Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

I was appalled. "How could you use extortion when you were doing something so ... sacred?"
Allison turned toward me, amused that I didn't get her punch line: "Well, my dear, I'm broke. When
you're my age, you'll understand."
She was still on the floor when I got up and left. I drove home and put Jason's list of instructions inside a
jumbo freezer-size zip-top bag in order to protect his pencilings from rubbing away completely. I
removed my shoes and belt and fell into bed, holding an edge of the bag up to my face, and sleep came
easily.
Part Four
2003: Reg
Jason,my son, unlike you, I grew up amid the dank smothering alder leaves of Agassiz, far from the city.
In summer I could tell you the date simply by chronicling the number of children who had drowned in the
Fraser River or been poisoned by the laburnum pods that dangled from branches and so closely
resembled runner beans. I spent those summer days on the Fraser's gravel bars, watching eagles in the
tall snagged trees browse for salmon, but I wasn't in the river just for the scenery - it was piety. I believed
the maxim that should I lose my footing, God would come in and carry me wherever the river was
deepest. The water felt like an ongoing purification, and I've never felt as clean as I did then. That was so
many decades ago -the Fraser is now probably full of fish rendered blind by silt from gravel quarries, its
surface pocked with bodies that somehow worked themselves loose from their cement kimonos.
Autumn? Autumn was a time of sorting out the daffodil bulbs with their malathion stink, brushing their
onionskin coatings from overly thick sweaters knit by two grandmothers who refused to speak English
while they carded wool. Winters were spent in the rain, grooming the fields - I was raised to believe that
the opposite of labor is theft, not leisure. I remember my boots sinking in mud that tried to steal my
knees, its sucking noise. And then there was spring — always the spring - when the mess and stink and
garbage of the rest of the year were redeemed by the arrival of the flowers. I was so proud of them -
proud, me . . . Reginald Klaasen - proud that they loaned innocence and beauty to a land that was never
really tamed. Proud from walking in the fields, inside the yellow that smelled of birth and forgiveness —
only to stare north, out at the forest and its black green clutch, always taunting me, inviting me inside,
away from the sun. Hiding something - but what?
Perhaps hiding the Sasquatch. The legend of the Sas-quatch has always been potent in my mind - the
man-beast who supposedly lives in the tree-tangled forests. It was the Sasquatch I'd always identified
with, and perhaps you can see why: a creature lost in the wilderness, forever in hiding, seeking
companionship and friendship, living alone, without words or kindness from others. How I hoped to find
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