Where I Live Now

by Sharon Butala

  “You saw a fish jump?” he asked, in evident surprise. As if getting a grip on his thoughts, he named all the kinds of fish in the reservoir, then, shifting again as if just remembering the question, said it would have been a trout. “They jump for flies,” he told me. I thanked him. Searching for a polite remark on which to leave, I said, “I just like . . . to know things.” In a clear, strong voice, he answered, “I like to know things too.” By this time he had packed his fishing equipment and was beginning to climb up the rocks toward me, and I saw that he was a First Nations man, the first I had seen fishing there.

  I walked away, for a moment feeling that the universe and I were in near-perfect communication. I cherish that simple memory and am comforted by it. Calm can return if you are alone in nature, nature having its way of bringing to mind thoughts of eternal matters.

  That listening, that attention, certainly doesn’t happen every time I go out, nor do I ever go out for a walk with that one experience on my mind as a destination. I go out for other reasons: to enjoy nature as nature, whether or not that includes nature as spirit, because, after all, trees, grass, shrubs, flowers — all are alive, and I never forget that Aboriginal people believe all things in nature to be enspirited, and I think that myself.

  Some years ago, in perhaps the last year of Peter’s life, early one cold winter morning as we drove away from the hay farm on the mundane chore of going to the dentist in Medicine Hat, we were heading north on a road that was little more than a trail, snow banked up on each side of the truck, and fields of unspoiled snow stretching out to the edge of the glistening hills, one of us looked back — I don’t know why or who — and gasped, causing the other to look back. I know Peter slowed the truck, I think he stopped it for a few seconds. A cloud of white ice fog or icy mist, opaque but radiant, was moving as we watched, from the east toward our house to rest over it, completely encompassing it so that all we could see was the cloud. It was shot with tiny rainbows like half-hidden jewels; it glowed a numinous white. It didn’t strike the road in front, the hills behind, or the neighbour’s house a half mile to the east or the dilapidated barn to the west, just our house and yard. It was alive and glowing with light. Now we both gasped; neither of us, though used to sun dogs and even in extreme cold to moon dogs, had ever seen such a thing. That it had covered and surrounded our house surprised and just possibly frightened me a little, if not Peter. I was so full of awe that the word celestial came into my mind. Being practical people (or at least Peter was), though, we drove on, watching through the rear-view mirrors until we no longer could see it.

  I so wanted it to be a blessing for his dream — now achieved — of saving his grass. Although there had been considerable dissent in our area about this, as I mentioned earlier, and we had to pass many tests, a project of this size and particular nature not having been done in our province before, most of Canada had been thrilled, and the First Nations people of the area had been happy about it. Peter had become a hero. A few years later he died, but not before a gentleman who has been for many years important in conservation work came to say good-bye to him and told him, “You have changed the face of Canada.”

  On the day of Peter’s funeral, once it was over and as many as fifty people had come out to the hay farm to hold an informal post-funeral wake, voices out in the yard began to call those of us in the house to “Look! Quick, come outside!” One of our number had, using his drum, already sung Peter an honour song, and afterward we had dispersed through the house and yard. Now we congregated again in the yard; it was nearing twilight, cloudless, and the vast sky was intensely luminous as it can be in Western Canada on a hot, late-summer evening. We faced the west, where the sun, hovering on the radiant horizon along the line of the hills, had turned blue. We were stunned by this event. We watched quietly without anyone speculating why it was happening, until it had disappeared below the western hills.

  In the first year after I moved to the city to live, I dreamt Peter had come home. We were at the ranch and I opened the door of the old ranch house that he and his sisters had been raised in and there he was, standing out on the prairie in his ragged old work clothes and his battered and stained grey Stetson, grinning at me — I in the house, he on the prairie that extended all around him, cream-coloured grass melding into soft blues and aquas in the far distance. I was pretty angry with him because, as I said to him, he had been so rude as to miss his own funeral and I scolded him for it as he grinned back at me like an incorrigible schoolboy. He said he’d been on a fishing trip at Chitek Lake (a place in northern Saskatchewan neither of us had ever been) with — he named two local men. Then I suddenly remembered what had actually happened and I said in horror, one hand flying up to hold my head, “Oh, my God! I sold the hay farm!” Already I was going through possibilities about how to get it back even as I was terrified that it would be impossible. But Peter said instantly, himself again, no longer grinning, but fully casual, utterly dismissive, as if such a thing didn’t matter at all, “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s okay.” And in the end it has been.

  Epilogue

  Starry Sky

  I think it could be said of this book, as Joan Didion says of hers, “This book is about grief.” And yet, how do you write about grief in the singular, in the present, as it happens? Grief is too big to write about that way, and so writers tend to write small anecdotes, to describe the past with the deceased in everyday ways, and by doing this hope to create the larger picture. So I have tried to do, yet I feel at the moment of writing this that I haven’t fully succeeded, leaning, perhaps, too far toward the beautiful and the romantic, leaving out the grit and ugliness and pain of death.

  When someone you love dies, everything gets mixed up; you experience a conflict of emotions: grief, loss, self-pity, love, compassion. You must also deal with the reactions of others. The combination for a widow is terrible. This before she has even properly become a widow, when her husband is still alive and opening his eyes to gaze at her with an expression in them she cannot read, as if he is seeing her for the first time in his life; as if in his dying he has gained the ability to read a soul, and what he finds there amazes him. This is not love or pity or sympathy. This is a man, for the first time in his life, as it ends, coming at last to see, to see what he never before in his life had been able to see.

  And still he does not speak. Does not at that moment of his dying feel a need to speak, or a duty to speak, while the widow holds a cloth to his forehead, whispers in his ear, holds his hand, strokes his cheek. He is beyond that kind of connection; he is looking, is already partly there, into a future no one else can see. You, moments from your widowhood, can see he is gone from you already even though he is still breathing and his hand and forehead and cheek are warm. You can see that whatever the others around his bed were to him, whatever you were to him, is over. The world becomes hollow; you are hollowed; in that density of black, that cavern full of darkness, there is not even an echo. Something is over. Something has ended, and there is nothing — nothing at all — to fill that black cavern that is your interior. It will be such a long time, years even, before anything slips in, and then something else, and then something else, until the cavern that is your interior narrows, shrinks at the edges, may even close. But the closing is fragile. It tears easily, it disintegrates minutely if examined; it is better not to examine it. It is probably better not to write books about it. But what is a writerly person to do, after all? When she has made such examination, such conjecture, such thought, how she lives her life, how she gets through her allotted span.

  Time passes. Years pass. She moves — no, I move to a city in another province. I start again. Lesson number one in grief: You never start again, although you think you do. I tell everyone that I have started again and I know that from the outside it looks as if I have started again. I live on the third floor now, and although I have a balcony that overlooks a green space where all spring, summer, and fall soccer players of all ages and genders shout and stumble and
run like fury, and whistles blow and blow again, if I want to touch the ground I have to put on appropriate clothing, grab my keys, walk down the hall, and either take three sets of stairs or the elevator, and walk through a heavy door if I want to feel the branch of a tree, or sniff a flower up close. Age teaches resignation; grief teaches itself to be, to just be, because it turns out that it can’t be outrun or forgotten.

  I can never forget, for example, in our last days in a hospital in Saskatoon, a busy, noisy, much too big hospital where I was to be Peter’s advocate and his protector, and where, like all patients, I — we — had become the victims of the system, of protocol, of the machinery of such a place, and I had — although I was there nearly all the time for a dozen or more hours each day — once again missed the visit of the surgeon who was to perform (or would not, as would be the case) Peter’s surgery, and the nurses couldn’t, were not allowed to tell me anything at all, and I had been brave for days and months and kept tears to myself, and worked to be clipped and sane, clear-eyed and intelligent, Peter told me something the surgeon had said that he did not understand and, baffled and angry, I said, “I will find out what is going on.” And I marched out of his room and down to the nursing station, opened my mouth to speak in that firm, clever persona I had adopted as the one that would work best in this environment, and instead began to cry. I became a fountain of tears. I sobbed so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was humiliated by my own weakness, by my clear plea for pity for me, not for Peter, but I could not stop. The nurse to whom I had been trying to speak came around the desk and put her arms around me, other staff came and held me too, and talked over my head about what to do, about how to find the doctor. I was ashamed of myself — it was the very thing our mother most hated, wallowing in self-pity, losing your dignity in public. True, I have not forgotten this moment, but when I do recall it, I try to forgive myself. You have to give in to grief to move through it and beyond.

  Eventually, I’m finding, old griefs become mingled with the loss of Peter: the loss of my first husband through divorce, and the divided life we created for our child, the fact that I’ll never again see my father or my mother or two of my dear sisters, and other smaller sorrows. They bundle together and become the sorrow of life, of living. They become the human condition, at last. They become even, in a painful way, deeply beautiful, like an embroidered wall-hanging from the twelfth century, the colours faded, the edges a little hazy now, the glint of gold threads no longer blazing, but soft and delicately gleaming. My past, my personal deaths, remind me of the most beautiful cathedral I was ever in, not St. Paul’s in Rome or even Notre Dame in Paris, but the stone church in Kirkwall, on Orkney’s main island, St. Magnus’s, begun in 1137 and finished three hundred years later. As I walked down its main aisle, pausing to gaze around me, it seemed to me that the surface of the sandstone of which it was built was turning soft and hazy, the beams of light from the side windows the light of centuries earlier, filled with dully glinting dust motes, the whole interior as if I had walked into an ancient dream of beauty itself.

  We experience death on so many levels. The hard reality of the physical act of dying, our own need for self-pity and silent grieving, society’s need for commemoration — each person must make her own understanding, her own tapestry of experience. Nine years have passed since that day in the palliative ward when I said good-bye to Peter, and if I have learned anything about grief it is that the people you have loved in life are still there in death; that is, through dreams and memories, and sudden flashes of understanding, you know they are still there with you. I often think that even if you forget them — although who could do that? — they do not forget you. Loss, then, even grievous loss, as time slowly passes transforms itself into a continuing relationship that provides a gentle, wondering comfort.

  In the last months of 2015, I received an email from the agency that now owns and manages what was the Butala cattle ranch that I first saw in 1975, the Nature Conservancy of Canada. One of its officials was writing to tell me that a difficult decision had to be made: whether to tear down the family home on the site, allow it to deteriorate slowly into dust, or possibly find somebody who might be willing to try to raise enough money to rebuild it. In subsequent communications the last option was dropped. With that first careful email came a photograph of the house yard taken by a professional photographer, at night, with special equipment (time lapse, etc.), with what I think was the aurora lighting the low northern sky, and above that, a plethora of stars, millions and millions of them, going far, far back into the unknowable, unreachable, not even quite imaginable cosmos and that, far, far out at its distant edges, can only end in myth and dream. For all the work that had been done in the way of professional photographers recording the place for one reason or another, nobody had ever produced a picture of the barn and house and yard that so brought out its genuine beauty, the way that it was situated, a tiny human habitation, hardly a pinprick on that vast tract of grass-covered hills and under the unlimited, bounteous, star-studded sky.

  All day I was sad and couldn’t put my finger on why, but as it was November 11, Remembrance Day, I thought that must be the reason. But then the truth caught up with me: it was the thought of that house being destroyed, disappearing from the face of the earth.

  All day I kept seeing the green of the grass in the yard in the photo, the red of the barn, the L shape of the old, unlovely house, and that enormous, star-filled sky. All day I lived inside the other memories the picture brought me: how far you would have to go on horseback or on foot to get to another occupied house, how empty the hills were, with the wind always sweeping through or dancing around you, as you rode slowly across the grass, through wide draws, and that great sky there above you, the horizon so low that the sky was all around you. I remembered the lichen-covered rocks nestling in the dry yellow grass, bright red, orange, gold, pale green, or white or black, slashes and patches, unexpected, peering up through the grass, and the purity of the colours filling you with delight: the tiny exquisitely designed flowers mostly white or yellow — yarrow and buffalo beans or locoweed or prickly pears — but with the occasional blue of the flax flower or even sometimes the mauve-blue of the penstemon; the tiny scarlet mallow; the creamy wild onion, never to be confused with the lookalike death camas that kills cattle; or the brilliant flare of goldenrod; the rose-fading-to-pink of the gumbo primrose. I remembered the scent of the wild carried on the wind, of the grasses and forbs — the wild roses, the primroses, the various aromatic, peppery sages, and the sweet dusty wild grasses — especially in the spring.

  The more years I was there, the more personal it was, the more intimate. The spirits that lived there — were they the ones the Romans of the ancient world called genii loci? — seemed always with me.

  I suppose, gazing at that picture, that I ached too for Peter, for the time we spent there together, how close we were in the early days. How I loved him for his easy courage that was mostly plain old knowledge shaped by common sense, his competency that seemed to me at times to reach a kind of brilliance, as if in a crisis his brain would crack open in a new place (that’s how the light gets out). I was awed by this capacity in him; it made me love him more. This, and the way he left me to think my own thoughts, so that at last, beside him, I learned how to be myself.

  I am still endlessly grateful. That I was there, all those many, many years, out there on the land and under that boundless sky, living among animals and birds and growing things, and in the constantly changing weather, this with someone who could show me and teach me about such a life and how to live it. Someone who was so familiar with it that he was himself part of it. There could be no greater gift to a single individual.

  Now, battle-scarred and weary, to quote storytellers everywhere and through time, I am grateful for those years. Without them I would be some other person. In those sometimes even terrible years I was learning how deep the shadow goes: how implacable, how relentless and ancient the larger shadow in the world, h
ow equally wide and deep the human soul. Whatever the cost, this is worth knowing: how, in the middle of life, nature is consolation, solace, friend, spiritual guide, and teacher.

  Bison herd on the Old Man On His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area.

  Acknowledgements

  One of my happiest moments with regard to my rural past came when I was reading in Swift Current and eight or nine people, all retirees, who had been my neighbours when I first went into the Divide-Claydon area to live in the mid-seventies, came to hear me. I found them still a warm-hearted, lively bunch, and I was very touched to see them. I thank them also for reasons that go back to when I first met them and heard from my husband the stories of their families and their land, and learned from the women their forbearance and quiet resolution.

  Juxtaposed with them are the urban people who in the late nineties began to move into Eastend. From them I saw in certain ways a re-enactment of my own efforts to come to terms with a local society that rarely bent to meet a newcomer halfway. They provided me with friendship and the return of an ease that I hadn’t felt in years. I thank all of them — those who stayed, and those who left — for this, and for bringing into such sharp focus the differences between rural/small-town and urban ways of seeing the world.

  I thank also the Nature Conservancy of Canada people, who saw the possibility in Peter’s vision, and who fell as in love with the land as Peter and I were. Of these, John Grant was the first. Others were Wayne Harris, who sadly died shortly thereafter in a farm accident; the inimitable Lorne Scott; Conrad Olson; and Sue Michalsky, the first project manager. The first of the NCC board to visit was Elva Kyle, and many donors, beyond the peerless Weston family, came, and Jack Messer, then of SaskPower, a pivotal player in the fundraising and planning. I know that I will wake in the night as those names I’ve forgotten from twenty years ago return to haunt me and I ask forgiveness. Without them there would be no Old Man On His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area.