Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Read online

  From the time we first bought the island, when Laurie was still living in England, my siblings and I had counted on the lake to bring us together. We spent hours on the dock, talking, swimming, and teaching various little children how to dive and waterski.

  We took the kids to the small beach on the west side of the island, and Ben spent hours there finding rocks to build a breakwater so we’d lose less sand from the beach. We sat on what we called Family Rock, a rock big enough for two adults and two or three small children to sit on, squished together. Over the years, Laurie and I spent hour upon hour sitting on Family Rock, watching the kids swim and build sandcastles, securing our sisterhood.

  While Greg and his young family spent most weekends at the cottage, we were too busy to do that. After we opened the cottage, we returned to the city and to our busy lives. We had to wait until the summer to take full advantage of our family oasis.

  THE STORE WAS QUIET that first summer, as it has been every summer since. The financial district emptied out; everyone was travelling to cottages and camps, taking overseas holidays or just enjoying time off at home. Our staff took vacation time, too, so they weren’t milling around the store with no customers to serve. Ben took his customary two weeks off at the beginning of July. While he flopped on a chaise and read all day, I bugged him to take more time off, later in the summer.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  The days grew hot and we spent time in the forest and time on the lake. Ben called work every day and if there was a problem (which there almost never was), he managed it from afar.

  I said, “Why don’t you give them a day off from hearing from you? Let them know they can manage on their own.”

  “Why would I do that?” he asked.

  “So they know you trust them to run the place.”

  “Do I?”

  “You should. It would be good for you, too. To stop thinking about it so much.”

  “If I didn’t call, I’d be thinking about it even more.”

  I stared at him, wondering how it was he didn’t understand what I was trying to say. Maybe I was the one not understanding.

  “But they’ll call you,” I said, “if there’s something wrong.”

  “Maybe.”

  I gave up and went for a kayak instead. I knew that once summer was over and we were back in the city, our lives would diverge again. Ben’s weeks would fill up with events: Monday night selling books at a reading, Tuesday at a launch in the store, Wednesday down at Harbourfront, Thursday another launch in the store. If we were lucky, he’d have Friday and Saturday nights off, although as time went on, that was never a given. He’d started selling books in Kensington Market a few Sundays a year, and we had our own Sunday brunch series as well as author dinners at Grano, an Italian restaurant on Yonge Street. Taken singly, these events were great fun and sometimes even edifying, but the pace was relentless.

  I decided that even if Ben didn’t want to take a holiday far from the store that summer, I needed to. I booked Yeats and me a trip to British Columbia, to spend some time on Vancouver Island visiting friends and driving out to Tofino on the west side of the island. I’d heard about Tofino since I’d lived in BC in my twenties, and I longed to see it for myself — its beaches, the endless ocean, the forests.

  I asked Ben to join us but he said, “No thanks.” He smiled at me. “I like my holidays at the cottage where I can read a stack of books.”

  I liked that kind of holiday, too, but it was nice to mix things up. It was nice to go somewhere new.

  FOUR

  YEATS AND I TRAVELLED to Vancouver by train. He was fifteen. He brought along his portable CD player but didn’t use it once during the four days and three nights we were on the train. We sat in the observation car, mesmerized by the scenery. First came Ontario, with its endless lakes and trees, deciduous followed by mixed forests. The train stopped in Parry Sound, on Georgian Bay, and travelled over the trestle bridge. It was the longest bridge in Ontario, standing high over the water.

  As the train turned west past Lake Superior, the mixed forests gave way to mostly evergreens. Yeats said, “Ontario goes on forever! Forest after forest, lake after lake. Did you know it was this big?”

  “Yes. Nanny took the three of us on the train to Winnipeg the year I was fourteen, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. You told me.”

  “It seems to me we spent most of the time playing cards, or sitting in the dining car. The porter would come through the cars yelling, ‘First call for dinner! Dining car forward!’ and we’d follow behind, calling it out, too. Dad met us in Winnipeg and we drove west from there.”

  “So you only had one night on the train?”

  “I guess so, but it looms large in my memory, maybe because we were moving from Toronto to Vancouver. It wasn’t exactly a vacation — I was leaving my friends behind and going west to the unknown. Being on the train was fun, but it was bittersweet.” I was guessing this trip would loom even larger for Yeats when he was grown, especially since it wouldn’t be tinged with sadness as my trip had been. It would be four days of enforced relaxation.

  I loved to travel and had done a lot of it — to Europe and Southeast Asia, to Africa and India. I loved the anticipation of travelling somewhere new, of being on the road. I’d had all kinds of good and bad experiences while travelling — from a transcendental moment at a tiny shrine in Darjeeling to contracting malaria in Zaire — and I’d intended to keep travelling after Yeats was born.

  Ben was not a traveller. When the kids were small we took two family holidays to Florida. Ben came with us twice to visit Laurie and Andy in London, but he didn’t come when Yeats and I went to see them in Greenwich. He didn’t join us when Laurie and Andy took us on a holiday to Italy and he did not want to go to BC. He said, “I might like it there too much and want to stay.”

  He was only half joking. He said he didn’t need to go anywhere new; that he was comfortable at the cottage and wouldn’t get to read much anywhere else. Secretly, I thought it was his feet. He was afraid that if we went somewhere like Italy, he’d have to do a lot of walking and his feet would give out.

  At first I wondered if I could bear to be married to someone who didn’t care to travel, but I found ways around that. I took Yeats to places where I had friends to visit or we travelled with Laurie or Mom or sometimes both. I hoped that one day Ben would come with us.

  As the train moved northward, we saw so many bald eagles that Yeats stopped bothering to count them after a while. We stopped in the rocky Canadian Shield at a tiny spot called Capreol and we had the porter, Charlie, take our photo there, with the train as backdrop. Not long after, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and a family disembarked. Charlie helped a man, a woman, and two very small children off the train. The adults heaved huge packs and the four of them disappeared down a forest path that I swear opened up only as they walked down it. Charlie said these people had a cabin on the lake; they’d be waiting for the train on the southbound side in exactly one month’s time, he told us.

  In the week before our departure, there’d been an accident on the rails east of Toronto, and the freight trains all the way west were still backed up as a result. Our train stopped often, standing still for up to half an hour on the sidings, letting these freight trains roll by. We counted the cars as they passed. One train had more than 140 cars and by the time it had gone by, we were thoroughly and pleasantly transfixed.

  Because of these delays, our train stopped for only half an hour in Winnipeg instead of a couple of hours. It was midnight and we stood on the street outside the station, looking one way and then the other. My father grew up in Winnipeg and maybe one night he’d stood in that very spot, looking up and down the street. Maybe when he, too, was fifteen.

  We woke before sunrise and I crawled down from my windowless berth and joined Yeats in the one below. We watched the sun come up over the prairies, enthralled again by the sweep of colour, the endlessness of the Canadian landscape.

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bsp; We stopped briefly in Saskatoon. I was already seated for breakfast but hadn’t yet poured my coffee. I saw Yeats out on the platform and then suddenly he was at the table, saying, “Mom, you have to come outside. You have to smell this place.” The two other people at my table laughed, but they came out, too.

  We walked up and down the station platform, dizzy with the smells of the prairie, the grasses, the freshness. This was air.

  My grandmother, Mary (who we called Mort), grew up on a farm near Arcola, Saskatchewan, and I thought of her and how strong she always seemed, how centred. I wondered how much Mort missed her old home once she moved to the city. I remembered her telling us about riding a horse to school and about her brother, Tom, who was killed as a young man when the tractor he was trying to repair rolled onto his neck.

  There was a photo of Mary and Tom taken when they were in their twenties. It was a close-up in black and white, and the first time I saw it I was stunned by my grandmother’s beauty. I knew her only as an older woman, but here she was in her youth: high cheekbones, wavy, short blonde hair, clear and steady eyes. She was leaning on her brother’s shoulder and smiling. He was tipping back his hat and grinning, too, his blond hair hidden. Mort kept that photo in her bathroom, where she would see it many times a day.

  I remembered visiting the farm in Arcola on that journey west when I was fourteen, drinking fresh lemonade in the big open kitchen with all my cousins. Dad and his brother had spent a month every summer on that farm, doing chores and other farm work, and he loved it there. He wanted us to have a sense of that place, too.

  Yeats and I had another truncated stop, this time in Jasper. Coming into town, our train had had to wait in a siding for over an hour; but it was far from boring. A black bear had come along and foraged for grain on the tracks directly behind the train. We were in the last car, and the porter removed the window from the rear door so we’d have a clear view of the bear. Every so often it would raise its head and sniff in our direction, but then it would go back to its task. It was exciting, but sad, too. We learned that bears often came to scrounge for wheat and other grain that fell through the cracks of freight cars; many of them were killed by trains that didn’t see them until it was too late.

  As we pulled into Jasper station, we saw a double rainbow out the back of the train and decided we’d been blessed. Because of all the delays, we’d be travelling through the Rockies at night, but this meant our next sunrise would be in the Thompson River Valley.

  As we rode through the valley the next morning, Yeats said, “I didn’t know we had a desert in Canada.” The landscape was beautiful and sparse: orange-brown dunes rising from sage-dotted riverbanks, pine trees scanty on the hillsides. Yeats was right: it looked desert-dry. I wanted the train to stop so we could feel and smell the air there.

  Our porter said to Yeats, “You are one lucky fifteen-year-old. Just wait till you tell your friends you took the train all the way from Toronto to Vancouver with your mother. They are going to be so envious!”

  We stopped next in Kamloops, then had a slow ride into downtown Vancouver. For a while, the train stood unmoving on the south side of the Fraser River, among freight trains and loading zones. It was a clear day and we could see the North Shore mountains in the distance, with their dusting of snow on top. My heart constricted at this view: it was a reminder of the city I loved so much, and I was happy to be able to share it with my son, if not with my husband.

  WE SPENT A COUPLE of days in Vancouver and then took the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo. Yeats and I stood out on deck and I took a photo of him with Mount Baker faintly visible in the background. It was a glorious day but windy and I decided to sit inside.

  Yeats came with me so he’d know where I was sitting, and then he went back out on deck. He stood at the front of the ferry, by himself in the wind and sun, and danced. He wasn’t shaking and twisting, but he was definitely dancing to a tune in his head. All of us seated in the big passenger area could see this lone boy, a tall fifteen-year-old with long, blond hair. He was bopping away, looking out to sea. His hair was flying, his hands were playing drums on the railing in front of him, and we were all watching.

  I was feeling a bit shy for him. Well, I was shy but he wasn’t, so what I was feeling was complicated. I didn’t want him to stop dancing, but I wondered if he was distracting people from their view. Probably his happiness was contagious rather than irritating.

  There is a point in that ferry ride when you can look back at the Coast Mountain range north of Vancouver and that’s the point, every time, when I have my little breakdown. My throat tightens, my eyes tear up, and I swear to myself that one day, some day, I’ll move back to the West Coast.

  My family lived in Vancouver for two years starting when I was six and then again for one year when I was fourteen. At twenty-one, after my second year at Queen’s University in Kingston, I moved back there for what was supposed to be a summer; I ended up staying for four years. That first summer it rained for more than forty consecutive days, but it didn’t bother me. I was working at a company that packaged and distributed incense from a loft in an old industrial building in Gastown. My officemate taught people how to grow food in city spaces and he practised tai chi with his girlfriend at lunchtime. I was living my hippie dream, wearing long, flowing skirts and sharing a house with six other young people. When I called my parents to tell them I’d decided to take a year off school to work and then travel to India with my boyfriend, they were speechless. This was totally off-script, but they couldn’t stop me.

  I used to go with friends every summer to the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, held at Jericho Beach in Kitsilano. We’d buy a weekend pass and see as much live music as we could. I saw Rita MacNeil, Stephen Fearing, Roy Forbes (better known to us folkies as “Bim”), various Bulgarian wedding bands, and countless local musicians. One memorable night we left the park with the haunting repetition of Sweet Honey in the Rock singing “U.S. out of El Salvador” over and over and over. I remember turning my back on a little stage one day, looking out over the beach and English Bay, over to the mountains on the North Shore. This view, along with the feeling of deep well-being I had throughout the music festival, imprinted itself on my brain, so that whenever I heard the word “Vancouver” these memories came to mind.

  When we reached that spot in the ferry ride, I went over to the window to look at the mountains so I could torture myself. Then Yeats was beside me.

  “Are you okay, Mom?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You look like you’re crying.”

  “Just with happiness. It’s so beautiful.”

  He cocked his head at me.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Can I have some money for cookies?”

  I gave him some change and he headed for the canteen. The woman next to me said, “Is that your son?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded and smiled, and said, “He looks like he’s enjoying himself.”

  I noticed lots of people looking at me as Yeats regained the railing and resumed his dance. Yes, I am his mother.

  MY FRIEND HEATHER, HER husband, Gord, and their teenaged daughter, Elizabeth, picked us up at the ferry. We drove down the island to a marina where they docked their boat. Their cabin was on De Courcy Island, a gulf island just south of Gabriola. De Courcy is a long, narrow island, about 300 acres of mostly forested land. There are about forty homes on the island, the majority of them seasonal, like our cottage in Muskoka. The boat trip to De Courcy wasn’t long, about ten minutes, then another five or ten minutes in my friends’ pickup truck to the cabin.

  And it really was a cabin, perched on a small hillside above a rocky beach. It had a cozy living room/kitchen area and two small bedrooms. The fridge, stove, and on-demand hot water heater were all propane, and the lights and water pump worked off the solar panel installed on the lawn outside. They had a generator for backup, but we didn’t need to run it while we were there.

  There was a
window seat that looked out over the water and a couch with armchairs around a pot-bellied stove. A long, wooden dining table sat alongside a row of floor-to-ceiling windows, and everything was within arm’s reach of everything else.

  We loved it. It was so vastly different from the cottage in Muskoka that I was instantly jealous.

  Yeats said, “Why can’t our cottage be like this?”

  Heather laughed and said, “But I love your place in Muskoka! Wanna trade?”

  Yeats thought about that but didn’t say anything. Then he went outside to play badminton with Elizabeth, followed by their dog, Jake. Jake was a Maltipoo, the cutest and happiest dog I’d ever met.

  Heather made a couple of gin and tonics, which we took out to a rocky point. For a split second I thought, She’s living my dream. Then I let that go, not wanting to wallow in envy as we watched the sun go down into the ocean. Heather and I had been friends since we were eighteen, and I didn’t begrudge her seemingly paradisiacal life. I was grateful to be there.

  “The kids are trying to play badminton.” Heather laughed. “It’s far too windy.”

  “Jake wants to play, too,” I said, watching the dog run from Elizabeth to Yeats and back again. “They’re going to play with him instead.” The kids put down the rackets and Elizabeth picked up a stick to throw.

  “What are you guys going to do in Tofino? Take surfing lessons?” Heather laughed again. She knew we wouldn’t be doing that.

  “No. Whale-watching. Hiking. Maybe we’ll go birdwatching.”

  “That’d be good. The last time we were there we went whale-watching and saw a whole pod of humpbacks. It was spectacular. I didn’t even get seasick in the boat.”

  “I guess you’ll never move back to Ontario?”

  “Are you kidding me? Not in a million years. This coast is home. When we were away sailing in the Caribbean, Elizabeth was homesick for the cool weather. She really missed the rain and fog and everything else. I guess I did, too. You know, big cedars and stuff.”