Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
For the past few weeks in Molly’s American History class they’ve been studying the Wabanaki Indians, a confederacy of five Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Penobscot, that live near the North Atlantic coast. Maine, Mr. Reed tells them, is the only state in the nation that requires schools to teach Native American culture and history. They’ve read Native narratives and contrasting contemporaneous viewpoints and taken a field trip to The Abbe, the Indian museum in Bar Harbor, and now they have to do a research report on the subject worth a third of their final grade.
For this assignment they’re supposed to focus on a concept called “portaging.” In the old days the Wabanakis had to carry their canoes and everything else they possessed across land from one water body to the next, so they had to think carefully about what to keep and what to discard. They learned to travel light. Mr. Reed tells students they have to interview someone—a mother or father or grandparent—about their own portages, the moments in their lives when they’ve had to take a journey, literal or metaphorical. They’ll use tape recorders and conduct what he calls “oral histories,” asking the person questions, transcribing the answers, and putting it together in chronological order as a narrative. The questions on the assignment sheet are: What did you choose to bring with you to the next place? What did you leave behind? What insights did you gain about what’s important?
Molly’s kind of into the idea of the project, but she doesn’t want to interview Ralph or—God forbid—Dina.
Jack? Too young.
Terry? She’d never agree to it.
The social worker, Lori? Ick, no.
So that leaves Vivian. Molly has gleaned some things about her—that she’s adopted, that she grew up in the Midwest and inherited the family business from her well-off parents, that she and her husband expanded it and eventually sold it for the kind of profit that allowed them to retire to a mansion in Maine. Most of all, that she’s really, really old. Maybe it’ll be a stretch to find drama in Vivian’s portage—a happy, stable life does not an interesting story make, right? But even the rich have their problems, or so Molly’s heard. It will be her task to extract them. If, that is, she can convince Vivian to talk to her.
MOLLY’S OWN CHILDHOOD MEMORIES ARE SCANT AND PARTIAL. SHE remembers that the TV in the living room seemed to be on all the time and that the trailer smelled of cigarette smoke and the cat’s litterbox and mildew. She remembers her mother lying on the couch chain-smoking with the shades drawn before she left for her job at the Mini-Mart. She remembers foraging for food—cold hot dogs and toast—when her mother wasn’t home, and sometimes when she was. She remembers the giant puddle of melting snow just outside the door of the trailer, so large that she had to jump across it from the top step to get to dry ground.
And there are other, better, memories: making fried eggs with her dad, turning them over with a large black plastic spatula. “Not so fast, Molly Molasses,” he’d say. “Easy. Otherwise the eggs’ll go splat.” Going to St. Anne’s Church on Easter and choosing a blooming crocus in a green plastic pot covered with foil that was silver on one side, bright yellow on the other. Every Easter she and her mother planted those crocuses near the fence beside the driveway, and soon enough a whole cluster of them, white and purple and pink, sprang annually like magic from the bald April earth.
She remembers third grade at the Indian Island School, where she learned that the name Penobscot is from Panawahpskek, meaning “the place where the rocks spread out” at the head of the tribal river, right where they were. That Wabanaki means “Dawnland,” because the tribes live in the region where the first light of dawn touches the American continent. That the Penobscot people have lived in the territory that became Maine for eleven thousand years, moving around season to season, following food. They trapped and hunted moose, caribou, otters, and beavers; they speared fish and clams and mussels. Indian Island, just above a waterfall, became their gathering place.
She learned about Indian words that have been incorporated into American English, like moose and pecan and squash, and Penobscot words like kwai kwai, a friendly greeting, and woliwoni, thank you. She learned that they lived in wigwams, not teepees, and that they made canoes from the bark of a single white birch tree, removed in one piece so as not to kill it. She learned about the baskets the Penobscots still make out of birch bark, sweet grass, and brown ash, all of which grow in Maine wetlands, and, guided by her teacher, even made a small one herself.