Les Grandes Bergeronnes

Les Grandes Bergeronnes

My grandfather’s grandfather was a coffin maker. His hands were huge meat cleavers, calloused and heavy. Milling black pine from the shores of the Saint Lawrence river into Black Pine boxes. Digging graves with pine handled shovels and filling the space in between the dead and the mourning with long arcs of dark brown dirt that flew back and up through the air like a movie rewinding.

My grandfather’s father, my great grandfather—though he never did get the chance to be so great—inherited the craft of coffin making and, by default, that of grave digging. He practiced until it killed him. By filling himself in with the dry brown dirt he’d tossed over his shoulder and up onto the bank of the freshly dug grave he was standing in. He hadn't quite finished it when his father watched it bury him alive. 

I suppose they had to dig him out, to put him in a black pine box of his own and into a different grave, dug by another. I wonder if the coffin was one he’d made himself, with his slightly smaller hands, gnarled and knotted. I wonder who had to scoop the deadly dirt out and around his limp and strong body, and if they were afraid that it would happen again, to them. Or perhaps they’d left him in the hole he’d dug. 

To reach this isolated region of the north coast, La Cote Nord, there’s a fifteen minute ferry across the Fjord at the Saguenay. It’s nothing special, a brightly painted red, blue and yellow car ferry, but you can get out on the rumpled deck and stand in the wind to stretch your legs. 

The seven hour drive up the coast, northeast from Montreal, is long but beautiful. The landscape shifts from pastoral farming bliss to small fishing villages. White churches with zinc oxide spires dot the autoroute, shining bright against the surrounding fields. Like sentinels, they guard each and every hamlet you pass, until the Laurentian mountains burst forth, the ancient granite core of North America. The Fjord cuts into their silhouettes. On the other side of the Saguenay are short and dark evergreens and not much more until you reach the Bay of Fundy and the open North Atlantic. The churches north, past Tadoussac, are smaller, humbler, their plain wooden belfrys painted to match the snow that covers the earth six months of the year.

If you’re lucky, like I am, you can catch dolphins with enormous frontal bulges, not bottlenecks, no, not hammerheads. I’m getting my dolphins confused. Anyway, you can catch them, with a camera lens, as they bob and weave around the small metal boat, churning the water white. Whale watching is very popular here. In the summer months, charters file a couple hundred plastic trenched people a day, up and down the rivers in Zeppelins for seventy five dollars each. Past my favorite camping spot, Les Petites Bergeronnes, The Small Rocks as we say, the tourists’ phones slip out of their recycled blue sleeves to capture memories of a place they’ll never come back to.

In winter the fjord just about freezes over solid. The painted ferry has steel icebreakers on the front and the back so that it doesn't have to turn around as it docks. The narrow path cut into the thick surface of the ice wouldn’t allow for such nimbleness. The cars drive on and off in one fell swoop,  like a parade. 

The first time I slept aux Bergeronnes, I arrived an hour after sunset. Typical. In the darkness, I set my tent up on a wooden platform wedged between enormous and undulating pink boulders. the sound of blow holes and broken water emanated from just beyond the fire’s light. So soft. They made a gentle poof poof sound. If you didn’t know that it was whales you would have never guessed it.

Aux Bergeronnes— the water is deep, and there are no beaches. The bedrock drops straight down from the surface like an underwater cliff. My fire, tent and I are sea level, river level, fleuve level. Next to us are millions of liters of deep flowing brine. The whales are within arms reach, if you had excessively long arms. Or a wetsuit. Or a cane, like in old movies. I imagine that the dew on my face is the breath of whales as they exhale into a world that they will never enter. The lights of the south shore, la Gaspesie, twinkle. The lighthouses point the way not to go.

My great Grandmother was left a widow. She never remarried. I’ve never been told what she did to support her family, but from the looks of her in the photos hung on my wealthy uncle’s wall, I assume she was a witch. She’s standing next to her soon to be deceased husband, holding her baby, my grandfather, in her arms, beads around her wrists and throat, invisible smoke in her eyes. 

Some people say she rented out my grandfather to the neighbors as a handy boy, but the word they use is prete. Which means to borrow and implies no exchange of money.  It's also the same word for priest, Pretre. The spelling is a little different but pronounced the same.   

She took my grandfather out of the missionary school before his seventh birthday. He read a different way, the numbers and letters were movable objects, interchangeable and imaginary. The nuns beat him badly for being dyslexic. But they couldn't even pronounce that word. Perhaps it was invisible in their mouths. Like glass marbles. It’s the double letters, and the silent ones that are the trickiest. There are some patterns we remember, like snake stripes, or the eyebrows on an Orca and Rottweiler. Or the constellations.

   

Why do the whales come so close to this shore? These funny fuschia rocks so far from civilization. I’ll tell you because I know you’ll never ask, you’re always looking at your phone. 

The river Saguenay drains from Lac St-Jean, a shallow green lake in south-central Quebec close to Alma. Alma means soul in Spanish, but “village in south central Quebec” to me. The lac makes the river chock a block full of delicious-to-whales plankton. When the smaller Saguenay runs out past the berth of the ferry and into the strength of the St Lawrence, the force of the stronger, larger river pushes the plankton back towards the shore and up to the pink cliffs of La Cote Nord. 

In the morning I unzip my tent and watch, amble past through the veil of my netting, long finned Pilot whales, Gray whales, Belugas. In feather down nylon sleeping bags on a bed of rocks, I count cetaceans. Too large to swim up the mouth of the Saguenay, they wait, cumbersome and elegant, in the St Lawrence for the rivers to bring their food to them. I like to close my eyes and listen. I've learned to love the sound of them even more than the sight.

 

Nuns can’t beat magic out of a person. Only inwards, deeper. When my Grandfather was fourteen, my great grandmother gave him a sack of flour and a white birch canoe.  They carried it over a sloping field of grass, wild strawberries and that purple flower that tastes like either honey or onions, and down to the edge of their little village. She told him, follow la Riviere Saint Laurent, jusqu'à Sept Iles, Seven Islands. There’s a mill there. You’ll get work there. With your dark, sorrowful eyes like mine and hands like your Grandfather’s. Under the plain church spire, next to the graveyard where her husband had lived and died, she heaved a baby from one hip to the other. Arms full. The neighbors' clothes drying on the line, calling with flaps and snatches. Return me. The boat floated next to bedrock, suspended by disbelief.

He pulled his Father’s frame into the trunk. He paddled with large flat spruce hands. Past the submerged and blubbery bodies of giant mammals singing songs that scientists have learned to decipher using algorithms, which he could hear solely by listening. Go north, east. He followed the stars.

Sandy beaches are rare this far north; what you find is usually gravel and rocks. But as the sun began to set behind a small island the first night of his trip, he pulled his canoe ashore the soft beach to sleep. Not far from there is where we have our family bonfire once a year in August. Where we dig for clams, looking for the pimple like holes in the wet sand, like pores in our skin. We wear my uncle’s collection of rain boots and follow the tide lines with a shovel. Crying out in glee when the mollusks squirt sea water defensively up and into the air. Into our matching faces. We all like getting dirty. It's a family trait.

No match for our hammer hands, we collect them together, into an orange pail from Home Depot, until it’s heavy enough to make us grunt as we carry it up the 100 stairs, not so slowly falling down into the ocean. On to the deck of my grandfather’s chalet. 

He made himself a fire too, and bannock in a cast iron skillet that used to sit in the cupboard in our house. I've made pancakes in it. It's heavy and calloused and I keep it well oiled. I couldn’t tell you where it is now. Not that you, or anyone else, would ask. I suppose it’s something that only I know the existence of. And consequently the misplacement of too. 

He told himself that night, told the stars, that he would build with his own hands, a fine pine cottage 100 stairs up on the bluff, with a view of this island, and the lighthouses across the fleuve in Gaspesie. 

I lied about my grandmother, or rather, I’ve gotten a lot closer to my own mother since I left, so now I know more about her and her history. Our history. 

She did remarry, quite soon after her husband’s death. She had four or five more children, I’m not sure how many because so often babies died then. And then her second husband also passed away. Probably in a much less dramatic way because no one seems to remember how it happened. 

Widowed twice, I suppose she wasn't as desirable a wife anymore. Not much has changed. Or perhaps she was burdened as a bad luck woman, killer of husbands. Can you be a widow maker if you only widow yourself?

My grandfather returned, the same way that he came, in the same white birch canoe. Bigger and stronger, richer and better able to care for his mother and her new family. Or maybe that’s not how families work, though I wouldn’t know I don't have one anymore. He opened a general store and became a father himself. You'd think being dyslexic would have made it hard for him to count and account, important skills to run a general store. So they say. But we think that eating and living is done by other means, deeper than paper and blacker than pen. Older than numbers and tasteless to those who use oxide to shine their shrines. My mother tells stories of sneaking into the old timey candy jars and the weird old candy she used to steal. Of spring when the fur traders would come in from the even deeper bush carrying the carcases of annoying animals that weren't even good to eat. And Mumming. If you don't know what mummers are, have I got a story for you. Another time.

He would tell his children, my mother, and the nine others, of the empty stockings in the Christmases of his youth. When the neighbors’ children would throw orange peels at him, because he had none. Not even an orange, or a stocking. Because stockings are for feet and he'd have been cold with his strung up on the wall. Oranges were an exotic Christmas gift then and there, a strange fruit, from a far southern flung land called Florida. Pronounce Flow-reed. Imagine getting an orange now. You'd cry.

He eventually would sell them in his store, oranges. It was a busy little place and he did well, until they put in the autoroute. My mother says he kept the discarded orange peels in a box, like pot pourri. The smell of them. He’d kept one in his pocket on his trip to Sept Isle, my uncle says, to smell the oils when he was tired. He crushed them in his hands, worn so young and rooty. Just the skin, though; he had never known the flesh inside. The essence was enough.

When my grandmother started to bear the newest line of us, we came out four sons, then four daughters, then one of each again for a total of ten. That lived. Twenty childbearing years between the oldest and the youngest. Can you imagine bearing children over twenty years, stillbirths and miscarriages and sudden infant death syndrome in between and it wasn’t even by choice. The church could guarantee big families by denying confession to any wife if she went more than fifteen months between pregnancies. The wiveless, childless men, in white robes- in contrast to the black habit of the nuns- would, under pain of hell, insist that a good catholic mother must hurry and be with child again soon, if she wanted to dispel her sins, through a mesh veil, into a small pine box. 

My family is larger now, then it gets a little smaller, then someone marries into even more. We ebbs and flows like a tide. What ties us together, I wonder, like fluorescent buoys. A shared name, a resemblance, the passing down of traditions. Binded by a pie crust recipe, the tendency towards moles on our backs, a grave digging trade. We’re sewn into each other like the line of the autoroute is on the map, the counties overlapping each other, from all the places we’ve lived to all the places we’ve been, to where we’re from. There’s a small plot in a graveyard of us, lettered into the granite, dug from the sloping hills of the Laurentians, the namesake of the river that is the namesake of the man who brought the French settlers here in the first place. 

Christopher

I want to tell you about the things I love. One particular solo road trip Feb 22 from San Francisco to Joshua Tree:

The sun is up and bright. It hovers above my trucated view of the hills over Sosolito and bakes the garbage in the streets by my house. I’ve been living in Oakland for a month. I don't know a soul in the city but I'm good at making friends. Tried some open mics, found the farmer's market, you know the important things. This morning I'm headed out for two weeks. I'll camp my way to LA and crash with my aunt on Hermosa beach, in her tiny apartment on the corner of Hermosa ave. At night the bus stops right in front of her bedroom window, you can hear the diesel engine and the bass from the suped up low riders. And the waves. From my aunt's house you can always hear the waves. Then I'll drive over the mountains and into the Mojave desert. I'm going to an earthen architecture workshop near Joshua Tree to build adobe houses for a weekend.

    To leave the East Bay most people take the 80 until it connects to the I5. I don't. I take the Bay Bridge from Oakland and cross the city of San Francisco towards the beach. I'll follow the coast all the way down to LA. I won't need a map, the directions are; don’t drive into the ocean.

Not fifteen minutes from my tiny room with great light, and the four roommates I don'treally like, I’m already tangled in the ramps and overpasses. But the windows are down and I’m singing at the top of my lungs. Everything feels loud. All that I need to camp and cook is packed neatly behind me. I have a new axe. I have a cowboy hat. I have picked flowers from the alley behind my house and stuck them in a plastic water bottle in my cup holder. They are bright pink and they smell great and I do not recognize them. California flower, I call everything.

San Francisco is fucking beautiful. There’s nothing behind it when you see it from this bridge. Blue green water, the outline tall and spiky against a I-kid-you-not cloudless sky. I get closer (very slowly because traffic is bad) and the towers shimmer in the car exhaust. The sun will set behind them and straight into the ocean. I'm cold stranded in the shadow of the buildings as I idle. I turn on the heat and watch as the sunlight makes the dust in the car shine. Everything glitters. Even the broken glass on the side of the road. I take the southwest exit (always more south, more west) towards the edge of the peninsula. See signs for Santa Cruz. The hills of San Francisco and its crayola houses disappear as the Pacific Coast Highway unfolds itself beneath my tires. The west, the sunset, the ocean, the road. I shift into sixth gear and give the engine more gas. I hug every curve.

    Driving makes me feel powerful and free. Driving makes me powerful and free. I didn’t know that I loved to drive until I travelled by myself. It used to make me anxious, not of accidents but of criticism. I felt like an impostor that I could even be considered a driver, seeing as I was so bad at it. (I haven't been in an accident since I was 18 but why would that be important.) Fiery and talks loud, obviously I am terrible at driving. God made boys all knowing. Now after months on the road alone, in my fast little fortress of steel and gasoline, I know better. It's an extension of me. Wielding power that makes weak men uncomfortable. I mean, don’t at me during rush hour, downtown, kinda high, talking about something I’m passionate about. I’m god damn human, not Top Gun. Or whatever. 

 Little Nicolette took long family road trips. Watched the Appalachian mountains become the Aderondacks and turn back into the Laurentians before I ever grew tits. Dad and I played driving games and watched the landscapes transform with the light. My mother taught me how to read in the backseat of a Toyota Camry while getting gently car sick. I understand the world from the inside of a car, things make sense to me there. I feel safe. Untouchable.

    An hour south along the coast from San Francisco you get to Pescadero. I’ll sleep here tonight. The wind through the windows revives me. I joy-scream as I round corners cut through cliffs. The waves roar up onto the beaches with insatiability. I can see everything from here. The Pacific ocean is infinite from here. The waves never stop eating the sand. The foam and the fog mix like an ethereal emulsion. Bright green scrubby some-type-of-beach-succulent, that will and can grow anywhere and at any angle, line the two lane highway. One day I will spend a whole month watching the hem of the ocean be fucked with by the moon.

    I’m almost at Sarah’s. She told me about a HipCamp outside of Cambria, a couple dozen turns down the highway after Big Sur and just before San Luis Obispo. I’m going to spend the night with her on a co-op farm and she’s going to tell me how to get there. Sarah is one of us, a witch. She is also my metamour and my friend. She is the kind of woman who always has a sleeping bag in her car, in case of adventure, and has a smile as wide as the sails of a Catamaran. On Saturday mornings I like to bring her coffee under the blue tent at the west side market in Santa Cruz. The line up for her register is always full of tanned brunettes in linen prairie dresses. Their platinum blonde hair lying in the shadow. Things Sarah taught me through osmosis; pigtails can be sexy and always carry a cooler in your car in case you stumble upon produce. It's California after all.

    It’s dark by the time I reach her dirt road turn off. The horizon is just a sketchy neon line. Sarah greets me by flashing her car lights. On and off. I follow her old Subaru with a tapped up bumper up a few dusty hills until we reach fields of cultivated flowers, kale and chard. Past blackened Redwood trunks the size of boulders, a reminder of the fire that almost destroyed this entire community two summers ago. Four buildings on this property burned to the ground. They hardly left any trace. Everyone on the co-op had to evacuate through walls of flames. Those that could joined the fire rescue, you can still hear the hoarseness in their throats from the smoke. 
I've brought Thai and we sit around the kitchen block with her roommates and talk about the coast, the universal reason we’re all here. There’s even a woman named Ariel who is from PEI and might have gone to school with one of my brothers. What are the chances.My witche's nose tingles.

    When we're finished eating we slip outside and make a fire under a sky so black ou can't even see it.

“There are mineral baths in those woods,”says Sarah, peeling the skin off a clementine with her pianist's fingers and tossing them over her shoulder like salt and bad luck. She point's out which exit to take and how long I should drive before reaching the right campsite.

“They’re a bit janky," she grins that enormous grin, "but the waters are magic and I think you’ll like it.” It feels nice to be seen. We slip off our pyjamas, yes I've already put on my pyjamas, I'm comfortable here, and sling our legs over the edges of a big wooden bath. The Japanese hot tub sits next to an apricot tree and is hidden from the farmhouse by the yurt that is my usual guest room. A stand of cypress and redwoods blocks the wind from the coast but the air still smells of ocean.
    "Watch out the door handle can get toasty” she says as she hands me a split log and beckons me to open the door to the stove. A small fire burns inside. We float and bump each other and giggle before settling our naked bums on the wooden benches. There are a million stars above us. The frogs are singing.

“In ten years most of the amphibians will have died off from global warming.” She tells me, white wine and a cigarette in hand, “The frogs will be some of the first species to die off.” We listen to them.

I like baths. Will go out of my way to swim, soak, dip my toes. Not only do I sincerely chase waterfalls but I have also been known to swim in ponds- not recommended unless you are comfortable dealing with ringworm- dirty ocean swells, public fountains, kiddie pools and countless other bodies of questionable origin. Honestly, drop a noun that contains water, I’ve probably been in there. Burst fire hydrant, yes. Children’s wading pools, yes. I have had baths in sketchy motel rooms all over this continent. I long for any water, always. Except, I've decided, for the baths of Baths.

"In the 20th century they removed the roof that protected the pools from the sun and exposed the water to UV light." Sarah flickes ashes into the breeze. "The result is a brain eating parasite that’s infested the baths and rendered them unsafe for human use. The parasites crawl up your nose and are one hundred percent fatal. But otherwise, everything and everywhere else is on the table." She lauges at the expression on my face. "Just don't get your face wet."

I sleep like I am bewitched and wake up with the sun. The light is coming through the stitch marks of the yurt. The sun is so warm outside that I shed a layer of sleeping clothes. I done my cowboy hat. I pick collard greens from the fields and carry them like a bouquet for a stroll in the half burned half come back woods. I look for mushrooms and blueberries but the regrowth after a fire is different here than what I know. I call my mother from the top of the first hill and describe the view to her. The beaches extend as far as I can see in either direction and the waves keep rolling and rolling in. I watch eagles circle. And circle. The sun burns the haze off the water. I pinch myself. I headstand in the wet grass. I pinch myself again. I feel my luck flow through me like a magic potion. 

I’ve driven and adored every mile of the PCH from Vancouver to San Francisco, certain stretches of it are burned into my retinas. The colours of the sand, the grass holding it all together. Seventeen different shades of blue an hour.
The first time that I ever swam in the Pacific was on a Christmas eve in Long Beach Washington. I slept in the basement of Maddison’s family's double wide, double stacked trailer. Built into the side of a hill on the beach. My second Christmas Tree. Skinny dipping will never get old to me, even if I do. Even in December.
I say goodbye to Sarah, turn up the music and roll down the windows. I drive and I drive and I drive. I take a hundred slight left turns. The trees get taller and the cliffs steeper. I keep the windows all the way open. Past Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea. I am headed somewhere that I have never been before.

Big Sur, I set up camp by a little estuary that runs into the ocean. The woman at the check in lets me keep my extra ice in her cooler. She has white dreads down her back. She looks young, but tired.
"Do you work with your hands?" She asks me as I buy a bundle of firewood. I look at my hands, slightly red from the chill. They are small, with strong fingers and burn scars. My nails are short and dirty. I don't know how to answer her. So I don't.
I make a fire and cook my bouquet of chard under the stars. The beating of the waves and the muffled laughter of other campers keeps me company. I miss my dog. I crawl into my tent alone. The cold creeps up from the ground and for a moment I wish that I wasn’t. Or at least that Magic was here with me. For the heat I tell myself. I wrap my tired little burned hands around the neck of the second sleeping bag and pull it closer to me. A thousand feathers keep me. My own heat reflected back.

It's morning. It's sunny. It's California. I am washing up and an even younger woman in Yoga gear and a puffer vest asks me if I’m travelling by myself.
“Yes.” I say, trying to mask my suspicion. Last thing I need is to be killed by a hillbilly couple from Sacramento. The way she looks at me, admiration and, longing? 
“I used to camp alone too. It’s so uncommon for women to do.” The way she says used to, I steal a glance at her boyfriend, baseball cap, maybe a chain. He is quiet. Maybe he is kind.
She and I chat in the sunshine as we do the dishes in side by side bathroom sinks. We compare camping notes. Favorite beaches, good cafes along the way. She tells me about her life before she moved away from the coast. To be with him and to save up to buy a house back here. Left to return. She looks happy, and healthy. But I recognise sadness when I hear it. Her hands are beautiful and delicate. Painted and manicured nails, purple.
“He loves the outdoors.” I hope he has other redeeming qualities. 
She asks for my instagram and uncharistically I give it to her. I see myself, as she probably sees herself, in each other. I honk twice a goodbye as I pull out of the campground. 
I take a few polaroids that don;t turn out very well.

The waves come at me, over my shoulder and out of the corner of my eye as I rip along the edge of the world. Chasing the sound of my exhaust, I project my dreams onto the landscape before me. Outside of San Simeon I spy Hurst Castle overlooking fields of cattle between the highway and the sea. Have you ever heard of it before? It was built by architect Julia Morgan in the 1920’s. A Spanish Colonial revivalist mansion. It’s closed, not because of Covid but because of a sinkhole in one of the many living rooms. I can’t say that I give a damn about William Randolf Hurst but a castle built by a woman a hundred years ago is definitely up my alley. Next time. I pull back out to the highway and take a left, south. 
I stop at the beach. Again. And again. I’m not going anywhere fast. I'm going nowhere, no where. It feels good. I feel. I watch sea lions and seals and seagulls. I watch waves and waves and wave.

I arrive in Cambria around late afternoon. Cambria, let's be honest, is an awesome name, dinosaurs could live here. The town is small and Victorian and full of tourists. I try my luck and buy a croissant. Mistake. The number of terrible pastries I've had in California is innumerable. Maybe I should just learn my lesson and stick to avocado toast.
It’s lively, sleek and expensive cars line the streets, the bars are already lit and restaurants advertise chowder loudly from sandwich boards. Sandals and long dresses, big hats and sunglasses meander from knick knack shop to liquor store. A sea of blonde and bald heads holding hands and shopping bags crowd the sidewalk, making me eager to leave.
I get what I need for dinner tonight, broccolini and green beans, from my favorite place, a farm stand I've never been to, and get back in the car. The road leading to the camp passes vineyard after vineyard, and I climb higher into a new mountain range. The sound of my engine echoes in between the slabs of rock. I hit the gas and she sounds even better. The mountains stick straight up now into that cloudless blue sky. Just a few miles in from the coast and the landscape is already different, older, rounder. The orchards drip avocados.   

Google pings that I’ve arrived, thankfully because this dirt road ended five minutes ago. The light makes the grass glow neon, framing the property behind a chain link fence. A hand painted sign welcoming campers hangs from a tetanus defying gate. The lower fields are crowded with mismatched greenhouses full of tomatoes and herbs. I can smell that particular tomato flower scent through the windows as I weave between the carcasses of rusting undercarriages and rogue tires. Up ahead the roof of a two story stained wooden house is peeking through the dense forest of live oaks. I pull up beside a parked truck. Its doors ajar, the stuffing escaping from the seams of the passenger seat, spilling into a pile of upcycled lumber. Everything looks like it had been built in the seventies and never finished. The house is garlanded with grandfather’s beard. I can see the shape of people moving on the dim first floor. There aren't any lights on but I can see an old electrical pole attached to the porch. To get there I have to cross a makeshift metal bridge. The spring gurgles underneath me as the bridge springs up and down. Alarmingly. I stop and stand midway for a few moments. I inhale my surroundings. These better be sweet baths.

Mike opens the busted screen door to greet me. His hands are meat cleavers gently cradling a beer. Wild, shoulder length, silver hair frames a face aged by the sun and the moon. His blue cotton button down is comfortably worn from years of care and the sweat of today. He welcomes me warmly. Reminds me of a softened cowboy. He takes my cash and explains to me where I can park and camp. With delicate detail he describes how he found the mineral spring in the late sixties and all about their probably bullshit healing properties. How he couldn't believe his luck. He's lived here ever since and plans to be burried on top of the bald mountain. I look up at the round peak and think that it will be hard to dig a grave into that rock, maybe he'll be cremated. I listen patiently as he waxes poetic about the Grateful Dead. My tummy rumbles.The emotion gently falls from his voice as my gaze wanders across the tools scattered across the porch. Our conversation blows away in the late afternoon breeze. 
“Better pick your site before it gets any later,” with a few grunts and some enormous finger pointing he explains to me how to find the baths.
“You are the only camper here tonight.” The screen door settles in its frame, too old and tired to slam.

 The sun is beginning to set. Up north, you can tell when sunset is coming because that's when the mosquitos come out, but I have yet to get a Mosquito bite in California. Past the main house, as brown as the dirt it's built on, I follow the tire tracks in the grass as they double back towards the opposite side of the creek. I saddle the car up next to it, I like to hear the sound of water when I sleep outside. Close to me there are a few fire pits scattered around some weeping willows. On the far side of the valley, furthest from the road, a dilapidated A-frame is slowly collapsing into the dark woods behind it. A half moon is carved out of the outhouse door and Tibetan prayer flags flutter in time with a wind chime. Otherwise all is quiet and still except the bubbling water.
Under a circular string of white patio lanterns an enamel bathtub stands alone on the shallow bank. Terrifying sun bleached shower curtains hang like dying petals off a horizontal stem, strung from birch trunk to trunk to trunk. What are they for? Privacy I imagine, but if you closed them around you you wouldn’t be able to see the trees and the creek. Or the giant round mountain tops looming above.This tub is freaky. But this isn't the one Mike mentioned to me. I wash my hands in the freestanding kitchen sink at its feet. Mysterious hoses run from it and into the woods. The smell of sulphur coils up into my nostrils like diluted medicine. The trees rattle their leaves at my presence. I have been noticed. There is something here. I say hello in my mind.

What’s left of the sun leaves dapples patterns on the rocks. I sweep them from where I want to pitch my tent inside a rectangular stand of birches. it must have been planted this way. Remembering the cold from the night before, I place every blanket, foam pad and camping layer I have under where I plan to inflate my mattress (a gift from Sarah.) I’ll blow it up later. I'm getting hungry and I’d like to have a bath. I follow the path with my eyes, over a different if equally sketchy bridge, and up into an ivy covered forest. The green of the live Oaks is so dark it fades to black.

I sit on a broken plastic chair and eat an apple. I toss the core into the creek. I clear out the fire pit and pull firewood from my trunk. The new axe in my hands feels cool and rigid. It comes down in the middle of each log that crack and split and fall apart. Fall away from themselves and onto either side of me. I feel powerful, graceful and, as if something is watching me. I split more logs, with accuracy and ease. Something about this has become performance. This is now a dance between me, the axe and the wood, and my invisible audience. I cut kindling, my fingertips holding and letting go as the axe slices what used to be a tree into bite sized morsels of fuel. The dance gets faster, I move with rhythm. My strength flows out of me. The pile of fuel stacks up, the shape of it round like the mountains behind it.

The fire is bright and crackling. Everything is still but for the chimes playing out of tune to the wind. I take off my clothes and set them far enough away from the fire that they won't catch, but close enough that they will be warm when I come back. I wrap a red plaid Pendleton robe around my naked shoulders, a gift from my first husband, and approach bridge number two. There's a spring in my step even though it's february. I think I'm funny. A rough log, elm or maple, or maybe I should learn more about native californian trees, is in the middle of the bridge. I jump over it and spread my legs out in a grand ecarte. My smile extends up and down the creek. I am happy, I feel free. And then I scream.

The shape of a man emerges from the woods. He's so fucking close to me I can’t believe I hadn’t heard his footsteps. Startled, I turn to face him. His eyes widen, as surprised by my reaction as I am to his existence. My heartbeat regulates as he transforms from shape to human. Young, sun kissed, handsome human. Messy, curly hair tucked behind his ears obscuring the nape of a freckled neck. 
“I’m sorry.” When he smiles the corners of his eyes crinkle.“I didn’t mean to scare you.” He looks at me worried that I might be mad.
“I didn’t think there was anyone else here.” I reply, my hands to my chest clutching my pounding heart, holding the lapels of my robe tightly across my collar bones. “Mike told me I was the only camper.” 
He looks at me, all of me. His eyes are shining with appreciation and I realise that he has been looking at me since I got here. His were the eyes I could feel in the woods.
“I live in this house” The falling down house, pointing to the shambled pile of lumber and windows behind him. “I help Mike take care of the grounds in exchange for free rent.” 
We look at each other in silence. I have become transparent. He can see through my robe, through my skin. My heart hasn’t slowed down but I’m not scared anymore. He can see it beating. Hear the blood rushing to my ears. I’m blushing. The way he is looking at me would make anyone blush.
“Have you seen him?” He asks me. 
“Who?” Who is he talking about. My eyes dart around looking for another devastatingly good looking woodsman hiding in the bushes.
“Mike?” He lingers over me, looking and then looking away.

I let go of the collar and part my lips. This kid is hot. Though practically a child. Mid twenties latest. Built. Healthy. His muscles stretch his red t-shirt taught across his chest. I swear I can see the flutter of his heart through his breast bone. My imagination is a wild thing. My witch's nose smells blood.
“I’m looking for Mike.” I shake my head. Right Mike, he’s looking for Mike. I'm dazed. 
I point across the creek towards the main house.

“Thanks.” He flashes a smile. As he walks past, so close on the narrow bridge, I can feel the heat from his body. 
“Sorry for scaring you.” He calls over his shoulder and fades into the foreground, but his red shirt remains visible to me, until I stop looking. I follow him off the bridge and turn in the opposite direction. Up the path, up the hill and into the darkening woods.
 
There's a clearing and two more bathtubs, side by side, under the shade of a big daddy oak. A stream careens down the side of the hill and is collected in a small plastic irrigation pond. The water is cerulean blue and cloudy. Sulphur and dead leaves permeate the air. The little breeze comes and takes it away, only to be quickly replaced by more sulphur and more dead leaves. There's a stone shower built into the side of the hill. I turn the faucet and out bubbles multi-colored and odorous water. Blue, green, brown, eggs. I can’t figure out the heater and let the bath fill green brown and tepid. 
I sit at the edge for a long time, feeling the sun and the shade on my skin. That breeze in my short hair. I slip my feet into the water and imagine that I can feel it bubbling. It takes a long time before I feel alone again. I listen to the woods and hear, nothing. The robe falls from my shoulders and I submerge myself up to my neck. The water is so opaque I can’t make out my form through the surface. It feels heavier in here. Like if it was more than water. I think of him, not the lumberjacknut, of another, and how much I would have liked to share this place with him. My eyes fill with tears and I lean forward to watch them drop into my reflection. I wet my hair, careful not to get any on my face, who knows what ancient parasites live here.
A plane flies overhead and birds disrupt the quiet. I allow myself a few moments naked in the fading sun and then I feel it again. Eyes, someone. I slowly, deliberately dry my every limb with care and attention before reclaiming my robe around me. The sun has just about disappeared, it's glow behind the trees is faint and all is quieting. Even the breeze is gone. Then the roar of night descends from the mountains and obscurs my view. I pull the plug and watch and wait for the bottom of the tub to appear. One last, long inhale before I leave. The bathtubs remain, side by side in the clearing, a dirty hose connecting them to each other.   

On the table by my tent there is a gift waiting for me. Roma tomatoes and fresh basil. The fire is still smouldering. I can tell he thinks I'm beautiful in the delicate way he's tied the basil stems together with a pink elastic band. That kind of care and attention only exists in young men when they want you, or want something from you. Don't ask me otherwise, how I know. I just do.
Carefully and with intention I split more fire wood. The long motion of my small arms, the delicate balance of one log on top of a larger log. Lining up the grain of the wood with my blade. From my feet through my core, to my shoulders, biceps, wrists, as the wood peels away from its centre. Pieces becoming smaller and smaller pieces. Disconnecting from their form, the roundness of the logs becoming rectangular, square, symmetrical. I am making fire. Wielding the tools of my grandfathers. I lift my hands above my head. I feel that I am fire, that I am. I exist. 
There is a light on now, in the kitchen of the falling house. Maybe music, escapes from the open windows. Or a television but that seems inappropriate. I knock gently on the door frame and startle the figure inside. The wind chimes chuckle.
“Hey, sorry.” I'm sheepish, I laugh at him. He turns with a huge chef knife in his hand. Relieved to see it's me, he smiles.

“Thank you for the gift.” 

“I’m sorry I scared you earlier. Accept my apology?’ He shrugs a little and looks at me through the screen door. His enthusiams has faded. He looks smaller and not as strong, the lights from the house cast deep shadows onto his face. He looks old. Looks like Mike.
“Would you like to have dinner with me?” I motion towards my campsite. “I made too much food.” I’m still not used to cooking for one.
He looks down, a little shy or a little disappointed. 
“I just finished making myself something. Thanks though.” He turns back towards the counter. I stand behind the screen door, an impassable obstacle.
 
Darkness came, to have dinner with me intead. She lingered along the string of lights and crept close to the heat of the fire. Loneliness too, came to eat. Swelling in the flames and licking the edges of my single plate. They whisper, "Who are you cooking for, if not just for yourself. You made too much food. You still cook for him." They creep inside my belly and makes my hunger twice. Blowing on the coals and feeding my tears. I embrace loneliness, and darkness embraces me.

Solace. The embers grow and fade, grew and faded. From the pile of split trees at my side. I hold space in the night, by the fire, by the creek by the bathtub. By the lonely man child in the falling down house. I hold loneliness in the softness, in the crook of my arms. My breath slows the beating of my heart. I feel very far away from the coast, even though it's less than thirty minutes away. I feel very far away from the string woman who dove across the continant by herself. Even though the car and the proof are sitting right beside me. I feel very far away from the married, happy woman I once was, even though the tan line of my wedding ring hasnt yet faded.

Shaking myself free of my thoughts, my utensils clank on my plate.
I place the items in their order, light the candles and burn the sweet grasses. I tie myself to the wisps of smoke and move my body to the ritual. My arms stretch across the flames to reach past the trees and into the mountains. Tacing their cold granite faces with the palms of my hands and eyes closed, I reconstruct them in my mind.
The chill of the February night has arrived in full force. The breeze is back. Scooting closer to the fire I place my notebook on a rock and my pen hovers above the page. Now watch me witch:

Christopher
Can I write, watch me

from the sombre window
start in SLO
Or in Seattle, on the street of your mother’s needle
A suitcase the homeseat  
I can’t imagine you,

even though your eyes are trained on me
What do you like
Tell me it so I can write your father out of jail and onto the beach

I will trade, an invaluableness
A poem and a practice, typewritten
The falling down housed you
Can I conjure a ghost with a past, a terrible host

I am interrupted by a question.
“Can I join you?” Well that didn't take long did it.

“Hadn't I already asked you to?”

He took a seat on a warm rock and handed me a beer. The crack of the can opened our coversation and we couldn't put it back again. He told me everything my poem couldn't have guessed.

"I was born in Seattle," He doesn't miss it, by the way he says Seattle. "I lived on the streets with my mom. She's an addict. But she's doing better these days." He doesn't look sad, oly resigned, as if he was used to telling people this uncomfortable truth. He places another log on the fire. "My dad is in jail, in Eureka, it's not far from here."

"I know that jail." I say

That his name was Christopher and that he was a writer. And then he showed me his poems, typewritten on ripped up pieces of cardboard covered with what appeared to be glitter and gold. They weren't terrible. They were better than some of mine are.

"So what about you?" he asked, sitting a little closer and a little closer. He leans over the flames towards me, I'm almost afraid his beard will catch on fire.

"It's a sad one. A little long and a little crazy but it led me here." I take a deep breath and weigh my thoughts, how much to tell how much to keep to myself. For the thousandth time my story unfurled its long tail from the crook of my belly. I told him of leaving my cold, winter city in my little black car to be with my love. How my house was stolen out from underneath me and how my husband abandoned me with no home to go to. How I came back to California only with myself, to learn how to surf and to write poems. I showed him the one I'd written about him.

It sprawled out and stretched and pawed at his chest. Kept time with the tip to his heart beat. His eyes followed mine, followed what I saw, followed my imaginings. Saw my story as it launched its sails into the cold dark wind. I wrapped my tail around him and pulled him, eyes glazed, under my spell. And I was happy to be seen and to be showing. I ate all his attention, the sweetness appeasing me.  Loneliness watched from the tops of the trees and dropped leaves upon us like dead snow. Then she unfolded her big black wings into darkness and slid over the treeless humps, out to sea.
He was enraptured and a small stone of guilt dropped into the pool of my eyes and rippled outwards. "Im a witch, be careful. If you bring me into your life it will change. Like the fire it's hard not to be drawn in, but if you move too hastily it will burn. The embers will press against your skin and your breath will catch in your throat." He leaned in closer and laughed at my warning. The lines around his blue eyes crinkled like only youthful skin can and my witches’ heart beat loudly. I was hungry again.
“Would you like to come inside?” He is unreadable, smiling and yet, distant. Holding me at arms length. Inviting, with words. I haven't yet inflated my (Sarah’s) mattress and the memory of the hard ground keeping me awake on the edge of Big Sur waves flutters between my ears. Tired icicles between my thighs.
I pause and think. I don’t really see the point in sharing myself with him. I will likely never see him again. I am trying my best to heal my broken and disintegrating heart. Would this serve me or would I be serving him. I warned him already about getting too close to a witch.
And yet. 
He is handsome, very. And young, rather. But what I like most is the way his muscles ripple under his skin, like a lions’ does under his coat. I can feel his strength, smell it. And I want some for myself. His lust and confidence draws me in closer, the flames lick the steam from my breath. Better put the fire out. 

We are the only two people in this valley. Except for Mike who drinks the mineral water from the taps in his hand built house. “It’s full of lead,” or brain-eating parasites, I think. “He is slowly losing his mind, I think.” He doesn't kiss me, only looks at me in that way that means something, everything. Nothing and more. I feel drunk. Maybe it’s the wine. His head hangs so far out over his shoulders towards me he is levitating off his seat. It's really getting cold now. He shows me his poems, of course he is a writer. They are good. There is something there. I’m running out of logs, I cast a glance at my axe, wondering if it’s time to split some more.

Inside the smell of the mineral waters is overpowering. It infests me. Crawls up my nose and into my brain. Sulphur in the taps and a man under the age of thirty do not belong in a house together. It flows in the bath and the kitchen sink. Evaporates into the corners of the post and beams and lingers in the linens, curtains, sheets. So heavy it stains the porcelain of the tub and kills the plants with its poison. Little spider plants wilt in the windowsills, begging to be let outside under the rain that never comes to California. What is this place, really. It is not a house, it is a mask for something else. A container. Something else is here, Maybe it's the water, maybe it’s something that comes in from the hoses that run away into the woods. 

 Even the spiderwebs keep little hints of smelly dew. The planks under my feet move as if I were on a boat. Books litter the floor, along with art supplies and abandoned paintings. He pulls me close and sweetly sticks his tongue down my throat. My clothes fall off and scatter behind me as I climb the ladder to the loft.

Suddenly he stopped. Sat bolt upright and looked directly at the empty wall behind me, the angled roof. 

“I'm in love with Sophia!” He yelled. To Sophia I suppose as he was far too loud to have been directing it to me. 

“Excuse me?”

“I'm in love with Sophia.” He repeated, still staring at the planks of wood behind me.

“No, I certainly heard you the first time.” Maybe even she did at that volume.

I’m naked, a little bothered, not overly, and getting cold. It’s draughty when you’re not rolling around getting hot.

I acquiesce, “Who the fuck is Sophia?” That’s what he wants from this, right?

I’d tell you what he said but honestly, it was so boring that I only remember the outline of an unrequited love story. 

Sophia, comes into the second hand bookstore that he works at part time. She’s not a real person, as far as I could tell from how he spoke of her. She is a beautiful corporeal form of a woman that he doesn’t really know. Therefore, in my interpretation, she has no faults, always looks the way she does when she shops for used books, has excellent taste; in used books. She is mysterious and doesn't talk much. To him. He doesn’t know her very well, no kidding, but they’ve been on a few dates and she has mesmerised him with her physical beauty and good taste in books and demureness. They aren’t a couple but right now, right at this very moment, undressed, in bed, with a witch, he has realised that he wants to be with her. With a capital b and e. 

“So, you’re cheating on her?” I tried to hide a yawn. Men divulging surprise spouses midway through intercourse had become, well, for the lack of a better word unsurprising to me at this point in my life. I pull the sheets up over my legs and tuck in under my armpits. I feign interest.

“No, she doesn’t really know who I am.” 

“I thought you said you’d gone on dates?” 

Silence. 

I guess some people would want a better explanation. Maybe they would care to know whether or not they are being a “homewrecker,” but that is so not my problem. I don’t make other’s decisions for them, I’m certainly not about to start taking on their guilt either. Maybe some would ask for more detail about Sophia, or what exactly happened to make him change his mind. I however, would prefer if he would hit the lights, I have a big day tomorrow. He is sitting crossed legged in the middle of blue flannel sheets, twirling a piece of string in his hands. He looks sad, guilty, beautiful. 

“Well, I guess you should tell her.” I roll over and fluff the pillow under my head. This has been very interesting and I’ll write about it later. Can’t say I didn’t warn him about me. I’ll change your life. I don’t control how, it’s not my life. Capital m, capital y. “Can you hit the lights?” We are clearly done having sex and I am ready for sleep. The mattress is warm and soft and my head is heavy from wine and apparently the exorcism of his true feelings. 

“You should go.” I almost laughed, not true, I absolutely laughed.

“Are you kidding?” I don’t even bother turning to face him. I don’t even open my eyes. I am comfortable, I have made my nest for the night. This witch is about to enter the realm of dreams and otherworldly affairs. The misguided actions and regrets of a boy have no importance to me.

“I shouldn’t sleep… You should go…” He is struggling to articulate his feelings.

Eyes still shut, I give him a little. “It’s fine, we can’t go back and undo what has been undone, go to sleep. Your dreams will untangle you and in the morning you’ll see things better.” 

He stutters, tries to say something unintelligible about feeling bad about sleeping next to me.

“My fire went out hours ago, it’s cold outside and I haven’t made up my bed because you asked me to come with you.” I toss a little and get more comfortable, “No way am I going to sleep outside right now, it’s too late for that now.” Why is it my job to teach young men to accept their actions?

I said goodnight, I hope this is the end of it. I can hear the wind whistling outside and I’m eager to join it. There are so many nooks and crannies for my soul to explore, as soon as this guy gets his shit together and lets me go to sleep. 

He sighs as if that is a response in and of itself. He knows he can’t ask me to go back to my tent.  “I can’t sleep next to you, it feels wrong.” He pauses and then, “You should sleep on the couch.” 

My eyes snaped open and I feel heat rising inside my belly, this better be resolved quickly because I am starting to feel my temper wake up, and it is bedtime.

“Christopher, I understand that there is a lot going on in your head right now and it’s ok that you don’t know what you’re supposed to do to make yourself feel better.” I try to make my voice gentle, but there is definitely an edge. I am losing my patience. “But we are here now and treating me poorly is not going to heal the wound you gave yourself.” I shut my eyes again and pull the covers up to my neck. “If you really feel that you are betraying Sophia,” more than you  already have I think to myself, “you should go sleep on the couch. I am going to sleep now. We can talk in the morning. Goodnight.”

He was still. The house swayed and groaned against the wind. It seemed to echo his feelings. Finally he nodded his head. Or at least that's probably what he did, I didn't bother to look. I felt the mattress shake a little, the lights went out and slowly he descended the ladder.

A huge smile spread over my face as I rolled onto my back. I spread my arms and legs out as wide as I could and curled and uncurled my toes. This is the most comfortable I have been in ages, my bed at home is not as nice as this. Downstairs the sounds of someone pulling blankets out of drawers faded into the darkness. I drifted off to sleep, with certitude, intention and prowess