by Sue Matheson
August
Sherman Meadows
It’s about six in the evening. I’ve been sitting here for over an hour. Behind me the spruce trees stand waiting, rising up the hill wave upon wave. Above a clear sky, a deep sky, no clouds and no wind. In Ontario, the mornings are pale as robin’s eggs, green and fragile when compared with the lapis lazuli of BC’s. Skies you could swim in, float suspended between the sun and the warm earth. Of course, I haven’t really been sitting. Waiting. I’ve been trying to read but can’t in this bumpy meadow of razed earth. Perched precariously on a flat slab of granite in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a brown ocean, I’d rather look at the troughs traced by the bulldozer. Sunk deep in the ground the treads look like furrows dug by a crazy farmer. He couldn’t plough a straight line. Yesterday, Diane was here, sitting on this rock reading and drying her hair. She could have been anchored in Copenhagen in the harbour, her legs curled beneath her, brushing the sun through her black hair. Yesterday, a breeze kept the bugs away. I wonder what’s for supper. It’ll probably be fish. Again. I rushed to get here first. After work. This rock is bloody uncomfortable.
August
Sherman Meadows
We’ve been here four days: Diane, Jerry, Grant, and me. The rest of the crew is loosening up and becoming friendly. I know they like Grant. He says hello to everyone, but I can’t see how I’ll fit in. No one talks or listens much. I still don’t think I’m here. A week ago I was in town in a bubble bath and now I’m on a top bunk in this trailer looking out its dusty window. My North. When we drove through Sherman on the way to the Falls seven years ago the air was clear....so clear still if you pushed a straight pin into the morning, the light would burst like a balloon popping.
Yesterday in the trees at the clearing’s edge two bears circled then walked into the far end of the meadow. When I looked up, there they were, sauntering to the garbage pit. The brown bear, about ten yards behind the black, was anxiously swinging its head in the changing breeze. Jean, the cook, says that they come into camp every night after supper. They were early. Bears always come in upwind. They circle behind and stalk strangers. You have to keep looking behind you in bear country...watching your back.
August
Sherman Meadows
What was I doing? I was working in the Quiet Bar as a waitress. I wore a long dress that night, cream-coloured with bell sleeves and lace. Not exactly the sort of thing to sling beer to rig crews in, but Bea had the sex appeal, Sally the experience, and Ruby was a mothering sort. That left me with naivete. So I wore lacy dresses and made a lot of money, my sleeves foaming like the heads on their beer. The ones who liked little girls tipped big--bushed and flush they had noone else to spend their money on. And they kept on spending as long as you stayed single. Didn’t put out. Remained V-I-R-G-I-N-A-L. You know what I mean. Boyfriends not only cramp your style they lower your market value. Bea made next to nothing the night Les sat at the table watching her work---all the guys behaved but none of them tipped. One night a regular asked me to marry him. I thought it was a joke so I said sure and went to get his beer. He followed me worried I’d want a ring and sue him for breech of contract and want to meet his mother. Another drunk-in-love barked like a dog and grabbed my ass. That one I cracked over the head with my tray. Hard. Bad doggie. He behaved and tipped. Then there were the guys who picked me up and carried me to the door. The toolpush had a priest in the truck. His friend owned the Catholic Church. Triple tequila on the rocks. Big tips. When their crew went next door to the cabaret to do some serious drinking there was a riot. After work there were two bodies on the asphalt. Lying in the parking lot on their backs. Blood was running out their ears and noses, pooling around their heads. Shimmering purple in the streetlight. The pools got bigger and two drunks came by. Then the girlfriends came. The moaning and screaming started...they were on their knees but no one touched them and then someone called an ambulance but a cab came by and drove off, women and blood and bodies in the back seat. The next day Ruby said six strangers in a pickup had pulled up, jumped out and kicked the shit out of those guys. No reason. I remember taking off my bloody shoes in the car at a red light on the way home, lighting a cigarette and smiling. Ninety bucks that night, but my feet were raw.
August
Sherman Meadows
At first planting trees is the washroom trailer caked with mud and pieces of dirty Lux soap eating pancake/bacon/coffee/egg/ cereal/juice at six thirty deciding who to sit with in the six-wheeler, one of the red rusty ones. Finally grunting up the mountain. Like the first day of school. Bouncing in the back of the bus with a lunch. Ruffed grouse. People being dropped off.
Everyone gets an acre to themselves and the higher you get the fewer people there are to plant. Diane was dropped off first, then Grant, then Jerry and me. Jerry has red hair, brown freckles, milky skin and small eyes that squint and shift and plaid shirts. When they dropped us off, the cruiser gave us each a canvas bag with a shoulder strap for on your hip, a hundred trees and an axe-handle with a dull, shovel-like blade bent at a ninety degree angle. Walk in a straight line three paces, dig the blade into the ground, lift it toward you, insert the seedling’s root, remove the blade, and step on the loosened earth. Walk on three paces.. Dig the blade into the ground, lift it toward you insert remove step on walk dig lift insert remove step repeat. Dig lift insert remove step repeat. Dig lift insert remove step repeat. Ain’t nobody know de trouble de dig lift insert remove step ain’t nobody know de cruiser checks trees giving a tug. If they stay in they have a chance of growing. If they don’t go back do not collect $200 do it again. 500 trees that day or you’re shipped home.
We work in grids of three paces, sweat slipping down our backs, dissolving the insect repellant. Slap at bugs blister our hands and heels. By mid afternoon, the grids became a network like Jerry’s plaid, twisting as he walks and bends, walks and bends, lifting digging inserting repeating. 700 the next day . The others’ quota. The trees, their roots packed in earth roughly the shape of an Aero bar. Break off a piece of chocolate. Bury it. Their needles wave like carrot greens in neat rows by the muskeg.
We get 6 cents a tree. Diane went home this afternoon.
August
Sherman Meadows
Sherman Meadows is country for bears. To get there travel for hours on a gravel logging road from Chinook Ridge to Two Lakes, climb a crumbling Forestry road over the mountain and drop into a valley. Ringed by a green sea of spruce, real mountains, bare-breasted in the summer, surround and pinch the valley at either end. Our camp left that flat rock when it bulldozed its meadow beside the road that falls into Sherman from the south, runs along the river, and then snakes out through the north pass to the sulphur pools. After the pools, the Kakwa runs east--powerful, brutal , beautiful in its untouched arrogance sliding between steep banks to drop in a bridal vale, fall farther farther than Niagara.
Seven years ago we stopped to fish there. After a luckless afternoon, a friendly, hard-drinking couple happened by, said hello, and left a cut-throat lying at the bottom of a bucket still alive. "Throw your hooks in," they said, before they drove off laughing, "And the one that he bites caught him." I looked in the bucket before going to bed, but the fish ignored me, grey and slim, sulking on the bottom. It was the coldest night in a tent I’ve ever spent, cold as the grave, and a scratching in the silence came out of that cold. A very loud scratching that worked its way round the canvas wall to my head where it stopped. Long, glinting claws, I thought, a grizzly waiting to slice the wall apart, pick my sleeping bag, and swallow me head first. Scratch. Scratch. I considered running but couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t close my eyes. Scratch. Scratch. I lay there. A log--a piece of deadfall. A juicy morsel..... Scratch. I held my breath. Air leaked out my nostrils. My sister began to snore. The scratching stopped. At breakfast, Dad asked if the packrat that had been digging all night around the tent had kept me up. Never heard a thing, I said. After breakfast, I looked in the bucket, the fish’s jaws stretched agape, teeth shining, stiff as board, the spine arched and twisted. Lack of oxygen.
August
Sherman Meadows
Not counting the cruiser and the boss, there are fourteen of us in camp: seven girls and seven boys. Or rather, seven women and seven boys. No. I’ve forgotten the cook. I have a top bunk; Donna sleeps under me, Judy across from her, and Mary across from me: four bunks to a trailer. We get on well enough, though I wonder if it’s because there are no guys to relieve the boredom. I often fall in love because I’m bored. Or lonely. Sometimes I fall in love because I’m curious. Sometimes I don’t fall in love at all. One guy came back six weeks after tipping big. He was drinking tall Diesels heavy on the ice. He had a long, thick, muscular body, curly dark hair under an oily baseball cap and green glinting eyes. He tipped really big and wanted to go for supper. So we went and ate steak with his friends and I took him back to their motel. He was pie-eyed, skunked, juiced, three sheets to the wind. So, I thought, I’m going to camp I won’t see him again he won’t remember the radio is on I hope he doesn’t have gonna...gawd these curtains are a horrible orange, what is that beer stain doing on the ceiling? I have to admit he did try while his friends waited like stray dogs outside on the lawn for the door to open. He tried really hard. Do I have all my socks washed, I thought, should I pack when I get home or when I wake up will the truck start it must be cold sitting on that picnic table outside. Then he fell asleep and started snoring through his mouth.
In the next trailer is Diane’s empty bunk, and Joan, and Patty, and Candice. Except for Jerry and Grant, I don’t know where the boys sleep. Charlie stands out because Jean feeds him extra dessert. She takes the trouble to wish him a good morning and makes tea for him in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep. Unlike the others, Charlie doesn’t speak except to say thank you. His face is almost as dark as his hair, slightly crooked, and he has a bad heart. Rhuematic fever as a child, I think Jean said. He has three brothers. He wears dark, green work trousers and chains his wallet to his back left pocket. He limps. His eyes are wild onyx in the shadows, cat-like, long and narrow. A blank wall, he sits at the other end of this table, playing chess with Jerry. Jerry is drinking rye in his coffee tonight. He is bad-tempered and nervous, fidgeting on the bench, scratching his elbows, chewing his fingers. A helicopter pilot is at my end talking to Jean. Some guy is lost in the hills south of here. The pilot says men die regularly in the bad air currents and unpredictable weather. Jean, he says, makes a great flapper pie.
August
Sherman
Meadows
I planted 850 trees because the bug juice ran out. When that happens, you have to keep moving. Patty told me at lunch that life expectancy of someone in the northern bush with only t-shirt and shorts is around eight hours. We wear rubber boots, heavy socks, jeans, t-shirts and turtle-neck sweaters with long sleeves, as well as gloves and hats to keep the bugs off. Even then the mosquitoes drive me crazy. When the repellant dripped off my ears and face, I was planting along muskeg and could pick handfuls of noseeums out of the air. How do the animals live here? How do the deer survive? It was above 80 after lunch. No salt tablets. The cruiser brings us our water. The bears have been visiting again. I’m staying inside the trailer after supper because the garbage pit is only 30 yards from the cook shack. Tomorrow is Sunday. No day off.
August
Sherman Meadows
Last night I fell asleep in my clothes on top of the sleeping bag. I woke up at six when Jean banged on the window with a broom. Been feeling wooly all day. Diane was like this when she got sick.
August
Sherman Meadows
Before I left the bar, Leslie and I went to an air show. It started around seven. It was a perfect June evening: around the airstrip, there were green shoots of barley in the fields, only a few mosquitoes hummed in the ditches, the dusty haze that settles over dirt roads hung in the hot air. We parked in the heavy golden light and sat on the hood of Leslie’s blue Firebird. The jets were small and fast, too stiff to be birds. Reflected in the car’s hood they darted like minnows, in schools, then singly, turning and spinning. Slim shining streaks that swam and roared above us until we were turning with them amazed and elated until two passed overhead low and upside down their grey tail fins slicing the windless evening. One plane rolled over and climbed, but the other remained in its trajectory. I began to count. One. Two Three. It still hadn’t rolled over. Four. Five. I jumped off the hood of the car. Six. The plane was lower, passing over a field of summer fallow. Seven. Eight. Still lower. Nine. It smashed into the field, gathered itself into a black ball of smoke, smeared the earth, burst into greasy flames. Then cartwheeled to a stop. No one said anything. The first car to leave, we met the ambulance at the city limits. We were driving slowly as well.
Last night I went to bed early and dreamt I was in a field with a garden hoe. Attached to a work gang, wearing grey green overalls, I was the only woman turning the summer fallow over. I looked up. A bright orange jumbo jet was in the grey sky. It was flying slowly, doing loops and rolls, looking as if it was ready to fall out of the air hanging heavily by its wings at stalling speed. Then the plane plunged falling from the top of a loop into the field. No one moved. I screamed the earth sucked at my ankles dragging my feet into itself. The plane had broken in half under a tree. The pilot, a young man lay a few yards away on his back. His eyes and mouth were closed. He was still breathing he was naked. I looked at his dark curly hair then tenderly wrapped the torso in toilet paper.
August
Sherman Meadows
A friend came back from the Island last summer, furious because it wasn’t England. His slides were boring. A pine tree. Boring. A waterfall. Boring. A mountain and a cloud. Boring. No perspective. Not cooperative. Not pretty. "The mountains don’t need us," I said, "That’s how it’s supposed to be. They tolerate us for a time and when we’re gone, they’ll still be there. Looking like that." He was not amused. After supper I talked to Patty. We were working an acre for extra money. When I threw my cigarette away and looked down the scarred slope into the sun, the river and our camp lay far below, toys in the mountain’s shadow. There was still enough light to see every detail clearly. Twenty yards away, every pine needle stood out from its branch as sharp as a sword. I could run and leap off the hill, spread my arms and soar, down to the valley. A fluttering, white-shirted kite. An impossibility. Standing on the south slope.
August
Sherman Meadows
There is time to think while planting trees. Walking, swinging, bending. Again and again and the nearest person is two miles away. Only the cruiser drops by in the morning to bring more seedlings and water...to make sure you’re alright. Some days I can work alone for hours and be content. Other days, I’m always listening, checking the forest’s edge for something in there. Looking out at me. I was jumpy this morning. The bears walked into camp last night. We were across the road after supper getting water to do the dishes. Patty, Jean, and myself. It was twilight and the trees grown green-black and the mountains purple and taller behind them. The river is shallow, I can wade across it and not be knocked over by the current and the water is clear to the bottom, but cold as steel. Looking to the bottom you can see rocks swimming in that river. Grey and mud-wet near the shore, it runs quickly. So we were there, on the sandy mud bank with our five gallon pails, skipping stones when Jean said, "Oh no." Further down the bank, the brown bear was standing between us and the dump. We looked at him. He looked back at the camp, cautiously, swaying back and forth on his front legs, his muzzle lifted, testing the air. Finally he shuffled to the road and turned south, leaving us rooted in the mud. At a distance he was a small, sad-looking animal, a pauper, a beggar just trying to get by in a bad berry season. But once bears come into camp they come back. Berries are no longer enough. He could be anywhere now, curled up in the forest, sleeping off the heat of the day.
Half an hour ago I ate lunch and now I’m watching Jerry work his line. Serious. Deliberate. He paces three steps, selects a seedling, plants and walks. Swats a fly on his shirt. Selects. Plants. Walks, Swats. Sweats. Jerry hasn’t spoken. The silence is creeping into him and filling him up like the others. He’s not like Charlie who’s there but doesn’t speak. Planting and walking. Planting and walking. Walking. Only Jerry and myself on this half acre bulldozed a month ago. Grass has started, fireweed and yellow daisies too. The logs, windfalls, and uprooted stumps festooned with flower spring up in our paths, but we climb over them and plant like machines. Straight rows of trees. Replacing what is gone.
August
Sherman Meadows
Patty led the way back to camp after the brown bear left. She’s an Engineering student in her last year at the U of A. Blond. Short. Svelte. Patty misses her boyfriend who is also an Engineer in the same year and taking the same classes. Even though she’s from Edmonton and I’ve never met her before we know the same people. Patty’s boyfriend is my friend, Loreen’s brother’s best friend. I met him at New Year’s Party two years ago, but he didn’t make much of an impression. Gary? Garth? I can’t remember his name. Can he really be as good looking as Patty says? Patty says Loreen is madly in love with this boyfriend, Gary, Garth, What’shisname. Who/atever. And she wants to know what Loreen looks like, eats like, likes, dislikes. I tried to shield Loreen, but I couldn’t hide everything. Tall, dark, thin, softly bony Loreen dresses like a cushion my grandmother has on her couch. Patty’s not Fussy. Frilly. Dainty. Gentle. She so tough she wears a tank top tree-planting and the mosquitoes don’t bite her. Patty smokes Players Deadends and has a pink rose tattooed on her right should blade. When Patty plants a tree, it stays planted. When she skips a stone, it jumps like a trout on a line.
August
Sherman Meadows
I was lying on my bunk after supper when they shot the black bear. Tom knocked on the door, stuck his head in the trailer, and said, "Want to watch?" Judy and Mary went out to see. Donna was having a shower. I stayed where I was. Fifteen minutes later, the gum cracked. A minute later another shot was fired. Then another. Patty came in and sat down on Judy’s bunk. "What happened?" I asked, "Is it dead?" She shook her head.
Everyone had stood behind John. He had the rifle. The bear was moving away from the camp shuffling through the furrows toward the trees. The light wasn’t good. The first shot wounded the animal. It began to run away. All the boys ran after it. The bear turned around. The boys ran back to John. He shot the bear as it charged them. When the bear fell down John shot it again. No one was sure if it was dead. No one checked.
My sleeping bag is blue and has a heavy silver zipper. Inside the bag, brown grizzlies, yellow deer, and tanned mountain lions watch me from the lining. Every night I crawl into the bag and press my head against their bodies, holding them fast in the dusty closeness of the bunk, only three feet from the ceiling.
There is a small, streaked window with a torn screen a foot away from head. Two moths fly against the naked lightbulb hanging from the centre of the room. Their grey wings beat the glass like a drum.
This morning, motionless, adrift in the brown ocean, shipwrecked near my rock, the pile of fur shimmered with dew and flies. "Don’t you want to see it up close?" Patty asked. At breakfast, Jerry was singing. They’ll bury the bear this afternoon.