All winter long I have been looking forward to exploring the wilderness. Now that school has adjourned and we’ve moved to Laclu for the summer, I’m keen to get back to Rosena Lake. I’ve decided that I want to be an Indian. My father has given me Ernest Thompson Seton’s book Two Little Savages, and I can’t wait to make a bow and arrow, a buckskin vest, and a birch-bark canoe.
I’ve told the other members of my gang about the Precambrian Shield. I’ve told them about the snapping turtles, the giant fish that broke my line, and all the thousands of nameless lakes that lie just beyond it. I’ve told them we could do some serious hunting up there. We could build a teepee.
“Where are we gonna get a teepee?”
“I’ve got the plans. We’ll use my dad’s tarpaulin.”
“Okay, so what’s this lake look like?”
“Lots of dead trees, cliffs, and swamps.”
“Cool. Is there quicksand?”
For some reason, quicksand plays a big role in our determination of whether a place is interesting. I didn’t see any quicksand at Rosena, but I tell the boys I’m pretty confident that we could find some if we put our minds to it.
“Okay, this Columbian shield of yours,” says Dennis, sucking thoughtfully on an ice cube. “What’s the best way to get there?”
“We’ll take canoes,” I say. “We’ll take the creek from Laclu into Bell Lake, and then take another creek into Rosena.”
Dennis points out that Danny and I are the only gang members with a canoe. “One canoe won’t carry all five or six guys.”
“I could get my mum to drive us,” says Randy.
Dennis groans. He’s a bit older than we are and thinks that getting driven places by someone’s mother defeats the whole purpose of being in a gang.
I tend to agree with him. Now that my dad has shown me the way to the Shield, I want to try exploring it without the benefit of parental supervision. “Why don’t we walk?” I suggest.
“How far is it?”
“About four miles.” I have no idea how far it is, but four miles sounds about right.
So it’s agreed – we’ll hike to Rosena. Once we get there, we’ll do some scouting and find a good campsite. After a preliminary scouting trip we’ll return with pup tents, fishing rods, hatchets, and gasoline. With a good campsite, we’ll be independent of adult interference. We’ll stay up late, play poker, and smoke Cameos. During the day we can shoot things and roll giant boulders off the cliffs. We can go around smeared with soot from the fire, wearing feathers in our hair and animal skins for loincloths. We can build an Apache war drum and use the gasoline for making torches. Soaked in gas, held aloft, a burning cattail will illuminate the eyes of any hostile predators circling our stronghold.
For the next few days we refine our plan. Our general meeting place is Webbs’. People come to Webbs’ to buy groceries or gas. We like to watch them buy gas. Sometimes the gas pump is the most interesting show in town. It’s an archaic contraption with a glass fuel globe on top. When motorists fill their tanks, air wobbles up through the clear brown gasoline like murderous thought-bubbles rising in a Martian’s brain. When they’re finished buying gas, they purchase groceries inside the store, which is a large rustic building divided into two sections. One half of the building makes up the store, and the other half is a large dance hall with varnished log walls. High on the wall of the dance hall there’s a stuffed bull caribou that was shot on the lake in the winter of 1923. A moth-eaten northern pike the size of a railway tie hangs above the fireplace. There’s a bandstand at the back end of the room, and a lunch counter at the front. After our afternoon swim, in which we furtively try to overturn the diving platform, we gather at the lunch counter. Johnny Webb, the owner of the place, never seems particularly happy to see us, perhaps because he suspects that we’re the unknown parties who have been releasing garter snakes in his store. But he tolerates us enough to accept our grimy fistfuls of warm change, which we barter for chocolate bars and packages of BBS.
While we sit at the counter, we debate various aspects of the trip and make lists of the things we’re going to need. Because I’ve been to the Precambrian Shield already, and because I’m basically the promoter of the trip, I more or less chair the meetings. My fellow gangsters are full of questions, and although I don’t necessarily have the answers, I use my experience based on an afternoon of fishing and a winter’s worth of book research. In our planning sessions, Rosena Lake gradually rises to grandiose stature. It’s not just a picturesque lake where we plan to camp out and do a little hunting. It’s a place where we will unravel the mysteries of life and become men.
We spend so much time planning that I begin to worry we’re going to spend the whole summer talking about it instead of actually doing it. Every morning, I wake up in a general condition of optimism, wondering if this is going to be the day for our wild trek. Danny and I sleep on the eastward-facing veranda, and our bed is flooded with sunlight by five-thirty in the morning. We thrash around a bit, clamp pillows over our heads, but by six o’clock it’s so bright we can’t sleep, and we’re stumbling outside to take a pee in the grass. Being a kid, I’m not formulating what you’d strictly call a ‘plan’ for the day. But I’m thinking about it. Once you get half a dozen boys together, then add in weather, family chores, and the chaos theory, it’s quite an accomplishment that we’re even planning something.
After breakfast we fill our backpacks with apples and peanut butter sandwiches and set out to meet the boys. Will this be the day we go to Rosena? It’s hard to know, because there are many temptations between there and here. Two boys walking barefoot along a dewy gravel road with Daisy Scout lever-actions have no trouble finding distractions. It’s an absorbing world, in the early morning, with the hieroglyphics of tiny animal footprints in the sand, the incessant chatter of unseen birds in the woods, and the macabre spiders spinning their gossamer webs in the cool gloom of the undergrowth. Our meeting place is a derelict wooden church that stands at a crossroads a little way north of our cottage. When we approach the church early in the morning, I sometimes feel like it’s an emblem of my fallen religion, a ruined building with the morning sunlight playing on its blanched siding and broken windows. Just beyond it is the backdrop of the wilderness, the dark swamps and forbidding woods.
The roadside ditch alongside the church is filled with stagnant water, and the high grass beside the ditch is filled with leopard frogs, good-sized ones, which leap into the water with a loud splash when you stalk through the grass. Once a frog jumps into the water, it thinks it’s safe, and it floats there, its arms akimbo, staring up at you. The other boys like to shoot frogs, and I shot a few myself the first time I carried my BB gun – just to see how it worked on them – but it feels mean, to kill them for no reason. My affection also extends to turtles, with their general all-around helplessness and their good-natured willingness to trudge for hundreds of yards on crooked legs. Snakes I like too. Cold and unblinking, they’re like living strings of code. And while I understand why people might recoil from snakes, it seems craven and sissified to snap their backbones in jest, as I’ve seen my buddies do.
So while Danny keeps a lookout for the other boys, I usually check out the interior of the church. The churchyard is overgrown with hip-high weeds and Russian thistle. Making your way around to the back stairway, you have to watch your step because of all the old boards with nails sticking out of them. If you step on a rusty nail you get lockjaw, and they have to pull out your teeth in order to pipe water into your mouth so you won’t die of thirst. The stairs themselves are rotted and falling apart. Climbing up the stairs, you enter a porch and then a little office. It’s probably the Lutheran equivalent of what Catholics call the sacristy, where the priest dons his vestments and prepares for mass. It’s a little room with old wine bottles on the floor and rain-buckled girlie magazines in the drawers. When I first arrive in the sacristy I spend a little time looking for hidden contraband or new writings on the wall. Because of my reasonable fear of rabid animals, I never go into the church until my gang arrives.
How many dark winter mornings have I spent in rooms like this? The priests I always worked for never spoke while they dressed. Their glittering rayon vestments rustled in the silence. The only sound came from the main hall of the church, where you’d hear an occasional cough or the bang of a kneeler as the old Italian ladies filed into the pews. I’d pull on a black cotton cassock, and over that, a blowsy white surplice with short sleeves. The priest never talked when I prepared his candles and filled his glass wine cruets. Some priests wanted only a dollop of wine. Others wanted the chalice full to the brim, and we had to know the difference. While preparing for mass, you knew there were things you could touch and things you couldn’t. It was like working in a laboratory. Touch the Host, for example, and you were doomed. My friend Kenny once got the flesh of Christ stuck to the roof of his mouth and pried it off with his finger. It was a spur of the moment decision, but he’s probably going to Hell for it.
Above the cheap little plywood desk with its cupboards, there’s a church service schedule and some ancient birth and death notices pinned to the wall. The names are mostly Swedish. Or maybe they’re Icelandic. Whoever they are, they arrived in Canada late, after the best agricultural land had already been taken, and the Federal Land Office convinced them to try farming in northwestern Ontario. The rolling hills, lakes, and verdant forests around Laclu must have looked attractive when they first arrived, and quite a few farmers – including Gunnar Sigurdson, the man who sold us our cottage property – slaved half their lives trying to make their farms work. They cleared forests, built barns, and raised pigs and dairy cattle. Their kids went to a one-room schoolhouse just up the road, and on Sunday mornings, the families gathered here for church. But this country is hell on livestock. The winters are so cold that animals have to be kept inside, like prison inmates. The sweltering hot and thunderstormy summer days produce hordes of biting flies that can drive a thin-skinned dairy cow mad. So eventually the farmers lost everything. And the only reminder that Laclu was once a bustling little farming community is this derelict church with its old announcements pinned to the wall.
Once my crew finishes up with the frogs and comes up the stairs into the sacristy, we move into the church proper, cocking our guns and keeping an eye peeled for hydrophobic skunks. You can tell a skunk with hydrophobia because it trails long gobs of drool from its fangs as it staggers towards you, wanting to accomplish just one last thing in its miserable life and that’s to kill, kill. We’ve already got a tactical plan worked out for our first encounter with a rabid skunk – who shoots first, who shoots backup, etc. – but if one of us gets bitten we know what happens next. Our parents would never admit it but we know the truth: they chain you to a stout tree. Doctors arrive, but they don’t actually touch you. They push food and water towards you with a stick until they find out if you’re going to turn rabid.
That’s all right. If you’re going to venture into the woods, you have to take the good with the bad. We know that during any one of these patrols one of us might get caught in quicksand, step in a rusty old Oneida Newhouse bear trap, or get attacked by a crazed furbearer. Still, a ruined church is too powerful a lure to pass up. This is a place where adult society has no writ, and it fills us with reverent silence. We communicate in whispers as we pad up the aisles, past the shattered stained glass windows and empty pews, stepping over the animal turds and broken glass with our guns at the ready.
Near the back of the church I spot the skeleton of a dead animal lying on the buckled linoleum floor. Kneeling down, I examine the skeleton, probing it with the muzzle of my gun. It’s the remains of a bird, I think. The bones are slender and delicately tethered, like the ribs of a broken kite. Above me is the stained glass window where the bird beat itself to death, trying to escape. If it had had a larger brain, it could have flown right up through the roof. High overhead, there’s a rent in the ceiling, a hole laced with rafters where you can see the blue sky. A big puffy white cloud drifts across the opening. Its escape route was right there. It’s like what the life-saving manuals always advise. When you’re drowning, kick free and head for the light.