Mnemonic (6 page)

If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have asked Mr. Footner questions. I'd have asked about his life after the Boer War when he built bridges in the Sudan, a time and place so far away from our semi-rural street in Royal Oak, named for its groves of Garry oak. But he died in 1972 before I knew I would go on to write books, that I would be passionately interested in the history of the province I'd been born and raised in and took for granted until my own middle years.

I've tried, not hard enough perhaps, to find out if he had built the house he lived in at Royal Oak and perhaps the other two that resembled it on what might have been a larger lot that he'd subdivided. One archivist I spoke to insisted that the street hadn't existed before the 1950s. Yet there was an ancient farmstead across the road when we first moved there, with an equally ancient apple orchard and cider press. The owner, Bill Mahon, told my parents it was the oldest house in Saanich. It was torn down in the late 1970s for a subdivision. Well, maybe not under the current street name, I suggested to the archivist, but the road itself certainly existed well back into the century and maybe before. He wasn't convinced.

That single degree of separation (albeit tenuous) between myself and Walhachin, the Boer War even, is something to ponder. Growing up, my brothers had received the
Boys Own Annual
from their former Cub Master at Christmas and these were full of stories of the struggles between the British and the Afrikaners as the nineteenth century turned over to the twentieth. The names — Transvaal, Mafeking, Natal — entranced me. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouting movement, had distinguished himself during the Boer War, which was probably the reason that my brothers received the books as gifts. But still that history had its resonance for a girl growing up in Victoria with its own traces of colonialism, its Majors at the Bengal Room gazing mournfully into their gin.

My mother scoured the Goodwill on lower Yates for riding breeches and boots for me, a worn trace of those soldiers. Tags on the jodhpurs might hark back to India or Jermyn Street and sometimes the aging leather boots had old-fashioned trees within them to keep them shapely. I imagined someone — maybe a widow or a landlady — collecting up all the old garments and putting them in a carton to be taken to the Goodwill, for who else but a girl whose allowance didn't stretch to proper riding clothes would want such things? They were impossibly cheap. $1.29, or $0.75. The detritus of lives passed, and now forgotten.

Of course it makes no difference that the house my Brownie pack entered to gaze upon the spoils of colonial hyper-confidence and activity was not the Newcombe house. I knew nothing of this then. I knew no First Nations people then. When we took a Sunday drive out past Brentwood Bay, we'd pass the tidy old farms on West Saanich Road, the fancier houses near the water, and then we'd come to the Reserve. Small noises would come from my parents' throats. They disapproved of the unpainted houses, the untidy yards, the dogs everywhere. It wasn't until much later that I learned anything of the history that allowed for such discrepancy between the communities. Paved sidewalks and prosperity on one side of the line, poverty on the other. Yet no one pointed out that each of those homes on the Reserve had a smokehouse behind it, that in spite of education policies that almost exterminated the cultures and languages of the original inhabitants of the coast, there was evidence of pride and dignity. Nobody mentioned or noticed that there was no need to clear out the wild plants in order to have gardens.

Gardens are an attempt to mirror Eden. But what if you already lived there? What if you could step out your door and pick huckleberries, salal, the new tips of thimbleberry to steam like celery? What if you could dig the roots of the blue camas to dry, springbank clover tasting like young peas, wild onions to flavour your stew? Or climb down to the beach to the clam beds, carefully terraced over the centuries. What if walking in the woods was like wandering through a vast and beloved place of abundance? Why clear the earth of all these life-giving plants in order to have . . . grass?

Once, riding my bike from a temporary residence out on Ardmore Drive to my summer job near Brentwood Bay, passing through the Reserve, a very old man came out to call off a dog that was lunging at me. “Here,” he said, “try this,” passing me a knife with something speared on its tip. And I ate a slice of warm salmon right out of the smokehouse. It tasted of the sea, and campfires on cool evenings, buttery and smoky. It was utterly of the place and time. And no one I knew was eating it. Except there.

In autumn of 2009, I was reading
Trees of Greater Victoria: A Heritage
and was completely surprised to come across this information:

A rare heritage evergreen species, known as live oak,
Quercus virginiana
, at 144 Dallas Road, 36 inches (91 cm) in diameter, 22 feet (6.7 m) tall, has an amazing spread of over 50 feet (15.2 m). It is on the old homesite of C.F. Newcombe, outstanding Haida Indian authority for whom the Newcombe Auditorium at the Provincial Museum is named.
⁷

So not a eucalyptus at all! Instead, it was a tree I'd read about in southern American literature, a tree associated with William Faulkner and Walt Whitman, a tree ancient and gnarled, draped with Spanish moss. In fact, the tree became a code for Whitman's robust homosexuality in the much-discussed “Live Oak, with Moss”:

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,

All alone stood it, and the moss hung down

from the branches,

Without any companion it grew there,

glistening out with joyous leaves of

dark green.

But why did Newcombe choose a live oak, I wondered? Living in a city surrounded by wonderful native species — and himself a man who knew the value of plants and how a culture utilized them for medicines, commerce, and the practical business of everyday life — why choose a tree from the southeastern United States? Although common in southern cities, it is a tree happiest in parks, large estates, and on riverbanks where it can access damp sandy soil and where it can spread. The widest crown of any live oak is more than forty-five metres, belonging to a tree in Florida. I tried to figure out why that tree, in that place.

Next time I'm in Victoria, I drive over to Dallas Road (144 is next to 138; the lot was no doubt larger in the early twentieth century when Newcombe built here) and park across from Ogden Point breakwater. All those huge granite blocks were brought from Hardy Island, near where I live on the Sechelt Peninsula. I want to walk out on it as I did as a young girl with boyfriends on dark Friday nights. We'd pause to kiss as waves crashed against the exposed side. I always felt like I might fall — into the deep cold water of Juan de Fuca Strait or the more mysterious waters of human affection. Perhaps it was that fear of the deep that kept me from loving any of those young men, or even having them matter to me much, for I have a hard time remembering a single one of their names.

Instead, I pinch off another small branch of live oak with its deep green leaves, their undersides downy as a boy's face, and tuck it into my notebook, a small accordion pocket at the back provided for mementos. I don't see any of the acorns nestled in their deep cups, but this is a neighbourhood of squirrels, plentiful and industrious. The nameless branch at home is still pressed in a plant book, my efforts to identify it unsuccessful. Though now I can put a tiny bit of tape around its stem and write on it,
Quercus virginiana
.

No, this was no eucalyptus with its pinch of menthol, but a tree that grows quickly to a size large enough for shade, and is tolerant of salt-winds. One hundred thirty-eight Dallas Road is very exposed. There were fortified village sites along this part of the waterfront, beginning eight hundred to nine hundred years before contact, with moats and stockades; and it was kept shrub-free in order to encourage camas, Hooker's onion, and other food plants of the Lekwungen people. Later on the whole area was known as Beckley Farm, producing meat and vegetables for the Fort. Cattle and pigs ate the camas flowers before they could seed and the pigs even dug up the bulbs, eager for their sweetness. Little by little, exotic and introduced species took over from the delicate wild grasses and herbs; a live oak in soil once nurturing Garry oaks or arbutus. Yet Victoria's mild climate has encouraged gardeners to plant trees as exotic as bananas and palms so perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised to learn the tree's true name.

As a child I was impressed that Beacon Hill Park featured the tallest totem pole in the world, carved by Mungo Martin. It was erected in 1958 and is 127 feet tall. Sometimes I'd ride my bike over to the park and sit at the base of the pole. I could see the Juan de Fuca Strait and often there was a cold wind coming off it. I remember leaning my head back and trying to read the story in the totem's elements. No one talked about its imagery. To refresh my memory, I've checked the newspaper reporting of the time and find no mention of the symbolic elements of the work. Its size was emphasized, the method of placing it in a skirt like a huge candleholder so that guy wires weren't required.

The cedar tree that became the tallest pole grew at Muir Creek off the West Coast Road near Sooke. Brought to Thunderbird Park, it became graphic with Mungo Martin's family stories. Beginning with Geeksan wrapped in a blanket at the bottom, followed by the cannibal bird Huxwhukw, the crest animals rise one by one — killer whale with its formidable teeth, sea lion, eagle, sea otter clutching a fish, another whale, beaver, a man, seal, wolf, crowned by three men, two of them wearing blankets against the chill winds off Juan de Fuca Strait. And perhaps against loneliness. Beacon Hill Park is far from Fort Rupert on the northern edge of Vancouver Island where the stories had their origins.

I saw the world as an animated place. Walking the beach in search of bark for our stove on Eberts Street, I'd find long lizards of root wood tangled in amongst the logs with the faces of ravens peering out of the grain, ovoid knots forming the eyes. The monkey-puzzle trees with their serpent-like branches dropped cones scaled as the garter snakes my brothers would drop down my T-shirt, leaving me frozen in horror as the dry terrified animals slithered out above the waistband of my shorts. It wasn't that I was frightened of the snakes themselves. I could spend ages looking at one sleeping on Moss Rocks, even touching the pattern on the scales with a tentative finger. But feeling them against my bare skin was enough to make me pee my pants. Which I suppose was the idea. I learned to pretend indifference as I got older, which meant that I lost the knowledge of reptile skin against my own.

I saw the tired heads of elk in the bare branches of Garry oak and black bears nosed their way from the burned wood of old bonfires. So looking up into the faces of Mungo Martin's crest animals staring steadfastly out to sea from their perch on the tallest totem was akin to reading a story from a culture adjacent to my own but which shared elements, a sense of the numinous, and to recognize the familiar amidst the strange. These were not my crest animals, but they were part of the landscape I loved, and some of them had formed me as surely as they had formed any child born into that locus.