Listen. My Dad, Wesley, can change a spare tire within 20 minutes, catch, clean, and cook a salmon, and help people to die in peace.
“You need to fill your life with more metaphor and mysticism.” Only he—minister, morning prayer, Celt Admirer, father, allo-parent, husband twice over, hospice volunteer, and son of Irish immigrants, born in a BC small town near a canal, a Sitka-spruced, Douglas-fir shadowed and misty place—would give me advice to find soulful stories.
Made up of variegated colours, sometimes he is yellow. His soul, his Hallelujah, moves towards me; sometimes he is blue, moving away, a west coast horizon decolouring to grey as the ferry steams from the Mainland. Although I see him in all these colours, the enduring and endearing music of creaking knees is my strongest sense memory of my father.
But, he is also a swimmer. Together, we have admired a stingray cruising over greasy brown fronds on a coral reef, swum naked in a big cold lake beside his hometown on Vancouver Island, rode the surge waves in Acapulco, and clambered under a hot waterfall at a Québec spa. In the 70s, vowing to quit smoking, we swam a mile in a pool, and he was butterflying with gusto.
These days, we read Dad’s favourite, the recently deceased Irish poet Seamus Heaney, for whom nature answers moral dilemmas, whose poems are tender to the natural world. For us, too, nature signifies: the granite truth, the ancient peat, the solemnness of trees, the immutability of roots, the innate goodness of streams, with their show of murk and bright splashes.
If we read a novel—La Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, or The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (woman acts as priest for years) by Louise Erdrich—we talk Mexican revolutionaries, Rivera and Kahlo, Cortes, a “conqueror,” Jesuits, Native American reserves, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation process (my father’s church has given millions), Thomas King’s welcome sarcastically named “dead, live and legal Indians,” women priests, gay priests, or same sex marriage. So the conversation ebbs and flows. Sometimes we talk about poetic metaphors. But, I am disturbed by stories as glittering diamonds for the taking: Canadian natural gas, preserved dinosaurs, glacier-fed streams, thousands of fish spawning, all of our clichéd treasures. I dispute that we are alight. Are we really in a sacred bowl, cupped by the universe? Maybe. Maybe not.
If we are in the bowl, the bowl will tip. We will all equally pour out, equal.
All stories are prismatic. From one angle, a memory shows my father gifting the ten-year-old me Island of the Blue Dolphins (the Aleutian woman living alone on the island) and Dream of the Blue Heron (the Chippewa boy at home and residential school). The books became my talismans. One memory shows my father, an activist, escorting a sandaled me to the 1977 Berger Commission Hearings on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, in Vancouver, so that I could write my Grade 12 research paper. I explained why Thomas Berger recommended no gas pipeline through the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. I remember. Dad also paid me to mail out a newsletter to citizens concerned about watershed protection and mining in British Columbia and the Yukon.
On another face of the prism, I can see that Dad is such a Canadian man, a beer-drinker, a creaky-kneed, sweater-wearing, appallingly bad singer (I uphold this trait), who does not appear to own a tie, although he does have two or three ministerial stoles. As a teenager, I ironed his shirts, while he perched on the chesterfield without pause for Hockey. Night. In. Canada, its own allegory for men, ice, dark nights of the soul. The TV was loud then, much louder now. My father learned how to play poker from the loggers, “Here comes the lady!” Despite being in the hot sun all day, he loudly cheers at logger’s sports, “Watch this tough guy now!”
On yet another face of the prism, I see my father rising wet out of the Caribbean, seaweed on his head and speechifying, “I came not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.” The white coral sand glinted. The warm waves lapped. Laughter lapped from my mom and siblings, too. Oh, Dad.
Since that was all there was on offer, he, an obliging gentleman, was known to sleep on sacks of corn in Central American refugee camps when helping there. Or, he would grab some shuteye, hunched on a bench in a clanging old jeep that is kicking up and drawing into the cabin a fine yellow Central American dust. The dust settles on his closed eyes. Inviolate, soldierly, he sleeps as a strong human does.
Turn the prism. My father is still and always a human.
What is a human? The philosopher Teilhard de Chardin argued that the Book of Genesis was not literally true, but an allegory like this piece of writing. De Chardin is most famous for saying that human beings are evolving and perfecting ourselves in a directional, goal-driven way, and that secular efforts are also getting us closer to Christaosis (maybe a state of grace). De Chardin said that we humans are not redeemed by the single act of divine intercession that is Christ risen from crucifixion and now mediated by rituals of the Catholic Church. What a relief. It is a wise concept to dispute that we need to practice in a particular time and place, with a particular man to mediate our relationship to any potential divine.
If we are evolving, isn’t appreciating diversity the Christaosis anyway?
My father is always ready to meet the divine, be embedded in family and community. Spiritual and ruminative and mindful and tender to nature, he also knows, tenderly, that land is not only a commodity.
Like anyone, he can appreciate the silky splash and resounding solitude after the blue heron swoops away. The landing of the heron on water and land, land, land.
To see this land, drive a few kilometres from Port Alberni and turn onto the Great Central Lake Road. The pilings of a building are still there, under water, another ghost town of BC. That is my father’s hometown, gone. He cannot claim it. He cannot convert it to home. It doesn’t belong to him.
One can convert to pacifism. It doesn’t take burning passion to become a pacifist as my grandfather did. One can drift that way, so that my teenaged father had to hide his rifle in his room and not speak of it. Because of an alleged Japanese submarine that fired a shell at Ucluelet, on the Island, my father and others formed the Great Central Lake Defence Brigade. (Dad was 15, the school janitor, a basketball player, an owner of a 30-30 Winchester rifle of which his father, the pacifist, disapproved.)
My grandfather had already lost his brother, my father’s namesake, another Wesley, in WWI. This Wesley was “in the war,” Second Lieutenant, 11th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, and is buried in Sanctuary Wood Cemetery, Ieper, Belgium. We can say, “He was in the war.” The information is so spare and unassuming. The commanding officer wrote to the family saying someone saw this Wesley “fall under fire” and when other soldiers tried to retrieve his body, all they found was a “German cap.” That is the story entire, an allegory for “take no prisoners; war is hell.” This Wesley’s dutiful, brotherly letters home to Ireland from France are in penmanship we no longer know. The letters were so functional and devoid of emotion, “There’s great talk of something big coming off on our front, but I’ve heard these talks so often that I am sceptical about our moving.” He stated, maybe with sarcasm, that events would “depend on the exigencies of the campaign.”
In the 30s and 40s, my grandfather, a machinist, worked at the Bloedel, Stewart and Welch sawmill at Great Central Lake, came home, ate potatoes, meat, and pie. Previously a pharmacist, but in that era a leader at Vacation Bible School, an organizer of community picnics, a woman who listened to the tears of other women (who had sons MIA in WWII), my grandmother was a grower of red roses and tiger lilies, and a baker of berry pies. She was a kind woman making a small difference. She knew the white-shirted Shantymen missionaries who went out to the logging camps to evangelize. In that small town of 65 families, there was no doctor or police officer, just the butcher who admired my teenaged father. My aunties claim all were friends: the assemblage of fishing families of Japanese heritage (people hauled away to the Slocan Valley despite an Ottawa protest by the mill supervisor), a few South Asian Canadians, a few white families, all immigrants that generation or the one before.
Of course, loggers are a feature story in such a town: they came to town dances from the camps, got drunk on Wiser’s Whiskey, smoked Player’s roll-your-own and picked fights with the sawmill workers. The teenagers, my Dad among them in the 40s, hung around the edges, out of the light, to watch these showdowns. “Fight at the dance!”
All that time, the Nuu-chah-nulth were there, too. Over the path, down the road, across the strait, on the inlets, on the lakes, antecedent, giving their children everything.
Everyone was of the canal, the coast, together, deer hunters, salmon fishers.
Would my grandparents have known about “prisoners” at the residential school for First Nations children? They wouldn’t have thought of it that way, about culture lost and found, about children as captive, about assimilation, a word probably not used in those days in such towns. Would my grandparents have known what went on in the shared forest and down the road near “Port”? Irish immigrants such as my grandparents would see themselves as required to wash off all past, to put their heads down and work. Sorrow, my grandparents had their own and plenty.
Their children were wild. After he inhaled his Player’s to the hot filterless stub and slogged up Thunder Mountain with his Winchester, Dad would sit still for two hours up wind, waiting for the deer to return from drinking at the watering hole that reflected their proud tree branch antlers, their Meares’ Island mysticism, their spirit brown eyes. My father killed seven in his lifetime, one single-handedly. He shared the deer organs with the ravens, an act of a true Coastal Rain Forest guy. For the deer he shot by himself, he had to haul it home as a bloody cloak over his shoulders. “Best hunter!” exclaimed the butcher as he skinned the deer and set aside the roasts for the town widows. (When my father left Great Central Lake, he never hunted again, and only fired shots in target practice while training for the RCMP.)
My father was wild.
Dad knows how to be still and silent, maybe from climbing Thunder Mountain, picking berries and flowers for his mom, or smelling the cedar in its true place and time. I broke my hand once, while camping with him. He drove me to Princeton Hospital, and then after my hand was set in a cast, sat with me at a picnic table under some Ponderosa Pines, just listening to the wind. He said nothing. Once I had blood poisoning and he took me to the hospital for treatment. He let me bring my doll. I was so nauseous and rattled after my daily antibiotic shots, that Dad would take me down to the seawall to sit and watch a green sea roll by. Dad, a doll, me. He said nothing.
It can be exhausting to have a silent parent who is up every morning, thousands of mornings, greeting the morning, praying, reading, reflecting. Dad is a Father, ministering. Is there a pacifist Thomas Merton book that my father, the Father, has not pondered? Does my father not sleep? Sipping café con leche in a jardin, the jade a glossy green against the cloudless sky, sipping cabin coffee while sitting in a raw wood Adirondack chair, pulled to the edge of a creek so sunlit that each round stone in the creek bed shone like a loved child. My father, there he was—first up, first outside.
I have received ongoing religious instruction although it never takes. I followed my Dad—who then worked for the Anglican Diocese of Belize, and was a minister at St. John’s Anglican Cathedral—over the green scum in the Belize street from the rectory (our home) to this church. In his white gown and orange stole, Dad proffered the chalice: “He has risen.” The day before, giggling, I had secretly climbed the steep ladder to the bell tower, with my brother too, laughing and rushing. From our black friends, my brother and I (white) learned contempt for the British soldiers, still holding Belize as a colony.
We were wild. This was our place.
As a young family, we travelled to the Mayan temple of Atlan Ha. Recently, Dad and I went to the Mayan display at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. The Mayans were bright, star readers, writers of current affairs, and agriculturalists. Their past was displayed in beautiful dioramas and artefacts. The present Mayans were represented by some photos of cherub-cheeked indigenous Guatemalan kids, probably high on coffee, land poor, school poor, money poor. They were smiling “Dead Indians” in the sense that King means: clichés. My father and I sadly shook our heads at the photos.
Once, Dad led me into the sacristies of a giant European cathedral, peering through glass at old host in gold host holders, gold chalices, and stoles, a history of rituals that he could read. The cathedral was a knife through my indigenous-favouring, Latin America-favouring heart. But my father, the Father, after one more room of gilt-framed art, deadpanned, “The wealth; maybe they could send some back to Peru?” Oh, Dad, if only.
In the caliphate at Cordoba, Spain, Dad and I walked through the forest of columns. We peered into the mihrab (the niche that amplifies the words of the Iman). We finally understood that the arches of stone inside the rectangles were meant to radiate both energy and stillness—the equilibrium. Both the story and the stillness—just like my father.
The penitent stories of the burnt world are the same: a residential school, the Anglican liturgy, the Supreme Court. There is often an apology. Someone gets between all of us and the (maybe sacred) forests.
It is no secret that “The biggest problem in the world today is fundamentalism.” By this, Dad means Christian, Islamic, and Jewish puritanical thought and action—the concept that these so-called holy books are the direct word of God, not interpretable, and are the source of the highest law, requiring obedience. Exclusion, hate, or murder will come to those who do not obey. I exclude myself without apology.
Isn’t the cure for fundamentalism a proliferation of diversity? See First Nations’ artist Shawn Hunt’s postmodern painting—the raven sitting on top of the Campbell’s condensed clam chowder soup. The story? Shawn Hunt has combined Bill Reid’s sculpture (the sculpture so Canadian, so famous it is on our money) showing that when the world started, the raven was there, releasing the first men from the giant clam shell. Mr. Hunt has layered the story of the world’s beginning with Andy Warhol’s contemporary pop art: the Campbell’s soup cans, lovingly painted depictions of mass-produced, everyday objects. A spoof.
The cure for fundamentalism is the spoof, the pastiche, the layers, the two-spirited, the diversity. Isn’t diversity the real Christaosis—or whatever the unchristian equivalent of that concept is? Let us encourage the multibranch hecticness of evolution, the straight, bent, fissile, prismatic, generative. See the black hawthorn berry, the red salmon berry, the elders, the infants, the evolving First Nations, the princesses, also single parents, also young, also Okanogan resort developers those who cannot be labelled, those who are not time’s father, those who seem to live outside of Western time.
How can nature create or heal fundamentalism? Fundamentalism is literalism, a human conceit that then says these are divine artefacts to which we must listen. I would rather learn to read the stories of the Mayan current affairs carved in glyphs on door arches long ago. Or, see the petroglyphs thousands of years old of animals on rock walls near the Island lake my father loved.
Why can’t the salmon fishing, deer hunting, whale tales, Grandma’s blackberry picking, the good and the bad of rural life be everyone’s story if we are evolving to biodiversity and acceptance? May we look back in a hundred years and see the “British Columbia” way of life, as a story of family and community but also of an evolving understanding and cherishing of Nature. Let’s model early morning humility and tenderness to every tree. May there still be cedar and cedar’s children, more idealism, less cynicism. Just like Dad, earnest, smiley.
The bowl is tipping. We might pour out.
Many times, my father swam in his 13,000-year-old lake on Vancouver Island. Daydreaming, I have also swum in my father’s cold lake. And, while I kayaked over the teal and brown shadows, the ghosts hummed dreamily and sweetly below. Blue dragonflies skimmed the surface.