The Ethel Wilson Symposium

For most of the time that I knew them the Wilsons lived in a high-ceilinged, old-fashioned apartment in the West End of Van- couver which looked down upon the waters of False Creek and out to the sea and the islands and across to the mountains which Mrs. [...] You drive inland for a day, and then next morning you leave the rugged highway and drive on a narrow winding road through the sage brush along wagon tracks, over the cattle ranges, up into the hills through the forest of crowded little pines.3 The approach changed little until the 1970's when the development of mining in Highland Valley and the consequent construction of a four- lane highway put a [...] The Wilsons would see "the aspens turning to honey gold after the first frost," the squirrel "carrying great whiskers of grass dried by the summer," the Northern Lights, greenish -and glowing in the sky above the lake, the flocks of wild geese and sandhill cranes flying south. [...] They would hear the "high silvery trumpeting" of the cranes and "the vacuous but musical cry of the loon," whose laugh "clattered over the lake and was thrown back by the shores;" they would hear, too, the "plop" of the jumping fish and the explosion of flying spray as the osprey hit the water. [...] Across the front was a screened porch from which Ethel could see the two oval lawns with their border of pansies and Iceland poppies, the driveway, the north side of the lodge, the boathouse which from 1885 to 1910 had been the lake's first hotel, the grassy bank where day fishermen parked their cars, and the wharf where the white and green boats were tied.