The Choir. A moment to remember.

 

Transition.

Heather is a member of a new community choir on the island and tonight, just before Christmas, is their first concert in the Anglican church which they have borrowed for this occasion. It is a large choir ( 60 people) and looks splendid on the risers in front of the altar and pipe organ. With this many members they could pack the church with relatives alone, but in fact the community as a whole comes out on several cold winter evenings like this to support not just this choir but another of similar size and several smaller ones. And that`s just choirs! It is a very lively place, this little island of ours.

I sit well back in the pews to get the full range of sound and as the program unfolds I begin to look carefully at the individuals singing there. Some are young or in mid-life, but many I recognize from thirty years ago who were here when we ourselves first arrived. Then they were in their twenties or thirties, now they are so grey, their faces set into the forms that tell of personalities and their life journeys. Others are more recent retirees from around the world determined to throw their enthusiasm into their new, and perhaps last, island home. The spotlights angle down onto faces that seem so vulnerable, caught up as they are in the singing. I am planning to take my photography into a study of people next year and already I am taking the first steps by focussing on personality, faces, and the angles of light that will bring all this to my camera`s lens.

It is interesting though, in how all the elder faces are so beautiful. One would naturally look for it in the faces of youth, but here it is shining out of these lined faces much more powerfully than one would expect. Partly, it is the music that is transfiguring them, - they are the song they are singing - and partly too it is the sheer polishing, like rocks in a streambed, they have achieved as they slipped through the years. As we all, in the choir and in the audience, slide closer to the end of our lives we are beginning to be transformed, not “In a moment, in a twinkling of a eye”* but through the much more sure and steady progress of living through the joys and trials that fate has brought us or which we have struggled to achieve. We are all the singer and the song and this is a moment to remember.

* Handel`s ‘Messiah’.

Building a life #17. Its all a matter of balance.

                                                                                           Oh, Jez.

It is time to raise the ridge pole into the peak of living room ceiling and as usual I am working on my own. I have the radio tuned to CBC ( Morningside, with Peter Gzowski) for company and am scratching my head to work out a system that will get the 20 foot cedar pole way up high in the cathedral ceiling -12 feet or more. At one end is a tall post with a space at the top and at the other a slot in the peak of the wall for the beam to slid through to the outer end of the roof line. Really, this is a job for at least a couple of hefty men and some staging but I decide to wing it. It is some time since I have fallen on this building site and cracked my ribs yet again. I am getting cocky.

I manhandle the beam into position below and lift the inside end onto a wooden plank nailed temporarily to the vertical post. Great! Now I lift the outer end onto another temporary step. The beam is now four feet off the floor. I repeat the whole process once again and then hoist the inside end up into a rope sling beside the top of the post. The beam swings ominously in its sling at a 35 degree angle even after I lift the low end to the top of a six foot step ladder. It is time for the decisive step! I will climb the step ladder, take the beam on my shoulder and just walk up the steps until I can slide the beam into place. Up I go, -as the beam approaches horizontal it seems to get lighter - and with a grunt lift it from my shoulder to over my head. Drat, still not quite high enough! I am standing on the very top of the ladder with a long heavy pole held in my quivering hands.

Now I realize that there is no going back. I could never reverse the process smoothly enough to put the log safely back on my shoulders and hence back to the ground. If I try to throw the beam to one side and leap for it, the ladder would just tip over and I would end up crushed by the beam on the floor below. How far down that floor seems! Very carefully I lift the log up onto my fingertips. Still not enough! AHHHH! I rise on tiptoe and, ever so delicately, it slides into place. Phew! I will wait a long time before I share this story with my family.

Ancestral memories on a moonlit night.

                                              Owl moon.

There are several degrees of frost tonight, the still air crackles and though the window the moon shines so white that it looks like snow coating the rocks, trees and buildings. I will have to step outside for an armload of large pieces of firewood to last the rest of the night. Whoever wakes later will go downstairs to stoke the stove some more, thereby saving us from a chilly morning kitchen. Somehow, as I step down the stairs through streaks of moonlight, these nocturnal trips are rather special, as if an all-night sleep is not really the normal state for humankind at all.

After my quick trip outside I stand for a while at the window to admire this white world, so seldom seen during weeks of cloudy, rainy weather. An owl calls and is answered from somewhere deep in the big woods. These are not standard owl calls, but shrieks and moans, -either someone has cold claws out there or they are plotting some very bloody deed. If it gives me the shivers, I can imaging how all the field mice must be feeling crouched down in their burrows.

Then I remember that far back in the remote past our ancestors were once small mammals too. They must have listened in the pine woods on moonlit nights like this to the dinosaurs calling from ridge to ridge as they planned their hunting. We must have shivered in our dens like these mice do today. Then I remember some more: those owls are the last descendants of the dinosaurs. No wonder they raise the hairs on the back of my neck tonight.

The vision of Paul Gauguin.#4. Sea bathing.

‘Wishing to suggest a luxuriant and wild nature, a tropical sun, which set aflame everything around it, I have had to give my figures an appropriate setting. It is indeed life in the open air, but at the same time intimate; amidst the thickets, the shadowy streams, these whispering women in the immense palace decorated by nature herself, with all the riches that Tahiti affords. Hence all these fabulous colours, this fiery yet softened and silent air.


‘___ but all that doesn`t exist!


‘___ yes, it exists, but as the equivalent of the grandeur, the profundity of that mystery of Tahiti, when it has to be expressed on a canvas a meter square.’      Gauguin.



While walking along the beach road on the island of Moorea, I caught a glimpse of a very white European woman quickly covering her breasts with a towel lest my ‘prying eyes’ should shame her. A minute later I found a couple of local ladies bathing waist deep in the lagoon with their children, completely natural in their nudity. The contrast was striking! There is a quality in Gauguin`s portrayal of women that is very refreshing, - they are like those women with their children, real people who are comfortable in their flesh. For Gauguin of course they also represent a tropical Eden before the serpent, or Tahiti before the missionaries.

I am thinking of that moment on Moorea when I select my next painting for exploration. In the immediate foreground there is a long passage of pinks, purple and oranges; sand, fallen blossoms, vines and twigs - one can almost hear the music from the orchestra pit. A tree trunk stretches darkly across the front of the stage and then sweeps up and branches. Two women prepare to swim; one is already splashing in while the other is removing her parae. They are strong, competent people, diving into the ocean. Out in the dark water I glimpse an outrigger canoe and a spear fisherman. Perhaps the swimmers are to join in with the harvest? Flares of light from the fishermen`s lanterns are like stage lighting on the dark beach. If there is a deeper message here I`m sure it has to do with what the sea represents to Gauguin. As in the two previous paintings, and as it was for us sailing across the Pacific the sea is the universe, eternity, the unconscious, that which birthed us all and to which we will return. He is orchestrating his painting so I can make the connection at a deep level. He shows us real actors on the stage of life living the mystery.

THE ROAD TO COPENHAGEN - We follow, the U.S. leads.

"Did we lose that Mr. Harper yet? "
"`Fraid not, Mr. President."

Building a life # 16. Cussing has its place.

                                 The interview.

The early 80`s see a big downturn in the economy and building activity wanes. I need to jump into new employment and I see that the Provincial Parks Department is looking for Park Rangers. I apply, and later, as I am cursing away while laboriously chain sawing a big cedar post in half lengthwise, for the house, I see a pair of brown shiny shoes out of the corner of my eye. My interview for the job has begun! My academic qualifications may actually count against me for this ‘man`s job’ but I guess my chainsaw abilities and cussing qualifications ( learned from the goats) are just right, so I become the new supervisor for the three provincial parks on the island. It is difficult adjusting to being a cog in a civil service wheel, I have lived a remarkably independent life so far, but I do adjust and at least I am quite confident at running the island parks with limited visits from head office in Victoria. The union pay is good and regular too which eases our financial worries. By this point the main house is framed and roofed so I can work on it as time from ‘Rangering’ permits.

                                        The Park Ranger.
24th of May long weekend.
In one dark park a once yellow schoolbus, now spray-painted with graffiti, is surrounded by a screaming multitude of drunken young adults. It is my new job to control this and I have no training, no idea what the rules are and it is just a tad risky to even approach this lot. In another waterfront park, a large crowd of drunken people have lit an enormous beach fire out of drift logs. Beer bottles fly about in the darkness. Now what do I do? It turns out that there is a good reason why this job was available!

It will take me several months to clean and prep the parks for the summer season, to study the Park regulations and to decide that, despite the general lawlessness of the majority of park users at that time, that I will begin to push back. Interestingly enough, my ex-teacher self is of little use here and occasional supervisors who wander by have few useful suggestions. I remember an American park ranger I met briefly as a child and decide to model my new park ranger self after that impression: friendly, fair and firm. Of course he had a proper uniform while I have a used green jacket, he had training and a large organization that was prepared to supporting him, but I realize that this is mostly a matter of acting. Until I really have the experience to professionally fill the role, I can confidently act as if I do. It works! Several exciting years would pass before the word gets out to all the youth, party and motorcycle crowds that things had changed on Saltspring and I will have lots of technicolour evenings on patrol to talk about. “What happened last night Dad”, would be how I was greeted by my children in the morning. “Well I had to call the RCMP again last night because...”.

The surge.

Indian Point is past Fall now. The mossy rocks and undergrowth of salal shine vivid green in the wet, and the grey even light shines purely into places it hasn`t visited since the new Spring leaves of maples cast them into shadow. Those leaves are now plastered to the muddy ground except where torrents of water have swept the trails clear. It is now a time that is past regret for summer, well past, and we are launched into the winter rains that are themselves a dark reflection of summer`s drought. It feels good to be committed to action at last, immersed in the dark, stormy season of winter.

Walking along the cliff trail, stepping carefully over granite bones, I hear the now calm grey sea quietly surging against the fine gravel of the first beach. Is it breathing or a heartbeat? I cannot decide and try to avoid focussing on its insistent rhythm lest my own breath, my own heart, should synchronize and I be swept away. In this solemn season that does not seem improbable now that dark winter spirits have reclaimed the land and sea.

The beach itself has changed since the 60 knot south-easter of last week reshaped it. Old familiar logs are gone or flipped over into new configurations, the stream that slides out of the undergrowth now drops three feet over a new gravel bank and one must step carefully on slippery lumps of pulverized driftwood to get across more or less dry shod. Deep in the darkest part of the forest all is silent and sodden. A white shrine of shells on a stump has been here for years, constantly renewed: it is a naturally spooky place. The beat of the sea filters faintly through the trees to give this place a heart as well. I would rather it was a heart than feel it was something invisible and very big breathing down my neck. I quickly step out of the trees and back into the light.

The point itself is littered in logs and finely ground driftwood mixed with seaweed and flotsam. Left by the last high tide, a bright plastic bottle and a large square of blue foam pretend to be a natural part of the scene. In a way they are, as they swish in the backwash or rest awkwardly high up on the rocks. They will soon move along to other shores or stay and be ground up by waves and gravel.

Ahhhh! The surge breathes again, trying to catch me unawares. It is high time I hiked back out of here, before I am myself ground up fine and spread out along the shore.