D6

Lynda MacGibbon
People, places, things

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There's a line from a Beatles' song running through my head this week as I contemplate Canada's birthday. It seems a more appropriate musical tribute than Happy Birthday, or our national anthem, or even Gilles Vigneault's Mon Pays (which is really about Quebec, but not being Quebecoise, I have no difficulty singing it with Canada in mind).

The song is a Beatles' standard, kind of a lament, actually. And perhaps that's appropriate, too, for I'm thinking about Canada while living half a world away and that makes me just a little sad and lonely for the place on Earth I most like to call home.

"There are places I remember / All my life though some have changed / Some forever, not for better / Some have gone and some remain. . ."

The Beatles were crooning about lovers and friends in this song, but as I sing it softly to myself, I'm thinking only about places, particularly places in Canada, ones I know and love, and ones I've yet to discover.

I'm singing it as I navigate the noisy, dusty streets of Almaty, Kazakhstan. I'm living in this Central Asian city for a month, leading a cultural linguistic exchange for university students. So there will be lots of opportunity to talk about Canada, to sing our national anthem and show a little patriotism. I'll cry when I sing O Canada in this foreign land -- I've been here before and I always get a little sentimental, not just because I can be a bit of a sap at times. I really do love my home and native land.

It's Canada's landscape I'm thinking mostly about these days and that leads me down many diverse roads.

There's a stretch of highway, for example, that takes me east every summer as I make my annual pilgrimage back to Newfoundland, the province of my birth and my formative adolescent years. The stretch is just outside New Glasgow, N. S. and on the way to Antigonish.

If the day is clear, as you crest a particular hill, you get a clear view of the Northumberland Strait and the coastline that keeps the water from spilling onto the land. The scene is only there for a moment, for as you head down the hilly highway, it disappears into a forest of trees. But I've driven that stretch of highway for more than 20 years now, always with anticipation for that one view. I'm not apt to forget it.

Far, far to the west, on another coast I tucked another landscape scene in my memory. This one I took in while standing on an outcropping of rock, just on the edge of a cedar forest on Bowen Island. I spent a week living on this Gulf Island one June, with nothing required of me except that I learn to be a better writer, and that I do so in the company of nature.

Each morning I'd walk up a woodland trail to the look off. But it wasn't the view of the Pacific Ocean that captured my attention. It was the tall Rhododendrons which were more like trees than the bushes I grow in my New Brunswick garden. I stood beneath a six-footer every morning, examining its tawny bark and fuchsia blooms, letting the forest imprint itself on me as yet another of the places I'd remember when I think about Canada.

I hold some Canadian landscapes more in my imagination than my memory, for I've never actually visited them. But I've read about them, and while that's never as good as being there, it's something.

Someday, for example, I'm determined to drive through northern Ontario and into Manitoba so I can see for myself the landscape of the boreal forest giving way to prairie grass. I was introduced to the idea by reading Michael Ignatieff's family memoir, True Patriot Love. He writes this:

". . . you can still feel the wonder my great-grandfather felt when you break through the forest cover of the Canadian Shield and the big sky suddenly opens up and the plains appear, stretching away as far as the eye can see. It's one of the places where Canada awakens awe."

There are many places in Canada which awaken awe for me, some are as obvious and collective as Niagara Falls, others as private and individual as the point of land jutting into the lake where I spend my Newfoundland summers.

These are places we remember, the places that make us want to sing, O Canada.

n Lynda MacGibbon is a writer living in Riverview, N.B. Her column appears every Friday. Contact her at lynda@nbnet.nb.ca