“I take it back,” Mary Lynn said, staring. “Not just a field.”
For all her grumbling and exaggerated pessimism, she apparently didn’t mind admitting when she’d been wrong. In my own life, I found that a particularly difficult thing to do, and I liked her more for being so willing to. It wasn’t easy for Mary Lynn to walk on the alvar or in the woods, especially when there wasn’t a trail. She had a slight stitch in her gait, and we weren’t sure if it was from a childhood accident, a birth injury, human wear and tear, or something else, but that day she went just as far and explored the place for just as long as the rest of us did.
Well, for as long as everyone except Bev, who’d marched off without a care, a backward glance, or an invitation for me to come along to parts unknown. She’d returned, though, rosy cheeked and smiling.
Bev was an anomaly—the oldest of our group yet often the most energetic. The one who wore dresses, heels, and nylons to work, but was comfortable in the woods. A woman without a man, yet who seemed to generally like them more than we did, and who’d lived for more than half a century yet back then seemed untouched by age or time.
Mary Lynn appeared just the opposite to me, and I couldn’t help but compare her to Bev. In contrast, she seemed old beyond her years, set in her ways, closed off to most new experiences, or at least often highly critical of them.
When I remember how I viewed her back then, as someone behind the times enough to just be dismissed as old, it makes me cringe. Why had I been so judgmental? So what if I was younger than she was. So what if I thought she should have been as energetic as Bev. Except for her nightly visits to Peegeo’s, and to wonder why Linda had invited her along, until that day on the alvar, I’d barely given Mary Lynn a passing thought.
For someone who supposedly wanted friends, I certainly wasn’t very compassionate to people I didn’t understand. When Mary Lynn went to the island with us that first time, she’d been only forty-four. Almost a decade younger than I am now. I knew nothing of her life or of its difficulties. I thought everyone could and should be just like Bev.
Late the next afternoon I was sitting outside our trailer in a lawn chair, noticed the faint odor of stale beer drifting by, and looked around for its source. A screened-in shed back at the wood line. Other than that, Barb’s Landing was unchanged from the previous year and the one before that. Frank hadn’t fixed the dock, replaced the old trailers, or weeded the gravel, but he had built a shed to store the trash and returnable cans.
Just then Susan walked out her trailer door holding an insulated coffee mug I was pretty sure didn’t have any coffee in it but rather whiskey and Diet Coke. A straw angled jauntily out the sip hole and her ponytail bounced in the breeze.
“So?” she’d asked, perky and expectant. “What kinds of stuff do we do when we’re up here?”
Several of the other girls had also claimed one of Frank’s lawn chairs and we’d arranged them in a half circle. Next to me, Linda leaned back and raised an appraising eye.
“Ah, you’re pretty much doing it,” she’d said.
Our lodgings’ interior was tighter than I’d remembered, and although Susan had spent a long time getting dressed, fixing her hair, and putting on makeup, Bev and I had been anxious to get outside. It was a warmish fall day, fifty degrees and sunny, and we’d gone for a walk down to the dock to look at the lake. From the northeast side of the island where we were staying, all you could see were other, smaller tufts of forested islands, the occasional freighter, and open water. Miles and miles of open water. It looked cold, but also beautiful.
“Doesn’t that make you want to get in a canoe!” Bev had said.
When we walked back and joined the girls, most of them had gathered outside together in the lawn chairs. With such tight quarters and an unseasonably warm day, the gravel rectangle between our two trailers had been turned into a sort of outdoor living room. No TV, no couch, and no fireplace, but there was a well-stocked cooler next to the picnic table, a nice fire crackled in the fire pit, and an orange extension cord powered Andrea’s boom box.
“So then what, we just sit around and drink?” Susan had asked, looking from Andrea to Jill to me for an answer. We stared back and she took our silence as a yes.
“Okay.” She’d shrugged. “Cool beans.”
Afternoon drinking has since lost its novelty, but back then it was the only way we knew how to relax and leave all our worries of home behind. Susan hadn’t sounded the least bit surprised, and seemed just happy to be along. If afternoon drinking was what was required, then afternoon drinking was what she’d do. I knew the feeling. I hadn’t regretted one second of time with the Drummond Girls, and was starting to feel like she wasn’t going to, either. It looked like for all his bluster and boldness, George had met someone pretty great, and I was glad for him.
I’d met his ex-wife when they were still married and she’d been nothing at all like Susan. His ex could be funny, but she could also be coarse, bad mannered, and sometimes even mean. After their divorce, all the women who worked at Peegeo’s felt a bit protective of George. Our place of employment might have been a backwoods bar in the middle of nowhere, but it had good food, a great atmosphere, and through long hours and hard work George had built it into a successful business—making him tantalizing bait for the wrong kind of woman. The more I got to know Susan, the more I could tell how much she cared about George.
She jogged down the trailer’s stairs then and sat down in the circle like she belonged there. She wanted to join our group not because it would make a good impression on George, but because she liked us for our own sake.
“I think we’re going to see a bear this year,” Jill said randomly. “I feel it in my bones.”
“Well,” Susan sang out, “just in case that doesn’t happen, I brought Pictionary!”
Linda glanced my way and raised an eyebrow. Her look said, Board games? On our party weekend she wants to play board games? Before I could return it with a look of my own, Frank appeared. None of us had seen him coming, but then there he was, same white hair, same big belly.
“Got a surprise for you girls,” he’d said.
His arms were tucked behind his back, and he was smiling as if what he was hiding was something unusually good. Linda introduced him to the new girls, and Bev hopped up to introduce herself.
“And who might you be?” he asked.
“I’m the Polish Princess,” she said.
Frank’s gruff exterior softened, and I could tell he was charmed by her, the way a lot of men were. By then, my opinion of Frank had changed and I felt genuinely happy to see him. He was one of the only people we knew on the island, and although I’d wanted this kind of welcome my first year, that kind of familiarity wasn’t just given away here. You had to earn it.
He still sometimes struck me as paternalistic, but I could tell he was also fond of us. To him, I think we were somewhere between paying customers and distant daughters, and whatever he was holding behind his back must have needed two hands because he didn’t reach out to shake Bev’s.
Frank wouldn’t have bought us anything from a store, so whatever was behind his back was probably something he’d made himself. A plank of the smoked lake trout or whitefish the Upper Peninsula was known for? A jar of wild blueberry jam? Some hand-carved thingamajig? We all turned in our chairs to see.
“The recipe was real good this year, but I saved this one just for you all,” he said, thrusting a bottle of oily liquid toward Linda.
Homemade jam? Really? I should have known. The previous winter I’d checked some books about Drummond Island out of the library. The Ojibwa who’d been the region’s first inhabitants had called the island Potagannissing, but when Canadian settlers and military officers arrived, they’d ignored the native history and renamed the island after one of their countrymen, Gordon Drummond, a lieutenant colonel in the British army.
The British had control of Drummond Island during the War of 1812, but the Treaty of Ghent solidified many s
overeign borders, and that was when the island became part of the United States. It took fifteen years for the British to leave, a delay I could well understand. When the U.S. military officers arrived to inspect the fort, the first thing they did was get liquored up on “copious draughts” of rum the British had left behind.
Drummond Island’s history was built on booze, not fish and not jam. It was a tradition that apparently still dominated nearly two hundred years later because in Frank’s fist was the neck of a Jack Daniel’s bottle that someone had soaked the label off. Inside was a watery gold liquid the color of grizzly bear fur and the greasy consistency of gasoline. A fifth of his very best, Frank declared, arching his back, sticking out his gut, and handing the gift to Linda.
She held the bottle up to the light and offered to open it right then so we could share a taste of it together, but Frank said he had Barb’s Landing chores to do and would regretfully have to decline.
“Probably shouldn’t smoke near it, though,” he suggested, eyeing her cigarette.
Before he left us, Frank said he’d overheard Jill mention wanting to see a bear. For our own safety, he thought we should know about the “Megabear” that had been terrorizing the island in recent weeks. According to Frank, this bear was so destructive and dangerous there was a $1,000 bounty on him. He was bold, hungry, and unafraid of people. He (and by the size of it, Frank said it had to be a he) was big, perhaps more than 350 pounds, and for the last several weeks had been ransacking Dumpsters, prowling through the island’s campgrounds, and scaring campers and tourists.
The news was intended to scare us, I’m sure, but it had the opposite effect, at least for Jill. At the word Megabear Jill’s face lit up. An expression that Frank did not seem to be immune from. He looked like he’d put the bear on a leash and walk it around his resort if she would have asked him to. She didn’t, of course, but he gave us a suggestion anyway.
“If you want to see him, just wait until dark and then drive on over to the dump. He’s down there feeding almost every night.”
There was no place in the world like Drummond Island, I’d remind myself again and again. No place with the same combination of rocky cliffs, fresh water, remote wilderness, and tough, friendly people. No place where eight otherwise perfectly sane mothers, wives, girlfriends, waitresses, bartenders, and one paralegal on a weekend vacation would enthusiastically choose to sit in a car at the gate of the town dump and hope, with all their might, to catch sight of a dangerous predator on the lam.
That was just fine by me. After another year of housekeeping, bill paying, and fried fish order taking, I was with the girls on Drummond again. Having Bev along only added to the magic of the place and at that moment, lying in wait with her, Jill, and the rest of the girls for a menacing bear on a garbage pile in the dark seemed like a great idea.
“There’s supposed to be sixty-some bears on this island,” Jill said, when we were on our way. “Shouldn’t be too hard to see one.”
“Bear! Bear! Bear! Bear!” Andrea chanted.
The dump was only two miles from Barb’s Landing, and so we’d all squeezed inside Linda’s new Explorer for the drive. Andrea was loud, and sounded as if she were cheering from the wide-open stands at a football game, instead of crammed into the back of a two-door SUV.
Some of the girls didn’t care whether we saw a bear or not and were just along for the ride. But Andrea and Jill could talk of little else. Of the eight of us, they were the real thrill-seekers, and in three trips to the island we’d yet to see anything more dangerous than the deer that sometimes leaped out of the woods right in front of our cars.
If Frank was right, then nearby was more than three hundred pounds of sharp teeth, long claws, and wild eyes. There was something oddly comforting in knowing large and independent animals thrived on the island and could happily exist season to season, year after year, mostly invisible, and yet within shouting distance of people.
No matter how dangerous he was, I wasn’t just along for the ride. Like Andrea and Jill, I wanted to see a Megabear. In theory, I suppose I could identify with him, because I often felt invisible, too, though not always by choice. But it wasn’t legit to believe you identified with something you hadn’t even seen.
There were bears living in our own area of Michigan; you’d hear stories of them knocking down bird feeders and getting stuck in Dumpsters, but with thousands of miles of land to roam, they mostly stayed away from people so it wasn’t likely we’d ever see one back home. The island was different. On the island, a bears’ innate wildness was present but also geographically contained. Kind of like ours.
“We’re not going to see anything,” Mary Lynn said, dismissive of the entire effort.
“I’m telling you,” Jill repeated, “we’re seeing one. I’ve got good intuition and I can feel it in my bones.”
“That ain’t intuition,” Linda quipped. “It’s Frank’s secret recipe.”
She knew how to break the tension and everyone laughed. After talking to us about the bear, Frank had retreated from our circle to do his chores but we’d passed his bottle around anyway. One sip was enough to cure bad posture and remove your tonsils, and Linda had quickly screwed the cap back on and put it away.
So that’s how locals made it through a winter on Drummond, I thought.
Traverse City is right on the 45th parallel and winters there were bad enough, but winters on Drummond Island were the stuff of legend. Ice storms from November through May, seventy-mile-per-hour winds, and blizzards that downed what few power lines the island had, cutting residents off from the outside world more than they already were. I’d often wondered how anyone could live there year-round, but I’d wonder no more. Down a bottle of that stuff, and you’d endure a furnace blast of searing heat, then be down for months of complete hibernation.
We arrived at the dump but saw nothing that looked like a bear. I thought of Earl, back in Andrea’s Bronco, tucked into his Ziploc bag; of Frank’s ancestors holed up in their log cabins for the winter, nursing a fresh batch of bootleg, and I wondered if Megabear was already hibernating. It was only the first weekend of October, but the temperatures in the Upper Peninsula were already starting to dip and there’d even been a dusting of snow. But Jill said black bears wouldn’t “den up” for at least another month. They should be busy now eating as much as they could in preparation for winter, even if the food they found was just garbage from the town dump.
“Don’t tell me that,” said Pam, who was so tenderhearted she couldn’t stand to hear about any animal’s discomfort, let alone real suffering. To her, the image of such a majestic being eating garbage in order to survive qualified as both.
Jill and I were squeezed way in the back, pressed in next to each other scanning the outside terrain, and while Linda and Mary Lynn teased Pam about the bearskin rug she had in her living room (“It was a gift! I hate it, but we couldn’t say no”), I asked Jill how she knew so much about bears.
“I’m going to take it as a sign,” she’d said, as if I’d asked her something else. Something a lot more personal. “If I see one, I’ll know everything is going to be okay. I’ll know I’m going to be okay.”
Andrea was squeezed in the back with us, too; she gave me a look and shook her head no. I think by then all of us knew things weren’t going well for Jill, that she and her husband were about to split up, but I wouldn’t have asked her about it then. Linda’s car only sat five, but all eight of us were mashed in and doing our best to stay quiet. I’d been known to ask a personal question or two, but that was not the moment for it, and even I wouldn’t have chosen to probe into Jill’s marriage right then.
Dusk was fading into dark, and in the glow of Linda’s parking lights we could just make out the center of the dump—a steep pile of ragged newspapers, unraveling blue tarps, and the smeared bulges of waterlogged magazines flapping in the wind.
“There’s one!” Mary Lynn whispered, pointing frantically.
Of course, I thought, the naysaye
r would be the one to spot the bear, and then like hypnotized cartoon characters with spinning eyes, we all stretched our necks toward the windshield and looked as hard as we could look. Halfway down the trash hill was a large and puffy black shape. And it seemed to be moving.
It wasn’t the bear, the shape was much too small for him, but in the beam of our stares, it did look like an older cub—was there such a thing as a teenage bear? There had to be, and this one appeared hunched over some prized morsel and “feeding” just like Frank said. Its rounded back was toward us and muscles rippled under its glowing fur. Huh. Maybe a diet of garbage wasn’t so bad for bears after all. Maybe that was why there were so many of them living on the island.
We watched it arch its back, then relax. We held our collective breath and waited for the animal to turn around, lift its head, and stare into Linda’s headlights. I’d remembered to keep my camera in my pocket this time, and I pulled it out and pressed down on the little button that warmed up the flash. Even the girls who hadn’t seemed to care one way or the other watched intently.
Inside the car, it was as quiet as if time had stopped to take a breath. If our eyes had been lasers, there would have been sixteen holes burned clear through the windshield.
“That’s a garbage bag,” Linda said, appalled, and we shrieked with laughter. Some nature girls we were, mistaking an orb of lumpy plastic for a real live bear, and the giggling lasted for several minutes.
“C’mon, we’ve got to be quiet or we’ll scare them away!” Jill finally hissed.
She was still holding out hope that her intuition knew something the rest of us did not. Mostly for her, we stayed parked at the dump’s gate for maybe another half hour, but not one deer, crow, chipmunk, or so much as a mosquito ventured into view. Eight women squeezed into one car in the dark after an afternoon of drinking, when at least half of them need to pee, is not a good formula for silence. It didn’t take long before we had to unroll the windows for air. If Megabear had been at the dump that night, there’s no way we would have seen him.
The Drummond Girls Page 8