Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  What would they have been mixed with? Oil, of course: linseed, walnut, or poppy. With solvents to dilute them for translucent glazing. Different colours dry at different rates, so that would be considered when mixing — turpentine, or a little more oil, perhaps, added to the Alizarin crimson and some of the yellows which dry very slowly. These ingredients would be added much more sparingly to the ochres and Venetian crimson (depending on the schema of the work itself) because they dried faster. An artist in the heat of creation, wanting layer after layer of transparent colour to intensify hue and create the optical effect of warmth and depth, would want the layers of paint to dry quickly enough to allow the momentum of the work to be sustained (unless there was something to be gained by working alla prima).

  In the past few years, inventories have emerged from the dusty depths of the state archives in Venice which reveal that sixteenth-century painters had convenient access, through sellers of artists’ pigments, to the raw materials used by glassmakers and dyers — finely ground particles of coloured glass.4 The use of blue smalt, or finely ground blue cobalt glass, was already known about in some fresco work; but further analysis, using scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive spectrometry, of the work of Lorenzo Lotto and Tintoretto revealed presence of other colours of glass, the silicas and irons allowing for an expansion of colour choice. The glass was used with pigment in very thin glazes that resulted in transparency, vibrancy of colour, and luminosity, qualities associated with the work of these artists. The glass also acted as a drying agent, fundamental in facilitating the application of many layers.

  Those grey days in Venice, I made my way along quiet back streets among carnival masks and shops resplendent with pastries as beautiful as sculpture to Madonna dell’Orto, Tintoretto’s own church in the Cannaregio where his canvasses filled the space. The Presentation of Mary at the Temple, the Sacrifice of the Golden Calf — such colour and drama! To Sant’Alvise where the Tiepolos brought tears to my eyes — Christ laden with his cross on the road to Calvary, his flagellation, the crown of thorns. And Tiepolo again as we sat in the Scuola Grande dei Carmini to listen to La Traviata on a dark night, light casting its spell on the flesh of the heavy-eyed Mary on panels, the plump Violetta singing on the stage.

  Near Arbutus Point

  The list embarrasses me, but I remember one older man, an amiable satyr, who took me to a hidden beach in moonlight and laid me down on his coat, spread over cool sand. What he did with his tongue was miraculous. No boy I’d dated ever suggested such pleasures were possible. They brought out their wallets, the leather imprinted with the ring of a condom, those badges of honour — and saw no reason why anyone needed to go farther than the back seat of a car, parked at Beaver Lake or the end of my parents’ road. Not to remote beaches in moonlight where arbutus trees rustled in wind and a bald man made me cry out in surprise.

  But I will tell you that if you wish to keep your complexion for a long time, you must make a practice of washing in water — spring or well or river: warning you that if you adopt any artificial preparation your countenance soon becomes withered, and your teeth black; and in the end ladies grow old before the course of time . . . And this will have to be enough discussion of the matter.

  — Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook

  More than thirty years ago, I removed my clothes for an artist, each layer — the baggy sweater, jeans, cotton underpants, lace bra — flung to the ground in careless abandon of a self I hoped I could transcend, on canvas if not in fact. What he wanted from me wasn’t physical exactly. It was what men often hope to find in a woman’s presence that makes itself known in her body. Before that, and afterwards, there were others who found this in me though I was puzzled by their conviction that I had something they needed. Occasionally I recognized it in poems written for other women, for instance the beautiful “On Raglan Road” by Patrick Kavanagh.5

  I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known

  To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone

  And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.

  With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May . . .

  — and also in poems written for me, most of them by the poet who became my husband. Time provides such clarity and from this great distance I wish I’d been more easy with the role in which I’d been cast. It troubled me then because I thought I was at fault, that I wasn’t worthy of the kind of relationships my friends were entering into. Now I can honestly say it was a privilege to (however briefly) occupy the imagination of a man who caressed my skin with brushes of hogs hair and sable, and who filled a small book with my image.

  I am memorized on canvas, on paper, a Madonna without the beautiful long eyes or that wise serenity. And I look down from the wall of our living room, a poster girl in a robe of Alizarin crimson. A poster girl whose face was underpainted in terre verte (an unctuous earth pigment, taking its green from hydrated oxide of iron), and then left. Surely this was an exercise in verdaccio and my painter intended to use the grey-green to establish the values for painting my flesh with successive layers of glaze? Unfinished, or abandoned, or given up to dull green earth. It took time, but I came to love this version of my younger self, uncharacteristically elegant, her skin echoing the new bark of the arbutus framed by the large window. And there’s another portrait, a dreamy girl with flowers in her hair; she is wearing a blue wool vest I sewed from fabric bought at Capitol Iron in Victoria. She hangs high in the stairwell and gazes down as I descend the stairs each morning, dishevelled and eager for my coffee. I’m not sure if she sees me or sees through me. And if the obverse is also true.

  There are arbutus trees at Francis Point, a grove of them, leaning out to sea, wanting to partake of the cool air off the water on summer days. Mount one and stretch your body along its length. Has there ever been a tree more seductive to the touch? Has there ever been a trunk, peeled of its bark and new, more like the smooth torso of a beloved? Without mark or blemish, asking us to run our hands along its taut muscularity? The underwood is chartreuse, radiating light.

  How many times do we shed our outer layers in a life? How many times expose our tender new skin to the world, soft as the soles of a child who has never touched the earth? Looking out my window, I see the bark curling from the arbutus on the south side of my house. Like paint peeling from an old surface, we hardly notice it but are drawn to what’s revealed underneath. Steaming the bark with the pale bulbs of camas would turn them pink as young flesh, beauty for the eye and the palate.

  Postscript

  Even the red-breasted nuthatches that visit my feeders have a black line elongating their eyes to make them as elegant as Veneziano’s Mary . . .

  “May I help you?” asked the nice woman at the cosmetics counter in Shopper’s Drug Mart in Sechelt. “I’m not sure,” was my reply. I explained about the eyes of the Byzantine Madonnas and without even raising her own well-shaped eyebrow she sat me on a stool, brought out a pot of deep brown powdered eye shadow and a thin brush, and tilted my face up with one hand on my chin. Deftly she brushed a thin line along my eyelids, top and bottom, and gave me a hand mirror to look in. Well! I certainly don’t have the long almond eyes of those ikonic women, nor do I share their beautiful serenity; but I was pleased to see a quality of which Cennini might have approved. Then take a little black in another little dish, and with the same brush mark out the outline of the eyes . . . I bought a pot of the shadow and a brush and have been trying ever since, without success, to replicate the effect. Which goes to show that some have the sure hand of an artist, and some don’t.

  Populus tremuloides

  Cariboo Wedding

  Leaves: Alternate, deciduous, simple, broadly egg-shaped, kidney-shaped or circular, 2.5-9 cm long, 2.5-8 cm wide, the bases rounded to slightly heart-shaped, smooth, finely toothed and fringed with long white hairs, upper side green, lower side paler; leaf stalks 2-7.5 cm long;
buds smooth1

  It was a long way to drive for a wedding, from our home on the Sechelt Peninsula to the Nazko Valley, west of Quesnel. We left on a Thursday, in late July. Up early, second ferry from Langdale to Horseshoe Bay, Sea to Sky Highway to Pemberton, then east on the Duffey Lake Road as far as Lillooet the first night.

  In Lillooet, we could see flames on the mountain behind the town. Helicopters were swinging buckets of water over the flames, clouds of smoke billowing into what had been a clear sky as water hit fire. The woman at the post office said part of the town was on evacuation notice but when we said we’d been thinking of staying a night in Lillooet, she quickly said, “Oh, you’ll be fine. It’s only the outskirts that need to worry.” A small town in depressed times: every tourist dollar counted.

  We wandered around and looked at things. The main street of Lillooet was Mile Zero of the wagon road leading miners from Port Douglas to the goldfields during the 1860s (many place names on the route evolved from the stopping houses along the way: 70 Mile House, 100 Mile House, the 108 Mile Ranch, etc.). The beautiful Miyazaki House was elegant in its shady garden, trees hung with bright apricots. Farther down Main Street, the museum featured in its basement a dusty approximation of Ma Murray’s Bridge River-Lillooet News print shop (Margaret “Ma” Murray and her husband George launched the newspaper in 1934). We couldn’t decide at first whether to stay or move on to a town without a fire at its back. Clinton, maybe — or Cache Creek. But we liked Lillooet. I felt that there was a story in the plantings around the Miyazaki House — that the fruit trees, the big cottonwood, and the lilacs might figure into this memoir I was writing about trees. So we reasoned that the fire couldn’t reach the town overnight, and it was likely we could sleep peacefully in a room at the Mile 0 Motel without being roused by loudspeakers to pack our bags and leave within twenty minutes.

  Our room at the Mile 0 was adequate, though spartan. A few thin towels in the bathroom and two Styrofoam cups by the coffee maker. Still, there was a view of the Fraser River if we stood on the small balcony with sliding doors to let in air. If we stood outside the front door of the unit, we could watch the drama of the helicopters, one after another, rising from the Fraser River with their buckets.

  We loved the Miyazaki House. It was built in the late 1800s (a heritage report issued by the District of Lillooet indicates the construction was between 1878 and 1890) in the Second Empire style, with a mansard roof. Built for Caspar Phair, a merchant and gold commissioner, the house, with its gracious lawns and gardens, was a centre for social activity well into the next century. During the Second World War, it became the temporary home and surgery for Dr. Masajiro Miyazaki, a Japanese-born Vancouver osteopath who’d been interned at nearby Bridge River when Canadians of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from the Coast. Dr. Miyazaki’s medical skills were needed in the area and he was recruited as Lillooet’s coroner when the town’s doctor died during the war. After the war, Dr. Miyazaki was able to buy the house from the son of Caspar Phair and lived in it, raising his family there, until 1983, when he donated the house to the town of Lillooet.

  Walking the main street of town in the evening, after a good meal at the Greek restaurant, we saw people on every block or corner, all of them looking towards the mountain. It was a Thursday, not a weekend, but it felt almost festive, walking the sidewalks of Lillooet where residents had set up lawn chairs with small coolers full of beer and soft drinks for the children. Some people kept binoculars focussed on the fire. We bought ice cream cones and ate them on the patio of a little café; around us, customers sipped cold drinks and talked of the fire. I expected to smell smoke but it was just a faint whiff, a rumour. Several times in the night, I went outside to see a deep orange glow against the dark mountain. Other motel guests were watching too, an uneasy fellowship. I imagined I could hear the crackling of flame, fanned by wind off the Fraser River, but in fact it was strangely quiet.

  We were heading to a wedding so we drove off before 7:00 a.m. the next morning; the helicopters resumed the water-drops at 6:00 a.m. so we didn’t need a wake-up call. Our car was covered with a fine film of ash. By now we knew that the mountain was Mount McLean, and that there were no roads to where the fire was raging on its slopes which meant the blaze would be fought mostly from the sky. As we drove over the bridge across the Fraser River, we saw the smokejumpers’ campsite on its banks, a village of tents that had sprung up overnight. Young men were crawling out of tents, pulling on red shirts with the fire-service badge. I thought of another MacLean — Norman —and his wondrous book about another fire fought by young men, the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana, a book of Shakespearean power, which ended in tragedy. In my heart, I wished these guys courage and luck.

  The Pavilion road was beautiful in the cool of morning. In the valley bottom, there were trembling aspens, their heart-shaped leaves fluttering while horses grazed above the river in distant fields. Hawks watched from telephone poles. And everywhere a soft wind, the smell of dry earth. It felt like morning at the dawn of the world, the old gods walking those shimmering fields, attended by rustling leaves.

  I had my copy of Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia in the car and looked up trembling aspens. The delicate movement of their leaves, dark green with pale undersides, made a sibilant music. The white bark was a perfect contrast to the cinnamon trunks of the ponderosa pines. What would the book tell me about their ecology?

  “Reproduces mainly from root suckers following disturbances, such as cutting or fire.”2 Well, this was a landscape vulnerable to fire, I thought, looking behind us to see the smoke from the McLean Mountain inferno while the radio news reported that its size had doubled overnight. I remembered my childhood among the fire-shaped Garry oak meadows of southern Vancouver Island and saw some similarities to these dry expanses of grass. There is also a history of controlled burning by the Stl’átl’imx people3 to enhance plant resources, notably berries and roots.

  While we drove, we were listening to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sing Handel and Bach arias.4 Two years into my singing lessons, I was happily accompanying her while John drove; our windows were open and warm air carried the tang of sage into the car. The aspen leaves were rustling and when we passed a grove of them by the side of the road, we could hear their whisper. It was an idyllic drive, Lorraine (and me) singing,

  There in myrtle shades reclined,

  By streams, that through Elysium wind,

  In sweetest union we shall prove

  Eternity of bliss and love.

  Such a potent landscape — the rock formations and pines and golden stretches of grass. We passed small creeks entering the Fraser River and shelves of rock which were fishing sites for the First Nations people of the area. These sites were owned by extended family groups and had names passed down through the generations; sometimes a place speaks its own name even now: the site known as “shady rock” or the site known as “foaming.” The sockeye were running, heading for their spawning beds near Horsefly and Stuart lakes, and I expected to see people out with nets but didn’t. We did see a pair of coyotes on a small hill, taking the sun, and hawks swooped as chipmunks raced across the highway.

  Our destination was Quesnel. We’d reserved a suite at the Talisman Motel, and we didn’t know what to expect. The marriage of my niece Lisa and her beau Chad would take place on Saturday afternoon at Rainbow Lake in the Nazko Valley, an hour and a half from Quesnel itself; my oldest brother and his wife had their home on the lake and their children — Lisa and her three brothers — had been raised in the valley. Then everyone would return to Quesnel to the Seniors Centre for the reception that evening. It seemed prudent to stay in the town, walking distance from the reception.

  Although it was hot when we left home, it was even hotter in the Cariboo, a different heat from the bracing dry warmth of the Lillooet area where we’d spent the previous night. Driving up the long highway, stopped at various intervals for road work (the smell of new asphalt sickening in the heat), we were glad
to have air-conditioning in our car, along with bottles of water and bags of fresh cherries to eat at the construction stops.

  My family drove this highway when I was a child, on our way to Edmonton to see our grandmother. (There was a faster route but we took this one if my father wanted to pick something up in Prince George — a gun part, maybe — or if my parents wanted to visit old friends in Clinton or Williams Lake.) They were long trips, my father wanting to make the most of daylight, so we’d break up our camps shortly after dawn. He’d pack the station wagon while our mother made sandwiches for later in the day. My brothers and I were delegated to walk the dog and make sure she peed before she was loaded into her spot in the car.

  I recalled camping trips in this country with our children when they were small, our own dog panting in the back of our van as we drove the long highway to Bella Coola or Prince Rupert. I’d forgotten the spruce forests along the highway and the beautiful grasslands near Williams Lake, the aspens in small groves, often with horses grazing among them; yet they felt deeply familiar as we drove north to the wedding.

  We passed the Sandman Inn on our way into Quesnel, where my younger brother Gordon had first suggested we stay. We were meeting him, and the idea of a shared suite seemed sensible; we could have a visit (we so seldom see him) and we could drive out to Rainbow Lake together the next day. My brother had stayed there for another family wedding a few years earlier and praised it for the adjacent bar and grill, but we were glad when we saw it that we weren’t staying there. It was located south of town on the side of the highway. “Can we walk nearby?” we’d asked him, and he confessed it was not really that kind of place. We knew from the description on its Web site that the Talisman Inn was above the Fraser River and near a walking trail that circumnavigated Quesnel. I imagined the three of us walking early in the morning and updating one another on our lives. The Sandman Inn, next to the big parking lot for Extra Foods and Walmart, looked like it could have been anywhere in North America.