Winging Home: A Palette of Birds

PRAISE FOR HAROLD RHENISCH

Carnival is about so many ideas, the story itself would be enough, but there is more. There is the exquisite beauty of the writing—the density of detail, depth, a cacophony of sounds, the symphony of images and motifs.

—Prairie Fire

Tom Thomson’s Shack confirms Rhenisch as one of the most perceptive and distinctive essayists currently writing in Canada.

—Vancouver Sun

Often nothing less than astounding.

—Canadian Literature

Carnival strikes a rich motherlode in the otherwise minimalist saltpan of contemporary fiction. . . . [It] can stand beside anything by Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

—Vancouver Sun

A series of vignettes that are moving, beautifully written, and, like dreams, sometimes startling in their clarity of vision.

—Western American Literature

With a sensibility sharpened by the daily natural observation of living and working on the land and shaped by the transplanted European cultural traditions of his childhood, Rhenisch is a hardy hybrid. His ability to stand at the flashpoint where art and nature converge produces . . . prose that is almost Japanese in its intensity and austerity.

—Vancouver Sun

Winging Home

a palette of birds

Harold Rhenisch

illustrations by Tom Godin

for Diane, Leandra, and Anassa

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.

-Chinese Proverb

Contents

A State of Mind

The Robins Come Home

The Blackbird Jug Band

The War Over the Muskrat House

The Eagles of Sepa Lake

Colonel Watson’s Swallows

Jokers

Travellers

Woody and Winston

About the Author

A State of Mind

Old birds are hard to pluck.

German Proverb

On the top of the Central Plateau, the aspens flash and flare in wind, and the blackbirds ride the reed stalks on lakes formed entirely by snow and rain. There are twenty-five hundred lakes within an hour’s drive of my house, reflecting the sky from closed-off valleys and shallow stone pans. Their water is glass among the jewel-headed fall grasses. Above them, the air hangs like a raindrop. The light is mercury. Everything is slow. Everything is happening at the same speed, which is no speed at all. »

We came through town in the summer, a sweltering night before Diane was interviewed for the job of principal of the junior high school. Trucks were gearing down like jackhammers on the hill coming into town from the north—right outside our hotel window—and continued all night. There was no question of sleep. For half an hour my infant daughter, Leandra, and I sat on the dew-wet and weedy grass at the side of the highway and watched the trucks pass, north and south, one a minute. With every truck Leandra yelled out in joy. I waved at the drivers. Dust scattered over us as each load passed. The whole time, lightning flared, soundless, distant, in a ring around us, now to the north, then the south, and to the west and east, yet in town the air remained dry and hot. With each arc-flash of light, huge thunderheads sprang up on the horizon, then vanished again into the dark. Only later, as I held Leandra against my shoulder and walked her back and forth in the parking lot, as a cold breeze sprang up and I sang amidst the barking of the dogs at the cattle ranch behind the hotel, did she sleep.

At breakfast, the waitresses, girls just out of high school, with white lace blouses and perfect hair, were whispering in a group around the coffee machine. Occasionally one of them drifted away for a moment to wait on a table—the restaurant was crowded—but that was obviously not the focus of their interest. Many people sat waiting without menus—like us. There was a crash of plates in the kitchen and an exclamation like a frog being eaten by a duck, followed by a short burst of laughter from the tables. The waitresses looked up briefly, then started whispering again. Finally, a blue pickup covered in mud pulled to a stop up front and a young man dressed in mud-caked jeans and workboots swung out of the box, laughed to his friends in the cab, and walked in through the people waiting for tables. He had the swagger and confidence of a young man in a town where the future belongs to young men. He said something to the girls, pointed to the truck, and our waitress wiped her hands on a towel and stepped outside. While she was gone, talking to the driver through the open pickup window, the young man inside the restaurant teased the other waitresses. They hung smiling off his every word. After five minutes our waitress kissed the driver quickly and came back in, the first young man waved and strode back out through the still swinging door, hopped into the truck, slapped the window, and the truck swung away in a roar, spitting up gravel, faces grinning out of its windows. It was a complex mating ritual, like a grouse drumming dust during a mountain afternoon. First jobs after high school: cutting down trees; serving food. What I remember is that swagger. It was not a young man who came in that door, but a god. »

I didn’t know then that thunderheads crack and snap overhead almost every summer afternoon on the Plateau. All day, the hot, dry air draws water out of the lakes by the freightcar load. At night, wind rages across the shores, and in the dark the pines sway twenty feet at the crowns. Caught by the wind and springing back, they leap upwards with a roaring, rustling, female cry. The storms come so regularly that to live on the Plateau is like living in the tropics, where you can set your watch by the noon rain, except that in the tropics dark comes like a curtain at 6:00 pm. In the summers here, it comes at 10:30, and is gone again by 4:00. To live on the Plateau is to live in light. Storms here smell of primal elements: water, ozone, air. The rain splashes against the windows and across the whole Plateau. Purified of the fish scent of the lakes, it lashes into the pines: primal. When the storms quiet, a flash of mosquitoes rises over the mirrored surface of the water, like chips of glass come alive, and spreads out through the trees. It butts up against windows in a high, thin whine, like the sound of nerves, the only sound you hear in an otherwise perfectly silent room. »

We left Keremeos in late summer, with apple harvest, grape pressing, and two and a half months of lingering Indian Summer ahead of us, two and a half months during which the days were going to slowly cool into a luminous, grey desert rain that experience taught us would join sand and sky into a watery light. Later in the day, we arrived on the Plateau. It was mid-fall. A few frost-shattered yellow leaves, half-brown from a mid-August frost, still hung on the aspens. A few woodland birds were foraging for saskatoons and snowberries. There were no birds over the water. The seedheads of the wild grasses along the paths were like feathers and bottle brushes and cotton swabs. It was a brown world. Everyone walking along the lake carried a small bell and shook it from time to time to scare off bears. A cold wind blew off the waves. »

Halfway north to the Plateau, I found myself winding down the cutbacks—thirteen percent grade for fifteen kilometres—slowly, behind a cement truck making a return trip from the copper sulfate lakes of the Highland Valley Copper Mine. The Thompson Valley was seared, brown and broken and burnt, a thousand yards and almost vertically below me, as the engine of the U-Haul roared and the transmission let out a high-pitched whine. I had a lot of time to think there, as the truck and I twisted together down the paved-over range-trail. Minute by minute there were fewer trees, but the transmission still protested. On that last stretch of road down into Ashcroft I considered the wisdom of my wife’s father, Aksel, who had pointed to the map and named this lonely mine road a good, straight, fast highway.

One minute earlier, Aksel had passed me on the near vertical drop of a hill; he had slowed down beside me to smile and wave before pushing on ahead with my deep-freeze and mattresses, past the cement truck, into the burning throat of the valley. Soon he became only the glow of a taillight two kilometres ahead. Diane was an hour behind us, with the girls: Anassa, who was six, and Leandra, a year and a half. I was alone with my thoughts. They were jammed to the door and the ceiling for twenty-eight feet behind me—all my books packed into wine and whiskey, hydro-cooled carrot and anti-freeze boxes, a piano, a pump-organ—and, you know, it felt like every one of my thoughts had achieved form there, like the antlers of a caribou, long and beautiful in the pale blue air, with the wind blowing right through them and smelling of the stars. I was carrying with me all the hope and promise of twenty years of poetry and eleven years of marriage. A lemming might throw itself off a cliff there, but I was winding down it slowly, so very slowly, as the first alfalfa fields burned like emeralds in the weeds and cattle-trodden bunchgrass, pondering the wisdom of maps. »

All fall I sat on the deck and looked out over the lake—as if it was a palette in Monet’s hands. I set myself the task of coming to know the water colour by colour. Thirty-four years in the Similkameen had given me a knowledge of every stone, every plant, every stretch of river, every shade of light over the faces of the mountains as the snow rode lower and lower down the cliffs week after week, and though it was at times difficult not to parody that knowledge, it was a bedrock, and what I wrote stood always on what I had written before. On the Plateau, I didn’t have that. I had nothing. I felt that if I was to write here I would have to get past the idea of water, past the idea of the colour blue, and find a new palette to form the foundation of a new knowledge.

Afternoon after afternoon, when Leandra slept, I left my unpacked boxes and stepped out into the air to write the colours of the lake. From apricot to sulphur to the baked enamel of heavy machinery to the hair of highland cattle and water lying over the facets of pyrites in granite, they shifted minute by minute. By the late afternoon the easterly winds had driven most of the light against the reedy west shore. It lay there in bright blue and silver chips, bobbing on the surface like fallen leaves. I wrote it all down. I recorded it in long columns, and annotated them with notes about the weather, the birds, and the wind in the trees. I thought I was writing poems.

I look at them now—my palettes of tree and reed bed and pine, shifting day by day, week by week, and although they are beautiful—and some of the colours of lemon almost unbelievable—they remain only as what they were in the first place: palettes. And I might think that the paintings were never made from those colours, but that would be wrong, for I made them within myself and saw, for month on month, the whole landscape as a series of oils and watercolours—including every wash and every brush stroke.

At some point, somewhere, that long attention to water sank in, for week by week I felt myself stilling from the madness of moving, until one week I walked out in a bitter wind that was like the blue main current of a stream overhead, drawing all heat out of my hands. Leaves lay thick over the path in a tunnel of aspens. It was like a scene out of Robert Frost: Two paths diverged into a wood. . . . As I walked into the trees, a sapling suddenly rose up beside me in a stream of electric and platinum fire, and held there, trembling in the air. Then Leandra screamed and I was drawn away, giving one last glance to the sapling as I picked her up and carried her back to the house, but the moment remained there, as a suggestion that I was waking from a long and troubled sleep.

The next day, a flaming yellow sparrow flitted among the heavy branches of a willow hanging to the ground among the thistles and roses. Behind it, the lake was a sheet of shale, cut off hard and ash-grey over the shallows and broken up into little boats of light among the green canes of the new reeds. In that light, the reeds were not individual stalks but a thin cloud of colour floating just over the surface of the water. The rain streamed down incessantly. The lake’s cut face sparkled with every raindrop, even those a kilometre away. »

To carry the work of building a home for myself forward into the community, one lettuce-green Cariboo evening I drove into 100 Mile House to join the local writers’ group. It would give me someone to talk to. That’s where I met Susan.

Susan writes women’s novels. I glanced at her across the plywood table in the back room of the library. She was framed against old National Geographics from the 1920s set on shelves against the varnished plywood walls. Her hair was done up in tight curls, in a globe around her head. Her eyes were piercing, her lips thin. She had a way of throwing out her words when she talked, and of tossing her head with the rise and fall of her sentences—every movement she made was sharp and clipped. I was the odd one out there. I write poetry. I was a little nervous, and my voice quavered with it. Poetry elicited only silence. It was not writing.

What’s a women’s novel? I asked.

Oh. A shake of the head. The blue eyes. A small laugh. You know. Relationship novels. She was a little embarrassed. Susan had an agent in New York, to whom she had paid $75 US to market her historical fantasy on the Shroud of Turin.

Your book is very publishable . . . the agent wrote back. Susan was proud. That night in the library she asked to read us a section of her new novel about Scheh erazade. Her Scheherazade was a girl in a harem, fiercely intelligent, fussing over the shape of her breasts in a mirror, cynically jealous of the other girls there. Her Scheherezade was a princess, denied access to men, except the eunuchs—the ultimate in safe sex—whom she mentally undressed. She watched every movement of their muscles ripple under their thin, silk trousers. Their chests and backs were black and bare. Susan’s tongue licked over her lips as she read. Her cheeks were flushed.

I had been in the Cariboo for two weeks. I drove home in the inky darkness. The stars splashed out over the night sky like wildflowers—seeds cast by hand over the low meadows of the land. The land was awake, watching.

All night I dreamed about old Constantinople, and the harem. All night Susan licked her tongue over her lips. All night the eunuch stood in the doorway, to wait on a young girl’s pleasure, knowing he had been called there only to be watched. All night the plywood walls. »

Where does the Cariboo begin? asks Bob next door, the dentist, who moved here from Nanaimo a year before I arrived.

Well . . . I answer, stalling, giving myself time to think. Bob is tinkering with a video camera, trying to remember how to operate it. It is his daughter’s ninth birthday and the candles are being lit. It’s not Cache Creek, I say. "That’s the Thompson. But it’s not far from there. It must be that auto-wrecking yard just north of Hat Creek, with the collapsing fence. The one that’s for sale. Land and Business."

The auto-wrecking yard is an architectural triumph: rough-cut wooden slabs stand up on end surrounding a field of pigweed. Across the highway, cut into the soapstone and shale, a cedar house, transplanted from the suburbs of Vancouver in the dark-stained back-to-the-land images of 1973, advertises worms and fishing information. The yard is a collection of rusted cars, used oil tanks, and moose antlers. Nothing in the yard is alive.

You’re right, laughs Bob. It’ll be a long time before they sell that one. He notices a flashing red light on the front of the camera and then dips his head to peer into the viewfinder. That’s the funny thing. You can’t easily say where it begins, but when you’re there, you know. The candles are all lit. Bob swings the camera around and we sing, on tape. Bob’s daughter blows out all the candles—except one. It burns like a small flower cupped between her hands on a winter night. All the girls laugh. Bob’s daughter blows out that last candle. The red light keeps flashing. »

The Cariboo is not a place but a state of mind. In the fall the rusted tangles of junk in the ranch yards among the jackpine and the alkali lakes are covered with the heart-shaped sulphur-yellow leaves of the trembling aspens. In the late spring the willow cotton drifts and catches like snow among the pink petals of the roses. The clouds graze overhead, like electronic dreams and memory grids of water. They pass over the hills and trees of the Plateau: huge structures of consciousness ten kilometres above us. Every thought arches between the clouds in wave-signals kilometres long.

The Robins Come Home

God gives every bird his worm,

but he does not throw it into the nest.

-Swedish Proverb

The robins arrive on the Plateau in the greyest days of the year, when the snow has lain among the trees and houses so long you know for certain it will never, ever melt away. In March here, a half hour above the coiling, grey-green current of the Fraser River, it is impossible to picture a world not completely covered with and darkened by snow.

Darkened. Postcards show bright white snow, twinkling in the sun, looking as if the stars have fallen to earth. We get snow like that here, too, but those are December postcards, not March ones. March snow is not bright. In March, all the light in the spreading sky drains away and is caught in old, icy drifts. Frozen to their core, the trees have grown black and heavy. Their shadows are purple. Photographs of blackbirds feeding in the yellow manes of the sunflowers the previous summer, or snapshots of crabapples, glowing fuchsia pink on fall branches of yellow leaves, seem impossible here in March. They look like fakes. When you see them, you swear their colours were painted in by a child with a paint set picked up on the sale table at the nearest dollar store: Made in China ®. The colours are like delicate petals on tissue flowers. You feel as if you could walk through them.

To live on the Plateau in March is like having an old two-channel television with rabbit ears, while the kids down the road spend their afternoons spread out on the plush carpet, eating Cheezies, watching cartoons in full colour on YTV. On cable. That’s how our winters end here: they fade away. They drizzle. They crush. March skies are as heavy as lead. You crimp them to your ten-pound-test line and drop them into the deep pools. You wait for something big to bite.

Earlier in the winter, our lives on the Plateau are full of light. We move through the winds off the sun like salamanders shifting in the coals of a fire. What everyone says on the Plateau is Don’t go south in March. It’s good advice. The reason is obvious, though you usually only remember it when it’s too late: while our March skies are grey and marbled with cloud, like old mop water sudsed with soap, it’s not so everywhere. Six hours of No Passing lanes and semi-trailers south down the continuous thread of cold of the Fraser River takes you to the river’s mouth, twenty-five hundred kilometres from the Rockies. By the time you have reached the coast there, you have passed with the river and the roar of the trains through the pine forests of the Plateau, the alders and cedar of the low country, and the paint-box pig farms and suburbs of the Fraser Valley. Your children call out excitedly as the trains wind across cliffs of water-worn rocks stacked up by glaciers for a thousand feet above the river. They count the coal cars: 105, 106, 107, 108. . . .

In March we follow our cold down to the sea, and there at the river’s death, among the red-barked logbooms, sushi bars, and pale green glass streetfronts of Richmond and Delta, the houses barely rise above tideline. They are like boats tied up to shore, knocking at the dock. Among them, the March flowers are nodding, yellow, in thick new grass, tossed by a fresh wind off the strait. After that shock treatment of colour it is very hard to drive back home in the muck and the black ice, with all the yellow lines worn completely off the roads by winter grit, and with the tracks of avalanches still white in the gullies at the roadside. »

That’s March. In the dead of winter, though, in January and February, the bluebottle skies above the heaving, seasick forests of the Plateau are like a Siberian shaman’s spirit stone. The world glows in those months. It is a jewel. When storms come, and they do, with irrepressible speed, they are weightless. You feel energy drain out through the soles of your feet, and then the weather is on you. Wild storms surge off the thirty-foot swells of the open Pacific and collide with the Coast Mountains, washing Bella Coola a little further off of its gravel delta into its fjord, nourishing the moss on cedar-shake roofs in the retirement communities along the east coast of Vancouver Island, and buffeting the cities clustered like purple mussels at the mouth of the Fraser. When the winter storms come to Vancouver, they spray over the cliffs at Wreck Beach, fly up in spume and foam, and land heavily on the city. They break trees over cars, scatter oak and elm branches over streets in torrents of smoky rain smelling of kelp and oysters, and drive rain horizontally into people’s faces and windows. The city drums. A small river runs down each side of every street, disappearing with musical bell sounds into the storm sewers. »

When the rain turns to snow, the cities slow to a crawl, and even stop. A day’s drive and four cups of coffee to the north, the same storms curl off the face of a wall of pure cold that stretches from the steel-hard ground up to the upper limits of the atmosphere and the glittering stars. When