Free The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema Page B

Court, the gorgeous
Zen scholar’s garden in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York, and something terrible happens in a Portland
hotel room. Well, the Astor Court is perhaps one of my
favourite places on Earth. And I’ve stayed in that very hotel
room. Resonances. Always resonances.
    (As an aside, there is something interesting about
resonance, I’ve discovered: it’s cyclical. The act of writing
about a place renders that place resonant, even if it wasn’t
prior to the act of getting it down on the page. Thus,
walking around downtown Victoria is, these days, often a
little surreal, with places given additional weight through
their writing. And writing tends to fix those places,
permanently, in my mind. Thus I’m surprised whenever I’m
at RJH to discover that it has a sleek, modern ER, not the
cracked, dingy hell-hole that I have in my memory, my soul,
my book. And the library hasn’t looked like it does in Before
I Wake since before the novel came out. Often, walking
through these familiar places feels like walking through a
dream, or a dissociative state. It’s like I don’t know quite
what’s real, and what’s not. Which, now that I think about
it, is pretty much how I spend every waking moment, so . . .
no harm there.)
    My sense of place, and its importance, is perhaps closer
to the surface when it comes to Henderson, the setting of The World More Full of Weeping , though the issues are a little
cloudier. Actually, a lot cloudier.
    A little background to start: I spent the first seventeen
and a half years of my life in Agassiz, BC. Fourth
generation.
    The joke in Agassiz is that there are people from there,
and newcomers. The dividing line is the flood: your family
was here before the flood, or you’re a newcomer. Of course,
the flood occurred in 1948, which might give a sense of the
Agassiz mindset. A skewed one, but a sense nonetheless.
    (Another aside: it just occurred to me that I grew up
in the distant shadow of the flood of ’48, and with the
annual awareness of the river rising against the dikes. Is
it any wonder, given the universality of floods in world
mythology, that I gravitated to a mythic interest? Things
to ponder . . .)
    Agassiz, at the time I was growing up, was home to
about 3,500 people. A very small town. I had a wonderful
and terrible childhood and adolescence; how I characterize
it typically depends on what mood I’m in when I’m asked.
Right now, I’m feeling a cautious warmth toward the world
(it’s 5:44 a.m., the sun is coming up, and the coffee is kicking
in), so I can say that, despite the bullying and the pain and
anguish that came with chunks of my teenage years, I had
a pretty good childhood. I remember being outside all the
time, riding my banana-seat bike in the driveway with my
brothers, playing with the kids down the road, exploring
the woods . . .
    The woods.
    Always the woods.
    Here’s the thing: Henderson is not Agassiz. Agassiz is
not Henderson. I just want to be clear from the outset.
    I mean, look at it objectively, side by side.
    First: Agassiz is a small town in southwestern British
Columbia, a farm-town nestled in a crook of the Fraser
River about an hour and a half outside of Vancouver. A
couple of days each year the air is so heavy with the smell
of fertilizer from the fields that you almost taste the cow
shit. Coming into town, you cross a bridge over the Fraser
(which terrified me as a child, and terrifies me more now),
you drive down either the front street or the back street.
There’s one high school, and in the mid-’80s a close group
of friends won the Provincial basketball championships
against all odds. There’s a library, and a couple of coffeeshops, and down the road a piece is another little town,
Harrison Hot Springs, on the shores of Harrison Lake.
Every year in Agassiz, there’s the Fall Fair and Corn
Festival (third weekend in September), and the Corn King
is crowned.