by Anna Maxymiw
THE SPARK
A week before leaving, and I’m finally not scared to swim alone. I’ve learned how to be by myself, with the background sounds and smells of the forest and the shoreline and my own imagination to fill in the gaps. After so many days of cheek-to-jowl living, it’s a rare pleasure to be able to dart away for a little bit to wash the heat off my skin. It feels good to be fine with aloneness. There’s even something reassuring about the trees: they stand as quiet witnesses as I strip down to my bathing suit and spend a moment with my eyes closed and my face to the sun. How long will it be before I feel this breeze on my skin again, before I feel this sand below my feet? The thought of leaving and maybe never returning to see this beach, this lake, this place is suddenly too much for me, and I walk into the water as quickly as I can manage with the rocks underfoot. As soon as it’s deep enough, I bob under, graceless and desperate for some relief, to hide my face and wet the corners of my eyes before the tears can.
Because of the high midday sun, the water is the colour of old blood, rusty, prismatic in rich browns and deep reds, glittering with minerals from the sand I’ve dredged up. It means I can’t see if there’s anything lurking alongside me. But I don’t care today. I’ve learned to abandon some of that baseless fear. Yes, be scared—know that there are pike in the lake, bears in the woods, things that could harm you, might eventually want to hurt you—but don’t be afraid. Don’t let your biases and irrationalities take over and ruin what could be the best summer of your life.
As much as I’ve dreamed about going back to the “real world,” I’m not quite ready. I’m not sure any of us really are. We’re young and dumb and think everything revolves around us and our selfish, temperamental needs and flash-bang mood swings, so it’s odd to think that the rest of the world went on without us for the past sixty-some-odd days. That beyond the lodge, in the land of internet and phone lines and roads and transit, the people we love have gone about their days; that we weren’t integral to any particular aspect of a life; that things have continued and changed without us. Up here, in our state of disconnect, we’ve changed in a different way. We’ve sped up and slowed down at the same time—I’ve gone from buses to boats, from cellphone to crow caw. For the past two months, I haven’t worried about school or picking courses for the second year of my master’s degree, or writing, or working on my thesis. I’ve suspended the too-cerebral part of my brain; I’ve given into the id and listened to my body, not my anxiety. I’m leaner, meaner, ruder. I’ve learned new swear words and idioms and sayings; I have a new set of knowledge, too, about bear scat and bird calls and boat bottoms. I used to only identify myself as a city girl. Now I know I can exist beyond boundaries marked by telephone poles and highways and subway lines.
I drag my hands through the water, creating that swirl, the pike’s surfacing sign of infinity. Around the point, I can hear the dockhands talking to one another, the occasional gem-clear swear word rising above the rest. It seems silly to think that one summer can affect a person so much, that something new is now etched on the innermost parts of me. I wonder if I’m going to be a split woman from now on. That the city life that I always thought was the only life for me will have some doubts pinned to it. I’ll remember that I came north with a naive idea of how a summer of hard work could be, and I will remember that I proved myself. That my mettle was more formed and more ferocious than I could have ever known. That I could hold my own with the bullies and the braggarts; that I learned how to make female friends and appreciate all facets of their complicated, gorgeous personalities. From this point on, I’m a woman of two souls. I’ll value the rough white-sand beaches as much as a hot, gum-speckled sidewalk, the chitter of the grey jay as much as the laughter of women lined up smoking outside of a Toronto bar, the people I’ve worked alongside as much as the friends I’ve known my whole life. I wonder if there will be mornings I wake up in Toronto, years later, and stop dead in my tracks as soon as I open my window because I will smell Kesagami on the air, if there will be moments when I hear a song on a store’s stereo system that sounds vaguely like a bird call, and I’ll cock my head and wonder for a second. The North has pushed its way into me, onto me, and I’ll never be able to shake it.
* * *
For our final task, Henry decides that the staff has to make new boat rails. With the summer almost done, we feel as if our workload should be lightening. No such luck. It’s not just about nailing new pieces of wood in place; to set up the new rails, we’re going to have to fill new gabion baskets, large mesh cubes that get loaded up with rocks and are set in place along the shore to prevent erosion. After the gabions are down, the rail can be installed overtop. In order to do both of these things, to get the rails in place exactly where Henry wants them, the entire shoreline is going to have to be moved back about four feet.
When Henry rounds us all up and tells us, I don’t quite understand the gravity of what we’re going to have to do, but some of the veterans do, and I can see through their dropped jaws and the wideness of their eyes that what’s just been asked of us is something more than the usual afternoon chores of staining cabin decks or hauling wood or dropping buoys. There’s something more serious about this one.
Four feet. This short distance means digging through four solid feet of compacted, untouched northern soil. This means hauling thousands of pounds of rock—from the shallows, the shore, and the islands—to fill the baskets. This means cutting down tall spruce trees and peeling the trunks, nailing them up in place as new, dangerously slick rails. And all we have are a few rusty shovels, one rogue pickaxe, and seven days in which to complete the task.
It doesn’t help that it’s so hot it feels as if we’re moving through gelatin. The heat is so big and thick that we start every morning in a sweat, being pried out of sleep in a damp panic, emerging from fever dreams so vivid we can’t tell if we’re awake or still sleeping. It’s so hot that we’ve started wearing our bathing suits under our clothes, so that whenever we have a moment, we can run out into the shallows and sit cross-legged in the water, up to our necks. It’s so hot that we snap at one another, our patience wearing thin under the grinding sun and the list of work that stretches in front of us.
It also doesn’t help that the final guests at the lodge are officials from the Moose Cree First Nation, people who are technically our bosses, with the transition virtually complete. There are about twenty in their group, which has two ramifications. First, we have to be on our best behaviour because it’s like we have twenty managers looking over our shoulders; Henry is even more anal-retentive than ever, making us rewash tables and polish cutlery and refill syrup bottles when we should be focused on winding down for the summer. Second, we can’t focus on getting closing-up chores started because we have such a large group in camp—they’re flying out on the morning of the last day, leaving us barely any buffer until we, too, have to head home.
“Gonna be a shitshow,” Jack mutters when Henry tells us of the plan to have such a big group in camp until the last possible moment. “A real fucking shitshow.”
That afternoon, every member of staff on shore—dockhands, housekeepers, guides who aren’t out on the lake—lines up along the water’s edge. We’re dressed in our sloppiest clothes, caps pulled low on our heads. The sun is as fat as I’ve ever seen it, ripe as a large, hard fruit, birch-white and searing, and I can feel the back of my neck prickling with heat, see silver spots swim across my eyes when I try to turn my head too quickly. There are several rusty shovels and the one wobbly pickaxe strewn on the ground, and someone has spray-painted a red line four feet back from where the shore currently ends: this is our finish line, the place we need to shovel our way to.
There’s no ceremony. We pick up the tools and we start. It goes like this: someone uses the shovel, and someone is in charge of the wheelbarrow. The digger fills the barrow; the barrow-driver wheels the dirt over to the side of the shore, dumps it as far away as possible, and comes back for another load. I thank God we’re
not on the Canadian Shield, because then this inane task would be near impossible. Still, the soil we’re gnawing into is difficult: it’s heavy and almost clay-like, filled with rocks and roots, and garbage that was left behind by the years of guests and construction before us and compacted back into the earth like awful fossils.
We’re a chain gang, driven on by the metronome of the thunk-ca-chunk of our shovels hitting the hard dirt, prying a load loose, dumping it into the drum-like belly of the barrow, going back for seconds, thirds, fourths, until it feels like our arms are going to fall off, like our biceps are burning and our heads are hazy-stupid and we’re about to fall over, swooning into the dirt.
At some point, I end up next to Jack, who has somehow become my wheelbarrow partner as I clumsily manipulate a shovel. I look around for Tiffany, not wanting to upset the status quo, but she’s gone inside to run the dinner service, so I’m stuck with him.
I nod to the pickaxe at his side.
“Can I use that?” Already, I’m kicking myself for feeling the need to ask him for permission.
Jack looks at it. “Oh, Jesus,” he says, shaking his head, picking it up as if he’s trying to get it out of reach. “No. Absolutely not.”
I wrest it from his hands anyway. If I’m going to be working my ass off, I might as well have fun, and the pickaxe looks like it could be pretty entertaining.
I swing, and hit my shin.
Jack howls with laughter. “You idiot.”
I’ve managed to knock myself above my protective work boot. The bruise is going to last for days. I resist putting the pickaxe right through his head.
There must be something desperate in my face, because he softens. “All right, here, look. You have to do it like this.” He swings the pickaxe and slices through a ream of soil, using his weight like a lever. He makes it look easy, seamless, as if his arms aren’t about to fall off, as if there isn’t sweat tracing its way from his hairline down his spine. I scratch at the damp waistband of my pants, fan my shirt away from my body to try to get some air next to my skin. Jack straightens up and wipes the back of his hand across his forehead.
“Give it,” I say, pulling the tool to my chest. While I’m not as apt as him, my second try isn’t so clumsy, and I knock some dirt onto the ground. He shovels it into our waiting wheelbarrow. I do it again, and feel powerful, feel my brain start to let go and give in to my body and its ability to work. The hiss and chunk of the pickaxe’s movement makes a slow song, and my heart starts to fall in line with the tempo.
And that’s how it goes. We all become a soft rhythm of swinging, hitting, swinging, the clank of the shovel against the wheelbarrow’s sides, the click-clack of the barrow’s wheels over shoreline pebbles, the occasional muffled swear word, the sporadic yelp of a tired joke. As the day wears on, the sun bears down on the backs of our necks and the tops of our heads. The boats throw long, cool shadows; when we need a break, we squat beneath the hulls. I swirl my baseball cap in the shallows, avoiding the algae and dead-bug bodies, and slap the hat back on my head, feeling the lake water trickle down the back of my neck, joining the trails of sweat. As the sun gets stronger, our vocalizations become fewer, until finally we’re working in hot silence, conserving all possible energy for the up-and-down and back-and-forth motions of digging and dumping and digging and dumping. Our break times are spent staring blankly at each other, stunned from the heat and the exhaustion. Drink water, Jack and Pea urge, and we take frequent Thermos breaks, curling up in the shade.
Each inch of dirt becomes a ribbon of accomplishment. Each barrow is a medal we wish we could wear on our chests. Really, we don’t have to finish the new shoreline. We could, theoretically, tell Henry to shove it. We could tell him that next year’s staff can finish what we’ve started if he wants new boat rails so badly. That it’s a stupid task to do in the final few days before we leave, and that there’s so much else to get done. But we have pride.
At one point, Connor unearths a flat piece of rock and dusts it off. Without saying anything, he slams it into the ground so it’s sitting up like a tombstone. Pea takes a piece of charcoal and writes R.I.P. Henry on it. It stays on the shoreline for the rest of the day. If Henry sees it, he doesn’t say anything.
* * *
After the digging, there are the rocks to contend with. Jack and Pea do some rudimentary calculations and figure out we’re going to apparently need about thirty thousand pounds of stones to fill the gabion baskets that now sit in position, empty and with tops open wide like hungry maws.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Syd hurls a pebble in their direction.
“I didn’t choose to do this!”
“What the fuck, man—”
And so goes the unceremonious beginning to the new stage of our labour—hauling. But this is no ordinary rock collection, not like the times all the housekeepers would join hands and walk through the shallows off the main beach, sweeping their legs back and forth to feel for rocks to pry out of the silt and bring back to shore to line the lodge paths. This is not gentle. This is, instead, like every wood and rock haul from the entire summer is compressed into one awful task—with a time limit.
We walk up and down the shore, starting with the smaller rocks that are easy to grab, palm-sized and the perfect heft. When we run out of those—which happens too quickly—we move on to the larger stones. We squat, shoving gloved fingers into silt, prying rocks out of shore mud. We crawl under boats. We crawl under branches. We crawl into the cusp of the forest. We use sticks and shovels and other rocks as tools, anything and everything to get the stones out of the ground and into the gabions. When we run out of rocks on shore, we slide off the end of the dock and walk, knee-deep, through the water, wrestling stones out of the mud, getting the hems of our shorts and shirts wet as we dig. When we get a rock loose, we throw it into a wheelbarrow Kev is holding steady on the dock. As we’re doing that, the other guys focus on the boulders that have probably sat undisturbed in the ground for decades, centuries, maybe longer. Jack and Pea build a makeshift pallet out of four old wooden boards, and the guides and dockhands work to roll each big stubborn rock onto the pallet and struggle to carry it to the baskets.
Suddenly, there’s a scream, and then a squawk, and then a splash. I whip my head around to look. Kev—and the wheelbarrow—have disappeared off the dock. Alex and Alisa are standing knee deep in the water, mouths open, hands to their faces. There’s a moment when I’m frozen with cold fear.
“Oh, what the fuck, Rook!” Jack’s voice carries, sharp and cutting.
I stand up from where I’ve been crouched under the boats, dart up to the concrete part of the shore, and once I get a better vantage point, I can see what’s happened. Kevin, who was trying to wheel the barrow up the narrowest part of the dock, the little wooden gangway plank, lost his balance and took a header into the shallows—along with the load of rocks. He’s fine, thank God, standing up with both pointer fingers in the air to shrug off his fuck-up, showing off the scrape on his inner thigh, but it’s another reminder of how quickly things can turn. We throw ourselves into our tasks without thinking about the ramifications, and so far, we’ve been lucky that no one has suffered a major injury.
“Better pick up those goddamn rocks,” Jack continues, gesturing to the water where the wheelbarrow is partly submerged, its belly red and rusty in the sun, and that’s what happens. The housekeepers congregate around Kev, look at his bleeding skin. We make sure he’s actually fine, and then lift the barrow out of the water, put the rocks back in, and keep trucking. As always. As per usual. As we’ve done the entire summer.
We gather rocks for two days straight. We work until the sun falls like a lure toward the hungry line of the horizon. We work until the backs of our necks are on fire, until the tips of our ears are dangerously sunburned and our hair is matted to our foreheads. Until we stink through the green of our shirts and our palms are blistered and flaking and our muscles screaming from lifting huge chunks of granite. Most important, we
work until we finish the goddamn job, all of us staring at the new shoreline lined with new gabion baskets sitting four feet back as we assess what we’ve done. We stand in a row, dead quiet and breathing strong and fast through our noses, our hands resting on the tops of our shovels and pickax and the lips of our wheelbarrows, our bodies silhouetted against the gloaming sky, and we wonder if this will last until next year or the year after that or even the year after that, if what we’ve done is even a little bit permanent, or if, as soon as we’ve left, the land will rise up and swallow our work, rip apart our feeble attempts at changing what has been here for eons.
But for the moment, that doesn’t matter. We came and saw and changed. We carved ourselves into the landscape, like writing our names on the ceilings of our cabins—and when new staff come, far in the future, Henry can tell them that we did that, that we worked together in a choreographed chain, dipping and bowing, arms raised, arms lowered, that this is what that dance built.
* * *
Later that night, we all go swimming for the last time. It’s less for pleasure and more for necessity, because when we scythe into the lake, clutching bars of soap, the water behind our bodies is feathered with oily trails. When we bob up from submersion, the border on our skin where the dirt used to be is clear and sharp.
This is a quiet swim. We’re so tired we can’t find it in ourselves to get our tongues working. Every muscle, every body part wants to be still and silent, and so we sit up to our necks and let the water lap against our collarbones. Minute by minute, the sweat and grease and smoke washes off of our bodies; hot skin becomes temperate, less blistered from the days of sun; sore fingers and palms and arches of feet are cooled, and we stretch underwater and feel the meat of our legs and biceps lengthen and untangle. We let the lake take the bad from us and carry it away toward the horizon.