North of Normal- A memoir of my wilderness childhood, my unusual family, and how I survived both

by Cea Sunrise Person

  Chapter Two

  After years of living as misfits, coming to California felt like coming into their own to my family. People here actually seemed to care about things like freedom, healthy eating, and what was going on in the rest of the world. My grandparents rented a ramshackle old house ten miles south of San Jose on the outskirts of Los Gatos, and dedicated their days to pot smoking, nude cookouts, and philosophical discussions with the friends my grandfather made at his new job as a climbing instructor. The kids, left to their own devices, dropped out of school one by one. By the time my future mother Michelle was fifteen, all four of them were spending their days smoking at home and their evenings with various love interests. Dane’s primary affair seemed to be with LSD, but the girls made the most of their sexual freedom. They brought home guys, scruffy-looking characters with matted hair and rambling political opinions that no one listened to, who spent the night and then sat at the breakfast table with Grandma Jeanne the next morning with their dingdongs in full view. Before long, the Person residence became known to many as the coolest place in town to hang out; the music was hip, the drugs were in good supply, the two older daughters were pretty and willing, and the parents were always totally groovy with it all.

  One afternoon, my grandfather came home from work to find his wife having sex with another man. The couple was huddled under a sleeping bag on the living room floor, but the noises coming from within were unmistakable. Papa Dick stared down at the scene before him, his expression hard. It wasn’t that he was angry; he and my grandmother had had an open marriage almost since they arrived in California. It’s just that until that day, the arrangement had been strictly one-sided. While my grandfather brought women home to their bed, Jeanne had preferred to numb her evenings away with pot. Now panic gripped my grandfather’s heart. He turned away before his wife could notice him, and went to the backyard to sit with his head in his hands. At that moment, he admitted the truth to himself: this latest development was just another tear in the thin fabric that was barely holding his family together. His children were in crisis. Jan had taken up with a Hells Angels leader, and often came home drugged out on acid and beaten blue. Michelle was rarely seen without a joint in her hand, and didn’t have an inkling where Vietnam, the country’s number one topic of conversation, even was. Dane had been acting more and more strangely lately, a result, my grandfather was certain, of too many bad acid trips. And Jessie, though mentally challenged and barely thirteen years old, was bringing new guys home regularly. But if there was one thing Papa Dick was sure of, it was that society was to blame for his children’s troubles.

  My grandfather’s early golden view of California was fading fast. After three years there, he had begun to notice the hypocrisy of supposedly enlightened folks who professed their hatred of The Man by evening and then returned to their cog-grinding, hamster-in-the-wheel jobs by day. For all their talk about striking out against corporations and government, in the end these people still paid their taxes, kept their money in banks, and bought their burgers at McDonald’s. There were some exceptions—the commune-dwellers, for example, folks who started off with the best intentions but inevitably ended up using their emancipation as an excuse for one long, drug-fueled sex-fest. The antiwar crowd was more sincere in their convictions, but though the impending threat of the draft hung over his own son’s head, it was freedom my grandfather craved, not retreat from the powers of authority he so loathed.

  The idea that had been brewing in his mind since his teens was pulling at him stronger than ever now. He had heard talk about a movement up north in Canada, a land known for its harsh climate and gentle handling of disillusioned Americans. But a new country was only the start of my grandfather’s plan. He knew how to hunt, how to survive in the wild, and he had some exciting ideas about shelter. What his kids needed was fresh mountain air and dirt between their toes. If he could just get them away from the city and into nature, back to the basics of food, water, clothing and shelter, they might still stand a chance. And so, he thought, might his marriage.

  Papa Dick stood up and walked back into his house, filled with renewed conviction. He would wait until his wife’s lover left, then he would tell her that the time had come for them to pursue a life far more meaningful than the clichéd hippie existence they had allowed themselves to slip into. He was almost certain she would agree. In fact, there was only one person in the family my grandfather was worried about convincing, and that was his sixteen-year-old daughter Michelle. Because only days ago, she had come to her parents with some happy news: she was madly in love, ready for marriage and two months pregnant.

  THE FIRST TIME MY father set eyes on my mother, she was running toward him with her hair flying and bare breasts bouncing. Like an X-rated ad for Breck Shampoo, she stopped in front of him, tossed her waves aside and gave him a coy smile. Greg blinked back at her, more intrigued by her complete lack of modesty than he was by her appearance. He was one of my grandfather’s climbing students, and had just emerged from his VW bus to have dinner with my family. An aspiring artist and Catholic boy brought up within a hedged suburban community, he hadn’t yet lived large, but had plans to: a little climbing and surfing, a few years of university, a summer in Europe funded by the sale of his vehicle, and some fun with the women he had no trouble attracting. Greg was tall, brainy and handsome, a man who others considered to hold great promise. He was twenty-two years old and Michelle was fifteen. He grinned back at her, carefully holding his eyes above chest level, and it never even crossed his mind to become involved with such a young girl.

  There was, however, one small complication: it was the sixties.

  The Person family was like none my father had ever met before. They got high together, shared the bathroom for showers and bowel movements, and didn’t even bother closing their bedroom doors for intimate encounters. Fascinated by my grandfather’s unique outlook on life and inspired by his unfailing confidence, Greg began spending more and more time at the Person home. He dug the music they listened to, the food they ate, the fact that they talked about sex right out in the open, and that the females, not the least bit self-conscious, didn’t mind if he sketched nude drawings of them as they went about their day. Greg befriended everyone in the house, even Dane, but he was careful to avoid my perpetually topless mother.

  Michelle, however, had her eye on a target and wouldn’t be swayed. Although she was young, she had plenty of experience when it came to seduction, and in the end her persistence paid off. She had a boyfriend, some short dude with bad teeth named Little Joe who appeared to be living in the backyard shed, but that didn’t stop her from taking my father’s hand at the beach one evening and leading him to a secluded sand dune. For Greg, one night would have been enough, but he also understood the complications of bedding the daughter of the man he had come to nearly idolize. My grandfather seemed to approve of the relationship, so Greg decided to go with it, at least until Michelle lost interest. But each day only seemed to crush my mother tighter against him, until he felt like he couldn’t breathe. At night, she would trail her fingers over his body until he caught her hand in his own to stop it. Unabashed, she would leave the light on to stare at him as he slept, unable to believe her good luck. Here she was, not yet sweet sixteen, and she had already found herself a bona fide college man. My mother knew she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and she had already seen her share of trouble and pain, some of which she had promised herself she would never tell another soul. But her love for Greg made her want to forget all the darkness, and dive headlong into the promise of everlasting devotion and protection.

  WHEN MOM TOLD MY father she was pregnant, he asked her a few questions in disbelief (“Are you sure?” “Really sure?” “Totally positive?”), then left her house with the look of a trapped animal given the choice of chewing off his leg or waiting to die. A few days later, he came by and dropped off two hundred dollars in an envelope with the words I’m sorry scrawled across it, having sold his beloved VW b
us to secure the cash. My mother, utterly devastated, spent an entire week bawling her eyes out and comforting herself with her mother’s pot stash. Jeanne, at a loss to console her daughter, finally took a bus into the city to make the necessary arrangements. A short meeting with a doctor, a couple of signatures, and she was able to go home and tell Michelle it would all be over soon. My mother took to her bed and vowed not to leave it until either the day of the abortion arrived or my father had a change of heart.

  Against all probability, the house in Los Gatos had a telephone, though it was almost never used. But on an afternoon in May of 1969, less than a week before my mother was scheduled to abort me, the ringing of the telephone was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. “I’m in Reno,” Greg said to her over the line, his voice trembling with either excitement or fear. “Pack yourself a bag and get on a bus. We’re getting married.” Mom screamed and dropped the phone on the floor, she was that happy.

  MY MOTHER WAS A wife for five months. And when Greg left her again, this time for good, Papa Dick decided it was time to make his move. He sold off most of his family’s possessions, waved goodbye to his wannabe revolutionary friends and herded his wife and kids into the old VW bus. Mom once told me that her family left California on a Thursday and she didn’t stop crying until the following Friday, nearly one week after they had set up digs in a tumbledown house in a town just over the Canadian border whose name she didn’t even think to ask.

  Chapter Three

  If my mother hadn’t nearly lost her mind, we probably would have made it into the wilderness a lot sooner. Our time in Hills, British Columbia, was never meant to be more than a stopover to accommodate my birth, but it became an eighteen-month delay stretched out like a frayed elastic by my mother’s deteriorating state of mental health. And as my grandfather’s patience wore thin and tensions among family members built, my mother came face to face with her darkest inner demon: the green-scaled serpent.

  Just days after settling into our temporary home, a draughty old house negotiated by my grandfather in exchange for a side of bear meat, my mother took to pacing the worn floorboards with her hands at the small of her back. Still inconsolable over the loss of my father, she kept screaming at her mother, “What are we doing here?” Eventually, instead of answering, Jeanne just held her daughter’s hands and told her to push. On the last morning of November, just as the sun was appearing over the distant mountains, I was born in a tiny hospital just down the road from Hills in a town called New Denver.

  “A girl,” the doctor said, holding me by the legs like a plucked chicken. “And Lord above, but she’s a long and skinny one.” He laid me across my mother’s chest, and my eyes flew open and locked onto hers.

  “She looks exactly like her father,” she breathed to Grandma Jeanne, shaking her head sadly. “Cea. I’m going to call her Cea. That’s the name Greg picked out for her. Before . . .” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Look out the window,” Grandma Jeanne said, desperate to distract her daughter from her pain. “Look at that beautiful rising sun. Surely that’s a wonderful sign.” Just then, as if on cue, someone down the hall snapped on a radio and “Here Comes the Sun” filtered tinnily into the air. Mom lifted her face and smiled for the first time in weeks. “I love this song. That’ll be her middle name. Sunrise.”

  Freshly named and scrubbed, I went home that evening. Mom placed me in a cardboard box in front of the fireplace. She looked down at me sleeping peacefully, then went to her bedroom and returned with something in her hands. “Suzie Doll,” she said softly, tucking her childhood doll in beside me. “Who would have thought you’d be replaced by the real thing so soon?”

  MY MOTHER TOLD ME that when I let out my first wail, shortly after my homecoming and just minutes after she herself had finally fallen asleep, it took hours to reach its end. “She’s colicky,” my grandmother declared as I continued to scream my way into day five, but that was just the beginning of it. I shrieked day and night, practically without pause, until even the neighbors inquired. My overwhelmed mother took to gazing straight ahead as if paralyzed while I cried, or walking in aimless circles with my head flopped sideways onto her hand. When I arched my back and wailed instead of feeding, she would lay me down on her mattress and leave the room to smoke a joint.

  One evening, Papa Dick found my mother standing at an open window with a pitiful look of defeat in her eyes and her arms wrapped limply around my writhing body. He scooped me up, led his daughter over to her bed, and then brought me outside while he chopped wood for the fireplace. Things hadn’t been easy for his family since their move to Canada. Jan had already run away once, hitchhiking back to California to reunite with her biker lover, only to return home when she found him passed out with another woman’s lips wrapped around his flaccid penis. Just recently, the family had had supper with folks at a local commune, a visit that resulted in a dose of the clap for Jan and a case of hep B for the rest of the family. Dane’s increasingly erratic behavior—he left the house late at night and ranted on about aliens posing as government officials—was becoming more and more worrisome. And now Michelle’s sanity seemed to be slipping. As much as my grandfather was itching to be on his way, he knew his dream would have to wait a little longer. There was no way he could afford to have two of his kids losing their marbles out in the bush.

  As it turned out, Papa Dick was right to be cautious. My mother’s day of reckoning came when I was about six months old. It happened when she was sitting in the bedroom she shared with her sisters, staring at herself in the mirror while she smoked a joint. The house was empty, and I was screaming. Mom had been trying to soothe me for hours, rotating like an automaton through a futile routine of lullaby, walk and swaddle. I hadn’t nursed since morning, too wound up to latch on to her breast, so she finally gave up and just placed me in her lap. She knew it would only be a matter of time before I hyperventilated enough to pass out, which happened on the really bad days.

  As my shrieks filled the room, Mom took a deep pull on her joint and plucked a photograph from the corner of the mirror. It was a picture of my father, taken during the time they had been together. He was wearing a fringed suede vest and playing the guitar. My mother let out a loud sob and collapsed in a heap beside me. How could he have done this to her? She hadn’t even wanted a baby, but he had married her and given her hope, and then left her when she was too far along to do anything about it. And now her parents were going to move her to the wilderness, of all places, where quite possibly she would never meet another man as long as she lived.

  Suddenly it all seemed too much to bear. My mother put me down on the floor and lay beside me with a brand-new idea in her head. Although the thought was a scary one, it was also strangely comforting: a permanent way out. She pondered her options. There were no pills in the house, no vehicle to sit in and asphyxiate herself, and no high buildings or bridges nearby. Her father’s hunting rifles were in the basement, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to reach the trigger if she aimed it at herself. Her only viable option seemed to be a rope. She considered this for a while, but all she could think of was a photo she’d once seen in National Geographic of a woman’s face after she’d hung herself. Despite my mother’s misery, ugly and bloated was not the way she wished to exit the world.

  Still laid out on the floor, Mom finished up her joint and lit another. Her mind entered a sort of hazy state of emptiness. She stopped thinking about ways to kill herself, about my father, and even about me. She just smoked and lay there, staring up at the ceiling. After a while, she noticed an annoying sound in her ear that wouldn’t go away, like the buzzing of a mosquito. At first she thought it was leaves rustling outside her window, but then she realized it was actually a voice, and that it was speaking to her. Yes—it was telling her to look in the mirror. She sat up and did so, and right there, coming out the top of her head, was a serpent.

  My mother, more curious than afraid, stared at the reptile. It was small and sh
iny, with perfectly formed green scales, and it rose directly up from her hair like a curl of smoke. And as she gazed at it, she knew exactly why it had come. It had come for her mind.

  As my mother listened, the serpent spoke to her. Her sanity had been crumbling for some time, the snake said, but it had now reached the end of the line. All that was left for her to do was to make a choice. She needed to decide if she wanted to enter into a world where everything would be easier, but where her days would be ruled by confinement rather than freedom.

  Me as a baby, wearing Papa Dick’s hat.

  Freedom. It was this word that jarred my mother from her trance. She knew it was something she wouldn’t be able to live without, and she silently said as much to the serpent. It nodded, satisfied, and flicked its tongue at her one last time. Now, it said to her, pick up your baby. Mom shook her head to clear it, and her ears slowly tuned in to the sound of my cries. When she looked back at the mirror, the snake was gone.

  After that, things changed. Mom put my father’s picture away in a box, and swore off drugs for a good month or so. She was grateful for her narrow escape, but she also understood that her decision had come with a price: no more denial. No matter how unprepared she might be for motherhood, her fate was now tied to mine until the very end of her days.

  Chapter Four

  The journey from southern British Columbia to northern Alberta is a long but picturesque one, with each bend in the road revealing yet another view straight out of a Canadian tourism brochure. Wildflowers spring from green hillsides, dense forests give way to rippling bodies of water, and snow-topped mountain faces loom against bright blue skies. The scenery, however, was little more than a distraction from my family’s anxious thoughts. It was May of 1971, eighteen months after my birth, and my grandfather was finally on the road to his dream. But for such a monumental day, the mood in the van was somber. My Aunt Jan had nearly convinced herself to get out at the next gas station and hitchhike, yet again, back to California. Grandma Jeanne alternated between worrying about the viability of their tipi—after all, she had made it herself and never tested it—and wondering if they would be able to survive a freezing northern winter at all. Aunt Jessie simply feared that they might all starve to death. And my mother couldn’t help but think about her brother Dane, who had hit the dead end of mental soundness several months before and was noticeably absent that day. She could only hope that I, now sleeping straddled across her lap as the highway unwound behind us, would never learn why he was no longer with us.