I'll remember you
Mostly about trees.
Hi friends,
It’s time for me to share some comics! I’ve been alternating between comics from the old Drawing Book, and comics about Bob Dylan - and I’m due for a Dylan comic. I don’t have too many more of these, but I found a Dylan reference in this old comic from my old series Sam Hester’s Ramsay, a monthly comic I wrote for my community newsletter for a few years. It’s a December comic, so there’s a Christmas tree in the last panel. And there are a few other trees, as you will see…
When I first heard Dylan’s song, “I’ll Remember You” (a lovely, thoughtful song from the strange but awesome album Empire Burlesque), I thought the use of “piney” as an adjective was kind of silly. Can you really say something, even a wood, is “piney”? Apparently you can. There’s even a place called the Piney Woods - maybe that’s what Dylan was thinking about.
But when I hear that line, I think of the Reader Rock Garden, the rooky wood near my house.
It’s amazing to me that this shady, flowery, foresty oasis in Calgary’s downtown once looked like this, apparently (I found these photos of the Reader garden and house in an Avenue Magazine article by Andrew Guilbert).
William Reader was Calgary’s Parks superintendent from 1913 to 1942. The land where he made his home, just south of the Stampede grounds, is a beautiful forested park today. Thanks, Reader! (Although, rumour has it that Reader was responsible for introducing “creeping bellflower” to Calgary, a pretty but persistent weed that is nigh impossible to get rid of. Oh well, his intentions were good.)
William Reader helped early Calgarians to get thinking about the way plants, flowers, trees and green spaces could play an important role in the city. (Here’s an article about his work.) Today, Calgary still has a long way to go to make the most of natural infrastructure, but there are some cool things happening - like the City’s program that gives away trees for free, and this interactive map of all the (City-owned) trees in Calgary!
And speaking of beautiful, historic, forested places, I’m thinking this week of the town of Jasper, in the mountains of western Alberta, which was damaged by wildfires a few days ago. I’m not from Jasper, so that isn’t my story to tell. But you can help those affected by the Jasper wildfire by donating to the Canadian Red Cross, either on their website (www.redcross.ca), by calling 1-800-418-1111, or by texting ABFIRES to 45678 to donate $10.
I hope the community can recover and rebuild, and I also hope that decision-makers can learn from this tragedy, so that future disasters like this one can be avoided.
We’ll remember you.
Here are a few tree drawings and paintings from the files in my basement! A sketch for a 1999 mural concept: a painting of the house and spruce tree that I saw from my bedroom window when I was about fourteen; a forest painting; and a work-in-progress tree painting (I painted the sky blue, later) from the early 2000s.
