An accounting of one’s life amounts to a confession one way or another, and the place you live has a lot to say about how you live it.  Where I grew up, life was regimented and routine.  Weekdays most worked at something for wages, and every day, weekday or not, was marbled with milking, feeding, watering and keeping up with a slew of temporary repairs.  Time was measured, not in years, but in seasons.  I know what I’m talking about because this is where I lived for most of my life and where the first part of this story takes place:  at this end of the valley, Tansor, from 1953 to 1967.

Winters brought heavy rain, steady for days and days at a time, cloud cover so close to the earth it was difficult to breathe, snow predictable enough to claim its beauty and scorn the consequences, frost that kept a light bulb burning in the pump house or something close to hell would freeze over with satanic laughter.  Summers were hot and dry—the earth cracked and fissured and begging for relief—and only the infrequent wind would push the searing air into the shade and shimmer the surface of pools left in the painstaking trickle of spring-fed creeks that began at the foot of the two-humped mountain and snaked like a rumour through the dappled shade of forest floor.  There were birds in spring and so many shades of green in the flora that the mind began to doubt the eye—yellow-lime shoots all the way to green so dark they were purple—while the bulls and roosters and rams and stallions, fenced or unfenced, strutted in the pull of the lengthening, expectant days.  The slanting light of autumn was like a dwindling pile of delicious desert, reduced by minutes daily, a pellucid light that dressed trees and bushes in competitive yellows and oranges, reds and browns that held, waning, until there was no light, and birds who knew how said their seasonal goodbyes and roofs were made ready, vegetables canned, hay stacked to the rafters, turkeys slaughtered—except the one given reprieve and fed extravagantly until Thanksgiving.    

The people who lived here came from just about everywhere:  Europe, across town, a callous persecution, a slight of fancy, a thin entrepreneurial dream, a second chance.  They were here now and knew they were here to stay.  Their mostly small, rectangular plots of land had a skim of fertile soil on top of yellow clay that demanded any agricultural aspiration had to be supplemented by work from town or a sawmill or setting choker in the woods.  Reading consisted mostly of TV Guide and the weekly paper, and magazines and books that did exist were mainly used to swat the drunken slurry of flies that migrated from barns to houses as if trying to move up in the world.  In Tansor, people didn’t move in and they didn’t move out:  they clung to their existence like goldfish—thankful to be in bowls that held water. 

Gardening for the beauty of gardening was an omission as a rule.  One might find a geranium in a clay pot by the corner of the house and depending on the month it could be green and flowering or a paleontological exhibit of good intentions.  Carrots, beets and potatoes were common.  Sometimes corn.  Fruit trees, apple and plum mostly, existed but were there because someone had planted them years before and if a tree bears fruit it may as well be picked.  Many houses had a jungle of mother-in-law’s tongue, the resilient, water-me-when-you-want plant of choice.

Most yards came with their own garbage dump where broken cars and pumps and tractor accessories would be laid to rest, offer spare parts for a few years, then perceptively rust into the earth.  It was possible to transport garbage to the dump several miles away but few bothered.  Three or four years of exposure to the elements and a soup can would crumble like a thin cracker in your hand.  Pigs would eat most of the refuse and goats would eat anything they could wag their beards over.  The odd house had a uniform exterior but many were a patchwork quilt of temporary inspiration and material supply:  tarpaper and cedar lath a common stop gap measure.  Roofs were re-shingled only when attempts to patch them became a losing battle and an attic full of drip-catching buckets became too numerous to empty.  Fences were generally repaired, not replaced, and livestock took advantage of visitation rights.  Mrs. Eaton, the local spinster, was wakened at least once a month to the sound of a neighbour’s cowbell outside her bedroom window.

There were no babies here.  Once-upon-a-time babies were now tough and sinewy and would soon be ready to make babies themselves with little contemplation.  Armed with grade eight or nine education and having attained the magic age of fifteen, young men would threaten to join the navy and peel potatoes if necessary for a chance to see the world, but would instead take a job for close to the same wage their father earned setting choker in the woods or pulling lumber on the green chain.  In another pocket valley further into the countryside they would settle like dust on a similar patch of scrub land to replicate what they knew.  Young women would waitress or style hair and wait for their chance to build their own nest somewhere with someone and the sooner the better.  There were rare exceptions, those who would grind their way through high school and move to Victoria or Vancouver to work for name brand corporations and never be heard from again, relegated to past tense if their escape ever found its way into conversation, transported to an uncertain world along with the dead. 

For those living in the shallow valley at the base of the twin-peaked mountain the future was brittle and tentative.  Loggers made decent money when there was work, but summers often brought a four to six week stretch when the woods were so tinder-dry that logging was curtailed and unemployment applied for.  Come winter, a two or three week stretch, sometimes more, the ample snow made fallen logs indiscernible and the falling of trees impossible.  When the logging was shut down for an extended period  the mills ran out of logs to mill and the pulp mill ran out of chips to make paper and those who mended fenders had no work because . . . well . . . a fender can wait.  Spring and fall were full ahead months in the valley, months that any notion of surplus had to consider the paucity of the season to come.