On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  5. Acorns and Visitors

  He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor.

  —THOREAU

  DAY 63—VISITORS

  Peter has come to visit a few times, but today he brings his oldest friend, Aaron. When the seas are calm you can come right up to the house. They show up near sunset, anchoring their big boat close and rowing their skiff ashore. “Duck-hunting season starts tomorrow,” says Peter, “and we already got two.”

  This is a great time for these guys; good old hunting and gathering is hard to beat for making a guy feel good. During each short legal fishing season—lobster, mackerel, sea urchin, snow crab, or scallop—they work long, long hours. Not until their off weeks—or even months, due to storms—can they relax and booze it up. So for brief periods of the year there is a lot of drinking. They arrive already drunk.

  My family often hides when Peter shows up. Sometimes Stephan peers at us, wanting to be a part of something not available from his mother, and I am guilty of not seeing or hearing him, for he is small and Peter can be huge.

  We have more than a few beers. We tell stories, we exaggerate, we lie, confess, curse, and make promises. We speak of our dreams. We do what men seem to have to do: we share our isolation and for a few moments are completely known.

  The trails on the island can barely contain us. I watch Peter go diagonal and thrash through the trail’s edge, where a tree catches and holds him up, springing him back onto the trail.

  When he and Aaron leave, the whole island is silent. Wendy and Stephan reappear. “Wow” is about all any of us can say.

  DAY 64

  Quack, boom, POP! and hunting season is on. As the sun rises it’s raining ducks around Aaron and Peter’s boat. I see some other boats to the east, but I’m rooting for the ducks anyway. Which does not prevent me from accepting two from Peter. Feast! Sauté in garlic, apples, soy sauce, sugar, and onions.

  Wendy

  I’m glad Daniel is the cook in this family. If it were me, we would all starve. I’m good at breakfast—Daniel wakes up every morning saying, “Where the hell is my coffee?” as he snuggles next to me. Stephan’s favorite is French toast. He begs me to make this often.

  I have learned to make homemade bread, and boy am I good at it. I can make challah and an awesome rye bread. This is definitely a main staple for us. (We also could not live without my chocolate-chip cookies.)

  I have an oven board I bought at an antique store, and Daniel hooked it up so that it hinges down and up. I can put it up while I’m chopping vegetables or kneading bread and then put it back down for more room when I’m through using it. The propane stove/oven is just big enough to fit one round loaf of challah. The trick is making sure the propane tank doesn’t run out before the bread’s done.

  DAY 65

  Rainy foggy morning. We get up early to go ashore. It’s still stormy, and as we wake we watch spray blow over the rocks a hundred feet to mist our windows. We wear our float suits for the first time, heavy neoprene full-body life jackets. They are bulky but wonderfully snug, like a turtle’s shell. I drop Wendy and Stephan ashore for laundry and food shopping. They love to be together; Stephan can soak in her love without any competition from me.

  IT FASCINATES ME how we consider ourselves superior to the other creatures on our planet. That we have somehow risen above our brutal past existence as hunters and gatherers is, well, just bullshit. Our lives are hardly different from those of our ancestors, and I am happy when I am caught in any embarrassing animalistic behavior.

  Food, for example. I’m a squirrel, a paranoid squirrel who lives in constant fear of the first snow. Do I have enough acorns hidden for Whale Island’s eternal winter? Where did I hide them anyway?

  We now have enough food for several months. My favorite are the military’s MREs (meals, ready to eat). MREs have a shelf life of at least five years. They come in a heavy plastic bag, about as big as one of your feet, and inside is everything you could want, including salt, pepper, sugar, coffee, gum, toilet paper, matches, a spoon, Tabasco sauce, and a moist towelette. Each of the food items is separately sealed in a you-can-get-into-it-only-if-you-are-really-hungry plastic-and-foil pouch. This includes a main course of perhaps chicken tetrazzini, some applesauce, a powdered sugar drink, crackers with jelly, cheese, or peanut butter, and a dessert like a chocolate cookie. Some MREs even include a “self-heat” pouch. You simply pour a quarter cup of water in the pouch, put your food pack in, and stand back. They hardly ever explode, and three minutes later you’ve got a hot meal that some people say tastes like cat food, but I love it for its convenience and calories. Hairballs aren’t so bad anyway.

  The best part of an MRE is the labeling. Army people, or at least the ones who do the labeling, seem to have exceptionally low IQs. The self-heat pouch says DO NOT EAT. The drink package exclaims BEVERAGE BASE, POWDER, APPLE CIDER. Another proclaims its contents as JAM, STRAWBERRY, and sometimes you get one with the coded message 8 2 8 5 5 1 3 2; I have no idea what it means, but to me it tastes great.

  On those days when I find myself humming the Rolling Stones’ tune “Mother’s Little Helper,” there ain’t nothing like an MRE!

  Besides the MREs our diet is what I would call pretty normal. Fresh meats don’t last long, so we have them only on the night we return from the mainland. Tomatoes do not take well to the trip, nor do bananas. Between the grocery store and our kitchen everything must be picked up and handled six times: from shopping cart to car, to the dock, handed into the boat, carried from the boat and left on the rocks at our landing, and then carried a quarter of a mile over the twisting root-tripping trail.

  Thank goodness for cans! Under the couch I built is a vast drawer—actually it’s a plastic fisherman’s bait box that washed ashore in ’94—and it is full of cans. Behind it, a belly crawl farther, are an additional five rows of jars of peanut butter, jellies, and other staples.

  Vegetables keep a lot better than people suspect. Onions and cabbage are perfectly fresh even after a month if kept halfway cool. An onion makes any meal taste good. (Well, almost. Not breakfast cereal.) Potatoes, apples, and oranges all last if not in the sun and not too badly banged up on the way out. We use canned milk for our coffee. We miss nothing, except maybe fried clams. We’re all gaining weight, maybe because food is now a pleasure for us. We eat no meals on the run or standing up. We digest our food long enough to satisfy any grandparent. Wendy cooks our bread, I continue my lifelong quest to discover something new (a combination like chocolate and peanut butter—something that will be named after me), and Stephan, well, he eats.

  6. Married Life

  The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

  —THOREAU

  DAY 66

  Wendy and Stephan have gone to Halifax for the night. I think she wants to go shopping in the kind of stores where the aroma knocks me over.

  I had my first day all alone on the island and loved it, guiltless. At night it really rained, and the brilliant rainwater-overflow system that I’d developed had a problem, namely that the water didn’t flow down the pipe it was supposed to. Luckily, just yesterday I completed creating (my first) refrigerator. I cut a hole through the downstairs floor and dug into the newly revealed dirt under the house (finding a favorite hammer lost when the floor was built). Then I buried one of those big Tupperware-esque bins and carefully reassembled the cut-out floor. Picturing a cherry on top of a banana split, I put a brass latch/toe stubber in the center so I could pry the thing open. Anyway, all unsupervised water, whether from the leaky roof or spilling over the brim of the rainwater barrel, finds its way and collects in this gravitational mecca.

  It is possible that a trap-door refrigerator at the lowest point in a house that often has liquids such as rainwater or borscht
running inside of it is not a good idea. Oh well; failure is an unnecessary deterrent for the ignorant. . . . I was able to fill an additional forty gallons of spare water tanks, so now we have 150 gallons, not counting what’s in the fridge.

  I am loving my day of bachelordom. The house is such a cozy mess, and there are no standards to adhere to. I have sauerkraut, Pringles, and mustard for lunch. I enjoy eating dropped morsels off the floor (if I get there before the dogs), and I can leave half my face unshaved.

  Peter comes by at sunset. We sit on the rocks passing a bottle and feeling wonderfully free.

  Wendy

  I first met Daniel when I started my new job. I kept hearing everybody talk about this guy who was building a house on his island and how great he was. He walked into the office a couple of weeks later with the top of his nose bleeding because the hatch door on his pickup fell down on it. I thought to myself, This guy is supposed to be smart?

  DAY 67

  Ashore at five to get the girl, boy, and a small wooden skiff that Junior built during the winter. He has built one each winter for the past twenty-eight. Beautiful shape—she dances over the water like a Jesus bug. She is painted dark green. I hope Stephan falls in love with her; every rowboat needs a boy.

  What can you do with a woman who buys sod for an island in the North Atlantic? Wendy also has bought two small birch trees, another thing that has never survived this climate. But I don’t even get to vocalize this thought, as Abby eats all the leaves off both trees while we are carrying the sod to the house.

  DAY 68

  September eighth, our first official day of school. We rise early, nine-thirty, and as Wendy hammers away on the porch, Stephan and I hunch over some graph paper and zing, off we go. We eat fresh blueberry muffins to sustain ourselves through the rigorous activity of making the one-to-twelve multiplication table. Stephan slows a little when he gets to the sevens and eights. I get completely lost there.

  DAY 69

  I try to tell Wendy that I don’t think the sod she bought will grow. She goes outside before I can finish. I follow, and watch her unrolling and stomping on each row defensively. Now we have a five-row lawn. Then she goes back inside to eat a whole bag of Nestlé’s chocolate chips. Her look dares me to say anything.

  Later on she says, “Hey, what the hell happened to the fridge, how’d all this water get in here?” Relying on eighteen years of overeducation to get me out of this one, I nimbly reply, “Uh, I dunno.”

  DAY 70

  Stephan

  Today I found a really big lobster pot with four huge lobsters. I fell overboard rescuing it. Its buoy was gone, so I had to grab the rope. Then we stripped the bark off the trees Daniel cut down so that we could make a dock for the boat. I fell in twice. I also caught five fish for dinner.

  DAY 71

  The dock construction is going on full speed. Last week we rented a generator and a massive rock drill. It’s a pain in the ass to lug around, but the three-foot-tall drill makes a hole one inch wide by eight inches deep in three minutes, in solid granite. I drilled extra holes in a few prominent rocks; maybe they’ll be useful later. After all twelve holes were filled with sixteen-inch stainless steel threaded bolts and cement that expands as it dries, we drilled through the trees we had cut. We bolted and nailed the whole mess together. Then we laid eight-foot logs across the “runners,” and I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of anything I’ve made, including the salad bowl in third grade. There is something special about designing and building a thing from the ground up. Usually my dad helps—whatever he builds succeeds with elegance, so I am eager to step aside for the benefit of the project—but this scrounged bizarre tangle of timber is all ours: the idea, the labor, the mistakes, and the comedy. Perhaps this is yet another step into manhood, where I am the creator and my father is there only to smile upon my finished work. And just maybe Stephan will one day appreciate something about my style, and he’ll be heartened by doing things his own way, and passing that along.

  By dusk I’m slathered with sap. Our showers here are critical to maintaining a sense of comfort. “Hardships” are not so tough to endure when you are clean. Until recently we have been using a solar shower: basically just a thick-skinned black rubber three-gallon bag (French army surplus, $10). This absorbs sunlight while lying on a rock. It warms up nicely in about three hours. When the water feels right we hang it from a nail over our heads on the outside of the house. Gravity feeds the warm water through a spigot, and if you are quick, or shut it off and on between rinses, it works great. Wendy and I share one bag. Because Stephan only showers when forced—once a week—we let him use a whole bag. Of course on rainy days we stay dirty, as the water needs direct sunshine to heat up.

  Last week I finished our indoor system, and it is as luxurious as the Plaza. First we heat up a three-gallon bucket of water on the propane stove. It takes only about six minutes to get warm. Hidden under the dining room table is an old water jug attached to the floor. With a funnel, we pour the heated water through a hole in our table and into the jug. A hose goes through the floor from the jug and connects to a spigot on the first floor. My father gave Wendy an ancient-looking bathtub he found at a junkyard, and we hung a shower curtain around it, suspended from the ceiling. The hose hangs over our heads with a little shower spigot attached. Except for the fact that the tub is by the foot of Stephan’s bed, which sometimes gets wet, the whole thing is great. Three gallons runs for about four minutes, so we move fast. There is also a clamp behind the spigot, to control the flow. The tub drains through another hose that goes through the floor and into the dirt under the house, and yes, it’s fun to blow in the end of that and scare whoever is in the shower.

  DAY 72—LOBSTERS

  Today is September twelfth, Landing Day, the final day of lobster season, when everyone must put up all 250 of their traps for the year. It’s a day of hard work, and you can almost hear an audible collective sigh. For two months these guys have been busting butt, the money they make from their catch directly proportional to how vigilant they are. This money will be most of what they earn this year, and two months is a fairly short period of time. Peter has asked me to come along and help.

  The alarm wakes me at four-thirty. I make a little noise getting ready, just enough so Wendy will think I am awfully manly getting up so early. I stumble to the slipway in the dark and rain. The weather is intrusive, the cold and wet immediately going to my skin. I push the boat down the almost completed ramp and happily start the engine, loving how I can operate still mostly asleep. By five o’clock I’m at Peter’s wharf, tied up and just in time to meet him and Aaron as they stumble out of the camp. We pile into the Defiance and head out of the tiny cove. I could jump off and land dry on the rocks we skim past. The wind is gusting at over twenty knots from the southwest.

  It is clear to me right away that I am little more than extra body weight. Working together all summer, Peter and Aaron are like the gears inside a well-oiled watch. Peter steers the Defiance next to the lobster-pot buoy, and Aaron snags the floating line with his gaff, hauls in, then throws the gaff onto the deck behind him with his right hand while handing the rope to Peter with his left hand. Peter drapes the line over the winch with his right hand while momentarily letting go of the wheel and with his left hand starts the hydraulics that spin the winch that pulls in the line. The lobster pot comes whizzing toward the surface, at first a dark and mysterious shape. Then Aaron drops the buoy in the boat as he neatly coils the fifty to one hundred feet of line. I help by untying the buoy. (A four-year-old could do it, but I hurry and grunt loudly, and make the most of it.) Peter maneuvers the pot on board so that it sits on a table directly between him and Aaron. Peter rapidly goes through the trap, throwing the small lobsters back, dropping the keepers in a bin, and tossing out any crabs or starfish. Usually he’ll keep a fish, maybe a flounder, for the next meal. Aaron puts the coil of rope inside the trap, closes the pot, and while Peter heads us for the next buoy, Aaron either hands it t
o me to stack or just keeps going with the boat’s momentum and throws it himself onto the ever growing heap in the stern. All this in no more than a minute.

  Between traps I go to the bin and put rubber bands on the lobsters claws. Since I have handled lobsters since I was a little kid, I am able to do this well enough to at least not get bitten.

  During squalls the wind howls through us and our wet clothing. We stack the traps higher and higher, like bricks. The Defiance is big, and she holds eighty traps before there is absolutely no more room for us on board. Aaron throws a few more on top, and we head in toward Peter’s camp.

  At the beginning of this season two lobstermen had too many traps stacked in the stern of their boat. The wind was blowing strong and from behind them, and the traps became like a sail, so when they made the turn around Grubby Rock the wind caught them and rolled the boat right over. The traps were lost. Luckily they were being followed by another boat, and they somehow swam out from under and were quickly rescued. They were able to tow the boat back into Kingsland, upside down and minus its traps, very embarrassed. Later on the lobster-men hired Aaron to dive and recover most of the traps. These two guys were a lot luckier than they deserve. Aaron tells me, “What they did was ignorant, damn fools. Them’s originally from Weed Harbor, you know”—just to remind me that no one from Kingsland could possibly be so foolish.