Under the Canopy chapter 9

 Chapter 9

Rising Tide

    The morning tide crept into the harbour like a thief, quiet and patient, and the brothers were already awake when the first boats nudged the docks.  Lim Tan stood behind their father’s spice stall, neat ledger open, brush moving in careful strokes, a perfectionist.  Beside him, Tait Tan leaned against a wooden post, watching the dock workers argue over sacks of rice and crates of dried fish.  Their father liked to say the sea fed honest men. But both men had learned early that honesty rarely paid for expansion.  Tait nudged Lim with his elbow.  “People don’t buy spices,” he said, eyes fixed on the crowd.  Lim didn’t look up. “No,” he replied softly.  “They buy hope they can afford dinner.”  Tait’s grin spread slowly.  “Then we should sell hope.”

    The strike came the year the rains failed during El Niño.  Ships arrived half-empty, and tempers filled the gaps.  Dockworkers gathered under patched banners, their voices rough with hunger and pride.  Most merchants kept their distance.  The Tan brothers did the opposite.  They arrived with sacks of rice and a borrowed loudspeaker that squealed before it worked.  The union foremen eyed them with suspicion.  “You speak nice words, merchant boy,” he said to Tait.  Tait stepped forward, sleeves rolled up, voice warm enough to melt doubt. “Not words,” he promised. “We will bring rice to the picket line tomorrow.”  Lim stood just behind him, expression unreadable.  “And we will remember who stood with us when this is over.” The foreman nodded slowly.  The workers cheered. Lim, unnoticed, was already making mental lists.

    Politics came next as naturally and as inevitably as the tide. Tait had the face for it- open, earnest- the kind people trusted before he finished a sentence.  Lim had the patience and the business sense.  While Tait shook hands in the markets and prayed loudly in the mosques, Lim built the quiet machinery: donor lists, favours owed, favours granted.  On the night Tait announced his run for local council, the campaign office smelled of cheap paint and ambition.  Tait adjusted his borrowed campaign sash in the cracked mirror.  “You don’t win by being loved,” Lim said from the desk.  Tait glanced back, amused.  “Then why are the crowds growing?” Lim finally looked up, a thin smile forming.  “Because they think you are one of them, brother. You have them fooled because the workers are fools.”

    After the election, the first envelope arrived on a humid evening thick with mosquitoes.  A port contractor- nervous, sweating through the collar- slid it across the table like something alive and fragile. Tait stared at it as if it might explode. Lim picked it up gingerly with two fingers and weighed it. “Development requires…lubrication, ”he said calmly. Tait’s jaw tightened. “And the workers?” Lim slipped the envelope into his jacket.  “Will get their rally next week.” Outside, the crowd was already chanting Tait’s name.

    By the time Tait ran for governor, the myth of the Tan brothers had become cemented into something close to folklore.  They were the merchants who remembered the poor, the men who brought rice when others brought speeches.  Union banners filled Tait’s rallies, bright and loud, patriotic, for the nation for their progress, and their leaders spoke as if victory were already written.  On the night the results came in, fireworks cracked over the capital while supporters flooded the streets.  The union chief found Tait celebrating and gripped his arm tightly. “You won because of us,” he warned.  Tait smiled, warm and reassuring.  “I never forget my friends.” Across the room, Lim stood very still, already planning the next steps.

    Power changed the air around them.  It came first in small decisions dressed as necessities- regulatory reviews, permit delays, quiet meetings with investors who arrived in dark cars at odd hours and left quietly. The unions began to notice the gradual shifts.  The confrontation came late one night in the governor’s office, Monsoon rain hammering the windows. Tait stared at the anti-strike bill on his desk as though it were written in another language.  “You can’t sign this,” he muttered.  Lim stood beside him, composed as ever. “Investors are watching what we do.” Tait’s voice dropped. “They carried me into office.” Lim slid the pen forward with gentle persuasion.  “And now they expect you to govern.”

    For along time, the only sound was the rain

    Then Tait picked up the pen and signed.

    Destiny changed direction that day.

    The real money arrived with the forest contracts.

   

  Kalimantan interior, vast green endless, poorly defended by the Indigenous, open to those who understand leasing and permits, growth and development better than principles. Lumber concessions multiplied.  Shell companies bloomed overnight.  Helicopters began to replace fishing boats in the brothers’ schedules.  At the grassroots, they were still folk heroes; scholarships still bore their names, and sacks of rice still appeared during floods.  But in the backrooms, the price of access kept climbing.  One evening, as they looked over a map dotted with new leases, Tait let out a low whistle.  “Fast lane now,” he said.  Lim closed the folder with quiet satisfaction.  “No,” he corrected. “Now the road belongs to us.”

McMichael Gallery Kleinberg, Ontario

 

Under the Canopy Chapter 8

 

Chapter 8

    On this day in the Alpine sunshine, it was all behind him as he was quietly and sedately on the move with his noble donkey, which he had named Freud. Ernest thought that a suitable name because he had constant one-way conversations with his donkey on the lonely hills seeking insights into life, but sadly, with very little emotional progress to show for all the therapy. For spiritual and religious companions, Ernest had two hard-working sheep-dogs, Knox and Zwingli, also useful in moving his flock of sheep from one high-level pasture to the next in splendid solitude.  Together, always on the lookout for meadows where his sheep and donkey could graze.  As a former medical student, he found that he felt more like Francis of Assisi, finding quiet contentment in caring for his animals, keeping them on course, nursing the sick back to health and enabling them to rejoin the flock.  Life was simple, yet a certain restlessness stirred within him.

    Ernest soon discovered that, like sheep, to survive, he had to learn to adapt and change with conditions.  Sheep, with their thick woollen coats, are very resistant to high-altitude alpine temperatures and can scratch food from under even thick layers of snow; unlike cows, they can even eat frozen grass. They are well adapted to their environment, but under harsh conditions, food must be brought in to supplement the herd's diet, adding further expense to this dying mountain tradition.  

    Ernest was pondering his next move. 

    By the end of the season, Ernest would gather his flock and all of the stragglers he could find along his route and eventually lead them to the village of Belalp, where the owners would take them back, some for market and eventual slaughter, and some for shearing and the wool market. 

    The herding process had become more difficult over the passing years, given the growing urbanization even in more remote areas.  It’s not always easy to find adequate grazing between roads, housing estates, motorways, or “off-limits” fields that make up an incredible patchwork of landscape that a shepherd must hop, skip and jump over and through with his flock.  His was one of perhaps fifty or sixty such traditional herds left in Switzerland as farmers have been forced into more modern methods because of growth and progress and pressures from the outside world.  The same pressures that Ernest felt in his own personal life.  Modern influences always led to more change.  It’s not that Ernest was averse to change.  He did have a complete disregard for modern-day encroachment on traditional lifestyles.

    Ernest started to rethink his off-the-grid philosophy and lifestyle, and in terms of “pressures from the outside world,” he thought he had come up with a grand alternative.  He had weeks of solitude to think over his options, both while sitting for six months in a jail cell for his somewhat rash decision to dodge the draft and while on the magnificent slopes of Switzerland during his self-imposed banishment to the alpine wilderness where he now found himself. 

    It was during these long hours of solitude, under the blue mountain skies in the company of his dogs and sheep, staff in hand, boots damp from grassy dew, that his wayward thoughts often turned to the allure of the distant forests of Borneo.  He had researched these wild Indigenous people and those dense, lush forests ever since emulating their lifestyle on his Basil apartment balcony as a child. The Penan and other tribes of Borneo were the last of the great forest nomads who still moved to the rhythm of the jungle, carrying their world in rattan baskets on their backs.  His sheep pressed around him, interrupting his thoughts, nuzzling for salt. Ernest smiled faintly.  Switzerland had always been his home, but it was not his final destination.  The Penan called to him, wild, elusive, untouched in ways the Alps had not been in centuries.  

    The final decision dropped on him like a stone, causing radiating ripples in otherwise still clear water.  It was time to go.  To move on.  To leave behind these tiny meadows, to trade the ordered landscapes of Europe for the humid shores of Borneo.  He would slip off the beaten path, deeper than he had previously dared, into a world where survival itself became the final truth.

     He had made his decision.  

    Facing his steadfast sheepdog, Knox, he affectionately grasped  him on both sides of his furry face and stared straight into his deep brown eyes and said, “My friend, when I deliver you and this flock of ruffians, I am off to Sarawak; it’s time to truly get off the grid and do some spelunking.” Knox cocked his head as if in confusion, likely detecting a note of insanity from his temporary master before wandering off to do what he did best, mindlessly but strategically, chasing sheep. 

Under the Canopy Chapter 7

 Chapter 7. Social Contract

    Eventually, his rebellion and perception of life led him to a remote, forsaken pasture in rural Switzerland, tending sheep. As he sat there shaking his head, tending his flock deep in thought, thinking, “How did I get here? Where do I go next? What the fuck am I doing?” He thought back to his goodbye with Elaina.

   

The bells of Basil chimed in the distance, dull and hollow.  They too seemed weary of the city’s rhythm.  Ernest Masters stood by the river, his hands deep in the pockets of a wool coat that once seemed to fit his life but now hung too heavily on him, like a burden.  The Rhine shimmered beneath a grey morning sky.  It stirred memories but no regrets.

   

Although Ernest had told his professors he was leaving. Not quite yet. His books still sat in neat rows on his desk, anatomy, pathology, the anatomy of ambition itself.  He had been the Masters family’s promise, the son of a prominent economist and a teacher, bred to be respectable, useful, polished.  Yet, lately every lecture had sounded like a hymn to life he could no longer worship, like sitting in a pew listening to a sermon he could no longer understand. 

   

Elaina’s letter had arrived the night before, ink smudged where she had tried to hold back the tears. “Ernest,” she had written, “you cannot throw it all away.  You cannot trade a future for a flock of sheep.”

   

Now she stood before him pleading her case, their case as a couple, eyes brimming with tears in disbelief and love.  “You’re not serious,” she whispered. “You’re talking like one of your Rousseau Social Contract fantasies again. Is it? Is this just another phase for you? If so, it will pass. What’s happening?  Make sense!”  She pleaded.

   

He shook his head slowly.  “No, Elaina.  It isn’t a phase.  It’s the only honest thought I’ve had in years.  I must follow through and be true to myself.”

   

“Honest?”  She laughed softly, but her voice broke with emotion.  “You call abandoning everything, abandoning us, honest?  What about your future here, our future together?  Isn’t that honest?”

   

Ernest looked past her to the slow-moving river. ”I have studied the body until I know every vein and vessel, every organ and cell.  Yet, I feel hollow inside.  Every diagnosis feels like a rehearsal of something false in my life.  I want to understand life before I try to save it.”

    

She stared in utter disbelief as if searching for the young man she loved, the one who had quoted Camus and sketched the Alps from the university rooftops.  “And you think you will find life in the mountains, with sheep.  Perhaps you are a genius or a fool.  I’m confused.  If you eventually go on to Borneo, as seems to be your wild plan, you’ll certainly die out there, of that I am sure.  Do you know how naive you sound?  Ernest Masters, you will die chasing a dream.”

   

“Then I will die awake,” he said simply.

   

A gust of wind carried the scent of rain and wet stone.  For a long moment, they stood together in silence, two lives now like a river divided at a fork.  He wanted to tell her he would come back for her, that this was only for a time, but he knew that to be a lie.  Some doors once opened, never closed again.

   

He gently kissed her forehead, like a benediction.  Elaina, he murmured, “Some of us are built to heal the body while others must try and heal the soul.”

   

Too overwhelmed, she did not answer.  She had no more words.  When she finally turned away in her sorrow, the city swallowed her, the sound of her footsteps fading into the hum of trams and church bells.  She disappeared like a ghost.

Under the Canopy Chapter 6

 

Chapter 6

    Even as a small boy, Ernest felt a strong, close affinity for nature.  He would make a bed on his family’s Basel apartment balcony from branches and ferns he collected from local parks. He would sleep on them and make camp in autumn and early winter to the tacit approval of his parents, who thought his behaviour odd but did not wish to discourage whatever creativity Ernest was taking in his life.

    Master’s, as a child, meticulously recorded the natural world around him, everything from the pattern of a butterfly’s wing to how a spider formed a web on the balcony railing. His skill set, which his parents found curious, would serve him well in later life.

     As a young adult, Ernest was actively denying his own legacy, fully understanding why, but he didn’t f why.  He was either introspective or self-destructive. He wasn’t sure of his own motivations at times.  He was at a confusing turning point in his life. 

   

Ernest had voiced his doubts and misgivings to a university friend, Lukas, almost hoping he could be talked down from the cliff he had put himself on, one of potential self-destruction. 

    The Cafe Fruhling-Kaffeemocher was located on Klybeckstrasse near the University of Basel, where Ernest’s future lay in the balance.  He was sharing a Schale, and a specialty of the house, a Basler Leckerli, with his friend Lukas; the place smelled of burnt espresso and rain-soaked wool.  Students murmured over textbooks as Ernest and Lukas sat at a corner table, discussing current issues concerning Ernest and his somewhat reckless plans for the future.

    “You look like shit, like you haven’t slept in a decade. What’s happening with you, Ernest?”

    Ernest exhaled long and thin, as if releasing weeks of pressure.  “Thanks for that, much appreciated. Maybe I haven’t slept.  Maybe too I'm done pretending I know where any of this is going.”

    Lukas, surprised by his friend's dismal comment, responds, “My God, Ernest, let’s get right to the core, what on earth are you talking about?  If it’s school and classes you are talking about, well, you aren’t alone, my friend.  It’s getting everyone down. You’ve always managed to push through. It’s brutal, but it will pass.”

    “That’s just the problem Ernest responded. “I wish it were just that simple. Sure, that may be some of what’s bothering me, but it’s more, much more.  All this time I’ve been pushing through a life I did not choose; well, I did, but it’s not what I ultimately want for myself. You know, ever since I was a kid, all I wanted…” He paused, searching for the right words to help his friend understand the dilemma, to help himself understand, “Purity, I guess.  Nature, the world before the rot.  I mean, look at this world!  Everything is competition, growth and greed. Look at those tribes in Borneo or Brazil, people who still live inside the world instead of fighting it.  The noble savages I read about in books as a kid.  They knew who they were.  Do we now, I mean, really? Life is upside down and inside out.”

    Lukas stirred his coffee, watching Ernest carefully. “And you think med school is what…a betrayal of all of that?  Ernest, look at all the good you can do here, or wherever you choose, when you graduate, and you will.  You will be a great doctor, one who makes a difference, and that can easily be you.  Just hang in there a little longer, is all I’m saying.  You know you’ve come so far, done so much.”

    “I think what I’m doing now is a betrayal of myself,” Ernest whispered.  “I’m about to graduate into a life of fluorescent lights and artificiality.  I’m denying myself the one thing I’ve always felt in my bones.  I can’t do it anymore.  I’m dropping out, plain and simple.”

    Lukas blinked, stunned.  “Ernest, that’s not some small course correction.  That’s jumping off a cliff.”

    “Maybe cliffs are where you have to go to see the horizon, to get perspective.”

    “That’s poetic,” Lukas said.  “And terrifying.”

    Ernest laughed softly, but it cracked halfway. “You think I’m being self-destructive?”

    “I think you are running from something,” Lukas said carefully. “Have you spoken to Elaina about all of this?” You are guilty of idealizing places you haven’t lived and people you don’t actually know, stories that are not your own. To me, that defines artificial. You might be throwing away a future you don't know, one you’ve worked for, for a dream built on mist.”

    Ernest looked down at the table, tracing a groove in the wood with his thumb.  “Maybe the dream is the only thing that feels real.”

    Silence settled between them, broken only by the occasional hiss of milk steaming behind the counter.

    Finally, Lukas sighed.  “I won’t talk you down if you are ready to step off the path.  I’ve known you long enough to know you don’t speak like this unless you’ve made up your mind.”

    Ernest glanced up, surprised.  “So that’s it?  You’re just letting me go?”

    “Not letting you go,” Lukas said gently.  “Just…letting you be who you think you need to be.” He reached across the table, giving Ernest’s arm a brief squeeze.  “I don’t know if this is courage or self-sabotage.  Maybe both.  But if you really believe that your future is out there somewhere in the world, somewhere between rainforest canopies and river villages, then…I hope you find it.”

    Ernest swallowed, his throat tight.  “Thank you,” he murmured.  “For not calling me insane.”

    “Oh no, you’re insane, alright, and certifiable,” Lukas said with a faint smile.  “But sometimes that’s how people find their truth.”

    Outside, the clouds broke just enough for a thin shaft of light to catch Ernest’s face.  He closed his eyes, as if receiving a blessing or a warning.

    Lukas lifted his cup.  “To whatever comes next,” he toasted, although the words felt both fragile and monumental.

    And in that moment in the quiet cafe, surrounded by the ordinary hum of student life, Ernest Masters felt the first tremor of a life unmade and remade, all at once.  Now all he had to do was explain this one more time to Elaina, his fiancée.