“…where a trickle of rain gathered sufficient momentum to make it to the coast.” (Olivia Laing)

I’ve been waking in the night to read. In Brentwood Bay last Saturday, I found Olivia Laing’s To The River, a book I knew about but hadn’t yet read. I loved The Lonely City and The Trip to Echo Spring so I knew I’d enjoy this one too. A book about walking a river, alive to natural history, geography, Virginia Woolf… I was reading an hour ago, at 5 am, the cat purring on my stomach, and I remembered that Venus had appeared in the bathroom window, bright over Mount Hallowell, the morning before. So I got up and no, she hadn’t risen yet. Once up, I thought I’d come downstairs and try to write about the days, the new snow on the mountain yesterday, the chum salmon in Anderson Creek, undulating in the quick shallow water under maples and salmonberry, stalks of scouring rush, and how when we went to have coffee with friends at Oyster Bay after our swim, we could see seals breathing, the fog of their breath on the surface of the glittering water as they swam in search of salmon. I wondered if they were fishing for late chum or if the coho, who also spawn in Anderson Creek, were gathering in the estuary, counting the days on their own particular calendars.

Now at my desk, cold coffee left from yesterday in my wide green mug, and the dark pressing against my window. It’s too late to choose a river to walk from its origins to the ocean. Too late to pair my own observations with those of a writer I’ve read since I was 16. Yet how glad I am to read this book right now.

It’s not always possible to plot where something starts. If I went down on my knees amid the fallen leaves, I would not find the exact spot where the Ouse began, where a trickle of rain gathered sufficient momentum to make it to the coast. This muddy, muddled birth seemed pleasingly appropriate considering the origins of the river’s name.

I’ve walked along many rivers, the Thompson, the Nicola before it enters Nicola Lake, and after, before it joins the Thompson at Spences Bridge, I’ve walked the Fraser near Rearguard Falls and along Matsqui Prairie where my father once talked to a man who’d caught a sturgeon, I’ve walked a stretch of the Red Deer River where I felt the presence of my grandmother somehow and learned later that I’d been walking in almost the exact location of the squatters’ camp where she’d lived with her first husband and 5 children, then 9, and from which she’d been evicted as a widow when the land was sold. The MacKenzie, the Liard, the Skeena. The Seine, the Thames, the Avon. The rivers I never knew names for but which ran down through the bogs of Connemara, their waters tea-coloured, in places overhung with the rampant Rhododendron ponticum, the Elbe with Katka and Tom, the Vlatava in Prague. In Amsterdam, Anik helped us to rent bikes and we rode along the Amstel in search of the views of Rembrandt’s etchings and drawings–swans on the lazy water, and big willows.

When we were at dinner in Victoria and I was saying, in response to a question, that I was probably not going to try to publish books any longer, that I thought the tide had turned, and not in favour of what I write (publishers not really interested, sales tepid, etc.), John said, This is something you might want to write about, to put down in words, because it obviously causes you some distress. It does, but it seems inevitable too. And in the moments when I stand in a sunny window at my friends’ house, looking out at the beauty of Oyster Bay, where remnants of fish weirs are visible at the very low tides, carbon-dated to the 1400s, when I see seal breath in the still air, little flips of salmon jumping before they make their final swim up the creek where they were born in sand, the little sting of publishing rejection hardly matters. I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’m feeling grateful. In my life, I’ve had so much. True and steadfast love, children, grandchildren, a house I know every inch of because I co-built it, gardens I made, even the weight of a cat on my stomach as I read in the night, a cat that came out of the woods to live with us when we needed it (him) most, the winter of 2016/17 when strange lesions appeared in my lungs, but then just as mysteriously disappeared.

And now Venus is bright in the sky over Mount Hallowell, the morning star, though it’s still not light yet. Time to make fresh coffee, a fire, to gather towels together for the pool. At Anderson Creek yesterday, I remembered all the times I’ve been there before. With overnight visitors from the city, with school groups, with Edith Iglauer at the opening of the park dedicated to her husband John Daly (the subject of her book Fishing with John), some years too early, some too late, though it hardly mattered to the fish, who entered the creek when the time was right and paid no attention to us. I want to live like them, purposeful, driven by time and biology and not by outer acceptances, false hope, regret.

It was a weave we were all caught up in. Beside me the stream was clicking east, relentless as a needle. A stitch in time, a stitch in time. Was there really more to the world than this? The details of the day–the cool still air, the sharp stink of garlic–were for a moment so precise that the great and hidden age of the earth seemed as unlikely as a dream. I ducked my head, bewildered, and followed the deer into the trees.