PROSE by CATE SANDILANDS

FIFTEEN MINUTES

I have in my hand a small, tin box. It is dull, drab-green, and a little bit larger than my palm, extending from the fleshy part at the bottom to my first knuckles. It is not so big that I can’t grasp it tightly, but it holds much more than its size suggests.

 It is July 2, 2021, and I am calculating.

On its top, hinged lid, the box announces CHURCHMAN’S Nº 1 CIGARETTES in large gold and red letters both outside and in. The letters are festive, from the days when smoking was an occasion rather than a furtive habit for back alleys and doorways. I am sure there are still thousands of boxes like this one: you can get one on eBay for $20. On the bottom, the embossed words DUTY FREE H.M. SHIPS ONLY are only clear when you hold the box in a certain way, aslant to the light. Apparently, these few words might make it more valuable.
 
When I cleared out my parents’ house in Victoria after my father died in 2019, I was faced with an almost insurmountable number of things. They had saved everything for decades. Scores of: cracked plates that could be useful for something, ill-fitting shoes that someone might wear someday, 78s from the 1950s, household receipts from the 1970s, and hundreds of slightly moldy books. Also: every birthday card I ever made them as a child and all the potentially reusable wrapping paper from at least fifty-two Christmases.
 
I was calculated. As I winnowed the piles down to manageable numbers I only wanted to hold on to things that were meaningful to me, that summoned our lives together, that made me smile with recognition. I kept the box, even though it didn’t meet most of those criteria.

 On June 29, the town of Lytton, BC, boasted the highest temperature
ever recorded in Canadian history: 49.6C.
According to calculations this record even beats Las Vegas.
It was only a few degrees short of Death Valley’s hottest day ever:
the hottest day ever recorded on the planet.
​

On the outside of the box lid, there are also several hand-scratched letters. I can decipher the words Ermyntrude’s Box. The writing is unmistakably my father’s. His cursive was perfect and invariable, a skill he developed while writing neat, tiny place names, longitudes, latitudes, and depth soundings on the hundreds of hydrographic charts that were his life’s work. I am fairly sure Ermyntrude is one of those very British private jokes, the kind he used to make with my mother and that I, Canadian-born, never fully understood. It is a euphemism for something, likely something sexual. I wonder if the box, emptied of its twenty cigarettes, might have once housed condoms.
 
I found the box in the attic while I was purging the house, in a steamer trunk underneath my father’s dress uniform from the 1940s, when he was still in the Royal Navy. I remember when I was about eleven secretly trying on the uniform’s wool jacket and formal cap, knowing enough not to ask to wear it for Hallowe’en. I also remember asking myself why he would bring so very many heavy things with him all the way to the west coast of Canada.

​Between June 25 and July 1, the BC Coroner’s Service calculated
777 sudden deaths.
That’s 579 more deaths in the same period than the five-year average in the province.
They won’t confirm the deaths are heat-related, but we all know they are
​.

The other part of the writing on the box I can make out – and there is more I can’t, possibly because it is in a second person’s hand – is the date. 1949. My parents were married in 1953.
 
Their wedding happened on a cold, late January day in London. There is one old black and white photo – that I love and that both my parents disliked intensely – taken in front of the church, showing my tall father in a dapper suit and my mother, nearly a foot shorter, in a fashionable jacket, skirt, and hat. They must have felt a bit stunned and I imagine I can see it in their faces in the picture: they married with two weeks’ notice, occasioned by my father’s sudden decision to take up a post in the Canadian Hydrographic Service in Victoria, one whole ocean and one whole continent away from home.
​
In 1949, my father was serving in the Mediterranean Sea, learning how to make those many nautical charts: ocean depths, textures of seabeds, features of coastlines, multiple navigational aids and obstructions. He never talked a lot about those eight years between the war and his and my mother’s emigration. Maybe it was because he knew what I might say about how those dozens of charts were mostly created to make the world safe for another century of British imperialism: for shipping and for laying thousands more miles of cable and pipelines. We disagreed, often, about that sort of thing, especially once I started to put two and two together about the afterlives of war technologies.
 
Or maybe it was something more personal. In one album with a tiny, elegant M at the bottom right corner of the inside cover, a photo shows my father as a lean, handsome man on board a ship in very bright sunlight. It doesn’t show much else: he appears to be alone, surrounded by the ocean.
 
I have always known he spent time on Malta and in Monaco. Now I know he also spent time with a Margaret because I looked and found one signed square of paper hidden behind this photo: All the best for a Happy Birthday, xx.
 
The box, the note, the M, and the xx add up to something I have wondered about for more than forty years. 

Galiano Island, where I am living,
was also under the persistent heat dome, as they are calling it,
in which a strong ridge of high pressure traps the warm air underneath it.
The cause of the dome was complicated
(everything about climate change is complicated)
but what is clear is that the ocean was ten degrees hotter when I swam in it to cool down.
They calculate that, on Galiano,
one million mussels boiled alive in a patch of sand the size of a tennis court.
​

When I tried on the heavy uniform at age eleven, it smelled comfortingly of smoke, like my father’s pipe. I discovered one shiny, stylish steel cigarette case in the jacket pocket. It had my father’s initials engraved on the front: RWS. The inside read To Sandy, With All My Love.  

Galiano is also tinder because
we have just experienced the driest spring in recorded history.
Normal spring rainfall is about 150 millimeters;
this year they calculated 53.
​

Shortly after finding it, I made the mistake of showing the cigarette case to my mother. Imagining romance, I asked her when she had given it to him. Her mouth hardened. She said, “I didn’t.” I never mentioned it again. I put the case on my bedroom dresser, and one day it disappeared.

​On June 30, a wildfire swept through Lytton, BC, obliterating
90 percent of the town.
They had fifteen minutes to get out, to decide
what they could save of their lives
and what they had to abandon.
​

The green, tin box now lives on my bedside table on top of our passports, which don’t quite fit. Inside, I have put our birth certificates, our newly-completed COVID immunization cards, a lucky coin, and three small pieces of jewelry that I would hate to lose. We can only take one or two things, but I have it calculated.

In that fifteen minutes, I can trap one frightened cat and pack her in her carrier. I can get my daughter to the car, where the five photo albums are already stashed, among the emergency supplies, beside one box of letters, one small soapstone sculpture from my father’s time charting the Beaufort Sea for federal government oil and gas exploration, and six crystal glasses that remind me of my parents’ many happy dinner parties together.

And then I can grab the tin box. When we are forced to get out, my father’s secret will come with us.
 
The rest of his legacy has already arrived.

Cate Sandilands is a professor of Environmental Arts and Justice in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. In addition to her academic writing in the environmental humanities, she recently published an edited volume of small stories and poems, Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times (Caitlin Press, 2019), and is working on a collection of her own stories. Her other work can be found at  
http://www.catesandilands.ca/.