Crossing Second Narrows

Book excerpt: They came from different parts of the old British Empire: Alistair Randall from Kenya and Rashid Hassan from India. Perhaps, they should have been enemies, but they were not. It was a defining moment in Alistairs life when he sat on the floor across from Rashid one cold winters day in Edmonton in 1969, and Rashid spoke with unsmiling logic about the need to shoot Alistair. But before that collision there was Jenadie MacIlwaine; without her Alistair would not have met Rashid. Telling a story set mostly on the campus of Capilano College in the 1960s, Crossing Second Narrows narrates the interplay among this unlikely triangle of characters who believed they could change the world: Alistair, the liberal white migr from postMau Mau Kenya; Rashid, the self-styled, dark-skinned Marxist from India; and Jenadie, the outspoken American blonde in the middle. It provides a historically accurate account of the searching for answers to the questions of the times: Why did the conservative universities try to squash innovative upstart community institutions? Why did the students and faculty at British Columbias fledgling Simon Fraser University militantly go on strike? How did these become literally life-and-death issues in a world stripped of its comfortable traditions, including, on occasion, clothing? In Crossing Second Narrows, author Bill Schermbrucker uses what Michael Ondaatje once described as the truth of fiction, to reconstruct an important story out of the heady Age of Aquarius.