Wolverine Lake

“The trees encountered on a country stroll

Reveal a lot about that country’s soul…

A culture is no better than its woods.”

― W.H.Auden

Katrina and I were strolling down Lake Road, licking the stubs of the tiger-stripe ice cream cones we’d bought at Green’s Grocery. We were surrounded by the flicker and buzz of an idyllic summer day, one of many we spent at the family cottage during summer vacation. The drone of a motor far out on the lake; the rustle of small creatures in the shaded forest we walked beside: we were oblivious to these noises because we were deep in conversation about what, exactly, led to death in space.

“Suffocation, when you run out of oxygen,” Katrina said, licking the melted drips from her wrist.

“Sudden decompression, when your body expands so fast it explodes,” I said, wiping sticky fingers on my cut-offs. I was recalling grade six science class. The strap of my tote bag cut into my shoulder because I was carrying two tins of canned pineapple for Mom and the 200-page notebook. It contained the first draft, in two different handwritings, of the Story of Sha-Kaziel, about a spaceship on its way to a distant galaxy.

We reached Frog Pond, where a younger me often tried to catch frogs, a swampy place that now seemed too childish to muck about in. I was startled by a figure that loomed among the cattails, then recognized her. I pretended not to see Nora, someone my parents kept pushing at me like a daily vitamin. She’d impressed them two summers ago with her poise and responsible attitude and they thought she was someone I should take on as a friend. To me, she was a grinder. Someone whose good grades and clear skin would contrast unfavorably with my own.

Today, Nora was frozen. She seemed to be hiding. Wait, was she trying to avoid me? I couldn’t say anything to Katrina without the sound carrying on the breeze.

“Oh hey, Nora,” Katrina called out. “You gave me a scare.” She laughed genuinely.

“Just doing my daily counts,” Nora said. In her men's-sized rubber boots, she galumphed her way out of the lowland mud, looking amused by the rude sounds her feet made. The frogs fell silent, like polite people do on hearing farts. Nora had a net and jar with her. A flashlight and stopwatch hung from her belt. “Their numbers are down from last year,” she said somberly.

“Oh yeah?” I said. I tried to sound sincere but really I was thinking about lunch.

At that moment we all looked up. Our eyes darted around looking for the source of the cigarette smoke borne on the breeze. Nora turned back to what she’d been looking at when we’d first seen her—and then Katrina and I saw them, also, a young couple sitting on an outcropping. They were too distant to recognize. “They come out every day,” Nora said.

“Lovers’ leap,” Katrina joked, craning to see them better. “D’you ever see anything, y’know, interesting?” she asked slyly.

“Oh yeah,” Nora said. She raised her eyebrows.

We grinned, waiting. How hungry we were to know about the goings-on in what would be the next stages of our lives. The romantic sections in our shared notebook were sparse and ill-informed.

“I’m not meaning to spy,” Nora said. “I just hope they stub out those cigarettes, is all.”

“Like, what do you see?” I pressed, impatient with her Sunday-school delicacy. I wondered if the lovers looked anything like the scandalous pictures in the Our Bodies, Ourselves book that my mom kept in her panty drawer.

“Nude sunbathing. That’s all. But I keep tabs on them. The last thing we want is another graduation fire.” Nora was referring to a party last year where the grads had not doused their smokes. They had only stepped on them, and some butts had continued to smolder. The grad fire had burnt up dozens of acres before the Volunteer Fire Department got it under control.

“I wonder if… I mean, could you guys also help keep an eye on things?” Nora said. “I think these small smoking parties are a huge threat. People think they’ve extinguished… but the conditions are so dry the fire keeps going in the soil.”

Katrina and I exchanged a glance. I wondered if Nora had caught wind of us trying our first smoke last week. We’d chosen to fast-track ourselves to adulthood with some cigarettes purloined from my uncle. Katrina and I had canoed to a tiny island in Wolverine Lake. On the side facing away from censorious parents, we’d lit up one cigarette, puffed, argued about how to puff, and made ourselves a little sick and a lot guilty by the end.

“Yeah, sure,” Katrina said lightheartedly. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

“And that’s not all,” Nora said. “Near the big fork in Cottage Road, today I saw kids looking for dry brush for kindling. I told them it was way too dry for any kind of campfire… they laughed in my face.”

“No, it’s not too dry, is it?” I said. “There’s mud here…” I pointed toward the cattails.

“According to the weather station, this is another dry summer,” Nora said. “D’you remember how noisy Frog Pond used to be at this time of year?”  

I gnawed my lip.

“I just hope they douse it, like, completely.” She spoke with unusual vehemence, and I felt embarrassed for her. She had to learn to dial it back.

I remembered last summer, when my parents had visited her parents one evening and we’d played together all evening. Jenga, Trouble, backgammon. It was fun until near the end when she told me about a TV documentary she’d watched, with animals panicking in the midst of a forest fire. We both loved animals; I guess that’s how we ended up on that topic, but I felt uncomfortable with her intensity.

Today at Frog Pond, realizing we’d fallen silent, she abruptly stopped. She laughed self-consciously. “I better stop before you think I’m a real pain.”

“Nah, that’s okay,” Katrina said. “We love this big ole forest.” Her head swiveled slowly around. I suspect she meant it ironically, but as I swiveled my head around, too, an unusual feeling pervaded me: I was inside the great green cathedral of tall trees.

*       *       *

The summer stretched before us like a hammock we could climb into and take our sweet time getting out of. I loved the long, slow mornings when Katrina and I would meet up on the dusty cottage road, stroll to Green’s for a treat, and discuss the Story of Sha-Kaziel. We had a hideaway, a grove in the forest where we’d stuffed an old tarp in the groove of a boulder. It gave us shade at noon and shelter from the infrequent rains.

One day Katrina would write the story and the next day I would take over. We leapfrogged over each other: plot, character, plot, character. Katrina was interested in the bigger forces that set the grand stage against which people lived their lives. If we had been writing War and Peace, Katrina would have written about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and would have itemized the Russian aristocracy. This metaphor occurs to me now as I write; at the time I was barely beyond Stuart Little and Anne of Green Gables. I had seen only one episode of Star Trek—whereas Katrina was a devoted fan.

She’d devised an elaborate hierarchy of people on the spaceship, impossible to keep track of until I stapled a sketch inside the notebook showing the chain of command. First the Captain, then the Commander, Lieutenant Commander, Lieutenant, and so on. Each of these had allies and sworn enemies. Some had romantic interests, an activity of increasing speculation as we talked and fumbled around in our hideaway.

When I received the notebook from her, I was often perplexed by the plot machinations of her freshly written chapter. A priceless scepter was stolen … a lieutenant was kidnapped … a high-ranking official was murdered. I’d invent a backstory for what had just happened. She teased me about “psychologizing” everything. 

Her parents were both engineers, no-nonsense types who, we soon found out, were preparing to move the family to Australia. When Katrina broke the news to me, barely two weeks into summer vacation, she began to cry.

“Australia!” I shrieked. Then I cried, too. We were a sobbing heap on the forest floor, crying to exhaustion, lying there until our eyes swelled shut and the needles left imprints on our hands and faces.

After that, the big move became something not to be mentioned directly. The notebook story became fixated on one storyline. The spaceship was heading toward a new planet where half the crew was to be abandoned and the other half would fly home.

Her family’s imminent departure hovered over us like a cloud that, as the date drew nearer, descended to become more like smog. It settled upon us, choked us, and poisoned our friendship. Small disagreements accumulated into ugly snarls of misunderstanding. We continued to trade the notebook back and forth, but the balance shifted. I made things happen to her characters, and she delved more deeply into the psyches, throwing a DSM-full of neuroses at her characters to justify their bad behavior.

*       *       *

By custom, the end of summer at Wolverine Lake was marked by Labor Day festivities in the old barn near Green’s Grocery. Everyone called it a barn dance but first there was an evening talent show, where each family had to put on a skit or perform a song together. One family juggled. My parents planned to humiliate us with Hank Williams’ song, Your Cheatin’ Heart, which they sang with maximum twang. It had no redeeming social value. “Why couldn’t you choose Blowing in the Wind,” I pleaded, “or Universal Soldier?”

At first Katrina refused to tell me what song her family would sing because she was so mortified. Spying is dead simple out in cottage land in summertime. I overheard them practicing Waltzing Matilda, I guess in honor of their big move Down Under. “Daddy’s going to make asses of us all,” Katrina hissed. Suddenly we were dearest friends again, united in our daughterly disgust. We sneaked back to the tiny island and shared a cigarette again.

“Well, I’m going to conveniently disappear at 8 o’clock,” I confided. In my family, it was easier to get forgiveness than permission. “I could argue till I was blue in the face,” I said, “and then those idiots would change it to, I don’t know, Elvis Presley or just as bad.” My father’s guitar skills extended to three-chord 12-bar blues songs, nothing more.

Katrina and I took to spending more time together, days where we lazed about under the green-dappled shade of maples and towering Jack pines, imagining a future together without families tearing us apart. One evening we canoed past Nora’s place and heard the radio playing Three Dog Night—then realized it was them. “Nora’s mom sure can sing,” Katrina said. I tried to imagine the mother’s very freckled, very ordinary face belting out “Shambala.”

“She’s an actress, don’t you know?” Katrina said.

“You’re kidding.”

“Commercials,” Katrina said. “Palmolive. But still… a lot of actresses are what they call ‘triple threat’—they sing and dance as well.”

I was intrigued. I had not, until that point, ever considered the actors playing roles in commercials for dish soap. Just another way I was rocketing far away from childhood.

A new problem emerged: how could I skip performing with my folks yet still be there to hear Nora’s mother sing?

*       *       *

September loomed, bigger for my family than most because my parents were teachers. As part of lightening the back-to-school blues, my parents had agreed to take me to a Billy Joel concert I badly wanted to attend. By Labor Day weekend, I had come to the realization I couldn’t get out of performing en famille. At least Dad agreed to drop Hank Williams for something higher on the cool factor.

Katrina and I spent the final hours before the barn dance experimenting with make-up, our hearts heavy with our impending farewell. We’d get the mascara just right when a chance remark would get us teary-eyed and ruin the look. I was an emotional wreck by dinnertime, when we returned to our separate cottages.

“Eat, eat,” Dad said. “I made your favorite.”

“Your growling tummy will drown me out,” Mom said. I chewed my sausage in silence, hating parents generically. I was nervous, too, about playing the tambourine Katrina had loaned me for the talent show but when the time came, we performed a respectable rendition of  Marley’s One Love.

When Nora’s family appeared, a murmur of excitement filled the room. Nora went to center-stage and adjusted the mic stand. She was dressed in goth, unlike the “junior biologist” look of lightweight cargo pants and button-up shirt she normally sported. Her actress mother sat at the keyboard and her father took up the guitar beside her brother on bass. They began with Joy to the World—then it dawned on me: Nora was the lead vocal!

Of course she would want to sing about Jeremiah the bullfrog!

She sang with unexpected power and eloquence. They did two encores—and would have done more, except that at Wolverine Lake, everyone had to take a turn.

At intermission I made my way to the lemonade area, distractedly weaving my way through the rug-rats. A cooler sat with beers floating among ice and I dunked my hand in, grabbed a Coors, and went to find Katrina. She’d skipped Waltzing Matilda but I figured she must be close by.

The night was warm; rain hadn’t fallen for two weeks and, as I wandered around with my contraband beer, the chatter was all about pumping lake water to rescue gardens and beloved trees. I kept looking for Katrina, already imagining our conversation where we’d dissect the evening’s event, including, most notably, Nora and her family.

*       *       *

A quarter-century after that evening, I reconnected with Nora. We were both in Paris: I, on sabbatical, and she en route to a new position with the global climate-change task force. At the café, I noticed her first. Nora had that sleek classic look about her, of someone used to providing sound-bites. After the social niceties, we both plunged into trying to make sense of that long-ago evening of the barn dance: how, at the end of intermission, everyone became suddenly alert to the smell of smoke. How a sudden panic seized us, an urge to discover where the smoke was coming from.

Behind the barn, an outcropping of rock held a water tank, so several of us scrambled up there and some even climbed a tree that was growing beside the tank. We saw the promontory where angry gray clouds roiled straight up into the deepening twilight. I have to find Katrina, I thought, and warn her the fire was near her cottage. I have to find Katrina, I thought as I stared up into the tree, remembering in that moment that I had her make-up bag, her tambourine and the notebook with the Story of Sha-Kaziel.

I have them still.

In Paris, Nora’s eyes glistened as she recalled that night. First, her relief that her family had played well, and her embarrassment at the whistles and cheers some kids were making as she got lemonade at intermission. She was puzzled when people ran outside talking about smoke—then suddenly she smelled it, too. “At that moment, horror filled me. I had been dreading this very moment for so long. Our beloved Wolverine Lake would never be the same again.”

Hours later, we briefly hugged and promised to stay in touch.

*       *       *

That evening at the barn dance I stood near the lookout while shouting people moved toward cars and trucks all around me. The captain of the VFD was hollering for some firefighters to drive there directly, and for others to go pick up the portable pump. They burst into action.

We others, non-firefighters, moved as if through heavy sludge, our disbelief slowing us down. All along we had known it was a hot dry summer; now we would be visited by a wrathful Gaia. The mood seemed fatalistic.

“We’ll dig a trench,” my parents yelled, “Get in the car! Right now!” and we sped along the dirt road to the promontory. I crouched in the back of the car, trembling and nauseated.

The irony was lost on me then: there we were, dozens of us responding to a climate-change fire, yet everyone was driving gas-powered engines, prime contributors to global warming, to the worst part of the carnage. The irony was lost on me then because I was a child without a concept of environmental forces. The only kid I knew who could have explained the bigger forces had, unbeknownst to me, collapsed near the woodpile of her family’s cottage. Before daybreak, her body would be burnt beyond recognition.

The conflagration spread to the five cottages on the promontory. At the narrowest point, the VFD plowed a firebreak and they fought ceaselessly all night, not to save five cottages, but to stop the fire from devouring the other thirty cottages—and the forest around.

In the morning the rain began. Five blackened stone chimneys are all that remain.

THE END