North of Normal- A memoir of my wilderness childhood, my unusual family, and how I survived both

by Cea Sunrise Person

  Dedication

  For Mom, who taught me to focus on the positive and banish fear to the dungeon of useless emotions

  Epigraph

  November’s winds

  are keen and cold

  As Brownies know

  who roam the world

  And have no home

  to which to run

  When they have had

  their night of fun

  But cunning hands

  are never slow

  To build a fire

  of ruddy glow.

  PALMER COX,

  Brownie Year Book

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One: Dream

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two: Cracks

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Three: Pieces

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Four: Choice

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Part Five: Consequence

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  This is the story of my life. Most of the memories depicted here are my own, but I have also drawn on the memories of my mother, grandparents, aunts and father. My early life was a complicated jumble of events that was difficult to put into order, even for my family, but I have done my best. Timelines may not be exact, and dialogue and settings have obviously been re-created in the interest of storytelling. I have also omitted certain events in my life that were not significant to this memoir. Some names, distinguishing features and locations have been changed to protect certain individuals.

  Prologue

  I rolled over in bed, reaching for the warmth of my mother under the bearskin blanket. She wrapped her arms around me, and I pulled Suzie Doll into my chest so we were three spoons. The birds were just starting to call. Through the tipi poles above, I could see a patch of lightening sky. Any moment now, our canvas walls would begin to turn from gray to orange. It was the time of day I liked best, because it was the start of everything.

  “Mommy,” I whispered.

  “Shh . . . still sleeping.”

  I turned to look at her, then placed a finger on each eyelid and pulled them up. “Mommy. Is this the day Papa Dick gets back from hunting?”

  “Maybe,” she mumbled, batting my hand away. “Now go back to sleep.”

  I lay quietly beside her, but I was too excited to keep still. It had been a long winter, the meat from my grandfather’s last big hunt had run out long ago, and he had promised he would try to get a bear, my favorite. My feet jiggled back and forth under the covers. I finally got them to stop, but then my fingers started to twitch. I drummed them on Mom’s hip. “Mm-mm,” she said, putting her hand on top of mine. “Cea, if you can’t sleep, why don’t you go start the fire? Heat up the footstone for me—it’s cold this morning.”

  I lifted the bearskin and reached for the heavy rock. Wrapped in one of my grandfather’s old wool shirts, it smelled like smoke and pine needles. I set it down beside the stove and pulled my clothes on: turtleneck, sweater, cords and leather moccasins. The summer before, one of the visitors’ daughters had shown me something called underwear. They had tiny rainbows on them, and they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. Mom said I could have a pair one day, probably when I was five. But right now, I was still just four.

  Mom was snoring lightly. I crept across our fir-needle floor, lifted the canvas door flap and stepped outside. It was no colder out here than it was in the tipi, but a breeze made goose bumps pop up on my skin. I hurried across the meadow to the shit pit and dropped my pants, peering down at the massive pile of poop beneath me as I peed. After zipping my pants, I slid the cover back over the pit and skipped over to my grandparents’ tipi, stood quietly outside. I could tell by Grandma Jeanne’s breathing she was still asleep, but there was another sound coming from my aunts’ tipi a little farther down. I walked toward it, my moccasins skimming over the dewy grass, and peeked inside. My Aunt Jessie was asleep in her bed with her mouth wide open, but across from her, my Aunt Jan was doing the screwing with the guy visitor. She was sitting on top of him, her long blond hair hanging over her breasts in sweaty strings. I gazed at them curiously, wondering where the visitor’s woman was. Mom said it usually wasn’t a good idea to do the screwing with a visitor who had a woman, but my aunts didn’t seem to mind. Maybe the woman was looking for her cat, which had disappeared yesterday. Anyway, Grandma Jeanne said that lady was awfully silly for bringing her city cat all the way to the wilderness like that.

  I was starting to shiver. In the distance I could hear the rush of the river, finally set free from its winter freeze. The sun was peeking over the top of the highest mountain now, flooding our meadow with orange light. I headed toward the woodpile, thinking that I would build the fire and then ask Mom to make hot porridge with prunes for breakfast. I picked up a log, but was distracted by the sight of one of my stick horses propped against the sawhorse along with my bow and arrow.

  Me in front of our tipi in Kootenay Plains, sitting on the sawhorse that we used to cut our firewood.

  Dropping the log back onto the woodpile, I mounted my horse, threw my bow over my shoulder and galloped across the meadow. “Giddyap! Giddyap, Apache!” I yelled, whipping the leather rein behind me. Randall, the Indian chief who lived across the river, had told me that word meant “go really fast” in horse language, and my horse always listened. He circled me around the meadow and then headed for the forest, almost bucking me off. Branches tugged at my sleeves, snagging my sweater as we ran, but my horse wouldn’t stop. He kept going until we got to Porcupine Tree. I pulled back the reins and slipped off his back, gazing upward with my hand shading my eyes. It was dark in the woods but the sky was bright. And porcupine was exactly where I had left him yesterday, snoozing high up on a branch.

  “Crotch,” I said to myself quietly. “Crotch crotch crotch!” I giggled. Mom said that was what that part of the tree was called, right where the branch met the trunk, and I thought it was super funny. I reached for my bow and arrow, but then stopped. Papa Dick had told me that unless you were starving, you should never kill an animal when it was sleeping because it just wasn’t fair. I looked around for a rock and pitched it at the tree trunk with a loud whack. The porcupine shook and snapped its head up. I set my arrow and pulled back my bow. It was a miss, but closer than I had come yesterday. I scrounged around in the bushes until I found the arrow, then mounted my horse again and pointed it home. I couldn’t wait to tell Papa Dick. He had said that if I k
ept practicing every day, pretty soon I’d be allowed to go hunting with him.

  After corralling my horse with a circle of rocks, I returned to the woodpile and loaded my arms with kindling. Back in our tipi, I built a fire from the embers in the stove, placed the footstone in the flames and waited for it to heat up. Then I carefully pulled it out with oven mitts, wrapped it up in the wool shirt and rolled it over to the bed.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” Mom said with her eyes still closed, and opened her arms for me.

  I snuggled into her naked body and she kissed my hair. After a little while, I decided to stop being so excited about Papa Dick maybe coming home, tucked my head under Mom’s chin and fell fast asleep.

  THE SUN WAS JUST starting to hide behind the tipi when I saw him. I was playing in the dirt, mixing it with water to paint on rocks, when I spotted Papa Dick across the meadow. I jumped up and ran full-speed until I slammed into his arms.

  “Peanut!” he cried, spinning me around in circles.

  I laughed and buried my face in his bushy hair. My eyes fell to the wheeled sled he was pulling behind him, brimming with chunks of bloody meat wrapped in wax paper.

  “Did you get a bear? Did you get a bear?”

  “Aha! Now that’s a surprise. What do you say we get Grandma Jeanne to cook some up and see if you can guess what it is.”

  “Hooray!” I squirmed out of his arms and bolted for my grandparents’ tipi, calling for my grandmother. “Grandma Jeanne! Papa got meat! Let’s cook some up!”

  She came out of the tipi, smiling, and ran to my grandfather. They hugged and kissed, Grandma Jeanne so happy she had tears running down her cheeks. My Aunt Jessie and Aunt Jan came out of their tipi and then Mom, and we were all hugging and laughing.

  “Geez, you’d think I’d been gone a month instead of just a few days,” Papa Dick said, but I could tell he was pleased.

  The late-afternoon sun was warm on my head, the birds were singing, and Grandma Jeanne was in such a good mood that she put Van Morrison on the tape deck, even though Papa Dick said there was only a bit of juice left in the battery. We all boogied in the meadow to “Moondance,” Mom rolled a joint and passed it around, and my grandmother heated up the iron skillet and fried up some of the meat in caribou fat. I took one bite, then jumped up to give my grandfather a hug.

  “It’s bear! It’s bear! Oh, thank you, Papa Dick!”

  When I went to bed that night, I was so full and happy that I didn’t even care when Mom and Randall woke me up later. I rolled to the edge of the bed and faced the tipi wall, pretending the grunts and groans were just part of a dream and that really it was just Mom and me lying in bed, snuggled up all warm in the dying light of the kerosene lantern.

  Part One

  Dream

  Chapter One

  The story that is the life I now reflect on began with my grandfather Richard Abel Person. His history is likely even more interesting than my own, but I only know tidbits of it. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, to Swedish immigrant parents, he seemed to come into this world knowing his passion. When he was just a boy, he began taking to the woods behind his family’s house to practice building campfires and setting handmade snares that brought down rabbits for his family’s dinner. By the time he was sixteen, he had memorized nearly every edible plant in North America and had taught himself how to climb, fish and hunt with both rifle and bow and arrow. He could build a weatherproof shelter from tree branches and twine and paddle through stormy waters with a coffee mug clenched between his knees. Even early on, he knew he wasn’t long for the urban life. When he walked the streets of his hometown, the concrete beneath his feet offended him. Sometimes he dreamed of escaping to a much different world altogether. But then he met my grandmother, and she gave him reason to stay.

  Jeanne was nineteen years old when she first met Dick, who was three years younger. She was sitting on the grass at the local pool where she worked as a lifeguard, eating lunch with a girlfriend. His moccasined feet stopped in front of her, she lifted her eyes to meet his, and that was it. For my grandmother, meeting Dick wasn’t just finding a kindred spirit, it was also a welcome distraction from reality. Her parents had divorced when she was eleven, and not much later Jeanne’s mother had suffered a stroke that left half her body paralyzed. It fell to Jeanne, the only child, to run her family’s bakery. She would wake each morning before sunrise, go to the bakery to work, walk the three miles to school, return to the bakery to help her mother until closing time, and fall into bed each night exhausted. And now that she was finished with school, between her bakery and lifeguard jobs her days seemed an endless cycle of work. When she could get away she would go to the forest to walk alone, sometimes wishing to get lost among the hills and valleys.

  My grandparents courted for three years before marrying, and both of them were certain that there was no other love quite like theirs in the world. It was a love affair not just with each other, but with the rivers and trees and animals of the wild. Nature fed their souls and gave them purpose. On the day of their wedding, Jeanne was walking to city hall to meet Dick when she got her period. Dismayed when it left an unsightly stain on the back of her fancy tweed skirt, she returned home and changed into a pair of jeans. And this was how she was dressed an hour later, when she stood in front of her mother, stepfather and Dick’s parents to exchange vows. Her mother despaired at her lack of formality, but Jeanne secretly thought it was the perfect outfit for the occasion and a true symbol of her relationship with her husband. They spent their honeymoon fishing and hiking around Lake Superior. My grandfather helped steady Jeanne’s hands on the rifle as she fired her first bullet at a moose, felling it with one clean shot to the head.

  My grandparents discussed ways they might live close to nature and still earn a living, and Dick decided on a career in forestry. He joined the army to get a free university education, but a war was raging in Korea, and within a year he found himself fighting in the trenches of Incheon. He wrote letters home to Jeanne, telling of his anger with the U.S. government—here he was battling against communism, he lamented, when he wasn’t even sure he believed in capitalism—along with his unexpected enjoyment of an existence that challenged the most basic elements of human nature. He was sleeping in the rain and eating live crickets right off the ground, things that his fellow soldiers loathed but that made Dick feel strangely alive, as if he were actually thriving in such an environment rather than merely surviving. He had long debates about the state of the American psyche with his comrades. “Folks don’t own houses,” he loved to say. “Houses own folks. Once you’re beholden to an institute of finance, you may as well just put yourself in prison and throw away the key for good.” Dick’s friends listened to his rants, but he understood that most of his words fell on deaf ears. And that was okay, because he had his wife back at home, the woman who he knew would stay up knitting wool socks for him while he talked to her about everything that mattered.

  Where it all began: my grandparents Dick and Jeanne Person, photographed in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1945.

  After he returned from Korea, disillusioned with American values but otherwise unharmed, Dick completed his university degree and took a job as a forest ranger. It was an occupation that kept my grandparents broke and rootless, sending them from Minnesota to Washington and Missouri all within the span of a year, but neither of them really minded. They lived simply and were able to unpack their belongings at each new home within a few hours. Before long, the babies came—Jan, Michelle, Dane and then Jessie. Shortly after Jessie’s birth she was proclaimed mentally retarded, but by that time, my grandmother was in such a state of depression that it barely seemed to register. She complained of migraines and spent hours in bed, and sometimes when Dick came home from work he would find her sitting in the dark while the kids ran wild around her. The truth was, he didn’t blame her much. He loved his children, though between Jessie’s mental challenges, Michelle’s slowness, Dane’s oddness—he seemed to live completely within his own
world—and Jan’s rages, they were a deeply mysterious handful of trouble. But Dick kept his concerns to himself. After all, this wasn’t a subject he was about to bring up with his wife, who was teetering at the edge of an abyss he hardly dared to contemplate.

  By the time the kids reached their teens, my family had moved to Jackson Hole and Jeanne’s mental health had improved. Privately, though, Papa Dick felt as if his wife’s years of depression had stolen a piece of her for good. She seemed more fragile than he remembered, and less confident. But perhaps my grandmother knew this about herself, because in 1966, she discovered something that made her realize happiness didn’t necessarily need to come from within: marijuana. Within a few months, her occasional toke had evolved into a daily habit. The pot numbed her guilt and relieved her of the worries about her children that had plagued her for years. Even more than that, it helped her bond with them. After being introduced to it by a friend, Jeanne started offering it to her three oldest kids when Dane was twelve, Michelle thirteen and Jan fifteen. But the one thing her friend had neglected to tell her was that marijuana was a drug, and it was illegal. And so it was that in that very same year, the Persons had the distinction of being the subject of Wyoming State’s very first pot bust.

  It all started with Jan and Michelle riding in the back of a car. Mom’s boyfriend was in the front passenger seat, and Jan’s boyfriend, who owned the vehicle, was driving. The car blew through a stop sign, and the police pulled it over. When Jan’s boyfriend rolled the window down, a cloud of pot smoke billowed into the officer’s face. It only took a few minutes for Michelle to admit that her drug suppliers were also her parents. Their cabin was raided, Dick and Jeanne went to jail, and the children were dispersed to foster families. Dick eventually managed to convince the judge to let them go, and by that evening the family was in stitches around the dinner table over the whole episode. That was the night, Mom said, when the family decided to move to northern California. And that’s when all hell broke loose.