This morning I am remembering Andrew Scott, writer, editor, historian, adventurer, husband, friend. He died earlier this week, too young, and yesterday, at lunch with friends, we were talking about him and I realized I’d put him in my novel Easthope, unnamed, but very much himself: curious, helpful, interested, knowledgeable.
A man Marty and Sam knew down the Coast called her one day to say he understood she wanted to know more about Doriston. Yes, I do, she replied, what’ve you got? I’ve only been there once, he told her, on the winter bird count, but I wrote about it for one of the Vancouver newspapers and I can send you my piece. It’s kind of haunted. Sam says you were there once too? I’ve had it in mind to call you before but I’m just back from the bird count again, though not the Inlet part of it, and I was reminded.
She told him about their trip there, how she was looking in a way for traces of the Anderson girls, though she knew they’d lived a little ways away from Doriston proper. But I wanted to see what they’d have seen in their daily lives, she confessed. The weather, the vista across water. I dreamed about them before I even knew about them…and she stopped, realizing it was a pretty odd thing to tell a stranger. But he listened, and said, There are places on this coast that have that effect on me. The sense of the past superimposed on the present, or maybe it’s vice-versa, but I want to know more, to know it in every sense.
Yes, that’s it, sort of. And with the girls, I wanted to pay them the respect of remembering them, I think. I’m a painter, maybe Sam and Marty told you that, and so I’ve tried to paint the moment their boat went down, I’ve tried to imagine what happened after. Not in a macabre way, though I guess it might sound so as I describe it, but to make a connection with them and their experience. I was a teacher for years, mostly art, and mostly older kids. So when I read the Doriston notebook in the Museum, I was more than impressed that children, really, could do that fine work of researching their community, describing its weather, its history, its social structure. One of the 3 sisters, the older one Mary, is named in the notebook as one of the contributors, so I felt I got to know a little about how she saw the world. A world she knew intensely and well, and then she was gone. I wonder what it must have been like for their parents.
The man on the other end of the phone was quiet for a moment. They moved away. You probably knew that. And there were no longer enough kids to keep the school open. So in a way it was the end of that chapter of Doriston’s history. Though others stayed, and a few live there to this day. I don’t think I’d want to live there myself, it’s too remote, too far from services we think we need, or I do anyway, but I want to know it continues still.
...Theresa Kishkan 