Bill Arnott’s latest “Season” memoir takes the reader on an emotional armchair journey through British Columbia’s iconic Okanagan Valley. But it needn’t be armchair for long. This delectable morsel may inspire you to shift from recliner to car seat or bus or even plane. In this historic moment, when Canadians are exploring our nation more than ever before, this wee gem is a must. Just over 4” wide and 6.5” long, it slips easily into a glove box, purse, pocket, or backpack, and Arnott is an expert travel companion. Lush with sensory song, Arnott’s travelogue is an epic serenade to this land he loves.
The memoirish aspect of this book is emotive, revealing the boy who fathered the man—a man raised in lakeside Vernon who grew up to be an acclaimed traveller and writer, speaker, poet, and songwriter. Winner of The Miramichi Reader’s “The Very Best!” book award for nonfiction, Arnott was granted a Royal Geographical Society Fellowship. His award-winning Gone Viking trilogy, researched and penned over a decade, is another timeless lure to adventure.
Anchoring his Okanagan journey are symbols—the hummingbird, the mourning dove, and sour cherry juice—innocent pleasures that haunt him still. And there’s something more. In this time of Reconciliation, Arnott’s awareness that he/we are settlers on this land riffles through the pages in the naming of places, people, and stories he chooses to feature. He honours this Indigenous land and its First People, the Syilx of the Okanagan Nation. On page one is a striking, painted photograph of the Chief, a metal sculptureon horseback at Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre in Osoyoos. It was created by the late Virgil “Smoker” Marchand to celebrate Okanagan/Okanogan culture. The book is seasonally structured around the Four Syilx Food Chiefs—Bitterroot (spring) and Saskatoon Berry (summer), Salmon (autumn) and Black Bear (winter). Arnott trips through summer and fall delighting in Nature’s changing hues.
The energetic text is enhanced with a series of digitally painted photographs taken by Arnott on his “outdated camera phone.” At the launch, he explained his process, but when asked if he would consider teaching a workshop, he humbly declined, saying he didn’t have the expertise. I beg to differ. These striking artistic images enrich and personalize his books in a way a simple picture cannot.
Sprinkled throughout the text are witty anecdotes, conversations struck up with locals, love songs to his Ukrainian grandparents, interviews with Knowledge Keepers, and forays into the history, archaeology, climate, and intricate geology of place. The Okanagan Valley is a lush land of wineries constantly under threat by forest fires, a gritty aspect of life that cannot be ignored. Of course, Arnott tours the cities and towns that have grown up and out: Vernon, Kelowna, Peachland, Summerland, Penticton, Oliver, Okanagan Falls and Osoyoos, offering lyrical suggestions of places to pause along the way.
But, what lies at its heart is a pilgrimage to the past and an honouring of the present. Dedicated to Dad, Arnott’s last acts are to celebrate his mother’s ninetieth birthday and scatter his father’s ashes on the hill above Lake Okanagan. “Where pine needles blanket the ground over pink and orange rock, with cacti and clumps of wild grass. A crow caws as a magpie swoops by.” A gifted bard, he creates a sense of majesty for even the most mundane denizens. Affection wafts from each page, at once, both poem and prayer.
Since it’s Mother’s Day here in Canada, I’d like to celebrate a daring Adventure Mom. I first discovered Capi Blanchet’s British Columbia adventure classic in a thrift store way back in 2002. Her literary tales captured me then, just as they do today.
The title derives from Maeterlinck’s theory that Time is a fourth dimension, relative to each of us, and can be plotted on a curve. This speaks to me. Time is anything but linear. It travels in circles and spirals weaving in and out of other dimensions. Capi says:
“Standing in the Present, on the highest point of the curve, you can look back and see the Past, or forward and see the Future, all in the same instant” (1).
The Curve of Time
This small, yet significant, book is a compilation of stories remembered by Capi—a nickname she took from her boat, Caprice—that chronicle her adventures exploring the British Columbia coast in the 1920s-1930s with her five children. I say loosely because I just read that her stories were highly fictionalized. Still, what she wrote is travel memoir and something now lauded as Creative Nonfiction.
According to Cathy Converse, author of Following the Curve of time: the Untold Story of Capi Blanchet, Capi’s depressed husband sailed off alone to Saltspring Island in September 1926 and never returned. The empty Caprice was discovered with his clothing onboard, but his body was never recovered. Blanchet was in her mid-thirties. To earn money to support her five children, Capi rented their seaside Little House near Sydney for four months each summer and took them boating. The 25′ Caprice was so small, they were only allowed to bring one bathing suit, one change of clothing, and one set of pajamas each. For the most part, they lived off land and sea, fishing and gathering, and were fortunate to meet generous homesteaders who sometimes offered them all the fruit they could pick and carry.
Capi was not only a risk-taker and independent woman, her prose is beautiful crafted and interwoven with natural history, archaeology, and dialogue AND she can fix a boat engine—something I’m most impressed with. Honestly, I’d love to pilot a boat but the thought of a breakdown out around the islands terrifies me. There were times too, that Blanchet was forced to row the dinghy for hours with Caprice in tow. She writes of lighthouses (most were built then), adverse weather and seas, and navigating tide rips like Skookumchuk and Seymour Narrows. They traversed rugged inlets with steep mountain walls and channels too deep to set an anchor, sighted bear and cougar, and survived all the strait threw at them.
Like her contemporary, Emily Carr, Blanchet discovered abandoned Kwakwaka’wak and Coast Salish villages, big houses, white shell middens, post carvings, hanging tree graves, artifacts, even bones. Out of respect, she doesn’t reveal the locations of these places.
The book began as a series of articles Blanchet sold to yachting magazines, Blackwood’s Magazine in Edinburgh, and the Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps that’s how they became fictionalized. In the 1950s, she compiled The Curve of Time which was published by Blackwood & Sons in 1961. It’s sad that only six months later, Capi died at her typewriter while working on a second memoir of their adventures at the Little House. She was just seventy years old, but it seems to me, most of those seventy years were packed with adventure and daring.
My 30th Anniversary Special Edition was published and introduced by Gray Campbell in 1968: White Cap Books, North Vancouver, B.C.
For more information, here’s a Tyee Review of Converse’s book, Following the Curve of time: the Untold Story of Capi Blanchet.
