we spot a polar bear from the main deck. In spite of the fog you can see it clearly a few hundred meters away, stripping bits of flesh and fur from a freshly captured seal.

The ship is comfortable and all the scientists seem eager to talk about what they’re doing. I’m here as one of the winners of the Amundsen Competition launched by the World Federation of Science Journalists and will spend 15 days trying to understand why the Arctic is so meaningful to climate researchers. The scientists on the Amundsen come from all over the globe and from so many different disciplines that within 100 metres you can meet physicists, chemists, marine biologists, or any one of a number of specialists. The climate is probably the most complex system humans have ever tried to describe. I thought that it hadn’t yet been seriously tackled with an interdisciplinary approach, but it’s actually happening out here in the Beaufort Sea in this unique arctic laboratory.

The first day on the ship we wake up to a new patch of ice at 70° 58′ N, 123° 55′ W, just south of Banks Island. We will stay here for three to four days if the north-easterly winds of the coming days don’t blow too strongly and push us south towards the mainland. Schedules are getting busier and there are three teams out on the ice sampling ice-cores, catching zooplankton, and measuring temperatures and concentrations of CO², mercury, and other air pollutants. My eagerness to have another bear sighting has been dampened by our chief scientist Gary Stern and the rest of the crew, who have warned us to be extra careful about wandering around by ourselves. The ice ridges are the hiding places of the largest land carnivores—the hungry polar bear.

Dawn in the polar regions is a godsend when there is no fog. Coming up on the deck later that week, I thought I had suddenly landed on Tattooine, the planet with multiple suns where the young Luke Skywalker grew up before following the ways of the force. Ralph Staebler, a researcher for OASIS-Canada, quickly shatters my city-boy dreams. He tells me I am looking at a “sun-dog,” a common phenomenon in the Arctic produced by sunlight reflecting off of tiny ice crystals suspended in the dry Arctic air. It’s a bright spot, similar to a rainbow only circular. There are two—one on each side of the sun, like two smaller stars shepherding the larger, brighter star in between. The effect is spectacular and captures the attention of both newcomers and seasoned polar dwellers.

My cabin phone rings a few minutes before noon. “Hey if you’d like, you can fly out to fetch your bags at Sachs Harbour,” says Gary. Sachs Harbour is the only community on Banks Island and home to a couple hundred Inuvialuit. “Be on the helipad at 3:30. Dress warmly!” No need to twist my arm. I’ve been peeking inside the hangar at the white, red, and blue Twin Huey, a Bell 212 sporting the graphics of the Canadian Coastguard for days now and bugging Gary about when, if possible, maybe, I could hop a ride.

Flying at these latitudes is completely different. Fog, vapour, and ice crystals reduce visibility enormously and all navigation is done by instrument. Only very experienced pilots are allowed to fly here, and they always fly in pairs: one for the instruments and one for the steering. At 100 knots, a few minutes in the wrong direction would cost us precious litres of fuel. Without fuel you might end up having to land on the ice somewhere and wait for hours—if you’re lucky that is—for the Amundsen (the only ship at sea!) to come and rescue you. At −40°C or −50°C in the blowing wind, that doesn’t sound like much fun. The flight goes by smooth as silver and as we carefully land in front of our hangar, a crackling from the radio tells us the kitchen has kept a couple of dishes warm for us.

My bags are not there. I come back without my possessions but with a camera full of pictures. We are also bringing back a present from Sachs Harbour: two large and heavy boxes of muskox meat, an Inuvialuit treat that I’ve been wanting to try since my arrival. The flight alone is worth the trip. I finally get a bird’s eye view of the “flaw leads” everybody is talking about: an intricate network of canals in the ice that appear and disappear according to the winds. These patches of open water are becoming ever more frequent in the area—the very reason the Amundsen and its scientists are wintering at sea. In the barren white and icy landscape, they look like warm rivers as the water, barely above -2°C, lets out clouds of vapour into the -30°C air.

What you understand following researchers in the field is that the data you read in scientific publications and reports are distilled out of days of relentless, hard work. One single figure is often the result of dozens of assays, samplings, filtrations, and surveys. This is how scientists get results. It is not an easy task. We’re on a $250 000 000 ship powered by six 16-cylinder diesel engines with state-of-the-art equipment connecting us to the outside world, but research in the Arctic still takes a lot of luck and creativity. The rosette, for example, a paramount piece of equipment that provides daily samples of water from as far as the bottom of the ocean, has broken a component that must be rebuilt in the metal shop on board. This means at least a 24-hour break in sampling.

During the last days on the ship, we are greeted by high pressure and clear days as we sail north. The scene is magnificent. If it weren’t for the cracks and openings that reveal the open water below, you could almost mistake this lake for one of those dry salt lakes that are ideal for racing cars. Gary is grinning. In front of us lies the peculiar mix of thin ice and open water he has been hoping for. This means the scientists will have a chance to observe how CO² is released into the atmosphere, and to witness ozone and mercury depletion events. No big breakthrough, but an important bit of arctic science could happen here today.

The green laser light is flashing as Jeff Seabrook, a PhD student at Purdue University, operates the now-functioning lidar, a special kind of laser that uses three different light frequencies, much as radar uses radio waves. We wear thick dark goggles because the beams, although invisible, could harm our eyes. The installation process is not yet complete but is coming along nicely, and tomorrow the instrument should be churning out the first data on the ozone 10 metres above sea level. The aim of this experiment is to observe and record ozone depletion events: sudden and still-mysterious falls in ozone concentration.

I’m also on the lookout for seals and bears as my last 24 hours in the Arctic approach. It’s a good spot, some of the crew tell me, as we are close to Banks Island and the open water should attract seals and make it an appealing hunting ground for bears. The last highlight of the day was a chilly but wonderful walk on the ice at night. The 25-knot wind and the -30° air temperature feel like -50° on my skin. But the view, with streams of snow whistling on the pack, was just unbelievable.

My last full day on board is a lesson in creativity. Ralf Staebler’s sled is finally out on the ice gathering data on CO² in the atmosphere and giving Leif a chance to set up refractors for his air analysis system. It takes about an hour of hard work on the windy pack, two kilometres west of the Amundsen for Ralf, Leif, Phil, and Roc to get it to work properly. Then Ralf’s laptop crashes because of the cold. Things don’t look too good when even sticking it into Ralf’s parka to heat it up doesn’t seem to help at all. Finally someone has the idea to sit the laptop on a running engine of one of the Ski-Doos. Not something you’d find in the instruction manual, but the untested protocol works fine. No beers to celebrate tonight because the bar is closed, but an iridescent sunset greets us as we return to the ship.

A few more hours and the Twin Otter will land on the runway traced onto the ice just west of the Amundsen to fly Wayne and Bart (the two reporters from the Winnipeg Free Press), Helmut (the researcher working on CO² chemistry), and me back to Inuvik. Fifteen high-school students and teachers will then fly in, as well as Emily Chung, another of the winners of the WFSJ Amundsen Competition that brought me here. It’s been 15 days packed with discoveries, learning, and wonder at the vastness of the Arctic. My trip is coming to an end but the scientists’ work continues.

I return to the bustle of city life with images from this place, one of the most hostile and pristine environments on our planet, engraved in my memory. I also have a more precise understanding of how the environment we live in is our life support system, and how this system is being endangered. Ice is a perfect example of how generous and fragile our ecosystem is. Knowledge of its inner workings and of the complex feedback network regulating climate change is progressing, thanks to the work of many passionate and dedicated researchers. But now I know we all need to change our daily lives if we don’t want our future to melt away.

The road is a blur of grey beneath searing tires as sunscreen-soaked legs pump and glisten in the summer glare. Sweat escapes my bandana and slides to the peak of my nose. A salty drip grows and trembles from the hum of the tires reverberating through me until, no longer able to cling to my skin, it falls and splatters into oblivion.

One runs out in front of me. He scurries and bounds for the median, making it halfway when a truck flattens his head into a white stripe in the middle of the road. My heart and tires skid to a stop. I want to run out to him, but cars zoom by and cut me off. Step out anyway. Force them to stop. Force them to care. I imagine myself lying beside the gopher, just as flat, just as dead, and the cars just keep zooming past.

I bow my head, slide my feet back into my pedals, and ride away. Looking back, I wish I could have saved him.

“Let’s bike there,” Brendan said.

“Bike where?”

“To Vancouver.”

“You wanna bike?”

“Yeah.”

“To Vancouver?”

“Yeah.”

“On bicycles?”

“Yeah. I’m sick of cars and planes.” He stared at me from under glasses, a permanent fixture his face looked naked without. His fiery hair stood on end and his small, athletic frame was suddenly imposing and inescapable. “C’mon, let’s just bike there. We have to go to Sechelt for Bob’s memorial anyway.”

I remembered how Bob looked in my dream and knew pedalling towards that image of him, even though it was only an aura in my mind, was the right thing to do. Brendan needed it too. Needed to connect with his grandfather one last time.

“I am sick of driving.” The realization infected me like road rage, creeping up and sinking its teeth in.

“So let’s do it. Biking is the most efficient way to travel you know.” He sounded like a salesman.

I tried to imagine myself pedalling through the mountains on the side of the highway. “What about gear?”

He shrugged. “We’ll buy gear.”

“I’d have to buy a new bike.”

“So buy a new bike,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You wanted to get a new one anyway.”
I stared at Brendan, saying nothing. My stomach cramped up and my chest tightened and all I needed was a deep breath but the wind felt knocked out of me.

“Come on. It’ll be unbelievable.”

“It would be,” I said, biting my thumbnail and feeling as if I stood on the edge of a cliff.

“Let’s do it.” Brendan smiled excitedly, his eyes and red hair practically glowing as he nudged me closer to the edge.

I shrugged, lowered my hand…

“All right. Fuck it. Let’s bike,”

… and, jumped.

I spun around and moved to the end of the patio. About one hundred feet away, a black bear sauntered through the backyard. As I stared at the bear, I wanted to look into its eyes and run my fingers through its fur. “I’ve never seen a bear outside of a zoo before.” The realization made me feel as if I hadn’t really lived.

Bob stepped beside me. “Well get a good look ’cause it’ll take off in about five seconds.” When the bear stepped into the garden, tripping the motion-censored sprinkler, water shot into its face and sent it running for the trees, growling and shaking its head. Bob laughed—a deep, contagious laugh that made me smile.

I crank my music to help forget about the heckler. Over my shoulder and down the windy slope Brendan is a few football fields away, but I could see his flaming orange shirt from Everest’s peak.

I pant and perspire my way to a summit somewhere between Golden and Yoho National Park, stop, and dismount. Removing the bicycle seat from my butt is heavenly, like picking a concrete wedgie or standing after a ten-hour flight. I stretch, a tiptoed, fingers extended stretch that cracks my entire spine. Then I roll my head from shoulder to shoulder; it sounds like tiny rocks are grinding in my neck. Brendan rides up looking as red-faced and tired as I feel.

“Break time?”

Brendan nods and pants.

I take off my helmet. “Some guy yelled at me.”

“What’d he say?”

“Get a car.”

“Really.” Brendan laughs. “That’s funny.”

“Hilarious.” I roll my eyes.

“Why do people do that? I don’t feel like yelling, ‘Get a bike’ at every car that passes us.”

“I do.”

We flop down beneath a nearby sign and rest in an ever-shrinking patch of shade.

“Did you get any honks?”

“No. Did you?”

“Oh yeah, two or three. One guy even gave me a thumbs-up through his sunroof.”

I close my eyes. “I guess that evens it out.” Sleep is right behind my eyelids.

We’re flying down a smooth stretch of highway somewhere past Golden. I look down at my odometer:

He’s squatting beside his back tire. I dismount. “What’s up?”

“Flat tire.” He walks towards me. “This sucks. We were flying.”

“I know.”

While retrieving the pump from my pannier, I hear buzzing. A mosquito hovers above my arm; I shoo it away and realize something horrible. “Brendan.”

“What?”

“We didn’t bring any bug spray.”

“Shit.” He waves the mosquitoes away from his face.

A swarm of mosquitoes large enough to blot out the setting sun looms in the distance. They jump us like junkies to free crack. Moving as fast as we can while constantly rubbing our skin and scratching our bites, I kneel and pump, and Brendan holds the bike as steady as he can, which isn’t steady at all. I grit my teeth and try to ignore the mosquitoes so I can pump faster. They bite and bite and bite while I pump and pump and pump. As pressure builds, the pumping gets harder and slower and the bites longer and deeper. Covered in bugs, guts, and blood, I jump to my feet and flail around as if doing the hokey pokey while on fire. “Ahhhhhh, fuck off. They’re going through my clothes. Their stingers are like needles.”

“I know. What’s it at?” Brendan squirms and kicks the air.

I glance at the pressure gauge. “About fifty.”

“Good enough. Let’s get outta here.”

Jumping on our bikes, we pedal like we’re evading vampires. I look back at the cloud of thirsty bloodsuckers and scratch the bites on my exposed, mosquito-smeared skin as we escape.

“Thanks for helping me,” Bob said in his deep, hoarse voice. “This usually takes me all day.”

“No problem,” I said, my dirt-stained hands working busily. “It’s the least I can do to thank you for helping me set up my compost.”

“You don’t need to thank me. You did it.”

“Still.” I dropped a worm into the can. “Cleaning it alone is kind of a pain.”

“I like doing it. It’s meditative.” He tossed a couple worms in the can. “I don’t think about my next doctor’s appointment or if I’ve missed a pill. I don’t even think about how I’m never hungry anymore.” Another worm in the can. “I just concentrate on this. Everything else melts away.”

“It’s like in Buddhism. Being in the moment without letting the world distract you.”

Bob nodded and picked up another worm. “The right concentration. It’s part of the Eightfold Path. No distractions from your present reality.”

We sifted through the rest of the compost in silence, Bob’s arduous breaths filling the air. I wanted to thank him for adopting me as a grandson and letting me be one of his last students. To tell him about my sixty-seven-word sentence he’d inspired. To get up and kiss him on his gaunt cheek. But I just sat up straight, breathed deeply, and let the world melt away. Just me, Bob, compost, and the worms.

Whee.

“Did you hear that?”

“Yeah.”

“What was it?”

Brendan shrugs, and we finish eating our instant soup.

Wheee.

Brendan and I look at one of the semis.

Whee. Whee. Wheeee.

“That truck’s full of pigs.”

Soon, screams and bangs are all we hear. Brendan heads to the bathroom to wash the dishes, and I approach the truck. The entire trailer rocks from the struggle within. Afraid of getting caught for stealing a look, I sneak forward. A snout, moist and glistening in the floodlights, pushes through a hole and stares at me. It sniffs the fresh air. I reach out, but before we touch it disappears into the trailer and fuelled by claustrophobia-induced rage, starts a fight. The horrible shrieks make the soup bubble up in my throat.

“They’re antsy tonight,” a trucker says, walking towards me. “Two hundred and twenty-seven … That’s all we can carry in the summer.”

“Why’s that?”

“Any more than that and they get too hot, and then, explode.” He mimes an explosion and makes the sound effects. “No sweat glands. They just overheat and blow up.”

“Really?”

“Yep. I’ve seen the trailers after it’s happened. It ain’t pretty.”

A war wages inside the trailer. I want to free them, to help them run away and hide in the dark forest all around. As the half-digested soup burns my throat, I regret every slice of bacon, piece of ham, and pulled-pork sandwich I’ve ever eaten.

“Where ya coming from?”

“Red Deer.” I retch, but he doesn’t notice.

“Red Deer. Long way. Where ya headed?”

“Vancouver.”

“Vancouver? I’ll be.” He adjusts his hat and spits onto the dark cement. “Well, good luck on your trip. I better hit the hay if I’m gonna head out before it gets too hot. See ya partner.”

He walks away, and so do I. Brendan’s waiting at the picnic table.

“It sounds horrible,” Brendan says. “It sounds like … ”

“People. I know”

“Yeah. People.”

“I think I’m gonna throw up.”

We move to the other side of the rest stop where the screeching becomes a murmur easily confused with the wind against the tent. Exhaustion makes me fall asleep, but hours later, I’m woken up by screaming; the pig truck chugs past and saliva fills my mouth. I unzip the tent and spit into the cold, morning air, but the bad taste doesn’t go away.

“I brought you The Name of the Rose,” I said. “I heard you wanted to watch it.” I handed it to him and hugged him. His embrace was weak and shaky; I could feel almost every bone in his back.

“Thank you.” His voice was a distant whisper. “I really appreciate it. Thank you. And for coming. Thank you for coming.”

I helped Bob to his feet before he disappeared into the bedroom. He had no time for movies. He spent most of his day sleeping and taking morphine.

“Almost … there … should we … take a break,” Brendan wheezes.

“If I stop,” I huff, “I’ll never,” I puff, “get going again … and … there’s no way in hell … I’m walking … this last bit.”

“Fuck you hill,” Brendan yells, pedalling harder.

“You’re not … stopping us,” I shout between gasps, pedalling in time with Brendan.

Up ahead, over the peak, the driveway calls to us; we stay side by side, fighting for every painful inch we take.