Cocktails in Cabin Ten

Coming soon, return to Regina. At the moment I'm about to meet Doug and Lou of NeWest Press in Edmonton to talk about my 14 Tractors, which they're publishing next year.

Got in yesterday from Emma Lake, where mozzies rule. There I touched up the tractors and wrote a series of encounters with people (Monroe, Woolf, Hill (E.G.), Fitzgerald (Ella), Kerouac, Brother Bernard (OSB) and, finally, Kroetsch) who showed up for cocktails in cabin 10 at Emma lake. When I realized that the first three were all alive at the same time, 1926 (when Monroe was born) to 1930 (when Hill died), then everyone had to be. For Kroetsch, born a year after Monroe, I had to narrow the range to 1927-1930. Now, any more entries to this series will have to have been alive those three years too. Barbara Stanwyk, maybe. Or Gary Cooper.

These are all people I admire.

SE 6-22-1

I notice how easily we turn what we like into stories. I keep coming back to, for instance, that visit to the farm. I realize this dates me, but the whole trip out there was self-affirming.

Now I'm tempted to blend impressions of that place with other ideas. I'll run into someone at work, chat in my office for a while, end up telling him about my trip to the Hill place northeast of Eyebrow. Everytime I tell such a story, it layers just a touch more, whether I want it to or not.

You see how tempting this whole process is. The pitfalls are obvious. So I'll say only this:

That yard--no matter how overgrown and unruly or the depth of the cowshit and junk--would give me, in writing, everything I wanted. (The discovery of a couple of clipboards full of receipts and correspondence, dating to 1919, doesn't hurt either.)

At the moment, the disjunction--between the hardships the Hills and everyone else experienced in the late '20s, early '30s, and the appeal of lilacs and peace while the land is still moist in early June to someone who doesn't have to make a living off it--is too damn wide.

the Hill place

"There's the Hill place," John Aitken said, as we drove north out of Eyebrow. "You can see it from all around." I'd met John a year ago, after I'd identified myself as a "son of an Eyebrow man" in introducing his daugher Hilary, "daughter of an Eyebrow man," at Luther convocation.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: it's a dry, stoney place my family left in '30 when E.G.Hill died and his eldest daughter took the younger kids and her sick mother down to Mazenod, where she (Maude, the daughter) taught school. My dad, also a schoolteacher, had left by that time. Alex Foulston bought the Hill farm, as it's still known, from the land company in 1949; his son owns it now. The yard, abandoned, serves as winter shelter for Foulston's cattle. The house E.G. built in 1917 still stands, although no one has lived there since the elder Foulston died in '92. Everything is falling down; the yard and outbuildings, even the house itself, are filled with junk.

But what a gorgeous location, the crest of a hill giving views for miles north, east and south. Dad rarely spoke of this place. I think life was too hard, and/or his own father too hard, to merit remembering. During a few good years they did well enough to buy a new threshing unit--long ago scrapped, with dozens of other pieces of machinery, out back of the barn--and a crawler tractor which Dad, age 15, drove to the farm from Moose Jaw (a 15-hour trip by tractor). But by 1930 it was done.

E.G., his wife Alice, and their son Leonard who died in the flu epidemic are all buried in the Eyebrow cemetery. Their farm is visible for miles, as I said. This morning back in the city I can still see it.

This Morning

In a section of their own called "Long Story Short" or dispersed among five other sections of a manuscript called Natural Causes--six Stan Still songs will go one way or the other. But's that for later, after I tell you about the potential tenants' revolt here in my apartment building.

Apparently what is happening is that my zealous pursuit of rock dove eradication has multiplied their presence on other people's balconies. The balcony straight north, for instance, presents a new skyline: pile of dung next to the barbecue.

Just now when I threw my bag of household garbage into the dumpster, I heard a voice coming from any of five half-open windows or balcony doors. "Hey buddy. Carry your share of the pigeon load, why don't you."

("Rock doves," some other voice yelled, correcting the first. "But I agree about the load.")

It's getting a bit tense. Anyone I meet on the stairs looks at me like I'm the sherrif or something. And all because I've kept my mornings free of rock doves and their cooing, so that I may better hear the busses idling loudly across the alley.

A Page of Family History

Neither my sister Susan nor I, browsing through some family histories last weekend, remembered knowing that our grandfather's parents and 3 siblings were buried in Regina. None of them had lived much of their lives there. But we found Robert and Mina (short for Jemima), the parents, with one of their sons, added 25 years later, buried right beside them.

Like all families, ours carries a number of oddities, too many to mention here (except for the tall guy named Shorty).

I've been thinking it might be fun to explore the stories, maybe give them to Stan Still, a character I've visited lately. I want to keep the garb of fiction in full swirl if do get at those stories--that a nod to my sense that maybe I was a tad too free with family stories in pieces in My Human Comedy.

Fiction or not, most them are rural in setting. I suppose I'd risk tripping on nostalgia or other forms of dogma if I or Stan went on and on about buns, roads, countertops--all of it coated with dust.

So the thing to do, maybe, is start at the gravestones, work back.

afternoon rock saturday dove

Barring catastrophe, this will be my last rock dove entry. I'm about to declare my place cured.

Still, earlier today I spotted--at an angle of about 100 degrees left of where I'm looking right now--a familiar shadow: rock dove 134b2, landing on my windowsill. He was scrawnier than I remember, twice as desperate. I gave him a split-second rest then shooed him away with a snip of my brand new scissors.

Time to roll back the netting for good or tomorrow.

back to the rock doves

This morning I'm feeling a tad exposed. Just washed my windows, for one thing. One of my sisters is dropping in tonight, for another (but that's a small one). I'm starting to dig into my Stan Still poems and songs--that must be the main thing.

Not quite. What exposes me most is the removal of anti-rock dove netting out on my balcony. Right now--prime mid-morning over the commerce of the alley, for the rock doves--I'm here at the keyboard, when I should be out there with my prod and my traps in case "Sylvia" or "Ben" happen by.

(I should explain: I'm the one who removed the netting so I can sit out there and my sister can.)

Every five minutes or so I go out and rattle a bucket around or knock over a broom. It's just one person, but I'm doing my bit.