The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  I’d been kidding (mostly) about whether a cop stationed on the island now was noteworthy. We did still go to the bars. We did stay out late and two-track. We played pool, and shared toasts, and hijacked the jukebox for hours at a time. We just did it all with a moderation unknown in the early years. I think we worried more about forgetting the hamburger buns, or that Mariner’s Passage would be out of coffee filters, or even about getting enough sleep, than about being pulled over by the police.

  But traditions were good. Traditions were what Drummond was all about. Sloppy joes and nicknames and no cops. And as we aged it was comforting to know some things stayed the same, year after year.

  It had been a busy year, we hadn’t seen as much of each other as we would have liked, and on the drive up, we got busy catching each other up on what had been going on in our lives. Kenny had been gone for more than four years, and I knew from talking with her about it that Linda had weathered the worst of her grief. She still worked at Peegeo’s, and her take-charge personality had returned, though she’d still occasionally get quiet and need time alone. She hadn’t dated anyone else; the longer he was gone, the more Kenny’s legend grew. He was not just a hard act to follow; he was an impossible one.

  Andrea had her second child, a girl, in 2003. Jill had been living with a man we all liked, Brett, and they’d had a baby, also a daughter, in 2006. Those little girls were in elementary school and preschool now, and our friends both said their families felt complete. Jill worked in shipping at a cherry processor and Andrea had closed the preschool in order to help her husband, Steve, with his automotive accessory business. Neither one planned to have any more children and wanted to focus on their careers.

  Pam and her husband, Jim, had gone on several Caribbean vacations and had been discussing buying some vacation property nearby so they could relax closer to home. Susan and George had been married now for more than ten years, Peegeo’s was thriving, and Susan had been given a promotion at the law office where she was a paralegal. She’d recently been assigned to more complex cases, some in federal court.

  In contrast to how single-mindedly the rest of us pursued career success, Bev would be retiring at the end of the year. She’d been in the workforce for more than forty years, toiling away as a curb service waitress and short-order cook at the Dipsey Doodle Drive-In, then dispatching drivers for her father’s cab service, answering phones, typing letters, and holding hands at various secretary and nurse’s aide stints before becoming a legal secretary. For the past several years, she’d eagerly anticipated the day she’d no longer have to work for wages and was so excited by the prospect she could talk of little else.

  “I’m going to travel, and learn to play the piano, and volunteer, and work in my garden, and go to the gym more, and get a new haircut, and—”

  As for me, my life was in flux. I’d emotionally adjusted to being divorced, my sons had long been old enough to be in school all day, and I’d used the time alone to make my writing a priority. I was considering graduate school, my second book had been published, and I had won two regional awards. So I felt optimistic about my future, yet also unsure of my place in it. My sons were thriving, but my brother (and only sibling) had been in an ATV accident, suffered a brain injury, and struggled mightily to adjust to its lasting effects. I’d achieved my goal of being a working writer, yet was still recovering financially from the divorce and was barely making it month to month. Even coming up with $325 for Drummond that year had been a struggle. How was I ever going to pay for my own retirement someday? I had no idea.

  As if all of that weren’t enough for me to grapple with, there was a man.

  A muscular and handsome, motorcycle-riding, cigarette-smoking, rum-drinking, salmon-fishing, politically aware, sharp-witted, and intelligent man. I was almost forty-eight years old, and yet, by “in love with him,” I don’t mean I felt some grown-up, reasoned, and mature affection. I mean I felt a giddy-up, lunatic-making, heart palpitation–causing, lost-my-freaking-mind kind of adoration.

  When my divorce was finalized, my farmhouse had been in the middle of a remodel. Because of finances and emotional exhaustion, the project suffered a long hiatus. When I’d saved enough for the contractor to return, he arrived on a black Harley and I promptly fell in love with him. What a catch I must have seemed to him: a middle-aged woman with three kids, who was not only suffocating in debt, but gun-shy and hormonal, too. And yet, none of that must have mattered to him, because when we left for Drummond that year, I was wearing an impractically large pear-shaped diamond on my ring finger.

  “Enough with the cell phone already!” Linda called after me.

  She and I were sharing the master bedroom at Mariner’s Passage that year, and she’d caught me again running up the stairs to check my messages. My fiancé (good Lord, the word gave me hives) had bought me a cell phone right before we’d left so that he and I could stay in touch. There was a time when the man phone tree had been more than enough contact with the outside world for me. Now I could think of nothing but that little rectangle of connection to him, even on Drummond.

  “I love you, my Mardi,” Pete’s deep-voiced message reverberated from the speaker. “Be safe, don’t do anything crazy, and get home to me soon, okay?”

  But I was going to do something crazy. Not on Drummond Island, not anymore, but back at home. It was only fall, but when summer came back around I was going to marry that man.

  “Hey lovebird,” Linda said, calling up the stairs to me once more. “Get your ass down here. Gamer has a plan for our afternoon.”

  Gamer’s—Susan’s—plan was to spend the afternoon geocaching.

  Just as the places we rented, the vehicles we drove, and our lives back home had changed, so had what we did for fun on the island. Modern Drummond Girls didn’t just go to the bar, sit inside and play board games or watch old action movies anymore; they ran around outside in the woods, along the shore, or in our case in the swampy marsh of the DNR’s Pigeon Cove Wildlife Flooding Area, and tried to find “caches” in a new kind of treasure hunt.

  Susan explained geocaching was a worldwide phenomenon. The “treasure map” for this kind of hunt was digital. Latitude and longitude coordinates that had been logged into satellites by other geocache enthusiasts. They’d hidden treasures all over the world—including dozens on Drummond Island—and then uploaded their locations onto Geocaching.com. Satellites bounced the coordinates back down to an app on a smartphone or a fancy handheld GPS unit like the one Susan had. And we were going to go and hunt for one.

  My own sense of direction was famously bad—I sometimes got lost in my own town—and I’d never heard of geocaching.

  “Will we find money?” I wanted to know.

  “Nah,” Susan said. “Mostly just little knickknacks or doodads. You know, trinkets.”

  That made it seem less inviting to me. What was a treasure hunt without the treasure? I could find doodads at home in my kids’ junk drawers. Still, we’d been to the island so many times by then, and I did like the idea of trying something new.

  Susan thought the Pigeon Cove cache would be a good one to target for our first try. The coordinates were near a well-traveled spot on East Channel Road, about three miles from the ferry dock. A little creek flowed through the area, and on her GPS’s map it looked like a seasonal marsh, with lots of wet-kneed cedar trees and rocks for someone to hide a cache behind.

  We parked along a dirt crossroad and bounced into the high grass and cattails as if there really were piles of unclaimed cash to be found there.

  All of us got our feet wet, but later when I’d had the chance to really look at a map, it awed me to think of where the water that had soaked through to my socks had been. And where it was going.

  A culvert guided the tiny creek under East Channel Road where it emptied into Pigeon Cove, which later became Sturgeon Bay, then Potagannissing Bay. All those coastal bays of the island combined into the St. Marys River, and then the North Channel. The North Channel empt
ied into the Georgian Bay, which flowed south into Lake Huron, then through the St. Clair River into Lake St. Clair. From there the water became the Detroit River, then Lake Erie, then Niagara Falls, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and finally, the Atlantic Ocean. If I looked at that map long enough, I could have traced the reverse route. I could have found how the Atlantic Ocean ended up as a wave lapping the shore of Drummond Island, then flooded the very marsh we’d been hunting in for treasure.

  And I thought of how our trips to the island had been like that, too. A circle of friends and time, around the human calendar as the world rotated on its axis, whether the world meant literal geography or just our own cyclical lives. Youth and aging, experiencing and forgetting, driving home and then driving north, over the bridge and across the ferry, again and again.

  Andrea was the one who found the cache, and when she did she whooped as loud as if she’d just captured a leprechaun. It was just a clear plastic jar, big, with a handle and a yellow screw-on lid. Inside was a lanyard, a pink stress ball (the kind an office worker might keep in their desk drawer), a tiny deer figurine, and a small spiral notebook.

  The notebook functioned as a log and contained an entry from the maker of the cache as well as signatures of the other geocachers who’d found it before we had. That was Susan’s favorite part. Reading through the log of any cache she found and then adding her name to it. She signed “The Drummond Girls” on the first blank page and then wrote a little note about us (“We’re some fun girls from Traverse City up here on our annual trip!”).

  “When you find a cache, you can add something to it if you want,” she explained, “and take something out.”

  We didn’t take anything, but Susan wrote “GC” on the back of a cardboard coin good for one free drink at Peegeo’s, and Linda added her Drummond Island key chain. The key chain never turned up again, but I now think people who put messages in bottles and toss them into the sea might improve their chances of getting them back if they added a drink offer. Because that coin did come back. At least, we’ve chosen to think it did.

  Susan had dropped Peegeo’s coins in a lot of geocaches that year (that’s what the “GC” stood for), and a few of them did get cashed in. I like to imagine there was something of us embedded inside, and our essence worked on the finder the same way the currents worked on the water of that tiny creek, moving it south.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN 2011

  Bev, Jill, me, Pam, Linda, and Andrea at my wedding reception, August 2010.

  I did not Hula-Hoop at my first wedding. I did at my second, and while wearing my wedding dress, too. A lovely appliquéd, daisy-inspired, knee-length Lilly Pulitzer I’d bought on the Internet. Andrea and her daughters came to the reception, brought along their striped plastic tube, and I hula’ed the crap out of it. That activity alone explains anything anyone might want to know about the difference between my two marriages.

  My second husband and I took our vows on my farmhouse’s front porch while a poet presided; our sons witnessed; and my family, our friends, and all the Drummond Girls, along with their assorted husbands, boyfriends, children, looked on.

  Bev was the first of them to hug me afterward.

  “Be happy,” she whispered into my ear.

  A year later, my husband and I celebrated our first anniversary, not by doing anything special, but by doing something we did together all the time. We went fishing for salmon in the Grand Traverse Bay. He drove the boat and set the lines while I leaned back in the seat and felt the comforting hum of the motor vibrate down to my bones. When we came ashore, we had two big fish in the cooler and every organ inside my body felt swelled to bursting. Back at home, I picked up the phone and called Bev.

  “I am,” I told her, and even though there had been a yearlong break between her wish and my confirmation of it, she knew exactly what I meant.

  My new husband could launch a boat, hook a fish, plow a driveway, build a china cabinet, glaze a roast, and tinker with the pieces of my jaded heart until they fit back together again. Not perfectly, not without a gouge here and a scratch there, but perfectly functional nonetheless.

  When necessary, my new husband could also jerry-rig an ancient camper onto the back of his pickup truck. Which turned out to be a useful skill to have when you married into the Drummond Girls.

  In 1959, the Midwestern-based Skamper Corp., known for its economic recreational vehicles and hardtop tent trailers, started manufacturing truck campers. My maternal grandpa Hain was an avid outdoorsman, and he liked the idea of being able to drive to remote backwoods locations while still having comfortable accommodations handily accessible. He was never one to cozy up to trends, though, and some serious time would elapse before he was convinced the Skamper engineers had worked out the kinks.

  The hermit crab–ish lure of a real bed fitted inside his truck bed was ultimately too much for him, and in 1989, he purchased the thirtieth-anniversary edition—twelve feet of Skamper camper with the fetching side dinette design—and attached it to the bed of his Ford pickup. Many satisfying fishing, rock collecting, and wildflower identification trips followed.

  When my grandfather died in 2008, my brother inherited the Skamper. But not too long after, he’d had his accident, and although he’d made an amazing recovery, his depth perception was no longer reliable enough for him to drive. And probably wasn’t ever going to be. Accepting that took my brother two years, but in 2011, he gave the Skamper to Pete and me as a belated wedding present.

  The timing of the gift was actually quite serendipitous—Pete had a new pickup truck (like my grandfather before him, my husband was a Ford man, too) and with a little adjustment, the Skamper would fit. The reason that mattered was because we’d just received Jill and Brett’s wedding invitation in the mail. And there was going to be camping:

  We wish to share our happiness with you, our family and friends.

  No gifts please.

  Camping is available

  at

  The Brown Campground

  Spend the weekend with us—

  Stay as long as you wish. Pets welcome.

  Jill had finally found a man worthy of her, and so on the appointed mid-June day, the plan was for a convoy of Drummond Girls, and some of our assorted spouses, children, and dogs, to meet at Peegeo’s and embark together on the half-hour drive to the cozy home deep in the forest where Jill lived with her soon-to-be husband and their young daughter. The wedding was going to be in their side yard, with the surrounding forest as backdrop.

  Jill and Brett’s house wasn’t exactly far away, but it was so remote and back in the woods that none of us had ever been there. The invitation included a map. Andrea and Steve and their two daughters led the way; Linda and Bev followed close behind them; Pete, me, our dog, and our Skamper were next; with Pam and Jim bringing up the rear.

  The old three-quarter-ton Ford of my grandfather’s had an eight-foot bed, perfectly matching the eight feet of camper floor designed to be inserted into it. Pete’s truck was newer, shinier, lifted, with bigger tires, and far more stylish than my grandfather’s. It was also two feet shorter. Once Pete removed the tailgate and attached the Skamper, twenty-four heavy inches of boxy white aluminum still protruded from the rear.

  For this, our maiden voyage, he’d secured it with tow straps and commercial-grade bungee cords. It was locked on but good, though every time we’d hit a bump, the Skamper camper lifted off the pickup, then bounced back down.

  “Back teeth all in one piece?” Pam giggled out her window when Jim pulled alongside us to check the directions.

  We got back into formation, but then after a series of turns and a shuffle in line I heard Andrea call, “We lost Pam and Jim!” out her window. I checked the side-view mirror for their white Jeep and was rewarded with only a cloud of gravel dust. Up ahead, Andrea’s hand, with her cell phone attached, was extended out her Jeep’s window, exploring the backcountry air for service.

  She was trying to phone the missing couple with o
ur location when Steve hit a rock and Andrea’s cell phone flew out of her hand and into the tall grass.

  When Pam, Jim, and the cell phone were all finally located, we set out again and in due time came upon the first in a long series of hand-painted signs marking Jill and Brett’s driveway. JILL LOVES BRETT, the first sign read, in pink script inside a red heart. The muddy two-track that was their driveway gently curved this way and that, and in another hundred yards we read, WEDDING, THIS WAY! then, KEEP GOING… More trees and underbrush, another curve, and YOU’RE ALMOST THERE!

  The woods grew darker, the trees taller, the undergrowth thicker, the mud muddier, until finally the very last sign: I KNOW, RIGHT?

  We parked in a sunlit clearing, got out of our cars, and walked en masse toward a woven twig arch in the distance, where perhaps sixty guests had gathered. The forest was eerily quiet for such a happy celebration and in half a minute we realized why. The ceremony was in progress. We’d missed the vows, barely catching the minister saying, “You may kiss the bride!” followed by hearty applause. In the distance, people whooped and laughed, but from within our ranks our shoulders slumped and Andrea’s youngest daughter dissolved into tears.

  She was only five. Missing a bridal kiss, deep within a fairy-tale forest, by only seconds was a tragedy beyond compare.

  I wasn’t a little girl and yet I’d felt like crying, too.

  It’d been twenty years, but I’d still wished chance had brought me to Peegeo’s a little sooner. Then I would have gone to Jill’s first wedding and been with the girls on that first trip. But it hadn’t, and I wasn’t. None of us had been invited to her second wedding—it happened too fast—and now I’d missed her third one, too. The real one. The one I could tell was going to last.