The Fall of Man

Part I chapter 11

Chapter 11

After tucking Noah into his sleeping bag on the sofa, I switch off the bright overhead light and return to my armchair. I gingerly settle myself beneath the tarnished halo that my small reading lamp throws over the dark glass of the coffee table. My eyes are drawn back to the picture of Joanna, at the centre of the small pool of illumination. She is radiant in the photograph. She sits, knees and ankles tucked demurely together, on a slight wooden bench that is perched on the edge of a ravine. A rucksack lies alongside her booted feet and her thin blonde hair is pushed back from her face in sweaty clumps. The hastily taken snapshot exudes her breathless excitement and an overbearing sense of wonder. Behind her loom the vast Canadian Rockies, alive with colour and crystal clear in the thin, clean air - fifty miles east of the city of Calgary.

Joanna is swaddled from head to toe in layers of thick fleece and breathable fabric. Against the rugged backdrop, the fragments of her body that are exposed to the camera – her flushed face, one cold ear, a slender neck revealed down to the collar bone, and two finely boned hands cupped over her knees – suggest a delicate femininity and a frailty that I see now for the first time.

The atlas still lies flopped open on the world-view page which Noah and I used to locate Calgary. With my finger I re-trace the line of fifty two degrees latitude from Milton Keynes, England - four thousand, four hundred miles due west across the Atlantic Ocean.

It is incredible to think that we live as far north as this piece of Canada – a place whose residents dig themselves out of snow and scrape their windscreens every morning for at least half of the year. Britain would share this icy fate if not for the Gulf Stream, a conveyor belt of warmed ocean water that delivers heat all the way from South America to our small island, and moderates the climate so effectively that palm trees flourish on its south-westerly coastline.

There will be no palm trees in Calgary. It will be COLD. Nevertheless, as a destination it makes perfect sense. Although the million-strong population is now sprawled across a sizeable territory and the oil industry is the biggest employer in the area, the city is nonetheless touted as one of the cleanest in the world. Joanna’s sister Trisha lives there with her Canadian entrepreneur husband and their two children, and they would provide a stable and immediate family base for Noah. Maybe out there it isn’t too late to start afresh. It is a place that still boasts untapped natural resources, that has an abundance of space at its disposal, and that continues to grow and adapt to a demanding environment. In a place like this, it should be possible to make a break from the shackles that bind us here.

A small part of me wonders quietly whether we might even make a little difference with our impending adventure. Certainly, not a big difference. But perhaps, by telling someone the story of how we escaped, or by leaving a mark of some kind behind us when we depart, we might help in some unmeasurable way to demonstrate that the accepted, established, normal ways of existing day by dreary day are not the only way to live…