Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  I wanted to go and I was afraid to go. I dithered silently for months, and every time I concluded it was beyond me and gave my answer to Jack, he seemed not to take it in, until at last we were sitting over dinner with Graham and Adrienne one night in August drawing up a list of who’d bring what.

  I liked them, a young, versatile couple, long together, but I didn’t know them, and Jack and I had never spent more than a few days together at a time, nor were we much in each other’s confidence at the time. I don’t think he had any idea how apprehensive I was, how miserably I had been imagining trying to land on a beach in surf, or continuing to paddle if there was no beach to land on, or how to manage any of the things I had never done in my life in autumn on the biggest lake in the world. One night in bed, when going on the trip finally seemed inevitable, I told him glumly, “Jack, if I get in trouble out there, I hope you’ll help me.”

  IT WAS FALL on Lake Superior, the hills dusky garnet. We camped the first night on Agawa Bay in a public campground with hot showers and transport trucks roaring by on Highway 17, setting up in the sand back of the beach, cooking pea soup in the dark, thoroughly excited. We’d driven all day in tandem, Graham and Adrienne ahead of us, their Toyota looking like a blocky keel under their big two-seater kayak. By the second night we made it to Neys Provincial Park, shut down for the season, deserted except for a maintenance crew cleaning up. Neys is a ravishing place a few hours past Wawa, established as a park because of a geological phenomenon at one end of a long driftwood beach: the scarred taproot of an ancient volcano, eroded and worked over the last ten thousand years by crashing waves. One of the staff gave us leave to park for a dollar a night and launch from the beach. We strolled through the scrub onto the beach and there were the Slates, faintly visible on the horizon, a gauzy hump to the southwest.

  There was too much wind to launch the next day. Stately breakers rolled in, spray flying off their backs, the sun buried in glinting, gunmetal clouds. We packed a picnic and marched down the beach in rain gear and hiking boots. I wore my Swiss Army cape, a rubberized canvas affair down to my ankles, completely waterproof, though incapacitating. Huge rock sculptures hunched at the waterline, Henry Moore bronzes, scoured to satin by tiny grains of sand spinning in the waves. We spent all afternoon clumping over the rocks, Jack yelling with delight when the waves burst on the point, sprawling water over the rocks, shedding it into the lake to be hauled up again.

  Nor had the wind dropped the second morning. I would gladly have stayed on the beach again, but Graham, accustomed to getting the better of physical situations, urged that we move on and look for another angle of approach. We packed up in a waft of warm air, the lake still blowing summer off its face while the land cooled.

  Terrace Bay is a pulp and paper town on the north shore, the shortest point between the mainland and the Slates. When we got there it began to rain and the wind cut off, the lake still rolling and huffing but setting up no whitecaps. The islands were suddenly very close. We went down to the beach to look. It was drizzling and glum, but there was a channel of smooth water past the surf zone, safe access onto the lake. We had a chance.

  I knew I’d be the one to say the word, and I said, “Well, let’s go.” The men whooped and we went into motion like things that have been drifting at random and suddenly coalesce and find their purpose. This crossing is what we came to do. We took the boats off the roofs and down to the shore, pried the hatch covers off, wadded bundle after bundle below decks. We moved the cars away and locked up, took to the bushes to worm into our wetsuits and clammy paraphernalia, traded off final impossible items to whoever had a pocket of room. Jack took my frying pan and billy, strapped the covers on his hatches, rammed his hat on his head and eased the tail of his boat into the water. I was already floating, my hands trembling on my paddle. We made our way out past the surf zone and the bottom fell away.

  The lake was in a state of queasy, lolling swells; some monstrous thing, temporarily dozing off. I put my rudder down, yanked my hat and gloves off, got Jack on my right side, thirty feet away. I would have liked to tie myself to him, but it wouldn’t have helped. I couldn’t rest, not trusting the slack, wanting to drag the islands closer. I paddled the twelve kilometres without a break, Jack rising and falling serenely beside me on ten-foot swells, Graham and Adrienne on our other side, keeping company. After a while I was warding off seasickness and needed to keep my paddle in the water to brace and ground.

  The wind held off. We got into a gap between the islands and the big waves stopped. We paddled into a bay in late sun, and it was like coming into a Haida camp a hundred years ago, the water crystal and still, the steep beach sickle-shaped, caked in rolling pebbles, the trees backlit, laying shade into the water.

  We landed, and jumped for joy. We’d left the world and come here on our own power, and we were all alone. Even the birds had gone.

  IT DOES REMIND ME of Haida Gwaii—the pure water, cobble beaches, collapsing wild woods. Here it’s spruce trees, thin and toppling, wrapped in crinkled green lichen. The ground is thick with autumn rot and windfall, a million shooting spores, wet-scented fungus and mushrooms, caribou trails.

  We hiked today, explored the body of our island, taking the caribou labyrinth in an arc that brought us down again to the shore, following a maze of trails the animals have made, elegant and steady, the easiest, most logical route over the island. The forest is hectic and magical, the spruce trees pressing on one another, the individual trees fragile, their lower branches thin and brittle, reaching straight out and frequently snapped off. Jack thinks they are being devoured by the lichen covering them. In a coastal way, the fallen ones nurse other growth, a wild rumple of mosses and lichens of every kind. There are thousands of mushrooms, frail ones with filament stalks and tiny, brilliant knobs, huge saffron umbrellas on top of milky stems. These plants are pure sex; minute, unabashed genitals, a slippery, showy fusion of male and female that’s part thrusting and part rilled and round.

  We follow a path that takes us up to the crest of the island, to a southern view of the near islands and out over an empty, aluminum surface as far as the eye can see. We go down again to the shore and walk back along peach-coloured slate that is turned on edge like a worn deck of cards, softened and smoothed where the waterline has worked it away.

  After lunch the others go paddling and I walk down the beach. The hills rise steep, aspen-covered, the trees turning amber, dark spires of spruce shooting through the gold. Along the waterline the dark rock is splashed with orange lichen. Mountain ash are in berry along the shore. Paddling in yesterday to the camp that Jack remembered, we passed many beaches, always stone, some so fine and smooth we could drag the kayaks up on them, some pale and jagged, some cobble. Each of them has a huge throw of driftwood high above the waterline, the print of winter storms.

  THE WIND is in the east the next morning, an opportunity to visit the rugged south side. We are tucked in our boats before the rain starts, a fine, out-of-the-way drizzle. We paddle round the west point, and after a while there is nothing to my right but horizon and on the left, huge beaches, a succession of ragged coves, sheer and tremendous, grottoes draped in ferns, mad sculptures shaped by waves, juts of rock set on edge straight as ships. Between two massive capes of rock, boulders the size of cars are jammed, flung there who knows when. Farther on, a wall of rock has shattered but holds intact, keeping its cracked form like a windshield in a wreck. We paddle from one fabulous view to the next, like tourists with the wonders of the world lined up for us. We land in an enormous curve of tiny pebbles and eat in thin rain on six feet of dry beach under a leaning shelf of rock. Graham hands out soup, and we are grinning. We feel like castaways. This is all we hoped for, the best it could be.

  After lunch I do not want to go on to the lighthouse at the halfway point and decide to start back. I have a constant sense of pushing my luck in this extreme place. Jack accompanies me and we go slowly, trailing into the shallow coves we passed this morning. One has a floo
r like crusted jewels, rose and turquoise stone in crystal water, the dark walls cupping over our heads.

  The rain strengthens and a headwind comes on. We paddle side by side, resting behind an island before the last leg. We see Graham and Adrienne coming along in their tandem, the only moving shapes in a dim grey ball of water and sky.

  Jack cooks one of his peculiar meals tonight. Lentil stew, lurid in the light of the kerosene lamp, potatoes baked in the fire and a can of sardines, placed on a log out beyond the tarp, all topped off with dried fruit soaked in hot rum.

  I LIKE TO TENT with Jack, his parcels all laid out by mine, the nice order of him, the two of us pressed in together but self-contained. His clothes never ball up with mine, he doesn’t disturb anything I have laid down or elbow me accidentally. I like being with a person deft at being alone and glad to be with me.

  “This is the first time we’ve spent more than three days together, Jack.”

  “Is it? How do you like it?”

  “I like it.”

  I contrast us with Graham and Adrienne, the difference in the couples—the old young couple and the new old couple. In temper we seem reversed. Graham and Adrienne are partners since high school, easy together, everything for them still ahead, how it all will go. The line between them rides loose with the sense of plenty of time. Jack and I have so much already behind us, already gone as a possibility. We are ardent and careful. I could almost count the time we have, if I could just see it, before the next rogue wave. I feel as though Jack and I met between calamities. Sometimes I send up a little plea—I don’t know to what, to the maple trees—for a long intermission. I don’t think that’s crazy. What do old new lovers have for each other? The death of their parents. Their own decline. Humour, if they’re lucky. Thankfulness. Skill. Not so bad, perhaps.

  WE MEANT TO LEAVE yesterday but put it off because of a fine south wind, perfect wind to paddle to the south side again and perfect wind, if it had held, to push us back to Terrace Bay. We don’t know what the weather has in store: the radio batteries gave out.

  In the event, the wind changed. We had our splendid day yesterday and glided down our island early this morning prepared to make the crossing. When we left the lee, the north wind broke on us so forcefully we could barely make headway. Paddling as hard as we could, we tacked east to another island and landed behind it. Nothing to do but wait out the wind.

  The next day was the first day of October, the month of storms, and we get as far as the sandbar we landed on days ago, the two-sided beach Graham calls a tombola, bounded on one end by a high bloom of land, and joined at the other to the main part of the island. We have now moved to the farthest edge of shelter. There’s nowhere to go but across Jackfish Channel to the mainland.

  We wait differently. Adrienne and I are content. After a morning of slashing rain, the weather clears and we move around our narrow turf in bright wind, keeping a little fire going, making teas and soup, the two of us assenting to the temper of the lake. Graham paces, watches the wind rough the water, thinks how to get us out. Jack spans the difference, temperamentally more ready to wait than Graham but sympathetic to the task of getting home. The two stand bundled against the wind, conferring.

  We are probably not in mortal danger. If we try the crossing, the waves, so far, are not big enough to capsize us, but we are at risk of wearing out against the wind and being forced far off course. We have no radio contact, no forecast, no chance of passersby, a limit to our food.

  Jack and I take a walk in the afternoon along the trails to the south, with high views of the coast and spongy breaks in the trees, where we crouch and watch the wind tear at the water. Wind rocks the woods, the little spruces gyrating on their roots, lifting the thick moss around them. How does anything hold in this place? Without the trails it would be impossible to move. The undergrowth is a tangle of windfall, young spruce and fir, outrageous fungi, chines and crevassed rock with deep moss throats, lathered birch, aspen, broken spruce drizzling pale lichen—a fragile tumult.

  Graham joins us and we stop at an east view to take our bearings, the men ankle-deep in verdant moss, murmuring and plotting. I sit above a crevice, watching the sunlight flicker in the trees.

  Possibly this is gender, the men preoccupied with getting out, the women musing and acquiescent. Or perhaps it isn’t. Graham is a guide, in the habit of moving people. Jack can go either way. Sometimes he stays and waits, sometimes he travels. He wanted to try for it this morning, before the rain broke. He thought there was time.

  Or maybe the situation itself creates what we have. We are wind-bound. On this lake it is inevitable. Some restlessly problem-solve and some poke the fire and wait, forward motion in balance with holding motion, till something shifts. Adrienne lies on her Therm-a-Rest, reading. I leave the men and follow the caribou paths, letting the animal lead. Going along, climbing and bending, I seem to anticipate their nature by these perfect paths. The hollows the caribou make are the right size for humans; the way they choose is always the least arduous, the most graceful. A branch snags my hat. I puncture my nose on a twig and dab it with sphagnum moss. I go into that slight feeling of fusion, boundarylessness, I have in certain places. My hands and feet seem to become large, more pliant. This time I am linked to a shy, soft-walking animal. I climb a steep hill, and when I can look up, two caribou are in front of me, their big dark rumps to me, their necks strained around, their eyes rolled to see me. Then they buck and crash off through the trees. I find a shed antler on the ground, a gliding shape, mahogany-coloured.

  IN THE END we spend two nights on the beach, slowly draining ourselves making plans to leave and trying to leave. A strange predicament, strangely tiring: the place that enchanted us is unquittable.

  On the third morning we get up before light, eat a cold breakfast, and send Graham and Jack off in the tandem to Terrace Bay—or whatever shore they can make—to get rescue for Adrienne and me. The wind screams on, but the balance between going and waiting has tilted; they will go. Adrienne and I climb the north cliff by separate paths to watch them. It is my Haida tableau: the women on shore with the force of their thoughts, the men in the boats. When I’m high enough I see the kayak, a battling little needle setting a good angle, making good time, a red and a yellow dot paddling.

  When they are out of sight I climb down to the beach and take down my tent. If we are here tonight, I’ll tent with Adrienne. We squat by the fire, find our companionship. After a while she goes to nap and I settle myself in a pile of logs on the west side. Little by little the day warms. I shed my parka, fleece pants, hat. The wind drops. A couple more hours’ wait and we all could have paddled out together.

  Early in the afternoon a wide motorboat comes into the bay like the arrival of modern times. An easygoing man from town drives the boat, Jack and Graham with him. They made Terrace Bay by strength and found Earl in his house, having coffee. At first he declined to make the trip, but after a while he saw the flag outside sagging and agreed to make a run.

  I do not like to leave this way—by Caesarean section—but that is how we leave. I stand braced in the boat, facing backwards, the islands growing hazy, getting away, the caribou walking on their trails.

  When we reach shore it’s all motion again—unloading the kayaks, hitching Earl’s boat to the trailer, drawing it out of the water, saying our thanks, finding car keys and packing up. We make a late lunch on the hood of the truck—instant hummus and pita—and stand talking in a rush. No matter how good a trip has been, there’s always some mix of relief, some caving in, at the end. When a trip is over, some part of me is relieved to dash into a Quik-Mart and buy nachos. For a while anyway, I’m glad to come in from so much vitality.

  Jack pre-empts a plan to drive as far as Wawa for the night and turns in at Pukaskwa, a bulge of land where the highway leaves the coast, a national park, unmaintained but open this time of year. He’s about done in and chooses a site abruptly, throws up the tent while I fetch water from the lake and start a makesh
ift meal. Graham and Adrienne find us and we eat in a pale circle of light from our candle lanterns. We say our goodbyes. Graham has to work the day after tomorrow and they’ll need an early start.

  HEAVY FROST in the morning, the fly stiff and the bushes silver-white. My bags are too rigid to stuff. We get underway and gradually reach the hardwoods in Superior Park, their colour further along now, deeper into fall. We slow on the big hills, crane for views of the lake. We’re coming down now, leaving Superior, a geographical and emotional plunge. In Blind River, at the end of the day, I negotiate a big motel room. We each have a bed, with the same Van Gogh print over the headboards. We take weary and grateful baths, and walk around town before finding a place to eat. Being indoors is like being stuffed in a closet, but we’re too tired to care.

  In the morning Jack checks the oil in the truck and tightens the kayak ropes. We walk in glistening frost to a donut shop for coffee and bagels to go. It’s a good drive all day. I read Tales of the Great Lakes to Jack and we imagine trips we could take. Jack drives me home. Rounding the last climb in the road, I see my house, tall and quiet, through the trees, the board and batten starting to grey, the maples pure yellow, pressing in. Seeing them reminds me it’s an anniversary. Eight years here, almost to the day.

  Jack parks behind my old 4 Runner and helps me unload. I unlock the door and the big square room greets me, pale and cool, everything as I left it. I make tea and we drink it on the porch in two armchairs. It was a good time. It’s good to sit here, too.