Many times during those two terrible years, I prayed for it to be over. No one could have convinced me that having his life end this way was anything but a travesty. But I came to believe that without my father’s catastrophic disintegration, I would never have come to know the person he had been at pains to hide all his life. And without my own despair, which left me so vulnerable and open, we could never have discovered how deeply we loved each other. We learned it only because we reached a point that we had nothing but our presence left to give. It was the one thing we hadn’t thought of before. It turned out that it was all either of us had ever wanted.
High on the ridge of Cascade Mountain, far from the swarm of tourists on Banff Avenue a thousand metres below, lives one of my perennial heroes. She makes her home in open, alpine spaces. She thrives, small and determined and hopeful, in a windswept, barren landscape of talus and scree. Where grey-weathered slabs of limestone pierce the sky with their jagged teeth, she flaunts her softness and her colour. Her name is Silene acaulis and she is a member of the pink family.
I first met Silene in 1994, when I came to Banff to work for the summer and fell in with some local kids, a group of fun-loving, competitive cross-country skiers who went for three-hour bike rides after work and climbed mountains every weekend. They asked me along and, naively, I went, which was how I often found myself, weak-kneed and light-headed, on Silene’s terrain.
They called her moss campion, her common name, and they warned me early on to watch for her. Though she is one of the faster-growing alpine plants, her existence is delicate: her first flower won’t bloom for ten years, and a single misplaced human step could destroy her. As my new friends led me into the backcountry, stepping from rock to rock to avoid landing on living things, I could see that they cared for Silene; they respected her tenuous hold on the ground they walked on, and they taught me to do the same.
Most young people come to Banff to leave their cares behind. I suppose the truth is I came to Banff that summer to get away from my mother. Some part of me believed that, with only a sleeping bag, my hiking boots and a plane ticket, I could save myself from drowning in her quicksand moods; I could sever her hold on me and rise to the surface, three thousand kilometres from home, buoyant and happily sputtering.
There were other things too, other reasons to flee: poor job prospects, a failed relationship. But my mother’s depression was a dark shadow, a wall of snow moving up the valley toward me, threatening to obliterate the landscape and turn the rocks beneath my feet all slick and untrustworthy.
I stayed in Banff. I learned to dress for extreme weather. Following the heels of the person in front of me up the eight steep kilometres to Cascade’s natural amphitheatre, I ignored my body’s objections, my face burning, my arms heavy, my heart pounding in my ears, drowning out the sound of my friends’ easy banter. As their voices drifted farther up the trail away from me, my head swam with slogans and clichés: One step at a time. Just do it! I kept my head down so I couldn’t see how steep the path was ahead of me, and measured each breath to keep from hyperventilating.
If I kept moving, I had a purpose. At the end of an eight-hour hike, life’s big questions were diverted to the comforting dilemma over which to do first: sleep, shower or eat.
Altitude became my therapy. When I stood on a mountaintop, there was so much space; it absorbed me, carried me out into the dizzying gulf between Mount Rundle and Cascade, and wove me into the sky-strewn landscape. I was so small, and yet I felt so mighty to be part of all that lives and grows at the tops of those lofty peaks.
In Banff, people were always leaving. I could try on a whole new version of myself each time the ski season ended, each time the air turned sharp, the days shortened and the summer staff returned to school in the East. Even the mountains, my steadfast sentinels, bathed in sunset or clutched by clouds, never looked the same.
I moved a lot. I changed jobs a lot. Boyfriends, co-workers, roommates, even my cat, came and went. I went back to Ontario, but only to visit. My mother was in and out of the hospital, taking too many, or not enough, pills. Everything there was the same. Suffocating.
I lived alone in an apartment above the bookstore: one small windowless room, surrounded by slamming doors and an alley that erupted with garbage-truck noise every morning at 7:00 a.m. This was not home to me. Home was the river’s edge, where I would break from my run to watch the water pucker and swirl, its mirrored surface mountain-deep. Home was the beating of ravens’ wings, and moonlight casting a tangle of tree shadows on the forest floor; the swish-scuttle of stone on ice, and the other-worldly call of elk rutting. Home was that moment outside time when the sound of rocks falling meant the rocks had already fallen.
Relationships were steep, sliding slopes of scree. After a string of boyfriends who either wanted too much or too little of me, I began a year-long, self-imposed moratorium on dating. I bought myself Bernard Callebaut chocolate. I lit candles and drank wine with dinner. I carried my notebook and pen to the sun-drenched tip of Mount Fairview, in Lake Louise. I travelled alone, overseas. I went to work. At night, if I needed company, I wrote, or read, or watched TV. Ten months later I met Lach.
We met in January. In February, we lay in each other’s arms, huddled beneath a nylon sleeping bag in his shivery basement suite, naming our children. Being with him was like being in the backcountry, beyond the trappings of civilization, outside the constructs of time and productivity. He was my hard-earned destination, a place of rest and beauty where I could allow myself to just be.
Love happened like a windstorm, a sudden gust felling trees, thinning the forest to reveal a path of limitless possibility. We moved in together. We hiked, played tennis, went to concerts, went to Paris, got married, bought a house, moved to Canmore. Making a life together, and making a child together: that was our dream.
• • •
Jerked upright in bed, like a marionette. By what? Silence. Drenched in sweat. My T-shirt clinging to my body. My ears straining for the sound of her while the house holds its breath. I wait. Nothing. The clock glows 3:00 a.m.
Two hours since the last feed, she’ll be waking soon, God. Should try to get more sleep. Need to shower. Change my clothes. Dark wet circles dilate across my chest; my breasts are full, throbbing. I get up, shivering in the nighttime coolness of the house and cross the hall to where she sleeps in her bassinet. She’s on her back. Her arms are bent up by the sides of her head in a body builder’s pose, her little hands forming fists. So strong, so beautiful. Her face turned sideways is peaceful, her features delicate. I want to pick her up and hold her to me, smell her baby smell, nose pressed to the top of her head. Then: What if I pick her up and throw her out the window? … That’s crazy. It’s just… I don’t know … I’m so tired, my incision hurts, everything hurts …
My mind plays these tricks, creeps up on me when my guard is down. Like yesterday, on my way downstairs to the laundry room, past the side door, a thought, a cat-like pouncing in my head: I could just walk out…
I leave the baby’s room, turn into the bathroom and strip off my clothes, stare at the body in the mirror, at the long scar across the pubis and the bulging flesh above and below, at the staple marks. The breasts are twice their normal size, pale and luminous and marbled with veins. The face is pallid, the eyes abandoned, like vacant windows. Who is this woman?
I hear the shower door close, feel hot water pouring down my face, neck, breasts. Cold air shocks the parts of me the water can’t cover. Afterwards the towel is sandpaper on my nipples. I peer down to examine them and cringe at the angry red slashes I will soon be offering her hungry mouth. Will life ever feel normal again?
My mother has come. While I weather this storm of postpartum depression, she beams with a love for my baby that I cannot feel. She is strong now, thriving on the hope that sprouts from new life, new beginnings. As I cling to her lifeline of clean counters and folded laundry, I reach for her hard-earned understanding of what it means to survive.
It is April 2004. I am alone, now. While my husband goes off to work each day, I crouch in the corner of the living-room sofa, my baby balanced in my arms, the sun beaming like an alien spaceship behind the closed blinds. I have survived the first six weeks.
Mostly I stay indoors, topless, my nipples smeared with lanoline, or air-drying in breast milk. A soundtrack of screaming Oprah fans accompanies my scenery of failures and foreign objects—dirty dishes, stuffed animals, scattered laundry, an electric breast pump, a vibrating bouncy chair.
Venturing into the world outside my living room is an exhausting feat of logistics squeezed in between sleeps and feeds. Against a backdrop of world-class-tourist-destination peaks, I push our all-terrain stroller slowly around the neighbourhood, wary of bumps, fending off the slightest breeze with binder clips and a receiving blanket.
Back inside I cling to the couch, my mind held hostage by the weeds growing in our yard; the dust-streaked windows; the empty flower boxes. I sit motionless, watching the neighbours industriously cutting and watering their lawns, planting their gardens, paving their driveways.
I have forgotten what wilderness is. I have forgotten Silene, who among the arid, ancient-seabed shards, with no soil or water within a human arm’s reach, sprouts her cushion of tiny, bright green leaves.
Ten years ago, as the wind whipped my hair into my face and I looked for a safe place to plant my feet, Silene showed me the strength and beauty of her vulnerability. Like grass growing up through a crack in the concrete, she showed me how, one tender green shoot at a time, Nature reclaimed the old mining town of Bankhead, at the foot of Cascade. And as I climbed higher up the ridge, my lungs aching, my heart beating its way out of my chest, it occurred to me that I might belong to the same glorious, vital, and yes, obstinate life force.
It has been ten years since I first saw myself in Silene, and in my stillness—immobilized on the couch, my baby latched to my breast—I can’t see that I am blooming. I can’t see that in this new wilderness of motherhood, my roots are growing deep; that my roots will sustain me.
• • •
When Amanda is three months old, I order a backpack carrier from Mountain Equipment Co-op. After inspecting and adjusting all the straps and clasps, I snap her in, hoist her onto my back, and check us out in the bathroom mirror. We look happy.
I decide to take her for a test run up Cougar Creek. It’s June. All spring, the sun’s rays have been gathering strength, and a steady trickle of water winds its way down the creekbed toward the highway. I hear the sound of it, like laughter rippling through a crowd, gently dissipating. Summer is coming.
Pavement turns to gravel, and gravel gives way to a worn path through rocks and boulders, where Silene waits. Hoodoo sentinels guard the cliffside on my left, while across the creek, on my right, the bright red roof of a modern ranch house gleams against its backdrop of evergreens. I pause and crane my neck around, trying to catch sight of Amanda in the carrier behind me. All I want is to watch her, my tiny, triumphant pink flower, seeing everything for the first time.
Mark Twain claimed that if a cat were crossed with a human it would be to the cat’s disadvantage. But oh, what we would know of night, leaf stutter, mouse quiver, the sinful taste of birdsong on our tongues!
On both sides of my family there is a penchant for drink and horses. My maternal Welsh grandfather brought the two together. His father was a wagoner, working on an estate just north of the border, near the town of Shrewsbury where, my grandmother said, the church was round so the devil couldn’t corner you. From the time he walked straight-backed out of school in grade four because the teacher wrongly accused him of cheating, he worked every day beside his father, taking care of the horses and driving wagons back and forth from the fields to town. He was allowed to ride one of the draft horses if he wanted to go off on his own after the farm work was done. The gelding he chose was a Shire named Billy, seventeen hands high and an uncommon grey with white feathered fetlocks above hooves that spread wide as platters on the plowed fields.
When Grandpa reached drinking age, he and Billy made nightly trips to the local pub. Luckily for him, my grandfather was a singer like many of his Welsh countrymen, and inside, at a table near the window, he bartered a song for his first pint. Perhaps he wasn’t melodious enough to get a second or a third sent his way. Those were provided by Billy. It worked like this: my grandfather didn’t allow himself to down his first beer. He had to have faith like the thirsty man who primes the pump by pouring a ready bucket of water down the top, believing the sacrifice will pay off in a fresh stream gushing from the spout. When Grandpa raised his pint, Billy, tied up outside, poked his head through the open window and guzzled the beer down, his master feigning surprise and outrage. The patrons were so delighted they kept the drinks coming for the man and the insatiable horse until closing time when the two would stumble home in the dark. Grandpa said he didn’t know who was the shakier on his legs. Some nights he thought he’d have to carry Billy on his back.
• • •
Unlike the dog, its opposite, a cat shuns anecdote and goes for the lyric. Know that a cat is music given bone and muscle and the grace notes of paws.
• • •
The story of the drunken horse sits side by side with my mother’s tales of my grandfather’s strictness and pride, his meanness to her and her six siblings on their Saskatchewan farm. As a kid, if she hadn’t done the chores exactly as he’d wanted or if she’d come home late from a dance in the schoolhouse three miles down the road, he went after her with a willow switch, slashing at her bare legs as she squirmed on her belly into the farthest corner under the bed. Though he’d mellowed in old age, his daughters, wary of his temper, tried to keep me and my cousins from getting in his way. Often when the family gathered at the farm for holidays and celebrations, he’d retreat to the barn to curry the wide backs and haunches in the stalls or haul hay to the feed troughs, the tall animals swinging their massive heads to watch him lift forkfuls of dry grass. The qualities the Shire draft horse was bred for—endurance and willingness to work—were also his, and almost all I got to know of him.
• • •
A cat sleeps sixteen hours a day because owning so much wears him out. “In a cat’s eyes, all things belong to cats,” so the English proverb goes.
• • •
Bitterness intact, my grandfather pounded home his hatred for teachers and school, told me to pinch a dog’s ear to make it listen and to down a healthy dose of castor oil to clean a body out in spring. His and Billy’s shenanigan is the only complete story I can remember him telling. It shows a warmth I never saw in him, a sweet affection for a creature that was more to him than just a beast that pulled a plow or wagon and lessened his own heavy labours on the farm. I tell it to myself over and over because it gives me something I need to know: Nothing and no one are wholly what they seem, especially those difficult to love.
Sometimes I think we’re allotted a predetermined amount of pleasure that we can take from life. The measure the blessèd receive is enough to fill a water tower, a bounty that would provide for all the houses in a town. In my grandfather’s case, his limit was a dipperful. He used his pleasure up when he was young except for what he kept alive in Billy and their story. Thinking of my grandfather and that horse, the two alone weaving their way down the narrow country road under stars unwashed by city lights, both having to rise at dawn to work in the fields, I feel a tenderness for what gets lost in living. Now when I give my horse her head she leads me to the country of my grandfather’s birth and the years of his young manhood. Thin child from the future, in the barn’s close scent of hay and horses, I wait for him and Billy to come safely to their rest before the sunrise, a rest companiable, bone-deep, and brief.
• • •
Swallow two whiskers from the cat you’ve loved since she was a kitten. Now without a torch, you can navigate the neighbourhood at night and walk without bruising through any stooped and narrow doorway.
• • •
When I was four, into the kitchen of our house my dad carried a toy Pomeranian tucked in his coat pocket. He had traded, unbeknown to his boss, a half tank of oil from the green Co-op delivery truck for one of Mrs. Rittinger’s purebred pups. Furry and red as a fox, the pup was smaller than my father’s hand. Lying on my belly on linoleum warmed by the fire in the wood stove, I watched her small pink tongue lapping milk. The thread of white stretching from the surface to her mouth didn’t break until she’d licked the bowl clean. Never had I gazed at anything so long and hard, sensing for the first time that beauty, when you open up to it completely, brings both a wonder and a wound.
My mother named her Tiny, and she became my brother’s dog. Seven years older than I, he’d sometimes let me tag along when he and his friends played kick the can or built a soldiers’ fort out of the log ends waiting to be chopped for the stove. As soon as he grabbed his jacket from the hook, I was at his heels like a second dog, dumber in canine ways but just as loyal and underfoot. Some days he’d order me to stay in our yard. Other times, by the caragana hedge, he’d tell me to hide and he’d count to ten, and then he’d never find me. Tiny wasn’t sent away unless the games spread too far afield. “Go home, Tiny,” he’d say, and she’d wend slowly down the block, head and tail lowered. I knew exactly what she felt. She made an image of my sadness.
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