PORT ANGELES — John Vaillant, one of the quintessential Northwest writers — winner of the Canadian Governor General’s Award for The Golden Spruce — found himself gripped by an altogether different world.
In his new novel, The Jaguar’s Children, Vaillant speaks through Hector, a young man traveling from Oaxaca, Mexico, to El Norte, the United States.
hello I am sorry to bother you
but I need your assistance …
This is Hector, sending a desperate text message to a woman north of the border. He is sealed inside a water truck, the human cargo of a smuggler.
It is his story that propels The Jaguar’s Children, from which Vaillant will read this Thursday night at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St.
Admission is free to the 7 p.m. reading, while copies of Vaillant’s books will be available for purchase.
The journey with Hector is a harrowing one. Life became intolerable in his home city, so like the others in the water truck, he’s paid the smuggler, called a coyote, to transport him north.
Trapped
For four days, Hector and his fellow immigrants are trapped inside the truck. It breaks down in the desert, and the young man reaches out through the darkness using his friend Cesar’s cellphone to write missives to “Annimac,” the woman out there, somewhere.
The vessel started out with the word “agua,” water, painted on its side. But the letter “J” has been added to the beginning and “r” to the end — by whom, Hector doesn’t know.
The jaguar, as readers will see, isn’t only a truck.
Vaillant left his home in Vancouver, B.C., for Oaxaca in 2009 when his wife, Nora, a potter and anthropologist, wanted to study and work there.
He’s also explored the U.S.-Mexico border, finding it a fascinating, wild, chaotic place.
And though The Jaguar’s Children is fiction, it is based on things Vaillant has witnessed in Mexico. One event is the truck fire Hector sees as a young boy: an entire semi engulfed in flames. There are men standing around, and the heat is so intense that they are all wavering, like spirits or ghosts.
Hector’s trip in the water truck is another form of hell.
Yet Vaillant looks for some sign of hope or redemption. He knows this is a difficult saga. And he does find a solution — which of course we’re not about to give away in this report.
‘Draws you in’
The Jaguar’s Children “really draws you in,” said Alan Turner, co-owner of Port Book & News in Port Angeles.
“It gives you some insights about what [immigrants] are sacrificing to come across the border . . . and what kind of hope does the U.S. offer.”
Turner is a longtime admirer of Vaillant’s work. He first discovered The Golden Spruce at a booksellers’ convention, read it overnight and the next morning asked Vaillant to come to Port Angeles.
Thursday will be the writer’s fourth trip here, squeezed into a tour that includes Portland, Ore.; Bellingham; Seattle; New England; eastern and western Canada; and the American Southwest.
Back in Port Angeles, Turner said he’s sold about 1,000 copies of The Golden Spruce.
For him, this book, about a logger-turned-activist and the 165-foot Sitka spruce he fells, captures the mystique of the Northwest.
It’s one of the store’s all-time best-sellers — alongside The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown’s story of Sequim-bred Olympic rower Joe Rantz.
The Golden Spruce and Vaillant’s 2010 book The Tiger, both inspired by real events, have brought him many an honor, from British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction to the Nicolas Bouvier Price in Saint-Malo, France. He’s also a well-known contributor to The New Yorker, National Geographic and other magazines.
At the heart
But a novel, with the mystical jaguar at its heart, was the only container that would hold everything he saw and felt about Mexico.
“Hector was the catalyst who gave it all shape and purpose,” Vaillant added.
The story, he hopes, will take readers to a place they haven’t been.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
