by John Irving
I started feeling afraid—for no reason I could understand.
Georgian Bay: July 25, 1987—it’s a shame you can buy The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star in Pointe au Baril Station; but, thank God, they don’t carry The New York Times! The island in Georgian Bay that has been in Katherine Keeling’s family since 1933—when Katherine’s grandfather reputedly won it in a poker game—is about a fifteen-minute boat ride from Pointe au Baril Station; the island is in the vicinity of Burnt Island and Hearts Content Island and Peesay Point. I think it’s called Gibson Island or Ormsby Island—there are both Gibsons and Ormsbys in Katherine’s family; I believe that Gibson was Katherine’s maiden name, but I forget.
Anyway, there are a bunch of notched cedarwood cottages on the island, which is not served by electric power but is comfortably and efficiently supplied with propane gas—the refrigerators, the hot-water heater, the stoves, and the lamps are all run on propane; the tanks of gas are delivered to the island by boat. The island has its own septic system, which is a subject often discussed by the hordes of Keelings and Gibsons and Ormsbys who empty themselves into it—and who are fearful of the system’s eventual rebellion.
I would not have wanted to visit the Keelings—or the Gibsons, or the Ormsbys—on their island before the septic system was installed; but that period of unlighted encounters with spiders in outhouses, and various late-night frights in the privy-world, is another favorite topic of discussion among the families who share the island each summer. I have heard, many times, the story of Uncle Bulwer Ormsby who was attacked by an owl in the privy—which had no door, “the better to air it out!” the Keelings and the Gibsons and the Ormsbys all claimed. Uncle Bulwer was pecked on top of his head during a fortunate hiatus in what should have been a most private action, and he was so fearful of the attacking owl that he fled the privy with his pants down at his ankles, and did even greater injury to himself—greater than the owl’s injury—by running headfirst into a pine tree.
And every year that I’ve visited the island, there are the familiar disputes regarding what kind of owl it was—or even if it was an owl. Katherine’s husband, Charlie Keeling, says it was probably a horsefly or a moth. Others say it was surely a screech owl—for they are known to be fierce in the defense of their nests, even to the extent of attacking humans. Others say that a screech owl’s range does not extend to Georgian Bay, and that it was surely a merlin—a pigeon hawk; they are very aggressive and are often mistaken for the smaller owls at night.
The company of Katherine’s large and friendly family is comforting to me. The conversations tend toward legendary occurrences on the island—many of which include acts of bravery or cowardice from the old outhouse or privy period of their lives. Disputed encounters with nature are also popular; my days here are most enjoyably spent in identifying species of bird and mammal and fish and reptile and, unfortunately, insect—almost none of which is well known to me.
Was that an otter or a mink or a muskrat? Was that a loon or a duck or a scoter? Does it sting or bite, or is it poisonous? These distinctions are punctuated by more direct questions to the children. Did you flush, turn off the gas, close the screen door, leave the water running (the pump is run by a gasoline engine)—and did you hang up your bathing suit and towel where they will dry? It is remindful to me of my Loveless Lake days—without the agony of dating; and Loveless Lake is a dinky pond compared to Georgian Bay. Even in the summer of ’62, Loveless Lake was overrun by motorboats—and in those days, many summer cottages flushed their toilets directly into the lake. The so-called great outdoors is so much greater and so much nicer in Canada than it ever was—in my time—in New Hampshire. But pine pitch on your fingers is the same everywhere; and the kids with their hair damp all day, and their wet bathing suits, and someone always with a skinned knee, or a splinter, and the sound of bare feet on a dock … and the quarreling, all the quarreling. I love it; for a short time, it is very soothing. I can almost imagine that I have had a life very different from the life I have had.
One can learn much through the thin walls of summer houses. For example, I once heard Charlie Keeling tell Katherine that I was a “nonpracticing homosexual.”
“What does that mean?” Katherine asked him.
I held my breath, I strained to hear Charlie’s answer—for years I’ve wanted to know what it means to be a “nonpracticing homosexual.”
“You know what I mean, Katherine,” Charlie said.
“You mean he doesn’t do it,” Katherine said.
“I believe he doesn’t,” Charlie said.
“But when he thinks about doing it, he thinks about doing it with men?” Katherine asked.
“I believe he doesn’t think about it, at all,” Charlie answered.
“Then in what way is he ‘homosexual,’ Charlie?” Katherine asked.
Charlie sighed; in summer houses, one can even hear the sighs.
“He’s not unattractive,” Charlie said. “He doesn’t have a girlfriend. Has he ever had a girlfriend?”
“I fail to see how this makes him gay,” Katherine said. “He doesn’t seem gay, not to me.”
“I didn’t say he was gay,” Charlie said. “A nonpracticing homosexual doesn’t always know what he is.”
So that’s what it means to be a “nonpracticing homosexual,” I thought: it means I don’t know what I am!
Every day there is a discussion of what we will eat—and who will take the boat, or one of the boats, to the station to fetch the food and the vitals. The shopping list is profoundly basic.
gasoline
batteries
Band-Aids
corn (if any)
insect repellent
hamburg and buns (lots)
eggs
milk
flour
butter
beer (lots)
fruit (if any)
bacon
tomatoes
clothespins (for Prue)
lemons
live bait
I let the younger children show me how they have learned to drive the boat. I let Charlie Keeling take me fishing; I really enjoy fishing for smallmouth bass—one day a year. I lend a hand to whatever the most pressing project on the island is: the Ormsbys need to rebuild their deck; the Gibsons are replacing shingles on the boathouse roof.
Every day, I volunteer to be the one to go to the station; shopping for a large family is a treat for me—for such a short time. I take a kid or two with me—for the pleasure of driving the boat would be wasted on me. And I always share my room with one of the Keeling children—or, rather, the child is required to share his room with me. I fall asleep listening to the astonishing complexity of a child breathing in his sleep—of a loon crying out on the dark water, of the waves lapping the rocks onshore. And in the morning, long before the child stirs, I hear the gulls and I think about the tomato-red pickup cruising the coastal road between Hampton Beach and Rye Harbor; I hear the raucous, embattled crows, whose shrill disputations and harangues remind me that I have awakened in the real world—in the world I know—after all.
For a moment, until the crows commence their harsh bickering, I can imagine that here, on Georgian Bay, I have found what was once called The New World—all over again, I have stumbled ashore on the undamaged land that Watahantowet sold to my ancestor. For in Georgian Bay it is possible to imagine North America as it was—before the United States began the murderous deceptions and the unthinking carelessness that have all but spoiled it!
Then I hear the crows. They bring me back to the world with their sounds of mayhem. I try not to think about Owen. I try to talk with Charlie Keeling about otters.
“They have a long, flattened tail—the tail lies horizontally on the water,” Charlie told me.
“I see,” I said. We were sitting on the rocks, on that part of the shoreline where one of the children said he’d seen a muskrat.
“It was an otter,” Charlie told the child.
“You di
dn’t see it, Dad,” another of the children said.
So Charlie and I decided to wait the creature out. A lot of freshwater clamshells marked the entrance to the animal’s cave in the rocks onshore.
“An otter is a lot faster in the water than a muskrat,” Charlie told me.
“I see,” I said. We sat for an hour or two, and Charlie told me how the water level of Georgian Bay—and of all of Lake Huron—was changing; every year, it changes. He said he was worried that the acid rain—from the United States—was starting to kill the lake, beginning, as it always does (he said), with the bottom of the food chain.
“I see,” I said.
“The weeds have changed, the algae have changed, you can’t catch the pike you used to—and one otter hasn’t killed all these clams!” he said, indicating the shells.
“I see,” I said.
Then, when Charlie was peeing—in “the bush,” as Canadians say—an animal about the size of a small beagle, with a flattened sort of head and dark-brown fur, swam out from the shore.
“Charlie!” I called. The animal dove; it did not come up again. One of the children was instantly beside me.
“What was it?” the child asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Did it have a flattened tail?” Charlie called from the bush.
“It had a flattened sort of head,” I said.
“That’s a muskrat,” one of the children said.
“You didn’t see it,” said his sister.
“What kind of tail did it have?” Charlie called.
“I didn’t see its tail,” I admitted.
“It was that fast, huh?” Charlie asked me—emerging from the bush, zipping up his fly.
“It was pretty fast, I guess,” I said.
“It was an otter,” he said.
(I am tempted to say it was a “nonpracticing homosexual,” but I don’t.)
“See the duck?” a little girl asked me.
“That was no duck, you fool,” her brother said.
“You didn’t see it—it dove!” the girl said.
“It was a female something,” someone else said.
“Oh, what do you know?” another child said.
“I didn’t see anything,” I said.
“Look over there—just keep looking,” Charlie Keeling said to me. “It has to come up for air,” he explained. “It’s probably a pintail or a mallard or a blue-winged teal—if it’s a female,” he said.
The pines smell wonderful, and the lichen on the rocks smell wonderful, and even the smell of fresh water is wonderful—or is it, really, the smell of some organic rot that is carrying on, just under the surface of all that water? I don’t know what makes a lake smell that way, but it’s wonderful. I could ask the Keeling family to tell me why the lake smells that way, but I prefer the silence—just the breeze that’s almost constant in the pines, the lap of the waves, and the gulls’ cries, and the shrieks of the terns.
“That’s a Caspian tern,” one of the Keeling boys said to me. “See the long red bill, see the black feet?”
“I see,” I said. But I wasn’t paying attention to the tern; I was remembering the letter I wrote to Owen Meany in the summer of 1962. Dan Needham had told me that he had seen Owen one Sunday in the Gravesend Academy gym. Dan said that Owen had the basketball, but he wasn’t shooting; he was standing at the foul line, just looking up at the basket—he wasn’t even dribbling the ball, and he wouldn’t take a shot. Dan said it was the strangest thing.
“He was just standing there,” Dan said. “I must have watched him for five minutes, and he didn’t move a muscle—he just held the ball and stared at the basket. He’s so small, you know, the basket must look like it’s a mile away.”
“He was probably thinking about the shot,” I told Dan.
“Well, I didn’t bother him,” Dan said. “Whatever he was thinking about, he was concentrating so hard he didn’t see me—I didn’t even say hello. I don’t think he would have heard me, anyway,” Dan said.
Hearing about him made me even miss practicing that stupid shot; and so I wrote to him, just casually—since when would a twenty-year-old actually come out and say he missed his best friend?
“Dear Owen,” I wrote him. “What are you up to? It’s kind of boring here. I like the work in the woods best—I mean, the logging. Except there are deer flies. The work at the sawmill, and in the lumberyards, is much hotter—but there are no deer flies. Uncle Alfred insists that Loveless Lake is ‘potable’—he says we have swallowed so much of it, we would be dead if it weren’t. But Noah says there’s much more piss and shit in it than there is in the ocean. I miss the beach—how’s the beach this summer? Maybe next summer your father would give me a job in the quarries?”
He wrote back; he didn’t bother to begin with the usual “Dear John”—The Voice had his own style, nothing fancy, strictly capitals.
“ARE YOU CRAZY?” Owen wrote me. “YOU WANT TO WORK IN THE QUARRIES? YOU THINK IT’S HOT IN A LUMBERYARD? MY FATHER DOESN’T DO A LOT OF HIRING—AND I’M SURE HE WON’T PAY YOU AS MUCH AS YOUR UNCLE ALFRED. IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE YOU HAVEN’T MET THE RIGHT GIRL UP THERE.”
“So how’s Hester?” I asked him, when I wrote him back. “Be sure to tell her that I love her room—that’ll piss her off! I don’t suppose she’s been helping you practice the shot—if you lose your touch, that’ll be too bad. You were so close to doing it in under three seconds.”
He wrote back immediately: “UNDER THREE SECONDS IS DEFINITELY POSSIBLE. I HAVEN’T BEEN PRACTICING BUT THINKING ABOUT IT IS ALMOST AS GOOD. MY FATHER WILL HIRE YOU NEXT SUMMER—IT WON’T BE TOO BAD IF YOU START OUT SLOWLY, MAYBE IN THE MONUMENT SHOP. BY THE WAY, THE BEACH HAS BEEN GREAT—LOTS OF GOOD-LOOKING GIRLS AROUND, AND CAROLINE O’DAY HAS BEEN ASKING ABOUT YOU. YOU OUGHT TO SEE HOW SHE LOOKS WHEN SHE’S NOT WEARING HER ST. MICHAEL’S UNIFORM. SAW DAN ON HIS BICYCLE—HE SHOULD LOSE A LITTLE WEIGHT. AND HESTER AND I SPENT AN EVENING WITH YOUR GRANDMOTHER; WE WATCHED THE IDIOT BOX, OF COURSE, AND YOU SHOULD HAVE HEARD YOUR GRANDMOTHER ON THE SUBJECT OF THE GENEVA CONFERENCE—SHE SAID SHE’D BELIEVE IN THE ‘NEUTRALITY’ OF LAOS WHEN THE SOVIETS DECIDED TO RELOCATE … ON THE MOON! SHE SAID SHE’D BELIEVE IN THE GENEVA ACCORDS WHEN THERE WAS NOTHING BUT PARROTS AND MONKEYS MOVING ALONG THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL! I WON’T REPEAT WHAT HESTER SAID ABOUT YOU USING HER ROOM—IT’S THE SAME THING SHE SAYS ABOUT HER MOTHER AND FATHER AND NOAH AND SIMON AND ALL THE GIRLS ON LOVELESS LAKE, SO PERHAPS YOU’RE FAMILIAR WITH THE EXPRESSION.”
I wrote a letter to Caroline O’Day; she never answered me. It was August 1962. I remember one very hot day—humid, with a hazy sky; a thunderstorm was threatening, but it never came. It was very much like the day of my mother’s wedding, before the storm; it was what Owen Meany and I called typical Gravesend weather.
Noah and Simon and I were logging; the deer flies were driving us crazy, and there were mosquitoes, too. Simon was the easiest to drive crazy; of the three of us, the deer flies and mosquitoes liked Simon the best. Logging is most dangerous if you’re impatient; saws and axes, peavys and cant dogs—these tools belong in patient hands. Simon got a little sloppy and reckless with his cant dog—he chased after a deer fly with the hook end and speared himself in the calf. It was a deep gash, about three or four inches long—not serious; but he would require some stitches to close the wound, and a tetanus shot.
Noah and I were elated; even Simon, who had a high tolerance for pain, was pretty pleased—the injury meant we could all get out of the woods. We drove the Jeep out the logging road to Noah’s Chevy; we took the Chevy out on the highway, through Sawyer Depot and Conway, to the emergency entrance of the North Conway Hospital.
There’d been an automobile accident somewhere near the Maine border, so Simon rated a low priority in the emergency room; that was fine with all of us, because the longer it took for Simon to get his tetanus shot and his stitches, the longer we would be away from the deer flies and the mosquitoes and the heat. Simon even pretended not to
know if he was allergic to anything; Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred had to be called, and that took more time. Noah started flirting with one of the nurses; with any luck, Noah knew, we could fart around the whole rest of the day, and never go back to work.
One of the less-mangled victims of the auto accident sat in the waiting room with us. He was someone Noah and Simon knew vaguely—a type not uncommon in the north country, one of those ski bums who don’t seem to know what to do with themselves when there isn’t any snow. This was a guy who’d been drinking a bottle of beer when one car hit another; he’d been the driver of one of the cars, he said, and the bottleneck had broken in his mouth on impact—he had lacerations on the roof of his mouth, and his gums were slashed, and the broken neck of the bottle had pierced his cheek. He proudly showed us the lacerations inside his mouth, and the hole in his cheek—all the while mopping up his mouth and face with a blood-soaked wad of gauze, which he periodically wrung out in a blood-soaked towel. He was precisely the sort of north country lunatic who gave Hester great disdain for Sawyer Depot, and led her to maintain her residence in the college community of Durham year-round.
“Did you hear about Marilyn Monroe?” the ski bum asked us.
We were prepared for a dirty joke—an absolutely filthy joke. The ski bum’s smile was a bleeding gash in his face; his smile was the repulsive equal to his gaping wound in his cheek. He was lascivious, depraved—our much-appreciated holiday in the emergency room had taken a nasty turn. We tried to ignore him.
“Did you hear about Marilyn Monroe?” he asked us again. Suddenly, it didn’t sound like a joke. Maybe it’s about the Kennedys! I thought.
“No. What about her?” I said.
“She’s dead,” the ski bum said. He took such a sadistic pleasure in his announcement, his smile appeared to pump the blood out of his mouth and the hole in his cheek; I thought that he was as pleased by the shock value of what he had to say as he was thrilled by the spectacle of wringing his own blood from the sodden gauze pad into the sodden towel. Forever after, I would see his bleeding face whenever I imagined how Larry Lish and his mother must have responded to this news; how eagerly, how greedily they must have spread the word! “Have you heard? You mean, you haven’t heard!” The rapture of so much amateur conjecturing and surmising would flush their faces as irrepressibly as blood!
