by Jill Frayne
Walking along the beach, I think this might be the gem in my experience this summer, the lesson I have to sustain me when I’m home and thinking about the next thing to do with myself. I had a glimpse of something this summer. There was the exhilaration of the views, the extravagant layout for the senses each day, but I also got an inkling of the join, the non-difference. There were a few seconds somewhere—maybe in the Yukon or Atlin or on that high plain out of Haines—a few seconds when my whole being relaxed, when I was held in the land, not separate and apart but in it, just another sentient creature, another form of shrub or mountain.
If there’s no difference, if I am that—a kind of mountain, a bush that moves—then I don’t have to be afraid to die. I can go home. If I am endless and inconsequential, a flake of mountain that thins and blows away, where is the loss? The mountain is always coming and going.
Now the sun’s arriving full, the surf scrambling in. I hurry back to Bree.
SEPTEMBER 2
The second day in Tofino I lost my voice. The bug I got on Galiano hit emotional pay dirt in my throat and I couldn’t say a word.
The whole town is slumped in the rain. We’ve walked in the old forests on Meares Island and in the wet streets in town; we’ve watched the big tide lift and lower the moored boats at the dock. Bree sleeps, I rasp, we eat a lot of meals.
While we walk in the rain, getting used to each other, I’m in a turmoil of resistance. I don’t want my freedom to end. Once I leave here the road is all homeward bound, and when I peer down the kaleidoscope at what’s ahead, the days look fractured. I don’t want to take up whatever’s next. Out here on the farthest rim of the country, I feel as though I’m backpaddling above a waterfall. Even Bree looks to me like a beloved and devouring sea.
She and I are like people in love with each other who never get to live together and calm down. It’s been like this since she was fifteen. She went away to boarding school after the uprising with her father and I’d see her on holidays or when Leon and I would drive seven hours to Lennoxville to visit her in her tunic and routines at school. From the age of ten she went away every summer to camp. This past year, when she was finishing high school, she lived in Toronto. Time together is always an occasion. It takes us days to settle down, get the bond tuned up and do what people who live together are practised at doing: be by ourselves in each other’s presence. This time especially, after my summer as the Lone Ranger, I’m waiting for the intensity to ease, the engine to settle down to an idle.
SEPTEMBER 3
We’re in Vancouver and I’m disoriented, to put it mildly. Last night I drove miles out of our way to a campground I was determined to find, which turned out to be a chain-link RV lot, picturesquely located next to an airstrip.
Dazed and wretched in Labour Day traffic today, I haven’t the wits to keep Bree and myself clear of mother-daughter undertow, and we sink into our classic fight.
I’m thinking ahead to university for her next year, and I want to go over to UBC to see what we can find out. Bree wants to shop for crystals on Granville Island. I wonder (out loud, mewling slightly) how she can pass up a visit to the university, since we’re here. At least pick up a catalogue.
“We don’t need to go there, I know all about it.”
“How could you know? We haven’t been there.”
“I’ve already decided I want to come to school here. They’ve got what I want.”
“What?”
“Mountains.”
This is not a serious person. I can’t reconcile myself to her approach to things, and we have the awful and familiar fight where she accuses me of lack of trust and I lie and deny it.
Like most mothers, I’m taking my time releasing my child. It’s a long business, requiring that I pretend she is ill-equipped for independence. I worry that she is not ready for the world, that she sleeps too long, is too fond of fun. I worry she lacks a sense of scarcity she’s going to need in the world. This is pure rationalization, of course. In truth, I just can’t let her be. I want to keep prodding the wet clay into the shape I have in mind. I commentate, make suggestions, try to modify what she does, and Bree takes this as an insult.
I know this is an ordinary renegotiation of who runs Bree’s life. This is the normal-as-pie, monumental psychological work of releasing a grown child, an expectation that human beings probably can’t accomplish at all. In action, the transition looks like a gloves-off battle for control. There’s a twist to it, though, that makes it especially fraught. The twist is, mothers never understand their power. I learned this from my families at the counselling agency. In the battle with our daughters, we think our daughters have the edge. They seem cocksure and heedless and too bold, and we think whatever influence we can bring to bear is fair game. Because we don’t feel strong in our forties. We’re aging, newly aging, and in this culture that’s only bad news. We’re not used to it yet, we don’t sense any of the gains we’ll feel later on. In our forties we’re grouchy and off-kilter and appalled. It would be better if the thirty-two-year-old aunt or the grandmother took over and tussled with our teenage daughters for a few years, let us sit it out.
The fifth decade is the small death for women. When we look around, it can seem as though everything we’re losing has landed squarely on our adolescent daughters. They’ve got looks, nerve, a full head of steam, while we’re sunk in duty, caring for others, keeping the balls in the air, watching our skin go slack. I’m not saying we’re jealous or anything simple, but we’re in a tricky patch. For a while we don’t know our own strength, and in our protest and dismay our lovely, moody daughters, already trained mirrors, take the heat.
It’s never a fair fight, though. We always have the edge, no matter how frayed and besieged we think we are, because they need our approbation. We have an open channel to our children’s self-esteem and we always will. It’s never a fair fight.
Sometimes I know this and sometimes I don’t. I should have known it today. Haven’t I just lost a husband and a lover and the out-of-doors? I should know to stand clear of a fight.
In this quarrel my sense of righteousness fades fast. My argument is not really with Bree. She doesn’t let me off, though. I have to drag around smacking myself in the forehead till we’re both tired of it.
We walk around Granville Island in a cruelly brilliant sun, not speaking, and she buys a rock from Uranus, or somewhere dense and heavy.
SEPTEMBER 4
We escape Vancouver. We’re back in landscape and truly heading home, climbing north, following the Fraser River to join the Yellowhead Highway. From here, it’s steady east. We spend the morning in the shadow of the Cascades, dark, faulted mountains dropping straight into the Fraser River. Then we follow the Thompson River till the pitched black rock lets into rolling mountain and broad valleys. We stop to picnic beside a long rumple of bleached grass going off into flecked hills. The dry air blows hot gusts of sage, and I think of the tawny pass at Haines and the grey-green bluffs at Whitehorse. Of all climates and geography, bare hills, too dry and lumpy to cultivate, are my favourite.
SEPTEMBER 7
For the thousandth time I watch the sun on timber slopes and let the colour soak into my eyes. We’ve climbed the last of the route north and must turn east. I’m deep in memory. It’s been very strong again the last two days. I hate to turn away. Staring at these mountains all summer, the swag of trees over rock, I’m joined to them. I feel myself leave my body now and go to them, the way I’ve done a hundred times. All my cells lie in the trees, and I have their life. The air stirs the top boughs, the clouds moisten the needles, birds scream close by, light and dusk revolve. I don’t give up the joining. I turn away and steer the car east, and in the centre of my head I stay there on the flank of the mountain.
OCTOBER 7
My journal has petered out. Now I’m setting mousetraps in my house; maple leaves are falling off the trees.
The drive went pretty well. It was early fall, the land cooling off and growing dark
. Bree and I cooked our suppers wearing headlamps, the picnic table, the ground, the tent flaring up in yellow circles. Wheat fields I’d seen black and rolling over in farmers’ furrows in June had had their season and stood bone white again, a huge shorn disk around us.
We had a spiritual experience in Elk Island Park, past Edmonton. Buffalo roamed the campground, browsing the grass, unpenned and mingling with the few end-of-season visitors. One was standing, gigantic, outside the tent when I crawled out, his lovely liquid eye reproachful.
We ate picnics, spread on the hood of the car or on the ground. When we stopped at dusk we had packaged soups—minestrone thickened with leftover oil from a can of smoked oysters—cookies from the health food store.
I did the driving; Bree chose the music. I replayed the North in the roominess of my mind. We grew tolerant of each other and wry. I had my head inside the tent one morning, waking her. She began telling me a dream, a long one, and after a few minutes, without meaning to, I tuned out. In the middle of her recounting I backed out of the tent and walked away. She said, “We should have sent God out here to meet you.”
Ontario was raining. We drove the whole Superior sweep from Red Rock to Agawa Bay in blackout, after nightfall. We woke bleary on a cobble beach, seagulls strutting up and down, a turquoise counterpane jiggling in front of us, completely by ourselves. We stuck around, rock-hopping, taking pictures; then a fog blew in and we drove on.
At the end we left Highway 17 and took the ferry from Tobermory. It was cold and wild, but we stayed outdoors, sitting on a storage bin on deck, pressed together, Bree invisible in her hood except for the tip of her nose.
SHE GOT A JOB in Montreal when we got home. Leon greeted me skittishly and we took up our friendship, but there wasn’t much to say. I didn’t know what to tell. I don’t know what to make of things myself. I’m nothing articulate. I’m huge pictures ballooning and subsiding, not much else. I wrote to Bill, but my letter came back unclaimed.
Leon and I spent two weeks packing the schoolhouse and the new people moved in. They will rent for a year. Then we’ll decide.
Leon left for California a week ago and I came here, to the house on our property I haven’t stayed in before, a square house set high on the hill, crowded in by trees. I brought the big gas stove, my rocking chair, Leon’s frail Persian rugs and our two cats. He left me in my towers of cardboard cartons and I unpacked myself.
The leaves on the maples in the yard rub each other endlessly and bob in the gold air. I’m in my house, walking around my rooms, still turning like a dog on a rug who can’t make up his mind to lie down, still held in the North.
Ten
LATER ON
I forget how pale the Yukon is. Flying from Life-Saver green Ontario in late May or June and landing in these long, sere views always feels strange, as though setting down in a country drained of colour.
We float down through thick, soaked cloud, the ground gradually coming up, dirty ice clogging the Yukon River, tracks of yellow-green spruce like a vast nubby ground-sweater jabbing up. In Whitehorse the land is barely stirring after winter. I gather my belongings and get out of the terminal building. The air is chilly. The snow has gone off and at the edge of the parking lot I see where the Yukon sets in, the pale ground wandered over by bleached grasses and wild sage, loose stone and huddles of willow, a huge, poor land in tones of pale silver and gold at any season.
I’m on my way to Atlin. This will be the eighth time since the first excursion ten years ago, when I rented a car in Whitehorse and drove down on the say-so of the man in Juneau. I came again the following spring, 1991, flying that time, and went on to Atlin for a night or two. Carol Studer’s husband had died in the meantime and she took me for a drive in their old brown van, noting that it was the first time she’d started up an automobile in twenty-three years. “Frank didn’t like me to drive.”
On that trip I got up onto the Dempster Highway by pure luck, hitching a lift out of Dawson City and riding to the Arctic Circle in mid-June, when there is no night.
Then I came four years later, in 1995. I took three months off work and drove my car to Atlin for the summer, and since then the visits have bunched up to every nine or ten months, one season or another. This is a place where I’ve made a rough nest, a mud-and-twigs home that I come back to and that I hold in my mind when I’m in Ontario. I have outlasted the urge to buy property and move here, which I could not do. I come back, though, and by now I’ve patched together all the phases of light and growth in this part of the north, laying the seasons end to end, except for the freeze-up in November and December. I’ve never seen the grey sky lie down on the face of the lake and hang there till the ice forms. I’ve arrived when the lupines cover the ground in purple, and this time, on the way to my rental car, I see them barely in bud, holding water drops in star leaves.
When I’m at home, buried in my life, I long for Atlin. I see the wide cradle of sky between Monarch and Atlin mountains, the dipping line they make meeting each other, and I pine to be there. I arrange to go, by hook or by crook, and have a minute of elation when the leave from work is set or the flight booked. Then the plan begins to seem undoable, extravagant. So far to come just to walk about for a few weeks. But I come, and it seems settled that I always will. Lawrence Millman calls these unused territories “last places.” There are others I would like to visit, but I have a root here and I keep it tended. Atlin rocks me. I come around the corner, the last bend in the beat-up road from Jakes Corner, past the Atlin Unincorporated sign, and the view of Atlin Mountain smacks me in the face, its three draped snow tops, its gravel sickle, its huge bulk thrumming the sky, and every cell of me starts to quiet down and spread out at that moment.
I have only three weeks this time, little enough that I had to fly. Today is Sunday and there will be no mail truck to take me down to Atlin till Wednesday. I’ve rented a car so I can get out of town into the mountains while I wait.
MAY 22, 2000
I’m sitting in my sleeping bag in the back seat of the Chevy Cavalier I’ve rented. I took a turn off the road to Carcross last evening and came down a new gravel road that ends at a lake skirted by white dirt hills. I found a hollow in some willows where I parked. Lacking a tent, I slept in back, cranked on the fold-down seat like a hospital patient. I’m under-slept and longing for tea, looking out my six windows. The rising sun is beginning to wash the mountains to the west, lighting the hollows and scapes of snow. Willow beside me has a new growth of shiny mahogany in the grey crackle of the old. past it, a mat of blond grass drops off into a gully of willow, wiry and fine like a bundle of hair. There’s a small grey lake beyond, just free of ice. Last night there were ducks on it and a pair of terns hopscotching and shrieking above the surface. The ground is pale, fine dirt in a caked winter shape that poofs and breaks up under my step. A pointy band of amber spruce runs to the lap of the mountains. The mountainsides veer up, umber-coloured rock heaving clear of the treeline, angling into the clouds, grabbing the slow-passing clouds, and dabbing them to their cold, extraordinary faces. Mountains do everything for their own sake.
My body is still on Ontario time. I’ve been awake since four-thirty, shivering and happy. I love these long Yukon views, the beautiful undisturbed land in all its verve flowing away to the edge of sight.
Pitching in or near a vehicle is frowned upon by outdoors people, but what about living in an egg, a protective steel egg that moves from place to place? What about travelling in a shell?
I reach Carcross before eight. The roadside gas station and mini-mart is open, and I wait for the boy to come down and turn on the burner for tea. The town has a spectacular setting, lying in a narrows between Bennett and Tagish lakes, a wide junction where the mountains jump out of flat ground. Like so many settlements up here, Carcross was a hunt camp until the gold rush pumped it to size.
Today the town is at low ebb, even as a historical site. Carcross lost its centrepiece several years ago when its steamboat, the Tutshi, burn
ed. The ferry had its heyday during World War I when well-to-do Americans were looking for an alternative to travelling in Europe and sought holidays in the north. Visitors would come up the coast by steamer to Skagway and from tidewater take the railway over the White Pass into the Klondike. As a pleasant detour travellers transferred at Carcross to the Tutshi and were ferried east across Tagish Lake through Taku Arm to a little portage, where they would hop on a train to Scotia, to the dock on Atlin Lake, and then be ferried on the Tarahne to town. The Tarahne still stands in dry dock on the waterfront in Atlin, fresh white paint lashed over her rotting sides. In town, in those days, visitors were dined and put up in style at the White Pass Hotel before returning the way they came to resume their journey north. The Depression ended this three-day excursion and the careers of the Tutshi and Tarahne. The famous railway/water route between the White Pass and Atlin has thinned now to a ghost trail, etched again every once in a while when a dogsled team races over it.
CARCROSS IS OUT OF BUSINESS and looks particularly dispirited at the moment, with Nares Lake virtually empty of water across from the mini-mart. At this time of year the lakes are at their lowest level, the nights still too cold to melt the surrounding glaciers. Once the runoff starts, the lakes will gradually fill, and by August they’ll look themselves. Nares is a spongy meadow at the moment, floating a few cheerful ducks in its puddles.
The proprietor is the same blond bear-man as always, the owner of a kind-hearted orange dog everybody always asks about when they’ve been away. Local people begin to file in, looking a little sunken after a winter of wan light and no work.
When I first came up here I was afraid to talk to people. I thought getting into conversation would waylay me, break my association with nature, which felt frail as cobwebs at the time. I had an anxious, hoarding feeling when I travelled here ten years ago, as if I might lose at any moment something I’d got hold of that I really needed. Now it is a pleasure to talk to people. Now I am fastened to the out-of-doors by piano wire.