In Another World (eBook)

Prologue: Withering Heights

There were three roads

two led into the world;

the village spins

I woke early, ragged and jet-lagged, in my hotel room in the heart of the Canadian Prairies. I put on a tracksuit and trainers and went outside into the lightly falling snow to run away the lethargy and to take advantage of the conjunction of memory and the moment. I had been invited back to Edmonton, where I had lived for a year thirteen years earlier, to celebrate thirty years of the Writing Program at the University of Alberta. Block by block, I felt my way back into the city – its broad streets, the concrete and glass bulwarks of its university, the trees that mark the sides of the valley where the North Saskatchewan River flows. An old dog sniffing for something that smells like a trail.

Edmonton is still a young city. First established as a trading post, Fort Edmonton, in 1795, it has been state capital for just over one hundred years. Its historic main street, Whyte Avenue, still has the low-horizon, sidewalk feel of a street that could be as long as it wanted to be, given the material and the labour available. But, away from this vertebra and its ribs, Edmonton is an oil-rich city designed for the car. Broad boulevards lead to its downtown areas, mirror-bright and metallic, while its spreading suburbs – clapboard houses with neat lawns – follow a grid system.

From a base at Edmonton, a little over a hundred years ago, immigrant settlers moved north. Their labour and their loneliness still feel immense, their severing of contact with ‘the old country’ heartbreakingly acute. Many of their namings, shorn of their native rhythms, read like perfunctory tags – Peace River, Wandering River, Slave Lake. The landscape was too vast, their creative energy too limited, their knowledge too slight to conjure anything but the most basic resonance. Enormous space still surrounds the settled land, though towns – ones with names like these – thrive in the emptiness.

Ironically, many of the experiences that came out of the individual’s struggle for survival are communal ones that bind Canadians and have influenced their strongly democratic traditions. In The Company of Adventurers, Peter C. Newman suggested that it was the wide-ranging commercial endeavours of the Hudson Bay Company that had created Canada’s geographical unity. In addition, in the 1800s, over half the able-bodied men in Canada had supplemented their incomes by spending winter in a logging camp. This seasonal work transformed the lives of almost every Canadian family and gave them a shared experience almost as common as war.

Canadian writing still acknowledges and draws on its closeness to the natural world in a way that few other literatures do. In Survival, her thematic guide to Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood once tethered Canadian literature to an image of scribbling on the marginalia of the pressing wilderness, ever at risk of oblivion. And though many contemporary writers resent what they see as a backward-looking perspective, others show an awareness of how brief their presence has been in the Canadian landscape.

The Saskatchewan poet, Tim Lilburn, one of those celebrants at the University of Alberta, addresses such concerns in his essay ‘Philosophical Apokatastasis: On Writing and Return’: ‘We aren’t from where we are; we, descendants of European settlers, don’t come from this ground,’ he writes. ‘We have our graves here; we have spent a few generations changing the land but [ . . .] landscapes have long, exacting apprenticeships and in the aspen country of north central Saskatchewan and in the grassland south of it Cree, Assiniboine, Lakota, Saulteux and others have finished theirs.’

Thick shavings of snow fell on my face. I brushed them away and kept my head tilted to the pavement, finding a track through the snow. The Sunday streets were quiet. At one intersection, a car pulled back its snout to let me pass, an accommodation that, through the shrouding snow, reconnected me with what I once knew of this city and its inhabitants, gentlemen of the Prairies.

Later, showered, awake, I sat in the Second Cup, a corner café on Whyte Avenue. Perched on a high stool, I looked out of the window and could almost see my wife Julie in her black poncho and multi-coloured scarf as she pushed Cameron in his buggy, his hands clutching onto Blue Bunny.

‘You look lost in thought there, buddy,’ said a waitress – with a characteristic lightness that again sounded a note in my memory.

‘Yes, I, we, used to come here thirteen years ago with our son.’ And I heard my voice sounding reedy and cracked.

I sipped my Java and opened that day’s Edmonton Journal, a broadsheet with a comfortable, roomy feel to it, and it brought me back to a familiarity that wasn’t freighted with emotion. In its pages, I once read reviews of writers whose names hadn’t crossed the state boundary, let alone the pond, and I had enjoyed the detachment and grace of the literary outsider. In its ‘Sunday Reader’ section this morning was a front-page article with the title ‘Withering Heights’, concerning ‘The dozen citizens still living in Villabandin, Spain – who range in age from 58 to 91 – [who] cannot clearly recall the last wedding or christening in their dying village.’ There was a photograph of a severe-looking old woman, in the stiffness of a pose: ‘Milagros Garcia, an eighty-year-old widow, pauses in reflection after gathering some eggs from the farmyard.’

On the inside, a spread of photographs showed the village – a grey clutch of roofs – alongside pictures of its church and its twelve permanent inhabitants. ‘Who will look after our graves, once we are gone?’ one of them asked. ‘After us there will be nothing.’ The article explained that the experience of Villabandin in Castile and León was replicated in many other parts of Spain and across Europe, from Portugal to Russia.

I felt a jolt of recognition as one place brought to mind others from other times, each sitting inside the other, like a set of Russian dolls. The images of Spanish depopulation that contrasted with the bright, wooden, New World structures of Edmonton brought to mind the stubborn remains from the part of Scotland where my template of abandonment first took root – to where, whenever I am faced with a domestic ruin, my imagination returns. Even standing below a lintel in a house at Machu Picchu, breathing in a familiar smell of damp moss and fern, it had been the resonance of a deserted croft house in Scotland that I had felt.

For much of my childhood and early adulthood, my parents owned a cottage in the northeastern Highlands of Scotland. It stood at a slight distance from the village of Culrain, which itself lies a few miles from Bonar Bridge, the portal for the main artery north until the bridge was built at Dornoch. We started going there in the sixties, around the time people were talking about the A9 north as ‘the Road to Nowhere’ and when the famous newspaper headline had appeared asking the ‘Last person to leave the Highlands [to] switch off the lights.’

The cottage had been filled with hay bales when my father offered to buy it from the farmer, the pair of them bargaining in the field where it stood. The village itself – with the whitewashed farm as its centrepiece – stood close to the dismal pond into which (it is alleged) James Graham, First Marquis of Montrose, leader of a doomed uprising on behalf of the Stuart king, cast his armour after his final defeat on 27 April 1650. The pond’s name was Loch Sprint, but it was not so much a loch as the undrained sump of one, surrounded by a few straggly trees. It was a location, in other words, without romance or sentiment. And yet, such is the Scots twinning of glory with defeat, I found it perfectly possible to imagine handsome Montrose’s armour preserved and shining in its gloopy depths.

The village had once served Carbisdale Castle, now a youth hostel but, at the start of its history, a vivid example of the combination of power and pique. The castle (built 1907–1917), the local story went, had been strategically placed on a raised promontory, overlooking the Kyle of Sutherland, by the dowager Duchess of Sutherland to mark more intensely her disapproval of her son’s marriage. His private railway was routed below the castle, and, when he was passing, the duchess ordered all curtains on that side of her baronial heap to be closed.

From the top of Struie Hill – a good ten miles away – your eye is led to the distant castle as surely as it would be in any Renaissance landscape. There is indeed every measure of Highland grandeur in this ‘million dollar view’, but, closer in, up the straths and the glens, I used to feel an ineffable sadness. If, for example, you continued the road up Strath Oykel, which, until relatively recently, led to a dead end, you would see the broken shells of croft houses from the clearances, their abandonment and ruin only highlighted by the few intermittent white bungalows or renovations.

Even more poignantly, at the head of the glen of Strathcarron, stands Croick Church. Here had been one of the most infamous illustrations of the callous nature of the clearances. Those cleared from Glencalvie had seen themselves not as victims of oppression but of God-given laws: ‘Glencalvie people...