Dirty Work

by Anna Maxymiw

  “You are so goddamn annoying.”

  “Yep.”

  “Why aren’t you out on the water today?”

  “On shore.”

  This abbreviated conversation is doing nothing for my evaporating patience. I flare, an ember fanned by him. I set my jaw, and we stare at each other. Move, I think, and my emotions are so loud, so splayed across my face, that he laughs and I can see the points of his incisors.

  No, his body says, definitely. No to so many things.

  I almost buckle, but can’t. “Get out of my way.” I know that I’m bordering on childish now, one pout away from a foot stomp. This is why I’m going to lose—both our argument and, eventually, this friendship. I don’t become or stay a woman around Jack: I revert to teenaged sass and, if he’s especially cutting, childhood tactics. Somehow, Jack wears his immaturity well. People laugh at his jokes. My immaturity turns me into a nag, a bitch.

  I try to push through him, using the basket as a battering ram. All I need to do is get to the door and I’ll be home free. But he grabs my upper arms with both hands. I stop moving as he touches me, as his fingers wrap around my biceps.

  Before I can thrash away from his dirty palms, he pushes me down the steps with just enough force that I’m propelled backward in a stumble, and not enough force that I fall. All I can see is his mouth bobbing, rich and open. All I feel is distress. I can’t get to the door; there’s no handle for me to grasp. Jack grins a pike’s grin. If he wanted to, I’d let him push me all the way down, down to the pine needles, down to the hot granite. But instead he stands at the top of the stairs, legs planted and spread, arms crossed over his chest.

  ROOTS

  There are two sides to this place. There’s the lodge and everything that comprises: the hub of ramshackle buildings, the straggly paths that connect everything, the generator and oil drums and buoys and the wood splitter. Here, there’s the noise of human sprawl and takeover, a flesh-and-blood cacophony: the servers’ panicked squawking over the thrumming of the kitchen fans, the sound of one housekeeper hollering to another from Cabin 6 to the motel, the dockhands yelling down on the shoreline during boat pull, Sam hovering at the top of it all, screaming at our ineptitude.

  The other side of Kesagami comprises the pieces of land where we haven’t spread ourselves. There’s a point where the paths end and the woods begin, where I can take fifteen or twenty steps forward and the sound changes, where the trees are so dense that the quilt of background noise—boat motors, the low-hanging rumble of supply planes coming in, and the yelping, squealing, giggling, yelling, crying—becomes no-noise. Something that expands and contracts on its own. Something that exists: patient, malicious, brooding, angry, wise, old.

  We can’t conquer what surrounds us. We chop firewood and nick the forest apart for kindling, but we know that when it comes down to it, the trees have been here longer than we have, and we will never, ever get the best of them. The woods are beautiful, but it’s also the place that makes me feel the most uncomfortable: I feel safe and unsafe; I feel at home and at the same time so frightened I can barely wait to turn tail and run out of there. That’s the dichotomy of this place. It’s either spend time with everyone, always, snared in the cyclone of noise and sensation and everyone’s eyes on you and every emotion that dances across your face, or it’s the forest. The wild or the wilder. The present or the past. It’s a screaming mess of noise, or dangerous quiet.

  For young people like us, who think we’re so goddamn important, silence can be scary. We try to fill it; we stay up late to do so. This is why sleep is so difficult to sink our fingers into. The fear of missing out has gotten stronger now that there’s just a handful of days left, because we’ve started to realize that we’re going to be leaving and that this place, so removed and so precious, is going to be torn away from us as soon as we get on the plane back to Cochrane. So sleep starts to come second to time spent in one another’s presence, bunks, arms. This means, though, that when we flick back through pictures of ourselves on one another’s cameras or catch an unexpected glimpse of ourselves in the lake or a mirror we’re cleaning, we groan. A lot of us don’t recognize ourselves, for many reasons. Our bodies are different. We look honed and defined; the puppy fat from the beginning of the summer has melted away from weeks of hard work. We’ve gone from pale and pasty to farmer tanned, skin darkened from days out in the sun and on the water. Our muscles are leaner and longer and more corded from weeks of pushing wheelbarrows and lifting rocks and pulling boats.

  My body has become tighter and stronger, my shoulders defined and hollowed, and my forearms bronzed. At the same time, I feel like I’m falling apart, an adage that I never quite understood until I came here. I creak. My bones snap when I wake up in the morning. My hips pop in and out of place with a sick and fascinating thunk. My fingernails are shredded; my throat is constantly sore; my back is knotted so badly that I can barely lie flat on the floor before my sacral muscles spasm. I didn’t know my meat was so tender, that an environment could run so roughshod over me. But at the same time, the masochist in me delights in it—the dull, sweet ache after a day of physical work is a pleasure I’ve never known before.

  And I’m so tired. We’re all so tired. In a way, it makes us beautiful. Our eyelids are purple, our grins manic, and somewhere behind the fatigue, if an observer were to look really hard, they’d see us existing completely and exquisitely. But mostly, we’re teetering on the edge of being ready to keel over and fall asleep.

  In the middle of all this, a fierce love has developed. I didn’t really expect this. It seemed counterintuitive that tenderness should exist in between the ups and downs, but it does. In between the wheelbarrows and the floor-mopping and the nights spent in one another’s bunks, there’s no space for pretense; the fat is trimmed, and we have become only emotion and instinct. We’ve all become a little baser, a little more feral in our sleeplessness, and it shows in the way we move among one another.

  The girls like to lie in their beds and talk about the boys. The boys like to lie in their beds and talk about the girls. Body parts are compared and ranked like we’re drafting teams. We may have started out naive and nervous, but now we stare. We look without guilt or tact. We desire. But it’s more than just attraction. We adore one another unequivocally, in the way people thrown together in a harsh environment develop love, but we’d never cop to feeling soft. This love gives us power to make it through the days without collapsing, but somehow, saying it out loud is weakness. We like napping in one another’s bunks, but we leave zero trace behind when we wake up for our afternoon shifts. We’ll help one another with chores, but we won’t say thank you. We love one another, but we’re not going to fucking admit it.

  It’s a disturbing love, something that’s simultaneously fraternal and sexual. Sometimes I glance at the dockhands and think of what it would be like to have hushed sex in a staff cabin. Sometimes, I think about pinning one of the boys to the laundry-room door and kissing until a housekeeper has to interrupt us to get a hock of beef out of the chest freezer beside the dryer. Sometimes, I think about being tackled in the shallows of the lake as I take a makeshift bath to try to get clean between the never-ending chores. Girls and boys, brothers and sisters, adversaries and lovers—we’re all of these things, noisy and annoying and carving our own path out on this hard land while existing completely soft-hearted with one another.

  * * *

  Because the bathhouse has walls that don’t reach up to the ceiling, the boys and girls are able to speak to each other over the sound of the spray when we shower at the same time. We think it’s coy and funny to have conversations with each other while naked, sliding soapy hands over our bodies. Only a little self-restraint and a thin wooden wall separate us from one another.

  When the guests go out to fish and we’re left alone on shore, we sprint in twos to get clean, our towels flapping behind us like streamers. Sometimes the boys shuck shirts on the way, bursting into the bathhouse half-clothed, p
anting for soap, mouths open for water. We tell each other jokes as we test the temperature of the spray with our wrists. We complain about our bunkmates as we run hands up and down our legs, slide our fingers between our toes. It’s a confessional. We take advantage of it, releasing emotional burden along with the grease of hard physical work.

  At first, there was something blithe and innocent about this ritual. We were naked together, but not together. By the end of the summer, however, I try to finagle it so that I’m showering alongside the guys I find most attractive. The ones whose pale calves and shoulders I want to see most in that moment between swinging open the shower door and readjusting the towel. I race to try to emerge clean at the same time. I want to make eye contact. For some reason, this makes me feel like the potential is endless. We only ever stare at each other for a moment, taking in newly shaved ankles, clean toenails, uncombed hair that sits floppy and damp over tanned foreheads. Then we turn and skitter away.

  And there lies the problem. We want to, but we won’t. We continue to hold back for many reasons—self-preservation, a mutual aim to keep the lodge operating without romantic wrinkle, the way we smell after working for two days straight. But most of all, want has to take a back seat to need, and whether we realize it or not, we need family here more than anything else.

  We’re so aware of the temporary nature of our work that we feel panicky and weightless in our bodies. We didn’t want to make connections, but now we know that we’ve put down roots here. We didn’t want to see what’s underneath the clothes because we won’t be able to say goodbye, but we did, we saw it, almost all of it. And we know that when we leave here, we’ll never again be able to recreate this. Our lake, our lodge, will be different when different people come back to it. Things will have grown over, changed and branched out. This place won’t be ours. And we’ll never face this dichotomy again: back in real life, brothers are brothers, sex is sex, and the two don’t ever cross, and no amount of calling to one another—Are you there? It’s me—changes that. If we feel disturbed by what we’ve considered and created, we never say it. This is the only place in the world where I earn an older brother who I want to kiss. I’m here.

  * * *

  Pea entreats us. “Come on,” he says, motioning to the vague beyond, the land behind. Some of the housekeepers are sitting on the picnic table by the dock, trying to absorb vitamin D, trying to conserve energy by moving as little as possible.

  Alex turns her head and eyes Pea with that specific and beautiful mix of languor and disdain that girls have patented and that the dockhands hate so much.

  “Where to?” She leans her head back and her throat is exposed to the sun. In this moment, I can see why the boys become so exasperated with us. We’re the condescending demigods, aware and unaware of our sensuality. Our hormones push at the boundaries of our bodies, and we don’t rein them in. We float our feelings on the wind to the boys, but at the same time we’re rude and haughty in the way that only twentysomethings can be. And we’re lazy when we want to be—outwardly, pushily lazy. Lazy on the beach. Lazy in public. We don’t want to do the work, and we’re going to make damn sure that Pea knows it.

  Pea sighs, long-suffering and calm. He jerks his head. Back, way back. Shit.

  “Shit.”

  “Wood haul.”

  “Shit!”

  The trees of Northern Ontario don’t get enough credit. These are not the glimmering, graceful birch of Georgian Bay, or the legendary sequoias of the West Coast. These trees don’t look pretty. Their forest is not lined up in the telltale even slats of a hand-planted Southern Ontario thatch. These trees haven’t had it easy. There’s no deep, rich soil to dig their roots into, no lush seasons of rain and temperate weather to ensure their growth. Soil in the boreal forest is incredibly acidic, because conifer needles have high levels of acid, and in rainstorms, this drips from them into the dirt and leaches nutrients deeper into the ground and out of plants’ reach. So these trees have fought for every bit of their height and breadth. Their lives aren’t defined by leaps and bounds, but a game of inches.

  The Jack pine, also known as the grey pine or the scrub pine, is a funny-looking tree. It’s often crooked, or even shrub-sized, because of poor growing conditions, and it’s largely considered a weed species. It’s scrappy and small and was mostly ignored by lumber companies until its larger cousins were overharvested. But it’s incredibly tenacious, and it’s built to withstand—and even flourish in—the most dangerous of taiga threats: the fire. Jack pine seedlings germinate most successfully in the kind of soil that occurs after a fire rips through the boreal forest; they flourish when the other trees around them have been razed and the sun is visible; they can survive drought conditions for a month or even longer. And, most remarkable of all, their pine cones are designed to bloom open in the fiercest of heat, rather than explode: in fact, it’s been noted that Jack pine cones can withstand heat of up to nine hundred degrees Celsius, and the seeds stay undamaged.

  So it doesn’t feel right to carve up any of these trees, not after they’ve fought so damn hard. It doesn’t feel good to build our woodpiles, to flaunt them by moving them, to trespass with the express goal of taking and taking without giving. But it has to be done, even though we don’t like it. We might not feel that it’s right, but the four of us—Tiff, Alex, Aubrey, and myself—pull on tight long-sleeve shirts and gloves. We bring out bug-net caps and tuck our pants into our socks. Far back in the forest, away from the hum of the main building, the bugs are even worse; despite the heavy, wet heat, it’s better to be covered up.

  Here is where the two sides of Kesagami meet, when we—squawking and complaining and loud, from our bitching voices to the sound of fabric on fabric as we swat uselessly at the mosquitoes—enter the deep forest. At first, we don’t notice the change around us. Pea leads us back to the hollow, and most of us concentrate on avoiding the sucking wet beneath our feet. But as the walking gets harder, our complaining diminishes, and we grow quieter and quieter. I start to focus on my breath: the humidity fills my nostrils, pushes its way down the back of my throat and into my gut. The heat is so acute—amplified by the heavy clothes we’re wearing and the way our cuffs are tucked into socks and gloves—that sweat pools between my breasts and starts to run down the insides of my thighs. I can see the way my co-workers’ shoulders are sagging already, and we’re not even at our destination.

  Everything around me is so goddamn vivid. The moss is a bright, light lime green I’ve never seen before, plush and foreign to the touch; the spruce needles, when broken underfoot, let off a scent that I’ve never smelled, dry and sweet and pungent; everything, the detritus, the leaves, the brush, the path, is all new and silent and yet not silent, all of it painted from a palette of rich, rare browns and greens, colours that I think I’ve seen but now realize I never have.

  As I take another step, my foot sinks into the earth with a luscious squelching sound. The ground is spongy, and my running shoe is soaked through. As I pull my foot free, I howl, and the other girls join in, high-stepping as best they can, but knowing that they’re fighting a losing battle: we’re in a territory that isn’t even remotely ours—spruce territory, fen underfoot, the land of muskeg.

  The term muskeg comes from the Cree word maskek. It can be defined as a “grassy bog”—an accurate umbrella term for the eclectic series of landforms that make up this stuff that’s halfway between earth and water. It’s unstable land, with living plants on top, and plant waste below. Muskeg seems to defy precise definition. It looks crazy and mixed up, composed of mazes of tamarack and spruce, clumps of peat, sedges; the terrain is alien, hilly and rolling and filled with depressions and ditches and pools of motionless water. Muskeg is made up mostly of sphagnum moss, a plant genus that’s ninety million years old. Sphagnum grows slowly over decades. Once it reaches critical mass, it controls water flow in and out of its habitat: it can even restrict water to other plants, choking out the competition. Not only that, but the moss acidifies its
environment. It cuts off oxygen. The air starts to smell like putrefaction, thanks to the “swamp gas.” The environment becomes solely sphagnum—master of its domain.

  Canada has more than one million square kilometres of muskeg, with the densest tract of it—as broad as five hundred kilometres in some places—spanning from around the tip of James Bay up across the country, northwest, ending at Great Bear Lake, in the Northwest Territories. Where we are, the muskeg is patchy, not quite all encompassing, which means we can kind of walk through it, but not gracefully. By the time we get to our destination, we’re practically oozing our way through the bog, grumpy, hot, damp-footed. And a little bit quieter, a little bit more reverent, in the face of the forest we don’t see all that often.

  Kev has already been here with his chainsaw, and I see the fruits of his labours: neatly sliced hunks of raw black spruce, perfectly cut rounds. We form a chain, one girl to every five feet, and eye one another with determination. Now is not the time to moan or joke. This is a delicate procedure in which a flinch can result in a log to the face, and as comical and slapstick as that sounds, no one wants to be picking splinters out of their lips. It takes both arms to cradle one chunk of spruce, and our knees bend a little with the weight, our feet sinking into the muck. Pea stands nearest to the pile of wood, and throws the first piece to Aubrey, who throws it to Alex, who throws it to me. I throw it to Tiff, and she loads it into the wheelbarrow.

  We’re silent, concentrating on keeping the rhythm—the soft sucking of our feet in the ground when we catch the wood, the rough sound of bark on fabric as we pivot at the waist and throw it on. I imagine it’s hypnotic to see us pivot and return, silent as sentinels, but in reality it’s one of the hardest chores I’ve ever done, in one of the most compelling and unsettling places I’ve ever seen. We’re part of this now, our limbs stretching out for each log, our feet planted on the ground. We turn and catch, turn and catch, our arms reaching for one another, and I realize that even when we leave, part of us will stay here. Part of us will have taken root.