Part 4 (1/2)

Sticking to the coastline, we pa.s.s more big trees, a lot of seaside villages, brightly painted clapboard houses huddled against the rugged coastline. We encounter more cold, light drizzle, and a seaward wind that makes the fis.h.i.+ng boats tethered in the harbours strain and rear against their hawsers like startled stallions. The water looks cold and thick. On the radio, we listen to a weather report that warns of snow squalls higher up in the mountains, with acc.u.mulations of two to three feet. Merilyn and I congratulate ourselves on having stayed by the water instead of cutting inland at Eugene, though at some point, we realize, we are going to have to turn east.

We pa.s.s a sign: Eureka 10 miles.

”I have a cousin in Eureka!” Merilyn announces excitedly, the way one might say, ”Oh, I forgot to tell you, I won the n.o.bel Prize last night!”

”His name is Russell Thompson. He moved down to Los Angeles after the war and got into the movies, and now he's retired to Eureka!” I gather it's hard to p.r.o.nounce Eureka without following it with an exclamation mark.

”Great!” I say. ”Let's drop in to say h.e.l.lo!”

MY American cousin is really my second or third cousin, I can never figure out which. He and my father shared a set of grandparents. We're not close, but we're blood.

My father, like many men, didn't seem to care much for the family he came from. They lived in Toronto, about an hour and a half away. We'd visit his mother and his brother, who lived in the apartment next to hers, almost every week. The air in the car was always brittle as we drove into the city and still edgy as we came out. Family put my father in a foul mood.

The only relatives he talked about with pleasure were Russell and Russell's sister, Dorothy, cousins he spent weekends with as a boy. Russell's birthday was in the same month as Dad's, and every March, the phone would ring long-distance. ”It's Russell!” my mother would call out, breathless-”From California!”-and my father would rush to the phone as if he expected to win around-the-world cruise.

Dorothy's birthday is the same day as mine, so I call her every September. She is full of stories: about another cousin who played piano in a sheet-music store and took off for San Francisco to play professionally; about the time Russell drove back to Ontario from California in a Cadillac convertible, top down all the way.

My American Cousin, the movie, opens with the cousin barrelling up to the family homestead in a flashy red convertible. His name is Butch and he is darkly s.e.xy and safely rebellious in that James Dean kind of way. He's come to spend the summer in Canada, a place where NOTHING EVER HAPPENS, as the young female protagonist writes in bold across her diary. I felt the same way: real life happened somewhere else, somewhere like California.

Russell was lean and handsome, a lion tamer. In the eight-by-ten glossy in my parents' alb.u.m, he wears skin-tight trousers, knee-high boots, and a white cutaway, and he is flouris.h.i.+ng a top hat. I think he might be carrying a whip. When my parents talked about him, the conversation always started, ”Russell, he's in the movies in California . . .”

What could be more glamorous than that? I met Russell only once, the summer I was thirteen. He drove up to Canada, and we visited him at Dorothy's house in the woods. The day was hot and clear, the water as blue as the ocean. We water-skied, my first time, and somehow the feeling of standing on the water, zipping across the waves, is what comes to me even now when I hear the word ”California.”

Since my father died, Russell has been sending me photographs, of himself and my father when they were kids, and later as soldiers, fighting for different countries. After the war, Russell hosted a Sat.u.r.day-morning radio show on the Armed Forces Radio Service, Let's Pretend with Uncle Russ. He sends glossies of himself leaning into a microphone with some famous actress or crooner glancing over at him with wry affection. From radio, he moved to television: he was a pirate on The s.h.i.+rley Temple Show, a dead man on Gunsmoke. But it was on Ozzie and Harriet that he found his home. After the summer we met, he sent me an autographed picture of Ricky Nelson, signed ”To Merilyn with love.”

I haven't told Russell I would be travelling down this coast. I wasn't sure I wanted the old man he'd surely become to replace the golden Russell of my California dreams. But once I'd made the phone call, heard his voice, so rich and deep, that hint of a laugh waiting to split open wide, I couldn't wait.

”Eureka's not far,” I say to Wayne. ”Russell says we'll be there in twenty minutes.”

WHY do I find the name Eureka so familiar? Yes, it's what Archimedes is supposed to have shouted when he discovered the trick of measuring the volume of an irregularly shaped object: ”Eureka!” he exclaimed, jumping out of the bath: ”I've got it!” But I don't think that's what's stuck in my mind.

Eureka (without the exclamation mark) is a small city on Humboldt Bay, in the heart of California's big-tree country; it got its name when gold was discovered by some cla.s.sically trained forty-niner in nearby Trinity River during the California bonanza. The 1849 gold rush defined this part of California, draining so many people from southern regions that in one year the population of Los Angeles dropped from 6,000 to 1,600 and the population of San Francisco jumped from 800 to 35,000.

Mining and logging soon destroyed the forests around Eureka and the rivers that drained into Humboldt Bay. When the local natives, the Wiyot, protested the degradation, the citizens of Eureka hit upon a solution. In 1860, the local newspaper, the Humboldt Times, proclaimed that ”for the past four years we have advocated two . . . alternatives to ridding our country of Indians: either remove them to some reservation or kill them.” Eureka went for the second alternative. A group of citizens calling themselves the Humboldt Volunteers rowed out to a Wiyot village on Indian Island and slaughtered most of the Wiyot who were there celebrating in their annual World Renewal.

Bret Harte, then a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Humboldt Times, wrote an account of the incident: ”A more shocking and revolting spectacle never was exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Women wrinkled and decrepit weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long, grey hair. Infants scarcely a span along, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds.”

Without the Wiyot to protest, the degradation continued. By the 1880s, when the gold ran out, there were eighteen sawmills ringing the bay, and the city was supplying lumber to most of the northern coast. So much sawdust was dumped into Humboldt Bay that salmon stopped sp.a.w.ning in the Trinity River. Scientists are still working on ways to get them back.

Scientists! That's how I know Eureka! A few years ago, the Sci Fi Channel aired a series called Eureka. The premise of the show was that the American government was secretly hiding all of its scientific geniuses in Eureka, not an easy secret to keep since the scientists kept inventing things like antimatter and telekinetic computers. In the series, things are always going awry. For example, in one episode, when they create a Star Treklike transporter (it worked by decoding a person's DNA in one place and recoding it somewhere else minus the person's clothes, a complication not thought of by Gene Roddenberry), they inadvertently produce an uber-Einstein kid who could launch missiles just by thinking about them.

”Did your cousin ever do television?” I ask Merilyn.

”Yes,” she replies, getting a faraway look in her eye as if she's just turned on the old black-and-white set. ”He was a regular on Ozzie and Harriet. ”

I never really liked Ozzie and Harriet, but I don't tell Merilyn that. Ricky Nelson wasn't my idea of a rock star. I was a Leave It to Beaver kind of guy. But the difference was one of neighbourhood, not lifestyle. Like most kids who grew up in the Fifties, I formed my idea of what a typical North American family was supposed to be like from watching Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and My Three Sons. Fathers who wore suits to work, mothers who were rarely seen outside the kitchen, children who dutifully did their homework on desks in their immaculate bedrooms and then came downstairs for roast beef dinners during which the problems of the day were calmly discussed, debated, and solved. Parents who listened to their children, went with them to basketball games, took an active interest in their lives. It was our version of the American Dream. Oddly, the fact that I didn't know a single real family that remotely resembled these television families didn't prevent me from believing that there was something wrong with my family, where homework was done wherever I could clear a spot, dinner was a half-hour argument over macaroni and cheese or fried bologna, and no one ever listened to anyone, least of all me. I thought, as I was meant to think, that it was us, not the Cleavers or the Nelsons, and definitely not America, who failed to measure up to reality.

”Did your cousin know the Beav?” I ask Merilyn.

”I don't think so,” she says.

”That's okay, we'll go see him anyway.”

MY American cousin greets us at the door of the neat olive-and-cream clapboard house behind its matching picket fence. He's wearing a red plaid s.h.i.+rt, the kind farmers and lumberjacks buy at Stedmans, and a comfy zip-up jacket.

”Russell?”

”And which one are you?” he asks, throwing his arms around me.

”Number three.” The one who was rarely noticed, who got away with everything.

”You look like your grandmother Margaret.”

Russell's hair is still black. He's wearing oversized rose-tinted gla.s.ses. I peer into his face, looking for my father, and I see him, a little. The dark almond eyes; the long coffin of a face. He speaks in CBC tones, sonorous and rea.s.suring, as he leads us along a hall to his living room, which should be the dining room, since it gives onto the kitchen.

”The living room's full of old stuff,” he apologizes, waving a hand at a pair of French doors. I glimpse what looks like a plush fainting couch.

We sit on a standard-issue sofa while he eases into his recliner. There is something odd about the floor: it doesn't meet the walls. Russell decided to cover the old linoleum flooring with new hardwood, which he bought at a Home Depot and installed himself. ”But I didn't measure the room right so I didn't buy enough wood,” he shrugs, as if he's talking about c.o.c.ktail olives or soda water for the highb.a.l.l.s. He started laying the floor in the middle and worked his way out, leaving a gap around the walls. He'll fill it in later, he says, ”when I get around to buying more wood.” Sitting on the couch feels like floating on a large raft in a very small pond.

The television is on. I watch the credits of a show, thinking I'll see Russell's name. That's what we used to do after an episode of Perry Mason or Ozzie and Harriet.

”I played a ringmaster,” he laughs, when I tell him I always thought he was a lion tamer. ”That was on Ozzie's show. The producer for Perry Mason saw it and asked if I'd play the same part in a mystery about the circus.”

Russell is modest. Too modest for an American. It gives him away. I want him to flaunt a little. He knew Lucille Ball! Frank Sinatra!

Frankie Laine!

I ask him if he's doing any acting, hoping like a thirteen-year-old that he knows Tom Cruise, maybe, or Julia Roberts.

”I just finished a movie,” he says. ”A small part. I didn't think much of it, to tell you the truth. The language-!” He shakes his head. I have no idea how old he is. Over eighty, I'd guess. If my father were alive, he'd be eighty-eight.

”Whatever happened to Ricky Nelson, do you know?” I ask.

”Died in a plane crash. Awful thing.”

Russell gets up and goes into the kitchen to put on water for tea. He married a j.a.panese woman, Chiyomi, who owns Mad Hatter's Tea Party, a tea shop with banks of tea tins against the wall and a few small tables where she serves scones and fancy desserts. She creates her own teas: Russell offers us a selection, and Wayne chooses the Baby Grey.

The kitchen is immaculate. I feel comfortable here, though there is something odd about this room, too. There's not the slightest hint that food has ever been allowed, let alone prepared, in this kitchen: no pots hang from hooks over the island, no kettle on the countertop, no bouquet of spatulas and wooden spoons beside the stove. It is like a kitchen from the set of one of the commercials on The Garry Moore Show, or from Ozzie and Harriet. A fake kitchen. I half expect the back wall to open onto scrims.

The transistor radio above the sink is real, though. It's tuned to a show-tunes station. We stand awkwardly, waiting for the water to boil. We've gone over all the common ground, more than once. There doesn't seem much more to say. Then a song from the Forties comes on. Suddenly, Russell sweeps me into his arms and we swirl around the brightly lit kitchen, hands clasped, cheeks lightly touching, dancing in perfect step.

”Why don't you come home?” I whisper in his ear.

”I'd like to,” he says, almost like singing, ”but only if I could drive all the way in my Cadillac convertible.”

WE leave Chiyomi's tea shop with a Christmas gift bag of Baby Grey, Chiyomi's version of traditional Earl Grey, which includes petals of a blue flower that reminds me of the Steller's jay we saw in the redwoods.