Blaze Island Read online

  “He says it has to be tomorrow,” Anna said after her phone had pinged again. Caleb would have said she was holding a lot in. He didn’t sense much warmth in her towards the visitors.

  A restiveness had grown among all three of the men, as if they were on the verge of revolt.

  “What do you want to do, Roy?” asked Len.

  “Okay, look,” said Roy. “We might not be able to fly out again today, anyway. I don’t particularly want to go speeding directly into old Fernand. Truth is, I value myself enough to take self-preservation into account. So, let’s say we reschedule for first thing in the morning. It’s an inconvenience but we can work with that. Then we’re out of here. Got to get the whole eastern seaboard moving again as fast as possible. If this meeting weren’t so crucial, your interests, our interests mutually convening to address the climate problem in a timely fashion, I’d be out of here now. But we need to talk.”

  . . .

  While Frank stretched out on the daybed, Miranda cleared the breakfast mugs and oatmeal bowls abandoned hours before. She needed to check on the garden. There’d been no time before leaving on her father’s errand, his urgency pressing her onward. As she’d set off, she’d caught sight of a brief, worrying flap of loose plastic from the greenhouse on its slope behind the house.

  From beneath the tea towel, Frank asked if the internet was working. There was someone he needed to get in touch with. He paused. His mother. But when Miranda went across the hall into the sitting room, the small hub of the modem still blinked red. On the counter, Frank’s drowned phone lay buried in a bowl of rice. At least for now, they remained each other’s only company.

  Dropping dishes into the sink, Miranda told Frank she wanted to raise goats. The day before, their neighbour Pat Green had passed on word about a man selling a pair of doelings across the bay. She’d called the man’s number and left a message. Now, given the storm, who knew how long it would be before she heard back. If she did. Once, she might have asked Sylvia for doelings, just as, for many summers, Sylvia had kept them stocked with fresh milk and cheese.

  “We can ask in the village for someone to take you out to the Funks, only you’ll have to wait for the water to settle, and you’ll want to offer to pay for gas. Maybe Tom Borders, he has a speedboat.”

  She’d leave Frank in the house while she ran up to the garden.

  “Miranda —” Frank began, as if he were about to ask her something else. Then he broke off.

  “Why did you come here to look for your accidentals if Fernand wasn’t even supposed to come this far north?”

  “Well,” Frank said, “its winds were so huge, I thought better stay out of its reach but be close enough that some interesting birds might be blown my way. Admittedly a gamble.”

  Did that make sense? “I have to take a look at something.”

  Frank pulled the tea towel from his forehead. “Can I come?” It seemed cruel to refuse him. He asked if he could borrow their binoculars, plucking them from the table where Miranda had left them that morning.

  The path to the greenhouse and vegetable plots led behind the chicken coop and up the low slope where alder saplings rustled in the breeze. In her father’s boots, Frank walked as if the ground might jump up and hurt him. Near the top of the slope, Miranda felt him stop. He’d raised the binoculars, pointing them to where cove met sea, where big waves burst in white splashes against the rocks. A storm petrel winged over the water, one that the wind might have blown in from far offshore. For a moment Frank followed it, wondering aloud if it was a Leach’s or a Wilson’s, but the next moment he was peering at something else.

  “Miranda, what are those — those funny things in the field on the far side of your house, beyond the trees and the solar panel?”

  There were two of them, plus the wind sock. Weather monitors, one stick-like and metallic, the other like a tiny white house on a pole, both set far enough from the house that its shadow never touched them. Every afternoon at four o’clock, no matter what she was doing, if she was at or near the house, which was most days, Miranda went to meet her father. He, too, shaped his life around the indelible ritual of their daily weather measurements. In every kind of weather they walked out along the footpath and into the field. For years, this repetition had been set against all other aspects of her life. At the end of the previous afternoon they’d been out there as the wind began to rise.

  The monitors stood beyond the windbreak of conifers that her father had planted to cut the strength of the north winds, the persistent nor’easterlies, the newly powerful nor’westerlies. One day they would live amid field and forest, he said.

  The tall, insect-like monitor, its sensors exposed atop a metal pole, communicated data directly to the computer in her father’s study. At the top, the small spinning cups of the anemometer measured wind speed. Alan had nicknamed the monitor Marty, after a character in a movie he’d loved as a child. The other one, its sensors enclosed behind louvred panels, painted white to deflect sunlight, they called Iceland, since Iceland was the next thing you’d see if you craned over the horizon. They had to collect its data by hand. While her father sang out numbers, Miranda inscribed them carefully in a notebook, the wind billowing the pages as she wrote. On rainy days, she scribbled in a rough, water-soaked pad, and transcribed the numbers afterward, seated at a small side table in her father’s office, beside the row of notebooks, nine years’ worth now, lined on a shelf. Up above her hung a photograph of her laughing mother on the beach in Provincetown, still a pang at the sight. Her father believed in keeping both manual records and electronic ones. Because you never knew, he said. The handwritten might outlast everything else.

  After they’d written down these measurements, her father hiked back to his study, powered by the open book of the solar panel fixed to nearby rocks. Some minutes later, he returned with a small white weather balloon jumping at the end of a tether, the helium he’d pumped inside the balloon lighter than air. When he handed the reel of nylon cord to Miranda, she unspooled it, letting the balloon and the radiosonde, the panel of instruments dangling from it, rise. At each point where there was a red mark on the cord, she stopped to let the probe send data back to her father’s computer until the balloon was no more than a tiny thumbprint high in the air. Wind throbbed through the cord into her arms, currents pulling the distant balloon sideways, buffeting her as she reeled the balloon back to earth.

  At high tide, her father walked to the shore and measured the sea’s shifting height against the rocks. He recorded the weather details of every storm. In winter, they marked the height and date of each snowfall. With a broom they brushed snow from both solar panel and weather monitors.

  Some of this Miranda told Frank. Describing her life to a person from away made her feel like she was standing on a tall hill looking down at herself through binoculars. Or staring at something in a notebook.

  “Are you part of a government weather network?” Frank asked, still peering across the fields.

  “No.” Miranda spoke quickly. They weren’t, as far as she knew. She was pretty sure her father kept his activities to himself. “It’s just for us, or anyone around here who’s interested in the weather.”

  “What do you monitor exactly?”

  “Wind speed, wind direction, air pressure, temperature, humidity. Precipitation at ground level. Solar radiation.”

  At this, Frank gave her a stare. “Solar radiation?”

  “Amounts of sunlight.”

  “So are you noticing a lot of changes over time?”

  “Some,” Miranda said. She really didn’t want to face more questions about her father and what he was up to. There was the past, his past, which he’d ordered her to keep hidden, when his speaking out about the dangers of the world’s warming weather had overturned their lives. But there were mysteries in the present as well.

  “Is your father some kind of meteorologist? Professional? Amateur?”

  The wind shifted. When Miranda closed her eyes, the wind
swept over her, out of the southwest, batting her face, ruffling in her ears, a soft wind but one that nevertheless had force. She tried to concentrate, let it flow through her, around her, allowing Frank’s troublesome questions to fall away. She did not wish to talk about her father, she really didn’t. The wind was always there. She lived in a world made of wind. Wind was her father, mother, sister, brother. Wind was changeable, yet a wind like this, in its constancy, steadied her. She held out her arms.

  Frank’s voice broke through again. “Miranda, are you okay?”

  “The wind’s checking off. It’s moved back into the southwest, that’s our prevailing wind. The air is full of currents like the sea. When you close your eyes it’s easier to feel them.”

  Frank grew quiet. When Miranda couldn’t stand it any longer, she opened her eyes to find him, at her side, eyes closed.

  “I’m not very good at this,” he said. “I’m afraid to admit I have absolutely no idea what direction the wind is coming from.”

  “It teases you, it swirls, but mostly it’s pushing at your left cheek. Can you feel that?”

  She was close enough that she might have reached out to touch his smooth skin with her finger, sunlight making flecks on the barest hint of stubble. “What I feel is a lot of air moving about,” Frank said. “I suppose I need practice, don’t I? Miranda, will you teach me more about the wind?”

  An Arctic tern flew past, swift, bent-winged, a tiny air moustache, preparing for its long autumn flight south to the very bottom of the world. But Frank had his eyes closed and anyway the tern wasn’t an accidental, only a migrant.

  “A south wind arrives here over water, cold in the spring, then warmer. A west wind comes over land. A north wind’s a cold wind. Winds that have ‘east’ in them bring rain. Never go fishing in a wind with ‘east’ in it. Fish in a north wind because it blows towards the land,” Miranda said.

  “Never go fishing in a wind with ‘east’ in it, okay, got that.” Frank grinned. When a pair of goldfinches swooped past, chirruping, he startled, but Miranda told him goldfinches weren’t so unusual anymore. Though they never used to come to the island, there’d been more in recent years, their range shifting north as the weather warmed.

  Silently they stood there, eyes closed, as the smell of sun-warmed moss and lichen and the salt brine of the sea rose around them. The wind was agile and tender and calming. A gull called, while the shadow of a cloud passing overhead was a small, dark break of coolness.

  “Do you do this often?” Frank asked.

  “There’s so much wind out here, it feels good to stop and listen to it.” She’d point out the wind flag her father had erected in the yard, back when he was helping her learn her wind directions. There were other places she could take Frank to stand in the wind and listen to the sea.

  “So was that storm last night bad for out here?” Frank asked. “It may not strictly speaking have been a hurricane by the time it got here, but it was pretty hair-raising to be out in, I can attest to that.”

  “It was unusual,” Miranda said quietly. “It wasn’t supposed to reach us.”

  Frank opened his eyes, which was a sensation brushing against her. “So is your father some kind of scientist?”

  Miranda had to admire his persistence. “He’s retired. It’s a hobby. He’s just very interested in the weather.” She hoped Frank wouldn’t ask how her father came to have retired so young.

  By now the greenhouse was just ahead, strands of plastic rippling where they shouldn’t be. The storm had shredded some of the plastic walls to pieces. Miranda let out a cry.

  The fishing net, one of Tom Borders’s castoffs, which surrounded the greenhouse, protection from coyotes and foxes, had been flung to the ground but hadn’t blown away, still fixed to its metal stakes and their rock protectors. It was so random what a storm wrecked and what it saved.

  She and Caleb had built the greenhouse together, nailing the sheets of plastic to a wooden frame. When Miranda took hold of a post and tried to shake it, the frame stood firm. She’d wanted to grow tomatoes in this cold and rigorous place and she’d succeeded. She longed to tell Caleb both that the storm had ripped through the plastic and that the frame hadn’t budged.

  But here was Frank, coming up behind her. She lifted the latch of the greenhouse door and stepped inside where the smell of the tomato plants was still intense, the fur of it, though the plants themselves were limp and salt-blackened. Maybe they should have built the greenhouse out of glass. They’d spoken of it, yet glass was more expensive. The storm might have broken the glass. The plastic, though made from fossil fuels as her father pointed out, could be replaced. She had plans to build a second, bigger greenhouse as well.

  “The storm did all this?” Frank asked, fingering ripped plastic from the doorway.

  Miranda nodded. The good thing was she’d already picked the tomatoes. They were in crates in the utility room, had Frank noticed? He hadn’t.

  “You’ll need more plastic, which may not be immediately easy to come by, I realize, given the lack of a road, but it looks fixable. If I can be of any assistance, let me know. I’ve built tents out of plastic, which may be a transferable skill.”

  Tents out of plastic? “Where did you do that?”

  “Oh, at protests and encampments all over the world.”

  She was trying to square this information with her image of him as a birder. “For birds?” She meant protests for —

  “No, people.” Frank offered a generous smile. “Protesting monetary policy and obscene cutbacks and neo-liberal tax cuts for the rich. Capitalism, in other words. It’s what I do when I’m not birding.”

  Miranda wasn’t sure what to say. News of the rest of the world reached her, in fragments, from far off. She went online mostly to look at plant catalogues and biodynamic farming sites. Other demands tugged at her. All the living things around her. It felt better to push the rest of the troubled world away.

  The three vegetable beds were enclosed within a fence of slim spruce poles, cut and lined up in a row, on end. Longers, Miranda told Frank as she opened the garden gate. In the first bed, some of the long-fingered greens of the onions and garlic were bent; the dark thatch of the rows of potatoes and turnips, frilly carrot greens, red-veined beet greens, all thrust upward, tiny worlds of water pooling on the leaves. Miranda bent to touch them, speaking soft words. The hills along the oceanside had protected them, and the fence, too. Beyond it stood the row of alder saplings that she herself had planted as a windbreak. It had been back-breaking labour to dig up the saplings and transport them by quad from the cove. They would need more protection in the future. She would move more. Trees, they needed to plant more trees, her father always said, and every summer he planted more young ones up beyond the house. A ripple of alder leaves would surround them. Miranda stood up.

  In the second bed, the lettuces were wilted, arugula flattened. She knelt to pinch off blackened leaves between finger and thumb. “But look,” she said as Frank drew close. Beneath the blackened leaves were smaller ones, which, in the sun, had already begun to revive. “And even a storm like that can’t touch the kale.” There were three different kinds: dark-green and purple, tough stalks, resolute, leaves wrinkled as brains.

  There was sun and wind colour in Frank’s cheeks as he stared curiously down at her. “I have to admit I’m usually paying more attention to humans than plants. I used to travel a lot, until I — started to rethink the whole idea of flying. One of my roommates, she grows a few vegetables. The point is, I don’t really know what all these things are.”

  Pointing to each row, Miranda named what was in it: red potatoes and white, two kinds of carrot, cabbage beside the kale. Frank offered up another dazzling smile. “So you and your father, you’re probably all about food self-sufficiency, too, am I right?”

  “Only we haven’t figured out how to grow tea or canned Carnation milk or chocolate.” Her father sometimes groused about the impossibility of finding good olive oil on the island,
as if this were one thing he did miss about the outer world. Then Miranda said, “Actually I do most of the gardening.” For some reason she wanted Frank to know this.

  “You do?” She was awarded with an appraising look. “I’m truly impressed, Miranda.”

  In the spring, she and her father had dug out the third bed. Miranda had planted more rhubarb, a row of raspberry canes, red and black currants. Rhubarb was hardy and grew all over the place. Raspberries already flourished wild on the island. The currants, she’d see how they took. She was even thinking about apple trees. Her plan was to sell produce to other islanders who no longer grew things — and visitors, too, when there were visitors; there were always some adventuresome travellers. Salad greens beginning in the spring if she built a bigger greenhouse. It was a short growing season but they were so far north there was lots of midsummer light. Of course the wind could be a challenge. And the ever more unpredictable weather. Margaret Hynes, who ran the restaurant in the next village down the road, had begun to buy produce from her. Lettuce grown by the sea tasted like no other.

  She told Frank about harvesting berries that grew wild on the bare hills and in the protected places among the rocks, how everyone had their own secret spots for picking: bakeapples in July; blackberries, blueberries and partridgeberries coming into ripeness now; cranberries, marshberries after the first frost. She made jam. Canned vegetables. There were needles and buds of the spruce tree to gather. Her cheeks were burning. Why could she not stop talking? Where was her father? All the previous winter, during the long evenings while the wind blew around their little white house, she’d been thinking about what to do with her life. She would feed the people around her. She’d drawn up crop plans for the beds and pored over online seed catalogues. Lettuce see, her father had joked, peering over her shoulder. Who knows what might turnip, he’d said. Beets me, Miranda had replied.