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He would use these branches as poles to mark out the perimeter of the site,
about twenty square feet comprising one scrub bush, one small hawthorn, a
sizable area of deep heavy snow, and the ice along the shoreline. Much would
happen here, he knew, in the next week or so, some of it natural, some of it
caused by his own activities. When the poles were in place, he began to record
the site with his camera, first the whole area and then the details, reducing
the depth of field in stages until he was able to capture a thorn on the small
tree, a grey, cracked milkweed pod with one remaining seed attached, and the
feathered end of a tall weed stalk that had somehow not succumbed to the weight
of snow. He enjoyed these exercises in increasing intimacy and was warmed by the
knowledge that he would be able to remain for a period of time in the vicinity
of the natural references that would move him.
He was also pleased by the remnants of abandoned architecture that he
had seen here and there on the island, the way these weakened structures had
held their ground despite time and rot and the assault of a century of winters.
After Jerome and his family had drifted down from the north in his early
childhood, they had lived first in a small suburban house and then in an
apartment building perched on a cluttered edge of Toronto, far away from such
haphazard architecture as tool sheds, chicken coops, stables. And yet, his
otherwise solemn and often angry father could be brought to levels of brief
excitement in the vicinity of childhood projects such as the making of kites,
go-karts, tree houses, or forts in scrub lots slated for future development. The
engineer in him, Jerome now believed, that part of him he had been forced to
abandon when the mine closed, could be miraculously, though falsely, shaken into
wakefulness by something as simple as the placement of load-bearing lumber in a
tree. His enthusiasm waned quickly, however, as did Jerome’s, and these
projects were almost always left unfinished, slowly decaying on the margins of
the property, until Jerome returned to them later and took a renewed interest in
their construction and eventual restoration. After the horror of his father’s
death, Jerome would call to mind the structures on the now residential lots, and
he found that he would be able to recall almost exactly the way a tree house had
creaked in the wind, one loose board knocking against a branch, or the way the
large nails had looked in his father’s palm, his mouth, and then the same
nails after a year or so, exposed and rusting during the decline of winter.
Once, as a young adult, Jerome had walked all over the low-rental housing
development that occupied what had been the vacant land, looking for the tree
near a dirty stream where one of these projects had begun to take shape. But
both the stream and its culvert were gone. There was simply no way to place even
the few scraps of memory he had retained. His first project, then, would be an
attempt to rebuild what he thought of as the few good moments of his childhood
and would take the form of temporary and incomplete structures – playhouses of
a sort – that he made himself with torn plastic, discarded wood, and broken
objects found in abandoned lots.
He remembered a journey he had taken a few years before on a train, a journey
he was able to recall now only in terms of the images he had collected while
staring out the window. Trains were vanishing from this vast cold province and
were often halfempty,
those who were there likely being too poor to afford the kind of cars he saw
on the freeway that for part of the journey mirrored the path of the railway. He
had been thinking about the early days, about vacations taken when his father
was still relatively well, holidays that were spent in one provincial park or
another, he and his parents crammed into a tent that his father had bought at an
army surplus store. He remembered the sight of this tent, an ominous bundle
strapped to the roof rack of their deteriorating car along with the bicycle that
his father had given him and that he seldom rode. He also recalled the campfires
his father had taught him to make, the configurations of which were named after
architectural structures such as “the teepee” or “the log cabin.” It
wasn’t until years later that he realized that the ignition of these
constructions, made so that air might move more freely and carry fire farther,
faster, was like the burning of the history of the country in miniature, a sort
of exercise in forgetting first the Native peoples and then the settlers, whose
arrival had been the demise of these peoples, settlers in whose blood was
carried the potential for his own existence.
From A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart. Copyright Jane Urquhart 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of MacAdam/Cage Publishing.
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