MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2018

96 ML BLUE WINTER 2018 The Bachelor, who according to his passport was born in 1924 and died circa 2007, surely lived through the golden age of the magazine. Hundreds of issues of National Geographic are stacked in order and undisturbed on a shelf, as are the publications of the trade union he belonged to (we determined that the Bachelor designed and built industrial-grade pumps for a living.) This Liberty title may be a surprising addition (“Canada’s Young Family Magazine”) considering some of the other magazines lying about. One reason we’re sure he was a bachelor—apart from the total lack of clues that he ever lived with a woman—is that no married man would possess so many “girlie” publications in plain view. The bottle-cap-and-shell-casing curtain the Bachelor probably made himself (you can’t buy these in stores). The pictures on the wall are mostly aviation and space-program-related—a major preoccupation. In a box we find several photos of military aircraft taken through high barbed-wire-topped fences, suggesting the remote but tantalizing possibility that the Bachelor was a Cold War spy. A neighbour told Keita Inoue that the Bachelor had a son he never knew, who showed up at the schoolhouse after his father’s death. We could find out nothing further about the son but according to the neighbour, he stayed in the schoolhouse for a period of months. Then for reasons unknown, he left and never returned, leaving these remnants of his father’s life in disarray. I can only speculate that the letters and other documents, including legal forms, were out on the kitchen table because the son was trying to make sense of the life of the father he never knew.