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.