September 25, 1998
7:45pm Vancouver, British Columbia to London, England.
The duration of this journey is indefinite.
Mosey’s Beginning
On a summer’s day in 1995, I was sitting beside him, peering
out over Italy’s largest volcanic lake. We were seven weeks into a four-month journey
of camping and exploring, our first trip to Europe together, showing each other the places
we had seen in earlier times, and making new discoveries.
We met at university in 1992, typical college kids with our minds on
sleeping and growing in directions opposite to what our academic degrees dictated. Now, on
this black beach, under Tuscany’s infinite dome, we were grafting our vines and
twisting in the direction of a more faithful sun. Richard had just finished his mechanical
engineering degree after taking a year off to work in the field. He was ready for an
intermission, and loved the road, but the voice of a hard-working family of professionals
urged him to get back to reality and hurry up and get a job. I was taking a
material-gathering break from a focused year of painting in my British Columbia studio. A
part of me wanted to stay here forever. A part of me was anxious to settle down in the
studio and season myself, gain more experience, prove myself as an artist and try to make
a success in the world. It seemed each part could not exist without the other. There was
so much to see and experience, and there was so much to paint.
We were seven weeks into a four month journey and there was so much to
see, yes. Our route was random – we loved the serendipitous freedom of the road
– but we held return tickets to Canada from London at the end of August. We took the
backroads, driving a rusty, unpredictable 1978 Alfa Romeo Alfetta, one my artist father
and my twin brother had found in England many years before. Members of my family liked to
come from Canada and take "Alfi" on a road trip, gathering material for
paintings, "mosey" driving as we called it, exploring hidden pockets of Old
Europe one couldn’t find unless traveling by car, or mule, or walking stick.
I sat on the ratty picnic blanket, wrinkled in the sand with uncertain
edges, with Alfi casting an evening shadow on us, and our journals, my sketchbooks, and
our dripping bathing suits on a makeshift clothesline. "It’s going too
fast," I said. "I want to stop in this place and not leave for a month."
"Yes," he said. He was working on a job application,
preparing to fax it to Canada from the office-shack of the campsite. He sat cross-legged
on the blanket, a tangle of maplewood hair, puppy fine and trailing off into caterpillar
down around the nape of his neck. His legs, apricot from our weeks of sun, jiggled and
twitched with the anxiousness of the application. He was always fidgety. When I was a baby
my mother used to put me in a basket on top of the clothes dryer and let the vibrations
lull me to sleep. To this day I grow contentedly groggy, wobbling on a country road under
the growl of an old sports car engine. At night, even in sleeping bags on the hard ground,
he would jiggle and rock in a natural frequency, soothing me into a deep, warm comfort.
Journeying with him was an obvious progression from the discovery days
and sleepless nights of university, when our classes went on without us while we set up in
our student houses, lying together eating cookies, exploring our bodies and identities in
the mirror of the other. We had mini adventures along the coasts of California and Oregon,
Vancouver Island’s West Coast Trail, across Canada and through Vermont, New Hampshire
and Canada’s Maritimes. By the spring of his graduation, we were ready take advantage
of Europe’s Alfi and have a road trip a little farther away.
"There is so much to see, I want to come back. And next time
it’s going to be for a long, long time."
We made a deal. Get it out of our systems. Gain some experience. Save
some money. I found that in my studio I could work solidly for several months and then I
would grow anxious for a change of scenery. A jaunt in the car, a hike or a trip to a far
away place always recharged my batteries and brought new inspiration for paintings. Put
the brush down for a moment, and you’re aching to pick it up again and spill out the
new ideas. My father set the example by leaving his studio for a month twice a year. As
children my brothers and I became accustomed to seeing him go and seeing him return and he
remained always productive and joyful in his work. Travel was grist for his mill.
I asked Rich, "How long will it take you to gain the experience
you want before you’ll need a change, to venture out on your own?"
"Give me three years".
The commitment was difficult at times. At the end of our four-month
exploration, we settled back in Vancouver and set up a larger studio where I blurted
bodies of paintings based on our travels. He was snapped up by a small computer
manufacturing company whose founder was only a few years his senior. He was eager to learn
and open to what he could glean in this three–year window. The company grew in leaps
and bounds with his new, hungry blood and creativity. Halfway through the commitment I
became a little worried. How could I wait so long? The studio was closing in. We were
settling into a life of domestic patterns. He was learning things he would have never come
close to at school. With every day came a new challenge and set of skills. His salary
jumped every few months. I was struggling to hold on to my destiny of self-sufficiency.
"Take Friday off and we’ll drive up the coast…please?"
He was like a bird who had found himself on the deck of a boat carrying
grain to another part of the world. He was going to gather up as much food as he could
hold in his stomach, and then get off the deck of that boat before it got too far away. He
was focussed on that grain. He was a bloated, exhausted bird at the end of each day. The
interim page of our lifebook was a chapter of necessary maturity, but I was having doubts
about my work.
He came in the door, tired as always, tunneled in thoughts of the
day’s aggravations. "When I have my own company I am going to hire talented
people and pay them what they are worth". These kinds of remarks relieved me and
scared me at the same time. He was going to leave the job that kept us from directing our
days. He was going to meet his calling and work hard at championing something himself. But
would we be free to leave at any time, to go away and recharge, and savour the key
ingredients to a free and creative life? When we were hiking in the Austrian Alps his
spirit climaxed in the spectacular and the discreet: Aqua glaciers tipping like saucers in
a sink full of dishes, and alpine bluebells, triumphing between boulders under a
waterfall. He asked me to make him a promise: "If I ever lose who I am, I want to you
bring me here so we can walk through the mountains until I find myself again".
"I have to get out of here", I said, panicking and blaming
him in one stroke. The brushes balanced on the solvent tin, impossibly clogged with a
waste of cadmium. He sat down on my grandmother’s discarded chesterfield. "I
can’t think. I can’t believe they missed that order again this week. When are
those guys going to come up with the plans I asked for?"
One day I was walking with my family dog Emily, along the beach below
my childhood home. I had walked this way thousands of times, and painted for many years in
a small, makeshift studio at the edge of the water. The water was flat and earthy at the
estuary’s bank, where the decaying shack shrugged on its foundation. I thought of the
hundreds of experimental paintings I made there during my time off from university. The
studio and the work had been an escape from the stifling prejudices and uselessness of Art
School. I spent countless happy hours on my own, directing my discoveries and thinking of
nothing but the joy I was feeling at that very moment. A moment of no control over what I
might learn, and yet complete control over my life and the moments that made it up.
Emily went ahead and into a stand of cedars. I followed, and in the
shade of their umbrella I caught the sun’s freckles on the dirt path in front of me.
Emily was beyond the trees and standing overexposed in the gleaming ochre of the beach. I
stopped. I looked up. British Columbia’s vital afternoon was filtering through those
sagging, musty giants and sprinkling its gold all around me. Above my head a delight; a
diligent woodpecker, devoted to woodworking, tapped enthusiastically. Wood chips and
sawdust floated down through the light beams and over me like snowflakes.
Emily was impatient at the water’s edge. I gave her a nod to
encourage her to go on ahead, but she only turned in her tracks and came back towards me,
appearing colourful in the muted light once she reached the trees again. It was worth it
for her to wait. It was better if she could share it with me. I crouched and she came
towards me. She nuzzled me with her panting, foamy mouth, ecstatic with the day’s
direction. "These are your woods." I stroked my hands along either side of her
face, starting at her nose, passing her eyes and over her triangular ears, stretching her
forehead, which made her eyes open wide and show the whites at the top. "These cedars
grow bigger and stronger every day. Even after that old studio has fallen into the river,
these trees, this place, will exist for you, and the beach will stretch on ahead." We
walked together towards the open dunes.
The day finally came when Richard bought a bottle of wine and took it
into the office of the young entrepreneur that ran the company. He was launching into a
speech about Richard’s new responsibilities as his Right Hand. The boat was moving
swiftly out to sea, confidently, haphazardly, heading into storms and gales that would
require the commitment of an elephant in a circus – strong enough to bust out of
there, but convinced enough otherwise to never think of it.
Rich was sweating and fidgeting and thinking about how maybe the guy
was going to beg him not to leave and offer him a rich man’s salary and put him in a
terrible bind with me, waiting at home with the sketchbooks packed.
"I’m moving to France now."
A pause.
"Well, it’s hard to keep a good man down."
Rich got up, swallowed his last mouthful, and lifted off the deck of
the boat. He hovered for second over the other birds, pecking and nibbling, and they
stared up at him, knowingly. "Congratulations!" they shouted, and he banked and
pumped his wings towards freedom.
