Mnemonic (34 page)

They were gone a long time. When they returned, they were the bearers of bad news. Someone else had taken our tree! How was that possible, I wondered, remembering how hard it was to see it behind its fringe of brush. But it was true. They'd driven up the hydro road, over the washed-out area, to the big mossy stump and found only a smaller stump behind it, sticky with sap.

But they were also the bearers of a lovely bushy Douglas fir they'd found much farther along the hydro road, up past the creeks which they'd had to ford in the Honda Element, and beyond the area where the flowering currants are alive with hummingbirds in spring. And it waited in the bucket in the woodshed, upright, a dense vertical apparition which startled me over and over first thing in the morning when I'd look out the kitchen window, wondering who on earth was standing outside at that hour.

I had imagined our house filled with the scent of grand fir at Christmas, the resiny blisters on the bark oozing their fragrant balsam. I'd imagined a room perfumed with our own equivalent of frankincense and myrrh, those ancient offerings from distant trees, though in truth the Douglas fir smelled wonderful, a distillation of forest and damp green, a familiar balm to come down to on Christmas morning with the old carols calling us to rejoice, be merry.

Sometimes I wake from dreams of places I knew as a girl, dreams so vivid and natural, that I ache to return. A warm cleft of rock at East Sooke Park or Sandcut Beach, my face bathed in spruce-scented wind. The cluster of fawn lilies just beyond my bedroom in the charmed house at Yarrow Point — their sweetness in April an unexpected pleasure as I went out, sleepless, in moonlight, by the green door. The groves of cedars along the Goldstream River: in a dream I am walking there still, a long-dead dog racing ahead for the joy of water.

“Live in the layers, / Not on the litter,” Stanley Kunitz advised in a late beautiful poem,
³
and I have taken this to heart. Trees have their inner and outer layers of bark, and a layer of cambium, then sapwood and heartwood. So much is contained there! A record of years, weather, visitations by insects and fungi, seasons of drought and abundant rain.

What happened in a grove of trees? In the first place, a life, my life, accumulated there. I walk through, remembering, stopping at each tree — pines, cedars, firs, the unlikely olives and planes, Garry oaks, live oaks, the beeches of my lost grandfather's Bukovina (and the newly planted copper beech, caged in deer-proof wire, in memory of my father, waiting for its benediction of ash), arbutus on an island I sailed to as a young woman, the trembling aspens passed on my way to a wedding, and the arboretum of rare or cherished plantings. “The best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement,” said Cicero in his
De Oratore
,
⁴
and I despair of such orderliness. Everything comes to me in such splendour and chaos. Am I right in remembering the owner of the Rolls-Royce as the delivery man at the pharmacy where I worked? Or that I drank raki on a quay on Crete in the morning while my hands bled from rough ropes, that I ever wept (in the second place) on the side of the highway while listening to David Daniels sing Handel?

Every day I walk out of the house I built with my husband into a landscape of trees, some older than the country, some planted more than half a century ago to replace others felled by loggers who cut the local forests to the ground. They are still cutting trees, a team working on the mountain above the Malaspina substation where we walk most weeks. I hate to see the limbed giants lying in piles to be loaded onto trucks and taken to mills, pyramids of slash heaped to be burned. I wonder about the birds and animals that made their homes in those forests, though this operation worked through the winter, a dormant season. New regulations require that the cut-blocks are smaller, there is less waste, and in any case, this is an important part of our coastal economy. In fact, I recognize some of the young men working up there. They were classmates of my children. They've remained in the community, bought houses, and some of them have children of their own.

I walk out into cedars, red alders, Douglas firs, down our long gravel driveway carved out of western hemlock and salal, past salmonberry bushes, their buds barely containing the brilliant petals ready to unfurl. Some days, new scats, dense with tiny bones, tell me coyotes have come up to the house while we're sleeping and in late summer, bears climb into the crabapple to feast on its scabby fruit. I have my eye on a little patch of prince's pine, hoping I won't miss its brief season, the nodding pink flowers worth kneeling to the ground for. Ravens tumble on the thermals, klooking and tocking, and some days I talk back to them, giving them what I hope is a report on the state of things below. I wish I could sing to them but they've demonstrated before that they are the divas, their watery arias performed with high voice, or low.

In his splendid
Sylva
, John Evelyn wrote,

Thuya
; by some call'd
arbor vitae,
(brought us from Canada,) is an hardy green all the Winter, (though a little tarnish'd in very sharp weather) . . . most delights in the shade . . . The leaf being bruised between the fingers, emits a powerful scent not easily conquer'd.
⁵

The tree of life, its wood supporting our aging wisteria, also starts the fire in the kitchen each day in its incarnation as kindling. Most mornings of my life, I smell its smoke, a complex incense, summoning Goldstream Park, the spicy scent of fresh-sawn boards, the boughs I cut to wreathe the front door each Christmas. In the
Tusculan Disputations
, written in retirement, Cicero meditates on memory: he wonders at the power that inspires us to invent, to wander, discover, create shelter as protection from wild animals, learn astronomy, create music, poetry, and philosophy. “For what is the memory of things and words?” he asks. “Assuredly nothing can be apprehended even in God of greater value than this . . .”
⁶
Cicero concludes that our ability to remember is a proof of the divinity of our souls.

As a child and young woman, I explored a place set in my mind like a petrogylph. The images come to me in my daily life — the plants and trees of Fairfield, of Royal Oak, the shimmering olive groves of Crete, where, echoing Ovid's “The forest's a house, the leaves a bed,”
⁷
I stopped with Agamemnon to lie in the myrtle. I am sustained by trees. My life unfolds among the shade of the coastal rainforests where my house is anchored like a deep-drinking arbutus tree, eager for bedrock. It's a nest box, waiting for swallows, for children far-flung and missed. I've lost track of their departures but never their returns.

It rains a lot here. A tree can grow to an immensity undreamed of in other parts of the world. On the Klein Lake trail where we walk every week, huge firs, hundreds of years old, are draped with common witch's hair and speckled horsehair, browsed by deer in winter. Every morning the sun rises above Mount Hallowell to the east of us and every evening it sets to the west, behind Texada Island and the Strait of Georgia beyond. Dante wrote of the dark wood, in the middle of his life:
To tell about those woods is hard
—
so tangled and rough
. . . Yet, when the rain stops, sunlight comes through the trees so clear and true that the damp world shines.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the following journals in which versions of some of these essays first appeared:

Lake
(“
Quercus garryana
: Fire”)

Dandelion
(“
Pinus ponderosa
: A Serious Waltz”)

Memewar
(“
Platanus orientalis
: Raven Libretto”)

Brno Studies in English
(“
Quercus virginiana
: Degrees of Separation”)

Contrary
(“
Olea euroropaea
: Young Woman with Eros on her Shoulder”)

The New Quarterly
(“
Arbutus menziesii
: Makeup Secrets of the Byzantine Madonnas,”

      winner of the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest)

Cerise
(“
Thuja plicata
: Nest Boxes”)

Lived Experience Number 11 (Populus tremuloides: Cariboo Wedding”)

“
Platanus orientalis
: Raven Libretto” is dedicated to the memory of Floyd St. Clair.

Many people provided information, suggestions, encouragement, and inspiration during the writing of this book. I thank them all but particularly my husband John Pass and our children Forrest, Brendan, and Angelica Pass. They animate the pages as they animate my life, with patience and love.

I'm grateful for the gracious and intelligent editorial guidance of Akoulina Connell, the careful and astute eye of Paula Sarson, as well as the enthusiastic support of everyone at Goose Lane Editions.

I would also like to thank the following individuals and companies for their generosity in granting permission to quote passages from their work. Every effort has been made to secure permission for excerpts reproduced in this book. I regret any inadvertent omissions.

11, 229 Excerpt from “Canto 1” from
The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation
by Robert Pinsky. Translation Copyright © 1994 by Robert Pinsky. Published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, LLC and Orion Publishing Group. Reprinted by permission.

18 Quotation from “Time to Burn” by Nancy J. Turner in
Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest
, edited by Robert Boyd, Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission of Oregon State University Press.

20, 21 Quotation from Aonghas MacNeacail. Reprinted by permission of the author.

27 NCB77 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives.

30-31 Quotation from Ted Lea. Reprinted by permission of Ted Lea.

33, 131 Quotation from
Natural History: A Selection
by Pliny the Elder, translated with an introduction and notes by John F. Healy (Penguin Classics, 1991). Copyright © 1991 by John F. Healy. Reprinted by permission.

36 Quotation from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Web site. Reprinted by permission of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

47 Quotation from
Trees of Greater Victoria
by G.D. Chaster, D.W. Ross, and W.H. Warren © 1988. Reprinted by permission of the Heritage Tree/Book Society of Greater Victoria.

52 Quotation from
Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast
by Jan Hare and Jean Barman Copyright © 2006 by University of British Columbia Press. All rights reserved.

52 Quotation from
Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts
by Douglas Cole Copyright © 1995. Reprinted by permission of University of Oklahoma Press via the Copyright Clearance Center.

54-55 Quotation from Ira Jacknis. Reprinted by permission of the author.

56 BCPM corr., GR111 Box 8, File 39, Dec. 4, 1953 Wilson Duff to Richard Conn Reprinted by permission of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives.

61, 70, 79, 80 Odysseas Elytis excerpts from “Anoint the Ariston” and “As Endymion” from
Eros, Eros, Eros Selected and Last Poems
, translated by Olga Broumas. Translation Copyright © 1998 by Olga Broumas. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

62 Extract from part 9 of “Mythistorema” from
George Seferis: Complete Poems
,translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Published by Anvil Press Poetry in 1995. / Keeley, Edmund;
George Seferis
, Copyright © 1967 Princeton University Press, 1995 renewed PUP/1995 revised edition. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

67, 76 Quotations from Stephen G. Miller's
Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources
. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.

73 Quotation from
The Colossus of Maroussi
by Henry Miller, Copyright © 1941 by Henry Miller. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing.

119, 129 Quotations from Theocritus. Reprinted by permission of Anthony Holden.

128-129 Quotations from
Orfeo ed Euridice
. Translation by Andrew Huth. Reprinted by permission of Decca Classics.

158 Excerpt from “Book 13” from
The Odyssey by Homer
, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1961, 1963 by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright renewed 1989 by Benedict R.C. Fitzgerald, on behalf of the Fitzgerald children. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, LLC, and the Estate of Robert Fitzgerald.

164 Quotation from Alice Glanville's
Schools of the Boundary: 1891-1991
. Reprinted by permission of Sonotek Publishing.

194 Quotation from Patrick Kavanagh's poem “On Raglan Road.” Reprinted by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

197 Quotation from
Illustrated Flora of British Columbia, Vol. 5, Dicotyledons (Salicaceae through Zygophyllaceae) and Pteridophytes
, G.W. Douglas, D. Meidinger, and J. Pojar, eds. B.C. Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks, and B.C. Ministry of Forests, Victoria, 2000, 389 pp. Reprinted by permission of the Ministries.

200, 203 Quotations from
Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia and Inland Northwest
, Roberta Parish, Ray Coupé, and Dennis Lloyd. Reprinted by permission of Lone Pine Publishing.

216 Quotation from
The Practice of the Wild
Copyright © 1990 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

218 Quotation from “Closing Down Kah Shakes Creek” by Charles Lillard. Reprinted by permission of Rhonda Lillard.

227 Quotation from
The Collected Poems
Copyright © 2000 by Stanley Kunitz. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company.

227 Quotation from Cicero. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustee of the Loeb Classical Library from
Cicero: Volume III, De Oratore
, Loeb Classical Library Volume 348, translated by E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham, p. 353, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1942 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Loeb Classical Library ® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

228 Quotation from Cicero. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from
Cicero: Volume XVIII
. Loeb Classical Library, Volume 141, translated by J.E. King, p. 65, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1927 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Loeb Classical Library ® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

229 Quotation from Ovid's
Ars Amatoria
, translated by Angelica Pass. Reprinted by permission of the translator.