I'm reading Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss at my brother's place on Vancouver Island. It's a perfect match for the time and place. It is so wet. Rain falling hour after hour, running in rivulets down the driveway. The bark of trees is dark and sodden, puddles are growing on the lawns. All cold, cold, cold. A cold monsoon. Twice as much rain as last year, and this a month before the usual rainiest month of the year. I went over to my brother Pat's trailer for a while this afternoon.
The outside weather is more apparent there, the fragility of life sustaining itself against the great elemental furies of the natural world more directly appreciated through his thin trailer walls. The river running a hundred yards away from his doorstep is surging past full bore barely foot below it's banks, and the grassy flat the parked trailers sit on. Fifty year old trees stand half way up their trunks in the water. Over on the other road that goes down by the river mouth, the ocean is at high tide, chunks of sodden banks shedding away into the surge that roars over the wide swampy estuary. I feel a little nervous we are parked so close to the edge.
The weather has been strange and violent this year. Great gobs of snow dropped all over Vanvouver and Victoria weeks ago, gale force winds battered the shores last week. People nervously watch barometers and listen on the radio for hints about another expected gale. A cold hurricane. The slopes above the roads on the North shore are spiked like porcupines with shattered spears of orange cedar. Not quite so much damage on, the Island where we are, the rise of the Malahat channeled the blow toward the mainland. Only a few dropped sprigs of green, the odd upended pine tree.
It's not very cold. The thermometer on the porch is a hair below -5 C. So lovely to come back inside the house, the air warm and still, full of the smell of burning cedar logs in the fireplace mingling with the smell of Christmas baking. My brothers live in such different worlds, Pat so close to the edge of everything. Michael's house so still and quiet and buffered against the elements.
Things disintegrate in the northern rain forest dampness. Everywhere wooden structures molder into the ground. Roofs grow green fuzz, lichens coat the branches of apple trees, everywhere drifts of sodden brown leaves melt back into the ground. It takes constant applications of heat to dry everything out and keep it from dissolving away into the rain. Pat tells me he found himself telling himself that jumping into the river would be a really stupid way to kill yourself. He was surprised by the very thought.
Got a phone call from Rainbow. She wanted to come over with me on the ferry yesterday, but instead she had to go to the emergency room to get an awfully infection of the skin on and around her earlobe a looked at. Very frightening stuff. It just got so bad overnight despite courses of antibiotics she needed an intravenous pump. They don't want her anywhere near the hospital with such an obviously resistant staph infection. Seems like nature is beginning to fight back on a lot of fronts at once. Christmas Eve and I'm worrying about how many of these cold damp winters my brother is going to be able to make it through in that biscuit box of a trailer, what kind of world the child my daughter is carrying will have to negotiate? Maybe the Peace on Earth we need to make is with Mother Earth Herself.
The Christmas Carols singing softly in the background, candlelight glowing on reflecting surfaces, the beautifully decorated tree, it's all so much the perfect image of a traditional Christmas. Why do I hear the soft tread of a tiger behind me, the future stalking up from behind on silent feet while I gaze mesmerized into the past?
