From a Spiral Notebook: Horseshoe Lake

Hi all,

First, a couple of announcements:

• For those living in Victoria, I will be at Russell Books this Friday, June 10th, for a celebration of the Poets Caravan project for Planet Earth Poetry. I was honoured to do a video for this project, although it isn’t up yet. I’ll let you know when it is! But Friday I’ll be reading a poem at the celebration along with many other featured poets. Starts at 7:30 if you’re interested.

• For those living in Vancouver, I will be at the Main Branch of the Vancouver Public Library for the awards ceremony of the Vancouver Poet Laureate’s City Poem Contest, for which I am shortlisted. It’s in the Alice MacKay Room and starts at 2:30 on Saturday, June 11th, if you can join. Here’s the link.

I was so busy last month. You may remember that I said I signed up for many workshops for the AWA Write Around the World fundraiser. Possibly too many. I do that every year, and every year about mid-May I wish I’d remembered that my eyes are bigger than my zoom capacity. But this year I only missed one due to health, and one due to miscalculating the time zone (first time I’ve done that. Embarrassing). It was great fun and I learned tonnes, but I’m glad to be in a calmer month now.

Last month I also watched a bunch of the Federation of BC Writers Summit workshops. One of them, by Helen Humphreys on writing about place, had a great exercise that got me thinking about Horseshoe Lake.

I do not have a picture of Horseshoe Lake, but I offer these buttercups instead.

To find the lake, look it up in a hiker’s guide. It’s a longer drive than you’ll expect it to be from Jasper. For much of the time on the road the land will fall away from the car out the right window. The left view will be filled with dark pine forest.

That day, Mum was a bit embarrassed because she’d talked a bunch of medical friends at a conference into driving there for a picnic lunch, but the drive was rather longer than advertised. We kids thought it was longer than advertised too.

It will be worth it once you get there.

First we went on the hike, which I remember as easy (and I was young). It was quite a nice hike, but the real draw was the lake.

The lake is deep and still, deep enough that you can’t see the bottom, deep enough that you wonder if there is one. It’s surrounded along most of its curved shape by cliffs, which are jumped from in the summer by teenagers, according to the hiker’s guide. At one end is a rocky floor going down to the water, created millions of years ago by glaciers. It is almost completely flat and grey and drops abruptly into the lake.

I longed to step off and into the water, or at least sit on the lip as if at poolside and dangle my feet, but it was the wrong time of year, and anyway I wouldn’t do it in front of all those people.

One of the docs had a mixed drink in a silver flask, was giving everyone a sip and asking them to guess what was in it. I heard him tell someone who’d guessed wrong it was anisette. When my dad tasted, was asked the question, I proudly told them what it was, as if I’d figured it out myself, and then realized that was the wrong thing to do. The awkwardness tasted of licorice.

The rock continues all over the shore in hummocks and hills of grey stone. The lake is narrow and horseshoe shaped and quite small. When you stand on the tip of the shore, where the lake curves around as if to follow the front part of a giant horse’s hoof, you will feel surrounded, sheltered by cliffs.

I wandered all over the shore with my mum, imagined being there alone. I promised myself I’d come back some time. Sometime when there were no doctor friends of my parents, or summer cliff divers, or anyone at all. Early spring maybe, or early fall, I would come back.

The drive back to Jasper will feel much shorter.

(NOTE: When I google the lake after writing this, I notice that some of the pictures show not-cliffs. It’s probably not really that far away from Jasper, either. Isn’t childhood memory interesting?)

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

I wrote this poem when I was much younger, but as it’s about Horseshoe Lake and the same memories as above, I thought it might be interesting to include. I remember being fascinated by Patrick Lane’s writing of the same happenings in his memoir and in his poetry, how they were the same but different. I thought I’d share how my own prose and poetry connect.

The Lake in Jasper Whose Name I Have Forgotten

I said to myself, I will return here.
When I know what to do
with this sacred place
I will come again, and do it.

The water of the lake so clear
and so deep. Teenagers jump
from nearby cliffs in summer
but this was fall, and too solemn for that.
I dipped my hands in the blue cold
squatted on the rock shore.

When I come back I will kneel
I will bathe in the lake
and come out stark
nothing but myself.
I will speak the words
when I know what words are needed.

NOTES

• Please feel free to reply to this email, either by hitting reply (it will only go to me), or by commenting on the Substack website (there are little speech bubble things at the top and bottom of the letter) if you’d like to be part of a larger discussion. You can also “like” the post if you want.

• Also feel free to pass this along to any friends who might be interested. They can subscribe, if they like, by hitting the big blue button that says “subscribe”.

• And thanks, as always, for reading.

Yours,

Kelsey
kelseyandrews.ca