What I'm Not Reading

This is the book I started not to read after I heard the excellent Canada Reads program on the CBC.  I also heard subsequent interviews with Joseph Boyden and then my dad lent me his copy of the book. After reading a bit I returned the hard copy and bought a version for my Kindle which I read a little of and then stopped. That is why I am referring to it as the book I am not reading. I intend to pick it back up of course. My dad felt it was a bit brutal. It is. I like how the story is told through various voices. The writing itself is spare but descriptive. The part I have read, was violent but also magical and very real feeling. Since my trip to Smithers last year I have been thinking a lot more about the issues the First Nations face. The main one of those being how they are seen in today's and future societies. This generation needs stories like this to connect them to the history of Canada. And because I have not finished this book, that is all I can say.

The Way Home, Days 6 and 7

We left on Monday. I organized the trip so that we would have 3 travel free days in Smithers. Driving out of Telkwa toward Quick where my mother lived is emotional. I miss my mother in this world, more than anything. It's such a huge weight to carry, longing for the person you loved most in the world. We carry on. The sky opens up and rains on us as we pass her turn-off and we wind gently toward Hungry Hill. I stare out the window trying to remember everything as it whips past me. Our lives in the sacred Bulkley Valley. The road is my whole life stretching out ahead of me. In the video Mark refers to it as the highway that has become our home.

Scattered along the highway there are the little houses, homesteads, left by the first white settlers to the area. Hopeful. In clearings. The hay grows up around them and eventually the ground will reclaim them in much the same way it has claimed their owners. I can't imagine what it was like for the first non-native people to this region.

 

Simple barns and rail fences dot the landscape and are weak attempts to to tame the wild landscape. Civilization on the inside, the natural world on the outside. A line separating this, from that.
 

The train follows the highway we have been living on. My eldest brother has worked for the CN Railway since he was 18. I naturally admired him so it made sense to admire trains as well. We rode them east to Jasper and then west to Vancouver. We climbed the Rockies slowly and waited in sidings without complaint. We rode them west to a place call Pacific. The train took me places and felt familiar doing so. The first time I went away for Christmas after my parents split up, I rode the train home from Saskatchewan on New Year's Eve, where my dad was living. We rolled past frozen Canadian landscapes, filled with remote crossings in sleeping towns. It was 4am when we came through Telkwa as the only Hotel in that small town burned silently down as we passed, speechless, headed west to Smithers.

Vanderhoof. The center of British Columbia. Not much else going on there besides Glen's Drive-In, the local Sino-Canadian restaurant. Some smart person moved all these heritage type buildings into one highway-close-locale. We stopped and snooped but ultimately ate our lunch of sandwiches at a picnic table under a green umbrella. We did little to support the local economy beyond a few words of encouragement to the local shop owners,

The Loon. I heard them calling in the night at the lake. It's a sorrowful sound. The end of day floats over the lake at dusk, the loon calls us to bed, and the lake air flows through the cabin pulling away the fog of the past creating whole new memories, good adult memories in place of the fantasy of childhood.

Nearing Quesnel, there are so many logging trucks on the road we feel puny in size and purpose. Our mission to return to my childhood home seems superfluous in comparison to the whole lumber industry. The local towns are driven by mills. Train tracks loop into sawmill yards and back out. Trucks, massive trucks, low slung, super long, populate the highway and we are submissive, hanging back to let them proceed. Swaying trailers, threatening to crush us, their logs poised to  impale us should the load shift, the trailer tip. They are like missiles traveling the roads, let loose on gravel, proceeding to pavement, headed to the next mill-town. We hang back, we brake, we count our blessings. The harvest is enormous, an unintended consequence of the Mountain Pine Beetle plague. I am witnessing the forests with their dead trees, and it doesn't look good. The future of these forests hangs in the balance. We are inconsequential and get out of the way to let these monsters of progress and sustainability pass.

The Caribou. Rolling hills and pasture land.The omnipresent river flows south to the Fraser Canyon, the landscape gets drier the farther south we go.

Williams Lake, B.C.

South of Williams Lake headed to 100 Mile House for the night. I had wanted to make the drive in one day but ultimately it just wasn't possible or advisable. The Fraser Canyon lies at the end of the drive and as treacherous as it seems in daylight it's potentially deadly at night for a tired driver in a car with malfunctioning headlights. We stayed in the Red Coach Inn as we had as kids when we drove to Vancouver for summer vacation. It was pleasant and slightly surreal to be there with my dad and older sister as well as my own family.

Day 7. We slept poorly in the hotel despite being tired. I turned the AC off to keep it from blowing on my kid who had developed a terrible dry cough, the cause of which would not become clear for another week. It was hot and still and Mark and I were anxious about getting home, getting back to life post travel. We had a light breakfast and hit the road, the sun at our left as we drove south to the face the canyon. I'm glad I made this trip with my family. I feel a little more whole than I did when we set out. I feel a little more Canadian and a little more connected to the people and places I grew up around. I feel more deeply connected to the landscape of the province and to that road that connects me to where my cognizant life began.

Up the Mountain, Day 5

 Our ski-cabin is the light spec at the middle of this photo to the left of the lift-line.

Legend has it that my dad moved us to Smithers in 1965 because of the mountains. He had other reasons but they were lost on me. We skied on Sundays, as a family. Other families went to church, we skied. We ate pancakes in the morning and then we all piled into the VW Bus and after he had yelled his head off at us to get our boots, poles, and skis together, we were off. It was exciting and terrifying. My father at the wheel, hunched over, willing the underpowered vehicle up up up, around switchbacks lined by snowbanks just waiting to suck you in. He was a mountain climber but had given it up by the time I was born. Skiing was his next passion. So we skied.

He built us a ski cabin. It was a PanAbode number and the pieces got dropped by helicopter onto the mountain like bundles of Lincoln-Logs. The area that was the mountain was on Crown land, owned ostensibly by the government and we were all squatters. People built little basic cabins to huddle in after a long day of skiing, there was no power and we melted snow for water. There was a Ski-Club cabin as well where you could eat your bag lunch. I spent a lot of time there drinking cocoa and amusing the other skiers. Our cabin materials got dropped in the wrong spot so the cabin got built closer to the main run than it should have. Our outhouse ended up in the meadow where the cabin should have been. In winter I remember the deep path dug into the snow behind the cabin to the outhouse. As a child it felt like walking a long blue white corridor to the little wood hut. Scary and magical and slightly stinky.

 

Crater Lake beyond the trees. The alpine flowers were sparse due to the dry summer. Elevation is about 5000ft.

The Green-T hut. This was near the site of the original rope tow. As you rode up you could see our cabin and an optical illusion was created, the cabin appeared to sit tilted back into the hill, I imagined cups and saucers sliding off the crude table inside. In years of heavy snow my eldest brother and his friends made a snow-bridge onto the roof of the cabin and skied down the hill and over the roof, launching themselves into the ether. Spread eagles all of them, landing mostly softly below. We sold the cabin when my mother was dying, I am not sure who owns it now.

Many of the original ramshackle cabins still exist as well as many newer better ones. Everywhere progress and change even on the mountain.

 

The original ski-club cabin.

The Bulkley Valley, Day 2 and 3

Coming into Houston. It's been raining on and off since Burns Lake where we bought Okanagon fruit from an idling delivery truck in a Husky parking lot. It had been hot and dusty in Prince George 4 hours earlier, I was glad the dog didn't come. Lakes, little or long line the highway through Fort Fraser. The landscape gets prettier and more gentle as you near the Bulkley Valley off in the distance at the base of Hudson Bay Mountain.

We were lucky enough to stay with dear family friends at a lake west of town. The mountain follows you everywhere. It's at the foot of main street and all the way out here at the Lake. I've told this story a thousand times but it's very true. When I was a kid our house faced the mountain and whenever someone came to visit who was not accustomed to living with a huge mountain topped with a glacier in their backyard all sorts of fanciful adjectives got tossed around. I found their shrieks of glee ridiculous and over done. A mountain. Who swoons at a mountain that way. I do, that's who. It was good to see the mountain again.

Bathers at the Lake. My siblings and I, our hosts and my daughter and husband. The mountain looks on. At 4 o'clock the kids from next door appear for ice cream and trudge up the hill where they are served their daily ration. We stay by the lake too relaxed to move imaging how we can do this again tomorrow.

The lovely cottage where we stayed. I slept well here knowing that my family was happy they had come along on this journey with me. I thought I might cry at some inopportune moment but the tears never quite came, my sleep was active instead.

The Fraser Canyon Day 1

Driving north of Hope. The trees are replaced with sage.

The Thompson River meets the Fraser River, I think. The signage is poor along the road. The road conditions are sub-par considering the volume of traffic on the road.

 Dry, dry hills. 99 degrees out. Too hot to ride a horse. We have no stamina in the heat.

The reappearance of trees, small and scraggly clinging to the hillside, grass comes later, further up the road.

Road Trip to the Past

 Big sky and supplies at Lac La Hache

I wanted to go to Smithers. I didn't want to go to Smithers. All summer long we were allegedly going to Smithers. The drive is scary to me, it's long and the highway is undivided most of the way. It's lonely and empty and dusty and it can be hot or very cold and sometimes icy and always bumpy and under construction. The logging trucks and transport trucks are plentiful, huge and vicious. The first several hours of the drive seems to be straight uphill with the river below you on one side and a crumbling rock face above you on the other side. My head hurt, we couldn't listen to music, I was worried about the car making the trip, I was worried about being stranded in a hostile landscape in a country that has become foreign to me. I worried about my dog back at home in the kennel. In the video clips of our first night at Lac La Hache I can see how I have my hand over my mouth surveying the scene, trying to sort out what to do first. The next scene is of the tent set-up and I know by then I had had a beer and was feeling better. The clips of the following morning I look more relaxed, by the time we reached Smithers, 9 hours later, the video shows me warmly embracing my family members who had also come for the Centennial of our little town. We had made it, alive.

One of many roadside shrines to those who have died along the Yellowhead 16

Exercise

This writing everyday like it's a journal isn't really working. I can't write unselfconsciously. I can't make the time. I am thinking about things I should write, phrases and ideas and then because they come to me when my hands are full I don't write them down and then they are gone. My mind is mushy with hormones. I can't remember anything and it makes me wonder why we hold memory up as this thing that is so important. Why do we mourn memory loss of the demented and alzheimed, in the the brain damaged and the afflicted? I say good riddance! It's the past, it's gone, it's ether, this moment is all there is.

I am going home next week to the place I grew up, to the town that exists solely in my memory. The town has changed a lot in the 36 years since I lived there. I had mixed feelings about the whole trip. It's a long way and the drive is slightly treacherous. My childhood was filled with stories of horrible car crashes so my mind goes right there. I lost a friend in the second grade to a camper fire—I saw her Friday, Saturday she was dead—it happened in the night when the children were all asleep in the cab-over of some shitty camper and the gas leaked and the whole thing blew up. A fiery crash on some deserted stretch of the Yellowhead 16.

A childhood friends father died tonight. I saw it on facebook. I've been in contact with her, he had cancer. He was a good guy, totally dedicated to his kids. Oh my god he was handsome and so sexy. I thought so at ten. He was a truck driver some times his daughter and I would sleep in his king size water bed in his purple satin sheets. He was an operator I guess but he was her dad and he was there even when he wasn't. They had animals and an unfinished split level house that we used to bring her ponies into. The living room had Hawaiian scene wallpaper, oversize bean-bag furniture, and shag carpet, it was nirvana. We ran wild of course. It was the 1970's and no one's parents were keeping track of the kids. We slept in barns and drove trucks we weren't supposed to, and we rode those damn ponies all over hell's half acre.

It's Wednesday now. The weekend is over, my husband only left this morning to take the long drive into the city to do his radio show. I got up and took the dogs for a little walk in the yard and I let out the chickens. I combined the flocks two days ago and the new girls are still miffed and confused. Only one of them figured out to go into the coop last night, I carried the other five by hand. I am confident tonight will be better. Hens are so mean to each other and especially to the new residents. There's no welcome wagon let's show you around approach. It's more like I am going to peck you and steal your food because that's what I do. Only once has one of my hens taken a foundling literally under her wing and that chicken now enjoys second place in the flock behind the three oldest hens and above the pair of year old hens, a Cochin and a Royal Buttercup. Gingers and Freckles (three of each name) are just 4 months old, still not laying and are now going to bed at night nervous and exhausted in a strange land at the bottom of the pecking order.

The weather has been perfect for an entire month and even though the days are shortening slightly it's still light until 9 o'clock and the temperature is consistently pleasant. I am satiated by summer.

Around Here

We cancelled our weekend plans.  I am out 30 bucks for a reservation but it's the price you pay. I've been home for a few days on my own now settling into the routine of work and dog care with occasional trips out to purchase berries or to pick them. The pressure to preserve fruit is heavy right now, how could I possibly entertain the idea of going away again when raspberries are finishing up and blueberries are coming on.

I am in love with my days, the lazy way they unwind. Yesterday, I inflated the blow-up pool and filled it up two-thirds with water as Mark requested. Today the temp was 58°F after a few hours of sun. Later on I'll pick berries again and even hope to cook a meal, something I have been neglecting. When I am home alone like this I regress into some pretty questionable eating habits. I am no ones model. I eat nachos for supper without vegetable accompaniment. I let the dishes sit where they were emptied.

Listening to music while I work, the doors to my office open wide. A breeze blows past and taps me on my bare shoulder, reminding me how lucky I am. I wish I had a signal to make, like the sign of the cross to acknowledge the greater force but my luck has no name it just blows in from outside me and I gather it up.

Exercise

I'm not writing much these days so I thought I would bring the journal here for a bit and see what happens. It's Monday, a day of clarity, or a few hours of clarity at least. I make my lists on Sunday, dreaming in the car on the way back from the city about what I can do better this coming week, thinking a lot about my dad who we have just seen. He is in good form and I am more relaxed around him these days. Why oh why are you not completely relaxed around your own father? I am not sure. I want him to like me and respect me, I don't see it all as unconditional. The work we are doing at his house is coming along, I think he's glad we're doing it. He seems happy to have us there now and then. I try not to boss him too much. I try not to vacuum each and every time I visit. That's progress I guess. I saw Molly (my stepmother) on Sunday at Banfield, it's a depressing place but there are no other options, her state is depressing but she did recognize me and spoke my name immediately, she even wanted to say something about my new hair color but the words got garbled. Dad was sweet with her, telling her how beautiful she looked. I was odd, I've never heard him be that effusive with her but it was genuine and it seemed to cheer her up. She's sad. This current reality of hers is not one she ever would have chosen, living in public, letting others care for her body, dress her, apply her lipstick. The women who care for her are all saints. Why would anyone choose this work, choose to care for people who cannot care for themselves and in some case are very angry about the care. Molly is sedate. She is prone to outbursts of emotion. She always has been and that made me wary of her when she was well. These days I can see her frailty, her anguish and confusion. She seems to know what is going on but is powerless to control it. She doesn't ask to go home, does she even know anymore that home exists. Dad goes to see her most days, they have their little moments, he likes to make her laugh but I see what he is missing too. She adored him, and fussed over him, cared for him for years and now he is left with this current scenario and I worry about him feeling lonely at home. I hate to think about the loss of intimacy with Mark, I try to imagine us all old and creaky snuggling up as we do our bony legs covered in tissue paper skin in place of our once full flesh. My dad's legs are so thin and veiny now, I noticed that the other day. My concentration is blown, that's all for now.

Stream of Consciousness

Dead herbs on my father's deck.

The pace of summer is rapid, like a fast dance. I am dancing through forests and wetlands but not so much along my own beloved road. I am never without a plastic cooler of some sort filled with food and drink. We must transport food and beverages from one place to another, we eat less but drink more during this season of rapid movement, of endless comings and goings.

We camped last weekend near Mt St Helen's at the edge of Silver Lake. The woods were thick with smoke from campfires and the occasional waft of septic off-gas, an invisible turd lingering gently above us. I made a point of getting us to water during the heat of the day and we were directed to a spot on the Touttle River. This river that was famously a sudden outlet for the water and debris blasted off the side of the mountain that May day in 1981. Considering that, the water was harmlessly shallow with some current, amber in color and filled with tiny creatures, swimmers, skimmers, lurkers. I waded up the little river and floated back down a few times letting the water take me with it. I found a flat rock jutting up out of the flow and sat there, the river running past me without stop, and spent some time surveying the other river seekers. I find it fascinating how people behave in nature. To me it is a deeply spiritual activity and should be done quietly with a humble posture and without excessive litter. Not everyone shares my opinion.

My daughter turned 15 this week without a lot of fanfare. I was never great at creating the super-fantastic birthday bash, and this year I bought her books for presents. Books! On the day of her birthday I played chauffeur and took her and couple of friends to the movies. We had pizza afterwards but only one girl slept over and on the way home the birthday girl was complaining of a sore throat. The price of too much activity. She spent a day on the couch and when she wasn't better the following day we went to the local doctor. In the car on the way back with a diagnosis of Strep she said, "I guess I am prone to throat ailments", and she is. Part of growing up is getting to know the limits of your body.

Today I am cleaning my father's kitchen and in the midst of the crumbs and coffee grounds and ant-traps I found myself sinking into the meditation of the work. I am here in a place maybe I don't want to be right this minute but I am here so I will do this work and relax into the moment. I haven't walked for the past few days and I worry about how missing the active meditation of walking will affect me. My schedule has not allowed for the walk the past several days, the kid getting sick, weekend trips, visits with friends. I jumped on my trampoline for 20 minutes on Thursday, that seemed good but I crave the walk.

The weather continues to be perfect, cooling just a little as we drift past the solstice. It's a whole month now. I am outdoors mostly or if I am in, the doors and windows are all open. The grass is just starting to turn brown, and like I said, it's a fast dance this summertime thing and dry grass signals where we are in the cycle. With that in mind we are compelled to get out into the sun, into nature and jump in up to our knees to receive the glory of it all. So that is where I am at, just drinking it all in every chance I get while still working away in a semi disciplined way.

Perfect Summer

How perfect has your summer been? Mine has been dreamy so far. I am in that perfectly relaxed, sandals and a see through shirt state of mind. I sleep late, stay up late, eat late, work late. I have struck some magical balance between the things I must do and things I want to do. And more important even than the perfect blond streaks I had put in my hair is my perfect mood. I am not depressed for the first time in quite a while.  I've had some panic attacks but only the ones that happen when I am falling asleep. Somehow I have managed to revitalize my thinking toward my work. I am allowing my schedule to be jumbled while still maintaining the component parts. Walking, working, eating, floating, making and now added to the list is harvesting. The valley I live in is filling with ripe berries and so at this time of the year you have to set less important things aside and go and pick berries and bring them home and process them in the perfect way that is best for you. The whole activity is perfectly peaceful. Summer is the best looking of the season sisters, golden haired and tan and smelling of sweet grass. I shut my eyes and laid my head back on a late night drive home on the 4th of July and let the heavens pass over me dressed in the night air. We walk on grass and eat salads made from the few ingredients in the fridge. We drink cheap beer and eat watermelon and ice cream. It's natural to want to know what causes the depression. Is it stress about money? When work is plentiful I feel better but that's not everything. The weather helps but I started feeling better when it was still cold. It's some other tide that rises when your back is turned, diet and exercise play a part but only a part. Right now it just feels good that what I am working at seems to be working. Step over step, keeping my hands in the air waving to all who pass.

A long silence

The weather has been mixed. The bees are frantic in the kiwi vines above the path to my office. I can hear them buzzing furiously as I pass. They are oblivious to the dense clouds shifting back and forth in the sky, time is of the essence as the blossoms fall like snow at my feet. One minute glorious sun the next, atomic darkness. My pupils are sore from all the adjusting. The bees are charged.

I am trying to keep up with my integrated approach to my work keeping my guilt about certain activities at bay. I have a little chant, take breaks, take care of yourself, rest, work, repeat. Overall my energy to work has been good. I have gone from light work to almost every client I have every known contacting me seemingly overnight. I am sticking to my routine which seems to hold me together and I am making lists like a fiend and following them. I am not letting my mind go wild which seems counterintuitive but the result is calming. I stick to the structure of my day and complete the items on the list. I am talking to people, I have made more phone calls this last month than I made all last year. I can hear a change in my voice. I feel as though the blog has suffered because I feel well, but that is a twisted notion. I am writing now, that is positive.

Sons of Norway, Mission BC Vintage Trailer Meet

(long pause)

I didn't finish this post. It has been sitting here in a tab on my laptop. What have I been doing? What haven't I been doing? Writing is the main thing I haven't been doing. But the good thing is that I am busy, doing things, feeling well. School is out and so we are gliding into summer which for me means working diligently but also sliding in more recreational activities. When the weather is fine, one must get out.

We just spent 3 days on the Coast helping a family member manage his life. It wasn't so bad. There was the usual tension between Mark and his siblings when this work has to be done but they have agreed to do it, and so they do it willingly. No matter where you are in life there is the potential to be someone's caretaker or at least take part in the care of another human being. Our helpee lives in a small trailer park near a creek on the gorgeous Sunshine Coast. Whenever I visit there I imagine what it would be like, how one could arrange a minimal space and make it pleasant. Many of the residents have sweet little set-ups, making the best of where they are. Others are a little less polished or welcoming but the world is full of all types. Gardeners and hoarders, smokers and the deranged. We all have to end up somewhere and I like to imagine various possibilities so that if I ended up in a 16ft travel trailer with a joey-shack-sunroom and a sidewalk scooter I'd be okay with it. There are many ways to live, the point is to be happy with where you are and make it the best, for you.

So the summer means mobility and that means I have to get used to working everywhere because there is work that needs to be done. It's fine, it's better than fine. The routine of work keeps me sane and money keeps me from being a burden, and doing it in different places is freeing.

The Natural World

Golden Ears Park, B.C.

I casually titled this photo "What Emily Carr Saw". Of course the woods she encountered were wholly different from these. The trees she saw were giants, as big around as 10 men standing with arms outstretched, some of them were close to a thousand years old.  I can't say what she saw there but the resulting paintings are mysterious, sometimes dark, gnarled and smoothed, deep and cavernous forest-scapes. I read recently she was never accepted by the darling, Canadian, Group of Seven. They were easterners, she was out west. They were in different worlds geographically, she was a woman.

Interestingly or strangely I have little interest in painting the natural world. I prefer to walk in it, listen to it, absorb it and carry it away with me, let it nourish me. Today a friend and I walked up near the site of the 2010 winter Olympics at Cypress Bowl above Vancouver. My friend is a Parks Volunteer and I went along with her to help observe a particular trail. She took notes and photographed trouble spots, we noted birds and flora and fauna and I felt profoundly content. It felt useful to make honest observations and to clear a few branches away from the path and to consider how we could, in simple ways make the destination of the trail a better experience for those who trek up there. I forgot my camera and was a bit worried about my feet as I had neglected to bring socks (stupido!). The hike was fantastic and I decided, as it combined my two greatest interests; walking and pruning things, that I want this as my new job.

Show and Tell

Words seem to elude me, thoughts are slimy things and easy to lose grip of. The bees are humming everywhere and I am sleeping later, starting my day more slowly. When I feel the chaos of my mind begin to grow it is good to do simple things like strip the couch of its cushion covers and wash and hang them on the line. This is one of the pleasures of summer.

 

So is pruning the Rhododendron. Cutting the long scraggly branches that have grown up over 18 years and nipping off the spent flowers and finding these, the buds of next years blossoms, already in full swing. This is comforting.

The house and yard are a mish mash but in summer it is all pleasant. We live outdoors mostly, at least I do. I feel better outside.

 The Hydrangea has gone rangey, gangly, spindly, woody and heavy with flowers. The orange sliding shed door makes me happy, made from two old wooden back doors.

The view over to my office, so pretty this time of year. I must burn this into my mind to recall in the depths of winter when I am trudging to and fro.
 

My companion, coyly sits on her bed. Waiting for me to tell her what is next.

A sign from my youth in B.C. The back door and the aloe I tried to kill with sunlight. It's better now and my interest in growing things is piqued. It always amazes me the difference a little water makes. It is so wet most of the time here that I don't feel a strong desire to water when it's warm.

I made this terrarium and made use of some stuff I had on hand. The plants I bought at Lowe's, they were almost dead but seemed to perk right up once they got a little TLC. I am in love with this tiny world I have created, I am considering moving there.

The letter B, marks the rental on my property. I am grateful for tenants that seem pleased to live here. Their rent lightens my financial load