Calamine

Deep Summer, Slipping away

Still from The Colour of Ink

I feel like a time traveler:

June, July, August.

Summer dissolves in my mouth and I can't remember what it tasted like.

- Zoë Lianne, Erasure

It was a day like today. Deep summer. So hot the air is thickend. Too hot to be inside but also too hot to play outside much of anything other than lying around and waiting for something to happen. The air slowed like honey in a dream, like we are all inside a photo, everyone wearing a kerchief of somesort against the relentless sun and the relentless bugs in your hair and ears the back of your neck. Papa’s sleeves rolled up, sweat-stained shirt at the sawhorse with nails in his mouth puttting something together, Mama at her makeshift breadboard rolling something out on that smooth perfect a piece of white-grey marble. By the old BBQ, and beside that the rhubarb patch, red and green thick stringy stems we would dip in white sugar then take a bite and dip into the sugar again, the tart souring calmed by sugar, the big wrinkled leaves, what part of it was toxic? The root? Those shrivelly leaves? We kept our distance. The tiger lilies a wild tangle at the side of the house by the lilacs that were only heartshaped leaves now. And we hear a car on the road, the sound of car on gravel There is never a car. My uncle and aunt come around the bend down the hill loaded with backpacks and pick me out of the four kids, like I am the right age somehow. Was I eight? Nine? Anyway it was decided that they would take me camping. Just me. We would set off right from there. And it was like I left my brother and sisters and parents and house and yard all frozen there in August’s amber. Leaving that whole scene behind.

I remember how proud I felt to be carrying a big backpack to be going on an adventure that started right from our house. To be going on what felt like my first grownup camping trip. At the end of our road there was the Sheppard’s old farmhouse and for a while Boots their long-haired black-and-white farm dog followed us, but soon we were out beyond the second gate and further than the dog or any of us had ever been before. The feilds tapered off into Queen Anne’s Lace and the faded bluepurple of chicory and scrubby trees, and then the path dove into the wilder woods. We were looking for the perfect spot and I felt like I could walk all day. Sleeping bag and pots and pans hanging off backpack almost bigger than me. After a few hours the path dipped down into a swampy area maybe flooded by a beaver, the trees all dead and scraggly. Somewhere in there we found a little round lake too green and full of algae and frogs and turtles and broken grey stumps to swim in, but it was pretty and there was a flat area to pitch a tent and we were exhausted and it was getting dark and starting to rain and we figured this was as good a place as any to stop for the night. It was not. A good place to stop. It was a place that later, after finally making it past it, we would christen Bug Lake. The mosquitos in the tent kept us up but we squished some and the ones left couldn’t get you if you zipped yourself completely into the sleeping bag. My uncle knew that they were girl mosquitoes. That they could smell your blood type. It was a long night but what was worse was that in the morning we looked outside the tent and the day was dark. The sun never really came up it was just a pale lightening on the smudgey horizon. The air was dark. As dark as if we were in a rainstorm but out there in a giant bubble surrounding us was not rain or fog or dark clouds. It was bugs. And not just mosquitos, but blackflies and mayflies and giant mosquitos and moths and every flying insect that a swamp had ever invented. It was thick with bugs. Just leaving the tent to try to start a fire we realized it was going to be impossible to walk through this.

We decided to wait it out. We spent the whole day in the tent. My uncle, my aunt and me. I loved it. We played games and told stories and my uncle showed me a complicated puzzle involving arranging wooden matches. He was logical and organized and seemed to know everything about nature and math and engineering and problem solving. A day stuck in a tent felt long and rich and magical and I loved feeling like the centre of some new important world, and every once in a while unzippering the tent for a second to see if the bugs were still there. The next day was windy and the bugs, while still pretty extreme, had calmed down a bit. I am not sure how many days we travelled after that, but I know that eventually we found the perfect spot. A campside made for us. This one was on a bigger blue lake that you could swim in, and off on a sidepath we found a little point of pink granite rock. Canadian Sheild with lichen and wild blueberries jutted out into the lake, but with a little flat spot where you could wash dishes, and a rounder, bigger rock that you could jump off to swim in the deep blue water. That pink-grey stone and deep blue water. The sound of the tin camping pot blackened on the bottom clinking against the rocks and the lapping water. A little wind across all of this freckling the surface of the water into a thousand little suns. Before the rocky point, the land dipped down into a pine forest green and still and there was a springy, piney clearing for setting up the tent protected all around by forest. There were rocks up to the point where at night you could see the whole lake, the whole world and beyond, and above everything, the velvety blueblack of the sky all prickled with so many tiny stars. Enough stars that you knew you were on a planet. Everything there was round and full and right. I learned how to arrange spices in one of those pill cases that have the days of the week. I learned about the edible grey lichen that tastes like shredded wheat cereal but that you can cook up in a little butter with salt and spices and eat if there is nothing else. I learned how to carefully build an oven out of flat rocks and then bake syrup-sweetened cornbread, smokey but fluffy and gritty and golden-crusted by the smokey embers of our makeshift oven. And when the sun slowly lowered and the breeze calmed down and the lake got still, we drank a Buddhist tea that only he knew about that tasted like branches from the blue speckeled tin cups, and in the calm the mosquitos would come out and my uncle said: Watch watch. And sure enough, with the mosquitos came the dragonflies patrolling our perfect spot. They circled, humming into the quiet in loops low over the water looking for mosquitoes. My uncle said that they were special almost sacred creatures with their eyes that saw everywhere and their wings like stained-glass-window helicopter blades, and their irredescence, and the way that they were keeping the mosquitos away from us. Watch. Watch. He said and explained the way that the dragonfly catches its prey by forming a sort of funnel with its legs flying just above the mosquito and just fast enough to pull it into its smaller and smaller legs arranged in some geometry just perfect for capturing a flying insect. It seemed like my uncle had worked in the factory that designed dragon flies or had been there when they were invented. It seemed that he knew everything. It seemed that the bugs and the lake and the huge sky above us and the cornbread and the fire and the stars and all of it were part of something that was so round and whole and full and perfectly made that all you could do was sit in awe until you were so sleepy that you had to tuck into the sleeping bag with the perfectly swept out and wind-dried tent, and the springy pineneedles from all the years of this place being here, and the out there somewhere the lightest pattering of rain on the tent fly, above it feathery needles and sap glittering pinecones, then the night sky and the planets and stars and why in this perfect spot would you even need to dream when it was as it was, all one perfect dream.

But really I wanted to talk to you about Calamine Lotion. That pink chalky liquid that dries on the skin over a bit and cracks a bit like a mudpuddle, and brings down the swelling and kind of stops you from itching it. It feels like summer that has one foot in some other generation. A kind of 1950s summer of kids roaming their small towns in packs all day coming home only in the blue light of the end of the day for dinner, the screen door slamming, the kids covered in bruises and scrapes bug bites and maybe some poison ivy rash, and only after all the playing, after dinner, after the bath, does the Mother notice that they are all scratched up and covered in bites. If the hurts are bad enough, the Mother might bring out the medicine chest. Ours was a hard shell case made of some sort of blue leatherette and it smelled like medicine. Inside there is rubbing alcohol and bandaids and cotton balls and gauze pads and deeper at the bottom of the chest lived the older medicines. Caps almost stuck on the bottles. Iondine. Gentian Violet. Mecuricrome. Those oragney pink baby asprins that taste sweet and chalky but are so old you could imagine your Mother ate them when she was a baby. Alka selzter and Vicks Vaporub and various salves and ointments that have a red cross on them but the lable is mostly gone. Mama of course knew what each one did and how severe the hurt is for bites, how it was fine to just slather yourself in the Calamine and wrap you up in flannel sheets and put you to bed, the faint memory of the smell of the inside of the medicine chest with its fake satin walls and clicking lock. The careful look of applying ointment to skin. And you are healthy and taken care of and the bites will burn and you will long to claw at them but that silty pink layer stops you and before you can think further you are asleep.

Calamine is old. The Ancient Egyptians were already using the powdered form of this mineral to treat itchy skin. Before that it played a role in the beginning of metalurgy. Around 10,000 years ago at the end of the Stone Age, ancient peoples were playing with heating rocks to get metal. Copper came from malachite. Adding calamine to copper in the crucible gave them brass. The geologist don’t really call it calamine anymore because really it’s the combination of smithsonite, a zinc carbonate, and hemimorphite, a zinc silicate. I went down a bit of a zinc oxide rabbit hole and even though people where maybe excessively slathering all over their bodies as part of some TikTok trend a few years ago and some doctors said maybe that’s not a good idea, Calamine does seem to dry out and protect skin that is enflamed, help with poison ivy and oak, and act as a kind of sunscreen. The pink in modern calamine lotion comes from iron rust. Of course! I like the colour. I like the way it behaves on paper. I love the way that thinner, silkier inks like lamp black form dendrites as the ink meets the calamine and forms rivulettes through it. I like that rocks and metals and medicines and colour seem to be in some ritual conversation that has been going on for a long time. I like that the mosquitoes are still alive this year in the thick green tangle of weeds by the underpass where the grapes

are ripening in the evening especially. I like the feeling of adding a pink metallic mud to my skin. I like that summer is still thick, slowmoving, bug bitten, scatched up and unfurling its slow shared dream.

Next Week I am really hoping to talk to the art director of the Paris Olympics about the beautiful purple track and how it happened. Join us and get an email in your mailbox every weekend. Usually on Friday evenings but this week I had a workshop so I am running a little late, Yours, Jason