A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [4]
Now, two days after he’d arrived, as he stood near the shore with the camera around his neck and a snow shovel in his hand, the phrase breaking the river was still fresh in his mind, and he had decided that it would be the title of the first series he would complete on the island. He observed, by looking at the shards of ice along the shoreline, that, in effect, the river was broken by the island. Arguably, this would be true even in summer in that the island would break up the current of the water that passed on either side of it. But it was the ice that interested Jerome, the way it had heaved itself up on end and onto the shore like some ancient species attempting to discard an aquatic past. He plunged the handle of the shovel into a nearby drift, where it remained upright like a dark road sign. Then he walked away and began to search the surroundings for slim fallen branches of a suitable length.
He would use these branches as poles to mark out the perimeter of the site, about twenty square feet comprising one scrub bush, one small hawthorn, a sizable area of deep heavy snow, and the ice along the shoreline. Much would happen here, he knew, in the next week or so, some of it natural, some of it caused by his own activities. When the poles were in place, he began to record the site with his camera, first the whole area and then the details, reducing the depth of field in stages until he was able to capture a thorn on the small tree, a grey, cracked milkweed pod with one remaining seed attached, and the feathered end of a tall weed stalk that had somehow not succumbed to the weight of snow. He enjoyed these exercises in increasing intimacy and was warmed by the knowledge that he would be able to remain for a period of time in the vicinity of the natural references that would move him. He was also pleased by the remnants of abandoned architecture that he had seen here and there on the island, the way these weakened structures had held their ground despite time and rot and the assault of a century of winters.
After Jerome and his family had drifted down from the north in his early childhood, they had lived first in a small suburban house and then in an apartment building perched on a cluttered edge of Toronto, far away from such haphazard architecture as tool sheds, chicken coops, stables. And yet, his otherwise solemn and often angry father could be brought to levels of brief excitement in the vicinity of childhood projects such as the making of kites, go-karts, tree houses, or forts in scrub lots slated for future development. The engineer in him, Jerome now believed, that part of him he had been forced to abandon when the mine closed, could be miraculously, though falsely, shaken into wakefulness by something as simple as the placement of load-bearing lumber in a tree. His enthusiasm waned quickly, however, as did Jerome’s, and these projects were almost always left unfinished, slowly decaying on the margins of the property, until Jerome returned to them later and took a renewed interest in their construction and eventual restoration. After the horror of his father’s death, Jerome would call to mind the structures on the now residential lots, and he found that he would be able to recall almost exactly the way a tree house had creaked in the wind, one loose board knocking against a branch, or the way the large nails had looked in his father’s palm, his mouth, and then the same nails after a year or so, exposed and rusting during the decline of winter. Once, as a young adult, Jerome had walked all over the low-rental housing development that occupied what had been the vacant land, looking for the tree near a dirty stream where one of these projects had begun to take shape. But both the stream and its culvert were gone. There