After the airport, after the Canada Line to Georgia Street, and after the 257 Express to Horseshoe Bay, it felt like we were actually on our way home. We’d enjoyed five nights in Gatineau, spending time with our family there, helping a bit with putting the garden to bed, watching one boy’s diving class (the other boy’s swim team practices curtailed because of a shoulder injury), eating delicious meals, walking a trail right in the middle of the fall colour, we’d enjoyed all that, but somehow the quiet seats we found at the front of our ferry, with the Bowen Island ferry just to the port side, a seal mid-Howe Sound, those felt familiar.
Cities are a rare pleasure for us. This morning I am looking out at the woods, some mist over Sakinaw Lake, little splashes of gold where the big-leaf maples are turning, hearing the Steller’s jays yelling for their seeds (I heard blue jays in Quebec), and feeling the cat’s body winding around my feet as I sit at my desk. But yes, cities and their pleasures: crossing the bridges from Gatineau to Ottawa, seeing the library of Parliament’s elegant shape above the river, or the War Museum on LeBreton Flats or the National Gallery’s glass pyramids (I’d hoped to go on Monday to see Sylvia Safdie’s TERRA but discovered the gallery was closed that day), and yesterday morning, driving to the airport with my grandsons commenting on things we passed, which in their observations were mostly electoral signs, because, like their dad, they are passionate about history and politics and the discussion in the warm car was mostly about the election results from the previous day.
But ferries bring us home and that crossing is a time between. I mostly grew up on Vancouver Island so this has always been true. I remember 48 years ago this fall, sitting in St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, reading Malcolm Lowry’s October Ferry to Gabriola, a brilliant and flawed novel, and feeling both homesickness and anticipation, because I was on the first leg of a long trip home — first across the Irish Sea (by ferry), then by train to London where I spent a week mostly making notes about the island I’d lived on off the west coast of Ireland, wanting to get everything down before I forgot even a moment of that otherworldly time, then a flight back to Vancouver, and a ferry home to Victoria. I’d been in a place about as far from a city as one could be and I remember reading the passage in which the protagonist, Ethan Llewelyn, remembers a childhood gift:
To be sure he had not been bidden so far afield as had his father, who’d spent the last year of peace before the First World War as a legal adviser on international cotton law in Czarist Russia, whence he brought back to his young son in Wales, or so he announced, lifting it whole out of a mysterious deep-Christmas-smelling wooden box, a beautiful toy model of Moscow; a city of tiny magical gold domes, pumpkin- or Christmas-bell-shaped, sparkling with Christmas tinsel-scented snow, bright as new silver half-crowns, and of minuscule Byzantine chimes; and at whose miniature frozen street corners waited minute sleighs, in which Ethan had imagined years later lilliputian Tchitchikovs brooding, or corners where lurked snow-bound Raskolnikovs, their hands stayed from murder evermore: much later still he was to become unsure whether the city, sprouting with snow-freaked onions after all, was intended to be Moscow or St. Petersburg, for part of it seemed in memory built on little piles in the water…
I remember putting the book aside and watching lovers walking, ducks in the lake, the memorial garden to WB Yeats with its wide-armed sculpture by Henry Moore, and the melancholy leaves falling everywhere. It was everything I felt made visible.
And the little ferry to Bowen Island, white in blue water, under blue mountains, a wake of ripples behind it, was everything I felt too. That arrivals and departures are long, beginning and ending with water.
