Tag: Backeddy Pub

“my mind becomes one with all this” (Liu Tsung-Yuan)

theresakishkan8 Comments

jp-tk

I’ve been working on the final edits of an essay which will appear in a forthcoming anthology, Sharp Notions: Essays on the Stitching Life, due in fall from Arsenal Pulp. My contribution is about John’s bilateral hip replacement surgery in the fall of 2020 and the unexpected injury he suffered during that surgery. It’s about caring for him during a difficult period and how I worked on two quilts to keep my mind quiet. I was afraid. There were other medical issues at the time and our house in the woods felt very far from the services we needed. Because of COVID and because we were advised to consider John immunocompromised, we were not seeing other people at that time. I sewed and John healed and then I wrote about how the two processes were intimately connected, the threads overlapping and entwined. (In an older time, his incisions would have been sewn up after the surgery but now most surgeons use staples!)

Reading the essay as I worked on the rough spots, I realized it was about marriage as much as anything else. As well as anything else. When John was in UBC hospital, recovering from the surgery, we celebrated our 41st wedding anniversary. I bought pastries at a little bakery near where I was staying and took them to his room with a copy of Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-Yuan, translated by Red Pine (the pen-name of Bill Porter). We ate the pastries and read poems to each other, looking out towards the North Shore mountains.

Sewing, poetry, pastries…these have been constants of our lives together, it seems. We met at a poetry reading in 1979, we’ve worked as poets (though my writing trail veered off that course about 30 years ago), I began making quilts 35 years ago and the results are on every bed in our house, and we’ve always loved good pastries. When we stayed in Paris in 2009, in a tiny garret flat in the Marais, we went daily to a patisserie nearby and bought delicious treats to bring back to have with coffee. There were something like 94 stairs to our flat so walking up and down three or four times a day wore off the calories. We didn’t celebrate a wedding anniversary on that trip but a year or two later we were in Vienna on October 20th and we found a wonderful restaurant where we had a memorable meal. We chose the restaurant because it was a little low building and because there was a tidy stack of firewood by the door so we knew there would be a fireplace within. There was, and the food was wonderful. Tyrolean food, the owner told us, and he kept bringing little tastes of this and that, including duck and apple mousse in a tiny shell of choux pastry to taste while we were waiting for our soup and a schnapps flavoured with larch (for me) and pine (for John) to have with dessert.

Today isn’t our wedding anniversary but it’s the 44th anniversary of our meeting, which has always felt more important than the date we actually formalized our relationship. On the night we met, I was wearing a deep red dress I wish I still had. I was wearing mulberry tights. It doesn’t seem like 44 years ago. Everything feels like it was, oh, a month or so ago. A month or so ago I was waiting for our first baby to be born. A month or so ago I was sewing curtains for rooms for our children, red and blue cotton with white elephants marching from left to right. I was planting tomato seeds in little pots to arrange by the woodstove for warmth while the seeds germinated. I was writing my first essay. John was finishing a book of poems. We were listening to Dire Straits for the first time. We were walking down the driveway with one child, then two, then three, with one dog after another, until there were none. We were standing by the front door as grandchildren arrived and left. I was sitting in the rocking chair by the fire finishing a quilt. Starting another. Van Morrison was singing, I’m gonna walk down the street until I see my shining light. Our parents were getting older and older and then they were gone. Friends too. And how did this happen? We got older too.

A photograph is a story. It’s the whole story. In the one I’ve used here, we are young, there’s a baby on its way, we have slept on the land we live on now, we are learning where the best views of the mountain are, where the deer bed down for the night, where we want our house to be. We have made the first ring of stones for fire. We are drinking the water from the lake we love. Almost certainly the first dog of our shared lives was curled up at our feet.

Last night we drove out to the Backeddy Pub in Egmont for supper. The chef made elk ragu over soft potato gnocchi. We sat by the window and looked across the inlet to two frail lights on the other side. This is a life, two people at a table, the tide high, the waiter pouring a little more wine before the drive home on a narrow twisting road. I’m going to go slow, said John, because the line on the middle of the road has faded completely. A little snow fell.

Sandbars free of overnight clouds
village walls lit by the morning sun
a pristine pond encircled by trees
last night’s rain scattered by the wind
happy having nothing to do
my mind becomes one with all this
–Liu Tsung-Yuan, translated by Red Pine

“…the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/Something amazing…”

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backeddy docks

We were sitting on the deck of the Backeddy Pub in Egmont, waiting for our dinner, when someone at another table suddenly called out, Orcas! By the island! We stood at the railing and sure enough, there were two of them out where Jervis Inlet meets Sechelt Inlet. We watched them surface and then very elegantly disappear for a time, surfacing again further north. Then the couple sitting on the other side of us quietly said, There are more, just there between those boats…

Those orcas were hunting seals. They’d approach the little rocky islets where the seals pull out to bask and then there was a lot of splashing as they ambushed the seals. Meanwhile the people on the yacht fiddled with their crane, pulling up their zodiac, someone else was reading on the deck of a boat,

And then the huge beautiful orcas were gone.

For some reason, I thought of Auden, his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

the things we wake to

theresakishkan2 Comments

At 5:30, the smell of smoke. (Every window open.) Came down to check and yes, there’s a fire nearby, about 15 minutes south of us, on Cecil Hill, overlooking the little townsite of Madeira Park. Where we shop. Where we are preparing for our 15th Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival in August, where my children went to elementary school, where the government wharf is. All morning the water bombers (skimmers, these ones are called) have been swooping down over Sakinaw Lake, the helicopters are dipping their buckets in one of the calm bays nearer the fire. It was 2.25 hectares last night as we were eating mussels at the Backeddy Pub, oblivious, watching for whales (not lucky enough last night). Just now? 5 hectares. And people on evacuation alert.

I didn’t go back to sleep but when I got up a couple of hours later, the rabbit (now we are thinking it’s a snowshoe hare or snowshoe rabbit, Lepus americanus) was grazing peacefully just below the deck off our bedroom. I watched it for quite a while and realized it was eating, almost methodically, yellow hawkweed.

morning hare

We’ve seen it every morning now for the last 6 days, always near the forest edge. They prefer dense understory, apparently, and that’s what we have. That’s what’s burning on Cecil Hill. First thing, the reports were that the trees weren’t on fire but the underbrush and this time of year? Oh, it’s dry. The salal is desiccated in areas, the duff—old leaves, stems, the crisp moss—like fire-starter. Which it is. And has. The Cecil Hill fire is believed to be human-caused.

So smoke and hares and the experience of being elsewhere, in a way, because I’m editing my novella, set mostly around the Thompson and Fraser Rivers, even in them at times. Years ago we took Brendan and Cristen white-water rafting down the Thompson River, from Spences Bridge to Lytton, and at quiet points along the river, the guide encouraged us to swim. I expected it to be cold and it wasn’t, really. It was green and deep and one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, drifting alongside the raft, hanging onto a rope. There are moments like that in the novella, and also much sadder ones, but now I am looking for a title that carries the rivers in it, graceful, dangerous, and deeply historied. I keep making notes but I don’t think I have the right one yet.

These were the things I woke to: the smoke (so evocative in winter, when it’s our own fire in the woodstove, keeping us warm, reminding us of every winter we’ve spent here, building the fire each morning, drawn to it from other parts of the house to talk and share a glass of wine late in the afternoon); the snowshoe hare, like an emissary, its mouth full of hawkweed and its ears twitching; and the prospect of time in the rivers, or near them, if only on paper. Here’s a little passage to remind me, and you, too.

Our bodies are porous. They take in river water, sunlight, the scent of Artemisa frigida, dust from bone dry slopes, dust of bones themselves littered on the talus (bighorn sheep, marmots, the tiny hollow leg bone of birds eaten and excreted by coyotes, sand particles), pollen from ponderosa pines, midges, spores too minute to affect anything other than a lung, fine hairs of mule deer, the stink of migrating salmon. Over us, the deep blue sky, through us the air so warm and clear we breathe it in deeply and it doesn’t seem altered when we exhale yet the work of our bodies is there too. And helium, beryllium, and carbon, iron and nickel, the dust from dying stars.