Pop 89: Deep Scribe Preserve
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Last week, I promised to offer a list of some of the Prairie Gold I’ve mined over my life as a reader. I realize the impossibility of listing all the inspiring books I’ve read just since moving to Val Marie, where the best thing to do on these long dark nights is to burrow into an armchair, enwrapped in the warm shawl crocheted by my sister and tuck into a new book. So I’ll spread this recollection over a few weeks and begin with some formative books.
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I live in a Dark Sky Preserve and the quietest place in North America, according to acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who travelled the world taking sound readings. (He did have to rise before the birds, however, because their racket will wake the dead at 4 am, even if you are in the middle of Grasslands National Park, where he took his soundings.)
I believe living in places like Val Marie, a village with a population of 89, allows an author to plumb great depths and creates a kind of sensibility that cannot be easily accessed by writers living amidst the hustle and crunch of the cities. I often think of the desert mothers and fathers, the first monks of early Christianity, who would wander into the dark and the silence to bypass the dictatorial voices of bureaucratic clerics who institutionalized the voice of God, claiming only they knew how divinity should sound. Desert monks knew better; in the empty, dark and quiet desert, they waited patiently to engage in direct communication with The Beloved.
And indeed, I’ve discovered that sitting free from blaring noises and glaring lights, in pervasive silence and boundless darkness, aids in hearing with fresh ears and seeing with clear eyes. (And why most of the city-dwelling writers I know rise to write at five or even 4 in the morning before the world gets busy. ) For these and other reasons, I sometimes call this place a Deep Scribe Preserve.
I am surprised by descriptions of the prairies as bleak and empty. I feel far bleaker in cities crammed with billboards prioritizing things over nature. One of the reasons I find the Prairies so endearing is because it’s so full of living things: sky, land, weather, critters, and birds. And these become my primary relationships and encounters.
I rarely can recall the plots of the books I love; I just know I loved them for their language and their sensibilities. But I do recall phrases, pictures or descriptions that alter my perspective on things. I still carry an image of an experience unique to this place from
W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind. The boy in the story stumbles on an animal’s skeleton, “its rib bones clutching emptiness. Crawling in and out of the jawbone’s teeth, an ant casts about; it disappears into an eye socket, reappears to begin a long pilgrimage down the backbone spools.”
That experience of living close to the land appears in all of the works of Sharon Butala who, at 81, has released yet another book. This Strange Visible Air is a collection of essays on ageing and the writing life. Butala began writing when she moved to Southwest Saskatchewan to what is now Old Man On His Back. Her book The Perfection of the Morning chronicled her profound awakening to nature. It was a book whose time had come, especially for urban women, so many of whom never experienced the wild or chronicled the effects of nature on a woman’s soul. In her latest book, she continues to praise the wild while critiquing the “glib, speedy, ill-mannered chatterers on TV and radio” who clamour to tell us who we should be according to the standards and desires of youth. In the end, she reminds us, as an elder, “wild nature reminds us who we are.”
As I write this, I am about to attend an online book club discussing Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, another ground-breaking book. Campbell was born in the backwoods of Northern Saskatchewan, where, at a young age, she learned how to “set traps, shoot a rifle and fight like a boy.” She would find excuses to sleep on the floor on a braided rug, next to her Cheechum, her grandmother, who bestowed a love that ran deep and often manifested itself in Campbell as a deep belief in oneself. She told Marie stories when she was “afraid or hurt,” and that gift was obviously instilled in her.
Life with Campbell’s Metis family was full of singing and dancing, but there was hardship too, including “oppressive poverty, frustrations” and broken dreams. But life got even harder when she left for the city. Halfbreed is a timeless book not just about survival but about witnessing with enlightened eyes so that what is seen is fully articulated and transformed into lessons we all need to learn.
Some writers you grow alongside. In 1986 I gave my parents Mark Abley’s book Beyond Forget for Christmas. The book is a prairie travelogue by a man who once lived in Lethbridge and Saskatoon and decided he wanted to travel rural Saskatchewan. He now lives in Montreal. In the 2000s, I continued to read Abley as he began writing about the uses and abuses and wonders of language in his books Watch Your Tongue, Spoken Here and The Prodigal Tongue. I recently reviewed his book The Organist, about his fraught relationship with his father.
At one point in The Organist, Abley quotes from the Gnostic Gospels: “If you bring forth what is within you,” he writes, “it will save you. But if you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.” He added, “I don’t suppose it will save me now to tell the story of my father, but I fear it may destroy me if I don’t.” I’m thankful for the few mentioned authors for their gift of bearing witness to their lives and the lives of their families and the ways they help us in witnessing our own.