What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  “In the sure and steady hands of a writer at the peak of his power, it is an achingly beautiful journey. There is a sorrowful beauty to the strong, poetic language. Despite the savage reality of the revelations, there is a peacefulness, a maturity of vision that is a pure gift to the reader.”

  —The Washington Post

  “It is clear that in these vivid, intersecting worlds of nature and language, Lane has found true self-expression and a certain transcendence from the pain he seems destined to carry with him always.”

  —Seattle Times

  “What the Stones Remember is a dark and beautiful memoir. Lane, ever the poet, exudes an elegance in his writing even when describing brutality.”

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “At once courageous, honest, and uplifting, this book of wisdom and wonder should be savored.”

  —Library Journal

  “The sort of memoir you will leave open beside a favorite chair, and you will read it, I think, with long pauses to savor the beauty of the language and to reflect on its relevance for your own journey.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “To read this book is to enter a state of enchantment.”

  —Alice Munro

  “Patrick Lane has written a memoir of heartbreaking struggle that manages to be beautiful and encouraging, finding anchorage in what was once called Creation, the natural world and its unstinting promise of renewal.”

  —Thomas McGuane

  “A tough, lovely book.”

  —Margaret Atwood

  “There are scenes in this book so terrifyingly beautiful they take your breath away. Patrick Lane guides us across a grueling landscape with a steady hand. This is a tremendous contribution by an author at the peak of his power.”

  —Alistair MacLeod

  “This is the best book I’ve read in a decade. Here is a classic memoir, wrought in prose as beautiful as the natural world that is his obsession and salvation.”

  —Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “This is a record of recovery. Of a life, nearly lost, out of the dark into memory; of spiritual wholeness through a poet’s attentiveness, season after season, to his garden—a real one. Only a writer of Patrick Lane’s savage but forgiving vision could accomplish both in the same breath, and with such breathtaking beauty and power.”

  —David Malouf

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  In this exquisitely written memoir, poet Patrick Lane describes his raw and tender emergence at age sixty from a lifetime of alcohol and drug addiction. He spent the first year of his sobriety close to home, tending his garden, where he cast his mind back over his life, searching for the memories he’d tried to drown in vodka. Lane has gardened for as long as he can remember, and his garden’s life has become inseparable from his own. A new bloom on a plant, a skirmish among the birds, the way a tree bends in the wind, and the slow, measured change of seasons invariably bring to his mind an episode from his eventful past. What the Stones Remember is the emerging chronicle of Lane’s attempt to face those memories, as well as his new self—to rediscover his life. In this powerful and beautifully written book, Lane offers readers an unflinching and unsentimental account of coming to one’s senses in the presence of nature.

  Considered to be one of the finest poets of his generation, PATRICK LANE has authored more than twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s poetry. He has received most of Canada’s top literary awards and a number of grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts. His writing appears in all major Canadian anthologies of English literature. His gardening skills and have been featured in the Recreating Eden television series. Lane has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto, Concordia University in Montreal, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Alberta. He presently teaches part-time at the University of Victoria. He lives in British Columbia, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier.

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  WHAT THE STONES REMEMBER

  A Life Rediscovered

  PATRICK LANE

  TRUMPETER

  Boston & London 2013

  Trumpeter Books

  An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  Horticultural Hall

  300 Massachusetts Avenue

  Boston, Massachusetts 02115

  www.shambhala.com

  © 2004, 2005 by Patrick Lane. Published by arrangement with McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto, Canada.

  Quotations from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, reprinted by permission of the University of Nebraska Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Lane, Patrick

  [There is a season]

  What the stones remember: a life rediscovered / Patrick Lane—1st Trumpeter ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published as: There is a season. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, © 2004

  eISBN 978-0-8348-2695-3

  ISBN 978-1-59030-254-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-59030-389-4 (paperback)

  1. Lane, Patrick. 2. Lane, Patrick—Homes and haunts—British Columbia. 3. Recovering alcoholics—Canada—Biography. 4. Poets, Canadian—20th century—Biography. 5. Natural history—British Columbia. 6. Naturalists—Canada—Biography. 7. Gardeners—Canada—Poetry. 8. Gardening—British Columbia. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.L32Z476 2005

  811′.54—DC22

  2005009421

  For my brothers, Dick, Johnny,

  and Mike, and my sister, Linda

  “If you listen you can hear me.

  My mouth is open and I am singing.”

  —“Fathers & Sons,”

  from Mortal Remains

  by Patrick Lane

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE to acknowledge Geist and The Globe and Mail, in which short excerpts of this book previously appeared. I want to thank my friend Brian Brett, who traveled this year with me; Ellen Seligman for her encouragement; Dinah Forbes, my Canadian editor, for her wise suggestions; Emily Bower, my American editor, for her sharp eye and ear; Kathryn Mulders, my agent; my children; my friends; and the myriad writers who contributed through their art to this book. Finally, this would not have been written without the endurance, love, and support of my wife, the poet Lorna Crozier: “There are no stories but that which held me in the night.”

  1.

  If what we know is what resembles us,

  what we know is a garden.

  I STOOD ALONE among yellow glacier lilies and the wind-flowers of spring, the western anemone, their petals frail disks of trembling clotted cream. I was a boy and the mountain ridge I’d climbed was only a half-hour hike from the back door of my home. In the east the blue peaks of the Monashee Range rose up against the Selkirks and beyond them the far Rockies and the plains. I had wandered that morning among sheltered coulees and rocky hills and, finally resting, stared out at the paling distance.

  The high hills and mountains were my solitary land and I hiked the trails year-round. The days were all one to me back then, and the scuffed pad of a cougar’s track in the wet clay of Six Mile Creek in summer was no less wondrous than the spread toes of a coyote’s paw print in a fringe of thin January snow on the BX Ranch where he had braced to leap upon a vole or scurrying mouse who had come lucklessly into the thin winter sun.

  There were black bears and the occasional co
ugar or bobcat in those hills, but when I saw one I felt awe, not fear. Even then I knew what a blessing an animal was. Any creature’s appearance was a gift the wilderness gave me. The animals of the backcountry were unused to humans in those days and they stepped around me as much as I did them. Sometimes a cougar would take a lamb or two in spring from some flock and then the game warden would walk his dogs into the hills to track the big cat down. He hated killing cougars.

  Often he would take me along on those trips; why, I don’t know. Perhaps he felt sorry for me or perhaps my father asked him to in the hope it would make me a man. Gazing at a cougar lolling on a high limb of a ponderosa pine above Lumby while the cougar dogs slung their howls from the foot of the tree at the flick of its black-tipped tail was to look at a god. I watched from the back of an old white horse as Mr. Frisbee pulled his Winchester from beside his saddle and brought the cougar down with a single shot. The cougar falling from the sky was my first huge death.

  I remember touching the rough blond hair of a dead cat’s nape, the curve of its long yellow incisors, and the dead ball of its eye as it stared sightless through me to the fading sun. These deaths drew me toward a compassion I didn’t fully understand. All I knew was that such sentiments were not spoken of among men or boys. Feeling deeply about something was never shown.

  But it is not the cougars or bobcats, the bears or rattlesnakes of that early wilderness I think of now. It is another early memory that stays in my mind. I was up in the Bluebush hills west of Kalamalka and Okanagan Lake. I had hiked back into the hills with a peanut butter and jam sandwich, two apples, and a water bottle in the army satchel my father had brought back from the Second World War. I took it with me whenever I hiked out for a day. I stood on a crest in a frothing meadow of glacier lilies and anemones, and their fragile beauty remains with me. It lives in the blood and muscle of me and I can still call it up and bring it into spirit.

  Grasses, their stalks flattened and flung by the winter snow, lay like fallen hair upon the earth, and their new green spears caught the wind with frail hands. A mountain meadow and a boy in the long-ago of the last century. Did I know then it was a garden I looked out upon? Had I been asked I would not have understood the question. Garden? Wilderness? I gave the meadow no thought. Had someone asked me if what I saw was beautiful I would not have known what he meant. A boy is a boy and he is the place he inhabits. He is what surrounds him and the boy I was remains with me in the image of yellow lilies and creamy anemones among the grasses and scattered stones.

  What was I, ten years old? A child, a stripling boy, but those mountains and deserts live in me still and when I go back into that country my heart surges with sudden blood. The past hurls itself at me at times. My bones remember the water and the stones. I grew my body from that mountain earth, and my cells remember the cactus and pines, the lilies and grasses. I am as much blessed as burdened by this.

  It is such beauty that made me into a gardener. Perhaps by planting flowers and shrubs and trees I am trying to return to that earlier paradise. Yet finally, not. My garden today is another kind of paradise, and I am not the boy wandering in what another might call loneliness but to me was solitude.

  What I do remember is squatting and building a small cairn of stones in the middle of the meadow. There was no death to cover over, no occasion to ritualize other than the day itself and the curious busyness of a boy. But, like all animals, I wanted to leave some mark that I had been there so others who followed would know of my passing. Perhaps the mound of stones is still there or perhaps it’s been kicked over by a deer or coyote or some other boy who pillaged the cairn to make his own curious mark. Perhaps the snow, ice, and wind have spilled it. Whether or not the cairn is gone, the stones remain like ghosts in my hands and that is enough.

  Today, fifty-two years later, I am not in a mountain meadow in southern British Columbia. I am in my garden on Vancouver Island and it is early in January in the first year of the new century. The sky is gray and the small drops of rainwater gathered on moss and fallen leaves glimmer like opals in the winter sun. In the declivities of grass, apples lie where they fell three months ago. Under the scrabbled branches of the apple tree a red-shafted flicker carves white flesh from a fallen fruit. He feeds on the slim bounty of the season and doesn’t fully trust the grass and moss I still call a lawn though each year I starve it, encouraging the mosses to flourish. The flicker’s claws are better suited to the bark of trees where he spends the day climbing patiently up the trunks in search of insects who have buried themselves in slits to sleep out the gloomy winter months.

  A little apple for a bird to round out the insect flesh of morning. The red shafts on the flicker’s cheeks gleam like the skin of the fruit he eats. Above him, chestnut-backed chickadees and nuthatches slide and jerk in the air as they argue over this black sunflower seed or that. The flicker ignores their bickering.

  The chickadees’ arguing is mostly play. The fledglings of last spring, some bigger than their parents, flit among the bare branches of the apple and plum. Their backs echo the rich brown of the redwood where they go to play hide-and-seek. A black-capped chickadee, one without the chestnut coat of the others, lights upon the lawn and sips a single drop of water from the frayed edge of a brown maple leaf. The water, a tiny bit of moon, disappears into his body, just as my memory of the meadow and the lilies slips inside me, images lost in clouds and rain.

  I am withdrawing from the scourge of forty-five years of drinking. Two months ago I stumbled into a treatment center for alcohol and drug addiction. Now, I am barely detoxed. Standing here among the sword ferns my senses seem to be thin glass, so acute at their edges I am afraid I will cut myself simply by touching the silicon edge of a bamboo leaf. The flicker’s blade of beak as it slices into the apple makes me wince. My hands are pale animals. The smallest sounds, a junco flitting between viburnum leaves, a drop of water falling on the cedar deck, make me cringe. I can smell the bitter iron in the mosses on the apple tree’s branches. My flesh at times is in agony, and I feel as if I have come out from some shadowed place into light for the first time. I feel, for the first time in years, alive.

  The opal drop of water the chickadee drank is no different than the droplet at the tip of a bare apple tree bud that I lift my hand to. I extend my trembling finger and the water slides onto my fingernail. I lift it to my lips and take a sip of what was once fog. It is a single cold on the tip of my tongue. I feel I am some delicate creature come newly to this place for, though I know it well, I must learn again this small half-acre of land with its intricate beauties, its many arrangements of earth, air, water, and stone.

  The garden begins with my body. I am this place, though I feel it at the most attenuated level imaginable. Once dead, I am come alive again. Forty-five years of addiction and I am a strangeling in this simple world. To be sober, to be without alcohol and drugs in my cells, is new to me and every thing near me is both familiar and strange.

  The chickadee is back on the bird feeder staring at me with cocky delight. Welcome, he seems to say. Where have you been?

  I could tell him I’ve been ill for a long time and I could also tell him I’ve been in a ten-year-old’s body in the high mountains, but I don’t. The tiny bird is in the now and so should I be. He dips his bright beak and takes a black sunflower seed from the feeder. With the seed wedged securely under an obsidian claw, he strips away the shell and lifts out the kernel. Welcome back, he seems to say, and flicks up into the plum tree to eat his first seed of the morning.

  The chickadees are friendly little birds, quite brazen. I call them with the sound of a kiss on my lips, the breath inward, and they cock their heads and fly over to see what I am talking about. Sometimes they get quite angry, and I wonder if the sound I make is a long, complicated avian curse. I kiss a lisp with my tongue and lips and the chickadee chitters back at me, his head cocked sideways, irritated by my song. For God’s sake, get it right, he says.

  The red-shafted flicker lifts his head
from the apple. Whatever he has heard or seen has made him suddenly aware he is grounded. Basho, our young cat, named for the Japanese poet, makes a golden rush from under the viburnum by the deck. He is still quite young and a hapless hunter. The flicker rises above the lawn on his sharp wings. His flight is an undulating sway, a rise and fall like a sleeping breath. He crests the fence and is gone.

  Basho stops by the partly eaten apple and grooms his ruff. Once more the yard is his but for the chickadees and pine siskins who scold him from the branches above. On the deck Roxy, our other cat, colored like a Guernsey cow, rises and arches her back. She has watched Basho’s run and is slightly weary with it all. She reminds me of a chubby Audrey Hepburn, slightly rotund, yet graceful on her slender, delicate legs. The garden is her purview and she seems to reign over it, benign and bored, though, truth be told, she has been banished to the deck by Basho.

  A northwest crow passes over and gives a hoarse cry at nothing and everything. The songbirds ignore his black silhouette, sharp as a blade. They know he is not the Cooper’s hawk who hunts this garden every four or five days. He is only a crow carrying a potato chip robbed from some garbage bag down the street. He passes over in the way of crows, with a destination in mind I do not know just as I do not know where the flicker went when he lifted over the fence.

  Theirs are the way of birds. Their paths are known only to themselves, though if you watch them closely you can see them following invisible pathways in the air. Only when they are frightened do they break their patterns of travel, and that shattering of habit is more about survival than chaos. As it is in the bird world, so in ours. We break our path when fear tells us to live.

  The appearance of the Cooper’s hawk or his more common relative the sharp-shinned hawk sends all the birds into a panic and they rush wildly into the thickets of branches near them. Usually the hawks make a kill one out of three tries, a rare chickadee but usually a siskin or junco. All of them come and go from this winter garden.