marianne paul

Kayak Haiku

Sat, 28 May 2011 20:42:26 -0400

Kayak season is here once again. To commemorate all things kayak, and the exquisite details of river and lake that go along with that - I resolve to write a haiku to honour each voyage. Each numbered section represents a separate voyage, and the poem as a whole will grow over time. When read in sequential order, I hope to capture the flow of journey and season.

1.
woman and kayak
inaugural spring voyage
wind against the skin

2.
raindrops slap kayak
what's a little more water
in the midst of lake

and in the campground
arabesque stitching on yurt
a call to prayer

3.
rising atop cliff
totem pole spreads eagle wings
over river bank

goslings step from nests
geese stretch long necks above grass
river rushes by

4.
intoxicating
sweet smell of honeysuckle
spread thickly in air

tough guy with tattoos
cringes at water splashing
cold against bare back

5.
woman strums banjo
swallows dip belly in lake
lovers serenade

black dog and human
frolicking like sea otters
dog days of summer

6.
evening paddle
sinking sun lights golden path
eases day’s tensions

man bows to Allah
we both praise in our own way
by the bulrushes

7.
portage boat to beach
body hurts from hard-hit fall
forgot hat - damn it

paddle limestone maze
light dances on glacier caves
aches and hurts subside

8.
muskrat den shoreline
earth gives way beneath my feet
moss, cedar, fern, root

cross bay, cross-currents
circumnavigate island
granite and high waves

9.
paddle against wind
steer kayak through wide arc
surf waves back to start

how glorious this
waves tumble into whitecaps
crashing over deck

10.
rain as fine as mist
fog-shrouded distant mountains
loons or wailing ghosts?

waterline marks cliff
lichen and moss cling to rock
ochre and orange

11.
beneath the surface
seaweed swirls like mermaid hair
dangles from paddle

solitary swan
circles as if lost, calls out
disconsolately

12.
ye old sea woman!
oh, how i fit in my skin
sun-drenched and wrinkled

toss me, wind and waves
let me know my own true strength
the course of my heart

13.
the trees stand silent
only the poplar speaks out
with a silver tongue

up through the weeds
turtle pokes periscope nose
sinks like submarine

14.
fat-belly tadpoles
black and whiskered like catfish
dream of bigger things

launch from Nathan’s dock
set among the bulrushes
in memoriam

15.
tiny lilypads
turn cherub-faces upward
back float in clusters

big sky, big waters
big mountains, layered blue-grey
breathe deep the silence

16.
seagulls and sailboats
haze hangs over mountain range
surface mirror-glass

radiant sunset
i paddle into the light
find my paradise

17.
dip dip the paddle
little hands between big hands
rock-a-boat baby

grandson’s first kayak
sit on my lap, sing a song
“life is but a dream”

18.
circling overhead
airplane dips wing to river
i see the pilot

monarch butterfly
moons over my orange boat
it’s love at first sight

19.
through the looking glass
waves/light strobe psychedelic
sky and clouds double

deep river crossing
open expanse, streaks of beach
brushstroke horizon

20.
clamshells shimmer pink
winds light, seersucker surface
slips into fine silk

aim for the lighthouse
kayak weaves around houseboats
moored in the harbour

21.
cedars hug cliffs
exposed root snakes along bank
curves into fine art

trees overhang caves
ferns sprout from the crevices
fish flops crescent-backed

22.
water spills from cliff
lilies and morning-glories
open to the sun

scull swiftly skims by
three stilt-legged sandpipers
peck at the sidelines

23.
silent solitude
three thousand acres of marsh
lime green frog on weeds

wetland silhouette
black cormorant wings outstretched
stands iron-cast still

24.
sleek-swimmer muskrat
geese point white fannies skyward
wiggle tail feathers

osprey dive-bombs prey
heron moves with tai chi grace
they both get their fish

25.
strumming of tree frog
plucking of a guitar string
rustling bulrushes

season subtly shifts
milkweed, goldenrod, thistle
seagulls like lost souls

26.
wake parts the waters
pleasure boats take their pleasure
rocking-chair kayak

exclamation marks!
minnows swimming off to school
overcrowded class

27.
lakeside patios
umbrellas fold into monks
pondering vastness

flock of goldeneyes
whistling vibration of wings
long slow curve of bay

28.
it is the sky’s day
morning moon, soaring bird, jet
single-frame capture

distant tsunami
sun’s optical illusion
rolling horizon

29.
tickling under hat
daddy longlegs on my arm
season of spiders

bobbing flowerets
hydrangea lost at sea
rescue for the vase

30.
landlocked for a week
sweep cobwebs from my cockpit
cobwebs from my brain

six-heron blessing
train rumbles over trestle
i’m at peace again

31.
geese float lazily
conserving strength for fall flights
goldenrod mirage

rogue goose talks to me
i talk back, “er-ah, er-ah”
long conversation

32.
tinged pink, yellow, brown
leaves fall like rain, rest on lake
red-tail hawk rides high

shadow crosses sand
raven carves sky-circles, sails:
wings spread wide open

33.
burdocks and thistles
fisherman casts silver thread
heron’s beak a sword

seaweed matted thatch
sun bright, wind cold - foreshadows
things to come - downstream

34.
sycamore flames fire
caterpillars spin tent-webs
around green apples

mallards hide in marsh
lift off, body-memory
of hunting season

35.
dark geese congregate
like a penguin colony
populate the beach

one snowy egret
steps among them, odd bird out
crouches and stretches

36.
seagulls sit in the sky
clouds and reflections of clouds
surreal - Magritte art

pied grebe disappears
ghosts of trees underwater
old man in canoe

37.
concentric circles
raindrops spread into wave-rings
expanding patterns

loon slides out of sight
empty shells of snails float by
feathers curl quill-up

38.
sun melts morning chill
carry kayak on shoulder
heave up onto car

geese fly formation
crayfish skitters toward shore
maples blush scarlet

39.
lake metropolis
swirl of birds lifting, settling
city of seagulls

dragonfly alights
seagull feather set adrift
rides makeshift kayak

40.
indian summer
kayak slips through calm water
give praise, thanks giving

grandson squats at shore chants earth songs with grandfather
beats earth-drum with stick

41.
current mimes slow flow
of time, constant and almost
imperceptible

hands cold on paddle
otters scamper across rocks
morning sky bruised blue

42.
exhibitionist
trees shed leaves, bare their branches
reveal waterfall

creek throwing itself
off cliff, hurtling down rock bluffs
sun burns away frost

43.
swift-flowing current
turns bow upstream, stalemate
caught in rock-riffles

can’t travel forward
paddle backward to escape
ducks joyride past me

44.
geese kick up water
run in a row like sprinters
at the starter’s gun

heron ghost glides by
morning cold ices landscape
wear double layers

45.
fingers and toes cold
condensation drips from trees
like rain, splashes up

devil’s day paddle
upriver to devil’s creek
church bells clang praises

46.
sun mimics full moon
orb pale behind veil of fog
mist enshrouds river

man in red canoe
black dog standing watch in bow
river silhouette

47.
i know where the hawk
waits, where the heron lingers
near the waterfall

birch tree glows golden
and at the edge of the pond
a skim of ice forms

48.
milkweed spills its guts
charred skeleton of sofa
knee-deep in water

abandoned lawn chairs
beached canoes stored hull-side up
awaiting winter

Apples of my Eye

Sat, 1 Jan 2011 16:32:21 -0500

I love my Apple gadgets. My iPod, my iPad, my MacMini, and my MacBook. Like the multiple kayaks in my garage, each fulfills a different purpose. I have a boat for big waters, a boat for small rivers and flat water, a recreational boat for friends, a Kevlar old school boat that is a keeper – very light – I can easily pop it up my shoulder, hoist it up on the car, and look like an Amazon strongwoman. And then there’s my husband’s boat. Sounds like overkill, yes, but each boat isn’t interchangeable with another. It would be insanity to take my small riverboat island-hopping on the St. Lawrence River. And my island-hopping sea kayak would be of no use going down the Grand River that twists through my hometown.

Okay, so what about those Apples? My iPod is perfect for running at the gym (or should I say “plogging,” my unique blend of jogging/plodding), my iPad is becoming my favourite transportable tool – App loaded and ready wherever I happen to be – at the grocery store, or in my living room when I want to write with my feet up on the couch. My MacMini is my formal workstation - with a decent-sized monitor for my aging eyes. And speaking of aging, my aging MacBook is used less and less for writing, and more and more as hard drive storage - three emanations of computers and files reside within it. I recently uncovered in the MacBook nether regions a long forgotten story, re-bonded with the character, fell in love with her all over again, and the writing continues...

Apples. Macs. Macintosh. The real-deal version of apples that grow on trees - I love those too. They're hardwired into my childhood memories, the hard drive that is my brain. Groves of Macintoshes grew around my hometown in Eastern Ontario. Macs are the only kind of apples that I knew existed, until I grew up and had to do my own grocery shopping. Autumn along the St. Lawrence meant the deep reddening of the Maple trees, and the deep reddening of the Macintoshes. The frost brought that tang-shiver taste to the apple, and we'd wait until that first frost to go to the orchard, and Dad would buy a bushel full. It was a ritual. And somewhere in there, stored with that Macintosh memory, there's a layer of song, my mother singing, "I love you, a bushel and a peck." I thought at the time a peck was a peck on the cheek, a kiss.

The real apple of my eye these days is my (almost) fourteen-month-old grandson. He, too, loves Apples. He has his baby Apps on my iPad, can flick his baby finger sideways to rifle through to his favourite games and photos, squeeze his fingers to increase or decrease the screen size, loves the game Angry Birds. He also loves my iPod Touch, just an itsy bitsy iPad to him. Baby size. Loves it so much he decided to put it in his mouth. Sucked on it lovingly. That was the end of my iPod. It never recovered. The day before Christmas. Too late to put a new iPod on my Christmas wish list.

I must have been on a technological hit list, under some evil-Santa spell. My camera died that same day, a tough and rugged digital camera that is waterproof and coldproof and has survived two years of kayak trips. My last picture on the camera is baby boy in his highchair, an apple in one hand and an Apple in the other hand, bite marks in the apple-fruit, and suck marks on the iPod-Touch. I've sent the camera off to the Olympus folks, to see if they can save the camera, and if I'm really lucky, the baby-apple-Apple photo too.

More techie gadgets broke on Christmas Day. The DVD player for one. I watched just one of the three movie DVDs in my stocking before the DVD player bit the big one. We still haven't replaced it, since we tend to download videos, but that wasn't the point. It was Christmas Day, and the movies were holiday fare. It just wasn't the DVD player, and the camera, and the iPod Touch that gave up the ghost. It was also my husband's Christmas gift. I recently kicked my caffeine habit of many years, suffered through five full days of caffeine-head and detox to reach a caffeine-free state of body and mind. My husband is also a coffee-addict, still is, and he misses the Tim Horton coffee runs I would take at first light each morning, bringing each of us an extra-large to kickstart the day. So in the spirit of the season, I bought him a coffee machine, even though it meant I'd have to endure the tantalizing aroma in the morning while his coffee brewed. It was a gift of love. But on Christmas day, after turkey dinner, only coffee left to end a perfect meal, the new coffee machine went click-click-click-click, and nothing more. No coffee. Only cold water and dry coffee grinds.

The Tim Hortons that backs onto our house was open, I could see the cars in the drive-thru lineup. So I took the last vehicle parked in the driveway, and drove around the block to get coffee for my husband, daughter, and her partner, but true to the day, I missed the early closing of the coffee-shop by two minutes. Don't worry, the manager shouted at me through the closed window, the Tim Hortons up the street is open. So I drove up the street, rolled down the window, and ordered Christmas coffee for everyone but me. By now, the sun had set, and it was dark outside, and inside the car too. I couldn't see well enough to maneuver the toggle switch of the power window to shut it and kept opening the other windows, too. And I drove home that way, windows fully down, frigid air blowing in, the temperature well below zero. But I had the coffee, the successful hunter, or huntress.

The next morning, in the midst of Boxing Day Madness, I returned the coffeemaker and kept my calm, not a small feat, considering the throngs of shoppers, and also the task of fitting the coffeemaker and packaging back into the box to return it. Why is it that the box always seems too small? And how did the coffee machine fit into the box in the first place? Since I was out and about anyway, I treated myself to an iPod to replace my dead one, bought myself an iPod Nano. A green Nano, more of a Granny Smith than a MacIntosh, which suits me quite fine, and brings me full-circle, full-apple back to my grandson, the apple of my eye.

Baby boy has been diagnosed with food allergies, and now doesn't travel from home without an epicen jr. The egg allergy was discovered the first time he had scrambled egg, just a fingernail sliver. The wheat allergy was discovered when he ate a bit of toast. And the peanut allergy, well, that came up when the allergist pinpricked him during an allergen test. So what can he eat? I asked the allergist, feeling exasperated. (The kid's got to eat!) Meat, vegetables and fruits, he answered.

At home, I set baby boy in his highchair. He's been experimenting with finger foods, loves cheese, grapes, and - surprise, surprise - apples. So far, the food has been cut into tiny little pieces for easy chewing and swallowing. But he has that set of gorgeous teeth now...

So I take an apple from the refrigerator, a big round red apple, wash it, peel it. And I hand the apple to baby boy. Intact except for the peel.

His eyes grow huge. He takes the apple in both hands, and bites into it. He chews and swallows the little bit of apple he's bitten off, leaving tiny bite marks in the white flesh of the apple. Then he starts to laugh with delight, shouts in that unintelligible baby language. He's never before been given anything so large to eat. He looks at me with wonder, as if I'm one of the great wonders of the world.

And then he bites into his apple again.

The Miracle

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 09:06:16 -0500

The Miracle is a short story published several years ago, and distributed inside a coffee can! Storyhouse, a gourmet roaster of coffee beans, is also a publisher. The stories and poems start on the outside of a can, and then continue on an insert within the can, along with a trinket. My story was included with the “Holiday Blend.” I suggest, in keeping with the spirit, you go get yourself a cup of coffee, and then come back to read the story while enjoying your java...

_____

This story begins on a sunny day in June on the upper level of a red double-decker bus. A tour bus weaving through Victoria in summer is an unlikely setting for a Christmas story, I know, but nevertheless, that’s where this Christmas story starts.

It starts at the exact moment my then six-year-old daughter, Samantha, turned to look up at me. Her eyes wore that double-edged innocence that both heartens you at the sight of such hope, and then devastates you with the thought of hope unfulfilled. Life, after all, is a hard place, and every parent knows it. It is a secret we keep from our children as long as we can, hide from their early discovery with the same tenacity as Christmas gifts stashed under the bed.

But like most secrets, we can’t hide it forever.

“Found a quarter under my pillow,” Samantha said.

A hole gaped in the front of her mouth in that all-I-want-for-Christmas-is-my-two-front-teeth way.

“Told you the tooth fairy would find you at Grandpa’s house,” I answered.

“The tooth fairy didn’t find me,” Samantha said. “Grandpa did. He sneaked into my room, and I pretended I was asleep.”

It took only two city blocks for Samantha’s mind to work its way through the logic.

“Is there a Santa Claus?” Samantha said.

“Of course,” I answered. “Do you think we could afford to buy all those presents that somehow end up under the tree each Christmas morning? And they’re always exactly what you wanted, how would Dad and I ever get it right? You know your Dad. If he bought the presents, you’d get all Winnie-the-Pooh things.”

It was one of those family jokes that has survived to this day – her Dad’s obsession with buying young Samantha Winnie-the-Pooh gifts. As if A.A.Milne could protect his little girl from life.

“But is there really a Santa Claus?” she persisted.

The question, asked again, meant I would have to directly lie to my daughter to preserve the fantasy of Santa Claus. She was only six years old. What is wrong with fantasy? Nothing.

But lying... there is something wrong with that. She had asked a direct question, and deserved a direct answer.

“No,” I said quietly.

The red double-decker bus stopped, and we got off to inspect the Haida totem pole. Samantha stood dwarfed at its base. Her eyes followed the long shape upward. Raven and bear and hawk and whale, piled one on top of the other, like her thoughts. Tooth fairy, Santa Claus…

“Is there a God?”

Her eyes were solemn, wanting the truth, whatever it might be.
And so I told her, the truth, as best as I could. “I don’t know for sure, I hope there is a God. I believe there is a God.”

Or perhaps a Goddess. The feminine divine. I’ve always had difficulty reconciling the patriarchal God sitting on a throne in judgement with the beauties of creation.

Today, thirteen years later, Samantha is a beautiful young woman, strong and independent, and still not shying away from the hard questions and hard answers. She has grown up in spite of her parents, and it is her parents that are reminded, every time she steps out that door, that life is a hard place. And they have to let her go.

Tonight, the wind is blowing in our hometown of Kitchener, Ontario, in a way it never blows in Victoria. Gusts pick up snow, white swirls, like small tornadoes. The night is dark, and the street of our small crescent empty. Christmas bulbs outline the houses. There are borders of ribbons lights and dangling icicle lights, nets of lights spread over bushes, and necklaces of light twined around trees. And somehow, the lights against the night make the season, make life, seem even more wondrous.

Samantha is out of town, visiting friends in Ottawa.

I learn what happened later.

She is driving alone along a highway for the return trip home when a deer suddenly appears at the side of her car, emerging from the night as if by magic.

Samantha hits the deer, and her back tire flies off.

She works to regain control, but can’t.

The small red car full flips over once, twice, three times. It crashes through brush, and comes to a stop upside down. The windows are shattered, the car smashed.

The call comes soon after. It is Samantha. She stands alone, crying at the side of the road. She is bruised. She is frightened. But alive. And miraculously, uninjured.

People come to help her.

Samantha worries about items scattered across the field and in the ditch. Her watch and jewelry have been flung out of her purse with the force of the crash. She isn’t thinking straight. I can tell. She’s in shock.

“Leave them,” I say. “They aren’t important. You’re important.”

I hear the sirens in the distance, and I thank God, thank Goddess, for the people who have stopped to help. Christmas is about all kinds of miracles.

The Miracle has been slightly edited from the original “coffee can” version.

Solitary Journey

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:28:38 -0400

The train glides through walls of muted shades - white and grey and beige and burnt brown. Water gushes from the rock faces, spills into catch basins far below. A trestle reaches deep across a valley, and we travel the tightrope. Beneath me, a road unwinds, thin like an animal’s trail.

“Bear,”someone shouts, and there is it, lumbering in the shallows of a slate-grey river that cuts through the rock.

Here, in the Rockies, the train bends around corners, unlike prairies, where travel follows the straight and narrow. This arching of journey through landscape pleases me. I peer ahead while we navigate a curve in the track. The sight of the train rounding the bend, the long string of cars ahead of me, gives the sense of moving through time and space. The sense of journey.

I do not stay still. There is motion to my life.

I travel.
_____

Travelling alone, I’ve discovered an inner strength, an ability to take care of myself, and to entertain myself. I have no other person to depend upon to reach destination, to navigate geography, both interior and exterior. It is uncharted territory and I draw the map.

“I’m proud of you,” my husband tells me during a phone call along return journey. He is a solitary traveller himself.

The train has stopped to restock in Jasper. The temperature is near freezing and it is summer. For the first time along my trip it is truly cold, almost Canadian.

My warm clothes are packed and my luggage is checked. I scurry across the no-man’s land between the Jasper station and a strip of tourist shops to buy a sweater. The shops are quaint, and with the mountains looming, there is the sense of village in the Alps.

My cell phone is pressed to my ear, and I take in the scenery as I listen. My husband’s voice is breaking up, but I hear his words. He doesn’t have to say them, but I like that he does. I know he is proud of me. Proud of my independence. Proud of my journey. Proud of my map-making.

The cell gives a small measure of security, a link with the familiar, with home. But for most of journey, there is no service. We make contact when the train slides into larger urban centres. When the train rolls out again, the phone is dead and I am on my own.

Today, my husband and I don’t get a chance to say goodbye. The connection is cut. It is part of travel.

I shiver at the cold, push through the doors of the nearest souvenir store. There are racks of sweatshirts with Jasper stamped across them, fluffy jackets, wool sweaters. Clothes hang on the walls like pictures, and there are thick socks and moccasins for sale. I am not the only unprepared tourist. We spur an industry.

Behind glass countertops, jade jewellery. I look at the pieces wistfully, wanting to linger over them. Then I glance at the train, gauge intent, as if the train is an animal and might bolt, leave me behind.

I buy a fleece, the colour of pumpkin. Rub the material against my skin. Pull off the tags, tug on the shirt, right here in the shop. Leave the collar high around my neck, up over my chin, peer out from my shell.

I am re-enforced, ready to continue journey. Feel warm again. It is a good feeling.

Solitary travel does that, isolates things, magnifies the small sensory pleasures that get lost in everyday living, as if to say, Notice this? This, too, is what it means to be alive.

The animal on the track stirs. Hisses, then makes that jolting sound when one car is yanked into motion by another, metal against metal.

I take a final look at Jasper. Snap the photograph for my mind’s eye. Feel regret at the leaving. Promise myself to return someday. Make Jasper a destination on its own.

And I climb back up into the belly of the train.
_____

It is a different perspective, being the person in the automobile waiting at the cross guards for the train to pass. Much different from being the person sitting in the train, looking out the window, watching the automobiles wait, a long tail of them, and then passing them all by.

Sometimes I forget the bigger picture, my place in it.

From my window, I wonder why the cars are at a standstill, what keeps them from their journey, what holds them up. Maybe there has been an accident.

Then I realise with a start it is this train. The cross guards are down, the lights flash. I hold them up. They wait for me.

Maybe the real difference in perspective is between standing still and moving, between not travelling and travelling. Regardless, the passing of a train evokes response.

At first I think it is the train itself, big and powerful, but as I travel the country, I come to realise it is the passing by of the train.

The movement, the sense of journey, the adventure, the mysterious - after all, no one knows who is on that train.

Where she goes. What she does.

Why.
_____

Somewhere along journey, at a point where concrete gives way to dirt roads and farmer’s fields, a convertible, top down, stops for the train.

From the front seats, two young women wave. They are full of energy, so full of life that I’m left with the feeling the molecules vibrate within them at a higher frequency than the rest of us.

I can’t hear music, but I’ve no doubt it blares from the speakers. The two bounce, sweep arms at the train in wide arcs.

The chick in the driver’s seat wears a funny straw hat with a large brim. She makes me laugh, and I wave back. The word chick comes to mind easily. It is the perfect word to describe her. If ever there was a chick, it’s this young woman in this trendy canary-yellow sports car.

At a country outpost, an older woman out for an evening stroll waves at the train, too, but with less abandonment. It is her wild act, this little wave, I can tell by her hesitancy. But she can’t resist the urge, feels good for it. I see the response all along the route, right across the breadth of country.

In Northern Ontario, a cottage breaks through the denseness of geography, juts out of the forests and rock. There, I catch swift sight of a porch facing the passing of the train.

Two full-size figures stand shoulder to shoulder on the porch. Each raise an arm at us. I do a double take. Look quickly back. Confirm what I see. One full-size figure is a bear. The bear stands high on its back haunches, two menacing paws raised, and as big as a grizzly. The other full-size figure is a man. He stands, too, bare-chested and pot-bellied, and also grizzly. The man hikes up his beer bottle, salutes us as we pass by.

I realise with a start that the bear is not real, but a life-size woodcarving. Then I doubt my eyes, and think the man is the life-size woodcarving. Just as quickly as they come into my view, they are gone.

Later, travelling at the edge of yet one more wild and isolated lake, I see a single boat. It is a plain boat, aluminium, with a small outboard motor, a real putt-putter. A man hunches at the stern, manoeuvres the stick of the motor with one hand reaching back. A little girl sits at the bow. Both wave in unison at the passing of train.

The man and little girl, like others along the way, are located at too far of a distance to distinguish individual passengers. To know whether we travellers see them, acknowledge their actions, wave back or not. It doesn’t matter.

They wave anyway. They wave at the train, and the idea of train. There is something worthy in the journey, worthy of acknowledgment.

____

This travelogue was originally published in Stones Turned. Stories and Poems of Journey, and is part of my reflections during a trip alone by train to the West Coast.

Retreating

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:14:25 -0400

Earlier this summer, my friend Dianne and I paddled the Saugeen River, since she had bought a farm in the area, and the Saugeen is now her home river. We searched websites to find the best stretch to paddle first time out, and narrowed it down to two choices. After more deliberation, we decided that although one route was calmer, it also had three portages, and we felt too lazy to get out of our kayaks to carry them up banks and across concession roads. We’d take the route without portages, where we’d paddle through clay-sand bluffs, populated by cliff-dwelling birds, kingfishers and swallows. Along the way, the description said, the river bottlenecked somewhat, resulting in a stretch of rapids that would provide “excitement for the novice and veteran paddler alike.”

After a kilometre or two of quiet meandering river, our first inkling of approaching “excitement” was the sound of water rushing in the distance. Not quite a roar, not Niagara Falls, but loud enough that you heard the tumbling of water well in advance of seeing it. The river is higher this year than usual, and maybe that accounts for the unexpected bouncing ride we experienced over and over along the route. Since we had expected a paddle that novices could easily navigate, Dianne hadn’t worn a sprayskirt, and her kayak collected a layer of rapids-splash in the bottom. A sharp swift turn in the current, and all that water must have rolled to one side, and “thar she goes”! Woman overboard! A moment of “no Dianne” - the flat bottom of the kayak floating at the surface - and then up she pops. On shore, we rock the boat back and forth to empty out the water, and off we go again, grinning away, amused by our choice - the three portages beginning to sound a lot less energetic than the route we took because we felt lazy…

This same friend and I are now at a writing retreat on Lake Simcoe. We come twice yearly, once in the deep of lake-frozen, fish-hut winter, the lake becoming what I might imagine to be a futuristic moonscape, populated with clusters of outposts or way stations. Moon travelers and moon colonists in their space suits/snow suits, moon-mobiles zipping across the lake’s outer crust, the moon’s outer crust, long barren stretches of moon-arctic lake, moon-drifts/snowdrifts. But that’s the January retreat, the winter lake viewed on high from an expanse of windows, the retreat house on a cliff facing the water. Now it is August, the deep of kayak-glory summer, and we’ve rented a smaller chalet on the same property. The summer lake is temperamental and large, with quickly changing moods, its thunderstorms and dark skies and white-capped water, almost like an angry father. I think of my own father, his moods, and then his description of my grandfather as a dark storm, storm clouds quickly moving in, without warning.

Always at the summer retreat there is the gift of a few days when the lake is still and gentle, and at peace with itself. On these days, I put writing aside and alternate between taking the sea kayak out deeper into the lake, crossing the bays as the crow flies, or should I say the Canada Geese, and taking out my smaller kayak, a crossover boat that does shorelines well, lets me hug the edges, revel in the delights that only shoreline can offer. On this retreat, with two out of seven days suitable for paddling, I have taken out both boats, first the sea kayak, and now the crossover. There is no easy put-in point from the retreat property. I have to pull the boat down from a meter or so height of rickety old dock, through the odd spider web, and a canopy of lovely tree branches that spill over the water.

I’m sandal-footed, standing on shore in a spongy carpet of soft seaweed, with its little eco-sphere of critters and bug-life. I tug at the boat until the stern sits on the seaweed, and the bow floats in the water. I step into the cockpit, skirt myself in, and push off. And then the boat is free. There is always this little shared celebration between boat and woman at that moment, when the boat is no longer hampered, no longer moored, floats unencumbered. It is one of my favourite moments of paddling, and I always marvel at that feeling of lightness, being held by water, atop water.

The new dock further over has been decked out with “sails,” joyful open coverings that offer shade and a pleasant place to read and think and create. The retreat property is filled with so many such little spots, benches purposefully placed for renewal, contemplating. It is a careful balance of untamed and tamed, bright gardens, woodlands emptying out into a stone labyrinth for walking meditation, and at the far end of the property, a native wildflower and grass meadow. Through the centre of the meadow, a path of mulch has been laid down. When you walk the trail, long grasses brush against your legs and arms, and at this time of year, there are oh so many grasshoppers, popping-pop-pop, action and sound. Follow the path to the very centre of meadow, and you discover a chair, an invitation to sit, and observe, and listen, and marvel.

Near the waterfront “sails,” a visiting nun is sitting on a lawn chair, in her bathing suit, bathing in the sun (dare I write the nun is sunbathing? Somehow, it doesn’t seem write/right). I shout a hello from my boat. I really shouldn’t disturb her personal retreat, but I feel an urge to communicate. Are you enjoying your stay? I ask, and then tell her we are renting the chalet. “You’re The Writers,” she says back (and that’s how we’re known by the nuns, have been known for several years now, all of us clumped together under the proper noun, The Writers). “But you’re not writing,” she adds, and I feel as if I’ve been scolded.

I leave the nun to the sun (a rhyme), and paddle my crossover kayak up-lake (is there an up-lake to lake, in the way there is an upstream to river?). Two muskrats scurry along the tightrope branches of a fallen tree, and a party of itsy-bitsy fish pops across the surface, not unlike the grasshoppers. I round a small wharf and stroke past fishermen, stroke around the shorelines of some very rich properties. Here, the boathouses are larger than many suburban houses, including mine. One in particular looks like it must house the Queen Mary. The boathouse resembles a Mennonite Meeting House, long and white, and at first I think it is a hall or a church building. Several of the properties have German Shepherds, foxes, grey wolves on the large lawns facing the water. At first, I thought the animals were real, but when on return journey they were still sitting pretty, in the exact same spot, in the exact same position, I began to suspect… Then a woman tucked one of the German Shepherds under her arm, and walked away with it, just like that – placed the dog in another spot. I paddled closer, and the woman and I struck up a conversation. She said the dogs are decoys to stop the Canada Geese from congregating. She moves them daily to keep the Geese from figuring out the truth. It must work - there are no geese on her lawn. A few properties “up-lake”, I paddle by a raft with geese settled on it. The geese sit next to an owl decoy that has fallen over. They are not fooled, and I am amused.

Although I only paddle this way once a year, my paddle-memory comes back to me, and I recognize the small peninsula where the water is suddenly very shallow, and the waves, reacting to the gradient of the bottom, makes the boat do funny things, tugs slightly, tracks oddly. It is midday, mid-week, and the lake is quiet. Along the shoreline, several sun umbrellas are folded down. A strap tightens each so that the umbrella is cinched. From the viewpoint of water, the white one looks like the small statue in the middle of one of the retreat gardens. At first that is exactly what I think it is, a Mother Mary statue, until my eye adjusts and my brain says “umbrella.” I see the umbrellas all along the lake, but in various colours. The black ones look like priests, and the brown ones like cowled monks.

I round the last bay that I have explored in the past – ponder whether I want to extend my mapping by paddling further, add to the paddle-memory storage places/spaces in my brain. The sun is hot. I haven’t brought water with me. The informal paddle plan I left with “The Writers” back at the nunnery doesn’t leave much leeway for exploring, and I don’t want to worry them by being late. There is also that thing about lake – the return journey to starting point. Whatever distance you paddle “out,” you need to re-paddle back, so you double your time. Still, it will be another year since I come this way again. I decide to paddle a few more bays, cover new ground, or rather, new water. On the second bay, I am intrigued to see a bicyclist on a road or trail close to the shoreline, and then two women power-walking. A small path leads down to the water.

I beach the boat, pull myself up and out, stick my paddle into the cockpit like a flag stuck into the surface of the moon, claiming the territory, claiming the boat, claiming the voyage. I climb up the little hill, not unlike, I’m sure to the observer, a strange sea-monster. Kayaking gear is so weird-looking to the uninitiated – lifejacket, spray skirt hanging down and around to my knees, shorter in the back. It’s the way it fits around the cockpit when you sit in the boat, but out of the boat, looks like a skirt on backwards. There’s also a large loop that hangs from the front bottom hem, where you pull if you need to “wet exit” the boat quickly and you’re upside down in the water. Then the rest of my get-up, my baseball cap that I keep just for kayaking, and my sunglasses, my rubber beach sandals.

I emerge into a waterfront park, at the edge of the Town of Georgina, complete with a playground, and baseball diamonds, and a parking lot, and a wide trail. Off in the distance, there are four of those portable toilet stations – not unlike those winter fishing huts. Now that I am close to a toilet, I realize how badly I have to go. I scurry over, in my sea-monster outfit, join two men who must have had the same urge, but on land – they are motorcyclists. Well, if I look a sea monster, they look like Satan Choicers. They look at me as if I look extremely odd, and I wonder if they’ve looked in a mirror lately…

Bladder happily empty I return to my kayak (once while paddling the St. Lawrence, I climbed from my boat up onto a small rock of an island, squatted, hoisted up my sprayskirt – at that very moment a tour boat glided by, passengers pointing at me – I’m not sure they realized what I was doing…). I paddle back to the retreat property, past the Mother Mary umbrellas; the real nun at the dock has gone back to her cabin, or to walk the labyrinth, or whatever nun-things she does. I stroke my way to the shore, step into the soft spongy seaweed, climb up on the dock, pull out the boat - and if it might be said the nun has returned to doing nun-things, I return to the cottage and do writer things.

It is wonderful to have discovered the waterfront park. There are other delights, too, unique to this retreat – a porcupine that comes to the back porch – up the steps. And a fox that plays like a small dog, tosses in the air sweet rotting apples that have fallen to the ground, then eats them. I would never have expected a fox to be so small, being an urban raised person, or for its tail to be so light and fluffed, that the tail would stretch out the way it does, behind the fox, as it trots. How the fox grooms itself, sits with its legs folded underneath it, like a deer, or a colt. How it stalks a squirrel, but doesn’t attack, but rather jumps as if might attack, knowing full well that the squirrel will make it safely up the tree. How when it spots me (not being a tame fox, as it shouldn’t be) it lifts its very large ears, runs away, at times bounding. I wouldn’t have known that foxes bound like that…

____

Dianne and I lift the sea kayak onto the roof of my car. The sea kayak is long, and loading it is a two-person job. I plan to drive the two hours back to my hometown to attend a computer seminar, then return to the retreat for a final full day of writing. Weather predictions call for rain. I don’t need two boats with me at the retreat (although I can carry two kayaks atop my car), and decide to drop the larger boat one off at home. I tightly tie down the sea kayak, double-check my knots, triple-check them. The winds were large driving to the retreat, and the boats acted like a sail, the car pulling to one side. The sea kayak hangs over the back bumper, and I dangle a little red flag from the end near the rudder. I enjoy this preparatory aspect of kayaking – loading and taking down the boats - kayaking isn’t only the paddling but the complete experience. (I also delight in bungee cords, and a package of various sized cords is one way to my heart).

Twelve kilometres into journey, along the first of three major highways I need to travel, I hear a sound. The bow of my sea kayak lists starboard, threatening to tip, veering off to the side. I imagine with horror the boat bouncing into the path of traffic. I put on my emergency flashers, slow down. I’m already in the slow lane, but this is not what the highway planners meant by slow lane….

I pull off to the side of the road, but there isn’t much “side” to this road, and no gas stations, or businesses. I inspect what has happened. A piece of the cradle has broken off, the small bracket that keeps the J shaped metal pieces holding the boat in place. I’m still an hour and a half from my destination. I do have room for two boats on my carrack – and one of those places is empty, since I left the crossover at the retreat. But that would mean unloading the sea kayak by myself on the side of a very busy highway, and somehow loading it up to the other side of the car, a dangerous prospect. I don’t want to be “smushed” by passing traffic.

An unexpected calm washes over me. I will figure it out. I’m no longer my father’s daughter, not in this situation. He distrusted his own abilities, did not give his children the opportunity to “fix” things – to problem solve– especially mechanical breakdowns, or technical tasks that involved putting things together, even basic tasks like using a screwdriver. If he were with me today, he’d be “smushed” at the side of the road trying to move that boat over in the fastest way possible; he certainly wouldn’t have given me (or himself for that matter), adequate time to ponder the situation, plan a solution, execute it safely.

I secure the broken cradle with rope and bungee cords. Not much of a solution, I know. I also know I can’t drive this way for very long. I punch instructions into the GPS. The lady who lives inside it sets route for the nearest gas station. First, I will have to drive (limp) two kilometres to an off-ramp. The sea kayak still lists but not as badly as before, and a stream of cars whizzes by, giving me wide berth, warned by the flashers. Ms GPS leads me on a circuitous route through the countryside and an industrial park to a CANGO gas station that is obviously deserted, permanently closed. The wind has picked up. I don’t know how much longer the makeshift repair will hold. As her second choice, Ms GPS takes me to a Petro Canada at the edge of a place called Stouffville. I pull into the parking lot, grateful to be off the road.

I untie the ropes and bungee cords, tip and slip the sea kayak down the front window shield like a giant sleigh down a hill, counting on gravity to help me out. I stop myself just in time from pulling the boat completely to the ground, let the kayak lean on an angle, rest again the windshield and hood, little red flag flapping in the wind. It occurs to me that I can do this myself, without begging help from a passerby to lift the boat from the ground and up onto the undamaged side of my carrack. I slide the stern over to the other side of the car, straighten out the bow while it was still on the hood, and then push the boat back up. The kayak is long, but not heavy, made of a light composite material. I marvel at how easy the task… And then there it is, sea kayak back up on the car, and securely tied. I instruct Ms GPS to take me home.

All is well, and I learn an important kayak lesson, to check the bolts and rust and bits of the carrack and the cradle, not simply to check how securely the ropes and bungee cords are tied. According to Ms GPS, I will still make it home in time for that computer seminar. But then my usual route is unexpectedly blocked off for repair, and I have to take the busier 401 through Toronto, sea kayak, damaged cradle, and all. Ms GPS, recalculates, recalculates, and then in Mississauga, suddenly there is a storm of garbage bags flying across the three lanes of highway, caught in the wind like black ghosts, frantic demons, fifty large bags, under and over cars. About a mile or so further “downstream,” down-highway, a man has parked his truck at the side of the road, works to secure his painting paraphernalia, ladder, and drop cloths, and paint cans, but obviously, no garbage bags…

I do indeed make it to the computer seminar, although that is a bonus, and under the circumstances, if I had missed it, so be it. I also safely make return journey to the retreat later that evening - thankfully, gratefully, retreat back into the peace of the place, into the stillness, into the quiet, into the writing.

Mad Jack

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:55:43 -0400

Some might call it mid-life crisis. I prefer to call it growing adventuresome with age. A few years ago, I got a tattoo, a funky haircut, bought a Can-Rail pass and took off alone on a train trip. My pass allowed me to go wherever the train tracks led. Along the way, often in remote areas that appeared inaccessible by foot, the rugged wilderness of Canada, I’d look out the train window and see small monuments - rock piled on top of rock. These little inuksuk must have taken great efforts to create, perched on granite cliffs or other precarious outcrops. What is it in human beings that leads us to build our own tiny personal stonehenges?

The same spirit, I suspect, the leads us to make journeys, whether personal journeys of interior landscape to put words on paper, or exterior journeys that lead to the unexpected discoveries, the stuff of which to write. The story that follows is a colourful bit of some of that “stuff.” Imagine being locked in a room with someone you want to escape, but the room has no doors. You realise with a start that there is no escape; you can’t get out. Imagine that, and you’ll have an inkling of what travelling alone for an extended trip can be like – well, at least when the person who takes the empty seat beside you is someone like Mad Jack.

----

I sleep on the train with a stranger. It is the perfect word to describe him. I’ve never met anyone stranger than Jack. I secretly nickname him Mad Jack.

I suppose I should feel complimented.

After all, Mad Jack has chosen me.

Mad Jack arrives late, long after “All Aboard” and just before the train rolls out of the Vancouver station. From the aisle, he eyes the last two empty seats. He must pick one, the seat beside me, or the one beside a young woman who reads Margaret Atwood and looks very angry. He pauses, and then eases his lanky body next to mine.

Mad Jack sits with his knees wide apart. He squeezes a transparent drawstring bag into the space between his legs. The bag bulges with items shoved into it – blanket, pillow, jacket, clothes, towels, paperback book. Right on top, as if an afterthought, is a disposal camera, one of those cheap little things that non-photographers like me buy because we can’t figure out the finicky settings on a real camera.

As the train picks up speed, one mean-looking Via Rail broad reads us the riot act. Cause any trouble and she’ll put us off at the next stop, she says in her Welcome Aboard spiel. I have no doubt that she’d do it single-handedly and with immense pleasure. I feel as if I am in high school again.

After the riot act, the same lady scrutinises the passengers as if scouting. She stops beside Mad Jack and me. She’s found her man. And her woman, it seems.

She points out an axe stored behind glass. Will we use it to smash the window if the train derails? she asks us. Mad Jack grins. Of course we will. The Via Rail broad is pleased. Assigns him another task, too. Mad Jack is put in charge of the exit in the event of an emergency. He’s the door monitor.

Since Mad Jack and I are both travelling to Toronto from Vancouver, we are destined to spend a lot of time together. Twenty-four seven, in fact.
Well, twenty-four three. The trip will take three days and nights of non-stop travel, except for a few stops along the way where they let us out to stretch our legs for an hour or so. Jasper, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Sioux Lookout.

Mad Jack and I are the paupers of train travel, travelling economy, so we don’t get a berth in a sleeper car. We’ll be sleeping side by side in our seats.

By the time we reach Kamloops, I have a detailed picture of Mad Jack’s many talents. Mad Jack, it seems, is a Jack-of-all-trades. He works in the film industry. Not just on National Film Board and CBC productions, but on some pretty big budget, Hollywood-style movies. Television too, do I recognise him from X-Files?

Mad Jack says he’s an actor, stuntman, producer, film editor, radio interviewer, acting coach, movie director, scriptwriter (there’s a plot about famous dead actors and outer space that he’s afraid I’ll steal) and a director of photography for major films.

I look at his bag again. Note the throwaway camera. An odd choice for a director of photography of major films. And why is he travelling economy?

A flirtation stirs in the seats behind me. Three young men compete for the attention of a pretty woman headed East after attending a photography seminar in British Columbia. I tune them in, tune Jack out.

One voice stands out. The voice is drenched in that sexiness and cultured intellect that is a trademark of European men. (They sound sexy and smart, even if they’re not). The sexy voice says he is a photojournalist. I smirk. He probably has a disposable camera in his bag, too.

An hour disappears into the Rockies as if we’ve entered some kind of Bermuda Triangle North. The couples travelling together burrow in for the night, legs and arms draped over one other, heads dug into shoulders.

Mad Jack and I are careful not to touch, even though his legs and arms dangle over into my space. He’s not fat. He’s quite the opposite, skinny.
He’s just, well, so long.
_____

That first night together, Mad Jack’s eyes glow excitedly in the dark. It is almost frightening, really, now that I think about it.

He tells me about another one of his passions. Guerrilla filmmaking.
“That’s when you haven’t got your permits in order,” he explains in a rush, “and there’s a scene you just have to shoot. So you drop in terrorist style, stage it fast, and get out of there before the police show up. Like the time we set off this massive explosion in downtown Vancouver.”

Mad Jack wears a vest with the name of a film production company stamped across the back. The lettering is faded. He could have picked the vest up at a thrift shop, I think warily. And he did tell me that story about his father being a psychiatrist at an asylum for the criminally insane. When Mad Jack was a boy, his dad regularly invited to family dinners inmates doing time for such everyday things as murdering their mothers.

Mad Jack’s stories are so wild, so mad, so many, that they are hard to believe. He’s either telling the absolute truth, or he’s a pathological liar.
I must have glanced at the disposable camera. Mad Jack feels the need to explain. He says he found the camera on the bench at the train station. Well, he wasn’t about to leave behind a perfectly good camera, it only had one picture taken. His own camera is gingerly packed and checked into the baggage compartment. Since he plans to work while on an extended vacation in Ontario, he brought far more than the 50-pound limit allowed each passenger, had to pay extra to bring along his specialised computer film editing equipment. That’s why he was late boarding. And, since he decided at the last minute to take the train instead of driving, the only ticket available was economy.

Psychopaths are smart, I’ve heard. Can make you believe anything.
Right now, Mad Jack acts out a scene while sitting in his train seat, mimes punching out Sean Penn’s lights during filming of a movie (Mr. Penn was extremely rude and deserved it). He segues smoothly to a prison scene where Mad Jack played opposite Robert DeNiro. Mad Jack was so realistic in the role of a vicious con that Bob (that’s Robert to the rest of us who aren’t on such friendly terms) was scared shitless by the portrayal. Bob thought Jack should win an Academy Award for his acting, but the scene ended up on the cutting room floor. And then there’s the story about Bob ordering take-out from a Parisian restaurant and sending his personal jet to pick it up from location on a beach in British Columbia.

Canada is a vast country. I now understand this geographical fact in a new way.

I put on my earphones as Mad Jack says something about Antonio Banderas and Omar Sharif (earphones, a travel tip on how to avoid talking with a chatty seatmate), and listen to Amanda Marshall belt out, “Everybody’s got a story…”
_____

After that first night crunched up together, Mad Jack trusts me enough to tell me his conspiracy theories. After the second night together, I start to believe them.

I am a reasonable person. It is frightening, my quick descent into the conspiratorial quagmire.

I find myself nodding in agreement, adding a few theories of my own. Mad Jack and I, we’re kindred souls by now. Trains do that to you.

“They never landed on the moon,” Mad Jack says.

“Yeah, I heard that one,” I answer.

“As a director of photography, I know a few things the average person doesn’t, and those shots they showed us on television, without getting technical, they’re not right.”

We touch upon JFK, then move along to the Better Business Bureau. “Okay, think about it,” he says in a low voice, “BBB.”

He waits, as if it should mean something to me.

He gives me more clues. “Think of lower case letters, bbb. What does that remind you of? What numbers?”

“Ahhhh,” I say, either the conspiracy lights turning on or my brain cells turning off. “666. The number of the Anti-Christ. The Four Horseman. Revelations. The Apocalypse.”

My seatmate is pleased. He thinks he’s made the right choice. A woman who knows the meaning of 666.

Mad Jack doesn’t wear a watch but carries a Radio Shack personal organiser in his coat pocket. He’s programmed it with the canteen smoking schedule. The canteen car is the only place where smokers are allowed to satisfy their nicotine cravings, and then only according to a strict timetable set by Via Rail.

I don’t smoke, but I know the schedule off by heart. Remind Mad Jack ten minutes before it is time.

He looks at me gratefully, and then disappears. Thinks I’m just about perfect. A real goddess. A woman who knows 666 and doesn’t begrudge a guy his smokes – even reminds him when its time to go inhale some carcinogenics.

With Mad Jack gone, I stretch across our two seats. It is a delight to stretch. I now understand the wisdom of the phrase “life’s small pleasures.” Quickly fall asleep.

Too soon, I awake to Mad Jack poking my legs. I must have been in a deep sleep. Maybe a coma. He doesn’t poke gently.

Later, I stand in the aisle, debating what to do.

I’ve been away from my seat for about a half-hour, treated myself to last call dinner in the coach dining car. Splurged, defiantly order the baked salmon. Blew the rest of my food budget in true guerrilla-film fashion.

Mad Jack stretches his lanky frame across my seat. Sleeps soundly. Since mine is the window seat, I think for a moment that I’ll have to crawl over him. But then, instead, I lean over, poke vehemently. After all, he poked first. Mad Jack stirs, swings his long legs back in front of his own seat, lets me by.

A round moon sits large on the flat line of prairie. I try to cover my body with the coffin-narrow, Via Rail blanket, but it just won’t stretch far enough. It’s mathematically impossible. Either my elbows stick out or my ankles.

“You know Elvis isn’t really dead,” Mad Jack says. “The King lives on a deserted island in the Pacific with Marilyn Munro, James Dean and John Lennon.”

“But the island wouldn’t be deserted, would it?” I say, pondering the facts. “I mean, if they’re all living there together…”

Mad Jack arches an eyebrow. Shakes his head knowingly. Smiles enigmatically. “That’s what the BBB would want you to believe,” he says.

Of course, I think. It all comes down to 666.

There was a strange comfort to that thought, which I’m at a loss to explain when the train trip is finally over. But right now, rolling across these vast isolated stretches of Canada, passengers settling for the night, voices quiet, lights dimmed, I feel an odd satisfaction. Settle into my seat for another night, another province, another story, another conspiracy theory…
______

Story Postscript: While Mad Jack was off smoking, I stole a look at the name on the VIA Rail luggage tag tied to his bag. When I got home from my train trip, I typed the name into my computer search engine along with the Production Company stamped across his vest, expecting nothing. Surely Mad Jack’s wild claims to movie fame were all just part of a wilder imagination. But I scored a clear hit right away. Both the man and the Production Company exist, located in the little town along the Vancouver Island shoreline - as told to me during that train journey.

This travelogue was originally published in the anthology, Stones Turned. Stories and Poems of Journey.

The Changing River

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:51:38 -0400

“No woman ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and she's not the same woman.” (Revision of a quotation from Heraclitus, Greek philosopher, 535 BC-475 BC)

Slender sharp-winged, dark-winged birds. Gliding and diving across and over and around my kayak. Skimming the surface and veering upward, downward, “darting” the river. Their motion is unexpected, their patterns unpredictable, but not haphazard. Their flight is full of control, and full of beauty. Beauty-full.

Swallows swallow me. I cannot count the the birds, although it is a blip of humankind to want to quantify, to attach a number to the experience. I will guess there are a hundred of them, swooping this stretch of river. I wish I had eyes in the back of my head so I can full-y experience this swallowing – 360 degree vision, full circle, all at once, all around, so many swallows, a flight of swallows.

We humans are so limited by the placement of our eyes. Why is that? What trek of evolution put our eyes at the front of our heads so that we primarily see forward, a narrow path of vision - heighty-ho, onward and frontward? We have such little peripheral vision, not like the birds themselves, with their eyes situated on each side of their heads. What do they see that we don’t? Ultraviolet light, for one, perceiving the sun in ways we cannot, perhaps seeing other rays and waves that we cannot, magnetic forces and electrical fields.

Humans, I suppose, like to peer straight ahead, into their future. This understanding of time as a continuum rather than a single dot, a single moment - I’ve wondered if that is the knowledge gained by Eve with the bite of the apple, and if that knowledge is both a blessing and curse. But I shouldn’t put any further curses on Eve, she’s had enough of that throughout history. I’ve often thought she should be praised, rather than maligned, for setting in motion consciousness, having the courage and curiosity to take that meaning-full first bite, that fruitful, fruit-full bite. To have stayed in the Garden would have meant to step in the river and have it always the same. River and woman unchanging.

So here I am paddling, a continuum of paddles, to quantify, a hundred paddles on a hundred different days, days populated with change - herons and osprey and carp and raccoons and deer and turtles and muskrats, days of flat-water and days of crashing water, wind-less conditions and wind-filled conditions, sun skies and cloud skies. Banks overflowing with water, river high, and drought-dried summers, rocks exposed, river rock gardens, river low. Loons and ducks and Canada Geese, the loons the solitary ones, the Jungian introverts of the bird-world, diving deep and long, surfacing down the lake, down the river, “looning” to locate their inner circle, their few dearest loved ones. Canada Geese, the extroverts of the river, flying overhead in huge honking party-gatherings, en masse settling on the beach to sunbathe or to float in water.

I love the way birds keep track of each other, volley back and forth honks, sometimes just a hello, here we are, come join us if you wish, other times warnings, intruder off to the left, incoming unidentified paddling object, and then the call-to-battle cries, baby-snatcher, egg-snatcher, imminent home invasion, prepare for attack. It is the last communiqué in particular that I heed with haste, paddling quickly away from the shoreline nests, sometimes island nests, when the Canada Geese hidden in the brush become unhidden, plop into the water and head determinedly, menacingly, in my direction. Those birds are big, fast, their beaks potentially lethal.

Once in the midst of lake, I counted a line of thirty-two ducks, literally in line, one after the other, out for an extended family afternoon paddle, some mature ducks, others adolescents, no longer babies, not yet adults. I had an overwhelming urge to join the back of that line, tag along, just one very big oversized duck, the awkward relative – we all have one in each family - the lug. I thought I just might be able to pull it off. A kayak’s outline with the kayaker sitting upright in the boat isn’t outlandishly different from the outline of a duck or goose, body shaped like a football, long neck, head, extended up like the upper body of the paddler. I softened my stroke, moved slowly, quietly. A kayak can do that, sneak up, unlike a swimmer who causes splash and rippling, or a motorboat with its motor sounds, or even a canoe riding up high in the water. A flock of humans might have been fooled, what with their eyes in the front of their heads, their into-the-future vision, but the ducks saw my approach, and quietly dispersed into smaller groupings. My urge “to follow the duck leader” was somewhat satisfied; I had come quite close to joining the end of that line. Urges in themselves are inexplicable, swelling up from the deep of the unconscious without apparent reason. I’ve also seen a flock of seagulls sitting white and pretty on the water’s surface, and had the opposite urge – to race up smack into their midst and scatter them.

A hundred different paddles, a hundred different experiences. When written in succession, like those thirty-two ducks in a row, the changes in the river seem spectacular, such spectacles. More often they are subtle, a solitary and simple happening against the waterscape of the familiar. A feather floating past my cockpit, touching the surface at a single point of contact, the “featherets” caught in the breeze and serving as sails. The moving black shadow of a slew of nano-size waterbugs, hover-crafting across the water. A bee, mammoth in comparison to the water-bugs, wings water-sopped, trapped by the water’s surface tension, bee floating in the lake like a capsized sailor lost at sea. I’ve scooped up such a bee with my paddle blade, tipping it onto the solar-heated hull, knowing full well that when the wings dried out, the same bee might sting me, skirted as I am into my boat, in the middle of the river, with nowhere to go in a bee-sting hurry. I’ve wondered if other such bees have drowned, or when left to nature, the whims of wind and water, they have eventually floated ashore, beached on sand or pebble, exhausted, barely alive, but alive.

Bees aren’t the only items I have scooped from the water with my paddle. Once, on the Grand River, just past the put-in point at Blair, the water moving briskly, a troll floated by me. One of those tiny, naked, sexless rubber dolls that were so popular many a-year ago, the ones with wild hair, usually pink or green, sticking straight up and styled like a candle flame. This troll had been in the water so long that it was bald. It now sits beside me as I type at my keyboard in my writing room. The bald troll looks happy to be here rather than in the river, grinning away, river dirt still clinging to the crevices of its pointy ears. I pick it up, turn it over, and read stamped at the bottom of one foot – Made in China – and on the other – 1992!

How long did that little troll float in the Grand River? Did it become wedged in brush along the water, caught by a tree strainer, the trunk fallen over, branches traffic-jamming anything, everything, passing by? The troll finally breaking free, maybe after a season, maybe after years? Was it caught in an ice-jam, arms outstretched, that silly grin looking up through the ice? Did a child set it afloat, wave goodbye as it set out on journey? Or had she dropped it accidentally, cried to see it go, moved to retrieve it, stopped by the firm grip of her mother’s hand? Or had the troll been flung, like a rock, soared through the air before it landed in the river (can something “land” in water)?

Another time, near one of those islands where I often paddle, where the Canada Geese lie in wait to jump out from nests to chase away kayaks, I saw a goose egg on the bottom in shallow water. Not shallow enough to reach down and pick it up, but shallow enough that I could extend my paddle to touch it. The egg was bigger than I would have thought, bigger than the eggs in my fridge (from free-run hens, I might add), and I now understand how a large bump on the head can be called a goose egg. Viewed from the vantage point of my kayak, the goose egg caught my fancy, and I imagined it was a magic egg, a fairytale egg, a golden egg, a Mother Goose egg, and I wanted to retrieve it, another one of those explicable river urges. What would I have done with a goose egg? Sit it beside the troll at my keyboard? I think not.

I spent a good half hour in my kayak trying to scoop up that egg, much more elusive than the troll. The egg was rubbery, slippery, never made it to the surface; just when I thought I had it, the egg would roll off the “spoon” of the paddle, and sink to the bottom once again. It must have been in the water for a long while, the shell not hard, but soft and giving, like a hardboiled egg peeled. I finally gave up, left the egg to its watery grave, wondering if it had been rolled out of the nest, off the banks and into the water by its mother, the egg a defect and not ever going to hatch. Or whether the egg had blown out of the nest by high winds, and by a freak of nature or bad luck, came to rest at the bottom of the lake, the developing gosling doomed.

Just a paddle or so ago, once again on the Grand River in the water-stretch from Blair to Galt – from whence came the troll - my husband and I spotted a blue heron. The bird is common along the Grand River, but it still stirs awe, makes you feel smart and special when you spot it along the shore or among deadwood, the heron so large and so skilled at camouflage, so quiet and patient in its hunting. This blue heron stood knee deep in the river, so much like a statue, like one of those human mannequins in store windows that don’t move an iota, or only move slightly, that you don’t even know they are human, or if you do know, that you doubt what you know. As we paddled by, paddled closer, still the heron did not move. My husband took a video, and later, when we looked at the clip at home, the camera shaky and the film grainy, we still learning the fine art of paddling and shooting footage at the same time, the heron looked like an ancient dinosaur, a brontosaurus, long thin neck extended upward. You can understand how legends of Loch Ness monsters and Ogopogo monsters get embedded into our collective consciousness – for we have the proof, the photograph of the Grand River Nessie.

Something else struck me as wonderful, and startling, and unexpected about the heron-brontosaurus video, and that was the audio that accompanied it. A symphony of chirping, a river of bird sounds, flowed from the speakers into my computer room. I hadn’t noticed the sounds while I paddled, had been oblivious to the chirping, and here it was, thick and full. How could I have not noticed? Were the sounds always this way on the river, existing in my midst, but not perceived by me, like ultraviolet light? I resolved, resolve, to be more attentive, more observant.

I have put my boat into the river, put my body into my boat. I have stepped into the river, and it has changed me. Each time. Heraclitus, you are right. It is not the same river, and I am not the same woman.

_____
Above and Below the Waterline, my first book of poetry, is slated for release Spring 2011, by BookLand Press. BookLand Press is a member of the Literary Press Group.

On the Road to Heaven

Tue, 6 Jul 2010 11:47:48 -0400

This short story was originally published in Western People, on October 29, 1987. It was written in memory of my grandmother, Alice Lane, and my husband’s grandfather, Fred Paul, who never met, but died a few days apart, and could very well have taken the bus to heaven together. Fred lived into his eighties and Alice her nineties. Although a fictional story, much of the detail is historical, based on family conversations and events. The artwork is a cropped scan from a fading hard copy of the now-defunct magazine. The artist is not credited in the magazine, so is not credited here; however, I thank her (or him) for capturing the spirit of Alice so beautifully.

_____

Fred met Alice on the road to heaven. Alice had died four days earlier, but stayed on Earth to see if the birds living in the eaves trough outside her window would survive the last blast of winter.

“The prairies are like that,” Alice later told Fred with equal measures of fear, respect and humour. “Dare to think about the colour green. Just dare – and winter will knock those early birds whims out of you like last year’s stuffing in a scarecrow. Bury you six feet under the snow and ice and the bitter prairie wind.”

The bus was almost full by the time Alice climbed aboard. Her legs were swollen four times their normal size the day before she died and now made climbing difficult. She reached for the railing alongside the steps and hoisted herself up. One nice thing about being dead, there was no pain. The throbbing had left her legs the moment she closed her eyes and told life it was free to leave.

Fred boarded the bus a few hours earlier in eastern Ontario. He reasoned it was a few hours earlier, but wasn’t certain time still worked, not in the usual fashion anyway, although he appeared to be moving through it at a pretty fast clip. Fred checked his watch. The numbers were hazy and he couldn’t make out the position of the hands. He thought it was his eyesight and felt the familiar rise of anger and embarrassment and frustration. “Old age,” his family had whispered when his eyes had begun to play tricks on him.

Offering Alice his seat was the gentlemanly thing to do, and Fred did it without hesitation, even though he did not know how long he would need to stand. Heaven could be a five-day excursion away or just around the corner. The trip was new to him; he had never died before. Fred thought about asking the bus driver the time of arrival but he didn’t want to be a nuisance. He had lived most of the century on earth without being a bother, and had no intention starting now that he was dead and somewhere else.

“Thank you,” Alice said politely to Fred in the voice she reserved for strangers. She slid her sixty-pound body into the vacant seat, not that her body had substance anymore, at least, not the kind you can measure on the bathroom scales. But she was sixty pounds when she died, and she gave the impression of being sixty pounds now.

The seats were rather big, designed that way by Leonardo da Vinci at the request of Saint Paul to accommodate the variety of body shapes that came that way. “No traveler bound for heaven need experience discomforts again,” Saint Paul had proclaimed sanctimoniously as he whacked the rear end of the new bus with a bottle of wine, hinting (as was his habit) at the abominable conditions on the road to Damascus.

“There is lots of room. Sit down,” Alice told Fred, motioning with her small hand at the huge space left in the oversized seat.

Alice was surprised at her own forwardness, and folded her hands primly in her lap as a reminder of her prairie past. She and Amos had prided themselves on their self-reliance. They had managed quite nicely on the farm, thank you, without the charity of strangers. The clothes on the children may have been well worn, but they were clean. And with a bucketful of ingenuity and recycling, the family never went hungry or cold. Alice had even fashioned underwear for herself and the girls from flour bags, taking great care to scrub the clothes until the ink labels had faded away. She liked to recall the story of the postman’s daughter who, at the annual village Sport’s Day, was spotted to have “First Grade Flour” stamped across her bottom.

Fred hesitated for a moment and accepted the invitation. Sharing a seat with a strange lady on a bus was not something he did very often – in fact, never in the past. Eva was the love of his life and if there was any sharing to be done in this world he preferred to do it with her. Then he remembered with a pang of longing that this world was not a world at all, but some “other-than” place, different from everywhere else he had ever called home. Eva was healthy, except for a deficiency of potassium (which she remedied by eating a banana every day); it could be 10, maybe 12 years before she road the bus to heaven. People need people, Fred thought as he sat down in the corner of the big seat, determined to make the best of this thing called death.

They sat in silence for a long while, looking at the mural on the walls and the ceiling. Fat-bosomed, fat-bellied, fat-thighed ladies swathed in delicate dresses that fluttered about their legs. Naked babies with tiny wings protruding from their backs, standing in the sky or lounging on their stomachs as if supported by an invisible floor. And directly above them (they had to crane their necks to see), a man reaching his arm upward to touch the outstretched hand of God.

“Puuf,” Alice scoffed on the bus on the road to heaven, a more-wind-than-voice comment she saved for people or events she thought downright funny and worthy of her scorn.

“Beg your pardon?” Fred asked.

“Look at that lady in the painting. The lady with a face like a simpleton.”

Staring dreamily into utopia, drunk with the promise of heaven, all the women in the mural had faces like simpletons. Fred found their expression familiar; it had swept across a decade of teenagers at the same time Trudeaumania had swept across the nation. Long haired hippies who lolled aimlessly in the park, smoking funny cigarettes, preoccupied with another place and time Fred did not understand and did not care to understand.

The hippies had moved slowly, as if activity was a bad thing. Fred never doubted the value of hard work, just as he never doubted that only a fool would waste the lead in a pencil to cast a vote for Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

“That lady,” Alice said smugly, after she had given Fred what she considered adequate time to locate the right woman, “would not survive a year on a prairie farm.”

“Not a farm in Ontario, either,” Fred laughed.

It felt good to laugh, and surprisingly right, given the circumstances.

“Are you a farmer?” Alice asked, not recognizing the mistake in verb tense.

“No.”

“Oh,” Alice responded, returning to the too-polite voice reserved for strangers; a farmer, even one you had not yet met, was never a stranger.

“I rose from bed early like a farmer,” Fred said, remembering the coolness of the dawn, the morning stillness, the mist on the river, the waking of the birds, the waking of the world. “Worked hard like a farmer, too. Tended the horses at the dairy, hitched up the wagon, drove to town, waved hello on the way to the men in the fields, delivered the milk to the houses en route. You know, three days before I died, my son served me that sissy stuff they pass for milk nowadays, skimmed stuff. I told him I only drink real milk, homogenized.”

A milkman, a good honest job, almost a farmer if not quite. Alice abandoned the too-polite tone. “Life was no bed of roses on the farm,” she chuckled, as if sharing a joke rather than making a statement of truth that included sorrow and pain and death. “Amos worked damn hard in the field, I’ll give him that, but not any harder than I worked at home. Imagine, six young ‘uns and a grown man to feed. Open my cupboards and you’d wonder what we would eat for supper.”

Fred glimpsed at a memory of himself carving turkey for dinner, Eva mashing potatoes in the kitchen, the two boys squirming in their chairs “starving,” without ever knowing that starving meant much more than stomachs that growled during Sunday School.

“But with the farm animals and the garden and the wild berries, I’d conjure up a meal. My family survived, even during the Dirty Thirties. Maybe only potato soup for dinner, but at least we had dinner, and dessert, too. Always gave the last piece of pie to my youngest lad; maybe that’s why I never looked like her,” Alice laughed, motioning with her tiny head to the abundant lady on the wall.

“I’m sure you worked too hard to look like her,” Fred answered, pleased with himself that he had made an acquaintance.

“Puff,” Alice laughed. “No time to get fat. Too much to do. Wake up at five, round up the cows, drive them home. Oh, the sight of those cows, all wet and sparkling with the morning dew.”

Alice peered into her past; the rooster stretching its baggy neck, crowing up the sun; the turkeys gobbling like gossiping old maids at a church social; the mutt barking at a grasshopper as if warning of an Indian raid; and fried potatoes and eggs on the stove (funny how in the old country Father had hated to eat eggs). “Wake up, Artie! Wake up, Muriel! Oh, Amos, look at the baby, isn’t she a laugh? Jam all over her face and hands! Off to school, now, stop your dawdling! Got a mile and a half to walk, and you dare to dawdle!” Bake bread, do the wash, milk the cows, feed the calves, sew a patch, mend the socks and now here comes Amos into the house for a cup of tea.

The bus stopped suddenly, as if the people waiting at the side of the road to heaven were an afterthought. Alice lurched out of the past with the braking of the wheels. She steadied herself, and folded her hands protectively over a bulge in her coat pocket. “Were you always a milkman?” she asked Fred when the new passengers had boarded and found seats. She now felt comfortable enough with her travelling companion to put aside her prairie reservations and inquire about his life.

“Worked a spell for the Bank of Toronto, gave up banking to become a milkman. Spent 50 years in the dairy business,” Fred said, not having to take the time to figure out the sum. “Half a century! Worked for Ralph’s Dairy, Dye’s Dairy, and Smith’s Dairy. Did every job from driving the milk wagon to control checker. Finally retired at 71; they didn’t put me out to pasture at 65 like they do in the bank.”

The job in the bank was a stroke of luck, presented ample opportunities for advancement, would allow him to retire early, or so people seemed to delight in telling Fred. He saw a vision of himself as he had been – a young man dizzy with dreams, tethered to a desk and milking a never-ending row of numbers.

Fred shoved the bank from his mind and replaced it with a more pleasant memory. The river was busy, strong, so unlike the stagnant ponds in the countryside. They had kept binoculars by the window, making a game of watching the ships as they streamed past their house, identifying their homeports by the flags fluttering at the stern. They had a book, too, and looked up the countries of the flags they did not recognize. But that was the midday river. Sometimes, at night, the St. Lawrence was angry, beating at the shoreline, reminding mankind of its subservience to nature. But in the early morning, when Fred left for the dairy, the river was at peace. As Fred had felt at peace, surrounded by the dawn at the edge of day.

“Were you afraid to die?” Fred asked suddenly.

“Wouldn’t exactly say I was afraid of death but I sure spent a lot of time and energy avoiding it,” Alice chuckled. “Survival was ingrained in me – years of making sure the prairies didn’t defeat me or my family. Oh, it tried, but I fought back, like a wild animal protecting her young.”

Alice saw the darkening of the prairie sky in the distance. The sun was shining but she knew that in a minute or two the dust would block out day, block out sanity. The wind licked the clothes on the line, grabbing the boys’ breeches, the girls’ dresses, tossing them over and over the rope that stretched between the two trees, finally snapping the rope, dragging the wet clothes across the dry dirt… The children, where were the children? Gather the children, gather the animals, drive them home, like cows in the morning. Oh, Amos, another dust storm, another drought, how will the wheat grow? How will we survive? My God, the blackness. The baby is crying. Everything is fine, child. Stop your tears. Mama is with you.

“I didn’t think too much about death,” Fred said with a fierceness that seemed out-of-place coming from such a mild man. His tone startled Alice out of the dust storm. “I thought about taking care of myself, taking care of Eva, keeping on with the same things I had done all my life.”

The notice had arrived in the mail the year Fred turned 80. It was in a plain brown envelope, like a hydro or telephone bill. It carried a terse message from the government saying that if he wanted to continue to drive his car, he had to pass a test. Damn them! Fred thought. That young man with his clipboard, all the time writing, telling me with his expression that I was too old to drive, telling me with his words that I had failed the test. How did he expect me to buy groceries, pay the bills, go to church, visit our friends? What did he want to do? Prop me up on the mantelpiece – like those antique plates sold at auctions – done their jobs for years without any fuss or attention and are now to be put on a shelf and stared at, simply because they are old.

“I had a dream, had it many times after Amos died,” Alice confided to Fred. “I am strolling down this country road and the trees are turning yellow and red; I can feel autumn in the air. Amos drives up in his old black jalopy and tells me to get in, he’ll drive me home. But I know he is dead and if I get I with him, I’ll be dead too. So I start to run, determined not to get into that car. Even when I was so old a puff of wind could blow me over, I wouldn’t get into that car. Even when Douglas was with Amos – Douglas, our middle boy who died so young – I couldn’t stop living. I just couldn’t stop.”

“Hea-VEN,” the bus driver called in a voice that may have just as well have said something ordinary as Tor-on-TO or Win-ni-PEG.

Alice looked at Fred, and Fred could see her fright. “Do you think,” she whispered, horror in her voice, motioning to the ladies on the wall, “that heaven is like that?”

Fred understood her fear. He couldn’t fathom spending eternity in such useless splendour, like those doped-up hippies with their funny cigarettes. But there was no way out, no place to go; they had one-way tickets to heaven.

Fred and Alice followed the crowd down the aisle and down the steps. The bus had pulled into an unloading bay and the passengers streamed into the station. There were no cherubim, no fat ladies with expressions of paradise on their faces, just passengers who seemed like tourists in need of directions and a few officials dressed like custom agents. The station was under construction, seats not yet installed in their proper places, a scaffold against the wall, workers wearing overalls and painter’s caps, pretending to be busy with the last phase of Saint Paul’s revitalization plans. A line formed behind a turnstile. Alice and Fred joined the line, inching their way toward the front.

“Welcome to heaven,” a voice said over the intercom. “Welcome to heaven, a place you have created on earth.”

Fred saw heaven in front of him, just beyond the gate. It was dawn in heaven and a grey mist rested on the river. There was a house on the bank of the river, a house Fred knew Eva would love when she finally rode the bus. He saw horses hitched to a wagon waiting for him. He wanted to push through the gate to reach heaven quickly, but waited for Alice to pass first; it was, after all, the gentlemanly thing to do.

The bulge in Alice’s coat began to stir, as if awakening, and Alice reached into her pocket. She withdrew her cupped hands and opened them. The bird that died in the eaves trough, frozen by the last blast of winter, flew from her grasp and disappeared into a wheat field beyond the gate. Beyond the wheat, Alice saw a farmhouse and a barn, and she heard the animals. A black jalopy chugged down a familiar dirt road toward her. “He’s here,” Alice said to Fred, chuckling as if a joke had been played on her. “Amos is finally going to take me home.”

The Season of Offspring

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:54:36 -0400

This morning, a duck stood at the side of the road in front of my house. She looked like a miniature housewife in a plain brown cotton housedress - along with that “slipping” belly that comes with age and babies. I walked down my driveway towards her and she didn’t leave her spot, didn’t fly away, stood her ground, hovered at the edge of the grate cover of the storm sewer.

The duck wasn’t quacking, so I suspect she had been there a while and was now overwhelmingly perplexed, that feeling you get when you just don’t know what to do anymore, how to solve the problem. I had the same feeling at that very moment. Only the day before I had stopped the car to let a duck with a long single-file line of ducklings cross a major intersection. She led them across four lanes and disappeared into the tree-scape behind a Wendy’s fast food outlet.

It’s the season of offspring. I knew what was down that storm sewer, and I didn’t want to know, because I doubted I could do anything about it. I’m generally an optimist, but in this situation, I didn’t see any reason for optimism. To make matters worse, that duck wasn’t going away either; she’d stay there until she knew she could do nothing more, and then stay longer, such was the strength of imprinting.

I peered down the grate. Sure enough, there were her ducklings, swimming in circles in the water at the bottom of the rain sewer, a good ten feet below the road.

My neighbour across the road, Fabian, came off his porch to join me. He knows most everything that happens in our neighbourhood, even more so now that he is retired.

So there we were, the three of us, Fabian, Mother Duck and me. And still mother duck did not leave.

“Her ducklings fell down through the grate,” I said to Fabian. “She must have led them right over it, what are the chances?”

Fabian wasn’t surprised about the duck, nor the ducklings. Seems he knew about them already.

I never know these community things. I don’t even know the names of my neighbours two houses up on either side of my house, and I’ve lived here for eighteen years. Fabian knows the names of everybody on the whole block, probably knows more than their names.

“The duck laid a clutch of ten eggs in a yard up the street,” Fabian said. “Been sitting on them, wonder why she left to come down to our end of the crescent?”

I shrugged. “Searching out water? I suspect she led her ducklings to the storm sewer. Ducklings need water.”

I need water.

I share this need for water with ducks and ducklings all the time - at the conservation areas where I kayak, and on the Grand River - not in the suburbia of my neighbourhood. Those other ducks chase me away if I get too close. I’ve had the strange experience of a large Canada Geese escorting my kayak from her nesting territory - goose and paddler side by side - not unlike an air force jet escorting a plane carrying a terrorist. She kept constant pace with me - the harder I paddled the faster she paddled her feet.

But what to do, right now about the ducklings in the sewer?

I asked my husband, who works for a neighbouring municipality. He’s a city worker, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when he said: “Call the City.”

But I was surprised, and cynical, too. “The City? Who in the City?”

“Public Works.”

“Public Works will come out to rescue ducklings from a storm sewer?“

But with no other option on the table, I called the City of Kitchener. It was 7:30 in the morning, and yet someone answered the phone, already at work. Within ten minutes, a truck came by, and out came two city workers to join Fabian, the mother duck, and me at the side of the road.

And still that duck stood her ground. Even when I snapped the photos. Even when a school bus drove by. Even when those two city workers stood over the grate, and then wrangled it off, and took a very long net and scooped up three ducklings. Deposited them on my front lawn, all within two minutes or less.

Only then did mother duck make her exit, wasted no time hanging around any longer. She corralled the ducklings and off they hurried, all in a line, to disappear under the heavy cover of flowers in my next-door neighbour’s garden – Mary – her name I know.

Instead of packing up their nets and leaving, the two workers put their ears down close to the storm sewer. “There’s another cheeping,” one said, and, they found a duckling in the adjacent storm sewer. They swooped that one up in their net, and turned the net over near the clump of flowers, and then the mother duck hustled it away too. The City workers bent over again, ear to the sewer. Silence. No cheeping. Fabian had said there were ten eggs…

I don’t know if ten eggs hatched, if ten ducklings headed down the road that morning, or if only four made the journey. “Sometimes you can’t save them all,” the City worker said to me.

“You’ve done this before?” I asked.

“Yesterday,” they said. “The same situation. A happier result here.”

Then they left.

And I’m left too, left with a few thoughts - about that mother duck, how strong nature’s bond, the genetic imprinting. Although physically agitated by our presence, and by the absence of her ducklings from her side, she stayed close to us, in spite of the danger, the need to gather her ducklings overriding her fear. And when she had those ducklings back again, she hurried them out of there, nature again kicking in, and those ducklings followed her, the imprinting just as strong from their viewpoint. I felt less agitated myself, knowing that the mother duck’s agitation had subsided, that she felt eased that she was doing what she was supposed to be doing, that nature imprinted her to do, felt the ease in her body.

And then I thought about the bigger picture - it’s that same imprinting, call it deep caring if you wish, that keeps life going. Literally. At every level. And then I thought about those City workers – two guys who cared beyond the job description.

It’s been two days and I haven’t since seen the mother duck and her ducklings. I hope they found water, real water.

Satan, Take These Quarters!

Sun, 23 May 2010 09:20:36 -0400

Quest. It’s the first time I had voiced that word aloud to describe my travels. I’m surprised how easily it slips off my tongue. The word has the ring of knights to it, the search for the Holy Grail. In honour of the couple sitting with me along Victoria’s inner harbour, pulling up needle and thread to create dream catcher earrings as fine as spider web, the word also holds the echo of drums. Rites of passage and dream quests, where initiates enter the forest alone.

“I’m on a quest,” I tell them.

This is the last city I’ll visit on my month-long, five-city tour. I’ve travelled by train on my own from Toronto to Sudbury, Edmonton, Vancouver, Portland, and Victoria. Maybe it has taken all this time to be able to use that word. To know what it is I do.

Another couple might have thought it odd, both the statement and the stranger who voiced it. An opportunist might have taken advantage of it. As a female travelling alone, I guard what I say. Don’t draw attention to myself. Do not go out after dark, nor flash items that indicate I’m travelling unaccompanied.

It’s a matter of finding the balance between adventure - experiencing new things and new people, new ideas and new places - and safety. I’ve no urge to become a statistic. I take care that my plans are in order before I make the next step in journey – tickets, place to stay, related telephone numbers, connections - although there is always the hitch.

It’s how one deals with the hitch that is part of the legacy of quest.

What one is left with when the travelling is done.

“Satan! Take these quarters!” the man madly screamed at me in downtown Vancouver.

He stretched out his arm, pinched two silver coins between his finger and thumb, delicately out of sync with his voice and words.

I had been aware of his crossing sidewalk as if looking for someone, watched him. Made a point not to catch his eye, to avoid confrontation when he backtracked, pushed through the wide doors of the coffee shop.

He was a young man, maybe nineteen. He was rail thin, unkempt, not dirty, not as if he had slept on the street. He wore blue jeans, and a clean maroon T-shirt. It struck me as odd that his shoulder-length hair was unsnarled, shone as if brushed a hundred strokes.

But these aren’t the things that mesmerised and frightened me the most. Rather, it was his eyes. Jesus-Christ eyes. They drowned in blue. Reflected his obsessions, his personal crucifixion.

No filter between his unconscious mind – his inner turmoil - and the outer world. I couldn’t escape his eyes. Not this close.

It occurred to me as a fleeting thought that I could die here, right in this moment, in this strange city, far away from the people I love. That this demented young man could pull a knife or gun, leave me in a puddle of blood on the floor.

My coffee addiction would finally be the death of me, I thought in that way one thinks black humour at the most unlikely moments.

I had, after all, stubbornly searched out the sole Tim Horton’s coffee shop in the midst of this Starbuck’s city.

The man repeated his crazed command. “Satan! Take these quarters!”

I looked into his blue eyes.

“No,” I said. I was not Satan. I would not take the quarters. I would not die this day. He returned my gaze, then accepted my answer, dropped his arm. Continued his search, stopping at the patio tables along the street, and then disappeared around the corner.

We each have our own quests, it seems.

This first-person account was originally read on CBC Radio. The story is derived from my journals from a train trip in 2002.

We’d Live Forever

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 19:58:50 -0400

Bod. Jimbo gave me that word. Jimbo himself had quite a bod. Not like Victor’s, but not one to kick outta bed, either. I got that expression from Jimbo too - kick outta bed. The guys would sit around the beach, and talk about girls. How this one had a good bod or not. And then Jimbo would laugh and say, but I wouldn't kick her outta bed. They'd talk like that in front of me, even though I was a girl. They’d talk like that because I was one of them, a university student but more importantly, a lifeguard who had been hired by the town to supervise the waterfront for the summer.

Jimbo had brownish blonde hair, a tiny tight behind, and a crooked smile and chipped front tooth, the latter an imperfection that made him even more perfect. He'd wear his whistle tucked under the leg of his bathing suit, and his sunglasses perched atop his head.

Sunshine was a lifeguard, too. He had baby fine, sun-yellow hair that he wore to his shoulders, and he walked with an easy bounce. His hair would swing with the motion, swing back and out of his eyes. Then it would fall into his face again, and we loved him for it. Loved him, and the summer, and ourselves. The collective Us.

Sunshine swam. Every day. In the river in summer, and in the pool in winter. It was his religion. Built over years of devotion. He had broad shoulders, but he wasn't muscle-bound, not like weight lifters, stiff and awkward with their own bodies, with their own selves. Not like that at all.

And if we loved Sunshine for his baby fine hair, the way it moved in rhythm with his body, we also loved him for his swimming, the way he moved in rhythm with the water. Elbows lifted easily, almost lazily. It was deceptive, unless you paid attention to the power of his stroke, measured with your eye how far he travelled in a single pull.

Sunshine swam as if he belonged there, in the water, as if he breathed it in, and not air. It was a sight to behold, a thing of beauty, like our youth. We didn't know it then, bodies tanned deep brown, arm and leg hairs bleached blonde by the sun. Didn't know that it would end. That there'd come a time when we'd no longer wear our bodies naturally. No longer wear ourselves naturally.

*****

I’ve forgotten his name. He wore a green army jacket, and scuffed jeans, and long hair. He talked about peace, and hunger, and the need to redistribute wealth on a global basis. He raised consciousness, instead of his heartbeat. I doubt he owned a bathing suit.

We spent the weekend together. Not the kind of weekend where we fell off the cliff of friendship into the abyss of carnal sex. He asked me to sign up for a Starve-a-thon to bring attention to the plight of hungry people everywhere. Friday night, we played cards. We listened to music and sang peace songs. We snatched a few hours of sleep camp-style in bags spread over the hard floor. Saturday came. Our stomachs grumbled. Our backs ached. We drank fluids, and were unsatisfied, so we went for a walk.

We ended up in the produce section at a grocery store. I felt danger. It was seductive. I could eat an apple, a carrot, a head of lettuce, whatever I desired -- but I didn't. Outside and around the corner, my acquaintance pulled a candy bar from the pocket of his army coat. He unwrapped it, took a bite, and offered me a piece of chocolate.

What about the starv-a-thon? I protested. What about the principle of it? (Lifeguards believe in principles).

"Fuck principles," the boy whose name I can’t remember said, scornful that he had to explain. "No one gets hurt by me eating this lousy bar, 'cause nobody'll know. World hunger's publicized, and my stomach is full. What could be more perfect than that?"

Things were not as perfect as I had imagined.

*****

“Beach rats” were the regulars. Not the furry kind with four legs. Beach rats were the kids who'd come to the park like clockwork; in an earthquake, if one had happened. Most of them came to escape home, their own personal earthquakes.

Susie was five. Her big brother brought her every day. He was seven. A scar stretched like embroidery from the top of his chest to his navel. On cloudy cold days when there were few swimmers I'd sit Susie on my lap and brush her hair. The blond highlights would catch the sun's rays and glisten, and the matted snarls would transform into silk. The other kids refused to play with her. If she touched them, they'd scream bugs and run away. Susie, a creative little girl, could string curses together in combinations I'd never before heard. But when I'd brush her hair, she'd cuddle close to me. And for the moment, her world was perfect.

I spent my own little-girl years at Sunday school. I sang the church songs, earnestly promising to be “a candle burning in the night”. And like the song said, I believed “God sees the little sparrows fall, he sees them every one, and if God so loves the little ones, I know he loves me, too.”

My mother would dress me in clothes she made. One Easter, it was a coat of pink corduroy lined in silky taffeta. She sewed and sewed, a whirlwind of motor-noise, and corduroy, and pink thread. The Easter Bunny had come and gone, leaving chocolate eggs at the doorstep, and still she sewed. I heard a scream. Mom pulled the needle from her thumb. I wore the coat to church that morning, in awe of the fact that blood had been shed for me.

At some point I stopped letting Mom make my clothes, stopped going to Sunday School, stopped singing the church songs, and questioned God.

Victor Davis, Canadian Olympic speed swimming champion, flip-turning against metal, windshield, pavement. He died defending his girlfriend, car barrelling down upon them. Victor standing his ground. Juice bottle lifted above his head like Lancelot wielding a sword to protect Guenivere. Flinging the bottle at the last moment.In rage, perhaps, but with glory and honour nonetheless. Glory, and honour, and rage that belong only to youth.

*****

A psychiatric hospital stood at the edge of town. For the most part, we ignored the patients. A few of them, we adopted. Mainly outpatients. The ones who gave us nothing to fear, and made us smile. Ringo, standing on the corner of the main drag, singing Beatle songs, claiming to be the true Fab Four drummer, warning us not to be fooled by that cheap imitation who had snatched his body, but hadn't snatched his mind. The Laughing Man, who walked miles and miles each day up and down the same street, telling himself private jokes. Skippy, who pulled a wagon and delivered newspapers and never grew up, even though he had grey hair and walked with a limp because of arthritis.

And Chuck. Chuck was simple. Stupidly, dangerously simple. His eyes were quick, and calculating, and you knew he would kill you if you gave him the chance. He wore his trousers cut off to make shorts, edges frayed, his legs and body deeply tanned, chest and arms always bare, as if to make sure you saw his muscle. Made sure that you knew he could kill you with his bare hands.

One day, Chuck came to the beach. He circled behind me. I knew he was there, even though he had left my line of vision. "Don't even fucking think about it," I said, without turning around.

Think about what, I don't know, not even to this day. Nor do I know what I would have done if he had attacked me, instead of spitting in my direction, and then leaving. I just know I felt rage. Enough rage to throw myself in the path of a car.

*****

I remember Victor Davis vividly all these years later. How we’d crowd around the television set, watch him glare down the East Germans, their steroid-pumped bodies hardened rock. Watch him swagger to the swimmer’s block. It was a swagger to behold, not-too-fast-not-too-slow, his timing perfect, Victor perfect, his name itself strong with the promise of Olympic gold and victory. He was young and irreverent and invincible. And so were we. We worked hard. Played hard. Like Victor. It was as if nothing could touch us. We'd live forever. Just as we were. We were invincible. We had only to watch ourselves mirrored in each other to know it was so.

The Beating of Wings

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:31:47 -0400

The old lady lingers at the mouth to the trail. I use the word mouth because that's the way it looks. The trail opens like a mouth leading into the belly of the woods. We both stand on the paved road and look in. She stands further back, and I interpret her action as the hesitation of old people. I call my dog, Farley, to me, afraid he'll run at her and bark.

It is a glorious sun-filled autumn day. The kind of day that is a metaphor for life because you know it won't last forever. Winter. It sits at the edge of the day, like the perimeter at the edge of a rectangle.

I enter the woods, thinking maybe the old lady is lost or has wandered off. But then I push these thoughts away. She is probably just out for a walk on a beautiful day. Like me, a few years further down the road.
She'll walk a short way, and then retrace her steps back to the street.
The path narrows, and roots protrude, some hidden by leaves. The trail bends, and I lose sight of her. I turn another bend, and check my step. The hill is now steep. I reach for a trunk to steady myself. Eventually the trail flattens, and I come to a small meadow, and then a stone beach alongside the river.

The dog thinks this is the reason for our walk. Why we choose this route and not another. He runs ahead for a drink. I follow, looking for herons, and watching the geese and the pattern of the water as it spills over the rocks. Then the dog decides it is time to leave. He does that. Makes a decision. Runs back along the way we have come, and then sits, waiting, looking at me, as if to say, okay, let's go, c'mon now, I'll lead you out of the woods. I've had my drink, and played in the river, and you've looked for your herons.

On the return journey, I come face to face with the old lady. Somehow, she has made her way through the narrowing of the path, over the roots, down the steep hill, to the trail below. She hesitates. I say hello and she smiles, but peculiarly, as if she doesn't quite understand. It occurs to me that she doesn't speak English.

She wears department store loafers. Soles as thin as the leaves. Unsuitable for hiking. We pass. I climb the hill, my heart thudding with the exertion. My heart feels too big for my chest cavity. How will the old lady climb this hill? What if she doesn’t turn around, retrace her steps, but continues along the trail? She will exit the woods far from her entry point.

I scold myself. She probably lives in the neighbourhood. Been walking these woods for years. Who am I to doubt her on the basis of age? I reach the end of the trail, put the old lady into memory. Submerge my concerns like gnarled roots beneath autumn leaves.

The next afternoon, I walk the trail again. The dog, too, of course. I am hard pressed to get out the door without him these days. Let alone put on my hiking boots – his signal that I’m going to a place he damn well wants to go, too.

We reach the river. The scenery has changed. Funny, how that can happen in a day or two in autumn. A brisk wind last night has sent the leaves tumbling. In the summer, the trees canopy the path hiding the water from view. Now I can see the river clearly.

Canada Geese sit on the water like umbrellas dotting the sky of a René Magritte painting. The birds face all in the same direction. Beaks and eyes forward. They are absolutely still. Evenly spaced, a metre or so apart, across the ribbon of river. The surface is mirror-calm, and I fear the moment might crack like a fine sheet of ice.

The moment cracks, and I hear a noise. I search out the source. It is the geese themselves. One rears up and flaps its wings, but doesn’t fly away. Flaps hard against the water like someone beating a carpet. Then it stops and settles back into position. Another takes up this strange ritual. The pattern continues, without any apparent order, one bird, sometimes two or three, rearing up and beating its wings, then settling into place. And so it continues, up and down the river. Like a secret passed from bird to bird. I stand there for a while, and then continue along the path, the beating of wings breaking the quiet of the trail walk. Then I am past the geese, and the beating diminishes.

Finally, I come to the meadow at the river’s edge. I notice people. That’s all that registers at first. Then I become curious. These are teenagers, five or six of them. They scour the meadow, intently examine the ground.

Then I see the two women. One is middle-aged. She, too, scours. The person at the top of the incline is dressed in black and stands with her back to me. But I think I recognise her. To be sure, I check her shoes. Thin black loafers.

The old lady surveys the scene. I have the impression that she orchestrates the drama that plays out before my eyes. Not by speech or instructions, but by presence.

Today, she is not hesitant. She is strong. Perhaps it is strength that comes from family. People who see you in a different light than strangers. She is the matriarch. The Queen. The Witch-Crone, maybe; a woman of importance and certainty and power.

The middle-aged woman stands up triumphantly. She holds something between her fingers and lifts her arm above her head. It seems she holds a plant or herb of some sort. She says something I don’t understand, calls to the others excitedly. They look up; peer at whatever it is she has found. I continue past the searchers, past the old lady. I do not want to disturb them.

Much later, I return. No one else is around. I go to the water to let the dog lap at the waves and chase bubbles. I check the ground as we pass by. The meadow is filled with clovers. Is this what they were looking for?

I don’t know. But I do have a sense of "rightness" about it all. The old lady, her two journeys into the woods. I have no doubt that she searched out this particular spot the day I first saw her. A scouting mission for something over which she later presided. A deliberate act of will. She reminds me that everything is not always as it seems. There are mysteries. Wonderful mysteries. Mysteries that rear up and spread out before us, if we only watch for them. Like the beating of wings.

“Beating of Wings” was originally published in Vox Feminarum.

The Woman in the Moon

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:37:37 -0500

The moon is brimming this evening. It is a Van Gogh moon, framed by my writing room window, and hanging in the uppermost corner of my personal “Starry Night”. Granted, it is a star-less night outside my window, but the spirit of Van Gogh swirls in it, in the darkness, the haziness around the edges of the moon, the black lines of the trees, the fingertips of the branches.

Tomorrow is a night of the full moon, New Year’s Eve. There will be a moment when the moon can hold no more, its arms full. I love that image, the moon’s arms full. Instead of a man in the moon, I imagine a Woman in the Moon. She is full of breast, and large of hip and thigh and belly, like those tiny clay goddesses that archaeologists unearth in remote places.

In my night-sky, the Woman in the Moon holds her arms out from her body in a perfect arc. The circle of her arms forms a womb, and within this fullness, within this curvature, is held the night secrets - the promises and whispers, the waxing and waning, how time began and how time ends. Around her, like the interaction of island and river, celestial currents and eddies swirl, the pull of the tides. It is all there, in Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and in this evening, too.

If you look closely at my Woman in the Moon, you’ll see that her skin is smooth as alabaster, and as calm as deep sleep, deep space. Her eyes are closed, and you think she dreams. Her skin is tinged blue, for she is a blue moon. She is not the only blue One; there is Krishna, but his skin is dark, and her skin is the blue-grey of twilight.

A blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month. This New Year’s Eve is the night of a blue moon. Those who count the movements of the night sky say that such a celestial happening, a blue moon on New Year’s Eve, occurs once every 19 years. The tracking is predictable, like clockwork, all the more reason for a dreaming Woman in the Moon. Mystery to counter the rational, or to contemplate it. The universe craves both the observer and the observed.

In honour of precision, I can tell you the precise moment of the New Year’s full moon. It isn’t a Van Gogh Starry Night moment after all. The moon will be completely full for only a pinprick of time - 2:13 pm, December 31, 2009. Behind curtains of clouds, and daylight, the moon will wax to her fullest, and then pull her secrets closer to her breast, wane. Begin to lose sight of herself.

I know this, because I downloaded an app to my iPod that tells me such moon things, lunar things, lunatic things. Twenty-four hours before the onset of a full moon, my iPod turns into a werewolf and howls at the virtual moon that fills the screen. This howling amuses me in a werewolf-ish kind of way. The app tracks the moon phases, and also tells me other moonutiae/minutiae, such as the name of the full moon by calendar month. For December, the lady is a Cold Moon, or Oak Moon, or Christmas Moon, whether you choose her Celtic face/phase, or Wiccan, or Colonial American. But on this New Year’s Eve, she is Ms Blue.

This New Year, I’m shifting perspective, not making a list of my shortcomings and then trying to rectify them by creating resolutions. Instead I’m contemplating what makes me happy, fulfilled, full-filled, what makes me feel blue-moonish, a woman-in-the-moon. I’m going to fill my life with these things until my arms are full. The list is simple. Story-dreaming, story-crafting. Exercise, activity. Rivers, water. Family, friends. And a little boy-in-the-moon, little boy blue. The baby who holds the universe in his eyes.

Looking for the Miraculous

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:45:05 -0500

I haven’t seen an angel in a water spot on my ceiling, or the Virgin Mary in the shape of a potato, or the face of Jesus on a scorch mark on the bottom of my iron, or the Son of God in the lines and wrinkles of a cinnamon bun. Maybe I lack the vision. Maybe I lack the creativity. Maybe I lack the faith. The truth of the matter is - and by that I mean matter literally, concrete existence - I’ve never looked out into the physical world and seen the Holy Family.

Other people have spotted them easily enough, Jesus and Mary and the Archangel Gabriel in the here and now. It’s a story that repeats itself like Christmas, resurfaces in news reports at least once a year, holy sightings in fruit and tree bark and paint chips, in the markings on calves and the forehead of horses.

My mother, Marjorie, was one of those people. When she was alive and I was younger, much younger, almost new, at least newly adult and questioning the beliefs given to me by family, my mother showed me a photograph. She presented it as proof of God. It also served as justification for her charismatic ways, the swayings and the utterings of Jeeesuuus, and the slayings in the spirit, a killing of sorts where the preacher puts his palm on the unsaved’s forehead and shoves, and the unsaved falls to the ground amidst Hallejuahs and Praise Gods, jolted by the Holy Spirit.

The photograph showed Jesus in the clouds, Jesus as cloud, vaporous molecules configuring themselves into the shape of a bearded, longhaired, flowing-gowned Saviour. It really was quite remarkable, even arguably glorious, considering it was pre Photoshop era. The Jesus in the Clouds picture was travelling the prayer group circuit. “It was snapped from the window of an airplane,” Mom said.

The photograph didn’t have the effect she had hoped – I didn’t become a born-again believer. I wasn’t slain in the spirit. I’m a hard cookie when it comes to the Divine, particularly the Divine in a water-spot spread of angel wings across a ceiling, or the burnt scorches on the bottom of the iron, or the shove of the preacher’s palm against a forehead, or Jesus cloud photography. Such holy communications are akin in my mind to email scams. I don’t believe in those either. I guess that makes me a non-believer of sorts.

It’s not that I don't think the holy permeates matter. I do think just that, that there is this union with, or arrangement between, or infusion of the miraculous into the physical world. I love the New Testament verse that found its way into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, where the rocks and stones themselves start to sing. Where geography vibrates in this mass-ive Hosanna-Heysanna, and the inanimate, or what human senses perceive as inanimate, the cliffs and boulders and mountain ranges, participate in the cosmic “rock” opera. I find it so much easier to believe a stone might sing, that a stone does sing on a level we humans can’t hear, than a sighting of Jesus in a charred piece of toast is a sign from God.

In deference to my dead mother, I must admit I do like the idea of Jesus riding the clouds. The story of the Transfiguration, where Christ is lifted directly into heaven as if riding an invisible elevator, is a favourite New Testament narrative of mine. I have had my own recurring dreams of flight, and in the waking world, often embark in flights of fancy, and I am never happier than those rare moments when my words and spirit soar. That swooping of the spirit that comes with elation is its own kind of music, and when I am kayaking, I sometimes find myself in a celestial state of elation in the midst of the physical world, the water and rock and sky. I know I’ve reached this celestial state here on earth when my subconscious mind starts hymn-ing/humming, “And to my listening ears, all nature sings around me rings the music of the spheres.”

I’ve also experienced the odd vision or two of my own, and they were indeed odd. One of those visions was inspired by low blood sugar. The Earth moved beneath my feet (another song, no less), and then I saw the physical world peel away, shift, to unveil the matrix or structure beneath it, and I knew there were many kinds of reality, and that this reality in which we find ourselves encased, this lovely physical world of the planet Earth, is a gift and not a given, is not guaranteed.

An hour or so later, the same bout of low blood sugar, no doubt, I saw Teilhard de Chardin’s Hymn of the Universe enacted in my living room, the flames of fire and life and mystery spread out against the desert of my wall. I wasn’t frightened, but felt blessed, and fascinated, and gently amused by the revelation, the fact that this revelation, this vision, existed in a very real way for me, as real as rock, and yet wasn’t there at all. Later, munching on a piece of chocolate, I wondered if the prophecies and visions of the likes of Joan of Arc were nothing more than a lack of sugar, and how history might have been changed if someone had just given her candy, if she might have avoided the stake.

Early one August morning, when dawn had arrived but had not yet been broken by the activities of the day, still unmarred and morning-fresh, I walked down to check my boats hidden within a grove of bushes and trees at the edge of Lake Simcoe, on the grounds of the retreat cottage I shared with two writer friends. I stopped dead in my tracks, as the saying goes, very much alive, but slain in the spirit, slain by nature. I didn’t know whether to trust my eyes, my human senses, and I shifted perspective to see if the vision would disperse, that it must be a trick of the eye lens. But it didn’t disperse. I saw golden threads, a thousand of them, joining the trees to form a shimmering matrix, laser-thin spider webs crisscrossing the small pathway through the woods. Perhaps it was the minuscule droplets of dew clinging to the webs that caught and held the morning sun and lit the webs in golden strands of fairytale. I don’t know, I just know it was magical, and unreal, and yet very real, more real than my Joan of Arc visions. It reminded me of the luminous filaments that Carlos Castaneda wrote about when describing the teachings of Don Juan, and I didn’t really believe those filaments existed either, but here they were before me, shimmering proof. It is hard to deny the connections that exist, these golden spider webs, both as a metaphor for what we don’t know and can’t usually see, but at the same time, not a metaphor at all, just hardcore physical matter, what is already there in the world, spider webs catching the light.

Right now, as I write, it is the day before Christmas, and soon it will be Christmas Eve. The crescent where I live is empty, peaceful, but I know the grocery stores and liquor stores and the main roadways and the malls are packed with shoppers. I know, because I was there an hour or so ago, doing last minute things, a bit of Baileys for our Christmas morning coffee, gravy for the turkey, dinner rolls. My husband is out there right now buying stocking stuffers for my Christmas stocking. This morning, I awoke to a dusting of snow covering the trees, and the sight is still beautiful outside my window, snow and ice clinging to the branches, and to a few stubborn leaves that refused to fall, to the flower stalks in my garden, giving the decayed flowers second life.

Humans seek the miraculous, the divine, want it so very badly, that we look for it in the oddities, a cross in the white markings on the forehead of a calf, the angel in the seeping of water to stain a ceiling, the face of Jesus in a food item, in the scorch patterns of an iron. I don’t think we need to work so hard to find the infusion of the divine in the physical world, to see the miraculous in the here and now. The divine is in the spider webs, in the dusting of the snow, in the “Silent Night, Holy Night” of Christmas, in the ordinary birth of the ordinary child, in hope.

Peace, goodwill, and golden spiderwebs to you and yours this Christmas season, and throughout 2010.

And perhaps, if you’re so inclined, may you see the outline of the miraculous in your Christmas dinner mashed potatoes...

A Kayak, Blackberry & Jockey Shorts

Sun, 6 Dec 2009 20:37:35 -0500

On a blue-sky Sunday morning last December, my husband Bob and I set out with our kayaks strapped to the top of our car. We headed for Kentucky, where holly grows in Merry Christmas abundance in forests of oak and cedar and birch and pitch pine, among azaleas and magnolias and mountain laurel and sassafras. Specifically, we headed for the Daniel Boone Forest, a land of bluffs and rocky outcrops and caves, huge boulders stacked on top of each other as if tossed by ancient giants, water rushing and tumbling over cliffs and dropping into deep gorges.

An hour down the 401 toward the Blue Water Bridge, we slam head-on into the first winter storm of the season - whiteout conditions. By the time we reach Sarnia, the kayaks are ice- and snow-topped. It is small wonder the US border guard at Customs regards us suspiciously. What idiots would go kayaking in this weather? the border guard is obviously thinking, and do I really want to let them into my country?

The border guard bangs the deck of our boats for a hallow sound to make sure we aren’t smuggling contraband inside the kayaks, and then searches the trunk and backseat. Finally, he waves us through.

The odd looks at our kayaks are unexpected to us. The weather in Kentucky is a brisk autumn “balmy”. There is some light morning frost, a few snow flurries, but to Kentuckians, we realize, it is akin to the deep freeze of winter.

The camping and beach areas where we have accessed lakes and rivers during our summer Kentucky trips are blocked off. The parks are “packed up” for the winter, and empty. Hardy Canadian types, we are not to be deterred. We have driven all this way to kayak. We search out a boat ramp at a marina on Laurel Lake in the Daniel Boone Forest.

The wind has picked up, so we decide to put only one of the boats in the water, the less-likely-to-tip boat. I paddle first while Bob naps, stretched out on the dock. He is fully dressed in long pants, lifejacket and winter coat, his Blackberry hooked to his belt.

A short paddle later, around the bay, I pull up to the dock, climb out of the boat. As Bob takes my place, eases into the boat, his Blackberry hits the edge of the cockpit and there it goes - tumbles into the water. We watch it sink. It is one of those moments when time is suspended, when the action unfolds in slow motion. The Blackberry comes to rest on the bottom of the lake.

I put my paddle upright into the water and touch the Blackberry with the blade. The Blackberry is buzzing, I can feel it. It vibrates right through the water and up the shaft of the paddle to my hand.

So Bob's got email...

How to get the Blackberry out? It sits in about five feet of very cold water - cold even for Canadians.

From the end of the dock, we use the paddles as chopsticks to lift the Blackberry, working together, Bob maneuvering one paddle and me the other. We almost get the Blackberry out first try, but then it falls before we can grasp it.

We’ve stirred up the bottom, and the Blackberry disappears from sight. We have to let the sand settle before we attempt another rescue. We try the chopsticks method again, but we're only pushing the Blackberry further out into the lake and stirring up more sand. Then the Blackberry gets pinned under a tree root and we can’t dislodge it with the paddles.

We could leave it there. Bob figures it won't work anymore anyway, but he really should hand the Blackberry back to the IT Department at work to get a new one. After deliberation, we decide Bob needs to go into the water and get it.

Bob ponders the situation for a “brief” moment, and then strips to his underwear. So picture it, there he is on a marina boat ramp in Kentucky in the Daniel Boone Forest, bare-chested and in his jockey briefs - in what Kentuckians consider winter.

We wonder if there is a state law against the underwear bit - whether the lone state park worker up on top of the hill blowing leaves and fully decked out in winter gear will arrest us.

Bob puts his t-shirt back on, sits at the edge of the dock, bare legs dangling in the water, and looking very cold. There are a few ducks hanging close - one is a snow duck - winter feathers - quite curious and beautiful. We all sit there, waiting.

"Do you think I'll black out from hypothermia?" Bob asks.

I use a tough love approach, borrowing a slogan from Nike. “Don’t think about it so much, “ I say. “Just do it."

"But how do I get in?" he asks.

If it were me, I'd go to the shore and swim or wade out. Not Bob. He pushes himself off the dock, and stops, in chest deep in water, a shocked look on his face. He stands there. And stands there. I'm crouching on the dock, arms extended, using the paddle as a pointer to point out the location of the Blackberry. "Follow the shaft of the paddle," I say, trying to sound encouraging and helpful.

Bob doesn’t move.

"It's not the water temperature on my body," he tells me. "It's my face. I can't breathe. I can't go under the water."

What to do, what to do? Bob standing in the frigid lake in his underwear...

Then Bob has an “eureka!” moment. He uses the chopstick method again, this time to get the Blackberry between his feet, sculls and lifts up his legs. Grabs the Blackberry and hands it to me.

I have no idea how Bob got out of that lake, and neither does he - how he got out of the water (no ladder) and up the dock at least a foot from the surface so quickly. I think he willed himself up there (if you've read Carlos Castaneda, you'll know what I mean).

So now we have the Blackberry, but Bob is standing there on the dock shivering in his jockey briefs and t-shirt. I give him my Adidas jacket and he pulls on his winter coat overtop. His legs are wet and his underwear clinging to his skin. I climb the hill to the car, and return to Bob with a pair of my stretchy yoga workout pants for some reason I stuck in the trunk that day - in case the boat tipped... one of those intuitive feelings....

My yoga pants are way too big for Bob, but he pulls them on, and climbs up the hill, each of us carrying one end of the boat, and Bob clutching the pants up with the other hand. We get the boat on top of the car, the state park worker with his back to us and across the parking lot.

“I've got to get out of these wet clothes,” Bob says.

So we open the car door and he strips behind it with his long winter coat still on at least, but off come my yoga pants and that drenched underwear. His legs (and bottom half under the winter coat) are bare. We wonder again if he could get arrested - this time for indecent exposure. I think of us in a Kentucky prison, trying to explain what we were doing. This is, after all, Bible-belt country, a Baptist church on every country corner, even in the hills, especially in the hills, sometimes churches standing side-by-side. And it’s a dry county as well, strict laws, no alcohol for sale, although guns, it seems, are quite acceptable.

Finally, Bob is dressed and decently covered, the boats are loaded, and I drive along the winding mountainous roads of the Daniel Boone Forest towards the Cumberland Falls State Park lodge. Bob is warming up quite nicely, and the sun is starting to set. It glares brilliantly in our eyes so we can hardly see. Sight is dependent upon the curvature of the highway and the location of the sun in the sky. It is an awful long way down the rocky mountainside into the gorge if I miss a turn and go over the edge... But the geography is indeed beautiful, awe-inspiring.

As we round those curves, sun blinding, we resolve to buy sunglasses. A thermal blanket, too.

And just maybe, Bob should switch to boxer shorts…

This story was written last year
as part of a Christmas email to friends & family.

A Sunrise, A Sundown

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Today, my grandson was born. Just over a month ago, my brother died. Within the embrace of a single month, I felt a sunrise, a sundown. Harry Chapin comes to mind, to heart. He wrote this song for his own brother, Tom. All my life's a circle/Sunrise and sundown/Moon rolls thru the nighttime/ Till the daybreak comes around. /All my life's a circle / But I can't tell you why/ Season's spinning round again/ The years keep rollin' by.

Many sunrises and sundowns ago, moon rolling though the night time, I travelled in an old van from Ottawa to Winnipeg with a gang of friends, the kind of experience that folk legend Harry Chapin might write about, if he were still alive. We drove almost non-stop, somehow miraculously missing a moose that appeared unexpectedly, instantly, as if by molecular transfer, along a dark rocky stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway. It was impossible that the van missed hitting that moose, no time for either to swerve to the side, but we did indeed miss it, and the impossible came to pass. We happy van-travellers continued along our way, singing the circle of that Harry Chapin piece over and over again, the folksinger in absentia leading the motley choir via tape deck. That one song indelibly marked me for life. Harry Chapin’s “circle” became my philosophy, and you know what? As much as anything else, it is still my philosophy.

I started this blog posting in the days immediately following my brother’s death. It was a much bleaker piece of writing than the one you are reading now. But you can’t have the sunrise without the sunset. The two are irrevocably linked in circle. It is much easier to find beauty in the sunrise, the miraculous, the birth of a baby, the swelling of emotion that comes with holding your grandson in your arms. I struggle to find beauty in dying, to find serenity and peace in the falling apart I witnessed in the death of my mother and now my brother, and that is the bleakness.

The falling away of the pieces that held the whole together happens all around us. The petals fall off the flower. The rose blooms resplendent and then withers. The Japanese find beauty in decay. This beauty is expressed in the concept of wabi-sabi, the serenity and peace within impermanence, the recognition and acceptance that all things are in transition, in flux.

I watched the physical falling apart of family members, the deterioration of body, and also their emotional falling apart, the inability to keep the pieces together, to live a normal life, or a semblance of a normal life when normalcy itself was no longer possible. There is nobility and bravery in the attempt, and even love, but then entropy overtakes, and the falling apart happens at a faster rate than the keeping together.

Entropy comes from the Greek word tropé, meaning change. It is a scientific term, defined in part as the measure of disorder, the trend toward chaos and randomness. The measurement of entropy is sometimes called a kind of clock, an arrow of time, words of poetry from the physicist. It implies that time has direction, a “going forward.” In my mind, the unravelling that is entropy has more to do with a going backward.

I have thought a lot about time. Intellectually, I have reasoned that time is necessary to an existence where we have choice, and that change is an integral element of choice. Without choice existence makes no sense. Why bother. An existence without change, without decay, without entropy, is static. We’d be frozen in the moment. But the price that is paid for choice, in a cosmic sense and in a personal sense, is that clocks count out the length of a life, and arrows by nature pierce. The heart is a vulnerable target.

My father died alone in a parking lot of a massive heart attack, miles away from family. A sibling told me he was dead before he hit the pavement, quoting words from a doctor who wasn’t there, meant perhaps as comfort. I don’t believe it, and I am not comforted.

I don’t know. I don’t know if the pain that comes with existence becomes too much to bear, the price paid too big of a price, and that’s when entropy overcomes the forces that bind, that keep the pieces together.

How do you write about the people you love? It is a difficulty, choosing the words to put down, that respect the relationship and trust of family, but also respect the telling of story. How much do you say, do you tell? Do you write at all. I left the question mark off that last statement, because it really isn’t a question. Sometimes you don’t write, you choose not to tell all. There is a trust among family members, among those you love, that needs to be honoured.

Writers like to believe in the indestructibility of words, the Gospel of John version of the creation of the universe, that it all began with an uttering of a holy word that resonates beneath all things. Maybe it makes us feel godly, as if what we do is ultimately important. Sometimes we write with the idea we’ll be leaving behind something permanent, something that outlives us. But the reality is that words fall apart, just as the physical world falls apart.

All those storage systems for collecting words, whether the scrolls of long ago, or hard copy books of not so long ago, products of the printing press, or those floppy disks we used when we were computer new, or the abandoned hard drives collecting in junk piles or in closets, or even in those web spaces, web “clouds” where our words are stored online outside our computers. Stories die, words die. Nothing is permanent.

My brother, Art, believed in the afterlife, in spirits, the things that go bump in the night. He believed in them in a real way, not just as a parlour game to frighten and titillate. Fear on the edge can do that, titillate, as long as we only creep to the edge, peek into the abyss, and then return to safety, to solid ground, to the familiar. Art wasn’t religious as far as I know, not in the traditional sense, although in my growing-up family, religion was a superstition more than devotion, as if you can control something as big and chaotic and unknown as God. If you pray for this, utter these words, this incantation, this creed, I believe in God the father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, In Jesus Christ his only begotten Son, then the inevitable is set in motion, and everlasting life is yours. It is the theory of predestination in reverse.

Several years back, Art attended the Spiritualist church. He told me that at a service, he had talked to the dead. Another time, he had experienced leaving his body, floated above it, but was tethered. That tether was needed to stay attached to life, like some kind of umbilical cord. I wish I could remember the details of those long-ago conversations. When my most recent novel was to be published, a story narrated by a ghost, I knew without doubt that I would dedicate it to my big brother, “To Art, who believes in the otherworld, and shares the family history.”

I wonder if Art got around to reading that book, and whether he smiled in recognition at the family lore woven into the narrative. I also wonder whether the tether was loosened when he died. Whether he floated up towards his death and away from life like a balloon let go from a hand, fingers wide open. I hope so. I hope he was lifted up and out, this time entropy not a falling away of the parts, but a lighten-ing, like a dandelion seed lifts from the dandelion, weightless and carried by the wind. Perhaps that is just rationalization, my trying to deal with the stark finality of death. I am writing my big brother a different kind of send-off than the one he received.

Knitting together meaning from disparate parts is the task of the writer, but more so, the fine art of being human. We do that, search out meaning. Our existence might be nothing more than a one-time freak accident and that is unbearable to us, as individuals and as a race, the human race. Our myths put us above the animals, give us the right to name them and have dominion over them, for we are made in the image of the Creator. What greater meaningfulness could be bestowed on us, could we bestow on ourselves through the telling of story, than that? And what are we left with, if that is nothing more than story to scare away the true ghosts that haunt us, the prospect of nothingness?

Art and my mother convalesced together, he from open-heart surgery, and she from a stroke complicated by diabetes. I remember driving to see them, five hours along the 401, unsure of what I would find, what state of illness they’d be in. And there they were, sitting side by side on the large front porch of Art’s old brick house, my mother in her wheelchair, her straw sunbonnet on her head, my brother in his lawn chair, reading the newspaper, the two of them spending sweet time together in the afternoon sun, as if all was well. In that moment, all was well. And in the end, all we have is a series of moments.

Just as mother and son bonded in their later lives, Art and I also bonded, advocates for bringing my mother home from her prairie hospital bed to Art’s house in Ontario, along the river where she grew up, the St. Lawrence River, and where she wanted to return. Air Canada refused to fly her, and we found a small airline that would take her for a hefty price, complete with medical staff.

“Angels of Mercy” my mother called them. The other patients didn’t believe her when she told them she would be leaving in a jet plane, and probably not most of the staff. Her ramblings were the wistful imaginings of a crazy old woman nearing the end of her life, tethered to her bed so she wouldn’t try to escape one more time, in an attempt to find her way “home”. Then early one morning, at sunrise, she was whisked away, just as she had said, and the impossible came to pass. She talked with glee about being in the clouds, and then above them. She felt like Daddy Warbucks, she told us, in her own private jet.

In his teenage years, the family called Art by the nickname, Big Bear. It suited him, even as an adult, particularly as an adult. He was a bear of a man, both physically and temperamentally. He could growl, roar, but he had a big bear of a heart, too. He worked as a labour activist, and his big bear personality came out at the negotiation table, although I suspect he used teddy bear tactics to his advantage when the situation called for them.

There are so many layers to a person’s life. The union became my brother’s family, replaced his birth family, and we lost touch for many years, until dad died, and mom’s welfare became a binding tie, a sweet tether. Through the labour movement Art learned how to give a speech, to move the crowd. He delivered my mother’s eulogy, and in a packed chapel, in front of his union family and his biological family, in the midst of his own grief, he traced his activist roots to our mother. He told how she had attended meetings of a leftist movement as a young woman, and as a mother fought and defeated a school board proposal mandating school uniforms, and as a grandmother, carried a sign and accompanied Art on the picket line.

She would have loved that eulogy. And maybe she did love it, if I may indulge myself by writing another ending, mom’s ghost in the front pew, the guest of honour, basking in a rousing send-off before heading off towards the light. The light was her imagery. During the birth of her fifth child, my little sister, my mother’s heart stopped, and she felt herself rushing through a tunnel towards a bright light. A voice told her she had to go back, it wasn’t her time to die. Her children needed her, and her heart started beating again.

At Art’s funeral, his son, a young man of nineteen, gave the eulogy and in the son we saw the father. Art would have been so proud, and once again, may I rewrite that ending to say Art is so proud.

Scouring the photo memorials to my brother, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed in his living – how much he smiled. Sometimes it was a big smile, like the last photograph taken of us together, almost two and a half years ago. My God, we look happy. Art is robust, healthy, the forces that keep the pieces together stronger than the forces that pull them apart. In other photos, the smile is quiet, soft. It is those photographs that catch me most off-guard, where he hadn’t really expected the camera.

We show different sides of ourselves to different people, and I am grateful to have seen this gentle side of my brother, the way he treated my mother, the way he treated me. Whenever a new book was published, he called, and if he could, attended the launch, always bought multiple copies, gave them to his work colleagues, his friends.

In the last years of his life, Art had a cottage along the St. Lawrence, where he lived for stretches of time. Of all my siblings, we were the two to share the love of river, although Art tended to stay along shore. Early one evening, not long after my mother died, I launched my kayak from his dock, telling him I’d be gone only for a short paddle, a half hour or so. The water was flat, the sky clear, the river seductive and calming, especially after the emotion of the death and funeral. Drawn into the paddle, I kayaked much further than I had intended, longer than I had told him, the kayak tracking straight and true, skimming across the mirror surface. When I turned the boat back in the direction of the cottage, the sky had darkened and a lightening bolt cracked the distance, a paddler’s nightmare. Up ahead, I saw Art at the end of the dock, in the rain, scanning the water, searching for me, that big bear of a man. As I paddled closer, I saw relief fill his face. He didn’t say a word, didn’t have to say a word. The bond between us, an accident of birth, had been strengthened by choice.

That night, we talked family history, family myth, family idiosyncrasies. He told me a story I hadn’t heard before, about his boyhood, about a bear tamed and kept by a family at the outskirts of town. How he had wanted so badly to ride his bike to that house, pay the bit of money the family charged to see the bear, how he pestered my father to let him go, and how finally, unexpectedly, the impossible came to pass, and my father did let him go. And we laughed at that, the young boy’s desire to see the bear, and the collection of unlikely neighbours and relatives who peopled our past.

Later when illness weakened Art, we talked several times while he was in the hospital. The forces of entropy were working overtime, and yet in the midst of it all, in spite of it all, he gained strength, moved out of intensive care, made plans for living, not simply existing. And I believed his plans, and he did too, and he did indeed live, left the hospital on his own terms.

Those who knew him in his last days speak of that same optimism, the same planning for the future. Others tell a different tale. My regret is that Art and I didn’t keep in closer contact in the last year or so, that I hadn’t kept a watch out for entropy, hadn’t known when things were at risk of falling apart.

None of us has the corner on grief. None of us has the corner on happiness. In my life right now, there is loss, and new life, the joy and hope of birth. I think again of Harry Chapin. Sunrise, sundown. Sunrise.

The Joy of Not Writing

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Yesterday, I didn’t write a word. It was glorious. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write, but sometimes, I love not to write. To give it all a rest, the pause between actions. I thought about Glenn Gould when I wrote those words, the pause between actions. The process of writing is like that - the most unexpected connections pop up.

I fell in love with pianist Glenn Gould a few years back. Really in love. Obsessively in love. Stalked him. Bought and read every book I could find about him, even those expensive coffee table books with those beautiful black and white photos, Glenn shoulder-hunched at the keyboard, perched on that signature little ratty-tatty chair that he carried around from performance to performance. Another of him lost in the ecstasy of listening, one hand raised just so. Glenn, posing in that way of his that didn’t look like posing. Dressed in his winter clothes in summer, and his cap, and his gloved hands, the wool cut off so that his fingers poked through, long before it was fashionable and then unfashionable again to wear gloves in that way. Ever the eccentric, the recluse, living in a hotel, sleeping deep into the day, working deep into the night, creating his lovely and strange radio documentaries, layers of sound and voices and ideas, the Idea of North.

I’m not a musician, don’t understand the intricacies of notes and how they are put together, not even a little bit, but even so, Gould’s playing of Goldberg Variations gets me in the middle of my chest every time. The pauses, how the notes hang there, how the space between the notes hang there. Perfectly placed, almost an aching. I probably should admit that movie directors use that same passage of Bach that I love so much, but usually in conjunction with a serial killer, some fastidious psychopath. If my memory serves me correctly, Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter listens intently to Goldberg Variations in one of those dreadful sequels to Silence of the Lambs. I believe he is eating brain at the time, right out of the skull as if scooping ice cream out of a bowl.

Right now, I’m at a weeklong writing retreat at Roches Point near Keswick. I’m supposed to be writing. Not pausing.

Twice a year, a group of women writers rent a very large cottage on Lake Simcoe. In winter, we look out on to a frozen lake that is a busy city, dotted with hundreds of fishing huts. So much unexpected activity, vehicles and skidoos (Glenn would have loved to speed across the frozen expanse), people in bright winter garb, fisherman with their pails, holes cut in the ice, fishing lines dropped. In summer, we look out on a lake that is quieter, although on hot days, motorboats and water-skiers and personal watercraft fly across the surface.

Lake Simcoe is big, and can be dangerous and unpredictable. The weather changes quickly. At this retreat, we’ve mainly had rain and thunderstorms, ideal for writing. But yesterday, the weather was summer-perfect, the winds 5 km/hr, the sky immense and blue, the lake’s surface barely rippling. Instead of writing, I took out my yellow fibreglass sea kayak and spent the morning paddling. Midday, I set out again, but this time in my smaller kayak, and stayed closer to the shoreline. Hugged the shoreline actually, edged with docks and boathouses, children splashing in the shallows with their parents, teens sunbathing, white-haired ladies sipping drinks and playing cards under the shade of a tree, seagulls standing stick-legged on rocks. So I didn’t write at all yesterday, paused in those sweet spaces between the notes, between the words. Blame it on Glenn.

This blog entry was previously published on OpenBook Toronto,
and was written in August, 2009.

I’ve Come Full Circle

Wed, 7 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

I can get lost anywhere. Not only in my head while working on a story, but in the physical world. You’ve heard that old saying, her left hand doesn’t know what her right hand is doing? That’s not my problem, I’m quite aware of my right hand and my left hand. North, South, East and West, now they’re the problem.

I got a GPS for Christmas, a bit of gadget wizardry that makes my life much easier, although more crowded. Now, instead of a single voice in my head pointing out directions for a story, there’s a second voice in my car pointing out directions for a destination point. It gets noisy.
The tiny woman who lives inside my GPS is British, and could get a job with MI5 if she decides to change career paths. She is very self-assured, very bossy, very calculating. She is constantly “recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.”

This missing layer of knowing, this state of being geographically challenged, runs in my family. My oldest brother recently confessed he gets lost all the time. I should have recognized the clues. When the graveside service for my mother had concluded, I climbed into the passenger seat of my brother’s car. In respect, mourners formed a queue of cars behind us to let the immediate family leave first, to follow us out of the cemetery. My brother led the cars in a slow circle right back to my mother’s grave.

Going in circles sometimes isn’t such a bad thing. When ending a story, I like to return to the site of the grave, so to speak, to somehow circle back to the beginning. Of course, something has always changed, usually within the main character, and the ending is not an exact duplicate of the beginning.

On a recent visit to the small town of Deep River, I went for an evening walk. After an hour, I realized I had passed the same yellow house, the same beautiful garden profuse with roses, at least three times. I was going in circles, when I had thought I was heading back in the direction of my lodgings.

My husband and I lived in Deep River when we were first married. We fled small-town life for big city life as soon as we could. I felt trapped in Deep River. I hated the prospect of living my whole life there. I vividly recall driving away for what I thought was the last time. Our baby girl slept in her car seat in the back, the birdcage carrying our zebra finches bunched in next to her.

All these years later, our baby girl is grown with a baby of her own on the way. For the past two summers, my husband and I have returned to Deep River on vacation. I fantasize about buying a small house there, passing the summers in a lovely haze of paddling and writing. The fantasy includes a writers’ retreat where others stay a while, create, read, regenerate. It is a place where going around in circles is acceptable, even encouraged, and Ms GPS has nothing to say, since there really isn’t anywhere to go.

I’ve come full circle.

This blog entry was previously published on OpenBook Toronto.

Stay-at-Home Writer

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

I looked into the mirror and saw that I had two pairs of reading glasses perched on my head. My only defence is that I was in the writing zone, that interior place where I’m focused on story. Frankly, when I saw that reflection of myself, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude that I work from my home office, and not from a building in downtown Toronto, or another busy public workspace.

I’m making myself vulnerable by telling you that story. I risk your thinking that I’m not quite all there, that maybe I suffered a recent head trauma, or am demonstrating the early symptoms of dementia. I suppose I also shouldn’t tell you that, as I was writing the above paragraph, I smelled burning and hurried to the kitchen to flip over the grilled cheese sandwich I was making. Again, I blame story.

There are other challenges to writing from home, besides the fire hazards. Depending upon who wakes up first, my husband or I go to the Tim Hortons around the block and bring back two extra large coffees. We both retreat to our separate computer rooms, my husband for an hour or so of surfing before he leaves for work, and me, to check my email. It is delightful, on those days when my husband gets the coffee, to go straight from bed to computer, to nurse that coffee while slipping into the day. Sometimes the transition to the day’s writing is so smooth that it is mid-morning before I realize that I haven’t yet changed out of my sleepwear. The realization is usually made when standing at the door signing for a package delivered via courier.

Housework is a perennial problem for this stay-at-home writer. Let me tell you, unless you’re an author like J.K. Rowling, raking in the big royalty bucks, you still have to do housework. If I’m on deadline, the house stays a mess until the deadline is met. We’re not talking an empty coffee cup left on the countertop. We’re talking, when did the cyclone hit? We’re talking Toronto when the garbage collectors are on strike – well, no, not that bad. Once, however, when I saw movement beneath a pile of papers, I thought rat, and was relieved to see my cat emerge instead. But on the positive side of the issue of a messy house, I always meet my deadline.

Then there’s housework as avoidance. If the house is extremely clean, everything in its place, tabletops polished, coffee cups recycled, the smell of lemon Lysol in the air, then I’m avoiding the computer screen. If I left the house to work each day, then I couldn’t use housework as an excuse not to write.

Of course, there are advantages to a home office. I spend less on wardrobe, I don’t have to commute, I don’t have to scrape the ice off the car in winter (unless I’m the one going out to get the coffee) and I get to claim my home office on my income tax.

Presently, I have a huge deadline to meet by mid-February, and I’m working at my computer five hours a day to meet it. What’s the state of my house right now? I haven’t seen the cat for a while now, although I do hear purring coming from the mountain of newspapers and such on my writing room floor.

This blog entry, more or less, was previously published on OpenBook Toronto, and applies equally to my writing life today!

The Ghosts behind the Novel

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Fiction writers do a weird kind of story-dance where they take snippets from their real life, and reinvent them for the sake of the story. Every fiction writer will tell you - swear up and down - fiction is just that, fiction. But underneath the words, lie real events. And so it is with Dead Girl Diaries, a story narrated from the viewpoint of a ghost. I grew up in Brockville, Ontario, in an old house with lots of places for ghosts to roam - the dank dark stone cellar, the sagging enclosed porch that ran the full length of the house, the parlor where my older brother sometimes slept and woke screaming from deep dreams, and where my mother told us the old lady who once owned the house had died. The room never had the feeling of safety and we always felt uneasy in it, never used it as a sitting room, never put big easy armchairs there for people to gather and chat. Instead, it was used as a passageway - a space we had to go through to get to other parts of the house. Passing through the parlor was inevitable. We never lingered.

French glass doors separated the parlor from the living room. In the corner behind the French doors was my deceased grandfather’s prized tea trolley, and where my mother saw him, or rather, his ghost. He polished the glass windows - things had become muddied, he said, and she took that as a premonition. And then there was the ghost that frequented our backyard. The backyard was huge and had century-old trees and bushes planted long before we bought the house. My father spent one day furiously pulling out old growth. That’s when he felt the sudden wind stirring the brush, and my mother saw the ghost. They always believed the original owner of the house, who designed the gardens and now long dead, had returned from the spirit world to inspect my father’s work.

Across the street from our house was the stately (and upper-crust) St. Peter’s Anglican Church, where sometimes in the wee hours, organ music drifted out, although the building was in blackness. We always believed the church was haunted, and hurried past it when returning home at night. On humid summer evenings my mother and a next-door neighbor sat on the screened porch of the side of the house, and summoned the dead with the Ouija board. That abruptly ended when Mrs Fawcett, a matronly and holier-than-thou Pentecostal widow, spelled out the word “fornicate”with the planchette. Not once, but three times. She claimed in horror that she had no control over the letters that madly tumbled out beneath her fingers, that a malevolent spirit must be there with them on the porch. I like to think that it was a ghost with a sense of humour, and a healthy anti-fundamentalist attitude.

My father had his ghosts, too. But like the character George in the novel, he spoke of his father’s ghost sightings. There are a lot of phantoms in the loneliness of the farm on a prairie night - my grandparents lived on a isolated farm near Austin, Manitoba. Growing up, I often heard the story of the line of dancing ghosts passing right through my grandfather on a dark road, ghost-girls dressed like gypsies. That unearthly happening made it into the novel. And then another prairie ghost tale, where my grandfather was awakened by the clear tinkling of sleigh bells against the silence of the “below zero” winter night. He went out to greet the visitor - but there was no one, the snow on the county road undisturbed - no hoof marks, no sleigh tracks.

I grew up in a house where my mother read all the time - for escape perhaps - but regardless the reason, books on ESP, reincarnation, the afterlife, and miracles were strewn about our house - Edgar Cayce, Jeanne Dixon, Kathryn Khulman, Norman Vincent Peale. Many times I heard the phrase “the power of positive thinking” - as if thought were magical, and could bend spoons and influence events faraway. My mother did indeed pull out her Hoover washing tub during the spin cycle to explain the existence of the spirit world, spinning all around us, just as Golda explained it to Maxine in Dead Girl Diaries. I believed her - what ten year old wouldn’t? And you know, in some odd and comforting way, it still makes perfect sense to my adult self.

Out on a Limb

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

My husband, Bob, went out on a limb today. Way out on a limb. Climbed the chestnut tree in our backyard with a dexterity that proves once and for all that man (but not necessarily women) evolved from apes. Three stories up, to give you an idea of height, if he were scaling the side of an office building.

Climbing that tree was a spontaneous act. It’s not like he woke up and rolled over and said, okay, Marianne, this morning before I go to work, after I’ve shaved, and found a clean shirt and pants and matching socks (which isn’t always easy in our house), right when I’m about to leave for a meeting, I’m going to climb the tree in the backyard.

“Fearlessness,” Bob said, when I asked about the speed with which he made it up the trunk. “I had to act quickly, put all fear aside. If I didn’t, I was afraid I’d become paralyzed, stuck up the tree with the cat.”

Yeah, just imagine that – my husband and cat both stuck up the tree. But I could see exactly that happening, Bob being afraid of heights, and all.

So picture this, Bob makes it three-quarters up the trunk. The branches have narrowed, so he really can’t climb any higher without risking a branch breaking, and his crashing to the ground, and my becoming a widow. He’s not quite high enough to grab the cat, which by the way, is certainly not acting like her namesake, the fearless Hindu demon/goddess, Kali. The cat is huddled into a crook, making that little wheedling cat sound, and refusing to make an effort, to meet the tree-climber part way, to let go of her little corner of the world, and climb down a measly half metre.

So Bob extends his arm upward, and tips his head to one side, and starts calling to the cat, good kitty, good kitty. I can see what he’s doing, making himself part of the tree, hoping that the cat will climb down his arm as if it is a branch, and then use the top of his head as a stepping stone to his shoulder. But the cat, being a cat, isn’t going to trust just anybody. She starts to rub her scent on Bob. Did I mention that my husband is allergic to cats? As well as being afraid of heights?

I know, you’re probably saying that if a cat can climb up a tree, it can climb down a tree. Not this cat. We’ve tried that strategy before, left Kali on the neighbour’s roof for two full days until we finally caved in and rescued her. Rescued the lady next door from a cat meowing incessantly, pacing back and forth on the roof of her house.

So there they are, Bob and the cat, up the tree, getting friendly with each other, and I’m thinking YouTube, and wishing I had the video camera with me, and then feeling guilty because I would be thinking such a thing, at such a moment, that my first and only thought should be getting my husband safely back on the ground. But you know, I might have had that video clip to share with you, but then the cat made her move, and my husband made his move, and they both slid down the tree trunk, together.

I did my best to brush the bits of tree off Bob, the cat hair from his shirtsleeve, the dirt from his pants. Even so, he went to his meeting looking rather beat up.

Now I know this posting has very little to do with writing, or publishing and such, well, nothing to do with them at all, but I’m hoping you’ll cut me some slack, humour me a bit. I’m amused, anyway, and I’m thinking that those of you who know my husband, Bob, will be amused too.

Tending Gardens, Tending Writing, Tending Life

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

I used to define myself primarily as a writer, and a mother, too. That pretty well took up my time. I wrote lots. I published lots. And I raised a pretty fine child, who is now a bright independent woman, a mother herself, and also my friend. In my writing, I said plenty of things and learned plenty of things. But, you know, I’ve come to realize that writing has to be secondary. Otherwise you don’t have anything to write about. You run out of things to say.

Carl Jung said, Live until you die. I figure for the writer that means challenge yourself. Don’t just write life, do life. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, talks about the artist’s date. Once a week, take yourself out. Do something different, something you’ve always thought you’d like to do, something outside your comfort zone.

Carolyn See tells would-be writers in Making a Literary Life. Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, “Think about the things that put you on the high moral ground. If you’re dead set against fast food or red meat or oral sex or shaving your legs or hard liquor or bad language, you might want to go ahead and give them a shot. Just to see what it feels like.”

I think these two women are on to something mighty powerful here, but I’d add - don’t only experience new things because you’re a writer, experience them for their own sake.

Do them because it’s a wonderful huge world, and human beings are curious by nature, and we need to keep growing. And then let writing come from there, if it may…

My favourite part of attending the Banff Centre for the Arts “Writing with Style” workshop last year wasn’t the sessions or literary events, but rock wall climbing with other women who had never tried it before, and were as un-athletic, and as unlikely to climb, as me!

But I scaled that wall and felt the exhilaration of reaching the top. Now I know what rock climbing feels like, that it is your forearms that quake, that hurt unbearably (although I did bear it), and not your legs or biceps. I wouldn’t have known that, wouldn’t have been able to write that for a character in a story, without trying it myself.

Tich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and a marvelous writer, wrote about his vegetable garden: “If I did not grow lettuce, I could not write the poems I write.”

He added: “If you don’t live every moment of your daily life deeply, then you cannot write. You can’t produce anything valuable to others.”

While tending his garden, he is tending his writing, tending life.

* A version of this article was originally published in 2004 as a guest editorial in “The WaterWell”, a newsletter for writers.

Butt-Naked with the Black and Decker Guy

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Writers get asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” For me, story ideas often (but not always - some of those stories are simply the product of a disturbed mind) come from my everyday life. Take my recent experience buying a lawnmower. The old one had this long yellow cord that I had to toss over my head every time I turned to mow in the opposite direction. So when it died I bought a cordless, environmentally-friendly, Black & Decker rechargeable electric mower that folds up neatly like a card table chair, an attractive feature since my garage is stuffed with five kayaks and a canoe.

Smug with the purchase, I plugged my new lawnmower into the garage wall socket, and left it to recharge. When I returned, I noticed the battery recharger box had two little lights - one red - one green. Neither lit up. Surely those little lights were supposed to light up. Oh well, I thought, and cut my front lawn anyway. It was glorious, not having to throw a cord over my head at every turn. My euphoria was short-lived. The motor died, leaving my lawn partially cut. This is suburbia - one doesn’t leave one’s lawn half-cut.

I plugged in the lawnmower again, but still no lights on the battery recharger. I rummaged through the discarded box for instructional booklet. Across the top, in big bold block letters:

IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING DIFFICULTIES DO NOT RETURN THIS ITEM TO THE STORE WHERE YOU BOUGHT IT. CALL THE BLACK & DECKER SUPPORT LINE TO SPEAK TO A REPRESENTATIVE WHO WILL RESOLVE YOUR PROBLEM.

Well, that was hopeful. I could talk to a real live person about my problems. I called the 1-800 number, and navigated through the voice menu, pressed the appropriate number, and then listened to canned music, interrupted at regular intervals with a cheerful recorded voice telling me that all the representatives were busy, but that my problems were important to them, please hold on. Now the real dilemma with these kinds of service hotlines is that they’re like those slot machines at the casino, If I stop now, then maybe the guy behind me will put in a quarter and win the jackpot that was rightfully mine. If I hang up the phone now, maybe the next available representative is just about to take my call, and I’ve given up my place in sequence. Fifty-two minutes later, I decided all those representatives were out of the office at a Black & Decker ball game, and I finally hung up.

First thing the next morning I tried again, but this time, figuring I had at least an hour wait, I decided to use my time wisely. Surely, I had time to get dressed for the day. I put the phone down on the dresser. Thirty seconds later, butt-naked in my bedroom, I heard a male voice. It was the Black & Decker representative. How could he help me? Now there was a loaded question. I had this giddy urge to confess to the man at the other end that I was naked, but the call was being monitored, so instead I explained the problem to the Black & Decker guy using my best techie language. “The little red and green lights won’t turn on.”

I tilted my head to one side and hunched my shoulder to hold the receiver in place. Hands-free, I bent over in an attempt to pull on underwear, lifting one leg. The phone fell to the floor, along with the panties. “What’s the model number?” the Black & Decker representative was saying when I recovered the phone.

“On what page do I find that?”

“It’s not in the booklet,” he answered. “It’s on the lawnmower.”

“But the lawnmower’s in the garage, and I’m... “

There was silence on the other end, but I heard what the Black & Decker guy was thinking loud and clear - Well then lady, then go into the garage.

I made my way through the house and into the garage. There, I stepped over the long sea kayak and around the stubby whitewater kayak, and to the folded-up lawnmower. I felt exposed, vulnerable. It’s one thing to be naked in your bedroom, and quite another thing to be naked in your garage. “I don’t see any model number,” I said.

“It’s on the hood, a silver plate with numbers on it.”

“Where’s the hood?” I asked. 
“It’s a the back end of the mower close to the ground.”

There was nothing else to be done. I got down on my hands and knees, doggie-style, looking for the silver plate.

“There’s only a black plate,” I said, “with numbers on it, also in black.”

“It’s a silver plate,” the Black and Decker guy insisted, an edge to his voice.

What was the edge in his voice about anyway? I was the one naked on my hands and knees in a garage, nose to the back end of a lawnmower, my rear end up in the air. How was I supposed to read black on black? My reading glasses were in my writing room. I gave him a series of numbers to the best of my ability. “That makes no sense,” he said. “You got those numbers off the silver plate?”

“It’s a black plate” I said, now an edge to my voice.

And if you hadn’t sold me this defective piece of lawnmower shit in the first place, it wouldn’t matter if the plate were black or silver, and I wouldn’t be in this asinine position. Literally.

“Take the lawnmower back to the store that sold it to you,” the Black & Decker representative said. “They’ll replace it.”

Do these guys read their own manuals?

I got up off my hands and knees, hung up the phone, and recycled the booklet, with its 1-800 number and bolded, block letter instructions to call the Black & Decker service hotline to resolve my problems. Then I got dressed, and returned the lawnmower to the store where I bought it. The newest incarnation works perfectly, with little lights that brightly shine red or green according to whether the motor is charged. My lawn is uniformly cut, my neighbours are happy, and I no longer get tangled up in a cord when mowing the lawn. Sitting here at my computer, writing this blog posting, I am not naked but then, how would you know? I have an idea brewing for a story.

Let’s Talk Intimacy

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

I prefer intimate settings to large gatherings, tête-à-tête shared over a glass of wine (or two) with a friend, or a friend in the making. Maybe that’s why I gravitate to reading, to writing. Books are read one person at a time, a relationship between reader and author. It’s an intimacy that I don’t think exists with other story forms. I’m not sure watching a movie is an intimate experience, unless there’s an exterior circumstance to the viewing, someone snuggling into you.

It’s often said that writing is a solitary pursuit, and I’d agree. You need to be able (and willing) to spend time with yourself, to leave behind whatever distraction or delight beckons you to jump ship, to go off and do other things, anything, any thing, but write. You have to enjoy your own company enough to stay put inside your head, to build your house of story. But I’m mixing metaphors…

Whether a story house or a story ship, there’s always a reader peering through the window, through the porthole. While I’m writing, I try to look up from the computer every once in a while, to smile, and wave, and say – I know you’re out there, reader, be patient, soon I’ll invite you aboard my ship, into my house. We’ll share that glass of wine, you can read my book, and we’ll get intimate.

All this intimacy talk probably traces back to my childhood. My father wasn’t a reader, and I don’t recall him reading a book while I was growing up, except once. I had returned from the library with the first book I had ever borrowed, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. My mother was the reader in the family, and she probably read many books to me, but I don’t remember those occasions. What I do remember is this – sitting in the lap of my father, and his doing the most unexpected and wonderful thing – holding me close and reading to me.

The next time I went to the library, I checked out The Tale of Peter Rabbit again, from all the Beatrix Potter titles that filled the shelf. I felt embarrassed when my father refused to read the book to me a second time, wouldn’t let me crawl back up into his lap. I thought I had done something wrong, that I should have known better than to ask it of him.

My father was a practical man. What I realize now, that I didn’t realize as a child, was that to him, it was impractical to read the same book twice. He simply didn’t understand that it was the feeling of intimacy that I had wanted to recreate, the intimacy of story.

This blog entry was previously published on OpenBook Toronto. The photo shows my father, and my two older brothers - before I was born.

What MJ and I Have in Common

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

A little demon copy editor is jumping up and down on my shoulder, madly waving his arms, telling me I should rewrite the title. I should put it in the past tense, since Michael Jackson is deceased and I am alive. It should read: What MJ and I Had in Common. I will resist the urge. I can do that since this is my author’s blog. The present tense is so much more immediate. I love writing in the present tense.

By making this post I’m confessing something that isn’t too hip to confess. I’m confessing that I followed those pretend news articles and telecasts that appeared in legion after Michael Jackson’s death. You know the ones I’m talking about; they were cloaked as news, although they are better called entertainment. I balk at “A & E,” arts and entertainment. Just plain entertainment will do.

Several focused on MJ’s oddities, and it is in this area that Michael Jackson and I share something in common. No, it is not the glove, nor the mask, nor the armband. I am definitely not the surrogate mother of his children. Neither am I the Billy Jean in the song, nor do I have a tendency to grab my private parts. I can’t dance like MJ, nor moonwalk, nor sing. My singing is so atrocious that when I was a child and our class competed in the Kiwanis Music Festival, the music teacher told me to lip sync the words, although in those days, it wasn’t called lip syncing, but pretend singing.

The pretend news article I am thinking about in particular reported what the police found when they entered Michael Jackson’s bedroom. MJ had strewn his clothes messily across the floor, but even more odd, the article reported, he had stuck Post-it notes, about a dozen of them, across his bedroom walls, bearing little notes to himself.

I stick Post-it notes across my walls. I stick them in other places too, on my computer screen, by my keyboard, on my computer desk. I hadn’t known my Post-it behaviour was odd, until I read that article.

Sometimes I resort to writing a note on a serviette at a restaurant, and tucking it in my purse. Sometimes I use the Notes feature to jot down reminders to myself on my iPod. It’s a coping method. To put it more nicely, it’s a writing strategy. I’d go mad otherwise. The best stories are ill behaved. They pop up at the most inconvenient times, seldom when I am sitting down with everything in order and ready to write.

I also use a giant white board. Each morning, I stand in my writing room, at that white board, and wipe off the notes from the previous day that are no longer pertinent. And I add new notes, both things I need to accomplish, but also story thoughts, strands of story I don’t want to lose track of, and could very easily, those little details that add substance to a piece of writing.

I’d readily share that white-board idea with MJ, if I could.

This blog entry was previously published on OpenBook Toronto.

Locked out of the House

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Let's say I had written a story with the recurring symbol or plot line involving keys and locks. A story where the heroine keeps locking herself out of her house, or forgetting her keys. It’s obvious the character's repressed, you'd say, or she needs to find the key to her own happiness, or to unlock some key event in her past that subconsciously has been blocking her from getting on with her life.

Okay, that's fiction, a manipulated world that the writer creates to advance her own purposes, the story she wants to tell. But what about real life?

Three hours into our summer holiday road trip a small worm of a thought burrowed into my mind - does Sam have a key to the house?

“Of course Sam has a key," I told myself.

Sam had said she'd drop by to refill the cat bowls with food and water when we were gone. How could she do that if she didn't have a key? Surely she has a key. She’s our daughter. Why wouldn’t she have a key to our house?

I was obsessing. I knew it.

My father was obsessive-compulsive. He'd recheck the stove to make sure it was turned off, recheck the doorknob to make sure the door was locked, make sure we had rechecked whatever it was we were supposed to recheck.

Bob and I had taken the route less travelled, avoiding the 401 road rage, driving through the rocks and lakes of back country, geography that makes my chest swell with that lovely sense of belonging, this is where I belong. The back seat was littered with knapsacks stuffed with clean underwear and clothes, our laptops and techie gadgets. The kayaks were snugly attached to the roof racks, the trunk was jam-packed with kayak things - lifejackets and paddles and sprayskirts and bungee cords, not for jumping off cliffs and bouncing back up, but tying down the boats. I love the physical act of tying down the boats, choosing the ropes, looping them around the kayaks, winding them around the trailer hitch at the bottom of the car, knotting them, hooking the bungee cords, giving the kayaks a little push to make sure they are tight, a bit of give, but not too much give. It gives me a sense of satisfaction, self-sufficiency, especially when the boats stay where they're supposed to stay, don't fly off the top of the car, bounce down along the road, disappear from sight in the rear-view mirror.

My father wouldn’t have let me tie down the boats, if we had had boats, when I was growing up. And come to think of it, I don’t think I was ever given a key to the house. There was a communal house key, a silver key, long in the body and large. He hid it under the mat for us to find if we needed to get into the house and it was locked.

When we arrive at the hotel in Deep River, the lady at the desk hands me a key. My fingers close around it. The key feels substantial in my hand. They still have keys here, not those swipe cards.

"So this is the same room we had last year?" That room was perfect, ground floor, parking spot right outside door, full kitchen, living room, bedroom, walking distance to the two-street downtown where we could pick up a few groceries, and then the gorgeous Ottawa River - the boat ramp only blocks away.

"Well, no," the lady says. "We've put you at the back this time. The room you requested is being used by an extended stay resident. We couldn't very well ask him to move."

"No?" I think.

I could ask him to move.

"We want a room facing the parking lot so we keep an eye on our boats overnight."

"This is a small quiet town. The boats should be safe..." the lady says.

Within a few hours Bob and I are on the Ottawa River. The water is smooth, and the sky large. The surface reflects the expanse, the deep white clouds, the trees, the rounded lines of the Laurentian mountains. I feel calm. Water does that to me.

The cell phone rings. It's Sam.

"I’m locked out. Your house key is not on my key chain. I gave it to Dad that time you misplaced your key and couldn’t get in - I thought I got it back from him, but I guess I didn't. What now?"

What now? What now? We can't leave the cats unfed in the house for ten days. It’s an eight hour drive to get back to open the door. Maybe Sam could break into the house?

The house is impenetrable. In an obsessive-compulsive daughter-like-father frenzy, I had rechecked the safety bar on the back porch, the latches, the locks, shut the ground floor windows, double-locked the garage doors.

"The cats can drink out of the toilets if their water runs out," Bob says, trying to be positive.

"No they can't," I confess. "I shut the lids - just in case they might fall in, and drown."

There’s a Canada Post in town. I courier the key to Sam and wait. Canada Post promises me it’ll be delivered within two business days, maybe one. I think of all those cats that get caught in moving vans and end up clear across the country, or get stuck in a wall, or find themselves in other precarious situations. They survive days on end without food and water. Our cats can last a few days locked in the house, and they have food and water.

Now the boats. I’m being paranoid, I know, as well as obsessive compulsive. How to lock them up for the night? I retrieve a combination bicycle lock from the car. Fiddle with it, twirling to the correct numbers, finally clicking it open, winding the chain through the car rack and the kayaks, snapping the lock shut. And go to bed.

The next morning I wake early to unlock the boats. A morning paddle would be nice before the sun is too hot. I twirl the lock two turns to the right, once to the left, then to the right. Tug. The lock won’t open. I stand on a little step ladder I carry in the car for loading the boats. I try, and try again, blisters rising against my finger. The lock is stiff, won’t turn.

Bob can’t open the lock either. What to do? What to do? “Maybe 10W40 will loosen the lock,” he says, and we head up to Canadian Tire on the highway. The sun is rising. I’m getting hotter.

We locate the aisle with the 10W40, pay for a can. Bob takes out the little ladder, climbs up on it right there in the parking lot, squirts the lock. People are looking at him. The oil doesn’t work, the lock still refuses to turn.

“I’ll go to the Canadian Tire garage, and ask if they’ll cut off the lock. “ I say. “We’ve wasted enough time already... “

The river is waiting. The sun is climbing.

“What way did you say I should turn the lock?” Bob asks.

“Think high school, opening your locker, two revolutions clockwise, one revolution counterclockwise, then clockwise straight to the last number.”

“You sure?” he says.

He proceeds to do the opposite of what I said - an action that has served him well in the past. The lock moves smoothly, clicks, drops open with ease. He slides the chain off the boats.

Sam phones. “The key’s here. I’m in the house - the cats are fine. Hungry. They’re eating now.”

“That’s it?” I say to Bob. “I was turning the lock the wrong way?”

The cats are fed and freshly watered. The boats are unlocked. And I’m on vacation. I do what I’d do if I were a character in a story I was writing, and this was my story. And what is life anyway, other than that?

I tell Sam I love her. And then Bob and I go kayaking.

But first, I check to make sure I have my keys.