by Anna Maxymiw
In the city—any city—Canada geese annoy the hell out of me. They are evil, malicious, and violent, and I wonder why we don’t actively get rid of them. They gather in baleful flocks, terrorizing people, slicking the ground putrid green with their shit. Up here, though, they’re different: gun-shy, feral, less complacent. Sweeter. Odder. They’re too wary to land near us, and rarely fly close; they exist to me only as a V across the setting-sun sky, an echoing chorus of honks, something that reminds me of home without seeming like home at all.
The geese fly at unexpected times. The dockhands might be pulling boats or chopping wood, and the honk will start from one edge of the lake, so soft I don’t even hear it at first, but not soft enough to escape ears more attuned than mine. That’s when the guides’ heads pop up from behind the boat rails, one at a time, and the boys amble down from the high shore to the edge of the water. Their sun-browned faces soften with pleasure as they turn to the sky. Their eyes close in preparation for a moment of showing off.
The fishing guides and dockhands can call flying geese out of flock formation. I don’t know how they do it, what unseen efforts lead to the jarring two-tone echo of the goose cry. Maybe it’s in the contraction of the glottis, the squeeze and release of the sleekest muscles of the throat. Maybe it’s in the angle of their heads. Maybe it’s magic. Most likely, it’s an out-of-city thing. There are wooden calls designed for this—Kevin has a string of them hanging from his bunk bed—but there’s more pride in being able to lure a flock with just natural aptitude. Many of the guys hunt, know how to field dress a deer, how to fillet a fish on a board on a bucket in the middle of a moving boat. They know how to stalk bears, how to start even the crankiest Husqvarna chainsaw. A good number of the lodge employees, including some of the women, all attend the same outdoor college. They’re aiming toward degrees in fish and wildlife, arboriculture, aquaculture, outdoor adventure skills. My in-progress writing degree falls flat in comparison.
“What are you taking in school, Anna?” Jack asks me one night at dinner, a smile on his shit-eating face. He already knows—everyone knows everyone’s business—but he wants to start a conversation and so he’s prodding.
“Writing,” I start. I don’t get to finish, because the rest of the guys erupt. They lean back and hoot and blare.
“Arts degree! Arts and crafts,” Jack says. “What do you do in arts and crafts, Anna?”
“I bet you make paper-plate tambourines!”
“Do you put rice in your tambourines, Anna?”
“Dried beans?” “Peas?”
“Is that how you get your degree? Show them your tambourine? Do you know how to play tambourine?”
They must have planned this; the responses are too choreographed to be something random. I don’t tell them what I want to say—You fucking idiots. I can write. I’m good at something too. Instead, I lift my shoulders, try not to show weakness. “Yeah,” I say. “Master of fine arts. MFA. Stands for master of fuck all.”
This earns me a laugh, which makes me feel a bit better. The moment is broken up as Henry pokes his head into the room with a frown on his face.
“If you get any louder, the guests at the bar are going to be able to hear you.”
Some of the girls roll their eyes, trying to keep it hidden under the brims of hats or the edges of hoods. Some of the guys pick their teeth with the tines of their forks, purposefully avoiding his gaze. We think we’re being subtle in our small acts of disobedience, but Henry has the knack of knowing all.
“Okay, okay,” Kev says around a mouthful of pizza.
“And you have five minutes to finish up before I need the housekeepers to get ready to go out into the dining room,” Henry says to everyone wearing serving whites before he slips around the jamb and disappears.
* * *
Connor leans over.
“It’s easy to do, gal,” he says.
Kevin rolls his eyes. “As if.”
Connor is trying to teach me to call geese. He shakes his head at Kev, silently chiding him, and turns to me.
“You just have to say luke.”
“Pardon?”
“Luke, luke, luke. Just say it over and over, real fast. Luke. You’ll call ’em.”
The three of us are sitting at the staff picnic table: Kev has a day off from the lake, and Connor has finished his chores, and so I’ve asked them about calling.
“I can’t do that!” It’s not so much that I can’t do it; maybe I could, if I tried. But I can’t bring myself to actually open my mouth and say the words; I feel myself blushing. It mortifies me in the same way that singing in public does. It’s performance in front of people who know what they’re doing, and I decidedly do not know what I’m doing. I whisper luke under my breath, and Kev giggles. Connor hides a smile. Luke. Lukewarm. I don’t think there’ll be any geese filtering my way.
But it can’t just be that, repeating one word over and over again. Hollering luke at the top of your lungs is all well and good, but even Connor’s missing something—the throat jump, the muscle contraction that leads to the deeper, harsher sound. I know that some of the other men can call like that. When I hear them, it makes the hair on my arms and legs stand up. The first time I heard it, I dropped my rake and stood, frozen, cocking my ears, craning my neck and looking up for the geese that didn’t exist.
I know I won’t be able to do it. I know I’ll probably never feel completely comfortable in this place. At the same time, I’m enamoured with the sweet kind of loneliness I’ve uncovered in Northern Ontario. I always knew that there was a deeper significance to uncover about this land—that somewhere north, the petticoats of the country unfolded themselves to reveal an underbelly hard and old and unforgiving. I always knew that there was a sky bigger than the one pinned up, lackadaisically, over the Big Smoke.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to go back to the city and feel at home. Maybe my experience in the North will change me indelibly. It seems like such a frivolous thing to worry about: city slicker anxious that concrete and asphalt won’t feel familiar under her heels, that the forest will gnaw out the part of her that makes a metropolis feel like home. But even now, even here, there’s something about Toronto—its listless streetcars, the vast parks cradling couples, its stinking and seductive maw—that calls me out of place. There’s something about Vancouver—its rich, dark mountains, its lacy mist of rain, its desperation—that makes me question formation, the idea of belonging. I’m existing between two concepts of myself, the city and not-the-city, and I can’t figure out where I’m supposed to land.
Up here, where the world has started to offer itself to my imagination in every regard, I’m able to find something poignant in the honk of the geese. I like to think that they’re watching us, wondering who the silly mammals are down below, wondering why we don’t move in the V-formation, too.
Maybe I don’t need to learn to call geese. Truth be told, I’m fine with never learning that skill—it’s not in my wheelhouse, and these aren’t my talents. Instead, I sit back and watch as Jack, Gus, Kev, and Connor crouch close to the ground and flick their heads back when they see a flock spackled against the sky. The guys cast silhouettes against the strange, burnished glow of the setting sun. They’re not quite in that V-formation, but they stretch, walk, laugh together as a group, loud and in line and comfortable with one another. For all their rudeness, those boys are never as wild as when they gather together on bent knees like this. This is their strength, and it makes me fall in love with them even a little bit more.
How is it that the sounds that I found so irritating in the city have carved out a new place in my heart? How is it that I thought geese were ugly and malevolent? This is our link, this ornithomancy. The sky ribbons through both the city and the forest, connects the view from a fire escape with the view from a lonesome dock. If I look hard enough, long enough, there are messages to be seen from on high. An eagle perched on a branch means that even the noblest have to unbend to survive. A crow on a fire
escape means laughter is near, means you’re about to get taken down a few notches. A goose in the sky means that despite loneliness being wild and harsh around your heart, despite the fact that you feel forlorn sometimes when the bowl of the firmament seems too vast for you to mean anything, there’s a place for you, and you’ll find it.
CAKE
“Cake time, boys!”
Pea’s announcement at the breakfast table confuses me because the veteran men groan and the veteran women snicker while the new staff just look bewildered.
I lean over to Alisa, trying to talk as quietly as possible. “Like, Sam’s baking—”
She shakes her head violently. “No. No.”
Jack hears our exchange and laughs like a horn. “You wanna know what cake is, Big Rig? Meet us at the septic tank this afternoon.”
I stop buttering my bread and take the slice of cheese from between my teeth, where I was keeping it away from greedy male hands before I added it to my sandwich. Anything is up for grabs, so you have to play defence—always. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I’m still not sure what cake is, but if it has to do with the septic tank, it’s decidedly, one hundred per cent, definitely completely not something that Sam is baking, and it’s also not anything remotely good, either.
Jack raises his eyebrows, still smiling.
“What—”
I don’t get far into my question before Kev hollers at me from other end of the table. “Poop!”
“Obviously it’s related to that if it’s about the septic tank, Rook,” I grumble around a mouthful of bread and cheese, using the nickname he hates so much in an attempt to deflect attention.
Jack, Pea, Alex, and Tiff guffaw, and Kev gives me the finger with a grimace. I wince a wordless apology at him, and hope he understands.
Alex takes pity on me. “It’s when they empty out the septic tank using a shovel and a wheelbarrow.”
Syd cocks her head. “Excuse me?”
“Not, like, every week,” Alisa says.
“Yeah, more like every month,” Tiff adds from a few chairs over.
“Just wait until they play the game,” Alisa continues, grinning.
“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, don’t—”
“Tampon or fungus.”
“What!”
“I guess there’s a fungus that grows in the tank that looks a lot like tampon strings.”
There are groans and hollers from both sides of the table as Henry rounds the corner, leaving his office to shush us and tell us that we have to start getting ready for the day.
“Hey batter, batter,” Pete hums under his breath as we stand up to exit the staff dining room, and the boys erupt as we snake out into the main building, and I can’t help but smile, too.
* * *
I never thought I’d work a job that was dictated by human shit. It didn’t even occur to me that working up close and personal with shit would be a part of the job. Before this summer, I’d never immersed myself in any kind of work that revolved around the ins and outs of the human body, never had to create a schedule or chores around human refuse. I’d worked a secretarial job at a hospital; been a pro-shop employee at a snooty golf course; helped out with arrangements in a flower store; worked as a shop assistant at a bath-bomb chain in Vancouver. But things change when you’re following men around and cleaning up after them. At best, it’s funny and humbling. At worst, it’s so humiliating there are times when I want to cry tears of rage. The housekeepers are not only modern-day chambermaids, we’re also plumbers, cleaning ladies, mother figures, mock-wives, servants, and, on the bad days, whipping girls.
But mainly, we’re the Queens of the Clean. Every day, after we serve the guests their heavy, rich breakfasts of sticky eggs and oily flapjacks, the fishermen head out on the water and the girls run to start tidying the rooms. We start in the motel and eventually move to the cabins, making the beds, vacuuming or sweeping the floors, refilling the toilet paper and restocking the tissue boxes, refolding towels that the guests left for another day and replacing towels that need desperately to be changed. We pick up garbage off the floor, scoop hairs out of the shower drains and the sinks. We bend, straighten, bend, straighten, turn messy male hovels into livable rooms all on four or five hours of crappy sleep. We do this with aplomb and a liquid efficiency, murmuring to one another in a housekeeper language that we all understand: linens are passed hand over hand before we fully say that we need them, glass cleaner is sprayed and the next set of hands has a wad of paper towel at the ready before the liquid has time to run down the mirror. We’re masterful at what we do, and we’re getting better every day.
Despite our burgeoning mastery, when it’s time to clean the toilets, we always find ourselves staring down at the bowl and sighing. A weeklong trip filled with deep-fried shore lunches does funny things to a man. I predict that cleaning shit-covered toilets for a summer will do funny things to a girl, too.
The young women are always up close and personal with corporeal maleness, men’s bodies. The male staff only have to deal with the toilets, with filth, if a bad clog has gotten worse and none of the girls has the arm strength or the energy to manipulate the plunger. The women deal with the guests’ bodily functions on an intimate level: shit stains on the laundry, handed off without eye contact or even a mumbled “thank you,” misplaced pieces of used toilet paper, and the shit that finds its way onto and into things we never dreamed of before coming up here.
* * *
The majority of the guests go to relieve themselves in the bathhouse since there’s no running water in the cabins and walking to the motel for the nicer flush toilets takes too long. The housekeepers say a little prayer before entering the bathhouse despite there being only two toilets to deal with. One is in a little wooden stall: a large man can’t fit in there and shut the door, so the toilet often stays unused and we don’t wince when we look in. But the second toilet is tucked back into a dark corner, in a much bigger stall that has its own window and a large supply of toilet paper. Comparatively, it’s a bathroom fit for a king, if said king is apt to take a shit on the floor of his castle. The unlucky housekeeper on bathroom duty that day gently swings the door open, knowing there’ll be something bad in there. It’s a feces lottery, and all of us cross our damn fingers that our bathhouse day won’t be so bad that we have to snap our hands into the cheap latex gloves Henry provides.
But it’s always bad. Sometimes, there’s a thick rime of shit crawling up the toilet seat and lid like perverse lichen, spreading from the bowl with vicious tendrils. Sometimes, the men have missed the toilet completely—on purpose or by accident, who the hell knows—and have left their shit-smeared wads of toilet paper on the floor behind the bowl.
On one of my bathhouse-cleaning days, there’s a piece of poop stuck to the wall like a little projectile, as if one of the guests pulled his pants down, bent over, aimed, and let rip. I stand and stare for a moment before yelling a wordless invocation at the top of my lungs. My witchery works, because some of the other housekeepers come running from the cabins where they were making beds, thinking that maybe I found a particularly gnarly bug or that the dockhands have pinched my basket of cleaning supplies and run away with it, a common prank. When Aubrey, Tiff, and Alisa all screech into the bathhouse, skidding across the mat on their heels like a bunch of cartoon characters, they find me standing in the darkest corner of the larger stall, and they know what’s happened.
We crouch down to stare, like prospectors finding gold. At least I’m not alone for this.
“What the hell—”
“I’m more curious to know how this…the, you know, the physics of it,” Aubrey says, cocking her head to one side as she assesses the situation.
I nod. We stare some more. I can feel Alisa jiggling beside me, and I already know she’s laughing the kind of hard, quiet laugh that’s too strong to control. Tiff has her hand over her brow, looking up at the shit on the wall from between her rigid fingers, basically speechless. �
��Did he—did he aim?”
“Either that, or he did it with his hands,” Alisa says in a choked voice, and that’s when we all dissolve, hunched in the shadowy corner, bent at the waist, arms wrapped around one another as we laugh and laugh and laugh. If we don’t laugh, we might cry at the idea of cleaning a man’s excrement off a wall because that’s our job.
The mess never ceases to amaze me. From ripped-apart beds to clothes thrown across cabin floors to explosive shit in the toilet bowls, it boggles the mind. Why does getting away from home become synonymous with guests losing their sense of propriety? It’s as if the angry part of the wilderness—the part that turns people into predators—leaches into every male psyche, turns every guest into some primeval version of himself. Too lazy to throw the toilet paper directly into the toilet? No problem—chuck it on the floor for a girl to pick up. Too drunk to aim properly into the urinal? Piss on the floor and wait for the housekeepers to come and clean it. Left your pubic hairs all over the bedsheets? The girls will wash it. The girls will. The girls will. The girls always will, on hands and knees, eyes to the floor.
* * *
It’s a quieter night in the lodge, with only two thirtysomething men at the bar. They’re both Americans, dressed in camo sweaters, and fairly well behaved in that they’re not getting shit-faced or making lewd comments, so I’m acting along and being as patient as I can be, in between moments of covertly watching the clock.
“You know, youse guys are different,” one of them says.
My bartending shift is my least favourite shift. When a housekeeper tends the bar, she has to stay alone in the lodge until the last guest leaves. Although Henry sleeps in the main building, and technically his bedroom is right behind the bar wall—“Bang on the wall if you get into trouble and need someone to intervene,” I’m told by Tiff and Alex when they explain how the bar shift works—it’s unnerving to fend for yourself with only fishermen to keep you company. Most of the guests behave themselves. The majority don’t drink that much, because there’s nothing worse than waking up early with a hangover and then spending an entire day in a boat on choppy water. But there are a few outliers, and times when I feel genuinely unsettled. There was a tall, thin-haired guy who apparently scouts for an NHL farm team, who asked me if my nickname is “Big Rig” because I have a big ass; he was the last one to leave the bar that night, after having stayed far too long, and as soon as the door shut behind him, I ran to lock it.
