Excerpt: Dragonflies and Dinosaurs

Dragonflies live two different lives, in two different worlds. The young dragonfly begins its life in the water, eventually crawling out of the pond to transform itself into a superb aerial hunter with a wing span as big as 7.5 inches across.

~ The Sunshine Coast News, September 14, 2005

We measured our progress by red-tailed hawks and the iridescent carcasses of dragonflies flickering against the windshield in the warm light of the setting sun.

Eric and I counted the hawks, learning, as we crossed the endless prairie miles, to recognize their call, the broad silhouette of their wings in flight, and to spot them sitting still as death on fence posts and telephone poles. At each stop – for gas, for food, for a cheap, sometimes clean motel – Mickey analyzed, bagged, and recorded the wings stuck in the florid yellow smudges on the windshield. And then he carefully cleaned the glass until it reflected, without a flaw, the flaming prairie sun.

The wings were all that remained of the dragonflies after their abrupt halt against our windshield. Mickey used my eyebrow tweezers to tug them from the baked-on sludge surrounding them. He was extraordinarily patient, his wiry body stretched out over the boiling hood of the car, the tweezers in one hand, a plastic container in the other. I watched him. No longer a little boy, his face had thinned out over the past weeks, grown definition and character. His white T-shirt and shorts, even his untanned skin, vanished into the milky haze of prairie heat.

Mickey’s obsession with this form of violent death made me nervous. So did Eric’s silence. And the huge blue cloudless bowl of the sky above us, day after perfect day, made me want to crawl into a cave.

We weren’t moving fast on our road trip. Not with two boys aged twelve and fifteen. They slept until noon, insisted on showers and full breakfasts. By then it was past lunchtime. Finally on the road, we didn’t make time, we made pit stops. The car filled up with sticky slurpy cups and rattling aluminum cans.

On this trip two hundred miles was a good day’s journey, even across the straight-lined prairies. I bit my tongue and pulled into another rest stop, gas station, or tourist attraction. I handed over money for drinks, food, admission. I stopped at a bank machine at least once a day.

The idea for this sojourn began in a brightly lit hospital room two weeks ago on the day we learned that my sister, their mother, wasn’t going to die.

"It's the reunion this summer," Susan said.

She was lying in the rumpled hospital bed, and I had a premonition of the entreaty to come.

I nodded. I’d had what felt like hundreds of reminders of the reunion she spoke of. At least once a week I opened my mailbox to another cheaply mimeographed newsletter headed “Cranberry Portage Reunion.” It was filled with news about people I didn’t know and didn’t care to, cute poems in iambic pentameter, badly reproduced photographs of places I’d long forgotten.

My mother would have gone to the reunion and for her sake I flipped through the newsletters before I threw them away. The years in Cranberry Portage were the best years of her life. She’d spent years telling me so, bemoaning her loss. Everything in our lives suffered by comparison. She filled Susan and I with fairytales about a town and a man so perfect they couldn’t possibly exist – not in the harsh realm of northern Manitoba. Maybe not anywhere.

"Take the boys," Susan continued, “and drive across. The prairies are beautiful in the summer and you haven’t had a vacation since Mum died. You haven’t taken your car out of the city once since you bought it and it’s a perfect ride for a long trip, smooth, cheap on gas." Susan was a mechanic, one of the few female ones in the city, and made way more money than me. “You know I’m right. You need a break. You can do some sightseeing, go to the dinosaur museum, hike in the mountains, maybe even do a little canoeing.”

My face must have reflected my distress.

"My car doesn’t need four thousand miles of highway time. And neither do I. Besides, the three of us would spend all our time arguing about music. Eric only listens to those whatever-you-call-em bands, Limp Bizkit and Korn. I hate them. Nope. Bad idea.” I rubbed my temples. I got a headache just thinking about it.

The last place I wanted to visit was Cranberry Portage. I was six when we moved to the coast. My memories of that town were buried so deep I couldn’t dig them out in a month of Sundays. I cringed when I heard myself use my mother’s expression. I’d made a life without a father, without a man, a life I was perfectly happy about, and that was that. I didn't need to go back to some supposedly idyllic childhood I couldn’t remember.

"They’ll hate it,” I said, “and Mickey always gets carsick.”

"Not if he’s in the front seat. I’ll give you a year’s supply of motion-sickness patches to take with you. Please, Randy. I don’t want them to see me when I’m sick. Just take them and have a good time.”

"But...”

The next couple of hours remained indistinct in my memory, as if Susan’s surgeon excised them from my life. All I knew was that sometime during those two hours I consented to take the boys to Cranberry Portage.

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