By Harold Rhenisch. Brindle & Glass, 312 pp, $24.95, softcover.
“There is the official British Columbia,” writes Harold Rhenisch, “the one with an official flower (dogwood) and an official bird (Steller’s jay) and its official history (archived)”¦the British British Columbia, the one with all the words
in its pocket.”
And then there’s that other place, the focus of this Chilcotin-based author’s bitter and touching memoir. The Wolves at Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is about the unofficial British Columbia, “where Native and immigrant earths mingle”. It’s about the rangeland near Williams Lake, where the Secwepemc were stripped of their traditional territory and given instead a useless marshy margin—and that, grudgingly. It’s about the orchards of the Okanagan, where well-intentioned socialist marketing initiatives drove small farms under and paved the way, literally, for the golf courses and subdivisions and wineries that now spell Summerland. It’s about “the taste of tomatoes picked out of a field, with a dash of salt out of the shaker in your back pocket”. And it’s about the taste of ash, as the new immigrants mourn Dresden’s lost civilization while their aboriginal neighbours regard a rustic holocaust of clearcuts and stump fires.
Rhenisch writes so lyrically it’s hard to believe his book is as angry as it is. Drift through The Wolves at Evelyn with poetry in mind and you’ll be duly rewarded—all the way from that title, with its perfect mingling of the manicured and the wild, to the last, lovely anecdote. But there’s also a betrayal on nearly every page: a Nazi grandfather, an abandoned wife, a life lost to the bottle, a farm foreclosed. Stylish and articulate this book might be, but it obviously called out to be written: it bursts forward in shifting temporal gusts, its viewpoint never still until, finally, Béla Bartók and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sing Rhenisch to rest.
The good in the old country—in family, in the past, in that sweet, sour music—heals him and lets him return to the new.
“Welcome back to the land,” he says, accepting and reborn.
Welcome back, indeed. Both British Columbias need Rhenisch here, for no one else does wonder and regret so well.