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an infinitesimal part of the earth.
    â€” Pliny the Elder, Natural History
    I realized, as soon as we drove down Dallas Road, in the winter of 2009, that this couldn’t be the house. The numbers weren’t right. I thought — I hoped — that the house I remembered from a Brownie field trip in 1962 might have belonged to the Newcombe family. A very old man met the Brownies at the door and led us through a dark wood-panelled hall into a large room where he showed us cases of spiders and butterflies. I remember Native masks on the walls, and a small totem pole in one corner of the room. There were rattles, bearing fierce faces of ravens and loons, which we were allowed to shake. The old man had been a missionary. We were also told he’d known Emily Carr, a name that stayed with me, although at the time I had no idea who she was. In those years, her work hadn’t achieved the ikonic status it properly enjoys now.
    I have a clumsy theory about degrees of separation working vertically as well as horizontally. That we can trace our relationships down the rich road to the past, like an archaeologist examining the layers of Troy, the same way we can connect ourselves to others through the present. I’m not sure that six degrees will always take us somewhere significant, but in many cases it can.
    Charles Newcombe was a naturalist and ethnologist (though his primary training was in medicine; he was also British Columbia’s first psychiatrist). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he acquired artefacts from Northwest Coast cultures for many museums in North America as well as England and Germany. His son William was also a collector as well as a friend of the painter Emily Carr. Charles had died in 1926, but I thought William had lived into the 1960s. I imagined it would be somehow significant to know I had been shown the collections of two men who had been so instrumental in gathering the various histories of British Columbia: its botanical record, the material culture of its First Nations, and the artistic legacy of Emily Carr. So, on a trip to Victoria, my husband and I drove over to Dallas Road, at the point where Eberts Street joined it. I had a copy of Exploring Victoria’s Architecture , published in 1996, that featured a photograph of the Newcombe house and provided its address. We peered at house numbers. I was trying to wrestle my vague memories into something resembling fact.
    But it became clear that the Newcombe house was farther west, near Ogden Point, judging by the number given in the book: 1381. As far as I could remember, the house we’d walked to with our Owls from the church basement at Five Corners, where my Brownie pack met weekly, was between Moss and Linden Streets, near Clover Point. We wouldn’t have walked to Ogden Point, a group of six-year-olds on an after-school outing.
    In 1962, Victoria was a city of retired military men and ladies in white gloves. W&J Wilson Fine Clothiers sold them tweed jackets and Shetland sweaters, and Murchie’s carried the tea they liked, measured from great tins with a metal scoop. The Bengal Room at the Empress Hotel knew how to mix their drinks — Singapore slings, Pimm’s cup, and Tanqueray G&Ts. On windy days, couples dressed as though for church walked the seafront along Dallas Road with dogs straining at leashes. My father called it their “constitutional,” a word that puzzled me in this context because I thought it had to do with good government.
    In those years, a child could ramble freely around Fairfield neighbourhood and the waterfront along the Juan de Fuca Strait. I had a small, blue two-wheeler, given me for Christmas in 1960, and I remember riding as far as Beacon Hill Park. A trail known as Lover’s Lane was dense with snowberries, and once I accidently knocked down a wasp nest, crying out as its angry residents stung my legs again and again. My pedal pushers had to be cut off and