Excerpt of Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill
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1
Ursula
On a crystalline,
perfectly blue morning in June, after a day of angry pewter skies and of
sheeting, driving rain, we enter our story. Clouds pile themselves
picturesquely, theatrically, like plump odalisques, against the blue,
clear-edged and astonishing. The forest all around is a palette of greens. Wild
chokecherry trees are in raucous bloom. It is as if this were the first morning
of the world, perfect. Even the garter snakes slithering under roots, over
rocks, over roots, through the grass seem a part of the day's jubilance. Dew on
fat ferns catches the sunlight in bursts and disperses it, starlike.
We are just miles inland from the tip of the Keweenaw
Peninsula of Michigan, which juts out into Lake Superior, the arrival point for
the earliest hardy wide-eyed settlers arriving from the East on lake packet
boats to stake claims and seek copper, well before the Civil War. Lifting off
from a branch overhead, a red-winged blackbird calls out clearly something that
sounds much like kee'-we-naw, the native word for "portage." Many things here
that are not called Keweenaw are called its English equivalent, Portage, almost
as if life were much like a brief transit across a wee stretch of land.
It is Monday, June 9, 2003. Our story itself began long
before, if we believe that all back story is also story, that the underside of
the iceberg explains what we see above: all those wind-sculpted shapes that,
looking for all the world like praying hands, came to be called, by fanciful
meteorologists, nieves penitentes, or penitents sculpted of snow. Still, a
painful and highly unusual event happens this glorious morning, and it is
through this tiny aperture that we enter our narrative.
We are at the moment seeing through the eyes of Ursula Wong,
a child with dark Asian eyes, café-au-lait complexion, and a thick blond braid
down her back that seems frankly too much hair for a two-and-a-half-year-old to
have had time to grow. Ursula has had her second birthday on November 19. She is
a child small in stature, five pounds nine ounces at birth and now just over
twenty-seven pounds, as of her spring checkup. She wears denim bib overalls with
a purple T-shirt beneath; in the cool of the morning she has insisted on putting
on her purple hooded jacket for the weather. Snow mittens are clipped to the
sleeve ends. Yes, they are purple too. It is perfect and cool in the sixties.
Her mother, Annie, says, "Honey, you don't need a coat. It's
June." Her father, Justin, says to Annie, "She'll figure it out pretty quick.
She'll take it off herself and think it was her own idea.";
In a clearing a couple of hundred feet down an untraveled
dirt track into the forest, a glade carpeted by short grass kept low by odd
gravel-shot soil, Ursula is crouched on her haunches examining tiny white blooms
on wild strawberry plants in the grass. Each tiny bloom is a star. Ursula is
transfixed.
Ursula and her young parents have traveled almost five hours
west and north from their home in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. They have spent
the night at a Super 8 Motel in Houghton, a town that houses the state's mining
college, now more diversified as mine after mine has shut down. The motel faces
Portage Lake, and Justin, who is an installer of vinyl siding and gutters, has
paid the five dollars extra for a room with a view of the lake and the opposite
shore. They rarely leave home, and this overnight away is a treat..
Ursula has splashed in the pool and run around on the motel's
wooden deck, puddled from the day's rain. She has giggled delightedly as with
the heel of her hand she pounded buttons in the lobby vending machine to make
foil packets of chocolate-chip cookies fall, klunk, to the bottom of the
machine. Ursula has suggested in a business-like way that they might live here.
Justin has reminded her that Grandma Mindy is back home, and her purple carpet
in her bedroom and all her stuffed animals. "Oh," Ursula has said. "That's
true." Sober as a church mouse, clear-spoken as a valedictorian.
From Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill. Copyright Ingrid Hill 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
