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Intro
Lisa awakes from a mostly sleepless night to the sound of crows in the tree outside her window. The previous evening, the Coast Guard told her family that her younger brother Jimmy, his skipper Josh, and their fishing boat have been reported missing at sea. While Mom and Dad travel down the coast to join the search, Lisa sits on the porch and smokes, worrying about Jimmy and recalling events from their childhood. She and Jimmy were close in age and grew up together. Jimmy took naturally to swimming, although he disliked fishing, boating, and spending time outdoors. In contrast, Lisa struggled to learn to swim and never really liked being submerged in the water, while she loved helping her family with traditional subsistence hunting, fishing, gathering, and preserving the harvest.
When Lisa was about six years old, she remembers, her Uncle Mick came home from several years as an activist with the A.I.M., during which time he lost his wife, Cookie, to some sort of political or racial violence. Lisa and Mick quickly became inseparable. Lisa spent large swaths of her childhood with Mick and her paternal grandmother, Ma-ma-oo; both taught her about her Haisla identity and traditions. As she grew older, Lisa also began to piece together bits of her family’s troubled history: her paternal grandfather, Ba-ba-oo, lost an arm in WWII and subsequently became physically abusive toward Ma-ma-oo; Uncle Mick, Aunt Trudy, and Josh all suffered through Canada’s residential school system; cultural indoctrination and repression basically destroyed the traditional medicine that Lisa’s maternal great-grandmother practiced. Lisa began to have visions of a little man, a messenger from the spirit world who warned her of impending events both good and bad.
In the present, Dad calls to tell Lisa that the Coast Guard have retrieved the fishing boat’s life raft but haven’t located Jimmy and Josh. She decides to take the family speedboat down the coast and meet her parents. While she travels, she continues to reflect on her life experiences. When she was in middle school, Uncle Mick died in a freak accident when he became tangled in the family’s salmon net and drowned. This sent Lisa into a deep depression. She started to struggle in school and began to hang out with a group of boys—Frank, Cheese, and Pooch—known as class bullies. Within a year or two, Ma-ma-oo also passed away in a house fire.
In the present, Lisa stops her boat at Monkey Beach. Jimmy once tried to get a photo of a sasquatch there, and on the night of his disappearance she dreamed she was with him on the beach. Being in this place triggers further memories. Lisa remembers how her life continued to spiral out of control. She ran away to Vancouver at age 16, spending months partying and doing drugs with money she inherited from Ma-ma-oo. When a chance encounter with Frank brought her back to the village, she decided to get sober and re-enroll in high school. But while Lisa’s life improved, Jimmy’s slowly spiraled downward. A freak accident destroyed his promising competitive swimming career. He began to party and drink excessively. He started dating a beautiful but troubled girl nicknamed Karaoke. When Karaoke left town unexpectedly, Jimmy fell apart.
In the present, Lisa hears voices from the spirit world calling her from among the trees that sit behind Monkey Beach. When she offers them a sacrifice of her own blood, they give her a vision of Jimmy’s death. When he found out that Karaoke had gone to Vancouver for an abortion after her uncle, Josh, molested her, Jimmy decided to take justice into his own hands. He intentionally sank the fishing boat and killed Josh with a blow to the head. In the confusion, he lost the life raft, and he didn’t have the strength to swim to the shore. Half in the spirit world and half in the waking world, Lisa finds herself drowning in the water off Monkey Beach with Jimmy standing beside her. He puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her back to the surface, and she slowly comes back to full consciousness on the rocky shore.
