The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  Wanting the good-bye to be different wouldn’t make it so, and once we were on the road, I tried to forget about my husband, to stop wondering why the care and kindness once at the center of our marriage had faded, and instead allow the now familiar transformation inside of me to begin.

  For the next three days there’d be no one’s little hand to hold; no one to carry on my hip or hug; no one to criticize my housekeeping, fall asleep in front of the TV, then climb onto my body in the dark. For the next three days my body would belong only to me.

  I leaned against Andrea’s backseat and looked over at Bev. She was sitting as far forward on the seat as she could, staring out the windshield even though we’d barely left Grand Traverse County. Surely the scenery was familiar to her, yet I knew that kind of excitement. Like me on my first year, she’d never been to Drummond Island before, either, and she was filled with anticipation, wanting to catch sight of the place as soon as she could.

  “Are there any decent-looking guys up there?” she’d asked.

  I cringed.

  “What?” Andrea squawked. “No, there aren’t. Well, I don’t know. Maybe there are. But that’s not why you came… is it?”

  “No,” Bev answered. “Jeez, I was just asking.”

  Over the years, our relationship statuses would change, then change again, but that year Bev was the only one of us who was single. She and her boyfriend had just broken up, though even while she’d been dating him, men were a constant source of amusement and interest to her. Big or small, old or young, in suits or coveralls, it didn’t matter. Bev liked them and they liked her. She also liked to travel, so I knew she hadn’t agreed to go with us specifically to meet men. Bev was just being Bev. Her interest in men wasn’t calculating, it was just innocent fun. Sometimes, though, her enthusiasm could be misunderstood.

  Now that there were eight of us instead of just four, and now that we didn’t all see each other regularly at Peegeo’s, Linda scheduled a planning meeting a week before we left. She told her boyfriend, Kenny, he had to find something to do away from home for a couple hours; we all met at her house, and she handed out our assignments.

  Ground chuck did go on sale, and Linda said she would bring her sloppy joes, already cooked, and ready to be heated up when we were hungry. Andrea was to bring hamburger buns; I’d bring coffee, bagels, and cream cheese; and Jill would bring the rest of the breakfast food and a case of beer. The new girls had their assignments, too. Pam made homemade potato salad to go with the sloppy joes; Mary Lynn brought all of the ingredients for Bloody Marys; and Bev brought along two rolls of toilet paper, one for each car, in case we found ourselves stranded far from any facilities.

  Linda wondered how we’d communicate with each other on the way up now that we’d be in two cars instead of just one, but Susan said she had the solution. Cell phones were nonexistent in 1995 and even car phones were still a novelty, but George had a set of walkie-talkies and Susan said she’d bring them along. That would be her contribution.

  Her idea was a good one, but our execution of it left a little to be desired. We were so unaccustomed to having two cars that when we drove out of Peegeo’s parking lot and headed for US 31 North, both handsets were still inside Linda’s Explorer. An oversight none of us even noticed until we crossed the bridge and pulled into the parking lot of the Michigan Welcome Center in St. Ignace.

  “You guys, wanna play a game?” Susan asked, handing me one of the handsets. “I’ve got an idea for something fun we can do with these things.”

  It was a variation on Twenty Questions, with our pasts as the unknowns to be guessed at. Susan explained that someone in one car would depress the talk button and describe something crazy, funny, illegal, or just plain strange someone in the car had done, and if not regretted, then at least felt lucky to have survived. The girls in the other car had a minute to discuss it together off the air, but then had to depress their talk button and guess who it had been. Only the first guess counted, though we wouldn’t keep score, and there wasn’t going to be a winner, because that wasn’t the point. The game was just to pass the time, Susan said, have some fun, and get to know each other a little better.

  “Who spent thirty days in jail for selling pot?”

  “Who painted ‘Class of 1980’ on the roof of their high school the night before graduation?”

  “Who got kicked out of a bar with her friends and retaliated by picking up the owner’s sports car and leaning it against the front door?”

  “Who was an archery company’s pin-up girl, and did it for free?”

  No one matched the right girl to any of the first three questions, but even back then we all knew immediately who had posed with a bow and arrow. Only Bev had the personality and the looks to pose like that, plus the naïveté to do it for free.

  “Hey, I was really young then, it was my job, and I didn’t know women could get paid for that kind of thing,” she said.

  The game lasted from St. Ignace until we lined up for the crossing in DeTour. Once on the ferry, a crewman directed us to park right next to each other and we took it as a good sign. Every crossing is different depending upon what kinds of vehicles are in line, whether there are any trucks or boat trailers or campers, and fate could have had us parked far apart. Incredibly, there was a tugboat docked near shore with the name Linda Jean painted in big black letters on the stern. Our own Linda shared that same middle name.

  We unrolled our windows, talked back and forth, and Linda pointed out the lighthouse, the ferry dock on the Drummond side of the crossing, the size of the dolomite boulders, and the working limestone quarry. Not as ordinary landmarks, but as our own precious discoveries.

  The view was becoming familiar to me by then, yet it never failed to excite my senses. As we approached Drummond’s shore, a certain clear watery light that only ever shines in the north made the island appear to pulse and glow. A canopy of scarlet maples was surrounded by the ropy twists of weather-stunted cedar trees, and I watched the calm water lap over those man-sized rocks just offshore. They were smooth as skin and looked to me like ancient mermen, perpetually surfacing, their muscular and rounded backs breaking through the waves over and over again.

  I nudged Bev. “There’s your hot guys,” I’d said, pointing.

  “Where?” she asked, craning her neck to see, and I had to laugh at the sincerity of her effort.

  Bev had seemed so cosmopolitan to me back then. She loved to travel and had been to Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and of course all over the United States. She was from Michigan, too, but had once lived in Houston, a city far larger than anyplace I’d ever lived. She had a relentless curiosity about the world and enjoyed telling me odd details about the places she’d been. That year it was fun for me to approach Drummond Island with her and be the one talking about a place I’d been before, and loved.

  A thousand-foot Laker—one of the hundred or so freshwater-only commercial freighters that sailed the Great Lakes—rested a quarter mile to the north, waiting patiently just outside the channel for our ferry to cross.

  “I used to see those when Scott and I drove up north together,” she’d said, remembering a camping trip she’d taken with her boyfriend before they broke up. “I always wondered where they were from and where they were going.”

  Her boyfriend had been much younger than she was. I didn’t know if the other girls knew about the reason for their breakup but Bev had confided in me that he was childless and often agonized about it. Bev was fifty-one, her son and daughter were both grown, and she’d been honest with him. If he wanted children, it wasn’t going to be with her.

  “Tell me something about the island,” Bev said.

  I told her that those bright red trees, and the forest they belonged to, sustained a rich world of wildlife, from birds to voles to bears, and there were more deer on the island than people. I told her that in a few minutes the sun would be overhead and if we were lucky, the freighter would pass by, and we’d be able to see her stern
and read her name and her home port. It might be Chicago, but it might be Istanbul, too. And I told her she’d better eat something. Tonight we were going to the Northwoods and maybe to Chuck’s Place, too, and while the wildness of Drummond looked pretty now, its mudholed roads and wavy horizon were hell on a hangover.

  I reached in the back, rustled around, and put my hand on the bag of potato chips.

  “Chip?” I asked her, my own mouth soon full of salt and grease.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Too salty,” she said.

  I felt the motor of the ferry downshift as we approached. For the past three years it had felt like Drummond belonged only to the four of us. Even when times at home had been difficult during the rest of the year, having memories of the island made me feel rich in a way that was difficult to describe. It was as if we all possessed something or maybe just knew something or felt something you couldn’t bag, box, or buy from any store, no matter how much money you had.

  That feeling of reclaiming our wild selves wasn’t for sale, not at any price, and yet there were four new women along who we were happy to share it with for free.

  Well, not for free, free, but for $125 in any denomination, including coin-wrapped rolls of quarters and stacks of one-dollar bills, deposited into the trip kitty; some snacks, toilet paper, and bottles of booze, with no penalty assessed if they’d been opened and were already half gone; a set of walkie-talkies with a five hundred yard range; and a two-quart Tupperware container of homemade potato salad.

  I looked at the shrinking shore of the mainland and thought, Yeah, we’d willingly share Drummond Island with you for that.

  “Is that a camper?”

  Mary Lynn had just seen Frank’s trailers and her features contorted into an expression I knew well. One of my daily tasks at Peegeo’s was to write the dinner special on the chalkboard. On Wednesdays, it was barbecue beef ribs, which always smelled savory and rich to me, and were really popular with most of the regular customers, but not with Mary Lynn.

  “Nothing but strings and gristle,” she’d said, time and again, while pursing her lips and tilting her body as far away from the chalkboard as she could.

  I’d been sure Mary Lynn wasn’t going to be able to keep up with us, yet we’d barely arrived on the island and it was already apparent to me I’d been wrong. By the time we’d pulled into the muddy driveway at Frank’s, Mary Lynn had slurped a Jell-O shot at the Welcome Center, made friends with Beth, the infamously goofy bartender at Northwoods, and even whizzed in the woods. Not one of these experiences had seemed to faze her.

  One look at the trailer, though, and she’d balked. Pieces of junk held together by bungee cords, she’d complained, dismissing our accommodations the way she had the beef rib special. Mary Lynn was a fingernail-polishing, hair spray–spraying, fanny pack–wearing, cigarette-smoking, gin-sipping lady. Her favorite pastime was playing cards, euchre preferably, and doing it inside, at a cushioned table and sitting in a cushioned chair. Relieving herself in the woods aside, she was not a woman who roughed it.

  “Didn’t I say I don’t camp? Didn’t I make that perfectly clear?”

  Mary Lynn was short—a half inch shy of five foot—and when she was worked up, her voice sounded like she’d just taken a hit off a helium balloon. Behind her back, some of the Peegeo’s regulars called her “Gnomie.” They wouldn’t have said it to her face, though, unless they enjoyed receiving a barrage of grief in that ear-puncturing shriek. When Mary Lynn aired her grievance about the trailer, birds took flight; the wind stopped blowing; and while we hadn’t seen Frank yet, I pictured him running inside his house, with those giant hands over his ears.

  “Don’t judge it until you see the inside,” Linda told her, with more kindness than she ever would have shown someone younger. “They’re really not that bad.”

  “Think of it as an adventure,” Bev added, striding to the louvered door and pulling it open.

  “An adventure in yuck,” Mary Lynn snapped.

  One good thing about the trailers: They were clean. Once Mary Lynn smelled the Pine-Sol, she relented. We divided ourselves into the two trailers the same way we’d divided ourselves into the vehicles: Linda, Mary Lynn, Pam, and Susan in one; Andrea, Jill, Bev, and me in the other. We unpacked, put our groceries in the little propane refrigerators, and then met back outside to decide what the rest of the day would bring.

  Bev and Susan both said they wanted to see more of the island. From onboard the ferry, the approach to Drummond was scenic, yet revealed mostly just trees and rocks. We had stopped at the Northwoods, but the bar wasn’t too far from the ferry dock, and on the drive there it’d just been more trees. Frank’s was farther up the coast but reached via the main road, which was inland, so trees again.

  “What about hiking trails?” Bev asked. “There’s got to be a good place to get into the woods instead of just driving past them.”

  I loved her for saying that. I’d been longing to get my feet out into those woods from the moment I’d seen them. The other girls had preferred two-tracking to hiking, and I hadn’t wanted to suggest something different if I was the only one who’d felt that way. With two of us, even if no one else wanted to hike, she and I could go together.

  I doubted Mary Lynn was a hiker or a regular exerciser; I didn’t know about Susan; and Andrea, Jill, and Linda got their heart rates up by hoofing platters of food and trays of drinks from the kitchen to the dining room eight hours a day. I did that, too, but I loved the woods.

  Bev worked in an office all day and sat at a desk. On the weekends, she went to the gym, took an aerobics class, or went for a long walk in the woods near her apartment. New girls were going to mean new activities, something Linda had already planned for.

  “There’s this place we could check out,” she said. “It’s a preserve or something called Maxton Plains.”

  “Huh,” Mary Lynn huffed, skeptical. “Sounds like a field.”

  “No, it’s an alvar,” Linda corrected.

  “What’s an alvar?” Andrea asked, looking to me, not Linda, for the answer. I was the writer. I was the one with a ready and understandable definition for even the weirdest-sounding word. Providential? Lucky. Effrontery? Shameless. Indefatigable? Us. But an alvar? I had nothing.

  “An alvar looks like a field, but the plants are actually growing out of rock,” Linda explained. “They’re super rare. There’s only a few in the whole country, and the one up here is supposed to be the biggest. It’s new. We’ve never been there.”

  “Yeah,” Mary Lynn grumbled. “Like I said. A field.”

  Linda patiently explained that whoever wanted to walk could walk, whoever wanted to hang by the cars could hang by the cars, but Mary Lynn rolled her eyes at that, too. Usually, that would have irritated Linda no end, but she let it go, and I figured it was just Mary Lynn’s way. Every group had a curmudgeon, and Mary Lynn was going to be ours.

  Bev was the first to get ready, and once inside Andrea’s Bronco she bounced her legs up and down like a little kid. Mary Lynn was the last, grumbling all the way to Linda’s Explorer, but then when we drove the few miles down South Maxton Road to the edge of the preserve and parked, she raced Bev to be the first one out.

  All eight of us were struck silent by what we saw.

  Before us was an ancient place, a flat circle of silver and gold a half mile across and surrounded by florescent evergreens. The silver came from the concave, unbroken expanse of flat rock under our feet, so damp with dew, fog, or mist that it gave off a metallic sheen. The poplar leaves, the grass blades, the yellow of fall-blooming wildflowers, and even the wings of birds and insects merged together in the sun, creating an airy layer of gold.

  For once the wind was nonexistent and none of us spoke; cicadas celebrating that they were simply alive was the only sound. Bev took a breath and marched off in hiker mode; Mary Lynn stayed right next to Linda’s car, but she was just as awestruck by the sight as the rest of us were. If silver could be spun from rock and gold from grass
, what else was possible on this enchanted island?

  “It’s beautiful,” Andrea said in an uncharacteristic whisper. “Linda, how did you even know about this place?”

  Maxton Plains was out on the island’s remote right claw. No electricity, no houses, no people, and no roads beyond the one we’d taken to get there. Although today there are all sorts of Internet sites about it, you couldn’t Google the preserve in 1995. You couldn’t Google anything in 1995. Linda only knew about Maxton Plains because years before she’d come to Drummond Island to hunt deer with her boyfriend and they’d stumbled upon it. Someone had told them it was a good place to get a buck—a wildlife preserve that allowed hunting in order to cull the island’s exploding white-tailed deer population. She hadn’t shot anything, but the site had made an impression on her, and so when Bev said she’d wanted to hike, Linda remembered it.

  “Most alvars are remote, so it’s rare to even be able to see a place like this,” Linda said.

  She pointed to a series of interpretive signs, worn down by time and weather. Everyone else had walked right past them. More than a thousand acres of the alvar had been preserved by the Nature Conservancy, and although Linda had said it was a “new” place, it was actually only new to us. A glacier created Maxton Plains, and the rare combination of surface rock, endangered wildflowers, and stunted trees wasn’t new at all, it was prehistoric—at least ten thousand years old. Limestone and bedrock extended as deep as two full miles. At ground level, some of the rock was covered with soil, but it was such a thin layer even small trees couldn’t take root. The hardy plants that could grow there were grasses and wildflowers usually native to the Arctic tundra—prairie smoke, Indian paintbrush, Houghton’s goldenrod, and dropseed. In some places, especially near the center of the alvar, the flat stone plates were exposed, and other hardy plants like juniper and moss grew in the rain-collecting cracks between them.