Bog Tender: Coming Home To Nature and Memory
By George Szanto
Brindle & Glass, 272 pp., $24.95
Following in the footsteps of Brian Brett’s bestselling and prize-winning memoir Trauma Farm, the new book from Gabriola Island novelist, essayist and former McGill professor George Szanto chronicles his own little slice of the Gulf Islands, and through this, provides a lens on the writer’s life.
Bog Tender: Coming Home To Nature and Memory is broken into twelve chapters, each framing a month in the life of the titular bog that bisects the property that Szanto owns with his wife Kit, and that he looks out on from the window of his writing studio-cum-guest cottage. (It’s likely not an accident that the book begins with September: Szanto and Kit bought the island property for their retirement, and it’s natural that, for an academic, even a lapsed one, the year begins with the Labour Day weekend.)
Unlike Trauma Farm, which was steeped in Brett’s life as a farmer, with an in-depth and life-long participatory relationship with his land, Szanto experiences the natural world at something of a remove. His accounts of the birds, deer, raccoons and other animals, along with the flora of the bog, are those of a gifted amateur naturalist, examining a world from without, with a discerning eye for detail and a compelling descriptive style.
“I stayed for a while beside the bog,” he writes, “listening to a half-dozen variants of birdsong. Watched a pair of pileated woodpeckers, each over a foot and a half tall, peck their way around a dead tree fifteen feet off, their red crests burning in a shaft of sunlight.”
Szanto writes compellingly of the natural world around him, and the book, were it only a naturalist’s observations, would more than succeed. More significant, however — to this reader, at least — is the effect that the bog has upon him: “Living here on the Engineer’s Challenge, I’ve come to sense that my memory, too, is a kind of bog, obscure on the surface, at times clearer when waded into, at times murkier. Living by the bog has given me time to wander about in my past; I report what I discover or recover, I write down snippets of memory.”
From those snippets of memory, Szanto creates a delicate, impressionistic memoir, drawing together strands of the past and ongoing present, all cued by the bog and by Szanto’s life on Gabriola. Thus, the month of October reminds him of the death of his father, holding his hand for the last time, which engenders a memory of holding his hand as a child as they walk through a garden, and as they travel from Ireland to England via the night boat during the Second World War, their lives at risk from Nazi air or U-boat raids.
The related memory of his father watching the water, “a picture of a man trying to look into the water, under its surface, to see what kind of life goes on down there” leads into a memory of fishing with his father, which spirals into a life of memories of fishing, including a near-tragic lake-fishing expedition with friends on the west coast. September brings with it memories of taking a house in Mexico, where Szanto and Kit lived for a year and where he wrote The Underside of Stones, the first book in his Mexico trilogy, a memory that spirals out, over the course of the book, to include their homes in San Diego and Montreal, and their lives travelling.
This strand is crucial.
Beautifully written, deeply felt without succumbing to cheap sentiment, Bog Tender is, at its heart, an account of a life spent searching for home, physical, emotional and spiritual, a celebration of finding one’s place in the world, be it ever so humble — and magical — as a small bog on a small island.
Robert Wiersema is a Victoria-based bookseller and author. His latest books are Bedtime Story and Walk Like a Man.