Alexander Mackenzie

Photo: PBS.org

"Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three."

Painted in a mixture of vermilion and grease on a rock at Bella Bella, the triumphant inscription announcing his arrival at the the coast is still visible. Others probed the Arctic for the elusive Northwest Passage, but Mackenzie remained focused on finding the "Western Sea."

In 1793, with a North West Company partner and native guides, he achieved that ambition. The English king, George III, knighted the Scottish-born Mackenzie, out of recognition that he was the first European explorer north of Mexico to reach the Pacific Ocean by an overland route. Later, Americans Lewis and Clark duplicated the feat of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, arriving at the Pacific near Portland, Oregon in 1805.

The Mackenzie River and the town of Mackenzie, BC, bear the name of this explorer. Schools are also named after him in Vancouver and Hagensborg, BC, and in Cochrane, Alberta. This past June, Sir Alexander Mackenzie School in Inuvik, which opened in 1959, closed along with another school named after explorer and naturalist Samuel Hearne. The two will be replaced by a larger, more modern facility.

Alexander Mackenzie was also the name of Canada's second Prime Minister, a Liberal, but that namesake was not born until 1822, long after our fur-trading explorer had accomplished his most memorable feats. His memory continues to be honoured by BC Grizzly Tours.

Photo: Mackenzie's inscription, from Beyond the map.

Is postmodernism over yet?

Photo: Land's End

Leafing idly --  the catalogue came in the mail.

"Modern styles," proclaims the description of a coat with dolman sleeves, a belt that passes through a slit, leaving the back loose.

Hmm, I thought. That looks rather like the coats Auntie Gladys used to make. This was back in the nineteen-fifties when, as a tiny girl, I admired the talents of my seamstress aunt who had worked in the GWG factory.

Modern seems to go on and on, as by definition, it must.

Yet there was post-modernism too, though possibly the term was not used in fashion; just in academia.

Is that over yet, I wonder. One hears so little of it now.

And if it is, what has replaced it? Post-post-modernism? Or are we back to modernism again?

As we should be, perhaps. After all, most things in life are cyclic.

The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot and more by Angus Wilson

Photo: Cineraria, Gap Photos 

Darkly hilarious, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes show-cases Angus Wilson as a master of trenchant social comedy. An intellectual descendant of Ford Madox Ford and fictional forerunner of Ian McEwan, he was enormously talented.

I discovered his work by accident while doing research on Bletchley Park for my novel-under-construction. Walking on Charing Cross Road, I saw Sinclair McKay's book in the window of Blackwell's. Angus Wilson, I learned, was one of the WWII codebreakers who later became a novelist.

On a friend's recommendation, I read Margaret Drabble's biography of Wilson. Strangely, I perused this lengthy but fascinating opus before reading any of his work. As I remedied that omission by reading my way through his works, I found The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot to be my favourite.

In this novel, (originally published 1958) we meet Meg, a woman whose life has been influenced by a her father's abandonment of her mother, brother and herself, leaving them in genteel poverty.

However, Meg has made a fortunate marriage. Twenty years later, she retains a deep love for Bill, her hard-working lawyer husband, who has gladly conferred wealth and status upon her. Meg's financial affluence leaves her free to bring her considerable perceptiveness and intelligence to bear on her life of entertaining, collecting expensive porcelain, and voluntary charity work.

The couple have no children; presumably Meg is unable to get pregnant, but even this does not appear to have seriously interfered with their happy married life.

Meg has some regret about drifting away from her pacifist brother, to whom she felt very close as they grew up. He seems to have the life he wants at the Sussex plant nursery he has established with his partner, Gordon. But this rural world and Meg's London social whirl seem poles apart.

Everything changes when Meg and Bill set off on a six-month tour of the Far East and Australia. No sooner have they paused to change planes in a small fictitious Asian nation than they stumble upon a political drama in the airport restaurant. The trip is cut brutally short. After two weeks at the home of the local consul, Meg returns to England a shocked and grieving widow.

On her return home, she discovers that she now has very limited financial resources. It seems Bill relieved the pressure of his legal work by gambling. First, Meg faces the reality that she must sell her fashionable house. Once this is done, she begins to map out her future, and this means getting some job training. Meanwhile, she plumbs some old but problematic friendships, faces her loneliness, and builds a bridge back to her solitary and grieving brother, who is losing his beloved Gordon to cancer.

This reader, never doubting that she would somehow manage the inner and outer transformation, was plumping for her all the way. Meg Eliot was completely real and sympathetic.

As a bonus, her story plunges the reader headlong into the still-postwar London of the 1950s. Wilson's choice of detail is telling. Meg's fellow-widow Jill has put her life on hold and alienated her adult daughter in an effort to cling to the memory of her RAF husband and assuage her marital guilt. Meanwhile, a surviving pilot and his wife earn a living by arranging tulips and cinerarias in the shabby rooms of the formerly genteel hotel where Meg stays awhile.

Gentler than some of Wilson's more sharply observed social commentary, this is a wonderful read, not least because of the gleam of such heartbreaking human truths as Meg's valiant willingness "to accept his cocksureness because she could detect the swamps of self-doubt over which it had been constructed."

Wilson's description of David's awareness of his own motivations in his attitude toward his employee's family is no less than brilliant: "...he wanted above all to get on with Tim's wife, for a hundred mixed reasons -- preventive, defensive, apologetic, identifying."

No wonder so many consider this Wilson's best work. Meg Eliot is so real that the reader would hardly be surprised if she sat down, ready to employ her charm for helpful purposes, and asked a drawing-out question.

Originally published by Secker and Warburg (London) in 1958, the book was reissued in 1961 and 1992 by Penguin. The themes, and the writing, are as fresh and relevant today as when the book first rolled off the presses 54 years ago.

Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Vintage Photo of the Times of India building taken 1880 by E.O.S. & Company, Bombay Photo Images

Last term a student had presented this book in class, and it sounded interesting. I borrowed the audio version from the library. The start of the story felt slow. At first, I wondered whether I'd make it through all 9 CDs. But I needn't have worried. I was soon lured in by the adventures of Somer and Kris (Krishnan), Kavita and Jasu, and Asha/Usha.

Unable to conceive a child of their own when Somer hits menopause early, this California doctor and her surgeon husband adopt a child from an orphanage in Krishnan's native Mumbai. Asha, their daughter, grows up with every advantage her highly educated and well-off parents can provide. But when she asks about her origins, they cannot give her the answers she seeks. The orphanage has told them nothing about Asha's biological parents, poor farmers from a rural area.

According to village values, Kavita is expected to give birth to a son who will grow up a credit to his parents and help with their farm work. Instead, she has a second girl, whom she names Usha. Kavita then defies village conventions to walk to Mumbai with her sister when the child is only three days old. There, heartbroken, she places her infant in the care of an orphanage, hoping to give her a chance at life.

Eventually Kavita and Jasu do have a son, and though Kavita does not really wish to, they move to the city to provide better opportunities for young Vijay. After leaving behind all they have known, the couple must establish themselves in a strange city. This requires enormous sacrifices and brings new conflicts and unexpected results.

Meanwhile, Asha grows up and goes to university in the U.S. Aged twenty, she wins a journalism scholarship that takes her to Mumbai for a year. During her internship with The Times of India, she writes a report on the children of the slums. While she is in India, Asha gets to know her cultural heritage and her grandparents, and determines to find out who her biological parents are and why they gave her up.

This is a story full of familiar conflicts and misunderstandings: the struggles of a couple in a cross-cultural marriage, the conflicted identity of an adopted child, the terrible dilemmas faced by poor illiterate parents who give birth to two girls before they have the socially more desirable boy.

In the end, the tales of  a California family and "the two Indias," wealthy and poor, traditional and modern, are woven together into a gripping story, well worth the investment of listening or reading time.

Narrated beautifully by Soneela Nankani, the CD set was published by Recorded Books in 2011. The audio version is based on the novel Secret Daughter, written by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, and published by William Morrow in 2010. The book was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin, shortlisted for the South African Boeke Literary Prize, and nominated for two GoodReads Choice Awards.

In 2010, The Vancouver Sun included it as one of the Best Ten Books of the year. It has received many other forms of recognition and been translated and published widely.

Henry Hudson

Photo: Henry Hudson biography

Henry Hudson was one of the many British navigators who sought the mythical Northwest Passage, a sea route to the Orient.

He began his search in the area around New York, where he is thought to have been the first European to arrive, and ventured as far south as Chesapeake Bay. Today, the Hudson River, explored on this voyage, bears his name. In 2009, 400 years after Hudson set foot in what is now New York state, a replica of his ship, the Half Moon, was placed in Albany.

Later, after joining the Dutch East India Company, Hudson continued his explorations. The British, displeased to find him working for their business rivals, forbade him to continue.

After finding English backers, in 1610 Hudson sailed the Discovery into the strait that led into Hudson Bay. When he got as far as James Bay, he realized he had hit a dead end.

He was still hoping to find the Northwest Passage, but his crew did not share Hudson's eager interest in exploration. Some of them mutinied and took over the ship in order to turn back. Hudson, his son, and some of his loyal crew were cast off into a small boat and never heard from again. In all likelihood, they died of exposure.

Hudson did not find what he was seeking, but eventually, the bay where he lost his life, along with the strait leading into it, were named after him.

In Vancouver, Henry Hudson Elementary School also bears his name.

Hitchhiking plants along the railway

T

The railroad grade is a good place to see plants from outside the climate zone.

Among other hitchhikers that growing along the tracks at White Rock, the plants in these pictures include California poppy, some type of mustard plant -- a prairie native, I think -- and alfalfa.

Alfalfa also likes to hitch rides on trucks. Clumps of this prairie animal fodder are often seen blooming along BC's highways.

Saffron crocus - an expensive spice and more

Photo: Saffron

The rich purple and gold saffron crocus makes a gorgeous addition to an autumn garden.

When harvesting, just three stigmas per plant are gathered; they are used as a fragrant spice and also as a golden dye. According to Rachel Geenan, at $315 per ounce or $5,040 per pound, the price rivals that of gold. Not surprising. The Greek Products website says that 75,000 flowers go into one pound of spice.

Saffron has been used for thousands of years, and is featured in stories about the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra as well as in Greek mythology. Catalina Toma places it in ancient times as pigment in cave paintings. Tibetan monks used it in prayer ceremonies. Koranic writers used it in calligraphy.

As the rich golden colour suggests, saffron contains carotenoid compounds as well as volatile oils. According to Saffron Nutrition Facts, these substances, along with the vitamins contained in the spice -- A, C and some forms of B -- make it rich in anti-antioxidants. Medicinally, it has been used as an anti-depressant, antiseptic, and anti-convulsant. Research done in Italy in 2009 suggests that  may be effective in combating eye disease and  alleviating age-related vision loss. Similar research conducted in Australia and Italy the following year pointed to the properties of saffron in treating macular degeneration, and interest it beneficial possibilities continues.

The word saffron comes from the Arabic zafran. Native to the Mediterranean region, this spice is grown today mostly in Spain, Morocco, Greece, Turkey, Iran and India.

Saffron is also the name of an award-winning restaurant in Burnaby that serves a variety of Indian cuisines. At My Shanti in Surrey, I enjoyed a Honey Saffron Lassi recently.

It's a pleasure to enjoy saffron crocus among my fall garden blooms.