The Space Between

by JANINE DeBAISE

We raised our kids in the wrack zone.

Or at least, in the summertime we did. My sister Carroll and I set up lawn chairs near the cattails and decaying seaweed and the old gray dock, knowing that if we kept an eye on the waterfront, none of our kids would drown. We knew well the marshy edge of my parents’ camp—we’d spent our childhoods there. But now, with seven kids between us, Carroll and I were the adults. It’s true that our adult behavior mostly consisted of reading trashy magazines, making snarky comments about celebrities, and joking about whether it was too early to drink the first beer of the day. But still, we had crossed over from one stage to the next. We were the parents sitting in the sun, not the children screaming over a dead carp that had washed up. 

The wrack zone, the land just below the high-water line, is an intimate and changeable space. On the St. Lawrence River, the water is highest in early spring, and we pile rocks on the dock to keep it from floating away. By July, the spongy, muddy area is dry enough to spread out a blanket for small children. It’s a lovely place for sunbathing, if you don’t mind the occasional spray of muddy water from a dog who ends his swim with a vigorous shake. Our kids picked cattail punks, squealed at the water snakes, and chased little frogs that they never actually caught. When the kids got overtired and whiny, Carroll pulled out her party trick: she climbed into the old metal rowboat, disappeared down the creek, and returned with a turtle. All the kids came running then, each begging for a turn to hold the creature before its release back into the marsh. Catching turtles was Carroll’s special talent, and no one knew how she did it.

Our family camp is a peninsula of oak trees tucked into a huge marsh on a shallow bay. When we want to swim in the deep clear water of the river, we take a boat out to an island. Whiskey Island is the best for gathering driftwood, Flat Rock is close for an evening swim, and Artillery Island has natural indentations that make warm pools for small children. This part of the river is called the Thousand Islands, but that’s not an exact count. There are 1,874 islands and so many rocks and shoals that boating accidents are as common as scraped knees on a school playground.  

My siblings and I learned to swim at Third Brother’s Island, where two big rocks stand only a few feet from each other. My mother yelled encouragement as we flailed our arms and leaped from one rock to the other. I still remember the horror when my siblings and I arrived one sunny day to find the names “Bob and Madeline” spray-painted on the island in huge black letters. We spent hours scraping at the paint, determined to erase that act of vandalism. It was years before their names disappeared altogether. My mother used to remark that if ever a couple approached us and introduced themselves as “Bob and Madeline,” they’d likely find themselves attacked by a gang of angry children.

We never set foot on Ironsides Island, a narrow chunk of rock with tall cliffs and white pine trees. It’s a rookery for great blue herons, who have big untidy nests balanced precariously in high branches. Every spring my father and I would glide by quietly in his wooden sailboat to catch glimpses of the baby herons, long-legged and awkward.

The marsh that stretches out from my parents’ dock is protected by the New York State Freshwater Wetlands Act of 1975. But legislation, it turns out, can’t protect you from everything.

The oil spill happened during the summer of 1976. I was fifteen years old. We heard the news on our car radio, but when we pulled into camp, everything looked the same. My father went off in an aluminum boat to see what he could find out. He returned quickly. “I couldn’t get out to the river,” he said. “They’ve boomed off the bay.” 

It was a smart move. Goose Bay is about two miles long, but the opening to the river is just a few hundred yards. Floating booms helped prevent the oil from reaching the ecologically valuable marshes. We listened to the car radio and drove to town for a newspaper. The oil leaked for more than a day, three hundred thousand gallons in all. “The worst inland oil spill in North American history,” the Canadian announcer said.

It wasn’t until the booms were removed and we went out to the islands to swim that we saw the oil. It was what they call No. 6 oil, and it looked like tar. Thick, black tar, like something you’d pave a driveway with.

The oil spill happened when the water was at the highest point it had been in years. When the water level dropped, thick bands of oil remained, suffocating every rock, every island. The wrack zone still held weeds and driftwood and dead fish, but now they were embedded in big swathes of black tar, several inches deep and several feet wide. 

We tried to go for a swim at our favorite island. My father brought the boat alongside the shallow rock shelf, and we stepped out. Then we had to scramble across the rock and jump over those thick piles of black oil. We spread our towels on a high rock and then came back down to jump over the oil again and take a swim. We tried to be careful. We were careful. But still, when we got back to camp that evening, I found black tar on my shorts, another spot on my bathing suit. Nothing would wash it out. Eventually, my mother put the clothes that had been touched by oil into a trash bag. 

There was a clean-up operation, about $8 million worth. But mostly, that money went to cleaning up oil on the mainland and the bigger islands with summer houses. No one cleaned the little islands where we went swimming or where the wildlife nested. Ironsides Island lost one third of their adult great blue herons that year.

The oil degraded over time, getting less and less gooey, but the color remained. Mostly, we just got used to it being there. I remember once, more than a decade later, when my father and I took my uncle for a sail. My uncle asked, “Why do all the rocks and islands have that black stripe around them?”

My father said, “That’s the high-water mark from 1976. The year of the oil spill.”

I felt startled. I’d gotten so used to the black stripe that I didn’t even see it. I think that’s what happens with environmental problems. Climate change has brought us warmer summers, stronger hurricanes, flooding along the coasts. We accept it as the new normal. Air pollution and toxins in our food have brought us soaring rates of cancer. The incidence of breast cancer in American women has more than doubled since the 1960s. We see these statistics so often that we accept them as inevitable.

By the time my own kids were old enough to swim off an island, decades of weather had degraded the oil but there were new problems, like zebra mussels, an invasive species that soon grew out of control. We bought the kids water shoes to protect their feet from the sharp zebra mussel shells, and that seemed an easy fix, although I felt sad to think that my kids wouldn’t know what it was like to swim with bare feet.

 Wassail Island became our favorite. It was close enough to reach by canoe or sailboat, which meant that our ragtag flotilla could get there easily. Although it was small, there was something for everyone: a long shelf of rock that stretched under water so that my brother-in-law Jimmy could lie in the shallows, a sloping rock where we could spread our towels, and a high rock where the teenagers could leap into the river. But my mother was often the first one in the water. She’d dive in, then surface to do the backstroke and call out, “It’s refreshing!” We all knew that the word refreshing really meant, “Oh God, this is cold.” 

The sun beat down on the gray rock. My mother and my sister Laurie, both redheads, brought their towels to the mossy spot under the two pine trees and sat quietly in the shade, careful not to disturb the ospreys nesting above. My father, using a life jacket as a pillow, took a nap in a rock crevice. Carroll, who still had the blonde hair of her teenage years, preferred to sit in the sun, her tanned face turned toward the warmth. She didn’t like cold water, but the year my youngest son was learning to swim, she got into the river to show him how to float his body, hang onto a rock, and kick like crazy. As I lay on the warm rock, I could hear them splashing and laughing. Carroll was close to my four kids; she babysat them every weekday in the winter. Her kids and mine played a new game called Shoal Walk, which took them from rock to underwater rock, all the way out to a little island.

Carroll’s three daughters and my four children grew older. My sister Laurie and my brother Kevin added kids to the family. My parents had ten grandchildren who grew up and went to college and graduate school, but every summer we gathered at camp.

Then came the July vacation of 2014. We didn’t realize it, but this was the last time we’d ever be all together at the camp—my parents and their five children.

My kids and my nieces and nephews set up tents under the pine trees. For meals, we crammed in close around two long picnic tables pushed together near the fire pit. After each meal, I used a deck of playing cards to randomly select which two family members would wash the dishes, a task everyone hated because it’s almost impossible to clean greasy bowls when all you’ve got is a single basin of water heated on an outdoor grill. 

Carroll’s oldest daughter had given birth that May, the first of my parents’ great-grandchildren. Carroll was so excited to be a grandmother that the rest of us barely got a turn holding little Riley. My children were still close to Carroll, even though they’d long since outgrown the need for a babysitter. In the manner of young men everywhere, my sons showed their affection by teasing her. If she left her lawn chair to go to the outhouse, they’d take it and put it high up in a tree, over her head. They’d yell her name, “Carrrroolllll,” drawing it out, then pause for effect before shouting, “SUCKS!” Her laughter encouraged this behavior.

Change was coming to the family. My father, in his eighties, had given up his wooden sailboat, which he’d designed and built himself, but was now too much for him to handle. Change was coming to the islands too. NO TRESPASS signs sprouted on Wassail Island. Someone had bought it; soon a camp and dock would follow. Never again would we sit on that sun-hot rock or jump off the cliff into the icy water. It seemed only a matter of time before every rock and island would be owned, developed, and built upon. 

But still, we were at camp, and we were together, on the same river where my father had come fishing with his father in the 1930s, where my parents had come as newlyweds in the 1950s. My niece Jaime dangled her baby Riley above the river to dip her toes in for the first time. Like all the family members who had come before, Riley cried as her feet hit that cold water. My niece Erin glanced at my mother and said, in perfect imitation, “It’s refreshing.” 

Late that afternoon, my youngest sister Colleen announced that she and her husband Frank were going to cook supper for everyone. They drove to town to buy sweet corn picked that morning, packages of chicken, and bags of new potatoes, which they would boil in salt water. Colleen and Frank are both gourmet cooks, so we knew the feast would be delicious. We knew also that it would take forever to cook. My father kept wandering over to the grill and giving broad hints about how close the sun was to the horizon. But you can’t rush a foodie. It was dusk before the meal was ready to eat. 

“Don’t we have candles?” Colleen asked, as if we were eating at a lovely dining room table and not a couple of old picnic tables.

My mother disappeared into the cabin and returned with a dusty box labeled “Emergency candles.”

“Is this an emergency?” I asked.

“Of course it is,” Carroll said and grabbed the box. 

We had no crystal candle holders. But Carroll lit a candle, dripped wax directly onto the picnic table, and then stuck the candle to the table. “I’m going to use the whole box,” she said recklessly. 

My father sat at the head of the table, in a lawn chair that he had reserved for himself by tying on a piece of fluorescent orange surveyor’s tape. My mother sat next to him, and the rest of us crowded onto the benches: my four siblings with their spouses and children, my husband and children, twenty-five people in all. In order to make room for everyone, we made the left-handed people sit together. 

The food was delicious, particularly the fresh corn-on-the-cob from the grill. The little candles cast a soft glow onto sunburned faces. We ate and talked and slapped at mosquitoes. 

Eventually we moved from the picnic tables to the campfire, everyone jostling to get a spot, and we played the Music Game. I held an old book that someone left at camp years ago—a hardcover copy of The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder—and put my finger down on a page to choose a word at random. Then the family had to sing as many songs as they could with that word in it. My brother, Kevin, kept up a running commentary on how our team was doing, commentary that was essential because we were competing with imaginary teams.  

“Brazil just got seven points for the word FROG,” he said. “That’s going to be tough to beat.” He was interrupted by my husband, Bill, launching into “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night.

The Long Winter was a terrible book for the game, since I kept getting words like “trousers” or “newfangled.” But when I tried to switch books, all the young people protested. 

“It’s a TRADITION,” my son Sean said. “We have to use that book.”

My parents sang the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Carroll’s three daughters sang “The Wheels on the Bus,” their blonde hair swishing as they did the hand gestures. We sang Christmas carols and church hymns and songs from television commercials, the theme song from Friends, songs from The Sound of Music, and lots of old show tunes. My introverted youngest son, Bryan, prompted by his aunts, sang the score from Les Mis. I think that was when we surged past Bolivia and Peru in our standings.

Above the oak branches, we could see stars. “I’m making blueberry pancakes for breakfast,” my mother promised before she retreated with my father to their cabin, where they could listen to the singing from their bed. Carroll slipped away quietly without saying goodnight, as was her habit. The circle around the fire kept getting smaller, until finally even the young people were ready for bed. I watched the glow of their smart phones as they moved from outhouse to car trunks to tents, and I poured a bucket of water onto the coals. Smoke rose into the night sky.

Just a few weeks after we returned from camp, Carroll was diagnosed with breast cancer. We moved suddenly, all of us, from those carefree sunny days into a dark space that included chemo treatments and hospital rooms and crying in the car on the way to work, that space between life and death, where the wrack you collect are memories that you will hang onto like smooth pieces of driftwood. 

Four months after that candlelit meal under the old oak trees, Carroll took her last breath. She was fifty-five years old.

Four months was not enough to prepare me for the enormity of that loss. The day after Carroll died, I posted a photo on Facebook to let everyone know this jarring turn my life had taken, because I needed everyone to know that they would need to approach me gently, like you should approach someone who has just survived the most difficult shock. 

I felt caught in a wrack zone, that space between a lifetime in which my oldest sister was alive—to walk me to kindergarten on the first day of school, to stand with me at high school dances, to help raise my children, to sit with me in the sun—and the rest of my life, which I would need to live without her. I sat with my laptop and looked through photos of Carroll. So many of them were taken at camp, with her surrounded by her kids and my kids. In the photo I finally chose, Carroll is sitting on the rock of Wassail Island, her legs stretched out to touch the water. She’s laughing at my sons, who are teasing her about something. Her face is turned toward the sun, toward the light. 

What causes breast cancer? Here is what we know. 

In the 1960s, a woman’s lifetime risk for breast cancer was 1 in 20. Today it is 1 in 8.  More than 80 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer are the first in their family to develop the disease, which suggests that breast cancer is caused by something more than genetics. We know that industrialized countries have higher rates of breast cancer than non-industrialized countries. 

Estrogen is a hormone that is closely linked to the development of breast cancer. Xenoestrogens, synthetic chemicals that act like estrogen in our bodies, can be found in weed killers, pesticides, plastic additives, and spray paints. They are found in polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which is used in the manufacture of everything from food packaging to shower curtains. And we know that 100 percent of the air in the Lower 48 is contaminated by carcinogens.

When we talk about environmental problems, it’s easy to focus on the dramatic and immediate, like an oil spill that spreads black tar across the islands we love, that smears sticky black stuff onto the wings of birds, that kills wildlife and makes it hard for local people to make a living. The 1976 oil spill left indelible images on my fifteen-year-old brain. But we tend to ignore the more subtle and terrifying environmental problems, like benzene in vehicle exhaust or pesticide residue in the food we eat. We’ve grown used to breathing polluted air, to being exposed to carcinogens on a daily basis.

We are good at denial. We discuss environmental issues as if they affect only the bald eagle or the great blue heron. Perhaps it’s just difficult to admit to ourselves, as a species, that we are hurting not only plants and animals all over the world, but also the people we love—our sisters and brothers, our parents, our children, our grandchildren, ourselves.

I still sit in the wrack zone at camp, keeping an eye on my grandnieces and grandnephew as they toddle and crawl in the grass near the dock. I think about how much Carroll would have loved her role as grandmother to these curious, lively children. I don’t catch turtles: that secret died with my sister, although I suspect that it had something to do with her patience, her willingness to sit quietly in an old rowboat for long minutes, staring into the cattails, the hot sun beating onto her bare shoulders, waiting for a tiny creature to come to her before she took it carefully into her hands. I don’t have that kind of patience. But I let Carroll’s grandchildren clamber into the canoes and trail their hands in the marsh water, and I tell them stories about pirates and sailing ships.

During the long winter months, when I read articles about environmental toxins or attend a lecture on air pollution, my thoughts return to our family camp—that beautiful and scarred landscape with oak trees damaged by invasive gypsy moth caterpillars, rocks that wear a black stripe from that long-ago oil spill, bald eagles who have made a comeback after DDT was banned, osprey nests contaminated with bits of plastic, and down by the dock, in that space between land and river, a second lawn chair that will remain forever empty.