Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter Read Free Book Online Page B

into military tools for tactical manoeuvres.
    I received a flat stack of white sheets and a blue pillowcase. I was in Dorm 3, the attendant told me; there’s a key. A man from Lancashire asked where I was from and what I was doing. He liked that I wasn’t German. I explained my project and how I had chosen this dormitory so as to experience, a little, what it was like for the Newfoundlanders to sleep together in large tents in Salisbury. But there were Germans in the room. So I imagined myself in a hospital ward that treated both friend and foe alike. I reminded myself that Frances Cluett, the nurse, had ended up treating Germans.
ISLANDS
    I like islands. Islands that are poor like Cuba and Newfoundland. Because I’m not rich. The islands that attract the rich I’m less interested in—the island of Britain, for instance, where I’m standing now, which is twice the sizeof the island of Newfoundland. Some islands lose their island quality—Manhattan, even though Manhattan is only a thousandth the size of Newfoundland. And yet most islands keep the essential parts that made them: a shoreline and density. What is called a littoral zone.
    My father told me, when I was a child, of an island in Newfoundland called Glover Island. Glover Island is the same size as Manhattan. He’d pointed to it down the lake where our log cabin is. He had been to Glover Island once; it had rescued him, when an open boat he was in capsized. He had been moose hunting and the lake is a hundred miles long. The lake lies along the axis of the prevailing wind, as though the wind had made the lake. But the island and lake are built within a fault line that runs along the Appalachian mountains of Newfoundland. The fault disappears under the Atlantic Ocean and emerges again dividing the Hebrides in Scotland. There’s a pond on Glover Island, my father said to me, and on that pond there’s an island. Someday I’d like to spend a night on that island on a pond on an island in a lake on an island in the ocean.
    I remembered lifting up over Toronto in the dark and noticing the other side of Lake Ontario. The lake does not look that big. In fact, I had wondered if what I was seeing were the islands that are very near the Toronto shoreline. I could understand the coastline down to Hamilton and then around to the American side of the lake. As the planeascended, it was difficult to gauge how small things were becoming. This was similar to my experience of Stonehenge. How big is it? The roped-off area did not allow you to get close enough to tell.
    I slept well in the bottom bunk, with my sleeping mask and earplugs. I sank deep into the mythical embroidery of an old war. The window was open about four inches. Three pairs of bunks, six men. Some Germans. Civil. And the bunk was long enough for me.
    Very early the next morning, the Americans immediately jumped to the floor and began their pushups. Breakfast cost five pounds for buffet egg, sausage, bacon, beans, mushrooms, tomato, toast, cereal, and coffee. I made a toasted cheese and ham sandwich to take with me on the train. On the way to the station I bought a flat cap at the Barbour shop—made by Deerhunter in Denmark. It was a dark olive, and the only one that fitted me well. I tried on some of the larger Bond caps that men wore a hundred years ago but I looked too ridiculous—as if I was trying intentionally to enter the past. There were no English caps of the right colour or weight.
    The Newfoundlanders, if they had money, bought new outfits that looked like officers’ uniforms with big flat pockets. They did this in London, on their way north to train in Scotland.
A DISTURBANCE MADE OUT OF OMISSION
    I took the train out of Salisbury and awaited a change at Southampton. This was the port where the
Titanic
had left England. It was where many soldiers had left to join the wars in Turkey and France. And where many troops returned to English hospitals, wounded.
    But I was heading north. The flat lands and