Age: 31
Gender: Male (he/him)
Field of Study: Environmental Studies
Physical Description: When he isn’t slouching, Evan strikes a large figure; he stands at six feet and three inches and weighs around two hundred pounds. While he isn’t entirely out of shape, he has put on some weight during the pandemic, and has a fair amount of muscle density. He has a roughly rectangular body shape and long legs; in his youth, he was particularly lanky.
He has a pale olive complexion, with bright blue eyes and dark brown hair. He has an oval-shaped face with an aquiline nose and high cheekbones. Typically his hair is something of a tangled mess, although he brushes and gels it back when he has to look professional or put-together. While he isn’t losing his hair, his hairline has matured and Evan has a distinct widow’s peak. He rarely shaves, and usually sports lengthy stubble.
Evan has a number of tattoos, mostly on his arms and chest. On his left arm he has a full sleeve tattoo of a large fantasy battlefield, featuring humans and elves fighting back a horde of demons and orcs. The words “No Gods, No Masters” are emblazoned in a small design on his right forearm, with brambles and vines interlaced through the lettering. A large rendition of a Baphomet skull is tattooed over his right shoulder. His hands have a number of smaller tattoos, some of them clearly done by an amateur.
Most of the time he prioritizes function over fashion, his outfit usually being some combination of pullover hoodies, band t-shirts, and heavily worn jeans or track pants. While he once cared more for his appearance, he has given less thought to it since entering graduate school. Evan prefers to wear hiking boots or shoes when it comes to footwear.
On the trip, his planned outerwear consisted of a vintage soviet winter parka, a rainbow wool sweater, ski gloves, a pair of thick lined track pants, and brand-new cold weather boots. Underneath, he is wearing a faded gray flannel shirt, with the black t-shirt underneath featuring an independent print of an astronaut riding a space horse on the moon.
Background:
- Evan James Keane was born in Castlegar, British Columbia to Hank and Ellen Keane, a couple who ran a small construction and contracting company in Castlegar. Evan would describe his parents as prototypically upper middle-class, who held broadly conservative social and political views. As Hank was born and spent much of his life in Louisville, Kentucky, this granted Evan dual citizenship of Canada and the United States. Evan has one younger sister, Darcy, who was born when he was three years old.
- While Evan was a fairly introverted, bookish child who wasn’t much to show off to Hank and Ellen’s peers, Darcy seemed to correct for many of Evan’s perceived flaws. Kind, capable, and extroverted in all of the right ways, she was often seen as the so-called golden child compared to Evan. Nevertheless, he has a good relationship with his sister and never resented her for this - on the contrary, he found her perceived successes took much of the unwanted attention and pressure off of him.
- As a youth, he had relatively few friends, though the ones that he had were quite close. In school he tended to drift through various social groups, never quite fitting into one or the other. The closest friends he had were the online friends he’d play Team Fortress 2 with, or the one friend who enthusiastically crafted homebrew tabletop campaigns for a small group of self-described nerds at his high school. Much of his early socialization was through the internet, spending hours writing posts on imageboards and forums. For a time, he also collected and painted miniatures, though this hobby didn’t carry far into his adulthood given his itinerant lifestyle.
- He performed adequately in sports and physical education, but never displayed much enthusiasm beyond a single season with his high school’s hockey team. The most enthusiasm he displayed for a team “sport” was with his high school debate team, which he traveled with. throughout Canada and the United States for various tournaments. Ultimately he would ascribe this as the beginning of his wanderlust, and the main reason he spent so much of his twenties moving from place to place.
- Evan had a largely decent relationship with his parents, enjoying hiking and hunting trips with his father and bonding with his mother over a shared love of literature and poetry. However, he often clashes with their beliefs and found that he had a much easier time not engaging with politics or religion. In recent years, he has struggled to maintain this balance as a result of increasing political polarization.
- Some of his favorite memories of his father were ice fishing trips during the winter, where they would sleep in a canvas tent warmed by a small wood stove. Though many would describe Canadian winters as brutal, Evan enjoys the cold weather and attributes this to these positive experiences as a child.
- Though he would describe himself as broadly conservative throughout much of his early years, he found his beliefs changing as he passed through secondary school. Some early experiences with psychedelic drugs and cannabis had foundational impacts on his perspective, as he found much of what he believed about the world was far more subject to change and evolution than he’d initially anticipated. Finding excitement and pleasure in experiences that his parents had often described as illegal and dangerous only pushed him to try and break more boundaries. One of his classmates would go on to paint a picture of him as an “oddball shit-disturber” during his eleventh and twelfth grade years. A notable incident involved him and a few of his friends digging a massive hole in the middle of the school’s track and field area and leaving several stolen garden gnomes inside.
- Though he had middling, average grades throughout most of secondary school, he made a concerted effort to improve them in his Senior year, making enough of an improvement that he obtained a scholarship to the University of Toronto. To his parents, the idea of him moving to the other side of the country was stressful at first, but later became appealing as a way to put distance between him and the crowd he’d fallen in with in Castlegar.
- Evan would start a program at U of T in the Faculty of Arts & Science immediately after high school, taking mostly philosophy and political science courses in his first year. While he enjoyed several of the courses and the ability to spend much of his time reading, he found the city of Toronto far more exciting than his coursework.
- In particular, he became well-acquainted with the local music scene, spending much of his time at shows or at bar crawls following shows. While he had no particular genre that he stuck to, he found himself naturally drawn to punk and post-hardcore bands as there was significant overlap with various radical left-wing collectives that existed within the city. For a brief time, he was the rhythm guitarist of the short lived anarchist ska-punk band Molly & the Pipe Bombs, and subbed in with the better-known Dead Constables on occasion.
- By his second year of University, when he had to declare a Major, he instead opted to drop out of school and spend most of his free time writing, playing music with his newfound friends, and staying out late and intoxicated. He worked excessively, both as a bartender and doing odd jobs at venues throughout the city. The steadiest work he found outside of his bartending gig was as security for a small dilapidated venue that regularly hosted fairly raucous shows and raves. Between that and his time at the bar, he found himself often breaking up or in the middle of physical fights; these experiences taught him a lot about the nature of conflict and how rapidly human interactions could devolve into violence. Later, he would note that his forays into such situations were likely a coping mechanism for early symptoms of manic depression.
- While his romantic entanglements were predominantly with women, he never shied away from experimenting with men and considers himself bisexual. Few of his relationships prior to his return to the west coast lasted particularly long, owing to his lifestyle and impulsive temperament.
- A year after he dropped out of University, Evan was confronted by several experiences that compelled him to abandon his life in Toronto. The first was the overdose death of one of his close friends, on account of ecstasy pills tainted with Fentanyl. Only a month afterwards, he was witness to a violent altercation at the bar he worked at, where a man was stabbed and would later die in hospital. Lastly, his landlord opted to renovate the house he was staying in and evicted Evan, leaving him with few options in a city that had rapidly become extremely expensive to live in. This collection of events caused Evan to have a nervous breakdown, which quickly led to the loss of his job and a brief but difficult period of homelessness.
- Evan was able to scrounge together enough money to buy a van, largely through selling most of his guitars, furniture, and excess belongings atop of his meager savings and limited assistance from his parents.
- The 2008 Ford E-250 was quickly dubbed “Margot” by Evan, and he spent the next several years traveling through the United States and Canada in it. By his own estimation, he was as much seeking purpose as he was running from his trauma and increasingly difficult mental health issues. To make money, he would busk or panhandle, and occasionally resorted to small-time drug trafficking and sex work. These experiences were frequently traumatic in their own right, and did nothing to help him recover from the rapid collapse of his life in Toronto.
- He consistently rebuffed offers from his parents to return home and live with them for a time, preferring to amble from city to city. On returning home briefly for Christmas one year, his parents attempted to convince him to move back home and get help; however, they were emotionally ill-equipped to communicate this in a way that Evan would accept. Shortly before New Years' Eve, he got into a drunken argument with his father and left abruptly. For over a year afterwards, he neglected to contact them and only sporadically spoke to his sister, Darcy.
- At twenty-six, he was suffering from serious suicidal ideation, frequently venturing out to railroad crossings late at night and fighting off visions of lying down on the railway tracks and waiting to die. The eventual intervention of a passing stranger, also living something of an itinerant lifestyle, resulted in his seeking psychiatric help. Later that year, he was formally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
- The rail-raider who discovered Evan was a runaway who called himself Leaf. Leaf requested that Evan give him a ride to the Pacific coast; in exchange, Leaf would help pay for gas and supplies - and help Evan stay alive, if that was what he wanted. Evan agreed, and the two spent some time together traveling from Colorado to the Pacific Northwest. They panhandled, bartered, or stole whatever was necessary to make the journey.
- As they got to know one another, Evan learned that Leaf was fleeing an abusive home life. His plan was eventually to make his way out to a group of his online friends in Seattle, who had offered a safe place to truly call home. At the time Evan had been pondering abandoning his itinerant lifestyle and resuming a path through academia, but had been putting it off as it often seemed like he was giving up some greater virtue in doing so. Seeing someone so determined to find a new home cast his own choices in a different light, and he opted to start over in Seattle as well. By chance, he had been considering an application to one of the University of Cascadia’s graduate programs, and remained in the area once Leaf had arrived safely.
- After a lengthy and difficult process of reconciling with his parents and informing them of his new direction, Evan was able to get back on his feet and apply for the University of Cascadia’s graduate program in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
- When some of peers discovered he had still been living in a van while he started school once more, they insisted he move into a room in their shared house not far from campus. Evan didn’t exactly relish the idea of living with others - especially younger students who seemed like far more intact human beings than he was. However, he felt compelled to try it after contemplating the chance to reinvent himself around new people, as well as regular access to a shower.
- Life as a graduate student has provided an uneven sort of stability to Evan’s life, as he finds that he enjoys spending the majority of his time writing, researching, or teaching. The demands of academia helped him impose a kind of loose structure on his life, and helped him find the discipline to pursue his interests. He is regarded as a competent, if not slightly chaotic teaching assistant who leads enjoyable seminars that have a habit of veering off track.
- His primary interest in his research is the adaptation of anarchist principles into environmental actions and assessing the past and present impacts of such actions. Witnessing many examples of environmental degradation in his travels, as well as the worst excesses of capitalism, Evan is currently working on a thesis that contextualizes these efforts in the broader struggle to prevent climate collapse. His supervisor is Professor Carla Donato, with whom he has an excellent working relationship.
- In the course of his studies, he has also rediscovered a number of passions that were absent from his life before. Visiting several encampments of forest defenders reawakened a love of nature, and he likes spending occasional weekends hiking in nearby national parks. Exploring the nature of resiliency in the face of societal collapse naturally led to him joining various disaster preparedness workshops; there, he has attempted to learn additional survival skills, advanced first aid, and as networking opportunities for other like-minded individuals. One major obstacle has been his health, which he is only just starting to focus on once more. Years of poor nutrition and bad sleep habits have caught up with him, and he has found himself occasionally struggling to keep up with others in these groups who are in better shape than he is.
- These experiences naturally led him to brush up against a number of local activists beyond his studies of them. Evan regularly volunteers with a nearby Food Not Bombs chapter; although it is another item on his already busy schedule, he finds the work deeply rewarding.
- Consequently, he also found himself brushing up against local right-wing extremists, who would often target and harass him and his new friends after encountering one another at protests and counter-protests. A few particularly alarming experiences where threats were sent to his home address led to Evan applying for a concealed pistol license, and purchasing a handgun. His carry handgun is a CZ PCR, which he wears in a holster in his waistband; it was left in his safe at home, prior to the trip.
- Working at the University provided him with connections that made finding an affordable therapist easier, and he has attempted to devote time to working through some of his trauma and existential anxieties. While he has seen modest success, life in U of C has also presented some challenges, in that it provides easier access to various means of escape. Evan frequently uses recreational drugs, and himself fears that he might not be able to face reality on any sort of long-term basis while remaining sober.
- Other opportunities to escape include video games and fiction, which he digs into voraciously when he has downtime. While he has to read a large amount of pre and post apocalyptic fiction for his graduate thesis, he enjoys this and will often take books with him throughout his day as he reads them, finding it easy to pick up and put down a story on the go. After seeing a roommate play Elden Ring, he found himself sinking altogether too much time into it, enjoying the challenge and having never played a soulslike game before. He found the bizarre world fascinating, and it reminded him of some of his better experiences on psychedelics.
- He applied to the trip right away, as he was excited at the prospect of helping facilitate it; he had known about the ruins of Serensk for some time, and finds the prospect of visiting them fascinating. To some small degree, he is also hoping to quell any brewing desire to run away once again. In the lead-up to the trip, he has spent several hours working with Professor Donato and a researcher on the island building content for several students in the program. This researcher is actually a Janus-Hayes employee working under an assumed identity, with fabricated professional qualifications.
Assets: A naturally resourceful person who is willing to adapt and change, Evan will pursue unorthodox solutions to ensure his long term survival. Previous experience around dangerous situations and exposure to violence has meant he can at least recognize and manage his fight-or-flight impulse, and he is quick to react thoughtfully in a crisis. Spending as much time as he does researching political theory, Evan has well-established principles that he will not compromise, and this may make him an appealing ally. While he has no professional training or extensive experience, he is familiar with firearms and legally carries a concealed handgun off-campus in his day-to-day life. Lastly, he has some experience hiking outdoors in severe cold, and this may help him survive the frigid conditions of Severniy Norin.
Limitations: Evan is quite mentally ill, and regularly suffers from lost time and trauma flashbacks as a result of his experiences. Panic attacks are an infrequent but consistent occurrence following difficult situations, and he often resorts to drugs or alcohol to cope. With bad sleep habits and in poor physical shape, Evan will not easily endure prolonged periods of exertion. While principled, he comes across as uncompromising; this often results in conflict with others, who perceive this as a lack of empathy for those who don’t agree with him.
