by Anny Scoones
If you would like to learn about the colourful history of Victoria, pick up these well-researched pamphlets, walk through the streets, and read about murders, unlawfulness, gold seekers, high finance in the 1800s, opium dens, haunted hotels, and other spooky places and events.
Fernwood Road at Gladstone
CHAPTER FIVE
Fernwood
The village centre of historic Fernwood, with its surrounding heritage homes, is the quintessential, quaint, charming, small neighbourhood. Unlike Cook Street Village and other central neighbourhood meeting places, Fernwood’s centre sits on the classic four corners—quirky corners full of diverse culture and activity, smack in the middle of one of the oldest parts of Victoria.
It doesn’t take even a minute to realize that you are in an artistic hub when you stand in front of the Belfry Theatre, a renovated nineteenth-century church. Art banners fly from the colourfully painted telephone poles and young artists make their way across the road toward the little galleries, carrying canvases wrapped in brown paper under their arms, or gather at the corner coffee shop to chat or maybe even to philosophize as in the Parisian cafés in the 1920s. There is usually somebody doing something eccentric in the courtyard.
One day, there was an elderly man with a long grey beard, dressed in denim overalls and a purple cape, blowing huge bubbles, which drifted up toward the steeple of the historic Belfry Theatre, from a great grey plastic sword that he dipped into a galvanized pail of soapy water. Now there’s a juxtaposition! A sword and bubbles—aha! I get it. That was his art form—a sword and a bubble—a volatile instrument of death and killing, producing a fragile, gentle, floating bubble that wafts up the street. I suppose you could also say that the act of blowing bubbles, plus the bubbles themselves, was a form of public art, and when the bubbles burst, well, who says art has to last forever? This then could provoke the whole philosophical debate of what is time, and how important is it? All this from an eccentric man blowing bubbles on the street. He also had a purple sparkly troll or wizard sort of doll in one pocket, and a worn copy of a book on goblins in the other.
Everyone was kind to him, as if he was a fixture in the neighbourhood, and perhaps that is one way to look at a neighbourhood, to see how their local eccentrics are accepted and treated and embraced. We live in a crazy world with lots of problems, but I like to think that our tolerance for people who are different is improving, and that we are more empathetic toward the bullied ones who march to a different drummer. I think, in Fernwood anyway, that we are in a more compassionate world.
One evening I dropped in to the Fernwood Inn. I sat in the back room in a cozy booth with a glass of wine and admired the beautiful wildlife photographs, framed in rustic wooden frames, hanging on the yellowed walls. Then an extraordinary event began to take place all around me. First, people, mostly older and alone, very nicely dressed, began to arrive and set up music stands throughout the room. Then a band appeared on the little wooden stage. Two of the band members were women and one wore a black T-shirt that said, in big, crazy, white letters, THE MIGHTY UKE.
The woman began to strum and sing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Strum” and everyone joined in, accompanied by a rosy-cheeked, smiling man wearing a pink and yellow Hawaiian shirt, who coolly strummed the bass at the back of the stage.
The two women reminded me of an eastern maritime party—they were full of fun and humour and began playing maritime songs such as “Farewell to Nova Scotia” (all we needed was a step dancer!). They belted out the songs with gusto, stomping their feet and playing their ukuleles. And soon the whole room was singing and playing ukuleles as well. I was in the middle of the monthly ukulele strum-a-long hosted by Diamond Tooth Molly & the Mighty Little Uke Band!
They played a wide selection of Canadian songs, from Gordon Lightfoot to Anne Murray. I couldn’t believe that you could play such a variety of songs on the ukulele. In the break, some members oiled and polished their ukuleles; others tuned and tightened their strings and asked the woman on the stage to listen for the right sound, while others discussed the date of the next practice at the Legion across town. One lady admired the new leather carrying case that her friend had purchased from an online ukulele store. A smiling, plump man with ruddy cheeks, wearing big jeans and red suspenders, plucked away at the tiniest ukulele I have ever seen—his thick pink fingers elegantly touched the strings as the little instrument rested on his stomach.
After the break and another couple of tunes, Diamond Tooth Molly belted out to the audience, “Okay, folks, it’s time for the Uke Salute!” and everyone energetically held up their ukuleles by their necks. “I’m counting twenty-two tonight,” she yelled with delight before launching into “Makin’ Love Ukulele Style.” (The second time I attended, she counted forty-eight ukes, and the third time, fifty-four.)
On a glorious, sunny, early-spring day I paid a visit to the nearby Fernwood Compost Education Centre on a large city lot on a quiet, dead-end street right behind Victoria High School. It’s the oldest high school in western Canada, says the plaque in front of the massive stone steps; the school started out as a log cabin and now the stolid, elegant, massive sand-coloured structure has a French immersion program and many overseas students.
Fernwood Compost Education Centre
I strolled over to the compost centre from the village, a pleasant walk along a street lined with historic wooden and red-brick heritage homes, with gardens full of blooming snowdrops, and delicate yellow winter jasmines leaning against porches in need of a paint job after a cold winter.
The compost centre was a little oasis of fertility. There were lush beds of green winter vegetables, a composting toilet, a grey water collection and filtration system with bathtubs (stage three was made up of marsh plants which filter out pollutants), a “green roof” full of budding stonecrop, a native forest garden, and piles of rich organic “black gold,” compost created from local kitchen scraps, fallen leaves, and garden waste. My hostess at the compost centre quoted the definition of a native plant from the Native Plant Society of British Columbia as “a plant that occurs naturally in a particular region, ecosystem or habitat—and occurred prior to European contact. Native plants can be mosses, ferns, grasses, wildflowers, shrubs, trees and more.”
There was a bee area where all the bees were resting for the winter. The compost centre works with mason bees, a native bee that is a good pollinator and will rarely sting you—they look like large black flies and live in tight little cavities that the compost centre provides for them. My host told me that honey is the only food on earth that will keep and will never spoil. Honey in ancient clay vases has been excavated from the tombs in Egypt and is still edible.
From a warm little cabin, the compost centre sells heirloom vegetable seeds, kitchen compost buckets, and all sorts of interesting books and gadgets, and they are more than happy to give you a tour and explain the difference between native plants, noxious weeds, and invasives. But by far the most amazing feature is the straw-bale, natural-plaster-domed cottage and the incredible organic and permacultural worm project going on inside. The sturdy, light grey structure looks like a home for goblins and trolls (anything egg-shaped and oval seems to me to have something to do with trolls!). Inside, a soft and earthy odour comes from underneath the wooden benches that surround the round room. The benches are full of various stages of rich black earth and compost, which house hundreds of very happy earthworms, essential in gardens to break down soils and add further fertility. The wonderful, warm smell of earth comes from the heat and activity within the composted soil. What is it about the warm and humid smell of earth that is so comforting—could it be a subconscious connection to the ground of Mother Earth?
Sandra, a volunteer and permaculture expert, loves and values her worms and demonstrated “worm migration” by coaxing the worms to shift their location with new fresh, rich compost.
The compost centre has a hotline: 386-WORM.
Just a block or two down the street fr
om the compost centre is another beautified city lot named Spring Ridge Commons. The colourful sign tells us that the commons is a permacultural food garden, and that a public common garden means its products are free for anyone to harvest. The garden is a mass of fruit trees and garden beds separated by gravel pathways. The site is the location of an abundant freshwater spring that began to supply Victoria in 1843. The water was first carried to town in barrels by horse cart, but later pumped in through wooden pipes. One of the original wooden pipes sits as a historic monument beside the Selkirk Trestle, which crosses the Gorge waterway downtown.
When water was transported to town from Elk and Beaver Lakes years later, the meadows around the spring in Fernwood were used as municipal yards, and gravel was excavated as fill for other parts of town (the area under the Empress Hotel, for example).
The other historic feature of Spring Ridge Commons is, according to a weathered brass plaque amongst the tangle of campions and marigolds, that it was also the site of a one-room schoolhouse built in 1887. The principal was Isla Tuck, who was well loved and cared so much for her young students that she regularly took them to town and bought them shoes. The school closed in 1957.
One evening in the Fernwood Village, I ventured into a tiny, sweet-smelling café, the Darband Tea House and Hookah Lounge, which advertised Persian teas and Turkish coffees. When you open the red door, you go down some steps and into a tiny, warm, glowing area full of red cushions and orange drapes and rich carpets. The place smelled nice, a combination of sweet and smoke. People were lounging around on the cushions, engaging in a sort of social activity that involved sucking on a tube attached to a tall, elegant, glass-and-brass contraption called a hookah. After some research, I discovered that the hookah is actually an Indian device used for smoking in which the tobacco (or other substances such as sugar-beet sugar) is watered down inside the glass part of the elaborate contraption. It’s all completely legal, but not exactly on my list or awareness of urban activities. We couldn’t stay that evening when we discovered the little golden hideaway because there was no room, but I will return to experience the interesting pastime of smoking a hookah and order a Turkish coffee. It all seems as though it might take a toll on the body, and also, it feels a bit naughty, or sort of radical, as if we’re having secret political meetings or something and that at any minute the place might be raided by the RCMP.
Winter Beach, a painting by Molly Lamb Bobak, the author’s mother.
Right next door to the hookah place is another tiny nook called The Paint Box—I think it might be the smallest art school in town. I have never painted anything in my life (perhaps it is because Mum and Dad are such successful Canadian artists) but have always wondered if I have any aptitude at all in that area, so I signed up to take a watercolour lesson. I showed up at dusk on a drizzly winter’s evening. The paving stones in the Fernwood courtyard were shiny wet and the colourful posters advertising a bluegrass band at the coffee shop and an art show by brain-damaged students in the lobby of the little theatre across the road were dripping and peeling off the missile-shaped kiosk in front of the tattoo parlour.
I had to push really hard on the door leading from the wet, dismal night into the tiny warm studio, which was crammed with paints and art supplies, at the bottom of a little set of wooden stairs. The brick walls were almost totally covered in watercolours of still lifes, fabric collages, sketches of nudes, and pastel country scenes. There was a paint-stained sink with glass jars of paintbrushes. A colour wheel dangled from a hook next to a root-bound spider plant.
There was a long table in the centre of the room with blank paper taped to the surface. My instructor, Emily, a kind and gentle-looking young blonde woman wearing an apron and holding a tray of numerous little paint tubes, welcomed me and we began. She suggested that we begin with a landscape, a sunset, in fact, over a lake, and I immediately thought of the pink and grey sunsets Dad does on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, with a black fly fisherman in hip waders casting his line into the deep river, a row of dark trees on the riverbank in the distance.
Dad’s watercolours are technically perfect and accurate, usually of scenes; Mum’s are usually of great vases of flowers, watery and loose—that’s their personalities, and I wondered what method I would instinctively be drawn to. I had a hunch that I would be like Mum, free and wet and blurred and soft and dripping. I have never been skilled and technical and clever like Dad; maybe I am too emotional and need to have fewer boundaries—I have been disciplined, but not technically skilled, and that at times has been frustrating. I am sympathetic to those who are determined but unable to skilfully articulate, and I hope they realize that there are other “free” ways to express oneself and an idea.
So Emily and I chatted about life and art as she pulled a worn postcard of a landscape from a drawer and gently had me draw pencil lines across my paper where the purple sea met the pale yellow sky and where the grey treeline met the black rocks and where the silver, mauve, shimmering sea (or maybe it was a lake) met its golden reflection. Well, so far this was a cakewalk, I thought! However, she kept reminding me to cover the pencil lines. Every time she glanced over at my masterpiece, I sort of “choked” and found myself thinking, “Oh please, just let me be,” as a huge water splotch in the treeline washed its way into the orange sky.
“Dab the water with a Kleenex,” Emily advised, but I didn’t really want to. I liked the wetness and wondered if in nature the sky “watered” into the distant dark hills and sea, but I did what she said and dabbed away the water splotch, which created a lovely murky purple dusk.
I soon found out that Emily is the artist who paints the delightful and whimsical scenes on the Hydro poles throughout Fernwood. Apparently, BC Hydro encourages the painting of its poles in order to beautify the neighbourhood—I found it a strange juxtaposition that Hydro is installing Smart meters (which some people think are dangerous) onto every house in the province but at the same time humouring us by allowing us to paint their poles to decorate our streets. I thought I might ask Emily to paint the pole in front of my house in James Bay: a fish theme, perhaps—gold and silver fish in an azure sea, swimming around the pole and into the hawthorn tree.
Then we dabbed in some bleak black trees, possibly cedars, and as I poked away with my little brush, I asked Emily if she would ever like to have a show, because after all, she had been through the university program and was a trained painter, a visual artist. But, refreshingly, she said, “I just love teaching. I love the social-ness of it. I don’t need to have an exhibition—I don’t produce enough.” Emily was not the classic tormented artist, and I am not sure if you need to be tormented to create a great work anyway. Actually, being distracted by your anguish might deter you from creating something wonderful—it may well be a cliché to assume that a great work must be made during mood swings and a tumultuous “episode.” Perhaps if people were in this state of angst all the time, their genius might be created on a day when they were happy—who knows?
Emily and I agreed that a great work can never be predicted. Mum told me that one time she was struggling to paint the vision that was in her head and it just wouldn’t come out, and then, with no warning whatsoever, “something just floated by and I caught it,” she said. I would think an artist of any type would be very fortunate to capture a feeling at exactly the time it passed by—to be moved and to grab it right at the exact moment. Now that’s what an artist strives for, the moment when truth and emotion and capture all come together—it’s what keeps a creative soul going. I wonder how many artists have gone through their lives without hitting upon that moment, that unpredictable fluke of energy that Mum caught that one time as it “floated by.” I think that’s what athletes strive for as well, that moment of perfection.
A thumping vibration came through the walls. “That’s the hookah emporium,” Emily said. I told her that I was too nervous to smoke a hookah.
My wet painting was almost finished! It was so wet that we had to dry
it with a hair dryer. I signed my initials on the bottom and titled my masterpiece Vermillion Sunset.
Emily said that if I returned, we would do a still life, “which is more difficult,” she said, “because the sunset was ‘flat’ and a still life has more dimensions and light and shadow.” My heart leapt. She said that I was to bring in a few favourite objects. “Hmmmm,” I thought. A thousand items went through my mind—some white shells from a Barcelona beach, Gran’s little brass teapot, a jade-green ceramic box made by a peasant in Belarus, a blown-glass pig from Venice, and my Emily Carr ashtray in the shape of a salmon’s mouth (which I inherited from my grandfather). I did think for a moment that perhaps it wouldn’t be quite right to paint an object created by another artist—that seems rather odd and even pointless, to create something that has already been created! I think art should come out of something the artist feels, not just sees.
I left the tiny studio with my painting under my arm. The audience from the Belfry Theatre was emptying out through the great arched exit; its elegant steeple and stained-glass windows glowed faintly under a street lamp that shone down into the wet courtyard. The warm light flowed from the hookah place onto the sidewalk next door, but I still didn’t go in. Across the road, the audience from the little alternative Theatre Inconnu also drifted onto the dark street, perhaps heading for a late-night drink at the wine bar around the corner.
The Belfry Theatre
