Our great good fortune, the following year, was to become the caretakers of a beautiful property in the Landing, a rustic lakefront house with a stunning view south towards the Salmo–Creston range. A meandering driveway crossed little Gar Creek over a tiny bridge, and led down from the house to the garden and the “post office cabin”: a one-room log house dating from the 1920s that had served as the community’s post office in the early days of settlement. I found a date stamp hammered into the hand-hewn cedar wall: Johnson’s Landing 21 Dec 1951.
The first white settlers were farmers and orchardists who planted apples and cherries and shipped the harvest out to market on the sternwheeler ferryboat that came up Kootenay Lake once a week with the mail and provisions. There wasn’t a proper road until 1957. People thought nothing of walking to and from Argenta (home to about a hundred and twenty people), seven kilometres each way, for a community event, a square dance or a celebratory meal. Life was hard work but straightforward. You either hacked it or you moved to town.
The house we lived in was built in the late 1960s by Ruth and Frank Burt, who bought the large acreage with two kilometres of waterfront from Jack Raper. After the marriage ended and Frank left the Landing, never to return in Ruth’s lifetime, numerous individuals helped finish her house. Ruth was a Quaker who welcomed every passing stranger. In the late sixties and early seventies these strangers included many young men of draft age who left the United States to avoid being sent to fight in Vietnam. Evidently, more than a few of them had never wielded a hammer in their lives. The over-constructed bathroom door, for instance, was a massive jigsaw puzzle of heavy wood off-cuts, with elephant-track hammer blows around each nail.
Designed by Elmo Wolf, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, the house had a pleasing upward sweep to its shed roof. Inside, the cedar plank ceiling angled up towards large picture windows that looked straight down the lake. We had what realtors call a “million-dollar view.” A glory we never took for granted.
This was our paradise. We often called it that, immensely grateful for the privilege of living there. After Ruth Burt died her son was our landlord for more than a decade. Like Ruth, he endorsed our initiatives to improve the house and exterior landscaping. Always supportive and generous, he encouraged us to regard this beautiful place as our permanent home.
Returning was always a joy. We’d slide back the bar of the curious old Dutch front door that opened outwards, step over the threshold and inhale the faint cedar perfume. Enormous elk antlers hung on the wall over the staircase. We climbed four steps to the main floor: an open plan kitchen, dining and living room. Also, latterly, our bedroom, while the actual bedroom was under reconstruction.
We lived within a minute’s walk of Gar Creek and the lake. I seldom crossed the bridge without stopping to pay my respects, as though before an altar. I usually looked upstream, and watched the water as it gushed towards me round the bend, under the horizontal root of an old cedar stump, and chattered onward between mossy boulders, down to the lake. Wild blackcurrant bushes nodded on the bank. The creek was, to us, a living presence with a soul, a spiritual place. We often heard voices there. I sensed its blessing as I passed on my way to the garden.
Our garden over the years became a study in driftwood and rock decoration. Christopher is an inspired landscape designer who loves to beachcomb and play with what he finds. Our garden gateposts were two upended driftwood tree trunks, their root balls standing tall like hairy-headed giants. The gate was also made of driftwood, and more pieces wove their way along the fence and marked out the garden beds.
Inside the garden, a motley collection of perennials greeted us every spring: rose bushes, clematis, phlox, hydrangeas, campanula, lilies and anemones. A grapevine crawled along the fence and Virginia creeper clambered up the gatepost. Several trees took up residence over the years, including a very fruitful mulberry, a snowball tree and an English oak grown from an acorn. I made a stab at growing vegetables but found it a bit of a struggle. The garden stood in partial shade, on top of beach gravel, and every crumb of nutritious soil had to be made or imported: compost, manure, mulch. Trying to feed the plants and prevent the beds from drying out in the August sun was a full-time task.
From Johnson’s Landing we came and went. I had a small, utilitarian house in Kaslo, purchased in 2001. I was the coordinator of the Kaslo and Area Hospice from 1999 to 2007 and sometimes needed to spend the night “in town,” as we said. Later, we rented the house out for several years but in 2012 I told Christopher I didn’t want to look for another tenant, even though we’d have been glad of the income; I wanted to enjoy it myself.
Kaslo was one of the most beautiful villages I’d ever seen in British Columbia. But we always loved getting back to the Landing. It meant hearing the chuckle of water in the creek as we opened the car door, inhaling the clean forest air and, best of all, being greeted at the door by our beautiful black cat, Ozzie. He always pretended to be angry at our absence but was palpably overjoyed to see us. I would scoop him up and bury my nose in his fur. His fragrance was the reassurance and confirmation that I was back, I was home.
Ozzie, curled up on the bed where he enjoyed many morning naps.
Photo: Renata Klassen
Chapter 1: Countdown to Zero
It was the summer of 2012, and I’d last seen my mother, June Bath, in January when I visited her in England for three weeks. June still lived in our family home in southwest London, the house my brother and I had known since adolescence; she’d been alone there since my father’s death a decade earlier. Late winter gave way to early spring and I had to face up to the fact that my mother was showing alarming symptoms of dementia. Her neighbours on either side kept an eye on her. My devoted cousin visited regularly,using all her powers of reassurance, but June sometimes phoned her more than a dozen times a day, and knocked on the neighbours’ front doors late at night, agitated and confused.
I’d been going over from Canada three times a year, but my mother’s needs were increasing. In late May she sounded distraught as she pleaded with me on the phone to move up my next trip, scheduled for mid-June. “Darling, I need you so badly; I don’t know what’s wrong; I think I’m losing my mind.” I was glad my ticket was booked, and decided not to change the date; I was working almost full time. I would leave Johnson’s Landing on Tuesday, June 12, and be with her on June 14.
But over the weekend, just four days before I arrived, my mother had two falls in the garden; she broke her ankle in the first and fractured her right wrist in the second. Our attentive neighbour, shocked to see June hobbling around, her ankle and wrist black and swollen, insisted on taking her to the accident and emergency department of the nearby hospital. There, the medical staff realized that something else was wrong, as my mother became increasingly frantic.
“I want to go home, I insist on being allowed to leave. You cannot keep me here against my will!” June argued her case quite plausibly at first, but then delirium took hold. She locked herself inside the ward and couldn’t be persuaded to open the door for over an hour. Lacking insight into her injuries, she tottered across the room and fell down again in a vain attempt to demonstrate how mobile she was.
My mother looked pale and undernourished. The doctors held her under observation for forty-eight hours and I talked to them, en route to Vancouver airport. I made it plain that, although I was on my way, June was in no fit state to go home. Finally, the consultant geriatrician declared that my mother “lacked mental capacity.” A nursing home specializing in dementia care was willing to admit her, very much against her will. On Wednesday the two nurse-managers collected her by taxi.
On Thursday morning I arrived in London, jet-lagged and disoriented. For the first time ever, my mother was not at home to greet me. The house showed tragic evidence of her struggles—she’d written her own phone number five times on the wall next to the telephone; mouldy food lay forgotten in the fridge; mail had not been opened.
The nursing home was a long bus ride away, followed by a ten-minute walk. I was impressed by its cheery, clean appearance. Exquisite arrangements of