Summer Ends

A book, a climb, the road back home

I am back in the city after stretch of time spent in Northeastern Ontario. Our summer place is in a quiet area, sparsely populated. The loosely scattered tiny towns compensate for their decline and neglect with plantings of hardy tiger lily in front of the post office, and bingo at the Lion’s Club. I love passing slowly through them on my way to and from no particular destination.

Consequently, I’m not that enthusiastic about our return. I had grown used to the sound of wind and water. When night fell, I would go down to the dock and listen to the quiet, the only light cast by the stars in brilliant array.

The Fallen Angel (French: L'Ange déchu) by Alexandre Cabanel (1847).

The summer was dry and hot and the county banned outdoor fires. Daughter #1, who was working at the local nearby provincial park at the time, spent a month fielding questions about what did or did not constitute a fire. Alas, she told irate campers, she did not personally make the rules; thereby she did not have the power to change them.

The rules are the rules, that’s the way it is, like it or not. I have a garden up north, which teaches me acceptance. For most of the summer I battled a groundhog before I was forced to accept that the battle was lost. There were to be no green beans or kale. The little asshole ate the tops of the carrots and beets too. Only my winter squash was truly productive.

To show off my one success I’m planning a two-squash Fall Fattoush salad as part of our upcoming Rosh Hashana dinner. There will be a small winter squash that I grew from heirloom seeds with a pedigree stretching back one billion years. The seeds yield black skinned squash with sweet orange flesh, perfect to toss in oil and grill. I’ll also fry up the oblong yellow skinned, green striped delicata squash that seemed to thrive this year, their vines outmuscling even the cucumbers’ spread. These plants produced a weirdly large number of fruit tasting like a winter squash crossed with the summer kind.

It'll be around twenty for the Jewish new year’s dinner coming up in a few weeks. Kid #2 – who, conveniently, hates squash – will have finished about a month of public high school by then, so I’ll have to throw some extra prayers in. Is it okay to beseech the higher power to keep my daughter from forgetting her Jewish education? (I’m guessing that’s more a parental responsibility.) #2’s in an enriched math and science program and tells me she’s already bored. I’m not surprised, because 1) in my experience teenage girls bore easily and 2) she’s very smart, though she does her best to hide it behind lip gloss, straightened hair and expensive hoodies.

When she got up to the cottage after camp, we went on a canoe trip. We took along my cousin and his teenage son, and my friend and his twenty-year-old son. At the insistence of the boys, we paddled across the lake to climb a steep, wild looking hill that overlooked our campsite. Everyone scampered up through the boulders, sharp underbrush and angry conifers, even me.

At the top, the boys ran around picking up rocks (or at least trying to pick up rocks) then throwing (or rolling) them down the arid hill. Kid #2 looked on with her arms crossed from our perch above it all on an underground boulder formed in the ice age. She had a Wednesday Addams demi-smile on her face as she mocked the man-children and their efforts. “That’s going nowhere,” she noted as a small boulder slammed to a halt in a tangled trinity of tiny, scraggly firs growing out of a sandy ledge.

The same could be said of so many things these days. All summer I picked through the past and wondered where I was going. I read memoirs, trying to wrap my head around the genre that I am currently attempting for the first time. My favourite memoirs, I came to realize, were the ones where nothing much happened. Where the writer tries to go somewhere but never quite gets there.

In Emmanuel Iduma’s I’m Still With You, the young Nigerian writer chronicles a return to his traditional homeland to search for anything that remains of his uncle, who disappeared in the chaos and ruination of the brutal Nigerian civil war. At one point, Iduma visits a seemingly abandoned technical college. This was the spot where Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the purportedly pretentious, Oxford-educated ruler of the fledgling Biafran state, had given a remarkable “declaration” on how, as Iduma writes, the “flailing country would be governed”. The country, alas, was never to be governed. Even as the speech was being delivered hundreds of thousands were dying of starvation, including many of its poorly trained soldiers. The ill-fated quest for an Igbo modern state was over before it even really began.

At the school, Iduma finds cracked concrete out of which grow long grass and weeds. There is no monument, nothing to suggest this was a spot where anything even remotely important ever happened. I’m picturing those small towns up North. Out of nowhere appears a factotum who leads Iduma to the seemingly nonfunctioning school’s principal. The principal sits barefoot in his office, dusting his shoes, “indistinguishable from all the surly teachers” Iduma knew in childhood. “Men,” he writes, “who appeared to begrudge the youth of their wards, for whom teaching was a temporary position whose finale was always being deferred.” [144]

Iduma has no photo of his lost uncle, a solider in the Biafran army who, like so many others, simply never came home. Some describe him as having been light skinned, others as having skin dark as ebony. All witnesses to his possible bravery in the war are gone and what is remembered is contradictory. There can be no finale in these circumstances. Even the missing uncle’s name is debated This book must end without an ending. And so it does: Iduma discovering more of what he does not know. His only remaining uncle reveals that in addition to the disappeared solider and Iduma’s mother, there had been another uncle, a fourth child who came after his mother. His name, apparently, was also Emmanuel. “Emmanuel?” repeats the obviously surprised Emmanuel Iduma. Emmanuel died young, of an epileptic seizure. “Let’s forget about it,” Uncle Ajah says curtly.

All that nowhere, stretching for miles around. And how far away everything looks from the top of even the most modest hill.