The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  NO PERSON IS AN ISLAND

  Mum had sent me frantic messages over Facebook and to my email to say she had had a really bad dream about something happening to me and to ring her. My phone had been dead for a week at the bottom of my bag so I had not seen Mum ring. I phoned her up and she had a fit, first begging me to come home if I was going to keep on pulling stupid stunts like that, disappearing without contact, then when I promised I would not again she burst into tears.

  My only child, my daughter.

  But Mum on the phone is just a little voice, so small and so far away. She is standing on a dot and the balloon gets bigger and worse still Dad on the phone, standing on another dot, sounding tired and saying why do you have to do things like this to your mother, you know what her nerves are like. Tired in a way I have heard many times before. Tired, like you are always so far away, always have been so distant, we have always been stood on these dots getting further and further away from each other.

  This is only the second time I have heard their voices since I left. I should call home more. But she is crying on the phone and yes it hurts a little, I miss you but you know I’d never say, but also it feels good; she is crying but she can’t bring me home. The power of their summons has nothing on me now. I am becoming my own person apart from them.

  Before me her name was Jennifer and she worked as a secretary and before that she was as young as I am and she had ideas about who Jennifer was and what Jennifer wanted and what she wanted was to go to Italy and learn Italian and be an au pair and before that still she was a child, a little girl called Jennifer who wanted to be a ballerina, like she later wanted me to be. She had a whole self before me and I will never get to that part of her. She is a person with a name: Jennifer. Jennifer and Brian. Not just Mum and Dad. But I have always been Erin first and daughter after. Mum, Dad, Erin. Why is it we do that?

  It is a burden to have a mother that wants so much of you, but it must also be a burden to be an overly attached mother, like why can’t I just shake the daughter from me? You grew out of me but you never really grew away?

  I am reminding you that your name is Jennifer.

  Daughter; my parasitic twin.

  THERE IS NO WORD FOR ANIMAL IN THE DAKOTA LANGUAGE

  There is the bigger picture and then there is sex. Having sex grounds you and brings you out of the bigger picture. It makes life more livable and less giant and incomprehensible. It makes sense why people settle down and have babies really. It makes sense to push an idea of love and stability to stop people from feeling so rebellious and righteous and born to save the world. I suppose that was why Thoreau and the Unabomber and all those guys took oaths of abstinence. Plus it was a handy way to illegitimise women.

  Because when it suited men historically, sexuality was a thing that women had and they were above. In Greek times and in the story of the Fall, we were not allowed a say in decision-making because we were completely and utterly ruled by our sexy, lusty desires. Men could do without sex and did not see the point in dirtying themselves in such a way, and could therefore keep rational heads on their unsexy bodies.

  What must have happened in recent times is that the male genome mutated like a grasshopper driven into frenzy and meta-morphosing into a locust for lack of food. And now the clitoris is just a relic of that bygone time when women needed pleasure from sex to encourage procreation. Like the appendix is a relic of a time when people ate grass. No one eats grass any more.

  Sam feels heavy to lie with. He feels anchored. He feels like he bends space–time and the groove of it pulls at me. He smells like dirt, in a good way, like his skin is smoothed over with clay. We were tentative and very precious, a bit clumsy also, like children holding tiny mice. He has a freckle on his right eyelid. It is in the crease of his eyelid so that you can only see it when he is sleeping. When I pointed it out to him he said, ‘Yeah, I know, my ex used to like that one,’ and this made me inconceivably sad for just a millisecond.

  We started on the big talks that often come post-sex. The ones you use to excavate the depths of others. I said I did not know why everyone did not take themselves off to new places, that it didn’t even cost much if you did it right.

  ‘If everyone did it then the world would grind to a halt.’

  ‘Well, would that be so bad a thing?’

  ‘If everyone did it how would any culture preserve itself?’

  I thought of Naaja then, walking herself into the big tundra all alone, waif-small on the grey iced turf, a burden on her tiny shoulders, my own so easily thrown off and abandoned.

  And why does she not throw hers down?

  ‘What about places you care about? Who would look after places? Most Indians were nomadic once, but now they sit around in poverty fighting oil and mineral prospectors off land they see as sacred.’

  That one stumped me. A pang of guilt for the small cold ring of protesters gathered around the would-be drill site back home.

  ‘I just think if there’s something you don’t like about something you shouldn’t go off in search of something better just for yourself. You should fix it, take what you have and make it better for everyone. Things don’t change just by wanting them too,’ he said.

  But you don’t understand that is what I am doing.

  We lay awake talking and he started to tell me more and more, peeling away each layer of his skin, and in a way I wish he had not because now I have seen his innards I am going to end up really liking him. And that really will not do when I have to leave soon. He told me the story of the totem pole.

  ‘On the bottom there is an orca, our family crest. It brings luck and will come to the help of the family when any of them are vulnerable. From my nana’s house you can see an ocean cove and sometimes when they are near, in the shallows herding fish to eat, you can see the orcas arching out of the water, you can go out in a boat to meet them. Underneath it is the salmon carving, the symbol of the reservation of Salmon Water because all of the family crests are water animals in Salmon Water.

  ‘We also have a guardian animal. This is the carving above that looks a bit like a dog but more like a bird with ears, I think. The wolf is a really charged animal and helps with sickness. Not so much physical sickness, that’s more the orca, this one stands for the sickness of our family’s heart, or sadness.

  ‘And the otter is above the wolf. The otter is thought of as being mischievous and bright, happy and curious. The otter is my ma as a child because she was always sunny and laughing and hiding herself away so that my nana would get scared but my grandpa never did because he knew she would always let herself be found in the end. The otter is from the times they had before she got taken away.

  ‘And then the thunderbird stands above them. The thunderbird is a commemoration of bad things that are acknowledged but best not talked about. It brings thunder by beating its wings and lightning when it blinks its eyes, and it is a killer of the orca. We show reverence towards it. It broke apart our family.

  ‘My aunt and uncle carved and painted it from a cedar my grandpa had picked out years before he died, because he knew she would let herself be found again one day even though they hadn’t seen her since she was three years old. The first time they met again was when she was twenty-six, they held a potlatch feast and gave her the totem, and my ma cried herself to sleep for days in secret.

  ‘She couldn’t move back to the reservation and neither could dad to his. They didn’t have the identity cards to prove their indigenous heritage, because when they were both children they were taken from their parents by Indian agents and put into adoption with white families. Dad only had his two sisters left when they repatriated. Before he got taken he was being brought up by his grandparents because his dad left and his ma died, and they are dead now too.’

  He stopped talking but in a deliberate kind of way, like he was done now and that was all there was to say of the matter. I suppose he has rationalised it so well as to be able to talk it through, seeing as that is what his pare
nts do, he says, with their speaking jobs. For the first time there was not a laughing cadence through every sentence he spoke.

  This made me sad for two reasons; because it was sad in itself, and because by telling me he was signifying that he expected never to see me again after my short stay and it was therefore entirely reasonable to open up so soon about something so personal.

  He said he did not know how to feel about his white grandparents. That his mum’s adoptive parents were paid to take her in and his dad’s saw themselves as martyrs for saving him from the reservation where his real parents killed themselves with alcohol.

  He also at some point said something really specific that I have not ever thought about before. He says they are being disappeared, but no other culture gets worn on so many T-shirts. He was being light-hearted, so for something to say I thought it would be okay to bring up Rochelle and all the things she had said about her white boyfriend’s nicknames for her. I laughed and said it was kind of funny, and surely that is all you could find it now looking over it because it was so stupid.

  ‘How did you manage to get into a reservation with a camera anyway?’

  I had to tell him the whole story because I suppose that was the only credible way I was getting in there uninvited. He listened with a frown on his face. When I had finished he made me want to cry again by telling me a girl on his course at university had been researching murdered indigenous women who disappeared off the highways in Canada for her dissertation, and was murdered by two white men before she finished it. I just mumbled that it could have been a lot worse, then.

  He looked redder with the light from the window on him and my own arms looked yellow. I listened to the sound of my voice as if on playback and wondered how I had ever got there, in that unfamiliar room, feeling suddenly blank and inert.

  MONOCULTURES OF THE SPIRIT

  Agitations. Larus desperately in contact. Reiterated points: you’ve been stayed put a while, you’re planning on leaving soon, right, you need to keep well ahead of winter, don’t forget what you set out to do.

  ‘I haven’t. I’m still working on it here.’

  ‘Do you not think you might be making excuses to stay put?’

  ‘No, I think—’

  ‘Just have a think about it. I’m surprised at you is all. Didn’t think you of all people would get distracted by a boy.’

  Sam could tell I was irritated afterwards. He asked what Larus had said to make me so sour. I did not tell him in case he thought I had taken it to heart. He kept asking questions about Larus, like how much we talk, how old he was, things that irritated me more with their connotations.

  ‘I just wonder why a man old enough to be your dad, who begot five children and who probably thinks we we’re all “children of Earth” and that age sets no boundaries for kindred spirits, is interested in your “feminist project”.’

  ‘I really don’t think that it’s any of your business.’

  I wanted to make it sting like I did not care what he thought. For a second he looked like a cat I had splashed with water for no reason other than to see it squirm. I should not have. It was my fault for making Larus sound worse than he is when I described him just for comedic effect, really.

  Ah, the burden of being a feeling woman! But I am not about to let myself fulfil the very expectations I set out to subvert. I am fully committed to the project and ready to get on with it because winter is catching me up.

  I told Sam I needed to leave because his friend Ollie had mentioned driving to Dawson Creek via Prince George to make some deliveries in his pick-up, and it would be stupid to miss the lift. He said it was an indirect route to Dawson and that I could hitch later on or he would drive me. When I said I hadn’t been doing much on the documentary and I had to get on with things, he said, ‘Oh, of course, for art’s sake’ sarcastically.

  That was just one of his momentary lapses, he was soon right back to his jovial self, only being at the same time distant with me. In the morning I could not even tell if we was mad or not.

  ‘Well, I’m going, then.’

  ‘Have a nice trip, thanks for stopping by.’

  ‘It’s been really nice to meet you.’

  ‘Yeah, same with you.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to at least pretend to be sad that I’m going?’

  ‘What, try to stop you? That wouldn’t be very feminist of me.’ It was a deliberate game of trying to be the most unaffected. So I shrugged and shouted bye to Berry and turned down the path towards Ollie waiting in his pick-up.

  TOP TIPS ON HOW TO BE A TRAVEL WRITER

  The highway was empty, and our headlights pooled out ahead. For miles we would see other vehicles in the opposite lane only, and only sporadically. A hump in the road appeared, so that we could not see the behind of it as we rose and trees spilled on either side to its edge. Mounting the rise, we saw a large dark shape up ahead, maybe twenty metres. Ollie slowed the van and as our light poured up and over it we saw it was a small black bear. It stopped in the opposite lane, one paw raised limply, and looked at us. Ollie stopped the van to let it pass.

  The bear stayed put, lowering its head like a dog in submission. It was small and misplaced against the wide cut of the road. It tapped the ground with its paw, hesitant, testing the cool density of the concrete, warily reading the dead-eyed, no-legged creature that stood still before it. Then it bunched itself up and bounded in front of the van, its four legs gambolling, and we watched as its rump shimmied off into the trees.

  From outside Edmonton we had rejoined the Yellowhead Highway, a branch of the Trans-Canada Highway system which veers north-west, breaking off from the due westerly route and connecting Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta with British Columbia. The Yellowhead is named for Tête Jaune, aka Pierre Bostonais, an Iroquois-Metis fur trader and explorer who in turn got his name from his blond hair, homage to his part-white origin.

  In 1819 Tête Jaune led a brigade of the Hudson Bay Company through a pass in the Rocky Mountains, a piper with a ditty of bounties and a whole band of rats to follow. The pass now bears his name and from this the highway takes its.

  I was back on the road and it felt good to see the horizon reeling in, all the temporary things staying just where I left them. The feeling that had kept me still the past few weeks was less of a captivation and more like a rabbit trap, wire noose on my leg. It was not aligned with my purpose.

  And what is that exactly?

  From Edmonton the highway slides though the Rockies of Jasper National Park fast and sure like a river. The weather was sullen, and low clouds sulked around the grey and shadowed mountains, brooding thunder. Pine smells crept osmotically through the damp air and the open windows. Breaks in the cloud cover would stream down sun in spotlights, directing me further and further on the unfolding road, enchanting, pied-pipering me like Tête Jaune with all his little rodents. Big eagles perched on telephone wires, silhouetted in the low light.

  We arrived at our halfway point after Ollie had made a stop for his delivery.

  ‘This is Prince George, where we leave the Yellowhead Highway and strike out north to Dawson. Yellowhead continues right the way into the Pacific, then by ferry onto Graham Island.’

  The Hudson Bay Company drew a straight line right across Canada, not even conceding to the ocean. A branding of ownership. The other side of Prince George is nicknamed the Highway of Tears for all the unsolved murders. Sam said between Prince George and Prince Rupert at the coast, from the sixties until the last one a few months ago, something like forty have happened. Women picked up off the side of the road. Almost exclusively indigenous women.

  Ollie said, ‘Bet ya glad you don’t have to hitch that highway.’

  Could I ever have hitched that highway? I mean, could it have been the same highway for me as for them?

  The next day we left the Yellowhead exactly where the designated murder zone started. Yellowhead spilled out, continuing Tête Jaune’s trail through the Rockies, stalking a century and
a half behind him. Him stone cold dead and unaware of his namesake (and yes, well, at least he will be remembered for ever) or of the legacy of highways for indigenous women who have no namesake, only anonymous tears.

  And along such a highway by 1 p.m. we had reached Dawson Creek. Ollie left me at Mile 0 of the Alaskan Highway, where Chris McCandless took a picture with the big road sign, extending 1,523 miles, all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska. Tomorrow just past Fort Nelson I will enter the Yukon, the crazy Wild North and the place that cast a spell on so many Mountain Men, where the ghosts of old miners made Kerouac wonder. The Klondike, where Jack London the wolf-man found himself.

  GOLD FEVER IN THE YUKON

  From Fort Nelson I got completely stuck. Two full days to get a ride. I was not the only one trying to hitch and I had stayed down-road from the others in a long, sparse queue. There was a woman in first place who looked to be in her late twenties when I passed her in the morning after staying overnight in a hostel near the road. I wanted to interview her but she was not very approachable. She had been waiting for a lift for three whole days. Then I passed a guy who was maybe in his mid-thirties, scruffy with long, lank hair. He said he had been waiting two days but he felt good about today and he wished me luck. I watched him stand and wave and jab out his thumb, jumping up and down, and wondered how he thought he would ever get a lift acting like a crazy person.

  The girl got a lift on my first day. I only counted fifty-four cars that day. There was one woman who gave me a look that was not just judgemental, it had, considering her strangeness to me, a terrible anger to it like I had not seen before. I gave her the finger and the woman gave an even angrier honk.

  I felt bored and restless but of course there would be times when I did not get picked up right away. I imagine the guy has had a much less fluid journey from wherever he came from. The next day, monotonous, feeling quite hopeless, I set myself down again at a distance from the guy, who looked like he might have stayed out all night. Then a really bad thing happened. A lorry pulled in in front of where I was sat on my bag. The window rolled down and the guy inside said, ‘Hey, I can take you to Whitehorse.’ I could see down the road that the thirty-something guy was stood with his arms out above his head imploringly.