Photos by Jay Sturdevant

Evening descended upon the Ou river in Laos, and still we had not found shelter. Our hand-scrawled map of the river was not drawn to scale. The next village could be mere minutes away, or many miles yet.

Arms sore, I laid down my paddle across the front of our canoe. Looking up at the towering limestone cliffs that enclosed both sides of the river, I asked the question on everyone’s mind:

“What if they don’t let us stay?”

We had encountered only one other village that day. They dismissed us with a simple head shake. Whether out of mistrust or misunderstanding, we didn’t know.

The canoe rounded a bend in the river. The American, James, sat up suddenly at the stern. “There it is!” he shouted, pointing towards the river’s edge.

Along the shore, women in argyle sarongs bathed themselves in the murky river water. A lone man in shorts scrubbed his laundry against a boulder. Children chased each other along the water’s edge. One child spotted our approaching canoe and halted.

“Fallang!” the boy shouted out. Foreigners.

The villagers stopped and faced us. In the middle of our boat, Annike turned around towards Ellen. “Get the paper out.”

Ellen stopped bailing out water, then pulled out our Rosetta stone: a single piece of paper containing every phrase of Lao we knew.

“Sabaidee!” she read aloud. “Náwn yuu nîi dâi baw?” Can we stay here tonight?

The villagers continued staring for a moment. The man turned to the women. The women shrugged. He faced us again, evaluating the four canoeing backpackers in front of him. A radiant smile dawned upon his face. He dived into the river, swam out to the canoe, and towed us back to shore.

My grandfather Jimmy steps, steps, steps into the living room, led by a stainless steel walker. He lowers himself into the nearest chair, and pulls the dinner table towards him. An empty glass sits beside his daily can of Guinness. Jimmy struggles to grasp the can with his left hand. Two major strokes have deadened the entire right side of his body. His hand trembles violently as he pours out the dark stout, so much that I worry it will spill everywhere.

It doesn’t though. He fills the glass to the top, takes a sip, and lets out a satisfied ahhhh. He winks at me. “Still got it,” he says.

* * *

My first memory of Jimmy is the strongest. I was seven, on a family pilgrimage back to England, running around maniacally with my cousins in their garden in Middlesex.

“Hey kids,” Jimmy called. “Come here for a second.”

We ran over to the man I barely knew but nonetheless called grandad.

“Watch this,” he whispered. Jimmy opened his mouth wide. The top row of his teeth fell out of his gums.

We fled in terror to our parents, screaming about bewitched teeth. Our parents looked back at Jimmy. “I don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said, smiling with two sets of perfectly aligned teeth.

Our parents returned to their conversation. Still smiling, Jimmy looked back down at us, then dropped his dentures from his skull yet again, sending his grandchildren fleeing once more.

* * *

The years pass, and yet I still know little about Jimmy beyond his cursed teeth. The Atlantic separates us. The little knowledge I have of him comes out of the stories told by visiting uncles.

“I was 16 years old the first time I flew in a plane,” says my uncle Gerald, the youngest of Jimmy’s children. “As we’re about to go on, Dad suddenly tells me that near the end of the war, planes were assembled so quick and carelessly that most of them fell completely apart on take off. I’ve been a nervous wreck on flights ever since.”

Jimmy rarely spoke of the war. His sons have only a few small anecdotes of his experiences. “Like the time I introduced him to Sue,” his son Chris says, recounting the first time Jimmy met his future daughter-in-law.

“And whereabouts are you from?” Jimmy asked Sue.

She named a small town in northern France.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I was there once. Back in the early ‘40s.”

She was surprised. Her Norman hometown was far off the tourist track. What was he doing all the way out there?

He shrugged absently. “Bombing it from the sky.”

* * *

I return to England over a decade later and tour the Imperial War Museum in London with Kevin, the eldest son. He points out a replica of a Lancaster, the bomber plane Jimmy served in. “He once told me how everyone in the plane would be chatting and smoking as they flew over the Channel, laughing like they didn’t have a care in the world,” Kevin says. “Then the pilot would shout out from the front – twenty minutes to target! – and all of the boys in the back would fall utterly silent.”

Jimmy was positioned in the rear turret, an exposed glass dome that hung from the tail of the plane. The turret was uninsulated and unheated; the gunner had to wear an electrically heated suit to prevent frostbite. I climb into the Lancaster replica, through its fuselage, and drop down into the gunner’s nest. I try to imagine what it must have been like waiting here, shivering, alone with my thoughts and my machine guns. I try to envision black clouds of flak detonating around me. I lean forward and listen for the whistle of falling bombs. I try to imagine what it felt like to be Jimmy, but can’t.

* * *

By the time I’m old enough to appreciate that there’s more to Jimmy than false teeth, it’s too late. Another stroke destroys his memory.

“Remember the time I came to Vancouver for Expo?”

It’s the third time he’s told me the story today. I look across the living room to the man who once dangled in a frozen glass bubble twenty thousand feet in the air. There’s no chance of recovering the experience. Born in a generation that didn’t worship the individual, his experiences were never recorded in a diary, or a movie, or a blog. His memories die as his neurons do.

“I can tell you everything that happened a decade or two ago,” he tells me. “But everything else…”

What about fifty years ago?

“Nothing,” he says. “Were you here yesterday?”

Yes, I tell him. And earlier this morning.

“Oh. I see,” he says, polishing off his glass of Guinness.