In the past 10 weeks, there have been several books that I have wanted to recommend to you, but each week, I ran out of space. Hence, here are three rather eclectic books taken from my “must mention” stack.
First, Refuge Cove Coastal Kitchen by Cathy Jupp Campbell. This down-to-earth, often humorous compilation of photos, stories, recipes and art was clearly a fun community endeavour from this quaint West Coast “boardwalk community” in Desolation Sound, a boat ride across from Cortez Island, which is across from Quadra Island, which is off the coast of Campbell River, which is way up north.
Everyone from the “prawn King” to the “master apiarist” to a summer boater who was good with fudge to “Auntie Doris” contributed to the project, which I found absolutely heartwarming, and at times, maybe, almost (but not totally) pulling my leg.
I made the “green meatloaf” (it’s the spinach) and my friend made the two cakes that called for instant pudding and packaged cake mixes (but with other “natural” ingredients). There are recipes for pine tea and desserts titled “surprise” (remember those?). The ice-cream recipe is “not too rich,” only requiring a lot of sugar, eggs and four cans of evaporated milk.
They cook up there like my Gran cooked, using their hands, and with bacon fat, heavy cream, pork rinds, alcohol and a fire extinguisher, plus a mixer “if you have power.”
Crows, Encounters With the Wise Guys of the Avian World by Candace Savage (Greystone Books, 2015) is a fascinating, sometimes slightly gruesome, but often tender account of the corvids — rooks, ravens, crows and the like.
The book includes history, poetry, facts, anecdotes, stories, photographs (including a famous image of a crow using a stick tool to excavate a crevice in a tree) and diverse illustrations, including several ghostly fantasy drawings by 1900s-era illustrator Arthur Rackham, and the more contemporary symmetrical Cape Dorset depiction by Kenojuak Ashevak, titled Raven Opens the Box.
I love crows. Dad loved crows, too, and befriended a couple in his garden in Fredericton. One year, the crows gave birth to a little white crow and the crow parents cared for it for many years — it never left home. Dad and the three of them used to sit together amongst his tomato vines and nicotiana flowers at drink time.
In this book on crows, there’s a moving story titled Silverspot’s Treasures about a very private crow that liked to collect, tend and admire his secretive collection of white pebbles, shells and other pearly, milky-coloured items that he kept hidden under leafy debris — until, that is, he was spotted by a man.
It’s a wonderful story and so human, experiencing an invasion into your private, intimate world. I recall sealing my lips as a child when I felt I was being watched while having a tea party with my bears and trolls — a piercing intrusion, although it was no doubt near the end of childhood, when imagination would soon become, well, different.
I know that some people find crows annoying, but they are so intelligent and so sensitive – maybe intelligence, from whatever source, is, in fact, sometimes annoying.
I am including the next book in hopes that soon, we will all be able to travel again. A Sense of Place by Robin Laurence (Vancouver International Airport/ Figure 1 Publishing Inc., 2015) describes the awe-inspiring public art throughout Vancouver’s airport — in this case, a vast diversity of First Nations installations.
Bill Reid’s world famous The Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe is in “pre-security” at the international terminal, and The Rivers monument, two towering azure glass columns by Marianne Nicholson, sits in the domestic terminal building (post-security).
It sounds odd to have these spectacular cultural pieces in airport terminals, customs halls, the United States arrival area, and even the Canada Line, but it works when you see them and is a grand tribute to the Indigenous community, and to the sense of home.
We don’t think about art when we are rushing from gate to gate along endless turquoise carpets under the maze of white fluorescent lights, hot and anxious, finally arriving at passport control (my passport is always rejected in those machines because I insert it backwards), but public art in our airports is calming and stable, providing us with a true sense of place, both leaving and returning home, on our own journeys.
