Tree sailing.

                                                       Tree sailing.

As a child in England during the Second World War I discovered a special little game I could play by myself called ‘lining things up’. Through a slight movement of my head a fly speck on the window could be placed on the top of a tree outside, the line of the edge of the table before me could be extended into space to pass precisely between the heads of the adults who were talking to me. They were talking sure enough, I could hear the distant murmur of their voices, but I was off in a visual world of my own. If I had been born twenty years earlier that developing skill might have made me a sniper or bomb aimer but others performed that task and many died that I might grow in peace and eventually become through that little habit of mind an artist and photographer.


That habit grew and grew through time. At first the lining up of things became more challenging: as I walked I could I see potential complex line-ups as they developed and “fire’ with a quick twitch when the magic moment arrived. For it felt like magic. Then it was shapes in three dimensions: the garbage can in the foreground became the base of the building behind it and the cloud in the sky would balance for a moment on the mountaintop in I waited just a minute. Fortunately for me this never developed into a mania as it could have done if I had lived a difficult and stressful kind of childhood. Instead the family moved to Canada after the war and I lived on a little ocean bay on the west coast of Canada. The family was preoccupied with making a living and I , the youngest of five, was overlooked to wander the shores and woods alone. I began a romance with the wild that would last me forever and combined that with the keen observation I had learned in my childhood game. Now my world was a familiar, constantly shifting constellation of relationships. The top of the cedar tree I was clinging to in the gale for fun danced in concert with its fellows and the waves in the bay echoed that in an interesting complex rhythm. The low clouds rushed close overhead and spoke in a kind of grey visual language. I started to draw.

Nowadays when I take my camera for a walk I not only still see those complex relationships but look within those forms for what they are saying in their visual language. In this I share something with other artists down through time who have striven to record this in their art, whether in music, dance, or in pictures and sculpture. I think back to the cave paintings of Southern Europe that were striving to portray the mystery ten thousand years ago and know myself to be in good company. That little childhood game was not so crazy after all, just my portal into the realm of a reality that underlies and informs our knowledge of what we call ‘ the real world’.

Landfall.

Landfall

                                                                             Landfall.

Here is a memory of our Pacific voyages in Shiriri. The moment when the squall drifts off, the sky clears and land can be faintly seen ahead is a high like no other, especially if the crossing has been a nasty one. We are going to live after all, we feel, and then immediately snap our tired minds back into focus for the tricky bit of winding through the reefs that stand between us and a safe harbour. At the time we think that the safe harbour is the ultimate goal but in the end it is this moment in the midst of life with all its dangers that will remain most vividly in memory.

The vision of Paul Gauguin #5. Frog Woman.

My sketch of Gauguin`s painting.

‘...in the avoidance of the anecdote, the substitution of a situation that is equivocal and suggestive, demanding the imaginative co-creation of the observer,....’ David Sweetman. ‘Gauguin. A complete life’.

The woman in Gauguin`s painting kneels forward, knees apart, propped up on her elbows in what seems an awkward position. She fills the frame, supported by simple bands of white and yellow sand. The background is a thin, barely differentiated wavy strip of land and sea. Here at last I can settle down to a simple figure study.

I focus, trying to get my drawn lines to be precise to the original figure. Usually my drawing is not accurate to nature but here, with a figure, any straying from the truth will look awkward and false. OK Paul, but why have you chosen that pose, it cannot be normal for this woman to pose like that? She looks like a frog!

I begin to get a woozy feeling that once again I am sliding into a symbolic painting and that this is no simple figure painting at all but a synthesis of ideas. I proceed through the layers of colour, blending one layer on top of another, sometimes scraping pastel away to expose some of the lower layers: the hours pass like seconds. I am deep in the process when the power of the painting begins to take over, my clever little mind gets passed by. I am part of the scene, part of the woman and of the beach, part of a universal truth.

Gauguin is calling upon my imagination to see her as the present embodiment of the eternal woman who carries life forward through time , the mother of us all. Her breasts dangle beneath her, nurturing the earth, she spreads her legs and births everything into existence, dreaming us up as she stares off into space and time. Her strong brown legs and arms support her firmly on the earth. She is Frog Woman of my local West Coast First Nations traditional mythology. First creator, maker of the people, Eve.

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, 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.

Building a life # 15. Blowing things up, putting things up, putting up with things.

The first thing I must do to make a start on the main house is to create a flat building site where there is at present a long ridge of hard rock. We have decided that although we would like this house to be up above the shady forest floor, so important in the rainy winter`s low light, neither do we wish to blast flat the highest part of the ridge and thus destroy one of the nicest places for a garden. We decide to blast the end of the ridge and tuck the house into the hillside. It is an exciting week while the pneumatic drill chatters away making many deep holes and even more exciting when all of them are filled with explosive and the whole mass shatters in one great THUMP! The rock shards are pushed over the bank and I begin laying out the foundation form work. It is so frustrating having to work for wages too but this is the money that pays for the blasting and the concrete as well as looking after the monthly living expenses. We will build just as fast as the money comes in to pay for the materials. This can only work for us because we have no loan from the bank that would have imposed time deadlines and forced us to hire all the work out.

The winter is a snowy, cold one and we are glad to be in the log cabin, although the enormous space we experienced at first has shrunk again with all five of us bumping shoulders. This has certainly encouraged me to continue with our building schedule. We are reasonably secure in our log cabin but it doesn`t take much to shake our confidence. Once I get a terrible bout of flu and lie helpless in bed while Heather tries to manage things on her own and care for me. The final straw is when she runs out of split firewood and can`t handle the big splitting maul to make more from some big fir rounds. Neighbour Bruce finds her in tears of frustration in the snow and takes over from her and later a doctor makes a house call for me.

When winter brings even more snow, the school bus does not run, so we all go cross country skiing up and down our trails and it isn`t until next Spring when we have felled many more trees, had them milled into lumber by a portable mill and we have got a load of plywood delivered that we are ready to begin framing up the new building. We have designed a split level house this time with its main windows facing south and with Bruce`s help the frame goes up in three days. After the long labour of the log cabin, this is a big boost. Bruce also has a house worth of repossessed windows he will sell me cheaply so we design around those sizes. We have bought a logging truck load of cedar poles from a neighbour and will use them to build posts and beams into the interior of the building. The upstairs room layout is still undetermined at this point so I pace around the big two-level space, figure out two bedrooms, a bathroom and living room and then frame up the window spaces. Then the plywood sheathing is cut out with the chainsaw. An architect no doubt would scream at such a process but it is so much easier to walk around in a space and plan it by laying pieces of lumber on the floor and moving them around to represent walls and doorways. I build a loft room for one daughter with the other two occupying the bedroom below. Like the log cabin, the upstairs will have high cathedral ceilings, this time lined with our own cedar planks milled from our own trees.

The vision of Paul Gauguin #3. The birth of Venus.

‘The idea is the form of things outside of those things.’ Emile Bernard.


‘Gauguin demonstrated that the most disparate types of art - not to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical myths and much else beside - could be combined into a synthesis that was of its time yet timeless. An artist could also confound conventional notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing the dark Gods ( not necessarily Polynesian ones) and tapping into a vital new source of divine energy...’
David Sweetman. ‘Gauguin. A complete life.’

‘Emotion first! Understanding afterwards! My dream is intangible, it comprises no allegory’. Paul Gauguin.

For my second ‘translation’ I decided to leap in with both feet and chose a complex synthesis to work with. Once again I found that the pencil drawing opened the painting up to me: my hands were brighter than my frontal lobe. My reading of the notes that accompanied the colour reproductions I was working from showed me that no one had more than skimmed the surface. The various elements could be identified to some degree, but Gauguin`s painting was more than a collection of its parts and the ultimate ‘meaning’ seemed purposely shrouded in mystery. Its quite possible that even he was not completely aware of what he was creating. There was plenty of room for me to wander in and do my own exploring.

I am partially red-green colour blind so have always tended to view the world from its shapes rather than its colours, and yet I was stepping into paintings that carried much of their message in their colour relationships. A remarkable part of my journey was that I discovered that if I really concentrated hard I could differentiate between blue and purple, I could see the light green leaves on a pink background. I had simply taken the easy road in the past. This was exciting! What passion there is in colour!

This painting was designed like a stage set and a ballet of sorts was being performed to the music expressed in the colour harmonies. The more I looked as I drew with pencil and oil pastels the more I discovered. I could see the waves breaking on the coral reef, the rattling pandanus palms, and the volcanic mountains of Tahiti in the background: the setting was recognizable as were the figures with the wind off the sea flapping their clothes. Other elements like the ‘savage Idol’ and the three figures in the foreground were symbols to carry what the artist felt was the deeper meaning embedded in the landscape. The interlocking colour shapes in the lagoon in the foreground were fascinating, they could represent reflections of clouds, the coral reef in the shallow water, or forms adapted from ornamental friezes from some other culture. Or all three, and more. For me it was the font of all creation, star foam, into which the central figure was still dipping her feet. As she was wringing out her hair I knew that she and the other two figures still uncurling from the fetal position had just been born from the mind of the creator. She was Venus herself, fresh out from the foam, with a numinous green halo surrounding her to indicate she was a Goddess

For Gauguin I`m sure she was also his own creative self, the slim female spirit hidden within his powerful male body who could surface and walk the earth while he painted.

Building a life #14. ‘Dreams can come true. It can happen to you....'

The bright light of a harvest moon floods through the high windows of our completed log cabin. Heather and I lie on our couch-bed looking up at the wooden cathedral ceiling and pine beams. The flickering light from the wood stove glints on the log walls. Over in the shadowy corner behind a screen our three precious children sleep all unaware of their parents sense of wonder. After over a year in the pumphouse and trailer we are finally living inside something that started as a big dream and now is reality. This is heady and potentially dangerous stuff. We have learned that dreams can be made to come true and if this one, why not another, and another?

Not only have I laboured hard through almost a year of seasons to complete this project, I have gained a long list of skills that I can put to use on the next big project. Not that I am enthusiastic right now about beginning the big house back beside the orchard on the other side of the stream. It seems too much to even think about right now and besides we are low on money. I need a job, and on this little island with a plethora of back-to-the-land ex-teachers looking for work it will have to be associated with one of my new skills. The secret of island work is to be multi-talented and ready for whatever is needed. My curse of having a million varied interests and abilities can start to pay off for us at last.

I begin work as a plumber in a house a friend is building for resale and it is just a slight bump in the road to become the electrician as well. Bruce says to me, “Look Bill, I don`t mind you looking things up in the Readers Digest book, but hide it when we have inspectors and prospective buyers come around eh?”

I take on building the kitchen cabinets and am finally left to do all the trim details on my own when the crew moves on to another house start. I have the prospect now of full time work but little time to build for myself. Catch 22.

The vision of Paul Gauguin. #2. Namaste.

In art, we have just undergone a very long period of aberration due to physics, mechanical chemistry and nature study. Artists have lost all their savagery, all their instincts, one might say their imagination, and so they have wandered down every path in order to find the productive elements they havn`t the strength to create; as a result, they act only as undisciplined crowds and feel frightened. Lost as it were, when they are alone. That is why solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone. Everything I have learned from other people merely stood in my way. This I can say: No one has taught me anything. On the other hand, it is true that I know so little, which is of my own creation. And who knows whether that little, when put to use by others, will not become something big?.... Paul Gauguin.

It felt a little strange with Gauguin`s words ringing in my ears to settle down to walking down his path for a while by copying some of his paintings just like the art students of Gauguin`s time used to do as part of their training ( including Gauguin himself). I reasoned that the most intense way to view his works was to draw and paint them, taking several hours over each, - so much longer and careful a participation than a mere looking at and reading about them could accomplish. I had already read what other`s had to say, I had looked at his paintings as I read, I knew what others said I should look for, but as yet I had not really entered into them fully. Here was my real beginning.

I knew that I would not just copy the paintings, but find a way to participate as I felt Gauguin really demanded - a dynamic interaction rather than a faithful reproduction- so I chose a technique really quite different from the brush and oil paint on canvas that he used, in the expectation that in doing a kind of translation I would feel his creative process more directly: second hand yes, but closer to the original experience. Me and you Paul! I hoped that having walked in the same Polynesian landscape as the artist would help bridge the gap, not of years, because that was irrelevant, but directly from mind to mind. I did not so much wish to learn his techniques as to understand what he had to communicate.

The first painting I attempted was of two young women sitting on the sand. On first glance, it seemed the most straightforward. I first drew in the lines of the two figures and then used oil pastels to lay in the basic colour themes. I left the future dark areas untouched and applied white where it would be wanted in the finished piece. An overall wash of black ink was applied over the oil based medium and then wiped off again. Now I had a colourful picture with all blank areas still covered in black ink. Even at this preliminary point in the ‘translation’ I had discovered so much simply by drawing his simple bold figures and approximating his colours. The women had become distinct beings already, sitting in the dappled shade, one plaiting a hat. They were mysterious. What were they thinking, sitting so motionless, one looking up at the viewer?

What I had not fully grasped before was that even here in this seemingly realistic scene, the artist was using colour to communicate - the orange and pinks carrying their own message directly to my emotions, the yellow of the sand somehow representing the ultimate ground of being and the shadowy abstract line of the lagoon behind reminding me of eternity that lies always lapping around the edges of the present moment. I began to recognize that the figures, so monumental and solid, unified what we usually think of as two separate modalities. They were real Polynesian people and they were also Gods - transcendent beings: ordinary people sitting on the beach recognized for their immortal selves. Namaste.

By working so closely with his painting I am participating in his vision and what a powerful one it is. I could just as well be wrong in my interpretation but that does not matter, it is the process of interacting with the image that is important. The observer has entered into the idea being painted, was creating new meaning, and was no longer a separate ‘impartial’ viewer.

I continue to work into my translation with pastels and ink, varnishing to seal in the first layers and continuing with more pastels and then varnishing again. I am trying through depth of layers of pigment and films of varnish to achieve a surface that reflects the layers of meaning that still remain to be discovered.

Building a life #13. Buster gets our goat.

Driving Buster White.

Now the barn is completed and a fenced yard built behind it, we take our goats for a browsing walk in the mornings down the trail past Cat Hill. We are also now the proud owners of a castrated and de-horned young billy goat we have called Buster White. As we have milking goats, they have to be freshened and that means kids. Any little male goats get killed ( by me, a nasty job.) but Heather saved Buster with the idea that he could be trained to pull a light wagon. Cute!

Buster has his own leather collar, answers to his name, is aware of his protected status and is full of lively animal spirits. He likes to butt Gwyn and lies in wait for her to come by. We say to Gwyn, “ Stand up to him Honey. Let him know that you are the boss.” Buster is now heavier than Gwyn and has a harder head.

One day Heather is hiking up the hill to the cabin and Buster, hiding behind a big cedar, jumps out behind her and butts her hard in the bottom. That is something even I would not have the nerve to do and Buster quickly finds himself sitting on the front seat of the van watching the passing scenery in a manner that says “Ah, at last, I am being taken for a drive. Just what I deserve!”

A week later he came home from the butcher in brown paper packages and the family ate ‘ lamb’ for some time after. We got Buster`s goat in the end.

Building a life #12. ‘Dreams can come true. It can happen to you...’

The bright light of a harvest moon floods through the high windows of our completed log cabin. Heather and I lie on our couch-bed looking up at the high wooden cathedral ceiling and pine beams. The flickering light from the wood stove glints on the log walls. Over in the shadowy corner behind a screen our three precious children sleep all unaware of their parents sense of wonder. After over a year in the pumphouse and trailer we are finally living inside something that started as a big dream and now is reality. This is heady and potentially dangerous stuff. We have learned that dreams can be made to come true and if this one, why not another, and another?

Not only have I laboured hard through almost a year of seasons to complete this project, I have gained a long list of skills that I can put to use on the next big project. Not that I am enthusiastic right now about beginning the big house back beside the orchard on the other side of the stream. It seems too much to even think about right now and besides we are low on money. I need a job, and on this little island with a plethora of back-to-the-land ex-teachers looking for work it will have to be associated with one of my new skills. The secret of island work is to be multi-talented and ready for whatever is needed. My curse of having a million varied interests and abilities can start to pay off for us at last.

I begin work as a plumber in a house a friend is building for resale and it is just a slight bump in the road to become the electrician as well. Bruce says to me, “Look Bill, I don`t mind you looking things up in the Readers Digest book, but hide it when we have inspectors and prospective buyers come around eh?”

I take on building the kitchen cabinets and am finally left to do all the trim details on my own when the crew moves on to another house start. I have the prospect now of full time work but little time to build for myself. Catch 22.

The vision of Paul Gauguin #1. ‘Keep your eyes on the prize.’

                                                                           A point of view

A word of advice: Don`t paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! Study nature, then brood on it and think more of the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our divine master.
                                                                                                               Paul Gauguin.

I have been reading lately about the life and art of Paul Gauguin, that colourful character who died just over one hundred years ago in the Marquesas Islands and who revolutionized the development of the visual arts. While sailing around the Pacific several years ago I had planned to visit his grave and was disappointed to be headed off by the weather to another island in the group. So much has been written about his vivid life that his actual writing and painting is generally comprehended through the constricted lens of ‘morality’. By questioning the assumptions of the superiority of European culture, by actively seeking a simpler life close to nature and ‘going native’ he scandalized the morals of his own era and even of our own today. In visiting the island landscapes and peoples through the South Pacific where he painted, printed, carved, and wrote during his last productive years I began to see clearly that although his life and work are intimately connected, his value is more correctly appreciated through his paintings and the landscape than through the ‘morality’ of his life.

Gauguin was already a talented man when he began painting back in France. He quickly mastered the major new themes and techniques of his time and then proceeded to keep on pushing the envelope, pressing on with an art that filtered the world through his personal vision. It was an approach to life that emphasized the value of emulating the creative force of the Creator rather than following in footsteps already pressed into the soil by others. It is an important distinction and helps to explain the antagonism of his society, the freshness of his work and its value to us today.

Gauguin`s use of colour, line and shape as a visual kind of music that directly affects the emotions, his insistence of the freedom of the artist, that there is nothing that art cannot be free to express, are commonplace ideas today. Where Gauguin gets interesting for me is in the realm of the interaction between myself the observer, and his creative works that are left to us. Putting aside his theories and the development of art over the last hundred years, how am I directly affected by one of his paintings? If his paintings affect some of us deeply, then he does have a kind of immortality and we have found his door into the dark and fecund place of the creative spirit. That would be not a bad trick for a man now held in poor regard in the narrow court of public morality but who spent his life first creating a tool set of skills and theories and then putting them to use to express the transcendent.

The first thing I noticed in Polynesia was that I was seeing the islands through his eyes: the shadows, the fallen yellow blossoms, the black volcanic beaches, lush vegetation and red soils. A man galloped his horse down the road, smoke drifted up from smudge fires, children washed their horses in the surf, some women bathed bare breasted in the lagoon with their children - the raw materials that he used for subject matter were all around me, part of a whole universe of hot sun, crashing surf, and palms rattling their branches in the Trade winds. His challenge was to find the visual symbols that would convey all of this and its transcendent meaning within the narrow two-dimensional world of his canvas. As a symbolist painter he was uniquely qualified to take up this challenge.

Gauguin understood that a painting was an abstraction: that it could be an equivalent for the deeper meaning that all the elements of the landscape were expressing in a riot of form and colour. ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ is the title of one of his enigmatic paintings: enigmatic on purpose, so that we are forced to participate in the unfolding. He asks the observer to enter into his painting in order to touch deeper meanings. When one realizes that he had all the skills to produced the standard commercially profitable paintings of the day that would have lifted him out of poverty and given him the esteem of the people around him, it is all the more impressive that he kept focused on his struggle to express something that was so difficult to grasp and for which he earned nothing but ridicule from the French Colonials and indifference from his Polynesian neighbours whom he portrayed with such sympathy. He had his eyes on the prize - his place in the development of art and its ability to express the ineffable.

The many paintings he has left us can be viewed from so many different points of view. His challenge to us is to partner with him as we enter through the picture frame. How we frame the world, how we understand it, determines how far we can go into the paintings. We must park our everyday rational mind at the door, accept the challenge and drift through on our emotions, at first not seeking to understand as much as to feel. This is a journey into the unconscious, the unconscious is in its essence the whole universe, and we can experience the truths that Gauguin painted about human kind and our place within the rest of the natural world. He sacrificed his well being for something great and spend his Polynesian years with his artist`s finger on the pulse of being.

Building a life #11. ‘Raise high the roof beams!’

                                               The cabin without its lid.

Spring is just around the corner, and the cabin walls are up. The original little 20x30 foot plywood platform now looks big with its log walls containing the space that we will live in by the Fall. The next step is the roof and for that I have some long logs set aside to make the ridge pole. One clear dark night I take the hurricane lantern up to the building site and contemplate the splendor of it all: the shadowy walls, dark overarching fir trees and brilliant star filled sky. This may be simply a construction project, but for me it is a form of art that I am making here: it`s called architecture and, having designed the cabin on paper, I am now making it real.

                                              On a cold clear winter`s night.


As I raise the center post and its cross beams I am paying special attention to the world above the cabin, the birds, the swoosh of the wind in the trees and the first slight smell of Spring in the air. Soon, if all goes well I`ll be raising the rafters, nailing down the cedar shakes and enclosing this open-air space that I have occupied during the winter months. I will miss it.

Raising the ridge poles goes smoothly with the help of my powerful neighbour John Bok who walks up the ladder with the end of each 20` log on his shoulder and places them on top of their posts. The rafters and strapping are a cinch - anything that simply involves dimensional lumber seems so simple after all the picky work with logs and chainsaw.

While preparing for the roofing project I am also reading ahead to plan for the electricity and plumbing. I have had to pre-drill all the holes in the log walls for the electrical wires and outlets as I went along. The water line from the well is already under the house, the electrical wires loop above the hillside from the utility pole to a temporary pole. There are a lot of interlocking elements in construction and I have to plan and co-ordinate all these even as I am doing the repetitive log building work. Thank goodness all the necessary information lies in books and these are very straight forward to learn from. This is exciting!

Building a life #10. The cabin project.

Building the cabin`s log walls.

For the past year I have read nothing but building books: concrete, reinforcing rods, spans for wooden beams, plumbing, electricity... the list is endless as is my capacity to learn from them. That, in the end, is the real legacy of my years in university: I can read and learn from books and do not have to rely on partial knowledge gleaned from conversations or from working in a particular trade. Neither do I have to hire someone and reduce our small building fund still farther. It is a little like a marathon though, with a steady push to keep moving forward. I am certainly getting in spades what I had dreamed of while I was teaching. Teaching... that already seems like a distant dream from another galaxy.

Once the sill logs are in place and the plywood sub-floor nailed down it is time to begin the job of building the frame and walls of the cabin we will eventually call ‘Swallow’. I have decided to use an old Quebec style of building a log house called ‘piece en piece’ - a post and beam structure with the open wall spaces filled with scribed and fitted logs. This takes advantage of the small diameter ( 6 to 8 inches) lodgepole pine logs I have cut in the Okanagan which I can lift and handle by myself without needing machinery. I make a special pair of saw horses that allow me to work with the chain saw at waist level and some log dogs ( giant staples) to lock them into place while I cut the tenoned ends ( to fit into the morticed slots in the vertical posts) and cut the long V slot in the bottom of each log that I have scribed to fit the lower log. All very labour intensive and repetitive, but each day`s work in the cool winter weather sees solid progress. Compared to teaching, I can see the results of my creativity each day. At the end of each day we can read in the evenings about how Pa is building his log house on the prairie as we sit warm and toasty having the bedtime story.

War crimes and other atrocities.

                                 S*C*A*M*P.

‘I have seen the enemy and he is us.’ Andy Capp.

In the following piece I am drawing on my own experience of rowing among the Gulf Islands and having time to think about things as I go along. I was intrigued by the idea of waves that spread out behind a boat being like an event in the past that has reverberations that drag behind it to arrive some time in the future to disturb the surface of the mind. In the story, the real event of the waves in the calm sea opens a window into a hidden and repressed time from the past. The ripping sound of the breaking waves is the final tug at the blind which zips up to expose a wartime atrocity.

What I found interesting was the idea of continuity. A personality which has a past in wartime atrocities, I imagined an incident in the ethnic cleansing conflicts of the former Yugoslavia, but there are plenty of other possibilities, must always hide parts of itself within ‘normal’ society, but certain basic structures continue, in this case a preoccupation with efficiency. I think this person is a monster like those that ran the death camps for Germany during WWII, but the horror is even greater if we realize that much of this death and destruction was carried out by ‘regular folks’ who could fit right in with the rest of us when conditions changed once again. As Little Abner said in the Andy Capp cartoon, “ I have seen the enemy and he is us.”

                      
             Continuity of personality.

A motor yacht plows a deep furrow as it travels south among the islands. It`s wave pattern spreads out behind, forming several rows of steep, sometimes breaking waves in the calm sea. They sweep toward a lone man in a rowboat headed north.

Facing south, at the oars, he can see the yacht receding far down the channel. He can hear the waves when they finally arrive and turns his skiff to face into them. Up and down pitches the skiff while he balances it with his oars held steady in the water. The waves are smooth except when the crests tear open with a ripping sound and foam escapes to race down the wave fronts. The waves pass, the calm returns and he resumes his course, his mind, once again, free to wander.


“That beamy boat plowing along - all that energy being used to make waves.

Inefficient!”


“Those waves that came up behind me: they sounded like torn cloth when they broke. Riiiip! Or a machine gun.”


The sound of gunfire echoing behind the mountain ridge from the village in the next valley. A fusillade of rife shots, the ripping sound of a machine gun.

“Such a small village. The men had been told to conserve ammunition. Amateurs, anxious to get it over with. They will learn.

Inefficient!”

                   
Update.
On the radio this morning there was discussion about the conviction in Canadian court of Desiree Munyaneza for atrocities in Ruanda and of the war crimes trial in The Hague of the former Serb leader Radovan Karodzic who lived incognito for many years, just like the character in this meditation, before being caught. What I found difficult to deal with while writing this was that I was describing myself and the train of my own thoughts up until the final deeper memory of the massacre and even that was an easy and logical imaginative leap to make. While it is important to point the finger at those who cross the line into barbarism, it is also useful to recognize how adaptable human beings are, for better or for worse, and that all of us are part of this bloody species and share emotions like anger and the need to ‘defend’ ourselves, our families, or our ethnic and national identity. It is important that we do not bury these ugly attributes so they will grow in hidden and twisted ways, but admit them into our understanding of what it means to be human so that we can balance them up with the more socially positive aspects of humanity of which there are many. It is that struggle for the unity of our real selves that makes us fully human.

Building a life #9. ‘All work and no play.....’

Building the log cabin moves forward steadily throughout the winter months. We also must live from day to day in rough conditions and keep ourselves and our children happy and healthy. This is just as well because it is a temptation for me to focus twenty-four hours a day on the building project. I try to, but the other needs of the day drag me out into the larger perspective. Pacing is important, and we are launched on long term projects.

Our dog Saffi is killed one morning as I drive the children ( we are late) down to the school bus stop. She has been in the habit of running beside the pick-up truck as I haul loads of logs up to the building site and this time she darts in front of the van and is run over. It is a sad business, but she has been a stupid dog from the start and that caught up with her.

We are getting to know our neighbours. Heather has started volunteering as a Girl Guide leader
and the girls have made friends at school. We are not alone in our ‘back-to -the -landing’ on Saltspring. All around us are other families building and living rough, raising goats and chickens, learning archaic skills. We begin to get together for pot-luck parties. While the children play, the women trade experiences of their non- suburban life style while the men get deep into technical building discussions and the ways to get around the building inspector with his residential codes best suited to city subdivisions.

We have a memorable children`s birthday party in the pumphouse that first winter. A hoard of girls fill the little building. They play complicated games that lead them up and over the furniture. This is so like the essence of the ‘Little House’ books. That our girls all have ‘Holly Hobbie’ pioneer frocks and poke bonnets adds to the impression. The girls all get (second hand) baby carriages for Christmas and parade up and down the paved road which has little car traffic. Our property is rough, muddy and covered in building materials so the road is their cleanest play area. Thank goodness we have the washer and dryer in the pumphouse or just keeping clean would be difficult.

Christmas it turns out is problematical for Gwynnie. She writes in her letter to Santa that we are living both in the trailer and the pumphouse and to please leave the stocking presents in the trailer as his ‘Ho Ho Ho’ would be too frightening in the tight confines of the pumphouse. Like the girls who are leading parallel lives in the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ our girls get tin mugs from Santa this year. Santa always leaves an illustrated shakily written letter for the girls each year to show that they are in his thoughts. He appreciates the sherry and shortbread that is left for him in the trailer and the carrots for his reindeer.

Building a life #8. The Little House in the Big Woods.

                                    The little house in our big woods.

It is cold, dark and snowy outside our snug little pump-house cabin. We are all tucked into the big double bed and are reading the first book of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, ‘ The Little House in the Big Woods’. The wind shakes the boughs of the overhanging firs and down thump big puffs of snow onto the roof, but in our imaginations we are off in the much wilder world of the Ingalls: Mary ,Laura, Ma and Pa are living in the big woods of Minnesota during real pioneer times. How brave they are and how much they care for each other. How warm and cozy we all are in the our own big woods. How real their lives feel. We are living parallel lives.

Up on the hill on the other side of the stream, piling up with snow is the log cabin. There is not much to see as yet, some short posts on concrete pads and skinned logs stacked nearby that we have cut on the building site, but we are underway and the snow, heavy and wet as it is, will soon turn to rain and I will be back to work with the chainsaw.

During the mornings, Gwyn is the only child at home and Heather is anxious to help move this project forward. She sets Gwyn up in the trailer in front of the TV watching Mr. Dress-Up and Sesame Street and hurries up the hill. One morning I am placing the big sill logs on top of the cedar posts that raise the building high enough for a crawl space underneath. The final 30 footer has a curve that must be adjusted for and then I lever the smaller end up in place: easy. The butt end however is heavy and I sweat away, raising and placing blocks and wedges with Heather`s help, as it inches upward. Finally I call to Heather, “Take your hands away from the other end. I`m going to roll it on now!” Being curved, it moves slowly as I lift with the peevee until suddenly, passing the tipping point, it rushes to complete the roll. Heather`s hand is crushed as it rolls over her fingers!

There is no time for recriminations. We rush down the hill, put her hand in ice, gather Gwyn up and drive for the hospital, twenty minutes away. So far it has not hurt, but after the doctor has pulled each finger to check for damage it certainly does! Nothing broken, but this is a good reminder of how close we have been skating to an accident. Back in the other little house in the big woods we bet that Ma and Pa would have been more careful: not only was there no hospital for them, but an accident that crippled either of them would have life threatening consequences for their family`s ability to survive way out on the real frontier. Our life here may be rough and ready by normal standards, but it is only play acting compared to that of those folks in the big woods over a hundred years ago.

Building a life # 7. 'Who could ask for anything more?'

The Pumphouse is framed up.

Feeding the goats in their temporary pen. The chainsaw has the milling hardware that helps to make squared timbers for the barn.

The completed barn with Maggie, Muffin and probably Alice.

Most pump-houses are the size of an outhouse, but we plan a multi-use building - a 16x16 foot pole frame sheathed in plywood on a concrete base. Here we can all sleep in our proper beds, have a washer and dryer and use electric heat. With batt insulation and plastic vapour barrier lining the walls and ceiling, the walls lined with our drapes and with carpets on the floor this should be quite comfortable ( luxurious, compared to our tents).

Some friends come over and camp beside us for a few days and we quickly raise the frame. How proud we are! Once the roof and siding is on and I have poured a concrete floor, my next great challenge is to install the electricity; mains service, panel and wiring for the pump, washer, dryer lights and outlets. I have my bible - a Readers Digest book on everything to do with building and a little red book with the electrical code. A lot to learn in a short time, but the local hardware store is very helpful with consultation and diagrams and eventually the inspector, on my second try, gives me the ok . We seriously watch him drive away and then - WOOPEE!

We move the trailer beside the new building, stretch a tarp between the two and we are in business for the winter. We now have light and heat, running water and a telephone. Who could ask for anything more?

The next urgent item is the barn. It needs to be a larger version of the pumphouse, so on the other side of the driveway I level a 16x32 foot piece of ground - it always looks so small at this point - and pour another small concrete pad just for the milking area. The rest of the uprights sit on concrete blocks. I have an attachment for the chainsaw bar that allows me, with a lot of sweat and noise, to trim round logs into squared timber. The longest log (36') is the ridge pole, and it is a great day when we skid it up and lock it into place. It is very nice for this project not to have to use the generator every time I need power for my tools - a chain saw cannot do everything ( almost, but not quite all.)

Now we can unload the ‘pup’ trailer and store our furniture ( minus the beds, lamps, dressers and washer/dryer) in the lofts, move our goats and chickens in and regroup for the next really big project -the log cabin.

It is now time for Anne and Elaine to start school and fortunately the bus comes right past the end of our street. The first afternoon after school we tow our big dory ‘Swallow’, that I had built back in Okanagan Falls, down to Ganges, our island town ( with it`s clapboard buildings and wooden sidewalks) and go for a sail in the harbour. This day would usually be the beginning of a busy school year for me as well and it feels liberating to be sailing instead. It has been a terribly busy summer but we have met our targets and are ready for winter.

Branding. A nasty jab at Uncle Stephen.

The 'new' Canadian government has taken to branding itself 'The Harper Government' after our prime minister Stephen Harper and identifying our tax money being returned in services as rather his and his party`s gift to us. This is all very 1984 -ish (as in Orwell`s novel of that name) and I have surmised that the distribution of the H1 N1 flu vacine will continue the tradition.

The touch.

                                                              The festival of light.

Down by the bay the misty sun glints gently off the water and softly brushes over the trees and banks of salal. I feel it touching me too as I pause to make a photo. It is the gentleness of the light that has pulled me into the scene and in a time when we are drifting toward the harshness of winter this is a parting gift.

It is a spooky thing to feel this powerful communication without any religious packaging, no framing, just a direct touch of a vanishing hand and a whispered promise of return.

Great monuments to food.

Building a life # 6. The feral cats of Cat Hill.

The day when we first arrived, I lifted the smelly box of wild cats out from the truck and opened it. Zoom! The mother and daughter disappeared downhill into the trees like smoke. The girls became the cat`s caretakers and carried food down to the base of a tall rock outcrop. To get there they had to push their way through an alder thicket by the stream and then walk down a shadowy old trail. The salal undergrowth was far over their heads and the great firs and cedars stretched up forever. It was a spooky place, especially in the evening, full of spirits and now the hiding place of two cats who lurked while the girls quickly delivered their meal and ran back to the light of the clearing.

One of the first things we did was to try to find the property boundaries. With compass and a long string I set off through the forest swimming through the high salal, ocean spray and red current bushes that masked a mess of old logs, all rotten and slippery beneath my feet. I plunged through to the ground through cris-crossed logs, crawled up, balanced precariously, walked along a log, plunged down once more. The string payed out behind me and warned me if I was wandering off the compass course. “No worries,” I muttered when it felt like I might drown or wander lost forever. I was glad to find the clear spaces beneath the big cedar trees, like islands in the wild ocean of vegetation. At the bottom of the sloping seven acres were some enormous broadleaf maples which had found some open sky in a logged off clearing from long ago. A cedar stump several feet across still held an ancient tobacco tin from the 1940`s, bits of rusted cable draped over rocks. Some of the big trees around the overgrown clearing were bent from being mangled during the logging process or growing up through logging slash that had long since rotted away. I was walking through a forest of second growth - one cut away from the forest primaeval.

One place other than our little clearing with our summer camp that was clear of undergrowth was the top of the mossy outcrop that stood above the cat feeding place. It was the first landmark we named - Cat Hill.

Staring into space.

It was hard work making this lot of firewood, especially as the big Balsam fir had grown a grand set of thick branches while alive. It was dying down from the top when I reluctantly decided that this was the next sacrifice for our winter delight. I knew it would be a devil to split, and in the end the last knot ridden chunks had to be cut up with the chain saw. At last here it is in piles and ready to be stacked and covered so next winter`s wood will be cured and dry when we need it.

The dry branches are burning briskly after this morning`s clean-up. Already there is a pile of incandescent coals at the base of the high, flickering shaft of flame. Unfortunately it is now lunch time but I cannot leave the fire until it dies down because while we have had plenty of rain the ground is still dry beneath the forest trees. I throw down my jacket and lie on the ground. On my back, I can look up past the layer upon layer of branches of the large trees around the clearing to the bright blue sky. It is not often for me to find myself with nothing to do but literally stare off into space.

The sun flashes in and out of racing clouds. High up, there is some wind, and I find myself engrossed by the swirling edges, the forming and then vanishing clouds of vapour. I am at the bottom of an ocean of air that tumbles and twists as it flows over the rough hilly landscape. The clouds are followed by a long period of blue which is crossed by three high flying ravens that flap their way across the clearing and then several robins cross lower down between the tree tops. No planes, although I can hear them in the distance as a background accompaniment to the bird`s flight. What luck to have this upside down and unusual moment in a busy life -like a crab looking up from the ocean floor.