Broken

by Lori Mairs:

Uphill from the chilled dark of the cedars and into the warm light of the desert scape above, it is here on this parapet that the formations of hoodoos begin and end and where the prickly pear cactus grows. In some parts of Woodhaven there's a visual and temperate signature where distinctive bi-zones intersect, where the crossing from one to the other sometimes happens within eight or ten feet. This is one of them. 

The air is still cool from a surprising mid-March storm that thrashed down from an angry black sky. Window-rattling booms of thunder, sheets and strips of lightning ripped beyond the width of the horizon with a wall of hail pelting anything unsheltered below it. 

I like to walk after big weather. Mostly the walk is driven by curiosity and a pull to witness the affects of a wild that can't be tamed. This part of the dry interior is a desert knoll and the highest point of the trail system inside the fence line. It's a sheer drop, sixty feet or so in some places, to the forest floor. Steep-sloped honeyed-grey grasslands are still flattened from a winter dump of snow. On the forest floor, dirt changes from mottled grey-rust to a thick reddish brown where the bio-zone switches from fir-cottonwood to cedar-cottonwood. The first has sparse and evenly-spaced trees while the latter hangs with a thick canopy darkened above and sheltered underneath. I'm eye-level with the tip-tops of new growth fir and pine and I can see a third the way up gnarly old cottonwood right into the habitat holes. If I stand here long enough the squirrels will show up and put on a Cirque de Soleil show, but today is for seeing what the storm brought in or brought down or brought over and what it left behind.

Where the trail sign marks the junction, I go up along to the old flume where fir branches are broken and scattered on the ground from the wind. I reach down, grab and throw, grab and throw, at least a dozen times, winging the fallen ones into the underbrush. I cross over the big fir root that makes a step on the path then dips under the old flume on the far side. This mess of gnarled tin and wood is all that's left of what was once a water carrier for the apple orchards in the Lower Mission. It's corroded in some parts and the wooden frame that held it up at chest height is mostly on the ground and rotting. In a few places the half-hoops of galvanized steel that braced the whole thing from underneath are lying about and poking through dirt especially where the wooden frame and the metal half-pipe are mostly disintegrated. 

Next to this mangled mess of a flume sits the whole story of Father Pandosy, the mission priest who sailed to the “new” world to settle 'untamed' land. Father Pandosy planted food in rows and people in pews. He carved a path for Indian agents and land surveyors who would divide the place into parcels for grazing cattle and growing apples. The good Father and his flock missed the part where the land had no need of taming, the part where the effortless and obvious way in would have been to ask the people already here and thriving. The Syilx people have been in the Okanagan Valley for over ten thousand years, they could have been, and in the earliest times were, in easy partnership with European settlers. Father Pandosy did what new world priests do.  

Sometimes this crippled flume is a memento mori to the courage of the settlers and their child-like trust of the vision that inspired long and treacherous walks across barren lands. It was a certain ingenuity required to survive as they were accustomed to surviving. But on days like today, days after a storm and strange unheralded weather, I only have a desire to want to reverse what was done and untangle it from the mess. I want to clean it all up and supplant this settler mentality with a little grace in a world that once was new and make room for the efficacy to ask about how to be in this place from the ones that already knew. A simple task: ask.

My dad picks me up and sits me on the metal edge of the ship's railing. My mother has the baby and my other brothers and sisters are standing below on the wooden deck and waving. We're all waving. My mother, without turning toward him, asks my father if he can see the Hendersons. He finds them in the crowd and points out their position so my mother can wave in their direction. There are coloured streamers going from the boat to the wharf where a crowd has gathered and when the streamers run out the people on the pier throw toilet paper rolls all the way up onto the boat decks. It's a celebration and wall of grief all tucked into the leaving.

Where the metal and wood lie abandoned along the trail, broken and forgotten, are remnants of ice balls scattered about and melted puddle-dregs of a brutal sky-fall that was the storm. Ice balls and puddles, it goes from one to the other and I imagine it will eventually go all the way back up again, after it's saturated the earth. The plants will cast it off into the wind and the wind will deposit it into particles that will carry it to the sky and become cloud again where it will rain or hail next season. These are the cycles that live in the flume. 

I find a spot where the moisture has stayed well beyond the drift upward and it's here that moss grows luminescent green and glowing. The moss isn't a sign of the broken; it's a sign of the staying and reaping. There are teensy brown umbrella tops lurching out of cushioned pads, miniature capsules and splash cups all gathered into a Lilliputian garden to be savoured for those who venture to squat for the inspection. We don't get close enough sometimes. I want to see beyond the broken today, find the rich and nutritious in the cycles. Today I want hope and somewhere to pull back the tides and erase what keeps tugging at my midsection. 

There's a Maori troupe on deck and they begin to sing “Now Is The Hour” and my mother starts to cry. She is broken. She doesn't want to go on the boat like I do. I can see them both, my mother and my father, because I'm up on the metal railing. I look away and look down. The water below is a long way away and it's black and swirling like a whirlpool. I get scared all of a sudden that my dad is going to forget that he's holding me and if he does I'll drop into the water and be gone forever. I grab at his arm to remind him I'm there and see that he's crying too. A roll of toilet paper whizzes by our heads. The Hendersons have spotted us and they're waving and jumping about to make sure we've seen them in the crowd. The streamers and toilet paper rips and floats away into the whirlpool. The captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells us to cover our ears then the big horn sounds loud and long and low, a final bellow as our ship pulls away into the harbour.

There's always a time after a storm when the little things flourish. The battering of hail has fallen to silence and if my ears were like the deer or bear I'm sure I could hear water being sucked up through the dirt. I move along up the flume until I get to where I can cross over it safely and make my way to a fallen log that's been placed on the hillside for watchers. I come to this spot when I need to have a think. It's mid-March and these are days and nights when I spend time with my mother. Her birthday is March fifteenth, she died March thirteenth. 

As of today I've been a motherless daughter for 24 years. Seems like a long time when I think the words but it doesn't mean I can't still smell her. She would have loved this part of my life. She would have loved these days in Woodhaven at the in-between times of the season and she would have been here talking to the trees along with me. It doesn't matter how long ago something was, what matters is how much it mattered. Sometimes what mattered is the thing that purrs softly and cozies into a place in your heart that gets most remembered. Sometimes the most remembered is the unspoken agreements and all the un-saids that find a harbour in my midsection waiting it out for after a hail storm. March bites like that for me. It reminds me of the broken parts. 

***

Lori Mairs (1961- 2021) was born in New Zealand and lived most of her life in British Columbia, Canada. From 2002- 2017, she lived in the forest as the caretaker of the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna, British Columbia.  She completed her BFA and then an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was a sculptor and installation artist, using natural materials as well as fabric, metal and beeswax in her work.  She also participated as a lead artist in several eco art projects in Kelowna.  In the last few years of her life, she began writing essays and poetry.  In all her work, her primary concerns were the relationships we have with each other as humans and the deep and often reaching relationships humans have with the more-than-human world.  For many years she wrote a blog, “The Land of 7:30.”  She also practiced as a personal growth consultant until her untimely death.  She is greatly missed by her friends, family, clients and fellow artists, as well as the neighbors and other-than-human beings of Woodhaven where she wrote and made art for many years.

Eh-ALL-ing: Finding Poland in London

Photo by Nina Vlotides

By Emma Bielecki:

Let me take you to a part of London you probably don’t know, and won’t find on any map. It has a physical infrastructure, located in West London, but mainly it exists in people’s minds, and more specifically these days in their memories. It exists in my memory because it’s where I spent slivers of my childhood, taken there by my father, who inhabited it psychologically if not physically, and who would now and then announce on a Saturday morning: ‘Let’s go to Eh-ALL-ing.’

Going to Eh-ALL-ing — or Ealing, as people without Polish accents persisted in pronouncing it — most often meant going in search of foodstuffs then unknown to English supermarkets, with strange, sonorant names: kabanos, myśliwska, krakowska, chleb. Kabanos: a long, thin, leathery sausage hung in horse-shoe shapes behind the counter of the Polish delicatessen; myśliwska: a short, thick, leathery sausage displayed in bunches like bananas; krakowska: a fat cylinder of pork, paler pink on the inside than the others and with bigger white splodges, which comes in a synthetic casing you need to remove.

I remember how my dad would peel the sausage as he ate it, leaning against the kitchen counter with the sausage in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. I would try to imitate the gesture, the confident twist of the wrist, but I always made a mess of it, hacking off big bits of meat along with the casing. There was, though, something thrilling about the process. When I was a child, meals were often a formal and fussy affair: one ate sitting down, at the table, never standing up and never, never, in the street; one minded one’s manners, which meant worrying neurotically about one’s elbows and the correct way to hold the utensils. How liberating to be able to stand at the counter, to peel the casing from a sausage in a gesture that could never be described as either well-mannered or ill mannered, but was simply, perfectly, adequate to the task in hand. To see my father peeling smoked sausage was to see a man completely at ease in the world.  

Most often we ate the sausage withchleb and Kremska. A dictionary will tell you that chleb is bread. The dictionary is wrong — or was wrong in the 1980s, when bread was white and spongy when untoasted, but hardly ever untoasted or unbuttered; chleb was darker and harder, with a little aniseed kick from the carraway seeds. Kremska is a Polish mustard, and was a source of endless frustration and disappointment for my father. No jar of Kremska bought in London ever tasted right, which is to say no jar of Kremska ever tasted like it had back home. 

My father chalked this up to geographical displacement: in Poland, surely, Kremska still tasted like Kremska? He was wrong, of course, because it wasn’t physical distance that had wrought this change, but time. Kremska in Poland no longer tasted like Kremska either, that is to say no longer tasted like it had when my father was a boy.

Nowadays, all these products are widely available. You can get Polish sausage and Polish bread and Polish mustard in pretty much any supermarket in England. Along with Polish foodstuffs, the Polish language has become ubiquitous. I’m writing this in a café and I can hear Polish in stereo — a conversation between two young men in one corner, between two young women in another.  I think of pierogi, those little dumplings stuffed with all sorts of things. I like mine z kapustą i grzybami, with cabbage and mushrooms. When I hear Polish in the background, wherever I am, on the bus or the tube or in a supermarket queue, phantom pierogi always haunts my palate, the bassline rumble of affricate consonants like the deep umami taste of mushroom, the nasal vowels like the sharp acid burst of sauerkraut.

Sometimes, when we went to Eh-ALL-ing it was not to buy food but to visit friends of my father. In general, this was not an experience I enjoyed. My father’s friends seemed much older than him (they weren’t, but in his 60s he had married a much younger woman and had kids for the first time, creating an illusion of relative youthfulness) and much more old-fashioned. They lived in tudorette semis furnished with tasselled lamps and Roman Catholic wall art, smelling of herring and talc. 

As a small child I slightly dreaded venturing into such houses; as an adolescent, I sneered at their decor. It was only as an adult, at funerals, that I learnt about what had brought their inhabitants to Ealing in the first place. About Zula Stankiewicz, who spent her childhood in Dachau; about Andrzej Plichta, who had five older brothers, all killed at Katyń; about Halina Kwiatkowska, who lived for six years in the sewers under Warsaw; about Olga Rymaszewska, who joined the resistance at 17, was captured and tortured and sentenced to death, but who survived because, for some unknown reason — maybe she reminded him of his sweetheart back home? maybe it was his mother’s birthday? — the German officer supposed to shoot her let her escape. Now I regret every time I wriggled away from a bosomy hug, or rolled an eye at a tasselled lamp, or imitated an accent for a cheap laugh. Now I marvel at the how the heroic made a home in the most humdrum of English suburbs.

What I learnt from my father and his friends is that nothing is fixed: you can always rebuild a life, even on a heap of rubble and ash. The reverse is also true though — a life can collapse into a heap of rubble with very little warning, can go up in flames in the blink of an eye. The town my father was born in was in the east of Poland. When the Soviets invaded in 1939, he was sent with his mother and grandmother to a labour camp in Siberia. Now the town he is from is in Ukraine, and women and children are being deported once more. 

***

Emma Bielecki lives and works in London, where she teaches and researches nineteenth-century French literature. In addition to authoring articles on Balzac, Belle Époque detective serials, and radioactivity in the popular novel, she sporadically enjoys writing about other things that interest her, such as Bob Dylan, pet cemeteries and the history of Poles in London.

Memories of Elsewhere: The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Anna Evans:

I can picture the house where we stayed, my grandmother’s house. Painted yellow and white with steps up to the door, and a balcony above. Walking up the steps and opening the front door, the smell of wood and paint. Inside the feel of wooden floors warm and solid under my feet. The kitchen with its green painted wooden cupboards, like being in a ship’s cabin. Together around the table in the evenings eating crispbread and cheese, and boiling water in the saucepan for tea, always served in big cups with saucers, the tea light and delicate. Unwrapping the tea bags and trying not to let the paper get wet. Sitting on the wooden bench at the table, darkness falling and a lantern in the window. The feeling of being away from home, everything is cosy. I plead to be allowed to sleep in the little wooden trundle bed that is made up downstairs so that I can hang on to the feeling of being in a story; and so I become Heidi, tucked up in the little attic room, far away in the mountains. 

Sometimes unexpectedly, the feel and smell of a Swedish summer day will appear from nowhere. In this landscape, with its red-painted wooden houses, its forests and lakes, wildflowers and meadows, I spent long summers. It is a place I have never lived but that I visited frequently as a child, my mother’s hometown of Askersund, at the top of Lake Vättern. 

It is a place I associate with a feeling of space, and of openness. This feeling I have framed, from a trip back to Sweden, in the archipelago where we walked. The road ahead bridges, stretching out into the seemingly unending blue horizon. 

For me, this place will always recall the sense of time and of space I felt there, of the hours spent riding my bike and the sense of freedom it gave me; something like the allure of childhood memory and its summer skies. I think of time outside by the lake, and long summer nights. The rocks covered in moss, and adventures outside; the forests like a picture book. Arriving in Sweden, it is the rocks I look for first - those great expansive rocks which seem to be everywhere. Gathering blueberries in the forest, which tasted so fresh and alive. And the time we picked wild mushrooms and cooked them, the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Swimming in the lake and walking to the harbour in the town to look at the boats. If you continue walking, you can cross the bridge out to the island. 

There is a peacefulness and gentleness to the forest, the suggestion that there might be places to get lost in, and places where people have never set foot; but it is not a place to feel afraid in. The feel of a world co-existing and of non-human habitation. The forest provides a refuge for all kinds of creatures, not often seen by human eyes; even quite large animals like the mysterious and majestic elks. I am entranced by the lily pads, and the tiny frogs that can be found everywhere along the ground, that are given life in the picture books we read together; for the small creatures have as much value as the larger and more powerful ones. In these books there are trolls, the kind of trolls who watch over and protect the forest and its inhabitants. To look around the landscape, it seems to make sense that they are there, in the skies, the rocks, and trees; in all the hidden places of the forest. They are caught up in my mother’s journeys to England and in the stories of her childhood growing up on the farm. Her artists eye for detail, finding magic in the everyday. 

On a trip back to Sweden, we stay in a house in the forest and it rains for a week. I am looking for summers spent by the lake, the boats and the harbour; the light which brings openness and a sense of space. Every day we drive past and see the sign enticing, as divergences often are. From the house in the forest, we turn off the road and find a hidden valley and meadowland, fresh and bright after the rainfall; wildflowers growing by the side of the road. 

The road to Skyllberg is the turning we take off the main road on the last day of our trip. Not just a location on the map, but a symbol, found somewhere between the past and present. Each recall of memory is like a draft worked over and over. Each time I want to recreate the moment when we turn the corner and find the lake hidden behind trees. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.