The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [31]
They passed the dark miles in this way, the St. Lawrence, then Lake Ontario on one side of the highway, farmers' fields on the other; a landscape inscribed by a lover is like no other place on earth.
– This river where no one bathes, said Avery, this new St. Lawrence with its graves … I understand perfectly why Georgiana Foyle would rather row out to her husband's grave than move it. Even though she will now have to be buried alone … This torments her. But she's right. His body belongs to that place because his life belonged there.
– There is such a long human relationship with plants, said Jean, not just between seed and sower, but with the creation of the first aesthetic gardens. Who was the first person to desire certain plants for pleasure, to separate these plants from wilderness, the way prayer separates certain words from the rest of language? Why did the Egyptians use a palm leaf to symbolize a vowel? Before about 8000 B.C., wheat was just a kind of wild grass. But by accident, this grass was pollinated with goat grass, and the fourteen chromosomes of each combined to create twenty-eight chromosomes: emmer wheat. Then emmer crossed with another kind of grass and made forty-two chromosomes, and this is the wheat we now use for bread, the wholegrain we ate for lunch. But this was really a rare accident. Because the seeds of the new wheat couldn't easily transport and fertilize themselves, they would not spread. So man and plant needed each other. This tiny accident led to settlement, to the scythe, to the plough and wheel and axle, to the potter's wheel and the waterwheel and pulley, to irrigation.
– To water rights and land rights, said Avery. To canals, dams, and seaways.
– I've been reading about rain, said Jean. That utterly distinctive smell, when rain first starts to fall – two scientists have analyzed it. They've named it ‘petrichor’ from the Greek for stone and for the ‘blood’ that flows through the veins of the gods. It's the scent of an oil produced by plants partially decomposed, undergoing oxidation and nitration, a combination of three compounds. The first raindrops reach into stone or pavement and release this plant oil, which we smell as it is washed away. We can only smell it as it is washed away.
In the autumn, Avery packed his kit again and went north into the rock and darkness, the darkest green of northern Quebec, to work on the dam on the Manicouagan River. Many Saturday mornings, Jean and Avery drove toward each other. The highway motels had their own strange attraction, nothing more than a brick rectangle inserted among the northern forest, the front door to each motel room leading directly from the highway; and yet the chill, astringent air of the firs, the coldness of centuries of shade, seemed to penetrate even the bricks and cinderblocks with a clean, live joy. One would approach and see the other's car waiting in the gravel parking lot; that sight was sufficient to overwhelm each with happiness. Let us always meet in motels, Avery had said, even after we've been together for a hundred years. Jean drove to these meetings in her father's old blue Dart, often with her botany textbooks open on the passenger seat so that, after the first hour or so of daydreaming, she could glance down and memorize facts for her courses at the university. Thus the botanical lexicon attached itself to the miles, to small towns and gas stations: Esso and Equisetum, The Voyageur Restaurant and Athyrium, Greenville and Gymnocarpium, Ste. Therese and Selaginella, Pointe-aux-Trembles and Thelypteris.
And sometimes Avery drove south to the Holland Marsh, and they spent the weekend together in the white farmhouse with his mother, Marina Voss Escher.
Avery alone was one thing, a universe with loose shirttails and notes in his pocket, to be discovered slowly. And Avery and Marina