Roots

Or the Hydroponics of Belonging

When people ask me if I miss Canada, I reply “Not at all, it’s a great place to be from.”
“The key word is from.” I often add helpfully, just in case they did not get my drift.

Speaking of drift, I remain a willing exile from my home and native land ad mare usque ad mare True North strong and free and all that. Nevertheless, I renew my passport with diligent regularity and I can even remember most of the national anthem (which has to be one of the most mercifully short in the world).

But this does not mean I don’t have roots.
Just that they are very long.

I do occasionally dig looking for them, but all I find are words. I have to crowbar these from the steep sidehill fields of my childhood. Words like river stones, deposited there a long time ago; they bruise my fingers when I try to pile them into paragraphs. I can hear that river that made them smooth, that brought them there, but only just, over the dull murmur of a rather wider and more restless body of water..

All my attempts to define my feelings are fumbling and clumsy. I can never tell exactly about what or where I am writing, since my voluntary exile (but, I wasn’t leaving Canada, I was going somewhere else. That makes all the difference.) I confuse time, space, geography of the world and geography of the mind. I feel strongly about it, but cannot put enough words under it to prop it up. Thus, it’s not a very solid structure and sways a lot in the wind. It hasn’t fallen down yet, but I wouldn’t hang around under it.

So, you can imagine how delighted I am when someone else finds the right words.

When I was in high school, even I of course had a clump of friends with whom I spent most of my time. (For small town kids, friends are about all there is. And I was a mid-term intruder, and I am grateful to them all – Rob, Bob, Wendy, Debbie, Harold – for making that place home for me.) Like all small town kids, they’ve all moved far away. One of them has gone on to two places: off to sink roots into the land and to uproot his mind and set it wandering. Nothing contradictory there; I did the same thing, but backwards. My stormlantern is imagery, and his is language.

Harold Rhenisch has no trouble finding words. He is a skilled dowser, his pen held out in front of him as he patiently covers acre after acre, twitching and pulling when there is meaning running deep. Nor is he afraid to get down on his knees and wrestle with his texts, yanking out weeds, grubbing out stones; his chapters are ploughed and harrowed or lie fallow, depending on what suits best the harvest. Or some times he’s the one who walks invisible in the landscape. No 4×4 tracks to tell you where he’s been, just a handful of words plucked here and there and arranged. Harold’s wordfields are a mix of Japanese garden and back forty.

So, the other day, Harold sent me two books. The Wolves at Evelyn and Winging Home. Well, I have to say one thing, they certainly helped lay to rest any pretensions I ever had involving seriously writing about Canada. All those confused thoughts and 10-watt flashes of genius I’ve ever had… this was their obituary in prose, black on white on 100% post-consumer recycled and ancient-forest-friendly paper. Not that the loss is heartbreaking, mind you. I’m sure I’ll survive, pretensions lowered but spirit upraised. And of course, in time I’ll forget, stumble over another of those rounded stones while I’m wandering, and stoop down to try to get it out of the ground. (Some people never learn.)

But of course it’s all about the land. Canadians have a loose grip on it and yet gouge and scar it deeply. I’m not proud of that, nor of what Canada did to the original inhabitants. Less Wild West, but lots of cheap liquor, snake fences and disease all the same. It didn’t take long, a generation or two. I’ve walked through abandoned Nootka villages, a couple of hours by Zodiac from anywhere now. Rotting totems askew in the forest and the long grass. It was eerie: a requiem sung by screaming gulls, a winding sheet of ragged mist. And an unwilling son of conquerors and civilizers in a windbreaker and damp hiking boots, rain on my glasses and in my heart. I’ll never forget.

No, it’s not a country with a long history. One morning Canada basically woke up to find itself on its own. No more British. Tut tut, off we go, good luck and all, drop by if you’re across the Pond. So there you go, from a colony (or more exactly a private company; Rupert’s Land was a million and a half square miles, making the Hudson’s Bay Company the largest land owner in the world at the time) to a bona fide dominion, and a genuine constitutional monarchy to boot. No struggle for independance, no coming of age. No civil wars, no growing pains. Canadians happily traded one form of colonialism for another. An even trade: Whitehall for Parliament Hill, and it’s still basically run the same way. On the other hand, it’s a personable sort of heritage, as it’s not exactly dwarfing you from some hoary and lofty pedestal of aeons past, nor handing you some incommensurably heavy burden to bear.

Even the name is ambiguous. It’s commonly agreed that is is derived from a Wendot word kanata, which means “village” or “settlement”. But even that isn’t sure. What a country. Another decade to go before sesquicentenary celebrations and already nobody knows where the name comes from. Personally, I prefer this story: the parliament was arguing about what name to choose for their brand-new land, and it was decided that something short and easy to remember, like USA, was the best. But, after many rounds of votes, while no consensus came, three rival camps were clearly established. So, the Speaker asked each group for a letter. The first group came up with the letter C. “C, eh?” said the Speaker, and the secretary dutifully wrote this down. The second party proposed the letter N. “N, eh?” repeated the Speaker, the clerk took note. The last group wanted a D. “D, eh?”. This too was transcribed.
When asked to read out the suggestions, the secretary read “C -A -N – A- D- A”. And there you go.

Now that WAS very silly. My apologies. Here are some real words.

The Wolves At Evelyn*
Well, my mother and I might know how to be alone with the earth, but we sure don’t know what to call it. Take the simplest word: forest. The word is adequate, but disturbingly generalized. We are surrounded by millions of square miles of it, but don’t have any decent words for it, as it exists specifically around us and within us, just a few unlikely candidates from the world of land:

• Forest. Too much Robin Hood and the old oak trees that built the ships that sailed the seas. Too many German peasants with their cows and goats in the meadows.
• Bush. Too much Africa and untouched land where no one lives. Too many Zimbabwean women cutting down forests one stick at a time to carry home tied to their backs, to cook dinner, one dinner, one thin blue thread of smoke at a time, until the eagles are circling over a desert.
• Timber. Duh. Too many Kenworth trucks hauling into town, spitting up chunks of mud from their tires; too many slash piles; too much smoke. Same for: cutblock, riparian zone, wildlife corridor, old growth, prescribed block, woodlot. Too much sign-here-on-the-dotted-line, sir.
•Stick. This is from Chinook Jargon — or Wawa — British Columbia’s own language. Stick: a tree. As in, “I’m going out to the sticks.” Whim stick: a fallen tree. As in, “I’m going out to the clearcut.” You can hear the sound of the stick falling: whim. Still, this one has legs, as in: “He really lives out in the sticks.” That’s usable. Thing is, it’s come to mean: “What a hick.” If you used this to describe a forest, no one would be quite sure what you meant. Part English, part French, part Chinook Indian, Wawa was the trade language of British Columbia, Washington, and Alaska. Even in the 1930s, every newspaper editor in the province had a Chinook Jargon dictionary at his side. In 1898, the language had its own newspaper in Kamloops: The Wawa. In 1898.
• Boreal forest. Give me a break. Can you imagine going out for a walk behind your house, and saying to your kids, “I’m just going out to the boreal forest for a while?” It’s like saying, “I think I’ll stroll down to the Royal Ontario Museum for the afternoon and look at the plastic moose and the plexiglass loon.” All that really works here is something like, “I’m going out to the aspens, I’m going out to the firs, I’m going out to Green Lake, I’m going out.”

You can’t say it. In other countries it is the job of poets to make up words for situations like this.

• Trees. “I’m going out to the trees.”

Nah.

The trouble is, you’re not going out. You’re already there.
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A decade ago, my editor Angela Adison, a passionate daughter of 1950s Southern Ontario, put the problem to me very succinctly: “Quebec and Ontario will never separate. Even if there is a political separation, they cannot be divided, because at their heart they share a landscape: they both live in fear of the North. They are awed by it. They dream of it. That’s where their winter comes from. You don’t have that in British Columbia at all. You share none of it.”
If we’re going to talk about Canada, and I think we should, we need to include my Canada, and all the other silenced Canadas at the table, or we don’t have a nation, only a watch fob.
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It’s not that I don’t know any names for things. I have no trouble naming a copse, a grove, a dell, a dale, a forest, a boll, a glen, a brae — in England, full of the king’s deer. I learned all that way back from the book table at the 5 Cents to a Dollar Store, when I used to spend the afternoons hanging out with Robin Hood, stringing up monks by the heels among the gnarly oaks. In that English landscape of poachers and porridge and fog tip-tapping at the windowpane, of bleating sheep and clever collies herding them into pens while cleverer men smoked their pipes and knocked their walking sticks and whistled sweetly, my words are at home. It’s just that I’m not. On the other hand, in my own land made out of aspen trees and black spruce, rust-red pines riddled with beetles and woodpeckers hammering insatiably through the month of May, looking for a way in, I have no words, but I am home.

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The paradox behind my house, the land across the road, the land stretching for three hundred miles to the Rockies and three hundred miles to the Coast Mountains collapsing into the Pacific, belongs, you see, to Elizabeth Windsor, Queen of England, or, as we like to put it, to the Crown. It is held in trust for all of us. It is ours, in the same way that Friedrich the Great’s satyrs gave him the legitimacy to channel, through his wit and his will, a people, a land, and a stretch of earth into an empire. In that conflation of terms lies the problem. The dead logging debris on the ground, the shredded, punky wood, the branches stripped off the lodgepole pines by crab-like feller-bunchers and pressed into the thin soil and the deep clay by skidders, all provide nutrients for new soil. The thin trees left standing in this sandbox are still a forest, of sorts — but one according precisely to the requirements of a scientific worldview. A forest like that ensures the continuance of British Columbian colonial culture, British Columbian colonial land, but the only sanctioned entrance it allows into a spiritual earth is through the gate of the industrial metaphor laid upon it, just as its only culturally-sanctioned entrance into land in general and earth specifically is through the metaphor of subdivision and ownership. You would think we would have learned better after a whole century of Indian reserves, which cut first peoples off from themselves by the simple addition of snake fences winding along the hills.

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Living in half a continent stitched together with the catgut of a railroad and the mustard plaster of some old portage routes, I find it easy to share in the chill power of the St. Laurence frozen in February, with the green-white ice bunching up below Vieux Québec, cutting off the potato fields and maple trees stripped of their leaves on the Ile d’Orléans. I share in the sense of canoes setting forth from Montreal on the eighteen-month journey across Paul Kane’s paintings of the Cree, too, to bring back bales of furs to be made into men’s top hats in London, Paris and Berlin, so the Reichstag and the Bourse and Parliament could get on with their bowing and their clipped vowels. If I close my eyes I can feel a current of buckskin-fringed and war-painted Indians and smoke-eyed mountain men flowing down the river like uprooted trees pouring down the Amazon, a great novel decorated in its exotic finery spinning perpetually past the city. In fact, with Lucien, I share the sense of a whole continent draining past the cabanes à sucre and the tall churches with spires as sharp as knitting needles, knitting the sky together into a sweater for God, draining down like unwinding wool past the thin farms and their fat pigs. That’s easy.
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I live in The Interior, a place that men in the capital cities of Victoria and New Westminster contemplated from such a sense of hostile wilderness that they named it after the British experience in India and Africa. In Africa, no one went into the Interior, except dogs and mad Englishmen. Everyone else stayed in Zanzibar and whooped it up with the Arabs, in the heat and indolence. The indolence was delicious. They stayed up late playing with their slave girls, or boys, please, and they slept late, with their heads in a vise of the sun. The sea was the temperature and consistency of turtle soup. In the Interior of Eastern Africa, disease and hostility, barbarism and the slave trade laid men bare: just six months earlier they might have been school boys parsing Latin verbs in Oxford, but suddenly they were whipping their packers until they died; they were sleeping behind hedges of thorns; they were burning their grass huts so that there was nothing for any other man to use; they were dead men. Richard Burton went in there, as mad or as sane as they came, looking for the source of the Nile, and wandered around in hysteria and malaria for a year and a half, was given up for dead, found water going every whichway but never found its source, before he finally made it out again — only to want to plunge right back in. In the end, he got out by joining an Arab slave caravan — the voyageurs of their time and place: 1863, to put a nail into it. In those days, a small-time slaver could count on picking up 20,000 pounds of ivory, valued at 4000 pounds sterling in Khartoum, and four or five hundred slaves worth five or six pounds each — for a total of 6500 pounds. It was illegal, but profits like that weren’t to be ignored. It was the cocaine trade of its day. That was life in the Interior. In those days, the BX stage was running up the Cariboo Road through 150 Mile House, two miles from my house here among the trees, with a driver and a man riding shotgun and chests full of gold dug out of the ground. Jewish merchants were murdered for their gold on the road between the mines at Barkerville and the river crossing at Quesnelle Forks; miners walked the three hundred and fifty miles north through the sagebrush, the aspens, pines, and the bunchgrass, to dig pits in the gravel, sometimes ninety feet down. The mines were below the water table. They were wells, really. Even so, shafts were punched out of them in to leads of gold, shored up with trees cut down on the slopes above town and wrestled down. Water and gravel were lifted out one bucketful at a time. Men came from the whole world to dig and sluice that gravel, and they died young. That’s the truth — rather than the dream — of life in the forest. In Barkerville and Quesnelle Forks, thirty years was a good age to die. When the miners had been fleeced by black market prices and freight costs, they walked back out down to the Coast, through Likely, and Horsefly, 150 Mile House, Chasm, Pavillion and Lillooet, sleeping in the ditches, up to their ears with adventure, bushed. That was life in the Interior, too: except this time it was all legal.

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Besides rushing out and buying Harold’s book (IMMEDIATELY! That’s an order!) you can find out more here.
Read his blog.
Visit his site.
Check out his other recent book Winging Home, you’ll never consider birdwatching to be a trivial pursuit again.
Read the review here.
THE HOME FRONT

Otherwise, when I’m not relying on my best friends to bail me out of a newsletter, I am (cross my heart) hard at work. I have been sentenced to a year and a half of hard labour on three big book projects and am determined to do my time and pay my debts to society.
Illustrating a book is a war of attrition in which each picture is a skirmish. One is simultaneously the general on the hilltop with his maps and plans and the poor devil in the trenches…

Left: The astonishing standing stone on the postcard is local, currently in the Laténium, making its début in fiction…
Centre: A wall of books erects itself around me for each picture – or rather five pictures done more or less at the same time for reasons of continuity in this case –  and each time the phone rings I only just manage to hurdle them without falling flat on my face, or on the brush I’m invariably holding in my teeth.
Right: Trying to make sense of my flat plans and layouts.

A few more stills from the documentary.

*All excerpts from “The Wolves at Evelyn” are evidently © Brindle & Glass/Harold Rhenisch and are used here with their kind permission.