The seasons moved the men around as though they were wildlife, driven by need across the map from one circumstance to another, their brotherhood temporary but their instinct for survival unwavering.
***
In time, they took him out of the bush, named him Deputy Minister, and gave him an office at Queen’s Park. The biplane was long gone, but MacDougall could not prevent, from time to time, the geysering up of an uncontrollable desire to be in the forest.
After the second war, he handed a list to a design team at De Havilland and said, “Make a plane that meets each of these requirements and I’ll buy twenty-five of them.” The specs described what turned out to be the world’s most reliable pickup truck, with wings. They called it the Beaver. The Provincial Air Service took delivery in 1948, replacing their aging Stinsons and Norsemans, and thereafter used the Beaver to patrol, supply, ferry, rescue.
One was set aside for the personal use of the Deputy Minister, stationed at Toronto. He could be in the air with an hour’s notice, when he felt that geysering desire, when fire season hit its stride, when he wanted to see how things were progressing, when he wanted out of the city.
***
At the end of a tremendously dry summer, the island on Big Trout was again ignited by lightning—only this time, the blaze had leapt the narrow passage and raced to meet a second blaze, product of an unextinguished campfire, which had begun farther to the north and west. The two fires were drawn together as though magnetic.
He was told that a fire crew had lost a radio, and that the replacement needed to be flown out from the Sault. Feeling acutely the longing for action, he radioed and said he’d fly up that afternoon to make the delivery, and to help coordinate at the park if necessary, to lift morale.
He flew the yellow Beaver at five hundred feet through air thick with pollen, yellow-green clouds of it in the smoky false dusk, bluish-grey. Columns of soft summer air braided together with fire-heated gusts, on which rode delicate embers which zipped by the Beaver’s windshield as he aimed at the flaming horizon.
Unlike fire, whose sole governing principle is consumption, flight is a bargain with an unreliable friend. A hot wind hit his tail and knocked the plane sideways and downward, the stick jumping to life in the Deputy Minister’s hand.
For the slimmest instant, he thought he would be unable to correct his path before crashing broadside into a sheet of fire. Everything—the fire, the plane below him, the stick—possessed agency. Everything but him. In that instant, he had a desire to live, to last, but the difference between desire and agency was quite clear to him just then, as was the idea that he’d ultimately been in control of so little, propelled by a mysterious driver, a Protestant uneasiness coupled with harrowing experience that flung him, again and again, into the path of catastrophe. But it was only for an instant.
At last report, the firemen had dug and fought and cut their way to a wide country where the soil atop the bedrock was thin and tree cover was sparse, a perfect firebreak to transect the fire’s advance. He’d known this corner of the park well, as he had most all of its corners, but in the wake of the fire it appeared completely foreign to him.
Such mutability always moved him to speechlessness. His heart would go membranous, feeling as though it might disintegrate altogether right there in his chest. How amazing and deadly and unpredictable, fire’s supple advances and retreats, its crooked lines, moving as though on the balls of its feet, always a risk to wriggle and shirk its way from constraint to freedom.
Beauty does not require us, thought the Deputy Minister. It does not bend to our avowals or beliefs. It will outlast us. It will forget we were ever here.
To the north, the afternoon was already as dark as night. He flew straight toward it. Creeping fires consumed mosses and duff and slash, while crown fires jumped the tops of two-hundred-foot-tall conifers, candling—it was aptly called—trees like matches, their heads popping into brilliant light. Where the fire had already left its imprint, the acres smouldered. The ash there would fold under and next year the new growth would begin.
Elsewhere, engineers and foresters were at work developing ways to drop great quantities of water from the sky, arranging a new marriage of man and machine in the service of nature.
Elsewhere, Pearl sat alone.
Elsewhere, forests were not burning, but were damp and heavy with frequent rain, and families were camping beneath rich green canopies and breathing in the fragrant, resinous air, and men taught their sons to shoot deer with heirloom Remingtons.
And elsewhere, farther to the north, beyond that wall of flame, were the places where sturdy and foolhardy people had, a century earlier, attempted to cut a life from the great, thick forest. Where forgotten gravestones deep in the brush and tangle waited to be uncovered and burned clean.
Back at the park, campers and rangers would report being overrun with wolves and coyotes, alive in the daylight, fleeing in advance of the fire. Owls flying thick as June dragonflies. All the trains through the park’s southern corridor had been cancelled.
The Deputy Minister flew low enough now for the top of a burning Scots pine, detached and caught in a draft, to brush his left pontoon. It woke him up, here in the vivid and perilous heart of things. He belonged nowhere else.
He descended and steadied the Beaver, landed on the sediment-draped surface of Big Trout, and cruised toward the beach, where tents had been erected. There he was met by men he did not know, men with red faces and necks tarnished by the sun, bulging forearms, the knees of their trousers worn thin. They unloaded the radio and some instruments, and beneath their greetings and utterances there lingered some slight awe for the Deputy Minister, a legend here in their presence, flesh and bone. He and all his accomplishments, and his undiminished sensitivity to factors both airborne and subterranean.
Time was slow and hallucinatory. Casual conversations took place a hundred yards from the maw of a raging wildfire. The sun-heated pine needles beneath their feet wove into the scent of the fire, the fire which could also be heard, its heat felt in addition to that of the sun. In the dogwoods and cedars at the island’s edge there were chattering squirrels which either did not care about the fire or recognized their inability to escape it and so carried on, and would do so right up until the moment they were incinerated. Not far away, silent in its determined, prehistoric movements, a snapping turtle the size of a Buick’s hubcap walked out from beneath a juniper bush, slid into the water, suddenly graceful, and was gone.
***
The weather changed. In the end, that’s what it really took. The pumps and hoses, the firebreaks—they were all just meant to slow the fires, to hold them in place, until the weather changed.
A thickness in the air and then a drenching rain. Two days of it, leaving the ground black and smouldering, pricked with the charcoal skeletons of trees.
If only we could be the weather, thought the Deputy Minister.
At Cache Lake, the men cleaned off in the dormitory showers. Steam poured from the windows. Later, they sat outdoors while the sun sank over the tops of the trees and loons called. The day’s exertions settled in their limbs, making them heavy as cast concrete. They reclined in low chairs and let the dusk settle over their bodies. The mosquitoes, midges, and cluster flies came then, and the men swatted them casually, ineffectually, a gesture of habit, though their roughened limbs felt nothing in those moments save the sweet static of inactivity. Later they moved indoors, and drank beer and stared into the great iron stove, at knuckle-sized coals of glowing red.
The Deputy Minister led them through it all, in conversation and in music. Among his things, regardless of where he went, was a scuffed and worn leather case, within which nested a violin he’d made himself from a hunk of maple pulled from the park. It was warm and beautiful, and from it he was able to coax everything in the world, each sound, from joy and comradeship to sorrow, an almost Balkan misery. By now he knew each man’s name, and told jokes to all of them, walking among them, weaving
them together, this large man, larger for his comfort and exuberance, his neck like twisted oak, arms and chest on a scale which might best be described in automotive terms.
He wore green worsted serge trousers, a khaki shirt rolled to the elbows, unbuttoned to midchest in the heat to reveal the undershirt, and boots which came high up his shins, their leather creased and puckered, indented at the eyelets, with the sort of character you’d find on the face of a person in the perfect moment of their life. The Deputy Minister wasn’t ignorant to fashion—he simply lived outside its jurisdiction.
Finally, when none of the men remained in the common room, he retired to his old superintendent’s cabin, a short, dewy walk across a clearing, and found there his bedroll. He blew out his lamp and fell instantly to sleep. The next morning, he woke with the first birds, and walked in his undershirt and trousers and unlaced boots over to the dormitory’s mess, where he sang while he cooked for the men. Then, when the last pan was scrubbed, he put his things aboard the Beaver and rose, the water dripping off his pontoons, motor singing, banking toward the south and back to the west. To Toronto, bright and noisome, and to all it held.
***
Then MacDougall was sixty-seven years old. He sat in a dark suit and freshly polished brogues, his hands in his lap, at a table in a ballroom in Toronto. He was attempting to focus on the words of the event’s host, but his thoughts wandered. He shifted uneasily. He was not yet retired, yet they were lauding him, in terms he associated with someone who had nothing left to accomplish.
When news of the impending honour had found him, it was accompanied by a tremendous discomfort at the thought of being the focus of such attention, as well as an irksome disquiet at the prospect of giving a speech to a room full of people. He’d rather tell a joke and then his play violin. Would they let him do that? Talking about himself wasn’t a thing he particularly liked doing. He was beside the point. There were more important things, practical things as well as tender things.
He’d wanted a full life, while life was his, and to raise and send forth healthy and happy children. Every day, he felt in his body—among the few uncomplicated and uncompromised things within him—the clean, smokeless combustion of his love for them. But over that he had only so much control. He and Pearl had had three children, and he had outlived two of them.
The park, though, and the wild places—the trees, the coyotes cleaning deer carcasses, blue asters on the forest floor, the fragility of shadows in moonlight on snow—might yet stand close to forever. Available to all, but owned by none.
“He is renowned for his practical development of aircraft modifications and utilization and the protection of forested areas and wilderness parks,” said the host at the dais, but the Deputy Minister lost the rest to a ringing sound in his ears, the cumulative residue of a lifetime of propellers and cylinders, which faded into a low hum as his attention drifted.
Life was not equally measured. There were small instances within which more living was done than in other, greater stretches of time. Much of his life had occurred in those condensed moments: ones in which he’d encountered a will greater than his own, a faceless will. Though he knew it was advisable not to see such moments as personal confrontations, he knew also that he was humbled in them.
Somehow, he had survived. Come out of each such experience with his life. Here he was. He’d been alongside good people. Had flown with some of them over a great forest as, below, the flora became heat and light. He’d stood in a lake with the freezing water up to his neck and watched the trees immediately beyond the town fall like a curtain to reveal the land rising beyond, to the north and west. Watched the inferno expanding in all directions, its scale and power revealing to him, with great clarity, the awful enormity of the world.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to acknowledge and thank the Ontario Arts Council for a generous grant in support of this book.
I’m grateful to the editors of Maisonneuve for shaping, improving, and publishing “Emmylou” in their Winter 2017 issue.
Thanks to those who read and helped with early versions of these stories or this manuscript, especially Eric Fershtman, Seyward Goodhand, and Rick Taylor.
I’m indebted to several publications, including Sylva: The Lands and Forests Review, published by the government of Ontario from 1945–61, and Trees of Ontario by Linda Kershaw. For information and direction, thanks also to Todd Fleet and the staff of the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and to Michelle Curran and Scott Nichols of the Peterborough Multi-Sport Club.
If this book possesses any redeeming qualities whatsoever, they are the result of the efforts of Bryan Jay Ibeas, an extraordinary editor and a wonderful friend, with whom I have long wanted to work on such a project, and finally had the chance to do so. I hope there are more such opportunities in the future.
For company and support on adventures which fuelled many of these stories, thanks are due to Alice Winchester and John Dungavell.
I’m grateful to Leigh Nash and the entire Invisible team for their continued belief in my work.
Love and thanks to Denee and Gordon Forbes, to Sharron and John Curley, to Adelaide, Cormac, and Theo, and to the rest of my family, spread coast to coast. I’m sorry I haven’t visited more.
And finally, thank you to Christie Curley, for inspiring this book, and for making it possible.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright info
Dedication
Inundation Day
The Outlet
Emmylou
Waterfalls
Ex-father
Graceland
Footwork
Fortunate People
Pigeon
Broadcasting
Pharaohs
Lands and Forests
Acknowledgments
About Invisible Publishing
Landmarks
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Start of content
Acknowledgments
Lands and Forests Page 19
