I
think I am water. Fluid, solid,
vapour, always changing, perpetually moving. Water is both enigmatic and vital to life; does water
understand itself? Molecular, the
essence of everything alive; terrifying, the tsunami that takes life; gentle,
the rain that gives life, lying in lakes and flowing through rivers, gathering
in secret underground caverns. Two
molecules, hydrogen and oxygen, in an electron dance.
Water
shouldn’t be a liquid; that is, not at normal temperatures. Everything around it on the periodic
table, like nitrogen, or phosphorus, produces a gas when combined with
hydrogen. But not oxygen; the
positive charge of the hydrogen and the negative charge of the oxygen produces
such a strong electrical attraction that the molecules, instead of repelling
each other, cling tightly. It
shouldn’t be a liquid. But it is.
Water
runs through my life like a stream, tumbling from the mountains to lie in
shadowed pools, rippling down under sun and wind where, with the brilliance of
diamonds, it dazzles the eye; limpid at dawn and deep, still and watchful at
night with its necklace of stars or shroud of cloud. Rising to heaven as a breath, falling with the weeping of
clouds or soft feathers of snow, stinging barbs of beautiful ice.
The
zodiac, the circle of animals which the ancients thought to govern our lives
from birth to death, tells me I am an earth sign. Born in May, Taurus the bull is one of the three earth signs
that cluster around the vernal equinox.
Earth, water, fire and air, these are the four elements that were
believed to be the primal ingredients of everything, although I believe the
Chinese added a fifth, that of metal.
The earth signs and the water signs are supposed to be mutually
beneficial, the one fertilizing the other and bringing stability and life. But it is wrong.
Strangely
simple and weirdly complex.
Changing with the weather, clinging tightly to its relationships. I think I am water.
Water
is essential to all known life. My
life, certainly. I was not born in
water, not the first, physical birth when I was pushed, yellow-faced and
wailing, into the world; but water is purifying and the means of rebirth. Don’t take my word for it; certainly
the Christians think so, as the take care to baptize their children and
followers. So do the Hindus, the
Jews, and the Sikhs. In Islam, the
dead or washed in ritual baths which are meant, I suppose, to give a rebirth
into a new life. The Bible says
that “the earth was formed out of water and by water”. That’s nothing new; mythologies and
religions for time out of mind have believed that water and the world were
created together.
The
aborigines of Australasia believed (may still yet) that water was created at
the same time as the world; the Rainbow Snake, a spirit, symbolized the water
without which life could not continue.
It was rain, storms, waterholes, but most of all it was fertility and
creation of life. The female snake
was the creator; the male Rainbow Snake the transformer of the land. In Meso-America, the was Ttaloc, god of
rain, and his consort, Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of rivers, lakes and
springs. Mesopotamians had Enki,
the virile god of fresh water, whose realm was a vast ocean of water beneath
the ground, the existence of which was vital to life. Many native Americans hold that water came first, and only
an earth-diver bringing up a small amount of mud from deep below the waves
created the world.
They
say I could swim before I could walk.
I know this is not true, but I wish it were. It would give credence to my theory. Water had such and attraction that I
would play with it, pouring it from one old tin cooking pot to another for
hours. They would coo that I would
be a great cook some day, but they were mistaken; it was not the pots that
entranced me but the magic that flowed from one place to another, the sound of
it splashing, the spray that would touch my face as I sat on the grass on a hot
summer’s day, in the shade, with my pink bonnet – no, yellow, I am sure it was
yellow, it is so hard to say for certain in these old black and white photos –
and diapers, a smile on my face and a yell for anyone who tried to take the
pots and the magic away.
I
remember toddling down to the waters edge, unseen, down the water-steps and
onto the rocky shore, wanting to be embraced by the cool green ripples that
lapped my feet. I plunged in, only
to sink, infuriatingly, stone-like, being pulled out by a frantic parent. Two things happened at this time; a
small green picket fence was erected between the lawn and the sharp drop to the
water’s edge (although for some reason, they did not bar the steps), and I was
given swimming lessons. I had no
fear. Unlike others, who live as all
of us do on this planet, this blue-green planet of mostly water, who fear
water, I had none.
I
spent hours in the water, once I had passed the waterwing stage, paddling on a
small Styrofoam surfboard in the shallows of the lake, watching minnows dart
over the sand and seaweed, even netting a few in my small net, but only for an
instant before letting them go.
Dip, capture, observe, release, that was the routine. When I got older I would dive from our
float in the lake to the bottom and, through the murky green, see mussels on
the bottom and sometimes glimpse a bigger fish, maybe a trout, flicking through
the seaweed.
I
didn’t always live at the lake.
The fall, winter and spring or more directly, the school year, were
spent in the city. The community
pool saw me frequently, either in lessons or in play, holding my breath on the
bottom as long as I could, doing backflips, or jumping of the diving board into
the deep pool. Its chlorinated
depths and strange blue colour could never completely replace the cold,
slightly fishy attraction of the lake.
Later,
our house had a pool, a big one that languished, unused, when we made our way
to the cottage in the summer to the living water of the lake. In the spring, when the ice had melted,
rotted and then sunk, we would put our toes in and pull them back, sharply, at
the cold, longing for the warm currents of summer. May 24th, the official start of summer in Canada,
would see only slightly warmer temperatures, but I would plunge in
nevertheless, running to shore blue and shivering, to the warmth of my brightly
coloured towel, the colour of which was as warm as the looped cotton. It was a rite of passage from one year
to the next, my own personal fiscal year.
Every year, I was the first of my family to swim and the last one, come
September, to stop.
In
between, I was a fish. In the
early morning I would wake, often well before the rest of the family, and slip
into the cold, still, early morning water, hoping the sun would strike the raft
with a warming ray as I sat there.
In the afternoon, the lake would be alive with people and boats,
swimming, waterskiing, even parasailing.
It was exciting when, once a year, a big paddle-wheeler would come down
the lake, a relic of the distant past.
On
sunny days, I would alternate between the latest book (progressing from Nancy
Drew to Anne of Green Gables to The Lord of the Rings and beyond – I struck out
on James Michener’s Chesapeake when I was only 12, being wholly overwhelmed by
the massive prose, but it was an ambitious attempt) and the water, getting a
terrific tan in the process. In
those days, which I recall with a fear of skin-cancer, I hope that the sun was
less strong and the ozone stronger, but these are the cares of today. I didn’t know what ozone was in the
early 1970’s, and I am sure no-one else in my life did either. I would slather myself with baby
oil, put lemon-juice in my hair, and turn myself over on my towel at twenty
minute intervals to avoid getting burned.
Inevitably, I was dark brown by early July, showing brilliant white
patches of skin where my bathing suit straps covered my skin. My mother called me her Little
Indian. Things were simpler in
those days.
On
rainy days I would sit on the screened verandah, wrapped in a towel or blanket,
and read on the old red couch that sat outside the living room, wedged between
the chest freezer, the fishing tackle, the water-skis and old life
jackets. I do not know its
provenance, nor, so many years later, its demise, but it was a throne of
imagination to me as I devoured books on its damp and somewhat prickly
cushions. The best time for rain,
though, was at night. I would lie
in my bed, in my squashy purple sleeping bag if the bed was still too damp from
the winter, in the room I shared with my two sisters, and listen to the rain on
the roof. It wasn’t a tin roof, so
it wasn’t a loud, ringing thunder, but the roof was close overhead, and rain
would thrum compellingly on the wooden shingles while the drip from the
overhang played counterpoint outside the open window; the smell of rain, that
peculiar, elusive and yet unmistakable scent, drifting in. The train would rumble by on the other
side of the lake, its whistle almost the last thing I would hear before falling
into the careless sleep of the young.
Today I live where I can sometimes hear the train whistle blow, and it
has an immediate comforting effect on me, twenty-five years on. How strong is the memory of sounds and
smells.
Barring
sunny, hot days, my favourite, almost perversely, were the stormy days. There was a certain recipe that must be
followed to achieve perfection; it must be afternoon; it must be windy,
stormily so, and there could be some rain, although not blinding. There could not be lightening, as there
so often was, as the storms that whip down that valley in the summer often
bring lightening and thunder (that was best for night, when the electricity
would go out and we would site by the windows and watch the purple sheet
lightening blaze across the valley and light the mountains with witchlight),
and if there was lightening, then my mother would not allow me to throw myself
into the whitecaps as I loved to do, battling the lake, diving over and around
and through the waves, letting them buffet me. I would pretend I was a porpoise or a dolphin, leaping over
the waves and crashing back down.
Under the waves, there was a calm, a not-quite-silence and an absence of
the physical forces that raged just above.
In
the late afternoon, any wind that had come up earlier in the day would calm,
leaving the lake, if it were sunny, a brilliant canvas of moving sparkles. I would sit on the old swing and watch
it, swinging as high as I could kick myself, the smooth silver of the old board
beneath me, holding the rough sisal rope tightly between my hands. The swing terrified my mother, who was
afraid the two old trees that held it would break with my terrific pendulum
swings, but they were more than a match for my under one hundred pound
body. I would sit and swing there
for the hour before dinner, and once dinner was over, would be back until I
felt woozy. The water was
fascinating to watch from here, the water and the life it supported. Boats, especially sailboats, were
magical at this time of day; the sails would be outlined on their bed of liquid
diamond, a darker triangle of shadow scudding across the waves. Closer to shore, ducks would paddle by,
diving occasionally for something in the shallows. I would swing and dream about letting go, over the water,
like a rope on a tree, but this never happened; the swing was a good ten feet
from the edge of the water, even if there hadn’t been a row of willows
overhanging the lake at that point.
When we were very small, there had been a rope tree, over at the
sandhill; we would swing out from the trunk of the big pine tree, let go, then
tumble all the way down on the soft yielding sand as far as the water if we
wanted. I remember when the lot
was sold, to make way for condominiums; we were running down the road for the
sandhill when suddenly I was stopped by a ream of barbed wire I hadn’t seen. Luckily, the wire cut me just above and
just under my eyes, and not actually in my eyes, although it hurt well enough
as it was. It was the first time
that the world as I knew it altered perceptibly. Barbed wire when there should be none; no access to our sand
hill, for it was of course ours, by right of use and exploration. Or so I thought.
We
had a shower, but I disdained to use it.
Instead I would shampoo my hair as needed in the lake (again, it was a
simpler world; I did not know about the affects of detergents in the water
supply), diving to dissolve and disperse the suds. The Uncle would soap his chest hair, not having much on top,
and, after doing his Abominable Snowman impression, would also submerge. As a child I thought it funny. Later I would notice the water pipe on
the bottom of the lake from where we got our tap water and think about the
years of Breck and Body On Tap that went into the water with some concern. As we kids we would drink the tap
water, unconcerned about taste or the microbes that would scare our
Brita-filtered world today. But we
also had a pump, one that we shared with our neighbours, which pumped out fresh
spring water at the top of our hill.
Sometimes
it was my job – more often than not, but I was an obedient child – to take the
old plastic water jug and fill it from the pump. I could only do this once I was big enough (about 6 or 7, I
think) to work the handle and prime it before the water would spout out,
hitting a small stone basin if I didn’t catch it in the jug, and running over
the ground – patchy grass – and down the hill towards the neighbour’s
house. It never got there, of
course, the stream of water being quite small and the house quite far
away. I liked to go to the pump;
it meant that I would take the jug, then make a flying leap over the grate in
the floor (the cottage was an old one, built right over the ground, and had a
vent in the hallway the purpose of which was, I think, to help eliminate damp
and mold from rotting the floor), run to the screen door, which would open and
shut with a characteristic creak, swing, bang!, leap up the two stone steps
under the overhang that held the sign saying “WestWinds” (the name my
grandfather had given the place), up the path that went up the hill next to
some of my favourite trees, the three small crabapples that sat next to The
Aunt’s washing line, past Snore Haven (where my grandparents slept, a small
one-room cottage with two beds and a hot plate), past the woodshed and finally
to the crest of the hill and the pump.
The top of the hill was open from the many trees that hugged the rest of
the property, and was usually sunny; so sunny that The Uncle used to call it
Miami. As a child, I didn’t know
what that referred to, and if anyone asked I would have told them that it
simply meant “the sunny place on the hill”. There were a preponderance of ant-hills here, small ones,
for the tiny black ants whose population was probably in the millions. The pump sat almost in the full
sunshine of Miami, but not quite.
Once full and the small bushes next to the pump had been watered (many
plants grew poorly in the dry and sandy soil of the Columbia Valley) I would
make the journey in reverse, more sedately to avoid spilling the water, until
the water was safely ensconced in the fridge.
One
of my favourite things to do was watch my mother do the laundry. I loved washing day. That she hated it, I didn’t know until
later; I thought the old wringer washer (obsolete even then) was the last word
in marvelous. We would fill it
with a small green hose, bright green transparent plastic, and add the
clothing. It would smell humid and soapy, and mother would wipe the
perspiration from her forehead with the back of her arm, and sigh. She would let me hold the hose as the
tub filled; the green plastic warm in my hand as the warm water streamed
out. I felt as if I were doing a
service to my family by helping with the laundry; I see now that I was probably
an added worry, an annoyance or a nuisance to a hassled mother with three small
children to care for. The wringer
was the coolest part; once the clothes had been agitated and the white enamel
tub drained, the water had to be squeezed from the clothing. The wringer swung over the tub, and my
mother, more than once, had to prevent my hands from going through the wringer
too. The clothes would be hung on
the line to dry with wooden clothes pegs.
Ours was a square line, with several strings forming a square on a metal
base, as opposed to the single laundry line of The Aunt’s on the other side of
the property. It was good if it
was hot, or warm and windy, because the clothes would dry fast; but if the wind
picked up and a certain cast to the clouds and sky came, that meant rain, and
we would hurry out to get in the clothes before they were drenched all over
again. If this happened, my mother
would swear; not rudely, but vehemently.
One got the picture at any rate.
“Sugar in a rag!” she would exclaim. I think it took me many more years than other small children
would have taken to figure out what exactly she meant by that; even as an
adult, I have an alarming propensity to the literal.
Water
levels would rise and fall with the seasons, and with the years. Some years would see the water level
rise almost to the top of our retaining wall, about seven feet, and the waves
would lap the grass at the edge of the lawn. I remember The Uncle taking a picture of my grandmother, on
her 80th birthday, and placing her at the edge of the retaining wall
where a wave came up, almost over, and splashed her in her pretty blue dress
with the pink carnation. Despite
this, the picture I remember has her smiling, her grey hair carefully coiffed
but her dress moving in the breeze.
At these times, when the water was high, I would overhear worried
conversations about the strength of the retaining wall, and what we should do
if the cottage were flooded, but the waters never rose that far, as if the wall
were the edge of its possibility curve; thus far, and no further, said a famous
general once, I believe. I loved
it, as it meant one could dive from the wall directly into the water, and pull
oneself out the same way.
Other
years the water was low, so low that there would be a small rocky beach once
you had descended the water steps, hard on the feet as you stumbled into the
water; in these years, The Uncle would pay the young brood of cousins to pluck
the stones from the sand, a penny a bucket, in the hopes of creating a sandy
paradise on our stretch of shore.
When later, in university, I was to learn about water currents, beaches
and storm beaches, I laughed at the optimism that had him pay even so paltry a
sum to change what would never change, never could change. It was all in the water. Every day that
we would clear tens upon tens of buckets, and he would drag in sand from the
sand hill across the road, the next day would see just as many small pebbles
and just as little sand as before we began the day before. But at five you don’t think of these
things; you think that ten buckets of pebbles will buy five pieces of chewing
gum from the store in the town, where the proprietor called you The Bubble Gum
Kids and would throw in an extra piece of double-bubble when you gave him your
dime. Today, if you saw a dime on
the ground, I bet you wouldn’t pick it up. I bet I wouldn’t either.
Have
you ever skinny-dipped? If you
haven’t, you will not know the delicious, sinful pleasure of water on
no-longer-hidden skin, the feeling that the world has changed, just slightly,
but what has really happening is that you are experiencing a shift in your
perception of the world. Cool wet
silk caresses skin hidden not by fabric but by darkness. My mother would, every once in a
while when the moon was blue, suggest that we go skinny dipping, and we, my two
sisters and I, would creep down to the shore in the darkness, our nakedness
covered by our towels, no longer screaming with colour but blank in the
dark. The towels would slide to
the ground and we would scamper into the water. As we got older, these episodes would only occur when the
older Boy Cousins were not there, although I doubt if I noticed at the
time. The small bugs that
congregate over the water at night would crowd our mouths and noses, and we
would inadvertently swallow one now and again. Turning on our backs, the stars crowded the sky, the thick
band of the Milky Way clearly visible, unlike in any town, the small white
circles of our breasts breaking the tension of the water. We would swim to the raft but not get
out, holding it as we treaded water and looked up. Occasionally we would see a satellite making its determined
and swift way across the heavens, and sometimes, as when we were at the right
time of season for the Leonids, shooting stars would blaze swiftly. Getting out was hardest as, cold and naked,
we swam to shore and mother would dole out towels too slowly for our
tastes. I remember getting caught,
at the age of sixteen, by the lights of a car at the public beach two cottages
down, as a car full of young men drove up, headlights flashing, preventing me
from swimming back to shore from behind the raft to the safety of my
towel. I know now that, at
sixteen, I should not have worried about being ridiculed for my young, strong
and lithe body, but shame is a powerful idea among us all.
I
remember the last swim I took in the lake. It was late summer, and there were rumours that the cottage
was to be sold. A family dispute
between my father and The Uncle. I
couldn’t quite believe it. I dove
under the waves, made warm by the August days, and felt the water slide by like
a baptism, a reaffirmation of life and love and promise. Little did I know it was a ritual
bathing of the dead, getting me ready for the next life. Life, phase one, was over.
Have
you ever seen water crawl up a straw without any visible force acting on
it? This is because water sticks
to itself, because it has what is known as cohesion. The water sticks to the sides of the tube, then pulls some
more of itself up on top, and the process is repeated until the water in the
tube gets to be heavy enough that gravity can pull it back down. Whoever said that blood was thicker
than water was right, but they likely did not take into consideration the
cohesion of water. It might not be
thick, but it is powerful for all that.
