Country of Cold (16 page)

“Just follow the easy path.”

“Well, the familiar one, anyway. Which may not necessarily turn out to be the easier one, after all.”

“There are not so many easy ones, actually.”

“No.”

They walked on. Laurel stopped suddenly, as if to tie her shoe, but she didn’t bend down. Daphne didn’t
notice for a second, and then when she turned to Laurel, her friend started walking again.

“I would help you, either way,” Laurel said.

“For how long?” Daphne asked.

“I don’t know. As long as I could.”

“Which probably isn’t eighteen years.”

“I know.”

“I’m just going to try to not think about it for a few days and then see if it is clearer to me what I should do.”

“Good luck.”

They walked on.

“I can’t believe this is happening to me at my age.”

“I know.”

The squall scudded across the lake toward them and they could see whitecaps at the edge of the front, and rain driving down obliquely into the lake. The air grew abruptly cold, and the leaves on the poplar trees that lined the beach started to shake. The three women reached into their bags for their sweaters and pulled them on, still sitting. Litter began swirling along the water’s edge.

Hannah looked at Daphne. “So what would you do differently?”

“I don’t know.
Affiliate
myself somehow.”

Laurel: “Have a pickle, dear, we all feel like that at the end of summer.”

Hannah rocked forward on her feet and stood. Daphne looked up at her. Laurel held the pickle jar up to her in turn.

“Do you think we’re in trouble?” Hannah asked, raising her voice over the wind. “Do you think things probably aren’t going to work out for us?” Laurel looked at the sky. The rain was less than a mile away. You could see it hitting the water. Daphne shook her head. Laurel looked at her. “You think?” she asked.

“I’m pretty sure we’re going to be okay,” Daphne said.

Hannah sat down. She chewed on a pickle. Laurel touched Daphne’s arm.

This was in 1998.

After Lukie Oktok shot himself his house was empty for two months. Nobody on the waiting list for a new house would answer their phone during this time. Finally Theresa Kabluitok’s mother, who had five of her adult children still living with her as well as four grandchildren, including Theresa’s three, picked up the telephone and yelled into it, “Okay, okay, she’ll take it.”

The place still smelled of Lukie, and even in the carpet you could detect his Stetson cologne. Theresa’s ex-husband came around the day she moved in, thinking maybe they would have a chance now that he wouldn’t have to take the old woman’s abuse in order to live with her. Theresa thought he was not much of a man if his involvement with her and the children was contingent upon elbow room.

The children were delighted by the house. Having room to run and play seemed like an adventure to
them. They knew about Lukie’s death, of course, and the bad luck he had had, but they were not much put off by the story, were actually pleased to be part of a drama.

The night after she moved in, Theresa sat in the kitchen of her new house and smoked cigarettes and drank tea. Her children were asleep and she thought about luck, how it follows some people and seems to torment others. Lukie had been an unremarkable man before the accident. He was neither good enough nor wicked enough to stand out in anyone’s mind. After the accident, the townspeople combed their memories of him, looking for some portent of disaster. With other unfortunates this was almost always successful, but in Lukie’s case it was not. He simply had never said enough, done enough, to stick out in anyone’s mind. There were not enough details to shape into a revealing anecdote.

Theresa thought that such a state would suit her—to live inconspicuously enough that her end would seem as random and unilluminating to other people as her life, as she lived it, did to her.

This is what is necessary: an axe and a stone; a hundred feet of quarter-inch rope; a parka; one hundred pounds each of flour and rice; ten pounds of baking soda and of salt. Some fishing line and a set net and an ice jig. Twenty or thirty pounds of lard. A grill. A skillet. Some aspirin. A rifle. Really good boots. It is a relief to find a task, even if it is only to make this list. After working in the bush and caring for the man for thirty years, this absence of tasks is unprecedented. Motionlessness feels too much like death, and there has already been enough of that.

In this town of bearded and vinegar-scented men and women, who never bathe or change their socks, you could go crazy, you could light yourself on fire, or wear your underwear on your head, and their drooping eyelids
would not flicker. They have the same relationship with one another as do snakes in a winter den. And when the ice in the Churchill River is rotten and ready to go, in early June, there isn’t a creature here who doesn’t look out at the taiga and long for room enough to eat a meal without being inspected from behind clouds of grey smoke and tightened mouths like cigarette burns in car seats. Gypsy’s Pastry Shop and Café on Saturday afternoons: they all think it the Flore. It goes to show you what a sweetened bread roll can come to mean in an empty enough place.

The tree line along the coast of the Hudson Bay hangs a few miles inland and may be seen from the edge of town as a black fringe, sideburns lining the rock face that slopes into the sea. Churchill sits right at the ocean’s edge, preferring the eviscerating winds and pack ice to the treed wildness where muskeg monsters thaw and percolate. One conceives of oneself as impotent there—inland, among the trees and bogs—and so one is. It is astonishing to learn how fast a man or woman is, over distance. Except for the wolf, the fastest animal around over distances more than twenty miles. Try this. The first morning in late summer when there is snow on the ground, take the coffeepot off the stove and then go walking. When you pick up a set of deer tracks—you’ll know they were made the previous night—start following them at the fastest walk you can sustain. Before nightfall you’ll be standing before exhausted slobbering defeat,
feeling ashamed. The meat will taste of the day’s terror, but the point remains: we are each of us formidable. And it doesn’t take a Winnebago to make your way in the world. You’d think we would know this, and speak of it constantly.

Humans are, by disposition and design, lopers. They are pack hunters and seed grubbers who rely on endurance and planning. “Intelligence” is the wrong word for their gift, suggesting as it does their wit and social structure and clever tricks. Anyway, they spent four million years on the Serengeti and they have only been in cities for six or seven thousand years. They are most themselves when they are walking quickly and thinking about the medium term. One has to last, if anything is to make sense.

I find myself thinking about his crinkled eyes and thinning hair: tufts rising preposterously from his ears, like an elf, like Yoda, shaking his gnarled little head. At the end, his own vanity could not stand it and the jokes about his decline had grown steadily more incisive. When he was nearly so weak he could not walk from the bed to the toilet, he had spent a day constructing, out of fishing line and pulleys, an elaborate call bell system, to signal his distress. He laughed the whole time he built it, shaking his head slowly. I was outside for most of that afternoon, splitting wood, and by the time I was done I had a waist-high pile of kindling.

A solidly built eighteen-foot freighter canoe; four paddles, a one-and-a-half-horsepower engine for the upriver work, which means gasoline and oil; a chainsaw; a lamp and fuel, candles, a fish knife and a hunting knife; some books; matches. A lot of matches. You wouldn’t want to run out of matches.

The ice leaves all at once most years; the floe edge creeps in through May and spends part of June lingering enticingly close to shore, even though, Jesus Christ, there’s a heat wave in Edmonton. Then one day the wind comes from the south and blows hard for a night and a day and then the ice is fractured and dissipating, headed off into the sea in a thousand shards of its previously monolithic self. The moment is spoken of for weeks beforehand and its arrival is predicted as imminent for nearly a month. Living like this, in the anticipation of an event that cannot be influenced or manipulated—living like this changes everything.

And that is about it. Some sutures, maps, of course, and one of those small GPS navigation devices; the miscellaneous category is not so huge—either a thing is imperative and not at all miscellaneous, or else it is too heavy.

The beauty of useful things is worth noticing. Rope, for instance. Run it through your hands: light, pliable—look, you can bend it in half—gorgeous yellow polypropylene rope. A hundred feet of it weighs only a
few pounds, but it can hold hundreds of pounds. Thousands, maybe. Incredible. Or maybe more apparent: the canoe. A thousand bucks from the North West Company, solid, lithe, and light—look at it. It weighs seventy pounds itself and can carry half a ton. There is nothing necessarily impersonal about Kevlar—light and strong and warm: functionality is a kind of loveliness. Forest-green and square-sterned, to take the engine, this little shell still paddles easily and could take twice as much gear. The limiting factor is not what it can carry, but what you can. The rope is coiled and laid on the floor beside the canoe. Smooth, mellifluous dark green and canary yellow, at four in the morning these colours sing.

This is not an argument for a strictly utilitarian aesthetic. Ugly things can be useful and useful things ugly—consider rototillers and anuses, for instance—but people who care enough about tools to make and buy good ones want them to be beautiful as well. This is a kind of love. More on that matter later.

The Woods Company of Ottawa has been making packs for fifty years and they do it with love. Simple canvas-and-leather packs, double stitching throughout, reinforced straps and leather anchor points—pure beauty. Three are necessary for this trip, and they are laid in a line beside the rope. The new ones have rubberized nylon lining and internal aluminum frames, but you would never guess it to look at them. They remain as perfectly beautiful as the models of forty years ago. And
beside the packs, a down-filled mummy sleeping bag, bright yellow and as warm as baked bread. A Coleman lantern in its carrying case; fuel comes in shiny aluminum bottles. In a snow-covered tent, the lantern is heat as much as it is a light source. One will want to have some fuel around. In case it is necessary, for some reason, to come back before the warm weather returns.

Escape is contained within its own possibilty: even in its planning, a kind of release is already obtained. You line up all the gear here on the floor of the house, going over the list again, trying to think of something light and useful enough to take that has been forgotten. Liberation presents itself even now in the half-light, with the voices from the bar boisterous and raucous drifting in through the window at three in the morning; in the white nights the mania only builds as the ice groans, craving release, and a thousand men and women yearn as well, but the yearnings are more heterogeneous than they seem and nobody really knows what anyone else wants. And, sitting here looking at the gear, on which the winter pay has been spent, there are clearly no more bonds. You could pick up the canoe right now and carry it down to the water, the gear too, and you could be fifty miles upriver by midnight the next day. And you will be, just as soon as the river breaks.

The Northern Store sells magazines. Once there was one called
Survivalist
, which sounded relevant to this
undertaking, but all those characters seemed interested in surviving was a gang war. It was less about survival than annihilation. Bazookas and machine guns—idiots. A fish net is the fastest way to get together a quantity of food anyway. Men and guns.

The one for this trip is his single shot .308 and twelve gauge over-under: twenty-two dollars at the Northern Store, twenty years ago. It does not stir me when I hold it; it is heavy and scratched in many places, but it still fits together easily. The rifle shells have a beauty about them, if one likes the shine of brass. There is a power contained in each of the surprisingly heavy metal cylinders. You can hear the gunpowder within when you shake one. It sounds like a salt shaker. You think: this could kill me too.

Good equipment lasts, and you can tell whether it is good the moment you first lift the pack or swing the axe or load the rifle. The parts fit together properly and are neither too loose nor too tight. The difference between a rifle bolt that is work to operate and one that is not is impossible to appreciate until a well-made rifle is held. And once that has happened there is no going back. Why would someone bother with a cheap knife that won’t hold an edge if they knew that good ones do?

I remember when I was teaching in Winnipeg and he was trying to persuade me to come up here and live with him. Once, there was an empty seat on a government
plane coming down and he caught it. I met him at an all-night café on McDermott Avenue at three in the morning and we walked to Oman Creek Park and sat on a bench and kissed quietly by the river. It was early April and we were both very cold. We sat there kissing with our teeth chattering. And then the flight was returning and I went to the airport with him and saw him off. I remember this. It was 1976. A Thursday.

This house was made with good equipment, and the sawn spruce and cedar bear cut marks that are twenty years old. It is clear that the timbers were measured carefully and there are no cracks anywhere. Things fit together, each log lies true on the other, and the saws and planes and drill bits, long discarded, have left their importance here. Their meaning was realized as the edges wore down, were sharpened, and wore down again. Eventually the tools were worn out and he threw them away, but by then they had turned themselves into the beauty of right angles and straight edges. And these doorjambs and windowsills and rafters make it matter that the tools were made well. The saw marks say so.

When my sister heard that he was finally gone, she sent her daughter up to see me. I picked her up at the train station, and in the truck I told her that I had retired and would not teach in the fall. She asked me why, and I told her that I was tired. I took her for lunch at Gypsy’s and she asked me how I was doing. I kept saying fine
and she kept coming back to the question. Clearly her mother was alarmed. I told her to tell her mother not to worry and that I was planning on going travelling for the rest of the summer and the winter. She looked surprised at this and said that she thought that was a good idea, going travelling. Either with another woman, or, searching my eyes, alone? That’s still good, she said. Then she asked me where I was going. I said I wasn’t exactly sure, yet. She said there was lots of time to look at the schedules, watch for seat sales.