the trail that connected the two sides of the cannery. There was bear sign everywhere and my parents said that we shouldn’t go on the trail without an adult who’d carry a gun.
At this point, Muriel announced that she didn’t believe in guns. “They’re anti-intellectual,” she said. “And they’re counterproductive. The reason that people get mauled by bears is because they take aggressive weapons into bear territory. Bears are intuitive. This is their world, their land, and the onus is on us to live by their rules and be respectful of their rights and feelings.”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t carry guns?” Mom, as much as she disliked guns, couldn’t find it in her heart to embrace the idea. Not with five kids to protect.
“There’s enough evidence out there that bears can sense the hostility of negative and aggressive thinking by humans. They’re tuned into our individual auras. Maurice and I won’t carry a gun into the woods. I advise you not to either.”
Even I, nine years old at the time, thought this was an argument that bears would not feel compelled to honor. Dad, as usual, kept his thoughts to himself, while Mom tried to argue with Muriel despite how much she would have liked Muriel’s argument to be true.
So my parents, to preempt anything she might teach us on the topic, told us kids that we could only go on the trail when Dad was there with a gun.
This, under Jamie’s leadership, meant that as soon as we were let out of school on those short breaks between tests, we had to see how far we could get on the trail running as fast as we could, before we had to turn back in time to do the next test.
The memory of racing along the dry edges of the squishy, muddy trail (so that, as Jamie pointed out, we would leave no tell-tale marks on the trail or on our boots) marked by pink and yellow surveyor’s tape, the trees looming above us, the threat of bears around every corner, is vivid in my mind. We giggled breathlessly, exultant at being free of adult supervision, at having outsmarted the adults, at surviving the daring escapade.
Megan and I gripped Robin’s hands and raced him along behind Jamie. I was terrified of all the bear stories I’d heard, I had nightmares about them breaking into our house while we slept, but there was a laugh-in-the-face-of-danger joy about those urgent races deep into the verboten wilderness that lingers with me to this day.
• • •
When Mom first met Muriel in Meyers Chuck, she’d admired Muriel, in the way Mom always admired women she saw as more capable and take-charge than she was. Muriel was a registered nurse and saw herself, she said, as an Earth Mother type who wanted to live wholly off the land.
This sounded like the perfect person to accompany us into the wilderness, to shore up Mom’s less practical nature and provide immediate medical help should it be required. Maurice was not at all practical and had no wilderness skills, but he was friendly, genial, and intellectual. He tended to smile and nod, backing up whatever his wife decided. Where he shone was in singing folk songs and accompanying himself on guitar, like any back-to-the-lander worthy of his salt.
Muriel had traveled widely and had many hair-raising adventures to share. She found herself, she said, invariably in the position of having to stand up to abuses of power and ethical wrongdoing. “You must always stand up for what you believe in; you must be true to your convictions.”
Mom loved this because her instinct was to always stand on principle, no matter what it cost.
Everyone was pleased, thinking the two couples would be a perfect match at the isolated cannery site. But before we left Meyers Chuck, something happened.
A friend of both Mom’s and Muriel’s was the subject of controversy. When the village women got together to hash out what should be done and the conclusion was that the mutual friend should be driven out of the community, Mom stood up and said they didn’t have the right to make that choice; they were all the woman’s friends and they should act like it.
Her principled arguments, as always, were made as an emotional appeal and dismissed by the majority.
Muriel was silent on the subject. Mom asked her about it later—Muriel was at least as close to the woman as Mom was. Plus, other women would have listened to Muriel, who was so certain. Why hadn’t she stood up for her friend? “After all, you’re supposed to stand up for what you believe in,” Mom reminded her.
Muriel said it wasn’t any of her business and she preferred to keep out of it.
Right then Mom started to have doubts about heading into the wilderness with Muriel and Maurice, not to mention having Muriel teach her kids, but everyone was already committed.
• • •
For physical education (PE) we hauled firewood. Dad split it and we stacked it in rows on the wanigan’s front porch.
As it grew colder Dad had his hands full finding, sawing, and then splitting enough firewood for the floathouse, the wanigan, and the Hoffs’ cabin. Despite their back-to-the-land, sweat-andcallus aspirations, neither Muriel nor Maurice were interested in harvesting their own firewood.
They said that in exchange for his children receiving an education, Dad should provide them with firewood. So Dad would come home from a full week of hard physical labor as a scaler and bucker at the logging camp, and he’d spend the weekend splitting firewood like a machine. The only sign to us kids that he was human was the sweat pouring down his face and the steam rising from his head in the cold air.
Dad filled Maurice’s skiff full of firewood—several cords’ worth—and towed it over to Muriel and Maurice’s cabin. Dad figured it would last them a couple months at least, since the cabin was tiny and it wouldn’t take much to heat it.
The next day, the last day of Dad’s weekend before he had to go back to work, Maurice knocked on our floathouse door.
“We need firewood.”
Dad stared at him. “I just split several cords for you.”
“Unfortunately it had other plans and floated away.”
“How could it float away? Didn’t you tie the skiff to a tree above the tideline?”
Maurice offered an amused, worldly shrug. Obviously the loss of the firewood was an Act of God. What can you do?
Dad was fit to be tied. But, as Maurice indicated in his indirect, urbane way, they needed firewood, and since the agreement was that Dad would provide it in exchange for Muriel teaching his kids, it was up to Dad to supply it. And resupply it.
• • •
I recently asked Robin what he remembers about Muriel and Maurice. Though he’s four years younger than I am, he’s often my go-to source for memories because he has the kind of mind that keeps arcane details on tap.
He responded: “I hated her so much that I have no memory of her or him. I erased her from my mind.”
I understand perfectly why he feels this way.
Muriel wasn’t an easy person to like. She had a curious habit of talking to adults like they were children, and to children like they were adults. She went around braless to indicate her free-spirited feminism that unyoked her from the backward Establishment—while all the time trying to form her own Establishment that everyone else was required to support.
