Tag: inukshuk

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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excerpt

While he studied, he periodically found himself distracted by the
thought of the one art gallery in Vancouver he had not approached with
his paintings – the Alex Fraser Gallery. Stories of Alex Fraser, and his
treatment of artists in his London and Vancouver galleries, had circulated
through the art community for years. Ken was angry with himself. He
was rarely afraid of anyone and had met no one in Canada yet who had
intimidated him. Alex Fraser’s reputation did.
He had heard that the man was irascible – so what? He had heard he
was powerful. Was it in his power to judge his work? What if he found it
wanting?
The only thing worse than his fear was the prospect of his disappointment
in himself if he refused to face it, so one day he screwed up his
courage, loaded his truck with paintings, and drove to 41st Avenue near
Boulevard in Kerrisdale.
He walked into the gallery, where an attractive middle-aged woman
asked if she could help him.
“Yes, I’m here to see Mr. Fraser if he’s about.”
“Mr. Fraser doesn’t see people without an appointment.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. I’m here and I have some paintings. Please, can
you ask if he’ll see me?”
She smiled and walked into a back room. A few minutes later, a small
man with slicked-back hair and icy, blue-green eyes walked out. He was
dressed in a perfectly fitted gray pinstriped suit, with knife pleats in the
trousers and shoes that shone like mirrors.
Exhaling a great puff of smoke, he lowered himself into a big armchair,
and placed two packages of Players unfiltered cigarettes and an ashtray
on the little gate-legged table beside it. Taking a fresh cigarette from one
of the packages, he lit it from the one in his yellowed fingers, and crushed
the stub in the ashtray.
Turning to the woman who had followed him out of the back room he
called, “Doreen! Doreen, I want you to tell the young man about manners.
Ask him does he understand the meaning of manners?”
“Mr. Fraser would like to know if you understand the meaning of manners,”
she said, turning to Ken.
“Indeed I do,” Ken said. “And I apologize for coming in without an appointment
but I was nervous and I managed to screw up all my courage
to come in – and here I am.”
“Doreen! Doreen, tell him he is quite right to be nervous in approaching
me. Ask him what it is that he wants.”
“I have some paintings and would like to show them to Mr. Fraser.”
“Tell the young man that I can’t bloody see his paintings, anywhere.
Where are his paintings?”

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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excerpt

With the Group of Seven paintings as
a template, he taught himself to paint again, working only on southern
landscapes. He took several to the owner of The Golden Key Gallery who
placed one in the window and sold it within two days. More sold during
the next few months, but then the gallery owner sold his business and
Ken was once again without an outlet.
Still, he persisted and one day, while sketching the bent shapes of driftwood,
in the dunes near the airport, it occurred to him that he could make
a profit from the abundance of wood on the beach. He purchased a pickup
truck and two chain saws, cut up the wood, wrapped velvet ribbons
around the most attractive pieces, and attached a card with his telephone
number. He left the wood on the front steps of the city’s grand homes
and within days, the orders came in. While he delivered and stacked the
firewood, he told the homeowners his stories of the Arctic, and when
they asked about his paintings, he would display the canvases he carried
in the cab of his truck. The Arctic paintings didn’t sell but the southern
landscapes were a hit.
He taught himself to become a storyteller, rehearsing every anecdote
he had, practising his tone, volume, order of words and, most importantly,
his choice of words. Where was the power of the story?
His clients listened, but showed little interest, so he made a list of every
service club in the city. Would they like a guest speaker at their next
meeting? Yes, they would like to hear about the Arctic, and so, Ken did
the rounds. Each audience contained a handful of people who showed
mild interest – the rest were bored, and often antagonistic. Sometimes
he was heckled, and a red tide of anger would creep up from his chest to
flush his neck and cheeks. Once someone shouted that he, and the rest of
the people there, resented an immigrant telling Canadians how to live in
their country and run their lives.
“That is hardly what I am doing,” Ken retorted. “I intend no disrespect.
I am simply here bringing information from a faraway place.”
His words dropped like ragged bits of paper to lie discarded on the
floor. Perhaps his stories were so outside the experience of most Canadians
that they seemed like tall tales – unlikely and unbelievable. There had
to be a better way to tell people about the Arctic but what was it?
His father told him that he was involving himself in matters that were
none of his business. He was not a citizen of Canada and until he was,
he should keep his opinions to himself. He responded that he was only
doing what he had learned at his father’s knee, in Portugal. He reminded
his father that Ken Sr. had not been a citizen of Portugal and yet he had
become deeply involved in the affairs of that country and had worked
hard to help the people. The Inuit were human beings in great distress, he
said, and he was trying to help.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

Ken closed his eyes, his lids like coarse sandpaper scraping against
his eyeballs. Opening them was worse. The woman tied a piece of soft
hide over his eyes and all he could do was bear the agony and wait. For
days, he travelled as a blind man, in pain and nauseated from the gentle
rocking of the sleigh. When the pain eased, he took off the hide, and the
old woman gave him a pair of goggles with a small slit, explaining that he
would have to carve them to fit his face. He carved with great care so they
barely touched his skin. Close contact would freeze them to his pores.
They had been travelling a long time, when a golden glow appeared
on the horizon. As they drew nearer, the golden fire resolved into a large
group of igloos. The dogs heralded their approach, and people streamed
out of the igloos to welcome them. The first questions were about food.
The caribou had not crossed their path this season. Did the new people
have caribou? Yes, they had much caribou and it would be shared.
A feast was prepared for the newcomers, who entered the largest igloo
in the centre of the village. In the anteroom, they took off their parkas
and beat them vigorously before entering the main room, where layers of
caribou hides were spread on ice benches that circled the room. Kidney
shaped seal oil lamps provided warmth and light. When they had eaten
and told stories, people dispersed to their own igloos. Ken and his people
crawled under many layers of hides and slept. The old woman had told
the people that Ken was a quiet Kabluna. “He is a friend,” she had said.
“He is now Inuk.”
The next morning while the men built igloos, Ken pulled out his roll of
sketch paper and drew them, as they searched for the right sort of snow
by poking deep into it with a knife or a long sharpened piece of bone.
When they found the right spot, they drew a circle and began cutting out
uniform chunks of hard-packed snow, beginning at what would become
the entrance. They lifted the blocks into place, bevelling the edges, and
chinking the spaces between with loose snow.
Ken was invited to accompany the men on the next hunt. For the Inuit,
hunting is the essence of life. The animals must be revered and not offended.
Kablunat don’t understand this, the old woman told him, but Ken
was now Inuk – no longer a Kablunat. She convinced the hunters that
Ken was an exception. They set off onto the frozen sea that was covered
with a thin layer of transparent ice that moved in front of the sled teams
like a rubbery wave. Underneath them, thousands of air bubbles bounced
and rolled.
When they spotted a seal in the water beneath them they searched for
the beast’s breathing hole and waited. When the seal was forced up to
gasp for air one of the men heaved a long spear and the water stained
crimson.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

never been a connection between those people and the Inuit and yet here was
an original seminal idea being spoken by a woman in a completely different
time and space and place. All these things were like jolts hitting me. Here I
was living with an ancient people that were speaking to me directly. This was
not something being told to me by a teacher or a relative. I was getting the
original story and it affected me very profoundly.
When the old woman finished her story, silence enveloped the igloo like
a down blanket. Quietly, Ken stood and walked outside. The sky was filled
with as many stars as Ken’s mind was filled with thoughts. In one instant,
his life had changed. Knowingly or not, the old women had answered his
question about his role in this place, and in the lives of the Inuit.
She joined him, and he linked his arm through hers. Together they
stood gazing at the sky. Icy crystals of thought invaded his heart, while an
avalanche of ideas roared through his mind.
This was that crystal moment when everything that had happened before
made sense. I now had a clear purpose. I had gone to the Arctic because of
the stories that had been told to me in that cave in Portugal, but now, I felt
an urgency to gather as much information as possible – and to disseminate
it. It was clear to me how brilliantly I had been prepared. From this moment
on, I was no longer pursuing childhood dreams. I had a white-hot fire burning
inside me.
One day, the sun reappeared over the horizon and Ken felt as though
he was awakening from a dream. For a seemingly endless amount of time,
he had lived in darkness, listening to stories and legends, and the line between
waking and dreaming had blurred. And now the sun – a cause for
celebration – a reason for feasting!
Feasting also served to remind them of their great good fortune. They
had food, warmth, and clothing. Even more important, others had been
helped and they were grateful to have been able to help them. The young
man who had amputated his toes had survived, and that was even further
cause for thanksgiving.
As the days grew longer, the polar bears came out of hibernation. One
had been spotted nearby and men quickly prepared for the hunt. Once
again, grandmother prevailed upon the hunters to include Ken. When
the dogs picked up the scent they were released from their traces, and the
men followed their high-pitched howling.
When the dogs found their quarry they surrounded it, darting in close,
and then running back, staying out of reach of its lethal claws. Finally,
overheated and exhausted, the bear collapsed. The hunters fired at the
downed body until it lay still in a pool of blood, and then they began the
enormous task of skinning and butchering it. The oldest hunter stood
back. “In my day, that’s not how we hunted bears,” he said. “When we
hunted, it was one man with a spear and one bear with his claws.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

The days and nights blended one into another, and long
periods of quiet contemplation were interspersed with intense bouts of
hunting. Ken learned to breathe differently. Taking in great gulps of the
frigid air would have burned his lungs, so he inhaled slowly and measurably
through his nostrils, calculating each breath.
One day another group of people arrived at their camp with several
dog teams. Among them was a boy in his early teens. He too had recently
come from a residential school and was sullen and spoke to no one.
The group brought word that the caribou had not come their way and
they were here to join Ken’s group and hopefully share in what they had.
Ken’s group agreed to travel together and to share their abundance. They
planned to move further east, to where they hoped to find enough seals
and walrus to provide meat for the long winter.
One day before setting out, the troubled youth was particularly disrespectful
to one of the elders and was quietly chastised. He walked away
from the camp and had gone only a short distance before several people
went in search of him. No one could survive long in this cold. The wind
began to howl picking up ice crystals and blowing them across the land
and the searchers hurried back to the tents. Within minutes the world
was white; taking even one step outside the tent was certain death.
They waited in silence and Ken found himself feeling both disconcerted
and exhilarated by their patience and lack of anxiety. He was unsettled
because he had lost all sense of reference and elated because each moment
was perfect. He was alive in the now and nothing else mattered. The
long hours of silence gave Ken only one point of focus – himself. He was
meeting himself for the first time and the self he was meeting was neither
good nor evil – he just was – and Ken embraced that self with his mind
and heart, quietly blessing every event that had led him on this journey
to this place.
The white storm lasted for several days and when it ended, the people
left their tents to resume the search. There was no sign of the dogs,
just small mounds of snow scattered around the tents. When the people
nudged the mounds, the dogs emerged from their igloos, shaking the
snow off and wagging their tails furiously. They untethered several of
them to assist in the search, and their acute sense of smell led them to
another mound of snow under which they found the frozen boy.
There was no crying or wailing. They wrapped him in caribou hide
and with great effort moved rocks, that the wind had swept bare, to form
an oval. Gently, they placed the boy in the oval, placing some of his possessions
with him. Then they walked away. They had eaten animals all
their lives; in death, they completed the circle and returned their bodies
to the beasts.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

Ken’s people were caribou people.
When the last of the caribou had passed, they dragged the fresh carcasses
to several large piles of rocks that they lifted to reveal deep pits
lined with more rocks. They lowered the meat into the pits and replaced
the rocks. The main danger to their food reserves was marauding wolverines.
By caching their meat under rocks too heavy for the wolverines to
move, they guaranteed a food supply for the season to come.
The days changed. The shiny green bearberry that covered the tundra
turned blood red and when Ken gazed across the land he saw a river of
crimson. One morning the snow geese flew across in the hundreds of
thousands. When they settled on the land a down blanket covered the
scarlet sea.
The days grew shorter and the temperature dipped dramatically. Ken
shivered in his sleeping bag and the old woman gave him two caribou
hides – one to put under his bag and one to cover it. He developed a new
understanding of the word “cold”. Cold was not simply a word here – it
was a palpable, physical thing, which assaulted every sense – it was the
god that controlled the land.
A few days after giving him the caribou hides, the old woman presented
him with a caribou parka lined with Arctic fox. Through her son,
she explained that this was to be worn without undergarments, next to
the skin. The parka was light, soft and astonishingly warm.
They continued to travel east until they came to a lake dotted with a
number of small islands, where they had left sleigh dogs that had whelped
in early summer. The animals were wild, ferocious, and pugnacious. They
took them back to the mainland where they pegged them to the ground,
placing the lead dog at the front of the pack. Once a day someone tossed
a frozen fish to each dog, which it consumed ravenously. The dogs were
born to pull sleighs and once in the traces would run across the ice until
they dropped from exhaustion.
With the dogs in tow, they continued trekking to the place the old
woman called home. She was a Netsielik, People of the Seal. Her husband,
who had died of TB, was People of the Caribou. TB had become epidemic
among the Inuit. Several people in the group had severe coughs and often
spit up bloody phlegm.
Snow began to stream across the land, blowing from the west in a million
little rivulets. The temperature, already chillingly cold, continued to
drop. The old woman gave Ken a pair of trousers made from caribou hide
and sewed a wolverine hide along the edge of the hood of Ken’s parka.
To the amusement of the Inuit, Ken sat on the frozen tundra in his new
clothes, watching the snow dance across the land. He felt fortunate. He
was living his childhood dreams. This was the Arctic he had envisioned –
the land of Francisco’s stories.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

On shore, Ken’s friend took out a sharp knife and slit open the belly of
one of the big fish exposing a white strip of pure fat. He peeled it off, put
the end in his mouth and cut it off with his ulu. He passed Ken a piece of
the precious fat that melted deliciously on one’s tongue.
Ken became mesmerized by the minutiae of Inuit life. Everything they
did was alien to his previous experience. He watched one of the men
make a drum from the hide of a young caribou. Only the skin of a young
animal would do, the man explained. It was shaved clean, soaked with
water and spread out in the hot sun where it bleached white. It was then
stretched over several pieces of wood that had also been soaked, bent to
make a circle and bound together with strips of leather. The skin was
sewn on to the hoop and left out in the sun again, this time to shrink.
Watching the process, Ken understood how important each piece of
wood was to these people. Where he came from people would have used
just one piece of wood to form the hoop. Here, the circle was made of
many small pieces of wood. Trees didn’t grow on the tundra. There might
be the occasional knee-high shrub and very rarely, willows that grew waist
high in protected gullies. Every scrap of wood was hoarded and used with
care and precision.
The Inuit had to obtain additional wood from the south where the
sub-Arctic Indians lived. The old woman told Ken that there had been
an uneasy truce between the Indians and the Inuit, which was often not
honoured. Raids and massacres had taken place for years.
When the woman told stories through her son, she often said words
that she asked Ken to repeat. When he learned a new Inuktitut word, she
smiled and when he began to put words together to form a sentence, she
beamed. It was the most difficult language he had ever learned, but then
the people were like no others he had ever encountered. They didn’t make
eye contact when they spoke and they had no word for me, mine or I.
Raising your voice, particularly to children, was taboo. Children were
expected to learn by the example others set. They ate when they were hungry,
slept when they were tired, and played when they wanted to. Adult
displeasure was shown in the smallest facial expressions – the wrinkling
of a nose or a slightly raised eyebrow.
One day a young man named John joined the camp. He was about
sixteen years old and he spoke excellent English. He told Ken that he was
on holiday from the residential school in the south but he had decided
not to return. They had cut off his hair and had beaten him for speaking
his language. The old woman was his grandmother, and John told Ken
that she and others were trying to get their children back. But this was not
easy. While they needed to be stationary so that they could be contacted,
they also needed to keep moving …

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

Ken circled around the stone people, which he later learned were called
Inuksuit. Around and around he walked, occasionally reaching out a hand
to touch them in a dazed kind of wonderment and awe. For the first time
in many weeks, his spirit began to lift.
I thought I was quite a well-informed person on a variety of subjects,
given that in my upbringing, acquiring general knowledge was considered
important. General knowledge led you to being a generalist and it’s the generalists
that run the world so you want to have vast amounts of knowledge
in a variety of areas. So, you learn about the pyramids and the sphinx and
Stonehenge and Easter Island and all of that. But here were these strange
human-like figures made of stone that I had never heard of – and at that
point, I started to come out of my stupor. These figures got a hold of me. This
was something that captured my attention in a major way.
He set up his tent some distance from them, thinking perhaps they
were sacred symbols and while he struggled with his tent, he kept glancing
at the stone men, reluctant to look away even for a moment lest he
lose the magic. With his little tent tamed, and his camp set up on the
windy plain, he dug out one of his rolls of paper – from the depths of
his backpack – and began drawing. He rolled the paper farther after each
drawing and began another. He couldn’t stop; he was infused with the
same energy he had felt when he first began drawing, in Portugal, as a
young boy.
When his stomach let him know he was hungry, he walked down to
the river and caught a fish. Cooking was a challenge because there was so
little wood of any kind to burn. He had learned to start a fire with dried
moss and then add bits of shrubbery to get an intense blaze that lasted
mere minutes. He usually managed to cook one side of the fish over the
flame. Then he had to start a fresh fire to cook the other side. In time, he
learned to eat and enjoy raw fish because it was so much simpler.
While camped near the Inuksuit for several days, making drawing after
drawing, he noticed a group of people setting up camp some distance
from him near the river. The people on the west side of the river didn’t
acknowledge these people on the east side, and they in turn did not speak
to the people on the west bank. Ken concluded that these were Eskimos,
the people he had been searching for.
The Eskimos paid no attention to Ken and he did not try to make
contact. Instead, he continued to draw, fish and cook his meals. He was
consciously becoming a silent person and the deeper he fell into the stillness,
the greater the solace he found.
One day a woman with a deeply lined and weathered face carried some
fish and bannock on a flat stone to Ken’s tent, placed it on the ground and
walked back to her camp. Ken ate gratefully. “How shall I respond?” he
wondered.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

He ran to the first aid clinic next door. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“There’s been an accident on the road,” the medic said.
“What sort of accident?”
“A tractor-trailer jackknifed and went off the road.”
“Anyone else involved?”
“A pickup truck. There’s other help coming from town.”
Ken’s skin crawled. He forced the bile in his throat back down into his
gut and ran back to the lab, yelling through the door to John that he was
going to check on Jessica and her family. He cranked up the truck, his
heart pounding, an unnameable fear rising in his chest. He put his foot to
the floor, the truck careening around potholes and over the rutted washboard
road. About thirty miles down the road he saw the flashing lights.
He pulled up, got out of the truck and ran to the RCMP car parked at the
edge of the road. Below him, at the bottom of the embankment, amid the
jagged broken-up pieces of the semi, the pickup burned. Shaking beyond
control, Ken ran, stumbling and sliding down the steep slope. The young
RCMP officer he had met previously was struggling back up toward him.
He held up his hand. “Don’t go down there!” he shouted to Ken.
Ken stumbled toward him.
“Don’t go down there!” He yelled, again.
The officer grabbed at Ken’s shirt. Ken spun away. “Is the pickup blue?”
he shouted.
“I don’t know.” The officer said.
“How many people are in the truck?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many people in the god damned truck?” Ken screamed.
“Three, I think.”
“What do you mean, you think?”
“Don’t go down there, the officer pleaded. “Please don’t go down there.”
Ken ran down; tripped, fell, rolled, picked himself up and scrambled
down. He stopped when he hit the wall of heat bursting from the truck.
The flames were dying; the truck was gutted. But what he saw was a vision
he would spend the rest of his life trying to erase from his mind – a scene
that would come to him in nightmares over and over, until sleep meant
nothing but reliving the carnage – pieces of charred bodies inside the truck
– one of them still wearing a piece of fringed and beaded leather jacket.
I have spent so much of my life trying to contain these feelings – to deal
with these things. For a person of that age I had seen far too much death. I
was born to it – born in it. Anyone looking at me – coming from the right
side of the tracks, from a privileged family – anyone who would imagine the
sort of life a person like that would have would be completely off the mark.
So, I have to deal with these feelings very severely because I can’t make the
pictures go away. They don’t go away.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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“Grab a coffee and shut the door,” the manager said. When he was sure
no one could hear, he said, “I’ll hire you.”
“Sure,” Ken said. “That’s fine, but let’s sort this out first. I’ll keep your
offer as an ace in the hole.”
Later that day a small plane landed at the airstrip, disgorging the owner
of the company and his entourage, who commandeered an office and
closed the door. Ken slammed the door open and strode into the room.
One man jumped to his feet and tried to usher Ken out. “No,” he said,
shaking the man off. “If this is about me, I’m going to have my say. You
don’t hire an engineer. You don’t have one on the job, but you expect the
job to get done. I’ve learned how to do it. I’m doing it and what’s more,
ask yourself, is there any single thing wrong in the information provided?
Show me one thing that is incorrect – just one! I know you can’t. The
other question I have, is why am I doing the job of four to five men and
getting paid for one? I’m glad I’m fired. It feels good. Have a nice time!”
Ken slammed out of the room, as boldly as he had entered, got in the
truck, and drove back to Jessica’s house. He was nearing the gate when
he spotted the camp manager in his rear view mirror. Ken stopped and
waited for him to pull alongside.
“Are you fired?” he asked.
“I haven’t a damned clue and I don’t care. I’m having a good time.”
“Let me know immediately,” he said. “I’ll get you on the payroll right
away.”
“How much?” Ken asked.
“What are you making now?”
“That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Well what do you want?”
“When I know what I want I’ll tell you. Right now I don’t want anything.”
Late that evening John came to the log house with the news that the
entire issue had been smoothed over. He had told the owner that he was
the one who had taught Ken how to use a slide rule, and that everything
had been done correctly. They had screwed up in head office, not Ken.
The camp manager had also spoken on his behalf. In fact, John said, it
was a lovefest. “Everyone’s in love with you. And the owner of the company
looks like a dummy. Of course, he’s not – he’s a smart guy but he had
no idea what was going on. He has a lot of other companies to look after.
But this is a big project with a lot of contracts. No one wants to look like
an idiot. But, everybody’s happy now!”
“Well, isn’t that wonderful!” Ken said. “I’m not happy!”
“But it’s okay – you’re supposed to come back,” John said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Ken said. “I’ve been fired.”
“So what do we do?”

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