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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  There was much to do over the next week as my family prepared for our departure. Belongings were loaded into the canoes and paddled to the VW, our few bags of trash were taken into town, the shit pit was filled in and the food platform was torn down from the tree. The last to go were the tipis themselves. My grandparents stripped the canvas shells from the poles, leaving them standing like wooden skeletons. When the poles were finally untied and lowered, we all took a moment to gaze at the three worn circles left on the ground.

  “Don’t cry, Mommy,” I said, taking her hand as she wiped her tears. Then everyone was crying, even Papa Dick. I stood close to my mother, my arm around her waist, and waited for her to stop.

  Three years to the month after we first set foot in our campsite, we were ready to leave it. All the Indians came down to the river to say goodbye. My grandfather stepped toward Randall and took his hand, and they stayed like that for a long time. Then Randall hugged my mother and lifted her into one of the canoes. The rest of us piled in, and Randall pushed us off from the shore.

  At that moment I finally understood what was happening. As water droplets flew from Papa Dick’s paddle, I fell into my mother’s lap and wept for the home I was leaving behind. My mother shushed me and stroked my hair, but Papa Dick didn’t turn around. I peered over the edge of the canoe toward shore and saw forty faces shrinking into the distance. Randall, standing on the riverbank with his long black braids shiny against his suede jacket, lifted a hand. I lifted my own hand and held it there until he disappeared from my view, then I collapsed into my mother and cried some more.

  Chapter Eight

  As much as Papa Dick believed in steering clear of political topics, even he couldn’t resist sometimes poking fun at the government. He liked to say it was so messed up that often one hand had no idea what the other was doing, or “while one hand’s in the corporate cookie jar, the other’s wiping the devil’s ass.” This was demonstrated by our move from the Kootenay Plains. Apparently, someone in the government’s native affairs department had gotten wind of my family’s lifestyle and decided that Dick Person was the man to teach an experimental new program: Native Culture Re-Instigation. In other words, in an effort to reduce alcoholism and violence among the native population, my grandfather, a white man, was being paid to teach Indians how to be Indians. Adding to the absurdity was that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had just driven us from our camp for a bit of pot, and this double dose of irony made the opportunity irresistible to my grandfather.

  Our new home was the Stoney Reservation, located on the golden plains of southern Alberta. It consisted of about fifty run-down cabins and trailers; the problem was that we were required to live in one of them. And even though Papa Dick assured us we would only live there for a few months and then sneak back to the bush, for the first time I could remember, Grandma Jeanne seemed mad at my grandfather. She scowled at the Indian who handed over our key, then she unlocked the door and pushed it open so hard that it hit the wall. We all stepped inside.

  The place was a shambles. Floorboards were rotted through in several places, and the blankets on the single room’s two beds were soiled and riddled with mouse-chewed holes. The building’s lone window was broken out and covered with plastic, framed by a nicotine-yellowed curtain. The electric stove was crusted with what looked like years of careless cooking. Cockroaches scuttled across the floor, even though such insects were almost unheard of in this part of the world.

  Wordlessly, Grandma Jeanne fetched her cleaning supplies from our van, and the Person women got to work. They stripped, washed, scrubbed and wiped, and by that evening our home was livable. I slept on the floor beside Mom, staring at a wall that looked like it was crusted with boogers.

  While Papa Dick got to work trying to win over his new pupils, I spent my days exploring the reserve. But try as I might, it was impossible for me to relate these natives to the ones we had just left behind.

  “Papa Dick,” I asked him one day, finally, “why are the Indians so different here?”

  “You hear that?” he responded, pointing at a nearby cabin window, and I leaned toward the sound coming from within. “Television,” he said scornfully. “It rots the mind. Not to mention white sugar. Have you seen what they eat here?”

  I shook my head and kept quiet, thinking guiltily of the Mars bar I had devoured that morning. I had found it half eaten on the ground, but I knew where it had come from. There were lots of children at the reserve, and one of their favorite activities was raiding the supply cabin. They didn’t play with me, but I didn’t much care because I didn’t want to play with them, either. They ran together as a pack, their hair flying out long behind them and their noses in a permanent state of runniness. I would stand on a bed inside our cabin, pushing the plastic aside so I could stare out the window at them. They pulled each other’s hair and tried riding the dogs like horses. Another thing that was strange about the Indian kids were their parents. With the summer visitors, I had always known which kid belonged to which grownup, but here I never saw any adults around the kids, and when I did, they just seemed to ignore each other. It made me extra-glad to have Mom. I knew I could usually find her in our cabin, smoking a joint with my aunts or Grandma Jeanne. And whenever she saw me, her arms would always open up for a great big hug.

  PAPA DICK’S GOVERNMENT JOB with the natives didn’t last long. After several months of trying to interest them in hunting, canoeing and tipi-raising, he wrote the band off as hopeless. They drank all night and slept all day, my grandfather complained, and spent the remainder of the time so hungover they couldn’t tell a tipi pole from their asshole. He didn’t even tell the Indians we were leaving. We just woke up one morning and Papa Dick announced that it was time to go. Then we piled into the VW and headed thirty miles west, until Papa Dick found a spot he liked well enough to pitch our tipi and call home.

  Chapter Nine

  By the time I was five, I understood why my Uncle Dane hadn’t made it into the wilderness with us. Not only was he in the loony bin, he also had a disease. I had even learned to pronounce it: skit-so-fren-ee-a. Mom said it meant you were crazy, but that it wasn’t really your fault because you couldn’t help all the weird thoughts that came into your head. “Like what kind of weird thoughts?” I wanted to know, but it seemed like nobody in my family wanted to talk about my uncle. In fact, the only time he really entered our lives at all was when my grandparents received his quarterly psychiatric reports from the mental hospital.

  I could always tell when Papa Dick was reading one, because instead of reading out bursts of news the way he would from a friend’s letter, he would skim it silently. Sometimes Grandma Jeanne would dab at her eyes. After Papa Dick finished reading, he would place the letter in a tin box along with some money I knew he was saving to buy Dane a new set of false teeth. Mom told me Dane had stolen a hammer from the hospital storage closet and smashed his old set to pieces. So that summer, when a man with a toothless grin showed up at our new tipi camp, I knew exactly who he was.

  One evening shortly after my uncle arrived, the whole family gathered in my grandparents’ tipi for supper. I couldn’t stop staring at Dane’s mouth, which sunk into his face like a little cave. It seemed funny to me that even though he was the one with no teeth, he was also the only one doing any talking. As he gummed his fried rabbit and dandelion-green salad, he told us his good news: he was cured. The doctors had released him, and he was doing so well he was even planning to go off his meds.

  “What are meds?” I asked, but no one answered.

  Papa Dick removed his hat and smoothed his hair with his hand before clearing his throat.

  “How did you find us?” he asked.

  Dane grinned and leaned back on my grandparents’ bed, lacing his hands behind his head. “I knew you were close to Morley. I hitchhiked there, then asked around town. Phil Mesker down at the post office gave me a ride out to the dirt road. After that it was easy—I just followed the trail.”

  Papa D
ick nodded. Close to a creek, our new camp was a three-mile hike through the forest from the nearest dirt road. And although we had only been there a few months, our route through the trees had already worn into a telltale trail. “Well,” he said, “what say we go and pitch you a tent for the night.”

  Dane sat bolt upright, nearly smacking his head on the overhead antler rack. I jumped. “For the night?” Dane shouted. “What are you talking about, old man?” He thumped his chest. “I’m here to stay. Just look at me—I’m cured!”

  “I heard you,” my grandfather said quietly. “Let’s just take it one day at a time.”

  Dane stood up and stormed out of the tipi. Papa Dick followed, and the women glanced at each other. Then Grandma Jeanne started filling the basin to wash the dishes, and nobody said a thing.

  “LOOK,” DANE SAID, HOLDING out a stick to me. “It’s a beetle. I made it for you.”

  I took the carving and turned it over in my hands, wondering what my uncle was talking about. Even though I had seen him whittling away at it all day, this piece of wood looked like exactly what it was, a stick of wood and nothing more. I set it down on the ground beside Suzie Doll.

  Ever since my uncle had arrived, it had been hard for me to get away from him. In the beginning, he had spent most of his time away from our camp, going for walks in the forest and bathing in the creek as part of a healing routine my grandfather had put him on. “He needs to get back to what’s important,” Papa Dick explained to me. “Earth, sun, fresh air and water . . . he’s out of touch with nature. That’s what happens when you live among concrete and pollution. It rots your mind.”

  But it didn’t take long for Dane to start spending more time at home. One day, I walked by his tent and noticed something new at his doorway: a folded piece of cardboard with letters on it. I knelt down, sounding out the words the way Papa Dick was teaching me: Dane lives here, it said in bright red marker. And after my uncle put that assertion down on paper, things began to change. He would find me wherever I was playing, then sit close to me and tell me a story. At first I wasn’t really interested, but then he started being nice to Suzie Doll. He would pick her up and hold her like a real baby when he talked, so after a while I started to pay attention. The truth was that he had some pretty good stories. My favorite was the one about the time a friend of his at the hospital put a spider in his mouth, then opened it up to scare the shit out of a nurse.

  “Grandma Jeanne told me you knew me when I was little,” I said to him one day, holding Suzie Doll by the hands and somersaulting her over and over. “But I can’t remember. What did I look like then?”

  Dane smiled. He was whittling, the wood curling off the blade of his knife as he spoke. “I knew a baby,” he replied, “but she didn’t look like you.” He turned his stick around and started working on the other end. “You’re pretty.”

  “I am?” I brought my fingers up to my cheeks, pressing at the bones under my skin. If I’d ever seen my reflection before, I couldn’t remember what I looked like. Besides, I didn’t really understand what “pretty” meant, except that Barbie was for sure. I decided that the next time I went to my grandparents’ tipi, I would try to see myself in one of Grandma Jeanne’s pie plates.

  AFTER A MONTH OF having my uncle around, I was secretly hoping he might go crazy again so he would have to go back to the loony bin. With each passing day, he was acting weirder and weirder. One day, he told me he had no bones in his body and that the U.S. government wanted to capture and study him because of it. Then he made me walk around camp with him, looking behind bushes for hidden FBI agents. Sometimes he’d punch his fist into the palm of his other hand with a loud whack for no reason. He was also looking pretty scary. He had taken a pair of scissors to his hair, cutting it so close to the scalp that he’d left several bloody cuts that he hadn’t even bothered to clean. But none of this seemed to concern Grandma Jeanne. She smiled whenever Dane was around, and once she even had an argument about him with Papa Dick right in front of me. Their son had changed, she said to my grandfather, and it was time for him to let bygones be bygones. But Papa Dick wasn’t having it. He said he would allow Dane to stay for her sake, but after he had gone down the hill he just couldn’t be trusted again.

  I looked up from my sewing project. “What hill did Uncle Dane go down?”

  Papa Dick blinked back at me, confused, and then gave me a little smile. “Not gone down the hill, sweetheart. Went down in Hills. It means what happened there.”

  “Oh. So what happened?”

  “Nothing,” he said, turning away. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

  I went back to my sewing, wondering why everyone seemed so mad that my uncle was here.

  “Mommy,” I said to her one day. “Yes or no. Are you glad Uncle Dane is here or not?”

  “Am I . . . ? Oh.” She finished crumbling pot into her joint and licked the edge of her rolling paper. We were in our tipi, and had just finished eating dinner.

  I glanced over her shoulder at the dark-haired man sitting on a stump chair. He had arrived at our camp a few weeks ago as a visitor, but he’d spent almost every night since in Mom’s bed. Our tipi walls were now stacked high with his collection of canned goods, broken household appliances and worn-out cowboy boots, but Mom didn’t seem to mind.

  “I, uh . . . it’s complicated, sweetie,” she said, lighting the joint and inhaling deeply. “What I really want is for him to get well.”

  “But . . . he told us he was all better.”

  “Yes, I know, but . . .” She exhaled and passed the joint over her shoulder to the dark-haired man. “Just do me a favor, okay? Don’t spend too much time with him.”

  I knew Mom and my Uncle Dane didn’t like each other. I never saw them talk, and when Mom saw Dane coming she would turn around and walk in the other direction.

  “How come?”

  Suddenly, the man leaned forward over Mom’s shoulder and as she turned to him, he blew smoke into her mouth. She inhaled and smiled up at him.

  “Mommy, how come?” I repeated, but by that time they were kissing with their tongues sticking out, so I stood up and went outside to play.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER Mom told me to stay away from my Uncle Dane, I was making mud pies in the dirt when I sensed someone behind me. I turned and saw Dane, scratching at his balls as he stood naked in the morning sun.

  “Hey. Do you know where your mother is?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know. In her tipi, I guess.” I continued stirring pine needles into my pie, wishing he would leave.

  “No. I mean your real mother. Do you know where she is?”

  I stopped and looked up at him. “What do you mean? She’s in the tipi,” I replied, waving my hand in her general direction.

  Dane stared at me for a moment, then slowly kneeled down in front of me.

  “Okay,” he said, looking into my eyes. “It’s time I told you something.”

  “About Mom?” I said, my voice sounding far away. I could hear my heart thumping in my ears. “What about her?”

  “Okay, here it is.” He placed his hands on my shoulders. “Your real mother died.”

  The hair on my forearms stood up. “What?”

  “That’s right.” He nodded. “She poured gasoline all over herself and set herself on fire. I was there when it happened. I tried to stop her, but . . .” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “She was beautiful. Blue eyes, curly black hair, a real fox. Debbie was her name. Crazy Debbie. That woman who calls herself your mother . . .”He gestured toward our tipi scornfully. “She’s nothing but a cheap impostor.”

  Dane was still talking, but my ears were ringing too loudly to hear his words and I couldn’t seem to swallow. I stood up on legs of rubber and walked away, my mind racing. It couldn’t be, I thought. Hadn’t Mom always said Dane was crazy? But nothing could soothe my fear. Adrenaline zinged through my body and my eyes welled over. Who could I possibly ask? Aunt Jessie, my usual source of honesty, had recently gone o
ff to live in a yurt with her new boyfriend. Stumbling blindly through my tears, I rounded the side of my grandparents’ tipi and saw a blurry figure sitting on the sawhorse. It was my Aunt Jan, coughing loudly as she rolled herself a joint. I stopped in front of her, sobbing.

  “Hey, kiddo,” she said lightly. “What’s with the leaky faucets?”

  “Dane,” I replied shakily, pointing in his direction. “He said—”

  “Dane? Don’t listen to him. He’s full of lies.”

  I wiped at my eyes. “But—but he said that Mom isn’t—”

  “Let me guess. He said your mom isn’t really your mom, and that your real mother’s name is Debbie. Right?”

  “Yes.” Relief swept through me, immediately stopping my tears. “But . . . but how did you know?”

  “Ah . . .” Jan waved her joint dismissively at me. “He’s been going on about that one for years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She plucked a stray pot leaf from her tongue and examined it on the tip of her finger. Then she flicked it into the air and jabbed her joint at me. “Do you know why Dane didn’t move to the wilderness with us?” she asked me.

  “Yes. He had to go to the metal hospital instead.”

  Here’s a happier memory of my Aunt Jan; we’re snowshoeing near Morley.

  “Mental. Yes. But do you know why?”

  I shook my head.