Summary
Back in the present, Lisamarie gets a call from her parents, who inform her that they will continue searching for Jimmy in Nanu the next day. Lisa goes into Jimmy’s room and looks at his things, which are extremely organized. She goes into a memory of when she and Uncle Mick left for Kemano to fish for oolichans—a special type of greasy fish. She is very excited to have an adventure with Mick. Her mother takes her to Mick’s speedboat wearily, demanding that Lisamarie be well-behaved. While riding on the speedboat, Lisa sees a white man and his son on the beach, but Mick cannot see them.
Mick lets Lisamarie drive the boat for awhile. They stop to set traps for crabs and go to the hot springs while they wait to catch some. Lisa expresses to Mick how she wishes she could live with him instead of her parents, who do not let her have any fun. She says she wants to be a “warrior,” like him. Mick tells her a story about her parents’ first date, when her mother drunkenly made snow angels outside of her father’s house. This surprises Lisa. They return to their traps to find they have caught many crabs. Mick cooks the crabs in a more humane way than Lisa’s parents do. A halibut appears in the crab pot, which Mick says is a sign of either very good luck or bad luck.
Mick and Lisamarie reach the Kemano shore. There, her mother has already arrived with Aunt Edith and Uncle Geordie. Her mother treats Lisamarie in an exasperated way, thinking she is lying about the halibut. Lisa explores the old house there and then goes with Mick to collect drinking water for the week from a stream. They return and have a dinner with the rest of the family. After dinner, Lisamarie has to urinate but is scared to go to the outhouse alone, where it is dark, and she asks Mick to accompany her. Lisa tells her uncle that she is afraid of the ghosts, and Mick tells her mother. Both Mick and Gladys do not believe that she has seen something paranormal, as they do not believe in it themselves. We learn that her Ba-ba-oo had an experience of seeing ghosts, but Gladys does not want Mick to tell her about it.
That night, Lisamarie hears strange noises. She also hears Mick shouting in his sleep in a tone of fear. Her mother goes to wake him up. Then Lisamarie hears someone sobbing. Her mother will not tell Lisa what happened, saying that it is “grown-up stuff.” The next morning, Mick is yelling at Geordie and Edith about religion after Edith says grace. Through his experience at residential school, Mick has come to see Christianity as an oppressive belief system. Mick is very unhappy that day but he agrees to go on a boat trip to Kitlope Lake with Gladys and Lisa. They arrive and set up camp for the night.
That night, Lisamarie overhears her mother and Mick talking in a private way while they think she is asleep. Gladys advises Mick to settle down and have a family rather than trying to “save the world.” Mick reveals that he does not know what to do with his life. Early in the morning, when both adults are asleep, Lisa wakes up and gets out of her sleeping bag and explores a bit. She sees a strange-looking bird by the lake, a great blue heron.
Mick wakes up and takes a dip in the very cold lake. As the morning comes, Lisa sits and watches the lake, admiring its beauty but feeling something very deep that she can’t express to her uncle. Playfully, Mick picks up Gladys as if to throw her into the water. They return to Kemano that day, stopping to try to find the Stone Man, a large rock formation that has its own folklore. Back at the house, Lisa has to do homework and a few chores, which she does quickly so she can race outside to explore, without a coat, much to her mother’s disliking. She visits the cemetery and sees footprints of a wolf and deer. When she returns home, she sees Mick come up behind Gladys as she is cooking, giving her a kiss on the neck. Lisa is shocked and feels like she is going to throw up.
Lismarie again remembers her father’s garden with the greengage trees and the chickens that were brutally eaten by the hawks, comparing their fallen heads to ripe fruit. Then she is back in the present moment, trying to find her cigarettes. Plagued by “morbid thoughts,” she is having a hard time sleeping. She recalls when Jimmy used to feed the crows for good luck in his swim matches.
She then thinks back to when she was in the fifth grade and went to Tab’s house after school one day. There, Tab’s mother Trudy is smoking and drinking with Josh and his boisterous friends. Trudy demands to know if Tab has been “fucking around” and verbally abuses her. Lisamarie stands up to Trudy, calling her a drunk. Trudy starts yelling at Lisamarie, and tells her that Mick was always “panting” after Lisa’s mother. The next day Lisa goes back to Tab’s house and Trudy, now sober, doesn’t remember anything that happened. Finally, she asks Trudy if her mother and Mick had an affair and Trudy is shocked, not answering.
Lisamarie thinks of how when childhood ends, the “imaginary friends” disappear, such as the little man who she had convinced herself was just the result of eating dinner too late. She remembers one time when the little man had awoken her near dawn and put a hand on her, which she took as an attack, and only realized later that it was to comfort her, as he would always show up before something bad was about to happen. The next day she feels tired and edgy from the little man’s visit, which is accentuated upon news of Mick’s disappearance.
The chapter ends back at present when Lisa receives an early morning phone call from her parents, who are upset, informing her they found an empty life raft. Lisa tries to book a plane ticket so she can go meet them but there are no available flights, so instead she plans to take her speedboat to Namu, which is the quickest option to get there.
Analysis
In the last part of this chapter, we are made familiar with some of the past events which still plague Lisamarie to this day. In one way, her childhood has been idyllic, immersed in nature where she is able to explore the wild landscape and interact with plants and animals. There are many beautiful accounts of the closeness Lisa feels to the natural world, like in her observations of diving sea otters or the warm water of the hot springs. The description of Lisa’s trip on the speedboat to Kemano with her Uncle Mick encapsulates the joy and love of adventure that animates Lisamarie in many moments.
On the other hand, we are also simultaneously shown a messy reality of dysfunction and secrets which Lisamarie easily picks up on, such as the unclear relationship between her mother and Mick. Eden Robertson shows us how after witnessing the flirtation between the two, she has nowhere to place her feelings, no one to talk to honestly about what she has seen. This leads her to experience loneliness and a heaviness which is symbolized through her description of the ocean as “perpetually dark” and filled with “particles from decaying animals and plants” (125).
With the frequent appearance of graveyards (one of Lisa’s favorite places to play) we can infer a strong theme of death and darkness in the story—not necessarily as something negative, but in the sense of the hidden, mysterious aspect of life. The hawks who mutilate the family chickens are not evil, but simply doing what is natural to them. The adults, on the other hand, try to block out this darkness by escaping through alcohol, or in Al’s case, the busy work of making an ambitious garden. But even the meticulously created garden is not exempt from the forces of death and decay. The characters are motivated almost unconsciously by the darkness they do not acknowledge. For example, Trudy berates her daughter under the influence only to completely forget about it the next day. Mick yells out in his sleep, caught in a rage by something that he cannot quite articulate.
We see this mode of existence slowly creeping up in Lisamarie as she gets older, becoming more and more unhinged by the chaos around her that by the time she is 19, she often copes by smoking cartons of cigarettes and staying up all night. There is the theme of a disillusionment and growing away from childhood innocence. This is alluded to when Lisa talks about how imaginary friends disappear as one ages, such as the little man, who tried to comfort her in a way that the adults in Lisa’s life failed to provide. But struggling to integrate magic into her mundane reality, Lisa has pushed the little man away.
In such a complicated world, Lisa has a yearning for childlike simplicity that she lives out through her tomboy antics. She sees that it is clearly not enough to retreat into family life to find this simplicity, as her mother has done. The tension between freedom and responsibility is very much symbolized through Gladys, who we see in this section of the book as being very uptight and quick to reprimand Lisa for the smallest things. The adventurous character of Lisamarie as a child rubs Gladys the wrong way, who seems to have resigned herself to a life devoid of magic and defined by routines. This is why, also, the relationship between her mother and Mick—who Lisa had always seen as the freedom-loving antithesis to her mother— disturbs Lisa so deeply.
Stylistically, much of the story occurs through the descriptive imagery that Robinson weaves throughout the narrative. This is not a story made up of tons of action, although there are certainly serious turning points scattered throughout. We learn much more about the plot and characters from the small details, such as how Trudy makes Tab and Lisamarie a Kraft pizza after finding out that Lisa knows about her mother’s affair.
