Dirty Work
Page 2
Kesagami is how I remember it: set up in an odd sprawl, held together with hope and grit, and not quite making sense in the way it’s organized. The central hub is one big building that contains the bar, the kitchen, the dining room. The dining room is where all the hustle and bustle is, where everyone gathers: there’s a small tackle shop in one corner, rows of gleaming maple tables lit up by the stained-glass windows showing images of walleye and pike, fireplaces for guests to sit around, a pool table where I remember rowdy fishermen clustering to shoot the shit some nights. The room is decorated as a wilderness lodge is always decorated—taxidermied animals, including a tall stuffed black bear that looms in the corner opposite to the tackle counter, that give off the rich, ripe scent of old fur; a mottled carpet that releases dust motes into the air whenever you walk on it; old lures and hooks and pictures of trophy fish, guests from the past grinning with their big catches, all over the walls. It’s a throwback, everything a bit out of date and the decor more than a little tacky. There’s even an entire ancient moose pelt stretched out over the east wall. Still, as far as wilderness lodges go, it’s luxurious in that it has running water, generator electricity, hot meals cooked by a chef.
At the back of the main building, beyond the gloss and glow of the dining room, the staff perform duties that are unseen by the guests. This part of the lodge, the kitchen, is new to me. To get to the kitchen, you have to go through the dining room to a pair of doors—one in, and one out—which both seem to swing too easily on their old hinges. Beyond the kitchen, there’s the narrow and dark pantry, holding tubs of peanut butter and buckets of barbecue sauce and other condiments and dry goods. Beyond the pantry, there’s a tiny staff dining room, complete with a chipped table, smudged windows, a sloping ceiling. Across from the staff dining room is a storage space that leads to Henry’s bedroom, which also doubles as his office.
Exiting from the back door of the lodge leads to a three-pronged path. One direction takes you through a little thicket to the motel, the premium place to stay at Kesagami. The motel has ten rooms, each with its own baseboard heater and bathroom, but no real insulation, so every movement, fart, groan, and bone-pop can be heard. Take another path and you walk straight into the forest, past a wood yard. The final path leads to the guest cabins—eight of them, spread out through the trees, connected only by winding, barely visible dirt trails. Fishermen who want a more rustic experience—translated: people who don’t want to pay through the nose for a motel room where you can hear your neighbour pass gas—book the cabins, which have electricity but no heat, so guests make their own fires in the stoves provided. They sleep in damp-sheeted bunk beds and fend off spiders that crawl through the cracks in the walls; if they have to go to the bathroom, they walk to the bathhouse, one building that has two flushing toilets for the men and one flushing toilet for women, a few urinals on the outside of the shack, and a couple of showers.
There are thirteen cabins in total: eight for guests, five for staff. The “old man shack” is where the older guides and Sam, the cook, stay, wedged into tiny, dark bunks. Cabin 6, which used to be a guest cabin, is where the new boys sleep. Right behind Cabin 6 is the pebbly staff beach—we’re not allowed to swim at the waterfront, which is reserved solely for the guests. The returning male staff members sleep in the “guideshack,” a new, nice-smelling building with big bunks and lots of windows. The returning female staff quickly snap up the “front girls cabin,” a large, squat cube of a bunkhouse right on the waterfront. The cabin has a sign on it that says Rigi Stube in red block letters, a remnant of the original Swiss ownership. No one asks what it means; there are too many other things to figure out at the moment.
The new girls are sent to the “back girls cabin,” the old bunkhouse behind the lodge, at the edge of the trees. The back cabin is a sight. It’s shitty and old and its logs are chinked with rotting jute—which I initially think is human hair, causing me to recoil when I brush against the walls. There are four bunks crammed into this tiny space, separated by wood pillars that support the slanted metal roof. The mattresses smell like mould, having been left to weather the snow and then the spring. The wood smells like winter melting into the summer season. We smell like fresh meat.
“We” is me, Robin, Sydney, and Emma, four of the five new housekeepers—a very odd foursome, totally mismatched. We’re all young white women, but that’s as far as the similarities go. Sydney is small and ginger-haired, with a set of smudged glasses and an exceptionally foul mouth; Robin is broad and strong and quiet, with long black braids; Emma is skinny and coltish and very blonde and very nervous; I’m a bottle redhead and think I’m city slick, but am secretly chewing the insides of my cheeks as I size up my roommates. From what I can glean from grunted conversation on the train and in the air base, we come from different cities and different backgrounds, and we all kind of have different ideas of what we want this summer to be. I sigh, look around at what we’re dealing with. While the front girls cabin is sunny and big, this cabin is like the hut in the woods in every scary story I’ve ever read.
“Ah, fuck,” Sydney murmurs, and with that expletive heralding the beginning of our summer, we move in—unceremoniously dragging our duffel bags, leaving snail trails in the dust. I’m stuffed into the top-left bunk; Sydney’s below me. On the other side, Emma takes top and Robin claims bottom. This means that Emma and I are almost sleeping side by side in what is basically a plywood double bed—the only things that separate our two mattresses are our bug nets and a low wooden ledge.
And then there’s the mess, the artifacts left over from the legions of housekeepers from years prior: trashy gossip magazines, damp pages turning to mush and rotting into the wooden chairs around a rickety table; old sneakers caked with mud and God knows what else; bug-bite lotion; literally hundreds of tampons strewn around the table and the floor, which is very strange and also funny in its overkill. I can sense the spirits of the other young women who came here before me, and it gives me an itchy feeling up and down the backs of my legs and across my palms. Something about the idea of sleeping where so many others have slept makes me feel like I don’t quite fit in my own skin—I can feel these ghost girls’ pheromones, their frustrations, the exhalations of their dreams still lingering in the high corners of the peaked ceiling.
Four girls slotted into four little wooden bunks. Four bug nets strung up like bridal veils. Four sets of hands at work, throwing old magazines and tampons into garbage bags. Four pairs of feet trudging back and forth to open the door, close the door, open the window, find the broom, find the dustpan, work to make the cabin slightly less inhospitable and just a tiny bit more livable. Four strange, fragile hearts, still alien to one another, beating quickly and wondering how we’re going to survive the next nine weeks, cheek to velvety cheek, fingertips to haunches, hip to groin.
* * *
Jack wiggles his eyebrows and laughs, folding his arms and slouching his body in an insouciant way, and the rest of the men follow his lead in an almost spooky manner. There are only two new male staff members, but they are already sniggering along with the veteran guys. The churlish ease of brotherhood makes it simple to adopt a vocabulary of familiarity, and I’m immediately jealous.
The guys are a motley crew. From the way Jack acts—tossing off unofficial orders peppered with insults from the side of his mouth, walking in and out of the crowd with the ease of someone who knows his power and is confident in it—he’s the group’s natural leader. He’s oddly arranged, arresting to glance at but stranger the longer you stare. There’s something about the way he holds himself that makes me nervous, and even the way he’s built—slump-shouldered and slightly pot-bellied but skinny-armed; bronze-skinned, with his nose peeling from sun exposure; wide-mouthed and all gummy—is new to me, and totally unsettling. Pea, our head dockhand, is the other alpha of the group: his real name is Luke, but it seems that everyone who’s worked with him before calls him Pea, short for Sweetpea, because, as Alex leans over to tell me as we wa
tch Pea consider different sizes of ball caps, he’s so kind. He’s white, sharp-jawed and on the short side, but built like a gymnast, with ropey arms and muscled shoulders. I can’t tell what the top half of his face looks like because he has a baseball hat firmly on his head. Then there’s Kevin, a fishing guide colloquially known as Kev, or Rook (short for Rookie, from his first year at the lodge), who has pretty doe eyes and ruffled blond hair, a thick and sturdy chest. There’s Gus, a veteran guide from Moose Factory—he’s tall and broad, Cree, craggy-faced, has deep smile lines around his mouth. There’s Pete, a white man in his late fifties, one of the true veteran fishing guides who’s been working here since before all the young bucks.
The new male staff members are Aidan and Connor, two dockhands both in their early twenties. Connor, who I flew in with, is from Moose Factory like Gus, and is Cree. So far, all I can tell about him is that he’s quiet, one of those people who uses words only when they’re really needed. Aidan, a little slow on the uptake, is a tall and oddly mannered white guy from Guelph, with thick, expressive eyebrows and a dark shock of hair. There will also be other men who come and go throughout the season, fishing guides who are flown in for a few weeks at a time but don’t want to spend their entire summer here.
So this is the core group; these are the men I’ll try to work alongside every day. Nothing about these guys intimidates me right off the bat. I run my eyes over them, assessing body parts, the variances in height, the angle of each neck, the wideness of each stance. Already, from these few visual cues, I can tell a lot about each of them. And if I’m being honest with myself, the idea of sharing my summer—my close quarters, my thoughts, my life for the next few months—with a bunch of young women is scarier than these cocksure young men. These boys could probably become the annoying older brothers I never had. With girls, it could go either way; we could become a coven, or we could turn on one another. Sometimes I find it hard to interact with other women, don’t seem to be able to say the right thing. But I want this summer to be different. I want to create sisters. I shove my hands into the pockets of my jeans and cross my fingers as the girls line up.
There’s Alex and Tiff, our two superiors. Alex is lean and rangy and full of energy. When I first stepped off the plane, she was in full work mode, already directing housekeepers to cabins with one arm and holding a handful of Thermoses with the other. Tiff is an astrophysics major with a tendency to ask startlingly naive questions. I’m not sure what to make of her. She seems kind, and there’s something comforting about her soft-spoken nature, but she’s wearing mascara, which strikes me as odd for the middle of nowhere, in a place where no other woman has makeup on, especially not this early in the morning.
Then there’s Alisa; she’s little and blonde and comes from a fishing family: her grandfather Max has worked here as a fishing guide for years—and will be flying up for a few weeks this summer—and her father is a fisherman back in Southern Ontario.
Most of the housekeepers are new, though: Aubrey, Alex’s friend from home, who has giant blue-green eyes and a determined look on her face. Sydney; Robin; Emma. And me.
* * *
At nearly twenty-three years old, I’m one of the oldest girls on staff. And while many of my co-workers either have experience working as fishing and hunting guides or tree trimmers or in aquaculture, or are completing their diplomas in outdoor education, I’m between the first and second year of trying to finish my master of fine arts in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. It’s not an easy program to get into, and rattling off the name of my degree usually gets me some form of respect. Here, however, the ability to write a novel is pitiful compared with the ability to split firewood or tie a proper knot or identify a bird just from its flight pattern. Here, my writing degree means nearly nothing.
When I was getting ready to move out west, everyone told me that once I’d settled in to Vancouver, I’d never want to leave. Once I got to Vancouver, all I wanted to do was go. The city was brutal: my first month there, I didn’t realize that there were mountains because the weather was so shitty that the fog occluded everything. For the first six weeks, I didn’t see the sun, because I had moved during Vancouver’s worst and rainiest autumn of the past decade. For the first three months, I battled a bedbug infestation that came with my trendy Kitsilano apartment. For the first half of the year, I cried hard and often: on the bus, in my hot yoga class, in my shower. Vancouver was my first time living on my own in a big city. I had pictured independence, writing dates in coffee shops, lots of laughter with new friends—all of the typical girl-moves-away-from-home clichés. Instead, there was an intense kind of loneliness that came from being halfway across the country from my family and in a different time zone; from being one of the youngest in my program, not at all experienced in life like my classmates were; from sitting alone in my apartment, with the damp of the rain in the air and all of my clothes bundled into giant plastic bags to protect them from the bedbugs I was trying to eradicate.
Nine months on, Vancouver is still an enemy: I hate the rain, I hate the slow walkers, I hate how expensive it is, and, most of all, I hate the idea of buckling down for the next year and editing my thesis, a novel that my adviser, from what I can tell, despises with all his heart.
Summer planning was easy when I was at my desk in my apartment in downtown Vancouver, on the grid and plugged in. But standing here, overtired and bleary, I’m not sure why I chose to do this. This is what happens when someone feels confident behind a computer screen, applying for a job she really doesn’t know anything about because the idea of being physically worked to the bone for nine weeks seems more appealing than the grind of writing a thesis, chasing down my adviser, trying to keep up with his haphazard and temperamental edits. This is what happens when a master’s student is so fed up with her program that she wants to get away for a break at any cost. When I was warned by Henry in his preliminary staff emails that there might be snowstorms up here, even in May, I figured it was better than weeks of never-ending rain wearing on me, compounding the anxiety I was feeling about maybe not graduating on time. When I was told that there wouldn’t be any internet or cellphone service, I thought that was better than sending my adviser email after panicked email. When I realized that Kesagami would be a challenge, that I’d be exhausted and worked hard and completely out of my comfort zone, I figured I could handle it.
* * *
“Anna.” Alex is holding out a ball cap: it’s deep green, with the Kesagami branding across the front. I smile and grab it.
When we all pull on our matching uniforms and line up in front of Henry for the first time this season, I can finally easily tell the vets from the newbies. The veterans’ shirts are bleached around the collars from the sun, the material faded and comfortable-looking. My shirt is fresh out of the package, dark green and itchy. My new hat sits funny on my head, its brim not yet moulded by hot hands. Despite the discrepancies, we’re all part of the same machine: when I covertly glance up and down the line of us, standing shoulder to shoulder, I realize how similar we look. We’re lanky, jumpy, filled with a weird energy; some of us pull our hats low to cover our dark-circled eyes, moving with a startling similarity; some of us smack our gum, popping and cracking like our tired bones; our shirts are all cut the same way, so curves and hips and gender and posture are almost hidden underneath the bright yellow writing that marks out our life for the next sixty-odd days: Kesagami Lodge Staff.
Henry launches into a speech that is supposed to put verve into our spines, though we’re all too tired to care. As he speaks about the summer to come, about knowing our place and not fraternizing with the guests and working the hardest we possibly can, I assess the differences I see in him between this year and last. As a lodge manager interacting with guests, Henry was obsequious in the way that people who have worked years in customer service become. As a manager interacting with his staff, he has an edge of granite. Henry’s an interesting study in contrasts: he wears the utilitarian
quick-dry gear of fishermen, as if he could go out onto the water to get messy at any moment, but his khaki-coloured shirt and pants are absolutely spotless. He’s been up for a few days already, but there’s not a salt-and-pepper hair out of place on his head. He’s well put together and talks in a measured, metronomic way, and at the same time, there’s something coiled about him.
His speech is met with our slouches, our half-shut eyes, our slow, dumb breathing. Many of us haven’t been broken in; I’m one of them. A bunch of us are kind of smug, kind of slick. I turn my head and look beyond our lineup, to the west windows, to the trees swaying slightly in the wind. I imagine the land as party to our smugness, crossing its arms and staring, snickering at us through the grubby dining room windows and beneath the cracks of the doors. Just wait, it murmurs, showing teeth made of pike bones and Jack pine bark. You’ll learn.
* * *
The first night in the back cabin, the four of us don’t stay up to chat. Instead, we lie in our bunks, silent and still. When I shift my gaze upward, I see that the names of all the female employees who have lived in this cabin throughout the years are written on the ceiling in permanent marker, along with inside jokes, nicknames, their coded wishes and hopes and upsets—all there, quiet graffiti watching over the rookies. I try not to think about the people who came before me; instead, I shift around on my mouldy mattress, listening to the other women. I’m pretty sure all of us are lying awake, trying to slow our breathing to make it sound like we’re slipping into sleep. But none of us is; we’re not even close. I’m thinking about my choices, what led me here, what led these other women here. What we might be running away from. What I’m running into. The fauna. The flora. The forest behind me, looming outside the little window at my head. The branches are just a few inches too short to tap against the glass; they fold and sway with the wind, casting shapes on my pillow. Every crack, rustle, lick of the wind makes my eyes fly open, but I don’t have the guts to lift my head, turn around, and peer out the window into the darkness.