James Douglas – …Theresa Kishkan

All morning the news was of the marches in cities across the world. A form of protest, a series of statements about justice and democracy, the moving sight of rivers of people holding signs, crossing bridges. A group of people on a research boat in Antarctica, holding up their signs. The hundreds of thousands in Grant Park, Chicago, a number considered too many for a march. Closer to me, just across Georgia Strait, in Nanaimo, a thousand. One for the history books, for certain

It’s interesting how we record history, the stories that are included, abandoned, neglected, overlooked, revised. I was talking to my older son this morning — well, talking to his family! His wife Manon and their son Arthur, who remembered his grandparents from his Christmas visit and who blew kisses cheerfully — about the stories remembered and handed down by Indigenous people in British Columbia. Forrest is teaching a survey course in B.C. history and I wondered if he knew a story recorded by Imbert Orchard in 1966, collected in Robert Budd’s Voices of British Columbia, in which Lizette Hall, a member of the Dakelh First Nation, remembers an incident from 1828 involving James Douglas, working then as a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk at Fort St. James, and Lizette’s great-grandfather, Chief Kwah. It’s a story her family kept intact because of her great-grandfather’s involvement. She acknowledges that the story she tells has been “retold so many times, and a thing added here and a thing added there. Well, this is the true story of what, just what did happen.”

We sometimes think that because things weren’t written down, well, then they can’t be reliable. Good stories, maybe. But history? Lizette tells her story so emphatically and clearly that I have every faith that her version is “the true story”. And remember the “discovery” of Franklin’s ships in Nunavut, in a place where Inuit people had said they were located? An oral tradition held the story of the ships carefully and accurately but not many “experts” believed the validity of something not written down. I’ve read that the Inuit called the area on Queen Maud Gulf where the Erebus was found “the Ship Place”. (What would have happened if archaeologists paid attention to such names a hundred years ago? Had paid attention to generations who told essentially the same story?) Louie Kamookak is an Inuit historian and it’s fascinating to read about his expedition to visit areas remembered by his great-grandmother Humahuk:

Humahuk’s father took one item that he later made into an ice chisel (in later years she learned it had been a dinner or butter knife). As they were looking for more objects they noticed a man-made mound the length of a full-grown person. At the end of it was a stone with strange markings on it. Seeing this, her father became afraid and they made their way down to the shore.

Once at the shore they found more strange objects: wood and a metal chain going into the sea.

The world is an intricate collection of stories, if we learn how to hear them, read them, hold them in our hands and decode their own particular language. I keep two rocks on my desk, pieces of conglomerate dense with fossils from the Sooke Formation, a geologic formation on the west coast of Vancouver Island, dating from the Oligocene, about 20-25 million years ago. The stones are heavy enough to hold paper down, literal enough to contain their own pages of marine history. I can read a little of it, recognize the marine fossils of gastropods, pelecypods, and oysters in the stones:

oligoscene fossil.jpg

That tiny remnant of oyster on the top of the stone — it’s as beautiful as any pearl. And the other stone, with its ridge of bivalve — a clam? I run my thumb along its edge. 20 million years of calcite seamed into rock.

fossil

Instead of marching in Vancouver, we hiked the Cedar Bridge Trail. (We have to be in Vancouver twice next week, and it’s several hours each way, including a ferry…) Watery sunlight, pink buds on the alders, the sound of water running down the mountain (snow-melt!), the unsettling sight of a dead coyote in a creek by the highway, and as we came down off the trail, I had a sudden idea for a quilt. I’ve been working on one that somehow didn’t end up being as beautiful as I’d hoped. Strips of deep red, various dark blue plains and prints, and white damask from old tablecloths too worn for the table (but still with usable areas). Sashing of Japanese-inspired red and white prints. The backing is a big piece of Japanese cotton, indigo-dyed. It should be beautiful but instead it’s like a whole lot of French flags. I’ll finish it of course — I’m too thrifty not to. But I’ve been wondering about starting something that I’ll love as a process and as a finished quilt. I have two vintage linen sheets, found in a thrift store some years ago, and I thought today that instead of cutting them, I’ll batik salmon on one of them, making a whole life-cycle with varying sizes of fish, and even shell buttons for the eggs. Then I’ll dye the sheet using one of the shibori techniques I tried on smaller pieces of fabric last summer. This arashi, maybe, done with an old damask cloth.

arashi

Arashi means “storm” and if I can figure out how to do it with a large (single-bed sheet-sized) length of fabric, then I think it might be lovely. When I did this batch of indigo, I loved the process but wondered afterwards about the actual colour. I think this time I’ll use more indigo and do more immersions than I did last summer. I want a deeper blue. The fish will look something like this:

Now the snow has melted and I can be outside (if it’s not raining) with my dye vat and stick for stirring the tied lengths of fabric. I imagine them hanging on the clothesline to dry. It will be a story, told in dye and image, detailed in thread. Fish swirling and swimming, water rippling, shell buttons catching the light. A story open to interpretation.

Although you hide in the ebb and flow

Of the pale tide when the moon has set,

The people of coming days will know

About the casting out of my net,

And how you have leaped times out of mind

Over the little silver cords…

–from “The Fish”, by William Butler Yeats

A few weeks ago, John and I drove up Vancouver Island with Forrest and Manon — this was after Brendan and Cristen’s wedding — and stopped in Nanaimo for lunch and some shopping. We all went our own way, arranging to meet at the Literacy Nanaimo Bookstore before taking our lunch to a park to eat in sunlight.

I poked around, looking for the elusive silver-plated punch bowl I’m certain is out there, somewhere, waiting for me to find it. There’s a beautiful one, a bit battered (but big enough to hold five or six bottles of white wine, and ice, on a summer evening) in the Plaza Hotel in Kamloops. But they won’t sell it. Oh, call me Edwardian but I want one and I keep checking second-hand stores, the elegant silver shops on Fort Street in Victoria, antique barns, and even the odd pawn shop.

At the appointed time, I went to the bookstore and found the others there, all of them with stacks of books. It’s a great store. There’s always unexpected treasure. I found Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Afterlife, her essays and critical writing, and have spent the last few days reading her wise and calm assessments of (mostly) fiction. She wrote generously. Her insights into novels such as Middlemarch and A Few Green Leaves make me want to read them again. I loved them the first time around but now I have a few things to look for, courtesy of Ms. Fitzgerald. A turn of phrase, an insight into character…

I also found my own book, Red Laredo Boots (New Star Books, 1996), for 6 dollars. I’ve only had a single reading copy for years so it’s nice to have an extra, just in case. It’s on my desk so I’ve been peeking into it, remembering the things which inspired individual essays. This morning we picked blackberries so it was serendipitous to have the book fall open to “Cool Water”: “…I feel a certain loyalty to Himalayan blackberries, Rubes discolour, the kind I picked as a child on Matsqui prairie in the Fraser Valley. I remember my father pointed out a farm, the James Farm, and said that old James was responsible for bringing Himalayan blackberries to North America from Scotland in the last century. I don’t know how true that is, and it does have an apocryphal ring, but I thought those blackberries the very essence of high summer. Although there were occasional pies (I don’t remember jam), the way we usually had them was in yellow melmac bowls with a scant teaspoon of brown sugar strewn over and then milk. The milk turned pink and had the tiny fine hairs of the berries floating on top.”

I wrote that essay before I had access to the Internet and I know now that I’d probably spend far too long trying to figure out how and why and when Rubes discolor arrived in North America. (I think Luther Burbank had something to do with it but I’m not going to get distracted now.) And my father has died since then. But the memory is still perfectly intact – his voice intoning across Townshipline Road as he pointed to the long driveway leading to that farm, the Lombardy poplars on either side straight and true.

It’s poignant to read “Undressing the Mountains” now, too. It recalled a first trip back to the Pacific Rim area after an absence of more than twenty years. How strange it was to try to reconcile the way I’d known those long beaches as a girl of 18, camping alone, naked at times, and the mother of three who travelled there with her husband and children, her own parents, and her mother-in-law for a weekend at a resort, complete with whale-watching. I’ve returned several times since then and am more accustomed to all the posh hotels, the RVs lumbering from one parking lot to the next, and of course I’m no longer that girl, or at least she’s buried too deep to mind as much as I minded on that first return.

Last week Angelica and I wandered for a bit in Ross Bay Cemetery after her thesis defense and I kept an eye out for a few favourite stones. I saw Emily Carr’s grave, and the plot where Sir James and Amelia Douglas are buried — one summer, maybe 1962, a friend and I kept this plot swept and tidy and were written up in the Victoria Daily Times newspaper for doing so! But I’d forgotten to look for Judge Begbie’s grave, the one my father always told us honoured a man who distinguished himself by hanging many miscreants. (I know now that this isn’t actually true.) And there’s a moment about him in Red Laredo Boots, in an essay about Barkerville: “We eat our evening meal at Wake Up Jake’s. Fussy table linen and odd Victorian landscapes locate us in time. We eat huge plates of roast pork with applesauce, chutney, root vegetables, wonderful rhubarb pie and thick sweet cream. Judge Begbie sits at an opposite table, a bottle of claret at hand and his hat and cloak on a bentwood rack beside him. He is talking to a young man about the finer points of a case involving claim jumping, and I want to lean to him, say “A hundred years from now I’ll be playing on your grave in Ross Bay Cemetery, a child of seven, the same age as my daughter who, as you see, won’t finish her dinner” A young woman in a long cotton dress comes out of the kitchen, wipes her hands on her apron, and sits at a harp. Closing her eyes, she plays “Star of the County Down” in such sad slow strains that I wipe a few stray tears from my own eyes. It is not only for the music I cry but for the ghosts who stand by her harp. Ned Stout, John Fraser, Madame Bendixon, coming in off the street to request, each in turn, a song, an air to keep them from passing out of memory. Outside the sun is falling behind Barkerville Mountain, the last rays gilding the fireweed with such golden flame that we are all touched by its heat.”

Tag: James Douglas

“The people of coming days will know”

Ghosts