Alison Sinclair

Among Others

Jo Walton; Tor 2012

WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

 

I probably don’t have to explain Jo Walton’s singular new novel, Among Others, by now. If I do, in brief, it is the journal and reading diary of a fifteen-year-old girl who, after a series of traumatic events that left her twin sister dead and herself lame, has found a physical refuge in a girl’s boarding school, and a spiritual refuge in books, particularly SF. Which makes it sound mundane, except that Mor speaks to fairies—and not the Disneyfied, sentimentalized version, but the original wild spirits of wood, earth, and stone—works magic, and she and her sister sacrificed themselves to save the world. This is about the aftermath. It’s set in England in 1979-1980, and as someone who fell into SF while a teenager at a girl’s school in Scotland in the 70s, I really looked forward to the evocation of the time and the place.

I got that, and more. One of the unique aspects about the book was how well it portrays a young mind bursting out in all directions. I’d largely forgotten about that experience of intellectual flowering, of being in possession of an adult vocabulary and intellectual capacity, not to mention the toolkit that comes with a decent education, and being let loose with a fistful of library tickets to go romping through the best works of kindred and strange minds. I don’t think I ever found that experience—which has to be one of the best parts of adolescence, up there with the creative experimentation that goes with all those discoveries—portrayed in mainstream fiction—and how I snickered when when I read Mor’s caustic comments on Teen Problem Novels, because that is exactly what I thought, even then [i]. SF was a wonderful liberation from the mandated dreariness of adolescence. (I wonder if the experience gets encoded in SF and fantasy in the form of the emergence of psionic powers or magic . . . a topic for another time.)

The portrait of a character and a mind being formed by reading also made something go click in a way that hadn’t before: Reading is experience, as opposed to being a way of avoiding experience, or an inadequate replacement for it, a cultural assumption that I’d accepted (though not without resistance) for years [ii]. And because Mor absorbs her reading into her experience, on a number of occasions she simply says, “Oh, that”, and carries on, proceeding by the map her reading has laid out. Which in a couple of instances made me wince, and in others, laugh—pity the teenage lout who encounters a girl versed in Heinlein. Well, that was a laugh and wince, in sympathy.

And what about the magic? For myself as an SF/F reader, reading by a SF/F protocol, there’s no doubt: there’s magic. I like the magic, the subtlety of it, the way it merely leans on the possible. Having bounced off the endings of fantasy novels aimed at young readers (Silver on the Tree, The Last Battle), I like Mor’s explanation as to why she thinks that she will do less magic as she matures. Yet the very subtlety of the magic, makes it, as Mor says herself more than once, “deniable”. Mor has the hallmarks of reliability: she’s not a “fanciful” person; she might see fairies and ghosts, sense and work magic, yet she likes chemistry and physics, and would like maths if it would but like her back. She self-consciously challenges the putative reader’s skepticism only once, at the end of the first section of the book, unlike most first person unreliable narrators, who do so repeatedly. She’s prickly—I suspect Mor and (prickly!) fifteen-year-old me might not have got on—and sometimes brusque in her judgements, but deeply grounded and thoughtful, and has moved far beyond a self-centered view of right and wrong. Nevertheless, switch off the SF reader’s protocol, take a quarter turn, and consider the book from that angle, disbelieving in the magic, and the book still works as a study of a young woman’s imaginative response to loss. Which is another unique, and very neat, thing about it.

Footnotes

[i] I decided Teen Problem Novels were a product of cultural reaction against the teenage years of the the baby boom. Twentysomething boomers were embarrassed by adolescence, the rest of the culture was burned out on it, and nobody had anything good to say about it.

[ii] A few years after I discovered SF, I discovered feminism, and Joanna Russ provided me with a workable explanation as to the whole experience issue, which had preoccupied at least two generations of women writers before me (Mansfield, Plath, Russ herself): setting up ‘experience’ as a prerequisite, and certain kinds of experience at that, was another strategy that condemned women writers to insignificance. Worked for me for years, but I like this one better.

Cross-posted from Kayak-Yak.

Once upon a time in Brentwood Bay, while drifting over rocks studded with orange and purple starfish, and past huddles of starfish in crevasses at the waterline, it occurred to me to wonder why they were these colours, that purple, in particular. The starfish in question were the ochre star, Pisaster ochraceus, and the answer, after intermittent and desultory trawling through the web and the scientific literature, turned out to be (a) carotenoids and (b) maybe what they eat.

The Royal British Columbia Museum Handbook Sea Stars of British Columbia, Southeast Alaska, and Puget Sound, told me a lot about the anatomy, hunting and mating behaviour, but does not account for the colours: P ochraceus is the most common intertidal sea star, with territory from Prince William Sound, Alaska, to Cedros Island, Baja California (lucky it!), and from the intertidal zone to nearly 100 m undersea. It likes rocky shores, waves and currents. I’ve seen plenty in the Broken Islands, the Gulf Islands, and around Saanich Penninsula. P ochraceus eats mussels, barnacles, limpets, and snails. It is the paradigm of a “keystone species” in that its presence and predation significantly affect the numbers and distribution of other species, especially the California mussel, Mytilus californianus; in the absence of P ochraceus, M californianus takes over the beach. Pisaster spawn in May to July, releasing millions of eggs, which turn into larvae, first floating free in the plankton and then (those that survive) attaching themselves and turning into juvenile sea stars. Juveniles grow to adult size and maturity over about 5 years. Larval P ochraceus have a chemical defense that induces filter-feeders to spit them out (got to look that up). The only known predators of adult sea stars are seagulls and sea otters.

Harley et al, 2006 (full text available) looking at the colour variation, note in their introduction that “at least two caroteinoid pigments mytiloxantin and astaxanthin, sequestered in the aboral surface, produce these colors in Pisaster and other asteroids.” Aboral is the upper side side of the sea star, and starfish belong to the Class Asteroidea, under the Phylum Echinodermata. Caroteinoids as a chemical class are named after their best known member, the yellow pigment in carrots, and have in common a long carbon backbone with many concatenated double bonds which generally absorb light at the blue end of the spectrum, hence the orange colour. Mytiloxanthin was named after M californianus, part of P ochraceous’ preferred diet, from which it was first isolated, so it was assumed to be dietary in origin. Astaxanthin arises through “several distinct metabolic pathways”, and is orange. I’m still not sure from my reading what the pigment behind the purple is, though reading descriptions of 1940s-style chromatography makes me oddly nostalgic for undergraduate chemistry.

However, knowing the pigments doesn’t explain why individual starfish should be orange, ochre, brown, or purple, or why starfish on an exposed, wave-beaten rocky coast like the west coast of Vancouver Island should be predominately orange (6-28%) and brown (68-90%), while those in the sheltered waters of the South St Georgia strait should be almost entirely that brilliant purple so familiar on our paddles (95% in the samples collected by Harley). The answer is apparently not genetic: DNA studies don’t suggest that the populations sampled (from Alaska to California, with lots of attention to Puget Sound) are isolated from each other, and conversely do suggest that there is flow of genetic material between them. It’s not apparently to do with wave action, inasmuch as scientists have been able to reproduce in the lab the difference between turbulent water and calm. It may be dietary, in that the distribution of colours correlated with the pattern of prey: in the more exposed waters (where purple starfish are in the minority), P ochraceus preferentially eat M californianus, the big California mussel, whereas M calfornianus is uncommon to absent in interior waters (where purple starfish are in the majority), and the Pisaster there tend to prey on barnacles and bay mussels. So, eats purple mussels -> orange; doesn’t eat purple mussels -> purple. Hmm. And that still doesn’t explain why purple and orange starfish could be found within yards of each other. Another paper by Raymondi et al, 2007 (only abstract) found that the frequency of orange in a population was constant with latitude, but tends to increase with the size of the individuals in that population. So all is not quite explained.

References

• Harley CDG, Pankey MS, Wares JP, Grosberg RK, Wonham MJ. Color Polymorphism and Genetic Structure in the Sea Star Pisaster ochraceus. Biol Bull. 2006 Dec 1;211(3):248-262. And here’s marine biologist Christopher Mah (full name from his Twitter feed), on the Echinoblog, with a crisp and colourful synopsis, complete with photos and diagrams; if I hadn’t written a chunk of this entry while back before I found his entry, I’d just have said, go there!
• Lambert P. Sea Stars of British Columbia, Southeast Alaska, and Puget Sound. 2nd ed. UBC Press; 2000.
• Raimondi PT, Sagarin RD, Ambrose RF, Bell C, George M, Lee SF, et al. Consistent Frequency of Color Morphs in the Sea Star Pisaster ochraceus (Echinodermata:Asteriidae) across Open-Coast Habitats in the Northeastern Pacific. Pacific Science. 2007 4;61(2):201-210.

When I first thought up the Darkborn, I never envisioned writing three novels about them (plus an assortment of short story beginnings scattered like crumbs – or maybe seeds – on my hard drive). I had Balthasar and Floria, and the paper wall between them, and I had Tercelle Amberley arriving in distress on Balthasar’s doorstep, and I had Telmaine coming down the stairs and encountering Ishmael. Who was a Shadowhunter, whatever that was.

I ought to know by now to watch those offhand remarks. I toss one off, and when I look again it has sprouted and ramified, and turned into a major part of the plot.

So I hadn’t considered the sustained exercise of writing a novel completely lacking in visual references. The Darkborn are born without vision: they have eyes, but the optic nerve is atrophied. They replace vision with a sense akin to sonar; however, although the liberties I have taken are considerable. The original reference is Howard C Hughes fascinating book, Sensory Exotica. Electroreception is going to work its way into a story, one of these days.

First of all, I couldn’t use colour. I couldn’t describe the colour of peoples’ hair, eyes and complexions. I couldn’t describe the colour of curtains or carpets or tiles or linoleum or wallpaper or trinkets or flame or … or anything. In one stroke I’d lost the use of every single colour-word I possessed – and I keep lists of them, even the ones so archaic or extravagant as to be inadmissible to modern prose. I lost all references to distance; it’s not merely indistinct, as it is for myopes such as myself, but beyond reach of their senses. I had to expunge all references to distance and things only seen at a distance, sky, stars, clouds, etc, though horizon works its way in there, via an outré piece of artwork. I’d to start thinking about living in a world composed entirely of echoes, sounds, shapes, volumes, textures, and smells. My first concentrated exercise in it was that scene in Darkborn where Ishmael is lurking and waiting to speak to Vladimer. Ish is an excellent viewpoint for an immersion in the world of the Darkborn, because he pays such close attention to his senses. Balthasar and Telmaine are both urbanites.

Next, eyes are irrelevant to the Darkborn. I couldn’t describe looks or glances, directed or exchanged, when I was in Darkborn heads. No-one’s eyes would meet another’s in a private moment. In my teens, I’d been given a boxed set of Jane Austin’s novels, and the introduction to one of them described Austen’s portrayal of the language of looks and glances in playing out relationships and social exchanges in that repressed and rôle-prescriptive society. Nothing else about Austen took (truly), but I liked that. With the Darkborn, I lost that vocabulary, too; I had to do much more with speech, tone, and timing. I think being a regular listener to radio drama helped

Furthermore, there’s no watching from the sidelines. A Darkborn can listen without being observed, but the moment he or she sonns, his or her attention becomes obvious to the listener. That changes the dynamics; passivity is less achievable. Sneaking around is challenging, since Darkborn are aware each others’ sonn. Scenes such as the one where Ishmael comes into Tercelle’s house required strategy, on my part as well as his. I wasn’t quite writing action with my eyes shut – because doing that has the tendency to produce output like piy[iy ;olr yjod, but I was deep in my head.

If I admit to doing this, someone’s sure to send me an email saying ‘you missed one’, but I did try to remove all visual references. I kept ‘visualized’, as a generic term for an internal representation of a reality, but I tried to round up and substitute for ‘look/looked’, ‘see/saw/seen’, ‘watch/watched’, etc, without getting into verbal contortions. There was a point late in the edits of Darkborn when I was so sensitized to the words that they distracted me in other people’s writing.

I got a bit odd, I must admit. One does – well, I do – when the writing becomes intense. If the phone rings, I’m not quite sure who’s going to answer it. I’ve experienced my characters’ dreams and the odd attack of social anxiety for violating imaginary customs. At one point during the revision of the Darkborn sections of Lightborn I could be found following a nervous pigeon along a side-street, trying to find the exact words for the softly opaque, greyish cream of its feathers. I’d go into a trance in the grocery store with a tomato in my hand, tripping on its pure redness. (When I was writing Blueheart, it was plums. Eight hours writing, and I’d be standing in Safeway thinking, ‘what is this thing?’, bewildered to find myself on dry land). I blame the need to go on restorative colour trips for my fascination with the graphics capabilities of R, and the vcd package – though I think the 20″ by 20″ mosaic plot that took 1.5 hours to render was carrying it to excess.

At Farthing Party last August (good grief), I was on a panel on the question of “Who is Qualified to Write SF?”. My intro packed in an awful lot of thought, so I figured I would take the opportunity to unpack – though why I did not post this until now I can’t really explain, because it reached close to final form in the first couple of weeks after. Might have something to do with submitting Shadowborn, going out west, and starting a new job.

I raised four points:

• The usefulness of having a background (whether acquired through formal education or not) in the discipline (defined broadly) that is the focus of the story, which helps with the details, helps with getting the fundamentals right, and allows extrapolation (in any direction – forward, sideways, or backwards), as opposed to what I chose to call fabrication, which is just picking up the trappings [i]. At the panel we spent a lot of time on the big and small things that made us go ‘owww’ and – metaphorically or otherwise – throw books against walls.
• The need to know and avoid the ‘big dumb clichés’, the misperceptions of science promoted by news media that tend to normalize the aberrant and popular narrative media conventions that romanticize the deviant. Everyone who is a member of a social group or practitioner of an occupation or serious hobby has to deal with the ‘big dumb clichés’ around their domain. Others have written about the annoying and persistent myths around science; my personal pet peeves are the distortions of human research and medicine (a longer rant for a later time). This is about getting the culture, norms and ethics right [ii].
• The importance of being engaged with science. I spoke about the social awkwardness around being a young woman in science at social events – particularly those where the sexes were herded into different corners (we’re talking about the late 1970s and early 80s) – and saying what I did was the kiss of death to conversation. I still get the sense that many people who express judgments about science on the Internet are as checked out on the subject as those women who’d tell me that science was boring or too difficult for them [iii]. This is not a position to write SF from.
• However, being engaged does not mean being uncritical, which brings me to the fourth point, which is an argument that the best people to undertake the critique of science within SF may not be scientists [iv]. Science is a dominant, if not the dominant narrative in our society, and as much as we need competence and accuracy in the depiction of science in SF, we need competence and accuracy in the critique of science in SF – as a culture, as a system, as what my history lecturer would have said a ‘project of modernity’ – as the way it reinforces dominant narratives and power relations, and how it subverts and is subverted by them [v]. This requires a different position and a different toolkit, which is where SF needs people who don’t have a science background, and aren’t socialized and acculturated.

And this is by no means a complete list. Other thoughts:

• In my observation, it’s more likely that a writer who writes prose that makes me drool, purr, and mutter ‘envy is a sin, envy is a sin’, does not have a formal education in science than that they do (note the epidemiologist’s phrasing here). I may be biased by knowing how much my own style deteriorated from late high school to graduate school, and by the memory of having my style described as both ‘flowery’ and ‘insensitive’ during the same university term, by a science prof and an english prof respectively.
• Jo Walton and Jim McDonald both said the writing – the mastery of storytelling – was paramount. Yes, yes, yes! If a writer has the writing and storytelling part right, I’ll not only be more prepared to believe that they have the information right if I don’t know the subject, and more willing to accept implausibilities and forgive errors (having fact-checked) if I do.
• There’s also the problem of time.There’s that million words of garbage or that 10 000 hours of practice needing to be got over. Science-science doesn’t generally give one as much time as social sciences and the arts do for the simple exercise of putting words together to convey one’s meaning accurately, much less time to think about narrative or the production of story.

Expansions

[i] We can argue about whether or not extrapolation is a necessary criterion in the definition. It’s in my own, particularly on those odd Tuesdays when I define SF as a product of the present day in dialogue with the needs, concerns and technologies of the present day, and therefore needing a reference to the present day. Plus, I like to watch writers do the extrapolation. However, my definition of SF is anything but fixed. See also [v].

[ii] And for me personally, errors there are more offensive than errors in fact.

[iii] Today, I could offer a number of responses that might lead into productive conversations about how and why they had become checked out (if indeed they were) – public perception of science, science education, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion – but then I was too young and skinless to deal well with what felt like dismissal.

[iv] At the panel I mentioned butting heads with fellow listserv members on the subject of Margaret Atwood, and realizing upon reflection that the heat was actually being generated by a struggle over who did and did not have the dominant narrative. We were not arguing so much about whether Atwood is a SF writer, or whether she writes good SF or not; we were arguing about power, privilege, and who gets to be the authority. I saw the arts having the dominant narrative, and Atwood being granted disproportionate attention because she was such a major figure in CanLit. I suspect my fellow members saw science as having the dominant narrative, and myself as dissing Atwood because she was neither within the field of SF or the field of science.

My early experience did not suggest that science was privileged. The formative years of my education were at an all-girls school that came out of a particular tradition in female education that took the education and vocation of young women unusually seriously, but which nevertheless centred on the arts, leaving the sciences as something of an afterthought. Then, before I had finished school, we moved (back – it’s complicated) to Canada, in the mid-70s, where the arts were the chosen platform for the expression of Canadian identity. It was in America, where science and scientific prowess were one of the platforms for the battles of the Cold War, that science was being actively promoted.

In addition, as a woman training in science, I did not feel privileged. I felt a barely tolerated outsider, stumbling through the complicated dance that would keep the men around me seeing me as a scientist rather than as a female, and entirely too aware that my femaleness would be used to push me outside any time it suited them. I’d discovered feminism, but many feminist writers appeared to equate science with masculinity and condemn it as a tool of patriarchy (it is, it is), leaving me with the sense – rightly or wrongly – that they regarded as science as no place for a woman, and a woman in science as an unnatural being (… where had I heard that before?). It was a splendid moment for me when I picked up a 1982 issue of Ms magazine in which they published a long excerpt from Vivian Gornick’s “Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition”.

I got clued to the biases resulting from being embedded in science via various inputs. The ones that come to mind are:

• the inescapable experience of being female in science and observing how the science around gender was refracted through social expectations
• the work of critics of the sociology of science like Evelyn Fox Keller and Hilary Rose [vi]
• going into medicine, where there had been extensive work by feminists and sociologists looking at how the science of medicine intersects with the sociology of medicine and with the lines of power and privilege
• taking a course on the history of modern Europe, which turned out to be an intellectual and political history of Europe, which gave me the perspective of science as one of the projects of modernity – along with feminism, democracy and individuality.

And I also clue to the potential limitations of science fiction purely by scientists by reading a form of SF written primarily by insiders. I’ve been reading naval and military fiction and SF ever since I got into Hornblower via Star Trek [vii]. I recognize the writers’ authority – not only do most of them have the real-world credentials equivalent to having science degrees and writing SF, but the work gives off that particular resonance of an author confident both in story and subject. However, being an outsider, I also recognize the unexamined assumptions in many of the popular works [viii], and feel the tension of being pulled into the story  and yet being fully aware that as civilian, a physically unexceptional female, and someone whose politics – at least these days – is left of centre, I do not belong there. Well, other than as a shreddie. That’s another area where Lois McMaster Bujold stands out, because she takes the perspective both of the insider and the outsider, does not take for granted militarization as a norm (Barrayar is a militarized society in the process of demilitarization), and questions the power-relations. Furthermore, Miles is by birth, socialization, and ambition an insider, but because of his physical limitations is an outsider.

When I was writing Cavalcade, I was in the middle of medical school and conscious of the ongoing process of socialization to professional norms , and the difference between the realities of the profession and the ‘big dumb clichés’. I wanted a special forces team aboard, and I was sure that popular representations of the military were as distorted as those of medicine. I read a whole variety of books written by insiders, would-be insiders, and people who were consciously using an outside perspective and outside toolkit to look in. Ones I particularly remember were “The Company They Keep”, written by an anthropologist married to a special forces soldier, “The Militarization of Women’s Lives”, about the influence of even a peacetime military on women, families and society, a book about praetorianism (whose exact title I can’t remember), which picked apart the American republic’s history of profound ambivalence and indeed distrust of military power as a threat to democracy, fascinating to someone living next door to the post-WWII, post-Cold War, militarized republic. I never was sure enough of myself to present a point of view from the special forces unit, but their presence and the relationship between them and the forming government ran through the novel.

[v] There are a heck of a lot of my personal causes and beefs embedded in this viewpoint, and unpacking those would run for few thousand words or so. Suffice for the moment to say I Have Views about the social as well as the artistic purposes of science fiction. But see also point [i]. On alternate Wednesdays, I don’t care about the social purposes of SF; I just want some shiny, irresponsible fun.

[vi] Rose discusses science fiction as offering models for a feminist science in a later chapter in her book “Love, Knowledge and Power”, and Jane Donawerth uses Rose’s ideas to give shape to a broad discussion of women’s presentation of science in science fiction (with lots of examples) in “Utopian Science in Science Fiction by Women,” in “Frankenstein’s Daughters”.

[vii] I once had a conversation with Marie Jakober about our shared fascination with war despite being unambiguously opposed to it IRL. I don’t recall that we reached a conclusion, but we were fully aware of the contradiction.

[viii] Unexamined within the work, at least.

(Cross-posted from Kayak Yak)

Starting back into the regular Monday-Friday routine concentrates the mind. Forecast of 10-15 westerly knots (again) notwithstanding, it was paddle Sunday or not at all, and the day that I got made me regret all the similar days I passed up.

(But I am not gloating, really, only on this particular day, the east won.)

It was Parc de la Rivière again: Bixi to the Metro, Metro to Cartier station, STM 73 bus in the direction of Fabreville – Laval, bless them, puts the direction of travel on the buses, unlike Montreal. Arrive just after 9 am in noticeably slanted morning light at the Embarcations, and stake my claim on a Kayak de Mer, the doughty orange Kasko.

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve only paddled the Parc once this summer, back in mid June, the continually taunting weather reports having fed into my third-book-and-trilogy completion neurosis; I kept procrastinating, waiting for a day with no wind forecast. When I was out in June I was impressed by how low the water already was. It made me appreciate that last winter had been dry. Last year in the early summer I was able to paddle through trees (and get munched on by flies), and venture into the marsh; this year, even the turtle pull-outs were well up the bank, the marsh was impassible beyond a short, narrow channel, a number of shortcuts, like the one out of the lagoon in front of the launch site, were above the water level. I’m simply not used to the water going away and not coming back 6 hours or so later. I found myself thinking that the originator of the expression ‘letting the grass grow under one’s feet’ as a measure of indolence had not observed river grass invading an exposed bank. There was no way of telling from the grasses alongside the river that that part was underwater a year ago. Today it was even more of the same. In a lot of places, if I’d tipped, I’d have been sucking mud, and if I’d banged my head on a rock, I might have been rediscovered like Lyuba, the baby mammoth in a million years or so. Although when I did wobble interestingly, it was because I was probing for the bottom with my paddle in what turned out to be a deep spot.

I took what has become my usual route, out the east end of the lagoon, and past Île Gagnon, where the water was extremely shallow, the bottom muddy and rocky, and I was conscious of tucking my tailbone up in anticipation of the grinding beneath. Up the south side of the river, under the Autoroute des Laurentides and the footbridge to Île Locas, checking out the completed swallows nests on the underside as I went – I’d watched the foundations being laid when I was out in June, beakful by beakful of dark river mud, trying to figure out whether one plan ruled construction or not. And then on to the marsh. This post was nearly entitled “500 geese, a dozen herons, and me.” This panorama, taken from beside the lookout on the edge of the marsh, should give the idea (note, those speckles are geese).

I let myself drift very slowly through a gap between goose-gangs, and discovered a dredged channel leading into the marsh, which terminated abruptly in a wall of black mud and sticks. I don’t think beavers were involved. If they were, no waterway is safe.

As last year, the great blue herons were out of their usual exclusive neighbourhood in the marsh, and scattered up and down the water’s edge west of des Laurentides, each one apparently aspiring to solitude. They seemed touchier than usual, and though I wasn’t trying to spook them, even when I swung over to the other side of the channel it didn’t seem far enough. Though there was the one I came on as I rounded a bend; it froze, I froze, and we played statues as the wind pushed me gently past and away. I also spotted a number of kingfishers dashing between islands, and some small white-bellied shorebirds I could not identify. No swallows, scattered dragonflies, and whatever moved beneath the water’s surface was safely hidden in mud. The water-lilies were looking tattered and tired, and there were scattered mats of purple river-plants.

Wind, yes, there was wind, intermittently. But there were spells of calm, allowing full appreciation of the flotillas of round cumuli proceeding overhead with perhaps just a little too much despatch to be stately. This panorama was taken at the furthest west extent of the Parc, at the tip of Île de Mai looking west. One day I shall go beyond …

I rounded the tip and came down channel between Île de Mai and Laval, brazenly floating down the middle of the channel while munching on a roasted mushroom and chevre panini, something I’d never have dared do in the middle of summer. I paused to admire and take pictures of a weeping willow planted above a wall and draping down almost to the water. While I was doing that, the first power boat of the day passed by, sending the water sloshing and my kayak rocking. Then I swung back over to make a pit-stop on Île Chabon, muttering ‘I must do more of this’ as I floundered to dismount onto a steeply sloping beach. Two or three canoes had reached the lookout and the geese had scattered. Then I paddled back the way I had come through the channel towards the des Laurentides bridge. I was well into my fourth hour and a day rental, so I paddled around the north side of Île de Jiufs, but had decided to cut myself off at 5 hours and get the 2:30-something bus, so back into the lagoon, which was crowded with single and double kayaks and two person canoes, heading out to enjoy a gorgeous warm afternoon. Would that it had been June!

My fake GPS plot – just Alison ‘taking a line for a walk’ as we used to call it in kindergarten. Unfortunately, I can’t recall where I got this image from, or I would have updated it to show the difference between then and now.