by Anna Maxymiw
Copyright © 2019 by Anna Maxymiw
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Maxymiw, Anna, author
Dirty work : my gruelling, glorious, life-changing summer in the wilderness / Anna Maxymiw.
ISBN 9780771061462 (softcover).—ISBN 9780771061479 (EPUB)
1. Maxymiw, Anna. 2. Fishing lodges—Ontario. 3. Outdoor life. 4. Self-actualization (Psychology). 5. Authors, Canadian (English)—21st century—Biography. I. Title.
SH439.M39 2019 799.1 C2018-903254-5
C2018-903255-3
Cover art: boat © Chris Clor/Tetra images/Getty Images cleaning supplies © DragonImages/iStock/Getty Images
Cover design by Five Seventeen
McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.3.2
a
To the dockhands and the guides and the housekeepers
The forests are making magic against us—
I think the land knows we are here,
I think the land knows we are strangers.
—Al Purdy, “The Runners”
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
THE LAND OF LITTLE STICKS
WELCOME TO THE SUMMER, ASSHOLES
QUEEN OF FISHES
PIN BONES
PANTHEON
THE FLOCK
CAKE
NO-WOMAN’S LAND
NAIADS
SAM
TROUBLE BEAR
BEYOND THE VEIL
THE BUZZ
NO TO IT ALL
ROOTS
THE SPARK
THE BURN
WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Permissions Acknowledgements
About the Author
THE LAND OF LITTLE STICKS
“DHC-2 Beavers stopped being produced in 1967, you know,” the pilot tells me with a shit-wild grin. I can’t see his eyes behind his huge sunglasses, but I know that he’s hungover from the way he speaks, and the way he slung himself into the front seat of the plane. By that logic, the de Havilland floatplane I’m sitting in is just about fifty years old, and it looks it—worn grey seats, ancient controls, a smeared windshield.
I clench at his words, regretting all the decisions I made that have led me to this point. Deciding to spend a summer in remote Northern Ontario was all well and good when I was in the city, but now that I’m here, at the very moment we’re about to depart, I begin to panic. Nothing about this—the pilot, the plane, my surroundings—is reassuring.
Some people might call it brave, the act of getting away and stepping so far out of one’s comfort zone. But I don’t feel brave. Instead, I feel my thighs start to sweat, my skin sticking to the plane seat and the skin of the two girls who are wedged in on either side of me. On my left is Sydney, to my right is Robin, and in the front seat, there’s Connor. I’m too wrapped up in a complicated web of nerves and regret and a strange form of excitement to feel brave. None of us speaks.
“If you need to puke,” the pilot continues, filling our silence, “there are barf bags in the backs of the seats in front of you.” When I reach into the pocket he’s referring to, I pull out flimsy plastic shopping bags, which are full of holes.
Behind me, the plane reverberates with a dull thunk as a member of the air base staff throws my duffel bag into the boot and slams the door. My palms are damp and my mouth is dry; I try not to move my hands around too much, so the others won’t notice that I’m shaking. It’s not too late, I tell myself, to get the hell out of here. It’s not too late to unbuckle my seatbelt and wriggle out from between this sweaty female flesh, climb over hips and stomachs, and fling myself out of the plane and back onto dry land. I could tear my bag out of the back if I really wanted to; I could kick up a fuss. I could leave and spend my summer in a different place, a place where I won’t run into black bears, where I won’t have to spend nine weeks cleaning up after middle-aged men, where I can step outside and blackflies won’t immediately gather on my eyebrows and temples like a bloodthirsty crown. That would be the easy choice. Because I know that nothing about where I’m going will be easy. I know that because I’ve been there once before, and I’m scared to return in a different capacity, scared to revisit this place that has hung, wild and lush and gesturing, in my dreams for a year.
The propeller starts with a thunderous moan, and I jump. The sound fills the tiny plane body, all-consuming; it vibrates into my bones, all the way up to my teeth, like the purr of a huge, rusty cat finally getting attention; it crowds me so much that there isn’t space for doubt. There’s only space for momentum, for self-preservation, so I yank the padded headset over my ears, double-check that my seatbelt is buckled, and curl my fingers under the lip of the seat. There’s nowhere to go but forward. There’s nothing to do but take off.
Three other planes have gone up before us, carrying cargo and the rest of my co-workers. We four are the last to be delivered of thirteen young adults from different towns all around the province, mostly strangers to one another—all of us running on empty stomachs and a bad night’s sleep at the air base’s piece-of-shit bunkhouse—about to spend late May to late July working together at a fishing lodge in the Northern Ontario bush.
* * *
Northern Canada: “The land of little sticks.” It’s a part of the country that evokes divisive emotions in those who have seen it or live on it—or have tried to live on it—and now it’s going to be my home for the summer. I’ve done a little bit of reading on this place. I wanted to know what people had to say about it, bad or good, whether they were entranced or repulsed. “The land that God gave to Cain,” Jacques Cartier wrote when describing the northern forests of Quebec. I can’t help but replay those words to myself as I think about the summer ahead. In fact, Northern Canada was deemed so worthless that, in 1670, England’s King Charles II gave the land away—7.7 million square kilometres of it—to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which, it might be said, turned a good profit off of it. And so Northern Canada, this tangle of bog, fen, black spruce, and myth, is known as many things, depending on who you speak to: the nothing; the North; a wasteland; a dream destination; a place of infinite and strange beauty.
Our destination, Kesagami Wilderness Lodge, is in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, a geological region defined by peat bog and wide, slow-moving rivers, which sits about a hundred kilometres south of James Bay, near the Quebec border. You can’t drive to where we’re going. The labyrinth of trees and water stops you in your tracks. Roads end as if you’re about to drive off the Earth. So, we made our way by train through the Canadian Shield, that ancient plate of granite that grips half of our country, unforgiving rock that had to be blasted through to build roads and the railway. We’re heading for the middle of Kesagami Provincial Park, to the eastern side of Kesagami Lake—a big body of water, about 32 kilometres long and 12 kilometres at its widest, with about 290 kilometres of shoreline. Kesagami means “big water” in Cree, and the name is fitting. Big water, big land, big fish, big possibility.
* * *
Our plane lurches alive. I grab my elbows and brace my body as the Beaver’s prop revs up to full tilt and the plane fills with a roar that makes it impossible to yell, le
t alone talk—if we had been talking to one another in the first place. The plane jerks forward and then turns, near the end of the lake, readying for takeoff. I’d ask the pilot a million questions about safety, about how long he has to make his decision about when to lift the plane up into flight before he runs out of lake, but he wouldn’t hear me. We accelerate, the pontoons carving out a wake and the end of the lake approaching in our windshield, faster and faster, and then we’re hovering over the surface of the water, dragging out a spray, before the whole machine scuds gracelessly up, up, up, and we’re in the air, and there’s no turning back.
I look ahead. My ears pop and I sit as ramrod straight as I can, trying not to give in to curiosity, because I’m worried I’ll get nauseated and have to use those hopeless barf bags in front of these strangers. As we get higher and higher, I turn my head to peep out the window over Robin’s shoulder. I’m blown away all over again, even though I’ve seen this before. A few minutes into the flight and we’re already approaching the boundary where the Canadian North really, truly begins. The boreal forest, also known as the taiga, is a biome—an ecological community. It’s a huge terrestrial area, a swath of cold forest that slices across the top of the world map. Worldwide, the taiga measures about twelve million square kilometres, and Canada comprises 24 per cent of this. We’ll be flying into an area where the taiga is at its narrowest, pinched tight around the tip of James Bay.
As the plane tilts, the windows are at a direct angle to the morning sun, which is prisming across the clean sky and scattering over the water below me, and then bouncing up into our plane. An overpowering light slants through the smeary plastic and lands on my palms. I look around in silent awe as the sun laces into the tips of my hair and across my body, creating a circuit, filling the plane and filling me. The four of us go from singular beings, damp and miserable in nervousness and nausea from the bouncing little plane, to a group forged in gold in the span of an instant that is saturated and alive and gleaming. Every surface is lit up, everything bright, almost painfully halcyon. I wonder if this is a sign of good things to come; the anxiety curled up like a tiny beast behind my breastbone starts to unwind, just a little.
There aren’t words to describe the vastness of the land below us—the green depths of the forest that stretches farther than the horizon, the occasional ribbon of brown where a decrepit logging road braids through the woods. This is Northern Ontario, and the sight of it makes me feel like all of the air has been struck out of my lungs.
As we go farther north, the forest dimples and tatters, and the trees start to give way to swampy ground, a terrain that looks gnarled and odd to my eye, twisted up in shades of lime and amber. These are the lowlands, an area formed by the ebb and flow of ancient seas and the rise and fall of ancient mountains, a place apparently so uninhabitable that not all of it has been explored. Who knows what lives in the foliage below our pontoons? Or, for that matter, in the water. Dotted into the land are hundreds and hundreds of lakes—intricate, myriad, shimmering bodies of water of various sizes. As employees, our lives up here are going to revolve around water. Though we’re going to live on the land, it’s the lake that’s the star attraction. It pulls people to it, has the power to give and take life, and contains the fish that draw people to the lodge from across the continent. But right now, so high up, I can’t think about the fish, the depth, what lives below the surface. I can only stare at the shimmering skeins of lake unfolding before me, kilometre after kilometre after kilometre of watery divots dappling the green.
It’s like tracing the footsteps of giants, travelling back in time. I’m glad that the prop rumble is so overpowering that I wouldn’t be able to voice my thoughts if they managed to slither out of my mouth. But in the untapped part of me, there’s a feeling that the forests below hold secrets that none of us would be able to whisper. That below these wings are monsters and gods: bears taller than me, pike as long as children, things that lurk in the latticework of the woods. That agreeing to work at this lodge this summer is the smartest or stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
As the plane nears our destination, Sydney presses her face to the window, and I follow suit, slotting my sticky torso against hers. If she minds, she doesn’t say anything. Something about a fist-clenched plane ride and being in close quarters has set us at ease; our bodies are already comfortable around each other, even if our minds haven’t caught up. The colours of the land swell into mottled, rich browns and taupes, rust reds, and vivid greens; the earth has plaited itself into the water, and in places where it looks like soil, I instinctively know there’s water there, too, hiding and waiting. The lakes that looked like footsteps have given way to footstep greenery, the land no longer dominant.
A saucer of thick water expands in the windshield of the plane, broadening like a swath of brown velvet unwrapped. My heart thumps; I recognize this sight. I remember these curves and corners and white sand. The lake grows in front of us as we get closer and closer, and the sun hits its surface, the morning light dancing up in hues of black and silver and white and beige. And then we’re tilting down, down, down, and I watch as we hover over the water for what seems like minutes, and then there’s a great wake, a lurch and a hum, the propeller slowing its roar as the plane sputters up to the dock, my pulse taking over that rhythm. The smell of not-city forces its way past the windows and into the plane, curling its hands around our necks and stroking our lips with its fingers—it’s the smell of diesel and algae and lake water and something else, something I can’t put words to.
We fall out of the plane to lots of laughter. I can see figures on the shore, hear a chorus of male snickering. The interlock dock beneath me is too unsteady, and I’m unmoored, a stranger here.
In desperation, I squint and look at the silhouettes: the sun’s so strong behind them that I can’t see faces, only the outlines of ears and jaws and ball caps. As I stare, one of the figures cocks a head. We’re being watched, right away, taken stock of and slotted into people’s minds based on our bodies and our postures and the way we hold our duffel bags. This is my first chance to make an impression, and I’m frozen, looking back at the person who is looking at me, my damp hair coiling around my chin from the high whip of the northern wind, my heart limping in an unsure tattoo.
I can’t move—won’t move, won’t cede to this standoff—and then Henry, the lodge manager, walks toward us, saluting us with chores already on his lips, and the moment is broken. When I look to the shore, the boys have scattered, and somehow, inelegantly, suddenly, the summer has begun.
WELCOME TO THE SUMMER, ASSHOLES
“You’re going to have to run that by me again,” says Jack, head fishing guide and veteran employee of five years. We’re standing in the lodge’s dining room after a whirlwind tour of the camp, led by Alex and Tiffany, our head housekeepers for the summer, and therefore the two girls who will direct the rest of us regular housekeepers. My brain is flooded with so much information I feel like my eyes are spinning. Now we’re trying on staff shirts, and the veteran female employees have introduced the new girls to the boys.
“Because I’m not gonna fuckin’ remember any of your names,” Jack continues, chewing on his spit.
Really, he has the easier job when it comes to retaining information. The rest of us haven’t even been here two hours, and already we’ve been given a hurried, haphazard history of the lodge and geography lessons about the land we’re staying on. So far, I’ve learned that Kesagami lodge is an old beast, one that’s changed hands a few times over its life. It was founded in 1983 by a Swiss couple when they bought out an outfitter. Over the span of nearly three years, and with the help of large sums of money and many, many supply flights, the site expanded from its original six cabins and became a semblance of what the lodge is today. In 1992, an American couple purchased the lodge, and they implemented the strict fishing policies that survive on the lake.
Now, I hear, ownership is transitioning to the Moose Cree First Nation band, a Cree First N
ation from Moose Factory. Moose Factory is a community of about twenty-five hundred people located on Moose Factory Island, near the mouth of the Moose River, in the south of James Bay. It’s the town that’s technically the closest to us by helicopter or floatplane; it’s where we’d be flown if we suffered an emergency at the lodge. People can take water taxis back and forth between Moose Factory and its sister town, Moosonee, or, in the winter, drive the ice road between them. It’s comforting to know that there’s an out if we need it; somewhat nearby, there are roads and a hospital and a population of more than twenty-five.
A few of the veterans spoke of the leadership change on the train ride up. I caught snatches of the conversation from in between upholstered seats. What do you think it means? What will future summers look like? Does this mean the summer will be more difficult? Does this mean we’ll be working harder? Not as hard? Will the new bosses be benevolent or cruel? Will they drop in for inspections? What, what, what. The vets had no answers to these panicky questions, still don’t, so we’re all walking into the summer blind, it seems.
I don’t really have any thoughts on the change of owners. It seems like the owners are never really at the lodge, anyway; it’s Henry who spends the whole summer at Kesagami, figuring out the day-to-day ins and outs, bossing the employees around, making the rules that we have to follow. I’m not worried; it seems unlikely that the owners will have much influence on us. I am, however, surprised at the complexity of the situation. We’re living on Indigenous land, and it seems odd that Indigenous people have to purchase the lodge from white people. Did the original Swiss owners buy this land? If so, from whom did they buy it? Or did they set up the lodge in the same way that settlers have often stolen Indigenous land—just doing it, not asking, not apologizing? These are the questions orbiting my head as I try to get my bearings here once more.
