Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  At the turn of the twentieth century, a young man biked down Cook Street, “a rutted, muddy roadway with a large pear tree in the centre . . .”3 (I close my eyes and try to see this. I wonder where the pear tree would have been. I’d like to think of it on the section of Cook Street where the small shops and fish and chip enterprises cluster now near May Street and Faithful.) That same young man remembered Sikh cremations on the beach at Clover Point, two-metre log segments criss-crossed to form the funeral pyre, with the body placed gently on top.4

  In the early 1960s, one would have been hard-pressed to find an area of Trifolium wormskjoldii at Clover Point, though I remember finding condoms on the beach, washed in on the waves that also carried raw sewage from the outfall. I didn’t know what a condom was, and thought it was a sturdy balloon until my mother smacked me for putting it to my mouth. She refused to say why. Many years later I realized my error and cringed at the thought. But of course the salt water would have long washed away the little sac’s former contents. My oldest brother remembers catching tiny fish in tide pools near Clover Point and bringing them home, laughing as he recalled our mother’s horror at the sight of him carrying six or eight fish into the house, each swimming in its own condom from the beach. We’d been told they were “dirty filthy things” and when my middle brother reported a sighting of one in our own family’s toilet, our mother insisted he was wrong.

  Growing up, I remember the elderly couples at work in their gardens, tending neat English borders of perennials, trees pruned within an inch of their lives, watched by a cocker spaniel or Jack Russell. These couples were kind to children whose baseballs landed in their backyards. And there were also the widows. Invited into their houses, I was filled with the sense that time had stopped. Such still quiet — I came from a home loud with four children. I realize, now, that some of these women had lost their husbands in the Great War. Photographs of smiling men in uniform, many of them on horseback, filled mantelpieces and the tops of china cabinets. My mother knew them all, it seemed, and offered my brothers and me for chores, errands, and sometimes just for company. One of the widows (though not a war widow), a Polish woman who spoke almost no English, lived on May Street in a tall ramshackle house. My mother befriended Mrs. Ciechanowski, maybe because my father could speak a few words of Polish (learned from his older half-sisters whose father was Polish; his mother’s second husband, his father, had come from Bukovina and spoke Ukrainian).

  We were timid about entering Mrs. Ciechanowski’s house. It smelled strong. She cooked food my father raved over, dishes his own mother must have cooked for her first husband and then continued making for her second family — cabbage rolls, soups with peppery sausage and potatoes, bowls of pickled beets that dripped and stained like blood. This contrasted so sharply with our macaroni and cheese, our roast beef on Sundays. Once, my father drove us all to a cemetery in Colwood, where Mrs.Ciechanowksi’s husband was buried, and she arranged my brothers and me around his grave and led us in a song that I only realized halfway through was “Happy Birthday.” Afterwards there was cake and juice served on a blanket she spread over the grass between graves.

  This was the golden time of my childhood. When I walked with my Brownie pack to Dallas Road and into the missionary’s house. When we no doubt received a badge to indicate we’d been courteous to an old man who showed us cases of hairy spiders, artefacts of dark wood and bone, masks featuring strange birds hung with hair that looked suspiciously human, and who hoped we might understand something of the dimensions of a life spent among the heathens, urging them to accept God into their hearts.

  Two years later, when my family moved to Halifax, we stayed with my grandmother and aunt in their big house on Walnut Street while my parents looked for a place of our own. I remember telling them that I wanted to be a missionary when I grew up. I don’t think I was inspired by the man on Dallas Road, but was trying to rehabilitate my image which I’d felt had been tarnished by my excitement at being allowed to choose a Barbie doll once we’d actually arrived in Halifax after a long camping trip across Canada. Barbies were new on the market, and I wanted one badly. I suppose I must have expressed this to my grandmother and aunt. And when I was finally taken by my parents to Eaton’s to buy one — an ash-blond model with a bubble cut — I was thrilled beyond imagining.

  But when I showed off my prize to my grandmother, her disapproval was immediate: “This is what you were so excited about? I expected a baby doll.” I suppose the doll’s bust and worldly wardrobe were not considered appropriate for a girl of eight. Or those long, long legs, and feet designed for high-heeled shoes, some of which were trimmed with feathers and glitter. The house on Walnut Street was not one that had known contemporary children.

  “I want to be a missionary when I grow up,” I told them, desperate for their approval, their affection. Forgetting the doll for a moment, they smiled at me. My mother was visibly relieved.

  But before Halifax, before we moved from Fairfield, when we were given the freedom to roam the neighbourhood on bike, or on foot, sometimes we visited the Museum,5 then in the basement of the British Columbia Legislative Buildings. There were stuffed animals with staring glass eyes, cases of textiles, and dust. My oldest brother told me recently that he would ride his bicycle there with a couple of friends, and Dr. Clifford Carl, then the director of the Museum, would come out from his office and ask, “What can I show you boys today?” Out would come drawers of butterflies, each fixed with a pin to a display board, or a collection of rocks, or some animal fresh from the taxidermist.

  More interesting to me was nearby Thunderbird Park, where a child could watch an old man at work on a totem pole while fragrant curls and chips of cedar drifted from his tools. Sometimes he talked to us, his words slow and almost foreign to our ears. I imagined he’d always been there, a relic from the days when all of Victoria was Lekwungen territory; imagined that when the city had been developed, he’d somehow been allowed to keep his lodge. When the wind was right, he could smell the sea, and gulls whirled in the blue sky above. We knew so little about the people who had lived on Vancouver Island before Hudson’s Bay Company Chief Factor James Douglas stepped ashore in 1842, followed by his men, and the wheels of change began to turn.

  What they brought

  Japanese flowering cherries, dawn redwoods, monkey-puzzle trees, blue Atlas cedars, English walnuts, Portuguese laurels, Pinus nigra from Austria, Aleppo pines from the Mediterranean, Korean cedars, true and weeping cypresses, Quercus robur (especially the Coronation oaks in churchyards and schoolyards, in public and private gardens), bigleaf lindens, Camperdown elms, catalpas and empresses, medlars, Tasmanian eucalyptus.

  Brides, a hundred of them, sailing from England on the Tynemouth, the Alpha, the Robert Lowe, and the Marcella. Some of them becoming the wives of prominent men — Emma Lazenby who married David Spencer, whose store on Government Street was where we always went for school clothes; Margaret Faussett who married John Jessop, both of them teachers, John rising to the position of Superintendent of Education for British Columbia.

  Cloth, seeds, racehorses, fine English china, hats and woollens, cricket bats, boatloads of assorted dry goods for provisioning shops, surveying equipment, the language of litigation, roses and sabres and knighthoods.

  Grey squirrels to displace their smaller cousins. Starlings. House sparrows. Rattus norvegicus.

  Names. Victoria herself. Albert (for Albert Head), Saxe Point, James Bay and Langford and Colwood (nostalgic for home). The beautiful Selkirk Water and Finlayson Arm. Ross Bay and McNeill Bay, the long view from Mount Douglas and Mount Tolmie, their slopes blue with camas in spring, fringed with erythroniums. Streets named for architects and mayors and wives of merchants. Nods to the Native people themselves but in an orthography we can all pronounce.

  Stories at every turn, to be remembered on maps: Glimpse Reef, for the shipwrecked barque off Clover Point in 1860; farms nestled within the names of bustling communities: Craigflower, Strawberry Vale,
Broadmead, the ghosts of its horses galloping over golden grass where the smoke of burned Garry oaks hangs in the air like spiderweb.

  Expectations of commerce, cotillions, academies of learning where Greek and Latin texts jostle the butterfly nets at the ready for species now extirpated or worse, extinct. Euchloe ausonides, the Large Marble, Euphydryas editha taylori, Edith’s Checkerspot, and Callophrys mossii mossii, the nominate subspecies Moss’s Elfin.

  The shoemaker, John Fannin, with his menagerie of stuffed game animals, hungering for a museum.

  A version of Wawadit’la

  The old man we watched carving at Thunderbird Park, a man with a soft voice and younger helpers, whose tools left curls of cedar behind — spicy Thuja plicata, or western red cedar, and the skunkier pungent Chamaecyparis nootkatensis, or yellow cedar — might have been Mungo Martin. The time was right. Mungo Martin and his son-in-law Henry Hunt worked on the Welcome sign posts between 1960 and 1962, the same years I was riding my blue bike through Fairfield and into Beacon Hill Park. The ceremonial big house at Thunderbird Park is a smaller version of Martin’s ancestral property at Tsaxis, or Fort Rupert, a house called Wawadit’la, which belonged to the hereditary chief Nakap’ankam. As the inheritor of that title, it was Mungo Martin’s right to build the house and to display its associated carvings. The house was dedicated in a ceremonial way, with potlatches and dancing, in December 1953.

  While the city buzzed and hummed with the electric wealth of the postwar years, a man, not Lekwungen at all but from Kwakwaka’wakw6 territory, patiently carved sea lions and grizzly bears in a smaller version of his home on the northern end of Vancouver Island. And in any place, Tsaxis or Victoria, in any era, seventeenth century or mid-twentieth, there would have been children drawn to the smooth movements of his hands, fascinated but not surprised to see the strange animals emerge from the wood.

  This was a man who’d seen too much of his material culture disappear to anthropologists, museum collectors, and missionaries who were keen to remove the vestiges of a spiritual life they couldn’t begin to understand, and yet were not averse to making money from them afterwards. Teams of authorities seized ceremonial items used during potlatches or asked for their surrender as grounds for suspending sentences. Mungo Martin was given the task of recreating many of the poles and canoes and masks that had deteriorated beyond repair. (I think of the young men who carved with him: his son-in-law, his grandsons, others, all of whom learned by watching his hands, felt the weight over theirs as they used adzes, knives, and chisels, learned how to work with an imperfection, how to judge depth and grain.) He was given a small corner of the colonial enterprise on Victoria’s Inner Harbour to build the scaled-down version of Wawadit’la and to bring together elements of the coastal cultures so assiduously removed from the city in its earlier days. (In Victoria itself, the Lekwungen village site at Songhees was relocated, the waterways and wetlands once used for travel filled in or directed underground through culverts, the language discouraged, the spiritual practices vilified.)

  Those degrees of separation . . . When I was a young teenager, and my family lived at Royal Oak, I often rode my Anglo-Arab gelding down our street to a series of trails on Colquitz Creek. There was a house tucked back off the road, a sort of colonial-style bungalow; two more of a similar design occupied the front part of the lot nearer the street. At the end of the driveway leading back to that house, I’d sometimes see an elderly man out for a walk with his daughter and wife. They were the Footners. I remember the man telling me I had a fine animal.

  Once I was helping my mother go from door to door in our neighbourhood on behalf of the March of Dimes, and the Footners invited us in while they found a contribution for our collection. It was an interesting house with photographs and chintz curtains, I remember, and sat in its privacy with old roses and apple trees around it. Many years later, while engaged in research for a novel I’d set in the orchard settlement of Walhachin, I was astonished to discover that elderly man, Bertram Chase Footner, had been responsible for designing and building the houses of that settlement. I’d been there for research and had been taken by the remnants of the old community, a few of the bungalows with their steep-pitched roofs, high ceilings, and wraparound porches attesting to careful attention to climate. His own house there — for he’d lived for a time at Walhachin; his daughter Mollie had been born there (the middle-aged daughter I’d known a little in my teenage years) — was built of river-stone and still sits quietly elegant above the Thompson River.

  If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have asked Mr. Footner questions. I’d have asked about his life after the Boer War when he built bridges in the Sudan, a time and place so far away from our semi-rural street in Royal Oak, named for its groves of Garry oak. But he died in 1972 before I knew I would go on to write books, that I would be passionately interested in the history of the province I’d been born and raised in and took for granted until my own middle years.

  I’ve tried, not hard enough perhaps, to find out if he had built the house he lived in at Royal Oak and perhaps the other two that resembled it on what might have been a larger lot that he’d subdivided. One archivist I spoke to insisted that the street hadn’t existed before the 1950s. Yet there was an ancient farmstead across the road when we first moved there, with an equally ancient apple orchard and cider press. The owner, Bill Mahon, told my parents it was the oldest house in Saanich. It was torn down in the late 1970s for a subdivision. Well, maybe not under the current street name, I suggested to the archivist, but the road itself certainly existed well back into the century and maybe before. He wasn’t convinced.

  That single degree of separation (albeit tenuous) between myself and Walhachin, the Boer War even, is something to ponder. Growing up, my brothers had received the Boys Own Annual from their former Cub Master at Christmas and these were full of stories of the struggles between the British and the Afrikaners as the nineteenth century turned over to the twentieth. The names — Transvaal, Mafeking, Natal — entranced me. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouting movement, had distinguished himself during the Boer War, which was probably the reason that my brothers received the books as gifts. But still that history had its resonance for a girl growing up in Victoria with its own traces of colonialism, its Majors at the Bengal Room gazing mournfully into their gin.

  My mother scoured the Goodwill on lower Yates for riding breeches and boots for me, a worn trace of those soldiers. Tags on the jodhpurs might hark back to India or Jermyn Street and sometimes the aging leather boots had old-fashioned trees within them to keep them shapely. I imagined someone — maybe a widow or a landlady — collecting up all the old garments and putting them in a carton to be taken to the Goodwill, for who else but a girl whose allowance didn’t stretch to proper riding clothes would want such things? They were impossibly cheap. $1.29, or $0.75. The detritus of lives passed, and now forgotten.

  Of course it makes no difference that the house my Brownie pack entered to gaze upon the spoils of colonial hyper-confidence and activity was not the Newcombe house. I knew nothing of this then. I knew no First Nations people then. When we took a Sunday drive out past Brentwood Bay, we’d pass the tidy old farms on West Saanich Road, the fancier houses near the water, and then we’d come to the Reserve. Small noises would come from my parents’ throats. They disapproved of the unpainted houses, the untidy yards, the dogs everywhere. It wasn’t until much later that I learned anything of the history that allowed for such discrepancy between the communities. Paved sidewalks and prosperity on one side of the line, poverty on the other. Yet no one pointed out that each of those homes on the Reserve had a smokehouse behind it, that in spite of education policies that almost exterminated the cultures and languages of the original inhabitants of the coast, there was evidence of pride and dignity. Nobody mentioned or noticed that there was no need to clear out the wild plants in order to have gardens.

  Gardens are an attempt to mirror Eden. But what if you already lived th
ere? What if you could step out your door and pick huckleberries, salal, the new tips of thimbleberry to steam like celery? What if you could dig the roots of the blue camas to dry, springbank clover tasting like young peas, wild onions to flavour your stew? Or climb down to the beach to the clam beds, carefully terraced over the centuries. What if walking in the woods was like wandering through a vast and beloved place of abundance? Why clear the earth of all these life-giving plants in order to have . . . grass?

  Once, riding my bike from a temporary residence out on Ardmore Drive to my summer job near Brentwood Bay, passing through the Reserve, a very old man came out to call off a dog that was lunging at me. “Here,” he said, “try this,” passing me a knife with something speared on its tip. And I ate a slice of warm salmon right out of the smokehouse. It tasted of the sea, and campfires on cool evenings, buttery and smoky. It was utterly of the place and time. And no one I knew was eating it. Except there.

  In autumn of 2009, I was reading Trees of Greater Victoria: A Heritage and was completely surprised to come across this information:

  A rare heritage evergreen species, known as live oak, Quercus virginiana, at 144 Dallas Road, 36 inches (91 cm) in diameter, 22 feet (6.7 m) tall, has an amazing spread of over 50 feet (15.2 m). It is on the old homesite of C.F. Newcombe, outstanding Haida Indian authority for whom the Newcombe Auditorium at the Provincial Museum is named.7

  So not a eucalyptus at all! Instead, it was a tree I’d read about in southern American literature, a tree associated with William Faulkner and Walt Whitman, a tree ancient and gnarled, draped with Spanish moss. In fact, the tree became a code for Whitman’s robust homosexuality in the much-discussed “Live Oak, with Moss”: