On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  The strange thing for me is a feeling that it probably really was me who did something—whatever it is we are fighting about. It’s not so much that I am wrong, or did a bad thing; it’s more likely I just did not notice what was falling out of my mouth. There is a very short cable between my mind and my mouth. When she asks me something like “Do I look fat in these pants?” I assume it’s really a question, and that I should answer truthfully. (Wrong!)

  Stephan made us pizza for dinner. He’s enjoying reading this year’s ten most banned books, which a friend in Idaho sent him. (I can’t think of a better way to get a kid to read.)

  DAY 107

  Great afternoon walk around the island, Stephan wearing his long underwear and greatly resembling a young and depressed Santa Claus being told he did not get a part in the Christmas pageant. He’s beginning to do that teenage thing of trying to look miserable.

  Wendy and I argue for a minute and to end it I just look away and go back to the book I’m reading. I hear “But Daniel” and look up to see her face undergo the transition from sadness to tears—the whole process—in maybe five seconds. And then she looks away, having had the ultimate end of any argument, the last word of Tears.

  I offer Wendy a sense of safety. I am her knight in armor, the protector. The conflict is that in my eyes I can do this only in my world, on this island. Here I can build shelter, create warmth and comfort, prepare for emergencies, supply power and water, and ensure safety from most worldly demons. That’s why I’m here! And so elated to have a well-defined purpose in my life. But Wendy, she wants to meet people, to work, drink lattes, go to yard sales, eat frozen yogurt. So how is it our lives are woven together, our wants, needs, and dreams entwined, our souls wonderfully tangled?

  DAY 108

  Gloomy rainy day.

  DAY 110

  Burnt fried spaghetti for breakfast. Stephan and I do schoolwork while Wendy repaints the porch door and chairs. We’ve begun using the woodstove, a real sweet friend to visit day and night, luscious heat.

  Rainy storm. Several new leaks develop where the rain is being driven up and under the roof shingles. I’m trying to convince myself that any asshole can build a house that doesn’t leak.

  Wendy

  Daniel is home-schooling Stephan, which is a very brave thing. I would be unable to do this part. I love the quiet time this brings for me. Daniel has Stephan do his work either at the desk in the small hut or outside if it’s nice weather. Daniel is very patient with Stephan, giving him lots of extra information and making sure he’s looking at things from several different viewpoints. The curriculum we chose is Christian-based because it was the most challenging and advanced. But since Daniel is Jewish, he comes with a totally different take on things. He challenges Stephan to look at what he’s being taught and what his heart tells him to be the truth for him. In the hut there are war marks on the wall where Stephan sits to do his work—big black scuff marks from his boots.

  DAY 113

  Stephan and I drive for hours to a town called Hill River, where, I’m told, a lady sells rabbits. I assumed they would be big, wild, and vicious beasts ready to breed and survive on an island, laugh at blizzards, and frighten small children. In a few years we could hunt them and always have food. Turns out they are the old petting-zoo rabbits—as in too old to survive the rigors of getting petted. “But we drove all this way, and don’t they look kinda cute with those big floppy ears?” Stephan says. So in the back of the truck they go, six of the cuddliest rabbits you’d never want to eat. One is dead by the time we stop at the town’s only red light.

  Three hours later we release the remaining five on the island. They look at us sadly, motionless. Bear and Abby are barely held by Stephan. I run at the plump little fellows, waving and screaming, hoping they’ll scatter. One nibbles some grass.

  Stephan

  We went into town today to go to a flea market, and I got to eat onion rings.

  Then we got rabbits, and the dog’s already killed one. I buried it and gave it a big gravestone. Now I am reading Watership Down.

  DAY 116

  West-southwest gale. Bear proudly shows off a black bunny he has obviously been chewing on since dawn. Four to go. Stephan had to clean his room and he found some dishes we’ve been missing.

  DAY 117

  Quote of the morning from the radio: “Investors ignored the early-warning signs of fraud, when the gold mine’s geologist committed suicide . . .”

  Stephan has been singing from my Rocky Horror CD all day. What do you say to your eleven-year-old when he’s yelling, “I’m just a sweet transvestite . . . from trans-sexual . . . Transylvania . . . ah ah”?

  Naturally I am disgusted, but the fact that it’s my CD and I have every song fully memorized prevents me from saying anything. I hum along.

  DAY 124—NOVEMBER

  We wake to a cold and brilliant blue morning. Wendy overenthusiastically flushes the toilet and one of the small plastic pieces of the “flush mechanism” explodes with a twang, vanishing forever (I guess it’s with all the unmatched socks).

  Gorgeous day. Peter and Mike stop by for a yarn as I’m fixing a leak in the motorboat.

  When we met years ago interactions were tense—me the rich, overeducated, New York, Green Peacing privileged snotty blah blah blah. Now I’m called over to have a beer. I’ve hunted with them, and we’ve shared a hangover or two. A man is finally a man in his own eyes when he knows himself among other men, when he’s on a team, one of the guys.

  DAY 125

  Stephan is banned from the house for the day because he threw a tremendous fit, complete with tears, yelling, and door slamming. This one had to do with a Monopoly game that he was close to losing. Did my parents let me win games? Is that what I am supposed to do? Again the zucchini thing. Am I forever doomed to be so selfish with Stephan? Am I the dad or another child?

  We find the remains of another rabbit, so that’s three down. When next Bear comes by I tell him to stop pretending he isn’t a corpse-chewing murderer. Then Aaron and a friend of his show up and, only to be polite, of course, I offer them a drink, and, well, one thing leads to another.

  Getting drunk with Aaron is a privilege. He’s about five foot six and two hundred pounds of muscle. The thing I like about him is his smile, his open look right back at you that is simply friendly. Aaron is someone who you want to stand by you in a bar fight or a gale. He is loyal.

  As they leave, Aaron throws Stephan and me two ducks from the bottom of his boat. I want to nurse one of them back to health because it isn’t quite dead. But it’s dinnertime, and I think it is important to know exactly how food shows up on your plate. I break its neck. Then when I cut its head off the duck runs around in circles to Stephan’s (and my own) shrieks. Luckily our manhood is not questioned, as Aaron’s boat is already weaving out of the harbor.

  8. Our World

  Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities; look at the world!

  —ROGER BACON

  DAY 126

  Wendy

  Daniel and I had a very small wedding, about fifty people. We had sushi and shish kebab catered. Daniel made all of our invitations by hand. He took old sea charts and cut them up. He wrote everything by hand on every invitation. Then he got a roll of wax paper, you know like for your kitchen, and cut a piece for inside each invite and then sealed them with a piece of duct tape. People loved them—it was so Daniel. We were married by a woman who is a wonderfully enlightened minister. At the beginning of the ceremony she had us give our mothers each a rose to acknowledge them. When the ceremony was over Daniel’s best friend put on ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me.”

  During Stephan’s history class today some creative rewording of his book’s text was unavoidable. The Christian-based home-schooling books we have are excellent, but I am, after all, a liberal New York Jewish guy, so we modified “In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America” to “In 1492 America was invaded by . . .” Later, “The missionaries were the only t
rue friends of the Indians” became “Although responsible for the destruction of the entire Native American culture, the missionaries generally smiled when at work.” In the geology section, where it says, “Some scientists actually consider the possibility that the continents drift and at one time were . . .” we changed it to “About 1 percent of the especially inept geology graduate students continue to wrestle with the theory of plate tectonics.” I’m particularly proud of that one.

  Stephan

  I hate Daniel, he made me clean up my room.

  DAY 127

  Stephan

  I love Daniel, he took me for a boat ride today.

  DAY 128

  “Daniel, did the fridge flood again?”

  “I’m ignoring the fridge, dear.”

  During the day the upstairs is usually quite warm, especially since the stove is burning. The idea with the fridge was to have a cool box, not for ice cream or anything that really needs to be cold, but for eggs, cheese, cabbage. Even milk will last a day or three in there. Just leaving things outside in the shade doesn’t work, because what the dogs don’t eat freezes at night. But, the earth that the fridge is buried in will stay at a pretty constant temperature. A good plan, it’s just that most anything that spills upstairs ends up downstairs. That is because the second floor’s floorboards have dried and shrunk so much that the upstairs works like a giant colander, but that is quite another issue. The end result is that whenever you get down on your knees, pull open the trap door, and reach in, you never know just what you will find. That’s why you will often hear Wendy or me asking Stephan to bring up this or that from the fridge.

  Actually there are two bins side by side under the trap door. On the right we keep all the stuff not easily bruised, like beer, jelly, a layer of regular and sweet potatoes, onions, cabbages, and carrots. As this neatly stacked arrangement works only if you come at it from the top down (“Hey, let’s have some carrots and cabbage for a snack, potatoes for dinner, then a lot of jelly and beer for dessert!”), entropy has its way, and it is usually a frightful mess in there. Many a meal begins with “Hey, Stephan, grab five things from the right bin.”

  The left bin is more dangerous; it’s all soft. Right after a shore visit it may contain butter, eggs, cheese, a thawing surprise like hamburger, or even frozen pizza. The left bin also contains the leftovers.

  My mother always told me to only eat what I liked, and not to stuff myself. As a result of this attempt to raise me properly, I have rebelled. I will eat anything, including a worm when I was properly dared by a pretty girl. I still not only finish all of my food but will then eat from other people’s plates until the table is cleared. But if there has been a major miscalculation in the amount of food made—that is, if I’ve gone through all the heroic efforts of “saving” an awful meal with curry and chili and ketchup and, finally, red pepper, and Wendy has politely said that she’s not hungry—well then, we do have leftovers.

  I don’t know if Wendy and Stephan have an actual conspiracy against me or if things from the left bin are actually escaping. My point is that few of my leftovers have ever returned from the fridge. I send them down, plan on how I might resurrect them the next day in a “Lazarus stew,” and then they vanish. Perhaps they have decomposed into a splendid sediment slushy that will one day baffle a geology graduate student. All I know is that I will never reach into the left bin and the dogs are getting fat.

  DAY 129

  Wendy confesses to finding another dead rabbit, so now we’re down to two.

  Abby vomited during dinner, a rabbit foot. This only briefly interrupted her begging us for spaghetti, of which she got none, so she re-ate the foot.

  I became so sad today reading a letter from some friends in Idaho: “The pictures you sent us are wonderful and your life seems so much like what we dream about, but the bills keep us locked here.” People hang on to their excuses as if they were a commodity in short supply.

  DAY 133

  Another dead rabbit in the morning. I hear him scream, a humanlike sound that is truly frightening. Hearing it dumps adrenaline into my system. When I get him out of Bear’s mouth his back is broken, so I kill and bury him—no heart to turn him into stew, as was originally planned.

  We walk around the island and stop at our bog. It’s about as big as a football field and so soft you can jump up and land headfirst laughing. We are rolling in the thick moss when I show Stephan a primitive living skill I learned years ago. By holding and squeezing a wet clump of moss over your mouth you can drink. The cool part is how you aim your thumb at your thirst (that is, you hold your fist up so the water from the wet moss runs down your thumb and into your mouth). First Stephan squeezes the moss before holding it up and gets his lap wet. Then on his second try he aims too low and gets his belly wet. Clearly a being who can operate a TV remote and cannot get a drink of water if his life depended on it couldn’t have evolved from anything. So much for my theory of evolution.

  Two weeks ago in Galeville there were paper turkeys in every store window for Thanksgiving. Why would I think about the harvest, a time of thanks for living, anything like that? What organic input did my former life contain where I could be in touch with a natural cycle? I relied on specials on stuffing to alert me to a seasonal change. Thanksgiving. Thank spending, Thanks pending.

  I hate going ashore now. On the island I have a place. Ashore I am entangled in a web of triviality, and I just want to sit down and cry for the vagueness of my life. Wendy flourishes like a spider in the center of its web, rejoicing in the vibrations of each silken string.

  Today, ashore for laundry and shopping, we stop for a hitchhiker. The first thing you notice about Albert when you pick him up for his weekly trip into town is that his clothes don’t fit right. My first thought about him was that he wasn’t operating on all thrusters. Listening to him took some focus; the words were chopped, accented. He’s such a wild character, like he’s out of a novel, that you can barely talk with him in real life.

  Albert rows a small red dory along the coast and combs beaches, primarily in search of firewood. If it’s not storming, he’s on the water. I have seen him before, I just never really noticed him. A lone boat working along the coast—as common as a herring gull, and not as noisy. He has always lived alone. He grew up across Kingsland’s harbor in Young Cove some fifty years ago. Junior’s wife, Becky, also grew up there. Ten or so families lived in this tiny community, which no road led to. They would row the mile to Kingsland, or walk if the ice was thick. Today Young Cove is a favorite safe and secluded anchorage for visiting yachts. Ashore you can find some graves and a foundation or two.

  Albert will row his dory as far as Whale Island, a good three-hour row. He gathers firewood for his cooking and heating stove. There is a huge brush pile by his house, a small shack you assume is abandoned. The woodpile is twice the size of the shack, which resembles something a Stephen King character would pause at before entering.

  Albert is immune to social graces. He is the person in Kingsland whom everyone cares for, a test of their conscience, perhaps. Whenever you have given him a lift into town you find a religious pamphlet suggesting you accept Jesus, and accept him soon. You never actually see him leave it on the car seat, or maybe the floor. I think he wants you to find it as if its appearance was a small miracle. The first time I found one I was deeply struck with love for him. A man wanting to share his God is inspiring to me, the rawness of it. A man wanting to impose his God—that’s ugly. But the two should not be confused.

  DAY 134

  Stephan swims daily and ecstatically. His joy is the best thing to remind me that he’s just a kid. It’s okay if his room looks like a bomb went off, or if he chews with his mouth so open that if you took a picture, you wouldn’t necessarily know which way the food was going. These are the fun things for him. I need to step back and let him have joy instead of corrections. If I could just do that.

  The dogs killed the last rabbit this afternoon. That ends the sustainable
-food-supply idea. Martini hour was moved up to three o’clock, after which I thought of building a still to replace the rabbits.

  DAY 137

  The seat for our outhouse is a sperm-whale vertebrae—one of the biggest ones, the first or second from the skull. What is so special about this “seat” is how perfectly the human ass fits into it. When you sit you are so comfortable that you barely know you’re sitting. It’s like when you were learning not to pee in bed and you had dreams that justified your accidents. like “I’m getting up . . . going to the bathroom” or “Well, I’m in the bathtub, so it’s okay . . .” or whatever, but it was so comfortable and warm for a while, to sleep in your pee, it just felt good, peaceful. Unfortunately, we had to learn that this feeling of well-being was bad; an angry mother changing the sheets may love you, but enough is enough. So now when you sit in this outhouse it feels so good that you not only can’t pee, you have an urge to go into therapy.

  DAY 147

  I am proud that we have our own dump out here, our own pile of refuse. We do not carry our garbage ashore to vanish somewhere else. And not just that, but with my master’s degree in environmental science, only I can take the blame for locating this dump on a hilltop just thirty feet from our one small well! So you see, my island, my brave new world, has all the comforts of civilization and no one to blame, no they, only I. We bust glass on a rock just where the waves reach, recycling that back into sand. Soda cans we carry ashore for recycling, and everything else we burn, either for heat or in our fifty-five-gallon burn barrel. I think all of the world’s environmental problems would be solved if getting rid of your waste was your own problem, and you could not pay someone else to handle it for you.