Pine Forms

The branch is structured in a way to gather what falls from above, adding mass and a larger surface, enabling it to add more mass, more surface, weighing it down to the point where it hangs at odds with how we have come to picture the larger structure, a ganglion of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur.

Molar Plexus

The morning after my event in Kamloops I awoke to a light crack. Twelve hours later I returned to bed with a throbbing toothache. Yes, I grind my teeth when I sleep. And yes, I have tried mouth guards, but I keep spitting it out. Now I have a cracked molar and have to wait until Monday to get what will likely be my seventh root canal!

Dispensaries

Wakenbake is the first cannabis dispensary you see heading south on Westside Road. Less than 100 metres later, Free Weed.

Vernon Value Village

Ah, a Willie Nelson memoir.

And inside -- a signed and dated drawing by its author!

On the Thin Ice of a New Day

Amy and Brian grew up on skates and are great skaters. Here they are on a break from challenging gender norms at the outdoor rink at Silver Star, Vernon.

Rilke Poem

In his Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (1905), Rilke writes:

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

Rilke Letter

On August 3, 1907, Rilke wrote to the countess of Solms-Laubach:

For weeks, except for two short interruptions, I haven't pronounced a single word; my solitude has finally encircled me and I am inside my efforts just as the core is in the fruit.

Preserves

Amy made over 30 jars of peaches, apricots and plum jam. The left over peach mash was shared with the chickens, who devoured it!

Fintry Provincial Park

Okanagan temperatures continue to rise. To escape the heat, we gravitate towards water bodies and immerse ourselves.

Lake Okanagan is one such body, and Fintry, on its western shore, is a place to take its waters.

The picture above is of a lighthouse thirty feet from the beach and the three young men who climbed its ladders and jumped from it.

A Bowl of Cherries

The tree rarely ripens before it is picked clean by birds. Not this time. Yesterday we filled this stainless steel bowl.

Penticton Lakeside Resort and Conference Centre

Figure 1 is publishing a book in celebration of wood and our relationship to it. Not wood as a logging product, but wood in its aestheticized form, as an architectural material.

As a contributor I was assigned three sites -- the Cheakamus Centre in Brackendale, the VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre and the Penticton Lakeside Resort and Conference Centre -- and asked to submit a 1000 word piece that uses these sites as exemplars of this new relationship.

Yesterday I dropped by the Penticton site to tour its five-storey addition. The photo above was taken from the stairway that leads to its first storey atrium, an ascent that brought to mind everything from Emily Carr's 1930s paintings to Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire (1967).

West Vernon Foothills, July 11, 2018 8:06 p.m.

Today is a travel day.

Creekside

The creek is a good two feet lower than it was in May, when the cottonwoods were shifting and the bridge was threatened. Always unsettling to think back on how close things come.

On the bright side, I am happy to see that the mallow I pulled has not grown back, and that there is less of it than I thought when I left. Although it all looks like the same patch, I remember areas where it came out easily and more stubborn areas where it grows through tightly-packed rocks.

Eleven days before another trip to Vancouver. Hopefully this time I can leave with seeds in the ground and a sprinkler watching over them.

Self-Portrait with Highball Glass

We drank to many things that night -- civility, protocols, Plato, Mourning Dove...

Back in my trailer I read a few more pages of Doctorow's Ragtime (1975), fascinated by the story of Evelyn Nesbit and her friendship with Emma Goldman.

2x4-tress

A "log cabin" made from cut-ends (2x4s). As a shed, it had a number of jobs, but for most of its life it stood around gathering cobwebs, not rot. Recently it had a concrete pad poured for it. A new roof was added, and a second-hand door. Now it is in the recycling business -- a transfer station for paper, glass, plastic and metal. It is guarded by a four-legged creature, also made from cut-ends.

Poncho

No one cares much for my poncho. When I purchased it, I announced boldly that I am "bringing back the poncho," so I think that sealed it.

I like my poncho. I like its adaptability. It is a blanket, but it is also a blanket to be worn when standing.

I also like its story: how I saw it at a thrift store in Kamloops, but when I went back to buy it, it was gone. A month later I saw it at Erin Templeton's Vancouver shop (I had bumped into Erin in Kamloops at an exhibition opening). I told her my story, and she laughed, said it was our story now, and offered to split the difference.

So the poncho is not simply a garment purchased at a shop, but an emblem, a story on which its relationships are carried.

Thanks, Brian, for taking its picture. And for last night's bison (wieners).

Work Day

The pitch fork hits the ground (and slides in) or it hits rock and I wiggle it (in). Once under, I lift, turning the fork this way and that before kneeling down and pulling up stuff like mallow, mustard...

Into the cart they go.

Then it's off to the next square foot.

I have done this at least a thousand times over the past three days, and it is something, but if there is a contraption that removes weeds without taking too much topsoil with them -- great! I want one!

Lunch now. On the deck under the gazebo. The towering clouds and blue patches have given way to dark twisting shapes. I hear thunder, but I see no lightning.

Part of me wants to see a lightning strike, like that Earle Birney poem,

He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it
shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain
so big his mind slowed when he looked at it

but that would mean fire. The forests are tinder dry, and if they catch fire, then we catch fire too.

INT. TRAILER - DAY

The waters have fallen since Thursday, when there was barely a foot between the creek and the bridge.

Yesterday morning, after some creaking and popping, a cottonwood fell across the creek, coming to rest in the fork of another.

All day long we walked around these trees trying to determine which way the tree will fall when it eventually falls to the ground, and whether we should move the trailer outside its potential fall lines.

We still haven't decided. Nor has Brian's evocation of Murphy's Law been much help: "If you move the trailer, it won't fall; if you don't move the trailer, it will."

Creekside

The rains began at exactly 5pm last night, followed by thunder and lightning. The sun broke through at sunset, followed by another blast.

When I awoke this morning, the creek was quieter than it had been in previous days. But when I looked out my window, it was noticeably higher.

If it it gets much higher, it will be higher still.

A New Month of Spring

Temperatures rise, snow melts, and down, down, down comes its waters, directed not by its banks but by its teamsters' silent partner: Gravity.