Standing here among the sword ferns my senses seem to be thin glass, so acute at their edges I am afraid I will cut myself simply by touching the silicon edge of a bamboo leaf. The flicker's blade of beak as it slices into the apple makes me wince. My hands are pale animals. The smallest sounds, a junco flitting between viburnum leaves, a drop of water falling on the cedar deck, make me cringe. I can smell the bitter iron in the mosses on the apple tree's branches. My flesh at times is in agony, and I feel as if I have come out from some shadowed place into light for the first time. I feel, for the first time in years, alive.I came to this book after reading Patrick Lane's Deep River Night: a story set in a 1960's logging camp in the B.C. Interior that felt so true in its details of life there, in the details of hopelessness and addiction, that I knew that Lane was writing from some experience. What the Stones Remember is the memoir that Lane began in 2001, and as it recounts his struggles to find his way back to living after a lifetime of drug and alcohol addiction, he also dips frequently into his far past – from his childhood of abuse and neglect to the stretch that he did spend in a logging camp on the North Thompson River as a First Aid Man – and as complementary reads, these two books focus and refocus, through fiction and non-, a lens on a remarkable life. Patrick Lane has been called “the greatest poet of his generation” and his writing here is never less than magical; I was transfixed.
The opal drop of water the chickadee drank is no different than the droplet at the tip of a bare apple tree bud that I lifted my hand to. I extend my trembling finger and the water slides onto my fingernail. I lift it to my lips and take a sip of what was once fog. It is a single cold on the tip of my tongue. I feel I am some delicate creature come newly to this place for, though I know it well, I must learn again this small half-acre of land with its intricate beauties, its many arrangements of earth, air, water, and stone.What makes this memoir special is the focus that Lane trains on his patch of garden out on Vancouver Island: from the abundance of life that blithely flourishes, oblivious to the pained and petty lives of nearby humans, to the physical work and meditative planning that transform him body and soul, reclaiming an unpruned garden is a worthy metaphor for reclaiming a life. As other reviewers have noted, Lane might be guilty of going on a bit too long about every weed and bug, but extravagance is a small complaint. There is a naturalness to Lane working away with pitchfork and pruning shears and getting lost in some memory; the time shifts always feel organic, and the stories that Lane shares from his past are candid and fascinating; the conclusions he draws are wise.
The garden begins with my body. I am this place, though I feel it at the most attenuated level imaginable. Once dead, I am come alive again. Forty-five years of addiction and I am a strangeling in this simple world. To be sober, to be without alcohol and drugs in my cells, is new to me and every thing near to me is both familiar and strange.I did find it interesting that for a recovery memoir, Lane only hints at his addictions; focussing more on their effects on those around him than the actual details of his apparent debauchery. I also found it interesting how many small details from his memories here eventually made it into Deep River Night: it makes me wonder if by not writing about his life as a drunk in this memoir, Lane had to eventually novelise those experiences in order to finally exorcise them. The following describes life in the logging camp, details of which made it into the novel:
The Sikhs, lonely and ostracized, fought each other on weekends with fists and knives, the white men in the bunkhouses raped Indian girls they'd had shipped up from Kamloops, the seventy-year-old Chinese cook sat drunk in his room drawing pictures of his child-bride back in China, the white husbands locked their wives in closets and bathrooms to keep them quiet, people drank and traded a wife or daughter for a bottle of whiskey. Drunks, passed out, never saw their wife or husband abuse a child or sleep with a best friend. I writhe with the memory of those bitter, unhappy times. I roll over, get out of bed, and walk into the garden.Even if you know nothing else of Patrick Lane, What the Stones Remember is a fascinating read: the man has lived an extraordinary life, his writing is masterful, and the format of following his progress over a year of gardening works very well. As a complementary read for me, it's that much more elevated and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
It was interesting to me when Lane wrote of having lived with his young family in a trailer in Merritt, B.C. - calling it "a wretched, dusty mill town in southern British Columbia" - because I had known a guy from Merritt; a manly young redneck who seized my heart as a teenager. I wrote about Glen before, but I'll just reiterate that he was a mass of contradictions to me: he'd talk of having driven to Kamloops with his friends to find brawls, to rough up men coming out of the gay bar there, but he also described the beautiful sari his sister wore to marry a Sikh man from town - he honestly didn't seem to be made of hate or bigotry; he loved his mother as a living saint, but from the controlling way he treated me, it would be hard to conclude that he respected women in general; he was uncouth, uneducated, unphilosophical, but was also a talented artist who spent his free time sketching. Glen couldn't imagine himself with someone who wasn't Catholic, but he never went to church; all of his stories from high school involved drugs and drinking at bush parties, driving offroad while wasted and wrecking cars, the strings of broken hearts he left behind - but he constantly outlined for me the future of settled domesticity he imagined for us. Glen was raised in Merritt just a few years after Lane's first batch of kids were born there, and the writing of the town felt particular to me.
As a further aside, the only time I ever heard of Merritt in the news was when a deranged father murdered his three children violently in their trailer. The depiction of the wretched and dusty mill town, the squirrelly-eyed man with his mental problems and addictions, the isolation and helplessness of the community; it all seemed to shine a retroactive light on the place that shaped the redneck that Glen was when I met him; all ultimately feels particular to me and the ways in which my own self has been shaped.