I had thought about hauling out the mermaid story I was currently working on but which wasn’t going well. It had reached the point all my stories did, where I simply put them in the lowest desk drawer and abandoned them. When this happened I worked on a history of the farm, nonfiction being easier than fiction because you had something concrete to start from. With fiction you were starting with nothing. No, not with nothing—with something that you had to bring into readable being from some amorphous state you could only sense.

The farm itself seemed to have elements as mysterious as the poster Old Tom gave to me. It was hard to know why. Why does one piece of land seem to be alive and breathing with suppressed something—potential, becoming, intelligent energy? There were the petroglyphs on our rocky coast pointing to people living here thousands of years ago. There were the generations of people who had owned the place such as Mrs. Brown, who had five children and had to sell off large tracts of land bit by bit to various buyers to pay her taxes in order to keep a small piece of land and the house. The house that now belonged to Old Tom, Sina, and me. The man who bought the majority of the tracts eventually convinced Mrs. Brown to sell the little she’d kept back and, sadly, finally even the house and then turned it from her farm into a summer place. He built tennis courts, now long gone, plowed up and made into a potato field by my great-aunt Bertha, who bought his property and the tracts Mrs. Brown had sold to others so that the 270 acres were one again. Aunt Bertha left it all to Old Tom when she died. She told Old Tom the tennis-court people had fabulous parties with Japanese lanterns and women in white gowns and important personages—all that glamour gone, and yet it still seemed to linger in the air with everything else: the people who had lived here thousands of years ago; the sadness of Mrs. Brown; the ridiculousness of Aunt Bertha, who, according to Old Tom, was as wide as she was tall and given to outbursts. He said she reminded him of a short, squat caboose chugging around the farm with steam coming from her ears. I don’t know if the land became what it is from the people who lived on it or the people became what they did from absorbing something from the land. I found all the history interesting and got it whenever I could in bits and pieces by asking all the old-timers in Sooke, everyone I met really, for their memories. But no one remembered much. And as interesting as those snippets were, none of it accounted for what I felt on the place, what the land seemed to be communicating.

So I didn’t mind working on the history if no fiction came to me. I thought it was important to keep doing some kind of writing. It always made me feel better. As if there were some kind of special energy available but outside of me that I could pull in and it would move through me, coming out my fingers onto the blank page as neither entirely itself nor me but something new. Nothing on the page ever quite lived up to the glimpse of the glimmer of that magic. It was the hope that someday it would that kept me going back to it.