by Abi Andrews
But the invention of Unanimous Time in Greenwich made the world fall into our order just like the cities are order and the roads and railways are order and the animals are order and genders are order. We invented time and we have sped it up by our own making. The Clock of the Long Now is a clock designed to mark time into the deep, deep future, 10,000 years at a time. It would be built by the Long Now Foundation, in the hope of counterbalancing modern myopia and making us more responsible to the future. But it seems to me just a louder assertion, just a bigger claw reaching. (I REALLY mark time therefore I VERY am.)
In the north, where the highway does not reach, the roadveins are less tangled, like a tree spilling out and reaching all its twig-fingers to the sky in whichever way it feels to fill the space around it. In the north, where the landscape is more immutable, the settlers have been made to oblige it. In the northernmost territories the permanent villages are mostly native because the First Nations and the Metis and the Inuit know how to bend to the land rather than make the land bend to them. And like Naaja said, they see the animal/mineral/vegetable worlds as a continuum of which we are a part in the same way that Inuit gender is a continuum.
The Trans-Canada Highway was built in the 1950s to link up the cities that Macdonald and the CPR spawned. And all of this came to happen so that the rational concrete highway could unravel underneath me and lead me forward on my journey like my very own yellow brick road. After two hours or so a young couple picked me up and took me to Saskatoon. The journey was treeless and flat, I could see the clouds move all the way to the horizon, where they would lose their shape and amalgamate into one big haze, the blue sky stretching over me like a dome.
THE BUFFALO AND THE PASSENGER PIGEON
INT. CAR – camera in Erin’s hand taking in the outside of her window – road sign flashes past, ‘You are leaving Saskatoon, please come back soon!’ – flat plains behind a low flickering fence, stretched out as far as one can see, sickie-yellow and bleached by the sun – no glint like there should be – no pastoral quilt trimmed with hedgerows – monotonous sprawling land, dirty and dead and coaxed and quenched with rotating sprinklers, wide and uniform and on giant scales – a humming that should be insects but is diminished and croaky like an echo from giant machines that even look small against the crop desert – now and then a metal structure bent like a crouching pterodactyl butting the ground –
ERIN: It smells
STEVE: Yep. Welcome to the hydraulic fracturing capital of Canada. There’s been fracking here for fifty years, but nowadays it’s goin’ haywire. Around abouts third-biggest petroleum reserve in the world
– Erin turns the camera to face Steve in the driver’s seat – red cap, dark green North Face gilet – he turns to the camera, smiles haltingly, turns back to the road, shifts his hands on the wheel to steer from the top –
STEVE: Then there’s your tar sands. And the forests. Half of Alberta is forest. It’s all in the north. And over half of the forest is ripe for harvest. Yep. You could say Alberta runs on selling itself. Alberta is a goddam whore
– he laughs, a short honk of a laugh – a shadow passes over his face because a cloud goes under the sun – he points to a harrier out of the window, silhouetted in the sky –
STEVE: That’s a harrier. My pop used to point out all the birds to me. I don’t remember most of the birds. But for some reason I always remember to recognise the harrier
– he carries on glancing back at the bird from the road until he cannot any more without craning his neck –
STEVE: I used to think all these environmental types were just out to scaremonger. But then when I worked the tar sands I changed my mind. And you know, I can’t get my head around why I ever doubted them. These guys who just want to see the world green. Over these corporations with big money in their pockets
– he talks about it all with an odd kind of affection – custodial attentiveness that makes it seem as though he is talking as part of the Albertan psyche rather than out of a personal fondness or interest –
STEVE: But hey. Who am I to moan? Driving my car?
– he sits quietly for a few seconds, as though waiting for her to cut the camera – agitatedly, he fidgets his hands, reaches to the glove box –
STEVE: You want a mint?
– he unwraps a mint between his fingers with his wrists steering the wheel from the top – the camera shudders as Erin reaches for a mint –
CUT
GOT LAND? THANK AN INDIAN
Steve drove me all way into Edmonton to where I was being picked up even though it was out of his way. He took the petrol money and gave me his email so he could see himself in the finished product when it came about. I thought about all the footage I have, about how Steve was not really talking about what I had told him my documentary was about. But he was talking about how Alberta is a whore and even if he did not quite know it, he was talking indirectly about women too, and the significance that it took a woman with a stolen body to write Silent Spring.
Sam’s parents left the farm a few days ago for a fortnight, to visit his mum’s family on their reservation over in British Columbia. Sam is a couple of years older than me and Berry is seventeen. They both have similar chin-length raven-black hair, but Berry’s face is much too soft and pretty for them to look too much alike, although they both have the same defiant jawbone. I had to do a bit of introspection and even read back over our emails to try to figure out why I had presumed they were a white family. Maybe it was the all-Canadian-sounding names.
The homestead is just north of Rocky Mountain House, a small town around two hours away from Edmonton. The drive leading up to the homestead from the main road is unpaved and winds through pine trees. Two chickens scuttled out of the way of the car as we pulled up the drive. In the clearing of the forest that surrounds their house, which is a large cabin, there is a totem pole reaching the height of the cabin and half again. I did not want to ask just yet how typical this is. There is a small shed to the right of the cabin and behind the trees fall out onto a meadow where they have a vegetable plot, paddies, a chicken coop and a shed with four yellow plastic kayaks stacked against it. At the far end a wide stream marks the boundary to their land.
Around the chicken-roost shed I counted five chickens, and more wandering around. They collect the eggs from the roost every morning and sometimes they eat the chickens. In a pen next to the roost were three speckled pigs, mucking about, two larger and one smaller. They take the bigger ones for breeding every year and raise up the piglets for market, keeping just one back to slaughter themselves for cured meat. The smaller of the three pigs was the keeper and they were fattening her up. The chickens, one pig, fish they catch from the river and the things they shoot hunting are the only meat they eat.
We grazed the pigs, letting them out from the paddy to forage through the forest for mushrooms and roots and berries and worms and things. We were assigned one pig each. I learned to move them by tap-tapping them on the flank with a stick and manoeuvring them with my legs. I followed my pig close because he kept moving and I was frightened of losing him.
The forest was awake with sound, a medley of territorial and cat calls. Now and again I would zone in on a trill I thought I knew, like picking up on a phrase recognised on a foreign street. Blackbird, wren, wood thrush, starling. And squirrels chattering at us from the trees, him digging up their nuts with his snout.
Sunlight filtered down through the canopy in diagonal beams and motes floated through them. My pig chattered happily and I was thinking to myself, yes, pig, this is what happiness is; when alone, being alone without people or people things, noticing selfacutely, and with a kind of fondness.
I asked if the chickens ever run away. Sam said they don’t because they feed them and the chickens are happy here. I asked if they ever get eaten. He said Grey the dog chases away the weasels and the cats, but sometimes he misses one and they lose chickens. This just happens sometimes, and since the chickens are not exactly theirs
they can’t get angry about them being taken away, they just feed them and sometimes the chickens give them eggs and seem to accept that every now and then they kill one to eat. I think this is very philosophical.
For dinner we had fish that had been smoked in their smoke house, and vegetables and potatoes from their plot. I am staying put for a few weeks, to decompress before the final push. This is going to be the perfect place to go into the whole helping-out-a-stranger-in-exchange-for-food-and-board thing. Like being a Samaritan in old times, but the idea is that I learn shit about organic living.
In the documentary this will be a few weeks of time-out skimmed over in a few short clips of idyllic pastoral living, like Kerouac, McCandless et al. working on flour mills and the like to pay their way across the States. Rest time and recuperation, a big breath before the deep plunge. Since I got to Sam’s I have this enduring feeling of serenity. I have caught it up for now, the thing, and its glow gives off enough warmth to bask in.
BECOMING A RIVER AND SLEEPING LIKE A RIVER
Sam and I took kayaks out today. The lake was pellucid and the air barely moved. As we cut into the water with our paddles we startled fish. We could see them a metre underneath us the water was so clear. There was the sound of moving water and the feeling of being pulled away. The feeling of sitting in a little vessel on top of an indifferent intensity, the feeling of being buoyant on the skin of depth. Big swathes of time would pass where neither of us would say anything to the other, just the rhythmical dipping of the paddles and the tinkle of drips from the blades. Behind us the mountains rose, diminished into lethargy by a hazy film of distance. Above the deep green forest, black shapes hovered and dipped.
We made it most of the way back upriver but in the end, when I especially was lagging and hardly pushing back against the current, we landed the kayaks and walked the rest. Sam drove to pick them up later and I went with him for company while a friend of his who had come to stay, a guy from the town called Ollie, made dinner with Berry. I can’t help but stare at Sam every time his talking gives me an excuse to. His hands are always dirty. Not gross dirty, but earthy from the farm. I might have been paying a lot of attention to him to notice that his hands are always earthy. Heavy eyelids like crescent moons.
In the truck he said, half joking, you’re good in a kayak, I didn’t know you had kayaks in England. I told him we do, and that I was good because I had been in kayaks lots as a Girl Guide. He found the fact that I was a Girl Guide really amusing. He said, ‘I hear you sing Indian songs around the campfire too?’
I told him there was a song about an Indian in a kayak we used to sing actually.
He said, ‘That’s funny. We never sing about Girl Scouts.’
A REAL MOUNTAIN
Sam said he did not know why I would want to go there, but he took me anyway: the famous Banff Park. The sky was practically cloudless and everything crisp with colour. Ollie rode up front with Sam, so I sat in the truck bed with Grey. To look out over the top of the van’s roof from the back meant positioning my face in the stream of air forced over it, which stung my eyes and wrapped my hair into tight little knots. The only viable way to sit was facing backwards on the bench with Grey wrapped over me, because even though Sam said he always rode in the back I was nervous about him getting excited and bailing over the side.
Not being able to see ahead on the journey gave me a novel perspective. The Rockies started to crawl into my view. Grey knew them, his eyes twitching to them frantically. I watched the fixed point where the road disappeared at the horizon as it all rushed past and towards it, the mountains sluggishly because they had further to go.
I am getting towards the real Wild North now, like I had imagined the frontiers-land, the Yukon, to look. Not quite there yet but I can start to feel its tremor. Looking at it, you get why all the Mountain Men do not care to keep any company if they can just keep company with the mountains, so sure and majestic and other-than-you-are.
But the road rushing away underneath does something strange. Makes it feel spectral, staged, to be seen but not really felt, like how walking through an underwater tunnel at the Sealife Centre is not anything like swimming in it. Every now and then the sides of the road would rise up and show the flat innards of some great rock or crust, layers of sediment and scars where the road cuts through.
Walking through the forest, Sam chose the least scenic but most secluded route, leading through thick pine forest. Grey rushed around in a frenzy, snuffing up stories, like maybe the coyote that killed its prey dead here, or a three-year-old hare that was caught by its leg already lamed a week ago in another scuffle, that time with a wolverine, and it knew that it could not be so lucky twice. It ran some way then lay down so as not to prolong the inevitable and gave itself to the coyote.
Grey smelled its before and its death smell, then much later in the walk its after, where the coyote had passed it in its scat days after. He smelled the terror of the ground squirrel in its burrow but he catalogued the scent and left it because it was too deep out of the reach of his snout and there was much too much else to read to make time for digging. There was smell around a grand old tree with a thick trunk like the leg of a diplodocus and he ran around it excitedly yapping and cocked his leg to it. Perhaps it was a wolf smell and he was calling out to them and leaving a message in case they came back. Perhaps he was accepting the challenge of the scent of his primordial nemesis: the cat of the wild, the mountain lion.
Sam walked us through like a heritage tour guide who has been decades in the game so has all the knowledge but waning enthusiasm. He pointed out the Polyporaceae fungi, of the Badius genus, jutting from a tree, a pruned brown palm cupping water. He took a skeletal beehive, paper thin, a snakeskin doubled and redoubled, folded and helixed on itself, broke it apart in his hands to show us the chambered innards and crumbled it absently. It fell away like ashes.
He said, ‘Don’t you see that that is what it is? Empty? It is a museum to itself, like someone took the whole thing and replaced it with a replica, put it aside for us to experience.’ At first I thought he meant the beehive and I thought, that is very deep to get about a beehive, I am sure the bees have just moved home. But as we went along I began to think he might be talking about the park itself, like it was all a vacant symbol to him.
We walked for maybe a couple of hours and eventually came onto a lake from inside the trees. It was that opaque and turquoise blue that you can just about accept in photographs but on seeing it there in the real-world landscape I was incredulous. It had a kind of powdered texture, as if a giant had painted the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds and then swilled out their paintbrush in the water of the lake. Peyto Lake is fed by a glacier, Sam said, and in the warmer months the meltwater takes the rock flour it ground up underneath itself and spills it into the lake. When this happens the water of the lake gets called glacial milk.
I told them I had seen this before, in the very wildest place I know at home: my old quarry. The quarry was for limestone but it had been abandoned for years so filled up with rainwater. The rainwater mixing with the limestone dust makes a similar rock milk, although it is not as dramatic, but eerie, the hacked cliffs and flats still and blinding white like a moonscape doused with floodlights.
The quarry was fenced off because it was dangerous and also because it was a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Hunks of orange rust char it, the remains of miscellaneous pieces of machinery, but it is heavy with the presence of the fossils in its 430-million-year-old sediment. There are trilobites from the Silurian period when life was just beginning to crawl out of the sea, and as though to mirror this there are shallow pools writhing with rare newts. There is my nesting pair of peregrine falcons, which Sam says are considered particularly spiritual by Native Americans and Ancient Egyptians. Driven to local extinction in places by DDT in the 1960s, I tell them, but clawing back in this graveyard to humanity. Sometimes when I am there I imagine it is the far future and I am the last human on earth.
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But the wild of Peyto Lake is the conceptual opposite. It is modelled on life before, but really it is just a simulation. Sam made me see this. He seemed unfazed by the place and sat on the pebbled shore throwing sticks into the water for Grey. On the far shore we could see ants looking down into the lake from an overhang which Ollie told us was designated the most scenic viewpoint in Canada. He asked us if we didn’t think it could be as beautiful seen from the other way round.
I was glad that being with the boys gave me a backstage pass into the park and made me different to all the other tourists, even though that was exactly what I was. Sam probably couldn’t help thinking I was not any better than them either.
‘It’s just a spectacle to them,’ Sam said.
Ollie laughed and told him to shut up, the park was beautiful, and if it weren’t for all the tourists they would not have the money to keep it open and conserved.
‘It’s beautiful, yes, but in a different way to how it should be. Doesn’t it worry you that it will end up with only preserving real mountains, picture-postcard ones? With waterfalls and snow on top and its image reflected in a lake? What about where we live? How long until the river is polluted because people have real mountains put aside to go visit in a park?’
And Sam is right. At home our quilted landscape is fully exploited and the wild is relegated to special parks. Spaces set aside for preservation are museums, and their segregation makes it okay to debase anything outside of them. Parks are time capsules and that itself seems a futile admission of the falling-apart of nature.
I chewed on my sandwich. Ollie took his time formulating a reply. ‘But no one would care about mountains at all if there wasn’t somewhere for them to come and see real ones.’ I could not disagree with him either.
