entre place

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I am whipping through the French countryside at 316 km/h on the second level of a TGV train bound for München with a slight headache from the boxed Bordeaux that brought me to the end of last night in Paris. Salzburg awaits me at the end of this jointed track and I remind my tongue the pronunciation of bitte, danke, ein bier, ja. The woman in the seat across the aisle one row ahead scrolls through blurry photos of Notre Dame on her giant Samsung. It is Sunday afternoon and the weekend is winding down. Germans return home from France with Perrier and macarons. A toddler bounces down the aisle with the Eiffel tower embroidered on his round, shirted belly and I watch for the border, overgrown now, I’m sure, and hatched with footpaths.

From this angle, there’s little difference between the two places. They share currency, a workforce, transportation networks, brand names and franchises. They both have a surprising number of green trees and valleys of puckered lush bush hidden between hills and small mountains. They both have vineyards and cute farm houses with new lambs frolicking in the fields outside. They have a likeness that changes ever so gradually, even at this speed. Yet the announcements repeat in three languages. English is the token given to ensure that everyone “else” can understand what is going on, everyone who lacks the entitlement to the land that goes along with knowing its tongue.

Like a good scotch, language needs time to work out the nuance of its fire, and this happens best is a barrel of isolation. Over the ages prior to our own, the earth was littered with such barrels. France and Germany–though neighbours–each developed their own unique flavour. When we learned how to fly, we also had to learn how to communicate with the distinct parts of ourselves. Esperanto was a nice idea–a blended language like a smooth Johnnie Walker–but with only a handful of native speakers and few others choosing to pick it up in their free time, it hasn’t risen to the fore as its inspired creator hoped. I’m not sure how English got the winning bid, though I imagine it had a lot to do with money and power, and little to do with equal representation.

Over the past month, I’ve had many conversations about language–all of them in English–with folks from Spain, Argentina, France, Ireland, Russia and Norway. Today, I wait through the German, then the French, before I am welcomed to have a drink at the bar in car fourteen. I am grateful, because I am thirsty and seven hours is a long time to spend on a train without a bit of a buzz. I spy again over the shoulder of the woman with the Samsung as the child with the Eiffel tower embroido-tattoo comes around for another pass. They are each taking something home with them, something to prove that they were elsewhere, even if elsewhere is looking more and more like here.

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turret fort: la petite cathédrale

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the Seine kisses the brow of her banks, strokes the underside of chin, lobes of new green foliage gaze up from beneath her swirling. the sound laps at the doorway, floods the air in the room. new pools emerge between grass blades on the path, daisies stretch and twist away.

bit by bit, the water is rising. it has swallowed the floor of the wash house and chased the ants inside. ivy climbs up the stone exterior, across the window glass. a cuckoo calls alarm. the line marked 8 now hidden, the darkened metre creeps up to 9.

step from grass to water on a fluid avenue. whirl away to the flooded Ash grove where timbers frame the mist reflected, hung and dampening the boughs high above. past a choir of willows in mourning, a wake for her decorated passage.

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bits & bobs

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The difference between a good trip and a bad trip often comes down to a handful of bits and bobs, small things that keep a body comfortable in the unpredictable new environments that it passes through. The neck pillow, the travel size toiletries, the umbrella, the raincoat and the perfect pair of walking shoes are a few that come to mind. Of the items on this short list, the pair of comfortable walking shoes is perhaps the most important. This is also the item I have had to do without over the last few weeks. Instead, I’m squeezing the last sloppy kilometers out of my most versatile and sensible black boots, turning a numb sole to their less than ideal fit, and a blind eye to their ratty leather (shoe shopping, anyone?).

As for the rest of these items, I’m more than adequately prepared this time around, a fair consolation for the situation with the shoes. My MEC taupe brown raincoat blends nicely into almost every assemblage of clothing I’ve carried here, plus it rolls into a compact lump no bigger than a bottle of champagne, which makes for easy packing. The pocket umbrella has already saved me twice in the late-arriving Spring of the British Isles and is small enough to fit in my purse just in case. My new buckwheat neck pillow has brightened my morning more than once, particularly my arrival DSC00523in Paris after the overnight coach from London (my neighbour, on the other hand, slept with his forehead resting on the rough carpet of the headrest in front of him). Yet the most delightful little bobs of this journey so far are certainly the no-spill 100ml squeeze tubes I picked up at U.N. Luggage before leaving. It’s here that I’ve packed my (essential) purple toning shampoo, my favorite hard-to-find volumizing conditioner, and my PH balanced face wash – an extremely difficult item to source abroad without a knowledge of the local cosmetics scene. These little “Go Toob” gems have a flip snap closure and a spill-free nipple that keeps my toiletries case clean and dry and also allows me to use just the right amount of product without wasting any precious milliliters.

Gone are the days of frizzy hair and dry skin, of soap spills in my make-up and airport security toiletry confiscation. Here are the days of dry walks through rainy cities, sleep en route, and reliable personal hygiene. These little bits and bobs make the road a little more like home, and the journey just a wee bit smoother. Tomorrow, I’ll be packing it all up again and leaving my retreat in the French countryside for a whirlwind night of forts, music and open galleries in Paris before heading to Salzburg on Sunday. The shoe shopping will have to wait.

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bodily apprehended

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It is different this time. Most notably there are new chairs in the sitting room of the cottage and there is wireless internet. The kitchen has a new cooker. The exchange rate is not as good as it was last year, and the temperature is lower. The sea is the same. Green in the sunlight, smoke blue in cloudshade. Gulls still use the wind to hover in place over the rocks that break the tide. The North Sea glitters with whitecaps. Kelp and shellfish darken the shore and pools of tidal life drown and surface twice daily with the ocean’s wet breathing.

Last time I was here, almost a year ago to the day, I was actively searching for Alexander Elrick in annals, microfiche films and the graveyards that surround this small sea/farm village. Alexander was the twin of James, who was the first of the Elricks to make the TransAtlantic crossing to Canada. After several years working in Buffalo and Toronto as a roof slater and tinsmith, James acquired the south half lot 5, concession 5 in Flos County, near  Barrie, Ontario. His brothers George and William followed shortly after, as did James Sr. and the boys’ mother, Ellen. Alexander stayed behind in Rathven with his wife Ann, and worked out his days as a blacksmith, shoeing horses and building wheels for carts and wagons. He never followed his family, never left home. As I scanned the parish records and graveyard registries with the whirring company of the Buckie Library’s microfiche reader, what I was really looking for was an answer to the two-fold why? directed first at James and the rest of the family: why leave your home, your culture, your context – everything; and the secondary question to Alexander: why stay? There are enormous gaps between the records that branch from “The Elrick Family Tree,” gaps that can only be filled with imaginative inference through an understanding of the culture of the past. Did they farm in the hills or fish on the shore? Did they own their land or were Canada emigration L_tcm4-563947they tenant farmers? What were the incentives of emigration? Bit by bit, I was able to collect enough local knowledge to put together a possible answer to those questions.

The first, why leave?, is perhaps the easier question to answer. Opportunity shines brightly when you are poor, as the Elricks of Rathven likely were. Many of the farms were owned by Lairds, and the hope of advancement was slim to none on the rocky, windswept soil of the Moray Coast. In 1888, £4 paid your passage from Glasgow to Halifax (if you wanted to go to Australia, passage was free). The promise of free land and the buzz of possibility that characterized the colonial period made the decision, for many Scots, a relatively easy one. Why the hell not? might have even be a better question at that point.

My question for Alexander was a much more personal one, and as such, it’s a matter of whimsy to find an answer. I like to think that he stayed because he was in love with Ann Shivlan and content in his blacksmith’s apron. Perhaps he was eager to carve an identity for himself apart from his ambitious twin brother, James, whose leaving was perhaps a break in the clouds. Maybe he was simply content with life as it stood and loved Scotland too much to leave it. When I did find him on the last day of my stay, it was a relief to sink onto the uneven soil in the cool shade of the simple, granite stone that marks his family’s bones, to rest on the one square metre of this country that I could rightly call home, and let these questions and their possible answers flutter through my mind.

This time, I am here with a different task: to dwell, to perceive, to record the specificity of this place and find the interstices where a heritage of sound, sight and texture may be mined from the locale. I have come to understand that home need not be inherited, it may be founded. That rights are inconsequential without direct experience. That home is a bodily apprehended concept. Last year, this place was mine only so far as I could trace my lineage. I only belonged on the soil between fresh air and the bones of Alexander; everywhere else was accessible to me only through the toy lens of the tourist experience. This time, I enter a place of past perceptions where I have a store of local knowledge and experience with the land and the people. The glitz of foreignness has worn off and left the place simply as it is, a small fisher/farmer village on the edge of the island, lodged between the dim past and the glittering North Sea. An end of the road for most, but a beginning of the road for me.

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fort in the burn: after Robert Burns

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“How pleasant thy banks and green vallies below,

Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;

There oft, as mild Ev’ning sweeps over the lea,

The sweet scented birk shades my Mary and me.”

 –from “Afton Water” by Robert Burns

When James and Ellen Elrick left Scotland in 1862, they went to Elmvale, Ontario to  join their sons James, George and William who had emigrated over the six years previous. One brother, Alexander, stayed behind. Alexander was a blacksmith in the village of Rathven, likely dealing primarily with the shoeing horses and making and repairing wheels. He and his wife Ann went on to have three children, all of whom are buried with them in the Rathven graveyard. The Elricks were traditionally farming people, and there was a pronounced distinction DSC00279between the farmers and the fishers of the region. While there was nae animosity between the two groups, they wouldn’t have mixed much at all, except for business. With these thoughts in mind, I chose a site in a ravine overlooking an old footpath that leads from Rathven to the Buckie harbour, imagining this as a path Alexander would have taken, and even, perhaps, a place where he and his brothers would have played as children. I settle under the crowns of the trees and fumble with the digital recorder. The lilting gait of Scotland’s great poet knocks my words into a rhyme. Here are three little poems and a snippet of sound.

(one)

birds call cacophonous from the lush ditch of the burn

hush of black water lies under their fever

a passing car glides ‘round the bend up above

and the wake of split air whispers after.

(two)

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guarding the bank like slow-blinking sentinels

the black burn flows twist the village and the sea

the old tired footpath keeps apace without speed

I listen for the steps of the passing Alexander

home to the fields above the sea’s constant clatter

(three)

up the hill and down

to the net and to the plow

to the salt and to the peat

to the fish and to the sheep

to the ship and to the horse

to the kelp and to the gorse

to the rope and to the wheel

to the net and to the steel

to the bell and to the anvil

to the gulls and to the cattle

to the wind and to the rain

up the hill and down again

screen porch: ruin fort

screen porch: ruin fort

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something is about to change. bay clouds spot red, bulbs of peach bloom. the giddy grin of afternoon turns a nostalgic mauve, courting stoic at the slate edges of the farther shore.

a heron drums a pattern of shadows on the surface of the sea, wings tick their own quartz regularity above the pallid tidal spill. past the hushed gulls, the homeward crow.

grasses let go their green, ochre stone melts again to grey, my own skin turns a driftwood hue. I scratch at the page. snag the last few licks of colour with pen’s black tip.

when the waves come: they come now with ink on their brows, ink, the rocks they break upon, the air between the rubble of this ruined house, and ink, the undersides of gulls: flying east now, looking for the sun.DSC00321

...in their lumpy, squat embrace...

luggage portrait 1.0

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Home: what you take with you when you go

My best packing is completed in a series of drafts. Draft one, a sketch on notepaper: cartoon diagrams of the items to be packed and the cases intended for carrying them, with dotted lines connecting the two. This helps prevent that panic on the way into the terminal when I realize I have four carry-ons plus a purse (but only a small purse, so it doesn’t count). Draft two happens a week or so prior to departure, when my anxiety levels reach their peak and the list of details not yet sorted have forged an unhealthy bond between myself and the internet. This time I pack willy-nilly. Favourite clothes are pulled from the laundry basket – from my body, even – and I end up half-naked with an overstuffed suitcase containing three seasons of irreplaceable items, with four pairs of shoes lined up out front, pouting. When the day finally comes – the big day – the day before leaving, I commence draft three, the final draft, the draft I will be submitting to the airport authorities in the morning. Two piles of fresh laundry, one black and the other pale, sit on the floor next to my suitcase and I look from case to pile to the stack of 14 books I also intend to bring, and wonder how I am going to possibly limit the number of things that I feel are necessary to make me feel at home on the road.

This time around, I had something else to factor into the allotted 1 check + 1 carry-on + purse equation. That is, the fort. The fort is a sizeable accessory. How does one maneuver a fort through airports, train stations, coach aisles and the oft precarious paths to my chosen building sites? The case I used last year was an antique hard-body suitcase with leather binding over the seams – nice to look at, but it was effectively mangled in the arteries of Keflavík, Toronto and Winnipeg airports on my way to and from Iceland, and simply wouldn’t do this time around. So, prior to leaving, I stopped at one of my favourite little shops in Winnipeg, U.N. Luggage. Not only do they have a great selection of all things “travel,” they also have a penchant for aesthetically pleasing pieces that are as good-looking as they are practical. They’re where I bought my giant, blue, base model suitcase hours before leaving for a month-long writing retreat for which I had decided to pack my cumbersome ergonomic keyboard. They are also the place where I bought my Briggs & Riley carry-on-on-wheels, which I have grown so fond of, I couldn’t imagine ever being happy with another case its size. That is, until I met its counterpart, the Briggs to its Riley, the case which now houses the fort in a convenient, versatile duffle-turn-shoulder-turn-backpack bag with lumbar support.

Glasgow: Queen Street Station

The left luggage service is out of use. I have 2.5 hours to kill until my train departs for Elgin, where I’ll be picking up a car to drive the final 26km to the cottage near Rathven. It’s between drizzles outside, about 5 degrees, and the nearest left luggage service is at Buchanan Bus Station a handful of blocks away, uphill. I contemplate my options. Gauge the pain in my back and feet. Try to rub the exhaustion out of my eyebrows from the 33 hours I’ve been mostly awake in transit. I lug ol’ Briggs and Riley across the road instead, where a bench looks onto the morning foot traffic crossing George Square. I wipe a patch of bench dry with my sleeve and sit next to my luggage to watch the people go by.

Riley

After a few minutes, I realize I’m too tired to sit absentmindedly, so I take out the camera and start snapping photos of the workers mid-stride as they cross the red tarmac of the square. I turn to Briggs and Riley. Snap a portrait of the two of them, locked in their lumpy, squat embrace. We’re making do, but in truth, they aren’t intended to be stacked like this. Riley’s smooth, rolling agility is definitely luggage portrait 1.2hampered by Briggs’ length and weight. Lugging these two around, I feel a bit like the kid who got stuck holding hands with the least mobile of the grandparents. But it couldn’t be avoided. They are perfectly fitted for their carrying tasks. Briggs may seem to lumber as a duffle-stack buddy, but he has hidden talents. He is a transformer with lumbar support, while Riley holds everything else: those 14 books, 3 pairs of shoes (the fourth I’m wearing), clothing for a month abroad, and still underweight at the check-in counter.

I fear I’m turning into a bit of a luggaphile. I can see myself snapping photos of my suitcases at all the key tourist spots along the way. This is us in Grassmarket, this is us in the Marais, this our walk down the Mönchsberg where Riley tried to race me to the bottom…

“Are you traveling alone?”

“No, I’ve got my luggage.”