Of Baked Bean and Bicycles
by Kirsty Schut
My sister met her husband near the sky, or, to be more precise, in a picnic shelter somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He was sitting morosely beneath a roof that had been built more for protection from the sun than the more frequently present rain. It was a good spot to be morose, because the view was spectacular, consisting of a number of glaciers tumbling down the mountainside and a small herd of mountain goats in the valley below, obscured at times by mist so thick it was almost snow.
My sister stood staring at the view for a few moments, and when she had her breath back, she turned to find lunch fixings in her car. Realizing that the only picnic table in the vicinity was already occupied, she proceeded to combine cheese and bun while seated in the passenger seat, directing the occasional glower towards the back of the sullen young man obstructing her perfect lunch.
But the latter soon roused himself from his gloomy contemplation of the extraordinary geology, and approached my sister with a request for a can opener. Perceiving her look of incredulity, he repeated his request and, by way of illustration, held up a can of baked beans, dented but fully intact. He explained that upon entering the national park, he had purchased a dozen cans of various foodstuffs, but had neglected to obtain a can opener. As he was travelling by bicycle, and did not discover this vital omission until he had progressed a great distance up into the mountains, he had decided to rely upon the foresight of other travellers rather than traverse the steep inclines again. “It’s much more interesting,” he added with a disarming grin.
My sister discovered that among her prodigious collection of pocketknives, she possessed one which did indeed offer a can opener among its many appendages. She proffered it to the eccentric cyclist before her, who made good use of it, and then produced a spoon form his coat pocket. My sister inquired, with a wrinkled look of disgust, whether he intended to eat the beans cold. Her husband-to-be grimaced at the mass of beans still in the can and remarked, “I didn’t plan this very well.”
My sister sighed, directed a comment to the heavens concerning the nature of men (we possessed a number of brothers, all remarkably lacking in common sense) and went to the rear of the car to search for her portable stove. Agreeing upon an exchange of half his lunch for half of hers, she proceeded to cook the meal in a most satisfactory manner, as her husband informed me at a later date. They parted ways soon after, but not before remarking upon the attractiveness of the landscape, the fortuitousness of their meeting and the similarity of their respective situations, for both had set out the same day, for the same sequence of destinations, soon after completing post-secondary studies in similar fields.
However improbably, the pair met up again in a campground a few nights later, and at his pleading request, my sister once again permitted him to make use of her can opener and stove, and offered to provide him with transportation when his bicycle was stolen the following night. It soon became clear that he had no intention of either filing a report with the police or purchasing a new machine, and the two continued their vacations as a single unit. When they returned home, he took up residence close to her, and their courtship continued, resulting a year or two later in that happy state of matrimony.
It was not until their anniversary, many years later, that they returned to the mountains, and my sister revealed that she had found a perfectly functional can opener in her husband’s coat pocket not long after they began travelling together. My brother-in-law, for his part, led the party which had joined them in their festivities to a piece of forest not far from the very campground where they had stayed many years before. After a bit of searching and digging in the matted grass, he produced a rusty but recognizable bicycle, and proudly declared that it had been hidden there for seventeen years, one month, and six days.
