Taking My Life by Jane Rule

Author:Jane Rule [Rule, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jane Rule, autobiography, gay, Lesbian, tomboy, nevada, british columbia, Literature, lesbianism, sexual politics, Desert of the Heart (1964), This Is Not for You (1970), The Young in One Another's Arms (1977), Contract with the World (1980), Memory Board (1987), After the Fire (1989), gay rights, little sister's
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2012-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Sally Millett and Jane Rule

Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

The steelhead trout were running. At the lodge, we met a man who ran a radio program called The Fish Finder. Each week he fished in a different place and reported the conditions of the place for other fishermen. He complained good-naturedly that he had a trunk full of steelhead, and his wife and all his friends were sick of fish. He opened the trunk to prove his claim.

“Would you like one?” he asked.

Sally and I looked at each other.

“It just might help,” Sally said.

“Help yourself,” he said.

I reached into the trunk and shoved a fist up inside the head of a ten-pound steelhead.

“How are we going to get it back, though?” Sally asked.

“We’ll get them to freeze it for us.”

That evening I was called to the phone.

“Dean Hawkes here,” the familiar voice announced. “Are you enjoying your vacation?”

“Very much,” I said.

“When do you intend to come back?”

“Tomorrow?”

“We’ll expect you then, tomorrow,” she said and hung up.

In the morning, we stowed our frozen fish on the luggage rack overhead, and then Sally went back to sleep. I was content to watch for all the familiar landmarks of the road, one every two or three miles for the first fifty, whether the peach orchard where we stopped to buy particularly good peaches or the suicide bend where large trucks had gone over into the river. I knew the very place where Dad had had a head-on collision coming up to see us one summer when I was young enough still to be sleeping in my parent’s room. He had hitchhiked the rest of the way and walked in cut and bruised but otherwise all right. I knew the legends of the road as well: Black Bart’s Rock, behind which he had hidden to rob stagecoaches; the cliff off which the proverbial Indian maiden had leapt to her death in unrequited love. There was a favourite picnic site; there the turnoff to buy salami.

I looked up from my musing into the landscape to see our frozen fish drooping its tail over the luggage rack. The heating system was located in the rack. I took it down and, because Sally slept on, wrapped it in her coat as a way of insulating it. It had become more of a peace offering than a joke, though we still hadn’t decided with whom we’d make the peace.

Into wine country, the weather getting warmer, I began to feel not apprehensive but eager to be back. Though I assumed we would be in some sort of trouble at the dormitory, I didn’t imagine our punishment would exceed the pleasure of the trip. After so many months of illness and struggle, to feel younger again, reckless, and more or less sure of loving reproof, restored for me a kind of courage, a simple pleasure at being alive and in comic trouble.

When we arrived at the college gates around four in the afternoon, we decided against presenting ourselves without checking on the climate.

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