There's a line between sterile nostalgia and the living breathing memory of something that is beautiful. When you think back on the things that make an impression on you, there's a reason that those moments have stayed with you over all the millions of intervening moments, most of which you couldn't recall if your life depended on it. Sometimes that moment stays with you with a pang of fear or pain, but thinking on it, perhaps from luck, I believe that most are impressions of some subtle consciousness, mundane beauty, and silence.
Almost exactly a third of a century ago, our parents bought the family cabin on the West side of the Rockies. I remember poking through the cabinets, exploring, odd pieces of furniture, mostly relics of the 60s and 70s, such as wagon wheel lights, a set of bull horns, the records left behind. The tv was black and white and got two channels, the rotary dial phone was disconnected.
In the sheds were odd sprinklers and tools that were different form those at home. Every shed was its own world of wonder. Jars of nails and paint, a bent hand saw, flyscreen, coils of cable. The man who owned it before us worked for the phone company and cable was his go to construction solution. In the boathouse was a big old glastron boat with sparkling gold paint, which winched creaking into and out of the Lake on a set of tracks that had been salvaged from the turn of the century copper mine on swansea, and apparently cost the previous owners a set of brakes.
On top of the boathouse was a patio with a shag carpeted bunkhouse. This became our clubhouse where we would drink oversaturated kool aid mix and listen to the radio or the hodge podge of old records, Steve Martin, Thriller, Abbey Road, Elton John, the Pretenders. There seemed to be only two radio stations, cbc and The Network, Sorrento Shuswap Salmon Arm. For some cryptic reason there were American and Quebec flags hung on the walls. I remember looking down off the railing on top of the boathouse, on a grey, windy day, watching the waves crash in the willows. Just watching. By accident I dropped the beloved toy sword Dad made me from a piece of wooden trim and a plastic venetian blind handle into the waves, it was swept under the boathouse, never to be seen again.
You noticed different bugs and plants on this side of the Rockies. Small blue dragonflies. Ospreys. Little water beetles scuttling about below the red will. Freshwater clams leaving inscrutable trails on the lakebottom. We went to the marsh and tried to catch bugs and frogs, garter snakes. The hillside was unconsolidated clay, lake bottom from the end of the last ice age, with sage, rabbitbrush. We fished off the dock in all weathers, and caught the odd pikeminnow. We could do that all day, 7 year olds in life jackets, rain or shine, casting off the floating dock. We went on lots of walks, down the road into the forest and down the steep hill to the little point with the willows, or the other direction to the hoodoos. In the forest there was a little pond where a spring pooled up, my dream was to stock it with fish. I took a minnow in a plastic milk bottle to the pond, but when I put it in it instantly died and sank to the bottom, it must have been the shock of different temperature or oxygen levels. The forest has mostly been bladed down in place of a new subdivision, and the mystery, for it was a thick brushy tangle, full of mosquitoes and hard to move through, has vanished too, and that's not just because I'm 40 now.
In the forest was a haunted house, which had been abandoned seemingly overnight, as there were piles of the Calgary Sun there and clothes on the hangers in the closets. The slab foundation had shifted and cracked, likely owing to some sort of spring. Dad told us that the 'Man with the Green Eyes' lived there, he was the ghost of a runner who had been hit on the highway, and was seen running early in the morning or late at night, with glowing green eyes, in his old, torn, grey tracksuit.
On both sides we had extended family cabins, and we began to put together the names and the community lore. This person was the best skier, this person had a cool car, this person is a super cyclist, this was the place to go for pizza or watch Hockey Night in Canada. We learned to first boogie board, then waterski on a mismatched pair of skis, behind our and the neighbours little outboard boats. It took a lot of falls, a lot of water up the nose, and a lot of flailing, but to be up... what a feeling.
We got to know our way around town, which at the time still had a big tree in the intersection at the end of main street, and a germanic flavour owing to a preponderance of German, Swiss, and Austrian immigrants. The Fishing Hut, a little fishing store in Athalmer, Dave's Book Bar, the Toby Theatre. I would look across at the mountains and imagine White Fang.
The essence is all the same. Today I saw a red willow, and a grey lake, that is all, and from there to here.
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