Work, travel, art and politics: those words sum up the events of 2008 for the inhabitants of Quoddy’s End.
Karin has been on a pedagogical marathon in Halifax, teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design throughout the year and beyond with nary a break, not even during the summer. She has been hired on a series of reasonably well-paying sessional contracts to teach Writing for the Arts, and, on very short notice, 20th Century Art History, as well as to set up both individual and group research projects. She is enjoying the work in a space where lovely things happen and even the administrators are artists, and she seems to be appreciated by students and colleagues alike. She’s been so busy designing new classes that her poetry and novel projects have had to take a back seat this year; she’s looking forward to pulling them out again in the coming year. For fun, in after-hours while in Halifax, she has been taking drawing classes in the NSCAD extension program. She’s made great progress—best of all, she’s no longer shy about using vibrant colour or huge sheets of paper. Her favourite classes are the figure drawing sessions, which are “hard,” but “utterly absorbing. I like the fact that no one can ever be completely still,” she says.
While Karin was teaching last January and February, Marike went to Mexico to get the boat out of its pricey “store-front” mooring in Paradise Village (Puerto Vallarta). We’d had it for sale, but already, the market was drying up. So in January, Marike re-commissioned Quoddy’s Run and welcomed Elisabeth’s step-son, Jean-François, aboard for the beat north to La Paz. From Halifax, thanks to the wonders of internet satellite services (and her map-reading and interpretation skills), Karin was able to provide them with extremely accurate up-to-date weather and routing information, a feat that never ceased to make Jean-François wonder. How could she know that the wind was going to come out of the southwest at 22 knots at 11 am?
The sail north to the Baja was rough. After a few days of battling both a severe headache and washing-machine seas, Marike became paralysed on the right side for an hour or so. Jean-François was very anxious—they were at least 22 hours from the nearest port. Meanwhile, Marike recovered somewhat, and she and Jean-François made it safely to Mazatlan, where they re-supplied the boat, slept, ate well and walked about. Then they set off for the crossing to La Paz—another thrashing sail but a stunning landfall: the desert mountains rise up in the west. Once they arrived, Karin, who had consulted six doctors, including her sister-in-law, Jules, at Johns Hopkins, ordered Marike home to for a check-up to make sure she had not had a TIA (transient ischemic attack, ie. a small “precursor” stroke). Happily, we discovered that Marike is in excellent health; she had suffered a complex hemiplegic migraine – read severe neurological symptoms because she did not treat a milder migraine, but tried to work through it. What a relief! Jean-François was a wonderful skipper throughout this little crisis, and accepted to close up the boat in La Paz while Marike flew home. Good thing we had such a capable mariner friend aboard!
Alas, Marike was in Halifax having a CT scan when Karin should have been spending her winter break on the boat in La Paz. And Marike was in Halifax when her nieces, Aimee and Heather, were supposed to be sailing with her in the Sea of Cortez. Phooey! Lots of holidays ruined by one ill-timed severe headache.
Happily, Elisabeth’s travels last winter were far more successful. She travelled to France and Turkey during April and May with her good friend Yvonne. While in France, they visited many of Elisabeth’s friends and family. The one person deeply dear to Elisabeth that they missed seeing was her god-daughter Florence, who was in Russia at the time with her husband Dominic, in the midst of adopting a son, a young Russian orphan named Aliosha (his French name is Leo). They are very happy to be new parents and Elisabeth is gaga as a new grandma—a grandgodma. Felicitations Flo, Dom, et Leo!
After travelling to Paris and Normandy, Elisabeth, Yvonne and friend Françoise Bessis flew to Istanbul for a few days, then on to Cappadocia where they stayed in a ravishing B&B run by a Swiss woman, who also toured them around the archaeological sites. They walked for hours each day--rather exhausting for Elisabeth, but enthralling and stimulating. Following that, Yvonne and Elisabeth had a good long visit in the Midi with Elisabeth’s sister and brother-in-law, Veronique and Jean. She returned to us tired, tanned, much loved, much missed, and full of interesting stories, pictures and beautiful articles from the bazaars.
In late March and early April, Karin continued to slog in the slush and trenches at NSCAD while Marike returned to the Sea of Cortez for a beautiful sail from La Paz, along the inside of the Baja peninsula, and across to San Carlos where Quoddy’s Run was hauled out, “summerized,” and parked in the desert until winter 2009.
When Marike came home (and while Karin had a short between-term break), we decided to do a major bit of home renovation. Before she’d gone back to Mexico, Marike had gotten a great deal on some hardwood flooring at a home show. With our trusty carpenter, David MacDonald and his son, Stephen, we tore out the horrible fog-coloured broadloom that had come with the house and laid nearly 2000 square feet of mixed maple and birch hardwood. Oh our aching knees and backs! But we’ve learned many new carpentry skills (thank you David!) and the result is wonderful both to behold and to live with. Only the dogs miss their giant, ubiquitous, smelly dog-bed – a good synonym for wall to wall carpet. They tend to slip a bit going up and down the stairs. Maybe we’ll have to lay some carpet....
The summer was a glorious one. Not too much fog and the water so warm that we could swim in the ocean for hours--well, half hours--without freezing. We were visited by Montreal friends Carmen and Kevin Wilson, and then Danica Meredith and Matt Bergbusch and their gorgeous baby daughter, Charlotte. Later, old friends of Elisabeth’s arrived from Switzerland for an East Coast tour, Christine and Gian Bezzola. We also hiked on the land at the Back Bay of Terence Bay and swam in the isolated freshwater lakes there. One day Karin played hooky from an afternoon of paper corrections and we kayaked all around the waters of Terence Bay and Prospect in the hot sun. It is very beautiful!
At the very end of the summer, Yvonne came to Quoddy for a two week stay with Elisabeth and the animals while Karin and Marike drove to the old Finlay family cottage at the Bay of Quinte, now sister Judy’s haunt. Judy generously let us use the place while she was off on a cruise of the Arctic to celebrate her 60th birthday! It was lovely to be on the Bay again, to bask in the warmth and sunsets. Not a quiet holiday though; we had invited numerous friends and family members to visit—which, happily many did. It was wonderful to have the place full to the brim the way Marike remembered it from the old days when her parents were alive: we enjoyed the company of Judy’s friend, Mac and her wonderful dog, Sophie, friends Kristi Norget and her daughter Adaeze, Marike’s nephew Aaron and his wife, Tara, and their cat who cleaned the rafters, Ken Gibson, who gave us a financial seminar on the beach, Henry and Emily, who kayaked out to meet us while we were laser sailing, Gale and Therese, who showed us around and fed us plentifully from their garden, Saima, who biked the River Road with us, Bernard, our former Eastern Shore neighbour, now of Kingston, ON, and Aimee, Heather, Bonnie, the two dogs…Then, at the end of the visit, we cooked up a birthday feast for Judy and celebrated the joys of being alive, here, at this moment.
Marike inherited a small piece of land from her parents adjacent to Judy’s cottage, so one of the tasks during our trip was to get the land surveyed and imagine the small eco-dwelling we might put there. Although we love being by the sea in Nova Scotia, we do miss our friends and family, most of whom live in central Canada or just due south, in the US. Building such a place would enable us to touch base more regularly. Our drive back to Nova Scotia took us through Montreal briefly, where we visited with still more friends and enjoyed Yvonne’s lovely, peaceful apartment. –That was a good swap!
Upon our return, we feasted from the vegetable garden and enjoyed Elisabeth’s flower gardens. Then Karin began another term of teaching, and Prime Minister Harper, trying to jump out ahead of the crash (and legal action against the Conservative Party), called an early election! Marike is Shadow Cabinet Critic for Arts and Culture for the Green Party of Canada, and Elizabeth May, the Green leader, decided to run in our riding, Central Nova, against Peter McKay, a Conservative and Harper’s Defense Minister. In addition to the usual work of the Shadow Cabinet-- campaigning in Central Nova, and helping to write the platform, Vision Green—Harper’s last move in office turned what should have been an easy file into a lot of work. Making draconian cuts to Arts and Culture proved to be a mistake for the Conservatives; it may well have cost them their majority, particularly in Quebec. No one would have predicted that there would be arts rallies all across the country (Karin was there in Halifax with the NSCAD crew), and that Arts and Culture would become a flashpoint, but it did. Which meant that Marike was besieged by requests for interviews and press releases on Arts, Culture and Heritage. High points included participating in a discussion on The Current, and getting a few words in edgewise on Sunday Edition (both of CBC); we wrote the standard-bearing platform it seems. Sadly, although the Greens won almost a million votes, this did not translate into a single seat in parliament, not even one for May. Only proportional representation will fix this anomaly. At least Harper did not get his majority! AND Barak Obama won in the US. We ought to see a little political change in North American now!
In the middle of all the electioneering, in September Marike was scheduled to go out to Vancouver for a talk at the Western Branch of the Psychoanalytic Society. Combining work and pleasure, she visited Brian Cullen in the Kootenays, where they hiked and kayaked in a western Shangri-la. She was also very happy to visit her old friends Karin Holland Biggs and John Rosten, who moved from Montreal to Steveston last year. They live just feet from the Fraser River. We’ve explored the possibility that Marike could work and teach psychoanalysis in lotus land, but moving the whole household there seems a daunting task a best, financially prohibitive at worst. Pity, because there is no culture of psychoanalysis whatsoever in the Maritimes; it is therefore very difficult to build a practice as the only analyst east of Quebec.
Tired of the hypotheticals of politics and psychoanalysis, we have begun work on a far more concrete project, a green project of course. It has always been a dream of ours to plan and develop a green community. So we have begun to explore, with the help of a wonderful architect friend, Anna Kramer, the possibility of developing just such a community on our 30 acres of land on the Back Bay of Terence Bay, just 25 minutes south of Halifax. At the end of the summer, we spent a wonderful day with Anna walking the land and imagining how we might build such a project of around 20 ecological homes. Anna has been developing a plan for how we might locate groups of dwellings on the land and Marike is busy exploring all kinds of green building technologies, sustainable services, and financial and marketing strategies. Our plan is to link the homes with walkways along the rocky spines that shape the land. The houses would sit there like erratics, those giant boulders dropped in the landscape as the glaciers melted – there are many granite erratics on this land. Services (power, water, etc) would be delivered to homes along conduits that would follow the walkways, a bit like the (more or less invisible) service delivery pipes along docks at marinas. That way we might be able to have a common geo-thermal heating plant, single well system, a recycled water sewage system, and not so many roads all over. The waterfront would be a commons; it would be a simple matter to shift a few of the rocks to make an enclosed saltwater swimming pool. If you know of any people who might like to participate and/or live in such a community please refer them to us. That is a part of the community aspect of the project: to involve the potential inhabitants in the step-by-step planning. Who knows if we will manage it financially? We’re moving slowly on this plan, especially in the present climate. One idea is to build one house at a time, then rent or sell it and move on to the next. Building a sustainable community also means keeping the debt load down, making the project economically sensible for both developer and buyer/renter...
What else? We mentioned that Karin has taken up drawing and some painting. This got Marike started struggling with a medium other than words as well. She’s been making wonderful watercolour and acrylic abstract landscapes, as well as working with Chinese watercolour techniques. She finds it very calming to paint—not like writing, which is somehow always agitating. And Elisabeth doesn’t have to struggle to keep on making her marvellous photographs, whether close-ups of ice forming along the shore or brown cows chewing their cud.
And then there is the financial crisis! As for most everyone, this crisis has had a profound effect on our disposable income so we have begun some serious belt tightening. We installed a fireplace insert at Quoddy– a warm soul for the living room. Our aim is to get through the winter heating only with wood, no oil! They say heating with wood heats you twice. Stacking, laying in, loading the furnace, cleaning the ashes, carrying them out to the ashpile: this wood seems to be heating us three or four or seven or eight times!
We have also made the difficult but reasonable decision to stop maintaining two households, at least for a while. We have rented the little house in Halifax to a lovely young couple and are in the throes of moving out now. Boy do we have a lot of stuff! A friend in Halifax will rent Karin a room for the weeks of the winter term when she needs to stay overnight. This winter Elisabeth says that she will not be making a trip to Europe. Her big luxury will be purchasing a new, super-sophisticated set of hearing aids, which she desperately needs. We were beginning to despair, as was she, that she’d ever hear us again! Well, maybe she will allow herself a little jaunt to Montreal.
Marike will leave for Mexico in March to launch and re-commission Quoddy’s Run. We need to look after her, one way or the other, and Karin will be, by the end of the term, due for a big break. (Besides, she still has a plane ticket with Aero Mexico that she never used last year!) It will probably be a working holiday—repairs repairs repairs, but pleasurable nonetheless. We intend to launch the boat and sail her for some weeks in the Sea of Cortez, and do a bit of writing and painting too. We would have liked to ship her to Canada this year, but shipping fees, tariffs and taxes have proved far too dear in this economic climate. For the moment then, we are pretending we have a condo in Mexico – a sometimes floating one.
So in the midst of this financial turmoil, we three count our blessings. How fortunate we are! How much we have besides Mammon: good health, each other, four wonderful animals, this splendid house and land by the sea, nights full of stars, flowers, paths in the woods, vegetable gardens, fine friends and, oh yes, SILENCE!
We almost forgot to tell you: our nasty neighbour has had to cease running his booming freezer truck. The price of diesel was too high, the price of lobster too low! All of the crises of the last year do not produce singularly awful results everywhere it seems. Here, at last, again, we have been able to open our windows at the back of the house and a screech owl hoots us to sleep; the loons cry us awake in the middle of the night; the lapping sea on the shore reminds us of things that last—and things that pass. We think we might stay at Quoddy’s End now.
Our guest room beckons!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Marike, Karin and Elisabeth
300 Gammon’s Road, RR #1
Port Dufferin NS B0J 2R0
Canada
