Terrace Nostoi
BY JAMES GIFFORD
Aerial view of Terrace, British Columbia/britishcolumbia.ca.
Near the southern tip of Alaska, in a tiny propeller plane jostled by turbulence, I flew back into Terrace. I was seated beside a crying baby. He cried like I cried four decades ago finding my first home for the first time—and now I was returning. It was a repetition, a once again to places already seen but unremembered.
The flight in along the flow of the Skeena River is like looking over tangling hair rolling down between the broad shoulders of the valley, the river running under a bridge and me following it in as the channel of my life. I was eddying back to pass this place before flowing away. While flying in over the plateaus of the valley, the river became visible as forest gave way ground to farmland that becomes a wall of cedar once Terrace itself came into view. But the return was aslant and with a significant shock. Our pilot, the anxiety-inducing “Captain Ron,” did not steer our flying galley smoothly through the choppy crests and troughs, and the baby echoed through the cabin as we thundered abruptly down onto the runway, listing heavily to the right, then gripping the ground again to finally turn true and straight, every vertebrae chattering in my spine.
That first day back in Terrace was all for business. It was the work of “hello” and “hello again” with smiles and handshakes among old and new colleagues and friends. It centred on a small college at the top of a hill, overlooking the valley and the Skeena River, and each of us was intoxicated with the shockingly clean air, so free that each breath inward shivered down to the fingernails. The trees were in spring’s mad race, most dark green but others lighter along the edges or burrowing their way into dead stands with pale bark and quaking green leaves exhaling their verdant air everywhere with spring buds yawning awake. Still, work has to be done, and only minor adventures befall a band of bespectacled professors shuttling up that hill to meet in that college, some burly, bearded giants, others weasel-faced with quick curious eyes, but all bound up with the written word.
I was thinking about the place though, not the people, and wondering how many visitors to Terrace come to see the town. How many who are travelling from a city to a town to consider the place itself and not its recreational enjoyments—the habitation of place and not its proximity to other pleasures? Our day’s work was all, at its heart, establishing trust across distances to give our students mobility. It’s a great risk to pass young lives to each other and to entrust their learning to new hands in different places, especially knowing that there are no homeward turns, no nostos, in those academic journeys, only going forever forward. By the time we cleared our agenda, the old friendships and camaraderie were restored. Out from the college at the end of the day, the sloping walk back to our group’s hotel showed the spilling valley overlooked by walls of mountains, thick with snowpack and the high plateau. As we gathered along the Yellowhead Highway after a confused stroll down, we eventually diverged in our separate streams. One group fell into a watering hole with only local beers—no ciders, wines, or spirits, and no food or fuss to dilute the buzz. Just beer and sausages akin to hotdogs in case of emergency levels of intoxication. I played it safe, breaking faith perhaps, and went with the crowd seeking a meal before most would scramble for a shuttle back to the airport in lieu of spending the night up in the north. But I wasn’t scrambling. I was staying on.
We had our table, broke bread, and remembered the same faces at different tables in Yellowknife, in Carcross, in Castlegar, in Kelowna. That was one part of my remembering while I tried to think through the aching nostalgia of washing up on a shore that wasn’t actually buried in memory. It’s a place that was wholly unfamiliar to me, not only for forty-four years of absence but for not even remembering my departure from it as my home.
As an adopted child, there are many things unremembered. I remember my parents raising me, but I hadn’t known that I’d been held and visited by my birth mother before first flying to Terrace, and I hadn’t known it until twenty years after I’d met her. What is the nostos in this place then, an arrival back at an unremembered departure? Is there really such a thing to anyone, anywhere in the world?
I’d come home to Terrace for the first time since I’d grown to the point I could start in the world. I was brought to a loving home here but I couldn’t remember the home itself. I hadn’t even seen the photographs of this home since I was as young as my own sons are now. My childhood memories, if I’m honest about them, are not images. They are all filtered through the prose of the books that I read, their words sieved my memories, thoughts thick with texture and glowing in their chain of language. And those books are few and deep-rooted as the landscape of my earliest origins. They are the tributaries flowing into me, swallowed whole into the basin of my thoughts and experiences and carried along my course.
Skeena River, British Columbia. Photo by Sam Beebe/Flickr.
As the table broke up, most off to the airport and back to the city life as quick as possible, I said my goodnights and turned to the heart of Terrace in the opposite direction: the Skeena Mall. It was a spot I needed to find under the acropolis of these mountains. Walking in from the Nisga’a Highway and Kalum Lake Road by the steelworks is longer than it looks on the maps. Each road crossing was punctuated by the “sol mi re do” of the street crossing’s chimes that rang so unfamiliar to my ears, ears that are used to Vancouver’s minor third. Eventually reaching the mall, I passed the bright fuchsia sign for “Ardene” and the anchor store “Winners” and went in to see if this northern agora could tell me something about my childhood or what life might have waited here for me. Like every mall, teens sat in the aisles and seniors shuffled through the shops. An empty store space gave me good luck. The local high school repurposed it to tell the history of the Skeena Mall—not the story of the people of the Skeena River but a history of the shops and stalls that give their peculiar comforts in small towns. It had started by destroying the original church to clear the land—a flow of history from faith to capital, giving the nation state the slip by skipping ahead. That was in 1975, just as I left. I’d never been strolled, swaddled up against the cold, down the nave through the transept (the tobacconist) to the altar of this building. Whatever it might reveal to me about Terrace, it could tell me nothing about myself and offered no sacraments.
I exited beside the chancel by the pharmacy without offering a tithe and went North on Sparks Street to find my other planned visit: the bookstore, the closest thing to a sanctuary and votive. I already knew Misty River Books came from after my own departure, but I wanted to know what Terrace read. I wanted to know if the books that shaped my life would have been different had I stayed here. The descending “sol mi re do” chimed me across the streets up from City Hall until I reached the little window filled with books. I entered the one-room shop that smelled to me like a shrine to find it bursting with the written word. Almost immediately, I was staring down titles from an author whose brother I had taught and helped apply to law school (he got in, and his own fast flow ran away from another northern small town simmering in his homeward turns). I saw a new book of poetry from someone who would teach that summer, and poetry in small shops is always a gift. There were so many unexpected and familiar faces, all welcoming me home. This was a devotional space, a votive to mark a form of salvation. I let my hands slip along the smooth then textured spines. I found some small gifts for my sons, and as it was, the Misty River had a novel for evening story-time before bed. It was a mystery about young boys on the shores of Harrison Lake, a part of my own childhood that I did remember, and I picked it up immediately.
But as I turned, I met my surprise. I had spent most of my adolescence and teen years reading and rereading a handful of novels that the used bookstore of my small town in the Fraser Valley made available. They were all here. Every single one. And they filled a whole shelf.
I was a boy again on Faldor’s Farm with the rich smells of a kitchen and a childhood idyll of comfort and love and safety and home. I might not remember being adopted, but somehow those books of a laughing, loving acceptance that could fill any child’s heart as the perfect atonement for anything and everything came racing back. That they were not only here but here in full seemed unexpectedly reassuring. I knew now that my relationship to those books was more complex. The dry voice whispering in some corner of my mind knew it too, and the books’ atonements, their confessions and penance to some other child of Omelas a decade before me, were already kindled. Our human hearts, our sins and our sorrows are entangled with everything in the slim stream of a life that unfolds and flows like a skein or a river overflowing its banks and never in the same pathway for another. These were the books I was already reading for my sons at home despite knowing the secret shame they confessed for another adopted boy in another adopted home beside another eddying river. I asked the owner about the Harrison Lake mystery. “Oh yes, it’s great fun for reading out loud. They’d like it.” I noticed too the full shelf of my childhood nostalgia. “I always keep them in stock. I think everyone grew up reading those.” So I bought my worlds of words for my sons and exited into the dimming early night of verdant and violet horizons.
Interior of Misty River Books. Photo courtesy of @mistyriverbooks/Instagram.
By the time I reached my hotel, the sun was behind the hills. I smelled dusty with sweat, and my legs and feet were warm with the welcome ache of doing what they were made for. I went up to my room, pulled out my notebook, opened my window to the shocking clarity of the night air with its crust of green scents from the forest world around me, and started to make plans for the morning hours I’d have before flying home. Time then to walk and time now to write.
I thought, nostalgia may be our familiar, peculiar homing pain, but I’ve no idea when the moment of nostos actually arrived in my life. I can date my return to Terrace in a notebook, but that’s not what I meant. Not the arrival, but that singular moment of turning back toward home.
There has never been a point at which the agon is done, the work set down, and the life’s rudder turned backward, and maybe that’s the point—I know for a certainty that I was not, at the moment of arrival here, in any way who I had been when I left, even if that flow from past to present was a continuous clear stream, swift-flowing and many-channelled.
It’s foolish to imagine it this way though, because I could never possibly navigate past the rapids. Who can? The eddying of nostalgia in time is really at best a momentary slack tide or stasis, a yawning, momentary mindfulness opening in Spring. The Skeena has no tidal stream here, and neither does life circle back on itself as seasons repeat. They’re born, not born again.
As I made these jottings, my phone buzzed beside me with an audio message. The wail of a banshee howling for all it could never have and all it had ever lost came through. My youngest son missed me, his world was empty, and I was supposed to be there to read the adventures I’d just seen on the banks of Misty River. What would happen to Garion? Would Old Wolf protect him? Who was trying to steal him away from his home?
My heart was tripping over itself. I called. My wife was calm and immediately passed me over to the tiny wailing voice calling across the distance. He was tired. He needed to know if the story was safe. He wanted to go to a carnival when I came home. He wanted to go right now. And like some consequentialist calculation around a child of Omelas, I wondered how to calculate the greater good of my being away from family. Should I have planned on an early ending like everyone else? Why was I stepping outside of life for this momentary slack tide?
I calmed the crying voice down, told him I loved him forever and always, and I tried to describe just how green and clean the world around me was and how much I wanted to show it to him. The crying calmed and quickly made its sudden turn to the snuffling snoring. I said my goodnights to unhearing ears and went back to my plans. My parents sent a message too, in response to my own call. They wrote to confirm that after I’d stayed as a tiny preemie with my birth mother in hospital until my lungs worked well enough, they had brought me back here to the corner of Kalum Lake Road and McConnell Avenue.
That was my first home, remembered only through ill-lit and fading photographs of my parents looking like plaid-clad hippies. Nostos. Algos. I had the address for Faldor’s Farm. It was the half-remembered dreamlike wound, the traumof childhood. And tomorrow I would wake to it. I fell into the fitful dreaming sleep that comes in a place of unfamiliar scents and sounds, like the echo of train horns resounding from mountainsides unheard for decades and the rich foliate chlorophyll of a green world on all sides. There was a woman with a white lock in her black hair, my sons calling for me to be home and one wailing against my absences—there was also another tiny adopted child hollowed out for the love that is so hard to find in rough rural towns, and me tossing through the night restlessly, thinking of a farm and a ringing smithy and laughing through an idyll of childhood I’d read as a gift, folding it into the bed of my life’s stream.
What need to atone drove an author to write such books for the young? What drove me to read them? He’d gone to jail for it. I went to college. But was the engine behind it so different?
I rose early the next morning. I’d left my window and blinds open to have the chill air and early sunlight to drive me from bed. I showered, packed, pulled on my hoodie against the cold, and went downstairs to pluck a few hard-boiled eggs from the breakfast set as they were just being put out, still warm, and a large cup of coffee. I put the eggs and a napkin in the front pocket of my pull-over where they would keep my hands snug against the cool. I started off out the doors onto the Highway of Tears and then turned onto the Nisga’a Highway.
The road wrapped round from the steelworks and ran uphill with a narrow soft bed on the side of gravel and the ground-down softness of shed cedar and pine washed to the sides in the winter’s thaw. It was muffled and soft underfoot, nearly grainy, and I walked swiftly under the trees, rising past rousing neighbours with barking dogs and the sun over tall grass meadows. The shade of the sun over the Kitsumgallum cemetery for settlers at the top of the hill gave way as everything opened into a high and flat plateau. An old man with rope for a belt walked past slowly on the other side of the road, and I offered my “morning” to him, met by a nod, though I had my earphones in to listen to a lecture by two friends on ethics, the banality of evil, and a fantasy story whose child was smouldering into my thoughts from some other time. I was blessed by loving parents, and also a loving birth mother who could give me up to their love. I had been too lucky. I ate my hard-boiled eggs, pitched the shells into the ditch with their short sulfur smell, and revelled in the freedom of a choice made to bring me to meet this world, to taste its clean air, and to walk my way through it.
With the sun on me, the coat of sweat’s salt and oil on my forehead, and a thin and cool bead of perspiration running down the back of my neck, I reached the crossroads. Here on the corner of Kalum Lake Road and McConnell Avenue, I had to see the past as an anchor into the future. The promises and failures, the flow of guilt driving unexpected atonements, the forgotten roots still growing, and the past as some dark basement to the present beside the upward-climbing path of the future. I reached the crossroad of my earliest life and my first home.
It was a void.
On the west side, the north and south by the church had homes too new and too unlike mine in the faded photographs to be connected. These were from later than me. To the east was an empty stand of forest in the north and the impossible to the south. My home was not there.
The first home in which my swaddling clothes were warmed in the oven, one button once too hot burned itself in to mark me for life, the silver scar carried all the way out into the world and now brought all the way back home again. The snows buried the roof my father would dig out, wild dog packs passed outside, and the poorly lit photographs of my childhood held firm roots. It was not there.
There was only the Waap Sa’mn House of the college, the same campus I had seen the day before to find pathways for students to move through their studies seamlessly. It was the Birch House of the campus, and the Celtic sense in me called out to new beginnings, but the settler hesitation I carry was unsure how to read the Sa’mn here on a site not my own and with my roots floating, even racing down the stream of the misty river to be washed away.
My childhood home was torn down to make land for the campus that was founded the year after I left. My shallow roots became a college.
I stood dumb and stilled. I had been here only a day before to say that students from anywhere are owed a pathway to anywhere else. Yet my own feet were calling to a rootedness not my own and a recognition that the cosmopolitan mobility that made my life’s riverbed possible might itself be a trauma to another.
I thought back to that small bookstore, itself filled up with books written as atonements for the harms done to a child like me, atonements every day repeated and everyday incomplete. And I could only think of my tremendous gift, to be on that precipice of impasse and able to look into it with love for Terrace, thinking less of my debts to the past and a history that formed me and more to the needs of my future that called, wailing in discontent over my absence, and my service to a debt from my own past that forgot my debt to the future. I took my photographs and thought of how I would read my son those books from my own childhood that he had come to love, and how I would tell myself something about the child toward whom those books were an act of atonement. In that moment of another beginning facing the birch, I saw the future as a departure outward that I could never fulfill but also a possibility to give this beginning place a portentous purpose, a direction, and a pathway always uphill to be run through, laughing.
My walk back in a long circle was tiring, and my trip to the airport shortly after was too brief to recall with the friends who were also stragglers. But as I flew out of Terrace later that morning with propellers churning, I had no aching pain of home. It was only the strange anagnorisis that the future of others needed my presence and not my past, and the same from the stories I was telling them—stories whose atonement may have driven their telling but whose futures would drive my sons with their aching wish for love.
I was eddying back again in the stream before flowing and resuming the current. In that moment looking down from the airplane shaking with the buzzing thrum of propellers, I lost nostalgia to the future after the return itself. The lost third Nostoi is always yet to be written.
Terrace, British Columbia. Photo by Sam Beebe/Flickr.
JAMES GIFFORD is an active editor and Director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. He’s taught in six countries on two continents and lives in the Fraser Valley. His recent writing is in SAD Mag, Abridged, The Nashwaak Review, and The Quilliad. Find him on Twitter @GiffordJames.