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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  But of everyone in the van, Papa Dick was probably the most tense. Usually immune to worries of a material nature, even he had to admit that the risk he was taking was huge. He had less than five hundred dollars left to his family’s name, fewer worldly possessions than his vehicle could hold, and no backup plan. In fact, he wasn’t even certain of our final destination. We were driving toward an expanse of the Rocky Mountains known as the Kootenay Plains, but where we would actually park and take the first footsteps into our new life remained to be seen. Papa Dick had heard rumor of a band of Cree Indians living along the river in the area, but he had also been warned that they could be unforgiving if they found white folk living on their land; there were reports of a small group of commune-dwellers who, not long before and after daring to trespass, had had their tents burned to the ground. Much better, my grandfather knew, would be to announce his plans to the Indians and obtain their blessing. Of course, we had to find them first.

  Two days after we left Hills, Papa Dick pulled off the David Thompson Highway into a crop of evergreens and killed the ignition. Everyone sat in silence, recognizing the significance of the moment.

  “Well,” my grandfather said finally, setting the parking brake and peering up at the sun. “We still have a few hours of daylight left. Let’s get going.”

  My family moved like a team of ants, gathering belongings and heaving canoes from the roof of the van. Everyone, that is, except my Aunt Jan, who moodily smoked a joint on the floor while I sat beside her, using her roach clip to pull threads from my shirt hem. Papa Dick fetched his axe and proceeded to hack off enough evergreen branches to conceal the vehicle from passing traffic, but still she sat in her darkened cave, sulkily blowing smoke into the air. My Aunt Jessie stood, staring into the van at her sister: the youngest and the oldest, the pleaser and the rebel. “Come on, Janny-wan, let’s go,” Jessie said in her slow and deliberate way, but Jan wouldn’t be swayed. Tossing back her long golden locks, she shook her head and squared her shoulders.

  Finally, my grandfather lifted me from the floor and gave Jan a sad shrug. “Lock up when you leave,” he said to her quietly, and walked with Jessie to join the rest of his family on the riverbank.

  Stepping close to the water, he surveyed the river in both directions. “Downstream,” he declared. “Even tribesmen need to go to town sometimes. It’s easier to paddle downstream with a boat full of supplies.” And with that, he pushed his canoe into the flow of the river and waited for my grandmother to follow suit. She hesitated, peering up at the road in the direction of her oldest daughter, and then slid her boat into the swirling current. Just then Jan came running down the bank, joint in hand.

  “Fuck it. Just fuck it all to hell,” she said to her father, and he started to laugh. Pretty soon the rest of the family joined in, and one by one they placed arms around shoulders and waists, forming a loose circle. Whatever the future might hold for the Persons, they would face it together.

  “YOU MAY STAY, BUT we will not look after you. Your survival is in your own hands.” These words were spoken by the chief of the Stoney Indian tribe, a man by the name of Randall, whose powerful, stocky build seemed at war with the soft cascade of his waist-length braids. Papa Dick’s instincts about the natives’ location had been right, and we had found them just over an hour into our paddle. My grandfather, with his gift for convincing others to see things his way, hadn’t taken long to win Randall over in our bid to stay on their land. Randall had even given us a brief tour of their camp. My family walked the pathways slowly, taking in the twenty or so tipis of canvas and rawhide, the cooking tent, the sweatlodge, and the corral of horses, all while forty faces stared at us curiously.

  Finally, the chief led us back down to the river and pointed to a fallen log, positioned several feet over the water and bridging the two shores.

  “There,” Randall said. “Over that log and through that stand of birch trees, you will find a meadow where the land is flat. Pitch your tipi close to the trees to break the wind. This is not your first tipi, I assume?” He fixed his eyes on my grandfather, who smiled broadly and adjusted his hat.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  Randall nodded and lifted a hand in farewell, his eyes lingering briefly on my mother. My grandparents stood facing the opposite shore, silently inspecting their new site. Nobody said the obvious: we may have found a home, but the real work was just about to begin.

  ONE THING MY FAMILY hadn’t anticipated was the rain. It came in a torrent shortly after we arrived, just when we were planning to fell trees to build our tipi frame. We took to our tents and remained there, trapped on our separate islands while we wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags and made our way through the dry food supplies. After three days, everything we owned was soaked, my mother was half-insane from listening to me scream in protest of my nylon prison and my grandparents’ spirits were as sodden as their clothing. On day four, they decided that enough was enough. As the rain poured down, my family pitched a lean-to to build a fire under, took turns cooking over our Coleman camping stove, traipsed into the forest to fell trees and stripped and bound poles. Within a week, the tipi frame was raised and readied for the shell. With her heart in her throat, my grandmother pulled the canvas from its bag and slowly unfolded it beneath the lean-to.

  The rain had lightened that day, but the ground was still slick. Grandma Jeanne watched as her husband and daughters, slipping and sliding in the mud, attempted to wrap the shell around the poles. She couldn’t even begin to count the number of hours she had spent on her treadle sewing machine, sewing strips of fabric together with nothing but a photo of a tipi from a newspaper clipping to guide her. If the seams didn’t hold or the canvas didn’t fit, her family had no backup winter shelter. Papa Dick tugged and stretched while her daughters pulled, but within a short time it became clear that my grandmother’s worst fear had been realized. If we hadn’t been so desperate for shelter, the scene would have been comical: our tipi ended a foot and a half short of the ground.

  While her daughters sank to the ground in defeat, my grandmother circled the tipi. Giving up, she knew, was not an option. She scribbled some numbers down on paper, then instructed her husband and daughters to get her sewing machine. They pulled it out from beneath a tarp, carried it under the lean-to, and stripped the tipi shell off the frame. Then, thanking her lucky stars she had brought both her sewing machine and extra fabric along, Grandma Jeanne threaded the needle and attached a length of fabric to the bottom of the canvas. Mom said there was a moment when my grandmother was sitting at her machine, sewing furiously in the meadow while the rain poured down around her, when she just threw her head back and laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. Everyone else joined in. That was one thing about the Persons: if nothing else, they were good at seeing the humor in their predicaments.

  BY LATE SUMMER, MY family was getting a handle on wilderness living. In many ways, it was everything my grandparents had envisioned: total privacy, a beautiful setting surrounded by mountains, clean water and air, and almost complete emancipation from the outside world. But in other ways, the work involved was much more grueling than even they had expected. Our diet consisted mostly of wild game, so my grandfather spent hours each day hunting bear, moose and grouse. And since he insisted on wasting no part of the animal, a successful big-game kill always meant weeks of work ahead. After the meat was cut, wrapped and stored in our tree platform, Grandma Jeanne would drain the blood to eat like soup, cut out the organs to eat, and boil the head and tongue to make a gelatinous mash known as headcheese. After that, almost every remaining part of the carcass was made into something useful: bones were carved into tools, antlers were made into hooks, and the hide was scraped with tanning knives and preserved with the mashed-up brain.

  Every day there was water to haul, laundry to wash in the river, wild berries, mushrooms, onions and edible flowers to pick, and endless amounts of wood to collect and chop for the upcoming winter. Mice quickly overran our tipi, mak
ing baiting and cleaning traps a regular necessity. And despite our best efforts, occasional trips to town were unavoidable. These were all-day affairs, with Papa Dick leaving before sunrise to paddle back to the VW, removing its branch camouflage, driving four hours to town, and gathering what food and supplies we couldn’t provide for ourselves. But even when he finally reached the grocery store, his task wasn’t a simple one. With money so tight, instead of paying retail he would offer an employee a few bucks for their past-prime produce. And, if all else failed, he wasn’t ashamed to head to the store’s Dumpster. The next day, Grandma Jeanne and her daughters would get out their paring knives and whittle every salvageable morsel of food out of the rot.

  My mother and me, demonstrating the only way to keep clean on the Kootenay Plains.

  To my grandmother, her work sometimes felt endless. Not only was there the cooking to do—she made bannock and yogurt, grew alfalfa sprouts, jarred berries, and stewed dried fruit—there was also the daily cleanup, which meant pots of water boiled over the open fire, several basins of dirty dishes, and the ongoing problem of where to put everything away. We were five adults and a toddler living in a twenty-foot circle, so to say quarters were cramped was an understatement. Besides my grandparents’ bed (sleeping bags atop a bearskin pallet), the tipi contained several tree stumps for chairs, four plastic food coolers, my grandfather’s book and rifle collections, our water barrel, a tape deck hooked up to a freestanding car battery that we used as a generator, some wooden shelving and two sets of antlers that acted as hooks mounted to the inside of the tipi frame. With no room for a table, food was prepared on the floor on chopping boards and we ate meals in our laps. My aunts, mother and I were sleeping in tents, but autumn was coming quickly and soon we would be forced to move into the tipi for warmth. Which brought us to a problem much more pressing than our need for more space: we desperately needed a woodstove, and with no money to buy one, even Papa Dick was beginning to worry.

  TO MY GRANDFATHER, EMPTYING one’s bowels was much more than the necessary evil it was to most folks. The way he saw it, almost every health problem could be traced to the intake and elimination of food, and he had even perfected a gut roll that he was fond of showing off. Starting at his diaphragm, his stomach muscles would clench and roll visibly downward to the base of his belly, releasing his colon in an impressive display. So it’s no surprise that of all Papa Dick’s creations, he was proudest of the shit pit. In lieu of an outhouse, this was our version of a toilet—quite simply, a ten-by-ten-foot hole dug in the ground with several boards over it to keep the flies out. Modern toilets were the cause of countless medical problems on account of the sitting position they forced their users to assume, my grandfather liked to say, but by contrast the shit pit allowed its customers to squat. It offered no privacy whatsoever, but by the time my family moved to the wilderness, such pretensions had long gone the way of refrigerators and running water. In fact the shit pit became a rather social place, and it was here that my Aunt Jan had her inspiration for our woodstove. My family was used to my aunt’s unpredictability—on some days she would scream or toss cold water over the head of whoever had been stupid enough to piss her off, on others she was needy and apologetic, and at still other times she would cry nonstop. But on her good days, she could be very resourceful.

  “I’ve got it!” she said to Grandma Jeanne, jumping up from the pit and zipping her cords. “The Indian camp! I saw something there we could use for a stove.” And with that she ran off before my grandmother, loath to ask the natives any favors, could protest. “Don’t worry,” Jan yelled back, as if reading her mother’s mind. “It’ll be an even exchange!”

  Two hours later, my aunt came back rolling a rusty old barrel, still dripping wet from being hauled through the river. Papa Dick looked at his daughter questioningly, and was just about to protest when she cut him short.

  “It’s better than nothing,” she said peevishly, and my grandfather could only agree.

  OUR NEW STOVE WAS christened The Guzzler on account of the amount of wood it burned. Using a metal saw, Papa Dick cut a hole in the barrel, creating a greedy belly that my entire family immediately became enslaved to. But by mid-October, we couldn’t have survived without it. Winter came on with a fierce howl, sweeping a thick layer of white across our landscape and bringing a drop in temperature so extreme that, for several brief ugly moments, my grandparents looked at each other and seriously wondered if they had made a grave mistake. Not that turning back was an easy option at that point; the river had already frozen over, leaving the nine-mile trek back to the VW possible only by ski and snowshoe, which only my grandparents possessed.

  By late November, Papa Dick was wondering if he’d chopped enough wood. He’d counted on two cords to see us through the winter, but with the stove burning constantly day and night, the woodpile was already looking picked over. We slept beneath layers of bearskins with heated rocks in our beds, but even then, we woke up with icy ears and snot frozen to the tips of our noses. It was the wind, though, that was the worst. Whenever it blew, it lifted the ill-fitting canvas off the poles just enough to let in a freezing billow of air. This caused some of the seams to rip, so after stormy nights my grandmother could be found inside the tipi with her needle and thread, furiously stitching it back together.

  IN APRIL OF 1972, my family felt confident; they had successfully made it through their first year in the wilderness living under canvas. Our food supplies were extremely low and our cash can empty but for a pitiful rattle, but we were all healthy and had the bounty of spring to look forward to: game, grouse, fish from the river and wild edible plants. But this far north, spring was a long-winded promise that rarely got fulfilled until late June, and as can so often happen, nature had one last surprise in store for us.

  It started on a day like many others, cold but not forbidding as the season slowly shifted into warmer gear. Our handmade tipi was battered from the long winter but still hanging in there like a determined hero. The wind began to howl as we were settling down to sleep, prompting Grandma Jeanne to heat some extra rocks in the stove for our beds. Papa Dick inspected the weakened seams of the canvas with a neutral expression, then went outside to double check the stakes that held the shell to the ground. With nothing to do but wait, we all went to bed and lay awake, listening to the impossibly loud beating of the tipi flaps. Eventually, we all must have fallen asleep.

  I remember one moment from this story, and that is being awakened by the sounds of a loud splintering and a horrifying ripping, and then a spruce tree crashing inside our tipi. It had fallen just shy of Grandma Jeanne’s head, clawing a hole in the canvas from the apex of the tipi poles right down to the ground. The loose canvas thrashed in the wind. Snowflakes stung at our faces. Jan was yelling, Jessie was crying and Mom was crushing me to her chest. My grandparents grabbed at the canvas, trying to pull it back over the naked part of the frame. The wind yanked mercilessly at the fabric, finding the weakest seams and tearing right through them. Within minutes the shell was in tatters, floating away into the darkness like an enormous ghost. Snow settled on our beds, floor and table, sparing only a circular area around the still-warm woodstove.

  The next thing we knew, Randall was beside us, holding a kerosene lantern and shouting at us to follow him. Mom yelled at me to find my boots, but they were crushed beneath the fallen tree. She finally hoisted me on her back, and we all traipsed through the swirling snow over the log bridge to the Indian camp. Randall led us into the cooking tent, where a warm fire was burning. We all gathered around the stove. Randall looked us over and then gave a low, rare laugh.

  “My good friends,” he said, “you must do something about that tipi of yours.”

  My mother and me navigating the log bridge from our camp to the Indian camp on a warmer day.

  THOUGH MY GRANDFATHER WAS loath to admit it, the Indians saved our butts. They made a deal with Papa Dick: they would give us one of their tipis, but they wanted to be paid for it—with cold har
d cash, not some bear or moose that they could very well hunt for themselves. My grandfather agreed, of course, and asked if he could have until summer to repay them. He would think of a way somehow, he assured his dubious family.

  Compared to our first tipi, our new one was downright luxurious. Four feet wider in diameter, the extra space felt cavernous to my previously overcrowded family. The canvas was heavier, and the commercial stitching was reinforced with nylon-edged seams. No one was more thrilled than Grandma Jeanne, who gazed admiringly at her surroundings as she cooked and cleaned, once again enchanted with her wilderness existence. Papa Dick even made some furniture for our new home: a wooden table, planed timber for our beds and a chair—a log whose shape was reminiscent of a swan, which Grandma Jeanne went gaga over and claimed as her own. Outside, the ice on the river finally began to melt away. We heard birds calling to each other in the mornings, and the snow in our meadow receded to patches on the brown, winter-worn grass. Despite our still-sorry food situation, everyone was filled with renewed optimism.