| volume 2 of time remaining: 2015 may-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Summer traveling to look for somewhere to live, trying to save money by camping. In parts 1 and 2 Osoyoos and Oliver: first Italia Grasso's b&b on Okanagan Lake for a month and then 6 weeks in the Loose Bay pickers' campground above Oliver. Jacob Korczynski organizes a show in Karlsruhe of prints of my 1978-1980 slides and the text of winter interference. I'm online in the Oliver library working on it with him. In part 3 give up on Oliver and drive north to rent a studio flat in Ashcroft, and then drive north again up the Yellowhead Highway and Alberta 40 to the Peace River Country. Straw bale cabin on Peter von T's yard for the rest of the summer.
Mentioned: Louie E, Italia Grasso, Nancy Rankin, Jacob Korczynski, Gabriel Perrier, Ivan and Chris of Loose Bay, Keith Swimm, Nina of the post office, Paul Epp, Hamada Shinya, Poppa Joe, Mary Epp, Emilee Baum, Chris Kennedy, Lois Home, Peter von Tiesenhausen,Teresa von Tesenhausen, Adam Gray, Levi Gray, Laura Parkin, Elizabeth Gray, Tana Chambers, Caleb, Sage, baby Juna, Anya, Maya, Kane Grey, Ed Epp, Mary Epp, John Niland, Chris Kennedy, Willie Epp, Jam Ismail, Colin Beggs, Herman Konrad, Elliot Weiss, Rowen Epp. Highway 3, Leisure Inn Princeton, Keremeos, Similkimeen River, Okanagan Lake, Jojo's Cafe in Osoyoos, Lakeview Motel, Oroville WA, Anarchist Mountain, Jones Boys Automotive, Black Sage Road, Secrest Hill Road, Loose Bay pickers' campsite above Oliver, Jamphee's Thai stand on Highway 97, the A&W in Oliver, Cock and Bull Cafe, Penticton, Fairview Road, Medici Coffeehouse, Oliver Cemetery, Covert Farms, Oliver Super-Value, Oliver Information Centre, Oliver Library, Naramata Bench, White Lake Road, Highway 97c, Coldwater Hotel in Merritt, Pine Grove Campground north of Kamloops, Ashcroft, Cache Creek, Logan Lake, Highland Valley, Grande Cache, Highway 40N, Thompson Valley, Mt Robson, Jasper, Township Road 740A, Euphemia McNaught's homestead, Hythe, Connolly Wong's cafe, the Seven Lakes Motel, Range Road 102, Grande Prairie Centre for Creative Arts, Alberta 59, La Glace, Demmitt, Whiskers Point BC, Caravan Motel in South Quesnel BC, Chetwynd, Prince George, the Cariboo, Sanyam Thai restaurant on Highway 97 north of 70 Mile House, Caffé Calabria. Okanogan Valley Gazette-Tribune, Paz Itinerary, Karlsruhe Kunstverein, Masumoto Four seasons in five senses, Hamamura Color of the sea, Ann Kipling, Willa Cather, Barry Lopez, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Doris Lessing, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Keremeos Register, Austin Clarke The polished hoe, Kijiji, Ursula Le Guin, Goethe, Ezra Pound, Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro, Coetzee Summertime, John Bentley Mays, Caspar David Friedrich, Dürer's rabbit, V Woolf, We Find Wild, TIFF Free Screen, winter interference, Oona Mosna's Underground Mine project, Kerberos Productions, Dr Charles Sorbie, Dr Stephen Clarke. |
May 2 2015 After Princeton the road ran quite flat along the flat sparkling Similkimeen. Sagebrush and pine. That was a good stretch. 3 It's too early to camp, bitter cold even after the sun had arrived 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 said no it's too late in the season, butt 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." little mining town of Oro 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. "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 satement. 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. 8 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." 9 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 behave 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 marriate 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 Blue iris, black locust, walnut, juniper, fir, cypress, apricots, all sorts of roses, lilacs in the town. 13 "Mediterranean for four months of the year" 20 Black Sage Road yesterday. It runs along the eastern edge of the valley. 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. 23 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. 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 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. 28 What is it I miss about the US. I just erased a long paragraph. What I miss is that I was interested. 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 a peach 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. There's Ann Kipling. I see her lines whenever I look across the lake at the hill and the clouds above it. Loose Bay Sunday 31st 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. 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. June 1st 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. 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 none of the girls 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. 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 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. 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. 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 chiar. Raincoat from the thrift store. Flannel pyjamas in black watch plaid. It won't always rain. 4 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. 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 - is it timothy? - nodes 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. " 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. 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. 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. 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 of the bikers in their thin logo-patterned bike-marathon costumes and beaked helmets as absurd. Reading this anthology I was thinking what's art for, it offers possible attitudes in general. 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?] 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. 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. Birds are very quiet in this 3pm heat. Scent of clover. 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. They 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 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. 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. 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 campstove, a light breathing in the pine. 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 but the crackheads live in town said Ivan defensively. 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. 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. 12 The wind this morning is so cold. Everyone's standing around in heavy jackets. I think they're waiting for their ride. This afternoon wind bursts so violent I was scared in the tent. The pine raved above me, the tent flapped and gasped. This morning there's no wind but it's still cold. How can it be so cold. Last night I was lying in bed feeling the day had been the worst here. The wind, the cold, a worse idleness, a sore throat, and then at night the hard stupid excited voices of young men drinking beer around their fire much too near. I like to live with blackbirds. This early it's the bird's field. At the flea market leaving after breakfast to put my laundry in the drier, there suddenly in a cramped corridor between rows of junk spread on tables a radiantly beautiful person, a face like none I've seen in years, a young African man shining, shining, alit. I see him, I catch sight of him and smile into his eyes and he sees me smile and lights up brighter still. 14 Woke to jungle drums from the southern acres. It was 3:30. The 3:30 bird began above me. The jungle drums are still going. I'm waiting for my tea. The sky is delicately pale in all its ordered directions. It's cold. - Powerful clouds build themselves over the hill wall to the east. Massive solid cumulus that stand there through the afternoon like a ridge above the ridge. Over that way is the plateau I don't want anything to do with because I suspect it's wet and cold and thickly forested. There's just this slot that's right, not exactly right but maybe as right as I can get. It's maybe quarter to five. Pink flush on a western hill, one of the uninteresting ones (wooded uniformly). A high mist lit white over the eastern ridge. There are birds that fly in long loops saying chut as they fly. My meadow's quickly going to seed. So many kinds of spiders. Very small yellow one. This one just now with long legs and a small body. Blackbirds making short flights to land on swaying twigs of weed. Last evening I was sitting in the jeep exceptionally peaceful looking around with the binocs. I looked at the distant rock face, at the white-haired man gazing next to his RV, and then I got into the meadow beside me. The binocs' shallow depth of field made a marvelous place of it, I'd pull focus a titch and see fine-line branching structures with sharpening bits of lovely color - purple, yellow, white - and with what seemed a lot of space between them. it was as if space had opened wider, as if I'd got depth vision back after I'd lost it. Here's the dawn breeze says Tom. It's suddenly colder. The sun is about to come up just there in the notch. - As I was leaving she said "We'll talk again" just as I was saying "See you next time." It was a story of how things work out because I just am who I am. The man at the counter was useless, I gave him my tracking number and he said "There's nothing theree." He tried again. "There's nothing there." He looked in a drawer. He looked in a rolling bin of packages that had come in this morning. She was the other person at the counter and I was thinking maybe better to ask a woman. I kept quietly pushing so he finally went and called out his supervisor, who said "Did you try 'search for package'." Just as they were finding it in the system the first woman edged over and mouthed "What's your name" and reached into the bin and held up my package. As I was about to leave - I'd unpacked it and started to look at the strips - she said "Did you get what you were expecting?" I'd liked the look of her so I took up what seemed her invitation and told her about the gallery in Germany and printer in Toronto. Where in Germany? Karlsruh'. She corrected my pronounciation - Karlsruhe - and I was realizing she had a slight accent. "You're German." When I'd seen her another day in the library and at first sight in the post office what I noticed was her hair, which was exceptionally thick and quite long, folded up behind her head, silver at the front and was it blond at the tips, but now I was seeing her eye to eye and noticing it was a good face, alert, with a wide intelligent mouth. I could see she was taking me in too. Two small dark birds up in the pine who utter the loveliest small gushes of water. It's no good this writing every little thing down but I'm all day with nothing to do and no one to talk to and often nothing to read. It's senile decay or else temporary. At times it helps me see. That small sullen man walks all around like a madman with a phone to his ear rapping in harsh Quebecois. He's the one who yesterday aft asked me to help him set up his tent because he was too drunk to figure it out. 17 Last night a brief storm. We saw it coming, the sky was grey-curtained toward the southwest. A wide half-rainbow across the southeast, faintly doubled and also it seemed beginning to repeat along its inner edge. Then brief rough wind, then a thin hard scatter of large drops, then wind again. I'm noticing rain comes like that here, in a parenthesis of hard-gusting wind. 21 Solstice. Brutal wind last night. I have to have faith in my tree and my tent. The weather here is so inconstant. I don't yet understand what makes the wind so lumpy. Is it the unevenness of the ridges? Keith Swimm the Nova Scotia fisherman said to his daughters So long as your grades are good I'll keep paying. "Oh the fishing was good. We caught a halibut eight feet long." 24 Saturday evening. Scent of pine smoke. Ivan said some of the tents would be gone after St-Jean-Baptiste and that has happened, a quieter yard. The sun's coming in low from the west, coloring the pines in front of me. It's not a strong light but it has a noticeable color. Is it the color I saw over the valley from Black Sage Road, a bit grayish. 27 Evening, evening. It's cooler. The moon's filling, there it is at noon's position - there it was - showing through thin cloud. There were a few spots of rain, enough to raise a scent of hay. Shinya Hamada is sitting at a picnic bench carving a small white piece of pine. Behind him the metal roof of the washhouse is shining like brightest silver under sky a bit darkened with possible storm. A cloud above me is reflecting light onto this page - quite a pretty, quiet, diffused light that's bringing up the color of blue shirt and brown arms. When I was in the library a young woman came to the table where I was and sat across from me staring at her phone. She was thin, had a lot of tattoos on her bare arms. A narrow pale face with deep perfectly clean eyelids and a smart carefully cut mouth. She had a farouche look given partly by the torc she was wearing, that looked like an ivory tusk, but also her bearing, which was a bit autocratic, disinterested. Her earrings had butterflies swinging at the ends of fine chairs. Her hair was shaved at the sides and rose in a longish strip over her forehead. Thin brown shoulders. She sometimes would speak to a young woman at the carrel behind me in a language I didn't understand. Her fingernails were dirty. She read something on her phone and exclaimed, threw her head to the side to exclaim. I found her startlingly beautiful. Just wanted to stare. After a while noticed that the tattoo on the inside of her right forearm was a diagram of a molecule. I asked her what molecule it was. She said oxytoccin. I said, "The love molecule." She said, in her slight Spanish accent, "Exactly." When I asked whether she'll go back to Spain when her work visa expires she said she's from Argentina not Spain and doesn't think of herself as from anywhere anymore. "I am from the world." She'd been moving for seven years. She was tired. They'd picked cherries through the night, starting at eleven. Gabriel has come to sit with me every evening. I sit in my chair, he sits on a pine round. I privately admire his smooth brown 21-year-old skin, his classic boy head with short hair showing his nape, his big candid French eyes. He plants his thick strong bare legs in front of both of us and I often look at them. Last night we sat till the mosquitoes came out. He was telling me about the dark net, which he knows how to get onto. There's quite a thickness of grey-blue cloud over much of the sky, though not to the north, which is luminous pale ivory. The washhouse roof has toned down. Hamada in his white shirt is still carving, he's another solitary it seems. Bananas hooked over his washline. 28 It's Gab's birthday. 22. He came this morning looking a bit puffy and said he'd taken acid last night. "It was the best night of my life." The stars were like a net, all connected. Clean waves passing through the network. The trees were moving. He had to keep walking to the washhouse for water. It took a long time to get there. - It's evening again, overcast, a soft grey batten. The pines are standing quiet. Last night when it wasn't much darker than this lightning began to the south, flashes the shape of long solid roots, here, then there, then there. Gradually the spectacular sky-to-earth nailings shifted east, still at a distance. I zipped myself into the tent to get away from the twilight mosquitoes and lay seeing another kind of wider slower flash due east, once with a long white line flashing out horizontally. A flicker on the wire fence this morning bending to drink from the irrigation drip. A deer among the trailers at the far end of the meadow, bounded away when it saw Chris's old dog. Really bounded - high. 29 Hot nights. I have to keep the tent zipped because of the mosquitos and then it holds the day's heat in the bedding. My pillow was wet in the morning. 30 Yesterday a dark sky was moving in from the southwest so I turned the jeep toward it and sat behind the wheel while the storm blasted through. Gust of wind that tore the abandoned tent off its pegs and rolled it across the yard. Loud thunder overhead, pines thrashing, water crashing against the windshield so I couldn't see out. All done in ten minutes. 1st July Poppa Joe wanting a ride to town, Poppa Joe who did ten years for armed robbery and looks it, and has a sweet touch on electric guitar. BB King he said.
He comes through to fetch his charger from the cookshack and tells me the story of the time he got caught between two boxcars and died - acts it out, the boxcars jerking back, the stuck coupling rod jarred loose and catching his hand, a piece of metal piercing his belly. The sun was catching in his blue eye as he spoke, surprisingly live young mouth moving in his grizzled beard. He said he's hard on himself about his music, "When they tell you you're no good you believe it." His blue eyes flooded.
I can see why Goethe called it repulsive and disgusting, all of his invention of grotesque punishments that have no end.
I like that seducers and flatterers are found covered with shit in a ditch.
Can see Pound's ambition better now. Dante covers a lot of ground geographically and historically, pegs a lot of known and mythological persons into his map. Dante covers a lot of ground geographically and historically, pegs a lot of known and mythological persons into his map.
"Get back, vile bird!"
2nd A movie called The air. Blackbirds stand around in the heat with their mouths open. Moonrise last night yellow in pale pink over the ridge, perfectly round among the pines. None of that says it. The clear yellow in very pale pink was sublime. It came up over the ridge at the moment of maximum twilight, best delicate pale pink translucency.
3 Keith feels a glance across the yard. There he was on his way to the toilet walking fast, bent forward over his bare hairy tub of a belly, brisk with exercise at 68, energetically good-humored. When he waved it was with his whole arm. He's like one of Dante's shades always ready to tell his tale. - Last night after sunset I was sitting on the picnic table looking toward the luminous west, sometimes turning to see whether the moon had risen yet. There was Venus very bright and next to it what must be another planet. [It was Jupiter.] The pair was perfect, moving just barely, so the skin felt loved by it. "We are watching the wind closely." Fire south of Keremeos. 4 I was up at three - had been lying awake and heard what sounded like but couldn't be thunder - was it an avalanche? - heated my tea and sat on the table. There was a bat. The sky very faintly light to the northeast, showing the ridgeline. Moon beginning to wane. The wind had stopped sometime in the night. Whole campground lying still under the still pines. Then the 3:30 bird began and went on for a quarter hour. - There, now the luminous ivory to the southeast, over the blue mountain on the far side of the valley. In relation to the valley we're on a curtained shelf. There's a gap in the curtain through which I can just see that distant powdered blue. 5 Trailer in flames - midafternoon stood out of my tent and saw black smoke pouring southeast angled almost flat by the strong wind, then the little tin box with fire shooting out its windows, and then very soon the whole frame now visible as the walls had burnt away. Loud bangs sometimes that weren't yet the propane tanks I was watching, tins exploding Chris and Keith said later. There was danger, though no one was panicking: the dry grass could catch and be pushed by that wind very rapidly across to the other trailers and then the miles beyond. I could see Chris leisurely moving a hose next to his own trailer. The few people around in the afternoon were gathering to watch. I thought, no, I'm too close if the propane tanks blow and drove the jeep further back. Sat in it watching as first the little forestry pumper-truck and then two big units arrived with powerful hoses I could see they were first directing onto the propane tanks. It was soon over and hadn't seemed much but I was feeling it when I woke at night as a tightness and flutter in my solar. Sunday morning. clear sky. Some bird repeating a bright sharp series. I look up and it's pink: the hill is. 6 I was sitting with Keith and Chris waiting for my apricots to cook, saw a quarter in the dust at my feet, bent to pick it up, wiped it off and without thinking handed it to Keith. He said "That's good luck you know, if you find a coin and give it to someone." 7 Have taken the dimensions of the bad house and gutted it to refit the interior, can't sit in the library reading or writing but can sit for many hours working a model. There's been enough wind to chase some of the smoke but not all. The sky to the west is lit but thicker. 8 Today's the opening in Karlsruhe. Only a few of us left in the camp, mostly drinking men. I've been hearing them laughing stupidly in the beer-drinking way over at Ivan's table. Ivan, Chris, Keith, the tattooed Indian, guests, a womans voice. Yesterday afternoon a police car cruised down to Papa Joe / Jean-Claude's trailer. Some talk of a gun being pulled. Papa Joe and Ivan's gang don't mix. Papa Joe is a Fagin, Chris says. "You're literate, you know Fagin, right?" He likes to get people doing things for him. It's a gossip mill. There's a lot of cursing. The pink is darkening. It's a somewhat murky twilight. Milky. Someone with a laugh like an automatic rifle or an automated sheep. I love the way the metal roof holds more light even than the sky. 12 I tried writing Home and came to a sore heart wanting the red and white house that is gone and the work I found there. Tried imagining a companion and came to a sore heart about Tom, that couldn't imagine another and better. 13 The three thirty bird sang somewhere else this morning. I could barely hear it. "Drive it like you stole it" he says to her. 15 Annie Proulx's The Wamsutter wolf in Bad dirt. She writes David Adams Richards kind of people without his grim seriousness. Takes hideous slovenliness and stupidity as comical, as if to say "Here they are, God bless 'em." Louche Bay has just that kind of population and I haven't been properly fond of them. The French kids are loud, crude and oblivious to anything but each other. They don't say hello. Their French is energetically unintelligible, except for constant curses, tabernak all day long. Bad old Joe down by this trailer curses loud enough to be heard all through the acres. Cursing Indian Vimy has been kicked out for fighting. Chris who walks everywhere with his two dirty old dogs is like a tanned skeleton broken at the waist so his pelvis twists forward oddly, has his upper teeth folded over on top of each other by the narrowness of his head. Like all the men here he likes to repeat his story without attention to his listener. He reads, he says, and on that account was taking me as a kindred spirit until I started avoiding him. Keith doesn't curse and is sociably courteous in his way but tells the same facts over and over and sits for hours in his hairy skin doing nothing. In the tent in front of me is what looks to be a father who fucks his young daughter. He looks to be a criminal and she doesn't look unhappy. They arrived without a tent and pulled a picnic table across the mouth of one of the open-sided shade cabins. There are little squeaks coming from it now. Yesterday he asked for a lift to the highway - had to go to Penticton for his meds. Said yes she's his daughter. "She's twenty-one." "She looks younger" I said. A&W won't hire him again but God always provides, he said. - So is it decided: I'm leaving, Ashcroft on Saturday, PRC after, studio apt in the sage country from Sept 1st.
Anxious in bed last night, anxiety waited until I was flat and unoccupied. Homelessness. How to live, how to belong somewhere again. Remembered that Valhalla has a little campground now, or was it Hythe, or both. Last afternoon on this yard, wind blowing soft dust down the road, small ants creeping, my sandals there holding the shape of my feet on bits of broken grass, fallen pine needles, pine shadows moving, pine wind above stronger and lighter and stronger and lighter. The camp deserted in mid-afternoon, this wind bashing at the Russian olives from the north. Here's my tent with its tarp forecourt, here's my chair, here's my kitchen in the shelter of long branches almost to the ground, here are six weeks' peelings and egg shells flung into dry grass, cherry pits and peach skins dropped among the drying-out still-green goosefoot. There down the yard through the road's gap and across the unseen valley is a dry hill capped by forest. I held back, I kept noticing myself holding back. I held back in the town, apart from Nina didn't like anyone, so many thick-waisted short-haired dull-eyed women my age or maybe younger, country wives, so many big-bellied old men. I held back here too, kept to myself, didn't take anyone in the way I wd have before Tom, limped across the yard in old clothes, old solitary and damaged in anyone's eyes, or so it has felt. There's anguish in leaving though, for 6 weeks there's been a location about 100 feet square I've been entitled to, could come and go to and from. There have been neighbours to see coming and going from their own locations, alive for now. The trees have held impersonally steady among us. There have been clouds the past days, but tonight the sky is open though still a bit thick. I can hear a cricket, it's nine and quiet. 18 The valley was pretty when I left very early. Still water, colored cliffs, empty road. First stretch of 97c easy driving but ugly forest, long hills, motor thrumming. Near Merritt sagebrush country again in lightly hanging smoke. Where am I and what time is it. Pine Grove Campground but they aren't pines though it is a grove. Tired. Oh take off my shoes, yes. What I did today. North then west then northwest to Ashcroft, then sat with Lois in a half-dead garden, then east from Cache Creek into glorious country that made me feel the very wrong little studio was not a mistake. Buttes, bluffs, benches. Thrilling color of rock thrillingly bared broken into smooth grass and sagebrush slopes. On 97c to Merritt stands of fireweed high on the cut banks. More flowers than in the valley; earlier in the season. Asters, something tall and yellow. Parkland: aspens with silver leaves. A kindness in the country. Yellow and white clover. Purple clover. After Logan Lake the startling panorama of Highland Valley copper mine, terraces cut into copper-stained rock, stacks-above-stacks of them, and the sludge pond vast as a lake. - They're Douglas-firs probably, loose branches with needles flat. The architecture of my new little place is completely bad. Egotistic, modish, careless of where it is, dark, windows only on one side and those narrow. No cross breeze. No white walls. No closet. A wobbly staircase. A stupid brown wall slanting down over what there is of a little balcony. A beige-carpeted bench-thing under a rough wood wall. 19 Evening. I'm somewhere a bit south of Grande Cache. There's a fast rocky river I can almost hear behind traffic on 40 north. It's some sort of free site with stony tracks and what look like workers' rigs here and there. Muskeggy narrow pointed spruce. Willows. Black poplars. Plants completely familiar, even the grass. Clover, yarrow, Indian paintbrush, short goldenrod, dandelion leaves turning red. There's my tent planted in clover. Ditches of Alberta. There they were along 40N, broad shallow ditches gardened to perfection, once a thick swath of scented white clover, othertimes fireweed, alsike clover, earlier today roads lined with blue chicory or a tall yellow thing or daisies. Driving like this I think of them. Some of their words come back. Jagen, to chase. Ed used it when someone drove too fast. Kleksen, to drip. That was when I was holding an ice cream outside a DQ in Hinton. There's no fire ban here, it's watered country. The long Thompson Valley this morning lovely fertile country, prosperous looking, honest-looking, hay farms, some vegetable rows, good houses and hay sheds. I realized after a while that I was following the Thompson - which will be my river - toward its headwater in the Rockies. Wasn't looking forward to the Rockies but oh my there suddenly as I came around a bend was jagged immense Mt Robson, and then as the good road looped sweetly southeast through the pass other immense deities standing in rows on either side, venerably naked without their ice, marvelously banded with their eons of deposition. Unspeakable things. Here's the sun still quite high and quite far north, shining flat-on against the willows and rocks in a way to enmarvel them all, an evening breeze rattling the black poplar leaves. 20 Dew! First I felt the top of my quilt damp and then I saw droplets all over the close mesh of the top of the tent. Now I'm drinking tea waiting for bedding and tent to dry before I pack them. Last night lay for a long time seeing summaries of the day's driving in a very pale and broken-up ghostly movie: I was moving forward at road speed with tall weeds whisking past on the right, the centre line swerving, rectangular signboards growing rapidly forward, small cars with tiny headlights approaching far ahead, copses on either side of the roadway to the horizon. I'd sometimes drift left into the oncoming lane or even rise a bit above the road and feel an effort to stay on the right. when I'd focus too much the movie would break but then I could begin it again. At the same time I could feel my recumbent body jolting slightly the way it does when there's roughness in the road. The long tapering sounds of individual trucks or cars passing seemed to be parts of that sensation. It was light a long time. I stuck my head up and saw orange-flaming clouds to the west. Woke once deeper into the night and exclaimed to see the sky black with large white stars. 23rd Township Road 740A in my chair under the lifted hatchback. There's a kind of tall grass with long pale heads moving in the breeze with the softest nicest sound. Across the road young aspens jiggling their leaves. Here's the Epp's place pretty much erased but still a place I can find. There's the gas well or pumping station, whatever it is, but it's silent now. The pasture's bluff has been carved back to a strip on the fenceline. The Hill Sixty field is back in grass, not much of it baled. Prairie. The run-off strip of couch grass on the hill is still interrupting the barley field. The yard hasn't been seeded, it's brome and I think I see the well's marker. Ed Epp is dead; Mary Epp has faded out of life; Ellie Epp is 70 years old listening at the culvert there still is where the driveway used to begin. The road is more graveled than it was. Today there's a quilted overcast. It's a gentle day. The breeze is inconstant. A brown dragonfly has lit on a bit of gravel. - There John Niland and the young Kinderwater who now owns the home place and this one. Pickups pull up and talk out the window. John rented this quarter for a while and then the Kinderwaters bought it back, not knowing a Kinderwater had pioneered it till after. Ditches of Alberta - they're flower gardens - what can be made of them - hard to photograph - a drone? - something like the ghost motion after driving Highway 40? - driving unbounded miles through flowering margins that often spread up into the fields beyond. Bordered roads, self-creating world up against the traveled path. That's nice: it's not just the ditches it's the flow of gracious world, gracious flow of world. I'm at the edge of Peter's field seeing fine grass, pink clover, willows, pines, young aspens, space I think, Manitoba maple I think, mown passages, that tall grass with long fawn-colored heads, brome, bits of yarrow, dandelions of course. 24 Hythe on a day with dull light. Oh where's the Seven Lakes Café, where's Connelly Wong's, and what's an empty Mexican restaurant doing here. The turn-off is Range Road 102. Getting to it was like breaking through an enchantment like the hundred-year spell on the house of Sleeping Beauty. Many of the windbreak spruce were standing dead. There was very tall grass I had to stumble through dragging my right leg, and then a complete ring of overhead caragana and then more long grass. I'd fall into its cushioned tangle holding the camera and then there was the front porch completely collapsed off the house and the unsheltered front face weathered to bare wood. Pushing back through the spruce to the jeep a thick ring of aspen. When I was going to drive away something said to give a gift and said what gift it should be and where I should put it. I believed it. I knew the boon I was asking. 25 I showed Peter the guestroom with his painting. He said it's interesting I picked that one and told a story. He was painting the bird and the power post and somehow felt the power post should be on fire. Next morning he had to go to Dawson Creek before daylight. This was in January. There'd been freezing rain. When he was just past Pouce Coupe where the road bends he saw a power post on fire. What the fuck is this, he thought. Just then, in the mirror, he saw the lights in Pouce Coupe go out. Look at the radiant meadow. That fine grass is timothy he said, timothy with an understory of alsike. The tall grass is reed canary grass. - Is this a quick reply? I said to Peter last night that he should do a book about this place and his work as a part of it. He didn't much like the thought. This morning walking up the track to his house I thought I should offer to make it. I was having coffee with him. I said, I still think you should make a book. He said, Do you want to do a collaboration? Oh the smell of the air. 28 Through the same cold sunlight - colder as the day declines, - and through the same sharp wind sharper as the separate shadows of bare trees gloom together in the wood, and as the Ghost's Walk, touched at the western corner by a pile of fire in the sky, resigns itself to coming night - they drive into the park. Dickens' energy. Bleak House because it's what I've got, provisioned from the Kinsmen's Market in Oliver. 31st Goethe "What is called 'Romantic' in a landscape is a silent sense of the sublime in the form of the past, which is to say of solitude, of absence, of seclusion." What are my slides, that are something else? Modernism is about presence not absence. Is Constable 'Romantic'? Constable can love without yearning; I so despise this male thing about getting away from earth, though seen as longing to get away from their dissociated selves it does make sense. - On Peter's studio wall next to the window overlooking the field a letter from me next to a piece by Rilke. It's a good letter. Light and clear. Something else: after the hot water bottle leaked I thought to heat a rock in water and put it into the foot end of the bed in a sock. Then rereading the last volume in the lake house I see myself heating a rock and carrying it in a towel to put into the foot end of my bed on the hay bale, which I'd forgotten. August 1st The field - timothy lovely and unphotographable - the way it moves from flamey green at its base to its many compact heads on long fine stalks each swaying independently, a graceful layer afloat higher up all questing stir like an intelligence. I'm looking at a stand of it somewhat against the light. And then look at the utter radiance of the stand of young trees and willow shrubs beyond it, set out individually in the light, and then beyond them massed aspen and spruce all catching light in their upper boughs, and one balsam poplar with a larger glitter. The sky's a great mess of blue-floored puffs that have nothing visual to do with this shining garden. - And how the clover heads are faintly pink little round solids in amongst the timothy stems, an understory relatively stolid compared to the airyness of the grass. And see then that many-pointed young aspen copse jittering its free edges. A small rabbit this morning standing quietly eating clover, with which it's so plentifully surrounded in its summertime. Through the binocs focused on the front rank of grasses' fine red stems, the heads long ovals rimmed with light moving against fluxed live greens out of focus with more and smaller light-rimmed long ovals all at different angles and moving. At closest focus can see the grass heads are blooming. When I move focus a bit further into the stand more ovals are there hanging and floating. Further, it's a gathering, a reaching crowd. Motion of grass could definitely be called The air. 2nd
Such a melt of uncertainty in that time, with Jam especially and in relation to writing. Global uncertainty about how to live, which I worsened by the way I read. 3rd I had fried bacon and blotted it and had it waiting on the green enamel plate while I got ready to fry eggs. Peter came to the door. It was nine o'clock approximately. He stepped in saying "You're making yourself a bacon and egg breakfast." I held out the plate. "Have a piece of bacon." He said "Oh no." "Just one," I said, "I have a lot." And so on, teasing him. He took a piece. I brought the plate back to the table, then turned around and came back with it. "Have one more." "No . No." "It's a test of will," I said, holding the plate toward him. "You shouldn't have said that." I was smiling into his eyes quite gaily. He took me by the shoulders very very lightly and turned me away, and just as I had turned said "I'll have one more" and took one. "You had turned." - Ah that was all so well done. On both sides. Reading Up north chapters exhausted by them. It has been raining hard, dark sky crumpling noisily above, pink flashes, a continuous foaming stream into the rain barrel, bright bits dancing on the jeep's roof. The lamp flickers now and then. 4th Then reading another chapter and liking the sparse balanced flow of time noted - the way it's written seems an accomplishment - the way it's lived too, attentive, more attentive than now. That inside-out attention.
5 This kind of writing - I automatically worry whether it reads but that misunderstands any writing - like my movies - make something for people to make something of - something that will be then not me - it's a more mature sense of writing though I still do long to have company in myself.
6 Have gone through N1 sorting into descriptions with examples, very absorbed. Noticed how many many I want to say fronts I was working on at the same time. surprised how often I mention the air. Hadn't realized how much it was my element. Noticing which elements Peter ignores along with those like wood and fire that he uses.
10 Colin - oh Colin - the way Colin stands planted short and wide and solidly balanced and quietly 100% there. The way his face kept changing and lighting when I told him about living at Mesa Grande, brightness, brightness. Colin Beggs the timber-frame master. 11 What happened in the last October and November in the lake house. I'd begun in the Olson house two years before, very self observing. Traumatized.
13 He sat in the chair with my G4 in his hands reading the journal passages from 1980 in a murmur so I could follow. He read them perfectly. I was sitting on the floor at his knee. It was 35 years later - 14 Such a good motel room last night. Caravan Motel on the southern edge of South Quesnel. Sweet Chinese boy at the desk, "You're not a senior?", there was a discount. Clean room with windows in three directions - end room upstairs - intelligent art - a bit old fashioned, an actual key, the right number of towels, not a pile of them - satiny silver drapes - neatly cut roofing paper nailed onto the stair treads for traction - orange marigolds on the landing - hanging baskets with purple and white flowers all along the walkway - a feeling of modest intelligence. This morning as I was leaving the whole family working at cleaning rooms. A father who looks like his boy, mother a bit sharp, the two of them having come such a long way to make a living in Quesnel that sulphur-stinking bush town. Yesterday it was boreal forest all day, radiance and glitter on the roadsides, long miles. Today is Cariboo country, grassland, aspen stands - copses, the weathered wood buildings I like, silver roofs, sometimes good barns, sometimes hay sheds. Chicory blue, white clover, always yellows, mullein for a while, alongside the Fraser. 17 The morning I was driving from Ashcroft here I sometimes felt I was barely hanging onto the road. It was canyon for two hours, tight blind corners, I had to be alert every second and I sometimes felt I wanted to quit or wd have to. It was an ordeal. Is it something like that I'm feeling now. Can I manage the hard road I am.
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