A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  He would use these branches as poles to mark out the perimeter of the site, about twenty square feet comprising one scrub bush, one small hawthorn, a sizable area of deep heavy snow, and the ice along the shoreline. Much would happen here, he knew, in the next week or so, some of it natural, some of it caused by his own activities. When the poles were in place, he began to record the site with his camera, first the whole area and then the details, reducing the depth of field in stages until he was able to capture a thorn on the small tree, a grey, cracked milkweed pod with one remaining seed attached, and the feathered end of a tall weed stalk that had somehow not succumbed to the weight of snow. He enjoyed these exercises in increasing intimacy and was warmed by the knowledge that he would be able to remain for a period of time in the vicinity of the natural references that would move him. He was also pleased by the remnants of abandoned architecture that he had seen here and there on the island, the way these weakened structures had held their ground despite time and rot and the assault of a century of winters.

  After Jerome and his family had drifted down from the north in his early childhood, they had lived first in a small suburban house and then in an apartment building perched on a cluttered edge of Toronto, far away from such haphazard architecture as tool sheds, chicken coops, stables. And yet, his otherwise solemn and often angry father could be brought to levels of brief excitement in the vicinity of childhood projects such as the making of kites, go-karts, tree houses, or forts in scrub lots slated for future development. The engineer in him, Jerome now believed, that part of him he had been forced to abandon when the mine closed, could be miraculously, though falsely, shaken into wakefulness by something as simple as the placement of load-bearing lumber in a tree. His enthusiasm waned quickly, however, as did Jerome’s, and these projects were almost always left unfinished, slowly decaying on the margins of the property, until Jerome returned to them later and took a renewed interest in their construction and eventual restoration. After the horror of his father’s death, Jerome would call to mind the structures on the now residential lots, and he found that he would be able to recall almost exactly the way a tree house had creaked in the wind, one loose board knocking against a branch, or the way the large nails had looked in his father’s palm, his mouth, and then the same nails after a year or so, exposed and rusting during the decline of winter. Once, as a young adult, Jerome had walked all over the low-rental housing development that occupied what had been the vacant land, looking for the tree near a dirty stream where one of these projects had begun to take shape. But both the stream and its culvert were gone. There was simply no way to place even the few scraps of memory he had retained. His first project, then, would be an attempt to rebuild what he thought of as the few good moments of his childhood and would take the form of temporary and incomplete structures—playhouses of a sort—that he made himself with torn plastic, discarded wood, and broken objects found in abandoned lots.

  He remembered a journey he had taken a few years before on a train, a journey he was able to recall now only in terms of the images he had collected while staring out the window. Trains were vanishing from this vast cold province and were often half-empty, those who were there likely being too poor to afford the kind of cars he saw on the freeway that for part of the journey mirrored the path of the railway. He had been thinking about the early days, about vacations taken when his father was still relatively well, holidays that were spent in one provincial park or another, he and his parents crammed into a tent that his father had bought at an army surplus store. He remembered the sight of this tent, an ominous bundle strapped to the roof rack of their deteriorating car along with the bicycle that his father had given him and that he seldom rode. He also recalled the camp-fires his father had taught him to make, the configurations of which were named after architectural structures such as “the teepee” or “the log cabin.” It wasn’t until years later that he realized that the ignition of these constructions, made so that air might move more freely and carry fire farther, faster, was like the burning of the history of the country in miniature, a sort of exercise in forgetting first the Native peoples and then the settlers, whose arrival had been the demise of these peoples, settlers in whose blood was carried the potential for his own existence.

  He recollected the cool mornings of these not-quite-real episodes in his childhood, how mist rose from the lake (though he could not recall which lake) in long scarves, and how his father, briefly enthusiastic, would insist on a dawn swim. As the day unfolded, however, the mists would evaporate, other campers and their hot dogs and radios would come into focus, and his father’s mood would shift down into irritability. He would begin to compare the spot unfavourably with the camp life he had known in the bush when the mine was still operating. “Is there no place left?” Jerome had heard his father whisper once through clenched teeth, just before he had begun to berate Jerome’s mother about the food she had brought, her recent haircut, the way she looked in a swimsuit. Then everything about the trip—the campground, the tense meal shared near a dwindling fire, his mother standing quietly by the water with her imperfect flesh exposed—became tawdry, embarrassing, something to be quickly discarded and forgotten. He would always respond to his father’s temperament in this way, would know that any attempt to create family joy would deteriorate in the face of his father’s disapproval, anger, or indifference.

  It was the indifference that Jerome would try to take into his own nature: the combination of brief infatuation followed by an apparently casual lack of care. This, and the solid knowledge of the mutability of a world that came into being and then dissolved around him before he was able to fully grasp what it was trying to be, what it had been.

  When the tracks had swung away from the highway, Jerome had become aware of the fencelines of the fields that were passing, one after another, by the train window. It seemed to him that these frayed demarcations made up of rotting cedar rails, fieldstones, rusting wire, and scrub bush were the only delineating features in an otherwise neutered winter landscape. The sole survivors, he had thought, glimpsing the irregular gestures of stunted Manitoba maples and listing wooden posts. (Is there no place left?) All of it in a state of heartbreaking neglect, destined to become the wilderness of asphalt, of concrete that he associated with the landscape of his later childhood. He had reached for his sketchbook, had drawn a series of overlapping lines on three or four pages, had made some notes about how these lines might be transformed into a three-dimensional installation within the confines of a rectangular room, and had experienced, for the remainder of the journey, the restless buzz that often announced the beginnings of a new conception.

  He quickly became obsessed by the ruined fences, and a few weeks later he had borrowed a car, driven out of the city, and begun to search out remnants of rails, boulders, and stumps, sometimes tramping for hours through swamps and scrub bush following a line of decaying posts or a path defined by rusting, broken wire. He began to think of fences as situations rather than structures. Like an act of God or a political uprising, they seemed to him to mark the boundaries of events rather than territories. And like events, he felt that these fences had come into being as a result of a great deal of energy, flourishing on the edges of labour for a few hard decades, then collapsing onto a ground whose only crop now was an acre of windblown weeds.

  Reading anything he could find on the subject, he learned about wedges and stakes, and about the much-coveted long, true split of cedar that resulted in six good rails to a log. He learned about rails that rested on notched “sleepers” and how those rails were fixed in place by wire. He learned about strong fences withstanding the assault of bulls and about weak fences that had permitted entire herds to drift into a neighbour’s alfalfa. For a time he wished he had been born in the nineteenth century and had been appointed to a team of official “fence-viewers.”

  He attempted to reconstruct the frail, disappearing remnants of the fences on the indoor/outdoor carpeting of a city art galle
ry, had lugged boulders and fence wire, branches and decaying rails into the space and had made six lines that moved from the entrance to the far end of the space. Made uncomfortable by any kind of verbal explanation, he had not stapled the customary lyrical passages to the walls so that beyond the announcement “Fence Lines,” which the dealer had pasted on the front window of the gallery, there had been no verbal apology for the exhibition. The black-and-white photographs on the walls of what he privately called “similar structures in the wild” had sold to some private and, in a few cases, small public collections, and had been the making of his reputation as a young artist to watch. The sense of loss that he felt in the face of decay, of disappearance had gone unnoticed, uncommented upon by the critics. But it was this loss that he had taken with him on his latest trip out of the city, to the town of Kingston and across the ice-filled lake, the ice-choked mouth of the huge river, to the shores of Timber Island.

  Jerome stood at the very edge of the island, looking at the ice, thinking of Robert Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass, about how the legendary Smithson had transported pieces of glass to the New Jersey site he had chosen, had heaped them into a haphazard shape, then waited for the sun to come out so that the structure would leap into the vitality he knew existed when broken glass combined with piercing light. Smithson had been mostly concerned with mirrors at the time and yet had chosen glass rather than mirrors, as if he had decided to exclude rather than to reflect the natural world. According to something Jerome had read, however, Smithson had come to believe the glass structure he had created was shaped like the drowned continent of Atlantis. Perhaps this explained his need to use a material that would suggest the transparency of water. But Jerome was drawn to the brilliance and the feeling of danger in the piece: the shattering of experience and the sense that one cannot play with life without being cut, injured. The sight of ice at this moment and in this place, ice rearing up against the shore of the island, the disarray of the arbitrary constructions that were made by its breakup and migration, seemed like a gift to Jerome, as if something electrical beneath the earth were sending signals to the surfaces of everything he was looking at.

  The temperature had clearly risen in the week preceding his arrival and the deep snow was gaining in weight and plasticity. Jerome’s footsteps remained embedded, small blue pools in sodden drifts, semi-permanent paths could be made from place to place, and the white surface was punctured by emerging grasses and shrubs, the shadows of which were like maps of rivers drafted on a white sheet of paper. The trees, in which he knew the sap would soon begin to rise, were beautifully placed, their branches vivid against snow and sky, the abandoned nests of birds and squirrels clearly evident. One tree in particular held his attention—an enormous oak with a thick trunk supporting a number of twisted branches.

  Although it was the end of winter, almost spring, there was something ripe and faintly autumnal in the soft glow of the light in the waning afternoon. A fine mist filled the air and gave a malleable look to shapes that one month earlier would have been so frozen and emplaced that interpretation might have been impossible. This cusp of a declining season, which held on not only to itself but also to the blackened twigs and stems and seed pods, to the bones of what had gone before, felt as exciting to Jerome as the uncovering of an ancient tomb. But it was not the quickening of nature that intrigued him, rather the idea of nature’s memory and the way this unstable broken river had built itself briefly into another shape, another form, before collapsing back into what was expected of it.

  When he was finished with the primary documentation, Jerome wedged the camera in the groin of the hawthorn, then laughed when he found that its odd appearance in that location made him want to photograph it. He removed the shovel from the drift in order to begin the first of the physical sessions of the project. Using the front edge of the shovel he drew a rectangular shape approximately eight feet long and three feet wide on the untouched surface of the snow, then he reached for the camera in order to photograph the lines he had drafted, which were wonderfully exaggerated at this moment by the angle of the low sun. He returned the camera to the tree and began to dig, creating an inner wall by using a plunging motion at the edges; then, with wide-sweeping gestures, he flung the excess snow away from the centre so that it would not disturb the surrounding surfaces. It was not easy going; the ice storms of the winter and every crust that had once been surface had formed a series of tough layers—like strata on a rock face—and often he was forced to turn the shovel around to use the handle as a pick or gouge. When he neared the frozen surface of the earth, he tossed the shovel aside so that he could hunker down and work more carefully with his hands. He wanted everything he was uncovering to remain in place, as it had remained in place since the first snowfall. Unlike some artists who had exposed the roots of trees, he would not call what he was doing “an uncovering,” but rather would refer to the process as a revelation, and would entitle the photographs he would take of this area of the site The Revelations. As he was thinking about this title, a shadow near some small willows farther down the shore moved at the edge of his peripheral vision, and he sat back on his haunches to survey the outlying terrain. It was then that he saw the small carved angel emerging like an ice sculpture from the snow, and he tramped across the quarter-mile of white space that separated him from it. An old gravestone, he realized as he approached, most of which was still buried. Perhaps there was a modest graveyard waiting to be revealed by the spring melt. The angel looked like a solemn child, lost in contemplation and surrounded by a circle of fresh pawprints. It had not occurred to Jerome that there would be animals on an island only a mile long and half again as wide, but he supposed that the animal tracks must have been made by a muskrat or an otter, some kind of water’s edge dweller shaken temporarily out of hibernation by the sun and the warmth of the day. Whatever it was, it had broken his concentration, made him aware of the declining light, and the sodden state of his gloves, and he returned to the site, plunged the shovel once again into the drift, and picked up the camera. When he reached the door of the sail loft, he turned toward the shore and photographed the site from a distance. Then he walked inside and carefully climbed the stairs, which were littered with an assortment of old tin cans, some filled with dried pigments, left behind, he assumed, by the previous resident.

  Each time he entered the loft he was astonished by the wealth of space around him, the width and length of the enormous pine floorboards, the height of the sloping timbered ceiling. The building had the dimensions of a barn or a medieval granary but without the roughness of the former or the stonework of the latter, though the ground floor had a stone foundation, a barnlike odour, and was used to store all manner of tools and equipment; some old, possibly original, some likely purchased recently by the Arts Council for the convenience of the residents. At the south wall there was a large window, a window that once might have been a door where sails would have been pushed onto waiting wagons. Jerome had read the historical pamphlet left on the table for the edification of those visiting artists who, like himself, would have no real knowledge of the island’s past, and he knew that the sails stored, mended, and occasionally fabricated in this location were made for ships built in what would have been called “the yard” outside and then launched near the spot where the coast guard vessel had deposited him. There was little about the single remaining quay that suggested the size and presence such nineteenth-century mammoths must have demanded. He remembered that, as a child, he had tried to copy illustrations of such vessels, but the time it took to render each line of rope, each board and spar, each of the many sails on the various masts had discouraged him and he had mostly left the drawings unfinished. Thinking of these things, he realized that the disappearance of such huge vessels from Kingston Harbour and from the quays at Timber Island would have resulted in an absence so enormous it would have been a kind of presence in itself. Gathered together at docksides, tall masts made from virgin pines rocking in the wind, the ship
s would have been like an afterimage of the forests that were being removed from the country. And when the last of the great trees vanished, this floating afterimage would vanish with them.

  He walked across the loft to a counter on which rested a hotplate, an electric kettle, and a microwave oven. He poured some water into the kettle, plugged it in, and fished about in his knapsack until he found the green tea that Mira, concerned about his well-being, had given him before he left the city. He would call her once he had a mug in his hand so he could tell her that he was drinking her tea and that he was thinking of her.

  Jerome finished making the tea but did not call Mira right away. He stood instead at the window, looking out over the snow toward the frozen lake, wondering, if it might be possible, in summer, to see remnants of the old schooners through the waters of Back Bay, the location of the ships’ graveyard. The wrecks were indicated on the map in the pamphlet as dark markings drawn in the shape of a schooner’s deck. These flat, geometric forms immediately signalled obsolescence, just as the rectangular form he was digging into the snow, once he began to think about it, suggested a human grave. He was toying with the idea of making his excavations in the shape of a schooner’s deck when he again noticed small animal tracks in the snow. Whatever had made these tracks had moved out of the scrub bush near the foundations of an abandoned, wooden house some fifty feet from the sail loft, had advanced in a westerly direction, then had changed its mind and looped around toward the junipers near the door of another abandoned building, which Jerome was able to identify as the old post office. Here a skirmish had evidently taken place and Jerome believed, even in this fading light and from this distance, he could make out traces of blood, traces of a kill.