I woke from the most atmospheric dream. I was walking on Sandcut Beach, west of Sooke, and I was drenched in rain. When I got close to the creek where I used to shower as a girl, camping overnight on that lonely stretch of coast, I bent to pick up a piece of sandstone, dense with fossils. I woke from the dream, my face damp with tears. I wanted to be that girl again, in that place, with my whole life ahead of me.
Where do the years ago? Millions of them are held in the stones that line the windowsills of my house, the chunks of sandstone I picked up on that beach. The formation where the fossils are found dates from the Oligocene epoch, roughly 34 – 20 millions years ago. It’s a good way to think about time and memory. And this morning, after my dream, I’m musing about both.
I first heard winter wrens on the trail leading to that beach. And if you’re a birder and you are saying, No, not winter wrens! They’ve been reclassified! They’re Pacific wrens!, let me just reply that I know that. But in 1972 or 3, when I first found the little parking area on the West Coast Road and walked down a long fern-lined trail through ancient forest to the breakers of Sandcut Beach, anyway, in those years they were still winter wrens. (And how do they think of themselves? Do they care what we call them? I don’t believe they do.)
To be there again, I wrote a novella, Winter Wren, which was the first title in the imprint my friend Anik See and I founded in 2015: Fish Gotta Swim Editions. We wanted to highlight the novella form and thought we would start with my Winter Wren, reasoning that if the venture didn’t work out, I’d be disappointed of course but we wouldn’t have to try to explain to someone else why their book didn’t sell.
In the novella, the protagonist Grace Oakden buys a cabin above Sandcut Beach. It’s the cabin I used to stand below and wish myself into. The thing about writing fiction is that you can do that. Grace is an artist and she takes up the challenge from the elderly man who owned the cabin before her to paint the view at dusk. She does it first for him and then for herself. He’s the one who tells her about the chunks of sandstone.
I’m glad I didn’t scare you away last time. That strong voice, a surprise given his frail shoulders.
I’ve brought you a piece of sandstone, she replied, placing it on his lap. It’s full of those shell fossils. I wish I knew more about them.
Keep watching the beach, he told her, and sooner or later you’ll see a geologist. He’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know. For instance, the beach is part of the Sooke Formation, sandstone deposits which contain fossils from the late Oligocene period, around 20 million years ago. He turned the rock over in his hands. You see, this is a clam, and this is a barnacle. They don’t look much different from what you’d find there now.
Grace asks him about the wrens, thinking she has heard a run of notes in their song which reminds her of Bach.
I keep seeing one, or maybe two, in the underbrush just outside the cabin. I listen to their song — and I think I hear Bach. Or maybe that’s the wrong way around: when I listen to a Bach recording, and I’m thinking here of the Partita for Flute in A Minor, the last movement, it’s as though I’m hearing a slower version of the wren’s song. Is that far-fetched?
He smiled the thin smile that looked more like a grimace but which was simply what happened to muscles in extreme age. I heard the Bach too. Then he whistled about ten bars of the Bourrée Anglaise. There. You hear that run of sixteenth notes? I knew an ornithologist who recorded most of the birds of the west coast and he gave me a tape — one of those reel tapes where you had to feed the tape to another reel — which he instructed me to play at a quarter speed. I did — and yes, it’s there.
So wren song this morning, and fossils, and a long stretch of wild beach, with rain blowing in my face, though I’m inside, near the woodstove, my windowsills lined with rocks and shells.
And on my desk, the little book that holds all those things. Still.
