Manna
Mica was keeping me warm. I drape the heavy graphite rectangle around my body. I am cloaked against the wind from the northwest, looking out at the water. Choppy, thick-looking depths, muddy, crusted with surfing white caps. I fold my feet in my boots beneath me, fold my arms in too, and feel my weight go straight down my spine and into my hips. My hair flies around my eyes, black lines itching at my temples, like the slipping sound of water and wind brushing through high trees.
I arrived here this morning, and it’s afternoon now, where am I going to spend the night, put up my tent? . Like my uncle, if he were here with me, would probably ask: “Ddo you want to continue on?”. Really, how much energy do I have?. Honestly, not much. The wind pushes my body, wrapped up in this tent-like weather catcher. I lean forward a little, and take a long breath. There’s so much air moving around me. Isn’t that a sign? Move, baby? What’s the horizon saying to me now?. I heard it clearly yesterday. These rambling thoughts. I want the words to keep sifting through, keep me in conversation, the more I sit here and breathe in the cold and breathe out the heat, my body staying the same, huddled warm within my Mica.
My uncle’s name was Misha. I know he liked material, but he was a lapidarian, and a geologist by trade. He was the one who told me about the felt that Mica was made of. Felt isn’t truly soft, Misha had said. it doesn’t bend well to the body. But it will help hold in your heat, and over time it will start to hang from your shoulders properly. Stories about my Uncle Misha are here, on this rock, and because I left, I’m starting to consider why Hhe was constantly sharing things with me. Is it because I’m a loner like Misha? What did he know?
My name is Manna.
I shift my hips, roll forward a little and pull Mica under my ass. Am feeling the cold seep through my jeans. It’s only April, after all. I have given my blanket a nickname (did I ever so badly want one, want a hook into my gut, a halo on my head), this dark grey fabric flecked with recycled oyster shells. It’s because of my uncle, who always knew how to explain everything. Because of my uncle, I’m used to hearing the world in anecdote or scientific sidebar. Stories ooze out from the loops in my clothing, they tickle behind my ear, they rise-up with the sun and explain the rain and blame the draining light on godly transgressions. Maybe that’s why I’m feeling more than a little stumped. Can’t someone cover come over here to my rock, and explain me? Where’s that voice on the horizon, telling me what I really should do?.
Misha always started with the yarn of how once, an eclipse had lasted much longer than it should have, almost seventeen minutes instead of seven, which was more than enough time that to have half of the stones on earth turned dark, and half remained silvery grey and white. The stones became half light and half dark. It was the beginning of binaries, he said. Not that I think he was justified in saying this, but of course it was the myth he liked to wind around the material. Did he not know how else to talk? He praised granite, marked with pieces of both light and dark. He, like my mother’s family, came from Ontario. Way up the road on the map that says James and George and Victoria. He felt like someone who was cut literally into two pieces.
Years ago, in the summer, we used to take a small outboard motor boat to this ghost harbour. We slammed our aluminum hull carefully alongside the decrepit dock, just like the cargo ship used to slap back and forth. We pretended we were on official business. My friend Mattie said, “We are Mr. Littlejohn and Mr. Beefendaeker from the government!”. We were staking things out. In elementary school, we were always playing parts. Felt safe enough to play roles, safe enough to consider we were spies, or other worldly spirits, or wizards, marked enough by precedent to think we all suited some character perfectly. Out we walked out onto the wooden edge and shook fists at the unseen below. The cannery, abandoned a few years earlier, was our expansive set display, featuring a store, a post office, a makeshift fire department, a power plant, a school, and a factory. Things were okay there for us, we were players. We didn’t know about our parents’ sadness, frustration, those that used to have jobs here in the summer, who had grandparents who grew up here. Now look, look at this place.
The shoreline of these islands, all along from where I’m sitting from this treed spot, and over to Bella Bella, is exactly the same Coastal land as it has been for millions of years. M, millions. I let those words sink in. Millions of years. Firs, pine and cedar, arbutus trees. Twill fabric undulating over mossy knolls.
Over there, on my left, things are piled up with cedar plank ruins, sharp and irregular. Sadness is messing with me. Lots of big boulders, tiny chunks that came off from the metal jaws and diggers, those dinosaurs that chomped through the earth and ate up property lines and made new ones to hang on the shoulders and minds of workers. Wooden slats everywhere. Splinters. Could get stabbed and catch an infection, or fall and have my leg trapped on the boardwalk, or fall tumbling down through the metal debris into the herring tank. The paper in my hand was not clean. It had oily drips from something I ate at home, maybe the fish from the last supper, a smear from my fingers. The last time I had written on the page was then, when I had added one other name to the list. The last person I saw when I left Bella Bella. And the last person from my family who had seen Misha, and the last person to tell me bBon vVoyage.
Mica on my side, under me. But when I turn around to look at the inland, I'm also thinking that blankets are not the same as friends. Even if Misha thought twill and felt served a purpose. I smudged further at the oily drips, and wondered whether I should start to invite my muses to see me here. I brought the charcoal and the other supplies I would need. I think it was ten people I asked to breathe a breath into a box, just to push out air and let me close it behind them. I tried to captured their dew drops in their voices that sprayed out when they spoke. And maybe I thought I was getting some of that spirit that makes them talk or makes them who they are, gives them power, so that it might transfer over to me and give me strength, or allow me to find words that I don’t didn’t know. I wonder if all these dewy drops make up all the roles that Mattie and I used to put on like camouflage. I opened my mouth, tempted to shake out the emptiness of the small flip-lid plastic box. An old orange Tic-Tac container with a flip- lid. Like Salbutamol or Ventolin inhalers, my shortness of breath neededs the air of someone else’s concern.
In Bella Bella, I have seen everyone around me doing different things. Some of them doing things so well, teaching and building and making art, and trying to preserve or conserve and some have left, looking to the shoreline, let’s say. Something different is pulling, some of my friends are no longer playing, they are becoming the spies and the agents that we considered over a decade ago. And I kind of think that I’m stuck in between, because I dream a lot of things that I want to do, like: perform on a stage, sing well, or act well, perform in any case. And be watched by people. And I dream of building things and want to know how to build things, be someone whom people consult. A professional. I want to be that. I want to fix the ruins. But I also just want to make sure people are okay, I want to look after them, and make sure that no one is suffering.
My spine starts to hurt.
Ten little spirit residues now in me, in little compartments. I tuck the orange box into my jacket pocket. The wind is pulling back, slowing down. By the time I have rolled myself out from under Mica, I look over to the lean-to and it’s gone. Nothing there. Turn my head the other way, and the splintered cedar planks of the cannery are gone. Ship. Nothing. Nothing left. My boat, my boat by the dock, gone. I feel heat rising inside me. “Ah come on.” What is this?.
Look at this. My hands catch me fluttering my arms and I’m stopped dead in my tracks, gazing at their fine wrinkles play and spotted constellations. I breathe in quickly, and after twenty years of returning back to this ruinous place, I’ve remembered why I left when I was 26. I don’t feel it anymore, this sense of what next, and do I trust I can do it. Or worse, that I have potential and nothing ever happens. But I’ve done it. I’ve changed the in-between that lived here. The abandoned ruins are gone, but foronly one fixed dock and one clean fueling station left. I get up, and see a tall figure hunched over a long wooden rack. A long line of salmon are strung up and drying out. Am I a healer? Did I do this? I don’t know, but I think I am finally the manna.. I lay Mica down on the ground, its long, tattered shape cocooning the rocks beneath it, silvery white and slag black knit together.
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Anouchka Freybe, Manna