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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  “Here we go. Hold on!” he said, and hit the gas even harder.

  Mom yelled at him to stop, but Karl was too busy drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and bopping his head to the music to pay her much attention.

  “Karl!” she shouted, louder this time. “Slow down, please!”

  “Hey, cool it, woman!” Karl yelled back, cranking the music up. “You wanna get there before midnight, don’t you?”

  Mom huddled beside me, wrapping her arms around my body. I grabbed the bottom of my seat to try to stop bouncing. Karl cackled and took a pull on the joint, and as I turned to look at him, something caught the corner of my eye. It was an orange flash, and it was coming from behind us. I turned.

  The back of the truck was on fire. Flames jumped at the rear window under a cloud of black smoke.

  “Mommy!” I screamed. “Fire!”

  “What the fuck?” Karl slammed on the brakes and the truck lurched to a stop.

  Mom pushed my door open and shoved me outside. I fell to the ground and she landed on top of me, jamming my face into the dirt. A wave of heat washed over my body. I lifted my head and looked for Karl. He was already out of the cab, hopping into the back of the truck and trying to throw a blanket over a large object. Whatever it was, it was burning like a small sun as Karl tried to get it under control. He finally pushed it over the side of the truck and it hit the ground rolling, flames moving slowly around it like orange liquid. Liquid. It was the barrel, I realized, the one Karl had stolen. He grabbed a shovel from the back and started throwing dirt over it, then stomped around on the ground to put out the last of the blaze, cursing all the while. Finally he tossed the shovel down, lit a cigarette with shaking hands and blew a long stream of smoke from his nostrils.

  “God damn it!” he yelled, kicking the truck with his stolen cowboy boot.

  THE FIRST THING KARL looked for was his cash. The storage trunk was burned partly through, so he reached inside it and pulled out the small wood box. The top was black, and the money sat inside it in an ashy little pile.

  “Fuck it!” Karl shrieked, throwing the box against a tree trunk. He walked away from us with his hands folded over his head, paced back and forth a few times, then came back to the truck. What was left of the tarp had melted into almost everything, making a huge mess. Karl pawed through his loot like a dog digging for a bone, tossing out anything that was ruined. When he was done, it was nearly dark outside and piles of junk were spread in every direction around the truck. Karl raked his hair back, jumped into the cab and slapped his hand on the dash for us to join him.

  “Well, you can forget your fucking cottage now,” he said to Mom angrily as we piled in beside him. “You see? If we hadn’t been on our way to your goddamn palace on the lake, this never would have happened.”

  “Fuck you,” Mom replied, and it was the first time I had ever heard her pair these two words together. “You’re the one who stole the barrel of gasoline. You should be thanking Cea—she saved our lives.”

  Karl glanced at her sideways, then placed his hand lightly on her thigh. “Anyway,” he said, his tone softer now, “not to worry. Your man has a plan B up his sleeve.”

  Mom scooted away from him, still mad, and put an arm around my shoulder. I slumped against her, willing myself not to cry. No cottage on the lake, not to mention that my face was pounding painfully from being slammed against the ground. Mom looked my wounds over and cleaned them with some spit on a paper napkin. I dug in my pocket for Papa Dick’s roach clip, relieved to find it still there, and then closed my eyes, grateful that Mom hadn’t asked what plan B might be. As long as we were driving, I thought, there was always the possibility that we might never stop.

  FLAMES SHOT FROM MY ankles like jets. I was weightless, flying over a clear green lake with Barbie in my hand. Far below, I could see my cottage. It looked like a delicious birthday cake, pink with white trim. I steered my jets and zoomed down to it, and then—

  It was the screeching sound that woke me up. I flew forward over the dashboard and bounced back hard on the seat, my face slamming sideways against the window. Our headlights spun in an arc across tall grass, picking out the gaping hole in the barbed wire fence we had just crashed through. The truck lurched to the left, landed back on its tires and shuddered to a stop.

  Nobody spoke. A ticking sound rose from the engine, breaking the silence. We were in a farmer’s wheat field. In the distance, a golden square of light glowed yellow. One square became two, and then three. People jogged toward us, their flashlight beams bouncing up and down as they ran. We stared into the darkness.

  “Well,” Mom said finally. “Fuck a duck. Talk about your bitch of a day.”

  Karl started to laugh. A moment later Mom joined in, and then so did I. Before long we were all cracking up so hard, doubled over in our seats with tears streaming from our eyes, that the farmers had to tap on Karl’s window to get his attention.

  “You folks okay?” the man asked us, his face confused, but we couldn’t even stop laughing long enough to answer him.

  That night, the farmers let us pitch a tent in their field. They called a tow truck for us the next morning, and the three of us rode into town and waited for Karl’s truck to be repaired. He even had them fix the reverse gear while they were at it, so when we left the next morning, our ride was as good as new.

  Chapter Twelve

  Karl said that after all he and Mom had been through, they deserved a break. “What say we do a little camping trip, babe?”

  “Camping trip?” Mom echoed. “Isn’t that kind of like going to Mexico when you live in Hawaii?”

  Karl shrugged. “Maybe, but at least we can hang by ourselves for a while. Let’s take off, just the two of us. I know a place we can drop Cea off for a few days.”

  I suddenly felt ill. Drop me off for a few days? I moved closer to Mom’s side. “Please, Mommy. I don’t want to.”

  “Oh, sweetie . . .” She glanced over at Karl. “It’ll be fine,” she said to me decisively. “It’s just a few days. You’ll probably have fun!”

  My caregiver for the week turned out to be a lady friend of Karl’s who lived in a tipi with her four-year-old son. “Don’t worry, he ain’t mine,” Karl added when Mom looked at him sideways. Karl’s friend wore a paisley scarf around her head and heavy gold earrings that stretched her earlobe holes into long, thin lines. Her son, Mica, had crusted snot under his nose and hair so matted that it looked like it would take a full day to brush out. His long fingernails had crescents of dirt beneath them. And even though he didn’t have shoes, his feet were filthy enough to make it look like he was wearing a pair.

  After the adults had a toke, Mom started rounding her stuff up to leave. I clung to her and cried for all I was worth, but it seemed there would be no changing her mind.

  “Five days,” she said to me as she unwound my arms from around her leg. Reaching into her knapsack, she withdrew her bottle of Rescue Remedy and opened my mouth with her hand. Drip, drip, drip went the cold drops beneath my tongue. “Six days at the most. I’ll see you soon, my love.” And then Karl hurried her out. There was a gap between the bottom of the canvas tipi shell and the ground, and I saw her moccasins walking past as she left. I fell on the floor and bawled.

  “Hey, cool it, kid,” the lady friend said to me. “Us mamas need a break sometimes, you know? It’s tough work raisin’ you little ones.” She handed her son and me each a baby bottle filled with milk. “Why don’t you guys go feed Rainbow or something?”

  “Wainbow! Wainbow!” Mica yelled, tearing out the tipi door, and I finally dragged my feet out behind him.

  Rainbow turned out to be their goat. She was tied to a tree with a leather strap, and she was as grungy as Mica. While she sucked greedily at the bottle Mica held out to her, he told me her story.

  “She lost her mama. Some dummy hunter thought she was a deer. So now I gotta feed her and stuff.”

  “Oh,” I said, wishing he would wipe the snot from under his no
se. Mica couldn’t seem to say the letter r, so he said hunt-tuh and dee-uh. The bottle drained into Rainbow’s mouth until it was empty, but instead of removing it, Mica shoved it in even farther.

  “Watch this,” he said. “She makes a funny sound.” Rainbow took a few gulps of air and began to hiccup.

  Mica squealed with laughter, but I didn’t really think it was very funny. He finally pulled the bottle out, and I replaced it with my own.

  Mica picked up a stick and started whacking it on a tree trunk. “How come your mama leaved you he-uh? She gonna come back?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I replied confidently, but the lump in my throat was back. I tried to swallow it down again, but when I couldn’t, I yanked the bottle out of Rainbow’s mouth, ran for the tipi and buried myself inside my sleeping bag, not even peeking out an hour later when the mom said it was time to come on out and eat some borscht.

  Other than feeding Rainbow, there wasn’t much to do at Karl’s lady friend’s tipi. I wasn’t used to being entertained, of course, but Mica’s mother paid us almost no attention at all. She usually made us dinner, but Mica and I scrounged up our own breakfast and lunch from whatever we could find in the tipi. She never tucked us in at night, and once when Mica burned his knee on the woodstove and started to cry, she didn’t even move from her place in bed. One night, she grabbed a wooden spoon and smacked him on the bum for no reason that I could see. Mica seemed to cry for hours afterwards, and I could feel the weight of his sadness filling the small space of the tipi. After that, I vowed not to leave my sleeping bag until Mom got back. I ate my meals in bed and just stared at that gap in the tipi wall between the ground and the canvas, waiting for her feet to come walking back to me.

  And one afternoon, about a week after she’d left me, they finally did. I jumped up from the floor and ran outside, joyously slamming my body into her legs in the biggest hug ever. As far as I was concerned, I had the best mother in the whole wide world.

  REJUVENATED AFTER HIS CAMPING trip with Mom, Karl was good and ready to tackle our problems. As he often liked to tell Mom, he was a man with a plan, and if ever we were in a situation that needed a plan, it was now. Karl ticked the facts off on his fingers as he drove the highway eastward.

  One: except for the sixty-five dollars he had left in his wallet, we were flat broke, which led to two: we had to rebuild our cash supply. This brought us to three: we needed to set up house somewhere private enough to grow a marijuana crop, and finally, four: Mom was dead wrong if she thought we were homeless now, because we had that canvas tent Karl had found during one of his stocking-up sessions. Guessing from the weight of it, he thought it was around the same size as a tipi, and lucky for us he had put it on the bottom of the truck bed, where it had been saved from the worst of the fire.

  “Right on,” said Mom agreeably, well into her first joint of the day. “Far out, babe.” She blew me a smoke ring, and I poked through the middle of it with my finger.

  Karl grasped the steering wheel as he nailed down the final point of his plan. “I got the perfect spot in mind to re-grow our wealth—no pun intended,” he said, elbowing Mom in the ribs. “Lake Minnewanka, Alberta.”

  “Alberta? I thought you were done with—”

  “Forget that,” Karl said, waving a hand at her. “B.C. wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.” He rubbed Mom’s thigh. “Listen, babe, I know the past few months haven’t been easy on you, okay? What you need is a support system. Some friends you can rely on.”

  “You mean like a commune?” Mom asked, passing the joint to Karl. “Not really my cup of tea. All they ever gave me was a bad case of hep B.”

  “Not a commune, no. Just some friends. I’ve got some—Larry and Susanne—who live out in Minnewanka in a tipi. At least they did last I heard from them, which was about a year ago. They were city folk before moving to the bush. They even have a kid, a little girl around Small Fry’s age.”

  “That would be nice for you, wouldn’t it, sweetheart?” Mom said to me. “You’d have a friend.”

  My heart leapt. “You mean Wendy will be there?”

  “No, honey. Another little girl.”

  “Oh. What’s her name?”

  “Kathy . . . er, no . . . Kelly,” Karl said.

  I turned away and gazed out the window, trying to imagine her. A girl who lived in the wilderness, just like me. I wondered if she would have any stick horses, and if she liked to pick the pitch off tree trunks like I did to chew like gum. Kelly. A real friend. I wasn’t sure why, but suddenly my tummy felt funny, like if someone had put a plate of fried bear meat in front of me, I wouldn’t have been able to eat even a single bite.

  “KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED for a Winnebago,” Karl said to us six hours later as he turned off the main road onto a dirt lane. “Should be somewhere in the trees.” I watched the side of the road as we bumped along, wanting to be the first to spot the prize. After a while we rolled over a cattle guard and came to a metal gate, which Karl hopped out to inspect. “Lock’s already been broken,” he said as he swung back into the cab. “Looks like we’re on the right track.”

  Ten minutes later, we pulled up beside a purple camper van with a huge pot leaf painted on the side. Karl and Mom jumped out of the truck. I slid out slowly, and then stood close as Mom went through our belongings.

  “Mommy, are there cops around here?”

  “Of course not, sweetheart,” she said distractedly, holding up a piece of orange fabric that was burned half away. “Will you look at that? Damn it. This was my favorite dish towel. And look at this—” she continued to Karl, pulling her backpack out. “Burned to a crisp. How are we supposed to carry our stuff to camp?”

  Karl came over and took it from her, then tossed it aside and dug around for his own pack, which was just as damaged. “Shit,” he said, throwing it to the ground. He placed his hands on the edge of the truck bed and leaned forward, head down. After a minute he popped it up again. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You’ve got yourself one smart man here, babe.”

  Karl pulled the canvas tent out, unfolded it on the ground and tied a rope at each end to form a hammock. Then he threw all our stuff onto it, grabbed an end, told Mom to do the same and started dragging the tent through the woods. It looked like it would be a fun ride, so I asked if I could get on too, but Karl barked that I’d be better off making myself useful by picking things up as they fell off. So I scrambled along behind, Suzie Doll under one arm, tossing pots and tin plates and underwear back onto the canvas as it snaked through the trees to our new home.

  Larry and Susanne must have heard us coming, because they were both standing in front of their tipi when we got there. When Larry saw Karl, he let out a whoop.

  “Madman!” he said, thumping Karl on the back. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Just passing through, Larry. Although, we may stay awhile.”

  “Goddamn, it’s good to see you. What’s it been—like, three years?” He turned his eyes to Mom. “And who do we have here?”

  “This is Michelle, my woman. And her daughter Cea. Where’s your kid?”

  “Out playing with bears somewhere, you know how it goes.” He looked down at our canvas tent, overflowing with camping equipment, and shook his head. “What the hell kind of contraption is that, Madman? Glad to see you haven’t changed. Come on inside, let’s roll ourselves up a j.”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the j was just the start of it. An occasion like this deserved a real celebration, Larry announced, and he brought out a little plastic bag filled with something wrinkly and brown. Karl laughed and twisted his arm behind his back as if it were Larry doing it.

  “What’s that?” I asked Karl.

  “Mushrooms,” he said. “A special kind.”

  He held the bag under my nose so I could take a sniff. They smelled horrible. I went back to my Big Blue Book, tracing my fingers over the Brownie Yearbook story. It was my favorite because it was all about my birth month, November, and I could almost read the whole
thing by myself. I finished my page and glanced up at Karl’s friends. With their matching long hair, colorful woven ponchos and tie-dyed bell-bottoms, Larry and Susanne looked more like twins than husband and wife. Larry ate another mushroom, then held the bag out to Mom and Susanne.

  “Ugh, I hate those things,” Mom said, taking a hot butter knife off the stove and dropping a chunk of hash onto it. “Never brought me anything but trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” I piped up, looking away from my book.

  She hesitated, and then held the knife under her mouth to inhale a curl of smoke. “Never mind,” she said, her voice strained as she spoke with held breath.

  I sprawled out on my stomach and rested my chin in my hand. “Mommy, when will Kelly be here?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie. Soon.”

  I went back to my book, but the adults were talking too loud for me to focus. Not only that, but Larry had a battery-powered boom box that was blasting Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.”

  “I’m tired,” I said to Mom. “Can I go to bed now?”

  “In a little while,” she replied. “Karl still has to put the tent up. Why don’t you draw a picture or something?”

  Her voice sounded too breathy. Her eyes looked funny. But that was nothing compared to Karl and Larry, who were now in the middle of the tipi wrestling like a couple of gorillas. Susanne kept laughing and telling them to watch out for the hot stove.

  “What’s Karl doing?” I asked Mom. “Why is he acting so weird? And why is that other guy—?”

  “Cea! Please! I just need a little grownup time right now,” Mom said sharply, and I jumped back. She leaned toward me and placed her hands on my shoulders. “Look, honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. But I just can’t be your mom all the time, okay? I try my best, I really do, but I can’t. Now why don’t you go and play outside.” She shoved a flashlight at me and turned away.