Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  And then the lilies: Lilium columbianum in the grass at the edge of the path, many blooms to a stalk, smelling like mandarin oranges; the fawn lilies (Erythronium oregonum) above their dappled leaves in the shade of arbutus and shore pine at Francis Point and Quicks Bottom every Easter, late or early, so many of them I want to weep for their beauty; and once, driving back from Campbell River, we decided to walk at the Oyster River estuary and saw hundreds of E. revolutum, a deep pink form. On the slope where we stop to sit in sunlight, the eerie Zygadenus venenosus, or death camas, in the grass already drying in late May; a few Fritillaria lanceolata are hidden among them, speckled like birds’ eggs. It looks like a perfect place for blue camas but I’ve never seen it here, though in Victoria, drifts of Camassia quamash cover the meadows of Beacon Hill Park, the roadsides in Metchosin. I remember driving to see Forrest at Lester Pearson College of the Pacific and stopping the car because the camas was in full bloom, shades from pale to deep blue, as common as grass. In the graveyard of the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, fawn lilies covered the ground under the Garry oaks.

  As a child, near Clover Point, I sat on rocks by the sea and idly ate grass stems, as a child does, and was surprised that some tasted of onion. I didn’t know then about Allium cernuum, the nodding onion, but thought of it later, in Ireland, when I found wild garlic in the ditches under the hedges or other damp places, its flowers as lovely as any spring bulb. I used to pick it and keep it fresh in a glass of water in my island kitchen because I was so poor I often couldn’t afford to buy food and relied on nettles, mussels, and the buckets of potatoes my neighbour brought from his garden. Boiled together and flavoured with snippings of wild garlic, they were my dinners for weeks at a time.

  How to watch the ground at my feet, the footnotes, and walk at the same time? What have I missed, trying to protect my footing on the mountain trails? Clubmoss sprawling across the gravel, wild ginger, enchanter’s nightshade on the shady path by the waterfall, rattlesnake plantain rising from its rosettes on a rubbly turn where the trail switchbacks to the summit, mimulus and mouse-eared chickweed, long strands of honeysuckle straggling through the ocean spray. What have I missed, waiting for the first cerise salmonberry blossom, as early as February 23 one year,2 or brushing away debris to find the tiny prince’s pines under the firs on the Hallowell loop trail? Whole lives have passed me by while I bend to uncover a trillium, a clump of Viola adunca in our orchard where the ground is like the carpet of wildflowers in Botticelli’s Primavera, violets, self-heal, vetch, everlasting pea, and Columbia lilies in the soft grass. It is always spring and I am always young — though right now it is winter and I am newly fifty-five, dreaming that I am filling my hands with beauty.

  Always spring; or always winter — the scent of evergreens, scarlet hips on the climbing roses, grouse feasting on small scabby crabapples, a long fluid line of elk running up the mountain when we walk on the high Malaspina trail.

  Abies grandis

  Walking on that high trail in the fall of 2008, we noticed a single grand fir growing behind a huge stump — this is in the area kept clear because of hydro pylons overhead — and decided it would make a wonderful Christmas tree. Perhaps two metres tall, it was full and symmetrical, its branches dense. Every week we walked up there with our dog Tiger and every week we’d check the beautiful tree, crush some needles in our hands for the balsam odour, and reassure ourselves that no one else would see the tree there hidden in huckleberry and salal. In truth, the area is a good place for tree hunters as small firs grow in the open under the hydro lines and free permits are available for those who want to cut their own Christmas trees. Most of these trees are Pseudotsuga menziesii, the Douglas fir, not true firs at all, but the source of fine timber on the coast. There are also some pines up under the hydro lines, and hemlocks. But our tree was well-concealed.

  We always decorate our tree on the afternoon of the day before Christmas. Years ago this was a way to fill the day with practical activity when we had three small children eager for what would come the next morning. In those years we usually cut a tree on our property. We have more than three hectares and the expedition to find exactly the right tree could take an hour or two, John armed with the folding pruning saw and accompanied by helpers. They’d look for a tree growing very near another, reasoning that the thinning was good for our woods. The trees were often bare of branches on one side but that made it possible to place them against a wall where they’d take up less room and no one noticed that the back was a little sparse. I’d stay behind and heat cider on the stove, festive with slices of orange pierced with cloves, sticks of cinnamon broken into the pot. Out would come the boxes of ornaments stored in a dark cupboard for the rest of the year and we’d drink the cider while decorating the tree. Each year the delight, as old and new favourites emerged from the box — the Paddington bear, stained glass stars created by our friend June, each one more exquisite than the last, the paper lanterns sent to John’s family from his grandmother in Suffolk their first year in Canada, the angels and Santas made at school and decorated with macaroni. Some years there would be family members to help: my parents often came; John’s mother and father (separated and living in different cities so a bit of juggling was required to invite one and not the other); friends or relatives who were free that year to join us.

  Even though our children have grown up and gone away, they still come home for the holiday and we still save the tree cutting and decorating for the afternoon of Christmas Eve. But it snowed the week before Christmas in 2008, heavy falls, and the roads iced up to the extent that our highways maintenance workers couldn’t keep up with the clearing. It was the year Forrest successfully defended his PhD dissertation and treated himself to a train trip home on the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle. Heavy snow in Ontario and the American Midwest made that both a disaster and an adventure, and he arrived two days later than anticipated, sleep-deprived, at night, on the bus, with us at the side of the frozen highway armed with flashlights to show the driver where to stop as every familiar post or driveway was covered by about a metre of snow. Our plan to drive up the mountain on Christmas Eve to cut the grand fir had to be quietly abandoned and a tree was cut close to the house, a wispy inelegant Douglas fir that I insisted was “lyrical” when it was laden with its lights and ornaments. Anyway, we said, the grand fir would be there next Christmas, even nicer for the wait.

  Several days before Christmas Eve, 2009, John and Brendan went up for the tree — we’d kept an eye on it all the next year, watching it grow even more beautiful, and more hidden as the wiry huckleberry sheltered it — reasoning it was better to bring it home a little early in the event snow fell or something else happened to make it impossible. It could wait for a few days in the woodshed, its trunk in a bucket of water.

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.