UVic “Modern Love” Stories, inspired by the New York Times column
Illustration by Sage Blackwell.
I pulled into Nakusp just after the sun slipped behind Saddle Mountain, and was met by a deserted main drag. Ten hours before, hungover, possibly still a little drunk, I’d scribbled my signature on some paperwork in Victoria and swiped an almost maxed-out Visa to rent a 2019 Accord, splurging on “economy” over “compact” — fancy me. I was dead set on a sort of “impromptu pilgrimage” to Nakusp, a town — I told myself — that held the answers I needed.
A mid-week catch-all-crusade, a Hail Mary throw from a thirty-something who was beginning to forget his playbook in life. And yes, this all sounded better in theory the night before, at a drink-cluttered table blubbering to my friend’s glazed face, than it did driving the Coquihalla, rehearsing my sick voice to call in for work, and calculating the several hundred dollars I’d already spent on the car, ferry, and fast-food gut-rot on the way (two stops).
But I went. Because Nakusp is two things.
First, it’s a remote village in the West Kootenays of B.C. that my mom, two siblings, and toddler-me briefly lived in. It’s the nearest town to my grandparents’ property that we summer- and Christmas-vacationed at during my childhood (in short, one of those overly romanticized “anchor places” that’s inexplicably stitched into the fabrics of our subconscious).
Second, it’s where Ron lives.
A couple of days before leaving for Nakusp, I’d broken up with my girlfriend Mandy in her room — surprising, in a way, us both. A sort of classic, self-defence panic maneuver that those of us with a little baggage and a self-defeatist attitude whip out when things get serious. She sat on the carpet beside her bed, smacking defiant tears off her ruby cheeks, and rubbing the cotton of her patterned pyjamas thin. July morning sun flooded through the sunlight above us, and I offered little but a sort of dumb, mute stupor to her whys.
The night before, we’d texted about getting sandwiches from an Italian deli and eating them on the rocks that overlook the ocean below Dallas Road. From the floor she said what about the sandwiches, then I left and cried in my car outside her place. The whole thing felt beyond my control, like movements from an old script that had been written and rehearsed in past relationships. Stale and dated and easy to follow. But she didn’t know that. She was blindsided.
Later — when I came to my senses about this all being a very troubling “me thing” — I was brooding about it to my friend at the pub. When he left to use the bathroom, I listened to a voicemail that had been sitting on my phone for a couple days.
I recognized the voice immediately. It was Ron, singing a crackling version of Janise Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” into the receiver.
A pause. Then a laugh. He just wanted to say hi and that he loves me. Then he hung up, and the whole thing hit me harder than the seven per cent sour I was holding.
The thing about Ron, I told my friend when he got back from the bathroom and noticed me staring into the abyss, is that he’s always been there. He knew me as a baby, and as the story goes, he and my mom dated on-and-off before we left Nakusp. But even after we moved, he never lost touch — calling on Christmases and birthdays and in-between and driving three hours to Salmon Arm to watch me play hockey or bring us produce from his garden, leaving again the same day. Pseudo-father of the century.
My friend said Ron sounded like a great guy. I nodded. The next morning, I woke up, chugged the stale water beside my bed, and left for Nakusp.
I pulled into Nakusp and eased the rental car at a walking pace past the storefronts of Broadway, the town’s main street. Old memories cloaked in the change of time. A frozen mannequin in a knee-high skirt stared dead-eyed from a shop window I remember being once filled with hanging models of fighter jets and rainbow-colored floaties. The Chickadee Cafe where my grandparents took their coffee outside to sit at metal tables under morning sun had a modern, rustic facelift, and a new name. I stopped at the only light in town, a flashing four-way, then continued past the old grocer (now a fluorescently lit Save-On-Foods), a bewildering gift shop selling Guatemalan folk masks, and the long-standing Leland Hotel where a collection of trucks and men smoking was somehow both a sign of life and stagnation. I wondered what I expected to find coming back to a sleepy village that seemed to be as confused about growing up as I was. But there was something enticing about simple, small Nakusp. Care-free lakeside living.
When I killed the engine outside Ron’s, he was pulling towels off a clothesline in the front yard under the faint glow of dying porch light. He laughed when I got out of the car, like he wasn’t expecting me, but he was. The same laugh from the voicemail. When we hugged, I could feel the thinness of aging that had squeezed him since the last time I visited, but his smell hadn’t changed. Sandalwood and lavender scented soap from the Nelson market in pungent union with garlic cloves from his garden.
Inside, even though it was late, a cutting board on the kitchen counter sat next to a half-filled bowl of chopped veggies that had been grown in the soil next to the house. We took our time to find our flow as we cut and washed the onions, carrots, and dill in sporadic conversation. Eventually, he asked why I’d come to visit on such short notice. I wanted to bring up Mandy, but side-stepped the breakup. I needed a little break from the city, a reset, I wanted to see ya! The conversation slowly devolved into what was in front of us. Ron nagged me about how close I cut each piece of vegetable to the root. I called him neurotic. He laughed. But I couldn’t help but wonder if this brand of particularness is something one acquires over the backend of a life spent single, not having to adapt to someone else’s way of doing things. He finished our heaping bowls with avocado and a boiled egg and we ate in the living room on a couch that smelled like the 1980s.
After eating, I laid awake in the guest bed and listened to the faint sound of television from the living room until late and wondered:
A: How big this fuck up with Mandy might be in the future when my only pre-sleep company is the voices on TV,
B: How inherently selfish that is as a reason to be with someone,
C: When I formed this pattern of self-sabotage,
D: Whether some form of digital reality may actually be a viable relationship substitute in the future anyway
E: When exactly this type of spiraling thought pattern necessitates a prescription.
The next morning, we walked the waterfront to the old Chickadees for coffee — the town almost as sleepy as it was the night before. On the way, Ron asked about Mandy. He noticed I hadn’t mentioned her yet, after excitedly bringing her up in phone calls over the past year.
Oh, Mandy. Yeah.
Her name fell casually from my mouth, as if I hadn’t given it a thought, guarding closed something I came here to open. I stumbled over something about personality differences, it not working out.
“Paul,” he said, looking across the lake, and possibly knowing more about me than I realized, “regret’s not a fun thing to live with.”
At the old Chickadees I sat across from Ron at a short table covered in sticky polyester cloth. My coffee was black and bitter, but I wanted to take it how Ron did. Locals stood in line, and some stopped to chat with us, effortlessly, in that small-town way that people in the city never seem to manage. One man in a sweat-stained hat and ancient looking beer belly gestured outside, telling me I was in God’s country up here after I said I was visiting from Victoria.
We walked along the waterfront again on the way back. For a moment, I had an urge to take everything in — Ron, the mountains, the small home on the lake we passed by with the real estate sign on its fence, the beer-bellied prophet at the coffee shop, all of it — as if I could call Mandy that evening and tell her how charming things were. That we should come for a visit. That we should camp along the way and eat chicken strips somewhere at a diner. That I was wrong. That we should live here, because it’s God’s country, and maybe I would be different in God’s country.
The next night, Ron drove us to the hot springs. Towel and trunks in hand, the 15 kilometers up the hill always feels longer than it should. The road was narrow and windy. While Ron steered one-handed, I looked at pictures of Mandy on my phone. I stopped at one of her feeding an apple to a Llama that we named Tom on a trip to Mayne Island in March. We had parked the car on the side of the road during golden hour and walked through the field to where Tom stood alone under a tree. Mandy fed him apples from a paper bag until he started farting and didn’t stop. That night in our Airbnb after some red wine, she cried for a few seconds wondering if Tom was still alone under the tree. I said I was sure he wasn’t. We finished two bottles of Pinot while I watched her dance to scratched-up vinyls on an old Panasonic.
The truck’s headlights lit just enough of the dark road ahead of us. I put my phone away. The memory felt distant, and sad.
Ron passed a blue sign for Nakusp Hot Springs — 2km — and asked me about school; if I would stay in Victoria when I finished.
I said I could see myself living in a small town like Nakusp.
He said don’t, there are no jobs.
I said yeah but the city gets complicated.
He said how so.
I said I don’t know.
At the top of the hill, Ron parked in a stall overlooking three small A-framed chalets lined up in a row below. The tiny homes’ windows warmed with light, smoke twirling from tin pipes stuck through shaker roofs. Inside, at reception, nostalgia washed me in waves of wet cedar and chlorine, the small ice-cream bar freezer humming seductively by the rotating rack of books by local authors. From the changing room, we walked around a tiled corner and out into the open-air enclosure of two sulfurous-smelling pools in the shape of half circles.
We eased in. Legs, waist, then chest, tingling in the heat.
Simmering in silence, we watched from the small, hot pool as children wearing arm floaties splashed happily in the cold pool beside childless strangers who drifted away in search of calmer waters. Life’s choices on display in mineralized soak.
With my eyes closed, I asked Ron if there was ever a moment when he knew he’d made a mistake. He said of course.
“Life is full of fuck ups,” he said. I wondered if not being with my mom was one of his. How different that all could have been. Then he told me something I never knew.
Ron used to spend many hours at the Leland Hotel. Drinking there, specifically. He had an unofficial item on the menu called The Ron, which consisted of some combination of meat, potatoes, and greens (not the important part) paired with a beer and a shot of whiskey (the important part). One winter, sometime around Christmas, when drinking had become part of a daily routine, he decided to drive to Salmon Arm to see us.
“Three hours on a dark, snowy highway with a beer between my legs,” he said. “Somewhere between Revelstoke and Sicamous, I crossed the centre lane. Ice, I guess. Missed a semi and spun a circle into a snowbank. Somehow, I didn’t kill myself or anyone else. A miracle.”
That spring, Ron said, he got help and has been sober since.
We drove down the hill in silence, listening to oldies on the radio. I felt warmed from the springs and the fact he’d shared something so personal. That he had let me in. But I could tell it was still a burden he carried — his past life tethered to the regrets he alluded to earlier that day.
In bed that night I thought about how Ron could have chosen a different answer to his problem after the accident. It would have been easy to keep drinking; it wouldn’t have taken any work. Sure, he may have died young, but even in that choice there was a simple exit and path. I wondered if I was going to be someone who would keep choosing the easy-out when things got difficult — when relationships began to have stakes — or would I acknowledge the risk and choose the work.
As I listened to the muffled TV voices from the living room on the other side of the wall, I realized we only get so many fuck-ups. And even if we manage to fix some things, it might still be too late for other things. For some of the best things.
