I wasn’t sure what to expect when I moved to Kelowna three years ago. I was coming from the rainforest. The Okanagan landscape seemed parched and barren. I was suspicious of the constant sunshine. I mourned the loss of my velvet forests full of ancient red cedars and Douglas firs, and set about trying to find a way to love this new land.
Norah Bowman’s book of poetry Breath, Like Water: An Anticolonial Romance, served as a how-to guide of sorts. It’s about a woman’s love for the Okanagan mountains and the history they contain. It’s about how to love a place when you are a settler. I read her poems about the fire of 2003 that ravaged Okanagan Mountain Park as I learned to appreciate the resilience of the surviving Ponderosa pines, charred but still standing. I began to understand what she meant when she wrote that “To love Mountain is to swallow coal.”
Her poems helped root me to this land, to respect and love it. I still take her advice: “when I arrive at a place, I like to lie down on my back, close my eyes, and listen to the ground.”
– Madeleine van Goudoever is a former graffiti artist from Montreal. She disappeared with a sketchbook and bicycle into the Latin American jungle for more years than her parents would have liked. Eventually she resurfaced in the Pacific Northwest, where she hunts mushrooms and writes things.
You can read Madeleine van Goudoever's story "Peachy like Nietzsche" in Issue 302 Winter 2024. Order the issue now:
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