THIS MORNING, CIVILIANS STROLL the riverbank in rumpled pants—they saunter past me now. A man who tells me he’s from British Columbia nods at me on the way to his daily swim near the sewage outlet, possessions bundled on his handlebars. He’s one of few men around here with hair longer than mine.

“The water’s great,” he hollers.

“I know it.”

Various dogs leave their owners to sniff my trousers. What a small but all-infusing joy it gives me to rub their forehead indentations. There is no denying my September pilgrimages have been a lonely business.

Beyond the chokecherry bent by last winter’s frost stand slabs of rock that serve as the kitchen furniture of a man I often see wearing a fedora. He’s not here today, though he has left his tablecloth folded in the grass alongside his transistor radio. It strikes me as tender that no one has stolen the radio.

Is my uniform, too, just another costume—like the swimmer’s dreadlocks, the itinerant’s moth-eaten blazer, the dog-walkers’ neoprene tights? Are we all one solitary traveller?

I break through a straggle of goldenrod and sumac and penetrate to the wild river-edge.

Beneath a maple scored with graffiti, I stare toward my old Quebec.

Looking downriver is for young people, who unconsciously follow the water as it flows toward their unknown future. Daydreaming while looking downriver fills a youth’s heart with mysterious anticipation. But when you’ve lived through long experience—my mother told me this and now I know it to be true—you automatically gaze up a river, toward the water’s source, its past. In sympathy with where the water has been you remember all you have been and done.

I turn my face upriver, away from Quebec City. Can Wolfe, can I, really bear to return there? Sophie mocks me, but she isn’t the one who must do it.

What if there is a museum on my battleground selling little red-haired dolls made in China with plastic mould-seams running down their sides?

What if Quebec City has no record of me at all? It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been thus disappointed.

Perhaps officials at the Plains of Abraham have hired someone who looks like me, someone who might do a passable job of portraying General Wolfe for my death-anniversary in a few days. Some student offsetting his tuition costs while he prosecutes a degree in history or political science or even some branch of the arts.

In recent years I have had little trouble finding freelance positions enacting military roles at historic sites for cash. These kept me going while I waited on my mother’s never-ending letter-writing campaign for the release of my military pension. God bless mothers. But I’ve made more money as a fairground beer-tent busboy than any military mother has ever won for her son’s war service.