“I don’t see why we have to drive all the way across the country just to see some old woman,” says Maya to me. We are riding in the last row of seats in the back of the station wagon, facing backward, as if we are perpetually waving goodbye. “Why didn’t we go home to Massachusetts and let Ned go alone?”
“Because he probably wants Mama with him,” I say. “His friend is dying, Maya. She was important to him at some point, I guess. Don’t you want to know why?”
“I don’t care,” says Maya. “I just want to go home.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“No. I want to read my comic book,” says Maya maddeningly.
We don’t speak for another half hour. Then as the car rolls down the road, with nothing of interest to see, and I fend off Maya, who has grown tired of her comic and is trying to give me a pedicure with no professional instruments or knowledge, I say, “Ned, where exactly are we going?”
Ned’s face has the concentrated expression of someone going to somewhere. You can see him casting through his memories of this place from his past.
“To the carriers,” he says.
When my mother is at the wheel it makes her chatty but Ned drives silently most of the time. I think he goes to faraway places peacefully and contentedly in his head when he drives. I wonder if he is thinking about Mary dying or what has led him to this moment where he is in a car full of children heading to somewhere from his past. My mother lets him do this. She doesn’t engage him in chitchat but instead, when she wants company, turns and talks to us in the back. Maya and I have to turn our heads around to talk to her.
“There’s no place in Canada called Thecarriers,” says Maya.
Maya since turning eight has become a great source of misinformation. She likes to expound on things she knows nothing about and when corrected isn’t deterred in the least. At eight she is suddenly sure that she knows everything. I think we are all glad, if for nothing else on this adventure, that it has taken Maya away from her teacher, the cheerful, all-knowing Mrs. Gunderson. Mrs. Gunderson shared Maya’s rarefied universe of misinformation. Seldom did a day go by when Maya didn’t bring home some incredible statement of fact, some erroneous item of history, some word usage peculiar only to Mrs. Gunderson and Maya, which if you tried to correct it, brought a storm of tears and tantrums and the ultimate last word, “But Mrs. Gunderson says so.” It was interesting if you thought of Maya and Mrs. Gunderson existing in their own little alternate universe. One in which its two citizens know everything. I listen to Maya ramble on about things she knows nothing about, more to find out what is happening in Mrs. Gundersonland than to learn anything useful. I regard it as being like reading a good fantasy novel without having to go to the trouble of remembering endless ridiculous boring made-up names.
“I think the carriers are a people, Maya,” says my mother.
Now, as Ned doesn’t further explicate, I ponder what carriers these are. I wonder if Ned, as he drives so dreamily down the long empty roads, has been inventing a Middle Earth–type fantasyland of his own, where people carry things. How would Mrs. Gunderson explain this?
“Are the carriers a real people?” I ask him.
“Yes, of course,” says Ned.
“What kind of people?” asks Maya.
“Normal people,” says Ned. “For the most part.”
“Letter carriers, Ned?” I ask.
“Hmmm? No, no, no. They’re a First Nations tribe living in northern British Columbia. They got the name because they carried the ashes of their dead relatives a long way in some kind of pack on their backs. Didn’t I already tell you all this?”
We shake our heads no. He is looking at us through the rearview mirror.
Ahead are a diner and a gas station. Ned surprises us by pulling in. We have almost a full tank of gas and we do not eat out as a rule; it is cheaper to picnic in the car, buying groceries in large discount grocery stores when we can find them.
Ned turns off the engine. “Who’s hungry?”
The boys yip. They are always hungry. I am dying for a hot meal. My mother gives Ned a look that says, Can we afford this? but he ignores her and shepherds us inside, where the waitress puts a pot of coffee and two cups in front of Ned and my mother without even asking.
“Thanks,” says Ned with some surprise in his voice.
“It’s a long ways down the road before you get to anything. No one comes in here but doesn’t want coffee. I always bring it first thing.”
“How do you know which way we’re going?” asks Ned.
“Don’t matter,” says the waitress. “It’s a long ways either direction. The world just kind of happened in other places and left us alone. But I got a sister moved to Regina and she says development is such that ain’t no place going to be lonely much longer. So many people multiplying so fast, we’re going to be like ants in an anthill someday.”
“Well,” says my mother. “You couldn’t tell from the look of things around here.”
The woman looks out the window. There’s a long lone wintry aspect, with nothing really to see but a few frosty tussocks now and again. But she looks as if she expects the answer to the future to be down the road somewhere. Or as if maybe while she was serving someone eggs, she missed the condos going up on the horizon. She scans it. No, nothing there, as usual; then her eyes scan further than that. So much further they must be going beyond the now and into the past or the future.
“Well,” she says slowly. “I suspect it will happen in my children’s time.”
“How many children do you have?” asks my mother.
“None,” says the woman, and keeps chewing her gum as if she hasn’t said anything strange. She must be fifty at least. When does she plan to have these children?
“Well!” says Ned. “Menus?”
She puts red padded menus in front of all of us. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Thank you,” says my mother.
“I want a burger and fries,” says Max.
“I don’t know if they make those at ten a.m., Max,” says my mother.
“Chet’ll make anything. He don’t care,” says the waitress, who is taking an order a few tables away but seems to monitor all conversations. Maybe it’s a godlike talent she’s developed in this lone diner in this lone expanse of prairie. She might be well known, put on exhibit, worshipped and revered or at least pretty well respected if she weren’t here in the middle of the unknown. Unknown herself. A person who can hear all conversations at once. Here in this pocket of strangeness where there aren’t enough souls to compare her to, or people to find out about her.
The waitress keeps talking to us while writing the other people’s orders. “Burger and fries is a real good choice. Chet don’t make anything fit to eat ’cept that. You wouldn’t think someone could screw up an egg but he manages it.”
We all close our menus and stare out the window, looking off at the view she faces all day every day. Each of us conjuring up our own vision of the future on that blank gray horizon. Or maybe the others just deciding on the hamburger and fries or French toast. You can only guess at other people’s thoughts. I always assume they are lost in the same strange tangle of ideas I am having, trying to solve the puzzling universe. But half the time, if asked, they say they’re not thinking anything much at all.
She comes back and we order burgers and fries. When the food sits steaming in front of us it is heavenly.
“How come burger and fries from a flat grill like they have in these places always tastes so much better?” I ask my mother.
The waitress is wiping off a table a couple of booths away but answers without looking up. “It’s because all the other things that gets cooked on that grill flavors the meat. Chet don’t never wash the grill. Good fry cooks never do.”
We eat in silence. It’s not every day you get a waitress who explains the future and the mystery of diner hamburgers to you in the same morning.
“Well, I guess it’s about time I did,” say
s Ned, as if our minds have all been psychically connecting in the car and we can so easily pick up the thread of his thoughts.
“Did what?” I ask, eating French fries with voluptuous pleasure. Why is ketchup always so much better out of a red squeeze bottle? I want one for our house but I know somehow that it wouldn’t be the same.
“Did tell you about the Carriers. About how I met Mary.” He begins, “One summer when I was in college—”
“Which college?” interrupts Maya. She likes her details precise.
“Uh, I don’t remember which it was, but one of them,” he says.
“How many did you go to?” I ask.
“Oh, quite a few, Bibles, quite a few.”
“Which one did you graduate from?” I ask.
“Well, technically speaking, none.”
“You didn’t graduate?” I ask. “Then how could you have an MA?”
“Signs and wonders, Bibles.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I say.
“Nobody knows what it means,” he says. “Anyhow, not relevant to my story. I was having some trouble finding summer employment and I saw an ad for a firewatcher.”
“What’s that?” asks Hershel.
“I didn’t know either when I first read the ad, Hershel. But later I found out it’s a person who sits in this great tall tower on a mountaintop in the middle of the woods, which in British Columbia means the middle of nowhere at all. Or, as I began to think as I sat there in that tower every day watching the sun come up one way and go down another, the middle of everywhere, the very middle of everywhere.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” says Hershel. Ned never gets tired of explaining things to them or even reexplaining endlessly if they forget or weren’t paying attention the first time.
“Yes, you do, Hershel,” says my mother. “Think of sitting on the porch steps back home and watching the ocean at sunset and sunrise. Do you remember that?”
Hershel nods.
“Well, didn’t you think you were in the very center of the universe then? Didn’t we all?”
“I don’t know,” says Hershel, and squirts ketchup from the red squeeze bottle all over his plate. He has lost interest. You can never get too abstract with him. He isn’t made for it.
My mother smiles. Ned smiles. I don’t know if it is at Hershel or if they are remembering sitting on the porch, watching the waves.
I am thinking that we would go through a lot of ketchup if we got a red squeeze bottle. Max and Hershel have squirted out way more than they are going to use. I am also thinking that my mother doesn’t seem to realize that the center of the universe for Max and Hershel has become the endless grasslands but I do not want to be the one to provide her with this worrying detail.
“Anyhow, Hershel, they dropped me at this big tower, like a big castle turret with a little apartment up at the top. They had to helicopter me in because I was so far north into the mountains that there were no roads. And I sat there all summer and watched for fires.”
“Did you put them out?” asks Max.
“No, Max, they didn’t expect me to put out any fires, just spot them. It was very lonely work, as you can imagine. And after a few weeks I got bored, so even though I had been warned not to, I decided to go for a walk in the woods. Among other things, I needed to stretch my legs. That was my undoing. The need for exercise,” says Ned.
“Why did they tell you not to take a walk?” asks Max.
“Because in those deep forests with trees shooting up hundreds of feet overhead, where you can’t see a horizon, there are no trails, paths, markers, roads. And here’s a tip for you, Max and Hershel. Every square inch of the forest looks like every other square inch. You think you can find your way back to the fire tower, easy as anything, by recognizing landmarks, a creek here, an oddly shaped tree there. But the thing is that before you know it you are going in circles. And then when you find a creek, well, which way along the creek did you come? All the trees now look kind of oddly shaped. And six hours later you realize you may be miles from your starting point. There’s no way of knowing. Should you keep going forward and possibly take yourself still farther away? If you stop no one will come for you. It may be days before the rangers realize you aren’t answering your phone and send someone to look for you. Do you know how hard it is to see someone through those trees? By the time you understand you’ve done a stupid thing, it’s too late. So here’s my advice. If you ever take a job as a firewatcher, do not go for a walk in the woods.”
Max and Hershel are nodding earnestly. My mother looks at them and says, “Oh, but, Ned, you’re here now. You must have gotten out of those woods somehow.”
“Well, yes, Felicity, but the moral of the story remains the same.”
“Don’t go for a walk in the woods, Hershel,” says Max, nodding his head at him. They stare solemnly at each other. Since my mother married Ned, factions have formed. Maya and I. Max and Hershel. Ned and my mother. Subsets. Of course, there are others too. Ned and I have our own subset built on the understanding of adventures and the lure of outlaw life. I think I am more of an adventurer and Ned is more of an outlaw and there seems to be a difference I can’t quite put my finger on.
I would like to figure this out but I am too distracted now by Hershel and Max manically nodding to each other. They worship the ground Ned walks on. As long as he is around to explain the universe to them they are perfectly content and I wonder if we are all looking for that, someone to explain the universe satisfactorily to us. Will they keep his explanations as truth all their lives or will they grow up and move beyond them? Will they go through their whole lives afraid to walk in the woods or will they grow up and think that Ned knew no more than anyone else? And he couldn’t speak French.
“I won’t,” says Hershel solemnly back to Max, and they both nod again. “I won’t ever go for a walk in the woods.”
“So there I am, lost in the wild, the sun beginning to set,” says Ned, happy that all eyes are on him now, as if watching him going through the forest. “Which would be helpful if I knew if the tower was north, south, east or west of me, but I don’t. I just keep walking. I don’t know what else to do. It’s very hard to sit still when you’re that agitated. And I am mad at myself for being such a fool. I spend a lot of time trying to decide whether I would rather be eaten by a bear or a wolf. Bear or wolf, I keep asking myself, bear or wolf?”
“Which did you decide?” asks Max.
“Bear. Because wolves hunt in packs and they’re smart. Smart is scarier than big. And a wolf will circle you and then while you have your eye on it, the rest of the pack will race out of nowhere from six different directions to surround you and rip you to pieces.”
“That’s nonsense,” says Maya. “There are no such things as wolves anymore. Only in fairy tales.”
“Just because they’re in fairy tales doesn’t mean they’re just in fairy tales, Maya,” I say. “Just because they don’t live in Massachusetts or Saskatchewan doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“Mrs. Gunderson says that lots of animals have become extinct in our lifetime.”
“Well, as usual Mrs. Gunderson is absolutely right,” says Ned. “But wolves are not yet extinct.”
“Did you see any?” asks Maya.
“No,” says Ned.
“Then how do you know? Probably something you imagined. Because you were afraid. Mrs. Gunderson says we often imagine things when we’re afraid.”
“I bet even Mrs. Gunderson knows that wolves are real,” I say. Why do I even bother arguing? Already Maya is frowning, framing an argument.
Ned leaps in quickly. “Well, anyway, Mayie.” He’s the only one to call Maya Mayie and only when he’s afraid of her. She gets this vertical wrinkle on her forehead that portends approaching storms. It is there now. “I was definitely scared. We can all agree on that. But I kept walking because there was no sense just waiting around for the Welcome Wagon.”
“What’s the Welcome Wagon?
” asks Hershel.
“It’s a big red wagon that welcomes you,” says Maya.
“Exactly,” says Ned, who has given up correcting her. It is one thing for me to enjoy Maya’s Mrs. Gundersonland but I think it would behoove a grown-up to set her straight. “Anyhow, night is falling and I’m getting cold and even squirrels begin to sound ominously large and menacing as they snap twigs and scurry up trees. Then I hear it. A big sound.”
Ned takes a bite of burger.
“How big?” asks Hershel.
“Oh, big!” says Ned. “Not squirrel-size, that’s for darn sure. I am hoping it’s a moose. Moose are sweet and shy. Moose can be avoided—unlike charging bears. Have you ever seen a moose run?”
He looks at Max and Hershel, waiting for an answer, but really, where would they have seen a running moose in their short little lives? They confirm that they have seen no running moose, so thankfully we can get on with the story. “Well, they look like their legs aren’t connected to their bodies. Everything appears to be sort of shaken loose in a moose.”
“Are you trying to rhyme?” asks Maya.
“No, ma’am, it happened quite by accident,” says Ned. “Anyhow, moose, I’m pretty sure, are vegetarians. But it isn’t a moose.”
He stops and looks at us as if the horror of this is just occurring to him for the first time. He is all surprise. Ned is the master of suspense. I like Ned’s stories but the suspenseful pauses can be held until I forsake all hope of sanity. I have learned that the best way to speed things along is to display no interest during the pauses. Maya has learned this too. We look at each other and go back to eating our burgers with no apparent curiosity about what is coming out of the woods. But it does no good because Max and Hershel, as usual, hang on Ned’s every word.
“What is it?” asks Hershel.
“Not bear or wolf or moose,” says Ned.
“ALIENS!” says Hershel.
Ned shakes his head no.
Northward to the Moon Page 2