Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

  “Lisa,” Aunt Edith says, squeezing my shoulder. “God is with them.”

  I nod. After Aunt Edith says grace, I eat all of the salmon on my plate. Mom jarred this fish earlier this summer. Sockeye. She did a good job on the smoking. Aunt Edith and Uncle Geordie went out to the Kemano to catch oolichans and make grease. Mom couldn’t make it this year and I didn’t have the heart to do it. I know Mom was disappointed. She wanted someone in our family to learn to make grease. The grease I’m spreading over the fish we traded with Aunt Edith, her grease for a box of our half-smoked.

  Oolichan grease is a delicacy that you have to grow up eating to love. Silvery, slender oolichans are about as long as your hand and a little thicker than your thumb. They are part of the smelt family and are one of the tastiest fish on the planet. Cooking oolichans can be as simple as broiling them in the oven until they’re singed—which is heavenly but very smelly, and hard on your ears if you have a noisy smoke alarm—or as touchy and complicated as rendering oil from them to make a concoction called grease. Oolichans can also be dried, smoked, sun-dried, salted, boiled, canned, frozen, but they are tastiest fresh. The best way to eat fresh oolichans is to run them through with a stick and roast them over an open fire like wieners, then eat them while they’re sizzling hot and dripping down your fingers.

  Because of their high oil content, oolichans go rancid easily and don’t last in the fridge or freezer. If you want the taste of oolichan all year round, you have to make them into grease. To do this, you have to catch a suitable number of fat, juicy oolichans. Then the fish must be aged properly, for one to two weeks, in a large pit. Two things must be kept in mind when aging the fish: first, the longer the fish is aged, the stronger the taste of the grease, and secondly, weather conditions affect the ripening process. Only the most experienced grease makers should decide when the oolichans are ripe enough to be transformed into grease.

  Fill a large metal boiler with water. Light the fire pit beneath the boiler and bring the water to a boil. Then add the ripened oolichans and stir slowly until cooked (they will float slightly off the bottom). Bring the water to a boil again and mash the fish into small pieces to release the oil from the flesh. A layer of clear oil will form on the surface. Scrape out the fire pit and keep the boiler covered. Let simmer, but, before the water cools completely, use a wooden board to gently push the layer of oil to one end of the boiler and scoop it into another vat. With a quick, spiraling motion, add two or three red-hot rocks from an open fire to the vat of oil, which will catch fire and boil. Once the oil has cooled, do a final straining to remove small twigs, water and scales. Put oil in jars. Keep your fresh oolichan grease refrigerated to prevent it from going bad.

  Oolichan grease is versatile. Most people use it as a sauce—a tablespoon or two is drizzled over cooked fish or added to stews or soups for instant flavour. Some people prefer to use grease to combat cold symptoms and to boost their general health. A mere teaspoon a day is enough to keep you regular and in top physical condition. When spread on the skin, grease is an expensive, fragrant and highly effective moisturizer. In olden days, grease was also used to preserve berries, fruit or meat.

  “Are you going to finish that?” Aunt Edith says.

  “Oh,” I say. I stop stirring my potatoes. They’re a fine mush now. “No, thanks.”

  “Lisa,” she says. “Go to bed.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I’ll pray for you and for your brother.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “For everything.”

  I scrape the leftovers into the garbage, put the plate into the sink and go upstairs to my bedroom. I stop at my door and stare down the hallway. Jimmy’s door is closed. I know he hates people to go in there without his permission, but I can’t help myself. The door squeaks a bit, the hinge needs adjusting and a little oil.

  His room is compulsively neat. From the size-organized paper clips on his desk to the colour-arranged clothes in his closet, you can tell he knows where every single thing in this room is. I touch the picture of Karaoke. He took it when she wasn’t looking, as she examined a bouquet of magenta fireweed.

  “Why’d you put that picture up?” she’d said, frowning.

  “I like it,” he’d said.

  “I don’t. If you want to remember me looking for bugs, go right ahead,” she’d said.

  She’s like me, not much of a romantic. I’m surprised at Jimmy. I would never have pegged him for a sentimentalist. Everything in his life has been so … utilitarian. Is that the right word? I don’t know. His life has been focused so tightly that I made the unflattering assumption that Karaoke was a substitute for swimming. She didn’t seem his type. Even the most aggressive of his girlfriends up to that point had been bunny rabbits compared with Karaoke. As Uncle Mick would ironically have said, she is a delicate Haisla flower. I wonder what they said to each other when they first met. From what I can squeeze out of Jimmy, I take it they were introduced by Jack Daniel’s.

  Karaoke’s picture is over the place where one of his first national awards rested. In the morning light, you can see the slightly darker outlines on the walls of his swimming medals and trophies, the ghostly imprints of his accomplishments. He took them down in early summer. They’re packed in four boxes and tucked somewhere in the attic.

  Dinner’s resting uneasily in my stomach. Or I’ve had too many cigarettes. Either way, I have to stay sitting up because when I try to lie down, acid burns up my throat. From his bed, I can see Canoe Mountain. Jimmy’s room is on the other end of the house from mine, and you can’t see down the channel as well because the greengage tree is nearer to his window. He has a wonderful view of the Alcan docks, though. And the place Ma-ma-oo pointed out, the canoe shape in the mountain across the channel. She said that when the sun touched the bow, you knew the oolichans would be here. Bears woke up and eagles gathered with seagulls and crows and ravens, waiting anxiously at the rivers. Seals bobbed hopefully in the water and killer whales followed the seals. The people who still made grease started building wooden fermenting boxes and tuning in to the weather network, watching for gales and storm warnings that might delay the start of oolichan fishing.

  The day Mick and I left for Kemano, the sky was low and grey, snow compressed into ice and covered by knee-deep puddles and slush. Ma-ma-oo used to say winter loved Kitamaat so much that he didn’t want to leave. He gave up only when the oolichans came, and then he packed reluctantly, grumbling and cranky. On wa-mux-a, the day winter shook out his cape, the snow fell in big flakes, but later the sun came out and melted them all away; that was winter going home.

  I had kept Mom and Dad up almost all night. I was so excited at the idea of having an adventure with Uncle Mick that I couldn’t sit still. I packed and repacked and hunted through the whole house for things I thought I might need on our trip to Kemano. We were going to make grease with Uncle Geordie and Aunt Edith, who would be following later in the day in Geordie’s troller. Mom was catching a ride with them and when Mick asked if they needed help, Mom gratefully said he could get me out of her hair while they were getting ready. Dad and Jimmy were going to Terrace for a swim meet. I thought they were nuts to give up a fishing trip just to go splash around some dumb swimming pool.

  I bounced out of bed at exactly 4 a.m., raced down the hallway to the master bedroom and shook Mom until she blearily told me that she still had a half-hour left before she had to get up.

  “You are out of my will,” Mom muttered, slowly rolling out of bed.

  She drove me to the docks, where the water was as flat as paper and the first light made the sky a receding grey. Even through the layers of clothes Mom had stuffed me in, the morning air had a keen, curt bite. We waited five minutes for Mick to show up. Mom spent the time smearing my face with sunscreen and threatening me with untimely death if I took off my baseball cap.

  “I’m not going to spend the week listening to you gripe about your sunburn,” she said.

  When Mick finally appeared, he clunked along th
e gangplank carrying his backpack. The feeling of everything moving too slowly became overwhelming, and I had to bounce. Mom hauled me back by the collar and said that if I didn’t behave, I wouldn’t go at all.

  “Come on, Monster,” Mick said as he threw the backpack in the middle of the speedboat. “Here,” he said, picking me up, grinning. “You gonna be a good girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, go ahead. Be my monster.” He noogied my head.

  “Mick,” Mom said in a warning tone. “Don’t encourage her.”

  “Can you do a moose call for me?” Mick said, eyes sparkling.

  I closed my left nostril with a finger and trumpeted as loudly as I could. When he’d taught me, he’d said that female moose made the sound so that they could have other moose to play with. He laughed and Mom said, “Put Her Royal Highness down and get going.”

  He smiled at me. “We used to call her Miss Bossy Pants when she was a kid.”

  I giggled.

  “Less cute remarks,” Mom said. “More attention to details—like the tide, Mr. Smarty-Pants.”

  Mick tossed me up over his head. The world spun, blurred as I twirled, then Mick caught me by the waist and, in one dizzying, swooping movement, lowered me from the dock so I landed in the speedboat with a thump.

  He cast off and hopped in the boat, rocking it alarmingly. After he started the motor, he raised one hand and flapped it a few times at Mom, then saluted and yelled, “Red power!”

  “Get out of here, you nut,” she said.

  Mick pushed us off, as she stood on the docks and watched us. He fired off the engine. We started off sedately, but once we rounded the breakwater and the point, and were firmly out of her view, he gunned the motor, the bow lifted like a ramp, spray kicked up three feet high behind us and we tore across the water.

  Behind us, the village, the road to town, the hazy plumes of smoke and the bright orange lights of Alcan shrank away. Ahead of us, the mountains stretched along the sides of the channel. As we rode near the Kildala Valley, I felt a sudden chill. A white man and his son, in matching neon green and black scuba gear, stood on a point, waving to us. I stood up and waved back wildly.

  “Who are you waving at?” Mick shouted over the engine. He was looking at me like I was nuts.

  “You can’t see them?” I said, lowering my arm.

  “Who?” He looked back at the shoreline.

  “They’re right there,” I said, pointing. “On the beach.”

  Mick craned his head and squinted. “I don’t see anyone.”

  The man turned and walked into the woods. The son—I don’t know how I knew he was the son—stopped waving too, but stayed and watched us. He seemed so lonely that I took off my cap and waved it in the air to make him smile. He stayed on the beach until we were out of sight.

  The Kemano was a half-day away on a fast speedboat. About three of the rivers in Kitamaat territory have reliable oolichan runs—the Kitimat, Kitlope and Kemano rivers. Like salmon, oolichans spawn in rivers and their fry migrate to the ocean, where they live for about three years. They return to their home rivers along the British Columbian coast in early spring, usually between mid-February and early April. The Kitimat River used to be the best one, but it has been polluted by all the industry in town, so you’d have to be pretty dense or desperate to eat anything from that river. Mom said the runs used to be so thick, you could walk across the river and not touch water. You didn’t even need a net; you could just scoop them up with your hat. Most people go out to the Kemano and the Kitlope these days, but you have to pay for gas, and you need a decent boat and have to be able to spend a few weeks out there if you want to make grease. If you have a job, it’s hard to get enough time off work. Oolichans spawn in only a small number of rivers in B.C., so the Haisla used to trade them with other villages for things that were rare in our area, like soapberries. In the past, most of the groups spoke different languages, so a trade language called Chinook was created, which combined the easiest-to-pronounce words in the languages into a pidgin, a patois. Oolichan is the Chinook word for the fish, but in Haisla they’re called jak’un.

  Oolichans spawn in other rivers on the northwest coast like the Chilcat, Nass, Skeena, Kimsquit, Bella Coola, Oweekeno, Kingcome and Fraser rivers. Each place has its own way of spelling and pronouncing “oolichans,” so the fish are also known as eulachons, ooligans, ulicans, hollikans and oulachens. Other people on the coast make oolichan grease too, but Mom always said, “Ours is the Dom Perignon of grease.”

  When I was a kid, I assumed Dom Perignon was another kind of fish oil. I was very disappointed when I found out that it was just a champagne, like Baby Duck, which I’d snuck a sip of one New Year’s Eve and hated. I coughed, spitting and sneezing as the bubbles tingled sharply up my nose.

  We drove past Costi Island, which splits the channel in two. We took the north side. Behind Costi Island are the Costi Rocks, a small chain of bare rocks. All except the highest are covered by the high tide. Light brown seals lay like fat cigars, crowded together, barking.

  “You want some seal?” Mick yelled.

  I made a disgusted face.

  He laughed. “You don’t know what you’re missing.” He paused, slowed the boat down, then let the motor idle. “You want to drive?”

  “Really?” I said as we drifted in the tide. “Really?”

  “Come on, hop over,” he said, sliding out of the captain’s chair. I was too short to see over the bow, so Mick let me sit on his duffel bag. He gave me a brief lesson on the steering wheel and the stickshift. The outboard motor, he explained, could be sped up or slowed down, but reversing was tricky because the engine tended to stall.

  “I’ll get it fixed sooner or later. Keep the bow towards a sightline,” Mick said. “See that point way down there?” I nodded. He continued, “Drive straight towards it and you’ll be okay. When we get there, I’ll take over. Whoa, gently, gently,” Mick said as I cranked the engine. “Start off slow and work your way up or you’ll burn our motor out. And watch ahead of us for deadheads. Do you know what deadheads are?”

  “Old logs sunk underwater but floating near the surface.”

  “Good. Avoid kelp too. If it gets tangled in the blades, we’re going to have to stop and take it out, and that’ll waste good fishing time. Okay?”

  “Can I speed up now?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Go ahead.” Mick sat back, smoking, as I pushed the engine as fast as it would go. It felt as if we were barely touching the water. I saw a flock of black ducks bobbing on the surface and swerved to go through them. Mick swore, but didn’t tell me to stop. The ducks rose up and, for a moment, flapped alongside us. Mick lifted his arms like he was flying, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and honked. They honked back, sounding aggravated, then climbed into the sky and flew north. Mick grinned at me.

  He took over near Wee-wah, a small cove about a half-hour from the village. A forestry camp is there now. They built their base over one of the best crab beds on the channel, but back then, the crabs caught there were large and fat. We set our traps. Mick let me bait them and toss them into the water. We drifted on the ocean for a while, bobbing with the waves. Mick turned his face to the sun. I played my cassettes, but quietly, because Mick hated Air Supply. If I played it too loudly, he’d reach into his bag and pull out Elvis and we wouldn’t be able to listen to anything else for the whole trip.

  “It’ll take a while. You want to wait at the hot springs?” he said.

  “Hot springs!”

  “Get your swimsuit, then.”

  I dug around until I found it. The hot spring was a squat little hut tucked fifty feet up from the shore and surrounded by high, creaky trees and squishy moss-covered ground. But the water, when I dipped my toes in, was silky and warm. Mick went up into the bushes to change into his shorts and let me use the hut. The air was cold, so I sat down fast after I changed. The concrete tub was slick and my feet slid so I landed on my rump.

  “Knock, knock,” he sho
uted.

  “I’m decent,” I said.

  He came in, dropped his stuff by the door and sighed as he sank down. His face went red with the heat. His hair flopped over his shoulder, frizzing where it was loose from his braid. Staying in the water, he half-swam, half-bobbed towards me. He leaned against the rocks. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  I nodded. “I wish I could live with you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “You’re fun. They never let me have any fun.”

  Mick sucked in a deep breath. He swam over to his clothes and shook out a cigarette. He came back dog-paddling with his head tilted out of the water, cigarette in his mouth, his braid trailing behind him.

  “Your mom and dad are fun too,” Mick said.

  I gave him a doubtful look.

  “They are. But with you, they have to do parent things. They have to keep you fed and clothed and pay the bills and watch out for you. That kind of stuff. We can just hang out like this. You understand?”

  “Yeah. You don’t want me either.”

  He flicked some water at me. “Na’. What a mood.”

  I wiped the water from my face. My hands were going all white and wrinkly. “I want to be like you. I don’t want to stay here and be all boring.”

  “Mmm. You might want to think that over.”

  “I want to be a warrior.”

  “A warrior, huh?”

  “I do! I don’t care what you think.”

  His smile faded. “Fighting didn’t get me anything but lots of scars.”

  “But you did things!”

  “For all the good it did,” he said, poking me in the side. He finished the cigarette, let it hiss to death in the water, then flicked it out one of the small windows. “Okay, let me tell you a secret. You want to hear a secret?”

  I shrugged, disappointed that he hadn’t reacted more enthusiastically to my revelation.

  “When your mom and dad went on their first real date, he invited her over for a few drinks. He had to go across to get some beer and got stuck in a snowstorm in town. He had to wait for the snowplow to go back to the village, and meanwhile, your mom was so nervous that she bummed some booze off her friends and was waiting for him at his house, getting royally pissed.”