It is summer in my memories.
That surprises me, a bit. When I was a boy, the season of my life was autumn: New school year, sharp clothes, girls. While my own kids were small, it was spring: The promise of the buds, the excellence of the puddles. Maybe, when I’m old, I’ll have a head full of winter (though I sincerely hope not). Regardless, when I close my eyes, these days, and think about what has been, I see beaches and cabins, sand-castles and camping.
I see the Gulf Islands. They are a very, very special part of the warmer months in southern British Columbia. They lie in Georgia Strait, between the mainland and Vancouver Island—itself the size of Belgium, and a third as long as Japan. There are around 200 clumps of hills and forest in the Strait (which, I guess, must once have been called the Gulf), but only a dozen or so are inhabited, most of them served by the government-run car ferries that are a fixture of the local imagination. Each of the islands has its own character, but all partake in a mellow vibe, and a stunning topography. Waters clear, deep blue-green, exquisitely refreshing and sharply salt. Beaches that are partly pebbles, partly sand, and partly not beaches at all, but sandstone ledges where you lie warm over deep emerald dives. Seals and seagulls and, sometimes, orcas visit the islands’ slippery skirts. On their high, dry hillsides, and around here we savour the dry, hawks and eagles ride the updrafts in front of overwhelming vistas—as though you have just climbed the Alps, in time for a second Flood. And they eye you, those grim raptors, among the twisted trees, under the glassy sun, and above the shining archipelago.
I started this narration on Gabriola Island, which lies just north of Valdes, which lies just north of Galiano. All of those names sound Latin, and the last two are, like many on the BC coast: From Tofino to Quadra to Zeballos to Malaspina. They were named by, and for, officers of the Spanish navy, which explored and mapped our upper, upper, upper California in the early 1790s. But Gabriola is different. It is not an Iberian name or word, or any other kind (as far as anybody knows). Apparently, when the Mediterranean navigators of the oldest New World empire were casing the island, they saw large flocks of seagulls: Gaviota. That went on the chart they drew. In the course of copying, and translating, somebody’s pen slipped: “Gabriola.” It is an error, a one-off. Like the name we give my favourite tree, it is uniquely here.
Gabriola lies just opposite the small Vancouver Island city of Nanaimo. This is famous for its eponymous “bar,” i.e., confectionery, which is genuinely delectable, although this is not news, since it consists in a slab of chocolate on a slab of butter on a slab of cake. According to tradition, the Nanaimo Bar was invented for the same reason as the town: Coal. Discovered nearby in 1849, this brought settlement and wealth, and a population of exhausted miners in need of high-calorie comfort. As a matter of fact, the place that grew up to serve the mines was originally called Colvilletown—after a local grandee, who was really named Colville, but still, it sounds amazingly dumb, Coalcitycity. The native peoples of the area, some of whom had directed the British toward the highly accessible seams in the first place, called themselves, approximately, the “Sne-ny-mo.” That became the basis for the town’s better and abiding name.
There is disagreement about what it means. Possibly “big strong tribe,” possibly “collection of tribes.” This is quite typical of native place-names in Canada. Starting with “Canada.” The accepted theory is that Jacques Cartier, sailing up the St. Lawrence River in 1535, was told he was nearing a “kanata,” Iroquois for “village.” However, he may instead have been told, through another garbling of Spanish, that he was heading “aca nada”: Toward nothing. I think we are allowed to prefer the village. Cynthia’s mother was from Nanaimo, as mine from Squamish–on the mainland, up the coast, water-access only, in those days. Squamish means either “mother of the wind” or “people of the sacred waters.” Our mothers’ parents, of course, came from away—as they say in Newfoundland, uncreatively so named by John Cabot (Giovanni Cabote) in 1497, but not here: From Norway, Sweden, and England via Alberta.
Nowadays, in BC, names like Nanaimo and Squamish are rewritten. The city of the bar and the coal is correctly Snuneymuxw. The sawmill town, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh. These are transliterations, crafted by linguists to capture native phonemes—mouth sounds—that simply don’t exist in English. I can’t write how to pronounce them, because I just did. If you want to speak, you first have to learn the phonemic values that are arbitrarily assigned to the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks of the transliterative system. And then you have to pronounce the ones you don’t know how to. Obviously, very few people (who are not linguists) possess the ability to re-shape their mouths, and re-tune their ears, that far. For we are far too much at home in the language that we learned, when we first learned language at all: What we call, appropriately and beautifully, our mother tongue. So, around here, we still say Nanaimo, Squamish, Tswwassen, Kwantlen, Coquitlam, Kitsilano, Capilano, Skana, Hayak, Knickinick, Musqueam, Saanich, Semiahmoo, and so on. But now we are saying them wrong.
Our summer reaches well across September, and even toward October. Some years, I can harvest greens from my garden at (Canadian) Thanksgiving; some years, my hydrangeas and anenomes deny they will ever not be there. The rains are coming, and we know that, and even love that, but we cling to the fantasy of always getting another swim. Warm dry day follows warm dry day, as island follows island.
Libber leeber 