About an hour later we turned off Highway 11 and took a little road, paved at least, into Cobalt. By that time my father had recovered from his confession and changed the subject to something safer—and way more boring. He was actually going on about the highway, saying how number 11 was the longest street in the world, that it was really just Yonge Street, one of the main drags in Toronto. It has the Eaton Centre and all sorts of other famous stores on it. Yonge Street starts right at Lake Ontario in the city and by the time it becomes number 11 it is heading north out of the suburbs and doesn’t stop until more than a thousand kilometres later, quite a few hours west of Thunder Bay, in the state of Minnesota! I wasn’t sure what that had to do with the price of snowballs, but I was willing to let Dad drone on about it for a long time because I was thinking about other things. Like hidden treasure.
Now I was ready to get a good look at my surroundings. In moments we would actually be in Cobalt. Everyone in the vehicle grew silent, even Dad. Staring out the window I saw the odd home, many of them like cottages, real cottages, smoke rising from their chimneys and looking so sharp against the clear sky that it seemed almost brittle, like it might shatter in the cold air. The sky was different here. It actually looked cold. But it was also incredibly blue and appeared to be impossibly far away, curving high above the car like a huge dome over the world. The ground was so white with snow that it almost hurt my eyes to look at it for long. I didn’t see any slush or any brown or black snow like back home.
Again I had the feeling that there was total silence outside. We drew closer to Cobalt. The houses grew in number, but their appearance didn’t change: they were still small and cottage-like. A blue town sign flashed by: “Cobalt: Come For a Day, Discover a Century!” I wondered what that meant. Then there was another sign: “The Silver Capital of Canada!” That seemed kind of sad, though I didn’t know why.
Driving around the next corner we found ourselves heading directly towards a building unlike any I had seen before. It looked spooky. It was falling apart and rusted and looked like a black tin barn with a pointed roof on a tower at one end. It cast a shadow towards us like it might pull us inside. Something was hanging from its top, banging so hard against the side of the building that we could hear it inside the Jeep.
“Mine shaft,” said Dad, glancing back at me, “a dead one.”
Mom looked around at the same time. “I believe they call them headframes, dear,” she said quietly. She was trying to smile. They both examined me in a brief glance, like they were trying to figure out how I was reacting to what I was seeing.
Soon it would be harder to take.
The road took several extremely sharp turns as it entered town, making you feel like you were going to run right into buildings or drive into the deep ditch. It wound around like a snake, creeping along at the bottom of a rocky hill that loomed more and more to our left as it grew steeper. The buildings were more decrepit than before and no one was walking on the sidewalks, when there were sidewalks to be seen. Homes, some boarded up, others with paint chipped or brick caving in, sat on the sides of the hill like a herd of old and sick mountain goats. It felt like they might fall on me. To our right, down an embankment, a small lake appeared, shivering in the cold.
We came to another sharp turn and into an area that looked like the centre of town, except there was nothing like a bustle here. In fact, it seemed almost deserted. There was a big hotel with a Molson Canadian sign flashing in neon, a mining museum, and further along a little library. An old abandoned railway station sat alone near the lake. Above us on the hill, the decaying buildings seemed jammed together, drilled into dull grey rock that was everywhere, and peeking out here and there, on both sides of the lake, were headframes, all of them looking rusted and sick, many just plain falling apart.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Some of the stores on the main street were boarded up and others looked poverty-stricken. Now I could barely believe that I was in Canada.
It was becoming so silent in the front seat that I wondered if I might soon actually hear my father’s heart beating.
“Dad,” I said in a monotone.
No answer.
“Dad!”
“I hear you!” my father snapped, sounding extremely testy.
“Is this it? Is this really Cobalt? Is this where we are actually going to live?”
Mom turned around. “Try to keep an open mind, Dylan.” It wasn’t her way to make excuses for Dad, but the look on her face told me that her heart was sinking and that she felt as badly for him as she did for her son and herself.
We pulled over across from the library, the only building that seemed to have been erected in the past couple of decades. Our house, the one that had been rented for us by Edison Brown himself, had an address that Dad couldn’t find on his cell, so he was going to ask for directions. When he opened the car door the blast of cold air was like a shock. I had never felt anything like it. Dad had been spending the last few weeks telling us that it wasn’t really all that cold in the north, that even though the thermometer often got to way below zero, the cold up there was a “dry cold.” “Toronto,” he’d said, “has a damp cold that really gets into your bones, so it will feel about the same up there as it does here.” But as he stepped outside I actually heard him give a little moan. The cold air pierced his Toronto winter coat like a knife. He glanced back at me before he crossed the road, looking a little apologetic.
“Close the door, close the door!” I yelled. I heard my father’s boots crunch and squeak on the bright white snow and then the door went crashing shut. Mom and I didn’t say much while Dad was indoors. It was only about 3:30 but the sky was growing dark. “How depressing,” I muttered. Mom didn’t respond.
About ten minutes later we turned up one of those mountain-goat roads and were going upwards at such a steep angle that I felt like the vehicle might tip backwards and go rolling, end over end, all the way into Cobalt Lake.
When we were at the top of the hill, we turned sharply into a large paved driveway. The house was big and modern, and all the lights were on inside. Through a large window I could see into the living room, where a fireplace was on full burn. The whole thing was a nice surprise. Several houses we had passed on the way up looked like buildings that should have been condemned. You could spot our new home a mile away.
After almost running from the car to the front door, we were excited by what we found inside. Or at least I was; my parents seemed, strangely, a little subdued. The house was warm, the smell of dinner was in the air, and there was a huge bouquet of flowers on the living room table. There was even a cook, in the flesh, who told Mom and Dad she was employed to double as a maid. Everything was decorated, and there was new furniture and a large-screen TV that caught my eye right away. “Excellent!” I shouted, before I remembered I was supposed to be upset.
My father walked slowly up to the flowers and plucked the card out. He quietly read what it said: “John and Laura. Welcome. I hope you and the whole Maples family find this suitable. Regards, Edison Brown.” He dropped the note and looked at Mom.
As I stood in the living room near the television I glanced out through the huge picture window. I could see most of Cobalt beneath me, in a half-moon shape around the lake. The lights were coming on in the buildings, shedding a glow on the whole cold scene and the frigid water. In a way, it looked pretty amazing.
After polishing off the tasty meal and treating myself to an episode of Star Trek on the Space channel (they actually had cable in Cobalt!), I thought I’d bundle myself up and brave the outdoors. I wanted to have a look at the world I would have to live in for at least the next few months.
Long underwear on, leather mitts with liners in place, knee-length parka with hood up over toque and ski mask, and big snowmobile boots clomping in the snow, I walked out into that wall of cold air. I couldn’t get over how different everything seemed up here. I looked out across and down at a silent scene that was like a kind of desolate movie set. Except Cobalt seemed like the only thing that was real now. Toronto certainly wasn’t. Here the old mine headframes stuck up in the darkness like tombstones amongst the houses and the forest. Feeling wrapped up like a mummy, I lifted my head and gazed up. The sky, black as hockey tape, looked like it was solid, like you could bounce something off it. It was the world’s biggest ceiling and it was filled, absolutely filled, with stars. I walked slowly as I looked up, listening to the strange sound of my boots crunching on the bright white snow. I had never heard a sound quite like it back home. Crisp. That was the perfect way to describe it. It was just so crisp.
Slowly I became aware of another crunching sound in the snow nearby. People were approaching. I lowered my head again and turned to them. It was a group of kids about my age: three guys and a girl. They were just walking at first, but then they began to run, sliding down the hill like surfers on the snow, moving at high speeds in grey-white boots of some sort that looked like moccasins, except they went right up their legs and tied just below the knee. Mukluks? Is that what they call them? As the kids surfed along they laughed and held their hands out at the side and above their heads like high-wire walkers. Every now and then they’d lose their balance and go flying into the snowbanks that were piled up like soft white walls nearly six feet high. The kids would go crashing into them and come up shouting, big smiles on their faces, their hatless heads covered with snow.
Suddenly I felt like an idiot in my RoboCop outfit. My eyes peeked out through my ski mask, the only part of my body exposed to the weather. A couple of the kids, the girl in particular, didn’t even have mitts on. After a few minutes they noticed me. Oh, great, I thought. Here they come. I wanted to turn away but it seemed impolite. So I just watched them as they walked by on the other side of the road, looking back at me.
“Hey,” said the girl. She had long wavy blond hair and gave me a big smile.
“Hey,” I said back through frozen lips. It sounded more like “Huh?” Excellent, I thought, excellent. They think you’re a complete moron and you haven’t even met any of them yet.
They moved on, glancing back a few times. Some of the boys laughed and I was sure they were laughing at me. But the girl didn’t, and when they were almost all the way down the hill, she glanced back one last time before they disappeared. Her bright-red coat and its big black buttons stayed in my mind for a few seconds. I don’t know why. Despite the cold, it looked warm and comfortable. Then even it vanished.
Everything was silent again, as if those four kids were the only inhabitants of Cobalt, and now they were gone. The silence was fascinating. Very cool. It sounds funny to say, but I had never heard anything like it. It would be like this if I were the only person on earth, I thought. I stood still for a whole minute just listening to nothing.
When I moved again it was like waking up. I looked down at the cold lake one more time and back up at the sky. But as I began looking down again, to turn back to the house, something crossed my line of vision and stopped me. It was a big home at the other end of the town. As far as I could tell, it was the only house that was higher than the one we were staying in. Ours was two storeys, long, modern, and wide-open inside. This one was taller, wooden, and looked very old and broken-down. It was different from the others in ways that I couldn’t quite describe. It was the sort of place that even from a distance looked haunted. The kind of house that would fit perfectly into a horror movie. Set against the black sky, it was a sort of shadow standing in the darkness, difficult to fully make out. But when I looked closer I could tell that someone was moving around inside, in a faint glow. I squinted my eyes. It was like there was a single fire burning in that house. The shadows on the wall inside loomed large, like a ghost or a vampire was on the prowl. I shivered. Then I did an abrupt turn and almost ran back to our house.