The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  • • •

  The evening of the opening reception, she caught sight of herself in the mirror of the seedy hotel room. Holy horrors! Her hair was in a confusion of directions, her body bulging in all the wrong places, her bosoms unwieldy, stuffed into the black crepe dress Alice had made for her. She looked like a potbellied stove, and felt like a damn landlady. Her spunk would dissolve if she didn’t leave that instant. Her hands trembled as she locked the door behind her.

  She walked into the National Gallery and found Marius Barbeau beating on a drum and singing a Tsimshian song at the top of his lungs. He stopped and hailed her, beat the drum for attention, and announced her arrival. She flushed, tugged down her dress, and took off her gloves to shake hands. Eric Brown, young, dignified, and handsome, with a sweep of brown hair across his forehead, greeted her by holding her hand in both of his.

  “Thank you for the rail ticket. It was a glorious ride,” she said.

  He introduced her to some guests. “She’s one of the most interesting painters in all of Canada. We were astounded when we received her work.”

  His words astounded her, so much that she offered only a muddleheaded response.

  “Astounded at the crates too,” Marius added. “Built as sturdy as ships with so many nails it took us a day to get into them.”

  Emily grinned. “Harold Cook made them. You remember, he’s the man who hauled up all the paintings from the basement.”

  Marius slipped her a clipping from the Ottawa Citizen. He’d outlined one paragraph in red.

  It’s a source of keen gratification to everyone interested in the preservation of aboriginal art that Emily Carr of Victoria, BC has, after fifteen years without recognition in her own province, been discovered at last and her work given the attention it deserves. Hers is the greatest contribution of all time to historic art of the Pacific slopes. Miss Carr is essentially of the Canadian West not by reason of her subject matter alone, but by her approach to it.

  “See?” he said.

  She pressed the newspaper to her chest and walked from room to room. To see her paintings displayed among Haida, Kwakiutl, and Tsimshian pole sections, carved feast dishes, ceremonial blankets, baskets, masks—a spasm of joy shot through her. Harold would not have been able to stand still.

  But how were these artifacts acquired? Were they lent, like paintings, or—? Or the unthinkable. A massive Raven mask with long beak commanded the center of a wall. Kwakiutl, the sign said. A single hollow drumbeat vibrated in her chest. It looked uncomfortably like the one from the potlatch at Mimkwamlis. Hold your tongue, she told herself. Don’t ruin everything by getting riled up. She convinced herself she wasn’t sure.

  The baskets used only traditional designs. Sophie’s one-of-a-kind work would have been more spectacular. She could kick herself for not showing it to Marius. She looked for names of the basket makers. None. Only tribal identifications on some of them. Apparently individuals weren’t seen as significant. She twisted her gloves like she was wringing out a washrag.

  Not finding several of her favorite paintings, she felt herself getting worked up in a snit until she counted. There were twenty-six. Her work dominated the show. She shouldn’t have counted them. This wasn’t about self. It was about seeing.

  She walked into another room and it was as if she’d walked into another world. Frozen lakes and waterfalls and craggy rocks and huge, undecorated spaces filled with feeling surrounded her. Here was the room of Lawren Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, Frederick Varley, and others of the Group of Seven. The dark silhouette of a single scraggy pine holding on for dear life to a rock along a wind-tossed lake shore struck her as exquisite, spare and unutterably lonely. She stopped before a Rocky Mountain landscape so clean and simple, so profoundly spiritual that she reeled.

  Marius touched her arm. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Not a ghost. God maybe. Nothing I ever saw in France moved me like these do. This Lawren Harris is astonishing, the way he eliminates the superfluous. Those dramatic shafts of light.” She slapped her cheek. “As if he saw some elemental life force shining in the wilderness. It’s what I feel, but he paints it!”

  “Would you like to meet him?” He pointed to a man graying at the temples with a widely divided mustache smiling at her boyishly not five feet away.

  The age-old gallery trick—an artist pretending to be engaged in conversation while he stands near his work listening to comments of passersby. She should have known.

  “Your work expresses the soul of Canada—what I’ve been striving for all along. If only I could do for my beloved West what you’ve done for the mountains and the northeastern wilds.”

  “You have, and you will,” Lawren Harris said.

  They walked the room together commenting softly on the paintings. “You simplify with such ease, taking liberties that I struggle over,” she said. His bare winter aspen trunks and pale cloud layers carried her to a silent, austere world stripped of fussiness so only serenity remained.

  “I think if I looked at that aspen long enough and walked into the frame, I could find God,” she said.

  “That’s what I felt too, when I painted it. That’s how most of us feel painting Canadian wilderness today. You are one of us. You just didn’t know it.”

  “And here I thought it was only me.”

  “If you see something that’ll improve any of these, tell me, will you?” he asked softly.

  “Me? Me?”

  More than what anyone could ever have said about her own work, that comment—well, she’d ask a blessing for Lawren Harris.

  “I see now that my work belongs more to the native people than to me,” she said.

  “Not at all. Yours are works of art in their own right.”

  “These don’t show what I’ve begun to work on recently. Just forests. My shapes could be more sculptural. My colors deeper. Years ago a Squamish woman told me to make the forest darker. I should have gobbled up her advice on the spot.”

  It wasn’t that she wanted to paint like them. She just wanted to capture her western landscape as sparely and purely as they did theirs. She was way behind them in the handling of spaces. Theirs had more rhythm and sweep and poetry than hers, but theirs didn’t have the love of native people that hers had.

  “You’re finding your own way. It’s not a question of technique. Technique alone is soulless. You have other resources to draw on. The emotional and spiritual. I see it in the places where you are more expressive than depictive.”

  “Yes, but I haven’t found my way clear to it always.”

  “It’s the seeking and the feeling that’s important. Go north again. Go for a different reason this time.”

  “Yes, I believe I will.”

  Eric Brown stepped up to them. “Excuse me for interrupting, but there have been some offers on your paintings, Miss Carr. Are they for sale?”

  “As if all of this wasn’t enough! Yes, they’re for sale!”

  “And one more thing. Would you be interested in showing your current work at our National Gallery Annual Exhibition next year? We’d be very pleased if you’d consent.”

  “After twenty-five years working up to this? I’d be a damned fool not to!”

  • • •

  She kicked off her shoes in her hotel room and threw herself onto the bed, giddy with gratitude, with love of art and love of country, her mind spinning with Lawren’s words—You are one of us—his stupendous work—one of us—and oh my God.

  She scribbled a note to Alice and Lizzie.

  Oh, what I’ve seen! I’ve found a new self I didn’t know existed. How much catching up I have to do. Time is running out. Fifty-six already. Where have I been? Not whole before. From now on, I want the work to break out of me as a river out of mountains, cleanly, unselfconsciously. A million thank you’s. Three paintings sold to the National Gallery and there’s interest from other people in more. The Group of Seven invited me to exhibit with them next year, and so did the National
Gallery. I think, if you had been here, you would have been just a little proud.

  She looked through the exhibit catalog, and on the last page, she wrote, There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, the mood, the vastness, the wildness, the eternal big spaceness of it. Oh West, don’t crush me with your bigness. Keep me high and strong for the struggle.

  Part V

  39: Raven

  “Take me,” Harold said when she told him she was going north again. “I can carry your painting things. I can set up the tent. Your swanaskxw.”

  There’d been a time when she would have welcomed a fellow traveler in love with native culture. It wasn’t that he didn’t deserve to go, all the help he’d given her, and would give her, especially this time when the trip would be harder on her. She worried that she might not have the resilience.

  “Take me take me take me.” He dropped to the ground under the maple and rocked, cupping his damaged foot in both palms.

  She had begged Father in a similar way to take her with him when he did a circle tour of Vancouver Island. For years afterward she’d thought him mean and selfish for denying her. She knew from her own childhood despair the danger of a wrong move.

  “My illahee.” He looked on the verge of sobbing. “You shall possess the good of the earth and sun,” he murmured, keeping his eyes on the triangle of grass between his legs.

  She squatted close to him. “You’re my right eye’s apple, Harold. You know that. I just can’t have you with me. I’d be painting for you then, but I can’t do that. I have to be quiet and alone there, to paint how the places tell me.”

  “Are you going to Kispiox?”

  “I don’t know. The Nass River for sure, and Haida Gwaii.”

  “You could find Muldo and Tuuns and Haaydzims.”

  “No, Harold. That’s not my purpose. I may not go to Kispiox. I may not even paint native themes.”

  “My only chance.”

  He had a sense, then, of his future, the world closing in.

  “I’ll tell you everything I see. You’ll see every painting.”

  The flare of his nostrils told her he wasn’t resigned. She reached into her smock pocket, rolled a cigarette, and passed it to him. He lit it, took a puff, and passed it back. She knew that ritual contributed to his make-believe. Only the excruciating pang of love made her do it. She wouldn’t after this.

  “The important journeys have to be taken alone. You know that. You’ve done it. You’re doing it now, with your writing. Think how much more you’ll have to read to me when I come home.”

  He looked at the ground and yanked out tufts of grass.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  He raised his head. The corners of his mouth drooped. He opened his palm to her, an offering. “Leaves of grass,” he said.

  She cupped his hand in hers. “Would you like to borrow my book while I’m gone?”

  His eyes opened wide and he fought back a smile, answering her only with a slow nod.

  “One other thing. It’s not good for you to dance on the beach in plain sight.”

  “Why not?”

  “People don’t understand. They might wag their tongues to the wrong person and make it seem that you’re a problem.”

  “To who? I’m nobody’s problem.”

  “Promise me. Dance in your back yard.”

  “My sister won’t let me.”

  “Then when I come back, you can dance in mine.”

  • • •

  After battling rain in the Skeena and Nass River villages, she went to the Queen Charlotte Islands. At Skidegate, William and Clara insisted she stay in their new house with glass windows and electricity. William was foreman at a new cannery and couldn’t take her to any villages, so she had to hire someone else at $50 for four days. The night before she set out, they ate the fish Clara bought at the company store off English china.

  “Did you know, the whole village of Angida on the Nass moved down river away from its poles?” Emily said. “They were full of holes from hunters using them as target practice.”

  “Awful what’s happened,” Clara said.

  “And Kitwanga’s a railway stop now. The poles that faced the river before are planted in cement at the train station now, for beastly tourists. They’re coated in thick gray paint. All their carved details, all the faded colors, gone.”

  “Go back to Tanu,” Clara said. “Go to Eagle clan side this time and see Crying Totem. Crying so hard over his dead sons that his eyes dropped out of their holes. Friends had to lift them back in so he could see to eat.”

  “How did they die?”

  “Killed by Boston men from a trading ship.”

  “I’ll look for it,” Emily said.

  • • •

  On the way south from Skidegate to Tanu a violent storm lashed the hired boat and they were lucky to make it ashore to Cumshewa, where William had held the sail over her so she could paint Raven in the rain. The sculpture was more ominous to her now. Sweeping tongues of foliage had grown in the sixteen years since she’d been here, and were licking at his pedestal, nearly engulfing the brooding bird—Nature reclaiming Raven, taking him to her bosom. It made her see that she wasn’t painting just a totem, but the relationship between the totem and the land. She’d paint the scene differently now, more smoothly sculpted, as spare as Lawren’s mountains.

  Out from under a heavy blue-gray cloud, beams of light shone like layered gauze screens reaching down to earth. She felt a Mighty Being acknowledging her endurance, her return. She realized that she needed to have painted the first version sixteen years earlier in order to let go enough now to pare away detail. She’d had to exercise the traditional out of her so she could get to her own, more authentic personal expression, of Nature outlasting everything.

  • • •

  On the Eagle clan side of Tanu she found Crying Totem. His strong, prominent nose, and his lips only a straight groove conveyed great dignity. It was the eyes that were startling. Eyeballs hung down to his waist on wooden sinews stretched in front of a dead frog he was holding. No, they weren’t sinews, but rivers of tears pouring out his closed eye sockets. Hanging by streams of water, the eyeballs had been carved into faces.

  The opposite of Kitwancool’s proud and happy Totem Mother, this Tanu father cried with wrenching formality for his hapless sons. Whatever it meant to the Haida, to her, this Eagle father also cried for the smallpox dead at Raven House in Cumshewa. He cried for the Tsimshian dead of measles in the Skeena. He cried for every father’s son sent to war. He cried for Sophie’s children, and for Sophie. He cried for Haaydzims and Muldo and Tuuns, some Gitksan fathers’ sons, for Harold, and for all the beaten, disfigured, lost. His tears shut no one out.

  A heaviness descended on Emily as she began to paint the weeping figure. His streaming tears bleached blue-gray as death, with an advancing army of dark, coned trees in the background, backlit by portentous clouds pressing down to earth, weighted with tears yet unshed—all of it seemed an omen pulling her back home.

  40: Sanderling

  “You’re home!” Harold said at the door when she opened it, handbag and jacket in hand. “I’ve been waiting and waiting.”

  “Dear Harold. Here, give me a terrific hug.”

  Awkwardly, he held his arms out until she stepped into them.

  “I’ve got heaps to tell you, but I was just on my way to the ferry. Come in for a little while.”

  He went straight to Woo chained in her corner and lifted her onto his shoulder.

  “Hey, did you come to see her or me?”

  She loved his sheepish laugh.

  “Did you go to Kispiox?”

  “Two weeks on the Skeena and only one day of good weather, and it was in Kispiox. I felt you tramping beside me.” She hunted through new watercolors and found one of Kispiox with tilted poles. “I think there were two dozen still standing. I did a fine one of Frog Woman I missed before. Do you remember that pole?”

  He nodded.
“Did you see Muldo and—”

  “No. They’re men now, like you, probably working in a new sawmill.”

  Better to get it over with. She told him of the gray weatherproofing paint at Kitwanga, the deterioration of poles, the missing ones. His crinkled forehead and eyes that could hardly contain their wetness alarmed her. She had to change directions.

  “I made a suit of mosquito armor. Heavy canvas trousers that cinched in under my shoes and a head sack with a pane of glass to see through. Two pair of gloves, one of them leather, and those wicked mites even bit through that!”

  His wistful laughter encouraged her.

  “I was practically shipwrecked in a storm in Haida Gwaii, rescued by a Norwegian fishing boat in a rambunctious sea. Ooh, was I seasick! Still, I did thirty watercolors plus drawings. I’m thrilled purple. Some of my strongest, cleanest work. That loose work on paper I did at Goldstream liberated me.”

  “At our camp?”

  “Your drumming in the woods helped me too. I’m all het up to paint.”

  He touched the edge of a Kitwanga watercolor study with Wolf on the midsection of a pole set tightly against a bighouse and filling much of the picture plane. She liked the intensity that this new close-up style gave. Harold’s index finger stroked Wolf’s snout.

  “Will you give it to me?”

  What would that do—to have Wolf staring back at him keeping alive those memories?

  “I’m sorry, I can’t now. I need it for reference for a big oil, but you can see it here whenever you want to. I’ll do another just for you.” She put on her jacket, feeling pulled in two directions. “Forgive me this skimpy time with you. Come back soon to see all the paintings. We’ll have a good, long talk.”