TRANSCRIPTION of the video reading
Sunday, October 16, 2005. It's a quarter past seven. I'm in a little piece of Canada in Rotterdam, at Yvette Poorter's residence on Harddraverstraat: This Neck of the Woods. I've been to Canada before, two decades ago as part of an exchange program run by the Kunst en Complex foundation and artists from Winnipeg. During my stay in Canada, I stayed several times at the Loewen family's cabin in Lake of the Woods. Because I think it's fitting, I thought I'd read a passage from the diary I dedicated to this trip —the diary is called 'The A of Canada.' This is a passage about our trip to Lake of the Woods, to the Loewen family's cabin.
Fragment 1
May 27, 1995.
[...] We headed into an undiscovered state: 'Yours to discover' is the motto on Ontario's license plates. When we took the Kenora exit, a fox came running towards us on the hard shoulder. The roads were getting worse. The road dipped and rose, the bus bounced. Swamps alternated with forests. The route felt like a ride in a roller coaster. Sometimes, when the road surface became washboard, the vibrations in the car threatened to rattle the enamel off our teeth. We crossed a watershed with a portage, a cable car to transfer boats. In a clearing by a bay, we parked the cars and loaded the luggage into Louise L.‘s parents’ motorboat. The group was taken to the cabin in two shifts.
The Mercury outboard motor wouldn't start. On the first floor of a nearby house, a window was opened. A man gave loud instructions, the meaning of which was lost in the labor of the starter motor. It was Bruce, Make-A-Buck-Bruce, the uncrowned supervisor of Lake of the Woods. When the smoke from the started engine had cleared, Maik, Marieke, Louise L., the toddlers Lola and Zona, the dog Bucky, myself, and some of the luggage were the first to be transferred. Canoeists positioned their craft across the waves we were making. In the distance, half hidden in the forest, lay the cabin. The Colosseum of Loewen.
We moored and climbed the path that lead to the cabin. We passed a barracks that served as accommodation for the construction workers when the cabin was still under construction. The cabin exceeded our wildest expectations. The high interior space allowed all spirits present to unfold undisturbed. The equipment easily matched what was available to us in Winnipeg. Louise L. designed the building, which was constructed almost entirely of cedar wood. It consisted of a spacious central nave with a mezzanine floor. A tree that used to stand there protruded through the floor of the attached mosquito-proof veranda and opened its crown above the balcony. In the center of the hut four locally felled tree trunks supported the roof. Bucky is at home here. She took me for a walk, disappeared rustling into the bushes to reappear with a deer skull in her mouth. At dusk, I settled into my bivouac bag next to the cabin on soft ground. A nylon stocking with camphor balls to ward off bears hung from the cedar tree I was leaning against.
Fragment 2
May 28, 1995
Every now and then, dog Bucky poked her snout into the opening of my sleeping bag to see if I'm awake yet. I had originally planned to watch the sunrise, but, still half asleep, I prefererd the sweet pre-dawn behind my closed eyelids. The cabin bustled with activity. Louis Ogemah was one of the few Canadians who managed make good coffee. In the grill, a pan of ‘Big Dutch Babies’ was baking: bread dough with egg, cheese, and onions.
I decided to explore the island with Louis and the dog. Louis is originally Ojibway. He is more at home in nature than I am, even though he is, as he calls himself, a city boy. He pointed to a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower with transparent wing beats. He recognized the drumming sound of mating partridges. He demonstrated it by beating his chest. The first clearly distinguishable path beceme less and less clear. Sometimes we followed a difficult-to-navigate game trail. Sometimes we stood still to speculated about the right path to follow through the undergrowth. Twice, the forest forced us to take a breather: on a cleared plot, Lot 15, we decided to take a short break. We ate fruit and seeds on the jetty of a hut under construction. A passing speedboat noticed us, slowed down, and headed towards us. A man on the starboard side asked who we were, what we were doing on the jetty, why we exist. He was entitled to an honest answer. In this area, fortunes could be made and lost. What the native Canadian or the Dutchman failed to do, was achieved by the dog: the man recognized Bucky and concluded that we were good people. He turned around, greeted, and continued on his way: Bruce. Riemke, Jeannette, and Lori paddled around the corner and came alongside with their canoe. The patrol boat stopped for the second time. Bruce felt obliged to inform us on the port side about the risk of our break: if the owner of the plot found us on his jetty, he might well shoot at us.
On the way back, Louis patted the birch trees. He was looking for birch bark for the installation he was currently working on. One of the components was a photo album with pages made of birch bark. He had just shown me the partly yellowed family pictures on the jetty. He found a suitable tree. I handed him my opened pocket knife. Before starting to remove the bark, he took a pinch of tobacco from a bag. He paused for a moment with the tobacco in his right hand and placed the tobacco at the foot of the tree. This was to compensate the spirit of this tree for the loss of part of its bark. He made a vertical cut in the tree bark, and cut again, deeper this time. When he cut through the third layer, the bark sprung open, detaching itself from the trunk. With horizontal cuts all around, he divided the bark into strips and peeled them off the trunk. We followed a deer trail. Louis found one of the branches of a deer antler. We combed the area to find the second one, but got stuck in the undergrowth. We found the spot where Bucky found her skull: a few square meters of forest floor covered with deer hair. Except for the hip bone, we found no other evidence of the prey.
Maik pushed the swing on which Lola sat. Lola showed that she could also swing standing upright. In the cabin, Louise finished baking cookies and Zona has had a baby. Very carefully, she lifted the blanket to show what was still in her belly this morning.
When I wrote in my diary on the canoe dock, a looney was fishing in the distance: black head and plumage like a test image. Every time the bird surfaced, it turned its head in my direction. Water beaded along its feathers. I took my binoculars. I had to look beyond the limited field of vision to see where it had surfaced. The intervals between diving and surfacing became longer and longer, until I lost sight of the bird/the bird has lost sight of me. The low sun caugt dragonflies and mosquitoes, which danced if they had not touched down to feast on my bare arms.
After dinner, Louis made a campfire. Above us, the sky opened up. Mercury kicked things off. Blinded by the flames, the appearances of dimmer stars could not be observed. However, I trusted that all the planets would be present that night. Holes appeared in the bark of the burning wood, allowing smoke to escape, like little chimneys. Large forest ants took flight, left their smoking stoves behind. Stories of personal experiences with the supernatural combined perfectly with the plaintive cries of the looneys. The brightly lit front of the hut hung like a lantern between the trees and lit our way to bed. [...]
