When your memories begin, you live between two vans. One is where your parents, Peter and Susan, sleep. The other is both where your bed is and part of the kitchen. The rest of the kitchen is between the vans, under a tarp. This tarp is enormous, stretched taut, and shelters a makeshift living room, complete with a carpet and a couch that are often slightly damp. Peter is building an A-frame cabin to Susan’s specifications and there are already some other buildings on the property – a barn, sheds, sagging outhouses. Peter and the other dads are constructing a large building for all of you to gather in, and something called a sauna.
There are lots of children there. You are a barefoot, snotnosed gang who are encouraged to speak your budding genius minds and finger paint on every available surface. Peter takes you and the other boys into the fields on Clydesdale-pulled ploughs and explains the finer points of horse farming, although it won’t become clear to you until several years later that he probably doesn’t know what he is talking about.
You live on what used to be a farm, and that’s what your parents still call it, although it isn’t like any of the farms in the books that you look at. Those farms have animals and, perhaps more importantly, farmers on them. Your farm has Clydesdale horses that the men fight about, a few scrappy chickens that continually die and are replaced, and a goat that rears its stunted horns and terrifies you. Your mother gardens in her bare feet and your father does something in the fields but there is no rooster and things aren’t as shiny and red as they are on the farms in your books. There is no tractor.
The first winter in your memory, you move out of the vans and into a shack. Peter hasn’t finished the A-frame. You know it’s a shack because your mother calls it that. Peter does things to the tiny building – nails cedar shakes to the roof, hauls in a wood stove and cuts a hole in the ceiling for the stack. He attaches pink insulation to the inside and covers it with prefabricated walls that come straight from the store. Your mother cries a lot, and smokes. You like the smell of her hair when you crawl onto her lap. It reminds you of fires, warmth. When it gets too cold and snow falls through the cracks around the chimney, you and Susan move into someone else’s finished cabin and Peter stays in the shack. The someone else is a friend of both of your parents, a man. Sometimes, all of you have dinner together and the adults stay up late, smoking and drinking, their teeth pink with wine by the time they kiss you goodnight. You keep yourself awake in the other man’s loft until you hear your father leave and your mother and the friend laughing. When it warms up, you and Susan move back into the shack with Peter. By the summer, you are living between two vans again.
In the second fall of your memory, Peter still hasn’t completed the A-frame. The big building is finished and is called the cookshack, though you know it isn’t a shack like the one your mother complained about. Other fathers have finished building cabins and kids are showing off the places where they sleep. No one has an actual bedroom. There are lofts with ladders to them, beds built into the wall, hammocks in the corners of living rooms. Their beds are like forts, but you still have the best one – a whole van to yourself. You tell the other kids that you could drive away if you wanted to.
And one day you do, only Peter is driving. You know it was something about the unfinished A-frame. You know your mother was upset; she was smoking and crying a lot before you left, like she did the winter before. Susan must be too upset to take care of you so you go away with Peter in one of the vans, the one that was your bedroom. Now it is just you two guys, Peter tells you, free and on the road. You miss your mom.
Since then, the smell of sawdust has always reminded you of that place. There was a lot of wood there, on the farm and in the town. You took trips to town with Peter and the other men to pick up wood at a place where lumber was stacked as high as the walls of a battle fort. There was wood piled everywhere at the farm, shavings all over the ground – soggy in the spring and fall, concealed under mountains of snow in the winter, so hot in the summer that if you sank your arm into a pile of it you could burn your hand. Peter tells you that you are both going home, to the States. That where you are going there are even bigger trees. When you get there, though, you miss the wood stacked up everywhere around you. The sawdust doesn’t smell the same.
Every year when the snow melted, I heard the clatter of trucks driven up the switchbacks behind our house and the sounds of teenagers – car radios pumped out of open doors, the clink of beer bottle – in the place where coyotes sometimes yelled at the moon. Waking to the coyotes had always scared me. At first, their wails were like children laughing, rising to hysteria. Then what I heard shifted, so it sounded like children shrieking in pain, and I would have to reassure myself that it was only the sounds of animals. Except when it wasn’t. To a child’s ears, teenagers on a hill could sound uncannily similar to coyotes, and that was equally disturbing.
As I got older, parties became my own lifeblood. They came in two basic varieties – house and bush. House parties spilled out onto lawns and driveways, and streamed through neighbourhoods, but there was always a house to return to, a toilet to bend over, a guest bed to pass out on. Parties outside were in a field, a clearing in the forest, or a wide spot on a dirt road that led up to the hills – all collectively know as the bush. In the summer, the bush was a clearing near the lake where there was no sand and no gradual slope into the water, but instead the danger of falling into a mess of weeds and sinking mud. There were no bathrooms in the bush, just places to squat and pee. I have scars on my legs from making my way through thick brambles in a miniskirt. Yes, we wore those even in the bush.
The notion of celebration was irrevocably linked to the forest in Sawmill Creek. We were taught early that the forest was something to extol, something that sustained us all in different ways. Every summer during Sawmill Days men raced up trees, a blur of spiked boots and leather straps slapping against trunks propelling them at dizzying speeds. They rolled logs along the river, the cords of muscles in their legs holding a fine balance of wet bark and moving water, until all fell in but one man, triumphant. There were contests in which chainsaws were twirled and pieces of wood were thrashed into sawdust in record time. Other men rendered wood into art, grizzlies on their hind legs and broad-shouldered lumberjacks hulking above them when they were done. During Sawmill Days, the word lumberjack was still used and the images of fairy-tale woodcutters and the beer-bellied, chainsaw-wielding mill boys were somehow wed.
On Friday afternoon, Krista told me about a house party on the hill the following Saturday night. We were in biology class, splitting hydras into multiheaded creatures in Petri dishes. “We have to go. The only thing is,” she said, “we can’t go back to my place. My mother has declared it a No Kid Zone for the weekend. I think she’s also declared it a No Husband Zone, but that’s not my problem.”
“What’s she going to do?” I placed a drip of water on a glass disc and set my eye to the microscope. Tunnel vision.
“Fuck if I know.”
I looked down the tube to where everything loomed large, bigger than I thought things could be, yet thinner, closer to disappearing. “Well, it doesn’t matter, anyways. You can come to my place. The party won’t start till late. We’ll leave after ten. You know my mother. She’d sleep through a train wreck. Hey, you get anything?”
“Absolutely, darling,” Krista said, winking. This meant that she had pilfered a two-sixer of Absolut vodka from one of the neighbours she baby-sat for, neighbours who bought liquor in cases, stored it in a stocked cellar. She had begun stealing alcohol a year before. I was fine with that. It was going to a good cause – our liberation.
“Rob and Mike’ll probably be there,” Krista whispered out of the corner of her mouth, her eye now on the microscope.
“So?” Rob and Mike. Interchangeable with any Matt, Jeff, or Jason at Sawmill Creek Secondary. Baseball-cap-wearing, chewing-tobacco-spitting, sport-bike-riding sons of mill executives. And that is exactly what Krista wanted. She wanted to ride hard and fast on
the back of one of those sport bikes, wanted to feel her red hair tear away from her face, her screams trailing behind her. That’s what I imagined. Krista was fair to my dark, at least in appearance. She had red hair, skin so pale and thin you could make out the faint lines of blood, blue beneath it. She had breasts, the promise of fleshy, milk-white breasts under all of her shirts. That holy land tempted even me.
“Oh, right. So sorry. I forgot you were above all that,” she said. The bell rang. “I’ll be at your place tomorrow night at eight,” Krista tossed over her shoulder as she left class.
The next night Krista and I sang along to the radio, yelping as we tried to dance in the small space, knocking hipbones and shins into pieces of furniture. Krista had brought along a backpack full of possible outfits and started to pull on a pair of tight jeans. She jumped around the room, red-faced with the exertion of trying to pull the zipper up, until I said, “Lie on the bed, I’ll zip you up.” I could hear water in the pipes which meant Vera was getting ready for bed. Soon we’d be able to go out. “Okay, hold,” I instructed Krista. She inhaled and held the air in her throat while I zipped. “Ah shit, you aren’t going to be able to move in those, Kris. What’s the use?”
“What’s the use? What’s the use? Granted, walking is a little difficult but they’ll stretch. Besides, look at this ass!” Krista got up and pointed to herself in the mirror. “There’s nothing better than a heart-shaped ass, isn’t that what Mickey Rourke says in that movie? Nothing better than a heart-shaped ass.” That movie was 9½ Weeks. Mrs. Delaney had a copy. We watched it at Krista’s after school one afternoon just as we had read bits of Fear of Flying and Kama Sutra to each other, doubling over in laughter when we tried to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Delaney churning curds, as one of the positions was called. “I have a feeling my mom’s churning curds with someone else,” Krista had said. Unlike Vera, she was at least churning curds with someone.
I wore my jeans looser, which wasn’t difficult with my figure, or lack thereof. The waistband of my jeans hung on the bone handles of my hips. My sweater was cropped and whenever I moved there was only skin in the place where a belt might have been between shirt and jeans. Nothing holding my jeans up or holding me in.
We worked meticulously on our faces, Krista convincing me they needed a lot of help. A light shadow beneath the brow, darker shade in the crease, liner as a frame for the eye. Mascara on the top lashes only, on the bottom lashes it was prone to smudging and would look cheap. Cheeks hollowed out with blush. The amount of effort put into covering our lips baffled me but I followed Krista’s lead. Lips lined first, then filled in with lipstick, blotted, smeared, blotted again, glossed iridescent. Lips of many layers. If you bit into those lips, you would leave marks. The mark of ridges in layers of colour and gloss, a pink stain on teeth. We refined our faces until I was sure my mother had fallen asleep.
My mother slept as though night descended for her own personal benefit, designed to plunge only her into darkness, a place where all her senses were wiped black and nothing could reach her. When we were children, this frightened Nick and me. We would come to her in the night or early morning, and if Vera was asleep, she was gone from us – unwakable even when we bounced together at the foot of her bed, using her legs as a hurdle. It wasn’t until exactly seven and a half hours had passed that she would sit up in bed, suddenly and irrevocably awake. By the time I was seventeen, Vera’s deep sleep was a boon. Her sleep was my freedom and I was sure that I could feel it when it settled on the house. The feeling of old wood contracting, of ground shifting. Once it fell, we could walk right out of the house, no need for cunning.
The air hit us as soon as we stepped out the door, a slow, cold bank. It was always thick in November, before it snowed, and hung in the fields like sheer fabric. The mill made the air like that. The smoke was laced with a smell I identified as wood processing and the lingering scent of trees divided and stripped to the grain. The mill yard was always lit and, although it was out on the highway, its light seeped into the air and everything glowed pink. It could’ve been beautiful, if you didn’t know what it was from. The valley did things to the air as well. In the summer it would hold heat, which would push the clouds out, keep the valley arid and light. In the winter, cold would settle on the valley floor and the air would clot up until there were banks of it, surface upon surface of drafts, woodsmoke.
“Fuck, it’s cold,” Krista said, digging her hands into the pockets of her jacket, tossing her hair around her face like a scarf as we started down the driveway toward the road.
“Yeah, and those jeans are going to cut off the blood flow to that heart-shaped ass.”
“Uh, thanks, Mom.”
“Like your mom would say that. She’d say, ‘Can’t you get ’em any tighter, honey?’ ”
“Granted.”
The road was wet, no ice yet but dense, wet cold. I didn’t want to walk to the party. It was across town, up on the hill where the people with money lived. “Hey,” I called to Krista, who was already walking, or mincing, her steps short and quick in the jeans. “Let’s take the bikes.”
“The bikes? Why would we do that?”
“Because it’s so cold. We’ll get there faster on bikes – and we’ll be warm by the time we do.” I turned back to the shed at the end of the driveway, my mind made up.
Krista yelled at me in a whisper clenched between teeth. “Harper, are you crazy? We can’t ride bikes to a party. Numero uno, my jeans will split. Numero twono, hello? We will look so cool arriving on bicycles. I can hardly wait for that.”
“We’ll bike into town, park them, and walk to 7-E to find a ride,” I said with finality. “We bike into town or I’m not going.”
We were used to riding bikes at night. In the summer, we rode to the subdivisions on the hill, where the houses were separated by narrow corridors of lawn. Backyards full of pools. Motion-sensor lights hadn’t gained popularity yet and these were people whose pets were clean and quiet, kept inside at night. The pools lay ready to be entered, fences and plastic covers the only things keeping us out. We had learned trees and fences already, ways to climb seemingly flat surfaces, ways to land with the minimum sting to the soles of feet. Pool covers were easily folded back or rolled up. It was the undressing that was the hardest part. Even though we wore only shorts over our bathing suits to straddle fences, and sandals for grip, taking those off was a final statement: we’re going in; if we get caught, we’ll be close to naked. We both prided ourselves on our stealth and ability to slip into water without a sound. The feeling of pool water then, in those moments of heightened awareness of slight movement and the possibility of lights, was like nothing else. The water, a smooth secret on every inch of skin.
That night, we got on the bikes – one mine, one Nick’s – and pedalled to the top of a hill, bracing ourselves against the cold. The road led away from my house like a ribbon unrolling in either direction. One direction led to town. The other eventually met the highway and led out. My hair whipped back from my face and I could feel the ends meeting violently behind me, forming knots. The air was as sharp as pins on my cheeks and uncovered hands.
The 7-Eleven was new in Sawmill Creek. It had arrived on my fifteenth birthday, erected on the strip of town closest to the highway. Across the street there was a Husky gas station and diner. I had memories of Husky diners and they all involved Jim Harper. On our road trips, Vera liked to prepare food in the van to save money. She had some kind of kitchen rigged up – a cooler, milk crates full of plastic plates and cutlery, blue jugs of water, orange plastic sinks. Jim had even built a storage space into the van that held all these things together and a makeshift counter. It was Vera who did the grocery shopping, Nick in the safety seat of the cart, me in the back. She placed the food around my limbs. The last thing in was always ice for the cooler. Vera preferred a block; it didn’t melt as fast. To me, grocery stores are still this: the feeling of the metal mesh of the grocery cart beneath my backside, holding ice between my legs.
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Jim, on the other hand, was a great crusader for the integrity of roadside diners. Ma-and-Pa diners were the best – the backbone of the road, and thus the spine of the North American landscape – however, Husky’s presence right across the continent impressed him. He felt a kinship with truck drivers through their shared appreciation for the lure of the road. Even as a kid, I could tell that the truckers felt uncomfortable when Jim waxed poetic about this. I was most often too happy with the grilled-cheese sandwich and fries that my father always let me order to be concerned for long though. Collecting paper Husky placemats on each of our trips, I traced our routes along the map of Canada, hearts on the places where my parents got along, Xs on the places where they fought.
Sawmill Creek did not register on the Husky-placemat map of Canada. It was on the way to and from places that made it onto the map and towns that didn’t, but were quainter and had more endearing name – Cherryville, Summerland, Peachland. The name Sawmill Creek had its own charm. We did have a huge carving of a lumberjack wielding a chainsaw to welcome people to town, but when the tourists found out that there was nothing there but dead boring main street and a dark mall, they moved on. On their way to bigger lakes, vineyards, and golf courses, they were able to pull off the highway, fill up with gas and eat without ever having to see the town that extended past the strip. They could get back into their cars and never get caught in the back roads that tattooed the landscape in grids, mapping out fields and orchards in never-ending squares.
The 7-Eleven in Sawmill was a meeting place for those without cars and those looking for passengers. A terminal where everyone’s destination was a party. When there were no parties to be found, the 7-E become a destination in itself. Cars were parked and kids stood around in packs, blocking the No Loitering sign. Girls fidgeted and fixed their hair, glancing over their shoulders as though any minute a stranger from out of town would appear on the edge of the parking lot to whisk them away. Guys shuffled their feet, arranged their chests and called out to each other in false baritones. In the summer, the clerks would come out, walk around the side of the building for the hose, and spray us full force with water until we got back into our cars and drove away. Even 7-Eleven clerks wouldn’t do that to us in the winter. We couldn’t stand around outside for long in November, regardless.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 3