We must be mute again, she says. Not like fields and trees but in a giant muteness, a huge forgetting of tiny chattering categories. We must flood and drown. We’ll outnumber. We’ll dump the churches, the lording of property and marriage. We’ll shit where we want and our shit’ll blossom the soil. We’ll roam with beasts and fuck whoever, whenever, wherever. Our babies’ll grow huge and strong playing in their volcanoes of shit and mud. We giants’ll be exuberant and solitary and generous. We’ll roam the whole Now. Lightning sky-clap will wrench our muteness, our stumble and stutter, to avalanche of words. Wrench us to song-grapple.
Here we come to Underbridge, Christine continues, the unwhere of the regulatory nowhere, the unpromise of the right-direction automobile. Here, in Between, we radiate and compose ourselves as nextness in a vast dense musicality of other dreaming unpromises. Ravens, coyotes, homeless, Big Gulp, toxins, free doom — we read unminded. Quilt under bridge. Seven men under bridge. Broken CD, Metro News under bridge. Shame, Cold, Boredom — language and languish under bridge where I and Christine build cities for the giftless.
Moccasin Box
for Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake
Drive north on any of Vancouver’s main streets, and the forested hulks of Grouse and Seymour Mountains lunge up a wall as your road disappears over a cliff edge into the inlet. In East Van the hulks dwarf false-fronted wooden stores reminiscent of frontier trading posts, laced together by electrical wires on leaning cedar poles. In the West End they loom over tower blocks and corporate skyscrapers, reminding the busy city, in its antlike toings and froings, of all it is not and can never be. All the more so because even the immense, implacable blue-green hulks are superseded by their crown, a pair of snow-covered peaks that Vancouverites fondly call the Lions.
With the cables of its Lions Gate Bridge, swooping from pylon to pylon, Vancouver ties itself to the Lions’ immensity.
Logs of wood and stumps of trees innumerable, Captain George Vancouver wrote in 1792, staring at driftwood on the delta of the Stó:lō, the river at the foot of these mountains, which did not lead him to the Northwest Passage. Trees, trees, and more trees on the wall of peaks blocking his way. Up the coast in the traditional lands of the Skwxwú7mesh, he found a stupendous snowy barrier lurching from sea to clouds and spewing torrents through its rugged chasms. He logged the weather: dark, gloomy, blowing a southerly gale, which greatly added to the dreary prospect of the country. Desolation Sound he called some of the coast: forlorn gloomy forests pervaded by an awful silence, empty of birds and animals.
Trees haunt the city: the old giants whose feet spanned a cart and horses — their stumps slimy with moss — still lurk in the salal and ferns of Stanley Park or up the slopes of Grouse Mountain in the Capilano Canyon, where they feed the roots of new giants several arm spans in girth. Their distant tops creak and moan in the wind. Myriad spiny branchlets of fir and long, drooping fronds of cedar catch shafts of sunlight and rake tatters of fog from the ocean. The air drips. Trunks, limbs, moss soak up the grind of city planes and cranes, holding in their cavernous understory the rush and trickle of the Capilano River, the peep of a nuthatch, the snap of a falling branch, and, high above, the combing of wind, the chortle of a raven.
Up above, high — sagalie, in the Chinook jargon Pauline Johnson used with Chief Joe Capilano, recording his stories of the Skwxwú7mesh people and the Sagalie Tyee. I imagine Johnson searching like I was for stories, not from invaders, but from here, stories from the first people of the immense mountains, the giant trees, the talking ravens.
The snow-covered Lions are not lions to the Skwx-wú7mesh people; they are the Twin Sisters who were lifted to the mountaintops by the Sagalie Tyee. It was they, so Johnson records in her Legends from Chief Joe Capilano, who brought the Great Peace between the Skwxwú7mesh and the Haida by the simple act of inviting them to a feast. Another legend tells how the Sagalie Tyee sent his four giants to challenge a swimmer, claiming they would turn him to a fish, a tree, a stone if he did not give way to their canoe.
Back and forth and right toward the giants’ canoe he swam so his child would have a clean life. The Sagalie Tyee made him Sl’kheylish (standing-up-man rock) to remind everyone: defy everything for the future of your child.
Thanks to the Sagalie Tyee, Shak-shak the hoarder suddenly found himself a two-headed serpent, one of his mouths biting the poor and one mouth biting his heart. He who pierces the serpent’s heart will kill the disease of greed — so said the Sagalie Tyee. A young man of sixteen remembered those words and brought down the monster.
A young woman could get help, too, from the Sagalie Tyee, if she wanted to know which suitor really cared for her. What if she were looking for other things? Like stories that had grown with the forests. Stories of women who dared, women who blazed trail? Women who spoke? Would the Sagalie Tyee come to her aid?
The front desk casually mentions a pair of Pauline Johnson’s moccasins held somewhere in the library, she’s not sure where. A Special Collections librarian says she’ll look into it and disappears to inner chambers. Some time later she returns with a large metal-cornered box. We have no provenance for these, she tells me, unfolding tissue paper around a pair of pale leather moccasins covered with beaded flowers and bands of woven grass, the soles smooth as the bottom of a foot. Their ankle-high cuffs flop over next to tangled delicate lacing. Lack of provenance meaning, I suppose, that someone could have found a pair of moccasins in Johnson’s possession when she died which actually belonged to someone else — her sister, say, or a friend — and mistakenly passed them off as Johnson’s, or even that someone claiming to be a friend of Johnson’s had given them to the library when in fact they had belonged to the friend’s grandmother and never been touched by Johnson. I try to convince myself of this, but I’ve opened a box I can’t close: I’m certain they are Johnson’s. She’s supposed to be wearing them in this photograph, the librarian explains. She retrieves from an envelope a photocopied picture of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake in her Mohawk stage costume, which she made of buckskin, and we see her as through a window smoked up by a house fire, moccasins illegible.
In 1909 she retired from the stage at forty-eight to a two-bedroom Vancouver apartment three miles from Sl’kheylish, one of her favourite destinations in Stanley Park. Like everyone else she called it Siwash Rock, though siwash was an insulting term for an aboriginal person.
For twenty years she’d been Canada’s most famous author (known throughout the English-speaking world), constantly touring and living in hotels. Now her days turned around a small apartment on a treed street in a town clinging to the far edge of North America, a town barely keeping its own against wind and sea and the forested mountains looming in its face. Yet here she found something grander than ever: her Cathedral Trees. Every day, heedless of the rain or sea soaking her clothes, she would walk to Siwash Rock, and then to the nearby Cathedral Grove, one red cedar and six Douglas firs from the old-growth forest, people called the Seven Sisters.
To support herself without income from stage performances, Johnson wrote stories for Mother’s Magazine and Boys’ World, stories like “The Wolf Brothers,” “The Silver Craft of the Mohawks,” and “The Potlatch.” Her friend, Chief Capilano, whom she’d met at Buckingham Palace, came to visit, sitting in silence at the round oak table from her father’s house. After several visits he began to tell her stories she would retell as “Legends of the Capilanos.” Lionel Makovski of the Vancouver Daily Province began paying her seven dollars a piece to publish the stories in his weekly magazine, adding photographs to make them and Princess Tekahionwake his star attraction; elsewhere the paper had called the chief an agitator and blamed him for disputes and uprisings. Johnson then could not meet his deadlines; she cancelled appointments without notice; Chief Capilano died; and breast cancer spread into her right arm. Makovski himself became her writing hand as she dictated the stories from her couch.