Steve Hamilton: A Stolen Season

From the beginning, everything about the night was wrong.

Everything.

It was cold. That was the first thing. It was cold and there was a wet fog hanging over the water. The kind of fog that creeps into your bones, no matter how many layers you’re wearing. The cold gets into your lungs and chills you from the inside out.

I was in Brimley, too-the last place I’d expect to be. It’s normally just a stop on the road, halfway around the bay if you’re driving from Paradise to Sault Ste. Marie. There are two restaurants in town, with two different strategies for serving liquor, one of life’s essentials on a night like this. Willoughby’s has a separate bar in back, and the Cozy switches over at nine o’clock every night, when everyone under twenty-one is kicked out. There’s one gas station with a little store on the side, and that’s about it, the whole town right there, just down the road from the Bay Mills Indian Community. The rez. On a clear night I could have stood there on the shore and seen the casino lights across the water. But this was anything but a clear night.

I figured Vinnie was probably over there, working at the blackjack tables, keeping order in his own quiet way. He had been a dealer for a few years. Now he was a pit boss. Vinnie’s a Bay Mills Ojibwa, even though he lives off the rez. He’s my neighbor, in fact, and one of my three last friends in the world. But I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him that night, even if he was just around the bay. I leave the man alone when he’s working. Hell, I leave him alone most of the time. That’s just the way things are with him.

Normally, I’d be back in Paradise on a night like this, spending my last waking hours at the Glasgow Inn. I’d sit in one of the big overstuffed chairs by the fire. Maybe there’d be a game on the television over the bar. Jackie Connery, the owner of the place and the Supreme Commander, was another friend. Although, unlike Vinnie, I seldom left Jackie alone. He’d never admit it, but Jackie would be lost without me, without my daily commentary on the way he makes breakfast, runs his bar, builds a fire, you name it. He tries to return the favor, but I ignore most of his advice. And his insults. Despite everything, he always has a cold Molson Canadian waiting for me, every single night without fail. He drives across the bridge to Canada once a week to buy a case for me, supposedly on his way to do something else. I think it’s just a ritual to him now. An excuse to get out from behind the bar. Either that or he really wants me to have my Molson.

Yeah, a cold beer and my feet up by the fire. That would have been another plan for this night. Instead of standing here on the edge of Waishkey Bay, in a stranger’s backyard, looking out at the cold fog. Waishkey Bay opens up into Whitefish Bay, and beyond that lies the vast unbroken surface of the biggest, coldest, deepest lake in the world. Lake Superior. I could hear it out there. I could feel it. I just couldn’t see it.

I wrapped my coat tighter around my body and tried to convince myself I didn’t need to shiver. I knew once that started, it wouldn’t stop until I went inside. I wasn’t ready to do that yet. There was too much noise in there. Too much smoke. I wanted to stay out here a little longer, by myself, looking out at the fog and what little I could make out in the night sky. Later, there would be fireworks, maybe invisible but fireworks just the same, right here over Waishkey Bay.

Yes, that was the other strange thing about this night. I was standing here cursing myself for not wearing a warmer coat on the Fourth of July.

It wasn’t right. I swear, this was not fair at all. We live for the summers up here. It’s the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for God’s sake, as far away from civilization as you can get without leaving the country. The winters last forever up here. Or at least they feel that way. It’s brutally, inhumanly cold. The snowstorms gather their strength from the lake and then they unleash themselves on us like they have orders from God to bury us forever. In 1995 we got six feet of snow in one day.

Twenty-four hours.

Six. Feet. Of Snow.

Most years, it doesn’t even melt until May. Then we might get a quick flash of spring. The temperature might break forty and we’re practically lying on the beach in our bathing suits. That’s how desperate we are for a little sunshine. The snow will sneak back a few times and dump a few more inches in the middle of the night. Just teasing us. Then finally the earth will tilt into position and the summer will seem to come all at once. The old joke, how summer was on a Thursday last year. That’s how brief it seems. How fleeting.

But God, what a summer it is. For one blink of an eye, this becomes the most beautiful place in the world. There’s a light up here. You have to see it to know it. The way it hits the water in the evenings. The way the wind comes off the lake and you can look all the way down a long straight road and see the trees moving one by one.

The sunsets.

The desolate, heartbreaking beauty of this goddamned place. This home of mine.

But not this year. For whatever reason, we’re skipping summer altogether. We’re rushing right back into those fall months when the lake turns into a monster. Almost overnight, six-foot waves ready to batter the great ships again. To miss out on the promise of summer, it is the cruelest thing imaginable, and everyone, every last person living up here, has been feeling it.

For me, there’s even more to regret. But not just now. No use becoming completely suicidal. It’ll be there when I finally make it home to my bed. When I close my eyes and remember what her face looks like. When I wonder what she’s doing at that very moment, five hundred miles away.

I heard footsteps behind me. I was expecting it to be Leon, my third and last friend in the whole world, and the reason why I was here in Brimley that night. But instead it was the man named Tyler. I had just met him a couple of hours ago, so I didn’t know the man. What I did know was that Tyler must have cut quite a figure back in the sixties. He still had long dark hair tied in a braid down his back. Up here in Ojibwa land, that doesn’t set you apart too much, but everything else about him did. He was wearing a bright red and green tie-dyed jacket, and it looked like he got his little round eyeglasses from John Lennon’s estate sale. From what I gathered, he’d been a musician most of his life, and he’d come up here to be the entertainment director when they opened up the bigger casino in Sault Ste. Marie. He’d bought this old house in Brimley because it had a huge garage, bigger than the house even, with plenty of room for him to work on his old cars. Within a year, he’d quit the job at the casino and had turned half the garage into a state-of-the-art recording studio. He had the whole setup in there, with the sound damping walls and the separate little room for him to sit in with all of his equipment. I couldn’t even imagine how much it all cost, or where an old hippie had gotten all that money. But apparently the studio had become a local success story, with musicians from all over the state coming up to record just a few yards away from the lake.

The best part? Aside from this guy building his own recording studio and fixing anything with four wheels, he was also a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Hair and all. Although I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Any man who can survive up here year-round has to be great at a dozen different things and pretty damned good at a dozen more.

“Can you believe this?” he said. “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a monkey. No, wait, that’s not right.”