Third Place Nonfiction, 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Contest
Nineteen sixty-nine is the year my father calls me Gazelle for my lack of grace, and Sarah Heartburn for my dramatic tendencies. It is the year I begin piano lessons with Mrs. Lundin, who lives two blocks from our new house in Escanaba, Michigan. I practice on the small upright piano my Grandma Mimi gifts me for my tenth birthday. I am in fifth grade at Lemmer Elementary School which is eight long blocks from our house, walking distance for my sisters and me.
Escanaba sits on a bluff above Lake Michigan. There are two tall blue spruce out front of our two-story house. We climb the branches like ladders. I carve my initials into the trunk, high up, in one of the trees which stands to this day, even though my parents tell me I killed the tree by doing so. From those high branches my sisters and I spy on the neighborhood kids who play kickball in the street or pull the rope at dusk to taunt the few cars that cruise past. Soon, we join them for kick the can or hide and go seek, just like we played with kids in Chicago, only here we run further and play into the dark, which feels wild and wonderful. The kids are a mix of ages. Some big boys in the group call me Bozo, because of my curly hair, and question my ethnicity because of my full lips and on account of us moving here from Chicago.
These big boys become a fixture as we adjust to living in more public proximity to people after life in anonymous apartments in Chicago. During our first winter, my sisters and I find glass marbles in the snow. Every time snow falls, marbles dot the white drifts, fantastic cat’s-eyes and thumb-sized steelies, some clear glass shot with color and others brightly veined, milky-white. These tiny discoveries cause us to wade into the deep snow in our backyard. Snow boots fill and so does a five-pound Maxwell House coffee can our mother puts on the porch for our collection. By the time spring arrives, our blue can is full to the brim. It is years before we discover that those big boys had emptied a similar coffee can from their garage next door, Folgers, and red, by the fistful. They pitched glass marbles toward our laundry line. I am not stupid enough to think the marbles fall from the sky. My little sisters firmly believe they do.
At the end of May, I near the close of fifth grade. I have spent the year peppering my teacher Mr. Ladin with too many questions. He is impatient with my need-to-know about the specifics of the upcoming moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin which my ten-year-old mind finds very disturbing. I pester him about math problems in the lower-level math group. I don’t ask him how my father will make a living in this long-wintered place. I won’t ask if we will ever get our furniture from Chicago. He does not know we sleep in sleeping bags on the floor and eat at a picnic table hauled in from outside to our dining room. He knows that on Memorial Day weekend, I will go on a boat trip with my family. Even though Mr. Ladin cannot assure me of the safety precautions aboard the Apollo Mission or help me understand long division, he does tell me one important thing. About this boat trip, he says, my homework is to write about it.
On Memorial Day my family drives north to Marquette Boat Harbor, where the average air temperature is 60 degrees. The temperature of Lake Superior, upon which we are setting off in my father’s just purchased Chris-Craft closed- hull fishing boat, fluctuates between 39 and 55 degrees. Lake Superior is always cold. In May, there are often chunks of ice floating along the coast.
My father had recently earned his boat operator’s license through the Coast Guard, and purchased this used, single-screw, 35-foot wooden boat with a loan from his younger brother. We set off in an easterly direction from the harbor, guided by his plan to motor along the southern coast of Superior, pass through the Soo Locks, and then motor back west, along the lower edge of the Upper Peninsula to the boat’s new home port of Escanaba. Dad named the boat Big Bill, after his father. I never wondered about this until now, about what this trip cost us.
His able-bodied crew are his three daughters; me, aged ten, and my two younger sisters, eight and four years old. My mother, who at that point had never read a nautical map or used a two-way radio, is six months pregnant. She is the sole supporter of this family as a full-time elementary school teacher. We have one pair of sunglasses among the five of us, life jackets—one for each—and a cooler of food jammed into the small galley below deck. We sit on deck chairs tied to the interior of the boat. We watch the shore pass by our right shoulders. We slide by Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore where tall white pines stand sentry on the colorfully striated limestone cliffs. Gulls glide overhead.
Though I am a Girl Scout in Delta County where everyone calls me Juniper, I have not yet earned my Lifesaving Badge. I know how to use oars in a small rowboat, but that’s it. We have never done a girl-overboard drill on this big boat. My mother is a strong swimmer. I have only ever seen my father wade in belted khaki shorts, wallet bulging his back pocket. My sisters and I swim at beaches where the water is shallow, where we can see our knees as we turn somersaults with our noses pinched shut.
This is the boat I will help him scrape and paint, clean and outfit for his new charter fishing service. This is the boat he will take men out to troll for coho salmon and lake trout. I will swim in the murky deep waters of the dockyard harbor with boys who don’t go to my school. They, and this boat, live on the other side of the tracks, as Escanaba is bisected by the iron ore-carrying rail line. This is the boat he will rename after my new sister, who will be born in August. He will have her name painted in flashy gold letters on the stern, as if proclaiming the boat in her honor would undo what happens on this trip.
First though, my father has to almost lose us and his boat, twice.
Once in the too-shallow waters of a shoal on our first day out. My mother frantically reads the depths of the lake from a map, pointing in the direction she thinks he should steer. My father runs the propellor backwards to get the boat off the rocks without breaking open the wood hull. I look south toward land. Cold wafts up from the surface of the lake telling of unseeable depths and a swim to shore that I couldn’t make. I watch my parents’ backs at the bulkhead.
Would this be an appropriate time to pray, I wonder? Would it help if we sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”?
The next afternoon we approach Whitefish Point, the fabled tip of the peninsula where many ships have foundered, and crews have been lost. We, too, are caught in a storm. The sky turns green then gray then black. This is what is called a gale. The waves become mountains our boat climbs. Once at the wave’s peak, the boat slams sickeningly down into the trough of the next. The single- screw engine screams.
Would Jesus walk on these bottomless waters, too, like he did on the Sea of Galilee? It is hard to tell sea from sky, rain obscures the horizon, the world becomes towering waves and wind. Could I even see Jesus in this tumult?
Terror slices the air between our parents as my father clutches the boat’s wheel. Waves crash over the boat. My sister looks over the side and sees a hole in the lake, blackness with no end. Wind howls. They tell us to go below, then call us back to be near them under the standing shelter. My youngest sister wraps her body around my legs and buries her head in my sweatshirt. I keep watch, my head just barely above the pilot’s desk. My father makes SOS calls on the two- way radio. Through staticky communication, the Coast Guard figures out where we are on the lake. There is a harbor ahead. The boat tosses at angles unlike any ride at Riverview Amusement Park in Chicago.
After a time that is forever, a sea wall emerges from the slanting rain. I am sure we will perish against it. This storm is in charge of the boat. The gale drives us toward what will be our end.
But it is not the end. The boat crawls toward an opening in the sea wall to a harbor. We are in a place suddenly out of the terrifying wind. Dad guides the boat to a dock among large fishing boats, working boats, nothing luxurious about these vessels that rock violently in the churning water. The boats wheeze and moan against their bumpers. We tie up to the dock. Reels of nets, tangled ropes, and buoys dance ghoulishly in the slashing rain and storm dark afternoon. This is a fishery. We go to the house that is lighted here.
I sit at a table covered by a red-checked plastic tablecloth cluttered with coffee mugs and juice glasses. I listen to the people tell my parents they’d given us up for lost at sea. It does not register to me that on this trip we could have died, twice over, or that this is unusual. Water runs off my hair and slides along my chin, drips onto the table. I reach for a bowl of potato chips and feel water leak off my shirt sleeve. My parents are hollow eyed. Once we are warm, we go back to the boat to eat dinner.
I recall the sound of the wind and the sight of that seawall, from outside the harbor, and once we were inside, waves barreling over the top of it. Maybe I am proud of my father for piloting us through this apocalyptic storm. Maybe I feel relief to be on solid ground, even though the dock rocks with each surge of the lake. I do what we do in the face of every calamity in our family, I move on. We eat food. We slink off our wet clothes and somehow find rest inside our sleeping bags in the belly of that boat. The next day, we pass though the Soo Locks and travel down the St. Mary’s River toward Lake Huron. My sisters and I take turns wearing the sunglasses, pretending to be movie stars in our deck chairs.
This will become an event that is never mentioned in my family. Except for the time I hear my father blame the boat. He tells my mother the single-screw engine is not fit for the Big Lake. I never hear my parents speak of the storm when they talk with people at church or to visiting aunts and uncles. This event becomes one of many moments that I am left to sort out myself.
Even now, all these years later, I see the maps flap in the wind as my mother’s strong hands hold them down while she studies the depth markings in the dim light of the storm. That seawall.
Fishing will be the thing I do with my father. I will know how to knot lures to monofilament and untangle reels. I will feel the thrill of lake water chilling my rubber waders as we cast lines into Lake Michigan off Stonington peninsula in early spring. Together we will scoop nets full of smelt that swim up the rivers of the Upper Peninsula to spawn in late April. Families go out to net smelt, and we do this, he and I, on the shores of Ford River.
From my first netful of smelt, I pluck one up and lay the shimmery wet silver-sided fish against my bottom teeth, my mouth open in both disgust and delight. I bite down. Then I spit the head back into the river. This will make me many things, most of all, a true Yooper, as white residents of the Upper Peninsula are called. I will do these things in and near the Great Lakes with my father.
Our trip continues, though our misfortunes get no worse. We are fogged in at Mackinaw Island while we wait for an engine part to be delivered to the harbormaster’s office. My mother and youngest sister take a Greyhound bus home from St. Ignace so my mother can teach the last week of school. This trip costs me the entire last week of fifth grade with Mr. Ladin. I am sad about this, but I spend misty days riding a tandem bike with my sister and our dad around and around Mackinaw Island.
Though Superior nearly devoured us, my family life is oddly unchanged. We passed through the valley of the shadow of death as if we were fearless, but with what did we pay for that safety? Faith in our father, the one who sings to his reflection as he shaves in the narrow rectangular mirror in the head below deck? Or trust that our mother could pull us through, no matter what? What are the unseen costs to my sisters and me? On the turbulent seas of our family life, who pays for the near fatal mistakes of our parents?
The engine part arrives. The fog lifts. We depart the lilac-lined roads of Mackinaw Island and make way to Escanaba. Suddenly seaworthy, my eight- year-old sister and I coil and uncoil the ropes around cleats on docks, and sleep inside our sleeping bags on slippery foam pads on the berth below deck. We drink Vernors pop and make sandwiches for every meal. What I have lost in days at school, I gain every time I jump from the boat to dock and back again.
Suzi Banks Baum dwells at the crossroad of literary and visual arts. A writer, mixed media and book artist, Suzi expresses the holy ordinary. Her devotion to daily creative practice is the super-food for her signature teachings: Backyard Art Camp, the Powder Keg Writing Workshops, and Advent Dark Journal. Suzi travels to Gyumri, Armenia to teach the book arts to women artists. She also administers the Writers Studio of the Pentaculum residency at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She will teach at Snow Farm Craft School in the fall of 2021 and at the Genesis Retreat Center in the winter of 2022. Her first book, An Anthology of Babes gives voice to 36 artist mothers. Her fiction is published in The Collection: Flash Fiction for Flash Memory by Anchala Studios and the Walloon Writers Review.
SPOT IMAGES CREATED BY WARINGA HUNJA
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