by Angela Long
I decided to treat myself to some comfort food – a bag of lime-and-black-pepper potato chips that cost almost four dollars. I reminded myself that things were more expensive in the North. They’d travelled long distances by sea and air to arrive there, and then 110 kilometres on a road riddled with clear-cuts, bolting deer, and the occasional herd of wild cattle. I was lucky I didn’t have to hunt and forage to survive up here. Really, no one had any business expecting to find a bag of carnaroli rice in the ethnic foods section. I should have been happy with a taco kit and a bottle of China Lily soy sauce.
Yes, just a few days ago I’d been living in Italy. But there was no need to talk about the delights of Italian markets, warm temperatures, and a boyfriend who did things like fold my fresh-off-the-line panties into perfect, origami-like squares. His charming accent was irrelevant now.
Now it was time to choose produce. The rumbling of a thunderstorm played as a fine mist settled over the wilted lettuce. I took a deep breath and moved along to things with longer shelf lives: apples, potatoes, squash. My mother had once told me it was important to eat well no matter how broken-hearted I felt. I loaded my cart with anything that hadn’t begun to rot, disregarding the prices and the fact that it was almost summer and I was buying items fit for a Thanksgiving feast.
While living in Guatemala, David had told me he thought it crazy anyone should choose to live in the North. He’d visited Montréal in January, and that was enough to convince him all Canadians were nuts. “I never once left the underground malls,” he’d drawled while swinging on his hammock. “I feared for my life.”
I’d argued we had four seasons – including summers hot enough for air-conditioning. But that was before I’d lived on Canada’s Northwest coast.
I zipped up my puffy black MEC vest and loaded my groceries. On the drive along Tow Hill Road, the trees were just starting to unfurl their leaves. The first time I’d travelled this road, one of those “this is it” feelings had welled up inside me. The sky had been very blue. The trees as multifaceted as emeralds flashing in the sunlight. At a bend in the road, a sherry-coloured river mouth, grassy dunes, and a great swath of topaz ocean had burst into view. That feeling had kept me here months longer than I’d intended to stay. On a second visit, only an offer to live in Italy had pulled me away.
But now I was wondering why I’d returned. There was nothing here, just the odd house with smoke snaking from its chimney into a grey sky. I stopped just before the sign for Naikoon Provincial Park, at my last chance to make contact – a phone booth. I called Italy. No answer. I left a message in a tiny voice. “Help!” I felt like crying.
Maybe David had been right to choose to live in a country where you could sleep naked and walk barefoot and flowers bloomed year-round.
I turned off the ignition. For the first time in several days, I stopped moving. I stood still beneath the gigantic spruce guarding the cabin’s front door. I breathed. I’d forgotten how fresh air could be. I breathed in air that had been filtered by oceans of evergreens and laced with saltwater mists.
For the first time in a long while, I was alone. Not the kind of alone when I’d been sipping cappuccino in the piazza. No one was going to walk up this dirt path through the forest.
Not many people, besides another Canadian, would understand the sense of possibility that arose on truly reaching the North. It was a feeling of liberty of the rarest kind. Perhaps it was reward for braving the elements and eating wilted produce. It was cold and nothing would bloom for awhile. But I was alone and the air was fresh. I could squat on the moss and pee if I wanted to. Sing at the top of my lungs.
It began to rain. A heavy-looking axe leaned against the woodshed. It was time to pick up that axe and split logs down their seams. There was no such thing as gentleness here. I had to learn quickly to be tough – it was the only way to keep warm. I picked up the axe. This was it. I swung, hoping to hit the right spot.
Dear Jessica
Not much has changed since that morning when the sunrise barely made its mark in the sky because the smog was so thick. You and I were on the rooftop doing downward-facing dogs. I started crying for some reason or another. You kept your arms straight, heels pushed to the ground, and listened. We went for a walk through alleyways filled with vendors selling bangles, nose-rings, and bindis. Later we painted our toenails, blood red, up there on that rooftop, just as the sun was setting and the kites rose into the sky. Now I’m crying again. A different place. A different posture. I feel like that sunrise that couldn’t make its mark in the sky. I know this will pass. I just have to think of those kites, the ones that broke free from their strings, how they soared for a few moments, startled by such freedom. How they fell so gracefully then, into the boughs of bodhi trees.
The Sounds of Silence
They say silence is golden. I’ve searched for it far and wide, not even knowing what I was looking for, at first. The quest began in the spring of 1999 on Inis Mór, an island off the west coast of Ireland. I was twenty-eight at the time. My days were spent digging potato drills. Dermot, the farmer who’d been foolish enough to take me on as a volunteer WWOOFer (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) said, “I’ve never met a woman who can handle a shovel like you.”
Dermot would never guess that my shovel fervour was rage-induced. Every thrust was a blow to the red-headed woman with whom Michel had fallen in love. As I dug I imagined her standing by the pine kitchen table I’d sanded by hand, mincing onions with the Henckel knife I’d forgotten when I’d driven away with all the possessions I could fit into our Subaru. I hated them both and the potatoes knew it. Dermot should have been afraid. Instead, he told the islanders, a tight-knit clan of Gaelic speakers whose ancestors had survived the Great Famine of 1845-1849 and were wary of all blow-ins (anyone who hadn’t lived there since 500 AD), that I was a brilliant worker. Work offers poured in. Soon I was cleaning toilets at Mainistir House Hostel, waitressing at The Bayview, and planting arugula at The Man of Aran Cottages. I rode a bike to all those places, usually against a wind that could blow you to a standstill and whisked the North Atlantic into a froth that crashed against 350-foot-high cliffs until the ground shook.
I was so busy cycling, scrubbing, brewing tea, and digging that I scarcely noticed I’d come to one of the most peaceful places on earth, a place people fantasized about, planning week-long visits years in advance. I met some of those people at the Man of Aran Cottages while tending the roses – clipping and tying with savage precision – as I imagined Michel and his new love listening to Jacques Brel, to our song, “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” the lyrics playing over and over in my head.
I met the silent seekers as they sat gazing out at a sparkly sea with the mountains of Connemara as a backdrop. They had a look in their eye, like they’d been drugged. They sat on picnic tables beside whitewashed cottages, novels face-down, staring straight ahead. It was Paulette from Paris who spoke to me first. “You must feel so at peace living here,” she said. I dead-headed the roses, imagining someone else’s fiery little head resting in my palm. I tossed the petals to the wind and smiled. Paulette told me how she’d dreamed of coming here for years, but she’d been too busy, first with family, then with her career as a curator for the Louvre. And now she could finally just sit for hours on end, drinking the silence like a fine French wine. “This is one of the last silent places in Europe.”
Silence. Is that what I’d heard the day I’d arrived, while waiting for Dermot in Kilronan? The tide had been out. There were no cars. No wind. Just a sound as though the air had been sucked up into the wide swath of sky and stretched taut against the grey. Just air scrubbed clean by wind and rain, empty of anything but the present. I’d panicked, examining the present moment for the first time. Stone buildings. Stone walls. A stone-coloured sea. Nothing but cold, dead, silent stone. What on earth was I doing here? I’d watched the ferry head back to bustling, crayon-box-of-colours, flowers-in-the-window-box Galway
City. The last ferry. I was stuck. Stuck with twenty pounds to my name and a broken heart.
Obviously Paulette thought I was one of them. One of the silent ones. She didn’t realize I did everything I could to fill my hours with as much sound as possible. Sound was my friend. Sound was life. If it wasn’t the battery-operated radio, it was the guitarist roommate from County Cavan who knew every Irish folk song by heart. It was the Walkman. It was the cello-playing, ballad-singing Nickie. It was the football match at Tí Joe Macs, the Irish dancing at Tigh Fitz, the cover band at Joe Watty’s.
Silence scared me. Especially on those days I hiked along the cliffs, singing “The Dawning of the Day” until I arrived at Dún Dúchathair, the Black Fort. Here, enclosed by ringfort walls, the Atlantic was finally muffled. The wind stilled. There was a feeling that I should whisper, tread lightly, that maybe the rocks had eyes. It was an eerie kind of place, but I was drawn there more and more as spring turned to summer, as the potatoes sprouted, and wildflowers burst forth from the grikes.
The Black Fort became a place of refuge from my non-stop noisy thoughts – Michel and his petit chou now in the throes of a Montréal summer, likely sunbathing at Parc Lafontaine, drinking La Fin du Monde at outdoor terraces. I lay on the sun-warmed stone, drinking my first taste of silence. Paulette had been right – this stuff was good, addictive, even. I lay on the stone staring up at the sky until my ears pricked up – tourists. Clatter of shale. Voices amplified across fields of limestone. The Italian tour groups. The lads from Dublin. I was annoyed before I even saw their faces. Annoyed by their feckless joy at making noise. I skittered along the cliffs like a wild animal being pursued until it was safe again, until it was silent.
In the eleven years since I first went to Ireland, I’d climbed Chichén Itzá, rowed down the Ganges, lived beside a Renaissance-era castle in Italy. I’d moved to an off-the-grid cabin called the Spare Girl in the middle of a temperate rainforest on Canada’s Northwest coast.
It was there, on Haida Gwaii, that I read One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet, in which acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton asks: “Have you heard the rain lately?” That summer of 2010, I definitely heard the rain. It fell hour after hour, day after day. The pattering upon cedar plank roof, the drip-drip-drip, the streaming from eavestrough to water barrel, the gush of a thousand pregnant black clouds whose water had broken – I knew the sound well.
Gordon Hempton travelled the world to prove what I feared: silence is an endangered species. Fewer and fewer places exist on this planet where you can sit for twenty minutes without hearing the noise of human activity. Thrum of traffic, hum of refrigerator, rumble of jetliner. But noise-cancelling headphones and triple-glazed windows aren’t the solution. “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything,” Hempton says. Silence can only be found in the natural soundscape – the sound of the rain, the “falling whisper of the snow,” the “passing flock of chestnut-backed chickadees.” Hempton set out across America in a 1964 VW bus to record a sonic EKG of the country, measuring the dropping of a maple leaf (thirty decibels), the distant call of an owl (thirty-five decibels), the hum of insect wings (twenty-four decibels), a starry night on the prairie (eighteen decibels). Within these natural EKGs we can find our birthright, the sounds our ears have been perfectly evolved to hear. We can find ourselves.
I wanted to find myself. But how could I when my Haida Gwaii neighbours fired up their chainsaws while I was listening to the chestnut-backed chickadees swoop from spruce bough to spruce bough? When the Albertans rode through the sand dunes in their ATVs? When the clam diggers roared down Tow Hill Road in their pick-up trucks? I wanted to find myself. I wanted to see what lay buried beneath the din of thirty-nine years of chatter.
I took the batteries out of the clock. I listened to the rain. I listened for weeks. And then the winds began. Hurricane-force winds that started as an innocent rustling of alder leaves and progressed to a banshee-filled freight train whomping the cabin, sending the woodsmoke running down the stove pipe and into the kitchen. I listened to the silence until I couldn’t bear it for another second.
I drove in search of insulated walls rather than driftwood logs chinked by moss and newspaper. I was beginning to understand, finally, in a deep, experiential sense of the word, that nature wasn’t a docile thing filled with birdsong and a spring breeze blowing through the trees. Nature was no more static than silence was empty. Nature was full, full of the sound and the fury. And I was nature.
And so I found myself. Drinking a vanilla latté at The Ground on Haida Gwaii. I tried to do what I’d learned in India – breathe. Inhale-One-Exhale-Two. I tried to listen to the natural soundscape of my mind. Instead I heard myself thinking about the ridiculous price of the bag of cherries I’d just bought, the way Surfer Jeff had looked at me at the post office (did he like me or was he just stoned?), the rumour of an earthquake, the program on CBC about biophilia, the student loan repayment assistance plan application form.
Even back at the Spare Girl, where it was quiet enough to hear a huckleberry drop on the moss, the inner noise persisted. Should I order wood from Smokin’ Joe or Kevin Deacock? Should I make focaccia for the potluck?
Would I ever hear the silence of the natural soundscape with a mind like the one Goenka described during those evenings at Dhamma Bodhi in India? A mind “so wild, like a wild animal, a monkey mind, grasping one branch after another.” It all sounded so good, this search for silence. Inhale-One-Exhale-One. Surf crashing. Inhale-Two-Exhale-Two. Branch cracking.
Nabob Tins and Turkish Carpets
We stood at Gate C and my mother began to cry. She’d been saying good-bye to me for twenty years, since I’d first left home and flew to Frankfurt from Toronto. There had been ferry terminal, bus station, front porch, campground, car-door, and at least a dozen more airport good-byes. She cried no matter where we were and regardless of whether it would be a month or a year till we met again. Once she told me that watching your child leave home, even if she was a fully-grown woman, was “like ripping your heart out and watching it walk through the door.”
Every time I left it became clearer and clearer that I, her only daughter, would never settle down. We’d never sew curtains together or examine carpet swatches. We’d never re-paint the bathroom. This wouldn’t have been all that important if my mother wasn’t a domestic goddess – the type of person who knew how to remove any type of stain, who ironed her sheets. Of course she’d be driven to tears by a daughter who’d never owned an iron, who’d always slept on futons, and stored her clothing in milk crates.
It hadn’t always been like this. There were times when I’d dreamed of three-bedroom houses and picket fences. When my mother and I had shopped happily for clothes together – feminine garb – things that called for ironing and matching tights. There had been talk of marrying at twenty-one and bearing three children. This must have been when my mother had started to save things for me – silverware, china, linens. She never envisioned they’d be stored in her mahogany armoire forever.
Those had been the late-teens, early-twenties years when my mother still had hope, when she called her daughter “my little gypsy.” When she’d thought it was all a phase.
There was no hope now. Now, I felt like crying with her. I was about to return to my remote refuge on Canada’s west coast – The Spare Girl cabin. It was built from items salvaged on the beach, and looked it. Nothing was finished. The logs were rough: chinked with moss and newspaper and a decades worth of dust, cat fur, ash, and who knew what else. Nails stuck out of the ceiling. Window frames were mismatched, their paint peeling. Carpenter ants nested in a perpetually damp corner where the eavestrough dripped into the rain buckets. Occasionally, piles of fine sawdust drifted down to let you know they were busy at the work of chewing the house down.
You didn’t have to be a person who grew up in a six-bedroom Victorian farmhouse with all the luxuries
of the day to be puzzled by your daughter’s most recent choice of abode. Sometimes I wondered about it myself. Sometimes I thought it might be nice to wake up in the morning and simply settle onto a warm toilet seat and go about my business rather than don a pair of rubber boots and trudge uphill through salal and huckleberry bushes to reach an outhouse. Sometimes it might be nice to turn on a tap and feel warm water cascade down my shoulders rather than fill a five-litre pot with rainwater, heat it on the woodstove, then funnel it into a bag fitted with a nozzle the size of a quarter.
But such inconveniences had their charms. There was something to be said about doing your business beneath a stand of towering spruce, or standing naked outdoors while showering to the sound of a thrush. There was something to be said for the cabin itself, how it felt like living inside a tree. It felt alive. An array of giant windows on all sides deepened this feeling. There were no escaping glimpses of ocean, sky, forest. Sound permeated the walls – raindrops, wind, birdsong, surf. I felt part of something much bigger than myself.
But I feared my mother wouldn’t appreciate these charms when she came to visit. I couldn’t really expect her to be a good sport about the black plastic stapled to the north side of the cabin, or the free-range chickens forever unearthing mysterious-looking fragments of garbage. It would be clearer than ever that Grandma’s silver tea-service would never be displayed on the cedar plank propped up by two giant Nabob tins that served as a side table.
A less stubborn daughter would have given in years ago. She would have settled into the type of place where you could lay down the Turkish carpet and prop up the antique china cabinet in the corner. She would have sat with her mother at the oak dining-room table carved with wreaths of flowers and poked napkins through ivory holders and discussed things like baby showers and Christmas cake recipes and family reunion picnics. They would have gotten to know one another amongst the solidity and endurance of such objects. They could have forged a bond on the rims of their porcelain tea cups, sipping where generations had sipped before.
