Meredith Quartermain - I, Bartleby

Inside the forest, our coats no longer balloon with wind, our eyes adjust to the shadowed cavern that spreads in all directions a hundred feet below the canopy. Half a kilometre away, other walkers drift along other trails; at one point several young men stand in a ring smoking pot. They disappear and we are alone again with sword ferns and trickling streams, looking at stumps bigger than four-door sedans. Thick ridges of their growth, laced with moss, still surge up over our heads from the forest floor — the remains of virgin forest. Some have holes in their moss-encrusted bark, reminding me of a story from Skwxwú7mesh chief Khahtsahlano about men cutting down a tree to carve into a canoe. They found a mask inside the tree. He told how they chipped into leaning trunks from both sides, driving in wedges till the weight of the tree pulled the tree down. If in the forest you find trees with holes some way up, these are likely test holes to find out whether the tree was hollow or rotting inside. Or, my sister said, they could be holes for the springboard notches where loggers rammed in planks to stand on while they worked their two-manned saws.

That day we do not find Johnson’s Cathedral Trees. They are not where one website says, where Tatlow Walk crosses a “Bridal Path,” or where another suggests at Bridle Path and Lovers Walk, which in fact never meet. We are lost. The trees are lost.

I wake at night wondering why I’m searching for them. Am I prey to the Lure in Stanley Park, a rock hidden not far from the Seven Sisters, where Johnson tells us the Sagalie Tyee imprisoned an evil-eyed woman who brought disease and sorrow, a rock so powerful it will drive to insanity or death anyone who goes near it? So evil was the power from this rock that the Sagalie Tyee protected people from it by transforming the kindliest, most benevolent of them into a grove of trees to stand as a shield. What if the shield was gone?

A few days later we return with more accurate directions. Although the wind is not as fierce, it is far colder, coming straight from the heavy snow on the Twin Sisters. Even under the canopy we must keep moving to stay warm, pausing just long enough to marvel, in our strange, scientific innocentness of the rock’s lure, at a harlequin pattern of moss coating the trunk of an enormous fir, or the cedar stalks thick as cathedral pillars split from a single root, or wolf-sized burls thirty feet over our heads. Delicate pink-budded shrubs grow out of virgin forest stumps. Or giants grow on these stumps who began their seedling life on a high platform left by the loggers, and now half swallow the old stump in writhing octopus roots.

At last we find seven stumps of the Seven Sisters and a scarred and smudged Plexiglas plaque showing faded grey trunks. Park officials felled the trees in 1956, believing they were a hazard to humans.

Bàba: the Chinese character for father.

Bù:the Chinese character for cloth .

Chow Lung:Chow Lung worked as a cook for ten years for British Columbia novelist Ethel Wilson (Mary McAlpine, The Other Side of Silence ).

Hăi: the Chinese character for sea .

If I, No Reply,: “the Christine who built a city for the giftless” refers to Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies. Italicized passages in the rest of the piece are from Pessoa’s July by Christine Stewart. “Underbridge” is Christine Stewart’s ongoing project that investigates life under Mill Creek Bridge in Edmonton. The piece is also thoroughly stained by The New Science of Giambattista Vico.

Māma: the Chinese character for mother .

Māo: the Chinese character for cat .

Mèimei: the Chinese character for younger sister .

Mén: the Chinese character for door .

Moccasin Box: Tekahionwake was Johnson’s Mohawk name. Stories about Captain Vancouver being greeted by Skwxwú7mesh people and about felling trees for canoes are from Conversations with Khahtsahlano , ed. Major Matthews, Vancouver’s first archivist. Annie Foster’s Mohawk Princess tells the history of the Tekahionwake machine gun.

Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt: the greyed-out character is Chinese for poetry . The others are root characters from L. Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification .

The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director: a taropatch is a type of ukulele with six or eight strings in four courses. Margerie Bonner described the one played by her husband as “a long-range uke with more strings and frets” (Perle Epstein, “Swinging the Maelstrom,” Canadian Literature ). Italicized material comes from published material by Malcolm Lowry and unpublished writings by Margerie Bonner Lowry. Unpublished writings by Margerie Lowry printed here by permission of SSL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Margerie Bonner Lowry.

Enormous thanks to Marion Farrant for her help in the final shaping of this book; her thoughtful suggestions were invaluable. Everyone at Talonbooks has been great to work with; many thanks to Kevin, Vicki, Greg, Ann-Marie, Les, Chloë, and Spencer. I want to also thank Daphne Marlatt and Rachel Blau DuPlessis for their feedback and editorial suggestions on an early version of “Moccasin Box.” And thanks too to Colin Browne for his feedback on “The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director.”

I am very grateful too for the support I received from literary magazines who published earlier versions of pieces in this book, especially Canada & Beyond for publishing “Manifesto” (titled here “If I noiselessly”); Capilano University Editions for publishing “Silence” in One More Once: for Pierre Coupey’s 70th; Dusie for publishing “Cloth Music”; Eleven Eleven for publishing “One cannot”; Endless Buffet Press for publishing “Waiters” in the Banff Writers’ Studio 2011 anthology; Event magazine for publishing “How to Write”; filling Station for publishing “I and Christine” (titled here “If I, No Reply, Write of Christine Stewart,”); Golden Handcuffs Review for publishing “Mén,” “Bàba,” “Māma,” “Mèimei,” “Māo,” “Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt,” and [forthcoming 2015] “Moccasin Box”; Prism International for publishing “If I, Bartleby,” “A Natural History of the Throught,” “Out of the dark,” and “How to converse”; and The Capilano Review for publishing “Bù” and “Hăi.”

The photographs in “Moccasin Box” were sourced online and are in the public domain.

I would also like to thank UBC Rare Books and Special Collections and especially Ken Hildebrand for his invaluable help in researching the Lowry Archive.

Endless thanks to Peter, always my first and most loving reader.

MEREDITH QUARTERMAIN is known across Canada for her depictions of places and their historical hauntings. Vancouver Walking (2005) won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; Nightmarker (2008) was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; and Recipes from the Red Planet (2010), her book of flash fiction, was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. In Rupert’s Land (2013) her first novel, a town girl helps a residential-school runaway in Alberta in the 1930s.