The Woods Read online

  The Woods:

  A Year on Protection Island

  2016

  Copyright © Amber McMillan, 2016

  all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, .

  Nightwood Editions

  P.O. Box 1779

  Gibsons, BC v0n 1v0

  Canada

  www.nightwoodeditions.com

  copy editor: Nicola Goshulak

  cover design: Angela Yen

  typography: Carleton Wilson

  interior photos: Amber McMillan, Nathaniel G. Moore, Silas White

  Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.

  This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,

  ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free

  and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  CIP data available from Library and Archives Canada.

  ISBN 978-0-88971-329-1

  for Finn and Nathaniel

  “What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens.”

  —Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati

  ✾ ✾ ✾

  Prologue

  April 30, 2014, Toronto

  [one]

  Our meal had just arrived at the Starving Artist on Lans­downe, just north of Bloor, when our first-floor neighbour texted.

  “Look at Kevin’s text,” I said, handing Nate my phone. “He thinks we left our cat behind and just moved away.” Nate read the text and scrolled through a few previous ones from Kevin as well. Arguments between Kevin’s phone and mine went back years; it was all time-stamped and saved in chronological order, giving every new argument the full weight of the past—every injustice heavier and heavier on top of old resentments left to fester, feed off and multiply.

  “I’m so tired of this,” said Nate. “He’s ruining my last breakfast in Toronto.”

  I could feel adrenalin start its course through my veins. My hands were getting clammy and my body temperature was rising. I was tired too, tired of fighting all the time. My muscles felt permanently tight and strained. I was exhausted, having only just arrived at the other side of a record seven-month winter, a winter that annihilated the city of Toronto with rolling power outages, ice storms that felled trees and power lines, four-foot snowbanks and hills of solid ice on every street, sideways sleet and hail, freezing temperatures and the ongoing, unpredictable hassles of travelling through all this: subway delays, traffic jams, overcrowded buses, the layers of necessary extra clothing caught in boots, zippers and jacket arm holes. Everything was wet and cold and heavy. The smallest annoyance was enough to send me into an emotional tailspin.

  “He’s probably going to let Bernie Mac out the front door now and we’ll never see him again. We have to go back,” I said and began looking around for our server.

  Me: We didn’t abandon our cat, Kevin. We’ve hired someone to clean the apartment. We are taking our cat with us tomorrow when we move.

  “I wanted to eat this and have a nice time with you. These people are driving me nuts. I’m gonna lose it, Amber. I’m telling you, if we go back there now, I’m gonna lose it,” Nate said as he lifted his plate to our server. “Can you pack this up? Sorry, but we have to leave right away. Sorry.”

  Kevin: Yeah right.

  Me: We are coming back to the house now.

  The server brought back our untouched breakfasts in two cumbersome boxes. We left the restaurant to head back to our apartment only a few blocks away. It was still cold, even in April, but the heat of my rage kept my face from freezing against the early spring wind. I began walking faster and faster. I was running through the last conversations I’d had with Kevin: the fight about the shared WiFi password that they changed without telling us; the parties he was always having that inevitably spilled into the lobby at three or four in the morning with drunken rambling and belly laughing; the time they let a film crew of forty people into the house, swarming everywhere; the band rehearsals twice a week… I was working myself into a frenzy. Twice Nate demanded I ease up on my pace. He was trying to calm down before we got there. I was trying to maintain my edge so I could go through with the confrontation. The last hurrah. Our magnum opus of arguments. I was trying to stay furious.

  We stood on the corner of Bloor and Lansdowne for what seemed like forever as cars and buses flew past, spraying our clothes with slush and grit from the street. My skin was becoming numb and tight from the cold as I watched the crosswalk signal, willing it to turn to the flashing stick man. People piled up on the corner, squishing in and pushing their bodies and shopping bags into everything, into my legs and ribs. I instinctively pressed my forearm against my inner pocket to feel that my wallet was still there. I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and over my mouth and nose. I stomped my feet to shake off the wet crud soaking into my pants and boots.

  “Come on!” I screamed in my head, at the people around me, at Kevin, at the whole city. I needed everything to happen faster. The crosswalk opened and I ran across, manoeuvring myself around the cars that had stopped inside the crosswalk and the people around me, all as frustrated and impatient as me. I saw Nate ahead of me and to the right, his hands jammed hard in his pockets, his head down to block the fierce wind.

  As we turned onto our street, I ran ahead and was first to barrel through the front door of the house we shared, for one more night, with Kevin. I stomped past the entrance lobby and knocked as authoritatively as possible on our neighbour’s apartment door—the kind of ferocious knock I imagined police trained for to terrify the people inside.

  “Kevin, it’s us!” I yelled. “Hello! Kevin, hello!”

  Nothing. I looked back and could see Nate through the open door, pacing on the front porch and kicking swaths of ice down the stairs to shatter on the sidewalk.

  “They’re not answering,” I said loudly, hoping our neighbours would hear me from inside their apartment.

  Nate came through the front lobby and stood beside me. He was breathing slowly and his hands were crossed over his chest, the takeout bag hanging from his fist. He reached out and banged on their door, just once, but louder than I had been able to do.

  “Kevin, come out and talk to me,” he said, and then stepped back.

  We stood there, staring at their door, freezing and outraged, waiting in silence, but there was no movement to be heard from inside the apartment. No voice in reply. Bernie Mac glided down the stairs from our apartment above. He looked happy that we were home and greeted us by nuzzling his face across our boots and purring, his tail waving gracefully in the air.

  “Let’s go,” said Nate.

  I turned toward the staircase that led to our apartment above and stomped loudly across the lobby. I sat down on the step and pulled off my hat, beads of water and ice that had collected in the knitted yarn falling to the floor. I pulled off my gloves with my teeth and tossed them into the wicker bin we kept by the stairs. I bent over and pulled open my shoelaces with frozen and stiff fingers, one stitch at a time, red where the laces settled and pulled between my finger joints. I tugged at the knot in my scarf and wrestled it up and over my head, dragging it across the vulnerable, raw skin of my face as I pulled it over.

  Upstairs, our apartment was completely empty except for a couple suitcases, a large box and a mattress we planned to sleep on for what would be our last night in the city. With our familiar clutter gone, everything looked strange. Even the light coming in through the windows looked different somehow, looked like the light of someone else’s window in someone else’s apartment. The kitchen looked pale and unfriendly, the bathroom oddly shaped and unpleasant. The dents and scrapes on the hardwood floor were more apparent than ever and somehow less charming than I had regarded them before. The crack in the plaster wall along the hallway was larger and deeper.

  We’d pushed hard those last months preparing to leave: notifying Lily’s school that she wouldn’t be finishing her kindergarten year there; registering for a mail-forwarding service; selling all of our furniture in a yard sale in the park across the street. We’d lain in bed, late into the night, and talked to each other quietly about our new life out west, about all of our plans, about how it would all would change for us completely. We imagined ourselves free of the hassles and troubles we’d accumulated in Toronto. We imagined a life without rushing, without the subway, without neighbours at each other’s throats, without the noise and frustration of daily commutes. Life with space. Life without the massacre of an endless winter, frozen pipes, cracking plaster and mountains of snow to overcome each morning.

  We’d considered many different places to go before settling on BC. We started first by looking for work and then considering the places where there were jobs. There was a teaching job for me in Regina, and another one in the Yukon that paid far above average. There was an attractive opportunity for Nate in Montreal but that would mean even longer and crueller winte
rs up there. We realized that nowhere was going to offer us the perfect combination of work and environment so we decided to go all in and aim for the best environment possible and figure out the money side when we got there. We finally started to look at the Nanaimo area on Vancouver Island because it was close to my mother in Victoria, had affordable rentals, was surrounded by water and trees, and had a low population compared to Toronto. There was also a university that might have a job for me if I could be patient.

  An online forum we’d found described Protection Island as a small “car-free paradise” in Nanaimo Harbour where residents got around on bikes or boats to wherever they were going. The idea of living somewhere without traffic seemed like an impossible fantasy. I thought of the kind of people who would live there, people who moved around slowly, lived apart in small homes, hiked through the woods every day, took boat rides in the afternoons, and instead of waiting in thirty-person lineups in oppressively lit grocery stores, grew their own food and ate it out of the dirt. I wanted to be a person like that. We wouldn’t be earning as much as we did in Toronto, but we wouldn’t need to because our cost of living would be less. We’ll build a fire every night, Nate would say. We’ll sleep outside in the summer, I would say.

  Only a few weeks earlier, and after putting down a deposit on a new house we had rented on the distant island, I had cleared out my staff locker at work and best of all, I’d told Humber College I wouldn’t be returning to teach the following semester. I was elated to know that I would never again take the 196 Rocket from Kipling Station, the furthest stop west on the Bloor line, to hurtle down Highway 427 at the edge of Toronto at the crack of dawn. I would never again hurry my child out of the house at 6:30 in the morning to a daycare program before school just so I could get to work on time and rush back after to pick her up at the end of the day. Soon I would have time with her, time with Nate and time for myself. We had undone everything we knew, the whole life we’d built, and we couldn’t have been more excited to leave.

  I walked around the apartment and scanned each room, the way you do during an open house, like a stranger. I was checking to see if we’d forgotten anything, but we hadn’t; the place was nothing but walls and floors, a blank slate that didn’t belong to me any longer. After a while I joined Nate and our takeout boxes in the living room and sat down on the floor. We ate our cold eggs and toast and listened to Kevin open and close cupboard doors in the kitchen below us. Through the vents we could him singing along to music in another room, trying to keep his voice low.

  The Island

  [two]

  When we arrived at the Nanaimo airport, four thousand kilometres from Toronto, we had two suitcases full of clothing and books, a single box of memorabilia and a stack of paintings we’d collected, protected on the outside by black garbage bags and wrapped up with duct tape. The new house we had rented on the island came furnished so we didn’t need to bring anything more, nor did we want to. We saw my mother waiting for us in the arrivals gate as we came off the plane, her eyes searching and her smile uncontainable. She had made the one-hour drive up from Victoria to meet us and help us get ourselves and our belongings to our new rental on the island. The sky was cloudless and blue and the spring sun injected everything with vibrant colour. The trees were greener, birds soared above us, and the water radiated light.

  We stopped at Thrifty’s, the downtown supermarket, to pick up groceries for a few meals before catching the ferry to Protection Island. Mum parked her car and we carried our bags of groceries, our boxes and suitcases, and Lily across the Island Highway and down to the harbour. From there we followed the signs that led us down a set of stairs and a ramp toward the Protection Island passenger ferry at the dock. Attached to a blue and white converted lifeboat was a wooden board with plain, painted letters that read: Ferry schedule May–October $9.00 round trip for Adults, $6.00 for Children, Extra: Bikes $5.00, Dogs $2.00. Attached to its top was another rectangular wooden sign that read Protection Connection painted in large, red letters. I checked my pockets for change, but came up empty. In the back pocket of my jeans I found a Toronto Transit transfer pass, expired by a day.

  “Do you think they take credit cards?” I said to my mum who was standing next to me reading the same sign.

  “I hope so. They should, anyway. Let me see if I have any cash, hold on.” She pulled open the flap of her purse.

  “Cash only,” said a man, positioning two large boxes on the bench next to us near the edge of the dock. The small box had a picture of a toaster on the side and the large one showed a black and white drawing of a printer. The man was tall with short greying hair and pale blue eyes. He wore light-coloured jeans and a buttoned-up white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He looked like he’d walked out of an ad for a sailboat. “And it helps if you have exact change.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I replied, and began unzipping one of our suitcases to locate the purse I had stuffed in it earlier that day. I was moving quickly. The ferry was scheduled to depart for the island shortly.

  “There’s a bank machine over there,” he continued, pointing to the other end of the dock, next to a water fountain.

  “Thanks again,” I said and checked the time. I had about five minutes to get to the cash machine and back before the ferry left.

  “Mum, how about you take this box onto the ferry and sit down. I’ll run up to the machine and be right back.”

  “Oh, no,” said the man, grinning and rearranging his boxes on the bench so they wouldn’t tumble forward. “This boat here is just the waiting room. The ferry isn’t here yet. You guys visiting friends on the Island?” he asked.

  “In fact, we’re moving there. Right now, today,” I said and smiled.

  “Oh!” he said, resting his arm on top of his boxes. “Well, welcome then. Where are you coming from?”

  “Toronto,” I said, aware of how surprising that probably sounded.

  “Back east, I see. From Toronto to Protection Island. I think it’s safe to say you guys are the first I’ve ever heard of doing that,” he said, smiling.

  “It’ll be a big change,” said my mum, still looking through her purse.

  “I’m Jim,” said the man. “If you need a hand with your stuff on the other side, I can give you a ride. I’ve got a golf cart over there to get around,” he offered and shook my mother’s hand, then mine.

  “Terrific. Thank you very much. We don’t have a lot of stuff to carry, but we’d really appreciate the lift.” I looked over at Mum and she smiled.

  Mum took Lily’s hand and they found a seat in the waiting room. Lily couldn’t stop asking questions: Where are we on a map though? Is this waiting room boat a real boat? Are there sharks under the water here? What if we sink? Are we almost there?

  I checked the time again. Four minutes. I positioned the suitcases against the bench and jogged down the dock and up the ramp toward the cash machine. There was no lineup. When I came back down the ramp a minute or so later, I could see the ferry boat pulling in next to the waiting-room boat and tying up to it. Ten or so people exited the boat, walked through the “waiting room” and out onto the dock. I ran down the dock to catch up to Nate, Lily and my mum, who had already started organizing the boxes and talking with the ferry skipper.

  We handed boxes down from the waiting room to the skipper on the ferry, who placed them along the boat’s deck. Next we loaded Lily onto the boat, then Mum, Nate and I joined her. We squished into one corner to leave as much room as we could for others getting on the boat, but we quickly saw that our stuff and our bodies were taking up more than our fair share of space. Thankfully, the ferry skipper was sympathetic to our situation.

  “It’s better to do it this way,” he said to us. “My name’s Rob. I’ll be your skipper most mornings.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. I noticed his skin was already dark from spending most days outside on the ferry. The hair on his arms and legs was bleached by the sun.