by Ursula Pflug
And once you’ve given away your power you can never be a star, no matter what. Not a real star, anyway. And I don’t mean a star on television, although that’s what he told some of the kids, the ones who wanted to believe that. I mean a person who shines with their own light, without giving it away to another.
I just headed away from it all one day and found myself going up the trail to Lydia’s without having in mind that’s where I wanted to go or even that I wanted to get away, just walking. When I got there things were different. For one thing, she was wearing clothes. A long dark blue thing, long skirt and big loose top. And her hair was out. Lydia had a lot of hair. There were a bunch of other women there too, her friends I guess, and they were all sitting around sewing. It was like a big quilt, and each of the women was working on a different section of it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A star blanket,” one of the women answered, and when I got even closer I noticed they were getting the cloth for it out of their clothes. When they needed a new section one of the women would take some scissors and cut a big section out of her skirt.
“Why are you cutting up your clothes?” I asked, and they all laughed.
“Oh, lots more where this stuff comes from,” and I remembered having heard somewhere in my travels that the universe is constantly expanding. And when I got even closer I saw that they were embroidering the cloth in silver thread. I could make out all the constellations and a lot more I’ve never heard of. That blanket looked very warm, and more than anything I wanted to sleep in it, but I sat on the bench and sang with Lydia and her friends, watching them work. Then when it got so late I wouldn’t be able to find the trail home by myself and they couldn’t work anymore they lay it down on the ground and wrapped me up in it, and I lay beside the fire wrapped up in that star blanket, and listened to the women singing and laughing until I fell asleep.
It was the best sleep I’ve ever had. I dreamed the blanket floated up into space, spreading itself out across the sky, and I went with it, travelling to galaxies no one’s ever been to, or even seen, only space wasn’t cold like they always said, but the warmest place I’ve ever been, and that’s the night that cured me of Winter and other predators like him for good. After that it was like I had another eye, a special eye that would tell me who was safe to hang with and who wasn’t, and I’ve never really gotten in any more trouble since.
THE END
26
WHAT WOULD HAVE to happen for me to start calling myself a woman? I remember asking that.
Looking back, I think maybe it was the day of my healing. And not because I was older, but because I was more complete. It was later that day that I had started collecting stories, a project that has come to shape me. It feels like there’s a connection, because of the missing parts of myself that I found that day, and as the stories came to me.
Back East again. Another year that seems like forever, but somebody told me all the years seem like forever when you’re a teenager. I’m living in Toronto, at a well-run squatter co-op. After that healing camp was over, I caught a ride east, thinking I’d look for Lark. Skinny went up to B.C. to go to school with Estevan some more. Keep learning how to design and build renewable energy systems, with the emphasis on cheap, built out of junk as much as possible. Both portable and stationary.
I’m almost nineteen. Next month I get to drink legally. More fun than Girl Guides! I’ve been back East for over two years now and never heard from any of those people. There aren’t so many Tribe message boards like there used to be; I can’t even find their main website now. Things have broken down even worse.
But I try and make the city things more like country things, like it was there. Not having a home on the mountain was always sort of like having a home anyway. On the mountain you could make a fire, a lean-to, or some kind of shelter if you didn’t have a tent. You could find something wild and green to eat to round out your bulk sacks of brown rice and black beans. You could eat at the community kitchen and chop carrots or wash dishes to contribute. There were lots of people there who knew what wild foods and plants you could eat and make tea out of and what they were good for, and were willing to take the time to tell you. Another workshop, one of the better ones I took. I remember almost everything I learned in it.
The people that gathered on that mountain were easier for me to get along with than city people, even if I didn’t exactly like everything about them. But they had a code. Like the food; they always had communal food there. Even if a lot of people had their own food that was better, there’d still be some shared food, even if it was just homemade flour tortillas and macaroni without the cheese. And they’d have those bins full of clothes people lost or didn’t like anymore, so people who came without enough to wear could find stuff.
I don’t know why but people here don’t seem to know about all that stuff. And so I tell them, show them. I remember how, on the mountain, by August when new kids showed up, I’d gotten to the point where I could recognize the fear, even if they kept it well hidden.
You’d have to show them, little by little, that they could make it. That most of it was really simple: keep your shitters far away and downstream from the spring; wash your hands before you do food prep; use condoms every single time. The raspberries are mostly over but the leaves make great tea. Mostly it was me and Skinny who talked to the new kids. They trusted us, because we were their age or just a little older. We had tattoos like they did, or at least Skinny did.
I stayed till Labour Day Weekend, when Skinny went north. In July and August, I wrote a lot of other people’s stories there. I guess I had nothing else to do. I didn’t know anything about satellite linkups, packet radio, cooking for hundreds or healing, and after that post fell on my leg when I was helping build a new outhouse that time, I wasn’t much use for physical labour.
I couldn’t even go on my beloved day hikes much anymore, so I wrote down people’s stories. I guess I did it ’cause I always liked to write and it seemed so interesting to me, that everybody had a story, all those two thousand people there, especially the teenagers. Everybody’s story was different and yet they were all so ephemeral, like the people would leave and go somewhere else, down the mountain to one city or another, or up to Canada, and their stories would be gone with them.
It amazed me how, beyond the surfaces, which most times was all you got to know, every one I talked to at the gathering had a life, as real to them as mine was to me. I didn’t ask people to tell me their life story, although they could if they wanted. But mostly they just told me something that had happened to them, something that stood out, maybe only at the time we were talking.
I’m glad I did it, ’cause now I have something to show for that time; all their stories like jewels. I’m going to school now, doing Independent Studies through that college where you can do school even when you’re on the road. I edited and collated all the interviews and stories and had them printed and bound into little books. They’re going to be part of my thesis, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking like a Tribe person now. If I start travelling again, I’ll take books with me and have something to trade or give away or sell.
It wasn’t like I thought it was really important or anything; I wasn’t looking for something important to do. It was pleasure that led me there, the pleasure of their stories, their lives, and of how they all spoke differently, used words, those amazing things, in such different ways. I’d transfer them from my notebook or an iPod Skinny lent me onto his laptop in the orange Security tent. I’d go there after our morning talk, when he was out doing his rounds, checking up on everyone, keeping the peace. And at night we’d both sleep in that tent, never touching.
At the end of August we both quit drinking coffee mainly because there wasn’t any, and after that, when he was finished his rounds, he’d make tea for us. It was usually something that grew there, like raspberry leaves or catnip or another wild m
int or some kind of pine needles.
During the Perseid meteor shower we stayed up till morning, walking and talking. “If your mom was here, we’d do a packet meteor scatter,” I remember him saying.
“A what?”
“We did it in Victoria this time last year. You bounce radio signals off meteorites and then see if you can pick them up again somewhere else.”
“Cool,” I said. “Can we do that?”
“Well,” Skinny said, “you need different packet groups in different places working together. And there probably are some. But I don’t know enough to try anything like that on my own.”
We both stood there quietly after that, contemplating life without Laureen, each of us for different reasons. The heavens seemed to hear our thoughts, though, because for the next few minutes there were more shooting stars than I’ve ever seen in my life. If we couldn’t have my mom, we had that at least.
After that I wasn’t afraid of anything; I thought I could stay on that mountain forever, eating whatever and making clothes out of bark. Even without Skinny I wouldn’t have been afraid. I wouldn’t have been afraid of anyone or anything because I could see what they were, just another story, and how even in the worst person there is an understanding of it, even of the reason they had for the thing they most regret doing. It’s funny, but almost everyone I talked to had at least one thing like that. And we were all living on the mountain together; that was what we shared. It was like some new kind of city, certainly run as efficiently, and even boringly, with its endless committee meetings and job charts that in the end somehow did manage to keep things moving.
There were no deaths, neither by accident or homicide or illness. Well, that’s not true of course. But the homicide that happened, happened off-site. It wasn’t Skinny’s fault. He wasn’t being derelict in his Security duties. There was only one knife fight, and Daniel broke it up before any damage was done. The theft was all minor, and there was very little of it.
Everyone left knowing more about how to look after themselves and each other than when they arrived. Yoga. Basics of herbalism. Build a still. Build a stage. Build a sauna. Make your own tinctures. Power your stage from bicycles. Convert your car engine to run on homemade bio-diesel. Speak Spanish. Write English.
I don’t think anyone learned it all but even the laziest or most fucked up learned a little.
Once he got used to me, Skinny and I held hands a lot, and sometimes he would reach across the space between us and touch my face. On our log pile or at Circle we’d sometimes kiss, but at night in the orange tent he never touched me. Sometimes I thought maybe the idea of sex even with me reminded him too much of something he’d rather forget. He was a good kisser though, tasting of coffee and cigarettes; probably the only guy there that did.
I used to want him though, so bad. Boy, did I lust. I hadn’t had sex yet, but all the same, or maybe because of that, I would think about it all the time, wondering what it was like. Of course there were other offers and I considered the free condoms box, the offerers, but in the end it seemed pointless if there was a guy there I wanted so much and couldn’t have.
I changed my mind about that, finally, last year. A nice guy, already a friend, attractive but not like I’d imagined it with Skinny, not like it was when we did it in my dreams. That was one of the most beautiful things that ever happened to me, and it didn’t even really happen.
I wonder if we ever did it in his dreams. If we did, he never told me, but then I never told him either so that doesn’t tell you anything.
27
MY FATHER IS HERE. We’re friends in a distant kind of way. I never could take him seriously after he didn’t forward his new contact info that summer. He lives in my co-op. We both share little loft apartments with other people. He doesn’t take care of me or anything, but sometimes at night he comes down to the common room and plays songs he was a little bit famous for, mostly in Europe, a long time ago. I always go and listen to him when he does that, and as time goes by I like my father’s songs more and more. “Camden Town” has been known to make me cry in public more than once. So maybe it is through his music that he cares for people. Laureen said that once and now I understand what she meant.
Let it all go. Only then can you heal. In fact, letting go is a pretty good definition of healing.
Wish I had Skinny to tell that to. I remember all our conversations on the log pile, drinking his secret coffee, trying to puzzle it all out. Wanting to touch him but afraid of making him flinch.
Last week Lark told me that Laureen hadn’t gone to San Francisco to reunite with Peter, but to confront him. She wasn’t moping because she missed him, but because I’d finally gotten through to her. She was busy those first days not just setting up packet radio but simmering, alternately with rage and self-incrimination.
I don’t know why it sunk in there and not all the times before.
Maybe it was the mountain. They say it’s a holy place, brings necessary changes.
That’s what she said the day we arrived. Maybe it turned out to be true, even for her. Sacredness, after all, includes truth.
Except then she had to screw it up, go look for him.
Bad idea, Mom.
She got herself killed.
The day they told me she wasn’t coming back, they didn’t have all the facts. When they found her body, it took them a while before they even figured out who she was. The case wasn’t sorted out till long after I left the camp. And when they finally did figure out it was Peter and notified Lark, he didn’t tell me. Until now, that is.
Spare the child.
But at least it explains why I had so much anxiety about her around that time. And it could explain what I experienced during my crystal healing.
So it looks like I should’ve gone up to Vic with Skinny like he asked me to, learned something useful. I guess I thought I still needed a little more parenting. Too bad I didn’t get much, but one thing I’ve learned is that some people just don’t know how, and all the things Lark gave me aren’t the things you really need to grow on, even though he’s nice in his way. Those necessary things I got from Laureen; they came alongside her moods, her poverty and dirtiness, and her broken down trucks. At the time I didn’t know they were gold. I was busy being angry.
I remember the day Skinny told me who had raped him as a child. It was the same day he told me I must be some kind of healer because I was the only person who had ever been able to get it out of him. And yes, no surprises there, for Peter followed Laureen to Estevan’s school at the end of that first summer we met him, when I escaped his groping hands to get back to Toronto to Lark. I wonder how I didn’t see it sooner; probably because I was fretting about my mom.
Skinny’s eyes that day were shadowed and his dolphin lips didn’t smile. Still, after he told me we found something to laugh about and then he turned his tin cup over on our Second Meadow log pile and walked away into the Lodgepole pines like always.
And that’s my story.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council who funded the writing of this book via its Writers’ Works In Progress program. The original manuscript, Drastic Travels, eventually became this book as well as the novel The Alphabet Stones. Thank you to Doug Back, Anita Buehrle, Oliver Kelhammer, and Esther Pflug, who all provided me with insight into packet radio and other technical aspects of Laureen’s work; any mistakes are my own. Thanks to Candas Jane Dorsey for structural comments. Thanks to Luciana Ricciutelli, Renée Knaap, and Val Fullard at Inanna Publications; I’m proud to be part of the Inanna family. Thank you as well to Anita Buehrle for her enthusiasm; we all need great readers and Anita is one of mine.
The stories Camden/Ameythyst gathered while on the mountain were previously published in slightly different form:
“Looking for Sofia” first appeared as “Lydia,” in Room of Own’s Own, Volume 19.1 (Spring 1996)
, Domestic Blissters.
“Secret Campground” first appeared in The Peterborough Review, Volume 1.2 (Fall 1994), Shelter Issue.
“Seeds” appeared in Windowspace ’91, a storefront show in Peterborough, Ontario (Fall 1991) curated by Jo-Ellen Brydon, with an accompanying videotape by the author entitled “The Red Suitcase.”
Photo: Anita Buehrle
Ursula Pflug is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Green Music, The Alphabet Stones, Motion Sickness (a flash novel illustrated by SK Dyment) and the story collections After the Fires and Harvesting the Moon. She edited the anthologies They Have To Take You In and Playground of Lost Toys (with Colleen Anderson). Her short stories and nonfiction about books and art have been appearing for decades in Canada, the U.S. and the UK, in genre and literary venues including Lightspeed, Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Leviathan, LCRW, Now Magazine, Bamboo Ridge, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and many more. Her work has been shortlisted or nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Sunburst Award, the Aurora Award, the 3 Day Novel Contest, the Descant Novella Award, the KM Hunter Award, and others. Visit her on the web at http://ursulapflug.ca.