Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Day 4-5: Keremeos to The Lawless Place

Dozens of fruit stands line the road into Keremeos. Their awnings boast cheerful paintings of peaches, plums, pears, and apricots. As Toby and I rolled through, I supposed produce-lovers must die and go to heaven here - twenty pounds of nectarines for twenty dollars! Acres and acres of vineyards yielding the best organic wine this side of the Similkameen. Orchards as far as the eye can see. My mouth watered. The fruit stands are long, low, sprawling warehouses and, at this time in late May, they are all boarded up. When the first cherries ripen in June, the doors will open, and fruit will spill into the hands of the valley. But for now, it’s a ghostly lane foreshadowing summer. Here, Toby and I enjoyed our last downhill ride of the day.
        After a lunch of peanut butter, bread and cheese in the park, we climbed out of the valley and over the Cascade Mountains. Out of fecund farmland into the northen tip of the Sonoran Desert. This area of the province receives the least rain and the hottest weather in Canada, and on Saturday, the sun burned down at 31 degrees. We climbed for about three hours before rolling into Osoyoos, drained, sweaty, and smelly. It was our fourth day of biking, and we’d yet to shower. Suddenly, the thought of water coursing over my body flared up as more than a craving; it was a physical need, akin to hunger, or satisfying sex.“I’m going to find a gym," I told Toby as we reached the town centre, "and I’m going to use their shower.”
        “A gym?”
        “Yeah. A place where people run on treadmills.”
        “A ha!…But you don’t run on the treadmill.”
        “No. I shower.”
        It was 5:00 pm, and the hours sign at Vengeance Fitness claimed this to be their closing time. I tentatively pushed on the door - it opened. A sporty woman with short blonde hair had her hand to the light switch, about to turn it off. She raised an eyebrow at me.
        “We just biked here from Vancouver,” I spewed, “and we saw your gym and imagined a shower and we were going to beg you to let us in, but I see you’re closing, so--” I lifted my arm up into the air, hoping she’d catch a whiff and understand.
        “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. “From Vancouver? That’s great. Get in here. You need towels? Soap?” I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. When a perfect stranger becomes, in a moment, a saviour, my deep-running sentimentality rears its mushy head. I accepted a towel and let the tears of gratitude run.
        Freshly showered and loaded up with advice on good camping and good food in the area, Toby and I sprawled out in the middle of Vengeance’s empty parking lot and contemplated the idea of getting back on our bicycles. I heard a yelping meow from the backyard of the house to our left. I wandered over. The lawn was shady and soft - a perfect place for two tents, I thought. A scrawny, dusty cat paced back and forth next to an old, tired dog. The cat wailed, and wagged its small stump of a missing tail. The dog flared his nostrils. The house’s back porch was lined with wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays. I knocked on the door. When George opened it, he looked at me, he looked at the cat, and having never seen either of us before, invited us both to set up camp for the night.
        George is a slight, delicate-looking man; his jeans hung loose at his hips and his over-sized T-shirt draped across his shoulders. Under a dusty ball cap his rust-coloured hair matched his skin. I figured he must work outside, and couldn’t discern his age through the weathering. He could have been anywhere between 25 to 45. Toby and I began to set up our tents and George, in an attempt to quiet the cat’s howls, offered it a bowl of wet dog food, borrowed from the gentle Sadie. The queer stump of the cat’s tail hid its sex. I thought it was a kitten at first, but the keen eyes and a wiry body betrayed a long, tough life. The dog food disappeared in seconds.
        “Would you like a glass of white wine?” George asked us.
        “Well, sure, if you have some on hand. We were going to make a beer run in a minute,” I replied.
        “No need. I’ve got more bottles here than I can count.” He went back into the house.George is the assistant vineyard manager at Desert Hills Winery, and on Saturdays he moves a field sprinkler in the afternoon and drinks the fruits of his labour in the evening. He emerged with a chilled Gewurtztraminer, BBQ skewers packed with lamb and tomatoes, a pot of Basmati rice and three plates. Four plates - a small one for the cat who, at the smell of lamb, continued yelping hungrily.
        “Now you’ll never be rid of this cat,“ I warned.
        “Aw, that’s alright,“ George said. “As long as she's nice to Sadie.”
        We finished eating, and George’s neighbours Kurtis and Ryan arrived home from work. The three men lit up a joint and enjoyed a backyard game of ladder golf. Toby and I lay down on the grass and welcomed tender snuggles from the cat, now satiated. I lifted its small body into the air - female. A mother, too. With her funny, pointy ears and stump of a tail, the boys concurred she must be a descendant of the desert lynx cat found in northern Washington, kilometres from where we were. After wiping all the dust off her fur, she remained the same greyish brown and, when perched on a tree stump or in the gravel, she disappeared completely.
        After the bonfire was lit and more wine was poured, George pulled out his bright orange Flamenco guitar and played a couple haunting melodies. He used to play for dance studios in Vancouver before taking up the family tradition of winemaking. As he strummed, I noticed his tattoos - armbands depicting battles from The Iliad and The Odyssey. The lamb, the wine, the guitar, the Homer - this man was a Mediterranean melange. I asked him about his family history.
George Phiniotis’s mother came from Hungary and his father came from Greece. For the first year of George’s life they lived in Cyprus where his father, a Doctor of Oenology, managed an international award-winning winery. In 1974, when the Turks invaded the northern part of their island, George’s family fled the country along with 5000 Greek-Cypriots. The Phiniotis family stayed in Hungary until George was six, then settled in BC in 1979.
        “Wow,” I said as George poured me another glass. “What a great family story.”
        “That’s not even the half of it,” he said, rising from his lawn chair and heading back inside. He returned with his laptop and loaded up a CTV news broadcast. Peppy reporters raved over a magnificent find, valued as ‘priceless’, at a BC Antique Roadshow: an Olympic gold medal from the 1936 Games in Berlin - the Nazi Olympics. The video cut to grainy, black and white footage of Hitler; those squinty eyes and that hard, whining voice, rousing crowds of thousands in Berlin’s Olympic stadium. The recipient of this gold medal? A wrestler from Hungary, Karoly Karpoti: George’s maternal grandfather. Karpoti, a Jew, took the title from defending champion Wolfgang Erhl - a German.
        “Well, that must have pissed Hitler off,” I said. George laughed.
        “Yeah, who knows. Maybe Grandpa’s victory tipped the camel’s back.”


The next morning, after a breakfast of Gatorade and Corn Pops, Toby and I said our thank-yous and our goodbyes. As we hugged and exchanged contact information, the desert cat lapped up our leftover cereal milk. I pressed my palm into her small body.
        “We both showed up at your door at the same time,” I said to George, “hungry for food and shelter.”
        “That’s why I’m naming her Chelsea,” he told me. “Gotta keep the legacies alive, you know?”
        With their coffee in hand and a hot Sunday ahead of them, George, Kurtis and Ryan sparked up another joint - the breakfast of champions, they said. In an attempt to have Toby and me stay another day, they spouted terrible tales of what lay ahead for us: the twenty-five kilometre climb out of town in the 35 degree weather. Tempted though we were, we rolled along, armed with Gatorade and a Desert Hills Gamay Noir. And, after a gruelling four hours up that hill, we reached the Anarchist Summit. The locals call this area The Lawless Place. We waited around a bit, but nobody showed up with our medals. So we just biked back down the other side.

9 comments:

  1. freaking fantastic. u inspire me, u and toby. keep this going. love.

    but change teh background to white and text to black. boring but much easier on the eyes.

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  2. AND if you want, i can totally design you a awesome header!

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  3. This is tremendous. Astonishing. And beautiful. Keep up the good work. I am glad you are doing this so that I can follow you closely without ever leaving the couch.

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  4. is toby miss trans-canada too?

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  5. Is there an RSS feed? I don't want to miss an update - this is awesome.

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  6. Hey; how are you? I'll try and keep track of you from time to time. Nice article I'm actually Assistant Winemaker at this time, I help out in the vineyard when needed. I have a crazy story for you about this cat (And her apparently psychotic owner) when I talk to you. George

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  7. Um, hi? 'Nother post, please. Kthxbye.

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  8. Dear Chelsea -
    Emotionally immature? I don't think so. . . in fact, your writing indicates literary maturity so, in my opinion, personal maturity must be lurking there somewhere. Your account made me laugh out loud and cry in the same paragraph, something many seasoned writers can't do. So keep on keepin' on!! Don't you just love (most) people??? XOXO Carmen

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