The Earthrise Diary (March 2012)

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (March 2012)

Don Diespecker

© text Don Diespecker 2012; individual © is retained by authors whose writings are included in this text.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after the first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Ernest Hemingway

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the sides of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants” (in Men Without Women, 1927).

…I only remember studying a map, taking a train, getting off at a station nearest to the Andorran-Spanish border, walking a short distance from one country to another, and taking a second train—ancient, cold little carriages, full of the soldiers of the Spanish Republic who were returning to Barcelona on leave.

…I tagged along behind the war correspondents, experienced men who had serious work to do. Since the authorities gave them transport and military passes (transport was far harder to come by than permission to see everything; it was an open, intimate war) I went with them to the fronts in and around Madrid. Still I did nothing except learn a little Spanish and a little about war, and visit the wounded, trying to amuse or distract them. It was a poor effort and one day, weeks after I had come to Madrid, a journalist friend observed that I ought to write; it was the only way that I could serve the Causa, as the Spaniards solemnly and we lovingly called the war in the Spanish Republic. After all, I was a writer, was I not? But how could I write about war, what did I know, and for whom would I write? What made a story, to begin with? Didn’t something gigantic and conclusive have to happen before one could write an article? My journalist friend suggested that I write about Madrid. Why would that interest anyone? I asked. It was daily life. He pointed out that it was not everybody’s daily life.

Martha Gellhorn, “The war in Spain” (in The Face Of War, 1959).

November 1937

At the end of the day the wind swooped down from the mountains into Madrid and blew the broken glass from the windows of the shelled houses. It rained steadily and the streets were mustard-colored with mud. It rained and people talked about the coming offensive, wondering when, when…

Martha Gellhorn, “The besieged city” (in The Face Of War, 1959).

Tuesday Feb 28 2012. This is such an old fashioned normal day that I feel compelled to record some of it: there was red in the dawn sky but the day in midafternoon is brilliant and sunny and makes this one of those beautiful days of soft February light. I walked down the dusty road to Richardson’s Bridge and back. I also stood on the Plains Crossing Bridge here and lamented the wrecking of my big river wall by not very big floods—it’s the worst damage ever. I sent off a mail advising some of my family and friends that the February Diary was posted yesterday. I was pleased that the ALP battling has stopped. I phoned Pam. I remembered seeing parts of the Academy Awards yesterday (I’m always moved when there are tributes to all the movie makers and movie stars who have died this past year, among them Jane Russell, Elizabeth Taylor, Ben Gazarra. And after lunch I took my copy of The Good Soldier down to the belvedere and continued reading, and then moved in and out of dappled light and assorted flying insects to read most of the first part of the book within a couple of hours. Nice. Sunny. Warm. Dry. I’m home all day. Tomorrow is the last day of summer but as I have to go to Bellingen and consult the osteopath, I can’t be here for all of the day—another reason why this day is just for reading and relaxing. I can’t remember when I last sat in the sunny garden reading for hours: it’s been a very wet and hair-raising summer. Now the dahlias are blooming beautifully just because of the sun and the dryness (although the plants are flat on the ground). The big pink lilies, those with the tenacious roots, including those at the edge of the belvedere continue to bloom splendidly.

Sunday March 25 2012. I was far too detailed in last month’s Diary and there were too many dates that referred to the month’s excitements. This month I’ll have gone to the opposite extreme. The past couple of days here have been magnificent and more summery than summer: the sky cloudless yesterday, the light perfect. The sun and a slight breeze made laundry a must and allowed me more than two hours of mowing that began at midday. The gardens—what’s left of them after the ruinous rains—have done their best: the new dahlia garden is still colourful although the plants have all collapsed in their frantic attempts to reach for sunlight (but the blooms look great). A small purple tibouchina is flowering too and the pink lilies continue. Red salvia seedlings from very old plants have made patches of scarlet along the fence line although the fence no longer exists. The young bleeding heart trees that sprang up next to the dahlias are now metres high and have won places in that light and shade part of the garden near the riverbank; the scarlet/crimson cannas that I pruned weeks ago have joined the red salvia to add more colour.

The riverside lawn is still covered in logs and smaller debris: the logs are being axed and returned to the river. When I’ve cleared some of the mess I’ll be able to repair the partly built wall there. The floods have again undercut the riverbank, however and I see that there’s now a deep hole where I moored the canoe a few months ago. Were it not for the tonnes of stone that I’ve used to build up the riverside lawn over the years and the adjacent casuarinas this corner would have been hugely damaged: the river continues ‘pinched’ against the bank on this side (which explains the worst ever damage to my old river wall) and a high flood will tear down the bigger trees. There’s not much that can be done here to prevent that.

By the end of February the unusually wet conditions had encouraged the dreaded Queensland grass to start seeding and it’s again out of control with many plants 2-m tall and offering an abundance of seeds for the birds to broadcast. It would be a simple matter to remove that grass and the bracken (digging the plants out, drying them and burning everything) and replacing the colonists with lawn grass; I need only a hundred or so volunteers to help and we’d fix the problem in no time…

As readers will see, I’ve avoided discussing most of March: too much of it has been unpleasantly wet and muddy. I’ve also steered you away from sundry problems that arose or were further exacerbated during this miserable month, but you may find footprints or traces of some of that in the writings below. Writing is always such a relief, often enough such an abiding pleasure and always a satisfying way of continuing the journey—and much the same applies to reading. I completed reading The Good Soldier but was not captivated despite Ford’s masterful writing; and I completed Barbara Kingsolver’s BIG book, The Lacuna, (set in Mexico and the USA) much of which I enjoyed, and now I’m finding my way into what may be the oldest of novels, Murusaki Shikibu’s The Tale Of Genji, a 10^th/11^th Century Japanese text translated into English that includes woodcut illustrations first published in 1650. Tense Kingsolver fans will be pleased to note that I best liked the first half of the book most because it reminded me of exotic places like Panama and, of all things, how to make a variety of breads.

Creative Writings

Climate Change

Russell Atkinson

Amongst the welter of facts, half-truths and misinterpretations concerning climate change a few truths are needed. One is that facts can disguise truth or obscure it altogether and data can be manipulated to ‘prove’ just about anything. In this way, the term ‘climate change’ is a misnomer. It might even be a deliberate red herring to disguise the fact that the climate is in reality, only a small factor in the danger of global warming. The problem is not that the climate is changing as it has always done, but that it is changing too fast because it is forced. Natural changes as are recorded in geological studies are slow. This gives creatures some chance to move or adapt. They may even appear to be part of an evolutionary process in the making of the planet. Consider how the great glaciers of the ice age have formed the beautiful contours and valleys we know now. They have ground rocks down to make and fertilize the earth. Forced ones are not likely to serve natural geological purposes. They are more likely to have disastrous consequences.

But this is beside the point. The truth is that more than forty years ago, before the words ‘climate change’ were so prevalent, scientists were concerned about global warming. They predicted that if global warming was not curtailed the biosphere would reach its heat limit in about 2781.

Like the changing climate, carbon is only a part of the problem. Our biosphere contains about 2,400,000 million tonnes of it, mainly circulating as carbon dioxide. Its geological form is found as calcium carbonate in the white cliffs of Dover and in corals in the Great Barrier Reef. There is no doubt that hydrocarbon in fossil fuels release carbon dioxide which, above a certain level, blocks the passage of infra-red energy from the sun, reflecting a percentage back into space but also reflects some back to the earth causing temperature fluctuations. These are facts. But the truth is that climate change and carbon dioxide is not a problem – unless we force one and create too much of the other.

The truth is that heat alone is the problem and we make too much of it - climate change, fossil fuels or whatever notwithstanding. Every addition to the huge number of people on the planet adds other quanta of heat, along with the increasing number of animals to feed them. Every internal combustion engine, every electrical motor generates heat, so every frig and TV set add to the sum total. Every light bulb generates heat, along with glass-covered sky scrapers, roads and car parks – where not so long ago there might have been forests, shrubs or grass to soak it up. An atom bomb test produces more heat in a second than all industry produces in a year. Every detonation, nuclear or otherwise, produces heat. The generation of power, nuclear or otherwise, produces immense amounts of it. An infrared photograph of a city at night shows masses of heat radiating out from underground car parks and train stations. The disturbing truth is, that no matter if a cool source of energy to fuel our vehicles and gadgets is found, which seems to be in the miracle department, it is likely that the biosphere would still reach a heat limit some time. It looks as though the only real solution is to stop the world if it is to continue.

In the meantime, something’s gotta give. Will old Mother Nature resolve the problem in some outlandish and undreamt-of way? Or will the whole structure of what we call civilization come crashing down, putting those that survive back to square one?

This brings us to another likely truth: those who express a vociferous denial of the dangers of global warming are impelled by the fear that they are in danger of loosing the indulgent life style they regard as essential to the economy and their wellbeing. The final most disturbing truth might be that this materialistic, technology-driven civilization has got itself into a double bind, a blind alley, between a rock and a hard place; a situation in which there can be no real solution to the problems material affluence has created. Maybe all we can hope for in the distant future is a reasonably acceptable subsistence.

(Russell Atkinson is a much-published author (books and articles on Hindu philosophy, memoirs, and aspects of naturopathy).

Russell’s blogsite is www.theoldestako.wordpress.com

Conversation as Caprice

Don Diespecker

A conversation is nothing more than the abilities of two or more persons to talk socially with each other; unfortunately, a conversation is sometimes much less than that: the opportunity for one talker to sabotage dialogue and reduce it to monologue. There is nothing quite like a good conversation when a minimal two of us observe both the niceties and the invisible rules for conversations. There is much that is heartening and even cozy (in the sense of convenience) in conversations or dialogues because two of us (for example) may politely create an enlivening discourse that we each are composing, a more or less equally shared dialogue in real time that is balanced, flows well and is satisfying if not enjoyable for both parties. And although the two speakers may veer away from absolute politeness and grow passionate or even heated, politeness and consideration for the other dictates that the conversation ought not lead to bloodshed or to a damaged friendship. (This narrative, as you may now suspect, is a kind of monologue. Writing is so often a solitary occupation. Sorry! None-the-less, there is nothing to stop you, the reader, from imagining your intellectual voice responding to these words).

Monologues on the other hand are solo acts and the soloist will essentially provide all of the stimuli that at least two speakers would otherwise access between themselves to enable a dialogue or conversation to be given life. In those prose fictions that we label Literature, with a capital L, authors may endow some of their characters particularly the most frequently observed protagonists with the convenient and remarkable ability of their apparently thinking in words by means of e.g., the interior monologue generally signaled by the use of the personal pronoun, ‘I’ to better inform the reader. Interior monologue and the free indirect style are the two principle means by which the thoughtful author will whisk readers into a mindset such that they may intellectually appreciate the ‘inner lives’ of the protagonists and other characters in the narrative: prose that is generally known as stream of consciousness writing. The free indirect style is represented in texts as reflective words apparently thought by a character and, as David Lodge has explained in The Art Of Fiction, ‘It renders thought as reported speech (in the third person past tense).’

There are also monologues that may have started as comfortable dialogues but which have then veered out of control because one of the speakers (one perhaps more psychopathic or deranged than is normal in polite and civilized society) has hijacked the role of the other and in the process of assuming his or her mantle has effectively snuffed out all of the ‘other speaker’s’ volubility. This sometimes ‘happens’ when there are two intending speakers present and ready to discuss or to argue intellectually and when one of them, wrongly inflamed with pathological zeal to compete or to dominate the intended conversation, will succeed in doing almost all the talking and the other person will feel necessarily obliged (i.e., chooses) to transform into the receptive and largely silent pupil. The deprived speaker having chosen to capitulate to being talked at realizes too late that s-he is increasingly challenged either to remain mute or to become sufficiently stirred to fall on the too voluble tormentor and to honorably dismember him or her.

A conversation between two people that begins with points of view being exchanged and argued and then is warped into a monologue by one half of the duo is doomed to become adversarial if not combative: the failing dialogue degenerates into a rant (a shameless monologue made by the more crazed speaker) and the other proto speaker is compelled into a resentful silence that may swell into anger and abruptly terminate following angry exchanges between the two participants. A conversation is not a competition demanding a victor and a vanquished. (Aspiring novelists who also enjoy a good conversation may be inspired by some of this discourse to create potential protagonists who not only fight each other for the individual rights to express their views, but who also reveal themselves to potential readers by showing their mettle via interior monologues or thoughtful forays by courtesy of the free indirect style).

Cozy (above) has two principal meanings (if we disregard teapot coverings): that which is warm and comfortable; or that which is convenient or beneficial as a result of dishonesty or contrivance (e.g., ‘a cozy agreement between competing firms’ as my dictionary gently puts it). Here I intentionally use cozy in the sense of a conversation being more or less between peers or equals (and cozy seems a less emotionally laden word than e.g., intimate) because for me a good conversation may be between good friends, less than good friends, and even between those never destined to become good or close friends: good conversations are possible even between politicians of opposing philosophies.

All of which suggests that if there is to be a conversation between two people it is wise for the potential dialoguers to initiate some sensible and agreed upon rules before they unbuckle their intellects and engage with each another. What those rules may be will depend on the two speakers and any number of related factors. In other words, we begin dialogues that may quickly become imperiled unless we first make clear how and what we each want in those intellectual engagements that we call dialogues and conversations; to not do so is to invite trouble (and, no, I am not about to explore dialectics).

I imagine that you the reader may now perhaps feel reasonably prepared to further read about a variety of human conversations that will seem either cozy with satisfactory outcomes or as close and raw as can be with consequences that are wretched beyond our worst dreams. I may yet revisit some of those events, but until a few minutes ago I was sitting in the sunny garden on what is virtually a summer’s day, but one quite out of time in March, while relaxing after soul destroying wet weather and floods with a good and entertaining book (Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna) when I was suddenly aware of what was far more obvious in my surroundings than might be dragged from my resting memory (besides, I felt driven from my own garden by a plague of very small winged insects that insistently changed our relationship from casual to intense: it was as though we had mislaid our rules and as if the multitude of winged beasties had congregated around my head for two insectivorous reasons: number one my presence in their garden was enabling a stupendous integration or possibly re-integration of combined gnat-hood, midge-hood and mosquito-hood such that increasingly bigger clouds of these entities were united as mixed flying societies each of which could assume a collective monologue superiority over any attempt by me to negotiate a dialogue or conversation that would benefit all of them and much of myself; and two, that by my frustrated swatting and slapping presence I was fostering a new insectivorous awareness that would soon allow the beasties to not only overcome any of my revolutionary tendencies to engage in a dialogue between us likely to result in my dominating their world but that they were surely going to become so successful in their group monologue that I would soon be sucked dry and discarded—a victory for World Insects that I would have foolishly precipitated by being an unaware catalyst). (Eat your heart out, Henry James!). I so swiftly fled the garden (my garden) that insect scouts would have had extreme difficulties locating me within their lifetimes.

From the safety of my house I noticed that the old water dragon now posturing where I had recently been sitting was enjoying a perfectly reasonable relationship or a possible conversation not only with my lawn, but also with the attendant clouds of winged insects! And I realized that the wily old dragon was also snacking on the little fliers and that he was able to accomplish this feat so dexterously and with such an economy of movement that the insect mobs were surely unable to fathom what he was up to. How many tiny insect brains or neural nets or whatever it is that they use would be needed to fill a 1.5-litre central nervous system or CNS or ‘brain,’ rather like one of our human brains? I have no idea but although the beasties may each lack individual brain power we must remember how difficult it is for us, the Big Brains, to swat even one of them at any time because they’re so adroit that it’s as if they can process incoming missile strikes viz., the human hand swatting, yet be able to avoid the swat. And what if these little guys choose to join forces and create one Big CNS or ‘brain,’ or several big ones, for that matter? Imagine a single tiny target being advised by a Big Group CNS to speedily exit the area (Gnat 2386: Abort! Go to Warp Seven!). That would suggest that the littlies are ahead of us by light years! And if they are, how come I, of all people, have just intuited their game, their ability and their perceptual and motor skills? Who, me? I? Shouldn’t our top scientists be working overtime on this? If the little ones are as smart as I suspect, they might be avoiding all possibilities of insect/human conversations prior to their taking over the world. Why hasn’t this stuff been classified yet?

Anyway, to return to the dragon on the lawn: apparently the dragon possesses the necessary genes enabling him to return full-time to dry land leaving the watery world behind: he was surely starting a revolution encouraging reverse evolution and his exciting descendants would again become dinosaurs, not just little water dragon-sized dinosaurs but the real deal: HUGE dinosaurs that would thump about roaring ferociously and tearing down forests! Risk-taking but wary insects hovering close to the river presumably expect water dragons to plunder their ranks but I’m inclined to think that an apparently motionless water dragon-like figure basking on the sunny lawn well away from the river would scarcely register on tiny beasty radar. I nodded my understanding of this peculiar circumstance; the water dragon, to my surprise, seemed to cock his head querulously in my direction. Or was he? Or were his genes now in such a clamour that he was able to read my mind directly from Big Lawn? It was then that I noticed a flurry of yellow leaves whirling away from the old white cedar high above the dragon’s head. The white cedar’s small green leaves turn from green to yellow, dare I write golden, in early autumn and the tree saves them for intended flurries: an economic matter, I suppose, and I always enjoy the sight, as sad as it sometimes seems, because the leaves momentarily are almost like light snow drifting across the green lawn. This is simply one of my more romantic notions because snow never falls here although the high ground up at Dorrigo that directly overlooks this part of the Valley is sometimes snow-dusted in winter.

I imagine that the wise old white cedar tree might whisper, Thank you sweeties for your service. Time now little leaves for your lawny long sleep of change. A leafy dialogue between the leaves being let go and the tree, Fare thee well, Mother could then become a new conversation between leaves and lawn May we rest here below? Yes, welcome little leaves; of course you may: together we shall nourish and replenish Earth: something like that, perhaps because leaves do in fact nourish the lawns and the Earth...

And now that I’m sitting inside looking out I see other possibilities for these deep dialogues: between eucalypts and their yet to be shed barks, between ants and the cavities in tree trunks where branches once grew; between raindrops falling and the lawn’s quavering grass blades, Take cover below: curl and crouch! There would be no time for dialogue! Or consider the frantic signals between all the plants in the gardens and all the other living creatures there below and above when Big Ugly and Dangerous hail as big as tennis balls is imminent. Spare us O Hail for we’re all on the same side once you get down from the sky! More terrified and tormented monologues from below. Hold it! Stop where you are! Can we talk about this first?

I now suspect that many of the dialogues that might take place in Nature are merely proto or crypto dialogues, there being time only for urgent one-line monologues. There’s obviously a lot of nervous energy in Nature and that would seem to suggest that delightful summertime chats between say the passing river and a clump of sedges or rushes by the water’s edge would be out of the question: there would simply not be enough time for dialogue beyond their exchanging hasty monologue-type greetings. A promising dialogue would be stifled at birth, being at best a hurried exchange, Hey, White Water how do you do that? You talkin to me, waterweed?

This presupposes that such would-be conversations would have to be interpreted or intuited. That in turn suggests that there would have to be something exceptional about interpreters. I reflected on exceptionalness hoping that I might have a modicum of the stuff (otherwise my understanding of Natures Conversations might be regarded as indications of approaching madness). I reflected for a long time before recalling a recent contender as responsible for my newly discovered ability. I remembered the awful affair of the Electric Roof (roofers had inadvertently driven a screw through an electrical wiring circuit when replacing part of my roof and the detouring electricity had enlivened the steel roof to a dangerous 240-v and perked up the river stone floor of my bathroom to 150-v). That incident would be a contender, surely? I had survived that, and that which doesn’t kill may sometimes make us a wee bit stronger, I think?

And now I recall another possible contender!

Recently I was idly watching TV while moodily sipping a glass of undistinguished Shiraz. The room lights were switched off and the lighting power was where it was supposed to be: safely contained within electrical wiring. It was otherwise too dark for me to have noticed the large spider in my glass of wine. When I did notice and switched on the lights the better to see what other awful phenomenon I had fortuitously survived I realized that the spider despite reminding me horribly of the Alien movies (remember how that Thing was able to hatch and spring willy-nilly onto the face of any spaceship crew-person; aaarghhh!) was now very dead and well on the way to complete deconstruction. It was old enough and ruined enough to have been disintegrating for a year or two in the bottle of wine and had definitely not fallen from the ceiling above while I was drinking. Eureka!

Although the ghastly arachnid had failed to survive the wine I had not only survived the wine fortified with spider essences without having been aware of either the spider or the changed condition of the wine. Perhaps my unawareness also indicated that spiders (venomous or otherwise) or their spidery elements could safely be ingested when taken with wine? Or possibly that may have meant that no matter how deadly the spider juice was (even when modified by wine) no harm would come to the casual drinker. Or perhaps I was intended by invisible forces to become vaccinated or inoculated and thereby protected by spidery wine? This explanation having quickly become the most appealing of possibilities is now so firmly establishing itself somewhere in my psyche that I’m ready to dismiss prior explanatory possibilities and to additionally consider that this odd inoculating event may even mean more than the prevention of some awful pathological decline: possibly it could mean that I now have additional cognitive abilities (arachnid enhanced powers!) enabling me to intuit unusual conversations verbatim as they take place in Nature!

I won’t dare suggest that you the reader should now expose yourself to either electrical stimulations or to unusual homeopathic remedies in order to better understand macro and micro conversations of all kinds. We must all take responsibility for our choices. On the other hand please ponder what the next step for me may be: my intellectual deepening may soon enable me to add my voice to many of Nature’s otherwise secret conversations! DD.

Rene

Jill Alexander

Rene is 104. She was my mother’s closest friend. From the time I was born she was always my Auntie Rene.

After my mother died in 1988 we formed a new bond. She became the mother I had lost and I became the daughter she had always wanted. She lived in a beautiful area of Victoria, British Columbia, called Cadboro Bay, one of the small villages that nestled and grew around the waterfront bays of Victoria. Her home was at the top of the hill just up from the little village. It was a lovely old stone house set on one acre of land and had peek-a-boo views of the ocean visible through the huge and magnificent oak trees on her property.

I began making regular trips from Vancouver to Victoria to visit Rene for several days at a time. This journey always followed the same pattern. I would leave my home in the morning at 9:15, allowing plenty of time to catch the 11:00 ferry. At approximately 1:30, I turned into Rene’s driveway and parked my car. As I walked toward the house I knew that she would be there standing in the open doorway waiting for me with a smile on her face. After we gave each other an affectionate hug, she always asked the same question, “Are you ready for a cup of tea?’’ While the tea was being made I would take my suitcase up the winding staircase to my own little bedroom. I came to love this little room and see it as my own: the single bed with its heavy wool blankets, the two upholstered chairs from a bygone era and the bookshelves covering two walls and filled with many old and interesting books. This space would nurture me and be my home for the next three or four days.

Tea was waiting downstairs and I would help carry the teapot, bone china cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits into the living room. We would sink into our own special chairs, similar to the ones upstairs. And sitting across from each other we began the journey into the past, with Rene sharing her vivid memories of a very deep and special friendship between herself, my mother, Margaret, and their dear friend, May.

The three were born a year apart: Margaret in1905, May in1906, and Rene in 1907. They met when they were in their late teens and were all working as stenographers in downtown Victoria. Around that time, a husband and wife team had set up a little camping business on the beach at Cadboro Bay where they provided tent cabins for people to rent out for the summer. For four years in a row (1922-1926) the three friends would rent one of these tent cabins for July and August. Their plan was a simple one. After work the three met up and took the trolley car to the very end of the line. This was only minutes away from a set of 78 stairs that led down to the beach below. Once they reached their cabin the first thing on their agenda was a swim in the ocean before fixing their supper. They would also have a swim in the early morning before getting ready for work and heading back up the 78 stairs in time to catch their trolley into the city.

On weekends they invited their friends to come and visit. The entertainment area was an outdoor wooden stage with an old beat up piano at one end. Rene would play the piano and everyone would sing and dance to all the old favourites of that era—songs such as “April Showers,” “Till We Meet Again,” “It Had To Be You,” “Always,” “If You Were The Only Girl In The World,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and “Roses of Picardy.”

As she told her story, Rene often made little asides. “I don’t know how our parents allowed us to go off like this for the whole summer,” I remember her once saying, ‘My father would often drop in unannounced just to check on us but we were usually behaving ourselves. Except for your mother! She would often disappear with some fellow down the beach. May and I would notice she was gone and say ‘Where’s Margaret?’ And off we would go to look for her and drag her back. She used to get so annoyed with us but we had to try and keep her out of trouble!’ Rene then gave a big sigh and said, ‘Those were such wonderful days—so many happy memories.’

On these trips to Victoria, I got up early in the morning, slipped out of my little room, down the stairs and out the front door without waking Rene. My destination was their beach at Cadboro Bay. I would start at one end and walk all the way down to the other end. As I walked, I imagined the three friends on this beach laughing and talking together the way they did so many years ago. Sometimes, I was sure I could hear their voices.

One morning, just as I was reaching the far end of the beach, I thought I saw something that looked like a step behind a cluster of thick vines. As I looked more closely, I realized there was a set of stairs leading up the side of the bank. Making my way carefully through the thick tangle of vines, I started to climb and without thinking I began to count the steps. As I reached the top, the count was 78.

When I arrived back at the house, I excitedly told Rene about my discovery. She was sceptical and wanted to see for herself. Later that afternoon we drove to the little road that I had found where the stairs had ended. She got out of the car, looked at the top of the stairs with the view of the ocean, and declared joyfully, “You did find our stairs!”

A few visits later, I was walking down to the beach on my early morning walk. Just as I was stepping onto the sand, I heard girls’ voices. Believing this to be the imaginary voices I had heard before, I headed in my usual direction. The voices, however, got louder. Then I saw three girls sitting on a blanket and watching the sunrise. After saying hello, they mentioned that one of them was having a birthday and that this was the way the other two friends chose to celebrate. I told them the story about the three maidens of Cadboro Bay those many years ago and how I felt this was a sign that they were keeping their memory alive for me. They loved the story and thanked me for sharing it with them.

Rene celebrated her 101^st birthday in her home where I so often visited. I was able to be there with her. Soon after that, she had a fall and was not able to go back to the home she loved so much. She is now in a care home.

In December, 2011, she celebrated her 104^th birthday. I continue to make the trip every six weeks to visit her. We still talk at length about the past and those wonderful days of the three best friends at Cadboro Bay. She remembers a poem that another friend, Myrta, wrote for them back in the summer of 1922 that captures one of their adventures. Rene loves to recite this poem for me every time I come to visit:

Down by the beach at Cadboro Bay

Three young maids all summer did stay

One was dark and one was fair

The other had very curly hair.

One dark night two of the three

Decided to go on a swimming spree

So after a few strokes they started to float

Out toward an American boat.

On this boat were three young sheiks

Who over the side of the boat did peek

One of them cried ‘I say what peaches’

And swam with them to one of the beaches.

Then pulling the third maid out of bed,

‘Come and see what we’ve found,’ they said.

So lighting a fire bright and hearty

They brought food and drink and had a party.

Then all too soon it was time to go,

So off to the boat the boys did row.

But all agreed it had been a grand day

Down by the sea at Cadboro Bay.

(Jill (Diespecker) Alexander is a retired business woman living in North Vancouver, B.C. who enjoys traveling, spending time with her grandchildren, doing half marathons, and writing her memoirs).

MMM 624

Don Diespecker

I often write when I walk—write in my head, I mean—and that depends greatly on the weather: dodging Darkwood Road traffic and giant puddles on wet and muddy days is not conducive to happy writing. The summer now passed and the start of autumn has been needlessly wet; this morning’s weather was beautiful: bright sunlight, impressively contrasting black shade and shadows and the dust damply inert. I greeted the eight horses I could see in the Happenstance paddock: only one, a youngster, stopped munching to look up briefly. I sauntered on, quite the flaneur thinking All The Pretty Horses, remembering that excellent novel by Cormac McCarthy (set in Mexico where the weather was drier than here). Then I looked further and saw how lushly green this valley and the surrounding hills have become following the excessive rains and that oddly suggested ‘Hills Like White Elephants,’ surely a near perfect Hemingway short story (from Men Without Women) set in a dry part of the Ebro Valley (the Ebro is Spain’s second largest river: it rises in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain and flows southeast to the Mediterranean south of Barcelona). In turn that reminded me of Fiesta. The Sun Also Rises which was not only Hemingway’s remarkable first novel: it was one of the defining novels in 20^th Century fiction, and also my lifelong best loved of all novels. The narrative is set largely in Paris and in Pamplona in northern Spain. ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is set in a Spanish railway station.

Then I reminded myself of another railway station in Spain, Irun, which is also in the north on Spain’s Atlantic coast. As I walked I recalled February 1951 when Jan Tierolff, a Dutch painter, and I arrived at Irun from Hendaye as a couple of young backpackers (think Bayonne, Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the French side and Irun and San Sebastian in Spain—these places not far removed from Pamplona). Two Spanish policemen took an immediate and severe interest in our being on their turf. They directed us to accompany them through the station and outside into the wilderness of the Irun marshalling yards. Jan and I speculated wildly: were these armed guys in comical patent leather hats about to execute us for reasons never to be made clear and possibly as punishment for our daring to hitchhike in their territory? We were aware of it being a mere 12 years since the end of the Spanish Civil War and Franco was in power. Slowly and very carefully the Law explained that they wanted to change some of our foreign money for some of their pesetas: we were pleased to oblige. Then we took the train to Madrid.

As I continued walking along Darkwood Road I became aware that I was now thinking of another quite different visit to Spain in the summer of 1957, in a Morris Minor ‘Tourer.’ I forget the year in which the car was produced but will always remember that the licence tag was MMM 624. Pam and I were living in London in those days and I had returned home early in 1957 after working on civil engineering contracts for several months in Iran and could at last afford to purchase a motorcar.

The small convertible was painted dark green, rather like the green racing colours that identified British racing cars. I recently had been searching for something specific via Google, remembered the summer holiday in France and Spain that year and the Morris Minor cars. My father, Durbyn, (in 1957 my parents were visiting from South Africa) had studied the small badge depicting a bull on the little car’s bonnet with great interest. ‘A bull,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Have you considered calling the car El Toro?’

I think we made the crossing on the ferry between Newhaven and Dieppe and then drove on to Paris. Durbyn and my mother Grace sat in the rear seat, Pam and I in the front. ‘Tourer’ meant that the little car had a canvas hood that could be folded back for open air traveling in the countryside: it was a proper convertible. There weren’t many of those models in those days and I added a box of Morris spares to our luggage in the boot. We arrived auspiciously in Paris at the start of the afternoon rush hour and I cheerfully attempted to drive the wrong way down a one-way boulevard. Every motorcar driver deserves to have such hair-raising experiences because doing what I attempted represented a very steep learning curve indeed and French drivers delighted in deriding ignorant foreigner drivers, particularly those in vehicles displaying GB plates. Similarly, parking anywhere in Paris even in 1957 was always a difficulty and the simple solution was to find a friendly person with a lock-up garage who would oblige me by locking the inoffensive little Morris away in the dark while we more comfortably navigated much of the Left Bank on foot. After all, Paris is a city best seen when walking.

It was at that time that we discovered Muscadet, a pale, dry wine best served chilled. I clearly recall a family dinner: the wine seemed the colour of a pale green river and its taste reminded me of grassy meadows at sunrise (it was that sort of wine). We enjoyed Paris and saw the sights and ate some fine food and then we left early one morning to escape the morning rush hour and went south toward Orleans. We all fitted comfortably and had a minimum of luggage and the little car went well, dashing down the French roads that I’d not traveled on since 1951, like the highway south of Paris. In 1951 Jan and I then thumbed our way to Limoges in one attempt: one of the best lifts we had ever managed; it was inside the cramped quarters of a truck whose affable owner was driving to a distant market with a pig in the back.

El Toro in 1957 was much more comfortable and we cut across the Massif Central of France and into those beautiful regions, provinces and departments—some with long, winding rivers: Lot, Auvergne, Gironde, Cantal, Haut Loire, Aveyron, Correze.. We wanted to visit the Lascaux Caves and so we stopped at the small town of Montignac in Aquitaine (it’s between Périgueux and Sarlat in the Dordogne Valley) and stayed in a small hotel surrounded by old leafy trees. Montignac is a small town and a favourite of mine. (When I returned to Montignac with my cousins Jill and Gene and our friend Ilse Vogel, in 1998 we visited Lascaux II. The original caves have been damaged by carbon dioxide emitted by humans (some of it mine) and by fungi and are no longer open to the public).

We continued our 1957 journey and were fortunate to find a good hotel on the beach in the northeastern corner of Spain where the food was wonderful and the range of wines was impressive. The maitre d’ used to spearfish when off duty and his catches always went to the dining room. One day we made a visit to Cadaques, the coastal town where Salvador Dali had once lived; and on another day we drove down to Barcelona to visit both Gaudi’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia cathedral (begun in 1883) and also the Monumental Bullring to see a bullfight! My mother closed her eyes for much of the bullfight; I don’t think any of us really enjoyed the bullfights, but the cathedral was visually splendid. There will be no more bullfights at Monumental: the Parliament of Catalonia banned them in 2010 and the ban will take effect this year…

I often recall some of the many images associated with El Toro:

Somewhere in the Dordogne after having bought a VERY BIG quantity (about 2-kg or more) of perfectly ripe strawberries very cheaply as well as bread and cheese in a nearby town we picnicked beside a rural road which had a marvelous avenue of old oaks along it and where we had an excellent lunch, largely of fraises. Winged insects took a great interest in the contents of the big brown paper bag that smelled so sweetly.

I remember that when I parked El Toro outside the museum (art gallery) in Toulouse in the bright sun the little British car looked completely foreign and almost alien next to the Citroens, Peugeots and Renaults.

In four years we drove the car several times in France (once ferrying her by air from Lydd to Le Touquet), Germany (where I quickly learned not to try passing slow traffic on the Autobahn because I instantly became very slow traffic to the avenging hordes of Very Fast German Sedans that had never experienced speed limits on such roads), Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, (and not forgetting tiny Liechtenstein), Denmark and Sweden (The Swedes drove on the left in those days, too). DD.

Three Summery Moments In Autumn

1. Mowing is frequently a meditative experience and sometimes it’s also an opportunity for writing or composing in my head. Yesterday afternoon (March 29) there were again flurries of leaves from the white cedar tree and the lightest of breezes to cast them across Big Lawn—enough for me to interrupt the Diary composing (in my head) and to see instead. Yesterday’s mow was like that: aestivating.

2. The old track that runs between the carport and Big Lawn cuts through an older riverbank (the house is also founded on this old bank) and is presently overgrown with tradescantia and giant maidenhair. In a sunlit patch I found a small swarm of tiny flying insects moving at speed. The blurry cloud of buzzing wings was a remarkable sight because the crowd of about 30 insects was moving in a space not much larger than a cantaloupe and the very rapid changes in direction were made at speed and in every imaginable direction—all without mishap. I stepped closer. My presence seemed to slow the insect’s movements. They danced for want of a better word in a shaft of sunlight next to a giant maidenhair fern. When I stepped back the speed of the fliers increased again. I wondered about the significance of what I’d seen.

3. The dahlias despite being flattened by the rain looked almost their best on March 30 and I counted 16 of the Mrs Rees blooms. The bleeding heart tree saplings next to the dahlias have grown to 3-m in this, their first season; nearby the pink double hibiscus has a flush of new flowers and on the riverbank the first of the white tibouchina are flowering.

Saturday March 31 2012. Thunderstorms last evening spoiled the illusion of yesterday’s mini summer and further diminished the dahlias, but it’s a grand day this morning. Happy birthday to Pam Diespecker!