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

by Cea Sunrise Person

  I looked around, suddenly aware of every little sound. From far away, a woodpecker knocked at a tree. Birds called and squirrels chattered. I stood up and did a few jumping jacks. I was chilly but not really cold yet.

  An hour later, I was wishing for a sweater. A few hours after that, all I could think of was food. By the time the sun started dropping in the sky, I would have given up my shorts for a glass of water. I held my breath for the twentieth time, listening for the sound of a stream, but there was nothing. My mouth felt like cotton. My tummy growled. Goose bumps crawled across my skin. I wished I had Papa Dick’s roach clip with me.

  Too soon, the sun’s orange glow was almost gone. I had to pee. Briefly, I considered going in my pants to give me a moment’s warmth, but then decided it wouldn’t be worth the wet coldness afterward. I went beside a tree and returned to my spot, scraping a blanket of dried leaves and moss over my legs. I lay back and looked up at the treetops. Birds called their good-nights. The sun dipped behind the horizon, leaving the sky dusky blue.

  “Papa Dick,” I whispered. “Please let her come soon.”

  I closed my eyes and saw my grandfather’s face under his cowboy hat. Welcome this, he said to me, for life lessons come by experience and not by chatter. Papa Dick always loved to say that to me, but I had never understood what it meant. Now I did. I opened my eyes, and when I closed them again the leaves overhead danced behind my lids in red and gray.

  “CEA! CEA!”

  It was my mother’s voice. I sat up and looked around wildly, my teeth chattering. I had dreamed of Mom calling my name so many times that I wasn’t even sure if it was real now.

  “Mom! Over here!” I jumped up from the ground, rubbing my hands over my freezing arms.

  I heard running footsteps, and then I saw a flashlight beam bouncing through the trees. I felt Mom’s arms around me before I even saw her.

  “Cea! Thank god, thank god, thank god . . .”

  She crushed me to her chest and covered my face with kisses. When she was finished, Karl walked over to me and grabbed my arm.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he said angrily. “Your mother was worried senseless. I’d like to just—”

  “Leave her alone, Karl,” Mom said, pulling me out of his grip. “Just leave her the fuck alone.” She tugged her sweater off and pulled it over my head, then turned me away from Karl and started walking me home.

  Back at the tent, Mom put me to bed with some rose hip tea and sat with me while I drank it. She had started to wonder where I was at around two o’clock, she said. She had done a quick look around camp, and then called on Karl and Larry to help. They had searched until they found me, almost ten hours later. Mom swore she’d never been so scared in her life, because the whole time they were looking she had been secretly afraid that I’d drowned in the lake.

  “It was awful,” she said, crumbling pot into a rolling paper. She licked the edge and reached for her matches. I plucked the joint from her fingers, and she looked at me in surprise.

  “What are you—?”

  “I just . . . do you think you could maybe not?”

  “But why? It makes me happy. Don’t you want a happy mama?”

  “Yeah. I just . . . I don’t know . . .” I shrugged, and she picked up the joint again.

  “Someday you’ll understand,” she said, lighting up and inhaling.

  Across the room, Karl was snoring.

  “Mommy,” I said quietly. “Why was Karl so mad at me?”

  “Oh, honey, he was just worried, that’s all.” She shook her head. “Anyway, he’s just upset because of his pot plants.”

  “His pot plants? What happened?”

  “It was Kelly. She picked them all today and tried to hide them in her pillowcase. And they, uh . . . weren’t ready yet. Karl was pretty furious.”

  I stared at her in shock. “She did?” I finally said. “Wow. Well . . . at least the cops can’t find them now. Right?”

  “Yeah, right.” Mom cleared her throat again. “The thing is, honey . . . Karl is under a lot of pressure. He was counting on the money from those plants for us to live on. He wants to build us a cabin. But it looks like he’ll have to replant them, and . . . well, we might be stuck here a while longer.”

  I nodded, thinking about the first shack we had lived in with Karl. If that was his idea of a cabin, I figured the stolen canvas tent wasn’t half bad.

  “That’s okay,” I said, taking Mom’s hand. She smiled at me, and I could tell she was starting to get stoned. Her eyes shone in the candlelight. “Just as long as I’m with you.”

  She leaned down and hugged me for a long time, and when she pulled away, my neck was wet with her tears.

  AFTER THE TIME I got lost in the forest, Mom decided she needed to come up with a plan to keep it from happening again. Her first idea was to give me a bell to wear. But when Karl pointed out that the bell would be useless if I strayed too far, she suggested that instead I take some of Karl’s red flags with me to mark my way, sort of like Hansel and Gretel. Karl argued that after a few months, the trees would have so many flags in them that I wouldn’t be able to tell one from another, and said that maybe I should carry a long ball of string tied to a branch outside the tent. The idea was that I would unwind it as I walked, leaving a line behind me to find my way home. After a test run, though, we decided to scrap this plan too, as the string got so tangled in the bushes that it was impossible for me to walk even as far as the lake without going back twenty times to pull it loose.

  In the end, Mom decided that I should just tell her where I was going before I left each morning. This worked for a little while, but since Mom liked to sleep in, I got tired of waiting for her to get up so I could fill her in on my plans. I would sit by her bed with my fists under my chin, bored and restless as I watched her doze. Sometimes I would reach out and touch her bare shoulder or blow lightly on her face, hoping to wake her up, but she would just moan and turn away. Finally, I went out one morning without telling her, and when I got home she didn’t say anything, so that was pretty much the end of that.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Just take what you can’t live without,” Mom said, tossing me a small backpack. “Make sure you can manage the weight. I’ll take care of your clothes.”

  I stopped coloring in mid-stroke and lifted my crayon from the page. “Why? Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere. Anywhere. Let’s just get going before Karl gets back.” She was already stuffing tin plates and cups into the larger of the two packs she had just taken from Larry and Susanne, who were in town for the day.

  “But what—?”

  “Please, honey. No questions right now. Okay?”

  I nodded and started putting my crayons away. It wasn’t really surprising that it had come to this. Since arriving here several months ago, things had been relatively calm between Mom and Karl, but recently they had started fighting again. Last night had been the worst one yet. I awoke to Mom yelling at Karl that she was sick of worrying about the damn fuzz showing up and busting their asses, plus she was tired of Karl’s limp-dick excuses because they hadn’t gotten it on in a month and her twat was about to shrivel up and die. Karl shouted back at her that he had shit on his mind and could she maybe just show a bit of appreciation for what he was trying to do to support her and her damn kid. Eventually Karl stormed out, and by this morning he still hadn’t come back.

  Take what you can’t live without. With her words echoing in my head, I collected up Suzie Doll, my Big Blue Book, my pink jewelry box, Papa Dick’s roach clip, my crayons and some paper. Then I put my pack on and stood ready by the door. The book made it heavy, but there was no way I was leaving it behind.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  Mom nodded and glanced over at me. I was wearing what I had put on that morning, my cutoff denim shorts and orange T-shirt with brown trim. She looked down at my bare feet and reached behind my bed for my snowmobile boots. “You need to change. Jeans, a
sweater, and these boots.”

  “But it’s summer!”

  She held up a hand to stop my chatter, and I shut my mouth and changed my clothes. Then Mom wrote a quick note for Karl, put her own pack on and reached for my hand. She looked a little scary with Karl’s .22 rifle slung over her shoulder. “Okay. Let’s get a move on.” We walked out the door and down to the lake without looking back.

  When we got to the shore, Mom stopped to look in both directions. “We have to stick close to water. But not the lake,” she added with a shake of her head. “There’s a creek this way.”

  We started along the beach toward the Point, a finger of land I was never allowed to go beyond because of the thick trees and bushes just past it. We reached it and Mom took my hand, pulling me along the wall of growth until she saw a small break.

  “If we can make it through here,” she said, “I know there’s a boulder patch on the other side, and from there we can go inland and find the creek. I’ve seen the waterfall from the lake while I was swimming.” She pulled a hatchet from a loop on her pack and started hacking away. “Follow me,” she said, crouching down and holding an arm in front of her eyes. “Put your hands over your face.”

  I did as she said and pushed into the bushes behind her, covering my face with one hand while I used the other to swat branches away. Mom moved slowly, stopping every now and then to hack at the growth, but branches still snapped back and twanged me in the head and arms. After about half an hour, I could see blue water sparkling through holes in the trees.

  “We’re almost there,” Mom said. “Keep going.”

  “Then what? Where—?”

  “Please, Cea. Just trust me. Okay?”

  I nodded and pushed forward.

  A short time later, we stepped out into patchy sunlight and a beach piled with gigantic boulders. I rubbed at my arms, trying to erase the red scratches with my hands.

  “Let’s go,” Mom said, holding her arms out for balance as she climbed the rocks.

  I watched, tin pots clanging against her backside, and then I followed. The weight on my back made it hard to stand up again when I leaned over. My heavy boots were awkward, but I was glad I had them on, because my feet slid on the rocks and more than once made me fall. Each time Mom would stop and wait for me, calling out to be sure I was okay before moving on.

  “It’s getting dark,” she yelled out once. “Keep up the best you can, okay?”

  “I’m trying.”

  A few minutes later, I scrambled over the last boulder into Mom’s arms. She gave me a quick hug and pointed ahead of us.

  “There,” she said. “The waterfall. We just have to follow it along the creek until we get to a good camping spot.”

  “Why can’t we just stay here?”

  “It’s too close to the lake. I don’t want anyone to . . . I just want something a little more private, that’s all. Like Papa Dick and Grandma Jeanne would choose.”

  I could hear the waterfall from where I stood. Mom took my hand, and together we walked over to the creek. It was a wide one, and about three feet deep.

  “Perfect,” Mom said, and pulled me forward into the woods.

  I hesitated. “What if we get lost? Did you bring a compass?” I asked.

  “No. Don’t worry about it, though. We can’t get lost as long as we follow the water. Let’s go.”

  The creek gurgled as we walked. We made our way quietly, sometimes sloshing through the water when the bushes got thick. When it got too dark to see, Mom pulled a flashlight from her pack to light our way. Finally, she stopped and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.

  “This should do,” she said, pointing to a small clearing.

  We found a tree that was tall enough for Mom to stand up under, and then she pulled the cord on her backpack and laid the tent out under the branches. When she took the tent poles out of their sack and started fitting them together, I saw that her hands were shaking. She yanked on one of the rods a little too hard and snapped the elastic inside, and that’s when she started to cry. I sat down beside her and tried to help, but she took the pole back from me and hammered it together with a rock. Sniffling and hiccuping, she threaded the poles through the tent loops, pulled it up straight, pounded the stakes into the ground, unrolled our sleeping bags and gathered some moss and branches to start a fire. After she got the fire going, she sat down and opened her arms for me. The flames cast an orange glow on her face. I went to her and curled against her chest.

  “Shh,” she said, even though she was the one crying. “It’s all right. It’s okay.”

  “I know,” I said, the heat making me drowsy—and I did. No matter where my mother and I had ended up so far, it had always turned out to be okay. She would find something for us to eat, tuck me into my sleeping bag and maybe even read me a story.

  Just before I fell asleep, I couldn’t help but feel just a bit sad for Karl. He would be home by now, wondering where we were, and he might even be crying. The thought made me feel a little windless, as if a large animal had decided to settle on top of me for the night and I couldn’t roll him off.

  THE BEST THING ABOUT living in the wilderness with Mom was that I had her all to myself. The worst thing was that I knew we wouldn’t be able to stay there forever. I could tell just by looking at our supplies—besides our tent, sleeping bags, hatchet, flashlight and rifle, we had some dry food, clothing, cooking equipment, candles and matches, a sewing kit, a small saw, a Swiss Army knife, some twine, four rolls of toilet paper, a bar of soap, a towel and a box of ammunition—that we didn’t have what it took to stay long. But you would never know it from the way Mom and I went about our days. It was as if we had entered a time bubble when we set foot in our new camp. We never talked about the past, the future, Karl, my grandparents, or anything at all other than our daily routine.

  We woke up early, fetched our water, ate granola for breakfast, bathed in the creek when the sun was hottest, collected firewood, washed our clothes and dishes, ate supper and went to sleep. Sometimes we would go for walks in the forest, always staying close to the creek so we wouldn’t get lost. Mostly, though, we looked for food. Mom was trying to save what little she had brought, so we ate whatever we could find—mostly wild berries, dandelion greens, mushrooms and small game when Mom could get it. She picked rose hips and boiled them into tea to boost our immune system. Blackberries were everywhere, so I ate them until my stomach hurt. I was hungry nearly all the time, but I never complained. Mom was twice my size, but she seemed to be eating about half as much as I was.

  This photo of Mom is exactly how I remember her in the seventies: windblown hair, youthful face, with the wilderness behind her.

  The sun pushed the dusk slightly forward each evening, and the days turned into weeks. I spent my evenings using Mom’s pocketknife to whittle twigs into stick people, finger-painting mud onto stones to make them look like animals, and drawing on every last inch of the little paper we had brought with us. When the paper ran out I began sewing the way Grandma Jeanne had taught me, covering my only sweater in embroidered thread flowers and stitching up holes in our socks. The only thing Mom had for fun, besides her pot stash, were two Conan the Barbarian comic books she had found in the front pocket of Larry and Susanne’s backpack. “Look at this,” she said when she discovered them, tossing them on the ground. “Even Time magazine would have been better than these.” The next night, though, she picked up one of the comic books and leafed through it. Before long, she was reading into the dark. She allowed herself two pages each night, sometimes reading out loud to me and commenting on Conan’s gentle but take-charge way with women. Conan, she said to me, was a real man, and she could only dream there might be someone like him in the real world.

  Every night before I fell asleep, Mom would read me a bedtime story from my Big Blue Book. I chose a different one each time, saving the best for last. When I finally asked for it, Mom just dropped the book on the ground and let it fall open to the right page. She placed th
e open book in front of me and curled her body around mine, reading aloud over my shoulder.

  “November’s winds

  are keen and cold

  As Brownies know

  who roam the world

  And have no home

  to which to run

  When they have had

  their night of fun

  But cunning hands

  are never slow

  To build a fire

  of ruddy glow.”

  I turned on my back and gazed up at the stars. Beside me, Mom closed the book softly.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for this to be your life.”

  I kept looking at the treetops, pretending she wasn’t crying. “That’s okay,” then, “Mommy?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “If I had a baby in my tummy and I read that story to her every single day, would she come out of my vagina knowing it?”

  Mom laughed in spite of her tears. “No, sweetie. But I’m sure she’d love it all the same.” I nodded, and she kissed the top of my head. “Cea? I want you to know something. If you ever get pregnant, like I did when I was really young, don’t worry about it. I’ll help you raise the baby. Okay?”

  “Um, okay, but that would be kind of silly.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Isn’t it better to have a baby when you’re old? Like as old as Susanne?”

  Mom laughed again. “Yeah, sweetie, I guess so. Does she seem old to you?”

  “Yeah. Way older than you, anyway.”

  “Well, that’s probably because I’m only twenty-two. Most mommies are a little older than me when they have their babies.”

  “Oh.” I snuggled into her chest and closed my eyes happily. Mom just didn’t understand. What I wanted was for it to be like this forever—just the two of us, living on our own and becoming friends with the wolves we heard howling at night. If we got to stay, I wouldn’t even care if we never got to move to the big city and live like Barbie with pretty pink dresses in our closets and pointy high heels on our feet.