Work and Days: In America: vol 8

in america 8 part 5 - 2005 july-august work & days: a lifetime journal project

Alberta 12th July 2005

Yesterday was messy. It began well, I made tea in the motel office in the Ponderosa, carried it upstairs and wrote in the pink room with sun shining in. Took two beautiful pictures.

Drove east on 200 out of the pines into grassland on and on. And then got onto 15 and flew to the border, and intended more flying on the other side, but there was a detour and I muddled north and west on either side of highway 2 through the long evening, miles and hours to not much effect because I'm still just parallel with Calgary. And then this junk hotel where a family tromped up shouting at 2:30 in the morning.

Had a lot to say yesterday but didn't say it. Now I'm having weak tea in what is still called the Chinese café. I hate the way honest little towns have done up their centers to look wild west for the tourists, highway 22 being promoted to bring their dollars into these farming towns. How many wild west towns can any tourist want to see?

The complicated struggle to go to sleep - I'll describe that - always the difficulty of the shoulders - I need to lie on my belly but I have to angle my shoulders so there have to be two pillows and they have to be the right thickness and they have to be positioned just right. And then there's temperature. My right foot leaks heat fast and will feel cold even in summer if the sheets aren't warmed, so I have to layer the blanket over the bottom third of the bed, but probably have just the sheet over my shoulders - but it has to be over all of them because I'll mind a small draft - but lying on my stomach I'll often have hot flashes, which aren't flashes just a welling of heat from the solar plexus, so I'll stick my left foot and/or my hands outside the sheet to cool down just enough. And then just after I fade I'll often come suddenly awake because my heart is racing. Something about falling asleep unregulates it. Usually that only happens once in a night. On this trip there have also been stinging eyes and sore teeth. My eyes weren't sore yesterday though I drove all day through sun because I wore the sunglasses and used the Thera Tears in the morning (and flood my eyes with them before I go to bed), and I have fixed the teeth by keeping salt water in my mouth for ten minutes before I go to bed. Last night there were for the first time also other twinges, enough so I took two aspirin to fall asleep. And that's the story.

I look weathered. My hair is dry and I'm puffy under the eyes. But I've come 2000 miles in four and a half days.

Don't want to forget the train. The track was on an embankment behind and above the Ponderosa, which was on the east side of Missoula. Deep in the night the train came through. It whistled very loud very close whoo - whoo - whoo - whoo, I think it was the same four notes, and then another longer one, starting higher and bending. A lovely voice. Then shortly afterward it happened again, the same.

Driving through so many miles I've thought of my dad, the way he liked new country.

-

After Fox Creek, rain so hard I couldn't see the road. I saw it coming, a many-storied tower of dark cloud with as if a mushroom stem of rain reaching in arms or skirts to the ground. The poplars had been turning up their leaves. I'm in a turn-off waiting it out. There's lightening. A trucker ahead of me was bare-armed in the rain tightening his load of logs.

(Another house! Three yesterday on the Vulcan road and that one this morning I thought I'd got rid of and then saw it whisking past just as I was turning onto 22 again after lunch.) [whole houses being moved behind trucks]

Grass and poplars wet and shining. I'm not camping tonight it seems. What shall I do - keep on? It was a wide divided highway and I was doing 85 without noticing.

13th

Wednesday morning, Demmitt AB.

The red and white house is foundered, and oh the home place has no access road anymore, and there is a gas pipeline pumping station on the edge of Hill 60, and another in the marsh south of the road, whose humming and thunking means no silence until the gas is gone.

There I stopped and asked what I'd been feeling so sorely yesterday as I stood on the road looking at the wreck: did I do that? The pumping station in the place of fertility - is that me being a professor? The driveway and pasture fence and barn and corrals gone, and the poplars and caragana swamping the house site so there's no shape of hill, the willow brush below the road cut back so the pubic curl is gone, no shape in the land, no precincts. Even the hill seemed reduced, dulled, and that large machine thumping at its base.

I waded up through the green barley, a good stand, waist-high, the earth deeply cracked among the roots, and then into the brome grass they haven't cleared yet, and there was a tall cross marking the pump, 1x6's nailed and painted pink. The levels of the earth had risen around it so it is at a child's height, and someone had strapped the handle in place. I pumped and water very quickly gushed up.

I was wading through the grass saying, Your girl is home. A couple of crows were shouting. I was glad I had been there when I was - how old was I - thirty-three? - 1977 - because it was still there, then. We'd been gone only 16 years, and now, since I was camped on the old site - I was saying that phrase, quoting myself - it's another 28 years, and the lawyer who bought the land is probably dead, and Bohns are presumably farming it. [west across the site] [east from the Wembley road]

And then the old white timber bridge was replaced too, concrete with an aluminum rail, and even the creek bed had changed, it looked as if it had been gouged out, it wasn't pooling under the willows as it had. Grandpa Epp's house and barn were gone, and the caragana hedge, and the spruce by the house, and that land featureless, sown-over with barley, but another pink cross presumably marking another well. A new house on Kinderwater's yard with four pickups parked in front of it.

I turned left on the Wembley road and went up the hill to the graveyard - that little cemetery, well looked after, headstones now - there never used to be - a little chain enclosure, a lot of mown grass. The sign doesn't say Mennonite though, it says Bible Fellowship or some such. Nick Sieburt died in 2002, chose to be buried there. Ed Martens, my dad's nemesis, died the same year he did. Julia Jansen who died in 1953 was 10 - the headstone calls her Julie, which is Mary Jansen's revisionary ambition. Helen Konrad, who died when she was 14.

And then I bought a phone card in the La Glace Co-op and drove west past the school, where they have ruined the windows to save heating costs, and through Valhalla Center, which has a café now.

And to the Valhalla Cemetery, and there were two old women, one of them banging on the hard clods of a new grave with a shovel, the other peering at me curiously. There was Helmer with pink plastic roses on either side of his marker and a long stone slab in what I guess is the Norwegian style, and Bernice next to him, dead at 56 a year before he died at 79. I sat beside him in the dappling shade of a young water poplar in the clover-scented lovely air.

And then I hoped I'd recognize the turn-off, and did, and there was the road where I met the groundhog and the place around the corner where Jam's little car and mine were both in the ditch, and then at the corner, is there still a track? Barely. It doesn't go through to the house, which now can't be seen from the road. I drive up over the summerfallow to get as close to the house as I can, then have to push through grass to my waist. There's no longer any kind of gate in the spruce, which have grown tall. The house isn't white anymore. The south face is weathered almost to bare wood. The porch rails have fallen. The chimney has collapsed. The kitchen floor has buckled and there's a hole at the foot of the stairs that someone has covered with the stair door. Someone has been throwing whatever there was to throw, the pantry cupboard, the red chair. The front porch pillars have broken off. The wallpaper is down in sheets. No shard of glass is left in any of the windows. Squirrel shit everywhere. The little desk I built upstairs broken off. But there on the wall I painted night sky blue I see my own handwriting in white chalk, perfectly fresh. What was it I felt about that - wordless - something - in so much ruin my mark's duration unspoiled for now. I loved a time. The place is spoiled but my love is not.

I was sad, I was struck hard, but there was also what I have always been, that wishing to know what life is - so this is what time means, so this is what happens.

Then I rushed to Demmitt where I would be known and welcomed, and was, by a young woman who hasn't changed in the last 13 years, which is how long it was since Louie and I were here. The child who was a year old then is a teenager, Peter is more famous and successful and international - he was just in Poland - and I'm in his cabin built it seems like a Bavarian woodcutter's hut. Teresa and I had a beer together at her table and when it got dark and I crept between my flannel sheets it was midnight. I slept perfectly, no shoulder-arranging, and was woken at 7 by a knock, two raps, some animal, and got up and made tea. There was scat on the path, fresh, I think a lynx.

-

Teresa thinks maybe a bear.

Leak in the gas-line's pressure regulator, a mechanic in La Glace - I don't know him, new shop - has ordered a part to be delivered tomorrow.

I told Teresa I was going to scout Rudy's land, and she said she had goosebumps. They've bought a couple of quarters in Demmitt Valley and are wanting people to come live on them, and when they've said Who?, they've said, Ellie? One of the ways to get there is the way I accidentally drove yesterday. I even turned toward it when I went to ask for directions on a yard.

What about it - there's a spot looking through poplars toward a lake. It's a clearing, it doesn't have a vista - Peter likes houses to be in woods. There's a house that was a nice size and shape, with its floor collapsed, and a front field that's now hay in swaths. Teresa says that field was reputedly the best garden in Demmitt. The old man who lived there grew corn, she said. A little further back in the trees a large warehouse sort of building sheeted in metal. Water, gas, hydro, she said. Someone could live there who'd pay land taxes.

How do I feel about that - not elated - it wdn't be my own - it wdn't be beautiful magic like the lake house - it wouldn't be vision for miles like the home place - I'd have to find money - I'd have to decide it's the end with Tom - or have it decided. I'd have poplars twinkling like these, willows blowing radiant. What I'm feeling is that I wouldn't love it - I was so in love with both those places. I was so fastened to the leaves in their ditches, the shapes of the paths.

The wind is blowing in the tall tops of the poplars - I could make films - there's a smell of warm strawberries. The clouds so shaped and deep. That dry rustling of leaves. It's a mild sun, no harm. The small willows are so alert. Now there's a pause.

Thurs 14th

Peter's black figure. I was coming up the path behind Theresa, who was talking about a bear. We were passing between young poplars and there ahead of us among the leaves was suddenly a black figure taller than a human being, one of Peter's watchers, burnt black - charred wood - holding himself with a straight back and his chin lifted. I like that figure best, here, because it's human and more than human, as if also bear and land and tree and native collectivity, standing on large feet with lifted ribs and tender belly, in an attitude of attention but also blind, without eyes or features, like a post, attentive inwardly or with the blind senses.

I also like the birdhouses made of poplar sections and pegged up on poplar trunks, the stone wall, the doghouse made of a round hay bale hollowed by dragging out the core, the studio's shed-roofed wood shelter paved with stones. This prosperous creative life, these three quarters of land, financed now by nothing but art that loves country. I forgot to say the ladder up into a platform suspended between three poplars young enough to sway.

It can happen because Peter is what he is, sexy and vital, friendly, and because he has Theresa organizing him and helping him, not competing with him, accepting to live his life. I talk to her about her kids. She doesn't see me. She's right for Peter.

Frank - I'd like to have shown Frank this life when he was 21 - I'd like to have shown Peter Epp.

But it wouldn't have been as simple as that. Peter has the confidence of the Von Tiesenhausens in Poland and Germany, "a small castle," his mother cultivated in art though she's pious now.

-

In the laundromat at Hythe a native woman in her fifties, strong eyes, was looking at me. Do you know a woman called Brigitte Horseman I asked. She'd known her from a baby. "She has three or four kids now, but she's into drugs. The chief at Horse Lake supplies them and he just got re-elected for another four years." She herself is from Kelly Lake - the woman says - and it's not so bad there. "I live for my kids." She says it again. She has brown hair not black, meaning she's Métis, and her granddaughter is another part white. She doesn't look me in the eye when she talks. I like her, I like her eyes and her big bearing, but I could see we were unbridgable. She packed her two double-loader loads wet into garbage bags. "I'm going to dry these outside" she says. "There's a wind" I say. Helmer and Bridgitte and Ellie The End.

I'm here but I've done just about everything I've got to do. I'm forlorn. I don't know what to say. The moon is growing but it's like breaking of strength, so much is gone.

15

Dispirited. It's raining today, I'm stuck in the cabin until I can phone to find out whether the pressure regulator has come. I can't go through the grass to make tea without soaking my pants and shoes. Well yes I could soak them and come back and get warm. I'll do that.

-

So here's tea. The fire makes a difference to the darkness of this fanciful hut.

I was reading my first journals, 12-14. The story of Doug Odland gripped me - there was a lot of manic description of boys I only saw but Doug was the first actual sexual transaction - I mean we had a specifically sexual relation and it tuned me chemically. I discovered that chemical. The right kind of man could make me look the way I wanted to look. That was worth knowing.

I want to know what's next.

This low and flat passage has lasted three years. When was the last one, 1980-1985. There needs to be a jump but I don't know where. Not here - this gate is closed - I would feel lost here, now. Not Vancouver because of the winters. Somewhere beautiful I could afford. I want to be in beauty and I want to be living in love. I want to be living in that wider way of being led.

What does this feel like - throat and heart - forehead - cramped - anguish - trapped, hungry-feeling - hopeless - there'll be no life, on and on -

Will you talk to me
Was she depressed no
She had a lot of energy
Was she right to be that interested in sex
Doug Odland turned her on
Was it a shame there was so little culture no
She was unspoiled you mean
But she's shallow YES
Am I still no
Shallow means unconscious
Do I like this depression because it's a sign that I'm not still that
Would it be better not to be no
Things to be mourned

-

Grande Prairie - jeep fixed - York Hotel - York Hotel! - in the coffee shop.

17

Myrtle. What was it about her. There was a grandmother in pink pantsuit, large wire earrings, brownish burgundy fingernails. When she came up the path I didn't know her and never did see anyone I'd known in her, but loved her for some reason. Sane clear heart.

A lot to say at once. A sweetness about the event. First, the place where it was, an established farmyard with a lot of space in it and then so much space beyond it. The fields - standing barley, miles of it. There was rain earlier and then the evening opened into perfection - the long evening. It was still evening when we left at 11:30. A ring of chairs around a big fire pit. Walter Pol who was a wall-eyed runt, now a large comfortable farmer on 14 quarter-sections. Raymond Gilkyson white-haired and very like himself but two heart-attacks later. Bernice - plain and responsible - rooted in the yard her father founded in 1911, her kids continuing there. Gail - Princess Gail - in streaked contemporary hair but with a very baggy neck with a goiterish big lump. She told her son's story with a kind of fixity and was drinking a lot of wine. Her husband Ross had been important in various international jobs and was there with a big belly and a sort of wonky intelligence, lurking around being interested in things. Dorothy Connell a skinny small thing with smokers' creases (though I didn't see anyone smoking). Allan Heidebrecht a stout old man, the oldest of the men, white haired, very bulky, kindly, farming his dad's place. Joe Farnsworth a millwright, flourishing - hooked up with Dorothy after her two marriages, she running the liquor store in Sexsmith - a lot of these people had been elsewhere and now are back. Edith Janzen who'd been an ugly mouse of a girl was there the image of a sexpot - tight little ass in fancy jeans, ash-blond shoulder-length hair, tense speedy manner fixing me with her eyes - tight thin skin - is that what a face-lift looks like? Sharon bulky at the waist, powder on her face making her look faded, a long oppressive marriage she said. Fay Walle a bright unaged small thing, very pert, with a good Olympus and Photoshop 7. A lot of false teeth at the gathering. A lot of them, it seemed, retired. I was the only woman who doesn't dye my hair.

It seemed to me, though maybe only for the event, the old distinctions of status had been dissolved - they had been very sharp - and everyone was there in sweet equality. People had made their way. Everyone had traveled. Peoples' kids have dispersed into all sorts of distinction and fruitfulness. Some of us had died, Henry of an electrical shock, Wayne Moodie of AIDS, Freddie Warnecke of cancer I think, last year, but there we were around the fire with the lovely polishing light on the shelterbelt spruce, on the miles of fields, on the towering cloud at a distance. We'd eaten and drunk together and told stories and not been ashamed of ourselves.

And there was Luke in his blue and red soccer jersey affable with anyone, helping to clear the tables, standing at the edge of the field talking on his cell. Luke Epp it said on his nametag.

When we drove home the sky was, he said, grapefruit pink to the northwest at midnight. There was a moose in a canola field west of Valhalla.

When I was driving with Luke through Sexsmith and down our hill and up the road, there was something I've never seen, just this side of the bridge a doe on the road. It was lovely life in the place I had mourned and it was there when I was with Luke.

And here is this place, hot. Luke fixed the campstove, I made tea, and he's gone for a walk. The brome grass moving, the poplar leaves dryly rattling, the willows stirring. Smell of strawberries. A cricket.

It was a beautiful event.

I loved Luke's company in it. We were in bed in the cabin, firelight, talking about it in our sleeping bags.

I wore the orange singlet I'd saved up for it, my new red tennies, new sage green pants, blue linen shirt. Not a single woman was wearing a skirt.

Will I tell this - as we were starting to drive away north on the La Glace road, Luke said, I have to say you made the rest of them look old. Just what I would want to hear. And Sharon sat down beside me and said It looks like you've had the most interesting life of any of us.

There was the muddy blue jeep parked in a line with all the other cars and pickups, with its California plates.

I told one lie. Bernice asked whether I was okay, she'd read about polio. I considered that she was hoping to hear something bad and said that post-polio symptoms don't seem to have got me at all.

Myrtle said I reminded her of Morag in The diviners. Her eldest daughter has a PhD in English. She said she remembered only good of her childhood, acceptance and care. She'd move back in a heartbeat. She's never felt that anywhere else.

Do you have more to say about Luke no
Do you have more to say about the trip excluded child come through into friendship
Both of us
As if he was my starman YES
Did he know he was doing that for me no
And did I do anything for him no
So was I using him wrongly no
Telling him all the stories
Having physical help
Being supported at the reunion
They saw me differently because of him YES
They all did
So has that changed something for me
I made myself a defender YES

That seems wrong to me, is it?

18

Monday morning. Luke went back to sleep. I'm on the wide half-log in a breeze with my tea.

I wanted to say something about what it was like for me in La Glace, and I did, to Myrtle. I said I'd had a hard time until about grade 7 because of my leg. I'd been isolated and sad. There had definitely been outsiders and insiders. Maybe the insiders didn't know they were insiders, but they were. That was when Myrtle said she'd never felt anything but acceptance.

What am I feeling. A little sharpness at heart because it's over, they are all gone again. I hadn't finished being with them. The completeness of life in childhood, no matter how sad or isolated. The parts are all together, still, like a whole landscape with its copses, fences, fields, paths and vistas eternally in place.

I was telling Gail I remembered her beautiful pleated skirt. She didn't remember it, and I didn't remember the color, but Dorothy beside me said it was blue with green and white - not white exactly.

Myrtle married Tudor Evans who had gone with Lorraine for two years. He was wearing his hair long, in a style that could once have been a ducktail. He seemed a dull man now, light gone out. Gail's Ross, though he was a gut-bucket, has his lights very much on, but Gail is miserable. Charlie Penson was the best of the husbands - centered and competent, kindly, humorous. A kindly humorous farmer's face with a nose that takes a turn. A British face, I guess.

-

In Hythe at the museum a spry man gets out of his pickup and says, You're the Epp girl, I used to sell you insurance.

Luke and I stop at the Valhalla café and there's a man having coffee with his wife. It's Arden Bangen. Bucky Thompson, he says, died of a heart attack driving his truck one night about five years ago.

It rains in patches. Luke and I drive straight north of La Glace and then follow roads parallel to the highway until we're some ways past Valhalla. Fields, gravel roads, farmsteads with shelterbelts. We pass a spruce shelterbelt with a new house behind it. They're the spruce that had the pink and white house behind them. The Olson house. I recognize the spot only from something about the crossroads.

20th

North of Quesnel - Kreeksite Camping.

We put up the big tent and slept in two diagonals dry and warm though it rained. My complicated tent Luke put up in the dark.

Peter last night - the way we found him, psychic teamwork. We drove into downtown PG and looked for a gallery. Turn that way, I said. In a block or two we could see a fancy building with an arts architecture look. Luke headed that way, and suddenly turned into an alley toward a loading bay. There was a man he felt he should ask. It was Peter just finishing for the day.

His show, especially the end wall where he had what he thinks of as sentences on grooved floorboards - tiny groups of people scratched into burnt wood, beautiful drawing, as many people in a group as there are letters in a word, but nevermind - his life wisdom precepts, but the wiseness of the drawing my preference.

What else there was in his show - drawings of pine trees made with pine ash on sheets of pulp from a bale donated by the pulp mill - sheets hung in a dense forest that stirs when you walk through it. Pine trees of many shapes, gracefully spread and balanced or thin snags.

We went to supper and I tried to feel what Peter is now. He's more doctrinaire. He was talking about presence rather than being present, for example. He looked good at 44, very good, sturdy, hawk nose, deep lower lip, cap of hair with lines of grey. I could see a young Baron von Tiesenhausen in some forested village in Germany. Arsenic in his blood and osteoporosis, though. He is more doctrinaire I suppose because he has been in pain and has a genetically damaged child. The sort of doctrinaire he was is the wonders and miracles kind. And yes he does live by wonder, having a thirty thousand dollar debt and buying a section of land for sixty thousand and finding it paid for in a year; being given by the plywood manufacturer just enough square pieces to go right around the gallery, plus four.

He's warm and fond. He remembered a time visiting at the red and white house when I said I must go get my bedding before it rained, I was sleeping on a hay bale by the lake. He remembers the shot of the moon rising into the frame and the water evaporating out of the field. He listened wide-eyed to my story about Millie.

Then we got in the jeep and drove some more, almost to Quesnel.

Jean Waite died at 93. She was in her house until then. Her niece took her to the hospital and she never came home. I had peered through the glass in her front door and there were her books, her green floor, but a garden planted and a red Geo in the garage.

In these days I have told Luke so many stories.

21st

A lake on the road toward Clinton after the Fraser. There is Luke chopping at a round of pine. We were lying on our mats facing what we thought was south. We were expecting full moon to rise over our heads but instead there was what seemed a brilliant yellow lamp shining among the pines.

-

Oh - it's over, my journey with Luke. There he is in Kits or somewhere having dinner with Kim, here I am in a Cantonese laundromat where they are eager to have me out by 9. City Centre Motel. The laundry will not be dry.

We had Saturday-Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday and best last night and today. He's competent and considerate. Under stress he gets pompous. He speaks in a sweet voice to small things, pretty calves. He bends under the chassis and examines possible sources of a leak. He drives well, though I had to explain shifting down on steep grades where we smelled the brakes. He bought food and I bought gas. I think we were happiest today when we were talking about books I've given him and books he liked when he was a kid. The odyssey, Roget's thesaurus, an encyclopedia of science fiction. He remembered me doing the accents when I read him Huckleberry Finn. He said he can still hear them. Seven arrows.

When he was thirteen he found a book of sexual fantasy on the top shelf (Sara's presumably) and he said he'd have to include that one in his list.

We were talking about books after we'd left Lillooet and climbed over the mountain toward Pavilion and come through the ravishing plateau of the Diamond S. It was a smooth treed bit of road, around Pemberton, was it.

Did I tell too many stories? I wanted him to know them.

When I asked what he'd most likely remember from this trip (it was before yesterday) he said the yellow fields he saw from the bus and the top of the hill over my home place - the story of my dad bursting into song as he came over the crest of that hill.

We had the visit with Peter and then the night in the tent, which he figured out. I cooked breakfast by the river. Then Williams Lake where a wiry freckled dyke in the next cabin - Linda? (works at the hospice) - told me about Jean and gave me a little box of Jean's and said I should pick a rock. Then from Williams Lake we found the road through Alkali Lake and Dog Creek and were on our own adventure. He said he didn't know there was such country, shallow lakes among gently sloped grassy hills with copses of poplar and pine, snake fences sometimes. Sagebrush and clover in the verges. Distant mountains. - But that's getting ahead. First there was the Fraser Canyon - those lapsed slopes and the fast river below. Hairpins down onto the bench - 4wd - clouds above near ridge.

Then the road took the turn back toward Clinton and we found the forestry site by the lake. A group of people camping with horses, that we saw next day rounding up cattle. Our campsite under pines. Luke made fire by building a teepee. Said Sara taught him. We cooked in the fire by setting the pots on rocks jutting into the flames. I made the beds, each on a tarp. We set them near the fire later and then were lying watching red sparks rise. During the night there was a patch of moonlight bright enough so I could see his blanket orange. It was completely silent.

Then yesterday we took the Pavilion shortcut and came into town by the back door through Whistler, where a bear crossed the road, and were an hour in traffic getting onto the Lion's Gate Bridge.

What do I think of Luke.

He looks a lot like the boy he was, but large. He dressed carefully and shaved every day though he was in the bush. He kept his stuff compact and organized always - had traveling systems, an apple juice bottle, a head lamp, a cigarette-lighter power socket for his cell phone. In larger towns he'd check his messages. We'd watch each other to see how we do things, both interested in stowing well. He'd organize the stuff in the back of the jeep. He listened for rattles and thought about what a vibration might mean. - It's his work too, I guess, logistics. I liked not being alone in the responsibility of travel. Setting up and taking down took half the energy. He'd carry. He's a good man, responsible and not tyrannical. He likes to share, he's assertive and not egotistical.

And how were we together. Formal, both. He carefully thanked me for everything I'd do, like cooking or making his bed. I'd hear his voice go more British if he was stressed in some slight way. I heard myself use my lower power voice. We could talk about anything but we couldn't relax and couldn't relax each other. I'm grateful he'll have anything to do with me and want to know me. We used to have full hearts for each other and now have cool neutrality, I as much as he. Is that necessary? We hardly touch each other. Is that my general heartlessness? It says yes. And he's in the same state, he's shut down on Kim and I'm shut down on Tom.

I said he hasn't been willing to choose a woman he really wants because he isn't willing to go through real loss again.

-

Blenz on Hastings - it's my city still - temperate - leafy - foreign students in thousands. I'm scanning to see whether people look different - clothes? - the clothes are ugly and miscellaneous but are they different? - can't tell. (I think people here are more slovenly.)

23rd

Tom hasn't written. Susan is writing blank notes wishing me a good journey, etc, and then in the last one addressed to three people making a crack about my "personal and professional" reasons to be interested in splits in language. Louie I hardly dare phone. And all of that is more or less okay though it's inconvenient not to have Louie's phone numbers for Michael and Rowen.

-

River Drive New Westminster

Does this page-light work - not very well - can't see the end of the line.

In the tent in the lower lawn, trees all around. Jeep hidden behind a magnolia branch. Here's my house.

24th

How things are on River Drive. Sunday morning. Shadows on the white sides of the tent. That one's cedar.

There's an engine that never stops, is it a parked locomotive? [Lumber mill.]

I walked across the road to where there was a view of the river over the roofs of two old woodframe fishplants, and found branches of a plum tree reaching across a fence over the tracks. Plums exactly right, small dark red ones - are they damsuns? So good - the best plums.

A garden on three lots over the river. An upper lawn and a lower. Dogwood, laurel, a giant fig. A grapevine covering the west side of the large shingled house. A verandah twined with wisteria. A tulip tree rising over the jeep's garage. A snowball tree with leaves eaten to lace by a beetle. Snowberry. Blackberry and volunteer hazelnut throughout. Japanese anemone in dry shade, not thriving. Creamy yucca towers fallen sideways. Orange daylilies. Cluster roses along the road. A plum tree decorated into its height with golden plums. Camellias and magnolias, rhododendrons probably. A japonica smothered in morning glory.

There's a train throbbing past, pausing.

The shadows have changed.

David in a pale green cotton shirt with the collar up. And there's tiny Dorothy with her little girl's pretty face and her pretty giggle. She's into her nineties, back curved in the way of extreme age, long-fingered hands with smooth long nails, a thin cap of straight hair faded but mostly still brown. Red eyes.

When I arrived she was at the kitchen table reading David Terry Glavin's piece on the rivers under Vancouver while he cooked soup.

She took me out to show me the japonica and we walked slowly around the block, she with her arm through my arm and her hand on my hand. I've shipped a little stone, she said, and I bent down and pried a bit of gravel from under her clawed big toe. She's ponderous on her topic, which is saving the environment, but otherwise light-spirited and sweet-hearted, as David is with her too.

In the dining room mirrors set facing each other across the room, heavy gilt frames and a wide red inner border, each over a mission chest and each reflecting a vase of flowers, orange montbretias, dahlias. Between them two dark red leather armchairs with the window behind them and the midday sun glowing in the wisteria.

I pulled out a chair at the dining room table and laughed because it was piled with books. They laughed with me.

25

This morning what's drawn on the side of the tent is wild rose vine, slight dropping cables with leaves and twigs angled upwards, all swaying very gently. There went a bee-shadow. In the dark green band that runs up from the floor, sturdy unmoving blades of grass, a dandelion leaf.

Delightful dreams - is it only when I sleep outside I dream well, now? I was standing on the ground and said to myself that I could rise, do anything I wanted. It was like lucid dreaming though I didn't say to myself that I was dreaming. I was drifting above the heads of children in a boarding school - on the stairs, which had rails and posts painted yellow - when a young man with a pitted face startled. He could see me. I waved and flowed on. At the end I could feel myself becoming heavier. I was going to have to land and stop.

There was a later dream where I was living with my family in La Glace, I was in a small cot but I saw there was a wide bed in the room and a wall completely open to green leaves. Was trying to remember how old I am - I'm sixty and I'm living with my family? Judy was there and Roy was living in La Glace too. She was preparing for a custody hearing, fighting Roy for custody of Luke. I said I would speak for her.

Was I dreaming because of the trains, the locomotive's very loud voice and the rustling-past of the cars. I wake and go back to sleep. It's alright.

I'm not talking about Dorothy and David, the way I shy off writing about people when they're in the house. Dortie, he calls her sometimes. She has sweet corners on her mouth that turn up - she's so, so old. A tiny crook-backed frame but she'll put her feet up on the bench like a girl, and slouch back in the sofa looking at the tulip tree, watching the bush tits. She asks questions and listens carefully to the answers - who, anywhere, does that? Her face is yellow and blue and creased like a dried fruit and yet she's pretty. She wears longish skirts, red or blue, and green velvet slippers. And David - he's just David, I don't pay much attention. He is kind and affectionate, stands at the stove cooking, and has his madnesses untouched. Saves bits of wood, brings me things to read.

-

Café Calabria. There I am in the mirror ten years later. Rust-colored teeshirt. I look nice. Silver bangs, flow of still dark hair down over my left shoulder. Strong caffé latté. I look brown and real. Not hard. Hoping to run into Kenneth, why not.

CARE card went through. EKG normal.
Look at my noble cheekbones.
Still haven't found Rowen.

I'm at liberty. I'm in the world.
Like having my jeep here.

Two weeks for the lectures. What else.
Gosh I'm handsome at the moment. This has always been a good mirror.
Let's get Work & days up.
Should I be transcribing.
Public library.
Hey, my thesis is done. I live in California. I have a jeep. I'm sixty. It is a marvelous summer day.
These plane trees are a lot bigger.
The coffee is delicious.

26

Starbucks, 6th St, New West

Last night the locomotives worked all night.

What should I do about pretty Dr Lee. First time in thirty years - ever - I've let a male doctor do my pap - he did it like a rape - he had a rigid modesty procedure, ask the nurse to sit in the room, cover one breast while he palpates the other, undress the top half and the bottom half separately - but when he got the speculum in, courteously telling me every move he was about to make - "I'm going to insert two fingers into your vagina" - he suddenly shoved it deeper and rammed it sideways, brutal. If I want the test results I have to go back and talk to him again. He'll want to do a pelvic and an anal and check my moles. No. If my tests are okay I'll leave it at that and if not I'll find another doctor.

27

VPL. Table above the forum. Table with an electrical socket.

Oh the way people walk. The way people dress.

Ceaseless arriving and departing. Turning in toward the door, exiting and turning either right or left.

The strange people of the city come to the library. The very fashionable oriental young, lots of them. Librarians dressed pleasantly with unexercised bulked tummies.

28

Yesterday - the library - Luke at Hon's Won-Ton - Moonboy at Lucky Rooms - picking blackberries with Dorothy and David.

Moonboy - whose mother is Haida Gwai - told a hideous story about the devil trying for James Blake's soul - says he has a BA in philosophy and psychology and believes a repulsive mishmash of stealing luck, the creator, and the devil. Smooth Haida legs coppery in shorts. He's cheap with his money, he said of Rowen. "He's cold."

-

And then I go to the libe in New West and there's a message from Luke saying he was at the fireworks and unknown to himself happened to sit down next to Rowen's roommate. Rowen was elsewhere looking for his date, whom he did not find, but then he did find Brad with Luke next to him. So now I have Rowen's home number.

29

Millie wanting to know whether I care about her personally or whether she's just embodiment studies research to me. What will I say to her. I don't care about her personally. I have cared about her professionally, the way Joyce cared about me, by being effective. I admire her, as Joyce admired me too. I have a stake in her website because it shows my work: that's where she can feel exploited. But it was a collaboration, so that she gains too by having it seen. She will want to know, how can you see me the way you have seen me and not love me? And I would say, I honor your valor but I am not attached to you, I don't want to attach you. You didn't involve the needy part of me. You gave me things I needed without being gamey in that giving. Was I in any way out of line with Millie? I feel I was impeccable and she was too.

Susan was not at all impeccable, nor I with her. Was her work of less value? It says no. I'm proud of how I was with Millie but not of how I was with Susan. It was messy. And yet she did what she intended. Did she cost me more than she should have? Yes. Was it the only way it could have worked? Yes. I feel burned by the way she dropped me and hustled back to the pious ones. I haven't seen the full extent of her monsterness yet, have I - she'll try to upstage me in our lecture - I let her, last time. This time I won't. (Shop for clothes.)

Remembered yesterday that I told Margo I'd do a report on the state of embodiment studies. Haven't thought of that.

Need to make a note of what I've seen I've lost - when I looked with Luke at our photos I often couldn't remember where they were taken. He could. I don't have the sort of strong exact memory I used to have when I'm writing here. I don't register as well. For instance Janet last night - is there anything I can recall? Yes, the neat fit look she had in her white clothes, her ugly gold watch and ring, her amethyst eyes, the way she looked more a girl when she'd eaten and her lipstick wore off. Does she think she's more wonderful than I, because of her professional success? Yes, and I think I'm more wonderful than her because of my vagrant invention. She's a career path person, shrewd and deft. I'm something else.

The part of the S lectures that I skirt is the notion of the divine. I loathe talk of divinity. I understand needing to love with devotion, I understand imagining someone to love. I'd like to be - I need to be - released to love largely. I feel very stopped down. I am very stopped down and it's bad for me. But the notion of a god is repulsive.

Should I love my students personally no
Should I love Tom personally no
Louie no
Mary no
My children
Luke loves me
Does Rowen
I was holding my breath on that one
Is there anyone else I shd love personally
Who wait to know
At the moment it's Luke and Rowen period YES
Is it possible to love life with full devotion YES
The cosmos YES
Is the stuff they say about other dimensions true no
Do we have access to other times
By a kind of extrapolation
Scientific method is true religion

Is it true that the core of s is the need to be love YES
To love like a baby
Devotional feeling
And then to grow up into the ethical
Which is responsible care
But in responsible care we still need to love like a baby
Because it's good for our cells
So is it necessary to love an imaginary being no
Do we have an "essential divine nature" no
Is the world "essentially divine" no
Is there a divine source no
Love life by means of clarity
Can we love what there really is YES
Our lives and the cosmos
Think of devotional techniques as means of turning the body on
We need to be in love
Can we be in devotional love and responsible care at the same time

Are you sure
I haven't learned that
Consumed without burning
Will you tell me how balance in honest coming through
I don't have a love object so I don't know how to come through

Now it's 8:30 in the doorway of my tent. I'm writing on the wicker lap-desk. There are high clouds reflecting white after sundown. The sawmill rattling.

Rowen was here - how did he look - a little broader at shoulder and hip. His hair is longer than I'd seen it. He looked nice. He has a plan, electrician school.

30

We sat over breakfast and he talked about Civilization 3. His hair needed washing. He was compliant and polite. Loved Dorothy's house, the beautiful fitted wood. Sat next to her peering attentively. She was winsome, such a winsome little face.

She said - two nights ago as we sat on the porch in the dark, David on the phone in the kitchen behind her - that a year before he died Russell said to her, I'm crazy about you. For their honeymoon they had decided to go slowly and get to know each other "and not go all the way." The photo on the picture rail of her at eighteen, eldest daughter of a dry goods merchant, born 1913. When the business was in hard times they moved to the farm at Sumas.

A wedding picture of a greatgrandmother on the Beach side, a beautiful young girl marrying an older man who looks to be a sot or a fool - in Kansas, I think. David's grandfather, her son, became a school principal, and married a woman - what was her name, Blanche? - with a broad calm intelligent face, who had also been a school principal. And somewhere this well-made house with its broad verandah over the river, where there was a quai, and six children born, three girls and three boys, and then Dorothy's children, four girls and darling David - Here's a darling one of you, she says looking at photos, but he isn't very darling in them. The girls though are beautiful - there was a dark-haired girl in a bathing suit, slim legs, pretty boobs. "That's Marilyn," who I met yesterday, a pitiable creature with a quacking voice, large gut, and look of deforming repression. She lives a holy life, she told David.

The paintings - the wonderful painting of the verandah with Dorothy sitting in the far corner.

What is 'spiritual' - the way I ask it best is by paradigm - what are my instances. I hate the books - Andrew Harvey's recipes for whipping up fervor. My instances aren't whipped up that way, they're markers.

As I was writing this, two curly-haired boys playing hide and seek in the library shelves, brothers, maybe Samoan, lit up with fun, stalking, dashing on tiptoe, holding up a hand to smother giggles.

New Westminster is a suburb of hell, worst bodies in worst clothes. People stare at my face.

I shd go home, I'm bored. Not enough to do today.

31st

It's not much more than three weeks since I left SD. Sunday morning, nearly Sunday noon. I thought to go to the work party at Strath but no, or not yet. Reread The mask of Apollo last night, the sort of spiritedness I like. "I closed the shutters, and threw myself on the tumbled bed. The room smelled of melon-rind and wine and sweat." Opened it to that. Divinity of art and dedication, a philosophy teaching humans to notice carefully and have honor. The gods were human possibilities. Why don't I mind the Greek gods? Because they aren't taken earnestly, they are temperamental loyalties. They're art in life, they're ways of feeling human life.

So do I hate 'the spiritual' because we have repressive unplayful forms of it? I hate it because of the denial in it.

Mary Renault 1966 The mask of Apollo Pantheon

1st August

Muggs yesterday. I arrived at the work party just as it had ended and there was Muggs weeding the lower path. A little fatter in her face, and something else, more of the look of a girl. It might be meditation.

We sat in the garden house together, vinewalk shining through the windows, double doors open onto the nursery beds where the silk tree is spread broad and flat layered with pink flowers. The apple collection won a heritage award from the city. Rob didn't come to the ceremony but they thought of him. They are making more money at the plant sales. They will have to cut down any of the pit fruit because of plum blight. There is an old man living in a hotel who scythes the orchard. The EYA is propagating native plants.

David someone - that was the significant meeting - came up the path with his two kids. Muggs had been saying he designed a deep pond for the wild area corner as his landscape architecture MA at UBC, and has raised money for it. She introduced us and he said, I feel I should touch your feet or something, and did, twice. He said the design of Strathcona Community Garden was part of the reason he decided to go back to school to do landscape architecture - he'd been a journalist. He was maybe 40, nice-looking, mild and smart.

And then I stopped by the Lucky Rooms to see whether Michael was home. Rapped on the window covered by a mattress. He lives in a filthy dark hole that stinks of cigarettes and garbage and catshit, but he's drawing, many drawings on the walls, still on napkins. He still has his hand. He's fifty, bonier, and somehow seems to have more teeth. I went out with him to eat and was startled that he was flirting with me across the table. He said, It's true what they said, you look just the same. And then he said, You look younger than you did fifteen years ago, you are happier.

He said he and Tom had smoked dope together on Read Island and Tom had been looking around nervously. Michael thought of it as American paranoia about dope. I didn't say Tom was looking around nervously because of me. I felt disgusted at Tom sneaking and lying through those years.

Does the dirtiness of Michael's place say he's less than he was? I think.

It rained at night, and a shunting train was crashing cars. When it was quieter after daylight I dreamed I was in an apartment with many rooms trying to figure out how to divide it into suites for myself and my roommates, who were Olivia, and Colin and his wife with their young daughter. I was looking for the rooms I'd want and trying to figure out where dividers could go. The others weren't focusing and that frustrated me. At the end I discovered a penthouse, marble floors, windows on all sides and a fireplace. That'd be the space I'd want, but would they let me have it? It was still decorated for a Christmas party, fake snow, which made it seem cold.

Olivia love woman
Filmmaker and photographer and child

It wasn't a derelict place, in the end, quite grand, but not many windows on the lower floor, and not much to see from those there were.

Is the space physical no
Psychological
Was that the correct division of space
Is there any more you want to say about it no
Has work woman become Work woman
Do you think it's true that I look better
Younger

2nd

Dorothy and I and David snuggled on the couch on the porch last night as the light faded out of the tulip tree. Dorothy has been telling stories. Last night about her honeymoon. She and Russell set out after the wedding but had to come back because they'd forgotten something. They found all the guests gone home except for the two families, so they sat around all discussing who had come and how they had been. And then they got into Russell's car again (a '37 Plymouth coupe, David said) and drove and drove to Seattle.

Russell had been at the University of Washington and in his boarding house had looked across to the * Hotel. That's where he'd like to go for his wedding night, he thought. When they arrived Dorothy didn't know what to do with her hat, so she wore it. (I wasn't sure why that was notable.) "We were all new." Russell's father had given them a complete set of new luggage.

Was it a nice room? "Yes, and when we looked out the window there was a full moon coming up."

She had made her own nightgown, come into town and sewed it on her grandmother's machine (gestured toward the machine standing on the porch). It was georgette with Brussels lace, puffed sleeves. She only wore it that one night because it gave her a rash. She still has it, it's folded away in a drawer. "When I'm gone you'll find it."

Her brothers had gotten into the luggage so there was confetti strewn over the floor.

They drove to southern California staying always as close as they could to the ocean. They ate wonderful seafood, Russell bought a shovel and they dug a bucket full of oysters.

There was one of those birds so large it scared her. Condor? we wondered.

Orange trees on the boulevards. She stood and stared.

In these evening visits - I mostly don't eat with them but I sit with them while she slowly chews her way through a large plateful - there has been wonderful playful ease and it comes from her. Dorothy Dimple her father called her. The apple of his eye, he said.

I brought out my Mac and showed them photos from the trip and then got the digital camera and took a picture of their rocker and demonstrated downloading and Photoshop. We said lithops many times, giggling.

We sat 'til we were cold, on and on, she and David cuddling. In the end she was telling a long tale of river and pesticide activism. Tertiary treatment.

- This completely secular thoroughly established being, so at home in her own life. I kept feeling the difference between her and Mary - that at-homeness, the way she has a good house around her, and a city her family has been central in, and she herself well-known to mayors and the like. Her liveliness and presence and play are an achievement of so much that made itself able to support her. Her ability to be interested by anyone she has in front of her.

Westminster, she called it. I said, Did I hear right? No one who hasn't lived here at least seventy-five years has a right to call it that, David said. I was thinking that, I said.

-

Are there time leaps no
Extrapolation into near future
Does the medium do the calculation no
The body does

Is the quantum level relevant no
Quantum indeterminacy no
Base level is not illusory
The art produced is a sign of its vapidity
Almost everything in any religion is wrong
And much science
We're early
Will it get better YES
People give up their superstition when they have knowledge

Le Guin has a better overview than most

"Cosmic humanism"

TSK experiential ground without the deist ideology

3rd

Louie. I sent her a note with Rowen's phone # and got ready for a cold reply. She wants my stuff out of her attic. Where will I put it - take journals with me - does Luke want any of it? I'm sore - that's the end of Louie - was it because of Susan - no, because I have hated her these last years - not simply, but hated.

-

What is it about Mary Renault. Lived with her friend and lover Julie, was a nurse. Sat at an Olivetti imagining beauty and freedom, giftedness of her own kind in men's bodies.

Next morning I went down to Pireus to find a ship.

I looked around the beautiful room, and at the window above the teeming harbour, the shops full of foreign luxuries, the well-dressed crowds.

I kept my land, and cared for it.

She so believes in art and friendship.

The substances that are named - clay, wood, wool, stone, gold, skin, fruit, wine, water, dust, vine, oak, olive, sun, moon, marble, parsley, bread.

4

Bored with the question of spirituality.

Later I'll go to REACH to check my teeth, probably deal with silly Dr Lee.

In the meantime it's 8:30, shadows on the east wall of the tent. Tea.

This journal begun with Louie in Mexico is almost full.

State of embodiment, then -

-

Such a technical day.

Oilchange and check brakes - they're okay - the squeal is probably alignment. Told Dr Lee I wdn't have him poking in me any more - after he said my tests were good. Cholesterol okay, a few white blood cells in my pee - pap not back yet - sugar good.

Then scaling at REACH for hours, I was crying behind my sunglasses, a couple of deep pockets.

And Louie said on email, "I can't see you" and suggested she could leave my things at the top of the stairs for Luke to pick up.

Forgot to say BP down to 134/90 when he tried it again.

How many people are mad at me now - not as many, Paul, Louie, Susan, is that it?

Louie is being vindictive, which says she isn't in a good state.

part 6

in america volume 8: 2005 april-august
work & days: a lifetime journal project