Spring in Smithers, Poetry and Hope in Prince George
Posted by Margaret Horsfield
“Happy Spring” declared a chalkboard outside a restaurant in Smithers. The sunshine was pale and clear behind the Hudsons Bay Mountain, and a small girl, beaming, walked past with a huge ice cream cone. Smiling because of the ice cream? Because of spring? Perhaps because she was wearing only a T shirt and jeans and sandals, and because the sun was shining.
Skiing season has just ended in Smithers, marked by the annual Schnai day, and the more intrepid mountain bikers are out and about on the trails around the town. A couple of blocks away from the main street an older man turned the earth of his vegetable patch, the rich dark soil almost glowed in the morning light.
At Smithers Secondary School, the Grade Eleven Social Studies class also glowed; a highly motivated and interested group, genuinely interested in the stories of people in my book, stories of real west coast people, revealed in letters and diaries they left behind. For the first time on this tour, I brought out the Powerpoint presentation, showing pictures from the book – unusually I had only one technical glitch, readily solved by a boy in the class.
The students were surprised to learn that all of my research had been with real documents, that none of the letters or diaries on which my book is based are available on-line. Did I manage to convince them, even in the slightest degree, that real documents can communicate so much more than digitized ones? That holding, smelling, turning old pages – onionskin, or frail lined notepaper, or foxed newsprint – can be so real that you sense the fingerprints of the writers on the page.. hear the voices of the writers as if they are in the same room with you? That the sharply jabbed penstrokes or the faintly pencilled words can speak volumes? We spoke of old technologies and their infinite strangeness: of letterwriting, of treadle sewing machines, of the days of sail and steam, of the darkness of homes and villages in the wilderness, without electricity, of pen and ink, of photographs on glass slides.
Then off to Prince George, past lakes still frozen solid, still imprinted with vehicle tracks from winter days on the ice, past many towns and settlements: Burns Lake, Fraser Lake and Endako, which features an old taxidermy shop in an even older false fronted building alongside the highway. Past hawks perched watchfully on telephone lines, and stands of pine trees, orangey-red and dying, past countless young birch trees still bowed over, bent in half, burdened with the memory of last winter’s snow load. This is an exceptionally late spring, everyone says. It has been a long, long winter.
At the Prince George bookstore later that day, three local poets gathered, with others, to hear us all talk of our books. My friend, the slam poet Darcy Ingram, was amongst them. For the poets, the highlight of the evening was talking to Elise about poetry, hers and theirs. On this tour I have repeatedly been struck by the powerful bonds forged by poetry. I knew nothing of the poetry community within the province, and I have seen how the slender strands of poems, meticulously worded, reach out to form intense links between people.
Later, chatting to Darcy, I learned about her rhododendron. She has not been long in Prince George, and coming from the greener gardening climes of Vancouver Island, she knows perfectly well that Prince George is not rhodo country. But she has one in her garden here - logic and horticultural advice be damned. Darcy is a fighter, a determined survivor. Like Elise she has come through cancer and chemotherapy, and defied medical odds. So her rhodo has received its instructions. It must come through the winter.
Last autumn, she carefully wrapped it in layers of burlap, and bolstered it to withstand the snows and the cold of winter. How is it doing now that April is here? It is still hidden from sight, buried under three feet of snow.
So Darcy is watching and waiting. The snow will melt and the rhododendron will emerge. I hope it has survived. Meanwhile, as the long winter draws to a close, Darcy has finally put away her winter coats and boots, and – best of all—she has just submitted a manuscript of her poems to a publisher.
I wonder if she has written anything about the rhododendron.
