Friday, January 8, 2010

In Search of Emily Carr








Part I

“Seventy isn’t so frightfully old!” Emily Carr, the Canadian painter, said. But the doctors would not allow her to travel alone in her caravan any longer; and after her first heart attack she had to depend on others to drive it to her favorite locations.

I would not know anything about Emily had I not inherited an Alaska Airlines ticket about to expire. For a one hundred dollar transfer fee I would be able to go anywhere with the airline, but if I wanted to stay within the $440.00 value of the original ticket, Victoria in British Columbia was the place to go. I googled “art and museums” and found The Royal B.C. Museum, a Miniature Museum, the Emily Carr House. The Victoria website beamed at me with a beautiful night shot of the Empress Hotel. Tea at the Empress is expensive but glamorous. The famous Butchart Gardens sealed the deal. Soon a three and a half day schedule emerged - a quick romp through Victoria’s highlights.

I researched Emily Carr. She was cranky. She never married. She painted most of her life though she had many obstacles to overcome. She began to write in her sixties, when it became too difficult to prepare canvas and too hard to haul around paint supplies. Emily grew up and died in Victoria. I bought her autobiography “Growing Pains,” and immediately related to the words she wrote about her Mother:

“Our childhood was ruled by Father’s unbendable iron will, the obeying of which would have been intolerable but for Mother’s patient polishing of its dull metal so that it shone and reflected the beauty of orderliness that was in all Father’s ways, his overbearing omnipotence….”

On the evening of July 27, 2009, a Monday, I summed up my first half day in Victoria with overheated disappointment: No air conditioning in my hotel room. No grocery store nearby. No Emily Carr anywhere. Vancouver Island was in the claws of a heat wave. It wasn’t prepared. The Huntingdon Manor in Belleview Park wasn’t prepared. A portable fan failed to reduce the ninety some degrees temperature; I only felt the fan’s power when I aimed it directly at my face.

As for healthy eating, buying one of the two bruised apples in a nearby convenience store was the only effort I made on the first day toward my low sodium, low cholesterol, low fat, and low sugar requirements. It seems that for every restriction added to my diet by the doctor, restaurants invent another fatty, well salted, cholesterol spiked meal, and, naturally, their menus brag about yet another super-moussed, extra sweet dessert that I can’t resist.

And what about Emily Carr? At home I had imagined myself in her footsteps on the streets of Victoria. By six in the evening I had gotten lost twice, was tired and hot and no longer interested in her. My thoughts dwelled with morose insistence on my failure to locate her home on 207 Government Street. Maybe a GPS device would have alerted me, let me know that I had given up about a block away. But in spite of my “primitive” tracking system – a map, interpreted by me with little regard to north and south – the afternoon had acquainted me with downtown Victoria, its government buildings, the layout of the Royal B.C. Museum, harbour and ferry services, bus depot, Munro Book Store, and the Canadian monetary system. I had spent some of the newly acquired dollars and cents on a little teddy bear, a few bottles of water, a mediocre salmon burger and diet coke without fizz. And, of course, that ninety-nine cent apple from the fruit bin on a street named Menzies.

On Tuesday, after a night of restless leg syndrome and an early morning television warning to the “elderly” to stay indoors, I examined my tight schedule. The decision was easy: Butchart Gardens can’t be postponed. Though Emily never mentioned it in her autobiography, it had must see priority in my book, and I had already purchased my bus ticket. At the 110-year old Gatsby Mansion next to the hotel I delighted in three days worth of cholesterol in the disguise of bacon and eggs and hash browns, before I walked to the bus depot. The Grayline Express Shuttle filled quickly with a multi-lingual crowd of garden experts and plain tourists.

The Gardens is a 55 acre expanse of flowers, shrubs, and trees, created by the Butcharts a hundred years ago to beautify an old limestone quarry about thirteen miles from Victoria. As soon as I entered the gate I was surrounded by an endless supply of colorful sites to photograph. A sunken garden of annuals with dramatically steep ivy-hung backdrop. A large Japanese garden crouching beneath filtered sunlight. A bright rose garden that stirred the emotions with its perfume. A gay Italian garden, complete with star pond and gelateria. Statues, fountains, green house, waterwheel, and Mrs. Butchart’s teahouse competed for attention. I took pictures until the batteries were dead, ate ice cream, inserted new batteries, took more pictures, leaned against a fence, ate ice cream again, bought a big bottle of water and a t-shirt, slowly moved from one garden to the next, sat under a tree, rested on a rock, congratulated myself that I was one of the many visitors who defied the heat. We exchanged smiles and sighs. Proud. Wilted. Thirsty.

Several hundred megabytes and six hours later I collapsed back into the air-conditioned bus. With a frown toward my pedometer I promised myself never to walk six miles in the sun again. Alain de Botton says it well in The Art of Travel: ” …it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.”

I don’t agree with him during my armchair travels, but I remember his words when I have walked in a foreign city until my feet are raw and my brain scrambles to the hum of unfamiliar sounds. That Butchart Gardens made me lightheaded can be attributed to the intense heat – somebody said 39 degrees Celsius – 102 degrees Farenheit - and the clutter of tourists who filled the garden paths or withered on benches, expressing muffled admiration for flowers and extreme joy over ice cream stations. Or maybe my teddy bear is to blame for attracting too much attention. Too much small talk, not enough fluids.

But my journey for the day wasn’t over when I arrived back in town. An old lady with long gray hair, dressed in sturdy, warm clothes, the gear of a homeless wanderer, shared my bench at a downtown bus stop. I asked her for the nearest grocery store. She shook her head. “Nothing around here.”

For a while we both stared into the street. Suddenly she came to life.

“Menzies!” she said. After a few seconds she repeated: “Menzies! There is one on Menzies.

“When she got ready to move on and hoisted her backpack into position, I saw that she carried a blue canvas bag, imprinted with the logo “Thrifty Foods.” “Where is Thrifty Foods?” I asked.

“Menzies!” She said it with a hint of irritation. “Go over a street and you’ll get to Menzies. You can walk to the corner with me. I’ll show you.”

With a tired “thank you” I declined her offer. ”I’ll find it.”

Two young German women confirmed its existence. “Ja, ja.” There is one. “An Menzies!”

I knew that my happiness would depend on Menzies. I had walked it yesterday, but apparently not far enough. This time I walked in the wrong direction. I walked to the end of the world. A crumbling high-rise apartment building. A dog. A jogger. The ocean. A man bunched up under a blanket on a bench close to the water’s edge.

Retracing my steps along Menzies I finally saw the sign. Thrifty Foods. A block from the convenience store with bruised apples. A bin filled with shopping bags. On sale today for forty-nine cents each. I grabbed one. It seemed important to honor the grocery store on Menzies.

I filled my new blue bag with Dasani water, a pint of blueberries, hummus, low salt crackers, goat brie, reduced fat herb cheese pâté and a baguette. 28 dollars and 69 cents.

When I realized that the Emily Carr’s house must be nearby I walked some more. “Closed Monday and Tuesday,” a cardboard sign announced. I stood for some time, holding on to the gate. Emily, where are you?

At the hotel I spread my bounty on the dining table, turned on the news, laid out my knitting, a map, a pen, my journal, the camera, the Netbook. I aimed the fan properly into my face and began my second evening in Victoria. All memory of burning feet and headache vanished in anticipation of my visit to the Royal British Columbia Museum. The goat brie was delicious.