The Moon by Night

by Madeleine L'engle

  In Mt. Olympic National Park we had our first real rain, but we expected it, because it has the highest annual rainfall in the continental United States. The funny thing is that there’s a place quite nearby, spelled Sequim, but pronounced Squim, which is so dry by contrast that they have to irrigate.

  On Mt. Olympic it was easy to believe in the almost continual rainfall, because the campgrounds were in the kind of luxuriant forest that only comes with a lot of moisture; tall, lush green trees, many of the trunks almost covered with moss; grass that is constantly wet—and wet firewood, too, the first we’d had to struggle with since Tennessee. The leaves were so thick over our heads that although it drizzled the whole time we didn’t get nearly as wet as you might have thought.

  The next day to get to Victoria, in British Columbia, we had to take a ferry across the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Isn’t that a beautiful sound, the Straits of Juan de Fuca? Like something out of a song. I wonder what kind of a song Zachary would make out of it?

  Victoria seemed much more like really being in a foreign country than our few hours in Mexico had. It’s a beautiful place, very English, with baskets of flowers hanging from the lamp posts, and the houses of Parliament outlined in lights at night like something out of fairyland. If Mother and Daddy had told us that we were all going to live in Victoria I don’t think any of us would have minded it one bit.

  We stayed with friends of Mother’s and Daddy’s, and we stayed in elegance, which we wouldn’t have done if we lived there. These friends must have been as rich as Zachary’s parents. They had a huge house, I mean but enormous, and I had a room completely to myself for the first time in my life. It was absolutely super and made me feel like royalty. There was a cook and a butler and stuff so we didn’t even have to help with the dishes. We just sat back and got waited on. It was very nice for a change.

  We washed hair and took baths and did laundry and Mother and Daddy had slews of mail and we had quite a lot of notes from the kids at home and we sent dozens of postcards back to them.

  And I had a letter from Zachary.

  “Dear Victoria,

  They’re rioting in Africa,

  They’re starving in Spain.

  When will I see

  My Vicky-bird again?

  The whole world is festering

  With sadness and sorrow.

  I wish I could kiss

  My Vicky-bird tomorrow,

  Italians hate Yugoslavs,

  South Africans hate the Dutch,

  But I like Victoria

  Very much.

  And I’d deeply appreciate it

  If you’d write back.

  Love and hugs and doom and stuff.

  Zach.”

  It wasn’t exactly my idea of a love poem. But it’d do. It was just fine. The reason I knew it was just fine was I sang the whole time I was in the shower washing my hair, sang at the top of my lungs.

  Mother came in and said, “That sounded good, Vicky. I haven’t heard you sing like that for a long time. Put on your dress, darling, we’re going to the Beach Hotel for dinner.”

  After an elegant dinner we went to the Butchart Gardens, in the dark, in a gently falling rain. It reminded me of Am-Lowell’s poem, “Patterns.”

  And the plashing of waterdrops

  In the marble fountain

  Comes down the garden paths.

  The dripping never stops.

  The lover of the girl in the poem gets killed, and it’s very sad, and she’s terrifically brave and all. If she weren’t so brave the poem wouldn’t make you choke up the way it does.

  I moved a little away from the others and walked on the soft wet lawn with the misty rain gentle against my cheeks, with lighted flowers gleaming on every side, and pretended that I was walking with Zachary, and that he wasn’t being doom-ey and scarey, but gentle and strong. And that he took me into the flowers and kissed me. Anyhow, at least I’d never be sweet sixteen and never been kissed even if another boy never looked at me between now and then. At least I’d got that far in growing up.

  We did a lot of sightseeing in Victoria. Mother’s and Daddy’s friends said it really was supposed to be very like England, and that the climate is similar, too, lots of rain, and never very cold in winter nor very hot in summer. We drove around the Lieutenant General’s mansion and gardens and ate in a real fish and chips place. After church on Sunday morning, we drove out to a wonderful place at Shawnigan Lake where there was a gang of kids and we all went swimming and saw a mink sitting on a rock by the water. We were warned not to go near it because minks bite, but it was another new animal for Suzy.

  From Victoria we went to Vancouver where we stayed with friends again. These friends had a tiny apartment, and Mother and Daddy slept on pull-out couches in the living room, with the rest of us in our sleeping bags wherever we could find a space on the floor. John and I put our sleeping bags under the piano, which took up most of the room, anyhow.

  After we left Vancouver we spent almost a week wandering through British Columbia which is the most beautiful place I have ever seen in the world. As Mother says John Fortescue says etcetera, comparisons are odious, and we saw so many beautiful places you couldn’t really choose between them, but British Columbia was the most happily beautiful place we saw on the whole trip, maybe because nothing exciting happened. Unless you count having a snowball fight in July exciting. The weather was gorgeous, the scenery was gorgeous, for a change I wasn’t feeling moody, and I think maybe part of it all was that everything was so unutterably beautiful that nobody could be unhappy there for long. If a place can remind you of a person, British Columbia reminded me of Grandfather.

  The campsites were very clean but quite primitive. There were nice fireplaces, but no water, except from the rushing streams or lakes we camped by, so that we had to boil all the drinking water. No lavs, only small outhouses. But these were cleaner and less smelly than some of the lavs with full electrical equipment. It was the way you’d imagine the Norwegian fjords, the way you’d image the Swiss alps. Great grandeur and absolute simplicity.

  We saw practically no cars with American license plates, and that was fun, too. Mother kept saying that it really did remind her of Switzerland, that there were the same spring flowers, the same feel to the way the grass grew and the sun shone while snow still lurked in the shadows, so that sometimes you weren’t certain whether a patch of white was left-over snow or spring flowers.

  When we got to Kootenay National Park (it’s still in British Columbia, but it runs right into Banff at the B.C.-Alberta line) we saw nine bears, three of them darling little cubs. These were our first bears since the one in Tennessee, the night I met Zachary, and we were all very excited to see them. The cubs were so cute and cuddly they looked almost like toys, as though you could get out and play with them. But Daddy reminded us that they’re wild animals, no matter how domesticated they look, and their mothers would soon put an end to any fun and games with human beings! We also saw one moose, one grey timber wolf, and five longhorn mountain sheep. Earlier that morning we had seen one mink, two deer, and innumerable chipmunks, so it was a red letter day for Suzy. Her Travel Book was dirty and worn and rapidly filling up with animals, birds, and bugs—though nothing else.

  Half the road through Kootenay-Banff National Park was under construction and miserable for Mother, Daddy, and John to drive through, in spite of the fun of seeing bears, and the magnificent scenery. When we got to Banff the town was mobbed, and we discovered that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were arriving the next morning! Ever since we’d reached Canada Mother and Daddy had carefully been planning to avoid them, in spite of our pleas to see a real queen, because of the crowds they’d attract.

  We’d expected a lot of Banff, but it was by far the poorest National Park we’d been in. It was huge, and jammed with people, though I suppose this was mostly because of the Queen, and if it hadn’t been so crowded it wouldn’t have been so bad. There weren’t any separate campsites, which made th
ings worse. You simply had to find a space big enough for car and tent. There weren’t any tables or fireplaces, and there was as much dust as there had been at Palo Duro or Grand Canyon. If you looked up you saw the tops of the pine trees and the mountains rising above, with their grand, snow-topped crests, so we didn’t regret being there, but it wasn’t going to be the more or less luxurious two days we’d looked forward to. No chance to wash clothes, or even ourselves, for that matter. Cooking wasn’t easy, either, because of the mobs of people. There were communal kitchens, with four tables in each, and two wood stoves, and far too many people in camp for the kitchens, so we planned to eat at odd hours. Also it wasn’t really convenient for cooking because we were geared to set everything up around the tent. The lavs didn’t have any lights, which you don’t expect in State Parks, but do you expect in National ones, and there weren’t nearly enough lavs to go ’round, so we were always having to stand in line, which was miserable if you happened to be in a hurry. We didn’t complain out loud after Mother and Daddy shushed us up, because, they explained, we were visitors in a foreign country and it wasn’t courteous to make cracks. But the Canadian campers around us complained loudly, and the louder they groused, the better it made us feel.

  After dinner there was a campfire program. We were ready early—the kitchens were so full we’d managed to cook some dinner on Uncle Douglas’s stove, unhitching the tent and using the tailgate of the car as a kitchen. While we were waiting for the movies to begin the younger kids played in the playground, and it was the best equipped playground we’d seen in any of the parks, I’ll have to say that for it. The trouble was that it was unsupervised, and the bigger boys kept shoving Rob off the swings and seesaws, and if he hadn’t had the rest of us around he wouldn’t have had a chance at anything.

  So, what with one thing and another, none of us was too happy when the movie began. And what happened next was that the very first film they showed made us feel for the first time that we were strangers in a foreign country. I know I said that in Victoria we felt that we were in a foreign land, but we weren’t strangers. In Victoria we were visitors, we were with friends, and we met a lot of interesting, hospitable people, and everybody was wonderful to us, and interested in exchanging ideas and finding out about each other. All through British Columbia we had fun talking with people, and learning from them. There was one girl with a long pigtail, who came from Vancouver, and who was biking all alone all the way to Montreal, where she was going to college. She and John had some wonderful talks. Then there were people from Calgary, in Alberta, who were leaving because of the Calgary Stampede. We’d thought something of going there, but they advised us not to, saying that in one day there’d be as many as a hundred thousand people there, and they always got away at that time if they possibly could, because it was like suddenly having all those people descend on Thornhill. They had twin boys just Rob’s age and the three of them made a magnificent fort out of twigs and rocks and had to be dragged away from their project when we all left in the morning. Anyhow, what I mean is that everybody was friendly and we loved meeting them and we didn’t feel out of place or different.

  But that first night in Banff the first movie was called The Two Kingstons, and it was about Kingston in Ontario and Kingston in New York, and the man who played the typical (so they said) American looked like Porky Pig and was always telling the Canadian off and trying to boss him around and showing off. All of a sudden, sitting there on the bleachers, surrounded by Canadians, we felt disliked, the way we’d heard Americans are abroad, and we felt very funny about it, funny peculiar, not funny haha.

  “What did they mean by it?” John said indignantly as we walked back to the tent. “Why would they show a picture like that?”

  Daddy said calmly, “After all, there’s a certain amount of truth to it, even if it isn’t very tactful, and even if it’s only a half truth.”

  Rob and Suzy ran and played as usual on the way back to the tent, but I felt as though someone had scrawled in large letters on a wall, “AMERICANS GO HOME!”

  That night it was noisy, and it was the very first campsite we’d been in where there was any noise at night at all. People were in the kitchens talking in loud voices till long after midnight, with the result that we, and everybody around us, were kept awake. I hoped the people making the noise were Canadian and not American. People in other tents kept shouting out, “BE QUIET!” but there wasn’t any quiet, and finally at almost one o’clock Daddy got up and went up to the kitchen and then it was a lot better. We were glad it wasn’t our introduction to Canada, because we’d have had a very bad impression.

  In the morning we slept late because of having been so disturbed during the night and Mother didn’t wake us up, because the kitchen was crowded, and so were the lavs. When we finally were dressed and went up to the kitchen to cook our breakfast there were only two other families there. One family left as we got started, and the other family didn’t seem to want to talk or make friends; they seemed to be deliberately ignoring us, but I realized later that that was because we were sensitive from the movie the night before. They had three kids, the youngest a boy about Rob’s age, and two girls, the oldest about Suzy’s age. The five of them got together (the kids weren’t worried because Rob and Suzy were American) and asked if they could go down to the playground while breakfast was cooking. Mother and Daddy said okay as long as I went along to keep an eye on them. The Canadian parents (their name was York) didn’t seem too keen on the idea, but finally they said the kids could go if they were back in fifteen minutes sharp.

  We ran down to the playgrounds, so they’d have as much time as possible, and I sat on one of the bleachers and watched while they see-sawed and swang and ran around and had a marvelous time and didn’t seem to be thinking about being Canadians and Americans at all. I really don’t think kids think about things like that. It’s all dumb grown-ups. Why is it that some grown-ups just seem to go on getting dumber and dumber year by year instead of learning anything?

  All of a sudden the middle little York kid tripped and fell and, instead of getting up laughing, she started to scream. I ran across the playground to her. Suzy was already there and I could see that the little kid’s wrist was spurting blood. Not just bleeding, but spurting.

  Sixteen

  “Shut up,” Suzy said to her roughly, “and be quiet so I can stop you bleeding.”

  The kid shut up. Suzy grabbed her wrist and began pressing. Somebody’s mother came running up. “She needs a tourniquet. Here, I’ll make a tourniquet for you.”

  Suzy glared at her. She was holding the York kid’s wrist and the spurting had stopped, though Suzy’s hand was all red from blood, and there seemed to be blood all over the place. “Sorry,” she said sharply, and she sounded almost like Daddy, “but a tourniquet’s the worst thing you could possibly do. Vicky, go get Daddy quickly and tell him to bring the first aid kit. I’ll go on applying pressure till he comes.”

  “You ought to get a doctor,” the mother said nervously. “Let the poor kiddie’s wrist alone. You’re hurting her. You don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll report you to the authorities.”

  “My father is a doctor,” Suzy said between clenched teeth. “Go ahead and report me.”

  It wasn’t very polite of her, but I didn’t blame her. I ran as fast as I could up the hill to the kitchen, panted out to Daddy to get the first aid kit and come fast, which he did, without asking any questions. Mother and John and the Yorks came running along, too, because of course nobody knew who was hurt. I tried to explain to them as we ran, but nobody seemed to understand just who was hurt, or how.

  We all got there at about the same time, and there was a crowd around Suzy, all of them telling her what to do, and a couple of women yelling at her, and the York kids all crying, especially the one who’d fallen, and Suzy, looking all bloody, was still holding on to the cut wrist with grim determination and crying, too.

  “Everybody’s yelling at me,” she sobbed as Daddy
came up, “and wanting to put on tourniquets, and I know it’s the wrong thing. I’m applying pressure and please make them all go away and leave me alone, Daddy!”

  Daddy squatted down beside Suzy, and John and Mr. York shooed the mob away, but I heard Mrs. York mutter, “If she’s hurt my child—”

  I’d had about enough. I turned on her. “She hasn’t hurt her! Your child fell on a piece of broken glass which shouldn’t have been on the playground, anyhow, and my sister’s keeping her from bleeding to death, and you just leave her alone!”

  “Vicky!” Mother said in a surprised voice.

  But I don’t think Mrs. York even heard.

  “Everybody thinks Americans can’t do anything right!” I shouted.

  “Vicky,” Mother said again, but quietly this time, and took my hand.

  I just stood there by mother, my mouth shut tight so I wouldn’t say anything more, while Daddy fixed up the York kid. In a couple of minutes he said, “I’m going to take her into one of the lavs. Will you come along please, Mr. York, and keep people out while I clean her up? She’s going to be all right. Don’t worry. You did exactly the right thing, Suzy. Good for you for sticking to your guns. You come along and wash up, too. The rest of you go back before breakfast burns up. We’ll be along in a few minutes.”