It is solved by swimming. (I’m lucky to have two children who know Latin and can help me tweak a familiar phrase to my own purposes.) It is solved by going down to the lake on an October afternoon and just walking into the water until there’s nothing left to do but glide forward. The awkwardness of the aging body, the little pain near the left knee, the shoulders stiff from a long flight in an economy seat, and then lugging a suitcase through an airport, a train, a bus, and up the flights of stairs onto ferry’s passenger deck. Then back down, along the ramp, and to the parking lot where the car waits.
It is solved. Or something is solved. The knot of thinking — ahh, windmilling the arms as I backstroked the length of the shore, but further out, in deep water; the knot easing out into something usable, long strands of sinew, to thread through a needle and sew into layers of cloth.
Something is solved. Or at least recognized as a possible direction: choosing geometric signs that carry meaning for me and finding a way to follow them. A meander, a spiral, a small roof. Swimming yesterday, I was thinking about a way to gather together ideas I have about form and function, about language, about a line that might carry music or the sound of the wind, the faint echo of starlight on a still night when you stand outside in nothing but a light cotton nightdress and listen. Something scrambles in the eaves nearby. Something else is also thinking.
The swimming is best in cold water. Best when the sky is blue over you like an open book. Best when a tiny fish jumps near your face. When the mergansers come to sit on a log and mutter amongst themselves. Yesterday the sand was warm when I came out of the water and I stood for a few minutes, wrapped in a big pink towel printed with flamingos.
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.
I was in the ancient history section and noticed the books inscribed with an owner’s name and on the other side of the room, Forrest was looking through the collectible books and he noted the same name. Then he found Mineral Deposits of the Canadian Shield, authored by E. L. Bruce, the very man whose Virgil I was buying, and whose Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way I had picked up and then decided against. (I have a copy at home. I also have the Virgil but in a different translation.) We spent time wondering about Dr. Bruce, as one does, or at least as a historian does. Mineral Deposits was inscribed to the geologist’s wife in 1933. A story there, how the books came to be in a school gym book sale in Rockcliffe Park, and we talked about it at length.
And how lucky, A. found a biography of Robert Laird Borden, whose name he’d been dreamily chanting for days.
There was something in the pattern of clouds and sky yesterday that I wanted to quilt. I wanted to somehow find that texture in layers of cotton and thin batting, using Japanese thread, and somehow as I was swimming under the sky in water almost too cold to bear, I was taking the pattern into my own breathing, my own pulse.
I was myself yet I wasn’t. I was looking at the pattern but also I knew it was beyond me. It was almost too cold. A loon feeding under the cedars near the shore suddenly saw me and took off low over the water.
I am a sky where spirits live. Stare into this deepening blue, while the breeze says a secret. Like this.
Today, I looked for that sky but it was gone. Another blue, lighter, and 4 female mergansers arrived just after I did, settling on a log by where I turn to swim in the other direction. When I’d finished, John said, They came just after you began your swim and they left just as you came out of the water. We saw them in the distance, swimming away.
The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns. When someone doesn’t believe that, walk back into my house. Like this.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to stay in the water as one month becomes another and I know I’ll feel as though I’ve lost something — being part of the layers of sky and lake and air, small allegiances of ducks, the sound of kingfishers. Like this. Almost exactly like this.
Note: the lines are Rumi’s, translated by Coleman Barks.
Enjoying: My fall swims. After a warm and sunny weekend, today is grey and cool. I will swim later this morning, knowing that this might be the final week. (I’ll be away for five days later in the week until next Tuesday and the break might serve as the volta.) Yesterday the water was so clear and green that I hardly noticed the temperature, until I came out and couldn’t get warm. But what luxury to swim in clean water under a blue and cloudless sky.
Watching: I almost never watch television. Somehow I never got the trick of it — sitting still, etc. But last Wednesday, I asked John if he could find the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice for me to rewatch. (I loved it the first time around!) And he joined me in sitting still for an hour each morning until yesterday when we watched the last two episodes because we couldn’t wait another day, even though we knew the ending. I loved every minute. Perfectly plotted, beautifully filmed, a glance carrying more information than most long speeches, tiny devices — the delicate needlework and attention to clothing detail that open each episode, for instance — doing so much to delineate time and place. I’ve read several Austen biographies, most recently Claire Tomalin’s, and I think I’ll find my copy on our shelves.
Appreciating: Yesterday I drove to Egmont to take boxes of stuff to the thrift store. I was expecting a quiet drive and it was, until the posse of motorcyclists caught up with me and shadowed me. I pulled over so they could pass, which they did with great roaring of engines. And Egmont itself was busy! The parking lot for the Skookumchuck trail was full. Two guys on the roof of the post office, which has been under plastic tarps for some time, repairing it. A crowd of cars and vans outside the hall. When I returned to my car after taking the boxes to the thrift store (it’s in the lower level of the hall), a woman said to me, We have flowers left over from a wedding last night. Come and help yourself.
Remembering: 4 months ago tomorrow my book The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze was published. Apart from the reviews (you can read them here), so many people have written or called to talk about it with me. They’ve shared stories as well as praise. Every word of both is appreciated. Sometimes I’ll be doing something else and I’ll remember a phrase that reminds me that yes, I did publish a book, and yes, people have read it. (It’s the time of year when literary festivals occur almost every weekend and I’m reminded that I wasn’t invited to a single one, alas.)
Cooking: As well as taking stock, I’ll be making soup today, though not stock. (I have some in the freezer to use.) Double-smoked bacon and mixed pulses. And maybe soda bread or biscuits to have with it for supper. (I have some soured cream in a bottle to use up too.)
Making: I am stitching a horizontal strip quilt, using blue sashiko thread to follow a meandering line. I wish I could put into words how it feels to have my hands filled with soft cotton and linen and another dimension developing as I sew, a flat surface taking on the topography of rivers, trails, roads leading into the unknown.
Hoping: As cold weather comes, I am hoping against hope that Russia stops its senseless violence against Ukraine.
Thinking: I have in mind a textile work, using some of my indigo-dyed ramie, to explore the textured dimensions of water and how it feels to be held in it. I am not a visual artist and have no idea how to work this way but I have the image in my mind and I’ve been turning it over, looking at it from various perspectives, and maybe I’ll find in my hands the skill to begin.
Loving: Getting out of bed last night to pee and seeing the moon, the waning gibbous, rising over the high shoulder of Mount Hallowell, and going out onto the deck off the sunroom to stand for a minute in its silver light. I wasn’t awake to see it set but no matter, there’s Sappho (in Anne Carson’s translation):
Moon has set and Pleiades: middle night, the hour goes by, alone I lie.
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.
Thinking: This morning, swimming in cloud and cool water, I was thinking about the deaths last week of Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard, both of them writers I began to read in high school. I remember a teacher telling me in grade 11 that I would love Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and he was right, I did, and I re-read it every few years. I had no idea you could write a book about observing and praising the things you found in wild places. And Wendell Berry’s poems came to me around the same time, their simplicity deceptive, because they weren’t simple at all but carefully constructed, holding important ideas and they held as well so much goodness in them, templates for a ethical and generous world. When John and I met in 1979, there were many things we disagreed about — writing, books — but Wendell Berry was central to our reading and we realized that what we shared more than we thought. We just had different vocabularies, poetics.
The summer ends, and it is time To face another way. –Wendell Berry, from “The Summer’s End”
Eating: We had an apple cake, made with windfalls, and it was delicious. The deep sweetness of apples turning under their skins to memory. And the bears are eating the last of the crabapples, ruining the tree in their urgency to reach every hanging fruit. When I stand at the upstairs window, looking out at the driveway, I see them once or twice a day, the huge mother and her two cubs. The cubs climb and the mother keeps watch below, fixing her eyes on me in the window. We know each other. She is the same bear who came last year to the door while I was quilting, looking in briefly, the tell-tale star on her chest. And she’s come before, years ago, sitting under the tree, sated with crabapples. In the old stories we might be friends, we might gather berries together, share news of our children, but in this story I know better.
Making: a mound of sand, a rhubarb leaf, cement mixed in the old wheelbarrow, the one we used to mix and pour the footings for our house, and two days of waiting for the cement to set. Yesterday we brought the birdbath to its place on a cedar stump near the steps leading to the front door. Stones for the smaller birds to stand on, an oyster shell, and clean water. They haven’t come yet.
Cooking: pappardelle with pesto last night, the salad we loved in Oaxaca at Cafe Boulenc (tomatoes, green olives, cucumber, red onion, parsley, cubes of sourdough bread toasted in olive oil), lamb burgers with garlicky yogourt and salad topped with slices of feta, fish tacos, black beans with the small fierce peppers from the greenhouse. Apple cake.
Working (on): the long horizontal panels of sky and water and myself swimming, organized as a quilt (this time: another time I arranged them as an essay). Stitching, I am finding a way into the next season, my needle meandering as a river meanders, pulling the blue threads of water, bringing the months of morning swims together, from mid-April until probably the week after next.
Loving: the morning visits from the Steller’s jays, thought I have to say I didn’t expect them to be quite as insistent as they’ve become, emboldened by the years of seeds. But to turn to their calls and whistles (and anyone who says you can’t have sustained relationships with birds, with reciprocal communication, is simply wrong), to see them in the blue they wear so casually, the blue I try for in my dye sessions, is to be both privileged and inspired. (This one is throwing a side-eye just after a squawk, while another, which you can’t see, is softly whistling.)
Listening: Over and over, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “There in myrtle shades reclined“, one of Dejanira’s arias from Handel’s HÉRCULES, a piece that forever reminds me of driving the road from Lillooet through Pavilion on our way to a Cariboo wedding, windows open, the cd volume turned right up, me singing along with my feet on the dashboard.
There in myrtle shades reclin'd, By streams that through Elysium wind, In sweetest union we shall prove Eternity of bliss and love.
This was the lake yesterday and the dark head is me, swimming. The air was 9 degrees. The water might have been a little warmer but not much. I loved every minute — the long strokes from one set of cedars to the other, the young merganser who swam past nonchalantly, the clouds above the dark islands. Yesterday, in the lake, I thought I might last forever, swimming my slow lake km. each morning. I loved smelling the hardhack hanging over the water, distant smoke from someone’s woodstove, the sudden tang of dried salal berries when I bent to towel off my hair.
But this morning I wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was even cooler, both the water and the air. I couldn’t find my place in the small swells of the lake. After about 2/3 of my usual swim, I came out to wrap my towel around me. I don’t want the season to end but I wonder if I am up to the shifts of temperature, the late rising of the sun (John points out we could come later in the day but it’s not the same), my body’s inability to get warm afterwards. This morning I am disappointed in myself. I have a wetsuit and might continue the early swims wearing that but I don’t love swimming in a wetsuit. It’s hard to actually submerge my body and it’s harder to breathe deeply with the suit’s constriction across my chest.
And the lake doesn’t feel quite the same either with the layer of neoprene between me and the water.
What I’ll miss when I finally stop lake swimming and return to the local pool with its uncertain schedules and sudden closures because of lifeguard shortages, anyway, what I’ll miss is how all summer my morning swims allowed for deep complex thinking. Oh sure, there are small disadvantages to entering that particular state of being. Some mornings I’ll be back-stroking with my eyes closed, working my way through a complicated puzzle, and then I’ll open my eyes to discover I’m far out in the water. But the wonderful synthesis of thinking and movement is worth the dislocation, the drift. The moment when the movement in the distance in not just ripples but an animal, an otter, and it sees you just in time to veer away.
(While I was writing this, a bear just loped past my window.)
We’ll see what happens tomorrow. In June, the end of summer felt so far away. We were feasting on garden greens, anticipating the raspberries, beans, tomatoes, squash, abundance of basil, the tart grapes, the Merton Beauty apples. The arrival of families, lamb on the barbecue, towels on the railings. Today I can’t get warm. There are tomatoes still, and basil, and apples in the back room, picked all at once when we realized the bears were anticipating them too. And maybe uncertainty is part of swimming, the possibility of the unknown. I think of Carl Phillips’ beautiful poem, “Swimming”:
…how the fog hanging stranded just above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind parts of those questions from which I half-wish I could school my mind, desperate cargo, to keep a little distance. An old map from when this place was first settled shows monsters everywhere, once the shore gives out—it can still feel like that…
My hope with this latest dye work was to rejuvenate two sturdy but stained cotton duvet covers. I wrapped one of them, on the right, with jute string, thinking I would get some eel grass and areas of deep blue. (Because the fabric is twisted tight, the dye doesn’t penetrate evenly; I am always amazed at the contrasts.)
In the centre of the other one, I stitched a spiral leading out to a single trail. I also tied some beach stones in fairly random places. The spiral didn’t work as I thought it might but there’s a lovely circular Fibonacci pattern there which is a nice surprise.
I could do this forever. It takes time, going back and forth to submerge the fabric in dye, then removing it to let it oxidize. You pretty much need most of a day. I let them bundles sit out overnight and discovered this morning that a bear cub had been to the compost, leaving a pile of poop near the dyed bundles. Maybe it was curious. I wonder if it is wandering around, blue-nosed, this morning?
So after a vinegar rinse, the fabric is now hanging to dry. I’ll let it rest for a few days, then I’ll wash it with gentle soap. And to use up the remaining dye, I put a length of ramie (a fibre related to nettles) and another length of some unknown stuff I bought for its contrasting weave. I don’t imagine they’ll get very dark — most of the indigo was used up — but they might make nice tablecloths or scarves or who knows. Not me. Not yet.
After my swim, I sat by the fire and tied stones into one of the pieces I’m dyeing today. I have two white cotton duvet covers, maybe 25 years old, and when I was washing them last week, I noticed they had some small stains on them. So I thought I’d prepare an indigo vat and see what I could do to give them a second life.
One of them is twisted and tied. I like this method because it often results in a relief pattern something like eel grass. Here’s that one soaking in water:
And here it is in its first dip in the indigo vat:
After ten minutes I fished it out and it’s oxidizing on the cedar bench while the other piece is having its first dip.
I sewed a kind of spiral and trail on the second cover, pulling the stitches tight, and I hope this will result in a nice shibori design. I also tied some of the stones in the first photograph at random on the rest of the surface. In the past, this technique has produced snow angels or birds in flight. You never know, though. It’s all about surprise, or at least it is for me, a complete amateur.
I like the process. I like the dreamlike state I enter as I stare into the vat and wait. Anything could happen. Steller’s jays are all around me as I dip cloth and spread it out to oxidize afterwards. It’s a blue they recognize, preening in the nearby trees. A blue I dream of, using my tongs to move the cloth around in the indigo dye, and later, at night, while the stars glitter and a coyote sings. It never gets old, preparing the cloth, measuring powders, rinsing, pegging the finished pieces to the clothesline to dry.
