Hearing the Owl
First published in Ireland in The Haibun Journal 1:1, April 2019, pages 38–41. An early draft of the prose was originally
written in an email message sent to Howard Lee Kilby on 14 June 2006, with the
poems added the next day, plus many edits in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2015, and 2016. And
in case it’s useful to know, “Kwakiutl” is pronounced as kwä'keeOO"tul. See also the three postscripts at the end.
+ + + + + + + + +
“A place is a story happening many
times.” —Kwakiutl Tribe
One of my favourite books is Margaret Craven’s I Heard the Owl Call My Name. It’s a short novel about a priest
whose Bishop sends him by boat to his hardest parish when he learns that the
priest has but a short time to live. The young priest travels to Kingcome
Inlet, deep in the remote north-coast waterways of British Columbia, amid the Kwakiutl
natives who have accepted Anglican beliefs but still value their native
traditions. They hold potlatch ceremonies to welcome the changing seasons and
to give thanks for bountiful fishing, bury their dead in trees, and gather for
mass on Sundays. It’s a tale of cultural encounter, an unexpected kind of love
story, an account of difference and similarity, of aging and agelessness, of
life and death, and ultimately a bittersweet tale of belonging. It has brought
me to tears each time I’ve turned a particular page.
half-carved totem—
the warmth of wood chips
falling through my fingers
I’ve enjoyed this book numerous
times, including once reading it aloud on a car trip across the Sierra Nevada.
I also read it when attending Expo 86 in Vancouver, British Columbia. I had the
book in my backpack, and would pull it out while waiting in long lines. My
favourite pavilion that summer was “Spirit Lodge,” sponsored by General Motors. The theme
of Expo 86 was transportation and communication, and each pavilion outdid
itself with bigger and better technology than the next, with interactive video
projection walls and magnetically levitated high-speed trains. But the GM
pavilion was the opposite of that—the utmost of simplicity, and straight out of
Kwakiutl culture. The pavilion had a square shape, with a ramp around the
perimeter that gently squared its way upward. On the way, amid deep-green
spruce boughs, draping moss, and recreations of old-growth cedar forests, the
walls showed paintings and carvings telling Kwakiutl history and mythology. The
symbols on the totems became more engaging when you learned the stories and
beliefs behind the eagles, bears, and salmon.
muggy afternoon—
an endangered species
pacing at the zoo

What a pleasure to be reading that
book in this pavilion. But the best part awaited us at the top of the ramp. We
were ushered into a theatre, set up like a native longhouse or spirit lodge,
where a shaman, live on stage, started telling Kwakiutl stories. For centuries,
and even today, the Kwakiutl always wished for a magical canoe where they could
recite an incantation, dip their paddle into the lake or ocean, and instantly
travel to wherever they wanted to be—or to be with someone they loved. We still
want that magic today, to be beamed up from a distant planet where our
spaceship orbits. While telling these stories, the shaman sat and stood and
danced beside a fire pit. As he waved his hands, smoke from the fire changed
shape and became the objects he described—a canoe, a grizzly, a soaring osprey.
It was done with holographic projections, and it transfixed us. Ultimately, for
me, it swept away all the technology that cluttered the Expo, luring the
masses, including me. It pulled the hype back to its roots—to desire, a desire
that every culture, no matter how old or young, wants to improve its
communication, understanding, and wisdom—within its own community and in
interaction with others. It pulled back the hype surrounding every culture’s pressing
desire for easier transportation, not just because it might be done, but to
fulfill those longings to be in loved places or with loved faces far away.
Nothing has changed, and for me, making that connection between modern
civilization and ancient civilizations was thanks to the Kwakiutl culture. I
thought of the poet H.D. and what really matters: “I shall be here after the wave
passes by.” At the end of the presentation, the shaman somehow disappeared from
the stage as he and the smoke wafted away.
breathless phone call—
our baby’s first kick
marked on the calendar

In 2006 I visited the University
of British Columbia in Vancouver for a conference. At the university, Kwakiutl
and the better-known and similar Haida cultures are heavily represented in one
of the world’s most important museums—the Museum of Anthropology. It features
the people who populated Cascadia’s endless coastal rainforests for millennia
before Russian and European invasion, those delicate indigenous tribes, the
first nations, and the animal, plant, and fish brothers with whom they lived
harmoniously—the bears, the salmon, and the owls. The museum offers the
reminder that this land is not ours, but theirs, that we are indeed still a
sort of trespasser, an interloper, though we think we’re not. Huge wood
carvings dwarf the visitor. Vibrant paintings in primal colours draw in the
viewer, and it is hard to look away at the ocean views across Georgia Strait to
the snow-capped mountains to the west and north. To visit the museum is
transcendent and humbling, especially for me, ever the alien, a British citizen
who became Canadian after living in Ghana and Australia, now living with a
Japanese wife in the United States, having never voted, never served on a jury.
But on this latest trip I didn’t visit the museum, not just because I didn’t
have time, but because it would have made me sad—sad for wanting to communicate
better with others and to be with loved ones more often—maybe even to the point
of crying, to the point of drowning in that aching melancholic sadness of
always wanting to belong.
first warm night—
the
hoot of an owl
penetrates my totem
Postscript 1
I’ve enjoyed a pleasant discovery regarding Margaret Craven (shown here), author of I Heard the Owl Call My Name. In April
of 1998, with Kate Kordich, I had the honour of interviewing Janet Lewis, most
famous as the author of The Wife of
Martin Guerre (made into the movie Somersby,
starring Jodie Foster), and herself the wife of famed poet and critic Yvor
Winters (see “Enduring Imagist: An Interview with Janet Lewis (1899–1998)”). As
it turned out, Margaret Craven was a tenant of Janet and Yvor for a time, in a
house near Stanford University, where they also lived. They became friends, and
Janet encouraged Margaret in her writing, and I believe mentored her to some
degree. Margaret was originally from Helena, Montana. She graduated from high
school in Bellingham, Washington, which obviously influenced her appreciation
for the Pacific Northwest—in her novel Walk
Gently This Good Earth she called the old-growth trees that cover the Cascade
mountain range and its foothills “the greatest forest in the world.” Read more on
Wikipedia about Margaret Craven and I Heard the Owl Call My Name.
—13 March 2019, on the 118th anniversary
of Margaret Craven’s birth
Postscript 2
The following is an excerpt from an email message I wrote to Chuck Brickley
after sending him a copy of the preceding haibun. Chuck is an American (and later Canadian) who for many
decades lived in Hope, British Columbia, where I also used to live. I had just
seen Chuck at the May 2019 Haiku Canada weekend at the University of British Columbia,
meeting less than a ten-minute walk from the Museum of Anthropology, which
once again I chose not to visit—but I know I soon will.
I actually left out one very personal detail in my haibun. In 1997, I was stuck
in British Columbia for six months awaiting my H1 visa to return to the US. I
visited the Museum of Anthropology in late September that year, and was still
waiting for my visa (yet still paying rent in California for all of those six
months). In the museum, amid all the massive Haida wood sculptures, with the
expansive view of the mountains across the water outside the huge windows, I
remember coming to a realization that I could live here if my visa never came through. It was a point of
acceptance that was profound for me, a powerful sense of social and spiritual
belonging. That afternoon, I drove home to where I was staying, where a letter
had arrived, that very day, announcing that my visa was approved. It was a
deeply emotional moment for me, after six months of disruption and uncertainty,
and that’s the real reason why it would be sad for me to revisit the museum
again (as I mention in the haibun), perhaps because I turned my back on that
acceptance, or so it might have seemed. And yet no. The larger acceptance was
embracing what I had sought for half a year, yet also embracing the possibility
of the other option too. I found myself capable of accepting everything. For me
it was a moment of saying yes to life.
I would also like to mention that
the owl might be my totem animal, if I had one. In Manitoba one spring, I was hiking
alone along the south shore of Clear Lake, at the edge of Riding Mountain
National Park, east of Wasagaming. I walked around a bend of the trail and
there, on a stump in front of me, not more than twenty feet away, at eye level,
was a giant snowy owl. I stopped in my tracks. The bird did not move. We stared
at each other for at least half an hour. It occasionally shifted a wing, or
looked slightly to one side or the other, but mostly maintained its gaze
straight at me. I shifted from foot to foot now and then too, but stayed as
still as possible—not consciously at first, but because I was transfixed, instantly
knowing that this was a rare close-up encounter with a majestic and solitary
creature. Eventually I became aware that I wanted to finish my hike and be back
in time for dinner with family and friends. I moved slightly forward, a step or
two, but the bird did not move, continuing its wide-eyed stare at me. I stepped
forward again, slowly and gently. And again. Then the bird smoothly stretched
out its wings, at least a five-foot wingspan, made a silent surge of its wings
and flew up to a distant tree top. I felt the breeze of its wings as it flew
away.
—2 June 2019, Sammamish, Washington
Postscript 3
In a review of The
Haibun Journal 1:1, 2019, edited by Sean O’Connor, reviewer Tony Beyer
writes the following in Haibun Today
13:3, September 2019:
Another feature of this haibun collection is their consistent high standard—a
credit to Sean O’Connor and to the authors. . . . [Various haibun] remind us of
the origin of haibun in travel sketches and records of human or natural
atmosphere. Combining some of these concerns, Michael Dylan Welch, in his “Hearing
the Owl,” spins out the associations derived from a favourite book (Margaret
Craven’s I Heard the Owl Call My Name)
into a consideration of cultural traditions among the indigenous Kwakiutl of
British Columbia. He muses on the way stories are told and signs become totems
passed on into the future, history and mythology, visual art and more intimate
personal experience. His words for visiting the UBC Museum of Anthropology,
“transcendent and humbling,” draw these strands together into a reflection on
what it means to belong among the succession of human inhabitants of a place.
—2 September 2019, Sammamish, Washington
|