The Setting Lake Sun

by J. R. Leveillé

  90

  We made the trip north in his old truck. The truck wasn’t really all that old, but it had a lot of dents in it. It was solid all the same, a 4X4.

  “It’s what you need to travel the roads up there. I fix it myself.”

  “You do everything,” I rejoined, slipping into the formal address again.

  “You don’t have to be so formal.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “No. Now we’re friends.”

  “We were always friends, just about.”

  “That’s right, from the very beginning.”

  I was almost never able to be informal with him in my speech. I would only do it by accident. I don’t know whether it was because of his age or his reputation, or what it was. It seemed to me that he deserved a certain respect and that he was what the Japanese call a “living National Treasure.” And he himself never managed to be completely informal, but would swing back and forth, often mixing the two forms in the same sentence.

  “No, I don’t know how to do everything,” he responded, taking up the thread again. “For instance, I’m no good at translation.”

  91

  There was magic in the air. The truck’s cab looked like an old space ship, a seasoned traveller of intergalactic routes that had seen a lot of sky. The fabric covering the bench was worn to a blackened sheen and looked like leather in places. The cab was filled with an assortment of objects. On the floor you could find spare engine parts, a haversack, an ax, a very beaten-up baseball bat, a tool chest. On the dash sat some screws, next to small clay statuettes. The rearview mirror had a piece of ivory lashed to it with leather thongs. “From a narwhal tusk,” Ueno explained when he presented it to me as a gift.

  The truck had a name. It was printed on a plastic plate attached to the hood, in the classic style of a big rig. This particular name reminded me of the tattoo a sailor might get stencilled on his arm—“Mom.” It was kitschy, it was cute.

  “It was there when I bought the truck,” he told me. “That’s what sold me on it.”

  It was a motley collection. A real truck.

  And it had two cigar butts in the ashtray.

  “They say tobacco attacks and destroys the palate. But, unfortunately, I’ve developed a taste for it.”

  He started to laugh and for the first time I took a close look at his teeth; they were quite yellowed, especially those next to his gold-capped molars. I used to think the Japanese had flawless teeth.

  92

  Ueno had come to Winnipeg to pick me up because I had no way of getting to Thompson except by bus. He himself often took the Grey Goose bus to the city. He liked to travel that way so that he could “meet the people,” as he put it.

  On subsequent visits, I would ride the bus north to see him, but this time he’d wanted to take me up there himself.

  He had driven down the day before to attend to some business, and early the next morning he came by to pick me up. He honked the horn; he was right on time. I brought two cups of coffee that I’d made for the road.

  Two things about the beginning of that trip have stuck with me. First, he gave me a copy of his poems. Then, as we passed the village of Saint-Laurent, he took me on a side-trip to the shore of Lake Manitoba.

  “It’s your country, in a way,” he said.

  93

  There’s a pretty Métis community there. It’s perhaps the largest in the country, although I didn’t know it at the time. It’s mainly fishers’ territory, because the earth is too poor to produce much in the way of crops. The landscape is unspectacular. The fields had been cleared in a haphazard way to allow the animals to graze, and they were still dotted with poplars and small, twisted oaks. I liked it.

  He said, “Wabi-sabi. Beauty in poverty.”

  What I came to appreciate most was the language spoken by the Métis from that part of the country: michif, a blend of Saulteux or Cree and French with a bit of English sprinkled here and there. I learned that for a long time the Métis were ashamed to speak their language, and that they had to fight off the influence of the “French” education they were given by the religious communities. I like the way they bend words and expressions, I like the lilt in their speech.

  94

  I once told him, with a laugh, that maybe he should have his poems translated into michif.

  “Why not!”

  I thought it must be wonderful to have a language of one’s own and it shouldn’t be allowed to die out. I imagined that the great truths in Ueno’s writing could, through translation, help to preserve another culture. I was quite young then.

  I associate all that with what we talked about while sitting by the shores of Lake Manitoba.

  “Do you know the origin of its name?” he asked me.

  “Yes, I do. Manitoba comes from Manitou, so it’s the lake of the Great Spirit.”

  “And Spirit has no colour.”

  95

  I never would have been able to translate the poems into michif because I spoke good French, as they say. My sister and I, like my mother, had been educated at Sacré-Coeur School, in a small French-speaking parish in the heart of Winnipeg. It was a miracle we kept it up, since it wasn’t always easy to maintain French in that anglophone environment. That made it twice as hard for me to live there.

  People thought I was adopted.

  96

  The next section of the road to Thompson is a barren stretch. You eventually enter a region of evergreen forest that grows close to the highway. It’s a welcome change. But in several places, where the trees have been destroyed by fire, it seems that you’re watching a show put on by skeletons. The towns are few and far between, and the road leads to the first of the big hydroelectric dams.

  That part of the country is impoverished. The road takes you through some rough terrain and passes close to Cree and Ojibwe reserves. You get a sense of what has been done to the country and its people. Then little by little the true Northern landscape asserts itself, with black and white pine taking precedence, silver birch and aspen growing alongside grey pine and larch. The larch is a marvellous conifer that, I’ve since learned, turns golden in the fall and is the only member of its species to lose its needles in winter.

  97

  Ueno and I were chatting as we drove, the landscape rolling past like a backdrop. Our attention was elsewhere.

  It takes eight hours to reach Thompson. What I liked most were our stops at the service stations that seemed to be plunked down in the middle of nowhere, where we’d stretch, go to the bathroom, or get a chocolate bar. I love chocolate.

  The staff at these places were real characters, so we got to “meet the people,” as Ueno would say. There was one young man brimming with energy who acted as if he were working for a big-city gas station. Ueno had asked him to fill it up, and after a while he said, “It should be full soon.”

  “It’ll be about thirty bucks,” the young man shot back.

  And a dozen litres or so later, while he was cleaning the windshield, the pump clicked off automatically at exactly thirty dollars.

  “Right on the money,” I told Ueno, who turned to the young man and said, “Close enough.”

  We all burst out laughing.

  98

  Ueno Takami’s house was situated just south of Thompson, near Wabowden. He owned a wooded lot on Setting Lake.

  “We’re almost there,” he announced.

  Ueno had installed a CD player in the truck and to mark our arrival he inserted a recording of Japanese music.

  “Traditional songs that have been Westernized a little,” he explained. “They use authentic traditional instruments such as the koto and the shakuhachi, with the venerable Jean-Pierre Rampal playing the modern flute. Look at his photo on the liner. He looks a bit funny in a kimono, doesn’t he? But when he plays his flute you’d swear you can hear bamboo.”

  99

  We’d left the main road to head down a narrow track of dirt and gravel. When we topped a small plateau, the forest su
ddenly thinned out and the space opened up. Ahead of us, between well-tended trees, was his cabin; beyond it, from the height of land, we could see the lake.

  “This is my place.”

  “From here, you’d think the lake really was setting itself down at your feet.”

  I felt good being there.

  100

  For a long time I thought the name meant “the lake that is setting.” I liked the poetry of it. The image of a lake slowly sinking down, like the night coming on, always pleased me. But Ueno one day explained to me that the lake’s name was a translation from the Algonquin, and meant “where we place the nets.”

  “So is the fishing good?” I asked him.

  “Miraculous,” he said.

  And we both laughed.

  101

  I have to talk about his cabin. It’s easy to imagine, given my interest in architecture, what a strong impression it made on me.

  The cabin looked like a teepee, a typical log house and a modern Japanese structure all rolled into one. It was simple but stylized. The harmony of the proportions and the combination of building materials kept it from clashing with its surroundings. It made you reflect on the whole question of how human habitat is rooted in nature. I was not very conscious of it at the time, but these are the reactions it called up in me.

  The roof, with its long sweep down on the lakeward side, seemed to be paying homage to the teepee. Its steep pitch rose to a central point where the beams criss-crossed and seemed to be arranged in a spiral. Along the roof the beams were partially exposed, and between them sections of cedar shingles, which had weathered to grey, alternated with sections of metal plates, what looked like steel, that had rusted.

  Ueno once explained that the noise of the rain on his roof was musical. The sharp hammering of raindrops on the metal, which would have grown tiresome, was balanced, you might say in counterpoint, by the muffled beat of the water on wood. The colours of the roof also harmonized with the background of trees and rocks.

  102

  Ueno had built the cabin with the help of the Natives from the Cross Lake Reserve.

  “We spent just as much time as it took,” he explained with a smile on his lips. “They were curious, amused and very interested. They brought me different kinds of plants I used to make tea. We drank a lot of tea. I’m convinced that by helping out with this project, hybrid though it is, they rediscovered the natural aesthetic of their ancestors. And I had the privilege of seeing my little building made both lighter and stronger by the breath of their spirit. When it was finished, about thirty of them came—elders, women, children—for a ceremony to mark what their shaman called the joining of the red wind with the yellow wind. The old man believes this place possesses an especially strong energy.”

  103

  That first day, as on my many later visits, I spent hours decoding and contemplating the complex of inner and outer structures. I tried to figure out how he had succeeded in coming to terms with the landscape and avoiding open conflict with the Northern heartland.

  I could go on tirelessly about that cabin. I learned more from it than from my courses at the university.

  104

  I was reminded of the magical harmony of the cabin a few years later when I was in my third year of architecture and Douglas Cardinal came to give a lecture.

  I thought Cardinal was a good name for an architect, and even better for an Indian architect. And I liked the St. Mary’s Church that he had constructed in Red Deer, Alberta. I liked it a lot.

  Waskasoo means “elk” in Cree, but the first Scottish settlers had mistaken the elk for their own red deer and named their town after it. But, red deer or elk, I’ve always thought of St. Mary’s as the Waskasoo Church.

  In response to a question I asked, Cardinal said, “It’s a question of proportion.”

  He must have guessed I was Métis, and what he then said really appealed to me.

  “Listen, I’ll tell you a story. An old Indian chief of my nation, John Big Sky Carpenter, was having a little cabin built. It was a small cabin with a porch, or a verandah, as we call it out west, on top of a butte in the Saskatchewan badlands. Even if the cabin was on the small side, he still wanted a verandah. ‘So I can sit in my rocker and rock,’ he said, ‘and watch the sun set down in the gully.’ But he was blind. Finally, as the construction was nearing an end, he asked one of the workers to drive a nail into the top of a verandah post so that he could hang up his tobacco pouch and his pipe. The worker made a pencil-mark at the exact spot. But as a joke, he pretended he couldn’t find it again, so he asked the old chief, Is it here? or here? Shouldn’t it be a bit higher?, indicating different places on the post. But the old chief’s sense of proportion was so precise that he held out until the worker came back to the original spot.”

  105

  Each time I went up to Setting Lake I was struck again by the cabin which, according to Ueno, came about through a series of organized accidents.

  “For a long time I had a picture of it in my mind. Nothing on paper. When the picture had become very clear I began to build. But as we went along, there were things we hadn’t planned on, unforeseen factors, accidents we just had to work with. And then, when it was finished, it was exactly as I had pictured it. Perfect.”

  Indeed everything about his place was tasteful; nothing was merely trendy or conventional.

  “Convention, and society is a convention, is sterilizing,” he would say. I can see his beautiful sabi face as he said it. “Ultimately,” he went on, “taste is neither good nor bad; it simply must be honed, like the intellect. Taste is a martial art.”

  106

  I didn’t understand right away what he meant by this. Often the things he said were simple, simple yet somehow mysterious.

  But I got a feeling, that day, that what he said mirrored the shape of my own unconscious thoughts.

  107

  After our eight hours on the road, night was closing in fast.

  He went to fix supper.

  “Is there something I can do?”

  “Of course. Look around, make yourself at home... Then you can help me set the table. I think we should have dinner in front of the bay window and watch the sun go down on Setting Lake. What do you say?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “And we can talk about those poems you’re going to translate.”

  108

  The inside of his cabin was like the cab of his truck, but tidier. There was a stack of novels here, art books over there, magazines piled together with heavier philosophical works. I could see small sculptures, manuscripts, engraving plates in a heap with pieces of wood and rocks that he had no doubt collected because of their shape. There were paintings leaning together against the wall, with jars of paint and an assortment of brushes in magnificent ceramic pots or containers of his own invention.

  It was a blend of tones and cultures. There were Native blankets of course, along with rugs from South America, Mexican masks, Japanese pottery. On one wall hung the skull of a long-horned bull, on another an abstract painting, a small Jackson Pollock. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was an original, a labyrinth of black and white plunging into brown. As we stood and looked at it Ueno said simply, “It’s so true.”

  109

  There was a general air of eccentricity to the collection of objects. The miniature Zen garden, for instance; instead of being surrounded by the traditional raked sand, the rocks were set among olives pits of all sizes that he’d saved over the years. Ueno called it his Garden of Gethsemane.

  Each object seemed to have found its own place in all the disorder; objects that were meant to be displayed showed up well.

  When I told him as much he replied off-hand, as if listing the ingredients of a recipe, “I furnished this place with things I love. I thought that if I liked them and felt good about myself, they would just be their beautiful selves and make their own arrangements.”

  110

  I knew exactly what he meant, bec
ause I was a little like that, too. My goldfish bowl was an example. I sometimes got myself things I needed not for practical reasons but to satisfy a physical or spiritual need, things that require a long relationship. It’s as if the external object represented something inside me that had to come out, and that I must recognize contained in that form.

  111

  We finished off our first evening drinking hot sake and I fell asleep in front of the wood fire in the fireplace. Ueno had wrapped me in blankets with Native designs to keep me warm.

  112

  I remember that on the first night of my second visit the Navajo blankets lay where I had left them. I had wrapped myself in one of them and was studying the fireplace, with its stone chimney and the mantel made of twisted wood, when I noticed a short list of dates pencilled on the wall next to the fireplace. I asked Ueno what they signified.

  “It’s a record of the occasions I’ve made love in the twenty-five years I’ve been here.”

  “It’s not very impressive.”

  “You don’t think so? Come and impress me, then.”

  He headed for the bedroom, knowing, I think, that I would simply follow him, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  113

  The next morning we woke up to see snow falling. There was a nip in the air, but we could tell that it wouldn’t stay. Through the bay window we could see birds playing around in the trees or at the feeders, or even on the ground where seeds had fallen.

  Grosbeaks made bright patches on the snow; most of them were yellow, but a few were black and white with pink breasts. I’d seen them the first day, at dusk, along with some red crossbills, blue jays and grey jays, but today against the white the colours of their plumage seemed more intense.

  We made ourselves some very strong coffee and took it with us on a short hike.