Home Free

by Marni Jackson

  “After what seemed like a few hours of climbing we came to a high plateau, with a wooden platform. I looked out onto the plain and saw grass, bushes, and wind-blown trees. Rising up ahead of us stood the peak of Gros Morne. On the platform was a sign:

  Gros Morne, at 803 meters above sea-level, is the second highest mountain in Newfoundland. Up above the tree-line, we are now in an exposed environment resembling the Arctic tundra. This barren land is home to wildlife such as Rock Ptarmigans, Arctic Hares and Woodland Caribou. The vegetation is fragile and the soil is prone to wind erosion. The trail to the summit will take you up a steep boulder gully. You will pass through several distinct ecological zones, each a different habitat for plants and animals.

  “The plaque gave a number of advisories.‘Be prepared for rapid changes in temperature, lack of water, high wind and blistering sun.’

  “There was also something along the lines of ‘Please stay on the trail at all times. The vegetation is old and fragile. The trail is steep and the gully can be dangerous to descend as there is a risk of dislodging boulders onto climbers below.’

  “Also, most importantly, ‘The mountain is closed until the beginning of July.’We were there in April,with patches of snow still on the ground.

  “For some reason, this didn’t faze us. I saw it as just another piece of paperwork, like one of those ‘Do you accept the following terms’ contracts required to do most things. From where we stood, the peak appeared to be quite close. It was grey in colour and round in shape—almost friendly-looking.

  “I decided that these warnings were intended for other less wilderness-savvy individuals—people with fanny packs and carbon fibre walking sticks. Gros Morne was a day hike. Besides, we still had a good three or four hours of sunlight left, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  “As we stood in front of the sign, I remember feeling a spark of hesitation. It was a subtle but familiar sensation. It begins with a potentially risky situation and a decision to be made. Is the lake too windy to paddle across? Is this set of rapids too big to run safely? On day 15, is it wise to eat the pre-cooked Mexican Beef with a little hole in the package?

  “From the platform we could see the trail winding through the alpine field above us,past a few small lakes and up to the base of the peak. From there, a series of cairns pointed to a rock gully that appeared to be the most direct route up—except that the middle of the gully was filled with snow. It was a case of either slogging through the snow or climbing up the bare but rocky edges of the gully.

  “I considered the challenges of walking on jagged rocks blanketed by snow, in sneakers. Prime ankle-spraining territory. I had visions of avalanches, the kind that begin as a tiny clump of displaced snow.

  “All of a sudden, we were no longer on a nature walk; we were two people on a mountain. Only half an hour had passed and we were in a totally different environment. The sun was brighter. The air felt dryer. We were leaving the earth behind and entering the realm of the sky.

  “As we climbed,we encountered bigger rocks, in the breadbox-to-blue-box size range. The grade became steeper, and soon we had to use our hands. At first it was fun and easy, like climbing a tree. From time to time a clump of rocks shifted under my weight, but for the most part things seemed stable.

  “We were now officially high up. From this perspective, the slope below us looked much steeper, and the trail we had just taken through the fields looked like a piece of string connecting the lakes. The sight gave me another shock of doubt.

  “Things were getting a little more serious, a little more technical. Going up, the way became narrower, and it wasn’t clear how far we would have to climb. Going down, the footing was unstable. Either way was bad.

  “I tested the sliding effect again with a careful step. The rocks gave way under my foot, and I watched them tumble down, down, down. This is how landslides are made, I thought. I was afraid. Someone had just turned up the voltage knob in my brain.

  “We turned and climbed on in silence, with slow and careful steps. I took account of our situation. As far as I could tell,we were the only people on this mountain. And to make it worse, nobody knew we were up here. Nobody was expecting us home for dinner.

  “I imagined the newspaper headlines: ‘Two Hitchhikers Found Stranded on Gros Morne.’ Or worse: ‘Tourists Ignore Posted Warnings and Meet Their Doom.’ I considered our chances of survival if we became stranded on this slope. We were probably visible from the plateau below—but who would be coming up here at this point in the afternoon,when the park was closed?

  “Spending the night on the peak without a tent or sleeping bags was not a great option. The idea of a rescue helicopter was embarrassing but comforting. I watched the smaller rocks roll down behind Julia’s heels as she climbed and imagined the whole bed of rocks rolling downhill like a conveyor belt.

  “This was officially dangerous, but there was no other way out. Even sitting and waiting would be dangerous if it went on long enough.

  “We began to discuss the situation in a pretend casual tone.

  “‘Are you okay?’

  “‘Yeah. You?’

  “‘This way? What do you think?’

  “‘Not very good.’

  “‘Let’s just keep going then.’

  “‘Okay.’

  “The slope had changed from a half-pipe to a more convex, rounded surface. I felt like an ant climbing the side of an exercise ball. We finally reached a point when we couldn’t find any footing secure enough to keep going up. I began to think about death. This wouldn’t be a bad way to die, I thought, but it would be embarrassing.

  “Maybe there would be a region of the afterworld for people who died doing stupid extreme things. We would be surrounded by base jumpers, rocketmen, and dirt-bikers. I didn’t want to join this club for eternity.

  “We clung to the mountain and considered our situation. The only way out was up. We took our chances and made our way in a diagonal ascending line, splitting the difference between up and down. “The world around me faded. Other hills didn’t matter. The ocean didn’t matter. Everything else was background music for the task of moving carefully from rock to rock. Look at Julia. Look at my feet. Take a step. Look up. Take a step.

  “Suddenly,we reached a green patch of scrubby, rough bushes. Labrador Tea, perhaps. The incline remained steep but now we had some purchase. Thank god for plants. We reached the peak only to find that it wasn’t the top of the mountain but rather a ledge below the actual summit. Not that the summit was of any interest at this point. We snuck along the ledge, anchoring our steps in the fragile alpine vegetation.

  “A few traverses of the gully wall and we had made it to the snow—home free. We began our descent. I looked down toward the bottom of the gully and saw our own tracks, clear dark lines in the snow.

  “Yes, from here, our route up the side of the gully did look a little questionable.

  “When we reached the wooden lookout with the sign,we broke into the crackers and smoked oysters. The platform was so perfectly flat and level. I was very happy to be there.

  “I looked back at the peak. Nothing about it had changed, but it looked different to me now. No longer benign. No longer round and friendly. I had to admit it—this was a serious little mountain.”

  In Banff, Alberta, there is a similarly modest summit that has claimed more lives than many of the glamorous peaks that surround it. During the summers I worked there as a university student and then years later, when other assignments brought me back to Banff, I would go up Tunnel Mountain regularly. Shaped like a sleeping buffalo (its original name), Tunnel sits just above the town and the way up is nothing more than a 40-minute switchback that rises not quite 1,000 feet—a bracing jog with the dog. But at the top, it doesn’t feel so domesticated. One must pay attention. The wind can suddenly pick up, and in the fall, when the path ices over it’s possible to make the final hairpin turn, and slide right off the back of the mountain, plummeting down into the valley. Many have
, especially the new arrivals in town, who like to drink five beers and then climb Tunnel in the dark.

  On mountains and in families, the sunny safe plateau can change between one sentence and the next to something mortal. My father’s death was like that—a quick, lucky fall that arrived at the end of a satisfactory day.

  The Saskatchewan River

  THE LANDSCAPE underneath a big bridge tends to feature graffiti,debris, and used condoms. I had forgotten that. This wasn’t the most appealing place for my father’s ashes to end up.

  Before he died, I had made a plan to drive through the prairies and see the bridge he had helped build in 1930. It was one of seven bridges that span the river that runs through the city of Saskatoon. My father graduated from the University of Saskatchewan as a civil engineer just as the Depression began. But the dean of engineering, C. J. Mackenzie, initiated a “relief project” that would employ as many men as possible and build something the city could use—a “bold, simple” bridge made of cement with nine graceful spans. My father was one of the team of engineers who worked on the bridge, which took 11 months of 24-hour labour, sometimes in the 40-below winter weather, to complete. It was a job he often talked about, with undisguised affection for “Dean Mackenzie,” as he always called him. He was a paternal figure in his life, after losing his own father at the age of 12.

  The completed bridge was more lovely than anyone could have predicted and it became the postcard icon of Saskatoon, its horizontal Eiffel Tower. I still have a photo of my dad in a dapper news cap, smiling with pride as he walks beside the tall, patrician Dean Mackenzie. I knew I had to make a trip back to the bridge and walk over it.

  I flew to Saskatoon, where it was clear that the Broadway St. Bridge is the grandest thing about the pragmatic, farm-circled city. Close by was the Bessborough, a CPR hotel built in the days when they still resembled Scottish castles. I prowled through the grand, empty corridors of the Bessborough and then walked by the river to the base of the bridge. I had originally planned to scatter the ashes off the bridge itself, but it was high above the water, and that day the wind was too strong. The ashes might simply waft over to the forlorn parkette on the other side and coat the single park bench there.

  Down by the pathway that wound along the riverbank, I found a bronze plaque almost overgrown by shrubbery that paid tribute to the engineering triumph of the structure. If I could scramble down the banks and surreptitiously pour the ashes into the river, this could be the official spot. Eyeing the current, I calculated that they would be carried under the bridge.

  I had left behind the vase, thinking that a woman with a full urn on a bridge might draw attention. Public scattering tends to be illegal. The ashes, in a plastic bag with two garbage ties twisted around the top, were as heavy and big as two bricks. I had decanted the ashes from their original bag, which kept springing open, into a bigger one, a task I did as quickly and unthinkingly as possible. The ash was light grey, very fine, and clinging, except for the larger bits, which were honeycombed like bone marrow. Not like, but were. What does it matter if these are his ashes or just whatever was on the bottom of the crematorium, I thought, but I continued to address the vase as “dad.” I put the new bag inside a dark blue velvet sack supplied to us by Just Cremation. It had a drawstring and reminded me of the old Seagram’s bags we used to keep our marbles in.

  The river was wide, a milk chocolate brown,with a steady, powerful current. The word Saskatchewan means “swiftly flowing river” in Cree, and one of its tributaries flows 1,200 miles, to the Bow Valley in Alberta. A good long ride. It gives breadth to the city and had dictated the scale and modest majesty of the bridge. In the public library I had found black-and-white photographs of its construction, how the supports were sunk in clay and the engineers had to compensate for the ferocious cold of winter which caused the materials to shrink. “Only four men died in the construction of the bridge,”one news item reported.

  I found a picture of three workers standing behind the rebar skeleton of the bridge’s steel supports. One figure, not the tallest, wore a cloth cap that did not hide his ears, which stuck out, just like my dad’s. The face was obscured, but there was a certain jaunty eagerness in the posture. I was convinced it was him.

  My cousin Margaret Ann, from Colonsay, stood behind me on the riverbank. She didn’t know my father well, being from my mother’s side of the family, but she was kind enough to tour me around Saskatoon and to witness this increasingly odd ritual. The moment was awkward and unceremonial, but still, when I squatted by the water and looked up at the rib cage of the bridge, my mind filled with thoughts: of my father and mother skating on the river, which they loved to do; of my father working at the YMCA a few blocks away, typing the witty, flirtatious letters with which he wooed my mother; of my mother in the frame house on 10th St. wondering when my father would come home for dinner from the bridge-in-progress. of my mother quitting her job as a switchboard operator, because the “relief project” hired only married men, and couples could only hold one job.

  Traffic gleamed on the bridge, and my good shoes slipped on the stones at the water’s edge. I untwisted the ties and tried to shuffle out the ashes, but they had been tamped down, and I had to dig them out. They sank, except for a few small clumps that caught on weeds, sticking like frog’s eggs. I shook and shook the bag—it took a long time. Margaret Ann clicked her disposable camera. The fine grit got under my nails, and when I had emptied the bag I saw that my hand was grey, cadaver grey, gloved with the dust. I clambered back up the riverbank.

  “Well, that’s that,” I said to my cousin, in my mother’s words. She smiled and said nothing. Sentiment is not a prairie thing. We walked back to her car and drove past the city limits to the RV campground that she manages with her husband, in the great curving space west of Saskatoon. It had been farmland until the farms failed. Colonsay’s grain elevator, one of the old wooden ones, was scheduled to come down soon. My hand, with its ghostly coating, lay radioactive beside me on the handle of the car door. Like having something stuck between my teeth, I urgently wanted the grit out from under my fingernails. But there was nothing to be done until we reached the campground,where I was staying in the guest trailer, a perfect, surreal bubble of shag-rug domesticity up on cement blocks.

  Margaret Ann went back to the house to prepare dinner. Inside, I went over to the sink and turned on the taps. I watched the last filaments of grey dust run off my hand and down the sink as the trailer rocked a bit, buffeted by the soft, strong, constant prairie wind.

  Be Home by Dinner

  I’M THREE OR FOUR years old. We’re living in a two-storey brick house on Stillwater Crescent, a dead-end street that peters out at the edge of Lake Ontario. On the other side of the bay are the smokestacks of the steel plants, with their tongues of flame. But they’re a long way off, and the lake itself is huge. We swim in it in summer (until the polio epidemic hits), skate on it in winter. The lake lives alongside us like a large, gently breathing silver mammal that we all take for granted.

  During the week, my father drives to work, through the small town of Burlington. My older brother Bruce rides his bike to school because there are no buses. Most days, it’s just my mother and me, alone with the dogs. I have no idea how we spent our days. I can’t come up with any memories of us doing things together, apart from ones I’ve reconstructed from photos in the family album. Perhaps this was because she was always there in the background: mother as weather.

  My father came and went, which may explain why I have more distinct memories of him. The time I fell off Mrs. Perry’s dock next door, down into the lake, and he caught the end of my long blond hair and hauled me back up in the air. I have a memory of sitting in his lap, in the armchair with the plushy red stripes. He’s reading me Scrooge McDuck, our favourite comic, especially the part where he dives naked into a swimming pool full of money. When he was young, my father was a gifted cartoonist who had been offered a job with the Disney studios in the early days. But the
y couldn’t pay for his trip down to California for an interview, and neither could he, so he stayed in Saskatoon and became an engineer instead.

  We both loved reading comics.

  My father drives home for lunch every day. Every day my mother prepares lunch, as well as dinner, including desserts for both. It might be just pudding, but cooked, not instant. Butterscotch or chocolate. I especially like the skin that forms on the pudding. One day we’re at the table, I’m perhaps four years old, wearing my terrycloth slippers with the thick foam soles, and I want lunch to be over because Small Types is on. This is a radio program on CBC for kids. It includes a rather ghoulish traffic-safety jingle, sung in an operatic soprano:

  Looook to the left, and loook to the right,

  And you’ll never never get run oooooohver. . . .

  I hear the jingle come on, and ask my mother if I can please take my lunch into the living room to hear the rest of the program. She lets me, and I curl up in the chair beside the big furniture-sized radio, the plate balanced on one arm of the chair as I carefully tuck my slippers under me. But not carefully enough; one slipper catches the edge of the plate and it falls upside down on the rug, oozing sauce around the edges. My mother, at the end of some rope I have not detected, rushes into the living room, sees where her cooking has ended up, and spanks me.

  This is out of character: my mother never shouts or hits. It’s the first time I’ve been spanked and it makes me feel diminished and shamed. I creep up to my room. Later, I come to the top of the stairs and see my mother sitting in the big armchair. She looks troubled. Something about her long days on Stillwater Crescent alone in the house, and thinking about lunches, had clearly got the better of her. The spot on the rug has been cleaned but is still damp. She calls me down, and I climb onto her lap. An apology is extended, but not a satisfying one. I am quiet and dignified in my response.