This short story of 8750 words has so many names in it. I have counted 44 names. It was hard to keep track who was who. Despite that slight difficulty, story about this old woman and her fellow islanders is very beautiful. As soon as the story revealed the meaning of ‘the Reach’ I had a hunch where the story was heading. Even before I learned about Stella’s (Old woman’s) terminal illness and the supernatural aspect of the story, I knew she was finally going to cross the Reach, because I would have done the same thing in her shoes.
Stella Flanders did not have a reason to leave the Goat Island
Stella, the old woman was not a hermit and her fellow Goat Islanders are not some cabin dwelling off-grid community. Stella lived in a proper house which had an indoor bathroom and a wood burning stove for heating.
Goat Island was a small town. It had a church and a town-hall for the community, a school for children, and a doctor to get medicine, mail service via a mail boat, the Goat Island Store to buy goods. So when Stella said she had everything she needed on the island, she wasn’t wrong.
Islanders could see the Raccoon Head City in mainland across the Reach. They traverse one and half mile wide Reach all the time to go to the mainland using ferry services and lobster boats. So they are not strangers to the city life. They had access to radio and TV signals and even an underwater telephone line from mainland to their island.
There were few reasons to leave the island. To have a higher education, to have a job, to go to the hospital, or for shopping. Stella used to send her son, Alden to fetch anything she needed from the mainland. She was content with her life. So there was no reason for her to leave the comfort of her island. And I am pretty sure she was busy doing her household chores to even think about going on an adventure on mainland.
Why did she cross the Reach?
40 years ago she missed out the opportunity to cross the Reach on foot and visit the mainland because she was doing laundry. I bet she sometimes regretted not having that experience. I have missed out some events and experiences because of some mundane reasons only to regret later. I think Stella also regretted not going with her husband and Bull Symes on that hike.
If she only had a deep buried longing to walk on the frozen Reach, then the people of the Goat Island would have helped her to cross the Reach to go to the city and come back safely. People seemed to adore their most senior citizen of the community, so they would have come together to fulfil her wish. But she did not ask anyone to take her, not even her family: son, granddaughter and her husband. What made her go alone?
In the last few months of her life she was literally seeing ghosts. And her cancer was getting worse. So she might have figured out that her end was near. At the end, when the ghost of Bull Symes revealed that it was her time to go, she got little bit scared. But I think even before she left her home for the one last time, her unconscious mind already knew that her time was up. So instead of waiting for cancer to take her on its terms and render her into a bedridden horrifying sight, she chose to go out in her own terms.
Did the dead come back to sing?
Stella Flanders was over 95 years old when she started to see ghosts. It started one month after her 95th birthday. Also according to her autopsy she was riddled with cancer. So her old age combined with advanced cancer could have affected her brain to hallucinate ghosts. Or may be as many near death stories claim, Stella’s oncoming death could have lowered the veil between her and the afterlife.
Counter argument, Stella physically interacted with the dead, so they must be real, right? Ghost of her husband put his ghost hat on Stella’s head. When she stumbled, he caught her and took her hand to assist her. Stella’s dead best friend Annabelle Frane’s ghost took her other hand. Finally she took dead Bull Symes’s hand to crossover to the afterlife. All this could be some hallucination of a dying old woman in cold snow storm. But there are third party evidence to claim that the dead really came to take away Stella.
Author of the story went into great length to hammer in the fact that Stella was wearing her son’s hat. Author has specified, six times, it was Alden’s hat. Throughout that 6 times we can gather that it was an orange hat with a bill and two fur-lined ear flaps. But when she was found, froze to death, she wasn’t wearing her son’s hat. Instead she was wearing her dead husband’s blue hat on her head. Few people: Stella’s and Bill’s son Alden, Larry McKeen, and John Bensohn had noticed this bizarre detail.
Author also makes it clear that Alden Flanders is not a very bright fellow. He has used few people’s point of view on Alden to paint a picture about Alden’s intelligence. This aspect makes a huge impact later in the story when it reveals that Alden starts to hear the wind is singing in dead people’s voices, because he isn’t simply intelligent enough for such imagination.
So who knows, may be the Dead really came to take away Stella Flanders.
It’s not a rare achievement to cross the frozen Reach
Story presents (at least I got a feeling) it was like a huge achievement to walk from Goat Island to Raccoon Head City and come back which only few handful of old timers did in the distance, forgotten past. But after looking at dates and numbers I realized that anyone above 45 years old should remember the last time when the Reach froze. People above 50 years should have definitely played on the frozen snow of the Reach. Any curious 20 something old person at that time now should be in their 60s and they all can’t be dead. Even Stella’s son Alden is now 59 years old. 40 years ago when the Reach froze, he was 19 years old. So why Bill Flanders and Bull Symes didn’t took him with them to the Raccoon Head? They asked then 55 years old Stella to accompany them, but not young and fit lad, Alden.
Depending on how many days the Reach stayed frozen and safe to walk on, many people might have traveled on the ice not because of curiosity but because of necessity. People like George Havelock and George Dinsmore who used to work on the mainland might have traveled to go to work. Freddy Dinsmore, the previous owner of the Goat Island Store might have brought in resupplies for his store.
Overwhelming number of characters
As I previously stated, this short story has more than 40 names crammed in to it. I read the story for the first time without paying much attention to all the names. So whenever a name came up, I could not tell whether it was a new character or not. I missed out a lot because of this confusion. So second time I took notes and made a list of characters in order to make sense who was who. And when I read the story for the third time I did not have to look at the list because I already knew who was who.
I’m really impressed with Stephen King’s ability to track all these characters and names. If he wrote everything about one character in one place and moved on to another character, then it is not an impressive feat. But the way he reveals details about characters not in once but few at a time throughout the story makes the characters flesh out by layer by layer.
Stephen King has made 2 mistakes.
There are two instances in the story that I’m pretty sure Stephen King had slipped up.
The old woman, Stella Flanders had two great-grandkids. A boy and a girl. Their names are Lona and Hal. When Stella was thinking about her family, she thought “David and Lois Perrault begat Lona and Hal.”
So it is clear that Stella’s granddaughter had one son and his name was Hal. But in the beginning of the story, Lois’s son’s name is Tommy. After that, Stella’s great-grandson is mentioned as Hal.
“Tommy asked his mother: ‘What does she mean?’
Lois only shook her head, smiled, and sent them out with pots to pick berries.”
Confusion about who went down with the Dancer. Hattie Stoddard lost someone when a boat named the Dancer capsized. Was it her father or her husband or both? In two places it says she lost her father to the accident and in one place it says she lost her husband. It is possible that both her father and her husband were working on the same boat. When the dead people started to come back to meet Stella, Hattie’s mother and father came back looking young. Stella noticed “holding her hand was Hattie’s dad, not a mouldering skeleton somewhere on the bottom with the Dancer, but whole and young.” So it is clear that her father definitely disappeared with the Dancer.
Hattie and her mother, Madeline both had the Stoddard surname. Her father’s name wasn’t mentioned but Stoddard must be his surname. Since Hattie was using his maiden name, I think she wasn’t married at all. So mentioning his husband went down with the Dancer should be a mistake.
I am happy for the old woman
Normally these kind of stories leave you with a sad feeling. From outsiders perspective Stella Flanders met a tragic ending. Oldest woman in a community wandered in to a snow storm and succumbed to the harsh cold weather. But from Stella’s perspective, she was finally able to reunite with her dead husband and her dead friends. In the afterlife, all of them had regained their health and youth. Now Stella could enjoy her regained youth and sing with them until the Judgment Day.
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