Up and Down (15 page)

“That it does. But have no fear, there is good news, too,” Chatter assured me. “I mean, beyond the fact that you’ve
chosen to visit one of the most beautiful untouched, unspoiled parts of this vast country of ours. The mountains and glacial lakes have this almost unearthly and spiritual restorative effect on people – especially those who come from the city. And if you happen to hail from Toronto, well then, son, you are in for the experience of a lifetime.”

This was a man who wore his name proudly. He stopped talking just long enough to take a breath before continuing to enumerate the wonders of Williston Lake and the surrounding region. When he paused again a few minutes later, I leapt back in, fearing I might never get another chance.

“So,” I interjected, “I think you were about to mention the
good news
part of the equation, weren’t you?”

“Right! I knew I was going somewhere with that.” He turned and looked out the window, down the hill to the dock, and then pointed. “You see that beaver down there?”

I followed his outstretched finger but could only see a red float plane. Ahh, capital B Beaver.

“That’s Doc’s plane. She owes us a favour and will get you out to Cigar Lake, and back when you want,” he explained.

“Um, okay. Is it safe?”

“A whole pile safer than a Cessna with a busted oil pump. You’ll be fine. She’s been flying these parts for most of her life.” He grabbed the mike attached to what looked like an old
CB
radio and squeezed the button on the side. “Hey Doc, he’s here. I’m sending him down.”

I watched out the window as the door of the Beaver opened and an arm waved back to us. I didn’t really have a choice. Besides, the Beaver looked at lot safer than the rickety bucket of bolts that had flown me to Prince George.

“Is it okay if I leave my finely tuned pocket rocket in your parking lot for a day or two?” I asked, pointing to the rickety bucket of bolts that had driven me to Mackenzie.

“Done.”

“I assume it’ll be safe enough in the parking lot. Car theft isn’t a problem around here, is it?” I inquired.

He looked out the window again at my car.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure it’ll be safe enough.”

“All right. Thanks for making alternative arrangements for me,” I said.

“Sorry for the inconvenience, but you’re in good hands with Doc.”

I darted out the door before he could renew his regional tourism patter. I walked back to the car, grabbed my wheelie suitcase, and pulled it behind me along the gravel path. On the polished floors of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport it had rolled quite smoothly. But it was not what you would describe as an allterrain suitcase. Halfway down to the dock, I picked it up and carried it.

A wiry and grizzled old woman climbed out of the cockpit of the Beaver wearing grey, grease-stained coveralls and well-worn hiking boots. At least I thought she was a woman. Her hair was also wiry and grizzled. She was all business.

“Hi, I’m David Stewart.” I extended my hand.

She offered her hand and we shook. It felt like one gigantic hand-shaped callous.

“Doc Lanny,” she replied, sounding older than she looked. And she looked old. Her voice tipped the balance in favour of her being a woman. But it didn’t tip it very far.

“Thanks so much for taking me.”

“No problem. Are you staying for a while?” she asked, gesturing to my suitcase.

“Um, no. I just wasn’t sure what to bring with me,” I explained.

“So you brought it all.”

She grabbed the bag. On instinct, I reached out to reclaim it, worried about her snapping a wrist or breaking a hip trying to wrestle it into the plane.

“Here, let me. I can put my own bag in,” I said, genuinely concerned.

She said nothing, but the look she gave me had me stepping back with my hands up in surrender. She swung the suitcase up as if it were a bag of marshmallows and pushed it through a small side hatch in the plane behind the cabin.

“You can climb in and sit in the front right-hand seat,” she directed.

I did as I was told, only bumping my head twice in the process. She followed, after casting off the line securing the pontoon to the dock and latching the door behind her. She slipped into the pilot’s seat and strapped in with the smooth and precise movements of someone who’d done it a thousand times before.

“Buckle up, Mr. Stewart,” she said, pointing to the seat belt hanging over the armrest. “And put those on. It gets pretty loud in here.”

I did as I was told, latching the lap and shoulder belt and pulling on the headset.

I figured that was the end of the safety demonstration. I knew where the exits were.

Doc Lanny seemed a bit preoccupied and sent a few quick glances my way as she went through her pre-flight checklist. She pushed various buttons on the instrument panel and punched the starter. The single engine sputtered to life and the propeller started its circular journey. We taxied out onto Williston Lake against a light breeze and small waves. Then when we were out from the shore a ways, she opened the throttle and the plane picked up speed. I could see one pontoon below me out the window and I watched as the water around it turned white. I’d never been in a float plane and was surprised by how rough the ride was until we lifted from the water. We climbed gently and she turned to the west, aiming the nose toward a pass between two lines of mountains. The scenery was breathtaking. According to the map, we were flying near the Rocky Mountain Trench that separated the Rocky Mountains to the east from the Omineca Mountains to the west. There were snow-capped peaks on either side of our flight path, with the sun slowly dropping in the west. It was stunning.

“So there aren’t many more than a dozen folks living on Cigar Lake,” she observed. “Where are you headed?”

I jumped when her voice crackled in my ears. I’d forgotten my headset was more than hearing protection. For the first time I noticed the small microphone that swung down from my left headphone. Right.

“I work at a big
PR
agency in Toronto, and I’m trying to track down the elusive winner of a contest we helped to run. We haven’t been able to reach him. He doesn’t seem to have a phone, and with the postal strike, well, it was easier and faster just to send me out to find him. The guy lives on Cigar Lake.”

When I looked over, she was staring at me. When she just kept her eyes fixed on me for what seemed like an unduly long time, I eventually pointed out the windscreen as a kind of subtle reminder that she was in fact flying a plane. She took the hint.

“What contest?” she asked.

“Well, I can’t really say, but the guy has truly won the trip of a lifetime. It’ll be out of this world,” I said.

She was staring at me again, for too long. This time her mouth was open. I pointed ahead, again.

“What’s the name?” she asked softly.

I really wasn’t supposed to reveal the winner’s name, particularly when the vetting process had not even begun. On the other hand, how was I going to be delivered to his place without giving up the name?

“All we’ve got is L. Percival.”

The plane violently tipped over on its right wing and nose-dived. I grabbed the seat and hung on. As we shot down, my
lunch shot up. An instant later, she righted the plane and brought us back onto an even keel a few hundred feet lower than we’d been. I managed to push my lunch back down where it belonged. I’d already been feeling some nausea from the ups and downs of flying in a float plane. So the manoeuvre she’d just pulled certainly didn’t help settle my stomach.

“What the hell just happened!” I shouted into the mike. “What was that?!”

I could hear her breathing hard in my headphones.

“Sorry about that. We caught an air pocket. It happens. I’ve got her now.”

“Well, I hope so. I thought we were going down.” I was hyperventilating, too.

She looked flushed, and shaken, but said nothing more. We flew on and she kept her eyes front. A couple of times I noticed her shaking her head slowly, probably reliving the ride through the air pocket. About half an hour later, I realized we were turning and descending. Below us I saw the familiar long cigar-shaped lake I had seen before, but just as a map on the Internet.

“I can certainly see why it’s called Cigar Lake,” I noted as we swung down to start our approach.

She seemed to have regained her composure after the stomach-turning barrel roll and nose-dive we’d executed a half hour before.

“Well, it’s probably a better name than Test Tube Lake, or Lake Howitzer, or what some folks call it around here, Phallic Lake,” she replied.

“Fair point.”

As we circled, I quickly realized that it was not just the waves I could see rushing beneath us but the rocks below the surface of the lake as well. Then at the eastern end of the lake, the blue of the water suddenly deepened and the rocky bottom fell away and disappeared.

“That is one shallow lake,” I noted as we passed over land again and made one final turn.

“Yep. A glacier dragged itself through here gouging out a shallow trough except for the one end here where it somehow dug down deep.”

We turned again and were back over the east end of the lake heading west at an altitude of about a hundred feet or so. She pointed out a rustic cabin right on the eastern shore.

“That’s, um, the Percival place.”

Then we were down, touching the water in the middle of the lake, our speed taking us almost to the western shore, where we turned around and started the long taxi back to the Percival dock.

“Why not land from the other direction?” I asked. “It would save you taxiing the length of the lake.”

“You don’t fly much, do you? I have to land her into the wind. That’s how planes work. In this part of the mountains, the west wind is not just prevailing, it’s permanent. Every take-off and every landing brings me out here to the west end.”

“Do you fly here often?” I asked.

She smiled a little bit and nodded.

Ten minutes later, she eased us toward the dock at the “Percival place” and cut the engine. While we were still gliding through the water, she climbed out of her seat, out the door, and down onto the pontoon. She stuck out her foot to stop the float from hitting the dock and then stepped onto the two-by-eight planks, guiding the plane into position. It was a perfect parking job. She grabbed a rope already fixed to a cleat on the dock and snapped the metal carabiner to a steel eye mounted on the front of the pontoon. She did the same with a second rope securing the aft end of the pontoon. She flipped open the side hatch, reached into the compartment, and swung out my suitcase in one smooth, easy motion. By this time, I’d managed to release the safety belt and crawl out of my seat. I was reminded of my headset only when it pulled rather violently off my head as I made my way to the door. I stepped carefully down onto the pontoon and then jumped gracefully onto the dock. I would have preferred to have landed on my feet, but my knees and then back would have to do.

“Are you all right?” she asked, helping me up.

“Oh, I’m fine. That’s my standard float plane disembarkation technique.”

“I see.”

We stood facing each other. She didn’t seem eager to move off the dock. I looked up at the cabin expecting one of the Percival clan to emerge wondering about their surprise visitors. Nothing. All quiet. That was not good. I’d come all this way and no one was home. A red canoe rested on a wooden rack just beyond the
dock, making me feel like I was stepping into a Tom Thomson painting. Doc Lanny looked out at the lake for a moment and then stepped toward me.

“Why don’t you and I start over?” she said, offering her hand to me for the second time in the last hour or so. She was smiling.

“I’m Dr. Landon Percival. This is my home. I’m the ‘L. Percival’ I think you’ve come to see.”

A raft of frenzied thoughts collided and collapsed in a heap in my head, which I guess is where thoughts traditionally collide and collapse. In no particular order:

He was a she.

She was certainly not twenty-one years old.

She wasn’t a young strapping lumberjack type.

My knees and back still hurt from my Beaver dismount.

How was I going to get back to Mackenzie after breaking the bad news to this old lady that she wouldn’t be going anywhere near the space shuttle?

Maybe our terrifying aerobatic routine on the flight here had nothing to do with a rogue air pocket.

Landon is a nice name.

Crawford Blake was going to hurt me. Amanda Burke was going to hurt me. It was quite possible Landon Percival was going to hurt me.

Despite “enjoying” the same lunch twice, once in a roadside restaurant and a second time in the plane, I was suddenly very hungry.

And I was dog tired.

“But … I thought you were a twenty-one-year-old ‘he,’ ” I mumbled. “I mean, your entry said you were twenty-one.”

Landon looked puzzled.

“No, it did not. I wrote seventy-one. And I don’t know why you’d assume L. Percival would be a man unless you just believe that only men would enter a contest to win a trip into space,” she replied with an edge, lowering the temperature on the dock.

She may have had a point on why I assumed “she” would be a “he.” I opened the front pocket of my suitcase and pulled out the file Emily had given me to help authenticate the winner. I flipped through it, extracted a photocopy of Landon’s original entry form, and showed it to her.

“See, twenty-one,” I said, pointing.

“Look again, eagle eyes. That’s not a two! Do you not know your numbers? That’s a seven. That’s how I make my sevens, with a tiny little tail at the bottom. See, seventy-one,” she responded. “I’m a doctor. Bad handwriting comes with the job.”

I was forced to admit upon closer inspection that it did sort of look a little like a seven. But it still looked a lot like a two. I guess I’d just assumed it said twenty-one and that no one in their eighth decade – and their right mind – would be looking for a ride to the space station.

“Okay. So let me see if I have this right. You’re Landon Percival. You’re a seventy-one-year-old doctor. This definitely is your official winning entry in the Citizen Astronaut contest. You
live here in a remote corner of northern British Columbia and fly a plane.”