How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad Read Free Book Online Page B

have told so many times that I now just float away while they tell themselves. So beware, beware, beware of lazy embellishments to keep me awake, and out-and-out lies, the by-products of the very relativistic girlhood that’s turning you on.)
    We left Squamish for the year-long road trip, our bags sloshing in the empty space behind us where the milk bottles were before. Rainy nights we slept on foam and sleeping bags, the sour smell of gas and dairy on our bodies in the morning. In every province as we headed east, we crashed with people my father knew but I didn’t, people we would never speak of or see again. Often these mysterious acquaintances lived in unfinished houses half-covered in orange tarps, pieces of land barely conquered by stacks of lumber, good intentions abandoned. Grown-ups who spent their lives at kid level, down on the floor, cross-legged or propped up on elbows and stomachs. The talk, the endless talk, came from lips moving somewhere under Brillo pads of facial hair. My dad hovered on the periphery, reading or staring into space. Perhaps if there had been dogma to go with thelifestyle, it would have made more sense to me, a vine climbing a strong trellis. But the ideals that others railed about late into the night (me lying on a piece of foam in the corner) were rarely parroted by my father. What I remember is that my mother was the political one, her fist pummelling the newspaper in outrage. Later, I could see that rhetoric was just a place for him to vanish; he was unnoticed, gazing skyward while the rest of them decided what mattered. Maybe they mistook his silence for consent, or maybe it was. But I always thought that he would live the same way in any time, which is to say, out of it.
    Near Weyburn, Saskatchewan, we slept in a tent on an abandoned oil field beside the giant, stilled bird-machine, its beak frozen, poised to peck the unfruitful land. At the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I saw a woman make a wiry braid from three strands jutting out of a mole in her chin. We hit the stormy season in Newfoundland and turned a slick corner to find a car teetering over the edge of a hungry cliff, no one inside.
    When we had used up all the road, we went west again, retracing our steps. We moved to the compound on Gambier, an island across the bay from Vancouver. The strangest, most unshakeable memory from those first weeks has nothing to do with my father: Taj Mahal is on the turntable in the dining hall, and I’m planting sea monkeys in a glass bong. They never grow but quickly start to stink like rotting shrimp.
    There was rarely more than thirty people on the compound at any given time, though they changed so often that Inever bothered to learn many of their names. They were city women, mostly, leaving behind husbands and jobs, screaming children tucked under their arms like briefcases. The few men who stayed, most of them single, spent their days in the rain building the boathouse and clearing the land for more gardens. In the most surprising ways, the great experiment bore tradition. The women ran things from the kitchen and raised the children; the handful of men stayed away until darkness and rose up with the sun to vanish again in the morning. Once in a long while, usually when a newcomer arrived, there were heated arguments and philosophical debates about the reason for all of this, but soon, the routine settled back to dull consensus and meeting after meeting to debate the quotidian. Voting for a new septic tank. Voting for selling eggs and milk to the mainlanders until we could become entirely self-sufficient. Arranging a boat schedule with the local farmers to get us on and off the island.
    But there was never any real panic that it would fall apart because everyone knew that Elaine, my father’s girlfriend, born to a wealthy family who owned department stores in Philadelphia, quietly funded the fantasy. She pulled out a black leather ledger and wrote cheques to the government for taxes, and to