Carr - Nowhere like This Place

I am a girl between two boys. My older brother has just graduated from kindergarten and my younger brother has not yet graduated from diapers. Our two-tone green Mercury Meteor has bench seats and the subdued version of tail fins that signals the segue into the more streamlined 1960s automotive silhouette. All three of us kids are probably rattling around in the back. Seatbelts are not yet standard or even luxury equipment in 1958 Mercuries. My baby brother might actually be in the front seat wheel well in his bassinet, ready to become a compact projectile. Sometime in the near future, when we graduate to a Plymouth Valiant station wagon, my little brother will have a car seat that clips to the top of the bench, complete with a steering wheel and a horn. The horn is definitely not a good design feature, nor is the placement of the child seat. But thats not a hazard for today. We have plenty of other ones.

The speedometer probably goes all the way to seventy. The road sign suggests about half that and were lucky to achieve the legal maximum on the downhills. Were headed west to Ontario in 1960 to my dads new job at somewhere called the plant. The moving van is a day behind us. If I were tall enough to see out the window, I would see an endless stretch of farmland with row upon row of bales of hay. It smells like cow doo-doo. Fresh country air, my dad says, and he laughs uproariously like this is supposed to be funny. Like he hasnt said it about a hundred times since we got in the car.

Were emigrating from Quebec dairy country south of Montreal, where both my parents families have lived since before Canada was born. Im a little perplexed by the notion of moving since I dont remember moving before. Im reluctantly along for the ride, like a cat in a travel carrier, cranky and complaining at first, then settling down into an uneasy truce with the inevitable and unknowable that comes with relocating to somewhere new.

My mother packed a lunch like she always does. There are no restaurants along the highway anyhow. We pull over to a rest stop with picnic tables and toilets. The toilets are the kind with wooden saloon doors and a gap between the roof and the wall to ensure maximum habitat for flies and spiders as big as dinner plates, at least as far as Im concerned. If you choose the picnic table downwind from the rest facilities, it actually doesnt stink that bad.

My mother is a dietitian. After the oil cloth goes on the table and we all wash our hands from the hand pump at the well, a lunch covering all of the required food groups emerges. There are carrot and celery sticks, which we stick up our noses or turn into orange fangs. We do not eat them. There are probably bologna and mustard sandwiches on white bread with crusts and iceberg lettuce. I do not like bologna. My brother does not like crusts. The baby gums Cheerios and slobbers on the oil cloth. We drink water from the well pump that tastes like rust and smells like rotten eggs. But at least its fun to pump the water. Probably more water than strictly necessary. You kids stop horsing around and acting like morons, Dad says.

There are hermit cookies full of raisins for dessert. You can squish them nicely in to a ball and the raisins will pop out. You kids smarten up and stop playing with your food, Dad says. And go to the bathroom. Were not stopping again. I do not go to the bathroom.

We stay at a motel for the night. The motel is just off the highway, as anonymous and innocuous as any other motel. Perhaps with one letter burned out: OTEL or MOTE. At certain times of the year there is probably a pool. Not this time of year. Ive never been to a motel before. Im concerned that our new house doesnt have a kitchen and Ill have to share a bed with my smelly brothers. This is not turning out very good.

We get to eat dinner at the diner. My grilled cheese sandwich has the right kind of orange cheese and squished crusts. My vanilla milkshake comes in a tall, V-shaped glass, and I also get the metal container from the milkshake machine with the bits that wont fit in the glass. My tongue would stick to it if I licked it but I know way better than that. It only takes once to know better than that. The milkshake is so thick it makes a really good slurping noise with the straw. Im sure my dad wants to conjure up a Scotch. Or three or four Scotches.

We dont get to eat breakfast at the diner, though. My mother has packed breakfast. Its a Kelloggs Variety Pack of individual cereal packages. There are five of us and eight little boxes of breakfast, which would seem to be an appropriate abundance of choice. But a cereal variety pack has only one box of Frosted Flakes. One of my tactics is to pretend to want the Raisin Bran and hope my older brother will fight me over it so Ill end up with the Frosted Flakes. But even if he doesnt take the bait, Raisin Bran isnt that bad, because the raisins are covered in sugar. I open the fancy flap on the box and my mother pours in some milk. The milk makes the raisins rise to the top. I count three lousy raisins. I eat the raisins, let the bran flakes get soggy, then refuse to eat them. So there.

* * *

The town of Deep River is as brand new as it could possibly be. It was whacked out of the bush north of Algonquin Park in the wilds of Canada by German prisoners of war in 1944 to house the employees of the newly established Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratories. Like my dad. And our nuclear family.

When we finally roll into town, our real new house is a blue bungalow. Beside a beige bungalow, beside a yellow bungalow, beside a white bungalow. It is barely fifteen years since the town sprang fully formed from the forest. The moving van arrives, along with our television set, although a reliable TV signal wont get there for another two years. If I were my mother, Id be looking pretty grim.

Seventeen children swarm out of the seven houses on our curve of Newton Crescent. Having one child pretty much indicates you are just getting started. Only two children is a little stingy. Three is a good round number. Four is okay too, especially if there are twins in the mix. Five is pointing towards Catholicism. After that you are on your own.

We are as free range as organic hens. Everything outside our front doors is fair game for games. There are no fences between the yards and we flow from one to another as if through a porous pool of play. We are a whirl of arms and legs and striped t-shirts and pink skorts and scabby knees. Tricycles and bicycles line the ditch like a freeway pileup, wheels still spinning as they are discarded for shinier objects.

We play vestigial games passed down in our parents DNA. Kick the Can. Red Rover. Dodgeball. All of these involve running and grass stains and bruises and a distinct lack of adult supervision or intervention. Rules are made up on the fly and are never the same from day to day. Exactly the type of lessons that will come in handy when I enter the corporate world.

The vacant lot at the bottom of the crescent is covered in knee-high grass. Thats where all the kids on our half of the street convene after dinner in the summer to play scrub baseball. I dont know who teaches us about scrub. We probably thought we invented it. And who could argue with that? I am really bad at scrub and always start out as a cow. I also always end up as a cow. A cow hangs out in the outfield, waiting for a pop-fly or wayward ground ball that never shows up. A cow is so far in the outfield that by the time I make my way back to home plate at the end of the game, everyone is already in bed asleep.

* * *

There is a swamp at the end of our street. Not the kind of swamp you get in southern climates, with murky water teaming with amphibians that have a taste for human flesh. Ours is a Canadian Shield swamp with murky water teaming with insects that have a taste for human flesh. The swamp isnt even that swampy. Just swampy enough for cattails and muddy ooze and frogs the size of pennies known as spring peepers that we nickname roasty toasties due to their delightful tendency to explode like a kernel of popcorn when we strongly encourage them to jump into a campfire. But the swamp is more than swampy enough to be a cozy homestead for mosquitos.