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:
dh’éirich craobh
is dh’abair i rium
ha litir na bial —
a samhla
cha mhis an tùs
ars a chiad chraobh
cha mhis a, chrìoch
ars an litir mu dheireadh
a tree arose
and spoke to me
a letter in her mouth —
her likeness
i’m not the beginning
said the first tree
i’m not the end
said the last letter9
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 . . .
One afternoon, when I was in my very early twenties, I went with a friend to a fortune teller in a café on Yates Street in Victoria. This was in the mid-1970s, when young women dressed in gypsy skirts. Shops selling jewellery from India, crystals, and yarrow sticks for divination were clustered around lower Yates and Bastion Square.
The fortune teller was surprisingly ordinary, a stout woman in her sixties in a flowered dress, set up at a booth in the corner. I don’t remember what I paid. The woman did something with cards, my palms, and the pattern of leaves in the bottom of my teacup. I wanted to know my immediate future. Was there love in the offing? Would I be happy? She gave a very general reading, not particularly vivid or inspired. But when I got up from my seat to let my friend take her turn, the woman quickly wrote something on a scrap of paper. She put a hand on my arm to get my attention and said, “I want you to call me this evening. I have something to tell you which I’d rather not tell you now, with people around.”
I was intrigued. Of course I was. Was there a prince apparent in the lines of my hand? Were riches coming my way? Was it that obvious? I dialled her number that evening, too nervous to eat dinner first, and probably fortified with a glass of wine (Similkameen white in those days, purchased in jugs). I wasn’t sure she’d remember that she’d asked me to call, but she immediately told me that she had sensed I was in the care of Pan. “He is watching you,” she told me. “He watches out for you, and you mustn’t be afraid. One day he will pass you on the street, and you’ll know it’s him. Remember this.” And that was all she had to say. I imagined her in an overstuffed chair, shoes off and stockings eased down her heavy legs, placing the telephone receiver back on its cradle. Her knitting waiting beside the chair.
Well, this was not what I’d hoped for. And I wasn’t sure I gave the conversation much credibility. But as a student of Classical literature and mythology (I had taken a number of courses in these subjects at university, enough to qualify me for a minor in Classical Studies), I knew something of Pan. God of shepherds, horned, hoofed: stories have him in pursuit of nymphs and mortals, who are turned into reeds to escape his amatory advances.
In the Homeric Hymn to Pan, the poet or rhapsode (from the Greek rhapsodes, “one who stitches together”) reported, “Only at evening, as he returns from the chase, he sounds his note, playing sweet and low on his pipes of reed: not even she could excel him in melody — that bird who in flower-laden spring pouring forth her lament utters honey-voiced song amid the leaves.”10 And truly, who cannot claim to have heard that note, wind over the hollow grasses, just beyond sight?
Pan was to be found in remote unsettled places, rocky heights, and those who encountered him, or even sensed his presence (the rustling of oak leaves), might be filled with a feeling that became known as panic (from the Greek panikos: a word derived from the god Pan’s name). I thought of the places I ventured alone — the highlands above Durrance Lake, the wild beaches past Sooke towards Jordan River — and how I thrived on that feeling which was not quite fear, not quite awe. Was this the god passing through the trees, just beyond sight?
I realized that Pan was also the god of the constellation associated with my astrological sign, Capricorn. When I indulged in something like belief in astrology, I’d muse on the qualities I was said to embody: steadiness, tenacity, practicality, a reluctance to forgive, to show emotion, a tendency towards convention. An interest in making money. I thought my sign was something I’d grow into because so far — I am writing here of my early twenties — I was not practical. I would spend a week’s food money on books or a dress, and then eat plain boiled pasta until I could afford a carton of yogurt or a bag of apples. I wept too easily and too frequently. I did nurse grudges, akin to that lack of forgiveness, but that was hardly something to be proud of. And I wasn’t sure I could claim tenacity, that sure-footed climb of the goat towards its goal.
Then one day, walking along Douglas Street by the Hudson’s Bay department store, a man passing gave me a look — not amatory, but complicit somehow — and I immediately knew he was Pan. I turned to talk to him, or follow him, or somehow make contact, but he was nowhere to be seen.
When I told a friend about this encounter, I saw the doubt in her eyes and realized that this was a matter of faith for me, and I would need to learn either to defend with passion and evangelical fervour, or remain silent. Only once or twice over thirty years have I mentioned the fortune teller and my daimon, if he can be called that. But in a curious way I have known myself to have the guidance of Pan, an intermediary between myself and the larger world, replete with knowledge and divine power. Perhaps this is simply an acknowledgement of fate — that our days are measured and apportioned.
Socrates said that his daimon provided warning but didn’t direct action and was more accurate than watching flights of birds or reading entrails. I have done both, traced the pattern of love in the long skeins of geese or the quick updraft of kinglets and fallen to my knees in sorrow at the spilled intestines of a young fawn still in its spots by Wallace Drive as I cycled to work at the Butchart Gardens.
“On his back he wears a spotted ly
nx-pelt, and he delights in high-pitched songs in a soft meadow where crocuses and sweet-smelling hyacinths bloom at random in the grass,” the rhapsode sang in the Homeric Hymn to Pan.11 And for a time, his later incarnation was carved in stone to peer out of the corners of the great cathedrals. When I see images of the Green Man, a face fringed in oak leaves, some even coming out of his mouth, his wide delighted eyes, I think of Pan and his legacy: a spirited god at large in the world, making serious work of being alive in wild places.
All those years ago, lying down among Alaska oniongrass, wildrye, long-stoloned sedge, Pacific sanicle (those footsteps of spring), the seedpods of the great blue camas, I might have been listening for the distant sound of reed pipes as my guardian spirit pursued nymphs in the hills above Colwood. The dry grass crackled and the oak leaves rustled.
It’s 2007, and I live on the Sechelt Peninsula, where a friend has a Garry oak he grew from a seed. There are no others that I know of on this peninsula, and why would there be? The field guides are clear in their delineation of its range: the dry slopes and meadows on southeastern Vancouver Island; the Gulf and San Juan Islands and elsewhere in Washington State; down into Oregon, where it is the Oregon white oak. There are two small locations in the Fraser Valley where it grows — one this side of Chilliwack, and the other near Yale. I am trying to think, now, of places where I knew it in abundance.
In the late 1960s, I used to saddle my horse early on weekend mornings and ride him across the Pat Bay Highway to a gate leading up onto the old Rithet’s farmland. I was in my early teens, a lonely girl in search of lonely places. Someone had told me that it was fine to ride there, but that the gate had to be kept closed, as there were cattle grazing in the area. I don’t really remember the cattle, but I occasionally saw deer in the tall grass. There were many oaks growing on the slopes. In the spring, there were expanses of blue camas, yellow buttercups, and odd brown speckled flowers that I now know were chocolate lilies.
I loved the open beauty of those meadows, where pheasants roamed and flew up, sharp-winged as we approached. The meadows smelled intensely dry, fragrant as hay, though not dusty. I’d let my horse canter up the long slopes and loved the way sunlight filtered through the trees.
I imagined those fields unchanged since the dawn of time. Yet now I know that the area was once Broadmead Farm, where Robert Rithet bred and raised his prize thoroughbreds. There were barns, paddocks, grooms for the sleek horses — even a racetrack farther up, near where the Royal Oak Burial Park is now.
Grazing changes a place. New forbs and grasses come in hay, some of them invasive. Thistles and mustards were introduced, along with persistent yellow broom and tenacious Himalayan blackberries — so succulent, yet undesirable because of their ability to seed themselves prolifically in the droppings of those who feast upon them.
When I rode my horse over Broadmead in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the land was still owned by the Guinness family in Ireland. Oak meadows stretched back almost to the Blenkinsop Valley, the hills eventually rising to Mount Douglas. A low area, fringed with the native willows and hardhack, was used for growing potatoes. Gulls and other water birds flocked in multitudes during winter, when the land tried to return to its boggy origins: black soil immersed in cold water.
The Guinness family donated the bog — forty-two hectares — to the District of Saanich in 1994; it has been restored to something like its earlier state. A trail surrounds the bog. I’ve walked there in recent years, listening to red-winged blackbirds and various warblers, heartened to see tiny oak seedlings planted here and there, protected with wire cages. But the meadows are gone. They have been developed into big houses and a few modern churches. For me, there are ghosts. If I look quickly, I see the sere grass and the big oaks, their gnarled branches bare in winter. If I close my eyes, I hear the sound of hooves as a girl races her horse up the slopes, pheasants rising in panic.
And I long for the sight of the western bluebirds and marble butterflies that were once a part of those meadows. The golden paintbrush and the Lewis’s woodpeckers, now extirpated. There were snakes and lizards on the dry rocks in those days, and while some may still remain in isolated pockets, there are no longer the healthy populations that ensure survival of a species. Such populations depend on an elegant, balanced symmetry.
I could never pass the big oaks of the old British Columbia Protestant Orphans’ Home on the corner of Hillside Avenue and Cook Street without wondering what it must be like to be abandoned by parents, by death or poverty or illness.
My home life wasn’t perfect — I was an avid reader, and imagined perfection to be something like those stories where brothers and sisters were kind to one another, fathers never shouted, mothers never called a girl ungrateful, and harmony reigned in the house and garden.
I had two parents and three brothers. Things felt normal in most respects. Some days, I would imagine myself to be an orphan, and could work up a considerable amount of self-pity, creating a story in which I was given to cruel guardians and worked to near-death in the kitchen. If I were asked to do something beyond my usual chores at home, I’d lean on my rake or hoe as I took a break from raking the grass or weeding the carrots. Tears would course down my cheeks as I swept the driveway or walked over to the grocery store for a pound of margarine or several tins of tuna for the casserole my mother was planning for dinner. I managed to produce ample indignation at the ways in which an orphan could be exploited.
The Orphans’ Home was built in 1892 with funds donated at the bequest of John George Taylor. It opened officially in 1893. Until then, orphans had been lodged first in the private homes of Mary Cridge and other compassionate citizens of Victoria, and then in a cottage bought for that purpose on Rae Street in 1873.
Curious, a few years ago I researched the Orphans’ Home, and found an application form for the admission of a four-year-old boy, signed by his father, attesting that he was healthy enough to enter the Home. What was not said was why the father was placing him there in the first place. The father’s place of residence was Nanaimo, so perhaps he was a coal miner. Maybe the child’s mother had died and the father had no interest in raising him alone.
Other letters reveal family violence, abandonment, and destitution. Concern is expressed for a nine-year-old girl (a “half-caste”) who seemed destined for the streets if a place could not be found for her at the Home. A mother wrote to say she needed help with her four children, their father having left the country, and in any case, she had discovered he had another wife and family elsewhere.12
From the holdings of the British Columbia Archives, I also read a poignant exchange, undated, between Flora Sinclair and Mary Cridge, the wife of Bishop Edward Cridge:
Dear Mrs. Cridge,
Would you kindly let me go to work at a situation for a change because I have been here ten years on the 30th of December and I wish very much to go away.
Yours sincerely,
Flora Sinclair
And the reply:
Dear Flora,
I read your request to the Ladies of the Committee today. We all agree that if you wish to leave the Home to work outside you may go when a proper situation is found for you. Would you like to have the charge of children or do you prefer housework? Remember dear child our wish is that you may be happy and useful and you will if you go where God directs.
Your [sincere?] friend,
Mary Cridge
These letters tell me a few things. Flora must have come to the Orphans’ Home as a result of a death, abandonment, or family hardship in the darkest days of the year. How sad to find oneself settling into an orphanage just after Christmas, as the year was about to turn. As for the year, I have no idea, but Mary Cridge died in 1903, and the whole enterprise of housing orphans began in 1873, so I’m assuming this was late in the 1800s, after Flora had endured a ten-year residence in the Home. She could not have been particularly happy there: “I wish very much to go away.” She does not thank Mrs. Cridge for watching out for h
er welfare or providing a roof over her head (the meals listed in the Orphans’ Home archive are heavy on boiled meat and soup, relentlessly mundane).
What does Mrs. Cridge offer? Childcare or housework. What if Flora had been a talented artist or had the gift of perfect pitch or wanted to become a nurse? No, she must go where God directs, or in this case, where His proxy, Mary Cridge, decrees. Flora’s handwriting is neat and tidy, each word formed as though in response to her need to state her wish as clearly as possible. Mary Cridge’s reply is scrawled, the writing of a busy, elderly woman, perhaps taken aback at the forward nature of Flora’s request: “Would you kindly let me go . . .”
My Girl Guide pack was taken to the Orphans’ Home in the mid-1960s. I don’t remember the point of our visit — a kind of service, I suppose, and no doubt badge-oriented, as most of our activities were, from learning to cook a hamburger on a little candle flame, to knots, making bivouacs, and other camping skills of Boer War vintage — but I do remember that it was awkward. Our Guide pack was comprised of girls from a neighbourhood near Tillicum Elementary School, mostly from two-parent households with assorted siblings, and membership on various school teams. We were old enough to roll up the waistbands on the skirts of our uniforms slightly, to show a bit more leg. Some of us wore eye makeup and Cover Girl liquid foundation (I couldn’t include myself among these femmes fatales; my mother would never have permitted it, and I had yet to discover the delicious and risky habit of defiance). I was still impressionable enough to want to do good deeds in my community (and earn a badge to add to my sleeve). The orphans were reluctant to mingle with us and do the craft we had brought to demonstrate — would it have been braiding key holders with plastic cord or knitting a dishcloth out of Phentex? The songs we’d practised to sing as rounds were not the success we’d expected them to be, either. I remember asking one girl about her family. Her sullen reply was that it was none of my business.
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