Before the Fall
By Celia Meade
I visited Eden many years ago, a place where nakedness was a practicality, and at a time before I understood shame. At thirteen years of age, my best friend invited me to her cabin at Adams Lake. Accessible only by logging roads, it sat in the center of British Columbia on government-protected land. The other half of the lake belonged to the First Nations. Logging roads cut dirt tracks through the thick green forest, an undisturbed silence that stretched out from us for miles, until the tracks disappeared into this remote, sapphire, deep-blue lake.
Elise’s family occupied the edge of mainstream culture. In the city, her house nestled at the bottom of a vertiginous road that led to the North Saskatchewan River. I walked the twenty minutes from my prosaic house, located in a suburban cul-de-sac, past the 7-11, the low-rental housing complex, and our school to her road that entered another realm when it dropped off into the heavily wooded valley.
The Ablemans’ house stood as the first at the road bottom. Obscured by poplars from the road, in a hidden world of its own, where her mother nursed yet another baby on the couch in the kitchen. The windows looked out onto a wild, bushy garden that made its way down to the river.
In spite of their idyllic city house, the family spent every summer at Adams Lake. A thirteen-hour Greyhound bus trip took me out to spend ten days with them. We drove the track from the gas station where I sat down, as we sang hymns and prayed that no logging truck barreled toward us.
I attended Anglican church with the intensely devout Ablemans for many years before I switched to attend Baptist sermons with a more popular friend. The boys in the Baptist youth group were better-looking. My religious beliefs were held in the sway of teenage hormones. A fusty, dim Anglican church always brings back the memory of childhood boredom: The wall clock’s second hand crept around in audible ticks until we were allowed to break for Sunday school, where there were games and coloring sheets. Childish pastimes about adult themes: A picture of Jesus kissed by Judas, or of Jesus washing Mary’s feet.
The cabin, constructed of unpainted boards, sat on the water’s edge, complete with a dock. We occasionally saw people, but mostly we were on our own. Elise’s father, Jonathan, remained at work as a lawyer in the city. I saw him infrequently in their front hall: He wore a suit and carried a briefcase, a bearded man with a balding patch that didn’t seem quite a full-fledged member of the Ableman clan.
At the lake, our bathing suits served as the day’s outfit. We disrobed to go swimming because we didn’t want to get them wet. Elise—the oldest of five kids and at thirteen only beginning to develop—stood in contrast to my burgeoning physique, but I joined in on the nudist culture happily, fearing only when other boaters came too close. Even that feeling couldn’t really be called fear: Fear was when the packrat got into the kitchen. Elise’s mother screamed and took a broom to it until the giant rat ran out from under the table and through the open door. That rat looked the size of a pig.
The whole family (sans father) embarked on an outing in a gaggle of canoes and boats to a waterfall once that poured down onto a small tributary that fed the lake. Elise and I led the charge, followed by ten-year-old Jonnie, six-year-old Peter, three-year-old Susannah, baby Millie, and Elise’s mother at the rear. She desired a picture of all her children in the buff under the waterfall. She wished Elise to appear like Eve in the Garden of Eden, but Elise refused to have her nudity recorded and shown around. Her mother became furious.
Elise rarely stood up to her mother. I never knew her mother’s name, as she always went by “Mama.” Nameless and old like all my friends’ parents appeared, she ruled as a stern school nun, in spite of the evidence of five children to the contrary. With long brown hair and disheveled clothes from constant breastfeeding, she was only thirty-five years old that year at Adams Lake. Elise reigned as the oldest child: The couple married young and set to baby-making with religious fervor.
Elise’s mother with her strong opinions held sway over me for a good many years. She often made pronouncements that left me scratching my head in confusion. She believed cancer to be the Devil’s last great stronghold. I thought that surely the Devil would prefer a stronghold in weak moral fortitude, something related to drugs or sex. Cancer didn’t make sense, as it spread among the innocent as easily as the damned.
My God was about miracles and love, and I didn’t really believe in the Devil, or our being cast out of the Garden of Eden. Eden clearly lived around us, pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk at every opportunity, flickering above us, sequins in poplar leaves. Eden waited to come back in full force given a chance, the way it existed in Adams Lake. Like my own atheist mother, I believed heaven and hell to be here on Earth. We all live here together, the redeemed and the damned.
I would love to have a picture of that waterfall expedition now. Instead I have a picture of myself in a bikini, standing in their cabin with rubber boots on, glasses, a shiny bomber jacket, and a shower cap. The reason for this outfit has been lost to time. Living in that kind of isolation encourages such getups, as there were no mirrors, no people outside the Ableman family, and the priority to stay reasonably dry in a place with no electricity.
Elise and I spent our days in luxury: We swam, canoed, and read for hours on end. A friend of her mother’s visited for a corn roast. We all swam before shucking for what felt like hours. We ate a ridiculous amount of corn on the cob. At the end, when we swept and tidied the kitchen away, Elise came into our room. She informed me that the mother’s friend felt shocked by my stretch marks. She had never seen them so bad. Elise and I were close friends, to the point of telling each other everything. She didn’t have hurtful intent in anything she said, but that remark did spell the end of my childhood. Feeling bodyless, living for experience rather than the worry of being seen, became lost to me.
I feel so grateful that I inhabited such a childhood. My daughter, seventeen now, is of prime Instagram age, and she grumbles at how terribly her young childhood pictures depict her, with her wildly clashing outfits and the peculiar way she wore her hairband, like a hippie, rather than the prep-school accessory it was intended to be. I wanted her to choose her own clothes, wear them how she wanted, and I think she will come around. That freedom helped shape her into a person who inhabits herself comfortably. Present times with the ubiquitous phone camera seem to have deteriorated into a giant photo shoot.
Much is the same as it was, however. My daughter constantly needs to move her long brown limbs; she’s perpetually outside, running or playing tennis. Her long chestnut hair is so much like Elise’s mother’s. She’s full of that dominant, broom-sweeping energy, and I wonder if many, many children are in her future. More likely to involve cars or boats in her case, to my surprise. Maybe there will be a cabin in the interior, or a bearded, briefcase-toting partner in the shadows of her domestic kingdom. I want to see her create her own Eden, whatever form it takes. I know I’m happy in mine.
My partner has two pairs of stretch marks. The first set on his stomach appeared when he broke his ankle before university and drank his way to an impressive beer belly. The second set came on his chest the following summer, when weight training moved his bulk north, to his chest and biceps. Marks cut across his chest from under his arms like ceremonial battle scars. I love them as much as every other part of him that makes him unique, as he does me.
I’d love to know what became of my beautiful friend Elise. I’d see her mother playing tennis at the community courts after our friendship faded. She played in tennis whites, as though from a purer time. She didn’t like the changes she saw in me, and chastised me for wearing tacky nail polish that covered up the beauty God had given me. She also feared that I read too much and my great love of food would lead me to become fat. She was kind of right on both counts. Elise came to my wedding, and disappeared into an Anglican college to study law like her father. I never heard from her again.
But what a gift she gave me in our childhood friendship, and in Adams Lake that summer when I was thirteen. It was a time before my life turned to the teenage years, full of rude awakenings like the visiting neighbor’s stare. Childhood innocence, the blue lake, and the deep hush of evergreen, a velvet silence that extended for miles in every direction from that plain, wooden cabin: God’s country and the precious, natural state.
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