Northward to the Moon

by Polly Horvath

  “Vikings!” says Max. Ned has a Viking bone that he takes out periodically so he and Hershel and Max can wonder over it all over again.

  “Frogs!” says Hershel.

  “Not alien, Viking, dog or frog, moose or goose,” I prompt him.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” Maya says crabbily. “Will everyone please stop rhyming?”

  “It was a man,” says Ned, looking nervously at Maya. “A Native man. He was carrying some rabbits he’d shot and was on his way home.”

  “He killed bunnies?” asks Maya.

  “These weren’t petting bunnies, Maya, these were eating bunnies,” says Ned.

  “What’s the difference?” asks Maya.

  “Some spent shotgun shells,” admits Ned. “Anyhow, he took me with him. He even had cigarettes.” Ned looks blissful at the memory. “He brought me back to his village, where they let me bunk down with them. They had traplines and were netting fish and trapping animals and hunting from their summer camp. They didn’t mind or care or even question my sudden appearance but just sort of moved over and made room for me. That’s where I met Mary. She had an extra room in her cabin and she made a bed for me there. It was my first introduction to the Carrier people. Their whole way of life fascinated me. I learned to hunt with the men. The women smoked the fish and skinned and tanned the moose hides and cared for the children. They lived as they had for hundreds of years. I stayed on with them for a while.”

  “What happened to your job as a fire lookout?” I ask.

  “Well, technically I couldn’t return because I had no idea where that lookout tower was anymore. But to be honest, I didn’t try very hard.”

  “But what if there had been a fire?” I ask.

  “I knew that if I didn’t check in, they’d phone me and if I didn’t answer they would send the helicopter. I was more concerned about people fruitlessly searching for me, so I went into town and called them to let them know I was okay.”

  “Were they mad at you?” I ask.

  “I suspect they were mostly glad that I was still alive. Otherwise it would have been tough recruiting the next guy. No one wants a job where the previous employee has disappeared.”

  The waitress is back and lays down the check. “Anything else?”

  Ned looks at us but we shake our heads. I suspect we would all like a little pie but so it goes. Ned pays the bill and puts a toothpick in his mouth and we pile back into the car and hit the road.

  “Have you even been in touch since then?” my mother asks Ned quietly as we drive along.

  “No,” says Ned. “That’s the odd thing. I haven’t talked to any of them in twenty years, so what in the world could have inspired Mary to suddenly remember me? I was just some kid who wandered into their camp, stayed awhile and wandered out.”

  “It’s a mystery to be solved,” I say. “Maybe, Ned, we should switch from outlaws to detectives.”

  “Maybe we could be outlaw detectives,” says Ned. “Bandanas and fedoras.”

  “I still don’t get why we are going at all,” says Maya. “If you haven’t even talked to her in twenty years. Couldn’t you just phone her?”

  “You don’t just phone someone who is dying,” I say to Maya. I don’t actually know this but it is nice to be the expert for a change. I can change Gunderson to Fielding, my last name, and create my own Ms. Fieldingland.

  “I owe her,” says Ned to Maya. Then he goes back into his head, into the slumbering tangled thoughts of the road.

  For a long time we drive in silence.

  “Well,” says my mother at last. The sun is at a springtime slant and the light is soaking into fields, filling them with energy. “Maybe the mountain passes won’t be too difficult after all.”

  My mother has been a little worried about driving through the Rockies if the roads are icy.

  “If the weather is nice maybe we’ll get to your friend even sooner,” says Maya. I think this is uncharacteristically considerate of Maya until she adds, “And we can leave sooner.”

  “Maybe,” says Ned. The straight roads are giving way to curves as the prairies disappear and the land rises to its gently lifting hills.

  My mother, who is looking dreamily on, murmurs, “But who can tell what’s just around the bend?”

  Some Amazing Things

  Over the next two days the scenery changes. Where there has been flat land there are now mountains. Where there have been grasslands there are now woods. We go north, deeper into the trees, leaving civilization for longer and longer stretches of wilderness highway where the blackness of the forest is compensated for by the brilliance of the night sky. Stars reign here unquashed by human light. Birds’ song breaks silence.

  We have been driving a very long time on this stretch of tree-lined highway. At night the moon dangles tantalizingly at the end of the road as if it hangs just beyond the earth’s edge. I imagine a highway that few know about that runs up to the Yukon, then heads not just northward but upward to the moon. And the astronauts who set foot there find some old Chevys. Inside them are girls still in 1960s mod minidresses, pageboy haircuts and pink lipstick, and guys in bell-bottoms. Only very mod mods are daring and stylish enough to take the moon drive. But it’s easier to find your way to the moon than back again and so they are stuck circling, the way Ned circled in the woods before a Carrier found him.

  “Their clothes would be very out of date because there aren’t many shopping malls on the moon,” I say to Maya as I explain all this.

  “How do they stay alive?” she asks skeptically. “If there are no grocery stores, what would they eat?”

  “Green cheese,” I say.

  “Feh,” she says. Now the idea is ridiculous.

  “Moon milk,” I say. I am quite taken by this idea.

  “Moon milk.” My mother has overheard. “Moon milk.” Sometimes she just likes the sounds of words, the way sometimes she will stand very still, just liking the feel of the air. She used to do this in the soft warm boggy mudflats, when steam rose off the wet sand in little wisps. But I have seen her do it on the prairies as well, when arctic air was coming down to us from Russia and bathing us in stinging sprays of wind ice.

  The car stops. We all sit there as if it will start again on its own.

  Finally Max says, “The car stopped.”

  “It’s out of gas,” says Ned, and sighs. “We’re fifty miles out of town and seventy-five or so from the Carrier camp and we’re out of gas.”

  “How is that possible?” asks my mother.

  “That’s not possible but moon milk is?” says Maya in disgust.

  “Hush, Maya, not now,” says my mother. “What are we going to do?”

  Ned heaves a huge sigh and opens the door. He walks around to my mother’s window and signals for her to roll it down. “I’m going to hitchhike into the next town and get some gas and come back.”

  “Is that safe, Ned?” asks my mother.

  “You have a better idea?” he asks. “I thought we could get through on our tank but I forget what rotten mileage this thing gets. I miscalculated.” He sounds irritated. I think he blames himself but his tone is a warning not to say that we do too.

  “Well!” says my mother. “That’s what I thought too. That we’d be in town before the gas ran out.”

  “It’s these darn northern roads. You forget they go on and on without even small towns or gas stations between,” says Ned. Then when no one says anything, he sighs.

  “All right,” he says, sighing again, enormously this time, and he starts ambling away a bit from the car, his blue jeans frayed around the tops of his tennis shoes. There is a hole in the toe of one of them.

  “Ned needs new tennis shoes,” I say to my mother.

  “I know,” she says. “But he won’t buy a pair unless he can find some that cost less than ten dollars like the ones he is wearing now.”

  “Did he buy them twenty years ago?” I say. “When tennis shoes cost that? It looks like it.”

  “I kn
ow,” says my mother again. “But the quest for tennis shoes that cost less than ten dollars makes him happy.”

  “His toes are sticking out,” says Maya.

  “Cold but happy,” I say to her.

  Ned stands looking hopefully down the road for the longest time. The rest of us don’t know what to do. It seems cruel to engage in anything while he waits there alone and yet we can’t go out and stand with him or it will look like we want the passing car to pick us all up, which will certainly cut down on the chances of anyone stopping.

  Finally a huge semi pulls to a noisy halt. It takes so long that Ned has to run up the road to get to it. He steps up to the window of the cab and leans in and then makes a thumbs-up gesture to us. He climbs in and that’s the last we see of him for a while.

  We sit still until all the car’s heat is gone and we have to rely on our own. It is chilly but not the bitter cold of the prairies. There are buds on some trees, even on stretches dusted with snow. As if spring is putting out feelers, trying to find out if it’s okay to emerge and show its face.

  “I’m bored,” says Maya.

  “Let’s get out!” yells Max.

  “Let’s take a walk,” says my mother.

  We leave the car and stroll down the road together.

  “But not in the woods!” says Hershel. “Never in the woods. Never ever ever in the woods. Never in the woods.”

  “Never in the woods. Never in the woods,” chants Max with him.

  “Oh no,” I say in low tones to Maya. “They’re bored. Now they are going to be obnoxious. They will chant nonsense things endlessly and run around screaming.”

  “Good. Maybe it will keep the bears away,” says Maya.

  I glance at her with scorn but it startles my mother and she suddenly looks worried.

  “I don’t see any bears,” I say to Maya.

  “It doesn’t mean they don’t see you,” she says.

  I’ll be glad when Maya finally has a friend. This constant sourness is wearing. But I know this isn’t who she really is. She’s just unhappy these days.

  The boys want to get their trucks out of the car and run them down the road. My mother looks like she is about to protest the safety of this but a look in either direction tells us that we will not see a car for a long time and when we do, will have plenty of time to warn the boys.

  My mother and Maya and I walk back and forth. Mostly to keep warm.

  “Listen to that bird, Jane,” my mother says. “What do you think it can be?”

  We look up. It is an eagle but it is a sound all wrong for an eagle. It makes me wonder if eagles are all they’re cracked up to be—if I’ve endowed them with noble characteristics they entirely lack. Perhaps they are cowardly whiny birds, burdened with legendary qualities they never wanted to assume.

  Just then we hear the long slow clear call of a wolf. It makes a tunnel through the air right to my heart.

  “That’s it. Get in the car, all of you,” says my mother.

  “There are no such things as wolves,” says Maya stoutly after we have stopped holding our breaths, listening for the next howl. “It was probably a dog.”

  “I love wolves,” I say to her. “Only maybe not too close to the car.”

  We sit there and shiver until Ned returns. He is in a pickup truck with a large muscly young Native man. Although snow is beginning to drift gently down, the guy doesn’t wear a coat. Flakes fall on his bare arms and he doesn’t seem to notice. Perhaps because his arms are, as they appear, made of iron. He doesn’t come to the car to meet us but he and Ned immediately open the gas cap and pour in gas from a can they take out of the back of the pickup.

  My mother leaps out of the car and there is a lot of polite laughter and shaking of hands. Then Ned leads the man to the back window and motions for Hershel to roll it down. He introduces the man to us as Jim. Ned says he is a Carrier and is going to take us to the Carrier camp.

  “Mary just got out of the hospital. Good timing,” says Jim.

  “That’s wonderful,” says my mother. “She’s much better, then?”

  “Nah, I think they just sent her to die at home,” says Jim.

  My mother looks startled.

  Then, as if no one has any idea what to say next, the man takes the empty gas can and gets into his pickup and my mother and Ned jump back into the car to follow him.

  My mother turns to see me staring at the muscly man in the pickup and looks thoughtful, as if something new has just occurred to her. I don’t want to be caught staring. For heaven’s sake, I want to say, we’ve been sitting here with nothing but woods for what seems like forever. Sensorily deprived, really. I am suddenly disgusted with both my mother and Ned and the things they put us through sometimes. There really has not been enough privacy on this trip. I look stonily out the back window, embarrassed.

  We drive right through the town. It takes about half a minute and then we are in pitch dark again going down the highway.

  “If she’s out of the hospital she must be functioning better,” says my mother to Ned.

  “Jim says she insisted on going home,” says Ned. “She insists there’s nothing much wrong with her. Anyhow, he says she’s at least conscious now. But they all think she’s going to die.”

  “So did they ask her why she kept calling your name?”

  “He said they thought they’d let me ask her. In case it was personal.”

  “Did they tell her you were coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  When we finally turn off the highway, night has placed us deeply and darkly into the universe. Every star sits millimeters from every other so that the sky is a dome of pinpricks of light.

  “Oh man,” says Ned as we drive a little ways down what appears to be an old logging road. The road stops abruptly and we are left with just woods. “Now I remember this place. This road. I remember the way everything smells like pine. Oh man, I love this smell. Bibles, this is the best smell in the world.”

  But he is wrong. The best smell in the world is low tide and the slightly musty smell of our house on the beach.

  “Where’s the village?” asks my mother in confusion.

  “Down a path. We have kind of a long walk. I’m sorry. I can carry Max. Do you think you can take Hershel that far? It’s about a mile or so in.”

  “I think so,” says my mother but she doesn’t sound happy. Long gone are the days when she could carry either of them easily. They are both asleep in the back. “Jane, can you take the red suitcase? It’s got everyone’s pajamas.”

  “Where are we sleeping?” asks Maya.

  “No one knows, it’s an adventure, Mayie,” says Ned.

  I grab the red suitcase and get out. I yawn. The earth is wet and there is a rich damp mossy smell. Jim comes back to us from where he parked his pickup. He takes the suitcase out of my hands and I’m glad. I’m really tired now and don’t feel like carrying it through the woods in the dark. To be honest, as much as I want adventures, tonight is not the night for them. I think of my bed back in Massachusetts with its old Pendleton blanket, the dotted swiss curtains, my favorite star.

  Jim has a flashlight and walks ahead of us shining a path, which is actually kind of useless as it illuminates the earth for him but not for us in the back. I trip on tree roots from time to time. I am surprised that Maya doesn’t whine but perhaps she is inhibited by Jim.

  Finally we get to a clearing. There are a lot of cabins with smoke coming out of their chimneys. The woodsmoke has a thick pleasant smell.

  Jim goes to check on Mary but reports that she is asleep.

  “I can wake her,” he says uncertainly.

  “Don’t think of it,” says my mother, and then there is an awkward pause.

  “Why don’t you sit down.” He motions us to a fallen tree. “I just have to tell some people you are here.”

  We sit under the stars. It is much warmer than Saskatchewan. Ma
ya clings to my mother’s side. There are noises in the woods. Then we see a cabin door open and a family with startled and curious faces races out carrying bedding. It is obvious that Jim is clearing a cabin for us. This is uncomfortable but what can we do? We do not want to sleep in the car.

  Jim stays awhile longer in the cabin and then another woman comes out, also throwing a curious squinty-eyed look at us although she can hardly make us out in the dark. I think we are the most exciting thing to happen here for a while. There is no Walmart or roller rink or even movie theater for miles and miles. I bet they all get sick of each other’s faces. This consoles me somewhat when Jim emerges and motions us over and says, “You can stay here.”

  “I hate to inconvenience those people,” says my mother uncertainly.

  “Oh no, they got plenty of room at her sister’s place. They don’t mind. They’re glad you came to see Mary. People’d do just about anything for Mary.” He shows us the cabin and says he will see us in the morning.

  The cabin is warm. The beds look freshly made. I am hoping someone changed all the sheets. It is one thing to be outlaws. It is one thing to have adventures and recklessly take what comes. I am all for that but at the end of the day I want fresh linens.

  My mother is looking at the beds. I bet she is thinking the same.

  She heaves a sigh, unpacks and gets the boys into their pajamas. Maya and I change in the bathroom and I am glad to see that my mother has already put Hershel and Max in a small bed together. I will have a bed to myself.

  In the close warm dark, with the sound of the fire, the crackling logs, the wind that whooshes through the pines and down the chimney, the spray of rain and ice against the roof in gusts, the sounds of movement outside, human or animal, impossible to tell, we lie content. Occasionally there is the soft sound of someone moving in his bed or a log shifting position. Quiet pockets of life in the still room. I think of the huge overarching starlit sky of the woods and wonder how it is to be up there in that great silence looking down at Earth. Maybe our explosions and tidal waves and wars are just quiet pockets of life in a larger still room.

  I hear the howl of a wolf again. Thank goodness Maya is already gently snoring. Something primitive in me knows that it is safer to sleep huddled this way in one room at night with a fire. I wonder if my mother and Ned are asleep yet or if their thoughts fill this room with images the way mine do. I am at home here in a cabin. I would not know this if adventure had not led me here. It is not a place I would ever have thought to come on my own. Sometimes it is good to have things happen to you outside of your control. There are parts of yourself you would never discover otherwise. But sometimes it feels that in these new places, as much as I discover new parts of myself, I lose parts of the old Jane. The one who was safe and secure and happy on the beach.