Lands and Forests

by Andrew Forbes

  “I think it’s the other way around, if you want to be literal,” she said, and then laughed at herself.

  “Well,” he said, “different ways of looking at the same thing, I guess.”

  She was bored with the subject, so she started looking around the place. Her eye fell on a great many things, none of which interested her. Richard watched her looking, waiting for something to catch her attention.

  “I just had that Rolling Stones poster framed,” he said.

  “Isn’t that something.”

  “I saw them in Rome once. Incredible.”

  “Isn’t that something,” she said.

  “That photo was taken on Bondi Beach in Australia,” he said, indicating a framed portrait of himself in small red trunks and a big straw hat. “Have you ever been?”

  “Never.”

  “Gorgeous spot.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “In six weeks in Australia I don’t think I once put on a shirt,” he said, and laughed. There seemed to be an offer of something; he behaved as though it was obvious, understood, like he held at the end of his arm a meaning she need only reach out to grasp. It seemed to have something to do with sex. No, the dance hadn’t changed.

  She thought, You ridiculous man. Your worldliness is a thin veneer.

  “That was a wonderful trip. We took four months just to go where we pleased. We’d just put the kids in university and were feeling a bit at loose ends. That was a year before we divorced, Diane and I.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it was perfect. We sort of found who we were. I think I had my moment on that trip. After Australia we flew to Egypt. At Giza I found myself thinking, look at what these people built! What am I doing?”

  “Humbling,” she said.

  “Incredibly. Of course, there are no more pharaohs. Long gone.”

  “No. And that’s too bad.”

  “Have you travelled much?”

  “On a teacher’s pension and his tiny life insurance? No. This is my travel. Skiing across the lake. Sometimes I visit my sister in Florida.”

  “You seem like someone who would love it. You have a curiosity about you.”

  “I satisfy it in books. They’re what I’ve got.”

  Ana Rae was at times prone to a kind of insidious inertia. That was the only way she could explain why she hadn’t already left Richard’s house. Hardy as she was, it was damned cold out on that lake, and his couch, which she now settled into with her legs folded beneath her, was comfortable. He offered a second cup of tea, and she accepted. Richard was full of faults, but it was nice to converse with someone every now and then. Most of that winter she’d heard only her own voice.

  The sun was sinking, cold and brilliant, over the edge of the lake. Winter afternoons disappeared so quickly.

  Richard said, “I should think about making you dinner. What do you say?”

  “Thanks, but I have a soup going in the slow cooker. It’ll burn or go to waste if I leave it.”

  “Nibblies, then. You’ll need your strength to get back across that lake.” He swept up the steps again and set about putting together a cheese tray, crackers, grapes. In a few moments he returned with it and placed it on the coffee table near her knees. She grazed at it a while, as the light coming in the windows went a deep blue, then black, and she found herself looking at her own reflection, and that of Richard, sitting at the other end of his overstuffed sofa.

  “Diane used to say of this time of day, in the winter, that the day left before it even arrived. It feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it.”

  “I love the suddenness of it. Day, then whoop, here’s night. No pleasantries.”

  “That’s a funny way of looking at it.”

  She’d expected there would come a point, a comment or a disagreement, that would force the end of her meeting with Richard, and indeed possibly even of their friendship, or whatever it could be called. Something remarkable, a gaffe or conflict to redraw the lines, or erase them altogether. But the afternoon had passed without such a thing happening. That was partly due to Richard’s accommodating way. He seemed to refuse to be bothered, bending this way and that to roll with the frequent stops and redirections she inserted into their conversation. His smile—courteous, deferential, the soft lips turned up at the corners like quotation marks—was the same now as when she’d arrived. Only the light had changed.

  “My skis must be frozen,” she said. “They’ll snap in half if I’m not careful.”

  “You’re going to leave now, aren’t you? That’s too bad.”

  “It’s dark. I should get home.”

  “I hope we can do this again.”

  “Thank you for the tea,” she said.

  Ana Rae reapplied the layers and accessories meant to keep her warm beneath the invisible dome of Arctic air. Outside, the night was sharp and cruel. A dazzling half moon looking down onto the snow and the ice.

  He’d hit her with an open hand, flush across the cheek. There’d been no warning. They’d argued before in just the same way, but he’d never even feigned violence. Then that. Afterwards he’d said nothing, just gone away. She heard the car starting and he drove off. Later he said he’d just gone around in circles, nowhere in particular. He behaved as though he himself were wounded.

  She stepped back into her bindings, put her gloved hands through the loops atop her poles, and then she pushed off onto the ice. It was silver beneath the moon. Everything was clearer in that deep cold, as though the lid had been lifted off the world, letting all the stars in, all the moon’s brilliance, inviting all the universe’s unfathomable cold to pour down over her.

  Below her feet was ice, and beneath the ice, forty or sixty or a hundred feet down, atop billion-year-old granite, there lay a darkness of a totality she could not imagine. Ten inches of frozen water lay between her and it.

  She pulled and glided, finding her tracks from the trip over earlier that day. She would ski for twenty minutes more, and then she would stoke or relight the fire before finding something to eat. There was no soup waiting. The moon shone down indifferently, and the wind was still. She entered between the rocks at the mouth of her bay, where nothing stirred. She came to the end of her own tracks and unfastened the skis’ bindings, looking up at the shape of her house, dark amid the trees, and small, and empty, thank God, wholly empty.

  Lands and Forests

  WHEN HE WAS twenty-six years old, Frank MacDougall watched a fire consume the town of Haileybury in a matter of hours.

  It was October. With the fire season passed, the rangers had already been sent home, though everything was still dry as tinder. When the wind came up, it fanned the farmers’ burn piles into great hungry flames which moved on the town as fast as an automobile and climbed two hundred feet up into the air.

  As the whole town was going up, MacDougall was standing up to his chin in the water of Lake Temiskaming, a sodden blanket over his head. He was among maybe two or three dozen other people similarly huddled, their heads just above the water’s surface, the curling heat on their faces, their bodies rigid in the cold lake. With his boot, he poured water over the blankets of those near him to keep them from catching if touched by embers or falling debris. There were mothers with children. An elderly wife and husband, their faces frozen in rictuses of age and grief. Labourers and shopkeepers. Struck dumb, all of them, by the sight before them. The children cried. MacDougall’s bones sang with pain and he could not feel his fingers or toes.

  Above the roaring of combustion, he could hear the trees’ piercing shrieks as the gases and resin and water contained within them came to an instant boil, building pressure until they forced their way out the way vapour escapes a whistling tea kettle. Each sound would be followed by a pop and a rushing as the fuel—leaves, needles, bark, branches—erupted into flame.

  It was fantastic and horrific. The choking smell of hot resin and smoke and scorched lumber and superheated stone, the hiss of embers falling into the water, the red p
all thrown over everything he could see, the sky gone orange at midnight, the magnitude of it. The awareness that nothing could be done to stop it.

  He harboured a clarity, as he stood in the black water and watched everything turn to ash, that if he were to survive, the moment would persist for him, would continue to prove remarkable as the decades unfurled. It stood even above such moments as kissing Pearl for the first time, her skin fragrant and her lips soft as kid leather, or taking a Belgian hilltop from the Kaiser’s Sixth Army, the gas scraping his eyes and scoring his lungs.

  When the body of the fire finally moved on, to the unbroken forest beyond, it left behind nothing but isolated spots of flame, the fallen beams of homes and shops crackling like campfire. The next day, rain came and then turned to snow, flakes sizzling as they landed, useless individually, but in aggregate working to extinguish what still burned.

  It was there that MacDougall realized he was bound to a life shaped by fire.

  ***

  * * *

  The next ten years brought births, advancements, setbacks, the intimation of middle age’s approaching tranquility—but they did not deliver him any sense of mastery over fire’s dominion. He had left Haileybury with a firm resolve in his breast, and it took him to Sault Ste. Marie, where the air service was headquartered, and where they put him in the open cockpit of a bright yellow Fairchild KR-34. That resolve carried him airborne, got him deeply involved in the great project to harness flight for the detection and management of fire.

  He would joke, too, that being in the air beat being on the ground because there are no blackflies at two thousand feet.

  In September of 1931 he sped out over the river’s brassy funnel toward Michigan, the wind in his mouth, before dipping a wing and banking around, doubling back toward the southeast to cruise over the rock and low tree cover of Algoma, gaining the French River as it spread and split and split again at its delta. The edges of Georgian Bay glinted silver, giving way to a cloudy tan, then a deep blue, before going green-black. Sudbury thereafter, and in its downwind lea the fantail of black smelter fog. Finally the lush arboreal carpet thickening as he came over Algonquin Park, of which he’d been named superintendent. If, as Saint-Exupéry posited, the airplane revealed the true face of the earth, the Superintendent was looking for signs of worry on that face.

  The late-summer warmth had broken the day before and the temperature had dropped precipitously to just above freezing. It was ten degrees colder in the air. At the Fairchild’s controls he sat wrapped in a winter flight suit, fur-lined—even the goggles, where they met his face, trimmed in beaver—with gloves the length of his arms, all of it worn over a layer of wool. Still, despite the thin sweat over his entire body, the cold reached him.

  He was five hundred feet over Cache Lake. A fine spray of oil from the engine coated the glass of his goggles, caught in the slipstream and flowing over the aircraft’s windshield. Every few minutes he lifted a hand to wipe it away with the back of a glove.

  The Superintendent put down in the lake and motored in to dock at the lodge there. He received a report and some supplies, then took off again and steered north, toward Burntroot Lake, where he had been told poachers were present and at work. In most cases, the cough and sputter of the Wright radial engine coming in low over the treetops was enough to dissuade men from unsanctioned pursuit of moose meat, or from haunting others’ traplines, but it was occasionally required of him to land the aircraft and intercept the hunters with an impromptu face to face.

  The unlimited ceiling accepted him. Wind howled through the empty seat, tucked beneath the upper wing, in front of him. His aircraft was nakedly practical, a shoebox with wings. Nothing extraneous. There was very little between the seat of his flight suit and the empty air, and the ground below that. Just lacquered fabric stretched over a wooden skeleton, some wire, a bit of glass, all of it pulled along by the hammering radial engine up front, its prop cutting the air to ribbons. He flew, he was aware, ever proximate to his own death.

  In addition to the reported poachers, an island on Big Trout had been lit by a lightning strike three days earlier. He would drop in there, after reconnoitring Burntroot, to check in on the crew he’d dispatched to cut a line and weaken the blaze before it leapt the narrow passage and began feeding on the vast green expanse beyond.

  The meaning of landscape varies by viewer, and the Superintendent suspected that it acted as moral mirror. Levelling off at a thousand feet, what he saw was, to him, something to inspire love, but which was itself indifferent to it. Rich late-day sunlight falling on deep emerald terrain pocked everywhere by the copper gleam of lakes and rivers. The open places in the marshes, where even now he could see moose feeding, three of them, up to their haunches in the tannin-rich muck.

  The Superintendent had also seen the fields of the Western Front, ones denuded and blackened by ordnance and gas. The latter had done a number on his lungs and was a fairly direct cause of his having chosen an outdoor line of work. It was tempting to see cause and effect throughout that sequence. His working his way into the life he would eventually know, in order to offer, on behalf of the Department of Lands and Forests, some amends to Nature—however insignificant those amends, and however distant from the War.

  Things tend not to be that clean, though, and nothing remains pristine.

  Pretty as Algonquin was, they’d long ago taken all the original white pine out of it, or all that was worth cutting anyway. Two-hundred-and-fifty-foot monsters knocked down and hauled over ice and taken by train to mills, or intact aboard ships, to be made into ships themselves. Any orphans left standing were lopsided or bent and couldn’t be used. They’d stand until they fell over or fire took them.

  The world was heaving, convulsing into some new shape. He felt it with the same sense that told him when fire was imminent, told him when the tall trees, their tops wavering in the troubled air, were due to flare. He understood that old certainties were dead—that we live in an approximation, a rough convergence of crooked lines, a messy agglomeration of elements made in order to be unmade and remade, cohering only just enough that we might recognize pattern and call it a world.

  He was aware that the majority of those who came to places like this one visited them as they might historic battlefields or the resting spots of martyrs. They came to see where nature had once happened but was happening no more. All the frontiers were falling or had fallen. Forestmen now spoke in terms more scientific than descriptive. Language was changing, and with it, the way people thought.

  Still he retained a belief that such change could be negotiated. That these hot, oily, metallic machines, their motors low-sounding and esophageal, could be harnessed to positive effect. That his aircraft was an instrument for detecting fire, and that other craft would one day aid in dousing it. His radio granted him the ability to signal fire’s presence to others—to summon, to warn. Planes, trucks, and canoes bringing crews to where they could fight it.

  He believed, with all this, that humans might yet prove to be of some benefit.

  ***

  The sky was riddled with crags and pockets which couldn’t be seen, only felt in judders and dips. The Superintendent set his aim north. In ten minutes, he descended to just under three hundred feet and circled over Burntroot, looking for signs of men, their gear and belongings, their rifles. He saw, within a ring of ramrod straight black spruce, a clearing with the remnants of a cooking fire but no equipment. He saw boot prints on the loamy shore but no people. They’d moved on, and he’d missed them.

  He tracked back to the south. It was only a short flight before Big Trout appeared through a bluish haze, more like a memory of a place than a place itself. The water of the lake was the same colour as the sky: washed blue fading to pink at its edges, with a tawdry swipe of orange at its rim, the reflected glow of the heat of the fire, the object of his crews’ efforts.

  The Superintendent descended again, dropping in low over a sandy ridge which itself dropped into a wetland.
He put down where the water opened up, with the island to his left, and after riding the wave of his own wake, steered the plane across the shallow lake toward the western tip and the firefighters’ camp. There, he was received by a pair of men who’d been tending pots, cooking supper for the dozen men still off in the island’s interior. There was no dock at the camp, so George Flynn—in stiff olive trousers, Wellingtons, and an undershirt, a bright red chigger rash on his forearms—waded out into the water to catch the KR-34’s float and steer it toward shore, where the Superintendent tossed a rope to the other man, John Ferguson, who tied it to the trunk of a tamarack near where the firemen had landed their canoes.

  The Superintendent, stiff in his thick flight suit, climbed down from the cockpit and stood on the float. “Boys,” he said, “how are things here?”

  “Not so bad, sir,” said Ferguson. “They’re saying they’ve got it out but for some spots and the smouldering. Boys are out turning over the hot spots and spraying them, but I think that’ll be it.”

  “Good,” said the Superintendent. “You’ll come in tomorrow, then?”

  “That’s the thinking,” said Flynn.

  “Great work, lads. Just great.”

  “Weren’t much of a fire,” said Ferguson. “Schoolgirls could’ve put it out.”

  Once they confirmed it was extinguished, there would come the labour of carrying out the hundred-and-fifty-pound pump, the linen hoses with their brass couplings laid out to dry in the sun and the air and then coiled into sacks to be ready for the next fire, whether the next week or the next year. The dozen or so men would then pack up their tents and grub boxes, jerry cans and tool boxes and lubricants, their axes, shovels, McLeod and Pulaski tools, and return to the lodgings at Cache Lake. There, they would wonder if it was the season’s last fire, and if so, when they’d be released to the other half of their year. Released, to scare up ad hoc winter employment in cities or in small towns, Elliot Lake or Saginaw or Ottawa. Back to their dark days of vagrancy, alcohol, despondency, the women they hoped were still there. Only the Superintendent and a skeleton crew of a few others would remain, including his mechanic, Landon Steeves, who would soon be required to help swap out the Fairchild’s floats for skis.