Some time in your life you must have been hugged by a poem written by Mary Oliver.
Upstream was published in 2016, not long before her death on January 17, 2019. It is both a memoir and an homage to her chosen town: Provincetown, Massachusetts. She moved there with her lifelong partner and soul mate Molly Malone Cook in the mid 1960s, and these essays celebrate fifty years of life lived in this artist haven at the northern tip of Cape Cod.
Provincetown resembles a crab’s claw on a map. It’s a long hooked peninsula, the historic scene of the Mayflower landing in 1620. Named Cape Cod by an English explorer in 1602, who appreciated the cod haul, it remained a fishing/whaling town for centuries. It is the ancestral territory of the Nauset People, who I’m sure had their own name for this place. The Nauset are an Algonquian-speaking People, who “sold” the pilgrims the land where they established Plymouth for “2 brass kettles, 6 coats, 12 hoes, 12 axes, 12 knives, and a box.”
But I digress.
I’m sure Oliver must have kept annotated journals as she writes:
“I saw wood ducks here for the first time in 1977” and “In 1985, a shoveler spent a spring morning on Blackwater Pond. Once, in late March 1991, a single hooded merganser appeared on Oak-Head Pond” (15).
The beauty of Provincetown is that the historic town stretches along a curved beach fronted by ocean and backed by a wildlife sanctuary. Blackwater Pond is there along the Beech Forest Trail. Idyllic. Paradisiacal. The town swells each summer with tourists. I can see why they chose this haven known for its artists and gays. This is a place worthy of a visit.
Why is Provincetown so Gay? explains the history and its liberal beginnings way back in 1899. A train connected it to Greenwich Village, NY, so many forward-thinkers found easy access to this out-of-the-way spot of beauty and freedom.
“Over the next two decades, Provincetown welcomed not only thousands of artists, but also writers, actors and left-wing political radicals who brought new ideas on gender and racial equality, artistic expression and sexuality.”
Oliver rises at 5am to greet the sun and go rambling through the wildlife sanctuary with her dogs. She writes as she walks. Nature is as much her muse as poets past. In particular, she loves Emerson, Shelley, young Wordsworth, Blake, and Basho. She writes of Emerson:
“The writing is a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to the heart, at the same time that it strikes the mind” (73).
The same can be said for her own work. Indeed, she writes in the Romantic Nature Tradition. Oliver is, at once, passionate and observant in her relationship with the land; her prose streaked with lines so vivid I must pause to savour them and capture them in my journal.
She includes brief bits in Section Three on Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth, perhaps gleaned from her talks, as she travelled to lecture, though I think she would have just as soon stayed at home.
Oliver sees herself as one of Nature, both prey and predator. She harvests honey locust blossoms and once digs deep into a turtle’s sandy nest to steal half of her eggs (13/27). She takes them home to pierce and drain, scramble their big yellow yolks, and devour.
This I find horrific. It hurts my heart. I remember pregnant turtles crawling out of Bill Brown’s quarry pond north of Ajax, Ontario, and crossing Concession 5 on their way to nesting. I’d stop the car and help them cross. I can’t imagine digging up a turtle’s eggs to devour unless I was starving on some deserted island somewhere.
“Each of the turtles is a female, and gravid, and is looking for a place to dig her nest; each of the mosquitoes is a female also who cannot, without one blood meal, lay her own fertile eggs upon the surface of some quiet pond” (52).
This is her point. The mosquitoes bite the turtles in the circle of Nature and she takes from the turtle, including herself in the web. She is as much a predator as the fox and the red-tailed hawk she surprises one day ripping into a pheasant. She considers stealing that too, but decides against it.
“I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same” (56).
I fear I am a sentimentalist, driven by feelings—though I’ve considered how culling the local Canada Geese flock might feed the homeless. They, the geese—not the homeless—leave such delectable hor d’oeuvres for my lab.
Oliver’s essays make me homesick for the East where I grew up. I recall the painted turtles, blue herons, hawks, and pumpkin-coloured Baltimore orioles, their nests streaming like long silk stockings; crimson cardinals against white snow, and canary-yellow finches … the great grey owl who soared over our bog, vampiric through the shadows.
I think I must nestle into my winter quilt and read more of Mary Oliver. There is much here to learn.
Write what you know. That’s what writing coaches tell us. In the case of former small-town journalist Maureen Brownlee, the advice rings true. Her latest novel is set in the interior of British Columbia, 1995 – “Cache Creek to Kamloops and north” (65) – an area close to where Brownlee grew up and worked at her own small-town newspaper during the time the mountain pine beetle was rampaging through the forests of western North America, destroying millions of acres of pine forest. Brownlee’s insider’s view breathes life and truth into this literary text.
“When the beetles attack, they bring a fungus with them, and the fungus spreads into the tree and makes it easier for the beetles to chew through the cambium . . . It stains the wood, blue streaks all through it. The lumber buyers downgrade it” (156). With its blue cambium, prices drop, even though there’s nothing wrong with blue wood if it can be harvested before it dries out and cracks. There’s a metaphor here somewhere.
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/
An unscrupulous developer (aren’t they all?), smelling the potential for a quick buck, comes to Beauty Creek to romance the Creeksters into letting him cut the timber and build his townhouse development before it’s too late. The problem with development is that the locals end up being priced out of their own land. We’ve seen this time and time again as gentrification has crept through this province. But what else can you do when you’re about to lose the only resource that keeps your town alive? And so the debate begins.
The narrative meanders through the distinct voices of three central characters: Maggie, the widowed editor of the Chronicle, struggling to keep her late husband’s dream alive; Stevie, a bright, uneducated single mother of two, bent on independence; and Nash Malone, poet, junk aficionado, and veteran of the Spanish War of 1935. These three strong, independent characters come together when Maggie offers Stevie a decent job at the Chronicle and sends her off to interview Malone. In an unlikely pairing, the older wounded veteran and the young wounded woman strike up a friendship. When the gloves come off and the town experiences its own insidious violence, we are reminded that evil manifests itself in many forms and doesn’t always appear as strangers or insects. Small towns have a unique heartbeat, sometimes fluttering, sometimes pounding with the force of an axe.
As the mountain pine beetle threatens the economy of this small resource-driven town, we see how quickly a community can be brought to its knees. With a voice and writing style reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver, especially her Prodigal Summer and Poisonwood Bible, Brownlee spins a tragically beautiful tale. A monstrous blue sadness chews its way through these pages, while the haunting memories of Nash Malone weave through the text like a magnificent memoir. I must confess that I was captivated by Malone’s richly sensual writing, but found the typeface, which I know was intended to evoke an old-fashioned smudgy typeface, very hard on these aging eyes. But that has nothing to do with Brownlee’s brilliant eco-fiction, and Nash Malone is a truly tragic hero.
Cambium Blue is a slow-burn winner and destined to become a B.C. classic. It has been shortlisted for the George Ryga Award, an annual literary prize for a B.C. writer who has achieved an outstanding level of social consciousness in a new book.
A sexy, captivating read, Prodigal Summer is as important now as when it was first published twenty years ago. I read it then and just reread it again. Kingsolver is an artist, poet, biologist, eco-warrior, and extraordinary storyteller. She wraps her words around these intriguing characters like vines on a frontier trellis.
Over the course of one verdant summer, we dwell in the farms and mountains of southern Appalachia with three intensely independent woman who, like Kingsolver, are all enmeshed in an eco-myth. These timeless women take it upon themselves to change their worlds and the disparate men who enter their lives.
Deanna Wolfe is a forty-something forest ranger living alone atop the mountain in her woodsy cabin until a charismatic sheep farmer turns her life around. As sexy and fulfilling as he is, Eddie Bondo has invaded Deanna’s mountain to shoot coyotes–a bane to his existence but treasures to our forester. Deanna does her best to educate Eddie on the perils of killing off predators at the expense of prey.
Lusa marries into the old Widener family then a freak accident leaves her burdened with a farm and no husband. Using her wits, she devises a way to make a living on the farm without giving in to growing fields of tobacco and being puppeted by her brother-in-laws. At the same time, Lusa worms her way into the hearts of the Widener sisters, their husbands, and children—especially her sexy seventeen-year-old nephew, Rickie. Lusa, whose passion is bugs, teaches us about the insect life in Appalachia.
Nannie Rawley mothered Deanna way back when. Nannie tries desperately to convince her neighbour old Garnett Walker to stop spraying his chestnut trees with chemicals. Nannie farms organically and his poisons are killing everything on both sides of the fenceline. A feud turns into something beautiful and we learn all about why it’s crucial to farm organically. While he’s learning a new way to be in the world, old Garnett teaches Lusa how to raise goats. All of the characters are as interconnected as Nature herself.
Kingsolver offers us a feminist tale starring maid, mother, and crone in this charming book. A tribute to Rachel Carson, writer of Silent Spring, Prodigal Summer is a classic with a timely and meaningful message.
Saltspring Island is one of the most unique and beautiful places on Earth. Today on our morning ramble, we discovered a pathway of poppies glittering in the sun. Is there a better way to begin a day?
p.s. The Rainbow Road is where I’m staying;)
I tend to live in seven-year-cycles. So, it’s no surprise that I’m returning to Saltspring Island this summer to research a new book. My dream dog, Puddy, came with me last time. It was his last trip. Puddy loved to travel, especially aboard the ferries. This summer, I’ll be taking Skaha along. Puddy was eleven—Skaha is ten-months-old.
Saltspring is the largest of the Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea. An artist’s haven, with an agricultural and environmental legacy, it is wildly beautiful and inspiring. Memories of 2011 below. What awaits us in 2018? I can’t wait to find out.
Sweet smokes seeps from your mouth to mine Filling me, willing me, to come, with you Shaman farmer crafter chef poet eco-warrior I want to know you; grow with you Dirty my fingers in fecund folds Drop seeds, bulbs, words, deep in sea-rich soil Then wait through sun and wind and rain Gestating magic cradled by leathered hands You are man and woman, yin and yang, androgynous lover Mesmerized by diamond shrouded seas, sun-kissed hair blowing free My flesh accepts your strong and briny light, your long and silent night Braid my hair with gems and blossoms, bound fast with vines Amber, sapphire, scarlet, peach, cobalt, pearly white Scrape my skin with black slate stones transfusing flesh and blood And when rootless I dance off, leaving only my bare footprint in your sand Fill it with Byzantine light, a beacon to lure me back.
