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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  “Goddamn it,” my grandfather said under his breath, reaching under the tarp for his rifle. “Damn it all to hell. Damn hunters.” We walked over to the animal. She stared at us, her visible eye crazy with fear, and Papa Dick shook his head. “I’m sorry, dear lady,” he said softly, and pulled the trigger. Blood splattered across the snow behind her. Papa Dick knelt down and touched his forehead to her shoulder, whispering something. Then he took out his hunting knife, slit her belly, let the blood drain into a cup and drank it. “Change of plans,” he said to me, wiping his hand across his mouth. “You’re going to have to help me get this back to camp. And quickly, before someone spots her and pins it on me.”

  I nodded and fetched the axe from the sled, mentally preparing for the grisly work ahead. The two dogs yelped and nipped at each other’s heels, impatient to be on their way. I watched as Papa Dick skinned the hide off the moose. Once the animal was quartered, I helped him load the pieces, including the head, onto the sled. I knew that this was just the beginning of the long process of turning every part of the animal into something useful, and that Papa Dick would give most of the meat away. We had no need of this animal. After so many years in the bush, my grandparents were always well prepared for winter with plenty of food. But, just as my grandfather would never shoot a female animal or one out of season, he believed that letting one suffer or go to waste was just as bad. It was one of the many traits I admired about him, although my admiration competed fiercely with my frustrations with him.

  If Papa Dick was the same man I had left behind three years before, I was a much different girl from the five-year-old he remembered. As he did with his pupils, he expected me to conform to his beliefs. So, to keep the peace around him, I pretended to hate the taste of sugar and disapprove of city life, and I kept my Barbie doll hidden. There were moments of genuine harmony between us, usually centered around a task that required focus, like hunting, or a cooperative effort toward survival. One time in the fall, he and I had returned late from a trip to town and got caught in a thunderstorm. The waves were high enough to crash into our canoe, rocking it so ferociously I could tell that even Papa Dick, so rarely rattled by the forces of nature, was nervous. I paddled with all my strength, ignoring the exhaustion and sharp pains in my back and shoulders, while he bailed water from the stern and shouted commands above the din of the storm. When we pulled the canoe up to the shore an hour later, weary and soaked through, I knew he was proud of me.

  But my desire to please my grandfather was equaled by my growing modesty and annoyance at his preoccupation with people not showing or experiencing fear. One morning, I sat on a mat in my underwear, ready for the yoga routine he had insisted I join him for, when he came into the tipi and looked down at me disapprovingly.

  “Cea. Don’t you know that wearing clothing while doing yoga constricts your energy? Please. Take those things off.”

  “I’d rather not,” I said.

  He shook his head. “That makes me sad, Cea, very sad. You’re living in fear of your own body. I guess all that time away in the city has corrupted your innocence.”

  Fear of my own body? All that time in city? Not only was he completely wrong on both points, I suddenly realized that he hadn’t asked me once where I had been or what I had done during our years away. I waited until he had settled into lotus pose, and then I spoke.

  “Papa Dick,” I said quietly. “Don’t you ever wonder where Mom and I were all those years?”

  He didn’t even open his eyes. “Peanut,” he replied, using a nickname I hadn’t heard since I was a toddler, “you know such things don’t concern me. You’re here right now, which means wherever you were doesn’t really matter. You need to learn to move on from the past, Cea, and embrace the present instead. Any other choice is one made in fear. Now, please, take off that ridiculous underwear. Seeing you covered up like that just breaks my heart.”

  As I stood and slipped my underwear down my hips, all I could think about was Barry. Though my grandfather’s intentions may have been nothing like his, the result wasn’t any less humiliating. But I was beginning to understand that against my grandfather, there was simply no winning.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Near the end of winter, my grandparents received a letter from my Uncle Dane. I was with Papa Dick when he pulled it out of the mailbox, his smile slipping as he read the return address. He tucked the envelope into his vest pocket, and didn’t look at it again until hours later when we were back at the tipi. Meanwhile, my mind whirled with questions that I didn’t dare ask: Was my uncle still in the mental hospital? How often did my grandparents hear from him? Would they ever let him visit here? I prayed not.

  That evening, Papa Dick read the letter silently to himself and refolded it. Then he went outside for some wood and started stoking the fire in the stove.

  “We should probably go see Dane,” he said to Grandma Jeanne.

  She stopped whistling, something she seemed to do more of when she was feeling blue than when she was happy, and put down the pot she was drying. “How come?”

  Papa Dick held up the envelope. “Got a letter from him today. He’s talking about reintegration again, and asking for money. I suppose we should drive down and talk to his doctors, see what the real story is. Leave before the next snow flies.”

  “It’s February. That could be any day.”

  “Yes,” Papa Dick said. “But it’s clear right now. We best leave within the week.”

  THE DRIVE SOUTH TO see my Uncle Dane took two days, two nights, one Nancy Drew book, and six gas station stops to refill Grandma Jeanne’s ice pack. I had never seen her so miserable. She lay in the makeshift bed at the back of the VW bus for almost the entire trip, complaining of a migraine, a cold pack draped across her forehead. Papa Dick was almost as silent, driving with a grim face and serving up mushy bananas and cold caribou meat for dinner. It was almost a relief when we pulled through the gates of the hospital.

  Alberta’s Ponoka mental health facility, my uncle’s home for the past eight years, didn’t look quite as scary as I had imagined. I had pictured ten-foot barbed wire fences and barred windows, much like a prison, but in actual fact it looked a lot like the hospital Karl had stayed at in Nanaimo. That all changed, though, when we passed through the front doors. We were greeted at the entrance by a security guard, who led us through a metal detector—just one more tool designed to control the population and force them to embrace the unnatural state of urban living, Papa Dick muttered as he removed his hunting knife from his belt. I watched the other patients roaming the hallways as we walked into the main building. A few of them looked like anyone you might see in town, but several were rambling on to themselves in loud voices, and one man was standing in a corner hiding something in his hand. He asked me as I walked by if I wanted to pet his mouse, but his hand was empty. A nurse quietly took him by the elbow and led him away. We reached Dane’s room and crowded inside to wait for him.

  It had been four years since I’d seen my uncle, but until he appeared before me that day, I had thought I could recall his face. I was wrong. He looked nothing like I remembered. He was about twenty pounds thinner, and looked to be about two inches shorter. Nearly all of his hair was gone, although from natural or intentional causes I couldn’t tell. He had a set of aspirin-white dentures in his mouth that clacked together when he said hello. He entered the room and sat on his bed. Then he reached into his mouth, pulled out his dentures and placed them on his bedside table. His lips sank in, and he looked a little more familiar.

  Papa Dick took his hat off and smoothed his hair down, staring out the window. Grandma Jeanne stepped forward and hugged her son. “Dane. It’s so good to see you. Do you remember Cea? Your niece,” she added, gesturing toward me. It was the most she had said in days.

  Dane glanced up at me and shook his head. Relief swept over me.

  “Don’t remember,” he replied, and switched his gaze to Papa Dick. “Did you talk to Dr. Rose? He’ll tell you. Tell you I
’m better.”

  “Not yet.” My grandfather sat down in the room’s only chair and placed his hat on his lap. “I wanted to talk to you first.”

  Dane smiled, causing his mouth to cave in even more. “I’m doin’ good. Stayin’ on my meds. When I hear the voices now, I tell them Dane’s the boss. They have to go away and be quiet, because Dane’s the boss. Dr. Rose—he said I had a breakthrough. Didn’t want to talk, talk about anything, but now I do. Told him about little Dane. Little Dane who lived with his family, told jokes, went fishing, went to school, new one almost every year. And older Dane, afraid of aliens, naked in the snow, LSD, and Crazy Debbie, my first love who went to bed with my father.”

  Dane fell silent, his final statement hanging uncomfortably in the air. I had no idea what he was talking about, but Papa Dick seemed to. His face dropped a little, and he stole a sideways glance at Grandma Jeanne.

  “All right, Dane.” Papa Dick sighed heavily. “I’ll have a word with your doctor. I can give you a little money, but not much. Not enough to live on.”

  “Doctor says I can get a job. Live in a shelter, go out in the day.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Papa Dick said again.

  I looked at my grandmother. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, wiping at her eyes.

  Dane nodded and stood. With jerky movements, he walked to his closet and reached up to the top shelf. From there, he took down a photograph and studied it carefully.

  “This girl, she reminds me of you,” he said, and it took me a moment to register that he was speaking to me. “Can’t remember her name.” He held the picture out to me, and I took it.

  It was of me, taken at the camp in Morley when I was about five. I was running toward the camera with my braids flying out behind me.

  “Have you met her? It’s such a sad story. Her real mother died, you know. She died in a fire.”

  BACK IN THE VAN, no one spoke. Grandma Jeanne lay down on her bed again, and Papa Dick started up the engine.

  “Papa Dick,” I said finally, after practicing the question in my mind several times. “Why doesn’t Dane have any teeth?”

  My grandfather tightened his grip on the steering wheel and stayed silent so long I wondered if he’d heard me. When he finally spoke, his voice was so quiet that I had to strain to hear it over the roar of the engine.

  “He pulled them all out,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  During the year I lived with my grandparents, I heard from Mom about five times. Her letters were always full of clipped comic strips and Sagittarius horoscopes folded into notes she’d scribbled on grocery list paper, newsy bits and pieces about her life in the city: her new waitressing job at a health-food restaurant, a groovy party she’d gone to on the weekend, a cute guy who’d bought her a drink at a bar.

  By April she was still living with friends, and I was beginning to get concerned. My grandparents were supposed to return me to her in just three months, and I wondered if she would be ready for me. The truth was, the thought of moving to the city scared me, even if I also didn’t want to stay where I was. While comfort and familiarity lived in the wilderness, I knew that my future and my dreams—if I could make them happen—lived in the city.

  So when Papa Dick returned from town one day in late spring with a letter from Mom, I snatched it from him eagerly, stuffed my Barbie doll into my pocket and went down to the lake by myself.

  Stepping onto the ice, I ran a few steps and slid sideways, watching a cloud of mist plume into the air as I exhaled. The first signs of the warmer season were just emerging. Glancing up at the mountains surrounding our camp, I noticed a few patches of gray rock showing through the snow. We had yet to hear the loud cracking of the ice on the lake breaking up, but Papa Dick had warned me not to go too far out. “Everything could change in a day at this time of year,” he often said to me.

  Settling down on the ice, I unfolded the pages and began to read. Mom had a new job that paid a dollar an hour more, she wrote. She wanted to revamp her look a bit, so a friend had given her a home perm and a huge pile of old Cosmopolitan magazines. She had found us a place to live, a basement suite in someone’s house.

  Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief over this news, my gaze stopped on a word halfway down the page: Barry. My jaw dropped open. No. It couldn’t be. But there it was, written in my mother’s childish scrawl. He had driven to Calgary to find her, and they were back together. Could I possibly find it in my heart to be happy for her?

  Tears sprang to my eyes. I crumpled the letter in my hand. Then I pulled my Barbie doll from my pocket and pressed her to my forehead. Barry. I wanted to scream. I pitched the letter furiously across the ice, and that’s when I heard it crack.

  Oh shit. I froze in place, gripped by panic. What had Papa Dick told me to do if this ever happened? Right, lie down flat and slide along the ice like a snake. I grabbed Barbie to stuff her back into my pocket, and that’s when the ice broke. I plunged through knees first, the freezing water knocking the breath out of me. My head slipped below the surface and I kicked my legs until I reemerged, coughing wildly. Then I flailed my arms out, found a solid edge of ice and clawed my way forward, screaming for my grandparents. I waited, scanning the snowy shore, but I already knew it was hopeless. Papa Dick had chopped the ice and brought it up to the tipi that morning so Grandma Jeanne could heat it on the stove for water, so there was no reason for either of them to come down to the lake.

  The current sucked at my legs. I had a sudden vision of myself being pulled under the ice, a dark shadow beneath the surface trying to break my way through. This had happened to Papa Dick once, and his friend had had to rescue him by chopping through the ice.

  Maybe if I were lighter, I thought. Yes, I was too heavy with all these soaking-wet clothes on. Holding the ice shelf with one hand, I reached down into the water, pulled the laces on my Ski-Doo boots and kicked them off. Then I felt for my coat’s zipper tab under my chin and worked it down until it was halfway open. The coat dropped around my hips and floated at my waist. I took a deep breath and threw myself forward once more. The ice held for a moment, and then crumbled beneath me again.

  My body was turning numb. I knew I had to think, and think fast. But it was as if my brain were as frozen as my skin. How long had Papa Dick said it took for hypothermia to set in? For frostbite to begin? Until the body shut down completely? These were some of the facts he rambled on about every day, and now, when I needed them the most, I couldn’t remember a thing.

  I tried to focus. What had I been doing before the ice broke? Oh yes, the letter from Mom. Something about a new place to live and a home perm. And Barry. Barry, with his big reward to me for masturbating him. Of course.

  I reached into the water with numb hands, and eventually managed to pull Barbie from the pocket of the parka floating at my waist. She was as soaked as I was, but her feet were bare and pointy. Sharp, almost like a pick. The problem was my hands, which were now too weak to form a grip. I thought for a moment, and then I stuck the fingers of my right hand into my mouth. Even my tongue was cold, but after exhaling forcefully many times, I felt my skin warm up a little. I put my hand under my armpit, which still held the slightest bit of warmth, and repeated the same with my left hand. Then I flexed my fingers, grasped my Barbie doll with both hands, reached my arms as far across the lake surface as I could, and plunged her feet first into the ice.

  “LOOK AT ME, CEA!”

  I opened my eyes. Frozen shards of hair were prickling at my neck. I turned my head, and they snapped off like dried spaghetti.

  “Cea! Look at me.”

  Slowly, he came into focus. Wooly red cap, blue eyes and bushy beard. Papa Dick. He was on his belly inching toward me. My upper body was sprawled across the ice, but my legs still hung in the water behind me. I had tried hard, but Barbie hadn’t been quite enough to save me.

  “Look at me,” Papa Dick said calmly. “I’m going to throw you a rope.” It skated across the ice and sn
aked into the water beside me.

  I reached out, touched it and felt nothing. My hands were paralyzed, making it impossible to form a grip.

  “Grab the loop,” he said. “Put it over your head.”

  Loop? Using my forearm, I lifted the rope from the water until it hung in front of me. Then I dropped it back onto the ice, picked it up between my wrists and slipped it over my head.

  “Now, around your shoulders. Under your armpits. I’m going to pull you out. Keep your arms at your sides.”

  I felt the rope tighten against my back. I kept my arms down, pressing them against my sides to keep them from shaking. My hips slipped over the ice shelf. The ice broke and I plunged back into the water. I coughed and floundered. From far away, I could hear Papa Dick speaking to me. It was snowing now, hard flakes that pinged against my face even though I couldn’t feel their cold sting.

  “Cea! Cea! Listen to me! I’m reaching my hand out. Take it. Just take it.”

  I felt my wrists being gripped. Something was pulling at me.

  Stop it, I said, but it was only in my head.

  “Kick! Kick your legs!” He was screaming at me now.

  I was being dragged forward, my chest and then my waist sliding across the ice, and then I was turning onto my back. Papa Dick was standing over me and stripping off his parka. Then the clouds and trees were moving; he was carrying me. We were so close to shore now that I could hear snow sliding from the branches in wet clumps. I looked back at my watery prison, the hole now six feet across from my attempts to rescue myself.