by Anna Maxymiw
The fish meat is pearl-coloured. When I put my fingers where Jack guides them, the silky flesh is cool and smooth to the touch. He moves my hand around, looking for something—the way a boy gets his hand under a girl’s skirt but keeps his eyes on her face.
“Ah.” He’s found it. “The pin bones.” I struggle to find them, and he sighs, recalibrating my hand. And suddenly, there it is: I feel a ridge in the reams and furrows of slick meat. A line of tiny bones. The pin bones that float, unattached, in the middle of muscle. Bones that are designed to make a fish tense up and swim as far and as fast as possible. They prick my fingers in a plaintive rhythm as I move my hands along their curving pathway.
Jack supervises as I cut the pin bones out of the tattered meat. They’re encased in their thin, pale strip of flesh, and for a moment I look at them, the whole outfit opaline in the bright sun. I like the idea of an escape mechanism embedded deep in a body. I stare up at Jack, and his eyes are so green in the sun that they make my head hurt.
Then he grabs the strip and flings it into the water. “Hurry the fuck up.”
* * *
On the way back in from shore lunch, Jack throws the motor into full throttle, gunning it, and the other boats catch up in an eddy of sound. He tosses us paddles, and we’re close enough to the other boats to see fox-like smiles. Pea’s boat is set up, Alex and Alisa dragging their paddles in the water, and as he yanks on the motor, the boat does a sharp turn, and we’re soaked in the resulting spray. There are screams. Syd and I struggle with the oars, unsure how to turn them to get the best spray. We accidentally nail Jack and Tiff more than once until we get the hang of it. Tiff guides us through the motions, sitting with her legs slung open, her face determined and shining and her hair whipping around her shoulders, and we learn how to be contenders. The boats drive in glittering doughnuts around one another, the Yamaha motors growling but not loud enough to drown out everyone’s wild laughter, and we fight back, aiming at Pea and Kev, holding on and desperately trying not to give in to the drag of wood on water and topple into the lake. The boat with Henry and Sam and Gus is long gone—the adults have left the lake, given up for the day, as if they knew what mischief was impending—and so we let rip.
The feeling of unease and uncertainty that has been sitting cold in my gut since landing starts to unknot itself. The sun is shining, the air smells like spruce and bracken, and the water slices up around our fingertips and faces in shining arcs, wrapping around us and pasting the soft curls of our finest hair to the napes of our necks. I could reach out and feel the spray of a thousand or more drops of water collide with my skin, feel the lake reach back to me—threatening or welcoming, I can’t tell—curling its fingers and beckoning, murmuring, holding the rest of the summer and whatever that may bring like a jewel in its palms.
* * *
A day later, everyone watches from the shoreline as the first guests fly in. I’m not used to hearing or spotting the planes, so the dockhands are far faster to find the dark pinprick on the horizon, and we stare as the Beaver grows larger and larger, the dull drone filling the air. I squint, a hand over my eyes, wondering what the plane will bring. Who is on board? Who am I about to meet? The summer is about to begin; tomorrow, we’re going to be thrown full force into work. The camp is ready. The beds are ready. The food is ready. The boats are ready. So I have to be ready, too.
PANTHEON
There’s nothing impressive about the staff dining room. It’s a ratty area that’s too small for all of us to sit in at once, so it’s lucky we tend to eat in groups, depending on how early we have to wake up or how late we finish our night shifts or what time the guides come off the lake. There’s one long particleboard table that’s chipped along the edges and at the corners, and windows that barely let in a cross-breeze, let alone any meaningful sunlight. There’s a shelf in one corner with a ragtag bunch of forks and knives, but not nearly enough spoons; a random collection of mugs from Value Village and Giant Tiger; and old plastic plates that are webbed with hairline fractures.
And then there’s the wall of fame. It’s the first thing my eye goes to when I enter the room: a wall covered in rows of framed photos, pictures of every group of employees from every year the lodge has been operating. Each photo has similar elements: there are young men and women standing on the shoreline, dressed in identical uniforms, staring into the camera with smiles. The pictures are lined up in order of year, with the oldest at the far left of the wall, and the most recent at the far right, and under each picture is a plaque with a list of the staff names. Despite the similarities, each picture is distinctive, based on the way these young people hold their bodies, or the angles of their heads, or the proximity they have to one another. I try to guess how each year got along by looking at their faces—if they told jokes in their time off, if they spent their afternoons alone in their bunks. It’s funny to look at the staff from the eighties and nineties and see what has changed and what has remained the same. In the photos from the eighties, women are dressed in cuffed sweaters and sweatpants, their hair crimped or pulled back with scrunchies. More recent years see staff members posed awkwardly, caught mid-sentence, not used to the speed of digital photography or the harsh, flat flash. Sometimes the lake in the background rumbles with rain; sometimes it sits glazed and well behaved. I’m struck by how the facial expressions remain consistent throughout the years—there’s a prevalent hope and a subtle, barefaced happiness.
I should feel reassured by these pictures, by the happiness I think I see in every small face, but I’m unsettled. I’m worried that the cohesion—a hand casually placed on the leg of the next person, an arm around another set of shoulders, two housekeepers half-turned to each other, caught in the middle of a sweet, silent joke—won’t come for my year. These old photos hang over us like religious icons; they look down on us, all-knowing: Yes, we were once like you. Yes, we turned our year into a thing of beauty, and yes, we love one another. Will you?
When I was a guest, I sat at our family table in the dining room and watched the white-shirted, long-necked housekeepers-cum-servers try to keep straight faces at the serving station, where they were observing us eat from out of the corners of their eyes. When I was at the dock, waiting to hop in a boat, I pulled my baseball cap low and stared at the dockhands and guides throwing lures and jerry cans and seat cushions to one another while running over rails and checking boat plugs. I was in awe of how in tune they all were, how all of the workers seemed to always be holding a smile back, as if there was always a joke following them around. As if they loved their jobs and, more important, loved the people they worked with. Therefore I, a hapless interloper, fell in love a little bit with each of them. And so, eating my eggs and watching the servers pat one another on the arms and the lower backs, their eyes soft and their bodies fluid, I made a half-thought-out choice to try my hardest to come back as a worker, to experience the other side, to immerse myself in that fierce love. But now that uneasiness that seemed to abate when we were out in the boats roars back, swirling around inside my chest. I thought we had made inroads, but this nostalgia is disorienting.
The mythology at Kesagami is rampant and important. The stories started on the train ride to Cochrane, continued at the air base bunkhouse and on the plane, and are now swapped between veterans at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The histories of years past are told to the newbies during laundry duty or while grunting hand over hand pulling boats at the shoreline. I hear about the former dockhands, head housekeepers, and all of the staff in between. I hear about them when we clean up leaves and pick up sticks. I hear about them as we make beds and fluff pillows. I hear about them as I chew my pancakes at breakfast and stare up at their faces.
It’s too early in the summer for this kind of apocrypha. It rattles me to hear about the talented, funny, strong people who came before. Maybe the veterans are feeling nostalgic for their former co-workers, are trying to suss out whether the new housekeepers and dockhands are anywhere near the calibre of
former ones, but all we hear from the returnees is how previous years were so good that the reunion parties happened fast and thick, that the staff couldn’t bear to be separated from one another for any amount of time. We hear that everyone is still close; we learn that they still go fishing together when they can coordinate some time off.
I stare up at the pictures of the vaunted ones with a bitter swell in my chest. We’re only a week into the season, and I’m racked with doubt. What if we never get as close? What if the past hangs too heavy over all of us and we never jell? How can our year ever be so reckless, driven, fun? How can my summer ever measure up?
* * *
Housekeepers work on a seven-day rotation. We have three days of serving food—breakfast before the guests go out, dinner at night when they come in off the lake, and the occasional lunch if someone decides to stay on shore for the day—and then cleaning rooms in between the meals; one day of floater duties (doing random chores around the lodge and being present in the main building during the day in case a guest needs something); one day of bartending; one day of laundry; and one day of dishwashing. I feel completely out of place, but fast, hard days of work mean learning on the fly, so I catch up as quick as I can. I learn that there’s no need to wake up so early before staff breakfast: all we need to do is roll out of bed, scrape our hair back, and stagger the short distance to the lodge’s back door. I learn how to balance plates of toast and eggs on my forearms so I don’t have to go back and forth to the kitchen too many times during the foggy-headed breakfast service. I learn that despite the jute, the back girls cabin still has holes in the walls, and the wind hisses through, calling to us in an unsettling way as we try to relax on our afternoons off. And I observe—very, very quickly—that the girls really do always stay on land.
Superstition holds that women aren’t allowed on board working ships. Females were believed to be a distraction, bad luck. We were temptresses: sirens out of the water who would lead the sailors to ruin. At Kesagami, though, the housekeepers aren’t even allowed near the water, let alone in a boat. The shoreline is for the boys, and a housekeeper who dares to break that rule is reprimanded immediately. The female staff don’t ever unload the guests’ luggage. We don’t dock boats. We don’t even get to walk on the interlock dock if there are guests present. Too close to water, too high of a chance of bad luck, maybe. There’s an actual line we aren’t allowed to cross on the shore, where the gravel path that leads down from the lodge ends and where the concrete of the dock base begins.
Despite what I’ve heard about the occasional female guest, the clientele at Kesagami seems to be mainly men, and many old-school fishermen want to see men on the lake and women in the lodge—the way it’s always been, the way they always want it to be. The housekeepers kind of knew what we were getting into when we applied for this job: we knew that we were going into an old-fashioned men’s world for sixty-seven days; we knew that we were going to be dealing with a male manager, a male cook, male co-workers, and mostly male guests. I’m a young woman, but even a young woman knows the full spectrum of what men can do when left to their own devices—messes made, impudence heightened, manners gone. We came into this job partly naive and partly already pushed around, as young women often are, and so now all that can be done is to buckle down, make our tips, and do what we were hired to do.
So the women do women’s work. The housekeepers’ chores are minutiae, little things that keep the place running without ever being perceptible, like filling the bottles of maple syrup, vacuuming the crevices of the guest rooms, replacing the toilet paper rolls, making sure the toast doesn’t burn. We’re made to stay inside the lodge, inside the cabins, inside the kitchen, inside the dining room; confined and passive. Meanwhile, the men do men’s work. They’re assigned to the forest, the open lake—dynamic places, places of motion and fresh air where they can chop and chainsaw and create and destroy. They’re allowed more glory. Their work is big. They rev motors with wide arcs of their arms and dramatic grimaces, straddling the gunwales of the boats and cracking their shoulders, farting like trumpets and then laughing at themselves.
One night, I accidentally stumble upon one of these big male tasks. I’ve folded every last sheet and washcloth and pillowcase I could get my hands on, and now have the evening off. Instead of burrowing into my bunk like I’ve been doing all week, like a chickenshit trying to avoid human contact, or opting to sit on the staff beach to write letters home, I’ve chosen to sit at one of the picnic tables on the main shoreline. There’s something about the quietness of the staff beach that frightens me; I’m not yet brave enough to sit there by myself, am too worried about what might leak out from the forest while I’m distracted. So I sit up on the higher part of the main shore, perched on a listing, splintery table, with a book in my hands but my eyes on the boys. Because, at the water’s edge, those boys are beginning to congregate, filtering down from all corners of the lodge; depending on the day they’ve had and their personality, they stumble or sashay or stalk down to meet one another. Dockhands emerge from their cabins with a speed I’ve not yet seen from them; guides come in off the lake and hop out of their boats as the motor is still sputtering. The clunky, rude young men I’m slowly starting to get to know suddenly become selkies, moving together in a fierce set of dance moves in order to line up near the boat farthest from the dock.
“What are they doing?” I aim my question at Alex as she hustles past me on the waterfront path. I may have the night off, but she has to boot it to the kitchen, where she’ll oversee the dinner service. Alex can be odd. I haven’t spent much time with her because she spends all of her time in her bunk, writing letters to her boyfriend. She’s also a complete veteran at this housekeeping business—this is her third year here, so she’s already perpetrated her hijinks; she doesn’t have time or patience for pranks or tit for tat. Because she can be so high-strung, I find her a little bit stressful, but mostly kind, intelligent, and good at what does. She looks out for the housekeepers in her care. She’s always willing to grab a sponge, a bucket, a broom, and make sure her girls are looked after and aren’t working alone. It’s a quality that’s rare enough in fully grown adults, never mind a twentysomething woman, and it makes her seem older than she is, in a good way.
“Pulling boats,” she says, her voice trailing after her. I watch her disappear between the trees en route to the main building.
Without any obvious verbal cues, those boys line up on either side of the first freighter canoe—a few young men on each side, with the two or three left over holding the rope that’s attached to the boat’s prow. They grip the weight of slick gunwales; their staff shirts stick to their backs; they pull their work gloves tighter onto their hands with their teeth; they crack their lower backs and their shoulders and their necks with grim determination, practising their own form of northern shoreline yoga, preparing for the ritual. Before I can move to take a photo, or sit up straight to get a better look, Jack and Pete shout something that doesn’t sound like words, and all of the men cock their heads down, bow their shoulders, and plow forward, their thighs flexing and swollen as they push the boat up the rails and into place. They bray from the stress of it, in the thick of it, moving hand over hand up the length of the coarse boat rope to heave the canoe out of the water and up onto the rails. I’m hypnotized by how beautiful it is, by its balletic danger. I’m struck, can’t move, held in place by the raw, powerful movements and the way the boys immediately change from clunky, rude gawkers into dance-footed, thick-armed warriors, nimble and tight and moving entirely as one being.
As I watch them pull boat after boat, the water behind them darkens with the slipping away of the day, and soon all I can make out are the boys’ bright white teeth. I start to notice that they each have their own position, and the positions never change. Pea, Kev, Jack, and Connor hold the gunwales. Gus anchors the rope at the very end, up near the shoreline, and Aidan stands beside him. Pete brings up the rear, a coxswain, shouting that everyone should k
eep pulling, keep pulling harder, harder, harder.
Every evening, the boys will have to pull the boats up from the water onto the boat rails on shore. The weather has the tendency to turn nasty at night, and if a boat stays in the shallows, its bottom can get irreparably damaged from rocking along with the howling wind. It’s a hard task, though, because these freighter canoes are about a thousand pounds each, and the boat rails sit at about a twenty-five-degree angle. This is a duty designed to test your attention and your agility and your strength, all after a day of serious work. The boat rails are treacherous when wet. The boys turn northern Wallendas on these slippery tightropes, trip the light fantastic, jumping from rail to slick rail mid-pull, moving their feet even as the rope is taut in their hands and the boat moving. If they fall, they get caught under the boat, break a leg, tear a muscle. If they fall, they hit their heads on the rocks, and the damage is untold, frightening to think about. So they don’t fall.
* * *
“Tell me the best stories from your years up here,” I say to Pea. The other veterans exchange looks and smile slowly. Dinner is over, so we have some time to sit and shoot the shit. Jack adjusts the buckles on his waders as Alisa flicks at her split ends. Farther down the table, Sydney is spooning cherry pie into her mouth and talking to Robin about the toilets she cleaned today; Robin is nodding emphatically, not at all put off by hearing about bodily functions while eating. Emma is twirling a butter knife absent-mindedly in her hand, folding slices of plasticky Swiss cheese into soft slices of white bread and eating them as a kind of after-dinner snack. I’m shifting around in my chair, trying to get comfortable. Comfortable—I’m not at that point, not this soon, but I don’t feel as awkward as I did the first few days, and so I feel brave enough to ask questions, poke around, see if I can glean any information.
