Mnemonic (2 page)

Quercus garryana

Fire

In early May of 2007, my husband John and I walked through the woodland below Government House in Victoria, under mature Garry oaks. Blue camas bloomed in great drifts like a dream of heaven, punctuated by wild roses and snowberry, fawn lilies, and grasses. It was sunny and warm, and the heat released a smell that transported me back decades, to my childhood.

It was 1965. My family was staying in a motel out towards Colwood. I was ten years old. My parents were searching for a rental house for us, now that we were back in Victoria after two years on the East Coast where my father's naval career had taken us. Some days they left my younger brother and me in the care of our two older brothers, who were twelve and fourteen. They hung out with some older kids — the offspring of the motel owners — and my younger brother and I found ways to amuse ourselves.

I took books into the area behind the motel, dry grassy bluffs with groves of oaks. The smell was intense — the grass, the leaves, sticky pitch from a few pines, the unexpected twist of onion as I grazed the stems of nodding onion. I'd recline in the grass, ants tickling my bare legs, and read Nancy Drew adventures. I longed for a life so exciting — where treasure might turn up in a hollow tree or under a bridge; where villains might be thwarted by polite requests; where a girl would rise from a shaking up by an escaped convict, straighten her stocking seams, and drive away in her roadster for the next case. I was absorbing the dry heat, pollens, and odours as I read, my body resting on golden grass that flattened beneath my weight, satin to the touch. My younger brother stalked imaginary villains among the bluffs, talking to himself.

Later in the day, my parents returned to report on possible houses, urging us to gather up our swimming gear for a picnic to Beaver Lake. I was pulled reluctantly back into my family's orbit. The green camping stove was stowed in the back of the station wagon with Star, our Labrador. We ate wieners in buns spread with green relish and bright yellow mustard, and drank fruit punch from a Coleman thermos jug. Swimming in the weedy lake, swans on the opposite shore guarding their young, I marvelled at how I could remove myself so completely from my family and then return to them as though nothing significant had happened. And to anyone else, nothing had.

That summer there was a fire warning; the stretch of rainless days was making the oak groves volatile as tinder. Lightning was feared, or the careless flick of a cigarette butt. I'd lie in my bed in the motel at night under a single thin sheet, worrying that sparks would lick the dry grass into flames and rush down the bluffs to the unit where my family slept, oblivious. Sirens from the Colwood Fire Hall punctuated the quiet. I could smell the night outside, heavy with heat. The idea of fire seemed somehow inevitable as our lives changed — suspended between a house we'd left near Halifax, and the house on Harriet Road, which my parents had yet to find. I was afraid, but also thrilled with the possibility of such latent power. I knew, though I wouldn't have had words to say how, that we lived in an intensely mysterious and potent world, and the possibility — even prospect — of fire was part of that. I imagined fierce heat and crackle as flames consumed grass and brittle moss.

There is a long history of fire shaping this landscape of oak and dry grass. Northwest Coast peoples used fire to create ideal growing conditions for camas, the roots of which were a staple in their diet. The oak trees withstood the heat; undesirable species didn't. The burned areas produced healthy harvests of the beautiful blue camas flowers and their succulent bulbs, as well as acorns, for meal. (I suspect that vulnerable young oak seedlings would not have withstood the fires, however, so I have to wonder about subsequent generations of Garry oaks in these landscapes, though recent research by range ecologist Jon Keeley and chemist Gavin Flematti, among others, does indicate that compounds in smoke trigger germination in buried seeds.
¹
) The Northwest Coast peoples burned after harvest, before rains, and developed techniques that used weather and terrain to their advantage.

“A perfect Eden,” James Douglas wrote of the park-like nature of southern Vancouver Island,
²
a quality that Captain George Vancouver had thought natural and artful, never understanding how the effect had been achieved.
³
Before these controlled burns, lightning fires would have produced some similar results and might have inspired those early people to use fire as a way to increase camas growth. They would have observed how animals fled from fire and how this made hunting more successful. People living deeply in a place are the best observers of cause and effect, weather, fire, and harvest.

Anecdotal reports from the journals of early explorers and settlers attest to the improved berry crops — wild strawberries, currants, gooseberries, black and red caps — as well as nodding onions and the important camas bulbs. The fires also improved pasture and forage for deer.
⁴
We have been taught to think of the Northwest Coast peoples as hunter-gatherers, yet there is evidence of a kind of agriculture, practised with care and skill — orchards of oak yielding acorns, rich fields of root crops, and berries.

Garry oaks, or more properly
Quercus garryana
, were named by David Douglas for Hudson's Bay Company official, Nicholas Garry. There are two distinct kinds of oak woodland on Vancouver Island. One of them, the Garry oak parkland ecosystem, is deep-soiled, producing big oaks such as those of the Broadmead meadows in Saanich, where I spent my teen years. In other areas, with shallow soils and more rock, we find the scrub oak ecosystem, a landscape closer to California's than our western temperate rainforest. The understory differs too, with snowberry, camas, fawn lilies, graminoids, and brackens populating the former and spring flowering forbs, grasses, and mosses in the latter. Fires were mostly used by the First Nations peoples to control growth in the deep-soiled areas, which is where the most potential existed for good root crops.

Sitting at a desk in the Annex of Sir James Douglas Elementary School as a child, I looked out at the familiar trees — Garry oaks on rocky bluffs below Government House — puzzling through a sentence in my reader, wondering yet again why words that looked the same sounded entirely different. I was kept in at noon one day because I argued that “food” and “good” should be pronounced to rhyme. It was not explained to my satisfaction.

When I was a child in that motel, fearful that those beautiful meadows would ignite, my reading retreat disappearing in an instant, I wonder now if somehow I was caught in a wrinkle of time when children would have lain awake in their cedar lodges, the same fear and anticipation quickening their pulses and hearts. “The fire runs along at a great pace,” a newspaper article from 1849 reads, “and it is the custom here if you are caught to gallop right through it, the grass being short, the flame is so very little, and you are through in a second . . .”
⁵
Was I running with those children, our feet swift on the dry grass, flames racing ahead, and behind? Was the acorn I pocketed a descendant of one a child in 1849 might have gathered with his mother, anticipating the taste of them steamed or roasted, before the excitement of the coming fires? Or one that lingered underground, longing to be awakened by smoke?

So often a myth contains within itself a kernel of absolute truth — a codex, an epistemology: the stories of harps singing on their own, the music contained in the wood of their making; gods and druids who took their wisdom from trees; acolytes seated at the foot of a banyan, or perhaps an oak, hoping for enlightenment.

The etymology of oak is curious and revelatory. Ancient Indo-European roots for “tree” begin as oaks —
der-, dru-, doreu-, derwo
- — before evolving through the Gothic
tru
and Old Norse
tré
to the Anglo-Saxon
treo
. Underlying this was a belief that oaks were the most important of all trees, where sacred names had their origins. Can you hear “druid” in these roots? And the Attic Greek word for tree:
δρûς drys
, echoes “oak.” It's only a short linguistic distance from
drys
to “dryads,” the feminine personification of the oak tree spirits.
⁶
Dryads possessed some divine gifts — specifically prophecy.

Researchers now believe that trees can hear, that receptors for sound are located in the leaves above ground. When plants synthesize the hormone gibberellic acid, it accelerates growth but also has been found to promote a listening response, the range of which is slightly louder than the human voice.
⁷
All those science fair experiments investigating the effect of music on pea plants had merit after all!

In thinking about this, I am reminded that oaks were venerated in Europe in pre-Christian times and were associated with various pagan divinities — the Greek god Zeus; the Celtic god Dagda; the Norse god Thor.

In ancient Greece, areas struck by lightning — frequently oaks because they were the tallest trees and poor conductors of electricity — were consecrated to Zeus. The supreme god of the Greek pantheon and god of weather (his epithets include “cloud-gatherer” and “hurler of thunderbolts”), one of his symbols is the oak tree. People heard the voice of this god, and others, in the rustling of oak leaves.

The Norse Thor was the god of thunder, associated with strength, fertility, and protection; his symbolic tree was also the oak. And Dagda was a principal Celtic god, an earth god, protector of crops. He carried a magical harp of living oak wood.

The beautiful Celtic alphabet, Ogham, is based on trees, its twenty original and five subsequent characters named for trees or shrubs;
⁸
and we find oak firmly within this system as dair or duir. Given the Irish love for trees and their placement within Irish mythology — who can forget the salmon of knowledge that fed on hazelnuts dropping into the River Boyne? — this alphabet is not surprising. Listen to this little Gaelic poem and its translation, both by Aonghas MacNeacail:

Years ago, I stood in the Kilmalkedar churchyard on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, and ran my hands over the surface of an ogham stone. I didn't know then that the stones were used as boundary stones, to mark territory. I thought it was simply a burial stone, which it may have been, as they served this purpose, too. (Most ogham inscriptions are tallies and serial groups of names.)

The stone was pierced at the top with a hole. I tried to put my hand through. Later, when I read Miranda Green's
The Celtic World
, I learned that these pierced stones were symbols of fertility, regeneration, and healing. The Christian fathers were canny enough to recognize the utility of these pagan beliefs and foundations and then to incorporate their own ikonography. So an alphabet of trees, carved in stone, standing for territory and naming, eventually enclosed in a churchyard surrounded by rowans, sycamores, and a lush
Quercus robur
, the great Irish oak — a hole in the top to ensure renewal. I walked under those trees, my hand tingling from its encounter with the stone.
A tree arose / and spoke to me,/ a letter in her mouth
. . .