The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  “Here’s your keys and towels, blankets are on the beds. Live bait’s in the cooler, but don’t put no guts in the water. You gals need a boat.” He smirked. “I should have one freed up by tomorrow afternoon.”

  It took a moment, but then it dawned.

  There wasn’t going to be any lakeside hotel or cozy log cabin. This was a fishing camp for fishermen, with a bunch of old trailers for rent. I looked around for one molecule of evidence that a woman had ever set so much as a pinkie toe ring on the place, but that effort was in vain. To complete the shock, it seemed like our white-haired host was getting his jollies by making fun of us.

  A flock of turkeys ran into the woods, then flew into the half-dead branches of a gargantuan pine tree. Ragged flannel shirts and white waffled long underwear hung from a nearby clothesline, their stained and saggy flies flapping open in the breeze. The voluptuous Mudflap Girl adorned the rear wheel wells of every vehicle in sight, and a fleshy scent hung in the air like a manly poltergeist. The trailers all came with fish-cleaning stations, buck poles, and charcoal grills, and somewhere nearby, forest meat was being charred.

  I looked back at Frank. He had his arms crossed over his chest and was stifling a laugh. He knew we weren’t there to catch fish, and it was pretty obvious to me he’d found our gender both helpless and amusing. Which made me furious.

  The decision to leave home and spend a whole weekend away from my husband and children wasn’t made carelessly or on a whim. I’d thought long and hard about it before I’d said yes. Getting into Linda’s Jeep that morning and leaving town had been a big moment for me. On the way I’d accepted the “no cops” announcement, the drinking and driving plans, my own bout of bridge vertigo, the dead wolf in the display case, as well as Jill’s bear population estimate.

  I hadn’t anticipated any of those things, yet offered no protest because I didn’t want these tough and capable women to think I was a sissy la-la. Which was what George and my coworkers called someone they thought was a wuss, a wimp, a gutless wonder. At Peegeo’s, the worst thing anyone could be in life was a sissy la-la.

  The drive north had been majestically scenic, the conversation fun, and I’d expected our arrival at the prearranged lodging to be met with a warm or at least a polite welcome. I’d slept in sleeping bags under the stars, out on sand dune beaches, and on the hard ground in plenty of tents, so I really didn’t mind staying in a travel trailer.

  But that smirk on Frank’s face struck me wrong.

  I might have been just the new girl, but someone was still going to tell me what the hell had happened to Barb.

  “So, like, where’s Barb?” I blurted.

  I’d seen the sign marking the turn into his muddy driveway, and it had said BARB’S LANDING. Next to those words, hand-carved animals frolicked under a cartoonish pine tree. Nothing had prepared me for burnt meat smell, long underwear, fish gut protocol, or being the subject of one rude old man’s amusement.

  “There ain’t no Barb,” the man said. “Not no more. I run the place now and I’m Frank.”

  His face broke into a genuine smile as he proffered a shovel of a hand for me to shake. My own hands were dirty, and I went to wipe them on the thighs of my jeans before I shook his. Looking down, I spied a brick-sized rock. It was gray and appeared to have fossils embedded inside of it. Worms and shells and what looked like creatures straight from a biology textbook. It was the kind of rock you might see in a museum display or a rock shop. I picked it up and brushed off the dirt.

  Frank looked at it, too. It was a limestone fossil, he said. The island was full of them, but this was a particularly good one, and I could have it to take home with me if I wanted.

  I held the rock in my left hand and met his palm with my right. Frank lived in the small bi-level across from the rental trailers. He was the first local I’d met on Drummond, and so his handshake—calloused, knowledgeable, and engulfing—turned out to be my official welcome to the island.

  “Look at it this way, Mardi,” Linda said later, as the four of us raised shots in a toast at the Northwoods bar. “It’s right on the water, and we’re still only paying fifty-five bucks!”

  That was fifty-five dollars total, not each. Which was a good thing, because although we’d pooled our money—our one-dollar and five-dollar tips, a few twenties from savings accounts, and all of the change in our coin jars—we still didn’t have much in the kitty. Three hundred dollars to house, feed, fuel, and quench the thirst of four wild women for a whole weekend. Well, three wild women and me.

  That tight budget didn’t stop them from toasting my Drummond Island debut with what seemed like every flavor of Pucker the Northwoods had on their shelf. I was just an occasional beer drinker, but after downing those shots of schnapps, I felt both loaded and loved on. My impenetrable exterior required lubrication to let those women in, and for the first time in years, I felt like I was becoming part of something. I wasn’t sure what yet, but whatever it was, it was going to include me.

  The bar, those welcoming women, and the island when it was still new to me would appear often in my memory, sometimes in almost microscopic detail. Externally, my world that night was small—the backseat of a Jeep, a car ferry loaded down to capacity, the inside of a rented trailer, and our little pinewood table at the Northwoods bar—yet it felt limitless.

  I was getting to know them, they were getting to know me, and the longer we sat at that table, the less anything else about the trip mattered. Not the doomed waitress from Detroit who’d driven off the bridge, not Frank, not even the trailers. There I was, past thirty, a wife, a mother, a taxpayer, and a mortgage holder, an adult woman with goals and responsibilities, and finally being accepted by the cool girls.

  I was too amped up for anything approaching introspection that night, but many times since, I’ve thought about that first year, of my all-consuming eagerness to fit in, of the angst I felt about being the new girl and how unnecessary it turned out to be. Whenever my mind goes back to those first hours inside the Northwoods, I feel the weight of my life and those heavy-bottomed shot glasses in our young hands.

  Each of us had so many options for our lives back then, the years ahead were like an endless road map spread out before us, our futures akin to the unexplored two-track roads cracking through the surface of Drummond’s crab claws. And we didn’t even know it.

  Thanks to what was in those shots, by 2:00 a.m. or sometime thereabouts, we at least knew it was time to leave. Not because of the late hour—up there no one cared, or for that matter even knew, what time we’d finally get to bed—but because our bar tab totaled an unimaginable eighty-two dollars. More than a night in one of Frank’s trailers and way beyond our meager budget.

  “Keep it between the ditches, girls!” the bartender cautioned as we pushed out the plywood door and swirled together into the dark.

  I scanned the parking lot and spied the red of Linda’s Jeep, a bright and happy square to aim for among the dozens of dark and shadowy vehicles. Had there really been that many other people in the bar?

  “I’m married!” Jill shouted randomly to the night sky, her pretty head thrown back, her warm breath floating like lace in the cold black.

  It sounded to me like Jill was trying to convince herself that she really was a newlywed. She did seem so young, and while I didn’t know her well, at least not yet, I had a hard time picturing her as someone’s wife. A year before, Linda and Andrea had surprised Jill a few months before her wedding with a trip to the island. Their weekend away had been her bachelorette party, a reminder that they had a history that didn’t include me.

  Andrea wrapped her arms around Jill’s waist and swung her in a lopsided orbit. They lurched and weaved, this way and that, floating around the parking lot like the last stubborn seeds on a dandelion head. Together, they could defy geography, time, and apparently even gravity, too, because when they were stationary again, they were also miraculously still upright.

  I stood to the side and listened to their v
oices harmonize in a throaty laugh. The sound made something uncontrolled expand inside of me. They might have been friends before I came along, had adventures and shared memories, too, I thought. But that was last year. This was now; I was here, the night was clear, and when I looked up, I saw that every star in the sky had come out. There was no one else around, so all those stars must have been shining up there just for us.

  “I’m married,” Jill said again, when the spinning stopped. But she said it in a monotone that time, instead of a cheer. “To one of those,” she added, pointing.

  We followed the angle of her arm and saw exactly what she saw. Through the shadows and the cold and even the liquor, we saw.

  Pickup trucks. The parking lot of the bar was full of them. Dirty, rusty, bashed up, and dented. Bald tires, cracked windshields, and matted pairs of fuzzy dice hanging from rearview mirrors. Most had ridiculously high lifts and giant CB radio antennas sticking straight up from bent hoods. I marveled at the number—I’d been so focused on being with the girls I’d barely registered there’d been men inside the bar, too.

  Some of the drivers’ side windows were open a crack, and we thought we could even smell their stink: generic cigarette smoke, paper sacks that had once held cold lunches, but now only abandoned crusts of meat, and the mildew of work clothes and stale sweat.

  Back home, I’d met Jill’s husband a couple times. He was a slight and handsome smooth talker who drove a puke-green rig that would fit right in.

  You could always divorce him, I thought and was dizzy with the shock of it. Was that really my first instinct? One disillusioned comment from Jill, and bam, I was ready for her to just chuck him? It frightened me to allow the word divorce into my consciousness. Once I did, there was no telling what might come of it.

  I thought of my own husband. The father of my sons who was home with them, and caring for them, so I could come here. What did I have to complain about? He might have been in a perpetually bad mood (especially, it seemed to me, when his pot ran out), but he worked hard and drove a Chevy Cavalier station wagon, not a junky pickup. Whatever my opinion of marriage was back then—of my own, of Jill’s, or of marriage in general—it did not include divorce.

  I wouldn’t have felt comfortable giving relationship advice, not to Jill or anyone else for that matter. Linda and Andrea had to have heard the tone in Jill’s voice, but they must have shared my reluctance to acknowledge it because they kept their thoughts to themselves, too.

  Linda was thirty-seven then and Andrea was twenty-two. Neither was married but both had steady boyfriends, and so you would have thought that we’d have discussed our men. And yet that first year not one of us did. Love was still a mystery to us, its own strange and mostly unexplored island. Perhaps we didn’t want to admit we knew so little about it.

  If you’d have asked me back then was I content, I wouldn’t have known how to answer. I couldn’t have articulated that being a mother was what I’d really wanted, while having a husband felt like a necessary step toward fulfilling that desire. Within months of my own wedding, I was self-aware enough to recognize I’d become a lonely bride, but I thought that would fade as soon as I’d had children. It hadn’t, not all the way.

  Linda joined Andrea and Jill and was now swinging in circles with them around the parking lot. As they giggled, then tried to catch their breath, she untangled herself and cupped her hand to her ear.

  “What’s that?” she said, suddenly serious and alert.

  “What’s what?” we asked, looking beyond the parking lot and into the dark.

  “Don’t you hear it?” Linda asked, and we listened again, harder.

  I expected the sound of something foreboding. A wolf’s howl, the stick snap of a backwoods kidnapper, or a bear growling and charging at us from out of those black woods. When all we heard was wind, trees, and foghorns—normal sounds of the Great Lakes at night—the three of us shook our heads no.

  “The two-tracks!” Linda hollered, running for her Jeep. “And they’re calling our names!”

  The lopsided twirl around the parking lot seemed to take Jill’s mind off her marriage, and while two-tracking was probably not the most traditional way to bolster a girlfriend’s spirits when she needed encouragement, that was Linda. A woman made of equal parts instinct and action.

  She’d seen rough times herself, far rougher than any of us knew back then, and had little use for hand-wringing, mulling over, or excuses. As it turned out, the two-tracks—unmarked and rudimentary vehicle trails meandering through the woods—were exactly what Jill needed.

  “Shotgun!” she called, dashing to the Jeep on her short legs and beating both Andrea and me there by at least a full stride.

  People who have never been to the Great Lakes state hear the word Michigan and probably think of big lakes or the industrialization of Detroit. But three-quarters of our state is actually covered by trees. We have more state forest property than any other place in the country, and much of it, including 53,000 of Drummond Island’s 83,000 acres, is interwoven with two-tracks and accessible by car. (Of course, by “car” I don’t mean Cadillac sedan on a Sunday afternoon drive. I mean something with 4WD that you don’t care all that much about the paint job on.)

  I have no idea whether other American women in their twenties and thirties liked to two-track, but boy, we sure did. Back home, I’d gone with Linda a couple times and knew Jill and Andrea had, too. From our houses or from Peegeo’s, it was a bit of a drive to access the rugged dirt roads that twisted through the woods. On Drummond, two-tracks were around every corner. On Drummond, two-tracks were the corner.

  Branches brushed across the Jeep’s hood, the lights of the bar faded, and soon it felt like we weren’t only in the woods, we’d become part of the forest itself. That was the lure of two-tracking for me. Yes, we were inside a vehicle, but all of our windows were rolled down, so that didn’t preclude being overtaken with a sense of eternity and I felt wild with the independence of it.

  We weren’t on any tracks Linda or the other girls knew; we were on a frontier. We were exactly like the women adventurers of old, crossing the prairie in our one-wagon wagon train. Well, exactly like those women if they’d traveled at night, with their 4WD engaged, their forward motion fueled by gasoline and blues-rooted, guitar-driven rock and roll. Did eastern red cedar trees dig Led Zeppelin as much as I did, I wondered, giggling. How about creeping juniper? Did it “Ramble On”?

  With Linda at the wheel, we charged through those woods, bouncing up and down over rocks and sticks at forty miles an hour, her tape player blasting my Zeppelin in darkness so complete, headlights were just pinpoints in a vast black universe.

  It had rained recently and mud splashed onto the windshield and into my open window, and yet I was still able to identify the native flora. I couldn’t decide whether my college botany professors would have been proud of my retention or aghast over the circumstances in which I was using it.

  “Copper beech!” I hollered out the open window. “Tamarack pine! Prairie sedge!”

  An hour or more must have passed like that before partial sobriety returned, we slowed down, and Linda turned off the music. We didn’t need Robert Plant to tell us we were the girls so fair, driving around in the darkest depths of Mordor, although we could’ve used an autumn moon to light our way. Without the music, it grew eerily quiet inside that vehicle. No one said much because the scenery veering in and out of the headlights had remained disturbingly constant.

  Trees, shrubs, mud, night.

  “Where are we?” Jill finally asked.

  I’d started wondering the same thing but hadn’t wanted to say so. Linda seemed to know her way around the island so well I’d started thinking of her as a human compass. Even as the woods closed in, the trails led nowhere, and the scenery took on a disconcerting repetition, I’d been taking it on faith she knew where we were going.

  After Jill asked the question, no one spoke at first, probably because not a one of us, not even Linda, knew t
he answer. We thought we were somewhere west of the ferry dock and the Northwoods bar, on state-owned land, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the USA, North America, Earth. But as far as our specific location was concerned, a precise point on the planet, we were lost.

  Only moments before, I’d been feeling mighty proud of my plant identification abilities, but when it came to navigation, I didn’t have any skills at all. None. My sense of direction was so bad, I’d sometimes find myself lost in my own town. As my sons grew, this became a running joke among their friends. It didn’t matter if we were only going across town, add an extra half hour if Mrs. Link was doing the carpooling. On Drummond, I felt wholly dependent on Linda to find our way back to civilization. I may have started to worry if I hadn’t remembered something germane.

  Yes, we were lost.

  But we were lost on an island.

  All we needed to do was keep going, as straight as the two-track would allow, and we’d eventually come to the shoreline. Barb’s Landing was on the shoreline.

  The thought struck me funny, but I did my best to stifle the impulse to laugh. Sure, I’d downed every shot of Pucker those girls had put in front of me, but I was still present enough to realize that most women, and (as tough as they were) probably these three included, didn’t want to hear maniacal giggling coming from a coworker they didn’t know all that well, while she was sitting in the backseat of their car, lost in the woods at night.

  Linda leaned forward, stared straight ahead, gripped the steering wheel, and drove on. Andrea lit a cigarette, exhaled out the window, and Jill turned around and leaned toward me.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  I knew she was just being nice, but I felt my grin fade as I considered the subtext of her question. She thought I was worried, or worse, scared. She thought I was a sissy la-la.

  I’d been so focused on the fact that I didn’t know Linda, Andrea, or Jill very well, I hadn’t considered our acquaintance from their perspective. The truth was, they didn’t know me all that well, either. They knew I could handle the Friday night crowd at Peegeo’s, but they didn’t know I’d backpacked through the Porcupine Mountains with my family when I was only twelve. They didn’t know my grandpa and I once missed a trail turnoff at dusk and had to swim our horses through a river cresting over our saddles in order to find our way back to camp. Not one of them had children, so they didn’t know what it felt like to give birth the old-fashioned way, in a regular bed without an IV, a beeping monitor, or so much as an aspirin. Then, two years later, to choose to do it that same way again.