There's nothing under the canoe, honey.
Above: This is how we roll.
My husband and I went on our honeymoon in Montana in June, which unbeknownst to us was still the dead of winter. (We hail from the Caribbean.) At the time, we were training for a Half Ironman triathlon,training for a Half Ironman triathlon, so we needed to find an upper-body strength and aerobic substitute for swimming during our two weeks of bliss. Without taking the weather into account, we’d decided that canoeing or kayaking would suffice.
So off we traipsed from Houston to Montana, where we stayed in an adorable bed-and-breakfast near Yellowstone, which we picked because the owner advertised healthy organic food. The beets, quinoa, and cauliflower kugel we were served for breakfast weren’t exactly what we’d hoped for, but we felt fantastic. And hungry. Very, very hungry.
Our “Surprise! We’re vegetarian!” B&B sat near a tundra lake. For those of you who have not seen a tundra lake, imagine a beautiful lake in a mountain clearing surrounded by tall evergreens. Picture deer drinking from crystalline waters, hear the ducks quacking greetings to each other as they cruise its glassy surface. Smell the pine needles in the air, fresh and earthy.
And then imagine the opposite.
A tundra lake is in the highlands, no doubt, but the similarity stops there: no trees, no windbreak, no calm surface, and no scenery. Instead, it’s an ice-chunk-filled, white-capped pit of black water extending straight down to hell, stuck smack dab in the middle of a rock-strewn wasteland. Other than that, it’s terrific.
Maybe it was because we were newlyweds, but somehow Eric intuited that I would love nothing more than to canoe this lake in forty-degree weather and thirty-five-mph winds, wearing sixty-seven layers of movement-restricting, water-absorbent clothing. Maybe it was because we were newlyweds, but I somehow assumed that because he knew of my dark water phobia and hatred of the cold (anything below seventy degrees), I was in good hands. My new husband assured me this lake was perfect for tandem canoeing.
So . . . we drove across the barren terrain to the lake. Eric was bouncy. I was unable to make my mouth form words other than “You expect me to get in that @#$%&&*$* canoe on that @#$%&&*$* lake?”
I promise he is smarter than this will sound. And that I am just as bitchy as I will sound. In my family, we call my behavior being the bell cow, as in “She who wears the bell leads the herd—and takes no shit from other cows.”
Eric answered, “Absolutely, honey. It’ll be great. Here, help me get the canoe in the water. I’d take it off the car myself, but with that wind, whew, it’s like a sail. Careful not to dump it over; it’s reallllly cold in there. Not like that, love. Where are you going? Did I say something wrong?”
I responded by slamming the car door. Anger gave way to tears that pricked the corners of my eyes. I stewed in my thoughts. I knew I had to try to canoe. I couldn’t quit before I started. We were training, and if I didn’t do it, Eric wouldn’t do it, and that wasn’t fair of me.
I exited the car. Eric was dragging the canoe out of the water and trying to avoid looking like a red flag waving in front of me.
Super-rationally, I asked, “What are you doing?”
He said, “Well, I’m not going to make you do this.”
“You’re not making me. I’m scared. I hate this. I’ll probably fall in and all you’ll find is my frozen carcass next summer. But I’m going to do it.”
My poor husband.
We paddled clockwise around the lake in the shallows, where the waves were lowest, and I fought for breath. I’m not sure if it was the constriction of all the clothing layers or actually hyperventilation, but either way, I panted like a three-hundred-pound marathoner. It would have scared off any animal life within five miles if you could have heard me over the wind. Suddenly, Eric shot me a wild-eyed look and started paddling furiously toward the center of the lake.
“You’re going the wrong way!” I protested.
“I can’t hear you,” he shouted back.
“Turn around!”
“I can’t turn around right now, I’m paddling.”
“Eric Hutchins, turn the canoe back toward the shore!”
And as quickly as his mad dash for the deep had started, it stopped. He angled the canoe for the shoreline.
“What in the hell was that all about?” I asked.
“Nothing, love. I just needed to get my heart rate up.”
I sensed the lie, but I couldn’t prove it. My own heart raced as if I had been the one sprint-paddling. For once, though, I kept my mouth shut.
The waves grew higher. We paddled and paddled for what felt like hours, but made little forward progress against the wicked-cold wind.
“Eric, I really want out of the canoe.”
“We’re halfway. Hang in there.”
“No. I want out right now. I’m scared. We’re going to tip over. I can’t breathe.”
“How about we cut across the middle of lake and shave off some distance? That will get you to the shore faster.”
“I WANT TO GO THE NEAREST SHORE RIGHT NOW AND GET OUT OF THE #%$&(&^%#@% CANOE.”
Now I really had to get out, because it was the second time I’d called the canoe a bad name, and I knew it would be out to get me.
Eric paddled us to the shore without another word. I’m pretty sure he thought some, but he didn’t say them. I got out, almost falling over into the water and turning myself into a giant super-absorbent Tampax. He turned the canoe back over the water and continued on without me. This wasn’t how I’d pictured it going down, but I knew I had better let him a) work out and b) work me out of his system. Looking like the Michelin man, I trudged back around the lake to the car and beat him there by only half an hour.
By the time we’d loaded the canoe onto the top of our rental car and hopped in, we were well on our way back to our happy place. Yes, I know I don’t deserve him. I don’t question it; I just count my blessings.
That night we dined out—did I mention we were starving to death on broccoli and whole-wheat tabbouleh?—to celebrate our marriage. Eric had arranged for flowers to be delivered to our table before we got there. The aroma was scrumptious: cow, cooked cow! Yay! And, of course, the flowers. I looked at Eric’s wind-chafed, sunburned face and almost melted from the heat of adoring him. Or maybe it was from the flame of the candle, which I was huddling over to stay warm. What was wrong with the people in this state? Somebody needed to buy Montana a giant heater. We held hands and traded swipes of Chapstick.
He interrupted my moment. “I have a confession to make. And I promise you are really going to think this is funny later.”
Uh oh. “Spill it, baby.”
“Remember when I paddled us toward the middle of the lake as hard as I could?”
“I’m trying to block the whole experience out of my mind.”
“Yeah, well, let me tell you, sweetness, it was about ten times worse for me than you. But do you remember what you said about falling in, yadda yadda, frozen carcass next summer, blah blah?”
I didn’t dignify this with an answer, but he didn’t need one and continued without much of a pause. “Well, you were in front of me, breathing into your paper bag or whatever, when I looked down, straight down, into the eyes and nostrils of a giant, bloated, frozen, very dead, fully intact, floating ELK CARCASS.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not. It was so close to the surface that if you hadn’t still had those tears in your eyes, there is no way you wouldn’t have seen it. You could have touched its head with your hand without even getting your wrist wet.”
“No, you did NOT take me out on a lake with giant frozen dead animals floating in it.” A macabre version of Alphabits cereal popped into my mind.
“Yes, I did,” he said, and he hummed a few bars of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”
“Oh my God. If I had seen it right then, I would have come unhinged.”
“More unhinged. I know. I was terrified you would capsize
us and then you would quadruple freak out in the water bumping into that thing. I had to paddle for my life.”
He was right. I let him enjoy his moment; I’m glad he confessed. But I will never canoe on a tundra lake with Eric again. Even if I got my courage up, he would never invite me.
Cinderella, eat your heart out.[1]
Click here to continue with How to Screw Up Your Marriage.
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There’s video of the tundra lake and other parts of our Montana trip on my YouTube channel, The Land of Pamelot. Sorry, there is no video of the elk. ↵
Excerpt from Puppalicious and Beyond (Animal and Nonhuman Stories)
I am not a whackjob.
I am not some whacko who writes about her labradoodle Schnookums. Let’s just get that straight right off the bat. Hell, I’m practically anti-animal, and I don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, either. Dogs? They shed. Poop. Pee. Barf. Drool. Chew. Bark. Cats? Ditto, except make that yowl instead of bark, plus I’m deathly allergic. That’s why currently we have only three dogs and one cat. Oh, and five fish. And I hardly even like them, except for maybe a little. We’ve cut back, too. It wasn’t so long ago the dog count was six, the cat count three, and the fish count innumerable, along with guinea pigs, birds, ducks, rabbits, and a pig. As in swine.
My most vivid memories of growing up in Wyoming and Texas are of animals. We had the normal sorts of pets, plus the absolute luxury of living in the country. I raised sheep for 4-H and rode my horse to sleepovers. We had visitors furry, feathered, and scaly, of both the hooved and clawed varieties. My husband grew up on St. Croix where the animals were different, but his wild upbringing, close to nature, matched mine. His mother tells stories of her sons bringing geckos on the plane from the island to the mainland, and finding their little skeletons outside the family’s summer home in Maine months later. Eric’s favorite photograph from his youth shows him standing on the beach holding the booby he rescued while surfing, then nursed back to health and released.
As a child, I devoured books about animals, like Black Beauty and Where the Red Fern Grows. I idolized James Herriot and Jacques Cousteau. I could never quite decide whether to be a veterinarian or a marine biologist or Shamu’s trainer. Somehow I sold out early on and became a lawyer, but that didn’t stop the animal love. There, I’ve admitted it: animal love. I ♥ animals, with a big red heart and sparkly glitter. All of them, nearly, except for maybe insects and reptiles. Also I am not a big fan of rats. But other than that, I love every one. Eric and I spend all the time we can outdoors looking for critters, whether we do it from bicycles or cars, or in the water or on our own four feet. We watch All Creatures Great and Small on Netflix. Our offspring naturally love God’s creatures, too, at least as much as they love their smartphones, and a whole lot more than they love us.
In the Virgin Islands of Eric’s youth, Christianity made plenty of room for the ghosts, spirits, and jumbies of obeah, a folk-magic religion with elements of sorcery and voodoo. The locals couldn’t comprehend why continentals like me scoffed at what was so plainly true to them, but scoff I did. Ghosts? Jumbies? As in Casper the friendly? It was hard for me to follow—until I met Eric. He and the islands opened my eyes to a world that existed just beyond the visible. Sometimes these non-humans scared me, and sometimes they comforted me. I liked my pets and the animals of the wild better, but I was captivated by the jumbies. Especially the one guarding Annaly, the house we bought in the rainforest.
When my lawyer career morphed into human resources and then I finally started writing, non-humans started spilling out of every story. Sometimes they are the stars, and sometimes they are the supporting actors. No matter their role, they always manage to steal the show from the unsuspecting humans who believe they are the center of the universe.
Froggy Went A' Courtin'
All the signs were there. We even talked about them, way back when. “The owners must love frogs,” Eric said as we toured the back yard of the house in Houston that would become our home when we left the islands. He nudged a knee-high pottery frog planter with his foot.
“Umm hmmm,” I said. I couldn’t have cared less. I was calculating our offer.
“That one is odd,” he said. He pointed at a large concrete frog Buddha, almost hidden by giant elephant ears and bougainvillea beside the waterfall that poured from the top pond into the middle one. You could see the ponds all the way from the front door, through the seamless full-length back windows. It reminded us of home, of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, of our beloved rainforest home Estate Annaly. How could we not buy this house? Eric continued, “It’s like a frog shrine.”
I remember saying something noncommittal, like, “Whoa, that is odd,” as I walked back into the house with the real estate agent. In retrospect, she seemed . . . in a hurry.
We moved in on the ninth of March, springtime in Houston. Beautiful springtime. For roughly six weeks, the temperatures are in the seventies and there’s a soft breeze. Flowers bloom but mosquitoes don’t yet. Sunlight dapples the ground through the vibrant foliage of the trees. Birds don’t chirp, they sing. The fragrance is clean, more than sweet. It’s heaven. We moved in, and our new house was like heaven.
Until everything arrived from the islands in another month, we had exactly one piece of furniture: a standard double mattress on the master bedroom floor. The kids slept in sleeping bags. It was spare. We ate our meals on paper plates sitting cross-legged on the floor. When we called to each other, our voices bounced from wall to wall in our 4,000-square-foot echo chamber. Still, it was like heaven.
But around midnight during our fateful third week in Houston, the first frog croaked. His piercing rasp drew our attention, but not our consternation. What was one frog to us, here in heaven?
Oh, had it only been one frog. Or one hundred frogs. Or even one thousand. By three a.m., Eric was standing pondside in his skivvies with three hundred pounds of canine looky-loos beside him in the forms of Cowboy the giant yellow Lab, Layla the Gollum-like boxer, and Karma the emotionally fragile German shepherd. I stood in the doorway.
“Fucking frogs,” Eric said, no trace of love in his voice.
Well, yes. Yes, they were. Frogs were, ahem, fornicating everywhere. It was overwhelming, really. I swear, if you’d Googled “swingers’ resort for frogs,” you’d get our address. The amorous amphibians held their tongues as soon as Eric switched on the backyard light. Muttering more curses, he snatched them up in stubbornly conjoined pairs and flung them over the fence. I did not dare ask his plan and after ten minutes, I sneaked off to bed.
Night after sleepless spring night, Eric battled the frogs with a homicidal drive. Day after spring day, he shirked his work as a chemical engineer and looked online for ways to off them. This campaign was beginning to drive me insane, too. Their sounds had long since become white noise, or at worst, bedtime music to me. Eric’s tossing, turning, cursing, and trips in- and outside, on the other hand, kept me wide awake. He would report the body count when he returned to bed.
“If I could just think of a way to poison them, I could sleep,” he said.
“If you poison them, you’ll poison the dogs, maybe even birds,” I said into my pillow.
“Acceptable collateral damage,” he replied.
In response to my urgings for him to quell his frog-blood lust, Eric tried to repatriate his little nemeses. He loaded them into industrial-sized black garbage bags and headed for the bayou. Unfortunately, the good citizens of Houston were on alert for a serial murderer that spring, and a man seen dumping lumpy garbage bags into the waterway attracted attention. Eric had only just barely returned home before the cops came to check him out. Reluctantly, I vouched for him.
The kids got into the spirit. Instead of just one underwear-clad man in the back yard, we now had him (thank the Lord, he’d started taking the time to don a pair of camo shorts—although I had the feeling he’d spring for camo face and body paint, too given the chance) plus the nine-, eleven-, and th
irteen-year-old kids. Like me, the dogs were sleeping through most of it now, except when one of the kids would make a particularly good snatch and yell in triumph. At least it was taking care of any lingering need for sex education.
When the children created an offering of dead froggies to the Buddha, I feared the repercussions. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could swear their numbers doubled that night. It was bad. It was very, very bad.
It pains me to admit that I conspired by my silence in the deaths of hundreds of croakers that spring. They died in an endless variety of ways, but mostly Eric heaved them—THUMP, or occasionally SPLAT—against the house. Sometimes he aimed high, and more than once we found dead frogs clear on the other side of the house the next morning, or their desiccated bodies on the roof weeks later.
“Maybe I should have let the cops take you after all,” I groused one night as he stomped off. The man seemed by God determined to ensure that I shared his insomnia.
“What?” he said.
“Maybe I should come out and help you after all,” I said, and got out of bed. Ugh.
The calendar pages flipped slowly forward. May passed. It wasn’t seventy degrees anymore. The flowers wilted and the mosquitoes hatched. A faint smell of decay—mold?—permeated the house, but it smelled no better outside. The sun burned everything in its searing gaze, yet still the frogs croaked out their horny croaks and gamboled nightly in sexual abandon.
“They’ll be gone by summer,” I said, certain that they would not. That they would never leave. That my husband would be scribbling REDRUM across our bathroom mirror by August while the frogs croaked on. Because “frogicide” written backward doesn’t spell anything.
And then one day, they stopped. Silence. Sleep. Happiness. Months went by, blissful days leading inevitably toward April. Make the clock move slower, I prayed to God.
January. February. March. We hadn’t heard them yet, but the little fockers would be here soon. Apri-ri-ri-RIBBITTTTTTT. Eric leaped up in bed as if the frogs were in there with him.
Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) Page 30