Tag: Easthope

“one foot bare to the weather”

theresakishkan2 Comments

This morning I have been thinking of the soft landscape around my grandfather’s village in Ukraine and how my photographs from a 2019 visit helped me to write the Ukrainian sections of my novel, Easthope. In the novel, the main character visits a village very like my grandfather’s, though her family history is not mine, and what she discovers there, the long threads of connection, some snipped, some tangled and knotted, inspire her to paint her way into a greater understanding. Her name is Tessa (and if you’ve read my other novels, you might recognize her as the child in The Age of Water Lilies) and I’ve given her an adjacent life, if that makes sense. She and her husband live in a house on the Doriston Highway, the first house John and I looked at in 1979 when we were trying to work out a way to live here (though we didn’t quite know that then; we thought we could spend summers, maybe a week or two in other months of the year too). We didn’t buy that house but Tessa and Marsh inherited it. Fiction lets you do that. And so it goes. She paints. (I can’t.) Marsh has a refurbished Columbia River gillnetter. (I don’t.) Tessa’s Ukrainian relations are not mine.

My novel is out on submission and maybe one day it will be published. I keep opening the file to read particular passages, maybe just to make sure they’re still there. That Tessa is still there, making her art, in the house on the Doriston Highway, the one with a secret room off the studio, filled with….Oh, you’ll have to wait to find out.

As the date for the show at the Arts Centre approached, Tessa found herself painting daily. Not work she intended to include in the show—those choices had been made with Sandra and she was happy with the selection they’d decided on—but new work. The dream of the
Sovytsya River, her grandfather floating away. She’d painted Stepaniya brushing her hair, baby Olena tucked into a basket. Over them, silver fir and beech. She’d cut a scrap of pink wool and carefully edged it with satin ribbon and if you lifted the edge, you could see Olena’s smocked nightdress and a tiny stuffed duck she’d made of yellow felt. Her grandfather floated on his back, eyes closed, and ahead of him, in the undulating surface of the water, she made a little pocket. She thought about how to do this for days and opted for cotton and adhesive, painting the cotton the same colour as the river. Silk thread, green as waterweed, allowed you to open the pocket. Inside: a tiny photograph of her grandparents and their 9 children in front of their house in Drumheller, the dry hills behind them. A chicken strutted in front of them and a washtub hung on the outside wall of the house. She was also working on a big canvas of a lean-to in the woods beyond West Lake, a woodcutter’s axe propped on a stump. And she was making sketches for a diptych: on the left, a portrait of the boot Richard had found in the woods, battered, with copper nails holding what was left of a sole in place; on the right, a series of images of a man’s life, from birth, to migration across a wild sea, to the skid row of a big city, to a remote forest, and finally a death under the roots of a fallen fir, one foot shod in a leather boot (she would use leather embedded in impasto, with tiny copper furniture tacks tapped in), one foot bare to the weather.

the weather

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springboard

Someone in the novel I just finished (typed the final sentence on Sunday and am now going over the draft to fill in the gaps. There are a lot of those…), anyway, someone in the novel finds this springboard in the woods. Or not this one but one like it. This one is part of Bert Mackay’s collection of old marine engines and logging equipment and spending time in his collection a couple of years ago, courtesy of his nephew Ian (those are Ian’s legs and hands in the photograph), was like entering the chapter of a book. It’s a book I’ve been reading all my life and it never finishes. A page turns, a section concludes, and then I find more to read. In a way the novel I just finished writing is a kind of reading. I certainly did a lot of reading as I was writing but I also felt I was learning to decode a dialect I was only marginally familiar with. And now? I’m not fluent but I have a working knowledge.

A working knowledge of engines, of life in a small community, of relationships, of the kind of seeing that allows an artist to make art. The main character is a painter and through her, I learned to prepare canvases, to layer impasto, and to plan an exhibition.

Last week we had one of those weather systems move through our area. Earlier, maybe three weeks ago, a small tornado hit the south end of Redrooffs Road and caused considerable damage. Driving by, I was shocked by swath of trees it had shattered. And last week it was our turn. Between our house and the high school where we swim each morning in the pool beneath the school, there were 10 separate areas of the power line damaged. Poles were down or broken or leaning, huge trees fell on the wires and snapped the lines, sections of wire fell to the highway and made it impossible for ferry traffic to proceed south on Wednesday (I think it was Wednesday) morning. We lit our oil lamps and candles and made sure the fire didn’t go out. This morning I heard that something called a bomb cyclone is headed our way, with 120 km winds. I’ve filled water jugs, John filled huge buckets to wait by the back door for flushing toilets, and the lamps are clean and full. Last week’s storm damage had been sort of repaired when one of the lines, the fibre optic one, died; this meant a day and a half without our landlines, without internet (though John’s cellphone had data so he could check progress from time to time). I spent the day working on the gaps in my novel, writing two new scenes, realizing as I returned to the manuscript after dinner that I’d somehow lost that new material. So this morning I’m re-writing, hoping I can figure out what I knew and wrote yesterday.

One of the scenes involved the springboard. At least I have a photograph. At least I can still imagine the moment when it’s found in the woods and the main character learns something new. She turns a page and there’s a new chapter still to read. Today I’ve had my swim and have just put bread in the oven: you’ve heard that tale before. But there’s a new chapter still to read. I think. I hope.

She was thinking about her paintings. She was thinking about what had happened with Leah. Alone in her head, she was thinking too much. So one late fall morning she put on her hiking boots and her rainjacket and drove up the Easthope road to where she’d first seen one of the ghost trees Richard had painted. She parked on the side of the road and scrambled up the bank to the remains of the tree she recognized from one of his canvases. The little notches cut just below the flare of the trunk for the springboards, the buoyant growth springing from the remains of the tree. Here, this was the one in the painting she loved, the grey-green lichen-crusted wood, the elegant roots clinging to the ground like the hands of someone reluctant to let go, and a maple growing vigorously from the decayed rubble in the centre of the stump. She leaned against it, imagined Richard in this place, trying to see the stars he knew were there, in daylight and darkness, imagined him making notes in one of the little books he’d stored away in a drawer in the studio: colour, texture, compass readings (which she realized were references for star readings). Then she heard something scrabbling in the bush, coming closer. She held her breath. People reported cougars regularly in this area. And quite often at night, driving home from the lower Coast, she and Marsh saw elk crossing the Easthope road. The noise was closer now. And then Tog emerged from the undergrowth, dogs snuffling and yipping a little as they saw her by the stump. Tog was holding a big machete.

Should I be scared, she asked him, a little breathless. Her heart was beating so rapidly under her rainjacket that she expected he could hear it. He was talking quietly to the dogs, telling them to settle.

Scared? Oh, because of this – and he stuck the machete blade-first in another stump and laughed a small gutteral laugh. Nah, this is for salal. It’s how I earn a bit of a cash now and then. Are you looking for Richard?

Let me catch my breath, she replied. And after a moment or two, she said, That’s an interesting way to put it. In a way I was. I’m getting ready for a show of Richard’s work and mine and it seemed like a good idea to come to the source of so many of the paintings I found in a little room off his studio.

He’d come to these woods for the ghosts, he said. The echoes. I guess I knew what he meant because I’m here for the same reason maybe. Sometimes he’d find stuff. An old springboard he passed along to the museum. A ball of old wire. Once a boot with copper nails holding what was left of the sole to the rest of the boot. Whose was it, he wondered. And we knew that the story wasn’t a happy one. He came at night, with a flashlight. He painted the stumps under the stars to give them everlasting life.

“I’m just about off the map.” (Charles Lillard)

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engine

As we were lying in bed on New Year’s Day, John said, I fell asleep in one year and woke in another. And I felt the strangeness of this, felt suspended in time’s uncertainty. Maybe this has always been my true state. I began the new year by working on my novel-in-progress, Easthope, set about ten years ago in a small coastal village. For a number of reasons, the main character feels the same: suspended. I spent some time looking at photographs of old Easthope marine engines. A year or so ago, a friend showed me through his late uncle’s collection, housed in a shed on Francis Peninsula. His uncle must have felt the urgency that I feel, to care for and keep alive things that have been important to the way people have lived. These Easthope engines powered coastal fishing boats from about the turn of the 20th century into the 1950s. They changed the way people fished, particularly the more reliable 4-cycle model which pretty much replaced the original 2-cycle design. My friend showed me many Easthopes and the diesel Vivians. I loved their sturdy beauty. I loved the shed, a museum of the useful past, with its springboards, a box of piano rolls, tools, and cans of grease.

Some days I feel as though I fell asleep in one century and woke in another. I drift between them. My own desk is a museum, the books lined up at the back relics of another time: Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Gary Snyder’s Axe Handles, Raincoast Place Names, a concordance to the Bible. I hold papers down with fossils from the Great Salt Lake and the Sooke Formation, stop to fit my late dog Lily’s pelvis back together (it cracked into 3 pieces when a shelf fell onto my desk, something I wrote about in “A Dark Path”), look at the 5 tiny hummingbird feathers in a jam jar. Asleep in a century I am unwilling to give up, as the character in Easthope is unwilling to leave aside a story she’s discovered about children drowned in the Skookumchuck Rapids as they tried to row from Doriston to the Egmont dock. On a grey morning, this grey morning, I can almost hear the put-put of Easthopes in the Strait, can almost smell the nets drying. A rock heavy with fossil corals is holding a book open to a poem that is keeping me company today, “Winter Brothers’, from Charles Lillard’s Shadow Weather:

There should be no poets, only a few poems,
winter brothers,
travelling as well as Irish whisky,
a ketch-rigged dory
and old friends
shaking off women, fish and certain anecdotes
to beat along my tack north.

If Charles was still alive, maybe we’d talk on the phone. Happy New Year, I’d say, and he’d ask what I was working on, and I’d tell him about Doriston and the sisters who drowned. I’d tell him about the Easthopes. A day or two later, I’d get a call from the man who used to own the gas station at Garden Bay Road, telling me a parcel had arrived for me by bus from Victoria. When I opened the parcel, it would be an archive of the old coast: pamphlets, brochures advertising Easthopes and Vivians, articles clipped from ancient newspapers describing bad storms, the coming war, a tragic accident in Jervis Inlet. By the fire where I’m going to go now to drink my coffee and warm up, I’d look at every page, and for a moment the novel would be clear in my imagination, clear as deep water, salty and wild.

doriston3

Clear in my imagination, and now the long winter to get it down, make it right, find out how all the pieces fit. One piece? The lights of a small boat leaving the dock as we ate dinner at the Backeddy Pub last week, lights that flickered into the darkness, and then disappeared.

I’m just about off the map.
It ends over there in a cluster of islands
and a swale of sandpipers.

Note: the passages of poetry are from Shadow Weather: Poems Selected and New, by Charles Lillard, published by Sono Nis Press in 1996.