I think I could live at the Brem River estuary. We’d been told to watch for grizzlies and it felt like a place they’d love too — long grass, the clean river. But I didn’t even see tracks in the sand that was as soft as flour. I could live at the mouth of Brem River, surrounded by mountains, Toba Inlet my view. We didn’t swim there, though earlier yesterday we stopped at Moh Creek and had the most beautiful dip in cold water, the beach dappled with stones the colour of butterscotch and ochre and clear white.
Four prawn traps were dropped yesterday on our way up the Inlet and pulled just now: dinner tonight. And Kelsey is in the galley making something wonderful for lunch, her playlist floating out into the lounge.
And when that foghorn blows
I will be coming home
And when the foghorn blows
I want to hear it
I don’t have to fear it
No foghorn at Brem River, just the soft sand, the water, the scent of new leaves, tangles of seaweed, the air as alive as I was, walking the shore.
Note: of course the song is Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic”
At 6 a.m., this was the view from my cabin. We spent the night at Southgate Bluff, right at the head of Bute Inlet. And now we’re heading down the inlet, with stops planned to pick stuff up, drop off other stuff. Yesterday, a brief swim at Purcell Point, the water cold but wonderful, and then we watched the 70,000 Chinook smolts leave the freighter for their immersion in the Southgate River. I’m on the top deck, drinking my second cup of coffee, and about 10 Dall’s porpoises just swam by. Mount Waddington was so beautiful in the first light, a little wreath of cloud around its base.
Overnight at Stuart Island and awake early as the boat negotiated a brief window in tide and current to pick up a truck with a tank of 70,000 Chinook smolts that will be dropped off at Southgate River at the top of Bute Inlet later today. (I am looking at the truck through rainy glass.) And now we are at Orford Bay for a delivery and we watched a load of logs tumble down into the chuck, where it was wrangled into place by a tiny boom boat, moving like a dancer in the green water.
Everything is so beautiful — the colours against the grey sky and green water, the lush forests, and the two grizzlies we see on a far shore, grazing grass, the cinnamon brown shoulders of the closer one, the dark logs. (I can’t photograph the bears with my phone camera though John took a couple of nice ones with his better camera and I’ll post them once we’re home.)
Coda, an hour later:
The biologists just brought a jar of smolts up so we could see them and they talked about their project. A gift on this rainy morning.
On a spring adventure, 5 days in the Discovery Islands and environs, on the Aurora Explorer, a freight boat with 6 small cabins for passengers. We slept last night at Hemmings Bay on East Thurlow Island after a wonderful dinner of strawberry, feta, and spinach salad, followed by ling cod over quinoa risotto and greens, with chocolate mousse drizzled in caramel sauce with flaked sea salt for dessert. B.C. wines. This morning we woke and sailed into the day with breakfast of fresh cinnamon buns, fruit, yoghourt, and (for those who still had room) eggs, sausage, potatoes, fresh bread…We were able to walk at Blind Channel and then we went up Phillips Arm to look at bears on the grassy shore. More adventures this afternoon and tomorrow, we will pick up freight –a truck carrying a tank of Chinook salmon smolts from a hatchery on Sonora Island and we will take them up to the very head of Bute Inlet where they will be released into the Southgate River, which is where they’ll imprint on their own transformation from smolts to fry. This freight boat is carrying diesel fuel, equipment for logging camps, coils of cable, a fridge full of amazing food (and Kelsey, from Malcolm Island, who makes these meals), 10 other passengers who share their stories as we watch the shore for bears, the water for whales, and the sky for rain. Which hasn’t fallen yet. (Fingers crossed.) One or two boats have passed us in the channels. I keep pinching myself that this is happening. That we slept in our bunks and woke in the night to big jellyfish drawn to the lights of the boat. That we had smoked and candied salmon for lunch, with every other imaginable form of charcuterie, cheeses, pickle-y things, and that this will continue until Sunday afternoon. Pinch me again.
On Monday, we’re leaving here for Vancouver Island, spending a night in Comox, and continuing on the next day to a little north of Campbell River where we’ll board a freight boat on Tuesday for an adventure. If you look at this map, you’ll see a number of inlets on the mainland side of the strait and we’ll explore a few of those. Here’s the description of our leg of the journey (the company offers two possible routes, aboard a 135 foot landing craft which carries heavy equipment and other freight to logging camps, remote villages, and other destinations):
She works her way up Discovery Passage into the maze of islands and mainland inlets, with possible stops in Loughborough Inlet, Cordero Channel, Phillips Arm, Stuart Island and Sonora Island. The Aurora Explorer then proceeds up spectacularly scenic Bute Inlet with stops along the way, possibly reaching the head of the inlet, where the Homathko and Southgate Rivers both empty into opposite sides of Waddington Harbour. The upper reaches of the inlet provide a vista of steep granite bluffs, numerous hanging valleys, cascading waterfalls, glimpses of the Homathko Icefield near Mt. Grenville (3109 m) and other glaciers in the surrounding mountain ranges.
I’ve wanted to see these inlets and rivers for years. And there’s no time like the present. No time like this one that is every other moment, because it’s also the container holding the past. The other day I was putting my swimming towels in the basket I use for taking stuff to the pool and I found myself marvelling at its construction (it’s one of those beauties from Ghana, bought for me by my older son and husband in Cache Creek in 2008, so of course when I carry it, I am carrying the dry air, the lunch we had at the Bonaparte Winery when it was just north of town, and the walk we took through Walhachin, pausing to look at an old concrete in a lot I thought about buying, a view of the Thompson River below). I thought of the baskets of Cueva de los Murciélagos in Granada, 9,500 years old, and as shapely and beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen. (You can see a photograph of them here.) Everything happens, and happens again, although the icefields are shrinking and the rivers drying up.
We will sleep in a small cabin (equipped, we are promised, with a flashlight and binoculars), lulled by water. The food will be excellent. I’m bringing books, a journal, and several warm sweaters. Some poetry. I’m remembering Tomas Tranströmer (from “Answers to Letters”, in: “The Great Enigma”, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton) :
Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
Note: this was posted last July and in the meantime, the 5th title in our novella (and innovative prose forms) program has been published. And it’s Anik’s book, Cabin Fever! When we were first discussing the possibility of creating a micropress to showcase novellas, we’d each written one and our experience with publishers was the same. They’d tell us they liked our work but they couldn’t possibly publish a novella! So I remember we smiled at each other over a glass of wine by our woodstove — she was visiting for a few days, enroute back to Amsterdam from Dawson City — and it was in that moment Fish Gotta Swim Editions was formed. We began with my novella Winter Wren, followed by Frances Boyle’s Tower, Barbara Lambert’s Wanda, and Jennifer Falkner’s Susanna Hall, Her Book. We intended to publish Cabin Fever as well but Anik kept saying, No, not just yet, until last summer as we ate spot prawns and garden salad and Reader, she said Yes. So we began planning immediately and now Cabin Fever is fresh off the press, ready for orders. In fact, we’ve shipped an entire case of books in the past week. If you’re interested in buying your own copy, visit us at https://www.fishgottaswimeditions.com/books-1
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I met my dear friend and publishing partner Anik See in 2003. She came to live in a cabin at Bargain Harbour and for the next two years, I saw her every week or so, sometimes more often. A writer, a letterpress printer, a world traveller (by bicycle; see her book, A Fork in the Road, for details of this), a chef, and a remarkably kind and intelligent woman. In 2005 she met a Dutch artist who won her heart and a new chapter of her life began, one that included moving to the Netherlands, having a child, working in broadcasting, teaching, creating podcasts, restoring books and manuscripts, and more. I see her whenever possible. In 2014, she came for a few days enroute back to Europe from a residency at the Berton House in Dawson City, and over a glass or two of wine by our woodstove, the two of us decided to establish a micropress to publish the occasional novella. (You can read about that here.) John and I flew to Amsterdam the next year for Anik’s wedding to the Dutch artist. And because of, well, life, we haven’t seen her since. Until Friday. With great pleasure, we welcomed her family for a couple of days. I remembered how much she liked Harbour suppers (because that was what Edith Iglauer called them)– steamed spot prawns, garlic butter, fresh bread, salad, a galette of fruit in season–so that’s what we had the first night, talking into the dark. When I see her, we just pick up where we left off. We cook food, talk, share books, ideas, and this time we got to celebrate her son’s birthday with a little party on Saturday night, setting the table under the vines with platters of Greek lamb kebabs, chicken with Sicilian salt and herbs, lemon potatoes, salad, warm focaccia with rosemary and flaky salt, a chocolate torte with homemade maple ice-cream. And as we talked, we made a decision about the 5th novella for our Fish Gotta Swim Editions. We’ll share details in a newsletter in October.
On Saturday night, after the birthday boy had gone to bed and the guest (Anik’s former neighbour at Bargain Harbour) was getting ready to leave, Anik’s husband, Walter Von Broekhuizen, said to me quietly, I made something for you. Come and see. If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit, you might remember I’ve mentioned some cedar rounds from time to time, cut from dead trees we had taken down last fall, victims of the climate emergency. (Western red cedars don’t tolerate the periods of excessive heat and drought well.) I kept thinking I wanted to make something with them. But what? I’m not an artist. I had in mind just organic constructions that would let them show their beauty, maybe supported in place by nets of old rope. I thought I might be able to “knit” the nets. I showed Walter the piles of cedar the other day and then somehow, without anyone seeing, he made this for me.
The rounds are braced to some extent by a helpful arm of chestnut. Walter showed me how I could use metal flanges if I want to secure the rounds for a time–eventually they will deteriorate of course and anyway life is ephemeral–but when I said I hoped I could somehow net some of them with knitted rope and add shells, he liked that idea. He also said, You can put things in the middles too. And yes, that will be something I know my grandchildren will enjoy thinking about. A birds nest, a special rock, the tiny skull of a shrew.
After we took them down to the Langdale ferry yesterday, John and I stopped for a swim at Trail Bay. As we walked back to the car, I stopped by the rock at the top of this post. It’s big enough for two people to sit on, looking out across the Strait. Two women maybe, talking about novellas, making a place for them in the currents of literary activity. We knew what we’d call our press at the same moment. Fish Gotta Swim, we both said at the same time. Because novellas gotta. They do.
Note: This was April, 2017, and I have to say that we were still thinking Winter was a female cat at that point. But one evening she (he) was washing her(him)self on the bed beside me and I became aware that we’d misgendered the cat who’d found us earlier in the year, walking out of the woods to join our household.
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I dreamed last night of a stream filled with salmon smolts and on a rock in the stream, an orange-crowned warbler was dipping and doing knee-bends the way American dippers do. I was so close I could see the tiny russet-y patch on its head. When I woke, I was in a sleepy state of wonder. Such abundance — thousands of little fish in a clear stream, a bird I see sometimes foraging for insects in a wisteria beyond my study window, its dull olive feathers a foil for the beautiful crown it wears and which is rarely seen.
I think my dream was the result of a conversation we had at dinner last night. We were drinking the last of our Desert Hills syrah, dark and jammy, and a joy to have with roast lamb. At our table, facing the west, we’ve seen sunsets and dense fog. We’ve seen the trees fill in over the years, so thickly that a couple are going to be topped in a few weeks, not just because they obscure the view but because they lean to the house in wind. Sitting and talking with that deep red wine in our glasses, we started listing the wonders we’ve seen here over the years without ever searching them out. Was it luck, we asked, or coincidence? Maybe they’re the same thing? Maybe if you live in one place for 35 years, you will see everything there is to see?
Snakes mating. Northwestern alligator lizards mating. 6 chestnut-backed chickadees taking their first flight one after another from the cedar nesting box on the arbutus tree. A black bear sow passing within a few feet of the living room window with two cubs ambling behind her. A least weasel entering a narrow passage of our metal roof in search of mice and the same weasel on a branch of dog-rose, peering in the window as I drank my coffee in bed. A doe and her twins coming most mornings and shimmering in sunlight like gods. A margined burying beetle slowly carrying a dead mouse away to bury it. A coyote pup coming day after day for a week, pausing one morning to enter a dog-house (its original occupant long-dead), turn around, then sit in the entrance looking out at the world. A western toad sending out a sticky tongue to take sowbugs from my hand. A huge bull elk running into the woods, its antlers shedding their golden velvet.
Yesterday I was doing something in the vegetable garden and I saw Winter, the cat that came out of the woods in January and decided to live with us, crouched by a tangle of daylilies, thatched over by montbretia leaves. Something was in the tangle. Her body was quivering and alert. Then I saw a mouse come out of leaves and go up to her. It stopped about two inches from her face. It went back into the leaves. Then came out again and did the same thing, pausing for several seconds. Winter is a good mouser — we see evidence on the patio, on the decks… — so I was surprised that she did nothing. She seemed taken aback (if that’s not too anthropomorphic an explanation). It was a moment I’ll never forget.
I think now of my dream, the salmon all swimming quickly in the silver water, and I know it was about wonder. To stay alive to it.
“Ripples on the surface of the water— were silver salmon passing under—different from the ripples caused by breezes”
A scudding plume on the wave— a humpback whale is breaking out in air up gulping herring —Nature not a book, but a performance, a high old culture
— Gary Snyder, from “Ripples on the Surface” (No Nature: New and Selected Poems)
They come, the days of light. They come after weeks of difficult darkness, when the world seems to be whirling out of control. Yesterday I spent hours working in the garden, spreading compost over the vegetable beds, digging out kale seedlings to tuck in elsewhere. I’ve been dragging out potted roses from their winter protection under the eaves and transplanting scented geraniums. When I come in, my hands smell of them: lemon, rose, resiny Fair Ellen, a small-leaved one that is sort of rose and mint. Huge bumblebees drift past my shoulders, eager for the flowering rosemary.
Last night we went to Egmont for supper and I lost my heart to a wooden cruiser docked below the Backeddy Pub. There are times (and this is one of them) when I dream of far places. I’ve just been to far places, I know, and part of me didn’t want to come home. Didn’t want to resume my bad habit of following the news. It was easier to walk ancient streets and not feel the urgency to know what was happening everywhere else. Next week we’ll take ourselves away for nearly a week on a freight boat making its calls to remote communities in inlets and on islands of the Inside Passage. My hope is to have all the vegetable beds sorted and ready before we go so I can plant out seedlings from the greenhouse when we return.
In this tumbledown house, thought and wind move alike. At the head of this winter harbour there was always another old passion, another voice or face to lure into the light. Now, what’s not come to my open hands, the weather’s killed or the old growth eaten long ago.
The strange turns of weather have made some plants thrive and others fade. A huge sage,at least 35 years old, so beautiful in May with its tall purple flowers, and its leaves pungent in squash and apple soup–most of it died after the heavy snow we had in January, though I have rooted cuttings to try again. A pomegranate is leafing up so who knows, maybe next year it will blossom and fruit, to remind me of the gardens of Carmen de la Victoria in Granada where we stayed in mid-March. (A carmen is a traditional house and garden in the Moorish tradition, where the garden is also an orchard; looking out my window there, I saw birds in the pomegranates that had overwintered on the trees, bright oranges and lemons, and quince coming into flower.)
But these are days of light. I’m finally open to them after weeks of wondering how to move into a new season, the news grim, some personal issues keeping me awake at night, and no way to find joy in my daily work. Days of beauty. In our old abandoned orchard, a cherry tree is blooming; a plum by the cucumber boxes is about to flower, its scent of sandalwood and honey held in each tiny bud.
Note: the lines of poetry are from “Closing Down Kah Shakes Creek”, by Charles Lillard.
Note: I was thinking I’d write about the stray apple tree, the one below the west deck, with its buds and its promise and then I thought, O, you’ve already written about it. Several times. So here’s my musing of 6 years ago…
For readers of the blog, the recurrence of plants, coyotes, frog-song, births, deaths, phrases of poetry (sometimes the same poetry), musings about dandelion pizza, the various rivers I love, the growth of grandchildren (and even a fourth one due in July), swimming, must get, well, a little tired. Yesterday I was driving to a meeting and I saw that the coltsfoot at Misery Mile is in bloom and I thought, oh, I should write about that (remembering my own young horse and how the leaves reminded me of his feet), and then almost immediately realized that I already had, in my essay collection Phantom Limb.
I stop on the roadside and carefully lift a plant of the coltsfoot to bring home to my own garden. Petasites palmatus, butterburr, sweet coltsfoot. There are the blooms on their fleshy stalks and the broad leaves with fine hairs on the underside. And there is one small inrolled leaf-shoot, not yet opened, the foot of that colt I hold as I once held the entire weight of his delicate ankles in my hands.
(The plant I lifted didn’t survive.)
And just now, looking out the glass door to the deck, I saw the buds on the volunteer apple tree growing in the rocks on the bank leading down to where our orchard used to be, the orchard I celebrate and mourn in Euclid’s Orchard.
Did this tree sprout from a seed spit over the side of the deck or excreted by birds or even seeds from the compost into which I regularly deposited cores and peelings from apples given us by friends in autumn? Belle of Boskoops from Joe and Solveigh, for instance, which make delectable fall desserts and cook up into beautiful chutney. Or else a seed from the few rotten apples from the bottom of a box bought from the Hilltop Farm in Spences Bridge, their flavor so intense you could taste dry air, the Thompson River, the minerals drawn up from the soil, faintly redolent of Artemesia frigida. This stray is all the more wonderful for its mysterious provenance, its unknown parents, and its uncertain future, for it grows out of a rock cleft, on a dry western slope. I won’t dig it up since I have no doubt its roots are anchored in that rock, but I will try to remember to water it occasionally and maybe throw a shovel of manure its way this spring.
It all comes around again. That’s what I’m saying, I guess. (Even the meeting I was driving to was to work on details for the upcoming—14th!—Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival, one of the pleasures of summer; I’ve been part of the organizing committee, off and on, since the beginning.) We sit on the deck at the end of the afternoon with a glass of wine and we notice that the big-leaf maples are heavy with incipient leaves and blossoms. And that means warblers and other songbirds drawn to both the nectar and to the small insects gathered on the blossoms. And as the leaves unfurl, we’ll watch for the western tanagers who nest either in the maple canopy or near it because we see them going back and forth during the nesting season, a flash of red and yellow, brilliant in summer sunlight.
My noticing, if I may call it that, is part of the way I remember, the way I try to keep intact the world I cherish. I am as political a creature as many or most; I have issues I follow, organizations I support, and lives beyond my own family and friends that I advocate for and with. But what I can do daily is record the place I have lived on and in for nearly 40 years—its cycles, its weather, its rich and ordinary earth. So the coltsfoot, the stray apple tree, the tanagers, even the samaras that fall from the maple in autumn and echo in the middle name of my first grandchild. Not only my home but what surrounds it, holds it. That people want to read these things never ceases to astonish me and I am grateful to you. And to Gaston Bachelard, who feels like a lifelong companion in his wise book about space—both the architectural space we inhabit but also how it fits into its environment, in our actual experience and how we recall it, how it influences our dreams and memories.
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
When I come down in the mornings, usually around 6:30, there are Steller’s jays waiting for me on the railings of the deck just outside the kitchen or else in the fir beyond it or the stray apple tree (the product of a seed and kind of miraculous) . In winter, it’s often 3 or 4, sometimes more. They begin a raucous noise as soon as they see me. I feed the cat first and put the kettle on for coffee. Then I take a handful of black sunflower seeds out to the two posts nearest the sliding glass doors leading to the deck. The jays demolish the seeds within seconds, one gobbling until it’s pushed away by another. They’re aggressive towards one another, though their initial call seems to be social, chack chack chack, alerting others to the food source. They are so smart. If seeds fall to the deck, they know exactly where to find them. If seeds fall between the cracks of the deck boards, they use their beaks like tools to extract them. They love dry roasted peanuts and I’ve noticed they’re quieter if peanuts come out, perhaps wanting to eat their fill before the others discover the treats. If I don’t come with seeds within a few minutes of coming into the kitchen, they stand by the sliding doors and squawk. Sometimes they kick the glass. Over the years, they’ve educated me to their needs, which seems pretty intelligent. It’s not just the mornings when I put out the seeds. Usually they arrive and demand food 3 times a day. They come every day until they don’t. And that makes me think someone else in the vicinity is offering something better. Hazelnuts maybe? We have two hazelnut trees but somehow the jays always get to the nuts before we do. They can live quite a long time; a banded bird in Alaska lived at least 16 years. So I often wonder if I’m seeing birds who’ve come for a decade, or their offspring, or theirs.
There are days when I watch their behaviours and wonder about their private lives. Like all corvids, they’re intelligent and adaptable. Why do they whistle sometimes? Courtship, I think. Music, not noise. You think you know something but you never know enough.
Last evening was beautiful here after a day of rain, sunny periods, a couple of hail storms, lots of rain. We decided to eat outside, not at the big dining table under the wisteria and grapes, but at a little table pushed against the wall for the extra warmth. It’s not far from the posts where I put the seeds out for the jays. Two arrived as we were carrying plates out. They didn’t make the social call, they didn’t make the string of whistles, but instead softly churred, more to each other than to us. John said he thought they might be nesting in a bigleaf maple down below the house because he’d seen them plucking at moss there a few days earlier. I’ve tried spying with my binoculars but can’t really tell if there’s a nest. Last night, though? The churring pair fed peacefully from the same post once I’d put seeds on both posts. They demonstrated a kind of courtesy towards one another, one pecking and then tapping the seed open (usually they carry the seeds away for stashing), and then the other would do the same thing. I suspect these are a nesting pair and sure enough, they headed over to the bigleaf maple. No loud calls this time and no crowds.
This morning there were two jays waiting for me. The same ones? I wish I could tell. There’s so much I don’t know (about everything but maybe jays in particular). I looked out the window at the maple, wondering about a nest. There was only the sound of ferry traffic down on the highway, the first ferry having arrived at Earls Cove ten minutes earlier. And in my mind, as I ground coffee beans, folded towels for our swim, I heard the churring again, saw the courtly behaviour of last evening’s couple. I thought of Wallace Stevens:
I think I could live at the Brem River estuary. We’d been told to watch for grizzlies and it felt like a place they’d love too — long grass, the clean river. But I didn’t even see tracks in the sand that was as soft as flour. I could live at the mouth of Brem River, surrounded by mountains, Toba Inlet my view. We didn’t swim there, though earlier yesterday we stopped at Moh Creek and had the most beautiful dip in cold water, the beach dappled with stones the colour of butterscotch and ochre and clear white.
