Mnemonic (15 page)

Maybe the other nests were older. Maybe I never noticed. The years pass and the summers enter the rich tapestry of memory so that we ask, When did we plant the ornamental cherry tree? Or the fig tree, laden with green fruit as I write, or when did we swim by moonlight, or cook sausages in a grove of trees on White Pine Island among flowering yarrow and sweet golden grass? Which was the last year we all lived in this house, dogs eager for the children to run with them or take them up the mountain to enter the cool creeks in early morning while spiderwebs jewelled with dew hung across the water?

I am still hoping for the swallows to return, though it's too late this year. We saw them for a few brief days in spring, flying ecstatic over our roof and garden. And we know they nest in multitudes down by the lake, where a fervent birder has erected dozens of houses, painted bright red, in the trees overlooking the water. Later, they appeared at our place again — the parents, perhaps, taking the young on their maiden flight.

This year, a chickadee couple seemed to be building a nest in the box on the arbutus tree but something must have frightened them — or else they found a location more to their choosing. There has been a pair around this summer, though, appearing suddenly in clematis or perched briefly on a wire; maybe it's the same couple, raising their brood in a tree cavity somewhere in the vicinity of the house. We hoped they'd choose one of our boxes to nest in but all we can do is make sure each is ready, the cedar sides weathered to silver, each roof intact, and wish for the best.

Platanus orientalis

Raven Libretto

Xerxes, who chose this way, found here a plane-tree so beautiful, that he presented it with golden ornaments, and put it under the care of one of his Immortals.

— Herodotus,
The Histories
¹

I was driving down the Coast to do some shopping, and the car radio was on. It was tuned to the CBC's
Richardson's Roundup
. Bill Richardson introduced a piece of music briefly, saying its performer was the American countertenor David Daniels. I'd heard of countertenors, I think, but had confused them with castrati. Certain pop singers used a falsetto voice and I wondered if that was similar. Anyway, nothing — knowledge or ignorance — could have prepared me for what came next. One minute I was driving on an empty highway and the next I was sitting in the car by Homesite Creek, crying into my hands, ravens assembled in the trees above me.

Bill had chosen to play “
Ombra mai fu
” from David Daniels's
Handel Operatic Arias
, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, an ensemble I have since grown to love for the clean pared-back austerity of their sound. But that day I only knew I was hearing a voice and an aria that pierced right to my heart. I knew so little about music, only a kind of blind joy when hearing Bach, sorrow when listening to a Górecki symphony, and wistful nostalgia as the Chieftains played their jigs and laments. But this aria reached down deep, bringing forth those tears, and something else: a desire to know more about singers.

I ordered the CD and listened to it over and over. I loved every piece on it. “
Ombra mai fu
”,
²
of course — that love song to a plane tree. In my travels through Europe, I'd grown accustomed to squares in the middle of towns, a single plane tree, or perhaps several, providing leafy shade on hot afternoons. Often a few benches were arranged underneath the trees and invariably someone sat with a bag of shopping at his or her feet, face lifted to the cool leaves. In Greece, old men played backgammon on tables pushed as far into the shade as possible, glasses of ouzo at hand. We stayed several times on the Left Bank in Paris and walked through one such square on our way to shop on the Rue Moufftard. Tables from one little bistro were set with gay cloth and crockery under two big plane trees. I thought of those trees as I listened to the aria.

ombra mai fu

di vegetabile

cara ed amabile

soave Plù

(Never was the shade

Of a plant

More dear and lovable,

Or more soothing.)
³

And the others: “
Cara sposa, amante cara, / dove sei
” . . . (“My love, my dear betrothed, / where art thou?”) The riveting “
Dall'ondoso periglio / salvo mi porta al lido
” (“From the peril of the waves / I have been brought safely to the shore”). I bought some of the operas from which the arias had been extracted:
Serse, Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare in Egitto
. A dear friend with great musical knowledge watched approvingly and sent recordings of other countertenors or entire operas in which I'd expressed interest. Handel and Purcell, music of all sorts sung by Daniel Taylor, Michael Chance, the Deller Consort, and much more: Dowland lute songs, Bach cantatas, Benjamin Britten's folk song arrangements for low voice (I was learning how ravishing the minor chords can be).

It was thrilling to listen to this music in my quiet house, the volume turned up, the voices filling the space between floor and ceiling, mind and heart. I was nearly fifty years old, and I'd somehow always imagined that opera really meant sopranos. I'd only ever really heard the high voices before — Kiri Te Kanawa, Maria Callas, Renée Fleming. Soprano voices have a way of claiming the space, soaring to those high Cs and beyond, bright and brilliant as filigree. I confess I am exaggerating a little and in any case my ear was so green. So yes, I'd heard tenors, baritones, the low melodic alto voice of Kathleen Ferrier; and when attending operas, I'd enjoyed the duets between the soprano and the lower male voice leads. But here, in my sunlit house, I was listening to something that interested me even more: countertenors and mezzo-sopranos. The range was warm and dense with possibility.

Once, in Paris, I'd listened to a beautiful countertenor from Martinique sing Pergolesi in Saint-Séverin, the wooden pillars (the one behind the altar shaped like a tree) and ancient pews providing a rich soundboard for those devotions. I was drawn to his voice, recognizing something completely new to me; but I hadn't known how to proceed with that insight. I returned to our hotel on the Left Bank, past the square with its grove of plane trees, the bistro tables chained to a tree, and a man asleep on a bench, newspapers wrapped around his torso. I hummed what I remembered of what I'd heard, and for once I didn't have to stretch for high notes.

When I was in high school, I sang in our choir. I loved singing. I wasn't particularly good at it but there was the moment, particularly when our choir practised a madrigal, when I could hear the voices braiding elegantly together and knew I was part of this effort; the moment when the puzzling notation made sense in a way that mathematical equations seldom did.

I'd love to have continued with the choir but I didn't get along with its master. He was a diminutive man who wore his hair combed straight up to add an inch or two to his height. He was fussy, his mouth pursed like the anus of a cat, and he preened in front of us during practice. He didn't like me and I didn't like him. I admit now I had attitude — I was sixteen, after all — and was easily distracted. But the occasions when we performed and our harmonies were true and clear were as lovely to me as anything in those years. I never received a mark higher than a C in the choir, but given his knowledge of music and his ability to develop true skills in many of his students, I wish my relationship with the choirmaster had been different.

I began to tentatively hum along to certain arias, after figuring out how the recitative worked: it followed the patterns of speech, the contours of the spoken voice, it seemed to me, and wasn't dependent upon musical structure exactly. The recits advanced the dramatic action of an opera's narrative and the arias opened up the emotional or lyric possibilities of the drama. I entered this musical territory as a complete neophyte, trying to make sense of it on a remote acreage on the Sechelt Peninsula, music playing as I went about my daily tasks. I'd pause in the kneading of bread dough to hear James Bowman in Handel's wonderful oratorio,
The Choice of Hercules
, thinking how smoky and rich his voice in the late recitative, “The sounds breathe fire,” and the following aria, “Lead Goddess lead the way.” I hung out the laundry, listening to Montserrat Caballé sing “
Chi il bel sogno di Doretta
” from
La Rondine (The Swallow)
while all around, the violet-green swallows whirled and dipped.

I loved Handel, finding in his compositions a grand and stately sweep, a generosity to the human voice. The ornamentations weren't just musical acrobatic manoeuvres, but provided natural moments for the singer to engage in something gorgeous and somehow humane — dramatic strength in service to lyrical beauty.

I was recognizing how suited a countertenor voice was to Handel and Purcell, so too the mezzo-soprano voice. In reading I've done, I've come to understand there are opposing schools of thought (or belief) about role assignations in Handel's oratorios and operas. It reminds me of similar arguments about staging Shakespeare — the gender changes, the debates on the appropriation of voice.

Should a countertenor sing a female role straight or in drag? Should a woman play a man — the trouser roles — as a man, or should her hair tumble down to show us her true nature? Was it Auden who spoke of the tyranny of the pronoun? Never mind. It was fascinating to hear everything: countertenors singing the Sorceress in
Dido and Aeneas
, mezzo-sopranos singing Orfeo in Gluck's divine opera of the same name. The music wanted what it wanted — a voice to enter a role, to caress it, claim it, offer it to a woman in a house in a remote forest, leaning on a broom, in tears.

My hummings became a little less tentative. I'd peer at the small print of the librettos often included with CDs, and attempt to sing. Well, to be honest, I croaked. There was something distinctly raven-like in the sounds that came from my throat. This came as no real surprise. I was surrounded by these birds. On my daily walks, humming and trying to sing, their music was as much a part of my life as that of the opera singers I was listening to.

The ravens are engaging in their vocalizations, sitting in a tall cedar and speculating on the human world below them.
Croanq? Klook?
There is a soft
krrrr
and a long watery gurgle that could go on for some bars, the improvisation of a skilled coloratura, shading and embellishing the notes. And the
tok, tok, tok
— a sound I can mimic by pushing and flattening my tongue up behind my teeth and striking it against my palate. When ravens fly past as I walk over the mail or else dig in the vegetable garden, I make this sound. Almost without fail, the birds do an about-turn, turn on the wing and fly over again, heads quizzically cocked.
Tok, tok, tok
, they'd reply, and wait for a response. We have a brief interchange — I hesitate to call it a conversation, though certainly sounds are made, mimicked, on both sides. Once they determine I'm not a bird, or maybe just because I bore them, they go back to what they were doing. Which often seems to be looking for trouble. Or roadkill.

I've noticed in our area that ravens use the Sunshine Coast Highway as a food lane, and it's not surprising that such intelligent birds have figured out the patterns of squirrel and raccoon deaths. One day there will be a dead animal on the side of the road, and within a very short period of time, a gang of ravens will have cleaned up the mess, muttering and squabbling as they do so. Often a scout will fly low to the pavement, scanning the edges of the road; if I wait long enough, I might see the same bird (or at least I think it's the same bird) returning to the area above the Malaspina substation where there's a huge roost. It will yell as it flies.

In his remarkable book,
Ravens in Winter
, Bernd Heinrich suggests that ravens have a series of sounds used to invite others to share their food, the kind of behaviour that humans would do well to emulate. (An aria from
Theodora
as the table is set, the platters laid out for all to partake.)

Sometimes on the stretch of highway near my home, a deer struck by a car will stagger to the roadside or just into the woods to die. Not long after, I've heard the specific raven yelps that bring other birds. Although I have no hard data, I assume, with the confidence that comes from a long residence in a place, that a message has been sent out to announce that a carcass has been found and that feasting can commence. That's certainly what happens, in much the same sequence, time after time. Now that there are coyotes in our area, and more recently, wolves, I think that interspecies cooperation will develop as the teeth and claws of the mammals prove to be an efficient way to open the bodies; once the wolves and coyotes have eaten their fill, the ravens can come to finish up.

When we walk up behind the Malaspina hydro substation, we often hear the ravens at the roost, yelling and uttering a sound nearer to a yelp. This area is home to a herd of Roosevelt elk. In calving season, I have to wonder if a vulnerable elk calf has been spotted and the alert has gone out to all members of the team. Sometimes we find coyote scats composed of fine beige hair, as though from the young body of a calf. Little slivers of bone, those delicate ankles.