Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  So Elizabeth and I did one of my favourite hikes instead, loading her two dogs and a couple of foster dogs, the ones who are still up to it, into the back of her old Datsun and driving a few miles out of town to the cemetery. It is unchanged, still the propeller and the wobbly mattress graves I have admired for years. At the south end, high above Pine Creek, we pick up the trail that follows the creek east. It is early spring, the willows barely pricked out in pale green, the shrubs all plum, sap-rising colour, lupines in low purple bundles, bluebells, the first yellow arnica, kinnikinnick in flower, juniper crawling over the ground, clouds breaking up and the sky washed sharp. The air is full of a scent I keep sniffing till I’m dizzy. It’s the cottonwoods, their leaves just emerging, sharp like tulips and glossed in some sticky juice, some birthing sap, wild and sweet. What a place.

  We walk the rim, the little creek below between its broad gravel borders amiably following the course left to it after all the gold rush mucking around. We come to a gorge where the creek gains volume and noise, spinning in the steep rock walls. Elizabeth yells at the dogs. It’s a sheer drop over huge boulders. Once we saw little ducks swirling around in the turbulence as if it were a bathtub, merry in the roar. Somewhere along here is where we spotted a raven’s nest two years ago, a great rarity to glimpse anything of the lives of these smart, secretive birds. The nest was a heap of messy sticks suspended over the gorge on an impossible ledge. There would be no practice runs for the young leaving the nest. Do or die. Elizabeth spies the nest again, but there is no family this year.

  We stop for lunch farther up, where the trail meets the creek, sitting down in a clutter of driftwood left by the runoff. Elizabeth pulls out the picnic she brought: cheddar, mayonnaise and cream cheese sandwiches, a tomato halved, coffee in a Thermos. I contribute some Swiss chocolate. We chatter and eat, watch the water and the little pines across the way with their brood of yellow cones. Her dog Sumo is very quiet beside us, his nose grabbing and sorting all the smells.

  On the return we take the low road, trudging in the gravel along the creek, the sun growing steadier and steadier until by mid-afternoon it fills the sky and loads the air.

  I love walks with Elizabeth. She is a keen observer of weather and birds and growing things. She goes out with her dogs every single day, and I believe she is part dog, her observations and intuitions running along dog lines. When I go out with Elizabeth I see better. And she is watching her life, which I like in people too.

  I am glad to be a woman for this reason; I can have the conversations I want to have. I can say to another woman, What is it all about, do you think? What have you been able to figure out? How is getting older going for you? A woman will answer with alacrity, as if that is just what she has been mulling over at that moment.

  Conversations with men are more oblique. I don’t know what men are thinking about. I don’t assume they are unreflective or lost down some rabbit hole. I stay curious and hopeful, though it is discouraging when thoughtful men like the writer Jim Harrison say they prefer to talk to women, that women are further along the evolutionary trail than men.

  I talk to men all the time in my counselling practice—fathers and husbands, brought to counselling by their kids or their wives. It’s my job to try to riddle them.

  I assume men live in code, from a woman’s point of view. We don’t know their lives. Between the sexes, it’s anthropological. I know their psychological work is harder. Men have to separate from their mothers, identify separately, whereas women don’t have to separate from, only withstand, their mothers. Maybe it takes it out of them. They have to give up that huge, comfortable, gossipy, solicitous circle women spend their lives in. What replaces it for them? What is expected of men now that there are no woolly mammoths left to kill?

  IN MY FORTIES I couldn’t be around men at all. I was too ratty and lonely. I read Edna O’Brien and lined up with the women in her stories, middle-aged, still lusty women full of longing and humiliation. I had no lover and did not expect to have one ever again, and it rankled like some vestigial spur. I felt abandoned by men. They were done with me, apparently, before I was done with them.

  Leon would come home from time to time, looking for friendship, a certain kind of intimacy, and I’d drive him out of my house. Or there would be men in my counselling room, needing so much care and patience, so much bringing along, with their terrible fragility. As soon as they sat down with me I’d pick a fight with them. Why should I be the one to help? How could I? Leon said, don’t think of it as gender—but it was gender.

  Menopause was my time to grind down my life with men, and for a long time I felt I had nothing to say to them, nothing to spare.

  I STILL LIVE in the house I moved to ten years ago, when I came back from the Yukon, the property at the top of Algonguin Park. I love my house. It’s the best home I’ve ever had, though if I dropped a match anywhere near it, it would be gone in twenty minutes. It is a dry, old, uninsurable house with several inconveniences. I have no plumbing. Good water runs all over my hill, but I have no well nearby and haul my water by the gallon from further down where there’s a well. I fetch it by car in summer when the road is open and by toboggan in winter when the road is full of snow. This has been a pleasant chore so far. I like the effort, strapping the canisters to the toboggan, chugging the half-kilometre up my steep hill. When I’m seventy I will want to drill a well close by.

  After I’d been in the house a few years, Leon built me a porch on the north side with a big double-board floor and specially-made screens floor to roof. He salvaged some big frame windows from a sidewalk and every November I lug them out of the back house and fit them over the screens till May, when I take them off again and walk them down the trail. In spring I lay a mattress down on the porch, cover it with a cotton quilt and sleep there most nights till October. I like to see the light change on the porch—the blank spring light across the floor when the trees are bare, the sliding leaf shadows through June and July, the apricot light of August.

  Leon has never lived with me again. Well, once he did. After one of his long absences years ago, I asked him to unpack, to stay home for good, and he agreed. I cleared a little room upstairs for his computer gear and he moved in, but it was too late. I had turned into some sort of outlaw, snappish and inconsolable, and wouldn’t have him back. After a few months I was ruining us and asked him to leave.

  Now, when he’s home, he stays down the hill in the first house on the property. In winter, when the trees are bare, I can see his lights. We keep a trail open between our houses and trot back and forth. A few years ago I asked him to set a price on my house, with a few acres around it, and I have it about paid off. I believe this formalizes our separation.

  We went to Cambodia together in 1994 to visit Bree. That was the last time we were lovers. Just once, one night or day, in a jet-lag stupor in Bangkok on our way to see her. For the next five weeks we slept side by side on Bree’s roof in Phnom Penh, but that half-conscious joining in the hotel in Bangkok was the last slide into our old relation. Before that, it had been a year or two. It takes a long time to unwind from someone. Possibly you never uncouple from someone you really married.

  I DON’T SEE MUCH of Leon lately. If he were home, I guess I would. We’re neighbours and rely on each other in certain ways. We keep some liveliness between us; we don’t let the friendship go. But not too much liveliness. When he’s around I’m aware of not stirring things up. I know that if I saw him every day for a week I’d be right back in, hectoring him, telling him everything. The whole band would strike up again, the banjos, zithers, pianos, same as always. The groove of our association is so worn, such a mix of love and exasperation, I would skid into it again. Nothing has changed. The love never goes. I am out of the habit of Leon, is all.

  He said, “I learned a lot from you, Jill. I learned that relationships are hard work and I don’t want to do it.” But he didn’t mean it. He’s in another one now. Who wouldn’t be, given the chance? I notice that pe
ople in their fifties don’t turn down love any more than people in their twenties.

  WHEN I MOVED to my house ten years ago, I took a job almost right away at a counselling agency in a nearby town. I still work there, three days a week. I didn’t mean to find a job so fast. When I came back from the Yukon I had enough money for a while and I wanted to see what would happen if I just waited. But I couldn’t stand the freedom. I found it stunningly difficult not to be plugged in anywhere, not to be bound up with people. It was a feeling of being not quite real. If a tree falls in the forest … If a woman walks around her house all day unaccountable, is she there?

  Leon would phone from somewhere, friends would phone, their voices too far off. A state of mind like sad weather would weigh in. Nothing prompted it, no effort dispelled it. I’d be fine, sitting on my steps in cool autumn light, the last hummingbirds streaking by the house, and contentment would fan out all around me. Then I would stumble, have a troubling dream or lose track of Bree in my heart, or it would seem too thin with Leon and I would see how I maintain the thinness, or I would be lazy with my time. Then I’d be hauled back under a cloud, wake sluggish, find no comfort in myself.

  I found out that time on your hands is only precious in relation to the nearness of, the easy access to, its opposite. In those first months after the Yukon, new in my house, no acquaintances or obligations yet taken up, I was a wraith. I had no place anywhere, no footprint, no weight. It was like being caught outside the living world, a ghost at the window.

  “WHY DO MEN chase women?” asks Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck. “Because they fear death.” That is what I think was the heart of my trouble.

  We are the animal with foreknowledge of death. This is the organizing fact in human life, the dilemma that explains everything, I sometimes think. We’re smart, but we’re going to die. As a hedge we busy ourselves, form attachments, get distracted. We bind ourselves to the earth by a thousand tiny wires, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, to beat the rap. Why would fame be so attractive, or goods, or reproducing ourselves, or any of our large and small pursuits, if they did not increase the grip we have on the earth? We practise subterfuge, stake ourselves out over as large a surface as possible, because it is incomprehensible that—honestly now—we are going to die.

  This is the mental outpost where I lived the first months I was home from the Yukon. I had pulled so many of the lines free, I was snapping in the wind. The time after my summer away was the teeth-rattling part of the trip, not when I was out there, loving my freedom, but later, when I came home and freedom was all I had.

  I know I would have accumulated a life if I’d waited it out, if I could have lasted. Fallow ground is pure potential. But I couldn’t bear the suspense. I had to jump ship and get a job, sit with families again, talk to people, and let a job solve what I couldn’t solve. And it worked. Presto, agitation gone.

  JUNE 1

  Gradually the days have fleshed out, more and more enjoyable, so that every minute now I look forward to. There are things I do, always the same but in different order—whatever I decide in the moment. Part of the joy is the steady, beautiful weather, the winds calm and the sun riding the sky all day, barely travelling, just easing below the horizon for a few hours after midnight before returning, so every day feels like bounty, like generosity or good fortune, given in boundless portions.

  I woke this morning as though I’d been catapulted awake, totally rested, ten hours asleep, with my usual intermission in the cool yard to pee.

  Pat said yesterday, on a walk with Elizabeth and Diana and six dogs, that Atlin makes her think of a notion about holy places, everything being in the right balance, all the colours and shapes in perfect relation to each other. It seems possible there is a resonance between spirit and physical or elemental composition, the mountains exactly the right distance from the eye, or from each other, light and water interceding, to set off some kind of perfection, a spiritual sonar that the human solar plexus registers.

  My habit is to write in the morning in the shady cabin, stop and eat lunch when the sun is crawling onto the porch, walk for a few hours in the afternoon, plaster myself against the hot porch wall in the evening before I cook dinner. When I’m tired, I pull the curtains and climb into the last square of sunlight in my bed and read till it’s gone, till dusk at midnight.

  Yesterday I went through the white woods late in the day, slats of sun lighting up the poplars like a clutter of bleached bones. I sat writing in the strawberry field, a clearing that you come upon from the woods like magic, everything swimming together, the line of mountains, trees and sky fluid as current. I stayed a long time, sitting on the ground, whisking ants off my legs, filling my eyes. It was after nine when I sat down in my dazzling cabin to my plate of spaghetti.

  I often walk at the south end of town, through the Tlingit village and along the dirt road that comes out at the cemetery with its picket graves. Beyond it are the dogged little pines at the back of the beach where people go for picnics. Sometimes I change my course and leave the road before the cemetery and go over the rocks toward the lake. These rocks are very wonderful—pocked, volcanic, covered in orange lichen and juniper and crackling ground cover from old years. The ground has a dry, shattered look, as if the winter cold had burst the rock, split the ground again and again. Erosion is leaving glittering white skeins of mineral over the orange granite beneath, the way fascia binds human muscle.

  JUNE 2

  I have a bald eagle on my flagpole. He is eating something, his back to me and to the wind. A seagull has been screeching at him, but he is unperturbed. He was there last night as well, this flagpole being the tallest perch around. I was alerted to his presence by the gulls, miserable and outraged, flying at him. I watched for an hour while he persevered through their onslaught. One or two gulls, once four, flew loops around him, screeching, stretching out their feet at him, warrior-style, never coming closer than a yard. He bore this, feathers upended and dishevelled like a count with a lot to put up with, wary of the gulls, craning his neck at them and cranking open his beak, holding fast. I thought he must be threatening one of their nests—who knows where—but perhaps gulls just hate him on principle, a fellow scavenger.

  I like him. He’s grumpy and alone.

  Now here’s something. A raven flies up and, without hesitating a second, lands eye level to the eagle, three feet from him on the pulley. The eagle stops eating. They stare at each other and the raven begins to make a sharp, rocking motion like dry heaves. He is half the size of the eagle but apparently is retching at him. The eagle holds the raven’s gaze, maintains his perch, his feathers twiddling in the wind. Now the raven flies off, cackling. The eagle sits immobile and does not eat. When I go to bed he’s still there, unkempt, contemplative on the flagpole.

  MY MOTHER CLAIMS the sixth decade is the best. “I’ve tried them all and your fifties are your best,” she says.

  I prepared for mine with hope. Toward the end of my forties I had the feeling I was approaching an incline, coming to higher ground after a long slog through swamp. I may be describing menopause. At fifty I was pretty well out the other side. My brain seemed to be clearing, the band waves coming in sharper; and without particularly resolving anything, I had stopped hating myself.

  I think I managed it by enduring. Gradually I had taken charge of my house—painted enough walls, tunnelled my fingers into the garden dirt enough springs, been the only soul on the hill in enough winter storms, to gain possession. I believe this is how you take hold of yourself, by staying in one place.

  When I walk in the mountains in the North, in Atlin or Kluane or in the passes, I sometimes become afraid of bears. When I do, I sit down. I stay where I am, look around until, little by little, I know the place. The birds and small animals I’ve disturbed resume their activities, my eyes and senses gradually register the ground, the sky, the lay of things. My skin seems to thin. I am breathing rather than thinking, and I have the sensation of being more similar to my surround
ings than different, the sensation of being another creature in a certain place. I pass into a different relation to bears, one that I can manage. Then I go on.

  Approaching fifty, I was more at home in myself by dint of lasting. Five or seven years after coming back from the Yukon the first time, I had outlasted all the endings I’d been through and had collected, very slowly, a different set of pleasures. Coming up to fifty, I had some ways to replenish myself and please myself, the way being in a little family with Leon and Bree and being a menstruating, moon-bound woman had pleased me.

  Coming up to fifty, I knew as sure as anything I was out of trouble, and in a wave of gratitude I decided to throw a birthday party for myself and go on a big outing. The same way I’d done in 1990, I excused myself from work and packed the car for the North. I asked a friend in Toronto if I could use her house, and I invited my family and best friends of twenty years to my birthday. Everybody rallied. They brought photos and told funny memories, made rounds of margaritas in the kitchen, danced on the bare floors—nieces and nephew, Mom and Dad and old friends all mixed together under one roof with me. Everybody but Bree. Bree in Phnom Penh. I made a speech, as if I’d just reached solid ground after a hard swim, as if I were Marilyn Bell hauling out of Lake Ontario. For me the evening had the effect of a rite. I’d waited out the last of something and was now in a light and neutral time, a woman with one chunk of her life over and another starting up.

  I BOUGHT A KAYAK the year after the Haida Gwaii trip, and I took it with me when I went to Atlin the summer I was fifty. I bought it without deliberation as a way to continue my experience in Haida Gwaii, a way to be outdoors and travel by water by myself. Unlike my cedar canoe, which takes two to manoeuvre, my kayak weighs only fifty pounds. I can hoist it onto the car roof without help and I can carry it, the combing biting into one shoulder or the other, over portages. My boat is a sea kayak, meant for open water, for the tides and surf of the coasts or the big fresh water of Georgian Bay and the Great Lakes. A sea kayak is an ancient conveyance adapted to waves. The covered deck and narrow cockpit make a seal against water. A paddler can go forth in waves, hunt or travel in the sea, without the boat taking on water and sinking. Kayaks are suited to riled water, but riled water is also their peril. In a sea kayak the danger is waves, waves far from shore during long crossings, waves blowing on cold sea water or on big glacial lakes where there is no shore in reach, where if you capsize you must rescue yourself quickly, get out of the water and back into your boat before you become too cold to move.