Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD
    NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD
    NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD
    Ebook122 pages1 hour

    NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD

    By Wade Bell

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The accomplished stories found in this book take the reader from Cuba to the Yukon, from a parched landscape in Canada to the cool streets of southern Spain, from Toronto to the Rockies, and from the narrowing world of the dying to the wondrous expanse of a child's imagination. Uncannily adept at transporting his audience, Wade Bell's collection offers a satisfying depth of experience. {Guernica Editions}
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGuernica
    Release dateJan 1, 2009
    ISBN9781550717532
    NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD
    Author

    Wade Bell

    Wade Bell is a writer whose fiction has appeared in more than 30 literary magazines and anthologies. He is the author of two short story collections published by Guernica: A Destroyer of Compasses and No Place Fit for a Child. He lives in Calgary, Alberta.

    Related to NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD

    Related ebooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Nt’s Lost Lands

      Oct 17, 2019

      The Nt’s Lost Lands
      6 min read

    • Article

      ADVENTURES On The ALCAN

      Feb 21, 2023

      ADVENTURES On The ALCAN
      7 min read

    • Article

      Onwards we Go!

      Jul 20, 2022

      Onwards we Go!
      6 min read

    • Article

      Onwards we Go!

      Jul 20, 2022

      Onwards we Go!
      6 min read

    • Article

      Rock My Soul

      Mar 15, 2023

      Rock My Soul
      3 min read

    • Article

      Wild and Three

      Feb 11, 2020

      Wild and Three
      6 min read

    • Article

      Crocs Crossing

      Jan 31, 2023

      Crocs Crossing
      5 min read

    • Article

      Cold calling

      May 31, 2019

      Cold calling
      13 min read

    • Article

      A Welcoming Roar And Yellow Ice

      Jan 1, 2023

      It’s tricky to find winter hikes suitable for children. They can’t be too long or too difficult but they should have a destination that keeps the kids eager to move forward. The Tooley Pond Road along the South Branch of the Grasse River is perfect f

      3 min read

    • Article

      Northernmost

      Dec 28, 2021

      Northernmost
      8 min read

    • Article

      Etchings On The Landscape

      Mar 1, 2023

      Etchings On The Landscape
      3 min read

    • Article

      Descents

      Aug 5, 2018

      Descents
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Portage With Purpose

      May 1, 2023

      A Portage With Purpose
      5 min read

    • Article

      Following The Flow

      Aug 31, 2019

      Following The Flow
      11 min read

    • Article

      Warm Memories Of Clattering

      Jun 1, 2023

      Warm Memories Of Clattering
      3 min read

    • Article

      Gathering Clouds

      Jun 3, 2021

      Gathering Clouds
      6 min read

    • Article

      Descents

      Aug 5, 2022

      As most kayakers know, when the snow starts to melt, and the rivers come alive in California, you go, and when the forests start to burn—you don't. California's Caldor Fire in the summer of 2021, which burned through three counties and across 221,835

      9 min read

    • Article

      A Tale Of two Rivers

      Mar 29, 2021

      A Tale Of two Rivers
      8 min read

    • Article

      An Eye For The Wye

      Mar 17, 2023

      An Eye For The Wye
      7 min read

    • Article

      The DOCK BOY of RAINY LAKE

      Jul 1, 2019

      The DOCK BOY of RAINY LAKE
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD - Wade Bell

      WADE BELL

      NO PLACE FIT FOR A CHILD

       PROSE SERIES 80

      GUERNICA

      Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

      2009  

      Contents

      Mountains and Rivers and an Arctic Sea 

      Pain 

      For Display Purposes Only 

      The Three-Cornered House 

      Monologue with . . . 

      Mr. Jam 

      Dead Horse Lake 

      In Her Eyes 

      To the memory of my parents,

      Bruce and Evelyn Bell

      Mountains and Rivers and an Arctic Sea

      The Maligne is a Rocky Mountain river, a fierce, nervous thread of silver tumbling from its snowmelt headwaters on Mount Mary Vaux to the Athabasca River some forty miles away. It falls perhaps four thousand feet in a series of cascades and near its end plunges from a hanging canyon into the Athabasca Valley below. The Maligne is not a navigable river.

      About two-thirds of its way down from Mount Mary Vaux, the Maligne slows and widens to form Medicine Lake, which exists because part of a mountain once broke away and fell across the river, damming it up. Now enormous chunks of limestone point through the lake. If you are eight years old and huddled beneath a rubberized tarpaulin on the ribbed, watery floor of an outboard motor boat – and if it is snowing, as it often is in summer, and the clouds hang just a few feet above the surface – it is easy to imagine the rocks as icebergs and the lake as an arctic sea.

      In the boat with the boy are half a dozen tourists his father is ferrying to a chalet at the far end of Medicine Lake. The boy’s mother runs the chalet. It is built of big, smooth stones from the river and logs from the surrounding forest and always has a welcoming plume of smoke rising from its chimney. The tourists will be fed a hot, nourishing supper in the chalet. They will sleep overnight in beds with many blankets and be given breakfast before continuing their journey. In 1949 this is how travellers get to Maligne Lake, which is higher in the mountains and even more isolated than Medicine Lake with its grey icebergs. Like a drenched animal the boy shivers and shifts his body looking for comfort among the duffel bags, suitcases and feet. Whenever he peeps out to try to determine where on the lake they are, his eyes and matted yellow hair are all that show above the tarpaulin, which is so oily the tourists would not have let their own kids touch it. Studying the boy, the tourists cannot help fearing they will die of pneumonia up here in these empty wilds of Canada. Above the echoing din of the motor, they yell to each other that next year they’re going somewhere hot, like Cuba.

      The Maligne is a lake famous among adventurers, a trophy for those who have been there. You can find pictures of its tiny, sacred island, Spirit Island, on threedimensional ViewMaster reels. For only two months of the year does the weather allow access to Maligne Lake’s pristine loveliness and no matter how the tourists complain, they badly want to get there.

      When you are eight years old and have a lake of your own, and people don’t care about your lake but only want to get across it and go on to someplace else, you tend to be resentful. The boy cannot speak because his teeth are chattering but, if he could, he would tell these tourists that Maligne Lake is nothing special. He would say that the chalet there is not as cozy as his mother’s, that the food is not as good as hers and, most importantly, that Spirit Island is not even an island but a mossy peninsula on which three or four skinny pine trees grow. If he could, he would tell them they won’t even be allowed to set foot there because the spirits are to be disturbed by no one.

      Because he remembers what a mountaineering guide once told his father, he would inform these tourists of Maligne’s real name, just to show them that they don’t know everything. Chaba Imne is its true name. If he could control his teeth, and if he could be heard above the outboard’s whine, he would tell them that thirty years ago two white women almost died discovering Chaba Imne using a map drawn by Samson Beaver. Twenty years earlier, as a man of fourteen, Samson went there to hear what the spirits had to say to him.

      Chaba Imne is very remote in 1949. In the wet boat with the boy are people from New York, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. They yell at each other over the bothersome noise of the outboard motor.

      Willy was at Maligne Lake before the war and raved about it, one of the tourists bellows. "Willy is from Hollywood, a famous fabricator of scenery who worked on that wonderful movie, Captains Courageous. No matter that we had to buy parkas and rubber boots in Jasper town, we’ve come all the way from L.A. and we’re going to enjoy ourselves."

      Another says, We’re gonna have a good time up there, even if we have to fashion skis out of bedposts or skate on the damned lake, because if it’s this cold tomorrow for sure it’ll be frozen over.

      The motor sputters, catches, runs erratically for a few moments, then dies. The unexpected silence looms menacingly in the small space between the still water and the fog above their heads. No one speaks. The tourists have no idea how big or small the lake is or how far they are from shore.

      As the boat drifts toward an iceberg, its top obscured by the fog, the boy’s father stands, levers his foot against the boat’s backboard and pulls the cord. His face severe, he adjusts the throttle and tugs at the cord again, and again and again, before the roar of the old motor consumes them and they can breathe.

      The mountains that edge Medicine Lake are less spectacular than those the tourists wait to see rising above Chaba Imne. The boy senses that even if the tourists could spy them through the cloud, they would not be interested in these mountains. He, however, knows how impressive they are. On one side of his lake the mountain wears a thousand-foot high skirt of shattered boulders called talus. As the boy knows, the sharp talus rocks shift unpredictably as you clamber over them, forcing you to lose your balance. They tear soles from shoes and rip knees and seats from pants and they cut your hands. Above the skirt the mountain rises, almost straight up, another few thousand feet. Nearly every night it snows way up there and in the mornings the ridge at the top is white, like icing on a milelong cake.

      There are no trees on that mountain because avalanches of rock and snow tore them down, but the mountain on the other side of the lake is treed, at least up to the timberline. Above the timberline, his father once explained to him, trees will not grow due to lack of soil and the extreme winds and cold. On sunny mornings when the boat’s motor is not working, and the tourists must wait at Jasper town until his father radios to say it’s fixed and they can be driven up from the valley, the boy sometimes thinks he’d like to climb all the way to where the trees won’t grow. But there is the fog to consider. What would happen if he was up there and clouds formed and slipped down to surround him?

      Tourists never like the fog. The boy understands that they haven’t paid their money to watch mountains disappear.

      What a horrible climate! a woman shouts above the drone of the motor. What a primitive country!

      Well, yells someone else, isn’t that why we’re here? 

      There is no public road around Medicine Lake in this summer of 1949, but there is a trail, dynamited through the talus skirt of the mountain. The horses and wagons that carry supplies to his mother’s chalet use it. Before the war, two Packard touring cars with convertible canvas roofs were gingerly driven up from Jasper town and finessed along the dynamited trail. These bulky, nine passenger vehicles with their oversized tires now carry the tourists from the boy’s mother’s chalet up to Chaba Imne along a perilous track cut through forest at the edge of the Maligne canyon.

      The boy has twice made the trip to Chaba Imne, peeking over the side of the touring car down to the black running board and then straight down again, not to the edge of the road, but to the end of his life as he knew it would be if the car slipped off and plunged to the rapids below.

      On the cold floor of the boat, sheltered by the oily tarpaulin from the drizzle that is now falling, the boy recalls the worst parts of that drive and knows the tourists will be properly afraid when it’s their turn tomorrow. The two women who discovered Chaba Imne twenty years after Sampson Beaver was there to consult the spirits, attempted to follow the river down along the canyon to the boy’s lake. They lost two horses with much-needed supplies and one of their men. After five days they gave up and went back to Chaba Imne and trekked out some other way.

      If he isn’t helping his father navigate the tricky waters of Medicine Lake, the boy plays near the chalet, watching out for animals. There is a footpath that winds about fifty yards through the forest between the boat dock and the chalet. Once, at dusk, he was

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1