| time remaining 2 part 1 - 2015 may-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
May 2 2015 Leisure Inn Princeton, 12:30, waitress called Chantelle who had the look of a starved childhood and who said Princeton is not a good place. She gave me a fortune cookie that said today was good luck for a romantic venture. I was nice to her and she gave me a journey blessing - I mean I felt it as that. - Osoyoos Now I'm next to a lapping lake - the foot end of my bed, which is pointing out of the foot end of my jeep, is lined up with the arrival of small green-brown waves and a breeze from the northwest, which is also the direction of the sun's path on the water. I'll hear the mild flumping all night. So far I don't like the town. It's disorganized and mediocre, bad buildings strewn along a lot of shore. The lake is its exploitable glamour and not interesting. I liked Keremeos better, I think, though I didn't see much of it. Cherry orchards. It seemed a working town. I wondered about pickers' cabins. After Princeton the road ran quite flat along the flat sparkling Similkimeen. Sagebrush and pine. That was a good stretch. When I'd said 'bye to Louie I went to leave David's jar of ineffective bedbug repellant at the cave. There his truck so David saw me off looking fine in his good clothes. Then out past Frank and Opa and Oma and M and then Grandpa and Grandma Epp, and then Chilliwack's goodbye at the Greyhound station. When I turned off onto Highway 3 I felt the journey was beginning; the first leg had been recapitulation. There was that long stretch of forest pass, Manning Park, that I just had to get through. When I'd shift down to manual 3rd on long slopes I'd see Tom's hand on the lever, the quality of his motion, what about it, intelligent, attentive, a bit sexy in a way I haven't named yet. - Yes, so Tom came too. And Rob, because I was thinking of farming with him, and Paul as indignation. The other Paul wondering whether he'd like to buy land with me. Louie was last night when we lay on the floor beside her fire and listened to Niblock, both pieces through, and then talked about it. She said it was thrilling. I liked being able to give it to her. It was very detailed in/by her big speakers. There was a lot of subtle throb. We agreed it was charcoal grey. The way it looked to me was like abstract expressionist marks. There are no plants or animals or humans in it, it's cosmic. Louie said she could feel it rearranging her brain, pushing backward. The second piece she said struck straight through the middle. At one point the porch door opened itself and cool air flowed in, as if it were joining the sound. I could not focus the whole, always had to choose foreground or background, or left or right, which often was the same thing. I thought of watching best landscape flowing by below an airplane, the way I can see it all but not remember it, in no way grasp it. Am interested in how anyone else can experience it because I knew it is beyond me. At the same time I didn't feel it crafted by someone, more the way my films are, things made for other people to make something of. It's windy but I got the stove working and have a hot water bottle at my feet. The air is cold, getting colder. 7:40, sun about to go down past the ridge. Have a pee, brush my teeth, pj's. Bring the hatch down as far as it'll go. 3 Sunday morning in Jojo's. It's too early to camp, bitter cold even after the sun had arrived among all the odd passive insects stuck to the inside and outside of the jeep. I'll look for an apartment. 4
5 I was in a store or restaurant, bent suddenly and licked at a wet spot on the counter. Louie arrived just then with two friends. She'd seen me and was disgusted, I was thinking mainly because she didn't want her friends to associate her with me. She went away as if forever. I was talking to myself about how that felt. Haven't said that when I woke in the jeep on Sunday morning my right leg was sore. It hadn't been sore the night before though I'd driven four hours pressing the gas pedal with it continuously. Since that night I've been hobbling pathetically especially after I first stand up. Italia wrote that she prays every morning and what she says is give me good health and I'll do the rest. Italia Sofia Combatti Grasso. All I knew Sunday morning was that I should go to the Lakeview Motel and ask if they have a monthly rate. It was Italia who opened the door for me. The Welsh couple who own the Lakeview - a pleasure to hear their accent - said no it's too late in the season, but Italia immediately said "I'll take her." A thin-faced woman with a sharp jutting bosom and short red hair, a slight Italian accent. She said $50 a night or $1000 a month. I said I can't afford $1000 but I'd stay a night. Handed over the $50. Yesterday when I was making tea in the summer kitchen she said "I'll let you have the room for $500. You think about it." So I drove to Oroville and got $500 US which turned into $592 Canadian and brought it to her. She gave me back a fifty. "You paid me that already." I liked Oroville. I wanted Oroville. Just across the border the land was less messed-up with buildings, the valley was simpler, orchards and vines, a few farmhouses, and then the small bare town, wide bare streets, a few of the kind of stately brick buildings I think of as solely American, cafes called diners, large packinghouses on a couple of long blocks. Houses for rent for $475 said the newspaper. Newspaper office on Main Street, the Okanogan Valley Gazette-Tribune. I was cautiously thinking maybe Tom might like it there, feel the western glamour of its modest hardihood below sagebrush cliffs. Found the post office and mailed him a card. 7 3:35, middle of the night, cold, sore, doubtful. Is this plan going to fail because of false advertising. It's cold here. Cold makes me hurt all over. Will I have to go back to Vancouver. Will I have to give up the jeep. Are my camping days over because I'm too frail now. Is the rest of my life going to be a misery. - I was taking someone through the building on Peter Epp's land, looking around at the grass beside the creek, saying the barn had been over there. I asked did they want to see upstairs, led them through the floor of artists' flats to the far end of the hall where I knew was a stairway leading down to another outside door. I was plunging down through snow to my thighs, hoping the door would not be locked. Two gay men opened it and passed me as I was arriving. Then I was back upstairs hesitating at the door of a long room being used as a common room. People sitting around. I asked them to rent it to me. It seemed they would. A new turn in the house of art. I'm asking for a humble space in the midst of other artists. I'll renovate to my taste. 8 Rhenish Out of the interior. 1993. He's a local boy, Keremeos, but also a poet, and his book seems more hyped than it would have been written by the best of prose writers. He had to do that, maybe, to be recognized at the level his ambition demanded, but it makes what to me seems a partly dishonest book. I hold back from it more than I'd like to. - So here I am a week later in a glass-walled summer kitchen in this border town I'd set my mind on, in pain, hiding out. Italia this morning knocking on the door, her son dying, they have to go, tears sliding down her face. I put my arms around her. I love her pale clear face. "It's not for dead, we all have that." It's because he's suffering, they cut his back open, "I'm-a a mess." Saying goodbye to her at the car window, "I think the angels send you to me." As the car begins to move "I think the angels send you to me too." That long khaki ridge with its twelve-mile slope up Anarchist Mountain is called the Interior Highland. As the sun slips west that stony wall takes the last light. Quail! A pair on the lake sand. There seems little written about this place. I'm comparing Borrego, which is so fully loved in print. There was hardly anything in even the expanded Okanagan system, that library has no local area shelf. 9 Paz Itinerary describes starting with the Spanish conquest. I was wondering how a woman equally ambitious could start, since that history isn't hers. Realized there was an earlier conquest, when humans moved into the continent - the larger history which doesn't leave me out is the physical history of the universe, of course. Italia's young life so brutal and she so true-hearted and loving, intelligent and hopeful, living in faith. I was not welcomed into this world: I was a girl. When I was born my father ordered my mother not to breast feed me so that in five days I would be dead. My mother worked in the fields ten hours a day. When she came home in the evenings she checked to see if I were still alive; then she made dinner. On the third day she said I sounded like a little rabbit whimpering and her heart went out to me. She picked me up and breast fed me. I behaved like a mad little dog. I grabbed onto her breast because I was so hungry. On January 5 1958 my uncle brought Carmine to our house for the first time. When he came through the fields my mother said "Look through the window - the man you're going to marry is coming." When I looked out the window my heart sank. My uncle was accompanied by a chunky, short, mean-looking man. He looked old enough to be my father and he almost was - he was 33. In the evening when all the guests had gone it was time to go to bed. I was expecting a little conversation and some preparation for what was in store for me because, after all, I was a virgin and he knew it. And he had never kissed me or touched me prior to the wedding. He ripped off my wedding dress and attacked me. He put his hands on my mouth so I wouldn't scream and proceeded to rape me. For a year I planned how I would leave Carmine. I knew I couldn't kick him out of the house. So I secretly bought another brand new house on Kent Street. Nobody knew I had this house. On August 17 1971, when Carmine was out of the house I rented a moving van and took all my furniture which I had worked for. I left Carmine some dishes and a bed. Before Carmine died I went and looked after him. He had had a stroke and was very sick. I stayed ten days with him. What I did was hold his lifeless hand and tell him all the pain he caused me. I said "Look at this hand. How many times did it punch me and pull my hair. And here, now, I could do anything I wanted to you but all I want to do is explain my anger to you." He couldn't talk but tears slid down his cheeks. I hugged him and I told him I forgave him and I thanked him for the three beautiful children we had. He was only 60 years old when he died. So now here I was - all the restaurants were gone, all the husbands were gone. I found what I liked and just knocked on the door. I stood in front of the picture of the Last Supper and spoke to Jesus. And I said to him, "Jesus, I had two marriages, one was arranged, I had no say in, the other one I chose by my own will but it still wasn't what I wanted." So I prayed to Jesus and said ..., "I'm not qualified to find my own husband. If it's in the cards for me to have a real true marriage then you find one for me." I had goosebumps when I said that. At the time I was 62 ... ." 10 Smell of sagebrush - artemesia - my nose likes the feel of it although it's not heavenly intoxicating like white sage. It's got a sharper edge. 11 Sunflower, lupin, syringa, spirea, dog rose, aspen poplar in hollows, sumac, long-leafed phlox. Italia has goji berry bushes. Blue iris, black locust, walnut, juniper, fir, cypress, apricots, all sorts of roses, lilacs in the town. little mining town of Oro 13 Annie Proulx' first, so much detail in every paragraph I keep wondering how she knows what she knows. Lots of world in her, non-fiction research, Vermont dairy farming, hard-rock gold mining, Newfoundland, Wyoming. You'd think she was a lesbian but it seems not. Postcards The writer so much more intelligent than her characters, seeing so much more, so the story ends up being about her; but still, lives of desperation brought to the notice of her more fortunate readers. Scent of black locust as I read. The jeep at Jones Boys, broken wire to the solenoid he says. Walked to and from the library yesterday. Small houses, quite a few empty with unmown yards. Roses in bloom, especially the rugosas. Lilacs browning. Best blue iris flourishing. Black locust in lovely bloom. Drove to Oroville with Italia yesterday, orchards on a narrow bench west of the two-lane road, dry broken hillside close in with slender paths marked on it in pale curves. Tom sent a link to a small-house compound in Texas. Houses $40,000. Life cripples us up in different ways but it gets everybody. It gets everybody is how I look at it. Gets you again and again and one day it wins. Oh, yes? And the way you see it you just have to keep getting up until you can't get up? Question of how long you can last? Something like that. Her similes - "a woman's thin legs crossed like a pirate's flag of bones" - sometimes seem to me to come from too far out of the time and place of the story. osprey, bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, ravens and crows, magpies, stellar's jays, great blue herons, house finches, cedar waxwings, evening grosbeaks, red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds, golden-eyed blackbirds, California quail, great horned owls, great grey owls, coots, red-necked grebes, loons.
- "You're being refused entrance today." He said get together a binder showing ties - rent paid, credit cards, phone, electricity. Maybe it could have been worse? I'd overstayed thirteen months, they could have banned me permanently maybe. Fingerprinted, photographed, six pages of questions on a sworn statement. They didn't record my websites I don't think. What were they checking all those hours I was sitting hugging my cold arms in the inspection foyer. And so here I am on the ugly side of the border wondering where to look, not sure it isn't a good thing to have that limit firm. But, but, where's to look, I'm at a loss. Grieved.
16 I liked Oliver. The first person I spoke to was a sunburnt man with bad teeth who was glad to tell me where to find the laundromat. Then the pale young woman in the A&W who laughed when I said I'd eat my mamaburger on lettuce with my dirty hands. Then there was a sweetheart of pixie-faced cigarette-wrinkled old thing in the RV park giving me smiling tips on finding a place. Then the sober thin man in the laundromat who followed me into the street to say there was still money in my drier. Then a shaved-headed good-looking gay French-Canadian man in a junkshop who explained where the other second-hand stores were. Then another sunburnt man with bad teeth, this one sitting with various bits to sell in a corner of a parking lot on the highway, who came into the antique store with me to fetch a box of towels he'd seen in the back room. Afterward I went over and held out a limonata to him, "It's not cold and it's not a beer but it's for thank you." - Oh, and there was the mother of four in that shop who asked 50 cents and told me a mortgage broker is better than a bank. What else I liked, the road is two-lane blacktop curving between orchards. Everywhere fruit and vegetable stands offering food though not yet. Farmhouses, dry hills nearby but in reserve. A cozier library, an Indian restaurant. 18 Victoria Day Monday. Italia and John are in town looking after her sick boy. Lupito at three in the afternoon is on a bench in front of his room gazing at the lake. I've been stuck close to my bed yesterday by rain and today by holiday traffic. There's nowhere in this town I want to go, the library's closed and it's not a good library anyhow, the counter women have loud conversations with anyone who comes in and there's almost nothing to read, shelves of the sort of novels elderly women who think of themselves as readers have asked for, esoteric love and self improvement in non-fiction. No local ecology section, no classics or librarians' choice section, a desperate wasteland, no large warm-eyed kindly intelligent remarkable Eric the librarian. 20 Black Sage Road yesterday. It runs along the eastern edge of the valley. - Black Sage Road Okanagan River channel 22 road Inkaneep Reservation - R at the start of Black Sage - corner of ecological reserve bottomlands E side of Okanagan Lake is reservation, arid biotic area N of Oliver, W of Vaseaux Lake White Lake Grasslands protected area, Mohoney Lake ecological preserve - get to it L on Secrest Hill Rd, R on Willowbrook, also L on Green Lake Rd Black Sage turns into something else past McKinney, which leads into the N end of town Fairview - W from Oliver on Fairview Rd three miles, mining town Vaseaux Lake has a prov. campground. Inkaneep prov park - 7 sites no reservations. Macintyre Bluff is on the river just before Vaseaux Lake. Observatory at White Lake. [numbers of geographical survey maps to get] - What was his name, Roger, a neatly bearded man standing on the sidewalk outside the library, who grew up in Dawson Creek and Tom's Lake, whose dad was the Watkins man he said must have been the one who called at our place in the fifties. 21 Awake at 3 in the morning worrying about money.
- After that discouraged note I drove north of Oliver today and turned left onto Secrest Hill Road which wound beautifully uphill through a slot onto a ponderosa bench. I let a red car and a Wrangler pass me and not long after saw them turn into a gate. Just had time to see tents and a campsite sign. Drove on 'til there was somewhere to turn around. Went back. Group of young Quebecois talking in French to a fat bald older man behind a table in the shade. Sign says camping $5 a night, $100 a month. Ivan, strong Quebecois accent, says go ahead and have a look. Dirt trails over a lot of acres, tents under ponderosa pines. Here's my summer. That after red curry at Jamphee's Thai stand on the highway. 22 What I'm imagining. Birds, stars, hot pine scent. Get a couple of tarps, a chair, a table. Some candles. Make a candle lantern by breaking out the bottom of a jar. Rope to anchor a roof tarp. Floor tarp to keep the tent clean. Library hours. Catalog the streets. Take Amos [Realty] woman to lunch or bring her presents. Ask pickers about their orchards. Buy hot showers at the RV park sometimes. Solar charger? Maybe there'll be replies to my two ads. But work: websites - mbo, W&D - Ant Bear, Jaes? Italia?
Garden, garden is what I keep seeing, a large garden, my own. Rowen is 30 today. - Wild rose - leaves used to flavour. Tea of boiled rose leaves and branches, nettles, Doug fir and cedar in sweat lodge and washed with it. Rose bushes "especially important as protective against bad spirits and ghosts. When a person has died, rose branches are boiled to make a tea to protect one" - placed in the house and yard especially across paths and over doorways - in time of mourning drank rose leaf tea. 23 A T and R dream. It was the end of an evening. I was lying on my back on the floor washing dishes, handing plates up to someone when I'd washed them. There was R suddenly standing over me looking down amused. Later people were talking about a movie or maybe a book, saying the relation had heated too fast. T said something about Vientiane. She was working at a food co-op. - Three weeks later. I hate it here. I hate the look of the town. I hate the lake because it's bordered everywhere by ugly buildings and because it's placid and dirty. I hate the female shrieks next door, the self-important motorboats. I hate every pot and piece of furniture in this garden, and every piece of furniture in the house too. I like the apricot tree next to the water but want everything around it gone. I like the staked 6' raspberry pillar blooming all over; it's a good idea. I love the quail couple strolling everywhere together so beautifully spotted and tinted, pale mauve on their bellies. I'd like that rounded heap of cliff if it were as it must have been before the town, though not nearly as much as the mountain above Borrego. It's busier. Its base is ruined by that torturous road slicing across it in straight lines. I have been grateful for the wide good bed and its rose-covered flannel sheets while it was cold and I in pain but there's nothing in the room I can stand to look at except late in the afternoon a patch of lace curtain shadow on the bathroom door. The clouds above the cliffs are de trop too, curly miscellaneous piles. What else. I'm hungry as if what I've eaten has had no value. Bored. Can't work here, and can't stand the library. Killing time 'til I can start the next thing. It's all the price of changing and I'm alright in it. - There went I think an osprey. I do like the slender pretty golden-eyed blackbirds too. Lying on the floor washing dishes.
- Note from Nancy Rankin with a tiny copy of the Ban Righ group photo attached. Abraham too. Mercury retrograde? Brian Cox talking about the physics of evolution in sea water. The sweetness of his love for natural fact, softness of his Manchester accent. He's like an ideal man, his native boy survived into more adult accomplishment than anyone needs, he's spectacularly active. The prototype of a right contemporary scientist, friendly, casual, unassuming, fortunate, handling media politics with no sign of cunning. Sexy simple joy. Sweet-mouthed soft joyful atheism. The tentative delighted way he speaks, his accent must be the best of any of the British kinds. He likes to tell us, he speaks as if to one. 27 And now Jacob talking about a show in Karlsruhe from July to September. What do I assume about Jacob.
Teaching was 12 years of exercise of that in relation to other people's formation, American formation as it happened. People's structures posed to me as questions.
28 I've just worked over Jacob's materials as if they were a student packet trying to get him more focused. Does he want that or does he need his vague matrix. I liked that he liked winter interference and unfinished system. Hadn't been hopeful until then. If he's going to use them I should have had In English printed - there I realize that having the materials already laid out in Indesign is maybe useable. What is it I miss about the US. I just erased a long paragraph. What I miss is that I was interested. This adventure isn't new enough. I'm looking forward to being camped on the ponderosa bench. It won't be dead time, as this has been. Though I won't know what to do with myself all day long. Americans are interested in themselves in ways we're not. For instance there's the way this valley has hardly anything written about it. A dull family history of a fruit farmer, a Brit's story of settlement which was only interesting while he was still on ships rounding the Horn - a Brit thing. Rhenish hyping Germanness and the war. Sandy's Okanagan movie was about her American cousin, which makes my point. Pat Churchland has a green card I assume. Has there been any native local fizz? Compare Masumoto writing about an orchard in California, and who was the other guy, another Japanese, what search term do I need, shark. Hamamura Color of the sea. Southern Interior. Who'd know more, Jeanette Armstrong. There's Ann Kipling. I see her lines whenever I look across the lake at the hill and the clouds above it. Wondering about a college course on locality. Where we are. It turns out that a local website is Harold Rhenish. Okanagan Okanogan. Watershed and run of the Okanagan River and the Chilcotin and Columbia River Plateau and volcanic plateaus and basins that surround it. Art, earth, science and beauty. Collection of tropical volcanic islands that are continuing to collide with North America. In my country the earth is within the sun. It's all sunlight, right down to the surface of the soil. brother writer who isn't writing for Canada or the US someone to tell the story of how to live on the land, and how to be it Southern Interior Glaciation, erosion and deposition Post-glacial revegetation 1. steppe zone - meadow steppe and bunchgrass, shrub steppe artemesia 2. ponderosa pine zone - lowland forested along dry valleys Doug fir, trembling aspen, Rocky Mountain juniper, lodgepole pine, grasses, artemesia, greasewood, waxberry, flat-topped spirea, wild rose, mallow ninebark, ocean spray, saskatoon, black hawthorn, chokecherry, mock orange, buckbrush - a ceanothus. Drought-tolerant. swamps, meadows, talus slopes, rocky outcrops, river banks the volcanic rock, the only kind of rock for me Sunday 31st Loose Bay Campground I do like it here. There's a scent I think is clover, or is it the pine. My fine chair is in the pine's room, that has branches to the ground on its west. Behind me there's a long row of Russian olive, silver; beyond it grape rows; a long way beyond them some rocky hills. To the east some acres of meadow: mustard, clover, crested wheatgrass. I don't begin to know how to identify grasses. Lamb's quarters under the tree. Chenopodium, I remembered that. Yarrow, a scrubby prickly ribes, a little pink phlox, on the path to the toilet. Shirtless kid speaking French to a dog, throwing a stick. Golden-eyed blackbird couple foraging among grass stems. Relaxed, it feels relaxed. Though there's a faint generator down the end, and a pickup passing, Evan talking to his dad on the phone. Chut says the blackbird. A cricket somewhere in the fenceline. A girl laughing by the showers. The light's going down very softly I was going to say and then over my shoulder straight from the hill's rim a white beam onto the page. It is on the power post now, fading upward imperceptibly. I hardly know my tent. I oddly don't know my tent as if I've never seen it before. - There, it's cooler suddenly. Would be glad to go to bed, though it must be June 1st - only 8 o'clock. One reply to my ad. John Wales. I'm under my pine. It's afternoon. I'm more organized. A container for my dishes, a bucket, more tent pegs to hold down the tarp, a little container for toothpaste etc. Found where to buy drinking water, made friends at the kitchen, talked to a water tester who told me where to look for land. Meantime reading Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea because I could help myself to them in the laundromat and the library has been useless. What do I think of them. In the first volume Anne is always going on about imagination. Fantasy is idealized by her and her fantasies seem generic, fairies, dryads, etc. Montgomery idealizes fantasy too, Anne is very idealized. I'm saying that a bit against myself, because Montgomery was the most important defender. Anne is pagan and profoundly anti-patriarchal. She defends feeling, candour, generosity, vulnerability, intelligence, sensibility, but isn't fantasy a recourse of helplessness. What's the relation of beauty and fantasy. Avonlea is described as if it's a wonderland, which maybe it was in 1908? Maybe not exaggerated. "Anne had a brighter face, and bigger, starrier eyes, and more delicate features than the others" - she harps on Anne's superiority always and her readers can all feel themselves special souls. Compare Willa Cather, who writes about a special soul without flattering readers. Why does it make me cry - am I more forlorn than I know. Is it going to rain? The wind's come up, east wind I think, sounding in the pine, blowing my hair about my face. I've battened down the fly sheet and stowed my kitchen in its new blue box. The tent pegs are properly angled. There was thunder. Keith the sixty-eight year old Nova Scotia man with a great round tub of belly who explained his system for cherry picking starting at 4:30 in the dark with a headlamp. The cherries glow. The evening before he looks over his trees for next day, chains his ladder to a trunk so no one will help herself next morning. He'll pick the sun side before the sun rises and then go around the other side in the shade. They stop at noon because the cherries get soft in the heat. Then there was an elfish Chinese boy called Jordan who's maybe going to the Max Planck Institute for microbiology. Then later a fine tall Parisian noir who's studying graphisme at Riviere du Loup, whose parents have gone back to Guadeloupe, also called Jordan or something like it. Then Maxim, a shirtless pretty thing also French from France but nine years in a suburb of Montreal and speaking with a Quebecois accent. In the old camper next to the old pickup Evan who goes to work in biological pest control during the day. As I was heating water for the hot water bottle after the rain had stopped and its wind chaser had stopped, other Quebecois cutting vegetables, a lumpy young woman cutting them badly and a young man with strange trousers that would have to be French Canadian cutting an onion with a beautiful set of concentration to his mouth. A shivering puppy on the ground next to him wrapped in a jacket. It's 8:30, someone's playing annoying music. I sat in the tent while it rained, watched water pouring off the fly. It's too dark to read and not dark enough to sleep. The tent is flapping. 3 Last of the series Anne of Ingleside 1939 unreadable. I mainly like her when she's about houses and scenes. Anne's house of dreams. She's otherwise pious and false. Anne has babies without having sex. There are village characters without end. The fortunate husband is no one at all, he exists to adore Anne. Mongomery is lesbianly narcissistic about women's beauty. Her female friendships have more heft than the central marriage. Her best males are the sexless bachelors: Mathew, Jimmy, Captain Jim. Emily is better in that respect I think. What's the point of this reading at this moment. Complete set in the laundromat. I'm an orphan at seventy. Setting out on my own needing a place to love, her kind of place, with skies and trees. Should I be taking people I meet as I took them in Sexsmith, as Montgomery taught me to take them, with humorous affection? - A&W in Oliver. A quail couple he standing lookout on Evan's chopping block, she leisurely pecking in the sparse dry grass. Before daylight both mornings a loud bird with a quirky voice singing half a dozen phrases - the same phrase half a dozen times - on a branch above the tent. Now and then a bird that sounds like a gush of water. I know blackbirds. Have just smiled at a Quebecer - the sort of pants they're wearing - baggy to below the knees. He also has blond dreads, an habitant cap, tattoos, bracelets, blue eyes in a tanned face. A beard, a nose ring, pouches hung from his belt. A nice hawk nose. I smiled because I liked his style in this room full of stylelessness. His Turkish trousers are patchwork. Main Street has a lot of shut-down cafes. When the Cock and Bull is closed (Wednesdays) A&W seems to be it. They are selling a lot of fries, which are the cheapest thing on the menu. He's on a white iPhone, I assume looking for work. I have my eye on the clock waiting for noon. He's a bit goggle-eyed, I see now, coureur de bois not habitant. - John Wales is already at the library though I am a quarter hour early: a thin old man sitting in his SUV staring at me. I walk over to his window and say "You're looking at me as if you think you know me." "I'm waiting for a party named Eli Epp" he says. I'd guessed he was expecting me to be a man but was surprised how staggered he was. We sat in the A&W. He bought me a coffee. His thick glasses gave his eyes a swimming beseeching look. He was wearing hearing aides in both ears and I was often unsure he'd heard me. He likely was unsure too, found it safer to talk about himself. He was 84, could have looked older. Winnipeg. Lumber mills. Divorced after 48 years. Female companion of 14 years called Mabel. I was being agreeable but found I'd switched off completely after he said his desirable situation is a mobile in a trailer park on Lake Tuclenuit. In his email he'd said he'd been a researcher. On what subject? Human nature. He'd always kept a journal. He'd arrived at a thesis - did I know what that was? He supposed I did. It was a thesis about men and women. When he saw my ad he'd taken it as a chance to move back to Penticton where he'd rather be. I didn't have the energy to be really interested in him. It's a good tent, with the fly zipped it's dry, airy but warm, light because of its white walls. I can lie in bed cozily and read, even after dark with my rechargeable lantern. Am all outfitted with lidded rubber boxes now. Excellent folding chair. Raincoat from the thrift store. Flannel pyjamas in black watch plaid. It won't always rain. 4 Emily is 1923, a lot later, and in what ways better. Anne as a child is more frantic, which is probably a bit true of her first eleven years as described, though not nearly true enough since an orphan servant would likely have been molested by the drunk husbands and more damaged than Anne turned out to be. Emily is the childhood of a writer - she has eleven years of a loving father in her. She doesn't have Anne's frantic edge. Emily also is more about Emily and less about colourful locals and entertaining scrapes. Emily is idealized some - soulful purple grey eyes etc - but there's not the drive to call her superior to everyone. Her friends are more interesting - Ilse, Teddy and Perry are quite vivid, they make a mythological 4 of a sort, drama, politics, visual art and writing. Cousin Jimmy is a bachelor savant like Mathew but Jarback Priest isn't sexless. There's still a lot of vacuous fairyland. She actually draws the two lines of her own bent - fairyland and local colour - and has Mr Carpenter prefer the latter. Fairyland is the etherialization of the denied presumably - sex and mortality etc. Early love of course. I like seeing this edition is Virago. She mentions Jane Eyre. Bronte was more important to women writers than I knew. Wd LM have read Dorothy? She could have, and Woolf and Masefield too. Then she'd have known she was a minor writer whose popularity and influence weren't necessarily a good sign. Something else I wanted to say is that both Anne and Emily, both of which I've read quite a few times, seemed partly unfamiliar to me, mainly their settings, as if they'd been rewritten in the meantime. How can that be? For instance I remembered New Moon as smaller. It might be partly that I've seen Vermont and can use it see PEI. Goldenrod and asters, etc. If I think of myself at ten, though, what did she give me. Permission to see people as bodies. She's fond of good looks and not blind to wrongness or oddness as I'd have been brought up to be. She's interested in people though - character - in a way I wasn't and amn't. I didn't learn that from her. She was inside a community and grew up on Dickens I suppose. I didn't catch her personification disease. Why does she do that. Even her fairies and sprites are personifications usually. When I say why I mean how is she wired, does she use face recognition tissue to feel nature, instead of, what, parietal, which had been more forbidden to women? - Jacob saying Holding one's own in an unfinished system for the title of Karlsruhe - is that really going to happen - and that he likes the underexposed photos. He wants audio, do I have any? What did I read? Do I have any of that? Message from Luke, tired, involved, included, thinking of me. It was hot when the library closed. I'm under the pine again, scented meadow. The salsify before the rain was pointed buds and now is great round beige puffs. It's more crowded in my neighbourhood, talking, talking. Did I sleep last night. There's an old lout in a decrepit little motor home likes to control the place with music after 10. Crested wheatgrass grows in clumps pretty enough for a garden.
5 7 on Friday morning. Cup of tea under the pine branches. Look how little and stiff this writing is. I walk around kind of light and lean dressed for thirty and then find myself startled to be seventy when I'm struggling down into the tent, any sort of kneeling. It's so pleasant a morning, sun's heat burning through cool air, my meadow quivering very small-ly, these dry brome heads, if that's what they are, most. Wheatgrass sways on long fine stems. The clover nods more heavily. A lot of the mustard is in seed, with lines of web glittering across its fine-line seed pods that glitter too. A few tall many-branched mustard plants holding up spaced bursts of yellow. The goosefoot patch that likes this bit of ponderosa shade is leaning east, shivering slightly. A yellow bird whistling up into the leader of Evan's pine. Last night loud partiers talking without cease. "Can I buy a smoke off you?" "I have bacon frying and couldn't be happier." Yesterday Evan and his wife at their breakfast table kissing so sweetly I dreamed of him. Keith rotund and amiable trundling toward the washhouse. They're in the pause before the cherries begin. I'll like them better when they're too tired at night for jawing as they do. Thread-leafed phlox on the way to the shitter. Wind higher up in my pine an even large dark breathing. It's a bit Bible camp - the smell of wet grass was - a bit tree-planting camp - the French Canadians - a bit my year in Europe - the eagerness of people in their twenties to talk to each other, and their poverty, many of them without cars and anxious about work but lithe and not worried about sleep. A Russian olive windbreak is just right here. Eleagnus angustifolia, polished brown withes with thorns. The native species Eleagnus commutata is wolf willow!
Paul week after next he says. Whole of the afternoon in the library, looking for audio for Jacob, listened through a couple of tapes (1996) of reading journal. Liked how they are read though there's too much stressing about Tom. They're read lightly and not in sentences, not the way they were written either - there's a kind of glide. I don't know why I've always read that way to Tom, it just seemed the way to do it. Clear sky, evening sun running the length of the silver shrubs, lighting a few taller tips in the meadow. There's a fine hiss all around. A cricket. Old Ugly's rattling generator. The loud neighbours are gone to jobs. I'll soon crawl into the tent. It's cooling. These mountains aren't heaps of sand, they're solid chunks of granite and they aren't completely dry. Wasn't that a dove just now coasting over the fence into the vineyard. A blackbird's song really is unspeakably sweet. There - the sun's gone. Sky turning white where it sank, like a magnesium flare. 6 Excellent night, so quiet I fell asleep at nine and woke at 3:30 a little before the odd bird. Clear sky still dark. Three-quarter moon due south. Now I've made tea and it's light enough to write. Very distant sirens howling must be on 97. A rooster. Again. Beautiful silence among the sleeping tents. Small chut chut in the pine. Yesterday a bird lit on the tent's ridge. There were its little black feet walking on the white. Is it the fly sheet that does something to sounds so they seem to be closer than they are and coming from the wrong direction. Two nights ago someone chopping wood seemed to be north of me and right there. Same with voices. Laughing and crying in Mary Karr's Lit wanting to go to an AA meeting and say I'm not an alcoholic but there's an alcoholic I miss. These people who go overboard in a way I don't and my family doesn't, who end up in the church. I mean overboard all the time. I went overboard about men and it made me religious for a while - that tape sounded overboard, yes. But my ailment is in the other direction, what Jacob calls withdrawal. Way underboard now. But she's so locked into people, which makes her successful and also wastes the world, which I don't do. - Pulled the tent under the pine for shade. It was hot.
That's Rich. Look at the purple of the clover, dark purple, paler and white. A thin small grass already dry and pale. It's after sunset, quiet. I couldn't stand it at Italia's but I open out here, I look at the purple mixed with yellow and the live grace of wheatgrass amidst, and the so-uninterrupted sky where now a shining straight line is being pulled fast across a thin tissue of tinted cloud to the west and where above are soft pale pink scribbles in darkening blue, so broad and free. All over these acres the ponderosas are the only trees. I like the way they stand alone and show their shapes. 7 There was a bicycle race this morning that passed the library. A dozen women were standing in the library canopy's shade clapping and yelling whenever anyone passed on a bike. GOOD JOB! I'd been reading Armstrong's anthology of Native poetry and was seeing the whiteness both of the women and the bikers in their thin logo-patterned bike-marathon costumes and beaked helmets as absurd. Jacob sent a draft of his press release. He's scrambling toward a deadline he's not ready for. Holding one's own in an unfinished system is right but 'withdrawal' isn't. He's trying to invent a commonality between me and his other artist that doesn't exist - I want to say - but I could maybe say there's a commonality he senses but hasn't named correctly, maybe is kept from naming by art world conventions or taboos? He has been sponsoring women, there's that: maybe something about his mom? I'm pressing a bit but also being careful. I don't know the constraints he's under professionally. Art blurbs often are puffed vagaries and I don't know whether in this instance it has to be that to pass as significant in a second-rate context. Reading this anthology I was thinking what's art for, it offers possible attitudes in general. I read two bad books yesterday and quite a good one. The bad books were useless as attitudes, one a woman pleasantly affectionate toward her mother and her farm animals and the other a woman needing to talk about her dead dog and her boyfriends but pretending to write about her botanist father. I was swearing at that one and clapping it shut because she kept moaning that she was afraid to be alone. Think what Lopez would have done with a Hudson's Bay botanist: he'd have taken the work seriously, got into it, actually honoured it rather than picking out a few terms she could use as metaphors. A gorgeous bird lit on a branch above me, a flicker I think. - Yes, a red-shafted northern flicker. There has been a small yellow-bellied bird too. [A chat?] Pretty Gabriel asking good questions. Oh look, the wheatgrass is suddenly flowing. 8 Just after 4, here's my tea, there's the sky white all around, tinted white, a heating ivory to the northeast, pale mauve at the antisolar. Last evening feeling the depth of the sky, its even endless translucency, as necessary bliss. I lay down at nine in that sky-state and faded as it faded evenly away, not noticing I was doing it. Now a bit orange in the southeast. Sounds like a dove. There's an exceptionally ugly bush, the only shrub here. What's ugly is its habit, it sticks up all which-way. - Antelope bush. In dry open ponderosa pine forests, browse plant. Greasewood. Has a lot of wood ticks. A dry clicking sort of bird up above turned out to be a quail. - An ambulance rolled through quietly yesterday afternoon. Chris this morning said a Quebec kid had OD-ed in his car. A hitchhiking girl stepping out of a car was hit by a truck. I move the chair around the tree looking for shade. CBC said 35 degrees today. Over south the sound of canons meant to scare birds out of orchards I think but birds are very quiet in this 3pm heat. Scent of clover. - over 300 grass species in BC grass stems round in cross-section and jointed tribes: barley, bentgrass, fescue, oat, canarygrass, grama node, internode, blade, inflorescence spikelet, awn is the bristle, lemma is a large outer bract, palea is small inner bract. flower, lemma and palea = floret. glumes: pair of bracts below the florets spikelets borne directly on stem or in an open branching panicle or raceme What to look for: - how many flowers each spikelet, 1, 2 or more - are glumes longer or shorter than first floret - are awns from tip of glume, from below the tip, or from between the teeth of a divided tip ligule: thin membrane or collar of hairs around the stem leaf blades flat, folded or rolled auricle: ear-like pair of lobes panicle: spikelets with stalks crested wheatgrass and bunchgrass both in the barley tribe = inflorescence a single spike = spikelet directly - Young bodies - le jeune Gabriel - 21 - smooth and pink with thick legs and wide feet like a hobbit. Visited in my shade this morning, talking English he learned playing massively multiplayer online games. Someone else this morning saying he skypes on his phone all day, two hours with his friend in Rumania. Then I drove to Oliver and passed Keith - barrel-bellied Keith who's 68 - who had heat-stroke yesterday, taken to the hospital by ambulance - pedaling the five miles into town to sit by the river. When he was a young man he and his brother were fishing off Nova Scotia. They took their fish boat all the way around through the Panama Canal to fish salmon in Alaska. He hadn't been back for a long time but last winter he and his brother flew back to visit his 95 year old mom. The boys are home she said. He said don't go to the St. Jean Baptiste gathering at Shit Lake because it's just one big orgy. Is it called that on the map? No. Pickers come from all over the valley, hundreds. It's a mess when they leave. Ponderosas, quail, Native poetry, Harold Rhenish's place page, ethnobotany of the Okanagan people, plants of the BC Interior, organic viticulture, how to identify grasses, Quebecers who are the Mexicans of this unCalifornia: acculturing, but NPR on the jeep radio and haven't sunk to Canadian newspapers. 9 $1000 Jacob says. That's just what the book said it would be. A thrift store new shirt, Pierre Cardin, that might be too tight. A broad-brimmed hat. An O Henry. A coil of garlic sausage. A root beer. Library books: Guy Gabriel Kay whose poems I can read aloud and imagine writing. Gregory Scofield Thunder through my veins - memoir - gay Métis, Cree. En'owkin International School of Writing, Penticton Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh Frye "possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his best readers" - "Poetry of the growing inner self" - don't call it an inner self - growing inner self wd be unborn person - intimations of prenatality 1997 Wordsworth - great decade to 1807 Poetry of spoken self-consciousness - poetry of intimate friendship? Teaching a human art of attention - "holding open both to imagination and to nature" - but what does imagination mean there? The male poetic tradition of willed assertion/invention? Tintern Abbey is addressed to Dorothy, "my dear, dear Friend" - "yet a little while / May I behold in thee what I was once." WW didn't have the guts to publish The prelude! He called it A poem to Coleridge. C: "His best poetry was all written in the year and a half in which he saw Wordsworth daily." Shelley the bravest dissenter - political, religious, sexual. - There are clouds tonight patchy and pretty mauve-grey below sun's reach, pink-mauve-grey above. The wind has changed direction, it's from the west. Last night there were strong gusts from the east. Tonight the kids look sunburnt, seem to have had jobs. Pickups drive up looking for workers. New kids arriving all the time, on foot with big packs. It's quiet. The wind isn't steady, strong gusts and lulls. It's a perfect temperature. When it's not strong enough to move the stiff pine needles it can be heard light in the softly silver Russian olives. Oo - look at the clouds now, tints of grey soft as - what? Whipped cream? Gelled foam, blancmange. That's toward the east. Behind me in the west cloudless incandescent ivory. The breeze freshens - that's its effect. - Alright it's too dark now. 10 When the sun rose a breeze from the same direction. A white flower back in the grass near the fence. I heard 'campion' in my head. It's in the pink family, scent like dames rocket, some. It's a little after 5. There's Chris with his toilet-cleaning bucket. It's cool this morning though cloudless. Orphan stories were in vogue. 11 Some fool was blasting rock and roll at 2 this night. A girl was coughing in her tent nearby. After sunset there were strong gusts of wind. Mornings are quiet though. Wandering chains of what must be quail tracks in the sand by the washhouse. Tea steaming on the camp stove, a light breathing in the pine. Yesterday morning as I was driving out of the gate there was a boy with beautiful eyes about to put out this thumb and at the same time on the other side of the road a young-looking tall slender deer who stood posed and gazing on the bunchgrass slope as we loaded the boy and drove slowly away. In the information center yesterday a smart-looking copper-coloured woman with long sharp corners on her mouth was bothered when I said where I live. "There were so many cans lying around it was worse than the res." When she asked where I was from was she wanting to know what tribe? I was interested in her but couldn't get her interested back. Townspeople I see in the library seem pretty lumpen. At 7:30 it's already too hot to sit in the sun. I've dragged the chair into the pine trunk's shoulder-wide shade. The encampment in front of me is getting ready to go to work, neatening and zipping. Loose Bay's reputation is drugs, theft and violence. "Girls come crying" said the information centre woman. Weed and beer said Ivan defensively but the crackheads live in town. Maybe he means meth-heads? Some of the Quebecers schooling at the library do seem wasted, very thin young women with a lot of tattoos on their legs and arms. The sharp black-haired man in his 30s who sits next to me on the library bench fiddling with his phone, who said his partying days are over and he's crew boss for a cherry farm on #7 Road, claims pickers can finish the season with $20,000 but many of the kids spend everything on drugs. Townspeople complain of the French, are prejudiced, but who else is going to pick the fruit? The people here don't pick, not even the farmers' kids pick. "And if California dies there'll be a lot more." I'm starting my life in the valley among the Mexicans of Canada. Mexicans though aren't young partiers, it's a more voluntary underclass? I asked Gabriel if it's that there's no work in Quebec. He said there's work but people want adventure. They want to get outside their culture I suppose, the Catholic Francophone res. It's more beautiful here. And then there's exquisite Benjamin like a sick child wanting to go home. This morning I have to do something about my bio. I wrote it. It was good. The gallery said it had to follow their pattern. I edged somewhat in their direction, complied with year and place of birth, place where I live and work. They wanted recent work. I sent a list of recent glories. Jacob appended them higgledy-piggledly. Now it's an irrelevant mess. At the library I am foraging in non-fiction. Poetry this summer I guess. Films - Jacob says instead of the lecture that sometimes introduces a new show at the gallery why not a screening: Trapline, Bright and dark, O sea and Last light, he suggests. Bronte The professor. Intro says it's her first and wasn't published in her lifetime, was found unpleasant, learnéd introducer tries to recoup it as a broad critique of social life in her time. I read it disagreeing. Read it eagerly, liked it, didn't think it needed defending. Her male narrator isn't much different from her women who all have that sometimes playful withholding rectitude. William Crimsworth and Frances Evans Henri are Lucy Snowe and M.Ernest. She began by looking at herself through his eyes describing what in Villette is given unexplained. Her women need a bossy man to release them into their powers. I understand that now, the pleasure of devoted defiance. Bronte declares it honestly and studies it. It's the theme she builds around. In both the Brussels books the man is brusque because he sees her value, that she is worth strategy. He works intelligently with what she is. If there's idealizing it's in her picture of a man who loves where he sees quality, who loves what she - and what I - want to be loved for, and then is energetically resolute to be with what he loves. In this book she lets her man and woman succeed together. Are they love woman and work woman in her own case? Does the relation of Jane and Rochester, Lucy and M.Ernest, Crimsworth and Frances tell the story of the book they appear in? I sighed there. The introducer is wrong about Yorke Hundsen too. She thinks of him as sinister. He's ironic, cynical, rich, unmarried, up on politics and science, irreligious, a traveler, Mr Rochester in the egg and the wilder animus Bronte could call on as shadow wit. He's accurate. I've just realized that what I liked in Lessing, the way her people read each other in the moment, is there in Bronte too though in the more pondered laboured way of Victorian minds. 1846. Pine smoke is delicious. Their music is barbaric. Sky after sunset so white before it's dark. Sweetly tinted pale blue at the southeastern horizon and then a most delicate pink at treetop level, then very very slightly blue to zenith. Little tents have multiplied around me. This afternoon savage lumps of wind came blasting from the west, chasing dust down the road and tearing at my neighbours' long blue tarp. Sometime later what seemed to be the same wind came blasting from the east as if it had turned around and come back. There's another blast now. It's cold.
time remaining volume 2: 2015 may-august |
