Tell Your Story Fall 2022 Writing Contest — Finalist
Stations in the Passion
I suppose flying the coop is as much symbol as artefact. I blew off the city of Thunder Bay with the same ease and sense of inconsequence as dust from a wide-angle lens. And university in Toronto could have been a mall in Des Moines or a MacDonald’s in Kuwait. It’s no surprise, really. We often travel through urban spaces whose signature is produced and reproduced by a machine. It’s social realism with a corporatist spin. We react with cheerful, surface acquiescence but also with a deeper sense of betrayal and sadness. I felt my academic journey to the evil empire of Toronto was a mistake or, worse, a sham. It had nothing to offer save routine, the hypocrisy of false idols and the grand failed narratives of a dead century. For the first time as an adult, smack dab in the middle of month three, I longed for my childhood hospice on the shores of Lake Agimac — admittedly, as much for its solitude as its remembered wonders. It wasn’t until much later that I learned — in the company of a new and very great friend — that my sense of rootlessness and my cruel testimonies were simply evidence of not having loved anything greater than myself.
And so it was, after that first year of academic ossification, I took the train out of Union Station, the twenty-four hour red-eye around the Great Lakes. I had my cheaper, coach seat ticket in my back pocket and I thought myself clever sleeping, as I did, in the luggage rack at one end of the car. Sure, a porter may assault you in the dead of night with a hundred pound missile, but you learned to protect your head as you slept, arms cradled, elbows forward: a ninja. Anyway, stretched out in the luggage rack, I was reciting the names of all the train stops — making a game of it, really, passing time — all the towns and landmarks between Toronto and Thunder Bay.
But the game got kind of weird. The rhythm of the wheels on the rails caught the rhythm of my words. Within the rests between the notes, there was a pronounced ker-chunk: Chapleau — ker-chunk — Wawa — ker-chunk — Terrace Bay — ker-chunk. Weirder still, I thought I heard the words returning through the darkness as script from a catechism. I had made these sounds many times before, made them with ennui and impatience. Now, for the first time, I felt like a train that was being bled of its air, breathless with a sense of personal belonging.
My parents knew I was out of sorts. They probably guessed that I had serious doubts about going back. Anyway, dad anticipated my needs and offered to drive me to camp the very next day. On the road together, I recognized the voice I had heard the night before and understood how habits of speech and mind can be passed on between generations. There were dozens of road signs between Thunder Bay and Ignace: villages, towns, rivers, lakes and parks, and even a time zone plaque whose splendid otherness among the stands of pines recalled Alice’s looking glass as much as anything else. My father recited each of these like concrete poems. Amazingly, he seemed to bring a tone of astonishment to the place names as though he hadn’t driven this three-hour stretch of highway for fifteen years and through the childhood of three boys. Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe I assigned surprise to something I recognized less and needed much more: gratitude.
Anyway, dad left me there with beer, steaks and a list of do’s and don’ts. When you use the big left element on the cooker, you can’t use any other electrical appliance. You’ll blow a fuse. He lit his pipe. You can’t drink the well water, anymore. There’s lots of bottled water. He gave me a hug and a kiss and got in the car. You shouldn’t have to use the oil stove. Call me in a few days. I love you.
Oh, papa.
It is fair to say that our camp is the crappiest camp on Lake Agimac. I guess you could say my parents are not turtles. They don’t carry their houses on their backs. They come here for a few weeks every summer to live as they did, not as they do. The lake water and the fresh air, the poplar trees and the sunsets and the loons have always been a conduit for their mutual adoration. Certainly, the new camps around the lake and those newly renovated do not lack for satellite dishes and jet-skis. Here, there is no running water and no in-door plumbing. Gotta go? It’s bombs away in my aunt’s house. And the floor in the kitchen drops about a foot to the floor in the living room that rises about a foot to the bedroom area. As a result of water seepage and rot, we never quite know where our floors will be at the beginning of each spring.
Years later, my own small kids, Katya and Sacha, would roll marbles or oranges from one level to another, sometimes timing their release at crosscurrents to cause a collision. They and my wife, Julie, would all laugh like hyenas. They’d never seen anything like it. If our floors were like locks on the St. Lawrence Seaway, it was because much time and love had flowed between those walls.
Anyway, on the living room table, conspicuously, there was a notepad that dated from ten years earlier. In it was the record of every card game Mom and I and David and Dwight had played during one very wet, very long summer season. I needed air. I used the two sawed-off hockey sticks to prop open the windows in the bedroom and living areas. I looked briefly at some family pictures on the walls and then the serpentine piece of driftwood stripped white by beavers and then the big photograph of the White Otter Castle.
I hadn’t thought about the castle at White Otter Lake for some time. I sat across from it on the couch and stared a little. The fellow’s name, the builder, was Jimmy McQuat. He came to Canada from Scotland near the outset of the twentieth century. He made his living as a trapper. Over twenty-three years, he built a fabulous, three storey building with a forty-one foot tower. A lot of the timbers, many of them thirty feet long, were hauled from the bush by hand and the windows were dragged from Ignace a distance of sixty miles through seventeen portages. According to legend, Jimmy McQuat built the castle to attract a girl he loved back home. She never came. He drowned. Tourists have visited the sight ever since.
I returned to the notepad at the table. There was a page with some phrases written on it by my mother and from that season: lousiest summer ever… rain never stops… tempers flaring… everybody thinks everybody else is cheating! I slouched into a chair and I cried. It occurred to me that weeks and weeks of card playing with three miserable boys through miserable weather was an act of devotion and faith on my mom’s part not unlike twenty-three years of building in the wilderness for the daughter of the squire. It also occurred to me that travelling to school in Toronto wasn’t at all like travelling to Ignace and skirting the depth charges on the shores of Lake Agimac.
Oh, mama.
A funny thing happened on my last night at the shack. I went fishing as usual. I went past American Point and into Moose Bay. As per usual, I stayed out too late, watching the sunset, and I had to navigate home in the darkness. After beaching the boat, I went around to the front of the camp to get a bucket for the one fish I had caught. When I returned — it was the most extraordinary thing, really. An otter was in the boat, on its hind legs, with my fish in its jaws, whiskers at attention. I had a bucket in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Briefly, we stared at each other through the yellow beam of the flashlight. And then he was gone. I would have gladly given him the fish, but he dropped it, leapt the gunwales and disappeared in a seamless dive.
Over the years, we had seen beaver, bear, pheasant, moose — you name it. This was a first. In the car on the way back to Thunder Bay, I recounted this episode to my dad more than once and then to my mom and to anyone else who would listen. And a month later, I would be telling my first best friend all about surprises that materialize in nature (as though life were unpredictable) and bloodsuckers and spiders and swimming and the call of the curlew and the peace that passes understanding. He would return to Ignace with me two summers later. I would be his guide, so to speak, his pagan escort through the opened doors to the lights of paradise. Among other sacred things, he hoped to see the animal whose eyes, with a little help, lit the darkness like the moons of Jupiter.
I had convalesced. I had connected with geometry beyond the centre. I had found adulthood returning to the place of my childhood. I had wanted to share my cure.
Twenty-five years later, the camp doesn’t exist anymore or it does, but in a form whose decrepitude is too much too sad. You use the claw of a hammer to pry off the plywood nailed over the screen door. You unlock the outer door of the porch whose particle board is humid and rotted. You unlock the inner door that opens with fierce resistance from the swollen floor onto the threshold of the kitchen. You breach the security of this sarcophagus of patient devotion and dreams and polished memories and you find rank devastation: a huge hole in the ceiling of the kitchen through which torrents of tar-darkened water have fallen as though from the bilge of a ship; a living area whose linoleum floors have peeled and curled like human skin in a funeral pyre; totems of new ownership where small animals have shat; and spaces vacated by the removal of the antique phonograph player and the lacquered pine stump whose roots like bones were upended and exposed in a freakish occurrence of wind.
On an emotional level, it is like visiting the chronic care ward in a hospital or the triage tent in a war zone. As I back away from the devastation, I escape from all these things undone, if only for a moment: I close my eyes and listen to the song of the leaves in the poplar trees. I am four or seven or thirteen: I am hidden in the tall grass, submerged in the lake, camouflaged in a tree. I am waiting for the sun to fall and the winds to calm and for my father to take me fishing. I want to return everything to the way it was and is in the imagined home of my childhood.
The irony is, of course, that I’m not talking about the shack. And I’m not talking about escaping the hospice of love given by my wife and children. And I’m not talking about my job as a teacher nor my home nor even escape from the self-immolation of trading nagging self-doubt for roadside coffee. I understand that I don’t want to return to anything so much as forego death.
But my kids are behind me in the porch and they will have nothing of this moribund tune. Katya is nine and Sacha is eight. They peer into the crumbling ark. Their eyes are large. “Oh, cool,” one says. They’ve never seen anything like it and they want to explore the carnage. I ask them to stay back. Feeling momentarily out of sorts, I am struck by motivations that are reflexively protective and compatible — they must not be harmed in any way in this place of mine, now nor ever. I must keep them away. The timbers have rotted and the wounds are deep.
At the Lone Pine Motel, we are doubtful of swimming today or during the length of our stay, for that matter. We could be wearing parkas or setting ice trays on the window sill overnight. A fine, bone-chilling mist permeates the air. Katya and Sacha are undeterred. They ask Julie and me if they can take off their shoes and socks and roll up their trousers, if we can find some sort of a receptacle for them — can, bottle or jar. We know what game’s afoot. We cut them loose. They have to do something to pass the time.
Two or three years earlier, they had discovered the exhilaration of big game hunting in the form of tracking and catching bloodsuckers or leeches. They would walk a hundred or so yards of beach, back and forth, scouring the sandy bottom beneath a foot of water for the undulating form of their quarry. Often, they would freeze in one spot, nose perched a few inches above the water line, eyes narrowed, trying to confirm a genuine sighting from a shimmering illusion. In fact, in this pose, their behaviour was remarkably similar to that of a heron fishing. And, like heron, the decision taken, they would make a quick strike, plunge a hand after the prey and, skill and luck willing, surface with a bona fide bloodsucker rolled into a defensive ball. Their fearlessness and joy in this activity were remarkable. They interacted with the slimy creatures like they were blood kin, would return them to the lake afterward as though they were seeing off aunts and uncles in the driveway.
The next morning, as the day before, we awaken to a panoramic vista that is autumnal, even though it’s not. The sun is rising grey-blue-yellow over a horizon of trees and the air is cool and palpable with fine molecules of water.
We are alone.
We guess the hotel holds sixty to a hundred guests, but we are alone. The proprietor had informed us at check-in that the peak seasons were spring for hunting and fishing and early summer for vacationing. In late fall, believably, a local hockey team billets its athletes here. My wife and I are happy as clams in our splendid isolation. Despite the fact that we are teachers, our inclination is to solitude and privacy. We are almost giddy with disbelief at our enjoyment of this world with our children on the shores of Lake Agimac, so much more so when nature colludes in rapid succession: first, we see two bald eagles circling over a tall pine on American Point; second, a rare treat because it is the first time for all of us, we see two rainbows simultaneously, each with an end that drops into the lake. The mist refracts the light in ways that can only be described as spectacular and biblical. We feel like the first inhabitants of earth in the land of ancient covenants. All that’s lacking is fire and our discovery of it.
That evening, we dine on Kung Pao chicken and Egg Foo Yung in a Chinese restaurant next to the local chapter of the Royal Canadian Legion. We go for a drive and look at the trailer park around Davy Lake and count the satellite dishes appended to all the homes like prosthetic arms. We pull over at a truck stop whose sign reads — Worms and Ice Cream Sold Here. The kids choose chocolate. We return to our hotel room and play a card game called Uno and watch Mr. Bean on cable TV.
The next morning, we pack up, check out and prepare to drive back to Thunder Bay. None of us want to leave. Before departure, I call home to alert mom and dad. Even for them, the shack has been excoriated of its fierce beginnings, its freezing winter temperatures, its laundry boards, its hellfire of mosquitoes and July heat and its incidences of serious illness that meant ferrying a sick child one hundred kilometres to the nearest hospital in Dryden. They know that this landscape, real and spiritual, is as much a part of their legacy as love’s labour on Thanksgivings and Christmases.
And, five years later, when I receive birthday photos and cub scout badges and hospital bracelets in the mail — Mom’s more and more frequent divestiture of heirlooms and keepsakes after dad’s death — I know that these things are the possessions of history and that Lake Agimac and Ignace stepped forever out of time every moment as a child and some few times as an adult.
Another ten years later, my wife and I visit Ignace for the last time. Curiously, unexplainably, the depth charges of my psychical world are disarmed. I had fully expected the blood lights in the waters of Lake Agimac to attract the leviathans of memory in all their forms. I steal myself for the arrival of the ghosts of the lake, wait for them to question and mortify me as the witches do, Macbeth: Say, if thou’dst rather hear it from our mouths or from our masters?
Call ’em; I think, let me see ‘em.
But my wife’s hand in mine is comfort I don’t need. “Are you okay?” she asks, as we peer and pan out over the water and through the horizon of pine.
“I’m fine,” I say. “It’s weird. I can think of things, but I don’t feel their depth. It’s like it’s a life lived elsewhere by someone else.” The waters aren’t so much preparing catastrophe for me in my advancing age as ambivalence. I wonder if my own retirement is the easiest and truest of reasons. We are spiders weaving plumb lines of wonder and grief while daily labour provides urgency with its own wonder and grief.
We walk the small, private beaches between the land where the camp used to be and the forestry dock. My brother had the shack flattened, the remains carted away. I believe our property is the only one among dozens whose testimony is mute. There is no man-made structure to indicate lives lived or ongoing. From Lake Shore Drive, you get a wide, clear view of the lake. I wish the lake could speak, acknowledge what we’re feeling and what we want to say.
We walk the length of the forestry dock. My wife reminds me how our gait used to be that of race walkers. She smiles to camouflage her regret. The fact is, I have arthritis in my ankles now and elsewhere. For related reasons, we no longer share our walks with forgetfulness. In fact, I wonder if chronic pain and the mindfulness that comes with it also explain, in part, my detachment from remembrance of things past.
At the end of the forestry dock, we absorb the warm sun and find points of blue disorientation in the cloudless sky. We look to our right at the Gap, a clam-shaped inlet where Julie and I fished often during our summer of courtship. We remember the lily pads and their gorgeous pink and white flowers, our regret at spiralling stems cut on the propeller of our outboard motor. We remember the dragonflies on the oar locks and the wasp that stung my back: the first time Julie heard me swear and with such volume that she didn’t know whether to feel empathy or fear.
Still at the end of the forestry dock, I remind Julie of my tour of Ignace in a helicopter thanks to a friend of my dad’s. I was six, or eight or ten. I remind Julie that the helicopter was without doors. I remember seeing my mother on the ground, her hand shading her eyes, her back story, afterward, of terror. In retrospect, for our parents, terror was always as close as one misstep or reckless manoeuvre — thin ice, gravel pits, and fires you should make and tend before you’ve opened your first science book. But we were kids in the playground of the world and no one could legislate remedy when fear was unfelt.
Back on our own property, I take off my shoes and socks, roll up my pant legs and wade out a ways into the water. My wife hangs back. Her intuition is good.
I am remembering that visit very soon after the death of my father, he who loved Ignace and Lake Agimac with devotion that creeps through age, sleep and consciousness. We had made a circle in the water, taken each other’s hands — my mother, my two brothers, me and my son. We, each us, took turns emptying the urn of my father’s ashes into the warm, summer lake, struggled to say some few words that would be intelligible and inclusive. We were all tearful or misty eyed. I remember feeling self-conflicted, worrying about my young son’s absorption of this ritual, grateful that he had come.
And when I complete my report to mom, put away my telephone and return to my wife in the car, it is as though the great emotions of these road trips are one and one million stations in the Passion and I am no more less filled with anguish nor vindicated by faith.
