When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer
up in the pump house. No room? Make room. Only when the obligatory death watch had fully elapsed, only when Dad and MC regretfully released each other from the sacred duty to attempt an item’s salvation, then and only then did my parents inter it or, perhaps more fittingly, grab it by the throat and drown it in duckweed.
The other kind of landfill, any offspringings not ours, as in anything not purchased by or for my parents, any item regardless of condition, quality or cost that someone else had paid their good money for and was subsequently fool enough to discard at curbside or into a public dumpster, those castoffs – praise the Lord and pass the ammunition – became landfill immediately. We tossed better stuff into the swamp than we used in the cottage.
So the swamp got filled with the expected trash, paint cans, tires and rusty lawn chairs, but also with the unexpected. Uncles were forever skulking over in the dead of night, when they thought no one was watching, to let fly some secretive personal refuse. In daylight, in reverse Conspicuous Consumption, they competed to chuck the most the most often. The undisputable winner, Uncle G, had contributed a cracked fibreglass canoe, two couches and a dead ride-’em lawnmower. Dad, intent on outcrapping them all, asked the existential questions: When junk is scarce and time is fleeting, why not take a truck and wander forth? Why not boldly go where no garbage picker has gone before? Carpe detritus!
And where do you find the best detritus to carpe? Dad circled one day on his calendar: Victoria County’s Big Garbage Day. He borrowed Hezzy’s truck, loaded up the uncles with a two-four of Carling Red Cap barley refreshment, and flew into Fenelon like a Bizarro Santa collecting presents: washers, dryers, freezers, fridges, couches. Ho, ho, ho, but no joke. In ’67, Centennial Year, he snagged the Big One, the find he boasted about the way fishermen brag about the one that got away. His catch wasn’t a muskie, but he did stuff it. Twenty double-wide red leather seats from a wrecked school bus, stuffed in the swamp.
Remember that crackpot artist in the nineties who wrapped a shoreline in pink cellophane to represent the intrusion of mass production on the environment? Dad’s Centennial project had him beat by thirty-some years. Let’s call his 1967 installation When Chaos Meets Cottage or So You Think Life’s a Movie? For personal reasons, not the least of which is my undying love of the Muppets, I want to call it It’s Not Easy Being Seen, but enough said. As Dad’s personal outdoor theatre, the name that stuck was The Rosedale Roxy, but no matter how many movies he made, not one premiered there. Imagine raspberry-red seats pitched randomly off the deck like a giant set of Pick-up Sticks. They land helter skelter in a lime-green swamp: end to end, perpendicular, vertical, facing each other or face down. With no hope of a movie, the Rosedale Roxy immediately began its decent into obscurity. For a time it had patrons. Sunning snakes and turtles congratulated each other on finding such soft leather logs. Confident frogs leapt from one colossal red lily pad to another, and we got the scathingly brilliant idea to do likewise.
Unfortunately for us, but perhaps fortunately for the planet, Darwin’s theories can’t be accelerated by pubescent desire. Compared to frogs, we humans lose every time. We have little of their accuracy, none of their agility and weigh, what, a few thousand times more? Did that stop us? What do you think? In that uniquely teenage blend of stubborn, hopeful arrogance, we practised Olympic thishful winking. We kept jumping and, as it should have, the planet laughed at us. So did my father. His jumping films jump themselves, his usually steady hand bumping with laughter. He offered strategies, directed moves, even drew us a hopping map, showing how he thought it might be done. ‘Don’t show your mother!’ He’d cheer us on until he heard her coming. We never told her, but for reasons obvious, stilettos on a wooden deck are like a machine gun – you heard her aiming for you every time. Leaving us the courtesy to be reamed out in private, Dad would film a few more seconds, snap his lens cap and vamoose.
Our amphibian aspirations were likewise short-lived. While we might pretend to be frogs, the seats refused to be lily pads. They met our far-from-graceful landings with lurching indignation. They chortled, they tipped us into the big green swim. There’s no quicker cure for pride than the suck of swamp slime in your shoes. We should have known better. Renaming fools no one, especially not the renamed. Ask Yogi. Ask Jordan. Those bus seats asserted their identity, registered a protest, and then like all things consigned to a swamp, they sank.
But spite floats. And apparently it winters well. It was late Saturday night by the time MC finally signed us off as being officially unpacked as per Arrival Protocol. We’d heard cousin laughter for over an hour – the first summer game of hide-and-seek. Never planned or discussed, at twilight we all simply materialized before the big cedar at March One. Last to appear was It. Uncles joined in. Jordan and the aunts watched from kitchen windows doing dishes, because bad legs and ill wives should stay home. For me, missing hide-and-seek was bad enough, but now the Saturday bonfire was well underway, and to miss both was treason.
Every Saturday night, and I do mean since 1921, March held a bonfire, a ceremonial burning of bush to mark the further wresting of habitable land away from the maw of godless wilderness. Attendance compulsory. All the Whos down in Marchville, the large and the small, metaphorically joined hands. My father, no doubt grudging every cubic inch that went up smoke instead of down in swamp, smiled his lips shut. But Mom wouldn’t play the Make Nice game. She who may have once looked like Della pouted a Grinchy pout. Legend has it that she once tottered into the bush clinging to Dad’s arm, announced that the slime was ruining her shoes and made him take her back. Her heart did not grow three sizes that day or any other. She issued standing orders that light supper makes long life, and forbade us to touch the Who Feast of toasted marshmallows and swampwater. No, of course we didn’t drink swamp. It’s a hybrid concoction of double sugar: half root beer, half orange Freshie. Once Mom pulled the addition curtains, Auntie E always passed us a cup and Dad always filmed us drinking it.
So whether it was an apology, another broom, or a thumbed nose saying I-can-be-as-late-as-I-bloody-well-want-thank-you-very-much, when MC broke her own protocol that first Saturday night, produced see-through snap-on boots in the shape of high heels and tugged them over hers, we just stared. She unfolded the impossibly small see-through emergency raincoat she kept in her purse, put it over her pink silk ensemble, got out to the fire under her own steam and sat down on a dirty overturned stump. No one spoke. Not word one. Until Uncle G pointed a smoking marshmallow stick in Jordan’s direction and casually asked, ‘So, Caroline, you all settled in? You and your little Almost family?’
‘Enough said, Gavin.’ Grandma shot back, ‘Jordan became a March, just as you did. At least she didn’t have to pay for it.’
I imagine even Grandma never saw the irony in that statement until it was far too late. But I repeat: we should have known better. We were sitting in a swamp. A swamp with rules – how March is that? We all knew what belonged there, and who didn’t. Mom stood up.
‘I’m sorry, Caroline … ’ Grandma started, but she didn’t know how to finish it.
ATLANTIS
So there was a lost world down there, way down below the duckweed, but unlike the Donovan song, I doubt it was anywhere you’d want to be. I often wondered what the snapping turtles thought of their not so brave new world, if they rolled their eyes at the random crap we so indiscriminately chucked into their habitat, if they had the good sense to take their shells elsewhere while the swimming was good. Probably not. Like most of earth’s creatures, turtles are both stubborn and shortsighted. I bet death surprised them.
The frogs were a little smarter. They moved out ahead of the overcrowding, creating their own housing crisis deeper in the swamp: too many frogs, not enough pads. Jordan loved it. You see, once she got her feet in place and gained her balance, she was March’s undisputed Frogging Queen, particularly good at hanging on to bait frogs, those tiny baby leopards that squeezed out of larger hands. Must have been the manual dexterity of all that writing and knitting. She would have won every Frogathon had Dexter and Alexander not cheated. Seventeen that summer, and so inseparable that Uncle H did their already similar nicknames of Dex and Der one better by calling them Ching and Ching, the boys simply combined their catch. They resented the fact that when Uncle H wanted bait he went to Jordan first, that when it should have been a nephew, a niece went fishing with him in his boat, Excalibur.