Country of Cold (17 page)

And then we drove back to my house, and I let her in, and she stopped in the doorway looking at all the gear lined up so neatly in the living room. She asked me how long I was going into the bush for. I told you, I said. She replied that the loneliness goes away eventually. I told her that that was nothing to wish for. She’d been divorced twice and she just blinked at me.

This was in 1997.

When Cora heard of the old woman’s disappearance she recalled that her mother had spoken of this woman, who had quit her job years ago to go north, following a man to Churchill. Cora’s mother had taught with her in the city for three years and they had eaten lunch together, every day in the library, unless one of them was on playground duty. Her departure was abrupt. Cora’s mother had found a letter in her mailbox one morning that said: “My advice would be to not marry him. His ambivalence will not resolve.”

And it did not. But, Cora thought, over time it had settled into something less agitating. Her parents were now at ease with one another, and somehow pleased, as if neither had expected things to turn out as well as they had.

Cora and her friends seemed incapable of this kind of patience. As details of the disappeared woman’s life
filtered out, through the gossip of her acquaintances to Cora’s mother, and then to Cora, broad similarities between her life and Cora’s were apparent. Cora lived in a small, cold place, just as the old woman had. But loneliness was, for Cora, like the snow—contained within the idea of the place itself. It was not something she thought could be effectively resisted. The idea of the old woman punctured Cora a little; the old woman’s success in building a redoubt of companionship and faith, surrounded by all that tundra, cast Cora’s acquiescence in a different light. She felt cynical and less brave.

She thought about this as she drank whisky and listened to the wind. There was not an obvious solution.

With a good enough book you can do anything. You could rebuild a carburetor, walk across a desert, learn Mandarin, become proficient in needlepoint. None of us is the first to be baffled by compound curves or aphid infestation. Our salvation lies in the scalp scratching of our predecessors, and this is how the world improves.

Boatbuilding, by
Howard I. Chapelle, has instructed three generations of shipwrights in the building of wooden boats. It was first published in 1941, and its clear and patient prose has calmed the panicked faces of inexperienced builders of wooden boats ever since. Chapelle makes the reader breathe slowly, and think more clearly, as the intricacy of sheer lines and rabbet joints are contemplated. Building a wooden boat is an act of daunting complexity, and Mr. Chapelle’s book takes the neophyte by the hand and approaches the task
one step at a time, soothing and encouraging. It’s as good as a cup of Ovaltine.

The first chapter is devoted to lofting. According to Mr. Chapelle, the care taken with the lofting of a boat is more important than any given act involving wood. The first step of lofting is the drawing of a full-scale plan of the boat’s hull on a suitable floor. Concentric hull lines taper together sinuously over the floor the boat is to be built upon. Using these lines as a guide, one cuts out full-size cardboard outlines of the important beams that will subsequently form the curves of the hull.

Churchill served Carol’s purposes well. It was on the northern sea and it was a long way away from anyone who knew her. When she arrived on the train, fresh from her appalling family, she had never known anyone who had built a boat, and so she began her own effort with a number of misconceptions and romantic but distorted images of the task. She imagined herself with a plane, bent over an oaken beam, pausing frequently to brush aromatic shavings from her forehead in an indefatigable-and-pant-suited Katharine Hepburn sort of way. She couldn’t but feel disappointed when she realized how much time she would have to spend before sawing into the first plank.

The autumnal equinox saw her in her kitchen, by lamplight, cutting out hundreds of cardboard posts, planks, ribbands, and rabbets. Her closets grew wild with
jutting bits of curved cardboard, numbered and cross-indexed against the plans. Every night she would sweep out the leavings of that day’s session, and not since high school had she held her tongue between her teeth as she guided scissors down pencil-scribed cardboard, concentrating like a jeweller.

As the bits of her cardboard proto-boat accumulated, she steadily developed more respect for the immensity of her undertaking. She was surprised, for instance, to learn how many pieces there would be in the keel that she would lay. This was naive; a single block of wood would be prone to splitting and twist. She understood that. Still, she thought, if there were to be a part of the vessel that would be whole and of a piece, you’d think it would be the keel, stabilizing everything through its own ponderous weight. The idea appealed to her—she liked the suggestion of constancy and submerged strength. (Attributes found even less in her own life these days than previously; soon she’d have to build a trough beside her bed’s headboard to spare the pillowcases.)

But the solitary load bearer works better in Homeric epics and popular films than in a working boat. As a matter of engineering principle, better by far to distribute the strain as much as possible; overlap and overlie at every opportunity. Single members fail—even if they’re sturdy enough at the outset, there’s no avoiding deep faults, hidden rot. Shared loads preserve the whole. Any failure analysis demonstrates it: singularity is poor design. In the
evening, in front of the radio in the kitchen trying to find music somewhere, this is as evident as a collapsed bridge.

Mr. Chapelle reminds us: design is compromise.

In Etobicoke, where Carol lived for twenty years, and where her husband remained and where her sixteen-year-old daughter, presumably, also remained, it was still summer, practically. Brandy would be wearing halter tops with sequins and small animals embroidered over her breasts. There would be dark circles under her eyes and her right index finger would be orange from the Player’s Plain habit she had acquired. There would be either the suggestion of or a frank and unreserved sneer on her lips, depending on her mood.

She would be sitting on the sidewalk beside the 7-Eleven in her Toronto suburb and reading whatever magazine she had just shoplifted. Parents of Brandy’s friends had told Carol that she was okay, was couchsurfing for now. But with her gone, the house had been unbearable. Carol hadn’t anticipated this but neither had it entirely surprised her. The immediate agony of Brandy had distracted her from the less insistent but all-encompassing and even less bearable dread of the rest of Carol’s life. And it wasn’t like her daughter’s return was going to be a relief. At least for more than thirty seconds.

Jim would be playing Myst on his computer, which is what he had been doing for most of the last four years. The seasons mattered less to him. He had long since
grown fat and white as Oreo cookie filling in that basement, emerging long enough to eat and fall asleep on the couch and go to work in the morning, where nobody at Robinson’s Plumbing Supply seemed to think there was anything wrong with him. Although, clearly, that Carol had some “anger issues,” they would say at Christmas parties, nodding sympathetically in his direction. The fuckers.

The workshed, which she had rented together with the cabin beside it, still smelled of muskrat pelts and motor oil. But the shed’s concrete floor would be just large enough to fit the hull, and its doors would permit the unrigged boat to exit too. That, and the presence of the sea a half mile from the house, made renting the place inevitable. The owner was a civil servant named Harry Postelwaithe who had lived and worked in Churchill for twenty vaguely hostile and eccentric years, administering the harbour for the federal government. He had slipped a disc and could no longer contemplate a winter out here at Goose Creek, seven miles from town, with no electricity or running water, and all that snow shovelling and wood splitting. He had taken one of the government apartments in town so he could shuffle across the street to work during this, his final winter, before retiring to the Okanagan Valley. Postelwaithe remembered the Okanagan from his youth as unspoiled orchards from north to south and seemed
to believe it had remained ever so. In her few pauseladen conversations with him, Carol had not disabused him of his idea of persistent paradise in the interior of British Columbia.

Living in town suited Postelwaithe poorly. He drove out to his old house in his pickup truck almost daily at first and then less often as the winter progressed, making sure everything was okay, the roof hadn’t started leaking with the autumn rains, the beavers hadn’t dammed up the creek in the back again. She found him, once, in the shed at night, looking at her piles of timber and sawdust, cedar planking and the paper forms all around. They looked at one another, startled—each of them too embarrassed to ask, or explain.

The neighbours had not come visiting. There, thankfully, had been no casseroles. She had had far more privacy than she had expected. It was not clear to her how pleased she should be about this. Exile is like that. It’s tough to know how much you want to succeed.

The city had not forgotten her. Every few weeks a letter arrived, or a message was left on her answering machine. She had not replied to any of them yet, but she intended to. She imagined her friends would give her some grace, though she’d been gone half a year already. Babies would have been born, people would have died. Rumination along these lines was abruptly halted and redirected to the matter at hand. Carvel planking versus lapstrake;
sloop or ketch; cutter head or not; there were many decisions, and this was as she had planned. All in all, her strategy had been effective. She went weeks without thinking about the world beyond her little homestead.

When she arrived it had been late winter and now it was almost winter again. She had spent part of the summer laying in stores for the winter. Postelwaithe had built a greenhouse, and in it a garden had risen and sagged; the squashes lay split and rotten upon one another, the potatoes still waited to be dug. The tomatoes had long since expired.

Her cold cellar was filled with blueberry and Saskatoon jam and apple butter and stewed tomatoes and turnips and beets and sweet potatoes. In the freezer lay a dozen dressed and plucked chickens, a couple of geese, some ducks, and half a lamb. Smoked hams hung from the rafter, a wheel of cheese was covered with cloth, and there were bottles of wine and cider. Beside the house were three cords of birch; the fireplace and the stove chimneys had been scrubbed down to bare brick. Bookshelves filled her bedroom. The library she had brought up here contained many graduate degrees’ worth of reading on astronomy and marine biology and, of course, boatwrighting and timber curing and celestial navigation.

The food and the books and the cordwood inspired in her a feeling of legitimacy or wherewithal that allowed her to imagine herself equal to this business.
This reasoning was dubious, she would concede. The possession of food, fuel, and information composed only a small part of what was necessary to build a boat, but that feeling—of capability, resourcefulness, intactness—was indispensable. Indeed, the whole object of this enterprise.

By early October she had finished the lofting of the individual pieces and she was ready to begin laying out the lines of the boat. This is normally done with chalk, on the work floor, she read. The sheer lines describe the curve the hull makes as it arches from the stern around to the stem, and was a complicated thing to translate from tenth-scale plans to her motor-oil-stained concrete. She studied the drawings for days, drinking coffee with Irish whiskey, in the barn. Houses are built sensibly, with right angles and vertical lines, ninety degrees being “right” and vertical being “true.” The language is dominated by house builders, as opposed to boatbuilders.

A static structure bears perpendicular surfaces well. The column reliably supports loads only when vertical and straight; when gravity is the sole antagonist, flat continuous planes at right angles to one another make compelling sense. The moment the construction is put into motion, all this changes. Sleek and graceful curves are as much a demand of fluid dynamics as they are of aesthetics, or more. The thin-hipped curves of the Spitfire would have been sacrificed in an instant for economy of construction had they not been the reason it was so fast. In the complicated mathematics of fluid dynamics the
intuitive sense of what looks best—that is, most graceful and supple—was for many years the most reliable design criterion for ships and aircraft. Before computers, the argument for an aesthetic sensibility in the design of vessels was an easy one. It is gratifying that in these instances beauty proved correct, if not right, in the perpendicular sense.

She had just finished stapling the last cardboard bulwark together, and was returning to the kitchen for more whiskey, when she saw the snow on the ground. It was late afternoon and it must have been snowing for most of the day—already it was a foot deep. She stopped abruptly and stared at the sky, alarmed that it was winter already and she had not yet affixed even a single bit of wood to another. She returned to the barn to look at her cardboard skeleton vessel, numbered and inscribed. It seemed improbable and pathetic. Too light, too much like a high school art project to have any real credibility. This, after months of work.

She stalked back across the yard and into her kitchen, turning on the lights as she entered. The yard light was surrounded by a cone of wet silver snow, like vaporized mercury. She looked at the scarred maple table that dominated the room, covered with boat plans and empty rolls of tape. She bit her cheek to stop the panic welling up in her, and walked quickly into the living room. Through a window she could see the sky thickening
with snow. She closed her eyes. She could be crazy, she thought. She picked up the telephone. When Jim answered she hung up. She wondered for a moment if he had gotten caller display since she had left. Probably not. Would he even know about star sixty-nine? Probably not. She wondered about Brandy and then forced herself to stop.