This piece
of land holds my life the way a mirror holds light or a glass
bowl holds water.
The beach
where I go almost every day is a semi-circle of brown sand,
framed by round granite loaves of rock. Bone Bay, we called
it, when I was a kid, because a dead cow had washed up there,
once, years before. We said they were human bones, ghost bones.
It was the ghost beach.
Today, as
on most days, in the late afternoon, the dog and I go to the
beach, he carrying his newly found soccer ball, long buried
under the snow which is finally disappearing. The Delicious
tree by the garden is full of robins, the garden is a river
of mud littered with islands of snow. Occasionally, one of
the robins flies down to pick through the mud.
The yard is
a patchwork of dead leaves, snow, ashes, and sawdust. Come
spring and warmth, it will all be eaten by the grass. The
honeysuckle and the clematis have been crushed by the snow
melting off the roof in huge crashing chunks. The potentilla
and other shrubs are also flattened. Spring is black and grey,
sharp edges, black branches like dead hair on the fruit trees.
We go down
the hill, across the orchard, over the rocks and onto the
granite sand. Mist hangs over the lake. The dog worries the
soccer ball until I kick it into the icy water, and he crashes
in after it. The lake is low. The water is still. A sucker
hangs motionless, just under the surface. Fungus whitens his
tail.
We moved to
the farm the year I turned six. This new land was a place
of cows, thistle jungles, and bantie chickens who followed
me hoping for food. Louis Shelackie's old shack, where we
first stayed, stunk of creosote and damp plywood because he
had built it from timbers he stole off a highway bridge.
When we moved
to my grandfather's big farmhouse, it reeked of smoke and
dust and ghosts. Pierre Longueval, the man who had created
the farm and then drowned in the lake, snuck through the house
at night, slamming doors or opening them again.
It was my
job to throw grain to the chickens. When I went out in the
late afternoon with a bucket, they came running from all over
the farm. As I stood staring out over fields, emerald in the
evening light, I fell, tumbling into this land, heart, soul
and body. I gave it my dreams, gave it all my longing and
belonging. The farm became a place of stones that turned to
elephants, hills up which galloped ranks of imaginary wild
horses, a beach where the rocks sang in the afternoon, and
golden eyed fish who lived in their own kingdom sailed with
majestic slowness through green-shadowed water.
As evening
fell. I would sit on the Fishing Rock, watching the sun leaving
over the top of McGregor peak, gold light catching the forestry
watchtower on its bald peak. A downdraft would start, I could
hear it coming, sighing down the mountainside through the
fir and pine branches.
Above me in
the fields, the dark was growing and the curlews were crying
and crying through the shadows.
They're gone
now. They've disappeared and I don't know why. My father says
the ravens drove them away. But when I was a child, lying
awake on hot nights, they cried and ran over the fields and
I loved their cries more than any other sound.
I stayed at
the beach until there was only a lingering rim of light behind
the opaque blue mountains. The fish made circles on the water;
the water slurped and lipped at the sand's edge like feet
splashing, like something coming out of the black depths to
visit.
 |
There is a monster
in the lake. Many people have seen it. On very hot summer
evenings, our father sometimes used to take us out in the
boat in the middle of the lake to swim.
He would swim
under the boat and grab our legs. He and our mother would
talk about all the bodies that had been lost in the lake,
the bodies that never came to the surface, the black endless
depths of the lake.
But still
I wouldn't want to go home. The fields were full of dark.
The hay stubble would bite my bare feet. My mother might be
calling. Mosquitoes began to haunt the air; light still glimmered
in dim layers on the mountains. But I didn't want to go, not
yet, not quite yet. The wind would come stronger now, enough
to rock the trees, wake ripples on the water which splashed
with greater urgency, – ghosts in the water.
The mountains
were black now. Under the trees, up the path from the beach,
I had to feel my way. The voice behind me from the water was
menacing. I had escaped but it wanted me back. All day I had
hovered by the water, staring into the green depths, looking
for fish, caught in a dream of water and air, the sun tasting
my skin, turning me to brown salt and leather. My skin would
glow all night.
Floating back
through the hay fields, half fish, half bird, blind across
the bird-crying fields, with the wind and the black sighing
trees and my mother waiting, calling me, singing, to come
in, come in, come back inside.
My mother
had trained as a singer before she married. She sang at her
work, sang to call us inside, pure operatic notes floating
over the orchard and down the hill to the water, where we
were hiding, escaping the endless work. When we moved there,
I thought the farm was freedom, I soon found its other name
was work. My mother sang in her toil, from morning to night,
the endless effort of running a farm and feeding everyone
on it and producing everything from scratch, all our food
came from the farm, meat, fruit, vegetables, milk and butter.
Every fall, 300 jars of fruit and vegetables lined the shelves
in the cellar.
Outside, the
farm was my father's kingdom. He extended his fury at his
disobedient and wayward land to us, his lazy children. The
rain rotted the cherries, lodged the hay so it couldn't be
cut; weeds overran the pasture grass and the garden. One year,
the chickens got coccidiosis and died, all six hundred of
them, and every day for a solid year we ate chicken, which
my mother did her best to disguise as something else but never
could.
The thing
I once loved most about my father was his hands. They were
huge, the skin thick as leather mitts, littered with nicks
and cuts, the lines embedded with grease and dirt. No matter
how much he washed, they always had those black lines, that
male reek of motors.
 |
When I was a child, I followed him everywhere.
I had to stretch my legs to awkward lengths to match his
strides.
"You're
just like your father," my mother would snap when
she was really angry with me.
I was my father's henchman, and for a long time, his enemies
were my enemies. I believed in his raging endless despair
about work and money, I followed behind him, snarling
at my brothers and sister who couldn't, wouldn't, could
never work as hard, as fast, as well, as I could. |
Once we were walking out to the hayfield in the spring.
Wind came beating in off the lake. We were supposed to spend
the morning picking up rocks, shards of granite from the outcrop
that my father had blown up with dynamite. He liked to blow
things up. I did too. I loved to help him. It's a miracle he
never blew any of us up. He used to hand us sticks of dynamite,
the paper damp from age and leaking nitroglycerine.
"Don't
shake your fingers," he said. We put the dynamite down
the holes he'd drilled with his ancient compressor, covered
them with dirt and rocks and tamped the whole thing down with
crowbars. He fixed the blasting caps, ran out the fuse, said,
"Get down. Open your mouths."
That was to
protect our ears. We all got headaches from the blast fumes
and our crazy dog Willy ran in and began pawing at the blast
holes even before all the rocks had stopped raining down from
the sky. Maybe he figured the world's biggest gopher was down
there somewhere.
On the way
out to the hayfield, my father began cursing my little brother
who
was lagging behind. I was eight, so my brother would have been
five. My father was ranting, about how we all had to work,
when
there was work to be done, you goddamn well did it, that it
was work or starve and by God, we were going to work.
I saw it. I
got it clear. It was one of those moments when life suddenly
made sense. We were all in this together. We had this thing
to do, called survival. I felt a clear and religious hatred.
I hated my brother, who didn't get it and was whining behind,
scuffling his feet in the dirt and doing everything to get out
of working.
Occasionally,
our father stopped cursing the weather, the fruit trees, the
contrary cows breaking through fences and getting out on the
road. Sometimes he played, went fishing, took us all hiking
up a remote creek across the lake to look for the rare and tender
brook trout in the high rushing pools of Next Creek. In the
summers, we'd go on picnics and winters we went skating on the
marshy spaces of Rat Slough where he chased us with bulrushes
breaking open in a foam of seeds.
One day frozen
sleet coated the hayfield and he took us out there in the old
Dodge pickup and spun it in circles until we were dizzy with
screaming.
I always felt
safe with him, even reaching under the shrieking buzzsaw to
pull away lengths of wood or the time he knocked a tree over
the power line. When the wires lay snaked and sparking in the
grass he said, "Don't touch those," so my brother
and I jumped over them instead.
And although
I never told anyone, I knew it was my fault the tree had taken
out the power lines. He'd told us to push on it as he cut through
with the power saw because it was leaning and the wind was blowing,
but when I felt the tree lean its awful weight towards me I
weakened and let go. It bent over to squash me but I was too
fast and ran out and away.
My father's
first paid job was at twelve, running a combine, harvesting
peas in the rain. The heavy pea vines kept tangling up the combine
blades. When my oldest brother developed asthma, our father
told us all how he had been allergic to pollen and dust but
had cured himself by working on a haying crew where most of
the hay consisted of ragweed. A day spent coughing and sneezing
in a haze of yellow ragweed pollen had cured him. The same treatment
never worked for my brother.
I came home
once from rounding up cows on horseback with the neighbour kids
with my scalp torn open from a low-hanging branch. My mother
demanded we drive the twenty miles to the hospital. My father
was furious at the idea of wasting gas and time over something
so trivial. But my mother won, for once, and a doctor used nine
stitches to close the cut.
It took me a
long time to become my mother's ally against my father.
At first, quite
reasonably, I tried to agree with both of them and I tried to
get them to agree with each other. I went back and forth during
their fights. Tell your father, tell that rotten bastard. And
I did.
To which my
father often responded bitterly in a phrase he still uses, "
You women," he said, "you goddamned women. You all
think alike."
Now, as I spent
more time with her, I took my mother's side more and more often.
My mother and I, over the baking, washing, peeling fruit, mixing
dough, agreed genially and often that my father is a bastard
and that her marriage to him had been a mistake.
The farm ate
my mother alive – as it ate everything and then reproduced
itself endlessly, each winter, the earth enthusiastically devouring
all the blood and shit and leaves and sawdust and bones and
feathers and sad yellow corn shooks we dumped on it.
My mother was
always there, at the centre, and if the life of the farm
had a soul, she was that soul, endlessly generating food,
meals, comfort, cups of tea, bowls of popcorn.
Even when
she couldn't afford shoes for us, she somehow afforded
records, a subscription to the Metropolitan Opera Society.
She sang at her work – and then she stopped singing.
She was too sad, she said, or her voice was going, or
she was too old. |
 |
When I was very
young, I promised my mother when I grew up and became a rich
and famous writer, that I would take her to the Metropolitan
Opera in New York. I never made enough money to do that. I regret
that failure – not the money, but the trip, the fact that
she never got on an airplane, never went anywhere but dutiful
occasional trips to see relatives.
There was so
much I wanted to give her and never did. Though she sang at
her work, she never stopped – cooking, cleaning, baking,
milk things, laundry, her kids, and then her grandkids, all
endlessly coming home to the farm, coming in the door, going
automatically to the fridge because she baked every day and
there was always something to eat.
When my mother
first started losing her memory, she didn't talk about it. She
wrote notes to herself, she wrote down all her grandchildren's
birthdays. She wrote her sister's and brother's birthdays in
a notebook. She wrote about music she liked and the names of
programs on the radio but mostly she wrote down lists and lists
of work.
I knew my mother
had started leaving us the day she phoned over to my house,
almost hysterical with fear because she couldn't remember how
to make biscuits. She'd been making biscuits for almost seventy
years – odd that her brain would lose such a simple thing.
These days, she sits and stares out the window. I hope she's
resting.
A family can
run away like water between your fingers. My sister came with
me to see our mother, who cried when we left but was soon distracted
by the nurse offering food. My sister and I went back to the
empty farm in silence. Over tea, we agreed, genially, that after
our mother died, we probably wouldn't see each other again.
"I hate
this goddamned place," she said. "I hate this valley,
I keep trying to get away from it."
She left and I went to the beach for a last swim, but the beach
was lonely. Tomorrow I would return to the city. The rocks
hummed
quietly to themselves – a new family had moved in next door
and kept driving in and out of their bay with their enormous
powerboat. There was no peace at the beach.
On the inland
lake where we lived, a boat has very little function –
other than pleasure and play, but what pleasure and play it
is, terrifying intoxicating, even sexy. The boat lifts you over
a medium through which, if you were encased in it, you would
have to drag yourself. A power boat is a flying dream in which
you are flung harmlessly, in sheer joy over the glistening flat
surface, surrounded by water but not in it or bound to it.
And all this
for pleasure, a pleasure which results in enormous amounts of
gasoline spent, fumes on the water, but a pleasure which allows
you to drift seamlessly and effortlessly through the vast beauty
of lake and mountains and or even better, to go round and round
and round in dizzy circles and all of this at the cost of some
$30,000 and rainbow sheen of oil pollution, quickly dissipated.
The first time
I went swimming this summer, I hesitated at the water's edge.
Rain slanted down on the other side of the lake, but the sun
shone on me. The mountains were black-green and blue in the
shafted light.
I shed my clothes,
waded into the water. It was warm at the edge and ice cold further
out. I gasped and let it take my breath and kept swimming. I
swam to the rocks circling the bay, hauled myself out and lay
there for a while.
There were
no boats on the lake because of the storm. I sat there in
the warm
wind then slid back in the water until I was full of the lake,
full of summer and strawberries and the heat coming and the
storm waiting on the other side of the lake and mosquitoes
hovering at the shore. I swam and gasped and remembered all
over again
the sensual intimacy of swimming, like making love, slow rolling
and rolling in the water. Seal woman. I couldn't bear to leave.
I could live
anywhere. I could love anyplace. That's what I tell myself.
It's the utter familiarity of this place that translates into
profundity. It's the same lake and the same beach and the same
summer repeating itself like a ancient liturgical chant. I used
to swim out for half a mile into the lake, over the depths of
black green water, and lie and bask and roll, spouting and playing
like a demented goofy whale. The water always feels safe. It
holds me up, licks me clean. I am its plaything as it is mine.
But this lake eats things, people, boats, bodies.
I came out of
the water and leaned against the sun-heated rock. The kids used
to warm themselves on these rocks. They claimed, when they listened
closely, they could hear voices. I listened but I didn't hear
anything from inside the rock.
But when I was
young, they sang to me. They danced in late afternoon the reflections
from the water. I finally told my mother that the rocks sang
and she said, " It must be insects, or the wind."
I rubbed my
back against the rock. My scalp tingled from the cold and
my
skin was as soft and clean as a washed leaf. After I left,
I stopped at the garden for strawberries, a new cauliflower,
onions
and garlic, the first perfect raspberry and even a few half
ripe Saskatoons – the grazing time of year, when the earth
drips
with food.
I never understood
before that memories are also a place to live. Whenever I come
home to the farm these days, I do the same thing. I prowl around.
I look at every change. I see the work I can no longer do, the
trees which need pruning, the weeds in the raspberries, the
unmowed lawns, the work I did for years, the work I don't do
any longer. But I see it.
The dog and I always go for
a last walk before bed. Usually, we go to the beach but
on my last visit home, in August, I found myself wandering
through the old Hog Pasture, which hasn't been a hog pasture
for sixty years. It's now owned by other people, has huge
new houses on it that nobody lives in, both for sale.
I'm trespassing but there's no one to see or care.
Plus I
have some rights here.
Or my memories do. And some needs as well. |
 |
The dog takes off, disappears into the darkness, running
fast, nose to the ground. I depend on him to warn me about bears
or cougars, but I'm not really nervous. Any self-respecting
bear or cougar would hear me fumbling along and get himself
as far out of the way as possible.
I'm never sure
what I'm doing out here, tracing paths that only existed when
I was a kid, paths that are now lawns and driveways. Still,
I know the way, even in the dark. Over this particular path,
I went every day after school to fetch Tiny, the Jersey milk
cow with the huge doleful eyes. She used to hear me coming and
hide in the brush. I had to stand very still and listen until
the occasional faint clank from her cowbell would give her away.
Once I found her, she'd begrudgingly head for the barn, her
calf, her evening feed of grain and hay. I'd wander behind,
a stick in my hand which I didn't need, switching the clusters
of snowberries off the bushes, or the last dried elderberries
from out of the thicket.
I'm glad to
see that same elderberry bush I used to walk by is still there.
Elderberries are hard to kill. Maybe the new owner got tired
of chopping it down, finally let it be and curved his driveway
to go around it. An old European legend says that witches live
in elderberry bushes. If you chop one down, the witch will curse
you.
White people
haven't lived long enough in this country to have similar legends.
We don't know or believe anything about the spirits of the land.
We don't think there are any. Maybe we believe that to our peril.
All my life
I have watched people move in around me, chop down the trees,
build driveways and houses and septic tank fields and lawns
and gardens. Gradually, they have built places which hold other
memories, not mine. But these houses are for sale because the
people who built them are both dead and their children live
far away and don't want to come here.
My memories
are of these places before they were owned, civilized, tamed.
Mine are of the old paths, the deer trails, the moss-beds under
the spruce, the snowberry jungle with the secret swamp at
its
centre. Mine are a child's memories – it is my childhood I
am prowling through out here in the dark, feeling my way over
paths
that my feet remember, that would be hidden to me by daylight.
I have an odd
fantasy that I can see the paths – that the layers of feet,
mine, the dogs, the cows, the O'Neil's crazy wild horses, deer
and bears and skunks and other animals prowling the dark, have
left thin molecular traces of themselves, traces that shine
dimly in the night.
What is probably
true is that the paths are a hidden unevenness in the ground,
so they refract the little available light, from the stars or
a distant yard light differently and so maybe it is true that
I can see them.
But I like my
fantasy better, that the path is visible to me at night in the
same way as the smells of wild animals are visible to the dog's
questing nose – that it shines in some way I don't understand,
that it is available to my seeking feet, wide open eyes and
my endlessly nostalgic heart.
The paths remain, – and the names. The names remain within
our family – I don't know if the neighbours with their
new houses have any idea that they now live in Sawdust Bay,
Haley's Pasture, the Hog Pasture, or Bone Bay.
These were the
farm names, acquired easily, lost just as easily. Sawdust Bay
still has thick piles of sawdust layered over with pine needles
where Pierre Longueval, the man who created the farm where I
grew up, milled out the lumber for his house and barns and chicken
sheds – Haley's Pasture is where one of the first white
men into the country trailed a herd of goats over the mountains,
built four log cabins whose ancient bones still crouch under
the fir trees. Someone has put a trailer on Pierre's sawdust
piles, someone has built a driveway over the rock walls and
rusty barbed wire Haley used for his goat pasture.
When I am home,
I prowl the old paths remembering stories stored in the ground
and waiting for me, shining up at me in the starlight. I prowl
these paths looking for comfort, for roots, for balance, for
reconnection. I know what I am really doing is wandering through
my own history, looking for the next book, the new path, the
next step on the road. It's what I do as a writer, wander around
in the dark, eyes to the ground, looking for the crystals left
behind by feet that have traveled this same ground.
When I lie in
bed at night the path still shine in my head. All night I walk
their secret ways, at home and content.
****
Driving alone
across the country is the perfect suicide dream. It's like being
dead for just a little while.
After I finished
working in Edmonton, I drove down through Calgary, stopped in
Fort Macleod, on to the foothills, through the Rockies to the
Kootenays.
I had been living
in other people's houses for months, living other people's lives.
I was tired of smiling, getting up at odd hours, eating breakfast
when I didn't feel like it, hanging up my wet towels, stopping
at two glasses of wine.
Now, every place
I saw, I imagined stopping, finding a place, a house, and simply
staying there, having a life of my own. And each life would
be in its own kind of place; in Northern Alberta, it would be
among the poplar and aspen and cottonwood, the gruff farmers,
oil wells and hydrogen sulphide flares, flat stretches of brush
and sly greedy trees busily reclaiming any unplowed land.
I wanted to
stop in Peigan country, near Brocket, where someone had spray
painted a sign saying, Free Nation, No Treaty Indians. Two men
were standing beside a fence post and tractor, stretching wire.
The wind was blowing hard, hard, out of the Crowsnest. The horses
stood with their heads down and rumps pointing to the mountains.
Or down through
the other side of the Crowsnest, maybe I could live in Fernie
and never go skiing. I could have a little house on the dark
mountains among the elk and moose and hunters in the fall. I
could live alone, in all that snow. I kept thinking of my favourite
Adrienne Rich poem about driving across the country, through
towns she might have lived and died in, lonely.
And then I
thought of the place I do live, and have lived for so long,
all my life,
and how peculiarly lonely it is there, among the people I have
known all my life. It's writing that makes me lonely, I thought
resentfully. It's all writing's fault. I finally understood
that writing made me an exile the first time I picked up a
pen
when I was six. I have been watching from the sidelines ever
since, trying to understand.
Maybe I could
buy an RV I thought, and understood that fantasy for the first
time too. Oh I know so much about everything when I'm driving.
I imagined myself freewheeling it alone down the Dempster Highway
to the Arctic and standing there, looking at the blue-black
ice on the wild ocean.
I could get
a dog for company. I'd never have to get out of the damned RV
except to go for long windswept walks beside the Arctic. These
days, they even have drive in bank machines. I could have a
computer and a satellite dish and a wide screen TV.
Of course,
I'd have to have some money but that wasn't today's problem.
Just
tomorrow's, when I got home and stopped being tragic on a windswept
highway heading out of Alberta and had to get ready to move
again out of the place I've lived my whole life. I've left
so many times and then returned.
I have always
wanted to write when I was driving. When I was a little kid,
I liked to ride around in the back seat of cars because I could
dream there. I didn't get to do it much because we had a pickup.
Four kids and two adults in the front seat of a '57 Dodge didn't
leave much room for dreaming.
For four years,
every week I drove a two hundred mile round trip to teach writing.
The long fall faded into winter afternoons, gold tinged hills
blending with the blue smoke from slashfires, an abandoned trailer
beside the river bleeding pink fading to yellow insulation out
of its guts.
At night I drove
through a black tunnel, with trucks crashing through the slush,
deer and elk peering from the frozen sidelines.
When I got home,
I'd build up the fire, crawl into bed, watch David Letterman,
lay there listening to the snow hissing against the windows,
and fall instantly, gratefully, asleep, glad to be home, glad
to be not going anywhere for a while.
The day before
I moved away again, my son and I were driving the lake road
with his son asleep in the back seat.
"Do you
think your grandmother has Alzheimer's?" I asked. I was
driving so I didn't have to look at him.
"She's
fine," he said. "You worry too much."
The steering
wheel shook because the tires were going bald. I never know
what to do about tires. They're never just right for the time
of year. Someone always tells me, "Oh, you shouldn't
have your winters on now," or then they say, "Better
get some new winter tires." It wears me out, thinking
about tires.
"Should
I get some new tires?" I asked.
"The tires
are fine," he said.
"She phoned
over to my house last week. She said she couldn't remember how
to make biscuits."
Oh, c'mon, I
had said. Of course you know how to make biscuits.
I wanted to
say, "Do you think she'll die while I'm gone, do you
think she'll fade away and forget everything?" but it
was such a beautiful day, the road like a carved edge between
the cliff
and the bright blue lake.
"She's
fine," he said again.
We drove on
and on, balancing on the yellow line, the delicate and multicoloured
wake of my life trailing behind me.
One night when
I was home, I walked back from the lake in the dark. The moon
was coming up behind the Purcells, behind the black and white
slanted slab of hill. I saw the moon. I stood and opened my
mouth. It was too much to take in – , all I could do was
breathe and breathe with the cold air and the snow falling in
my open upturned mouth. All I needed, all I ever wanted, was
to be walking in the cold night and watch the moon rise over
the mountains, the light falling over the farm where the coyotes
taunted the dogs as they all ran back and forth exchanging insults,
the coyotes in their snowy woods beyond the fence and the dogs
running between the house and the pasture, the sleepy grumpy
cows shaking their heads at them as the dogs ran under their
bellies and me, hesitating for a long while in the cold before
finally going inside. |
