Time Drifters

When it looks like you’ve got all the time in the world, watch out. It’s probably going to fly past you. It’s like seeing a drag racing car way off in the distance, thinking it’ll take forever to get to you. And then, in a flash, it zooms towards you and it’s gone.

Summers are like that.

I had finally convinced Dad to sign me up for riding lessons at the YMCA. I was so excited and couldn’t wait to tell Mom when she got back from the City. I was so determined to learn a lot and I promised Dad that I’d do my best to really appreciate it. Then it turned out that Mom was the one to ditch the whole deal.

The thing that’s worse than your parents yelling is when they fight without saying anything. When they talk to you, but not each other… that sucks so bad. It often made conversations very, very short.

Mom announced that she had already enrolled in a four-week retreat in the Berkshires. I told her that I needed to go to Riding Camp, but she said it wasn’t like I had an invitation to hunt at an English castle. On the other hand, she said she’d been trying to get into this classical repertory company for years and there was finally an opening.

She tried to sell the whole idea to me with the supposed bonus that I was going to visit my cousins in Canada for almost four weeks. Oh boy. Goodbye horse camp. And Hello to being a fifth wheel on a noisy, foreign vehicle.

Dad stuck up me for a bit, but he eventually caved to the inevitable and told me we’d try to make it work… “Next time.”

To be fair, my cousins weren’t totally awful. Aunt Claire was a vegan cook, but she threw in some meat now and then as a concession to me… something that won me points with Uncle Robert, it seemed. The girls, Annette and Marcy, were 8 and 10. Bookworms and boy crazy. Crazy for Famous Boy-Band boys, at least. Fortunately, I didn’t fall into their target range.

Steve, their only son, was already turning 17. He had his own friends to hang out with and they weren’t just talking about girls, they were finding them. Most of the time I wasn’t even on Steve’s radar because his mind – or whatever occupied his skull – was totally dazzled by two different “hotties” he was vying for.

I was glad that we spent most every minute of my month with them at their cottage, north of the city—a cabin on Lake Simcoe. It was jammed together along the beach between other cottages, all of them shoulder to shoulder like spectators at a parade.

It was cool having the water there all the time. The waves were small ones, not like what we had on the ocean or on Long Island Sound, and the water was a lot warmer too.

All three of the kids were really into water skiing and Steve was especially good at it.

“Liam, would you like to have a try?” my Uncle Robert would ask when he came up on weekends. I could tell everyone was dreading the fact that they had to stop the fun to strap me into a life preserver because it was my turn.

Originally, I thought it would be cool. That was before I had the humiliation of being dragged through gushing water that blinded me while I was desperately trying to coordinate my legs to stay on the boards so they wouldn’t become detached entirely from my upper body. I sometimes thought that the only reason I grew two inches that summer was because I consumed half of Lake Simcoe while almost water skiing, and the water simply had nowhere else go.

I shared a bedroom with Steve, but he would lock the door a lot when he wasn’t water skiing or out spying on the neighborhood girls with his buddies. The TV was restricted to after-dinner viewing only and, even at that, half of it was news or re-runs of shows I didn’t recognize. So I spent a lot of time in the hammock outside reading and swatting at mosquitoes, the starved ones that tried to penetrate through layers of natural bug repellant Aunt Claire insisted I slather on.

Marcy offered to share her books, but I just couldn’t get into them. The girls talked for hours and hours about the boy characters. I have to admit I perked up when they were pondering how Heathcliffe might cleverly disappear my Aunt’s lime green jellied salad with tofu. I was definitely open to suggestions.

I was happy to find a set of old-time history books tucked onto the bookshelf. They were stories written by Pierre Burton about the Confederation of Canada. Interesting enough, although really long and kind of hard to follow when you didn’t know any of the names. I was thinking since I’d already had a Drift between countries, I’d be smart to know something about both places and not just about our own US history.

The more I got into it, the more I noticed that we had even more in common with our northern neighbors than we did with Americans way out in the West. Uncle Robert was very encouraging and liked talking to me about Canadian and American history. Although I did notice that people treated me differently when they found out that I was American, almost as if they were suspicious. It was another reason that I ended up keeping to myself, or keeping quiet.

When we went into town for groceries, we would drive around Orillia and another big lake to a hamburger place called Paul Weber’s. Steve and the girls said they had awesome food and they were so right. And just as cool were the old train cars that the owner had purchased and placed behind the burger shack. These things were full size and real. There was a caboose and a rail car. Mr. Weber had converted those into a freezer and staff quarters. There was a newer passenger train with bathrooms and another for inside dining. I loved it.

Aunt Claire took notice. On our second trip, when I got back to the picnic table after checking out the railcars, she asked if I’d maybe like to take a trip down to visit Fort George and Niagara Falls.

“Why?” I asked, suddenly thunderstruck and feeling very guilty.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking quite shocked at my reaction. “You seem to like history, so I thought it might be fun.” She looked at me so oddly, I thought she might think I needed medical attention.

“Oh, right. Of course,” I said, my mind jumping around. “That might be nice.” It was as grown up and polite as I could be.

I couldn’t get it out of my mind that someone might still be looking for me, angry about what we’d done and ready to hand out punishment. I wasn’t quick enough to do the subtraction to figure out how many years ago I’d been there. To me, it wasn’t even two months. But no, they’d be looking for someone who was at least 40 by now, I figured.

She said she’d try to make it happen before I had to leave.

It wasn’t the only time that my Drifting activities haunted me that summer. I kept having flashbacks of that first time in Tarrytown. When we went exploring in a rocky area at a marine railroad north and west of Orillia, I stopped dead in my tracks at the site of a large gash of quartz totally exposed to the sun. There it was, shining brightly, all pink and white, just like at the Drift station back home.

“C’mon,” Steve urged me. “It’s not dangerous.”

“I think I’ll just walk around,” I said, opting to go past it, wrestling my way through sumac bushes and prickly juniper boughs that scraped my bare legs. I thought that was better than some kind of freakish reaction while I was walking over the quartz. That was something I couldn’t explain away to my cousins.

“Weird.” I heard Steve say it then, plus a few other times.

One morning, when I woke up, he was pulling on his socks and running shoes, sitting on the chair opposite my lower bunk.

“You have weird dreams, kid,” he muttered.

“Why? What did I do?” I asked, feeling embarrassed without even knowing what he was talking about.

“You keep calling out for your crystal,” he said. “Something like, ‘Gimme back my crystal. That’s mine.’”

“Oh, that is weird,” I said.

“That, and you keep talking about some dude named Marty,” he added, suspiciously.

“Marijka!” I said. “That’s a girl.”

“Ah! Okay, cool!” he said, a smile curling over his face. I’d gotten out of that one.

Still, it made me wonder about visiting relatives, or staying with anyone else. Would I screw up and say something that could get me in trouble? Living as an only kid, I didn’t have to worry about siblings listening to me in my sleep.

We finally made the trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake and then to Niagara Falls. We’d stopped for a picnic at a park that was beside the Niagara river, and I read about General Brock who had helped defend the British territory against the Americans attacking during the War of 1812. Steve seemed particularly proud of the General’s accomplishments and wanted me to know about it. I told him that I’d heard about him, because they named a hotel after him. That got another odd look. Aunt Claire elaborated—for my sake, I’m sure—that the Americans did take Fort York in Toronto the following year, but then abandoned it later.

Without his other friends around, Steve was easier to spend time with and we actually had fun tossing the Frisbee back and forth after lunch. By the time we got to Niagara Falls, it wasn’t hard to convince him to break away and go exploring.

I was so excited to see it all again, and surprised at the warm weather, the leaves on the trees and all the changes, even though I had to be careful not to say that anything was different since I’d never officially been there before. The Falls were just same, of course, although we were seeing it all from the Canadian side and I knew we wouldn’t be walking over the Rainbow Bridge—and I was just as glad, to be honest. What shocked me the most was how the buildings and attractions were now towering overhead, like tall spectators peering over a low hedge of shrubs towards the Falls. The Sheraton Brock Hotel was dwarfed and now had a sign that said it was the Brock Plaza Hotel.

I remembered about Helene—the real one—wanting to see The Burning Springs, and when I asked about it I found out that it had closed years before; both the natural attraction and the faked one.

“Come down this way,” I said, running ahead of Steve, passing the lineup for the Maid of the Mist towards the entrance to the power plant.

“What is it?” he asked, looking at the metal barricade crossing the road where I had stopped.

“That’s impossible,” I said, in disbelief. “When did it close?”

“Two years ago,” he said, reading a sign that was posted on the stone pillar at the left.

Vines had grown along the cement wall, and there were cracks in the asphalt and another barricade halfway down—the same route where I had walked along with Adrienne, Helene and Lucas. For some weird reason, my eyes filled with tears.

“What’s the big deal?” Steve asked, annoyed. I moved over to read the same sign he had seen, but I couldn’t speak. Tourists were passing by on the sidewalk, but I felt like I as teetering on the edge of a time rift and they were all just oblivious to the danger.

“Hey!” he said, kneeling down and touching my shoulder. “You Okay, buddy? It’s closed, but it’s just some old Hydro plant. No big deal.”

“Right,” I said. “No biggie.” He smiled at me and for a second I thought about Caelen. I missed seeing him and I wished I could go and visit him. But this was Steve and he was being nice to me, for once. And it felt good. Almost like what I imagined having a brother could be. Steve was actually an okay guy.

We walked back along the road and crossed over to the big park to rejoin my aunt and the girls. I saw the trail I’d taken in 1965… the one that lead up to the road and farther along to where I’d seen the lights go out. And I didn’t really care about going back right now. I was kind of happy to be right where I was… and when I was.

To me, August of 2001 felt like a good place to be.

#

As I was packing to take the flight back, my Aunt Claire was looking at me with sadness and distance. She was so caring—almost too caring—and gave me a long and thoughtful hug when she saw me off at the airport. I asked her straight out if something was wrong and she quickly denied it. So, I knew she was lying, even though I also knew that deep down she cared about me.

Mom was bouncy and happy when she met me at the gate. She was surprised that I’d grown and kept going on about it, to the point where I felt like I must be about six feet tall and just hadn’t noticed. I assured her it had just been a couple of inches.

She was full of stories about how wonderful her time had been and she told me everything, as she always had, assuming I knew about acting and had memorized a full catalog of the classics. The more she said she enjoyed it, the more I kind of wanted her to shut up about it.

She was jittery and talkative and filled every quiet moment. And even at that, I didn’t have to wait long to find out what else had changed since I was away.

She and Dad had a great barbeque dinner for us that night, and even an ice cream cake that said “Welcome Home Liam” written on it.

I didn’t want to cut into the cake. I saw the words written across the top with blue icing. It looked sweet and it said everything I wanted it to say. I wanted it to stay that way and I knew that first cut was going to break the magic.

“Go ahead,” urged my Mom. “It’s just going to melt if you don’t.”

And that was the point. I couldn’t stop it from happening. The longer I stared at the cake, the worse I got. I couldn’t help it. I burst out crying and ran to my room. The only thing I could think of was to grab Hoot, my stuffed animal owl and curl up on the bed.

I heard my parents at the door, but I just wanted them to die, right then. To just freeze and always be who they’d been during dinner. Who they’d been during the Solstice celebration. Who they’d been when we’d moved into this house. When they were happy.

They came in and hugged me. They told me they loved me and that they always would. They said it was their problem and not mine.

I screamed at them that it was a lie, but neither of them got mad. Their lips were tight and their faces were wet and sad.

I begged Mom to stay and she only told me she would if she could. Nothing I did seemed to make a difference. No matter what I said, they just took it all and held me until I fell asleep.

I dreamt about horses that night. Two of them that bucked and reared every time I came close to their bridles. I untied them from the fence post and they fled. I ran after them until my legs ached. But they were gone.