July 10th. Nick had to go back to work on Monday. Some vacation. Three weeks of Billy felt like ten years hard time with no chance of parole.
He wondered why the kid wanted the damn murals so badly, the project a manifesto—this place sucks, my father sucks, life sucks—the walls the proof, needing to be covered over. Billy seemed both excited and terrified at what he’d taken on. Nick would catch him chewing on his lip as he hunched over his drawings, his eyes lighting up when he got something right. With Nick, he was as sullen as ever, turning away from his questions with a stone-cold look.
Nick picked him up at Prairie View before supper each day. Billy dragged his feet, paint splats in his hair, blobs of colour on his T-shirt and jeans. It was obvious he hadn’t given up, but the particulars were scarce. Nick could have gone inside to see for himself, and while he was tempted to see Sarah again, the place gave him the creeps, so he stayed in the truck.
“How’s the project going?” Nick asked every time Billy slammed the truck door. He’d drum his fingers on the steering wheel, refusing to take his foot off the brake until Billy gave him an answer. “Good,” he’d finally mumble. Every time.
He’d dropped Billy off first thing that morning, then headed west. He wasn’t sure what sick compulsion kept bringing him back to the place where he started. He pulled the truck into the ditch along the county road and hopped the new gate with the No Trespassing sign. There was a stack of Overdale Developments’ permits stapled to the wooden post. The grand plan included rows of upscale country cottages weaving around spring-fed canals, a boat dock and playground, a scenic walking bridge built high above the water, ATV trails. The house and its wrap-around veranda, the tree and its tire swing, the vast and pristine acres on all sides—all of it to be bulldozed.
He’d failed miserably in slowing any of it. After the last dead-end trip to the county office, he’d couriered a thick package of Goose Lake photos to Ducks Unlimited, with a cover page that read DO SOMETHING scrawled in fat black letters. He’d let his membership lapse years ago, along with everything else that required a scintilla of commitment. He did not expect to hear back.
He walked along the private road that wound through the trees, ignoring the diggers waiting to tear through it all. Back when his parents ran the campground, he’d spent his childhood on this land. He stared at the rambling old house on top of the hill, its shingles and peeling paint, his bedroom window beneath the gable. Behind it was the black pit that used to be Campers Hall, the heartbeat of the place, now a smattering of foundation stones and jagged charred posts. He forced himself to turn away from its gravitational pull.
The old campground sites were nothing like their former selves, overrun by thistle and weeds, bushes spilling over the spots where the tents were once pitched. It was hard to tell where one site ended and the next began.
He sat on top of a rotted picnic table. This had been the Robsons’ site. Number thirty-seven. Mrs. Robson came with the twins, Randy and Zak, at the end of each June. When they were little, Nick had run alongside them barefoot in the sand, darting behind trees for games of hide-and-seek, lighting firecrackers inside Coke cans. The Robsons had a two-room tent with rows of dingle balls on the outside canopy. They’d move the picnic table, the one he sat on now, into the screened veranda, away from the mosquitoes. Mrs. Robson and the boys stayed until late August each year, her husband joining them from the city on weekends.
If you cut through site forty-two, where the gravel road stopped and the deer path started, you would enter the wild, zigzagging through untouched wetlands, wild bushes and sedges, cattails exploding in the quiet shallows.
It would be torn away soon, the earth, the shoreline, even the stars, the bright lights of progress obliterating what once shone in this place.
Nick could walk through the overgrown sites and name the regulars who’d camped there. He could still see the pup tents and tent trailers and tarps strung on trees. Kerosene lamps, coolers in trunks, mismatched lawn chairs around fires, tins of tobacco and packages of rolling paper, beach toys scattered about. Nothing fancy. The big motor homes went to the other side of the lake, paying five times as much to take forty-minute showers and run TVs and air conditioners day and night.
In the mornings, you could smell bacon sizzling, coffee perking. At night, fires roared beneath black starry skies. Flashes of lightning. Bats swooping above.
Down at the beach, you’d see water volleyball games and horseshoes tournaments. Babies crawling in the wet sand; teenage girls slathered in oil and lying on towels; teenage boys playing frisbee in the water, trying to impress the girls; parents with a beer and a book in their hands; dogs galore given free run.
Squeals of laughter echoed off the lake all summer long. The smell of wood smoke permeated everything. During a downpour, campers would cover their heads with garbage bags and run with go-cups filled with brandy to Campers Hall, the central gathering place and his family’s pride and joy.
Campers Hall had been an intergenerational Ackerman project. His father designed and built the large two-storey structure with the help of his own father when Nick was still in diapers. Campers could come and go as they pleased. On rainy days, they pulled games out of the cupboard, shuffling decks at the wooden tables scattered about. Women sank into the deep couch to knit and visit in front of the massive stone fireplace. Readers borrowed books from the antique bookcase passed down through the Ackerman generations. Rain or shine, kids came in herds to buy chips and candy from the Tuck Shop, a room no bigger than a closet, dropping change their parents had given them into the honour system bucket. Photos of campers’ growing families plastered the walls; trophies for the annual competitions shone through the glass door cabinet that Nick had built with his dad. It was more than a building. Laughter and memories echoed through the rafters.
Nick turned away from those thoughts, wandered down to the beach, and sat on a washed-up log. He kicked off his runners and buried his toes in the sand. A cool breeze came off the water, and the waves frothed lazily at the shoreline. He’d sat in this very spot a thousand times, ten thousand times.
How lucky he’d been. He’d lived for those summers.
That last one ended when he was seventeen. He worked at the campground, same as every other summer since he was eleven. The stakes felt higher that year; he’d be leaving in the fall for engineering school, and he needed to save enough to keep his student loans down. There were no free rides in the Ackerman family.
His parents were demanding, but fair, and paid him overtime for extra. They expected a lot of their only son; in return, they let him set his own schedule and work as he chose. It was his call when to mow the grass or weed the garden or scrub the outhouses. His job to clear the drains of the communal shower rooms. When new arrivals showed, he manoeuvred their tent trailers into the tight spots. He helped set up tents and tarps, chopped and hauled wood, emptied garbage bins, bandaged the scabbed knees of the kids that followed him constantly. He scrambled up tree trunks and hacked off the broken branches after a hailstorm. Captured the raccoons that holed up under the deck, drove them east, opened the cage’s trap door, and watched them waddle away.
Something always needed fixing. An outhouse roof. The chainsaw blade or kitchen chimney flue. A leaking tap or tire. He fixed more by feel than by book learning. His mother told him that when he was four, he’d disassembled the stereo with his miniature electrical set, tubes and wires scattered across the floor.
He liked taking stuff apart. Back then, he had a knack for putting things together again too.
Each summer since puberty he’d choose a new campground girl, sometimes two or three, depending on how long they stayed. He avoided the loyalists, the ones whose families would come back. There were plenty of options. Plenty of pretty girls in skimpy bikinis, clear-skinned and freckle-faced; girls too timid to look him in the eye; girls who had their tongues down his throat before he could ask their name. He didn’t want love or commitment; the conquest was the prize.
That summer was Miranda. Miranda Peat. He’d not thought of her in years, not until Billy.
She showed up in a rusted red Buick near the middle of July. Miranda and another young woman, who had registered for a two-week stay under the name Simone de Beauvoir. He’d never heard the name before, so his mother explained. “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir—author, feminist, thinker—one of his mother’s heroes from her college days. They discussed her at length at the dinner table. C’est bien. Let her pretend to be Simone, his mother had joked. Those girls will spice things up around here.
Both Miranda and Simone wore tie-dyed skirts and Birkenstocks and had long yellow hair—old hippies in young bodies. They pitched their tent in less than five minutes. After that, they kept to themselves, reading fat books in front of the fire pit. Sometimes they disappeared into the wetlands and didn’t return for hours.
Nick gleaned a little about them from the other campers. Calvin Pond, in the next site over, swore they ate nothing but fruits and nuts, like squirrels, brewing their own teas from forest forages, reading the tea leaves for all he knew. Teresa White, while trying to quiet her cranky baby at sunrise, stumbled upon Miranda heading back from a swim. At that ridiculous hour? She didn’t even have a towel with her. The campers’ dogs loved her, even Spoof, an irritable and standoffish old hound. He trailed after her every step, settled in front of her camp chair as if she were his new master.
Nick had his first up-close encounter with Miranda early on her second morning. He came upon her bent upside down in front of the water pump, a chill still in the air, hair flowing nearly down to the ground. She had a bottle of shampoo in her hand.
“Whoa, whoa,” Nick said, or something like that. “You sure you want to do that.”
She poked her head up and pushed hair from her face. She had the most startling green eyes.
“Why not?” she asked. “It’s biodegradable.”
“That water’s cold. Really cold. You’ll get brain freeze. There’s a shower house at the end of Row 1.”
“I like cold.” She raised her hand to the pump.
“Okay, well, I’ll work it for you.”
He expected her to scream but she merely moved her head into the flow, adjusting the angle of her neck to take the cold full on. Nick pumped the metal arm, again and again, until every strand was soaked. He watched while she lathered her mass of blonde into foam and worked the pump for her until all traces were gone. When she came up, hair plastered to her goose-bumped skin, he was startled by her enormous eyes and long wet eyelash clumps. It was as if he could see more of her than he had just the moment before.
“You must be frozen.” Her T-shirt was soaked, and she hadn’t even brought a towel. He felt overdressed, cowardly, looming in front of this fearless girl.
She laughed. “Well, that got rid of the cobwebs.” She gathered up her hair to one side and twisted and squeezed, water pouring out of her into puddles on the ground. “Thanks for your help.”
“Helping campers, that’s what I do.” He cringed as soon as he said it, but he gave a thumbs-up, which made her smile. “I’m Nick. This is my parents’ place.”
“I know. I’ve heard the kids calling your name. I’m Miranda.” She extended her hand formally, and he took it. He chose her for his summer girl in that moment, her small hand inside his.
Except she wasn’t. Not like the others.
Nick never saw her at Campers Hall or at the beach or wearing a bathing suit. He stopped by their campsite often, failing to get her attention. Can I bring you more firewood? Move your table into the shade? Miranda waved him away with a smile, like he was an annoying yet harmless bug.
Mrs. Robson, a persistent interrogator, managed to coax Miranda to her campsite for an afternoon iced tea. She shared the findings with Nick’s mom, who relayed the details over supper. Miranda had been raised in Vancouver and French-schooled since kindergarten. Her father died in a dreadful accident on the Coquihalla just as she was about to graduate. She and her mother packed up their lives and moved to small-town Alberta. As Mrs. Robson told it, the girl had been wandering ever since. She planned to backpack through Australia in the fall. On her own and so young! All those snakes in the grass. What is her mother thinking?
“You know the funniest thing,” Nick’s mom added as they were drying the dishes. “I assumed Simone and Miranda were lifelong buddies. Forever best girlfriends. But it seems they just met on the road. They’ve only known each other a few weeks. Imagine that. Isn’t it amazing how people find each other?”
Nick tried his best to make his own connection. He invited her to beach volleyball games and bonfire nights, but she gracefully declined, which made him feel small. By day six, he was ready to give up and move on. A fiery redhead from Saskatchewan had arrived. She had a mean pitching arm and manhandled her little brothers with ease while they climbed her legs and clung to her every word.
But then Miranda came out of the water, and everything changed. When he first saw her, naked and glistening, he panicked, as if he’d been caught at something. It was after midnight, all the campers were asleep; he’d been nearly asleep too, but he remembered he’d left the chainsaw in the bushes, so he’d snuck out of the house to retrieve it.
She was a mirage, nothing a person could prepare for. She waded out of the lake and towards him. Her towel hung on a tree branch, so close he could have reached out and pulled it down. She smiled as she came closer, not the least bit embarrassed.
“Are you a good person?” she asked. She stood before him naked under the stars, not waiting for him to deny it. “Of course you are.”
That’s all it took. She wanted none of the smooth talk he’d mastered with the others. She leaned into him, her wet skin smelling like lake, her lips shiny as ice, her breasts fitting perfectly in his cupped palms. He yanked his hoodie over his head, fumbled with his zipper, laid down with her in the cool sand. She clung to him as he thrust into her with everything he had. He was spent in all of ten seconds. Never even got his socks off.
He rolled away and lay on his back. He didn’t know how to explain his pathetic performance.
She stretched out in the sand and stared at the stars. “Let’s say you’ve been dropped from a plane. You’ll be rescued in a week. You can only bring one thing. What would it be?”
He felt immensely relieved. And bewildered. What had just happened? Who was this girl?
“Am I wearing clothes?” he said.
Miranda laughed. “Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t you be?” She threw her leg over his. Her skin felt warm, even though it was chilly, and she was still damp from her swim.
“Is it summer or winter?”
“Fall. You’re in the wilderness. The ground is coated with decaying leaves.”
She seemed impervious to cold.
“I’d bring you. In a waterproof bag.”
She sighed. “You have to do this on your own, Nick. That’s the whole point.”
“But they’re coming back to get me? The plane people. You’re sure?”
“I promise. In seven days.”
“Alright, I’d bring my Watchmen comics, also in a waterproof bag.”
She laughed. They lay side by side. She covered his hand with her fingers and rubbed his palm with her thumb. He leaned on his arm, memorizing the shape of her thigh, the line of her shoulder.
“Your turn. You get dropped from a plane. What do you bring?”
She lay silent for a long time.
“You can’t say Watchmen comics in a waterproof bag,” he prompted, hoping to hear her laugh. After an awkward wait, he changed the subject. “I heard you’re dropping from a plane into Australia this fall.”
“News travels fast in these woods,” she said, slipping her hand from his.
He laughed. “True. But Australia’s cool. I’ve been thinking about travel too.” The thought hadn’t popped into his head until that moment. Seeing the world. No parents to rescue him from travel disasters. “Europe, maybe.”
“Then go,” she said, as though it were simple. Her self-assurance was astonishing.
She stood and reached for her towel. “I need to get back.”
“Wait a minute.” He scrabbled up out of the sand, embarrassed by his shrivelled nakedness and the hole in his sock. “Just let me get dressed, and I’ll walk you to your campsite.”
She wrapped the towel around her while he frantically pulled up his underwear.
“I know the way. Au revoir, mon doux Nick.” With that she turned and walked out of his life, while he stood there dumbly, jeans puddling around his feet.
She was truly gone the next morning. She and Simone pulled out before dawn, a full week still to go on their reservation. Their site remained camperless with their early departure. Nick sat at their empty table, tossing pine cones into their fire pit.
He looked down the shoreline to where he’d been with Miranda some fifteen years before. The overgrown shrubs had inched up to the water’s edge, leaving no sandy beach, erasing the place where it had happened. He didn’t know what to call it. Miranda had given him more than Billy. It’s not like he’d lost his heart that night. He didn’t love her or dream of her or spend much time pining over her sudden disappearance. His seventeen-year-old brain was mostly stupefied and a little pissed. She’d taken him by surprise, left without saying goodbye. Yes, he’d committed similar crimes with a dozen girls or more, but he didn’t dwell on that. Not back then. Miranda had started a longing in him, a new and persistent grinding in his gut, a dogged feeling of everything drawing closer but too far to reach. Her dreams had seeped into his, his predetermined life not as enticing as it once was.
The summer turned to shit after that. He ignored the redhead and the ones who came after. His games of polite flirting felt awkward and childish, so he dug into work instead, painting the shower house under the blaring sun, repairing the rotted boardwalk posts he’d long been putting off.
He fell into bed each night, sunburnt and restless. Until Miranda, he’d had his life figured out. Engineering, a non-bullshit degree. Interesting problems to work on, like Ironman. Good money. Home for the holidays and noisy reunions. But now, doubts lingered like shadows, the certainty of his future gnawing at him. He questioned what problems needed solving, what regrets might crop up. When sleep finally overtook him, he dreamt wild dreams where he was a tiny speck in a big world, scrambling along steep cliffs, a pack strapped to his back.
His parents told him to ease up, enjoy some time off before university, but that only made him work harder. He didn’t want to think of school. He became sloppy. While up on the roof, he absentmindedly stared at a circling gull, lost his footing, and tumbled to the ground, requiring a tetanus shot and eleven stitches along his thigh. When he went to town for two-by-fours, he didn’t cinch them down properly in the back of the truck. The top board flew onto the highway, nearly creating a collision.
After Miranda, everything once effortless seemed fraught with complications. He still untangled the kids’ kite strings and patched their tire tubes, still joked with the parents and fetched their wood, but he second-guessed himself often. He questioned what lives these people lived when they weren’t holed up in tents. He questioned what life he could live if he opened himself up.
The day of the fire started like any other. It was the last Friday in August, and the campground was packed, campers cramming in the last bit of fun before school. The twins, Randy and Zak, joined their parents for the weekend. Now six-foot-three and U.S.-bound on basketball scholarships, they were jumping out of their skin to set off firecrackers at the bonfire that night. Nick was happy enough to reunite with them, high-fives and slaps on the back. But he couldn’t find that easy banter they once had. When Randy suggested they race to the floating dock for old times’ sake, Nick backed away and said he had chores.
Every camper, from the grandparents to the babies, headed down to the beach after supper that night. As the sun dropped under the horizon, the temperature dropped with it, the air tinged with an early autumn crispness. The fire pit was six feet wide. Nick had the logs crisscrossed so high that sparks flew and danced over the water. Campers circled close for warmth, most perched on sawed-off log stools, strollers parked nearby.
His dad always gave a memorized speech at these things, while his mother clasped his hand and looked out reverently at the crowd. We welcome you all to this sacred space. As we share fellowship here tonight—with you our beloved camp family—we boldly carry on the long tradition of sacrificing one of you to the gods of the lake—at which point there would be confused shuffles from the newcomers and winks and horselaughs from those who had memorized the shtick too.
This sacrifice keeps us safe from the monsters beneath the depths. The blood suckers and lake sharks. The sand dragons and sea snakes. The fifth wheels and gas-guzzling motor homes upon yonder shore. Who among us tonight is willing to be our sacrifice? Who is willing to take the plunge?
Bedlam ensued. Campers jostled, yelling out names, even the newbies, who hadn’t a clue what came next. Randy, the loudest, became the chosen one, much to Zak’s disappointment. Four of the men, old hands at this ritual, stripped out of their runners and socks and rolled up their pant legs. Randy yelled melodramatically, I do this for you, as they wrestled him to the ground, each grabbing a hand or foot. They waded into the water with Randy splayed between them, onlookers chanting Randy, Randy, Randy. They swung him once, twice, three times, getting as much lift as they could before letting go. Randy sailed through the air and made a resounding splash. He came up sputtering to loud cheers, arms stretched high like the champion he was.
Nick laughed with the others. Randy duck-walked to the fire’s edge in squishing runners. He bowed low as Nick’s dad placed the Soggy Sacrifice medal around his dripping neck.
Nick left the fire soon after, his mom catching his arm as he walked away. When he told her he was packing it in, she smiled and said, No wonder, you’ve been working so hard.
But it wasn’t that. He fixed things, rescued campers, plucked summer girls like saskatoons off a bush, yet he’d never once let himself be chosen for all those sacrificial dunkings. Why was that? Until Miranda, he had no questions. Now he questioned it all.
He left the roar of the bonfire crowd echoing off the water and headed to Campers Hall. Inside, he unlocked the door to the large storage room, the only area of the building off-limits to campers. This was where they stored tools and supplies, spare parts and equipment, odd bits of lumber, different-sized propane tanks and gas cans, and a large fridge stocked with items for purchase. He grabbed a six-pack, something his parents would vehemently disapprove of, and climbed the adjacent steep stairs to where the teens sometimes hung out.
The loft was a mess, kids’ paintings spread on newspapers littering the floor. Nick lit the candles he kept hidden in the wall shelf, their wicks jumping and crackling before settling into teardrops of yellow white. He dragged a chair to the window and opened it, letting in the cool breeze, cracked a beer, and stared into the blackness. He could hear the distant pop pop pop of the twins’ firecrackers, the random shouts of teenagers, a baby’s cry. He guzzled, stewing.
By beer two, a stunning new reasoning began to burble inside him. It wouldn’t be the end of the world to take time off. A year. Maybe more. Figure himself out. He didn’t have to go to school in the fall. It was not too late to unwind the steps. No one was holding a gun to his head. He could use his savings to live a little, take some risks.
Around beer four, he was dreaming about mustering cattle in the outback, building a well in Africa. By the time the beer was gone, he had talked himself into a different life.
At the loft window, he mulled over his pitch to his parents, his brain turned to mush. Campers’ noises faded until all he could hear was the rustling of the poplar leaves down by the tree line. Then something more. Scratching and scampering noises, too loud for mice, coming from beneath him.
Nick stumbled drunkenly down the steep stairs. He poked around, lifting blankets, peering under tables, kicking a stack of wooden crates—anywhere a critter might hide. He found none.
He left Campers Hall and staggered into his sleeping house. The bonfire had long since been extinguished with buckets of lake water, the campers zipped into their tents. He could hear faint splashing and high-pitched girl screams and boy shouts from farther down the beach. He kicked off his runners, felt his way up the dark stairs, passed his parents’ closed door, and fell into bed, drunk but still innocent. He remembered nothing more before he tipped into sleep.
The fire smouldered for some time before the first explosion, which everyone said woke them at a quarter to four. Charlie Carr, taking a timely leak beside his tent, was the only one to see the wall blow out, which he later described as the mother of all firestorms, boards jumping into the air and raining down like matchsticks. Teresa White, nursing her baby in her sleeping bag, said the boom made her shriek so loud her baby bit her hard, then howled.
A few minutes later came a second blast. Scrambling out of tents, campers imagined earthquakes or ungodly thunder or some other horrible and unnamed freak of nature. Glenda Hill, seven years old and missing both front teeth, swore she saw a fire-breathing sand dragon streak across the sky.
Nick’s parents tore out in their pyjamas and gathered with the campers by the hall. Larry Pond joined the crowd in his skivvies, his wife eventually catching up and wrapping her sweater around his middle. The air filled with a heat-haze of dust, black smoke billowing, chunks of soot floating. A sizzling crackle drowning out all else.
Nick’s dad ran back to the house to call the fire department and fetch the hose and shovels, while the men stomped on sparks in the wild grass. Nick’s mom wove among her charges, touching them as she queried in a hoarse voice, Is everyone alright? Is everyone accounted for? Is anyone hurt? Some of the children cried. Everyone coughed.
Nick, for his part, was the last to arrive at the scene, where he stood on the sidelines in shock. At a moment during the chaos, his mom pulled his dad aside. He watched as they clung to each other, their look of loss so palpable he felt as if he was swallowing their sorrow along with the soot. It nearly knocked him to the ground to see them like that. They had questions for him in the hours that followed. After the campers packed up and moved out, and the wreckage of the burnt building had been roped off, the police chief and the fire inspector had questions for him too.
Yes, he’d heard the teenagers from his bedroom window sometime in the night. No, he didn’t get out of bed to look. No, he saw no one by the hall. His mother vouched for his scanty accounting. Her son had packed it in before the fireworks. She’d seen him head towards the house.
No one could disprove it. The inspector surmised that the fire started in the loft, cause unknown, a tossed cigarette being the top theory. The fire spread across the loft, crept down the stairs, jumped to the wood shavings in the storage room, and snaked towards the gas cans, two of which exploded simultaneously like a detonated bomb. A propane tank burst next.
The police chief concluded that a pack of rowdy teenagers, names still undetermined, had been roaming unsupervised until the early hours of the morning. Melted beer cans were found in the rubble. Campers Hall was unlocked, easily accessible. Beyond that, they had nothing.
With the smell of smoke still in the air, the campground closed for the season. Through tears, Nick’s mother baked him a double-layer chocolate cake to mark the beginning of his new life. His parents were so proud of all he had done, of all he would do with his engineering degree. Nick’s father handed him a bonus of five hundred dollars alongside his last paycheque. You’ll be eighteen and legal soon. This could buy a few beers. He had no choice but to take it, though he couldn’t look his father in the eye. Hadn’t looked his father in the eye since.
That fall he went off to engineering school as planned. But he didn’t last long, failing out before Christmas his first semester. Despite all his musings about finding himself, of choosing another path, he couldn’t bear to think of his future, any future. He didn’t feel he deserved one. Those stupid drunk dreams burned them to ashes, destroying everything his parents held dear.
In the end, there could be no restoration. His parents sold, and now Overdale Developments would erase the last traces of the Ackerman Campground. He’d kept his mouth shut, through those first smoke-filled days, then smouldering months and years, his silence a ringing in his ears that never went away. Carelessness might be forgiven, but a body crumbles without a spine.
Nick threw on his runners and turned away from the shoreline, willing himself to stop looking back. All that was left from that time was Billy, and if he couldn’t make it work, Billy might go up in flames too.