“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

For ages I’ve felt kind of indifferent about my work. Indifferent about doing much with it. In some ways I feel that my time has passed. I’ve published 16 books–poetry, essays, novels, novellas–and when I look at the little stack of them in my study, I’m very glad to have written them, to have found interested publishers and even better, interested readers. (Yesterday a woman came up to me in Sechelt to tell me she was reading Euclid’s Orchard and that she was loving it.) But the publishing possibilities have dwindled. I’ve been busy with other stuff lately and haven’t thought too deeply about what might be next. But this morning, swimming in the quiet lake with very soft drizzle misting the surface (and me), I decided I’d return to the novel I’d put away for months. I actually thought about it the other night, briefly, when we were sitting at our table on the deck of the Backeddy Pub in Egmont. I’ve always loved that boat, I told my grandchildren, pointing to the wooden cruiser back in its usual place. (For a time, it was gone and I thought maybe the restoration work had finished and the owner had headed off to far waters but judging from the tarp, maybe that’s not true.)

The novel I put aside is set in a village very like Egmont. They share a community hall, a museum, adjacency to the Skookumchuck rapids, and even a pub. But one of them is an actual place and one of them, well, remember what Melville wrote? “It is not down on any map; true places never are.” The other night, and this morning, swimming, I realized that I need to keep writing about Easthope, the village that isn’t on any map. I’ve spent 30,000 words lovingly creating a world, with characters, history, food, paintings, and it would be silly to simply leave it incomplete. The world is difficult right now, in so many ways. Last night I watched a little of the DNC stuff, including Michelle Obama’s speech, and I thought that her call for us to do something was so timely. What can we do? We can stand up for justice, we can care for one another, we can hold each other up against the tides of anger and violence, and we can record the lives of people living in remote villages, even ones that are not down on any maps.

The boat I showed my grandchildren inspired a boat in my novel. It’s not the same boat but it occupies the same place at the dock and I’ve given it, and its owner, a life I might almost have lived, in different circumstances.

Today is damp and cool, drizzle glazing the green grapes on the vines, and I’ve spent an hour in Easthope, listening to someone tinker with an engine, ravens klooking in the cedars near the Skookumchuck trailhead.

Marsh walked across to the bar and waited while his glass was refilled. One of the young men who worked in the marina came in with an armload of logs and stacked them by the fireplace. Outside, gulls swooped down to exposed starfish as the tide receded. So much was happening in the world. So much to be angry about, to fear, to obsess about during the daylight hours, scrolling through a news feed or listening to the news at 6. But here, on the edge of the peninsula, the mountains beyond soft with fog, you could forget that world and live deeply in this one. Two men struggled with a tote on the dock, trying to lift it onto the deck of a small sailboat. A woman sat on the deck of a converted wooden troller, reading – Tessa met her once in the store and learned she lived on the boat with her dog, in summers following the route that Capi Blanchet described so beautifully about in The Curve of Time, a book Tessa read her first month in Easthope because Richard left a copy in the room she now slept in, and loved. Susan said she’d tried a couple of ways of living, with men, and women, and this was the one that suited her best. She cooked in a few camps when she needed money and she knew how to take her boat’s engine apart and put it back together. A few wooden crates lined the prow, spilling over with herbs. She was wearing bright red gumboots and her dog was stretched across her feet.