5) “Could we try ‘When I am laid in earth’?” “We can, of course.” I muddled through the recitative, though finding it easier than “Frondi tenere,” which I never sang after the first few attempts. And then the exquisite cry from the heart of Dido. Or it would have been beautiful if my throat hadn’t closed completely for the G above the staff. I was so disappointed with myself. Shelley very sweetly took the final refrain down half an octave but I was completely aware that I was mangling a thing of great beauty. “It’s not that it’s too high for you,” she explained, “but that you have to make a leap to a vowel, to an eeee, and you don’t want it to sound like you’ve seen a mouse. It’s always difficult.”
6) I discovered I loved Benjamin Britten’s folk song arrangements and that I could sing them reasonably well. “Down by the Salley Gardens” — a poem by William Butler Yeats, haunted by a long-ago love; “Last Rose of Summer” with its dark embellishments. Shelley had this transposed for me as the arrangement was for soprano voice; after three years of lessons, I could almost manage, apart from several ornaments which went to high C. Almost, but not quite. And the misses were dreadful. And I also was intrigued by the American song-collector and composer John Jacob Niles. I worked on “Black is the Colour,” a song I couldn’t forget and found myself singing mournfully while working in the garden or washing dishes. There was something in it of Dowland, something of Britten — the minor chords, the flats. The wonderful Daniel Taylor sings this with lute accompaniment by Sylvain Bergeron on the splendid Lie Down, Poor Heart, and I learned a lot about timing from him.
7) “Amarilli,” “And So It Goes,” “Aye Fond Kiss,” “Fairest Isle,” “The Cuckoo,” “Since First I Saw Your Face” (which took me full circle back to that choir when this had been a piece we sang in four parts. It made me wistful for missed opportunities, bad timing — maybe I could have become a singer in those sad old years in high school), “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” “Laschia ch’io pianga,” and “Where’er you walk” (I love singing Handel!), “O Leggiadri occhi belli” (my Italian stumbling to keep up), “Have You Seen but a White Lily Where it Grows?”, more Niles (“The Black Dress” and “The Gambler’s Lament,” which I sang with rib cage expanded and my tentative vibrato, but I longed to put aside my small classical accomplishments for these to sing them as plaintively, wistfully as Emmylou Harris might).
8) After the second year, after many exercises, arpeggios inching up a half-tone every few months, we tried “When I am Laid in Earth” again. And I could do it! I bought myself a deep red taffeta evening skirt at my favourite second-hand clothing store as a fitting reward. When I wear it, I am Dido, collapsing into her handmaiden’s arms.
When I learned of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s death, in July 2006, at the young age of fifty-two, I walked around numb and distracted. How could it be: a young and accomplished woman gone to spirit so soon? This was someone I’d wanted to have in my life as surely as my family, a guide through the difficulty of scales and arpeggios, someone to sing Bach with, the generous songs of Handel. And yet how could I mourn someone I’d never met, who had a husband and family of her own who would be inconsolable, burdened with sorrow. My grief seemed a remote intrusion, an affectation. I did what I could. I located every CD I could find so that I’d have the solace of her voice. The poems of Neruda and Rilke her husband, the composer Peter Lieberson, had set for her. The Spanish love songs she sang with Joseph Kaiser.
I read everything I could about her, wanting the company of her name spoken by others. I knew that she had been scheduled to sing Orfeo in the great Gluck opera at the Met (that story of the mourning lover descending with great courage to the underworld to beg the return of his beloved) — one of those marvellous gender-bending tropes, the ravishing mezzo-soprano singing the male lead (I think of Tatiana Troyanos, Denyce Graves) — and was surprised and thrilled to see that David Daniels would sing the role instead. In an ideal world, I’d have begged, borrowed, or stolen to be there, watching the performance (a Mark Morris extravaganza), but know somehow that Daniels’s Orfeo would have been sublime and I’m content to have it so in my imagination. Orfeo’s arias — “Che puro ciel” as he wanders Elysium:
What pure skies, what bright sun,
what new clear light shines here?
What sweet enchanting harmonies
are created by this blend
of the song of the birds,
the murmur of the streams,
the whisper of the breezes!;
and the gorgeous “Che farò senza Euridice?”:
What can I do without Euridice?
Where can I go without my beloved? — 14
are tender and tragic.
In Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, there is a happy ending. Amor allows for the couple to be reunited, though the great mythographers assure us that Euridice was lost to Orfeo forever, music without its muse. How fitting that the production was dedicated to Lorraine. For me, for so many, having found the voice of our dreams, we must adjust to absence now she is gone to the Elysian fields (I imagine them to be like the place described in Theocritus’s Idylls, a place where
Tall pines grew close by, poplars, and plane-trees,
leafy cypresses; and fragrant flowers, thick in the meadows,
a labour of love, as spring dies, for rough bees . . .15
that haunted place of perfect peace).
Predators, tricksters, comics, monogamists, careful parents, scavengers, demiurges, shape-shifters, opportunists, acrobats on the high currents of air, practitioners of song. If I am honest, I must confess that ravens are almost as influential to my sense of music as the other singers I have learned to love. How they croak and gulp in the tall firs on the Malaspina trail, in an area I think must be their roost. How they can klook and trill, utter two notes at once from throats shaggy with feathers, a dark and original duet with the self.
I have longed for the clear voice of a mezzo-soprano, to sing perfectly of plane trees and their gift of shade, but am too careless and erratic to train to that level. I say I began too late, but I suspect I wouldn’t have had the tenacity or the self-discipline even in my youth to repeat those scales, those exercises to improve tone and dexterity. An afternoon on a single vowel, a year, a decade, learning to match vowels to pitch? Coaxing and adjusting my vocal tract for perfect reactance? Oh, I wish it was easier, and that I didn’t love too many things at once. Distracted from practice to water plants, to pollinate the lemon tree in the depths of winter when no bees were in the sunroom to do it, to look up a reference, to design a quilt, to read a poem by Sappho, to call a far-flung son to ask about Christmas or the physics of acoustics. To sit by a window dreaming of Paris and its churches, its squares set with tables under plane trees, while here the cedar boughs droop with their weight of birds.
And it turns out I want something else of singing too, not formal or professional: I want, yes, I want the spontaneity of stepping out from a parking lot in the golden grasslands south of Kamloops to watch a cast of ravens in the open air singing their own opera of the everyday while cars pass on the roadways and shoppers load groceries into their trucks for the long drive home.
Pinus ponderosa
A Serious Waltz
The heart is the warmest organ. It has a definite beat and movement of its own as if it were a second living creature inside the body.
— Pliny, Natural History
There is a moment, driving on the Coquihalla Highway between Hope and Merritt, when the landscape changes. The spruces, which have carried snow in their strong, supple arms, give way to ponderosa pines. The highway begins its long descent to the Nicola Valley where the pines stand among the soft grasses and artemisia, providing shade for cattle, seeds for chipmunks, Clark’s nutcrackers, grey jays, and the myriad small birds that dart in and out of the branches.
Is it excessive to say that I have loved those ponderosas all my life? On family trips in my childhood, up the Fraser Canyon — this was before the c
onstruction of the Coquihalla Highway — I remember waiting for them. Was it around Boston Bar where the beautiful groves began? Or at least individual pines on the benches above the river, standing with the firs and delicate aspens. The pattern of branches against the sky changed as the firs and cedars gave way to the lyrical pines, their airy latticework and straight trunks a signal that we had entered new country. Sometimes we’d stop north of Lytton at the picnic site at Skihist and there were pines in that dry air above the river, stately and sweet smelling. I loved their bark, thick and puzzle-shaped, and would scrape little drops of sap off, rolling it between my fingers. In my sleeping bag at night, in a tent of blue canvas, I’d sniff my hands for the faint memory of resin, of vanilla.
In that tent, patched by my father with scraps of brown canvas cut from even older tents, we slept our way across Canada, by rivers snaking through prairie grasslands low with wolf willow or slender birch, in boreal forests, the mixed forests of the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence, and Atlantic regions; but it’s British Columbia’s park-like ponderosa forests that I remember with an affection approximating deep attachment.
In the other woodlands, mosquitoes rose in clouds; I was allergic to them. Once we had to go to the emergency room of an Alberta hospital after camping in drizzle somewhere low and marshy; my infected mosquito bites were dressed with gauze, and I was given penicillin. (I can still feel the fierce sting as the bandages were changed each day, the tape drawn quickly off, taking the fine hairs of my arms and legs with it.) But in woodlands graced by pines, it was usually dry. Instead of rain, we’d wake to the sound of squirrels and grasshoppers clicking in the grass. There was almost nothing nicer than the smell of coffee perking in the aluminum pot; it came to me filtered through fire, bright in a circle of stones, as I pulled on my shorts, dancing a little because I had to pee. Our tent was gilded in sunlight and pollen, surrounded by brown-eyed Susans and rabbitbrush. We’d cut a little clump of their flowers for the picnic table, keeping it fresh in a Campbell’s Soup can. This was beauty unrivalled, not even by a hothouse bouquet in a crystal vase or an arrangement of orchids in a Japanese ceramic dish.
Those waking moments, when the landscape changes, are portals, green with branches. Passing into ponderosa country, I remember to take a small twig or a cone. I keep the cones in a bowl at home, a way back as sure as dreaming. The cones are arranged and rearranged. Stray seeds adrift on the bottom of the bowl, as though their secrets might be revealed in the right presentation: a divination.
Late September 2008 — I’m determined to learn to make pine-needle baskets. I bought one for John for Christmas a few years ago and have come to love its sturdy beauty — brown needles still smelling faintly of their origins woven into a bowl, stitched with some fine thread. A top fits snugly, a wooden button plain in its centre. I’ve read whatever I can find on the baskets, have downloaded instructions from a Web site devoted to Northwest baskets, and ordered one of the books recommended for further study.
The materials needed are pine needles, raffia, and number 18 tapestry needles. The latter two are easy. The dollar shop in Sechelt has the raffia, even the recommended type: not fireproofed, which apparently makes the raffia waxy and slippery, and difficult to work with. I find the tapestry needles at the sewing shop in the mall, a whole range of sizes, all wide-eyed, with blunt tips.
So it’s the pine needles themselves for which I will have to go farther afield. I know there are a few mature white pines (Pinus monticola) in Halfmoon Bay — I’ve brought home their elegant cones to decorate Christmas parcels of homemade jams and fruitcake. But at ten centimetres, their needles are too short to turn and wind into coils. If I lived in Florida, I could choose from longleaf (up to forty-six centimetres long, these produce the longest needles of the native North American species), loblolly, slash, and pond pines. In other western areas (but not close to home), there are Jeffrey, digger, Colter, Apache, and Toray pines. On the west coast, though not as far north as where I live on the Sechelt Peninsula, and in the interior of British Columbia, it’s the ponderosa that is most widely used for basket making, with needles ranging from eighteen to twenty-three centimetres long. That settles it. A run up into the Nicola and Thompson valleys is necessary.
Monck Park is pretty deserted when we drive in early on a Thursday afternoon. Two campers set up down by Nicola Lake, signs of abandoned activity in the parking lot — a backhoe, a wheelbarrow, a broken pad of concrete with the informational sign it supported lying on its side in the grass. Under the large ponderosas fringing the parking lot are heaps of fallen needles. Masses of them. I’ve brought a large yellow detergent bucket from home and hope that by filling it with needles, I will have enough for my baskets. I begin to gather them by the handfuls. The smell is wonderful, though truly it isn’t just dry pine needles but also sage (Artemisia tridentata) and its smaller, woollier cousin Artemisia frigida, or pasture wormwood. Brushing my hands over their flowering tops releases a pungent, lemony odour that tells me where I am more accurately than any map.
For many summers, I camped here with my family and watched my children play among these plants. They ran among the pines and came to the campsite with sticky hands from the sap, their skin golden with pollen. We made fires with dry needles and logs of fallen ponderosa, which snapped and burned hot with pitch. I folded my children’s clothing at bedtime, their socks pierced with seeds. When I tucked each child into a sleeping bag and bent to kiss them goodnight, I smelled lake water and smoke in their hair.
Now my children have moved far away, where other trees watch them sleep — an apple tree and yews overlooking Cordova Bay outside Victoria; beeches and butternuts on a leafy street in London, Ontario; “something with green leaves, and another with purple ones” in Toronto (reported by a son unconvinced of the importance of specificity, at least in botanical matters).
A day or two later, I am under some dead ponderosas near Heffley Creek. We’ve stopped in a recreation area on the road up to Sun Peaks, mostly so we can drink our coffee and eat something because we drove away early from Quilchena without breakfast, planning to stop at a diner for a proper meal of eggs and sausage, but didn’t find a likely place on the drive north on the 5A. All around us, as far as the eye can see, there are standing dead trees — and very few living. I muse about the living trees and the dead, for these trees are not dead as a result of age or a falling meteorite or gases from industry. Rather, the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) has seriously decimated the ponderosa pines of the British Columbia interior. This has been happening for some years now and has filled the business pages of the newspapers as the lumber industry faces the challenges of declining healthy timber stocks and rising fire hazard as the woods become stands of pitch-infused tinder.
Science writers following the accelerated pace of global warming are breathless with numbers and charts. When I flew over the area last, returning home from Ontario, I was shocked at the patches of red in the dark green forests below. By the time I was over the Interior, the plane beginning its descent into Vancouver, I watched for the river systems, forests, cities, and small towns, all very distinguishable from the little windows. I’ve often followed our route home in my heart by tracing the Fraser River below with my finger on the glass. Anyway, I was startled by the way red was overtaking green in so many areas. Of course, I’d noticed this driving through the Interior, but some areas were still untouched, it seemed, by the beetles and their devastation. I suppose this was what I’d wanted to remember: the groves of healthy trees standing in their drifts of golden grass. I’d seen them in morning light and evening, moving with slow dignity in the wind, as though waltzing — a modest sway of upper branches brushing softly against the nearest tree.
Beneath the dead trees, thinking about this, I bend to begin gathering needles. I suddenly decide to keep the needles from the various areas separate. I should have thought of this earlier, because essentially I’ve filled the yellow bucket with Nicola Lake needles, not in any tidy way,
and I’m realizing that bundles properly tied with string or elastic bands, all the sheaths at one end, will take up far less room than a haphazard pile of needles put in any old way. I put elastic bands around each end of the Heffley Creek bundle and then label it with a bit of paper from my notebook. It’s then that I notice all the little seedlings coming up near where we parked our car.
In one small scrap of ground, perhaps one square foot, there are six tiny pines. And when I look elsewhere, I see that it’s the same. A forest in miniature, each tree no more than eight centimetres tall. I realize I must’ve stepped on many as I drank my coffee, ate my handful of almonds and my apple, and bent to gather the dry needles. I was so single-minded about choosing the longest lengths of needles, and preoccupied by the dead, that I hadn’t noticed the tender green seedlings.
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