On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  It is a shame the technology does not yet exist for either Stephan or me to be frozen solid and not thawed until the other has matured a little.

  I ask Wendy: “I can tell there is something I’m supposed to be doing, something I can’t feel, but I can’t grasp enough of it to know. What is it?”

  “It’s love. He’s just a little guy, and you treat him like he’s gotta meet your own standards to be loved, like he has to earn it from you and can’t even keep any extra in the bank for a grumpy moment.”

  Ouch, that’s true.

  Here I am trying to be in a friendship with this alien, and I’m worrying more about protecting my feelings than about his. I’ve been treating him like I would a rock, and not surprisingly, with my emotions so contorted, I haven’t been able to write, make love to Wendy, or communicate in any way that feels right. I take sleeping pills so I don’t lie awake hating myself for failing, for not being as good a dad as my dad was.

  Still, I am utterly unable to say, “I’m sorry, I was wrong.”

  Wendy

  I haven’t written for a long time. Sometimes I find myself getting depressed out here. Stephan is getting on my nerves, even though he is only being an eleven-year-old human.

  Yesterday I got so angry at Daniel that I wasted about a gallon of water on doing the dishes, and boy was he pissed.

  I think I will probably survive; it is just very difficult. I hate having to clean up sawdust every day, and it gets into the food. Daniel says it’s good for our digestion.

  We have been walking around the island almost every day. It is a great time for us to be a family.

  Stephan

  Me and Mom just got back from walking around the island. I tightened all of the bolts today so that the house would not fall apart.

  DAY 14

  Last night Stephan tightened all of the 386 bolts that keep our house in temporary entropy denial (every year the wood dries a little more, so they need attention). He then knocked over about a gallon of leftover borscht, which rained down the steps and onto a clothes pile, all the tools, and both dogs. When the red wave ceased there were two perfect dry dog outlines on the floor, and two reddish shapes could be seen running into the forest biting each other, trying to eat small pieces of sausage off of one another.

  I just breathed deeply and went outside.

  Today is windmill day. Nova Scotia has no shortage of wind. I bought an $800 marine windmill from a company in Arizona. It’s as heavy as a medium watermelon and has a four-foot propeller span. It is white and streamlined, wires lead away from it, and when it spins it produces electricity, a luxury item we use now mostly for listening to music.

  We mount the windmill on the roof and run wires into two 12-volt car batteries. With a hideous confusion of auto cigarette-lighter plugs and extension cords, these will power our radio and CD player, a VHF radio, a battery charger for all the flashlights’ double-A’s, and even an old Apple laptop. We also have three small portable solar panels. These are each three by two feet and flexible (like thick leather) and can be plugged into the system when it is sunny and windless. One panel in bright sunlight will play the radio on medium volume but not quite spin a CD. The big batteries, once full, will run everything for a couple of weeks without any charging. Our needs are minimal. Our lighting is from kerosene lamps and candles, a warm and friendly light.

  DAY 15

  Since our house is the highest thing around I figured the roof was the best location for the windmill, as that’s obviously where the wind is. Big mistake. Last night the wind blew hard from the east—maybe thirty knots—and it was like sleeping in a subway station. The house shook and vibrated and seemed to scream during the gusts. Not a timid scream—a full-throated “There’s a monster standing next to my bed” type of scream. This morning there were waves in my coffee. I guess it’s time for plan B.

  In the afternoon I get the whale-jawbone sink working, and I cannot help but ponder the fate of this leviathan. In the spring thaw of 1992 two dead sperm whales washed up on the island. We are close to the southern limit of the ice pack, where the ocean surface can freeze in solid sheets several miles wide. Apparently whales sometimes get caught underneath and drown. That spring Junior made one of his rare phone calls to me in Idaho with the warning “Yep, you got some dead whales washed up on the island there.”

  Two sperm whales are equal to about 120 feet and over a hundred tons of dead meat. Talk about a lawn problem. Believe it or not, one can get acclimated to having two tractor trailers of rotting meat just outside the front door. It took two years for all of it to erode. And then the bones appeared! We’re talking major bones here, like a skull that seats twelve, a vertebra that makes a killer toilet seat, a rib seven feet long for a stair railing, disks made into plates, and even an assortment of Calderesque art, seven-foot rib mobiles hanging from the trees. The inside of the jawbone is shaped like an oval, and it makes a great sink. I attach one end to a pulley, so that to drain it we just hoist it a few inches. The water goes down a funnel (where the teeth were) with a melodious gurgle. It runs into the trees, and when food clogs it up it is always fun to try to fool Wendy or Stephan into leaning over the drain as I blow into the tube from below. This results in much yelling at me.

  DAY 21

  Beautiful blue day, mid-sixties, and the inevitable could no longer be put off: it’s gonna be a long cold winter, and we need firewood. First we had to drag all sorts of old, dead, and rotting stuff away from the trail I cut years ago. (I was lazy and kind of just pushed everything out of the way, so the trail has been more like an impenetrable tunnel and we could not drag newly cut wood onto it.) There are lots of dead standing trees along the trail, and we cut those first. And that’s when we found a much older trail, perfectly straight, broad, and in need of only minor clearing. It comes within five feet of my twisting trail, ARGH! We all agreed to pretend we had not seen it, and to this day we have never walked its length.

  Sweaty work with the chain saw, but a good reason for us all to go swimming off the rocks before cocktail hour, in beautiful clear Bahama-like water. We’re in bed by seven.

  DAY 25

  Because it’s real windy today and the batteries are overcharging, Wendy can use her new Dustbuster vacuum. This really makes her happy, seems to rank up there with chocolate and sex.

  DAY 26

  Our woodpile is growing. It is difficult to know just how much wood we will need for the winter, our previous experience in this category being back in Idaho, when we would argue over whether to keep the thermostat at sixty or sixty-five degrees. On our next trip ashore I phone my friend Martin, who tells me, “Seven cords of hardwood, you’re gonna have to get it brought out. You can’t burn that spruce. And you gotta buy it dry, or you guys will freeze to death.” And I remember why he is such a good friend: like me, not knowing anything about a particular thing only encourages him to say more about it, perhaps speak a little louder and quicker. I ask to speak to his wife, Marilyn, and she assures me that he has never lived in a house with a woodstove and that as far as she knows he doesn’t even know where the furnace in their home is—that’s her department—and that they often argue about whether to keep their thermostat at sixty-five or seventy degrees.

  As we are loading groceries into the boat on the mainland, I ask Junior about the wood. “By Jeezus, start cutting now—I’m already doing next year’s.” So, with this encouragement we return to our island, where whatever wood we cut will be exactly the amount of wood we need, says me. It’s my island, DAMNIT! (And isn’t that the point of owning an island anyway?)

  The dogs are in total bliss. They wait for us on the rocks when we go off in the boat, and no matter how long we’ve been gone, they are there to jump in the water to meet us, getting pretty much everything at least a little wet. They are perfect dogs.

  Strange peanut-sauce-over-vegetables dinner, with rice and rotting leftover coleslaw. Rain in the evening. Our water tanks finally begin to fill.

  Wendy
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  I’ve been really emotional lately, but Daniel makes it okay for me to be just me, tears and all. I love him.

  I am getting very sick of carrying big logs to the house. I liked it better when I just had to turn up the thermostat. Firewood is heavy, and we have a lot more to cut and carry.

  DAY 27—AUGUST

  Fiercely clear morning. On the VHF marine radio gossip channel the news update is that Sylvester Stallone was in nearby Carleton on his seven- or twenty-six-million-dollar 125- or 225-foot yacht, depending on who you talk to. A big yacht does go by and I stagger around for much of the morning crying, “I love you, Adrian!”

  Then comes the mammoth woodstove trek of the century. Our old woodstove was a converted fifty-five-gallon drum. Junior accurately named it the “you’ll havta get outta there twice” stove and, sure enough, the first and every other time we lit the monster it got too hot to stay anywhere inside and we’d all run out to cool off, go back in, and then run out again! It would have heated a barn. So we gave in and ordered a smaller cast-iron thing with a nice glass front. It was delivered to Junior’s dock today, and the beast seems to weigh eleven tons. We strapped two six-foot-long two-by-fours onto it and could just lift it, sort of how servants would carry royalty. I was in front, Wendy and Stephan each holding one board in the rear. We trudged, fell, laughed, grunted, and complained. Whenever we stood still the weight of our load made us sink into the mossy trail. Of course we were also dribbling the dogs like soccer balls. Amazingly we carried it, just the three of us. Stephan is growing into a strong boy, and just in time. I was proud—this was the single heaviest thing carried to our home, and we did it, just family.

  Next we need a way to keep the floor from catching fire. We put on three backpacks and hike to the far side of the island. On Pebble Beach we collect fist-sized round and egg-shaped stones, each an ancient story told only with geological patience. We load up as many as we can, helping one another put on the packs. With much moaning, groaning, complaining, and laughing, we carry and stumble the rocks home. I screw a simple two-by-four wood frame into the floor around the stove. We spill the rocks within the framework and stand back, a little surprised at how perfectly they fill the area. Also at how beautiful it looks, the black speckles of mica matching the black of the stove.

  DAY 29

  Stephan and I moved the windmill today. We rigged a mastlike pipe to a tree and ran two hundred feet of heavy and expensive No. 4 wire to the house. Stephan buried the parts of it that cross the trail and our “yard.” Naturally he also buried parts of himself. He called me over, where I found him apparently without legs. Needless to say, it took a while to get him extricated. I then connected wires to the batteries with only one explosion of sparks (which blew off a dime-sized chunk of the butter knife I was using as a screwdriver). We can no longer feel it turning, but we sure can hear it. I like to watch it, and think I’m the one making electricity.

  We also set up the bathroom roof to collect the rainwater that spills over from the main roof. We now have about 550 square feet of roof collecting all the water we will need. I love to sit by the two fifty-five-gallon tanks on the first floor and listen to the water pour in. It is soothing, like watching a fire.

  Wendy, Stephan, and I can get the dogs to howl. First off the mood must be right—you can’t just go at it during a meal, or at sleep time. It also cannot be too hot. I begin barking, throwing in a yelp now and then. The dogs perk their ears—more than that really; they focus their whole beings with an intensity I envy. Next, Wendy and Stephen chime in, the tone escalating in yips and yelps. Then Bear joins in with a few tentative barks, Abby contributing with a sort of loud whining sound similar to a bag of hamsters being run over by a go-cart. The time is right, and with an instinct that just won’t go away, we all break into the howl together. Bear’s shoulders hunch and the hairs on his back stand up. Even Abby, bred for generations of . . . um, something, even she can do it, though a little squeakily. It is a happy moment in our lives and usually disintegrates in laughter and general tail wagging. We all feel better, uplifted and released.

  DAY 30

  These bizarre laughing birds were around again last night. They give a sort of giggle-hiccup animal chirp, a squeaky hinge crying out for oil. You feel somehow embarrassed when you hear them, like they have caught you in the act of doing something private. Since I hear them only when I’m peeing off the porch in the middle of the night, I can’t help but take it personally. I call them denial birds because I automatically deny whatever they are saying about me.

  DAY 33

  Long day: we cut and haul wood. In the afternoon Stephan goes swimming in the harbor.

  DAY 35

  August is warm and amiable. I am tempted to relax, not worry about all the preparations for winter.

  Wendy and I spend sunrise watching a cormorant get repeatedly stuck in the trees just beneath our windows. Cormorants are web-footed seabirds that should have no business being in trees. This guy lands by crashing into a treetop, which bends to absorb his impact and then spring-launches him ass first back in the direction he came from, into another tree. For five minutes he doesn’t move, draped like a flung-at-the-wall-to-see-if-it’s-done piece of spaghetti. Finally he looks around and then sort of trips into the air. He loses altitude fast (on water they have to “run” for quite a way to get airborne), and he scrunches around another tree, where he falls backward and, I swear to God, lies there on his back, barely balanced on a branch and looking dejectedly at heaven. We were about to launch a rescue party, bring him to the water, maybe give him a pep talk, but he finally mustered himself and flew off, probably too embarrassed to visit this island again. It’s a pity the denial birds didn’t see, because I would have liked to laugh with them for once.

  DAY 36

  Wendy

  Daniel caught a little bird that was fluttering around us when we woke up this morning. I could see its heart beating; its whole chest shook.

  We wake up to a little brown bird fluttering around our heads. I gently catch it and release it outside. I pause and think: if the world blew up right now, I’d get caught with a good deed as my final act. That’s not selfish of me, is it?

  Going for karmic broke I dig a new pit for the outhouse (which is by the harbor and the fishing shack). Steph and Wendy dig the dirt out from around the wood beams under the main house so they won’t rot. Then they begin to make a garden; they are a good team.

  Abby can barely keep up with destroying it.

  IT IS FOUR-THIRTY in the morning and I find myself on the couch, sleeping off some argument. I remember I was wrong, and didn’t want to wait around to find out how much more wrong I could get, so I ran away—my standard defense—and am in the small shack by the harbor, sleeping alone. I’m putting into words the nasty feelings of wanting to be single again, free of marriage demons, free to feel sorry for myself without the risk of getting caught being so stuck. Do I just up the Prozac dose? But when I do that my soda’s flat, and what’s the point of breathing?

  Sometimes I just cannot contain all the fireworks trying to bust out. Being in a marriage can feel like having surrendered. I think of my favorite Fitzgerald quote:

  Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees. He could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

  He knew that when he kissed this girl and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her.

  DAY 37

  I snuck back to the house early and made Wendy a cheese omelette.

  Stephan

  We hauled another ton of wood today. The stacks are getting larger and larger every day. The clouds are beautiful on the horizon.

  4. Island Life


  Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work.

  —THOREAU

  DAY 38

  Today Stephan is building a fort. We hear him hacking with the machete and yelling, “Come see, come see!” He’s cut down hundreds of dead trees—each maybe ten feet high and as thick as a wrist. These he has tied together into walls that enclose an area big enough for a school bus. He’s begging us to come and attack him. Funny, knowing the most trouble he can get into is with a machete is comforting. Living in this world is so much safer; traffic and the Internet are to me greater worries. (I see the Internet as the collective colostomy bag of our culture, and I prefer Stephan poking out the eyeballs of dead fish he finds washed up.)

  The windmill is quiet in its new and sheltered location, doing about six rpms while just a few feet above it seagulls pant audibly to gain on the twenty-five-knot wind. It seems we set it up in a small windless zone—shit! Plan C next?

  Stephan says he saw three ghosts by his fort today. “There was a man, a woman in her middle thirties wearing a hood, and a squirrel.”

  There is a story about a local ghost. A fisherman named Angus says she was killed by an angry man from Weed Harbor. He says she floats around and does no harm except for “scaring the piss out of me and my brothers late at night.”