Wanted or not, this was where we had been sent. But no one knew what to do with us now that we had arrived. Not the protesting people from the town, not the government representatives, not the RCMP, who continued to guard the train. No one seemed capable of making a decision.
“Stay where you are,” one policeman told the men. “Tell your families to be calm. Don’t try to get off the train.” As if we had any choice if we did get off.
It was easy to see that it was cold outside because of the way the protesters were dressed. We were told not to open the windows, but the air in the coach was worsening. It had reeked horribly throughout the journey, but now it was unbearable. Despite this, we were made to sit on the train for three more days and nights. Some children became ill and retched and cried. Odours of urine and feces and vomit mixed with the sticky-sweet smell of varnish from wood panelling inside the coach. Several of the old people had fever and diarrhea. Food was brought to the train by the RCMP, and the smell of it made the air even worse. There were spittoons outside the washrooms at the end of the coach where four or five old men stayed most of the time, bickering and talking and playing cards. It was difficult to fall asleep, even though we did our best to stretch out on seats that had been pushed back as far as they would go.
Abruptly, on the third day, we were ordered to leave the train. Once more, we gathered our bundles and left behind a place that had become familiar. A place where I had memorized every anxious face, every seat in the coach, every paint chip, every streak in the glass. Hiroshi and Keiko and I had walked up and down the aisle so that we could exercise our legs. We had fidgeted as much as our parents had allowed. Our legs were cramped, our mother’s feet swollen, our father’s temper barely held beneath the surface. Now we stepped down from the coach and stood in a huddle in unbearable cold, staring up at empty windows as the train pulled away and abandoned us.
I turned a full circle, feeling cinders grate under the soles of my rubber boots. Everyone was looking up because all around, in every direction, were the looming shapes of mountains. The town had sprung up in the centre of what appeared to be a four-square fold of peaks and valleys. White mountaintops glistened as if they’d been iced.
We boarded buses and were driven across the town bridge, over the swift and muddy Fraser River, arriving at a more or less flat, narrow field at the base of a mountain on the other side. Oversized tents had arrived from Vancouver on another train, and Father’s name and Uncle Aki’s were called out because, at their request, one large tent had been assigned to our two families.
The entire trainload of people began the business of setting up a tent village in the bitter cold of the mountains. And though we were wrapped and bundled and blanketed, I had never been as cold as I was in that place, high above a valley we had never seen, across from an angry town that did not want us on either side of the river. Mother told us to keep moving, and we clapped our hands and bent our knees and walked in circles and stomped our feet.
I could hear Father grunting, his anger visible as he pried at the boards of the crate. He had removed his jacket, his tendons taut beneath the surface of his skin. As he lifted out parts of the stove, muscles rippled up his fisherman’s arms, partly hidden by the sleeves of his shirt. With a steady flow of Japanese curses and with the help of Uncle Aki and another man, he put the stove together piece by piece and levelled it on rock and damp ground in an open space not far from the tent where we would be living. Hiroshi and Keiko and I were sent to look for downed branches and dry brush on the lower slope of the mountain, at the edge of the field. While I was dragging a branch through patches of snow, I heard Hiroshi mutter, “Arse-arse-arse.” Keiko began to giggle but no one else paid any attention. Hiroshi and Keiko dragged back larger pieces from blowdowns, and a fire was started in what had become, by necessity, an outdoor stove. Mother found and unpacked two pots—one being the rice pot from my bundle—and she began to melt snow so that she could boil water and prepare our meal. While we waited for the rice to cook, we leaned forward, sharing the space with Auntie Aya and some of our new neighbours. Hands and arms reached towards the burners in an attempt to capture thin waves of heat before they escaped into the mountain air.
Father put on his jacket again, and he scowled and planted his feet wide and stood behind the stove. He was taller than the other men and he wore a wool cap with earflaps, the chin strap dangling. His eyebrows scrunched as he gestured to the surrounds of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir that shadowed the slopes at his back. In places where there was no snow, the soil was a mixture of rough gravel and sand. In the woods, there was only darkness. High above, on the side of the mountain, a rockslide had left its mark, a slate-coloured vee now gathering dusk.
I shifted my weight, planted my feet in the way my father had, crossed my arms and tucked my hands into my armpits. Arse, I said to myself, knowing it was meant to be a bad word. Arse-arse.
I tried my best to remember our warm kitchen, the one we had left behind on the island so many weeks ago. I thought of Missisu’s piano and I turned my head sharply as if I might be ambushed by a fog of wavy, familiar notes. I looked to Mother’s face for a sign as she leaned forward to pull dishes from the willow basket.
But it was clear that Mother was not thinking about music or about our old, comfortable kitchen. I could see that she was thinking about getting food out of the pot and into the rice bowls, out of the rice bowls and into our bellies. I could see that she was thinking about warm water, which she had already begun to heat, so that she could wash the soot and train dirt off the three of us before putting us to bed on cots set up inside the heavy canvas tent.
And there we stood. Our family. The five of us captured in memory for all time, looking as if we had signed up for some bizarre adventure trek, having brought a stove with us to defeat the treachery of winter.
Uncle Aki, Auntie Aya and a few neighbours crowd into the edges of this memory. They are seeking our shared heat because no other man in camp has thought to pack a stove in a wooden crate. On the fringes of the same picture, more deadwood has been gathered. Campfires have been started all along the rows of tents. A baby wails. Food preparation has begun. The sound of high-pitched, rhythmic sobbing starts up from the far edge of the field. The same sobbing that kept us awake at Hastings Park has followed us here, to the camp. Auntie Aya shudders, and Uncle Aki puts his arm around her shoulder. Father surveys the scene and nods. Because, for the moment, our own small family is the only one that has a stove, and a poker to rattle its embers, a lifter to lift the burners and an open chimney pipe through which smoke curls up and up, into the circle of tightening darkness.
CHAPTER 10
1997
Six hundred and ninety-seven kilometres between the Soo and Thunder Bay, and I am somewhere between. I try to envisage five million square kilometres of Shield and all I can conjure is the idea of immensity. An eye looking down over lake and rock, peering into crevice to see hibernating bear, or moose knee-deep in muskeg, or wolf skulking in shadow. Water is high in ponds and craters because it has no easy place to drain. Trees lean as if a mythical wind has bent an entire forest all at the same moment and in the same direction. I feel that I’m on some vast and bumpy map, uncharted landscape from which there is no exit except the one I draw for myself. But for thousands of years, Native tribes have travelled this route. And for hundreds of years, voyageurs, Métis, missionaries and explorers pushed their way deep inside the continent.
I’ve been stopping here and there, mostly for Basil, but sometimes to do quick sketches on paper. Creeks and streams and rivers all head towards the big lake; dark waters bubble over jutting stones; circles puddle atop thin ice. And old conversations with Lena surface as I drive. A lidded eye pushes up from below, from the morass of memory that I have been holding down. I can’t prevent what bursts through. I keep thinking: Lena as … Lena doing … Lena trying … I remember her excitement when we travelled here together. Her insistence that we stop so that she could examine the
upheaval of massive slabs of rock. She wrote down the names of road signs: Widow Pond, Dead Horse Cove, Lost Boy Creek, Old Mine Road, Bear Paw Landing, Horse Thief Bay. “Every name contains its own story,” she told Greg. “In the way that rivers hold stories, so do roads and pathways. Sometimes, if we dig around and listen hard, we can find out what the stories are.”
She and Greg began to invent their own legends during long drives and camping trips. One day, we followed a sign for a place called Hope Lane all the way to a dead end, and Lena, peeved, declared the sign to be a malcontent’s idea of perversity.
I slow to watch a fox as it crosses the road, unhurried, and disappears behind the trees. It leaves its image behind, a palette of cream-coloured fur, its winter thickness streaked with rusty red. I want to tell Lena how different the landscape is so early in the year. From the highway, it’s possible to peer inside the naked forest to witness repetitive scenes of post-winter disarray. Birches have snapped and tumbled as if they’ve retreated in disordered haste. A month from now none of this will be visible. Deciduous trees will be in full leaf and will block the view from the road. They’ll link arms with the firs and present a dense wall of forest. But for now, it’s like seeing through transparent skin.
I haven’t had breakfast and have to keep an eye out for town or village. Hunger is gnawing, but not enough to make me get out and dig through the cooler to see what’s inside—apart from dregs of melting ice. Lake Superior is on my left—the vast Great Lake, with the United States unseen on its other side. I drove away from the cabin this morning at daybreak, and did not stop to explore the creek below. The van was gone, which meant that the two women had departed, though I didn’t hear them leave. I wonder now if they left after dinner and didn’t stay overnight at all. The evil fortune sticking in the craw.
A white-tailed doe, her flanks bony and thin, is feeding at the edge of the road, attracted to traces of salt left over from heavy equipment that sprayed the highway all winter. She looks up and stares as I pass. Yellow signs with images of deer captured mid-leap are posted along the road, but these gradually change to warnings of moose: NIGHT DANGER. An antlered animal is pictured: long sloping nose, left foreleg bent, shoulder to the road, challenging any driver foolish enough to be in its path while it’s on the move.
The signs are a long cry from what I now begin to see in ditches to my right. Massive carcasses, evidence of collisions between moose and transport truck. The animals weigh close to a ton, and when I see the first carcass on its back, its limbs reaching upwards in rigor mortis, I don’t understand what it is until I drive past another, and then another. I see four in all. Hit by trucks in the night and bounced back to the ditches to die. They are black in death, charred as if by fire. Not the majestic beasts Lena and I used to see in the forests when we were hiking, the ones that clip-clopped across the highway with their big, ungainly feet. These carcasses are sculptures gone bad, miscalculated shapes. And while I’m lamenting their calamitous deaths, I drive past a shallow gully and glance down to see a live moose looking out, a high, dark hulk almost hidden by moss and fallen trees.
When I drive past the sign for Old Woman Bay, I can’t remember what it is about the place that is familiar. And then I do, and I pull over and sit there, staring straight ahead. I think of an essay I read earlier in the week and I turn the car around, drive back to the sign, leave the main road and enter a parking area where I’m at once surrounded by woods, except for a clearing before a strip of beach. The sky is big-lake sky, white and expansive, streaked with blue. Every cloud shaped with clarity. Mine is the only car in the lot, and I let Basil out the back. “It’s yours, Basil,” I tell him. “The entire place. Look out for small stones.” But he has already taken off with a yelp, running in and around the trees, ears dragging as he follows some scent. He heads for the water, passing through beach gravel, sniffing and exploring as he slows and pads along.
I follow him down to the lake, my hiking boots sliding in and out of stone broken to millions of fragments along the edge of the bay. It was Böll’s essay, Heinrich Böll, and he wrote about how one road sign, one name, could set off an outburst of memories. For me, it was this one sign that has stopped me completely: OLD WOMAN BAY.
I plunk down on a massive but smooth driftwood log. The air is cool, the sun strong. The time I cannot bypass is a summer in the seventies. The event, our first car trip, when we drove as far as Manitoba for an adventure and then aimed the car south, following the Red River for a while. We decided to go to North Dakota, then Minnesota, and we returned via a southern route home again. Southern for us, but still quite far north.
We owned a station wagon then, too. Old and clunky. We’d bought it used, at bargain price. Greg was not yet born. We travelled with a small tent in the wheel well where the spare tire was kept, along with sleeping bags and a cooler. We could be self-sufficient when we had to be. But one night we were travelling through hard rain. There was nothing around but woods and rock, and we were far from hotels and motels. We kept driving and driving until we were so fatigued it was unsafe to go on.
“We have to stop,” Lena said. “It’s after one in the morning. Even the windshield wipers are dragging.”
“Stop where? We’ve been looking for hours. There’s nothing to be had.”
“No lodgings at the inn,” she said. “But we’re both falling asleep. If we continue, we’re going to kill ourselves.”
We saw the sign for Old Woman Bay.
I pulled into this parking lot. The same one. From the car windows we saw nothing but blackness and trees. Our headlights lit up a posted sign: NO OVERNIGHT CAMPING—STRICTLY ENFORCED.
“We’ll have to spend the night in the car,” I told her. “There’s nobody here, so it won’t matter to anyone.”
The back seat was already flattened, so we climbed over and unzipped our sleeping bags. These could be used separately, as singles, or opened out flat and fitted together to make a double, which is what we did, to make a wider bed for two. We crouched low, bumping our heads against the ceiling as we zipped the outer edges and stretched out our makeshift bed. We took off our clothes and tossed them towards our feet and climbed into the padded bag, which was now spacious and warm. The car rocked every time we moved. Lena reached out a bare arm, opened a window half an inch and pushed down the locks from inside. “I don’t want any bears knocking at the doors,” she said.
Once inside the zipped-together bags, we lay flat on our backs and started to laugh. “Tell me a river story,” Lena said. “One with a good ending, not something with cataracts and turmoil that will keep me awake.”
“Let me think for a minute,” I said. “Okay, here goes. A young man was once travelling through Germany, and as it happened, it was the year before he would meet the woman who would become his wife. He didn’t know that then, because she was living in Montreal, still unmet, and he was in Europe, travelling alone. As a matter of fact, she was sleeping in his bed in Montreal, having rented his share of a student apartment while he was away.
“The young man was following the great rivers of Europe. He had a sketch pad in his pack, the usual supplies, and he was trying to capture something he could not quite put a name to, some understanding of the rivers he encountered. Something lost, perhaps, or something not yet found. He lingered in Bonn, Beethoven’s birthplace, and visited Köln and the cathedral, and he travelled upriver to Speyer and climbed the highest hill and looked down over the ancient Rhine and watched barge traffic below. He thought he would stay overnight nearby because he also wanted to see the Neckar. He had been told that it was a beautiful river, more green than blue, with castles strung like jewels at the top of the hills. He proceeded to Heidelberg and found a hotel, and while there he bought a ticket for a boat that would take him on a new journey the next day.
“The next morning, he boarded a boat that travelled upriver through a series of narrow locks. He inhaled a breath of river air, which did not satisfy in any way because the day was uncomfortabl
y hot. The boat had two decks, and swans paddled to the side and stretched up their long throats, demanding food, which tourists tossed down: chunks of bread, pieces of chocolate, even sausage.”
“Dark chocolate? What kind of sausage?” said Lena.
“Quiet, please. People on deck were drinking beer. Small children carrying Fanta and fizzy cola ran up and down steps between decks. The boat slugged forward, but there was no breeze. And unlike the tour boat on which the young man was now captive, the passing barge traffic was remarkably swift. Colours streamed from multinational flags, towels billowed on clotheslines, bicycles leaned against shacks on broad decks. The barges sat just inches above water level, so low did their heavy loads nose through the waves.
“Across the deck from the young man was a middle-aged couple, sitting on a bench. The man was thick everywhere, squat build, large neck, rough skin. He wore short brown trousers hemmed above the knee and a pair of braces over his shirt. His wife was short, but even larger than he. Layer after layer of her body bulged from beneath a sleeveless cotton dress. She wore stockings of a bluish-white colour, as if to help remedy the swollen veins in her legs. She wiped her forehead and tried to ease herself by moving closer to her husband. At the same time, she leaned back against him. Then she slowly lifted herself sideways until she had pushed him against the inner wall of the deck. Squeezing the last bit of air from him, she turned her back, fell like a sudden blow upon him and stretched her swollen legs lengthwise along the bench.
“Jammed as he was into the corner, only bits of the man could now be seen. But he did not, as expected, push her off. Instead, he began to bounce one knee. His wife bounced and rolled with his inner tune, her eyes closed, perspiration streaming down her face. Her hand rested just below her husband’s trousers, keeping time on his bare thigh. It was a moment of such intimacy that the young man, in agony, turned away. At that moment, he would have given anything to experience the kind of intimacy he was witnessing. And then he thought, What nonsense. But he did not forget the couple or the intimate moment between them.”
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