Getting to Grey Owl
Page 1
Published by Trinity University Press
San Antonio, Texas 78212
Copyright © 2015 by Kurt Caswell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover design by Sarah Cooper
Book design by BookMatters, Berkeley
Cover images: © iStock.com/Vividus; korionov; zuperman; igoralecsander; chriscrowley; Sorapop; Minerva Studio; Bobbushphoto; wuttichok; ritfuse; brianbalster; Lagni
Some of these essays appeared in the following publications: a small part of “A River in Hokkaido” in Potomac Review, spring/summer 2004; the second part of “Les Femmes Belles avec Merci” in Matter issue 12, summer 2009; “Four Mountains” in To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature, edited by Kurt Caswell, Susan Leigh Tomlinson, and Diane Hueter Warner, Texas Tech University Press, 2010; an early draft of “Crossing Over the Mountain” in Waccamaw, April 24, 2011; “Ah, Venice, Again” in Slab, issue 6, 2011; “A Short Walk in Anasazi Country” in Earthlines, issue 1, 2012; “Death in Seville” in American Literary Review, fall 2012; “Getting to Grey Owl’s Cabin” in Terrain.org, August 1, 2013; the first part of “Les Femmes Belles avec Merci” in Shadowgraph Magazine, winter 2014.
Poems by Matsuo Bash, on pages 8–9 and 19 are from The Narrow Road to the Deep North: And Other Travel Sketches. Trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa. New York: Penguin, 1966.
“Home-sickness” by Mary Mackellar on page 114 is from The Book of Highland Verse; An (English) Anthology, Consisting of (A) Translations from Gaelic, translated by Dugald Mitchell, 1912.
Trinity University Press strives to produce its books using methods and materials in an environmentally sensitive manner. We favor working with manufacturers that practice sustainable management of all natural resources, produce paper using recycled stock, and manage forests with the best possible practices for people, biodiversity, and sustainability. The press is a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program dedicated to supporting publishers in their efforts to reduce their impacts on endangered forests, climate change, and forest-dependent communities.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 39.48–1992.
ISBN 978-1-59534-262-1 ebook
CIP data on file at the Library of Congress
1918171615|54321
for Scott a companion for every road
I am a nomad, not a farmer. I am an adorer of the unfaithful, the changing, the fantastic. I don’t care to secure my love to one bare place on this earth. I believe that what we love is only a symbol. Whenever our love becomes too attached to one thing, one faith, one virtue, then I become suspicious.
Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life. I wanted to be something that I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middle class person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps. A long time I castigated myself before gods and laws which were only idols for me. That was what I did wrong, my anguish, my complicity in the world’s pain. I increased the world’s guilt and anguish, by doing violence to myself, by not daring to walk toward my own salvation. The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right: it leads into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace.
—Herman Hesse, Wandering
CONTENTS
A River in Hokkaido
Japan, 1992–95
After Fan Chengda: A River Diary
China, 1995
Ah, Venice, Again
Italy, 2009
Death in Seville
Spain, 2009
Buying a Rug
Morocco, 1993
Four Mountains
United Kingdom and Ireland, 2007
Les Femmes Belles avec Merci
Scotland, 2007
Into the Hornstrandir
Iceland, 2013
Getting to Grey Owl’s Cabin
Saskatchewan, 2012
A Short Walk in Anasazi Country
Utah, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2006
Crossing Over the Mountain
Idaho, 2006
A RIVER IN HOKKAIDO
Japan, 1992–95
It is fall now, and the Chitose River is high and green, the cooler rains coming in to swell it from the mountain lake at its headwaters, Shikotsuko (Dead Bones Lake). The river moves fast through the trees and dwarf bamboo, and through a shower of colored leaves when the wind comes in, a bluster of bright butterflies. These fall colors fall. They spring, tumble, and float, spreading over the river’s surface like drops of paint, widening, a careless painter’s palette. The colors bleed together in looping swirls—oil on water. Dragonflies spin away, setting the sky in motion, and kingfisher and grey heron where the trees are hung low to touch the water, and in those cool, quiet shaded troughs at the cut bank, salmon move upriver toward the lake, the second deepest lake in Japan.
I paddle with my friend, Noguchi, our two canoes adding two colors—blue and red. There before the Chitose salmon hatchery, Noguchi turns his boat into an eddy behind an exposed rock. The rapid below is short and straight, not much to worry over. Noguchi scans the chute for obstructions, anything that wasn’t here the last time we paddled through. The route looks clear, and he positions the bow of his boat upstream at the eddy’s edge, pulls three strokes hard with his paddle, driving the bow of his boat into the oncoming current. The fast water takes the bow out, pushes it, spins it, the boat turning and turning, as Noguchi peels out leaning, his bow now facing downstream. He takes the rapid head-on. I see his boat drop into the wave-hole. He vanishes a moment, a moment more, except for his black helmet visible above the river’s horizon clouded with spray. His boat takes on speed, hits the bottom of that hole where the water dropping down begins to press up as the boat buoys, and, with Noguchi’s hard final stroke, punches through the peaking wave. Downstream, he finds another eddy behind an even larger rock, turns in out of the current, faces upstream again, and looks for me to come down.
I peel out of the eddy, following Noguchi’s line, and run the rapid clean and fine, catch the same eddy behind the big rock, and there we sit like bobbing ducks, my hand resting on his shoulder, the river moving fast around us.
“Ka-to,” Noguchi says, his pronunciation of my name, “I want a more bigger waves.”
I nod in agreement. “But it’s a pretty morning,” I say.
“Yes, of course. Pretty morning. You see the salmons?” he says pointing to the shallows along the left bank.
And I do see them. They are there and there and there, crowded against the rocky shore. I see dorsal fins exposed to the open air, their backs curved ellipses outlined by the water, like the hull of a canoe. The salmon are funneled into a tight chute, all of them trying to move upstream at once. They thrash and turn and push. They are running out of time. Or, time is running out of them. Noguchi and I both need to get home soon—our workday is about to begin. In turn, we pull up into the faster current along the outside edge of the eddy, push out and away, our boats back into the fast water moving down.
I came to Hokkaido, Japan, in March 1992 to teach English at a small private school. It was my first trip out of North Americ
a. I didn’t know much of anything. In the grocery store, I wondered: is this a bottle of bleach or a bottle of milk? The head of the school paraded me around the city to shake hands with officials. They spoke rapidly in Japanese, sizing me up with their eyes like a racehorse, or a used car. When I walked to school in the morning, people stopped to stare at me, or they pointed and shouted, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” or they ran away, frightened.
During those first months in Hokkaido, the Chitose River was good to me. It felt like home. It relieved me from the sensory overload that comes in moving abroad. It offered me a structure I knew, a system I understood. The river was my panic hole, what the writer Jim Harrison defines as a “place where you go physically or mentally or both when the life is being squeezed out of you or you think it is, which is the same thing.”
Canoeing is not an outdoor sport; it’s an art. At least I would have it so. It is balance, timing, intuitive knowledge of your body and the river, and harmony between those parts. To be a good canoeist, you must give up the idea that the boat is powered by your body. The boat is an extension of your body—the canoeist is an aquatic satyr: half human, half canoe.
New paddlers and nonpaddlers commonly mistake the boat Noguchi and I paddle for a kayak. The C-1 looks like a kayak—it has a closed hull, and the paddler wears a spray skirt to keep the water out of the cockpit—but it is clearly a canoe. The primary difference between the two (beyond the shape and size of the hull) is that in a kayak you sit on your butt and use a double-bladed paddle, and in the C-1 (as with all canoes) you kneel and use a single-bladed paddle. The kayak is hard on the lower back. The canoe is hard on the knees. The C-1 is more difficult to keep upright, because your center of gravity is higher, and it’s more difficult to move forward in a straight line, but it is easier to roll. A canoeist will tell you that the C-1 is “half the paddle and twice the man.” Or the other way around, that the kayak is “twice the paddle, and half the man.” To be fair, they are distinctly different boats attracting different paddlers.
During the cold months, Kazuko and I frequented our favorite Korean restaurant, Aridan. Kazuko took a taxi, and I walked across town and through the new snow. When I arrived, I would find her there drinking beer with Mama-san, the owner, at our regular corner table beneath the Kirin beer poster. One night I stared languidly past Kazuko at this poster of a young Japanese woman in a swimsuit with a mug of beer. She said, “You like skinny girl?” and then could not stop laughing.
At the first bend in the river, I come clean through the eddy line, plant my paddle and pull up into the slack water, then push forward with my knees and body pulling the boat up on the paddle, gliding, and peel out into the current. Noguchi and I take turns in the fast water paddling circles in and out of the eddy. On my final run I gain speed across the eddy line, lift up on my downstream knee, sink the stern and, as the bow comes up, pivot back 180 degrees. A pivot turn. Balanced on that delicate edge, the bow coming straight up out of the water, I hold it, hold it, hold it, paddling in a circle, a pirouette, and then lose it, and crash, and go upside down. In the water upside down, I have about twenty seconds or so to roll back up. If I can’t, I will have to pull the spray skirt away from the cockpit and come away from the boat. Or drown. Beneath the water, I roll forward, my chest pressed against the deck of the boat. Now I’m looking up through the water at the sky, as if lying on my back in a field of bluebell blossoms. I reach out and up with my paddle on the left side, find the surface, feel the surface with the blade, then, like a beaver slapping its tail, press down on the surface of the river and pull my body and boat upright. My head comes out of the water last. The water is cold as it comes off my back.
Hokkaido is home to the Ainu people, who were here long before the Yamato Japanese came up from the south, from Honshu, in the late nineteenth century. The story of the meeting of these two cultures is not unlike the story of the meeting of Europeans and the native peoples of North America: a long, bloody negotiation.
Kazuko loves to laugh and drink beer and forget her worries. She is in her late forties now, but young at heart. If she stalls at all in her energy and gaiety, it is her increasing concern about her fiftieth birthday. “Pretty soon,” she says, “I’m just old lady.” She is not tall but is fit and gracious and very beautiful and rich. She has full red lips painted in heavy red lipstick, and through the evening, the lipstick pushes forward into a crest of broken pieces from the friction of her beer glass. Her light black hair is shoulder-length and pinned back in a soft curve over her forehead. Sometimes in winter she wears a padded Chinese jacket, which accents her form, her face, her gleaming dark eyes. She doesn’t have any children, and it isn’t clear to me whether she ever wanted any, though a Brazilian friend married to a Japanese man told me not having children was the great tragedy of her life. Maybe so, as Kazuko negotiates the world through the prism of a tragic melodrama, a sad joy from a secret pain. I’m reminded of Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring, the open question in her eyes, her mouth willing and ready, but unable to ask it. One night in a taxi as she dropped me at my apartment, she took hold of my arm and said, “When you are back to America, don’t forget my name. Don’t forget. Write about me.”
At the place the river runs wide, the place we know as Big Eddy, I ferry across the current, making pivot turns and running back along the speed. When I am tired, I paddle to the dock and haul out like a seal. I have brought sweet bread from a local bakery, and Noguchi, strong coffee in a thermos. We cast off our helmets and rest in the sun. The clouds are building at the edges, and it might rain soon. A grey heron tows its broad-backed shadow over the water, and I look up craning my neck to watch it go. I stretch out, use my helmet for a pillow, and close my eyes against the sun. We both have to go to work in a few hours—me to the English school to teach, Noguchi to run the family business, a third-generation tailor and retail men’s suit shop, mostly fine Italian suits for businessmen—but for the moment it is possible to rest this way with the boats idle on the flat water, and stare up through the raining leaves against the blue.
The Chitose River is a mountain river with its source at Shikotsuko, the deepest lake in Hokkaido (1,191 feet deep), and second only to Lake Tazawa (1,388 feet deep) in all of Japan. Shikotsuko is a volcanic caldera, like Oregon’s Crater Lake, and the mountains around it are still active volcanoes: Tarumae, Eniwa, Fuppushi. This means the lake is surrounded by hot springs. In the language of the indigenous Ainu, the name of the lake means “hollow” or “depression.” To the Japanese, the name means “dead bones.” No wonder, as it is said that the bottom is covered in a forest of ancient, skeletal trees and that the lake is popular among people. When a body sinks to the bottom, it is entrapped by the fingery branches, and the cold freezes it, makes it heavy, at that great depth. People who go down do not come back up. This is great news for suicides who want to disappear. A friend claims to have once brought a corpse to the surface while fishing for lake trout. He thought he had a big one, and he did.
With all these broken spirits flinging themselves into the depths, Shikotsuko is crowded with ghosts. Ghosts appear commonly in photographs, and are spotted along the highway to the lake. Several people I know claim to have seen an old woman with long white hair running alongside their speeding car at night.
After a day of canoeing on Osarugawa, a river running down from the Hidaka Mountains into the Pacific a couple hours east of Chitose, Noguchi and I sit naked in Biratori onsen, a hot-spring bath. The Saru River valley is home to many Ainu people, and the village of Nibutani has a beautiful Ainu museum and cultural center. The hot-spring pool is shallow. I stand holding a thin, white vanity towel to guard my nether region against strained courtesy, as the water circles my knees. The air is chilling, despite the sun. When I sit, it warms me through, closing in around my heart and lungs. Noguchi hands me a can of Kirin beer. He raises his own. “Kanpaii,” I hear him say, “Cheers to our good day.” The beer is bitter and cold. Noguchi moves over there against the ston
e wall dividing the men from the women. His eyes fall closed in relaxation. He sinks under, the water closing in over the top of his head. We are outside, naked on the earth and under the sky, the cold creek rushing by the hot pool, welcome and warm here seated on the bottom. My birth is a time too distant to remember, but so near as to be almost yesterday. This is Mother Earth’s water, a primal seeding. I feel the crust of the planet beneath me as Noguchi pushes up out of the water, his head emerging like a fish, then his shoulders, his eyes pinched closed, his mouth opening to take a breath, as if for the first time. He looks at me like a puppy, happy and wild and free. He drinks his beer. His thinning hair now points straight up from sinking under. I sink lower into the steamy water. A pool of sunlight. Early spring. I feel the deep fresh refreshing, and all my muscles warm, go soft.
Bathed in such comfort
In the balmy spring of Yamanaka,
I can do without plucking
Life-preserving chrysanthemums.
— Matsuo Bash
In Chitose, I looked out my apartment window one morning in April to find a fresh spring rain melting the winter snows. The rain came in against the window, then turned away, falling in long lines on the quiet river, rolling by, rolling by. Across the river in the cedar trees lining the bank at the Shinto shrine, the jungle crows gathered against the wet cold. One flew out of the trees and dove down, then spread its wings at the surface of the water, pulled up, and landed in the trees again. Another followed, swooped, pulled up, landed. I saw something in the water go under—a little duckling separated from its mother. The duckling swirled in an eddy as the ravens dove from the trees. With each pass, the little duckling was forced to dive under. After a dozen or so passes, the duckling went under and did not come back up.
Kazuko and Mama-san welcomed me at Aridan. I removed my boots and stepped up onto the tatami to sit down. Mama-san called out for three mugs of beer. She drank with us, a few swallows, then made polite excuses and returned to her work. No, no, we complained. Drink with us. Drink with us. Then she bowed and apologized and told us her liver was bad, and the doctor said she should not drink. So she lit the gas grill at our table in preparation for the food she was to bring.