Tag: oyster bay

you can follow the phosphorescence like a pathway of stars

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oyster bay

Yesterday we drove down the Coast on various errands, our last opportunity to shop in preparation for a family visit on Saturday, followed by a family wedding in Victoria next weekend, followed by a few days, all of us, on a beach near Campbell River. Oyster Bay. I’ve been thinking about it with some excitement and some anxiety. In these later years, I’m realizing that I am truly an introvert. And it seems I have a flawed history. So yes, anxiety. But also, again, excitement.

We stopped at our local Oyster Bay on the way down to Sechelt, to drop something off at a friend’s home. It’s one of the locations I think of as old coast — two shingled houses, one of them formerly a logging camp floating kitchen, and there’s a shucking shed from the business my friend’s parents ran in the last century.

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We sometimes talked about having a dance in the shed, under its red roof, with the waters of the bay swirling underneath at high tide, and phosphorescence spangling the tide. Once we swam late at night in the bay and spread the phosphorescence from our hands like stars. My friend and I once canoed to the little creeks feeding into the bay, searching for the house Elizabeth Smart had lived in the second time she came to our area, not the one with the wooden board over the door, inscribed with The cut worm forgives the plough, where she wrote By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but a later house, owned in those years by someone we know. It was demolished when it became too derelict to safely enter. Today we pulled in just behind the shucking shed and the view was what you can see in the top photograph: shallow water, moss, the most beautiful light. I didn’t want those years to end.

On our way home today, the trunk of the car filled with food — spot prawns, sausages, watermelon, cheeses, buttermilk for pancakes, wine, Persephone beer, cider from a stop at Bricker’s — I felt drowsy with nostalgia. How many times we drove this highway with our young family, on our way to the Interior, on our way to Emergency with infections of one sort or another, asthma, labour (that was me), to basketball camp or for a meal out and concerts, once a movie (Baz Luhmann’s Romeo and Juliet), swims at Snickett Park or Porpoise Bay, how many times we stopped at the bookstore or the chocolate shop, how many times. The radio kept fading in and out and anyway the music was terrible so I put on Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars.

I lie awake in the middle of the nightMakin’ a list of things that I didn’t do rightWith you at the top of a long page filled…

I do. I lie awake in the middle of the night and oh, my lists are long and regretful. What would my life had been if I knew then what I know now? I’d like to have been a better person. A better mother, a more generous friend.

We woke each morning with hearts filledBluebird of love on the windowsillNow the heart’s unsteady, and the night is still…

Every morning I wake with the best person in the world in my bed and he listens to me with patience and love. What would I have done differently? Everything, and maybe nothing. The Steller’s jays are back, loud for peanuts when I come down to make coffee. You again, I say, taking them their breakfast. And you again, I say to the cat as I put food in his dish. None of them are bluebirds of love but they are reliable. My heart’s unsteady as I think of the past, what I know about it, and unsteady as I think of what’s to come. The nights are still, quiet, but in Oyster Bay, the one on this part of the coast, you can follow the phosphorescence like a pathway of stars. Where to? That’s the question.

breakfast

Note: the lines are from Bruce Springsteen’s “Somewhere North of Nashville”

redux: a few days ago–

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In the spirit of recycling, I’ve been re-reading my old posts and offering them again. Might I add that it feels like only, oh, last week, that I was hanging around this area, trying to locate my character Declan O’Malley on its shores.

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— we walked with friends over by Oyster Bay. More than ten years ago I wrote a novel, A Man in a Distant Field, in which the main character, an Irish schoolmaster, washed up on the shores of Oyster Bay. I explored the area a fair bit in those days, wanting to give my character a true place to live, a particular place on earth, and this particularity — the weather, the scent of wild roses in summer, the water birds, the bears that came to feast on salmon in autumn, the oysters on the rocks by the shore — would allow him to understand the resonances in the poem he was translating (which happened to be the Odyssey). And walking again by the bay a few days after Christmas, I felt that old complicated obsession a writer shares with her materials. While the others stood down by the water and watched a hawk on the opposite shore, I dreamed my way back into this abandoned cabin, not exactly the one I called World’s End in my novel, but a similar one. (As Melville so wisely noted, “It is not down in any map; true places never are.“)

a man in a distant fieldHe put the poem aside and walked out to the shore. He never tired of the bay, stretching out to open sea. Today the tide was coming in over the exposed mud flats, threaded with silvery runs of fresh water. There were birds everywhere — sandpipers on the shore where he supposed their nests must be, ducks coming in with the tide, a solitary loon, silent in daylight, geese gathered by the small rocky islands where some of them nested. He loved the smell when the tide came in, the rich fecund mud, warmed by the sun, meeting the sharp iodine of the sea. He supposed men had always stood by water, admiring the liveliness of its movement, loving the sight of birds feeding on its shores, fishing its depths with their strong bills. (from A Man in a Distant Field, Dundurn, 2004)

summer shortbread

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summer shortbread

Tonight we are going for dinner with our friends at Oyster Bay. I haven’t looked at the tide table but I’ll take my bathing suit just in case. When the tide comes in, the bay is the most beautiful place to swim. You are swimming over the remains of fish weirs and oyster beds and there’s feral asparagus, remnants of the cultivated crops grown by the local market garden, self-seeded in the rich muck along the shores. My friend gathers it in spring in her canoe and those dinners are spectacular. Tonight’s will be, too. And I offered to bring dessert—a gooseberry fool flavoured with a little rose-water, and lavender and lemon shortbreads. I made them with rice flour for those in our party who don’t eat gluten and as I was mixing and shaping, I wondered at what point you can call something that you’ve always made in honour of the person who gave you the recipe (well, her son actually, who is in his 80s now) but who would probably not recognize the recipe any longer, well (realizing I’ve lost control of this sentence), how long you still name the recipe for that person? When Alistair MacKay,who was once my husband’s French professor at UBC and who, with his colleague Floyd St. Clair (partner of David Watmough), became dear friends, gave me his mother’s recipe for shortbread, he asked that I call it “Mrs. MacKay’s Shortbread”. And I do, most happily. It is excellent. I’ve passed along the recipe to others and told them they too must call it by its true name. (It was a hit in Amsterdam last Christmas, apparently.) But when I add rosemary or lemon zest or fierce Chamayo chili bought from a man selling bags of it on the roadside in New Mexico, is it still “Mrs. MacKay’s Shortbread”? Yes, I think it is. So “Mrs. MacKay’s Shortbread, with variations for the times we live in, the flavours we crave, the spice we want in winter, the flowers we have available in summer”.

Back to Oyster Bay. I am married to a poet and have lived with him for nearly 40 years, surrounded by poetry. He says he is often surprised to find records of our daily life in the pages of this blog. Surprised by what I remember or pay attention to. Mostly he’s glad, I think. And similarly, I am often surprised to find our daily life in his work. Surprised and delighted and grateful. Here’s part of the first section of one of my favourite poems, John’s “Mud Bottom”, set on Oyster Bay some years ago now but still vital and true.

                                                          I should put on old runners

to walk the creek’s last clarity, its main channel
down the estuary utterly exposed,
brazen and pungent in the sun. Its bed
of clay and hard sand is the only footing
in acres of slippery, deep mud. Its few round stones

in shroud and sweep of seaweed hair are the blind heads
of seekers pushing upstream.
They would be worth knowing, knowing

what a husband knows.
A river, a marriage, living
are deep-pulling puzzlements their whole length.

—from “Mud Bottom”, in Water Stair, Oolichan Books, 2000.

“What song might lure a child from the deck of a small boat…”

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first day of spring

First day of spring, and it’s grey. But last night we went to have dinner with our friends on Oyster Bay and it was like so many dinners we’ve had over the 32 years of our friendship. Arriving before the sun went down to a bay filled with goldeneyes, buffleheads. The whoosh of the tide. The smell of woodsmoke as we gathered by the fire to drink a glass of champagne (because they invited us, 4 of us, to celebrate my recent nomination for a B.C. Book Prize!). Looking out the window at the crazy roof of the old part of the house—we were in the newer part—anyway, the old part of the house that was originally a floating camp kitchen where high tides wash under the floor, pulled up onto land in the 1930s or 40s and shored up with logs, I said to one friend, “This is the world we hoped to find when we moved here in 1982.” A place my old friend Charles Lillard described so beautifully in “Closing Down Kah Shakes Creek”:

This is an old west where a secret cove with an old house
is called history, a raven cackling on a limb, mythology.

We ate oysters collected earlier in the day from the beach (and there was a bucket full of them waiting for us to take home at the end of the evening), prawns, a delicious side of perfect salmon, and finished with lemon meringue pie. Champagne, and French chardonnay tasting of wet stones. A vase of snowdrops on the table set with my friend’s family Meissen, brought home from her mother’s house after her mother’s long life ended. Everything so beautiful and cherished.

I want to record these times because when we’re gone, will anyone remember that a house sat at the edge of a bay and 6 friends ate a feast pulled from its waters? That we talked of poetry and art (two of my friends are painters), of our children who are all making their way in the larger world but who all knew this house in their childhoods, swam off its generous rocks?

I wrote a novel about this bay after a series of dreams about a man in a small boat. A Man In A Distant Field is set in the salt meadows at the end of the bay where creeks find their way down to it from Mount Hallowell.

Past the watery thickets of eel-grass streaming over the surface of the bay, past the reeds where nests were concealed, past the tiny cove where Declan had stumbled upon Rose digging for clams with a stick shaped like a bird’s claw. There were sandy areas punctuated with oysters, the small Olympics that tasted sweet when you pried their shells open and drank them back like nectar, and there were rocks encrusted with the bigger Pacifics brought from Japan. The man who’d given Declan passage up the coast had told him that he was growing the big oysters on the beach in front of his homestead, hoping to market them to the steamships; he brought boxes of seed by boat from Vancouver, his young son responsible for keeping the boxes damp. “If it’s a high sea,” the man had said, “I tie a rope around his middle so he doesn’t wash overboard.” Declan imagined them coming up from the strait in wild seas on their boat with the boxes of oyster seed, the child tethered to the wheelhouse while the father steered a straight course for home. He heard the echoes of Odysseus resisting the song of the Sirens, lashed to the mast, while his men rowed past the pretty music. What song might lure a child from the deck of a small boat heading north to Pender Harbour into the dark waters of Georgia Strait?

I think it might be the song we hear that draws us back to dinners on Oyster Bay, talking of poetry and children, and all around us, the scent of woodsmoke, of salt.

a few days ago —

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— we walked with friends over by Oyster Bay. More than ten years ago I wrote a novel, A Man in a Distant Field, in which the main character, an Irish schoolmaster, washed up on the shores of Oyster Bay. I explored the area a fair bit in those days, wanting to give my character a true place to live, a particular place on earth, and this particularity — the weather, the scent of wild roses in summer, the water birds, the bears that came to feast on salmon in autumn, the oysters on the rocks by the shore — would allow him to understand the resonances in the poem he was translating (which happened to be the Odyssey). And walking again by the bay a few days after Christmas, I felt that old complicated obsession a writer shares with her materials. While the others stood down by the water and watched a hawk on the opposite shore, I dreamed my way back into this abandoned cabin, not exactly the one I called World’s End in my novel, but a similar one. (As Melville so wisely noted, “It is not down in any map; true places never are.“)

a man in a distant fieldHe put the poem aside and walked out to the shore. He never tired of the bay, stretching out to open sea. Today the tide was coming in over the exposed mud flats, threaded with silvery runs of fresh water. There were birds everywhere — sandpipers on the shore where he supposed their nests must be, ducks coming in with the tide, a solitary loon, silent in daylight, geese gathered by the small rocky islands where some of them nested. He loved the smell when the tide came in, the rich fecund mud, warmed by the sun, meeting the sharp iodine of the sea. He supposed men had always stood by water, admiring the liveliness of its movement, loving the sight of birds feeding on its shores, fishing its depths with their strong bills. (from A Man in a Distant Field, Dundurn, 2004)

 

Where we are in the year

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The other day we stopped at Anderson Creek to see the chum salmon run in progress. These are Oncorhynchus keta, also called dog salmon for the hooked snout and canine-like teeth the males form during spawning. (The females develop a less pronounced version of this kype as well.) They are lovely fish, about 10-20 pounds, with green and dark purple vertical bars on their bodies.  I think their migration is the longest of any of the genus. When we stopped the other day, the water level was quite low — we’ve had a very long mild fall thus far, with only a little rain.

Today I went back, hoping to take a few photographs. All last night it rained hard and the creek was quite full. I thought how often I’d come to Anderson Creek on school field trips, all the children watching the drama of the living fish and the dead. Just beyond, Oyster Bay with its remnants of ancient fish weirs, and everywhere the scent of the season — leaves, rotting fish, damp ground.  I wish I could share the sound of the salmon pushing their way through cold water to find the right place to dig their redds and lay their eggs. It’s one of the best ways to know where we are in the year — bears fattening on the carcasses, ravens klooking in the cedars, eagles making their thin vocalizations that sound so eerie filtered down through rain and trees.

The light wasn’t good for pictures but I took some anyway and hope you can see the shapes of the fish in the water, under ferns, hovering with a chosen mate.