Baltimore's Mansion (20 page)

T
HE CABIN WAS
built by someone who had either changed his mind about being a hermit or had gone to be one somewhere else. Now it was being rented by some Newfoundlander who had talked himself into believing it was a sure bet, the first of many cabins he would buy or build on abandoned islands and rent to mainlanders who had run out of places to go to get away. This much I had found out from the fellow who took me out to the island in the boat he used to fish from before the fish ran out. I had told him I was from St. John's, but I might as well have said Los Angeles, for he seemed to draw no distinction between one place he had never been to and another.

The cabin looks like something you would see at the entrance to a park for Sunday hikers, made from what might be imitation logs they are so lacquered, so polished. I can tell I will not be roughing it until I go outdoors, which is fine with me. Having been away from Newfoundland for five years, I came back three years ago and now, at the age of thirty, am trying to decide if I should leave again, knowing that if I do it will be for good. No amount of weighing the pros and cons
inclines me one way or the other. I have come to realize that in this choice, reason must have no say.

My hope is that, here, nudged by some solitary impulse, my mind will somehow make itself up, sparing me the task. Everywhere I've been there are people I can live among, or stand to live among, as it sometimes seems. I have to know if I can live without the land. Perhaps out here, where there is nothing but the land, I can decide. I have prescribed myself a week of solitude, a week without once dwelling on the question or otherwise considering my destiny or that of anyone I know. I can therefore read as much as I like but I am not allowed to write.

For electricity, there is a small generator. There is no running water, but there is a room brim-full of light-blue coolers stacked like wine casks at the back. There is no phone, but there is a short-wave radio rigged so that all I have to do in case of trouble is flip a switch and ask for help.

The place is well stocked with food and wood. There is a new wood stove that has a window at the front so it doubles as a fireplace. In the bedroom there is a real fireplace with bricks so pristine it must never have been used.

In case the tenant has not come properly prepared, there is winter clothing that would do for climbing mountains, as well as snow goggles and snowshoes that snap on like skis.

On the inside of the front door are instructions about what you should and should not do when you leave the cabin. Once you open the door on arrival, don't use the key again until you leave. NEVER LOCK THE DOOR. No matter how hard the snow is near the cabin, never leave without your snowshoes.

On the adjoining wall, a poster offers a crash course in winter weather. The freezing point of water. A formula for calculating wind chill. Using your thermometer. Using your barometer. DON'T BE FOOLED: LOW PRESSURE MEANS BAD WEATHER. An admonishment to stay indoors, no matter how nice it appears to be outside, if the air pressure drops two readings in a row. It all seems overdone, designed to impress on city dwellers just how wild this wilderness adventure is. Radio forecasts are helpful, but local conditions can vary widely within the forecast zone. A chart shows how long you can safely stay outdoors at certain sub-zero temperatures. Of little use to me because I have no watch. Any watch I wear or even put in my pocket keeps time unreliably and within a week or so stops altogether. I have been told by jewellers that for some unknown reason, a small number of people have this effect on watches.

I have never spent much time in winter this close to the sea. No one need ever have told me how long a man who went overboard into
that
would last. I can tell just from looking at it. How can anything warm-blooded have had its origins in that? No blizzard, no iceberg, no howling northwest wind is cold the way that water is. On the crest sides, the waves are rippled by the wind, on the trough sides as smooth and black as slate. Not snow or ice or wind, or any feature of geography present to the inhabitant or traveller the kind of obstacle this water does. Any place between you and which there is land is more real than a place from which you are separated by the sea.

An island to someone who has never left it
is
the world. An island to someone who has never seen it does not exist.

At night I try not to dwell on my isolation, partly out of
a fear for my safety that by day I do not feel. Any help summoned by short-wave to this place might be days in coming. I read constantly for companionship, to get back into the world. If this island had never been inhabited, if evidence that, at one time, the place was lived in was not scattered everywhere, I would feel less lonely.

I do not realize until I see the beaver house that I am halfway across a pond. Straight ahead, just visible above the snow, is a beaver dam and in front of it a triangle of slush ending in a stretch of open water. I turn around and gingerly retrace my steps, knowing that if I were not wearing snowshoes I would already have gone through the ice. I am lucky that the snow is deep. I guess that nothing smaller than a stunted spruce has seen the light of day since last November. It is the snow, more than the ice, that holds me up. The ice, insulated by the snow, is probably only about two inches thick. I am almost at the shore when the snow and ice give way beneath me. I go in up to my waist and then hit bottom, fall for a suspenseful fraction of a second until I stop in mud that, because of the snowshoes, I don't sink into very far. Feeling foolish, I pull myself out without much difficulty and crawl on my stomach the last few feet to shore. By the time I reach the cabin, my snow pants are as stiff as cardboard and the snowshoes so encrusted with frozen mud that I can barely lift my feet.

I have just had the sort of mishap on which the sort of person for whom this cabin was designed would dine out for years. A brush with death in the wilderness by which his city-weary spirit was renewed. It was also the sort of mishap that could have been much worse, that could have left me just as
dead as that greenhorn from the mainland. I had walked, like some out-of-his-element thrill seeker, across what, when I was twelve, I would have known was a barely frozen mudhole.

Now the warning on the door seems like a compilation of advice from tenants who learned the hard way what the hazards are. I add to the list, writing on a piece of paper that I tack to the wall: “Be careful where you walk. When the snow is deep, there is no telling where the land leaves off and the ponds begin. Remember that every step you take might be your last. Perils abound and woe to him who, having read my warning, heeds it not. ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.'” Let my successor try to figure that one out.

For the first two days I avoid the abandoned settlement that is the main attraction for the tourists who come here in the summertime. I tell myself I have no intention of mooning homiletically about in some ghost town. But I find it impossible, knowing that it's there, not to take a look. The hermit built just out of sight of the settlement, just around the shore from it, as if to have built within sight of it would have been too intrusive, would somehow have spoiled the place.

Most of the houses that are left are shells of wood. There is one structure that might have been a school. The various parts of it seem not to touch. It seems to be held up by the space that it encloses. Everything has been taken from here, every detachable, man-made, non-wooden thing. Glass, chimney pots, stoves, pails, anchors.

There is a church from which the stained glass windows have been carefully removed, even the porthole-like window in the steeple on top of which a rusting crucifix still stands. It is
like some sort of reduced-scale, model church, six rows of pews on either side, a narrow aisle between them leading to the altar. Between the windows are small wooden shelves still bearing the rings of the oil lamps that once rested on them. Trails of soot climb the walls above the shelves, and there are faint soot circles on the ceiling. The floor, the pews, the stripped-bare altar are strewn with leaves, twigs, orange needles from the blasty boughs of spruce trees. The side of the church that for the better part of the day is in the shade is damp and grown over with green mould and moss. In the cabin there is no brochure explaining who these people were, when and why they settled here and when they left.

In front of the church is a small cemetery. I have to dig away the snow from the headstones to read their inscriptions. There are eleven thin, semicircular white marble stones with black inscriptions, all of which bear the same last name, as if no marriages or births took place here, as if some family, after generations of attrition, died out. Some member of the family must have led the service every Sunday. They came here in pursuit of an absolute of self-sufficiency, a family resigned or even dedicated to its own extinction. Some of the men and women might have met and married people from elsewhere and left the island, though it is hard to imagine how these meetings would have taken place. They built on the eastern side of the island, the side that faced away from Newfoundland. From here no other islands can be seen, just the sea whose storms they took the brunt of rather than live on the leeward, land-facing side. It might have been a gesture of renunciation. Or perhaps it was just that here they were closer to the fishing grounds.

There is a feeling different from what you get in landlocked
ghost towns, the sense of a whole world, a whole history having ended. It is like some elaborately, painstakingly constructed object lesson, the kind of place that might have made the author of Ecclesiastes feel that the writing of his book was a foolish act of vanity and a striving after wind.

It is impossible not to feel the ghostly past of the place. At night, in the distance, I see the lights of passing ships. When it is time to take the lantern from the window, time to turn the wick down low and make my way through my unfamiliar house and go to bed, I try to imagine what my light must look like to someone watching from out there. Seeing it fade until nothing is left but a spark so faint they must wonder if it is real—and then know it is, for abruptly it is gone. Nothing now. No prospect but the dark.

This barometer, like the ones of my childhood, measures pressure in degrees instead of in kilopascals. On my third day, it registers the largest one-tap drop I have ever seen, three full points from thirty-two to twenty-nine. I have never even heard of pressure dropping under twenty-nine except at the sudden onset of tornadoes or hurricanes. My father often told me that the worst wind that ever blew across the island was nothing next to the worst wind that ever blew ten miles from shore, let alone two hundred.

A storm, a great storm, is coming. I feel as though there is no point in my being here if I stay inside. There is a hill directly behind the cabin, without ever straying from the lee of which you can reach the church. In defiance of the instructions on the door, I put on my snowshoes and go up to the church to wait for the storm to start.

There used to be full-length shutters on the north-facing windows that when open folded outward and were bolted to the wall. They have left arch-shaped shadows in the clapboard. There were no shutters on the south side of the church, which is so much in the lee of the hill I doubt the ground beneath the windows ever sees the sun.

At first I stand at the middle of the three windows, the wind hitting me full in the face. The snow does not begin with flurries. It comes in across the water like an accelerated bank of fog and forces me back as it pelts in slant-wise, flecked with ice that stings my face. I have to move farther and farther back to avoid it, standing sideways between the pews, then in the aisle, then in the other row of pews. The storm is only minutes under way when the drifting starts. The snow spouts through the windows like water held back for ages and at last released, three torrents of it gushing in.

I stand just out of range of the snow. I reach out my hand as though into the mist on the far fringe of a waterfall, then draw my hand back, cold and dripping wet. The snow is deepest on the floor beneath the window. From there it slopes off slowly until, about two-thirds of the way across to the leeward side, it peters out just inches from my feet. It adheres to the walls between the windows, to the pews. Eventually the snow will back me up against the wall and I will have to leave. I wonder if it is possible that the wind will blow so hard that the snow will come in through one window and go out the corresponding one on the other side.

It is as though the windows are hung with large white drapes that, when the wind is at its height, are almost horizontal to the floor, then flutter downward as the wind subsides.

I have never heard a sound like the wind makes as it funnels through the windows, a shrieking whistle whose upper pitch seems to have no limit. I can only hear the sifting snow between the gusts, hear it on the floor of the church and on the ground outside, snow on snow, the island's terrain shape-shifting by the minute.

The greatest gusts of wind slam the whole wall at once. If not for the open windows that disperse the force, I think the wall and the whole church with it would give way. Ships larger than this island have gone down in lesser storms. Yet I feel certain that having withstood so many storms, the church will hold up through this one. I know that I can make it to the cabin in half an hour as long as I set out before the sun goes down.

Almost no snow comes in through the windows on the leeward side. If not for them, the church, with each gust of wind, would go completely dark, for the whiteout is so dense that no light comes through.

They lived here, those people buried in that little cemetery. When a storm like this came up, they could not tell themselves that soon they would be living somewhere else. For them there was no last straw. Alternatives were so unheard of they did not know they had none.

A seagull glides down from the choir loft, banks slowly, goes out the nearest leeward window, returns a moment later through the middle one, rising, still gliding until he clears the balustrade. Behind it, with a fluttering of wings that I can hear but cannot see, he lands. A show of grace, a show of force. There must be a nest up there, I think, until I remember that no bird would nest this early in the year.