part
three in a series of three personal essays mixing travelogue and review
see part one here : see part two here
Day
3: Discovery Park
From Vancouver, at Prospect Point, anyone can see Mount Baker, a glacier-coated mountain my family could see from a small living room side window in Surrey; here in Seattle, Cheryl and I are admiring it from Alki Beach. In Canada, it stands for the south. In Seattle, it stands for the north. It’s the fifth biggest mountain in the Cascades where it plays countless roles for other directions, people and creatures. It’s one of the many distant mountains that surrounds Seattle.
Later in the afternoon, Cheryl and I explore Discovery Park, a large space equivalent to Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Colonialism’s history (aka military history or white settler history) is on display in both parks: in Vancouver the military presence is still active in Coal Harbour, a holdout from the time when the military wanted Stanley Park in the 1800s as a base to protect Canada from American invaders. Discovery Park has a decommissioned military reserve of large older buildings standing far apart from each other over large swaths of mown grass. It’s got a creepy vibe and feels a little like the Stepford Wives. The American military established Fort Lawton in Seattle in 1900. This most tranquil of places holds at its centre obvious markers of colonialism. It feels like a good place to reflect upon the poetry of Jess H̓áust̓i, not that the writer engages in military history, but their collection Crushed Wild Mint intimately conveys a spirituality rooted in the viscera of the body to the mountains that hold living ancestors in a grounded resistance to those who would delineate the world in borders, binaries and the 24-hour clock.
From their website: “Jess is a Haíɫzaqv parent, poet, and land-based educator living in their homelands in the community of Bella Bella, BC.” Crushed Wild Mint honours those homelands in ritualistic poems.
“Praying is dreaming out loud / with my ancestors,” the speaker tells us in the opening poem, “The Future.” The past and future are brought together in the ceremonial timelessness of a prayer, but the poem also reminds us of how laughter can partake in this sacredness. The poem defines prayer as that which gives “anatomy / to futurity,” the preserve of the past into the future. This idea of anatomy is brought to visceral light in a few poems later, where the speaker suggests “If I were to gut you like a deer, / the smell of good earth and the clarity of green things, the musk and the humus, that scent would rise up / like a prayer.” These lines hold no hint of morbidity, and within the context of gentleness and reverence that runs throughout the collection, they are offered as a vision. Not only are other creatures acknowledged as a part of the speaker’s world, but their existence parallels our own. The poem begins with deer chewing and ends with the speaker’s loved one chewing. More specifically, the speaker’s loved one is mourning some loss and this imagined ceremony of gutting is something offered to help “lift out from the birdsong sorrow / you hold in your mouth.” Familial love guides us through the ceremony of “Ruminant/Remnant.”
The overlapping lives of other beings we share the planet with is a central part of the poem/prayers in H̓áust̓i’s book (and certainly some cultures centre that sharing in ways that others can only imagine.) What I adore about Crushed Wild Mint is the echoes of wisdom literature from other corners of the world. I grew up on the Old Testament so it’s hard not to hear the Song of Solomon in the poem “You Are Inseparable,” but instead of romantic, it’s familial and/or self-love:
There are flocks of songbirds
sleeping in your hair,
deer’s wisdom compacted in your heels,
salmon in the creeks of your veins.
Your body and the land
have
collaborated for your safety and joy
The imagery of the land blends into the body and vice versa. This acknowledgement of the inseparable relationship between a West Coast people and the land is something I can admire from a distance, while trying not to be a white settler tourist (though I’m clearly all three.)
The fifth and last section of Crushed Wild Mint takes us into the mountains. As if enacting the long journey of climbing a mountain, many of these poems are longer than others in the collection. In the last section of one of these long poems, we read
These are living
Geographies.
This is especially true
when the crown of the mountain
was a gift from the weary body
of that mountain’s brother.
“iv. You have arrived”
Here the process of mountain formation is personified at a familial level. H̓áust̓i’s ancestors saw these mountains generations ago and the thousands of years are compressed within poetry.
This last section ends with “Prayer (II)” which begins “Creator, / go before us in all things, / especially small things.” Under the majesty of the names of mountains in the previous poems, we return to the smallest of things around us and this poem ends with a prayer “for the blessedness / of perpetual memory.” Climbing a mountain might hold a story of memorable moments but when that mountain is understood as a sacred being, it is also preserving memory on a different scale in space and time. Someone whose family has lived in a place since time immemorial can define and connect with that perpetual memory.
Vancouver and Seattle preserve the memory of their “great fires” (both in the 1880s) old civic leaders (both Seattle and Vancouver had American mayors charged with bigamy) and the centuries of colonialism in street names and statues. There are exceptions and I believe they have been growing. In 1970, activists took over Fort Lawton as part of the growing American Indian Movement. The Indigenous activities armed with “cooking utensils” came to occupy the land. They were met with armed resistance and skirmishes took place over three months until an agreement was reached:
In July 1971 negotiations started [...] In November an agreement was reached with the United Indians for a 99-year lease to build an Indian cultural center in the Park. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on September 27, 1975, and the impressive Daybreak Star Cultural Center opened on May 13, 1977.
https://www.historylink.org/File/8772
In 2022, participants in the Downtown Eastside Women’s Memorial March toppled Gassy Jack. The statue had been erected in 1970 as a bid to boost tourism in Gastown, but the fact that he’d married an indigenous woman and then, when she died, her 12-year-old niece rang too close to the violence towards murdered and missing indigenous women. Statues are coming down and new totems (at Hastings and Carol) are coming up.
Cheryl and I do a loop at Discovery Park and pass tourists, locals and far off mountains in the distance. We try to take in as much as we can while acknowledging there’s only so much we can take in.
Days 4,5&6:
Bumbershoot and we dance ourselves loose. We shake the way little dogs shake after encountering a frighteningly big dog. As humans, we have this thing called music to help us shake off our stress. Over six weeks this past summer, I was in emergency four times and I was laid up for weeks on end. At times, it was excruciating. There was no clear diagnosis. I’m finally almost one hundred percent and I dance off the fears of the summer. After dancing to the Montreal psyche-rock band TEKE::TEKE, the first person I hand a line of poetry to hugs me with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. I give out a few other lines of poetry and everyone at the festival gets it. On our drive home, we stop for dinner in Bellingham. When we tell our server we’ve been to Bumbershoot, she gets chatty. “When I was young, I went to Bumbershoot,” she tells us but she seems young so it’s hard for us to imagine her younger. I give her my last line of poetry, which is by Patrick Grace. She is thrilled.
Envoi:
Isn’t it lovely to return to words you haven’t heard in decades. On our last afternoon, in reading about Seattle history, I come across this:
'Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.'
--Chief Si’ahl, Namesake of the City of Seattle
When I was a teenager, after I stopped going to church, I religiously watched the Power of Myth on PBS. At the end of the series, Joseph Campbell quotes the words of Chief Si’ahl. I wrote the words out and shared them during our school’s graduation ceremony held in the gymnasium at SFU on top of Burnaby Mountain. During the ceremony, one of my classmates, who’d failed at least once and bullied me in my first year at junior high, leaned in to me and whispered, “I gotta piss.” As I stood up to go to the podium to give my valedictorian address, he drunkenly pleaded, “Keep it short.”
The sacred and profane are neighbours, living, at times, on reasonably friendly terms. So too poetry resides next to prose. Cities live next to each other with slightly different orientations but with the same giants in the distance. Giants some can know with an intimacy that others are oblivious to, but which demands respect if we care about justice, about living with the right words around us.
