Richard Wagamese

In the corner of the yard nearest the gravel road is an old wringer washer. It sits beneath a fir tree with its barrel filled with earth and dirt and sprouting flowers over the rim.

You could not dream this place. In the hard glint of early morning everything is over exposure and shadow.

It was the butterflies, my people say, who brought the first human babies to their feet. The New Ones sat in innocence beneath a tree watching the world around them with eyes of wonder.

The lake has tempers and moods. When the wind is right it can whip itself into whitecaps and swells even though its only three miles long.

When the thunder rolls through these mountains you feel it long before you hear it. We’re high enough here that the air is a messenger. Everything has a tactile announcement of its coming with the skin as a barometer.

Rivers fascinate me. When I was a boy I loved nothing better than solitary wandering along their serpentine lengths, studying the water, searching the places where fish would lie, watching the creatures that lived there and laying on their banks lost in thought under the seemingly endless blue skies of boyhood.

There are nights that stay with you forever. There are nights that come to you all uncontrolled and wild, bearing images that stamp themselves upon your consciousness, unrelenting and immune to the fading of years. You re-enter those nights like stepping into known rooms, the country of their being a territory, a landscape your skin remembers.

Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. At the crossroads one night he bartered eternity for adulation and walked away with twenty-nine songs on a six string guitar. He became the master of the blues and in the spill of years since you can still hear the rattle, hiss and spit, the yowling tom cat strut of it.

In the distance, across the span of lake, clouds form above the water. Here in the mountains the division between rock and sky exists more as suggestion than hard delineation and clouds on the water have become as familiar as birds.

Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings in E is one of my favorite pieces of music. There’s a particular lilt and jubilation to it that’s energizing and on days when my energies are flagged and I’m in need of a lift, I’ll put it on and feel it raise me up again.

The rain is a fine sprinkle through the trees. Against the sky the sun pokes its head through the thin crust of cloud and there’s a happy conjunction of energy everywhere around you.

I got my first writing job in 1979. It was as a reporter for a now defunct newsmagazine called New Breed in Regina, Saskatchewan.

We love to ski. There’s a resort a short drive from the cabin and we head there as often as we can in the winter months. As soon as our feet are off the ground on the chair lift both us feel exhilarated like being borne out of our lives and into an exciting, challenging world.

I started to run again. It’s been 20 years or more since I ran anything further than a trip around the bases in a slow pitch rec league. Back then it was still possible for me to entertain the idea of a marathon or competing in distance races. Back then it was elevating and somehow freeing.

There’s a mountain to the south and east of us that humps up like a buffalo. From the Paul Lake road heading west from Pinantan it sits there with a bald rock face and a carpet of fir slumped around it so that it looks exactly like a resting bison.