Clayoquot: The Sound of My Heart

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Betty Krawczyk started life in a rural family of poor whites in
Louisiana, a state that was then “mostly one big swamp” and has now
“been drained, sprayed, paved, air-conditioned and citified” beyond
recognition. After surviving the segregated South in the 1940s, a string
of marriages, and eight children, Krawczyk moved in 1988 at the age of
60 to 10 acres of land at Cypress Bay on Clayoquot Sound, on Vancouver
Island’s west coast. She sought peace and a quiet retirement. She
found logging companies bent on clear-cutting a forest she had come to
love and respect. She would eventually be arrested, convicted of
contempt of court, and jailed for four months.

In this most unusual memoir, everything is juxtaposed with everything
else, but the stream-of-consciousness flow is comprehensible and
pleasing. Krawczyk, a committed feminist and environmentalist, has a
sharp intelligence and a great sense of humor. From the opening scene in
July 1988, when the author is alone and afraid of encountering cougars
at the stream where she must get fresh water, to the touching closure,
when she says goodbye to a visiting grandchild and knows in her gut the
all-importance of children, nature, life, and “the earth itself,”
her story holds the reader in its grip.