Ross A. Laird

Me, circa 1982...

This week I was invited to present at the careers day of my old high school. I have not been back to the school for perhaps twenty years, and I am not in touch with any of my peers from that time. So it was an interesting experience, revisiting those old halls and talking to students in grade eleven about how their careers might unfold. I offered them some basic advice: don't plan your career too far ahead, decide on one step at a time, follow what you love, consider your own measures of success (which are not always those of your peers), enjoy, experiment, discover. The various presenters were introduced at the outset of the session in a humorous way: by having the graduation photo and yearbook blurb for each presenter projected onto the screen of the auditorium. There I was, when it came my turn: feathered hair (remember, this was the age of Luke Skywalker), confident smile (hiding my insecurity), one chin. I looked upon this image from my seat in the auditorium and was understandably a bit chagrined. But alongside the photo was my yearbook text entry, which reads as follows:

Activities: Prefect, Wing Captain, 2nd XV rugby and tour, Macbeth, judo, gymnastics, badminton, sailing, debating, France '80, WW I and II.
Pet peeves: disco bumps, mobile trees.
Ambition: Bino's in under 30 seconds, perpetual individuation.
Destination: The briny deeps, the Grey Havens, Queens.

Prefect and Wing Captain are private school designations. Basically, they mean you wear a different tie. 2nd XV rugby is for the kids who don't play too well (I hated rugby, though I toured Europe twice on rugby teams during adolescence). And obviously I was very much into sports during high school. (Bino's used to be a ski run at Whistler, under the blue chair.) Badminton and sailing are still interests; judo has been replaced by aikido. I don't remember precisely what WW I and II referred to; some inside joke about a winter football game, I think. As for the pet peeves: disco bumps are small moguls on a ski hill. I have no idea why they irked me so much. Mobile trees is another arcane reference; probably it's something about skiing mishaps. The destinations are interesting to me. These passages are where I tried, in the pretentiousness of my adolescence, to lay out my vision of where my life might lead. I do not remember why I chose the briny deeps as a destination, but it resonates with me now as the place of the shadow, a place about which I have written a great deal in my books. Perhaps, during high school, I already intuited the difficult road that lay ahead during my late teens and early twenties. Maybe I knew where I was going. Many times during those years, I believed I would not survive (and indeed, I almost did not). Perhaps, during high school, I saw what was coming. I don't remember this, but I have no other way to account for those words. It's curious to me that some of the most powerful sections of my first book involve the briny deeps. The following passage is from Grain of Truth:

There are spirits in the deep water, phantasms that appear only to the drowning and to submariners of surpassing skill. Down deep, where the water is colder than ice but under too much pressure to freeze, where the darkness is absolute and hydrothermal vents expel poisonous toxins in black, acidic spumes -- far down, in an environment most remote from us -- there is exotic, pristine, awesome life, the oldest life of this world. The abyss is home to the most primordial forms, and they are guardians of a great secret: dark, still waters are the sanctuary of the soul.

Apparitions both angelic and bestial inhabit this seascape of elemental dreams. The long-nosed chimera, also known as the ghost shark, has a dorsal spine so venomous a single touch can kill. The male of the triplewart sea devil, with its bioluminescent tendrils, chews through the skin of the female and fastens himself on, merging their bloodstreams in a bizarre sexual dance.

This pantheon of monstrosities is large indeed. The viperfish boasts fangs so long they extend beyond its mouth, arcing upward toward its deep eye sockets. Its abyssal companions include the fangtooth fish, also known as the ogrefish, and the group of gulper fish that can swallow prey larger than their own bodies. One of their number, the black swallower, draws its curved, needle­like teeth slowly over the entire length of its trapped victim. And there are creatures of mythological heritage: Vampyroteuthis infernalis (literally "vampire squid from hell") has the largest eyes of any animal, and the basket starfish, belonging to the family Gorgonocephalidae, is named after the snake­haired Gorgons of Greek mythology.

But just as the winged horse Pegasus emerged from the bloody remains of the Gorgon, the deep is a place not only of nightmares. Elegant swordfish travel the wide range between deep water and inviting surface. Among the many varieties of lantern fish, which give off their own shimmering and refulgent light from within, are those that journey to within a few feet of the surface at night and return to the abyss at daybreak. Their bodies are richly colored in glistening blue and iridescent silver. Vast arrays of them have appeared beneath shipwrecked sailors drifting in the north Pacific, hovering just below the surface, watching or waiting or wondering -- no one knows -- and vanishing as the rescue boat draws near.

The deep is home to ten million species of life, far more than are known to exist on land. Only the drowned and the recklessly brave have the opportunity to enter that hidden realm where no light shines. Yet, like the lantern fish, one can undertake that far journey and return.

Above my workbench, hanging in front of my first­aid kit on the upper shelf, is an old black fishing float, a long wooden ovoid with a large central hole through which a net rope once passed. I found it on the beach, near my grandmother's summer home, around the time my mother jumped from the boat. My father helped me fashion on it the shape of a rudimentary face: the curve of a shell glued on to make a mouth, eyes animated with gold and silver hobby paints, a segment of frayed rope through the hole making a shock of wild hair. I made that float into a charm, a deep­water talisman that stayed with me through the turmoil of those years. And still it watches, its black, elemental form like a creature of the abyss come to make a companion of the light. Who knows what forces come to our aid in the deep water? We never quite see their elusive faces but rather sense the accompaniment of a guiding gentleness that ushers us onward.

The second destination -- the Grey Havens -- refers obviously to the Lord of the Rings, to the home of the ancestors, to the place where the magic abides and returns. And indeed I have found this place also, in my creative life and in my family, in the journeying that has carried me forward from doubt into wonder. I have discovered that The Grey Havens is in every place and within each moment. And I have written a great deal about homecoming to the place of belonging and wonder. Sitting in the auditorium this week, gazing up at the text and images from what seems to be another lifetime, I was heartened to see that at that fragile age, fear and yearning wrestling inside me, I was not completely lost. My ambition of "perpetual individuation" was arrogant and pretentious, yes; but the pursuit of fulfilment has surely been the strong wind that has carried me through my life. My text entry in the yearbook ends with a cryptic rhyme that, as I recall, I invented solely for the yearbook:

We travel wearily through life,
Taking care to avoid the fall;
Yet no matter what the peace or strife,
In the end, the Five will catch us all.

Yes, it's drivel. And yes, it is embarrassingly pedantic. As I recall, it was based on notions of the essential characters of opera, as translated into Jungian archetypes by the Canadian author Robertson Davies (in his book Fifth Business and the rest of his Deptford trilogy). "The Five" refers, I believe (and I'm guessing here, because after all I wrote this bit of drivel almost twenty five years ago), to the essential roles we must play in our lives: lover, fool, hero, villain, and the fifth, who might be called the facilitator. The fifth is essential but also tangential. I don't know what I was thinking back then: something about how smart I was (or how I seemed, anyway), or how cool it would be to be individuated (whatever that means), or how interesting it is to be cryptic and hidden. But I have played all of those roles. And the direction of the ditty is interesting to me now: it speaks of an impulse, a desire for integration and healing, a fragmentary glimpse of a vast and unexplored inner world. I'm glad I was forced to sit through the display of my yearbook blurb and photo. It reminded me that despite my floundering and insecurity and uncertainty, despite my resistance to my own truths and my long exile from myself, I was reaching toward something, even then. Even now.