34

Meanwhile I was slowly becoming a citizen of Minaki.

I never thought I’d wind up living in a small backwoods community without a single bookstore, library, or even magazine stand. But human beings tend to draw together in like-minded groups, and most of my new friends were young urban people on the lam who, like me, were trying to start their lives again from scratch.

I was enjoying building my house, learning all the things they don’t teach in school. I’d insulated the walls and ceiling, and built a kitchen, dining area, and cozy sleeping loft. I was heating it with firewood, and it was so warm inside that even on the most savagely cold winter night, I could rise from bed at three a.m., go outside jaybird naked, tiptoe barefoot across the ice, pry another frozen log from the pile, gaze up at the millions of stars, pause for a moment to listen to the abdominal, never-ceasing grumble of the ice, and then pad back inside. I didn’t have to rush, because after tossing the log into the stove, I could climb back into my great fluffy Woods Arctic 5 Star eiderdown flannel-lined survival sleeping bag (a gift from my parents, who, I think, were beginning to vicariously participate in my wilderness adventure) and soon enough, as the log began snapping in the heater, I could drift back to sleep, worried not in the least about the house getting cold, but hoping, perhaps, that it wouldn’t get too hot.

I was becoming part of the community too. Once a month there was a town hall meeting, a genuine town hall meeting – not the kind of staged event that has become so popular on CBC television – during which issues of the day were debated. On the matter of the village acquiring its own cemetery, for example, some of the young people proposed that the older folks, the pioneers, deserved a dignified resting place. But the old folks themselves begged to differ. As old Jim Hay ward put it, “Those old buggers don’t need a cemetery. Just sharpen their feet and pound them into the swamp.”

After the issues were resolved, a list of jobs was posted on the wall. Everyone volunteered for something, and if you couldn’t find a voluntary job you were expected to devise one. Some people shovelled the hockey rink. Others organized the Saturday night dances, which were crowded, bacchanalian, dance-your-ass-off affairs that took place at the community hall.

I volunteered to work as a roving correspondent for the local eight-page newspaper, The Minaki News. I printed up a laminated PRESS identification tag and used it when I wanted to interview a government official or cadge a ride on a Ministry helicopter to the scene of the action (Forest Fire Charges Minaki! ).

I also managed Classic Cinema Night, a regular Sunday event in which everyone would gather at the town hall, buy a bag of home-made popcorn, and sit on plywood chairs in the dark, watching some hoary classic like Double Jeopardy or King Solomon’s Mines. My duties as movie host were simple – making the popcorn, refrigerating the drinks, doing a little bookkeeping, and drawing the promotional posters and putting them up around town. Every two weeks I’d drive to Winnipeg (which I enjoyed doing anyway), pick up the cases of film, and, theoretically, preview the movies to make sure they were complete. The only part I didn’t enjoy was the previewing. Who wants to wreck a movie by watching it ahead of time?

So I avoided that part, and ordinarily it wasn’t a problem. Once, however, I rented Psycho and designed a series of lurid posters and tacked them up all over town. We managed to get a full house for Sunday night, and at the climax of the film, where Tony Perkins pops up in a flower print dress and goes after the police detective with a huge butcher knife, the reel made a sudden flapping sound and the projector ran out of film. Hmm, obviously a major malfunction. I searched the cases, but there was no more film. Apparently some craven swine had rented this film, ruined it, and not told the agency. Everyone left in disgust, and after they were gone, ten-year-old Pokey Savoyard and a few of her wide-eyed little friends followed me around, earnestly explaining that they didn’t understand the ending.

Along with my civic duties, I had to make a living. I’d managed to get an occasional shift at Minaki Lodge, working as night watchman, and all night long I was the sole occupant of the spooky château. With a flashlight and time clock, I explored its dark basements and deserted dining halls, observed by fanged bears as I walked through the Trophy Room. My sole duty was to make the rounds every hour, so there was lots of time to write or to read a scary novel. (Stephen King’s The Shining was considered mandatory on-the-job training.) The shift finished at eight a.m., and I’d walk home through the crisp winter morning, past the bay, parts of which stayed open no matter how cold the weather, past the stands of trees laden with hoarfrost from the mist that incessantly poured off the blue river, and arrive at my houseboat just as the winter sun was topping the trees and swathing the white shoreline with mauve shadows. Inside the houseboat the fire had usually gone out, the floor was cold, and the windows were coated with paisley swirls of frost. I’d split a couple of logs, stuff them in the heater, and get them going with broken kindling and newspaper. The main advantage of cheap sheet-metal woodburners (or ‘Indian heaters’ as they were known hereabouts) was that they threw off a ferocious wall of heat, and in no time the houseboat would be warm again.

I’d sleep all day, and come late afternoon I’d wake up, put the kettle on, and do it all over again. The houseboat had no running water, no electrical hook-up, and no heating except the woodburner. It wasn’t as primitive as an Ojibway wigwam, but it was pretty basic, and spending the winter in it gave me an appreciation for the hardships the Indians must have weathered hundreds of years ago. My first winter in Minaki was the coldest in sixty years, with two record-breaking blizzards that piled high pagoda-shaped snowdrifts all along the lee side of the house. But my impressions of that winter weren’t so much hard as vivid – the sharp, clean bite of the air; the silence of early morning, a silence so vast that you could hear the creaking of a raven’s wings; the orange sunrise spilling across the white lake; the green snow-laden spruces along the shore; and when I got home from my night’s work, the happy crude, solid appearance of the houseboat, frozen stubbornly into the lake, blanketed under an immense Bavarian roof of snow.

A dainty ellipsis of tracks near my door would tell me if my buddy, a beautiful red fox, had visited while I was gone. If he came when I was at home, he’d announce his presence with sharp yap at the door. When I opened the door he’d shy away, but I’d prop it open with a broom and resume my work inside. Eventually, his face would peer in the doorway. He’d scrutinize the interior, ensuring there were no unfamiliar humans with me, then trot inside, giving me a polite look that said, Got anything to eat?

I was wary of feeding him by hand (childhood memories of catching hydrophobia and being chained to a tree), so at first I wore gloves when I fed him. He had perfect manners though, and soon I was feeding him with my bare fingers. As soon as I relinquished the snack he would wheel around and trot out the door. One night he showed up with two comrades – another red fox and a lovely black cross fox with yellow eyes. They seemed shocked by the first fox’s behaviour. But then I began giving him biscuits and they saw his logic. Within minutes they were circling me like trout, darting in to grab a biscuit when they could, and my own fox was getting upset, making little throaty noises and hip-checking them to keep them away from his pet human.

A bit of warm weather during the winter had a remarkable effect on everyone’s spirits. Could this mean spring was coming? Even in February a bit of a thaw had everyone cheerfully remarking, “Well, the worst of it’s behind us now.” Never mind that in this part of the country the month of March usually delivered up some of the nastiest weather of the year. A big pickle jar appeared on the counter next to the cash register at the grocery store, and for one dollar you could buy a ticket and write down your estimate of the precise date and time that the river would break up.

The arrival of spring was a mixed blessing. The locals told me that sometimes the ice went out quietly. And sometimes, pushed by strong winds, it tore up everything in its path. Anyone with buildings or docks along the shore stood to lose everything in a violent breakup, so there was always lots of debate about the signs – the perceived ‘blackness’ of the ice, the predictions of the Farmer’s Almanac, the rumoured arrival of the first crows, and countless other folkloric indicators that were ordinarily wrong.

In April the weather changed rapidly. The arctic air mass was weakening, and when it fell away in mid-April, a huge southerly flow of warm air gushed into the Shield country. Within days, temperatures shot up and the snow turned to slop, then to puddles, then to sheets of liquid sunlight pouring down the paved hill. The first winter I stayed in the houseboat, I kept a log and recorded the weather every day. The tropical air mass rode into town on the twenty-first in the middle of the night, and by nine in the morning it was warm enough to work outside in a T-shirt. The snow around the houseboat was white and crisp, but the sun was radiant. And when I looked at my shadow on the wall of the building, I could see a blurry mirage pouring off the head, like one of those spirit photographs that purportedly capture the image of a soul leaving a body.

Later in the day I went for a walk along the shoreline, wearing shorts and sunglasses, getting sunburned in the glare. The lake ice was still solid, but had turned black and was as bare as concrete. Boulders as large as overstuffed sofas were lined up along the shore, deposited there in years past by the ice. In the channel near the lodge I tiptoed past ‘air holes’ – spooky cavities that revealed the deep water underfoot. The air holes widened by the hour and were surrounded by ‘candle ice’, supple stuff that jingled like pop bottles in the wind.

A week later, in the middle of the night, the south wind began blowing hard. The trees moaned and creaked outside my bedroom window. At six a.m., I was awakened by the boom and snap of cracking lumber. The ice was going out.

I hopped out of bed. In the predawn light, I could see the neighbour’s docks shearing off. Great sheets of crumbled ice were pushing the wrecked docks up into the trees. There was no way to protect the houseboat. All I could do was take my manuscripts, books, and personal effects and load them into the van. At the coffee shop the waitress told me that some people were fighting ice in Town Bay, so I went to watch. The wind was blowing harder now, a warm wind that carried the smells of spruce forest and thawing ground, and a dozen boats and barges were going back and forth like lawn mowers in the shattered ice of the bay, chewing at the front edges of the floes.

I went down to the marina and launched my boat – a wooden one I’d acquired the year before. It was a lapstrake cruiser with a mahogany deck and a windshield. I’d bought it at the end of the summer from the marina manager, who told me that nobody wanted wooden boats any more, and that if I gave him a couple of hundred dollars, it would save him the trouble of burning it. I cleaned it up, sanded it down, and after a few coats of white paint and varnish it looked sharp. It came equipped with an old 40-horse Johnson that ran fine. The motor had been covered by snow all winter, but it started right away. Shifting it into gear, I cruised off to save my houseboat.

The river was choked with ice, and it appeared impossible to make it around the peninsula to Murray’s Camp. But I sneaked through by taking long circuitous detours, worming the boat through cracks between the floes. When that didn’t work, I broke the ice – not by ramming it, but by running the boat up on top and letting the boat’s weight crack the ice underneath. When I reached Murray’s Camp, I found the houseboat sitting blessedly intact in an expanse of blue water. A protruding spur of granite had protected it. But if the wind had come from a different direction, it would have been destroyed.

For the next few hours, I butted and steered the drifting floes away with my boat, which was a pleasant job, reminiscent of those boyhood days when you carved drainways in the street to hurry winter on its way. By nightfall, the big southerly was still clocking around to the west and losing its strength. When the sun rose the next morning, the air was balmy and quiet. I untied the houseboat and pushed it away from shore, climbed into the little wooden runabout and swung around behind it. Nosing the prow of my boat against the houseboat’s rear end, I gave the motor a shot of throttle and the houseboat moved. Soon the building was budging ponderously forward.

How exciting to have a floating house! Saying goodbye to Murray’s Camp, I pushed my home past Minaki Lodge, under the train bridge, and slowly headed off down the river. You couldn’t see a single fleck of ice anywhere. The sun was strong, the water was flat and blue, and it was the first day of spring.