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There is a grandness
about entering a country by sea. Even if the sea is simply a strait
crossed in an hour from the country you are leaving. Even if the
ship carrying you is only a huge ferry on which there is nothing
elegant. Even if you get seasick just by looking at water.
But coming into Canada
via Victoria, one of the loveliest cities on earth, on a clear, soft
summer day goes beyond grand. There are flowers everywhere,
romantic hansom cabs lining the streets, human-scale buildings,
green parks. The word “civilized” makes sense.
I love civilization.
It seems so rare.
Cities rife with ever
bigger, higher buildings have tremendous energy, but they are too
competitive to be civilized. Suburbs and the sprawl they spawn only
insulate people from one another, from community, from nature, even
from the raw energy of big cities.
Civilization does not
depend on place. Once, backpacking in Wyoming’s Wind River Range in
rain that began before dawn, my path descended into a meadow where
three horses grazed. Beyond the horses, near the edge of forest, a
woman wearing a skirt sat comfortably on a log next to a campfire. A
man in buckskins standing near the horses waved at me. I waved
back. He waved again, clearly signaling me over. “Would you like a
hot drink?” the woman asked, when I reached their fire. No one
could have offered more. My stove had broken, and unable to start a
fire in the morning’s wetness, I had had nothing warm since the
night before. “An old mountain man grog,” the man said. He told me
it was made of bark or leaves or twigs -- I never quite got the
ingredients. But it was the mountain man time the man was living.
It meant he got to wear buckskins and knew how to build a fire when
everything was wet. The grog tasted ghastly, but I swallowed every
warm drop, finding the moment intensely civilized.
Victoria spread before
us as the ferry docked. We could see it as David drove the truck
out of the hold onto the dock, see it as Canadian Customs waved us
into one of the spots reserved for those about to be investigated.
Why us? We don’t look
like smugglers. Any kind. Guns. Dope. Illegal aliens. What else
aren’t you supposed to bring in? Apricots, it said on a sign on the
ferry. Bear spray. I suppose we could look like the sort of people
who might bring in an apricot.
Years ago, coming
across the Canadian border into Montana, I did a stupid thing. Well
before 9/11, during that long, erstwhile friendly history of our two
countries when a driver’s license got you across the border, I had
driven to Waterton National Park with a friend and her baby. In
Waterton Townsite, I bought the baby a toy penguin. When we were
asked on our return if we had anything to declare, I said, “only a
penguin.”
“A penguin?” the
customs agent asked, looking triumphant at finding a criminal.
“It’s a stuffed toy.
For the baby,.” I said, wondering about a customs agent who thought
there were penguins in Canada.
“We need to look at
the car. Please step out,” he ordered.
That meant my friend
had to get all her baby paraphernalia together, and get the baby out
of his car seat and put him in his stroller, which made him wake up
and cry, while the customs agent, and several he called over to aid
in the great penguin search of the north, practically tore apart the
car looking for more penguins. He seemed unimpressed by the one I
bought, sensing I was hiding the real penguins.
He couldn’t find any.
Or anything else. They had to let us go.
But this time I hadn’t
done anything. I’d learned what not to say. (Never say you
have a penguin.) After David unlocked the camper door for them, we
were told to stand at the front of the truck while two agents went
through our pile of jackets. We could not see them when they
entered the camper. Were they going through cupboards? Through
luggage lying on the camper bed? Through hiking packs, photography
cases, book bags? The man who had signaled us over came out of the
back while his partner continued searching. Thank god there were no
penguins back there. (Although there was forgotten bear spray in my
rucksack they did not find.)
The only other vehicle
pulled over was a vintage VW camper, with an uncomfortable looking
old hippie standing beside it. He was sweating. “Did you pull us
over because of the camper?” I asked the agent. “Or because we have
New Mexico plates?” I could imagine they would think that if we had
a camper, and came from that close to Mexico, we must be
transporting illegals. Or drugs. Or guns for people running drugs
in Canada. Or penguins.
“Just random,” the
agent answered.
Right.
 Victoria
building codes do not allow buildings over a certain height. The
idea is that 19th century buildings should not sink into
the shadows of power, but also that nothing block views of the
Pacific from anywhere in town. Is it a revolutionary thought to
consider that our access to nature matters? Even a view of
nature, of the power of oceans, when you have spent an entire day
dealing with insurance fraud, or rude customers, or galleries
rejecting your work allows you to breathe deeper. We are civilized
by the fact of wildness. We breathe through daily routines
because we see the ocean or the mountain or the open green space
of a city park. Canada has its share of environmental problems, but
the city of Victoria has its own soul.
We drove directly to
the Royal British Columbia Museum, a handsome, and very modern
building set between the historic Empress Hotel and the Legislature
buildings and not far from the ferry terminal. The featured visiting
exhibit was a stunningly mounted collection of 300 artifacts from
the British Museum. Spanning thousands of years of global cultural
evolution, its intent was to show us where we came from and what we
have become. But what we could really see, is how intrinsic
art is to the human soul.
A permanent exhibit,
the First Peoples Gallery presents views of native culture before
and after the arrival of Europeans. Many objects in the gallery
were made for the gallery, but there are also pieces removed from
the people who made them in those days when the dominant society
sought to dismantle a culture they regarded as primitive and
heathen.
The exhibits present
First Nations’ interpretation of the things that have always been
part of their lives. I was drawn to a display of masks in a
darkened case in a dark room. As light falls on each mask
separately, we are told the story the mask carries. The mask recedes
into darkness, the next is lit. What we hear is the memory of
meaning. What we see is the immediacy of story.
On each of two visits
to the museum, I sat before the masks a long time, but it could
never be long enough. The stories do not let me go. It is the
stories that make this land, these people whose land this is.
Overlaid on the stories is the Anglo beauty of Victoria. But in
front of the exhibit, only story exists.
 We
left the museum to walk the few blocks to the house of Emily Carr,
the painter/writer who railed against her own society’s attempted
destruction of First Nation culture. Her Victorian house is now a
little museum honoring her. The rooms filled with things she would
have used are a million miles from the masks a few blocks down the
street. Yet, in a shed is a little caravan of the sort that enabled
her to stay in wild places to paint, a kind of transition-domicile
between her own culture and the world she loved.
“There’s tea and
lemonade on the porch,” the woman at the museum desk said to us.
“Please help yourself. And have some cookies.” We drank lemonade in
the garden.
How simple
civilization is!
Copyright © 2009 Ruth
Rudner |
