Tag: Merritt

summer after summer…

theresakishkan9 Comments
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The Murray Church, around 1985

…we walked through the little graveyard surround the Murray Church in the townsite of Upper Nicola, on highway 5A, the old road between Merritt and Kamloops. In that graveyard, I found names that spoke to me, though they weren’t my dead. They spoke to me and agitated and I wrote my first lyric essay, “Morning Glory” (in my book Red Laredo Boots). The church, built in 1876, and its surroundings, its beautiful plain dignity, the graveyard of old iris and cacti — well, they eventually helped me to write my first novel, Sisters of Grass.

morning glory

I have to write this now. I have to write this while I can. I just heard on the noon news that the church burned to the ground yesterday. Arson is suspected. I will go through old photo albums (this was all before computers and digital files) and probably I’ll cry.

 

 

 

postcard, the Nicola Valley

theresakishkan2 Comments

forever

On a clear day, you can see forever. And this is what it looks like. Suede hills, aspens just turning,Ponderosa pines so particular and iconic that you could look at each one and never think you knew pines in general. The scent of sage. The sound of magpies. An osprey overlooking Stump Lake, the waters green and dusted with the hatch of some insect that had a few flyfishers excited as well as the fish themselves, mouthing the surface of the lake.

And did I say the other day that the road up through the Fraser Canyon was my favourite on earth? Today it’s 5A, from Kamloops to Merritt, winding by the lakes, the creeks, the roads leading off to remote ranches, the Lieutenant-Governor’s home ranch at the head of Nicola Lake in good shape despite her absence, the store at Quilchena as enticing as ever (and this time I had to resist tiny cowboy boots, two-tone, with sensible heels; though if a grandchild asked for a pair, I’d go back in a heartbeat…). So I’m fickle about roads. So I’m contradictory. I have as my model in this the wonderful Walt Whitman, a poet I always think of in the kingdom of grass (lines of his thread through my novel Sisters of Grass…):

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

small stories on the Merritt-Kamloops road

theresakishkan7 Comments

We drove down Highway 5A from Kamloops to Merritt this morning. There was light snow and some fog. And some mysteries. How, for example, did this carcass (species unknown) get into the middle of frozen Trapp Lake? We wondered if it might be the way the highways crew deals with road-kill, dragging it to the centre of the lake so that birds could feed from it and then once the ice melts, the remains will simply sink to the bottom of the lake. But there were no marks of its having been dragged. So did a deer try to cross the frozen lake and then break through the ice, floundering until it died? The ravens were awfully happy, in any case, and there were eagles earlier when we drove down. (We took the photograph on our return.)

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We noticed this perfectly shaped Ponderosa pine near Peter Hope Lake Road

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and slowed to admire it. Then we saw a small brass plaque on it.

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Who was Eleanore MacVicar and who was Mac?

This is a ranch I notice every time we drive this road. I’ve imagined myself into it, a hundred years ago, many times and realize now that Margaret Stuart would have ridden past it in my novel, Sisters of Grass. I love its plain beauty, its vistas.

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And here’s a pair of swans, on ice, in Nicola Lake. The rest of the flock was swimming nearby but this pair wanted to ride a small section of ice.

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There was nowhere to pull over when we saw the newborn calves at the Willow Ranch or I’d end this post with them — tiny, black, their ears already pierced with bright red tags. Instead, I’ll end it with a pinecone from Eleanore MacVicar’s tree.

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