So, there she be. Chapter seven, up and running. That which was, by decisions of more publishers than I care to name, in higher places than I care to name, hidden from the eyes of the general, and even the theological, public, for a full couple of decades and more. Nice to see her out on her own, rambling through any part of the universe that can boast of an Internet hook up. It's hard to think of the computer communications network being any more energetic, lucid, and useful than Saint Paul of Tarsus, but it does get to zip around and about the universe quicker than he could. It took him years to get to Rome from the Levant. I get there - or anywhere - from the Kootenays as quick as click of a mouse. Can communications in Heaven be any faster?
Chapter seven was written in July, I think, in 1980, and it was unique amongst the first seven chapters in that it was not entirely fictional. All the characters up to that point, and therefore all the events, insofar as the events resided in characters, were, simply, made up. This does not mean that the spiritual events had not in essence occurred. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Spiritual events have been the norm of my life since I was a child, albeit not as regular then, nor as intense, and on reflecting on my mature years I can only say that my greatest difficulty as a story teller is to accept that ten times the quantity of fiction I have been allowed to write would be still only a fraction of the daily hum and rumble of the Almighty in my existence. The winter and spring of 1957 was no exception, and the story of its own self would be adventurous enough; and yet, in the peculiar way that those born to the novel have to think, I was moved to invent a framework, if only because I knew I was to be a novelist before I knew I had also to write an autobiography.
The essential elements of the Brock basement episode did indeed happen. There was a young man who dropped in while I was writing, and the job in the Chilcotin-Homathko wilderness did arise out of the endless inspirations of those days. But there was no Thurman Engineering in charge of the dam survey, and the young man did not go on into films, but into teaching college English, a noble programme from which he has recently retired. He came down to see me in the Pub rooms regularly, before he went off to his own summer job - I think timber cruising that year - for I already knew him quite well, and we did go up to the dear old Brock caf regularly for coffee. I think he was intrigued to see an aspiring novelist at work, and I was acquiring an increasing fondness for him and his friends, who were probably the most genuinely aesthetically conscious students I'd yet to meet. The university newspaper group were wonderfully interesting, but they were for the most part inclined to journalistic thinking with its inevitable passion for politics. These things, like the law, are necessary and useful, and certainly not without drama, but they are not equivalent to poetry and those who think they are inevitably wind up coarsened by their own convictions. The young man and his cronies also knew well the young lady I was to run into eight months later, and this would have added a mysterious, very well hidden, element to the mystique of it all. The spirits were enormously active, and enormously provocative to deep thinking; and trying to write the truth rather than according to a slickly positive, or tediously pessimistic, formula, without any other pressure from work or outwardly imposed study programme, contributed infinitely to helping them along. I knew I didn't have much of a plot, and I also knew I was seriously short of a vocabulary complete enough to describe all that I was experiencing, but I had every confidence that if I plugged along on my present route I would find both in their own good time.
I was not yet keeping a journal, so I don't know the precise date of my one sunny morning rising from the typewriter to walk over to the student employment hut. It was toward the end of April, that I do know. I walked through the door and swiftly found a sheet of paper, tacked on the notice board, asking for the lesser bodies for a survey crew, chain men and axe men, that was to spend the summer in the Homathko watershed, entering through the western Cariboo. There was another location offered to, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, but I was so charged by the thunderous coincidence of the Cariboo opportunity that it is possible that had all the places there been taken up, I might not have been at all interested in the Island job.
For a full year- a long time in the life of a twenty-one-year-old - I had been running on intuition, and that had served me very well, so well that I regularly wondered when it might all come crashing down and leave me back in my old, at least externally, rather chained estate. My father had even ventured to warn me, when I asked for a meeting to explain why I had left law school, that I might never find another job, and of course the devil loved to use that line of reasoning in the days - or rather nights - when I had left the law buildings and was totally devoted to studying on my own. I don't think my Dad really believed his own threats, because he knew his oldest son was simply too energetic and too smart to ever be "out of work" except by his own choice. But he had his dreams, and I was busy kicking the crap out of them. I think this had started the day I decided to join the Ubyssey and had been furthered by my joining the staff at the Vancouver Sun, the newspaper of the unions. (It was also owned by Catholics, the Cromie family, but whether or not this figured in those parts of his mind which were still Scots-Irish I do not know.) Also, for a man who had never really passed through high school, whatever the education the army conferred on him during the war because he was, by nature, actually a good teacher, he had an enormously irregular estimation of himself as a student of psychology through his study, as by then a personnel manager, of the texts related to that very low level of analysis of the human predicament.
And now here was the Cariboo, falling in my lap. The Cariboo, with its profoundly evocative history in the family, even though I had never seen that part of the province's Interior. The Okanagan, yes, especially the northern parts, and with some rambling into the very south in the weeks with the railway mail car that passed through Kamloops. But not the Cariboo, the setting of the first inflaming episode in the legends my grandfather told me, heard when I was still a tyke; or the location of my father's famous summer when he was twelve and his dad was developing a gold mine; and, finally, the scene, in the very northern part, of Rich Hobson's "Grass Beyond the Mountains", the story of his founding of a ranch south of Vanderhoof, the only book which ever tempted me to run away from home. The only situation of any kind, for that matter, which shows that I basically had it pretty good under my parents' roof, until it was time to leave it.
I never thought of it then as a kind of perfect revenge, on God's part, of the paternal nonsense. But I did see it as an enormous confirmation, to me, of the rectitude of my professional choices, and I was delighted when the man behind the desk, a very pleasant gentleman named John Hicks, signed my up for the adventure of a life-time.
Because I had barely studied any philosophy, and in real fact nothing like the core of a sound Thomistic or Scholastic programme, my then entire search for proofs of God's existence were - I can call them now - Existential. Saint Francis de Sales, as I was to learn some years later, says that the will of God is scarce known except by events. I sometimes believed, then, that the existence of God was scarce known except by events, and the Homathko job was just that sort of event.
What else could it be? The previous summer, I'd experienced the sense of my life as a complete failure unless I was able to spend one more summer working in the woods. This from reading one of Hemingway's short stories. It was a warning, a promise, and Mr. Hick's offering was the fulfillment.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Eric Tuttle's Dojo Shoes
Too bad the current financial crisis cannot be fixed as easily as my left ankle.
Not that the foot is totally all right again, but, as alluded to in Post 41, I went from 0 to 60 about as quickly as it can be done, and carried on for two more days of ten miles each. That should take care of a pound of tummy lard, although the results won't really show until the cell exchanges are complete and my body stops retaining water. I've found it quite amazing, how much fluid the system holds for repair work. Just in an ordinary day, or even a day without much physical activity, the average difference between the scale before bed and the scale before breakfast - actually before juice and coffee, as I'm at that much too early for Cook to expected to wrassle the bacon and tomatoes - is two whole pounds. These statistics were learned over and over again in the jogging summer of 2006. And given certain conditions like a very heavy workout, or successive days of heavy workout, especially if one has laid in a lot of animal protein, the difference can be much greater. Just recently I registered an evening-morning difference of six pounds. That's one of a kind, but four pounds or so is not that difficult to come by.
So what brought on the sore foot?
High heels.
You thought this was just a female problem? Or, if male, happened only to cowboys who got separated from their horses a long way from the ranch?
Uh uh. It happened to your friendly neighbourhood common walker. Not spikes, of course, nor those cuban things my mother-in-law looked so good in, but good old-fashioned rear ends of a very nice pair of walking shoes. I had just been thinking how much I appreciated my Dunhams on the return of wet weather and the putting away of my sports sandals. My Dunhams are full of support, a kind of little truck disguised as a Toyota Camri, just the thing for ambling along at a moderate speed.
But legging it out for the best part of 20 miles at four knots? Maybe not, unless, as I learned yesterday morning while taking on the 5.5 mile lake shore route, you redesign your running style.
The thing is, we were not born with shoes on. And there's a very good chance that Adam would never have worn the things. Moreover, after the Garden of Eden, mankind went barefoot. I've just read that blacks have a higher incidence of high blood pressure. Does their recent introduction to footwear have something to do with this? They haven't had the millenniums of genetic adaptation? This is only speculation, of course, but no one can deny that nothing drops a sense of stress at the end of the day like taking off a pair of shoes.
And shoes have heels. Especially modern jogging shoes, built for the miles of pavement that most joggers pound in their workouts. Of course if you just jog on those springy heels, and don't walk as I do in order to stick to my nasal breathing regime, you don't put the foot through all those complicated moves it takes to walk. Any dumb foot can run, because it's a kind of just putting one slab in front of another. That's an oversimplification, of course, but it makes the point that if you really want to make your feet think, take them for a walk, especially a long one, in a pair of shoes that are actually built the same way your foot is, with a heels of the shoe not only the same thickness as the soles, but rounded at the back like the natural heel of the foot.
Ah, you say, but that's basically the old fashioned running shoe, those things we all had to wear before they copied basketball shoes and gave everybody arch supports and a fair amount of cushioning. Nobody even makes those any more, do they?
Yes, they do. In China, for the Tai Chi people, who, you are no doubt aware, can be very extraordinary athletes, and much too clever to chose the wrong kind of foot wear.
I first met these humble little shoes in 2002, when MT and I joined Eric Tuttle's seven a.m. chi gong and tai chi sessions. Chen style. Demanding stuff, and away out of any practical hopes of my attainment, but I was fascinated by Eric's stillness doing Wu Chi in the Summit Gym, actually disturbed by not knowing what he meant when he talked about paying attention to the deeper muscles, and further impressed by the commitment of the Traditional Chinese Medicine students turning up five mornings a week for an extra hour of class. I began the class in jogging shoes. Pretty funny, when you look back, but the best I had at the moment. Eric quite quickly took pity on me and offered to sell me his spare set. And it was a bargain price. You could buy four pairs of Feiwues for the price of my road shoes.
I had to put my Birkenstock arch insets in the Feiwues, of course. The narrow heel took a little time to get used to, but the body can learn to re-balance and I started using the dojo shoes in the gym as well, both for tossing weights and running on the treadmill. Anyone who really understands the musculo-skeletal system will realize that I made a brilliant choice.
Unfortunately, as I see it now, I did not make the same brilliant choice when I returned to the "track", as it were, in 2006. Now, I'm not suggesting that everyone go to dojo shoes exclusively and throw away their high-tech joggers. As Ecclesiastes says, there is a time and place for everything. But walking and jogging in old-fashioned running shoes is an education in how our feet, designed by God Himself, actually were meant to work.
This is how it was.
On the Sunday evening, with 20 miles behind me, and my Personal Trainer obviously cranking me into orbit, with an early supper and the dishes therefore early done behind me, I decided to hit the road once again, to pile on some extra mileage. I had an hour before the weather report - to be followed by Chief Inspector Morse - and that should be good for another four miles. So I zipped out to the porch and climbed into my Dunhams. Hah. As soon as my foot hit the floor, my ankle screamed in agony. I recalled the times I had sprained it, it was that bad.
You could say I'd had my warning. Recall that I said I squatted down to study Coyote. He was indeed a message from First Nations wisdom. They wore moccasins, remember? Low Heels.
As Coyote moved on and I started straightening up, my ankle hurt like hell. But I was able to sort it out by walking on the side of my foot and extensive use of the Chicken Walk that Eric Tuttle demonstrated for MT and me one afternoon in the gym.
The Chicken Walk is a Shing Ye thing, where you stroll across the room with your butt as close to the ground as you can set it, and still actually walk. (Keep your spine straight and as vertical as possible.) It was not part of any course we were doing with Eric, but I think he was hit with a bolt of at least Buddhist lightning and inspired to put on an impromptu demonstration for our unique benefit. Eric did not stroll, actually. He shot across the room like a rooster putting the run on Brer Fox. Man, just think of his quads. Also, think of how it eased my pain by stretching my Achilles and the calf muscles.
Now, about a week or ten days before the dilemma of the painful ankle, the Lord had done two things. For about half-an-hour, he took away any and all mystical burdens, leaving his merely human servant with so much natural energy that the servant thought he must go mad if he could not find some way to spend it. And within 48 hours He also provoked a memory of the dojo shoes, which had been used a couple of months earlier to ease lower back pain brought on by, believe it or not, the not especially high heels of the sports sandals. Still, they were high enough, after my sledge hammer assault on the stump, to give me an awful cramp in the glutes, which also went into the good old always vulnerable sacrum, but which also could be nicely dealt with by going about in bare feet. I did this around the house, back in the summer, and out on the street wore the Feiwues. Everything settled down very nicely, and with my growing knowledge of physiology I began to realize that man-made heels, for all their good intentions, interfered with the normal stretching design of the muscles in the back of the leg, from the Achilles tendon to the gluteus maximus, and now that I come to think of it, probably with the plantar tendons and muscles as well.
What a difference an inch makes, but I actually forgot this rule of thumb, or, more precisely, the heel as its Original Designer intended it to function, and had to once again learn the hard way. I really do hope this is the final lesson of this problem.
Not that the foot is totally all right again, but, as alluded to in Post 41, I went from 0 to 60 about as quickly as it can be done, and carried on for two more days of ten miles each. That should take care of a pound of tummy lard, although the results won't really show until the cell exchanges are complete and my body stops retaining water. I've found it quite amazing, how much fluid the system holds for repair work. Just in an ordinary day, or even a day without much physical activity, the average difference between the scale before bed and the scale before breakfast - actually before juice and coffee, as I'm at that much too early for Cook to expected to wrassle the bacon and tomatoes - is two whole pounds. These statistics were learned over and over again in the jogging summer of 2006. And given certain conditions like a very heavy workout, or successive days of heavy workout, especially if one has laid in a lot of animal protein, the difference can be much greater. Just recently I registered an evening-morning difference of six pounds. That's one of a kind, but four pounds or so is not that difficult to come by.
So what brought on the sore foot?
High heels.
You thought this was just a female problem? Or, if male, happened only to cowboys who got separated from their horses a long way from the ranch?
Uh uh. It happened to your friendly neighbourhood common walker. Not spikes, of course, nor those cuban things my mother-in-law looked so good in, but good old-fashioned rear ends of a very nice pair of walking shoes. I had just been thinking how much I appreciated my Dunhams on the return of wet weather and the putting away of my sports sandals. My Dunhams are full of support, a kind of little truck disguised as a Toyota Camri, just the thing for ambling along at a moderate speed.
But legging it out for the best part of 20 miles at four knots? Maybe not, unless, as I learned yesterday morning while taking on the 5.5 mile lake shore route, you redesign your running style.
The thing is, we were not born with shoes on. And there's a very good chance that Adam would never have worn the things. Moreover, after the Garden of Eden, mankind went barefoot. I've just read that blacks have a higher incidence of high blood pressure. Does their recent introduction to footwear have something to do with this? They haven't had the millenniums of genetic adaptation? This is only speculation, of course, but no one can deny that nothing drops a sense of stress at the end of the day like taking off a pair of shoes.
And shoes have heels. Especially modern jogging shoes, built for the miles of pavement that most joggers pound in their workouts. Of course if you just jog on those springy heels, and don't walk as I do in order to stick to my nasal breathing regime, you don't put the foot through all those complicated moves it takes to walk. Any dumb foot can run, because it's a kind of just putting one slab in front of another. That's an oversimplification, of course, but it makes the point that if you really want to make your feet think, take them for a walk, especially a long one, in a pair of shoes that are actually built the same way your foot is, with a heels of the shoe not only the same thickness as the soles, but rounded at the back like the natural heel of the foot.
Ah, you say, but that's basically the old fashioned running shoe, those things we all had to wear before they copied basketball shoes and gave everybody arch supports and a fair amount of cushioning. Nobody even makes those any more, do they?
Yes, they do. In China, for the Tai Chi people, who, you are no doubt aware, can be very extraordinary athletes, and much too clever to chose the wrong kind of foot wear.
I first met these humble little shoes in 2002, when MT and I joined Eric Tuttle's seven a.m. chi gong and tai chi sessions. Chen style. Demanding stuff, and away out of any practical hopes of my attainment, but I was fascinated by Eric's stillness doing Wu Chi in the Summit Gym, actually disturbed by not knowing what he meant when he talked about paying attention to the deeper muscles, and further impressed by the commitment of the Traditional Chinese Medicine students turning up five mornings a week for an extra hour of class. I began the class in jogging shoes. Pretty funny, when you look back, but the best I had at the moment. Eric quite quickly took pity on me and offered to sell me his spare set. And it was a bargain price. You could buy four pairs of Feiwues for the price of my road shoes.
I had to put my Birkenstock arch insets in the Feiwues, of course. The narrow heel took a little time to get used to, but the body can learn to re-balance and I started using the dojo shoes in the gym as well, both for tossing weights and running on the treadmill. Anyone who really understands the musculo-skeletal system will realize that I made a brilliant choice.
Unfortunately, as I see it now, I did not make the same brilliant choice when I returned to the "track", as it were, in 2006. Now, I'm not suggesting that everyone go to dojo shoes exclusively and throw away their high-tech joggers. As Ecclesiastes says, there is a time and place for everything. But walking and jogging in old-fashioned running shoes is an education in how our feet, designed by God Himself, actually were meant to work.
This is how it was.
On the Sunday evening, with 20 miles behind me, and my Personal Trainer obviously cranking me into orbit, with an early supper and the dishes therefore early done behind me, I decided to hit the road once again, to pile on some extra mileage. I had an hour before the weather report - to be followed by Chief Inspector Morse - and that should be good for another four miles. So I zipped out to the porch and climbed into my Dunhams. Hah. As soon as my foot hit the floor, my ankle screamed in agony. I recalled the times I had sprained it, it was that bad.
You could say I'd had my warning. Recall that I said I squatted down to study Coyote. He was indeed a message from First Nations wisdom. They wore moccasins, remember? Low Heels.
As Coyote moved on and I started straightening up, my ankle hurt like hell. But I was able to sort it out by walking on the side of my foot and extensive use of the Chicken Walk that Eric Tuttle demonstrated for MT and me one afternoon in the gym.
The Chicken Walk is a Shing Ye thing, where you stroll across the room with your butt as close to the ground as you can set it, and still actually walk. (Keep your spine straight and as vertical as possible.) It was not part of any course we were doing with Eric, but I think he was hit with a bolt of at least Buddhist lightning and inspired to put on an impromptu demonstration for our unique benefit. Eric did not stroll, actually. He shot across the room like a rooster putting the run on Brer Fox. Man, just think of his quads. Also, think of how it eased my pain by stretching my Achilles and the calf muscles.
Now, about a week or ten days before the dilemma of the painful ankle, the Lord had done two things. For about half-an-hour, he took away any and all mystical burdens, leaving his merely human servant with so much natural energy that the servant thought he must go mad if he could not find some way to spend it. And within 48 hours He also provoked a memory of the dojo shoes, which had been used a couple of months earlier to ease lower back pain brought on by, believe it or not, the not especially high heels of the sports sandals. Still, they were high enough, after my sledge hammer assault on the stump, to give me an awful cramp in the glutes, which also went into the good old always vulnerable sacrum, but which also could be nicely dealt with by going about in bare feet. I did this around the house, back in the summer, and out on the street wore the Feiwues. Everything settled down very nicely, and with my growing knowledge of physiology I began to realize that man-made heels, for all their good intentions, interfered with the normal stretching design of the muscles in the back of the leg, from the Achilles tendon to the gluteus maximus, and now that I come to think of it, probably with the plantar tendons and muscles as well.
What a difference an inch makes, but I actually forgot this rule of thumb, or, more precisely, the heel as its Original Designer intended it to function, and had to once again learn the hard way. I really do hope this is the final lesson of this problem.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
The Walks of October
Well, the schedule I've been looking for since the beginning of January has finally, I think, arrived. And with it, I might add, not a few very interesting memories. It's getting close to the Canadian Thanksgiving, which in my particular recollections reminds me of the weekend trip to Victoria that did so much to precipitate my first, profoundly useful, withdrawal from law school. To be perfectly truthful, I have for some time wondered if the actual weekend were not a little later, because the big decision began to be made on the Sunday night of the return to Vancouver of myself and my roommate, I'm now fairly sure; but it's this time of the year that brings the memories to mind, and the spirit of the celebration is more important than the date recalled.
Now, as then, I have shifted priorities, and it has given me a very pleasant sense of freedom. For five months, so driven was I by the sense of need of the reform of music education, the blog has loomed every day as my first active duty. (Active as opposed to contemplative, or all the necessary operations of passive prayer.) With the weekend this has changed, because I have decided, or more accurately, been given the grace to decide, that my prime duty for the weeks ahead was walking for the sake of getting my weight down. I have indeed managed to lose eight or so pounds since my visit to my intended surgeon, at the end of December, but I feel that this is not enough, and of course the threats of high blood pressure justify the removal as soon as possible of more fat.
When I graduated from high school I weighed 150 pounds. I weighed the same after four years at UBC and for the next decades only weighed more when I had gained muscle from working at weight bearing occupations. I was still an eleven stone or 250 kilos chap in 1982 when I had my appendix operation. When you average seven miles of walking a day, spread over morning, afternoon, and evening, it's not easy loosing the lean. But with Shawn going to the museum in 83, and MT taking over housekeeping duties, the walking suffered. Then there was the car, acquired in 86, which made things worse from the fitness point of view.
So the battle of the bulge was on, and I struggled, actually quite successfully, with staying in the lower 160's, albeit with a second-hand scale which lied, although we did not catch on to the full extent of its fibbing until we bought a new one, battery-powered, which told the grim truth to the nearest half-pound. There was also the gym scale, which measured the nice acquisition of muscle weight in 2000, but you can't stand on that one wearing only the glasses you need for reading the numbers, unless you own the place and can go in when no one else is around. And other stuff demanded concentration, like the music research, the steady growth of the various plots, and the study of alternate schools of fitness and medicine. I always had in mind the simple fact that if I could just get into a regular schedule of adequate mileage, the lard would slip away in a relatively short period of time, but I could never quite get to such a program until the summer of 2000.
Now I knew, absolutely, as mystics have to know, that it was not simply a matter of human will power. When your principal purpose on earth is contemplative prayer, even 20 pounds here and there is all but irrelevant. Compared to most men still active, I had nothing but time, in the physical sense, for walking off the baggage, and yet there was more to it than that, for I seemed to have to go through a routine that included jogging, even if it meant hurting my joints to the degree that insisted on fuller studies of the musculo-skeletal details I was not always eager to learn. So, stop and start from June of 06 to March of 07, and the pounds were once more losing ground. But then the final understanding of the absolute rule of numbers as applied to music theory and practice, and then nine months of a lot of energy for the keyboard and not much for the open road of the dedicated walker, to say nothing of the return to writing via, finally for me, the new and lovely wrinkles of the word processor.
Frankly, I ignored the bathroom scale in those nine months and ate a lot of my own extremely healthy homemade bread, and drank a fair bit of my excellent - Capuchin approved - homemade beer, in the wee smalls of the morning while I kept exploring the gaps, on the keyboard, between my lovely, exciting, theories, and my much less lovely grasp of good scale studies and the perfect sense of fingering needed to go with them. It was not especially creative work, in the main, and I knew the beer would help me hang in there until I got a message or two. I also knew that the beer would hand some extra cells around the waistline, and I was right. By the time the good doctor gave my marching orders, literally, I was peaking - and paunching - at a svelte 177.
Thus, at four in the morning, sometime in the first week of the New Year, I felt myself kicked out of bed, and not for the rubber keyboard under the earphones, but for the streets of Nelson. There had been snow, but the city lads had the roads plowed. I worked out an uphill route, in the center of the old town, which is where we have lived these many years, but then settled for the Fairview route, going east on a gentle downhill grade to the last north-south street on that side of the town, then coming in parallel to the lake shore and home through the main intersection of Ward and Baker. A little over an hour. I got out about four times a week or so, and started losing around half-a-pound every fortnight or even less. I endured a finishing course on water retention - you think mood swings are bad - and also began, largely due to those nine months of leisure, to register quite sore feet. Well, I assumed it was just the leisure. More on that later.
As the jogging had earlier, painfully, illuminated my ignorance about the effect on the knees of tight quads, the front muscles of the thigh, so this walking programme began to teach me that I had been quite neglectful of the physiology of the feet. My arches became so sore that I went to our orthotics man to ask for an increase in the dimensions of the insets I've worn for the past dozen years. He skilfully prodded my extremities and said what I needed was not fatter insets but a better application of calf stretches. I had planter fasciaitis. He demonstrated the cure, and I began to make it work, although not to full effect. And, fortunately, MT had some months earlier begun to lay in texts related to the study of fascia.
I think this step marks the beginning of the end of the process, although I do not yet have total control of the effects on my feet. Yesterday morning I decided, or was moved to decide, that I would begin a ten-mile-a-day schedule. By far the most important part of this decision was to insist to myself and anyone else that the walking was the new priority. Even the blog could go to hell. If the ten miles left me too tired, so what? Besides, with the latest economic crisis, the world might need to relearn how to walk.
Even though my left ankle was giving me a little trouble, I thought, from some new stretches, I made my goal, in two rambles. MT left me to myself for the second. The ankle was even worse this morning, and as I came out on the street after Mass I felt like Saint Teresa of Avila the time her carriage collapsed while the horse was pulling it and her across a creek. "Lord," she said, "if this is how to treat your friends, no wonder You have so few." I was in a like frame of mind. If I've been so mentally set up to get cracking on the conclusion, why the sudden breakdown? The ankle had been fine for weeks. I stayed puzzled for about three blocks, then hit upon the solution, which was to extend the left leg as I walked, forcing it to be the leading limb. This worked instantly, and after the customary muffin at the coffee shop in the hotel on the lake shore, I left the ladies to walk the few blocks home on their own and took off for another two hours, rain or no rain, going east within constant view of the lake to Horlick's Point, the end of the road at that part of town. It's mostly bush out there, and only a few hundred yards along the return, I spotted a youngish coyote, down on the CPR tracks. I squatted down and we studied each other for a while, then he went on his way. Unlike Saruman, I like to pay attention to the animals. I'd say the coyote was a sign that it's going to be a very good month. In this part of the world, Coyote was an enormous symbol to the natives.
Then for a while I had the company of a border collie. Black and white, like the sons of Saint Dominic. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican. He had a phrase I've always loved: sufficient distinctions. I'll publish this now, as it is long enough, and the next installment will tell of that principle as applied to a perfect curing of my podiatrist problems, which surfaced hugely while I was in the middle of this essay.
Now, as then, I have shifted priorities, and it has given me a very pleasant sense of freedom. For five months, so driven was I by the sense of need of the reform of music education, the blog has loomed every day as my first active duty. (Active as opposed to contemplative, or all the necessary operations of passive prayer.) With the weekend this has changed, because I have decided, or more accurately, been given the grace to decide, that my prime duty for the weeks ahead was walking for the sake of getting my weight down. I have indeed managed to lose eight or so pounds since my visit to my intended surgeon, at the end of December, but I feel that this is not enough, and of course the threats of high blood pressure justify the removal as soon as possible of more fat.
When I graduated from high school I weighed 150 pounds. I weighed the same after four years at UBC and for the next decades only weighed more when I had gained muscle from working at weight bearing occupations. I was still an eleven stone or 250 kilos chap in 1982 when I had my appendix operation. When you average seven miles of walking a day, spread over morning, afternoon, and evening, it's not easy loosing the lean. But with Shawn going to the museum in 83, and MT taking over housekeeping duties, the walking suffered. Then there was the car, acquired in 86, which made things worse from the fitness point of view.
So the battle of the bulge was on, and I struggled, actually quite successfully, with staying in the lower 160's, albeit with a second-hand scale which lied, although we did not catch on to the full extent of its fibbing until we bought a new one, battery-powered, which told the grim truth to the nearest half-pound. There was also the gym scale, which measured the nice acquisition of muscle weight in 2000, but you can't stand on that one wearing only the glasses you need for reading the numbers, unless you own the place and can go in when no one else is around. And other stuff demanded concentration, like the music research, the steady growth of the various plots, and the study of alternate schools of fitness and medicine. I always had in mind the simple fact that if I could just get into a regular schedule of adequate mileage, the lard would slip away in a relatively short period of time, but I could never quite get to such a program until the summer of 2000.
Now I knew, absolutely, as mystics have to know, that it was not simply a matter of human will power. When your principal purpose on earth is contemplative prayer, even 20 pounds here and there is all but irrelevant. Compared to most men still active, I had nothing but time, in the physical sense, for walking off the baggage, and yet there was more to it than that, for I seemed to have to go through a routine that included jogging, even if it meant hurting my joints to the degree that insisted on fuller studies of the musculo-skeletal details I was not always eager to learn. So, stop and start from June of 06 to March of 07, and the pounds were once more losing ground. But then the final understanding of the absolute rule of numbers as applied to music theory and practice, and then nine months of a lot of energy for the keyboard and not much for the open road of the dedicated walker, to say nothing of the return to writing via, finally for me, the new and lovely wrinkles of the word processor.
Frankly, I ignored the bathroom scale in those nine months and ate a lot of my own extremely healthy homemade bread, and drank a fair bit of my excellent - Capuchin approved - homemade beer, in the wee smalls of the morning while I kept exploring the gaps, on the keyboard, between my lovely, exciting, theories, and my much less lovely grasp of good scale studies and the perfect sense of fingering needed to go with them. It was not especially creative work, in the main, and I knew the beer would help me hang in there until I got a message or two. I also knew that the beer would hand some extra cells around the waistline, and I was right. By the time the good doctor gave my marching orders, literally, I was peaking - and paunching - at a svelte 177.
Thus, at four in the morning, sometime in the first week of the New Year, I felt myself kicked out of bed, and not for the rubber keyboard under the earphones, but for the streets of Nelson. There had been snow, but the city lads had the roads plowed. I worked out an uphill route, in the center of the old town, which is where we have lived these many years, but then settled for the Fairview route, going east on a gentle downhill grade to the last north-south street on that side of the town, then coming in parallel to the lake shore and home through the main intersection of Ward and Baker. A little over an hour. I got out about four times a week or so, and started losing around half-a-pound every fortnight or even less. I endured a finishing course on water retention - you think mood swings are bad - and also began, largely due to those nine months of leisure, to register quite sore feet. Well, I assumed it was just the leisure. More on that later.
As the jogging had earlier, painfully, illuminated my ignorance about the effect on the knees of tight quads, the front muscles of the thigh, so this walking programme began to teach me that I had been quite neglectful of the physiology of the feet. My arches became so sore that I went to our orthotics man to ask for an increase in the dimensions of the insets I've worn for the past dozen years. He skilfully prodded my extremities and said what I needed was not fatter insets but a better application of calf stretches. I had planter fasciaitis. He demonstrated the cure, and I began to make it work, although not to full effect. And, fortunately, MT had some months earlier begun to lay in texts related to the study of fascia.
I think this step marks the beginning of the end of the process, although I do not yet have total control of the effects on my feet. Yesterday morning I decided, or was moved to decide, that I would begin a ten-mile-a-day schedule. By far the most important part of this decision was to insist to myself and anyone else that the walking was the new priority. Even the blog could go to hell. If the ten miles left me too tired, so what? Besides, with the latest economic crisis, the world might need to relearn how to walk.
Even though my left ankle was giving me a little trouble, I thought, from some new stretches, I made my goal, in two rambles. MT left me to myself for the second. The ankle was even worse this morning, and as I came out on the street after Mass I felt like Saint Teresa of Avila the time her carriage collapsed while the horse was pulling it and her across a creek. "Lord," she said, "if this is how to treat your friends, no wonder You have so few." I was in a like frame of mind. If I've been so mentally set up to get cracking on the conclusion, why the sudden breakdown? The ankle had been fine for weeks. I stayed puzzled for about three blocks, then hit upon the solution, which was to extend the left leg as I walked, forcing it to be the leading limb. This worked instantly, and after the customary muffin at the coffee shop in the hotel on the lake shore, I left the ladies to walk the few blocks home on their own and took off for another two hours, rain or no rain, going east within constant view of the lake to Horlick's Point, the end of the road at that part of town. It's mostly bush out there, and only a few hundred yards along the return, I spotted a youngish coyote, down on the CPR tracks. I squatted down and we studied each other for a while, then he went on his way. Unlike Saruman, I like to pay attention to the animals. I'd say the coyote was a sign that it's going to be a very good month. In this part of the world, Coyote was an enormous symbol to the natives.
Then for a while I had the company of a border collie. Black and white, like the sons of Saint Dominic. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican. He had a phrase I've always loved: sufficient distinctions. I'll publish this now, as it is long enough, and the next installment will tell of that principle as applied to a perfect curing of my podiatrist problems, which surfaced hugely while I was in the middle of this essay.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
New York, New York
Broadway, Madison Avenue, Wall Street, here we come.
And I did not do it My Way, by the by, as that is a road for half-wits, no matter how talented.
Take ye counsel from every wise man. Or wise woman. I think I know more wise women, at this point, than I know wise men, and one of the wise women simply nodded and grinned when I passed through the kitchen on this wonderfully sunny mid-day in the Kootenays and said I was on my way to talk to Hammacher Schlemmer about the chord-teaching guitar they feature on page 77 of the latest catalogue.
For most of my life, of course, I could only have chuckled and snorted my way through the pages of all that stuff they offer to people with, generally, more money than they know what to do with. Such a catalogue had no business in the house of a man who had taken a Franciscan inspired private vow of poverty. But then along came the parental estate, God bless it, and various bits of information being fed into the electronic surveillance of the moneyed classes, and the HS catalogue began showing up in my mailbox. As John Lennon wrote, Let It Be, and see what happens. Some of the stuff is genuinely useful, and I am, after all, the creator, at Shawn's instigation, of the great Gaetan Renard, at least one man of the universe who knew how to spend his money wisely.
But I am not a technician. Well, not an electronics technician. Actually, with MT's help with a yard or two of elastic fibre I've got quite clever in the manufacture of something that may turn out to be a most formidable enemy of high blood pressure. Maybe HS might like to talk about that, too. But for the moment we'll stick to music. Music, and phenomenal amounts of money insofar as it is generated in the process of genuinely useful manufacture. New York knows all about money, or did know before it let all those mortgage managers screw things up on the grandest possible scale. Mammon, Mammon, Mammon.
Money has a use, of course. And people with money even have a use, when they know that it's there for using wisely. So the question is, can money create a truly useful electronic teaching system with an instrument? The guitar manufacturers, whoever they are, have definitely been up to something useful. When the wheel came along, and before that fire, only fools denied the God-given advantage to mankind's struggle to get back to Paradise. So now, only fools will deny the possibilities in impeccably efficient instruction techniques in a guitar that speaks according to the norms of mathematics.
I emailed Hammacher Schlemmer. But then, I've emailed a lot of people. My agents have written to a lot of people. Some of them have woken up. Some have not.
The entire state of Georgia failed to wake up when I announced that I was prepared to write an opera based on Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind". New York could easily be just as thick.
Tune in next week, when the Lone Ranger says . . . . .
And I did not do it My Way, by the by, as that is a road for half-wits, no matter how talented.
Take ye counsel from every wise man. Or wise woman. I think I know more wise women, at this point, than I know wise men, and one of the wise women simply nodded and grinned when I passed through the kitchen on this wonderfully sunny mid-day in the Kootenays and said I was on my way to talk to Hammacher Schlemmer about the chord-teaching guitar they feature on page 77 of the latest catalogue.
For most of my life, of course, I could only have chuckled and snorted my way through the pages of all that stuff they offer to people with, generally, more money than they know what to do with. Such a catalogue had no business in the house of a man who had taken a Franciscan inspired private vow of poverty. But then along came the parental estate, God bless it, and various bits of information being fed into the electronic surveillance of the moneyed classes, and the HS catalogue began showing up in my mailbox. As John Lennon wrote, Let It Be, and see what happens. Some of the stuff is genuinely useful, and I am, after all, the creator, at Shawn's instigation, of the great Gaetan Renard, at least one man of the universe who knew how to spend his money wisely.
But I am not a technician. Well, not an electronics technician. Actually, with MT's help with a yard or two of elastic fibre I've got quite clever in the manufacture of something that may turn out to be a most formidable enemy of high blood pressure. Maybe HS might like to talk about that, too. But for the moment we'll stick to music. Music, and phenomenal amounts of money insofar as it is generated in the process of genuinely useful manufacture. New York knows all about money, or did know before it let all those mortgage managers screw things up on the grandest possible scale. Mammon, Mammon, Mammon.
Money has a use, of course. And people with money even have a use, when they know that it's there for using wisely. So the question is, can money create a truly useful electronic teaching system with an instrument? The guitar manufacturers, whoever they are, have definitely been up to something useful. When the wheel came along, and before that fire, only fools denied the God-given advantage to mankind's struggle to get back to Paradise. So now, only fools will deny the possibilities in impeccably efficient instruction techniques in a guitar that speaks according to the norms of mathematics.
I emailed Hammacher Schlemmer. But then, I've emailed a lot of people. My agents have written to a lot of people. Some of them have woken up. Some have not.
The entire state of Georgia failed to wake up when I announced that I was prepared to write an opera based on Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind". New York could easily be just as thick.
Tune in next week, when the Lone Ranger says . . . . .
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Portrait of the Author
So now, thanks to my granddaughter, we have my face on the blog. Or, as I like to think if it, one of my faces. It's not particularly discernible, because my tech opted for body language and background rather than a close up. Nice hat, though, you have to admit. It's new, an excellent design by Tilley - and it's already had a number of compliments, so any reader not liking it will not be listened to. My sister-in-law particularly likes it - she's seen the full photograph, via computer - and that clinches the argument, because she's always been very special to me. There was a time in the courtship of Shawn Harold when her ten-year old sister was the only person in the entire clan who liked me and thought of me as a suitable husband for the first born of the outfit.
Now as the Greeks so wisely said so long ago, "A thing goes into a man according to his disposition."
Even his own portrait must suffer the effect of this unbreakable law. I was not initially keen on Marianne's choice. I look too passive, perhaps a little sad. Just like Michael Gambon in the 2007, excellent, BBC filming of Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford". Not at all like the Billy the Kid image I'm actually feeling a lot these days. Those guns are slung low, tied down, with filed triggers and a pair of very itchy hands above them. I have this feeling that there are a lot of journalists out there, for one thing, who need to learn how to dance until the bullets stop. And I keep thinking of Peter O'Toole's film, "The Ruling Class", I think it's called, where the establishment wouldn't deal with a Jesus figure, so they got Jack the Ripper.
But as I thought about the photo, as I recollected over the years and the times that MT has proved her old teacher and still spiritual director dead wrong, I gave in and started to work with dear, dear, Michael. He is, he always has been, an excellent actor, and on Saturday night at the televison screening of a DVD, before the great Sunday morning encounter between Jack Hodgins and moi, he was Trigorin in the 70s BBC film of Chekhov's "Seagull", the play, directed in Nelson by John Stark, that brought me back to the stage after a six year absence. An impeccable Trigorin, was Gambon, in an excellent production. All this was simply too much to argue with, and so, dear public, I accept the comparison with Michael Gambon. My wife, on the other hand, doesn't see the resemblance. But then she is not, directly, writing this blog.
The background for the photo, which looks very "Rangerish", is the south wall of a little cafe on the East shore of Kootenay Lake, right at Kootenay Bay, where the ferry docks. The coffee shop is operated by friends of the lad who was our first renovator. He scared the crap out of me when he wanted to start with the roof - it has a very steep pitch - but we found other things for him to tackle and thus got a lot of very fine work done, including the renovation of the attic, where we now exercise on an erg, a dry land rowing machine.
Marianne and I started scouting the East Shore in 1998. She had begun to find herself profoundly depressed on Tuesdays, which happened to be John Paul's day off. February, 1998, was an unusually warm and sunny month, and somehow the North Shore bus service, originally set up to serve the good souls in Balfour, 20 miles east of Nelson, had rearranged itself so that Nelsonites could ride the bus out in the morning, and ride it back in at night. We rode the bus, caught the ferry, wandered around in the wonderful quiet of the East Shore. We even discovered salal over there. Salal is not supposed to exist east of the Cascade Mountains, the second barrier against the rain shadow that sweeps over BC from the Pacific. But there it was, shiny evergreen leaves, purple berries, just not as tall as the stuff I used to use a machete on when I was a surveyor at the Coast. We felt like professional botanists who had just made an important discovery. The old teacher, by the way, took a real whack over the head with identification. I trained her to be thorough, and by God, she's thorough, even when it means stuffing her old teacher in the trunk. It's reading that does it. Constant, dedicated, reading, of the right stuff. As Aquinas says, the Latin root for "reading" is related to the Latin root for "religious".
So, yeah, we'll go with Michael Gambon in the Mojo Cafe. He was, of course, the second Dumbledore. And JK Rowling and I have already had a bit of a push-me-pull-you via the mails.
So, think of the roles Michael Gambon has filled, so admirably, and think of Billy the Kid.
And think of Jack Hodgins and his "Broken Ground". There are some wonderful descriptions of stump blowing in that book. Incredible, actually, for my purposes, when I think of all my conversations with the angels. When I was eleven, on Lasqueti Island, sixty miles north of Vancouver, my father trained me as a powder monkey.
If not journalists, for those six guns, maybe bishops? It's interesting, how easily bishops get to imitate the Sanhedrin. Puffing and blowing like so many beached whales, blatting on about the decline of religion and the indiscretions of the young, yet themselves no more interested in perfection than a dog would be interested in a law degree. Emmett Doyle was one of the worst among them, of course, but others of my acquaintance have rarely been actually sensitive to the aura of spiritual purgation. Spiritually illiterate, basically, and apparently content to be so. Often ordinarily illiterate when it comes to literature as well. How else can one explain the pandering to the wonderfully sluttish appetites for inclusive language and almost filthy music for liturgy? It needs to be said over and over again: no one with any desire to accommodate inclusive language in any way has a spiritual life. It simply cannot be done. Therefore, we have a vast majority of bishops who have no real spiritual life. What a lovely situation for Christ's Church, especially when they don't even have the decency to apologize for the lack, nor show any inclination to take correction for the situation.
'Twas ever thus. This is the time of the year when Augustine, in the breviary, says most of his stern things about the shepherds. Then, when he's finished caning their butts, and got their attention, if not a little contrition, we have his letters to Proba, on - you guessed it - the life of the soul. It's a nice little schedule. One can only hope it gains a bit of a harvest this year.
As a little chap, I heard of the ten commandments. Later, as a young adult vigorously catching upon the catechism, I read of the two great commandments, love of God, love of neighbour. This is pretty much the schedule for most practitioners. But finally, what I really heard was the one commandment: Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. This really what it all boils down to, but why are there so few bishops sensitive to the fact?
Now as the Greeks so wisely said so long ago, "A thing goes into a man according to his disposition."
Even his own portrait must suffer the effect of this unbreakable law. I was not initially keen on Marianne's choice. I look too passive, perhaps a little sad. Just like Michael Gambon in the 2007, excellent, BBC filming of Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford". Not at all like the Billy the Kid image I'm actually feeling a lot these days. Those guns are slung low, tied down, with filed triggers and a pair of very itchy hands above them. I have this feeling that there are a lot of journalists out there, for one thing, who need to learn how to dance until the bullets stop. And I keep thinking of Peter O'Toole's film, "The Ruling Class", I think it's called, where the establishment wouldn't deal with a Jesus figure, so they got Jack the Ripper.
But as I thought about the photo, as I recollected over the years and the times that MT has proved her old teacher and still spiritual director dead wrong, I gave in and started to work with dear, dear, Michael. He is, he always has been, an excellent actor, and on Saturday night at the televison screening of a DVD, before the great Sunday morning encounter between Jack Hodgins and moi, he was Trigorin in the 70s BBC film of Chekhov's "Seagull", the play, directed in Nelson by John Stark, that brought me back to the stage after a six year absence. An impeccable Trigorin, was Gambon, in an excellent production. All this was simply too much to argue with, and so, dear public, I accept the comparison with Michael Gambon. My wife, on the other hand, doesn't see the resemblance. But then she is not, directly, writing this blog.
The background for the photo, which looks very "Rangerish", is the south wall of a little cafe on the East shore of Kootenay Lake, right at Kootenay Bay, where the ferry docks. The coffee shop is operated by friends of the lad who was our first renovator. He scared the crap out of me when he wanted to start with the roof - it has a very steep pitch - but we found other things for him to tackle and thus got a lot of very fine work done, including the renovation of the attic, where we now exercise on an erg, a dry land rowing machine.
Marianne and I started scouting the East Shore in 1998. She had begun to find herself profoundly depressed on Tuesdays, which happened to be John Paul's day off. February, 1998, was an unusually warm and sunny month, and somehow the North Shore bus service, originally set up to serve the good souls in Balfour, 20 miles east of Nelson, had rearranged itself so that Nelsonites could ride the bus out in the morning, and ride it back in at night. We rode the bus, caught the ferry, wandered around in the wonderful quiet of the East Shore. We even discovered salal over there. Salal is not supposed to exist east of the Cascade Mountains, the second barrier against the rain shadow that sweeps over BC from the Pacific. But there it was, shiny evergreen leaves, purple berries, just not as tall as the stuff I used to use a machete on when I was a surveyor at the Coast. We felt like professional botanists who had just made an important discovery. The old teacher, by the way, took a real whack over the head with identification. I trained her to be thorough, and by God, she's thorough, even when it means stuffing her old teacher in the trunk. It's reading that does it. Constant, dedicated, reading, of the right stuff. As Aquinas says, the Latin root for "reading" is related to the Latin root for "religious".
So, yeah, we'll go with Michael Gambon in the Mojo Cafe. He was, of course, the second Dumbledore. And JK Rowling and I have already had a bit of a push-me-pull-you via the mails.
So, think of the roles Michael Gambon has filled, so admirably, and think of Billy the Kid.
And think of Jack Hodgins and his "Broken Ground". There are some wonderful descriptions of stump blowing in that book. Incredible, actually, for my purposes, when I think of all my conversations with the angels. When I was eleven, on Lasqueti Island, sixty miles north of Vancouver, my father trained me as a powder monkey.
If not journalists, for those six guns, maybe bishops? It's interesting, how easily bishops get to imitate the Sanhedrin. Puffing and blowing like so many beached whales, blatting on about the decline of religion and the indiscretions of the young, yet themselves no more interested in perfection than a dog would be interested in a law degree. Emmett Doyle was one of the worst among them, of course, but others of my acquaintance have rarely been actually sensitive to the aura of spiritual purgation. Spiritually illiterate, basically, and apparently content to be so. Often ordinarily illiterate when it comes to literature as well. How else can one explain the pandering to the wonderfully sluttish appetites for inclusive language and almost filthy music for liturgy? It needs to be said over and over again: no one with any desire to accommodate inclusive language in any way has a spiritual life. It simply cannot be done. Therefore, we have a vast majority of bishops who have no real spiritual life. What a lovely situation for Christ's Church, especially when they don't even have the decency to apologize for the lack, nor show any inclination to take correction for the situation.
'Twas ever thus. This is the time of the year when Augustine, in the breviary, says most of his stern things about the shepherds. Then, when he's finished caning their butts, and got their attention, if not a little contrition, we have his letters to Proba, on - you guessed it - the life of the soul. It's a nice little schedule. One can only hope it gains a bit of a harvest this year.
As a little chap, I heard of the ten commandments. Later, as a young adult vigorously catching upon the catechism, I read of the two great commandments, love of God, love of neighbour. This is pretty much the schedule for most practitioners. But finally, what I really heard was the one commandment: Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. This really what it all boils down to, but why are there so few bishops sensitive to the fact?
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
A Longer Desert
Well, there it is.
Blog post 37, a short story, or at least the first installment. "To Hunt the Lions", Canto One. I had labeled it "Philosophers All", but I had to cut that in favour of a numerical designation in order to minimize confusion.
My first published short story in fifty years. The first and last time my fiction was in print was in the spring of 1958, and I have rarely been inspired to try a short story since. In fact only two finished tales come to mind. Though they were not printed - I tried to publish with one of them- they were very useful exercises in their own way, each in their own right worthy of a footnote that would be a story in itself. The big push was always for the novel, so I could get all those spiritual symbols lined up and functioning. And for no end of other fiddling, in so many adventures outside the strict confines of my various writing rooms. Lord, there have been so many rooms. But, almost in the beginning, I worked long, hard, hours both studying and writing the short form. Somerset Maugham was the first author of my own choice, after high school, and I can recall feeling so pleased to step into the discipline of taking on a model. A few years later I wrote him a letter, and received one in return. I scrawled my signature, did not type a clear version, and on the reply he called me Mr. Key Lamb. My penmanship has rarely been better than that of Thomas Aquinas, unless I was dealing, on the blackboard or marking papers, with my students.
I thoroughly enjoyed the discipline of the shorter pieces. A short story is not unlike a song, something to be presented in a brief space. You're in, you're out. You make an impression. You may not say all that much but you say it in such a way that someone just might pay attention. Maybe I'll write a short story about the first time Shawn laid eyes on me. I noticed her, later I could tell her I remembered the costume she'd chosen for the New Year's party. She came as a nurse. But there were a lot of people at the party and we did not then exchange a word. It would be a full year until we spoke. But she noticed me, and my roommate. We seemed to be the only people there that were actually having a thoroughly good time. The kilts may have had something to do with it. She said I had looked great in a kilt.
Nonetheless, I've never worn one since, although many years ago I studied the chanter, and at the moment I'm practicing the Scots accent for some recording of stern wheeler stories at the end of the month. "Rhotic", they call the Scots dialect on You Tube. That's because you rrroll the r's. Rrrob Rrroy MacGrrregorrr. Just think Sean Connerrry, John Hannah, Billy Boyd.
But back to the short story, and the joy of writing one. Ulysses was away from home, from Ithica, for twenty years. Moses spent forty years trucking the Israelites around and across Sinai. And that seventy years the Hebrews spent in Babylon probably did not include one mature adult who had to twiddle his thumbs for seven decades. It was God who had to twiddle his thumbs, waiting for the habitually traitorous "People of God" to go through sufficient punishment for ignoring the prophets.
Of course I've not twiddled my thumbs. But there's been a little pocket of something missing in my soul, because I really did love the short ones, and, in a sense, they loved me. I suppose "The Axe" was so much of a vision piece because it would have to hold me to itself for so many years.
So I think I have created - or non-created- some kind of record. The gold medal for the longest silence. Well, in the genre. Not many people can think of me as silent by habit.
Medals are not irrelevant. Those are the things they give out at the Olympics, for one thing, and the Olympics are coming to the turf adjacent to Howe Sound in 2010. Interesting that #37 should be set on its shores. Perhaps there are a few people coming who read serious stuff, who look for, even expect, the transcendental in literature. The Muse was no doubt waiting for the coincidence.
I remember, in first year English, Doctor Creighton devoting an entire lecture to actually asking us our definitions of literature. He drew a lot of blanks, of course. In grade twelve you study a lot of literature but you aren't really asked to define it. That would require philosophy, especially metaphysics, and BC high schools did not then teach philosophy, nor do they now. Did he count out for us the five transcendentals: being, oneness, truth, goodness, beauty? I don't remember. Such a list would probably been a conceptual shock for me, even though I most certainly had pretty vast experiential knowledge of all of them, but I do remember that Creighton brought the concept of Spirit into the discussion. I hadn't thought of that either, although I always got a great deal of spirit out of reading anything that took my fancy, and I also by that time got even more out of the process of writing. I suppose the being of the things I named on the page leapt back out at me.
That is, the being had that effect in the moment of the writing, because I was working with the Muse in draught mode, and the Muse wanted to encourage me to keep up the process. But so often when it came to reading what I'd done I found it lacking. It wasn't Hamlet, it wasn't the opening paragraph of "The Sun Also Rises" or"The Idiot". And if there was a good first line, there was not often an adequate second.
And there was another problem, when you look at it from the the vantage point of more than fifty years later. If "The Axe" was genuinely inspired, then so was the very first short story I wrote, but of course did not publish, for the Saturday Evening Post. The idea came while I was waiting for the bus, on my way to the first Ubyssey party of the autumn of 1954, and it contained two college football players, one of whom would at the climax of the story refuse to tackle a running back from the opposing team, even though such a withdrawal from contact would ensure that the lad with the ball would score the winning touchdown, because he knew that the other player was actually in no condition to be in the game and tackling him would only aggravate his injuries. The missed tackle was not obvious, because he who designed it was in fact a very good athlete, and could make it look as if he had just missed. There were no boos from the crowd. Thus the embryo of Jacob Cameron, with the other player of course Michael Thurman, who knew what Jacob had done. Those were not then their names.
So, if you submit to the laws of inspiration, you realize some of the obstacles to my making an early career as an author of short stories. As with the two young men who were on the yacht in my first version of that tale, I was being moved to probe the history of the characters who would be the cornerstone of a very large dynastic series, exactly the opposite of what Poe, Chekhov, de Maupassant and so forth were all about.
But I never tried to use "Jacob" again until the autumn of 57 and "The Axe". I came up with other characters, other predicaments, for the briefer tales, and always, always, stayed away from the core of what I knew with absolute certainty I would eventually make my life's work.
Now, there is always the possibility of a great distinction between what the writer habitually thinks and what he writes, just as there are profound distinctions between the actual personality and character of an actor and the roles he or she plays. I don't think this distinction was ever greater, in the history of developing authors, than in my own, yet I always knew that there would come a day when everything, no matter how seemingly disparate, would come together, first in fiction, in novels, and then within the ordinary autobiographical form, but only after I was first published as a novelist. I was made to realize, in those first weeks at UBC, that I would have to write an account of my life with Christ. I was at that time given only one topic: how Providence would look after my finances.
My own peculiar sense of the waggish now ponders why Jesus was being so "commercial". Did he not say, "Man cannot love both God and Mammon?" Why did he not suggest a loftier topic to focus on than the funding for my board and room? He made no reference whatsoever to any of the purely spiritual, and in their own small way, supernatural, events he had been quite regularly walking me through. Nothing about the displays of light, the ligatures, visions, interior words. These alone would have rendered no small harvest of incidents wonderfully adaptable to the episodic form. But, although I most certainly was taking notes at the deepest possible level, I had no ideas for a form that could take the notes to the next steps. In terms of practical production, I had a head as divinely blank as any Buddhist could hope for. There was a massive amount of images going in, but nothing coming out except pieces of journalism for the Ubyssey, and the occasional essay that inevitably felt like anything but an exercise in verbal aesthetics, and of course the yacht novel, which was a deliberate avoidance of the huge complexities of campus life.
This condition of the short story potential was to last for a long time. But now it is over, so much over that this weekend past I emerged from the hermit's study to hear a reading and talk in Nelson by Jack Hodgins, an author from my own generation. It was a grand hour in every respect. I was mostly reminded of the fall of 74, when I met John Stark, come to our town to do Chekhov's "Seagull". Do some things take a long time? Oh yeah. The Leacock story he asked me to adapt for the stage in those weeks opened last week in Santa Monica, California, by now, as far as I know, a musical.
Blog post 37, a short story, or at least the first installment. "To Hunt the Lions", Canto One. I had labeled it "Philosophers All", but I had to cut that in favour of a numerical designation in order to minimize confusion.
My first published short story in fifty years. The first and last time my fiction was in print was in the spring of 1958, and I have rarely been inspired to try a short story since. In fact only two finished tales come to mind. Though they were not printed - I tried to publish with one of them- they were very useful exercises in their own way, each in their own right worthy of a footnote that would be a story in itself. The big push was always for the novel, so I could get all those spiritual symbols lined up and functioning. And for no end of other fiddling, in so many adventures outside the strict confines of my various writing rooms. Lord, there have been so many rooms. But, almost in the beginning, I worked long, hard, hours both studying and writing the short form. Somerset Maugham was the first author of my own choice, after high school, and I can recall feeling so pleased to step into the discipline of taking on a model. A few years later I wrote him a letter, and received one in return. I scrawled my signature, did not type a clear version, and on the reply he called me Mr. Key Lamb. My penmanship has rarely been better than that of Thomas Aquinas, unless I was dealing, on the blackboard or marking papers, with my students.
I thoroughly enjoyed the discipline of the shorter pieces. A short story is not unlike a song, something to be presented in a brief space. You're in, you're out. You make an impression. You may not say all that much but you say it in such a way that someone just might pay attention. Maybe I'll write a short story about the first time Shawn laid eyes on me. I noticed her, later I could tell her I remembered the costume she'd chosen for the New Year's party. She came as a nurse. But there were a lot of people at the party and we did not then exchange a word. It would be a full year until we spoke. But she noticed me, and my roommate. We seemed to be the only people there that were actually having a thoroughly good time. The kilts may have had something to do with it. She said I had looked great in a kilt.
Nonetheless, I've never worn one since, although many years ago I studied the chanter, and at the moment I'm practicing the Scots accent for some recording of stern wheeler stories at the end of the month. "Rhotic", they call the Scots dialect on You Tube. That's because you rrroll the r's. Rrrob Rrroy MacGrrregorrr. Just think Sean Connerrry, John Hannah, Billy Boyd.
But back to the short story, and the joy of writing one. Ulysses was away from home, from Ithica, for twenty years. Moses spent forty years trucking the Israelites around and across Sinai. And that seventy years the Hebrews spent in Babylon probably did not include one mature adult who had to twiddle his thumbs for seven decades. It was God who had to twiddle his thumbs, waiting for the habitually traitorous "People of God" to go through sufficient punishment for ignoring the prophets.
Of course I've not twiddled my thumbs. But there's been a little pocket of something missing in my soul, because I really did love the short ones, and, in a sense, they loved me. I suppose "The Axe" was so much of a vision piece because it would have to hold me to itself for so many years.
So I think I have created - or non-created- some kind of record. The gold medal for the longest silence. Well, in the genre. Not many people can think of me as silent by habit.
Medals are not irrelevant. Those are the things they give out at the Olympics, for one thing, and the Olympics are coming to the turf adjacent to Howe Sound in 2010. Interesting that #37 should be set on its shores. Perhaps there are a few people coming who read serious stuff, who look for, even expect, the transcendental in literature. The Muse was no doubt waiting for the coincidence.
I remember, in first year English, Doctor Creighton devoting an entire lecture to actually asking us our definitions of literature. He drew a lot of blanks, of course. In grade twelve you study a lot of literature but you aren't really asked to define it. That would require philosophy, especially metaphysics, and BC high schools did not then teach philosophy, nor do they now. Did he count out for us the five transcendentals: being, oneness, truth, goodness, beauty? I don't remember. Such a list would probably been a conceptual shock for me, even though I most certainly had pretty vast experiential knowledge of all of them, but I do remember that Creighton brought the concept of Spirit into the discussion. I hadn't thought of that either, although I always got a great deal of spirit out of reading anything that took my fancy, and I also by that time got even more out of the process of writing. I suppose the being of the things I named on the page leapt back out at me.
That is, the being had that effect in the moment of the writing, because I was working with the Muse in draught mode, and the Muse wanted to encourage me to keep up the process. But so often when it came to reading what I'd done I found it lacking. It wasn't Hamlet, it wasn't the opening paragraph of "The Sun Also Rises" or"The Idiot". And if there was a good first line, there was not often an adequate second.
And there was another problem, when you look at it from the the vantage point of more than fifty years later. If "The Axe" was genuinely inspired, then so was the very first short story I wrote, but of course did not publish, for the Saturday Evening Post. The idea came while I was waiting for the bus, on my way to the first Ubyssey party of the autumn of 1954, and it contained two college football players, one of whom would at the climax of the story refuse to tackle a running back from the opposing team, even though such a withdrawal from contact would ensure that the lad with the ball would score the winning touchdown, because he knew that the other player was actually in no condition to be in the game and tackling him would only aggravate his injuries. The missed tackle was not obvious, because he who designed it was in fact a very good athlete, and could make it look as if he had just missed. There were no boos from the crowd. Thus the embryo of Jacob Cameron, with the other player of course Michael Thurman, who knew what Jacob had done. Those were not then their names.
So, if you submit to the laws of inspiration, you realize some of the obstacles to my making an early career as an author of short stories. As with the two young men who were on the yacht in my first version of that tale, I was being moved to probe the history of the characters who would be the cornerstone of a very large dynastic series, exactly the opposite of what Poe, Chekhov, de Maupassant and so forth were all about.
But I never tried to use "Jacob" again until the autumn of 57 and "The Axe". I came up with other characters, other predicaments, for the briefer tales, and always, always, stayed away from the core of what I knew with absolute certainty I would eventually make my life's work.
Now, there is always the possibility of a great distinction between what the writer habitually thinks and what he writes, just as there are profound distinctions between the actual personality and character of an actor and the roles he or she plays. I don't think this distinction was ever greater, in the history of developing authors, than in my own, yet I always knew that there would come a day when everything, no matter how seemingly disparate, would come together, first in fiction, in novels, and then within the ordinary autobiographical form, but only after I was first published as a novelist. I was made to realize, in those first weeks at UBC, that I would have to write an account of my life with Christ. I was at that time given only one topic: how Providence would look after my finances.
My own peculiar sense of the waggish now ponders why Jesus was being so "commercial". Did he not say, "Man cannot love both God and Mammon?" Why did he not suggest a loftier topic to focus on than the funding for my board and room? He made no reference whatsoever to any of the purely spiritual, and in their own small way, supernatural, events he had been quite regularly walking me through. Nothing about the displays of light, the ligatures, visions, interior words. These alone would have rendered no small harvest of incidents wonderfully adaptable to the episodic form. But, although I most certainly was taking notes at the deepest possible level, I had no ideas for a form that could take the notes to the next steps. In terms of practical production, I had a head as divinely blank as any Buddhist could hope for. There was a massive amount of images going in, but nothing coming out except pieces of journalism for the Ubyssey, and the occasional essay that inevitably felt like anything but an exercise in verbal aesthetics, and of course the yacht novel, which was a deliberate avoidance of the huge complexities of campus life.
This condition of the short story potential was to last for a long time. But now it is over, so much over that this weekend past I emerged from the hermit's study to hear a reading and talk in Nelson by Jack Hodgins, an author from my own generation. It was a grand hour in every respect. I was mostly reminded of the fall of 74, when I met John Stark, come to our town to do Chekhov's "Seagull". Do some things take a long time? Oh yeah. The Leacock story he asked me to adapt for the stage in those weeks opened last week in Santa Monica, California, by now, as far as I know, a musical.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Innocents Aloft
It was now eleven, and fully dark. Howe Sound was quiet, but then it had been quiet all day, as Toby well knew, because he'd been on the same beach, a little further south, in the afternoon. There was only a small breeze sometimes riffling in the alders that grew just above the high tide line of driftwood, and now that it was dark, no traffic on the Squamish highway, up the bank above the beach. The only regular sound was the little lap of the tiny waves lapping on the sand below their blankets. Otherwise, it was quiet, a very nice quiet at the end of a very nice day. It was Sunday, and the day had begun with Mass, as Sunday had been doing now for months, in fact for almost a year, and then it had moved on before lunch to the beach at Lions Bay, with the girl he was less than a month away from marrying, and her high school friend and the lad the friend was going to marry. They had come in the lad's car because Toby didn't own a car anymore. The other lad owned a car very naturally, as he was a Porsch mechanic. He was also German, and his father had been in the Wermacht. Toby's father had been in the Canadian army. The two young men had shaken hands when they first met, grinned, and Toby, who was quick with words, said that with lineage like that he hoped there wouldn't be another war for a long time. They had all enjoyed the drive from Point Grey, and then enjoyed the water and the beach and the sun and the picnic and then drove back to Point Grey. They had dropped Toby off first because the two girls still wanted to talk about the old days and the changing days to come. Toby wanted to get back to his writing. It had been an hour or two short of supper and he could still get some good time at the typewriter with the novel he was trying to finish before he got married. This novel was the second run at the first long story he'd ever written, but not the same story as he'd got some nice remarks about a year earlier from a Toronto editor, and he was feeling hopeful. All the last year he'd said "Twenty-two, and nothing done." Now he was twenty-three, and that might be a good sign. Also, he'd done a lot of studying and joined the Church between the two books.
But he hadn't written a word when he got home. He hadn't even taken the cover off his old tractor down in his basement room. When he'd walked in the front door, they'd been sitting on the couch, Gabriel and Willow, side by side, like two children waiting to be taken to the fair, but not at all confident that it would happen.
"Toby! Thank God you're here!" said Willow.
"We've been waiting for an hour," said Gabriel.
"We want to climb the Lions," Willow said. "We plan to drive to Lions Bay tonight, sleep on the beach, and go up in the morning. Gabe knows of a logging road that can take us a long way in, and if we have any luck we can be up to the top and back down before dark. I've got the food picked out and everything. It'll be great fun. My last chance to hike before I got to San Francisco and Gabe has to back to the boat on Tuesday. He won't be back in town for days. But Dad says we can't go just by ourselves. You have to come too."
Gabe nodded, grinning. The word chaperon was not used, but it hung in the air and Toby had got the picture. They were each three different religions, Unitarian, Anglican, and Catholic, and the old standards mattered. The chances of trouble were profoundly slim, for not only did the other two behave themselves, they were not even in love with each other, as far as Toby could see. It was just student friendship, built around passion for similar interests, such as hiking and literature and amazing conversations, and not around a passion for nonsense. But the sensibilities of parents had to mean something. And the opportunity was certainly there. Willow was wonderfully attractive to anything in pants and Gabe was a handsome and abundantly lively fellow in his own right. He could feel two discomforts. Mr. MacBride's, for his beautiful daughter, and his own, for lack of the clacking typewriter.
He had obviously sighed and registered the loss of the writing time. And there was the question of too much leisure for himself. He'd already been to Lions Bay and had a lovely afternoon. Was he entitled to yet another day? Their faces had begun to register sheer apprehensions, and not without reason. He was, after all, the most disciplined son-of-a-bitch in all of the circles they'd ever known, although there was always the hope that since he was close to finishing his book he might be able to loosen up a little. More than once Gabriel had told him that he worked too hard, and didn't let things sit long enough.
"Okay. I'll do it. I'd feel better about it if Jelena could come too, but she has to work tomorrow, of course. If you bring the Coleman, I'll cook breakfast on the beach, and brag about the twenty course meals I could cook in the bush with two Colemans." He laughed, and it seemed all right.
So they had gathered their stuff and hit the road, Toby and the grateful pair, with Willow moving like a rocket before he changed his mind. Willow drove, through town and the park, over the Lions Gate bridge and on to the Upper Levels highway. To Toby's surprise, it all seemed fresh again, even though he'd only done the route a few hours before. He fell to thinking about the philosophers he was always reading now, the old and new Scholastics, with Aquinas heading the list, and when they reached a point in the road where it starts to turn fully into the view of the sound, under the setting sun, his soul went very still, so that he understood that all the world was his apple, and a very good apple to have. He was sitting in the back seat, on the left side, so he could look out over English Bay and the rest of the strait. It had all been his water for so long, with so many bays and coves, channel and islands and beaches, speaking to him as the Aegean had spoken to Homer, as far as the poetry was concerned, and ladling up as many adventures, but he'd yet to find the words to put it all down. On the other hand, in almost everything he read, he almost never found experiences of the mind like that which he was having at the moment. He studied the backs of his companions heads, and was very happy they made had him into a chaperon.
By the time they reached the beach and pulled off the highway down the road to the sand and the row of driftwood, it was dusk. The sun had gone down behind Bowen Island, and the high loom of Gambier rose up to the north of Bowen, mysterious as always to his imagination. He had been on Bowen, he had spent wonderful times at two camps on the Gibson shore beyond Gambier and perhaps even greater times up the Sechelt region, but he had never been on Gambier.
They had spread their sleeping stuff, fairly close to the water because the depth of the sand increased the further you got from the driftwood. Some of the driftwood lay on gravel. "Toby, is this tide coming in or going out?" Gabe said.
Toby thought for a bit. "It was coming in this afternoon, but that was almost six hours ago so it must be going out."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Why are you sure?"
"I've had a lot to do with tides and that's what I figure. When I was ten and we lived on Lasqueti I used to read the tidebook like the Bible, and my Grandpop on the Inlet is always battling with low tide because he bought his place in January when the tides are really high and now in the summer he has a lot of mud flat. And I've hunted oysters and clams. Once on Lennie's Lagoon we almost got stranded in the high tide. Is that enough?" He had felt profoundly well documented.
"Maybe." Gabe also knew about tides, but, according to Toby, only from the decks of his coastal freighters.
They had crawled into their blankets, the men on the outside gallantly protecting Willow in the middle. And they talked. Gabe was still thinking out the trio's relation to the characters in "The Sun Also Rises". On a previous ramble, over on Hollyburn, with no interest in any lofty summits like the Lions, they had argued over who was what. Willow of course was Lady Brett. But Gabe had said he would be Jake Barnes and Toby could be Robert Cohn. Toby had no objection to being Jewish, because every Jewish girl he knew at UBC was very good looking as well as talented and bright, but Cohn was obviously a jerk. Gabe had pointed out that he should remember that from the point of view of manhood he, Gabe, had made a great sacrifice by taking the role of Jake. Right, Toby agreed, and wished that Hemingway hadn't created so many losers.He had said this out loud and then he added, "Why is it that a guy who writes so well about nature and things has most of his people going around on crutches? I speak symbolically,of course."
"I bet you do," Willow had said, laughing gaily. "Otherwise Jelena wouldn't have you in the house." Everyone knew about their first argument, over symbols in literature. Jelena then had assumed she was going to be an English professor, and Toby at that point was finding himself suspcious of a lot of literary theories, even though in the months long before the argument, before they had met, he had loved everything he'd read about the Greeks. He'd stood on the foredeck of the ferry heading for Gibsons, on his way to visit his grandparents on Sechelt Inlet before he headed off for his marvellous summer in the woods two years ago, with Francis Ferguson in his hand and Aeschylus and Homer in his head and the sound of his own Aegean in his ears. Now he had learned how Agamemnon Channel, up at the top of the Inlet, had got its name.
And they they grew quiet, and closer to sleep. They had to keep a lid on the chat, sweet as it always was, because tomorrow would be a long and arduous day.
He'd never been to the actual top of a high mountain. Standing in the snow on the summit of an eight thousand foot ridge in the Niutes was as close as he'd come, two summers previous. But that had been one hell of an adventure. Not the climb, which was just up and steady in perfect weather, and the same back down, but all of a sudden, half way between the bare rock and the far edge of the snow comb, he'd realized that if he and his partner had kept going they could have fallen through an overhanging lip of snow, five hundred feet into the valley below. "Carl!" he had yelled to the boy ahead. Carl had turned back, no more than twenty feet from the edge of the snow. It was funny to see the foot marks stop before the end and return. Funny and frightening. He could still shake just thinking about it, sometimes. At other times it made a good story.
The summits of the Lions would be three thousand feet lower than the ridge in the Niutes, yet every foot of the way would be from sea level, and it was still a good hike. Going up the slope to the ridge he and Carl had started at around two thousand feet in altitude. Perfect weather, but he'd been a little disappointed that he had not been able to see the water at the Coast. By the time of the climb, well into July, he'd been pretty certain he was going to come back to UBC instead of heading off to Toronto to try his hand at journalism, and it would have been nice to see the real coastline, if only to spur the anticipation of returning. But he'd had to wait for that anticipation until they'd actually left the Homathko system, flying out in September under a blazing blue sky to Campbell River, bussing to Nanaimo, riding one of the CPR ships to Vancouver, sailing into the harbour at evening under a sky that at least to him seemed to be on fire. Four months away from the city, his pants filthy from the woods, his shouldered duffle bag the same, striding down the gangplank like Ulysses come back to Ithica. There'd even been a Penelope of sorts waiting too, but that had come to end and then there was Jelena and life really began all over again. No wonder intuition had told him to give his alma mater one more chance, to come back as a kind of graduate student and experience some of the campus life he hadn't taken on in his first four years. Well, three and something. In the fourth year he'd quit early to study on his own, and then work when he ran out of money, although he kept on reading well, and then for the first time in his life write with the best hours of the day. No more of writing in the evening after a full day of school.
The thoughts of morning writing had been different. More real, although of course he was older, and better read, than when he'd first run characters and dialogue through a typewriter. But there were no escapes into happy fantasy for the slicks, or pessimistic fantasy, for the little magazines.
That morning writing had been honest, from memory as best as he could do it, given certain limitations he had put upon himself. Then, two years ago, he would not even think about religious questions when he wrote. He was full of philosophical and religious questions whenever he was not at his typewriter. But at the machine of his chosen profession they were always set aside, until recently. It had been some sort of deal with God. All that stuff was to come later, when he could be sure he knew what he was talking about, and really had the words for it. And now he had some of the words, and probably more real experience than he could handle, but he had very little in the way of characters or plot. That's why he'd had to fall back on the old story of the yacht cruise, which was working, to some degree, but still was miles away from what he really knew.
It had been quiet for a couple of minutes. Maybe five minutes. And then Gabriel Franklin said, "Skinner, I have to tell you, you're dead wrong about these tides. There's water in the tip of my blankets." Toby sat up. There wasn't much light, but he could see what Gabe meant. The tide had indeed come in, and Gabe, being the furthest down the beach for some reason, had had the waves licking at his toes. His tall form was already out of the blankets and pulling them back up the beach to safer ground. Willow and Toby began following suit. Willow was laughing. Toby felt stupid. He could not remember ever in his life making a mistake about tides before. "Oh, God. I'm sorry. You're absolutely right. I must have misunderstood what was going on this afternoon."
"You deserve to be left to drown," Gabe said cheerfully. "But if I let you drown then you wouldn't finish your book and I wouldn't have any reason to write your biography."
"Are you telling me I don't have a life apart from my writing?" Toby was now laughing as well, thinking of his conviction that his life was now and had always been much more significant than what he could set down on paper.
"We know you do, but who else does? That's why you have to write about it. I can only become famous if you become famous first. That's why I have to keep you alive. So don't make it difficult for me."
"I'm moving, I'm moving. My Dad won't believe this. He used to get me to check the tide tables when we had to do something with the good old salt water ebb and flow."
"That was before you were a chaperon. Obviously the responsibility has addled your brains. Now go to sleep. We'll need your path-finding abilities tomorrow."
"Help. I thought you knew the way in. I've never even thought of climbing the Lions. And the last time I was in this neck of the woods, except for this afternoon, we came by boat. Union Steamship, all the way to Britannia Beach. There was no road after Horseshoe Bay."
"I'm talking about chosing the routes after we leave the logging road. There will be some tricky choices until we get above the timberline. That was the other excuse for bringing you. You've actually spent more time as a surveyor than the rest of us. You should be good at scouting out the lay of the land."
"Thank you for those ego-restoring assurances," Toby said. "Indeed, you have made it possible for me to go to sleep."
"Stop talking, you two." Willow was settling into her relocated blankets. "You're not making it possible for me to go to sleep."
The boys did as they were told.
But he hadn't written a word when he got home. He hadn't even taken the cover off his old tractor down in his basement room. When he'd walked in the front door, they'd been sitting on the couch, Gabriel and Willow, side by side, like two children waiting to be taken to the fair, but not at all confident that it would happen.
"Toby! Thank God you're here!" said Willow.
"We've been waiting for an hour," said Gabriel.
"We want to climb the Lions," Willow said. "We plan to drive to Lions Bay tonight, sleep on the beach, and go up in the morning. Gabe knows of a logging road that can take us a long way in, and if we have any luck we can be up to the top and back down before dark. I've got the food picked out and everything. It'll be great fun. My last chance to hike before I got to San Francisco and Gabe has to back to the boat on Tuesday. He won't be back in town for days. But Dad says we can't go just by ourselves. You have to come too."
Gabe nodded, grinning. The word chaperon was not used, but it hung in the air and Toby had got the picture. They were each three different religions, Unitarian, Anglican, and Catholic, and the old standards mattered. The chances of trouble were profoundly slim, for not only did the other two behave themselves, they were not even in love with each other, as far as Toby could see. It was just student friendship, built around passion for similar interests, such as hiking and literature and amazing conversations, and not around a passion for nonsense. But the sensibilities of parents had to mean something. And the opportunity was certainly there. Willow was wonderfully attractive to anything in pants and Gabe was a handsome and abundantly lively fellow in his own right. He could feel two discomforts. Mr. MacBride's, for his beautiful daughter, and his own, for lack of the clacking typewriter.
He had obviously sighed and registered the loss of the writing time. And there was the question of too much leisure for himself. He'd already been to Lions Bay and had a lovely afternoon. Was he entitled to yet another day? Their faces had begun to register sheer apprehensions, and not without reason. He was, after all, the most disciplined son-of-a-bitch in all of the circles they'd ever known, although there was always the hope that since he was close to finishing his book he might be able to loosen up a little. More than once Gabriel had told him that he worked too hard, and didn't let things sit long enough.
"Okay. I'll do it. I'd feel better about it if Jelena could come too, but she has to work tomorrow, of course. If you bring the Coleman, I'll cook breakfast on the beach, and brag about the twenty course meals I could cook in the bush with two Colemans." He laughed, and it seemed all right.
So they had gathered their stuff and hit the road, Toby and the grateful pair, with Willow moving like a rocket before he changed his mind. Willow drove, through town and the park, over the Lions Gate bridge and on to the Upper Levels highway. To Toby's surprise, it all seemed fresh again, even though he'd only done the route a few hours before. He fell to thinking about the philosophers he was always reading now, the old and new Scholastics, with Aquinas heading the list, and when they reached a point in the road where it starts to turn fully into the view of the sound, under the setting sun, his soul went very still, so that he understood that all the world was his apple, and a very good apple to have. He was sitting in the back seat, on the left side, so he could look out over English Bay and the rest of the strait. It had all been his water for so long, with so many bays and coves, channel and islands and beaches, speaking to him as the Aegean had spoken to Homer, as far as the poetry was concerned, and ladling up as many adventures, but he'd yet to find the words to put it all down. On the other hand, in almost everything he read, he almost never found experiences of the mind like that which he was having at the moment. He studied the backs of his companions heads, and was very happy they made had him into a chaperon.
By the time they reached the beach and pulled off the highway down the road to the sand and the row of driftwood, it was dusk. The sun had gone down behind Bowen Island, and the high loom of Gambier rose up to the north of Bowen, mysterious as always to his imagination. He had been on Bowen, he had spent wonderful times at two camps on the Gibson shore beyond Gambier and perhaps even greater times up the Sechelt region, but he had never been on Gambier.
They had spread their sleeping stuff, fairly close to the water because the depth of the sand increased the further you got from the driftwood. Some of the driftwood lay on gravel. "Toby, is this tide coming in or going out?" Gabe said.
Toby thought for a bit. "It was coming in this afternoon, but that was almost six hours ago so it must be going out."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Why are you sure?"
"I've had a lot to do with tides and that's what I figure. When I was ten and we lived on Lasqueti I used to read the tidebook like the Bible, and my Grandpop on the Inlet is always battling with low tide because he bought his place in January when the tides are really high and now in the summer he has a lot of mud flat. And I've hunted oysters and clams. Once on Lennie's Lagoon we almost got stranded in the high tide. Is that enough?" He had felt profoundly well documented.
"Maybe." Gabe also knew about tides, but, according to Toby, only from the decks of his coastal freighters.
They had crawled into their blankets, the men on the outside gallantly protecting Willow in the middle. And they talked. Gabe was still thinking out the trio's relation to the characters in "The Sun Also Rises". On a previous ramble, over on Hollyburn, with no interest in any lofty summits like the Lions, they had argued over who was what. Willow of course was Lady Brett. But Gabe had said he would be Jake Barnes and Toby could be Robert Cohn. Toby had no objection to being Jewish, because every Jewish girl he knew at UBC was very good looking as well as talented and bright, but Cohn was obviously a jerk. Gabe had pointed out that he should remember that from the point of view of manhood he, Gabe, had made a great sacrifice by taking the role of Jake. Right, Toby agreed, and wished that Hemingway hadn't created so many losers.He had said this out loud and then he added, "Why is it that a guy who writes so well about nature and things has most of his people going around on crutches? I speak symbolically,of course."
"I bet you do," Willow had said, laughing gaily. "Otherwise Jelena wouldn't have you in the house." Everyone knew about their first argument, over symbols in literature. Jelena then had assumed she was going to be an English professor, and Toby at that point was finding himself suspcious of a lot of literary theories, even though in the months long before the argument, before they had met, he had loved everything he'd read about the Greeks. He'd stood on the foredeck of the ferry heading for Gibsons, on his way to visit his grandparents on Sechelt Inlet before he headed off for his marvellous summer in the woods two years ago, with Francis Ferguson in his hand and Aeschylus and Homer in his head and the sound of his own Aegean in his ears. Now he had learned how Agamemnon Channel, up at the top of the Inlet, had got its name.
And they they grew quiet, and closer to sleep. They had to keep a lid on the chat, sweet as it always was, because tomorrow would be a long and arduous day.
He'd never been to the actual top of a high mountain. Standing in the snow on the summit of an eight thousand foot ridge in the Niutes was as close as he'd come, two summers previous. But that had been one hell of an adventure. Not the climb, which was just up and steady in perfect weather, and the same back down, but all of a sudden, half way between the bare rock and the far edge of the snow comb, he'd realized that if he and his partner had kept going they could have fallen through an overhanging lip of snow, five hundred feet into the valley below. "Carl!" he had yelled to the boy ahead. Carl had turned back, no more than twenty feet from the edge of the snow. It was funny to see the foot marks stop before the end and return. Funny and frightening. He could still shake just thinking about it, sometimes. At other times it made a good story.
The summits of the Lions would be three thousand feet lower than the ridge in the Niutes, yet every foot of the way would be from sea level, and it was still a good hike. Going up the slope to the ridge he and Carl had started at around two thousand feet in altitude. Perfect weather, but he'd been a little disappointed that he had not been able to see the water at the Coast. By the time of the climb, well into July, he'd been pretty certain he was going to come back to UBC instead of heading off to Toronto to try his hand at journalism, and it would have been nice to see the real coastline, if only to spur the anticipation of returning. But he'd had to wait for that anticipation until they'd actually left the Homathko system, flying out in September under a blazing blue sky to Campbell River, bussing to Nanaimo, riding one of the CPR ships to Vancouver, sailing into the harbour at evening under a sky that at least to him seemed to be on fire. Four months away from the city, his pants filthy from the woods, his shouldered duffle bag the same, striding down the gangplank like Ulysses come back to Ithica. There'd even been a Penelope of sorts waiting too, but that had come to end and then there was Jelena and life really began all over again. No wonder intuition had told him to give his alma mater one more chance, to come back as a kind of graduate student and experience some of the campus life he hadn't taken on in his first four years. Well, three and something. In the fourth year he'd quit early to study on his own, and then work when he ran out of money, although he kept on reading well, and then for the first time in his life write with the best hours of the day. No more of writing in the evening after a full day of school.
The thoughts of morning writing had been different. More real, although of course he was older, and better read, than when he'd first run characters and dialogue through a typewriter. But there were no escapes into happy fantasy for the slicks, or pessimistic fantasy, for the little magazines.
That morning writing had been honest, from memory as best as he could do it, given certain limitations he had put upon himself. Then, two years ago, he would not even think about religious questions when he wrote. He was full of philosophical and religious questions whenever he was not at his typewriter. But at the machine of his chosen profession they were always set aside, until recently. It had been some sort of deal with God. All that stuff was to come later, when he could be sure he knew what he was talking about, and really had the words for it. And now he had some of the words, and probably more real experience than he could handle, but he had very little in the way of characters or plot. That's why he'd had to fall back on the old story of the yacht cruise, which was working, to some degree, but still was miles away from what he really knew.
It had been quiet for a couple of minutes. Maybe five minutes. And then Gabriel Franklin said, "Skinner, I have to tell you, you're dead wrong about these tides. There's water in the tip of my blankets." Toby sat up. There wasn't much light, but he could see what Gabe meant. The tide had indeed come in, and Gabe, being the furthest down the beach for some reason, had had the waves licking at his toes. His tall form was already out of the blankets and pulling them back up the beach to safer ground. Willow and Toby began following suit. Willow was laughing. Toby felt stupid. He could not remember ever in his life making a mistake about tides before. "Oh, God. I'm sorry. You're absolutely right. I must have misunderstood what was going on this afternoon."
"You deserve to be left to drown," Gabe said cheerfully. "But if I let you drown then you wouldn't finish your book and I wouldn't have any reason to write your biography."
"Are you telling me I don't have a life apart from my writing?" Toby was now laughing as well, thinking of his conviction that his life was now and had always been much more significant than what he could set down on paper.
"We know you do, but who else does? That's why you have to write about it. I can only become famous if you become famous first. That's why I have to keep you alive. So don't make it difficult for me."
"I'm moving, I'm moving. My Dad won't believe this. He used to get me to check the tide tables when we had to do something with the good old salt water ebb and flow."
"That was before you were a chaperon. Obviously the responsibility has addled your brains. Now go to sleep. We'll need your path-finding abilities tomorrow."
"Help. I thought you knew the way in. I've never even thought of climbing the Lions. And the last time I was in this neck of the woods, except for this afternoon, we came by boat. Union Steamship, all the way to Britannia Beach. There was no road after Horseshoe Bay."
"I'm talking about chosing the routes after we leave the logging road. There will be some tricky choices until we get above the timberline. That was the other excuse for bringing you. You've actually spent more time as a surveyor than the rest of us. You should be good at scouting out the lay of the land."
"Thank you for those ego-restoring assurances," Toby said. "Indeed, you have made it possible for me to go to sleep."
"Stop talking, you two." Willow was settling into her relocated blankets. "You're not making it possible for me to go to sleep."
The boys did as they were told.
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