Tag: oligocene

of wrens and fossils

theresakishkan2 Comments

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.

the wren, the wren

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As the year comes to a close and the old stories are told around fires as ancient as time, I am doing the final copy-edits of a novella, Winter Wren, which will be the first offering of FishGottaSwim Editions, a project initiated by me and my friend Anik See to showcase novellas. Watch this space for further details in the new year!

This morning I went out to fill the bird feeder and watched the chickadees dart to and fro for seed. And almost underfoot, a tiny wren also darting among the sword ferns for whatever little insects lurk there. Last night we were eating a festive dinner to celebrate John’s birthday and we had the deck lights on. Angelica noticed it first — the wren flitting from railing to herb pots to windowsill. This is their time. Do the songs and stories bring them or do they call up the songs and poems? Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s Poet Laureate, has written a Christmas poem which begins this way:

The old year, a tear in the eye of time;
frost on the blackthorn, the ditches glamorous
with rime; on the inbreath of air,
the long, thoughtful pause before snow.

A star on the brow of a mule in a field
and the mule nuzzling the drystone wall
where a wren, size of a child’s lost purse,
hides in a hole. St. Stephen’s Day.

(you can read the rest of it here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/19/wren-boys-carol-ann-duffy-christmas-poem )

This morning I watched the wren as it went about its search for breakfast and when I came in to my desk, the first thing I saw were two chunks of sandstone from the beach west of Sooke where my novella takes place. They’re filled with fossils and I keep them handy as paperweights and reminders of time, how it can be compressed into stone, 25 million years’ worth, to hold in your hand as you think about birds and their stories, light and darkness, and stars.

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(from Winter Wren)

It was so tiny. The wren let him approach and quick as anything he had it in the net, dropping it into a bag with a small cloth soaked in chloroform. The light in the dark eye went out.

He made the incision from cloaca to sternum through the belly. Clipped the humerus just below the shoulder joint and skin to the base of the beak. Cut through the eye membranes on the inside and through the ear canal at the skull. Severed the skull at the atlas vertebrae.

There was hardly any tongue or brain to remove, hardly any tissue at all. He dusted the skin with borax. He hoped this wasn’t the bird that hunted in the salal every day, disappearing like a mouse among the stems, plucking insects from the moss. He knew there were several in the immediate area but that one was reliable; he saw it most days and heard it when he was out cutting firewood or bringing up water from the creek. He was sure it was the source of the notes he had so carefully transcribed, listening and asking himself, was that little run e-g-e-c? Are they sixteenth notes? Now, there? A rising run, g-b-d-g? That was the bird he had drawn, its pert tail and brown legs. And probably this was that very wren.

He needed money. There were always requests for his work—he was known for meticulous preparations. So he worked down the list, doing what he could. He could not afford to be sentimental.

Its bright eyes—and oh, its song! At night he heard it while out in the corridor nurses chatted and prepared medications. Don’t be sentimental, Tom, he told himself. When they came to put a small pill in his mouth, he kept his back turned away so they wouldn’t see the tears.