Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

“What is Eliada?

“Well, let us take its measure.

“A thousand or more acres of woodland and scrub, stretching from the banks of the fast River Kootenai to the foothills of the Selkirk Mountains. The soil is rocky and saturated with acids from the needles of the pine trees that have taken hold up the banks. It is a hard ride, two days to the north of Bonner’s Ferry if the weather is fair, which is a rarity. It is inhabited sparsely; the children of settlers who’d lost their way seventy years ago—some prospectors who strayed south, fifty years past. Indians pass through it, as Indians do. But Eliada is on the path to oblivion.

“It is, one might say, forsaken.

“Yet, gentlemen, that is not the truth of Eliada. The truth I might only describe using the language of poets.

“Eliada is the majesty of a sunrise, spreading gold across the white water of the Kootenai River. It is clear birdsong. Rising mist. The jumping of river trout. The roar of the grizzly.

“Eliada does not give quarter. It demands, rather, that we rise to its challenge.

“I challenge any of you to make the journey, arduous though it may be, and inhale the clean air from the mountains, look upon their great granite faces, implacable as the gods themselves—and find fault with the conclusion that I drew, when I dismounted my steed, and wiped the sweat dewed upon my brow, and beheld it all in breathless wonderment.

“Gentlemen, I concluded thus:

“If we are to make our Utopian dreams a reality any place in Nature’s realm—we could do worse than drain our purses carving it from this stern Paradise.”

—From an Account Given of Mr. Garrison Harper, in His Address to the Philadelphia Race Betterment Society, July 19, 1904

4 - Utopia’s Daughter

The first time that Jason Thistledown encountered Ruth Harper, he did not learn her name and had no reason to believe he ever would.

He spied her as he and Aunt Germaine boarded the train at Helena, and she, a passenger from further east accompanied by an only slightly older chaperone, was taking a stroll along the vast station platform before the train debarked. Jason could not help but stare, and later, as the train crossed a deep gorge but an hour to the west of Helena, Aunt Germaine told him that he would have to learn to be more circumspect when be-spying young ladies in public places. “One does not gawk,” she said. “It is a sign of bad breeding. And it offends.”

“Then how come she smiled like that?” Jason had been gawking hard he figured, because although he was now looking out the window at a true spectacle of God’s handiwork—down what seemed like a mile to a fast silver river wending serpentine through tree and rock—the view was eclipsed by his memory of the girl: the light brown curls of hair that peeked out from beneath her wide hat the colour of fresh cream, her greenish-blue eyes that glanced between her soft hands and Jason’s own hungry eye, and the smooth red lips that touched up to a smile at one corner only, near a place where a tiny dark birthmark marred her otherwise unblemished cheek.

“She was being well-mannered,” said Aunt Germaine. “That was all. There is a tolerant streak in these modern young girls that sometimes expresses itself in what may seem like licentiousness. Do not take too much from it.”