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Life looks completely different after a good night's sleep. The hips on the rose bushes never looked so brilliant nor the light through the trees so sparkly. Breakfast cooked on the oil stove in the van and eaten tucked up in my bed with the window and the world on my right and the row of dogs in their boxes, still sleeping, on the left. Sheep and roosters crying, "Good morning, God, and thank you," and the fog-horn booing the fog out of existence, making it sneak off in thin, shamefaced white streaks.
Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr, Toronto/Vancouver, Clarke, Irwin and Company, 1966, p. 192.
PLACE: Albert Head(?), Vancouver Island.
TIME: September, 1935.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Impressions while camping.
Nothing is still now. Life is sweeping through the spaces. Everything is alive. The air is alive. The silence is full of sound...
There are themes everywhere, something sublime, something ridiculous, or joyous, or calm, or mysterious. Tender youthfulness laughing at gnarled oldness. Moss and ferns, and leaves and twigs, light and air, depth and colour-chattering, dancing a mad joy-dance, but only apparently tied up in stillness and silence. You must be still in order to hear and see.
Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr, Toronto/Vancouver, Clarke, Irwin and Company, 1966, p. 193.
PLACE: Albert Head (?), Vancouver Island.
TIME: September, 1935
CIRCUMSTANCE: Impressions while sketching "in the big woods."
How it has rained! With the canvas top of the van so close to my crown. I have full opportunity to note all the different sounds: the big, bulgy drops that splash as they strike, the little pattery ones, the determined battalions of hurried ones coming with a rattling pelt, the soft gentle ones blessing everything, the cleansing and the slopping and the irritated fussy ones. It is amazing that no two of them sound alike when you listen.
Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr, Toronto/Vancouver, Clarke, Irwin and Company, 1966, p. 193.
PLACE: Albert Head(?), Vancouver Island.
TIME: September 19, 1935.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Impressions while camping.
When the horn, normal at first and developing into a despairing grunt, informs the early world that fog is on land and sea, van cosiness reaches its high water mark. One effort and you have clambered out of bunk. A match across the shelf checks the horn back. Soon the sweet kettle song rises. Toast-and-teaish odours skedaddle the fog. And there you are, washed, ready, pillowed, hotbottled, breakfasted, and full of content.
Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr, Toronto/Vancouver, Clarke, Irwin and Company, 1966, p. 195.
PLACE: Albert Head (?), Vancouver Island.
TIME: September 19, 1935
CIRCUMSTANCE: Impressions while camping in her caravan.
Yesterday I went into a great forest, I mean a portion of growth undisturbed for years and years. Way back, some great, grand trees had been felled, leaving their stumps with the ragged row of "screamers" in the centre, the last chords to break, chords in the tree's very heart.
Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr, Toronto/Vancouver, Clarke, Irwin and Company, 1966, p. 195.
PLACE: Albert Head(?), Vancouver Island.
TIME: September 19, 1935
CIRCUMSTANCE: Impressions while camping.
There is a robust grandeur, loud-voiced, springing richly from earth untilled, unpampered, bursting forth rude, natural, without apology; an awful force greater in its stillness than the crashing, pounding sea, more akin to our own elements than water, defying man, offering to combat with him, pitting strength for strength, not racing like the sea to engulf, to drown you but inviting you to meet it, waiting for your advance, holding out gently swaying arms of invitation.
Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr, Toronto/Vancouver, Clarke, Irwin and Company, 1966, p. 200.
PLACE: Albert Head, Vancouver Island.
TIME: September 29, 1935
CIRCUMSTANCE: Impressions while sketching in the woods.
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