As goes the water

A sad fact of my so-called cultural life is a slavish devotion to military non-fiction. When I sit, looking at the Yukon River I am reminded not only of The Columbia River, but also The Volga as it flows through the former Stalingrad. I’ve never been to Russia and my connection to that river is mostly through the writings of Vasily Grossman and Anthony Beevor. Grossman was Russia’s pre-eminent war correspondent during the apocalyptic battle for Stalingrad. Beevor is an outstanding contemporary writer on the same topic. I am surely getting off topic here, but the strength of their writing and, in this case, their descriptions of The Volga almost assure me that I’ve sat on the west bank where the Russians found themselves pushed almost into the river. Where, behind me on the flats of the eastern shore they assembled and fought back from the brink of destruction.

When I packed to come north though I made an effort to bring some divergent reading that has been sitting in the to-do pile for some time now. One of those books is Patrick Lane’s memoir, There is a Season:

Defined by its (overly?) poetic garden musings of the elderly Lane, there are also catalogues of the brutality of his youth in Vernon. Growing up in the BC interior can tend towards harshness and violence. The scale of our experiences differ, but if such violence stains youth – and it surely does – my experiences, like Lane’s are equivalently, brilliantly pinholed by the radiance of the natural.

Walking out our family’s backdoor in Montrose you would initially be greeted by the somewhat feral cherry trees that constituted the garden portion of our yard. The world of man swiftly gives way as the yard, with equal swiftness, tilts up onto a mountainside. There was no actual boundary to the yard and so in the spring I could walk from cherry blossoms and flowering dandelions up through birch and pine trees. Approaching the crest of the mountain, the grade settled to reveal a shallow and microcosmic marshland, and later the receding snowline as it made its last stand at the bases of the conifers.

Down in the village kids would gather at the western edge, where housing ceded to cliff faces and the only road down to The Columbia and the scorched earth of Trail. Here, on the edge of our redneck Shangri-la, we would lean over the road’s crumbling shoulder and fill ourselves on snow-melt as it came through moss and tumbled off rock faces. Those Spring-time satings remain one of my most cherished markers of spring and are the standard by which I judge all water that passes my lips.