by Brian Brett
5
WALKING THE LAND
IT'S A GOOD habit to walk the land every morning after breakfast, checking the fences, the livestock, meditating on the past and the future. I don’t do it enough. We bought the farm because of its landscapes. It includes a forest grove of cedars with up to six-foot-thick trunks, pasture land, and classic Gulf Island rocky knolls. It also has a half acre of swampland, which we’ve nurtured with ponding to protect the marshy edges against the changing climate and to give us water for irrigation and waterfowl—wild and domestic.
The house is entered by a long cedar deck with herbaceous borders. To the left the middle of three lawns is currently owned by the puppy, Bella. This is where she discovers the world at night and in the early hours of the morning. Her most coveted possessions are littered around its central Turkish fig tree—a broom head, a crumpled peacock’s tail feather, two shredded teddy bears (she’s been raiding the grandchildren’s toy box again), our garden twine in a big jumble, several gnawed plant pots and a deer antler, an ancient lead toy soldier (where did that come from?), and the remains of a slipper. Carnage. Is this how we learn the world, by chewing on the relics?
The Turkish fig has its own story. I was given a cutting from a much-admired shade tree on Hornby Island, also north of us. We rooted our cutting and planted it in the middle of our lawn—protected from the deer by the dogs and the high fences. It never occurred to me that it needed protection from us until Olive, demonstrating her best black Labrador characteristics, decided to eat it. Fortunately, this was in the fall, so I trimmed the tree back to the ground, mulched the pathetic little stump, and erected a protective fence. The fig shot up in the spring, and I kept it shielded another year, until Olive was older, and I decided to release it before we held one of our “pig parties,” where we cook a pig on a spit and invite a hundred or so friends and family to spend the weekend on the farm. I was watching from the greenhouse when our first guest arrived, overloaded with unassembled tenting parts, and as she walked by the fig whip, she neatly cut it off at a foot high, without even noticing what she’d done. Back up went the fence. I started worrying about this tree.
Today it stands fifteen feet high and provides large, sweet brown figs yearly. It will soon be a fine shade tree. Poor Olive is so arthritic she will probably not see another summer. She is looking toward the stones under the willow tree that mark the history of our dead in this eighteen-yearlong day.
MY WALKS USUALLY BEGIN at the Chinese-style moon gate beyond the deck, then follow the dirt road around the barn into the cedar forest, which is dark and serene and needle-carpeted. Like most stable temperate rain forests it’s quiet, because most birds and animals prefer the margins where the shrubs thrive with food and protection. Despite the silence and their invisibility, I know life is about. Ravens in the treetops; deer, raccoons, mink in the salal; the smaller animals tucked into rotten logs. A red-shafted flicker swoops between the trees, and sometimes I see a gaudy tanager. This is the night territory of the barred owls who disturb our sleep and make the chickens tremble. The dogs love the forest and race after its mysterious scents. We reach the gate to our lower field, and I survey the split-rail fencing that borders our neighbour’s pasture. Among her horses she has a young stallion our ancient mare, LaBarisha, finds irresistible; she knocks down the rails to get at him, despite our neighbour’s sturdy horse fence on the other side of ours.
A mare in flush is not a sight for the faint of heart. Her vulva pulsates and drips gallons, occasionally squirting. Her “heat” is almost alien in its energy. I pile the rails back into place, then return uphill through a grotto of maple and cedar to the top pasture and the ponds.
AT THE WEEPING WILLOWS beside the main pond the world is all rhythm, the breeze-rocked branches like jellyfish tentacles in a current. The mallards and the pintails are muttering, circling in the water. Under the largest willow is a clutter of stones marking the lost animal heroes of the farm, the dead we’ve accumulated over the years. It’s a good place to go to ground. The willows make a soothing swoosh above the graves.
Willow is a proto-Germanic word, derived from the word for “flexible.” Not only are the limbs flexible but so are the uses. We grow osier willows for the ornamental pussy willow market and special varieties for basket makers. We also sell the fasciated Sekka willow, which grows at eccentric angles and is much loved by ikebana enthusiasts and florists during catkin season. Our Chinese curly willow is another “stick” used by flower arrangers. Cutting and bundling them makes for a hectic month before Valentine’s Day; then the market loses interest.
I love our market willows best in early spring, before they leaf. Their branches can be mottled or each one a different colour: scarlet, tangerine, maroon, yellow, brilliant green, black, displaying an assortment of narrow or fat catkins, also multicoloured. The willow is striking in every season. It is early to offer pollen and nectar to the honeybees, as well as important riparian habitat for songbirds, which hide and nest among its branches and feed on the buds. Willow water, derived from cuttings, is an excellent rooting compound. I often pour it on seedlings and struggling plants. Out of the bark comes salicylic acid—Aspirin—long known to Native healers as a treatment for rheumatism and fevers and pain relief. Florists toss an Aspirin into their rose displays. Some willow fanatics claim its water is also an aphrodisiac. Up by the house, Olive is always headfirst into the bucket of cuttings, sucking up the willow water, as if her body knows it’s good for her arthritic bones.
Willow roots yield a purple dye once used for colouring Easter eggs, and the wood has found a multitude of uses over the centuries: clogs, wheelbarrows, flooring, firewood, lumber for boats and houses, chariot-wheel spokes, brake blocks for railway cars, washboards in mills, Gypsy clothes pegs, coracles, sweat lodges, cricket bats, and, most importantly, wickerwork. There’s hardly a person who hasn’t sat in a wicker chair or held a wicker basket. In human hands willow has become lobster and eel trap, clothes hamper and beehive.
The willow is an antique creation—pollen has been found that’s 135 million years old. The ancients loved their willows. Orpheus carved the sound box of his lyre from willow, and ever since he carried the tree’s branches underground, the wind in the willows has been regarded as the song of poets. In Psalm 137, Jeremiah and his people hung their lyres on the branches of the willow trees (though authorities suspect they might have been poplars) and sat down beside “the rivers of Babylon” and wept, before he endorsed the dashing of Babylon’s children against stones. Thus the weeping willow came to be carved on tombstones. Some have thought that the name Wicca derives from wicker, as the willow was associated with witchcraft. Homer’s Circe kept a riverside cemetery planted with willow, dedicated to dark Hecate and the moon magic she controlled. The branches continue to be used for divining rods and witches’ wands. Those born in March are known as “willow people,” and they are said to be beautiful and melancholy. Willows were also placed in coffins. Along with protecting the dead, willow nurtures the infertile, and sterile women lay branches in their beds. Willow is about as multipurpose as you can get.
Beyond the willows, amid the orchard, are the farm’s two hives, and the bees are making their first forays into the day as the sun warms the hives.
“THEY ’RE SINGING THE QUEENLESS song,” the old beekeeper said. A tall, thin man who doesn’t appreciate fools, he’s known by islanders as the “honeyman” of Fulford Road. Once, he was a mathematics teacher, but the bees snatched him. These days he’s a swarm of advice, educated in many things, and his knowledge makes him cranky on occasion. I go to him for instruction. After he’s finished lecturing me about the failures of my generation, the secrets spill out— he’s generous despite himself as he tells the stories of a lifetime among insects. They’ve spoken to him for so many years I think he’s become ashamed of his own species.
My initial hive was troubled. Even an amateur like me knew it, so I stuffed the entrances with foam and bound it with the bungee cor
ds he’d given me, humped the hive onto my pickup, and drove it to his cluttered yard. As soon as I dropped the tailgate and we stood listening, he knew she was gone. A hive is always talking to itself. This one was humming grief. There was no queen, and all the larval cells were too old to convert into a queen—the hive was doomed, its last survivors wandering mournfully on the empty combs without purpose. A sick hive can even smell different. The odour of the combs, their colour, and their density constantly vary—red, thick and blackish, pale and fluid, or even crystallized like sweet amber. Resting my hand on the lid, I felt a low, sad thrumming. A healthy hive is aggressive if disturbed, and a couple of guard bees will immediately leap into the air. If I bang the hive an angry mob will kamikaze toward me.
When a bee stings, the exquisitely designed barb, its tip composed of two lancets jabbing alternately, sucks itself under the skin until the apparatus snaps off at a breakaway point and remains in the flesh, venom sac attached, shouting an olfactory war cry, as the bee stumbles off and dies, self-eviscerated. The released scent of the sting directs new warriors to the ambush site. Meanwhile, after seven minutes the venom sac reactivates and pumps in another shot. I’ve watched this often; the intestines act like a thinking organism.
When I approach a hive, even if the advance guards do not sting they will seize me with their mandibles and dab me with a volatile odour that will lure other guards, who will decide if I am worthy of the sacrifice, since every sting means suicide. Only the queen can sting repeatedly. Bee venom is a miraculous substance, composed of seventy-six chemicals, which interrelate in a way that amplifies their effects—a tiny stinger slightly thicker than a pin can kill people with sensitive immune systems.
“Deadly poisons,” according to Ovid, “are concealed under sweet honey.” But a poison is only a medicine delivered in the wrong dose. Bee venom has been used for centuries to treat diseases like arthritis and, more recently, multiple sclerosis. Some api-therapists have suggested that acupuncture originated from studying the effects of bee stings on various parts of the body. I have a neighbour afflicted with ms. Every two days his wife uses tweezers to place live bees on the key acupuncture points of his spine. He showed me his back once—symmetrically inflamed by the healing stings. Paralyzed down one side when the disease first struck, he now fast-walks past my gate every morning, with only a slight numbness remaining in two fingers. The effects of bee-sting therapy vary wildly, and the disease can return. Others report that it merely helped them wiggle their toes. For someone with ms that is encouraging news. Hope is huge in the world.
What first drew me to the bees was my arthritis. I stung myself for several weeks. It was a curious experiment. Since Sharon is allergic, I kept a jar of bees in the spare bedroom in our barn. I’d lift a bee out of the jar with tweezers and hold it against my skin. The rush was brutal, especially by the time thirty barbs hung like tiny fetishes from my knees. The adrenalin would speed up my metabolism, pounding my heart against my chest, my skin alive with sensitivity, and I’d leak an awful-smelling sweat that enthusiasts claim is the body’s toxins oozing out. Then, in several minutes, the stings would deliver their second poison-injecting pulse. After fifteen minutes I’d remove the stingers. They slid out easily if I got the angle right. I’d sit and gaze at the water jar where I crushed and drowned the doomed bees (a bee doesn’t die quickly after releasing its sting), and I’d feel overwhelmed with the sadness of the world. During the next days my sweat ceased to stink, and I found myself more energized. I lost weight. The pain in my knees went away. However, after six blessed weeks, the arthritis returned, so I ended the treatment, but I decided to purchase some bees anyway. I guess you could say I’d been stung.
For too many people today bees are scary. There is something about tiny, crawling, stinging creatures that instinctively repels us. Seals are cute; bees, spiders, wasps—we squash. Yet through a microscope, or in a close-up photograph, they are lush, brilliant, seductive creatures— as beautiful as tigers and flamingos.
The life of the hive, like much of farm life, is female. Males serve for stud service or slaughter. In the hive, every worker can become a queen—if she is fed royal jelly—but one suffices. Multiple drones hatch in the spring. Big and useless, they roam around like bumbling bachelors, enjoying the run of the combs, living in luxury, sometimes moving unrestricted from hive to hive, awaiting their glory moment. The young queen will make several preliminary flights, scouting her kingdom, perhaps to remember it for the dark years within the hive that lie ahead. Then one day she will leap out of her hive and take to the air, releasing a jet trail of pheromones, emitting a chip-chip-chip sound as she lunges for the sun. So loud is her cry, so strong her odour, males will find her from ten miles away. Those that fly the highest and fastest will reach her in the “drone zone,” a hundred feet above ground. Obsessive beekeepers claim they’ve heard the snap of their tiny genitalia as they break away from the queen and tumble to the ground, ripped apart by their one act of copulation. Sex and death with altitude.
Once is not enough for a queen. She will accept several drones, ensuring the genetic diversity of the hive, each one having to lunge higher and harder in the ecstatic nuptial flight, lushly described in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee, perhaps the most romantic passage on natural history ever written. After the nuptial flight, she returns triumphant, trailing her lovers’ genitalia like streamers, and the failed drones revert to their old bachelor mode, mumbling about the hive while the female workers grow more annoyed with them until, in what’s known as the “summer slaughter of the drones,” they are evicted. Some will fight bitterly, uselessly, as the relentless females shove them out of the hive, suicidally stinging them to death if they resist, heaping up clumps of bodies on the landing and tumbling them down into the waiting mandibles of wasps.
For thousands of years the Americas thrived without the honeybee. Pollination was accomplished by bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees, stingless bees, and other insects. Mesoamericans learned how to extract some honey from varieties of bumblebee. Then, only a few centuries ago, Native Americans gazed in horror at a sky full of “stinging flies.” The arrival of a honeybee swarm meant that white colonialists were not far behind, eager to seize and change the land.
Now in this new world, small farmers like myself are also endangered. Modern agribusiness spends more money on chemicals than on machinery or seed. Their pesticides are poisoning millions of bees, already suffering from other introduced pests, such as foulbrood—a bacterium that eats bee larvae from inside out—varroa mites, tracheal mites. The wild European honeybee is approaching extinction, the large commercial apiary operations floating in a plethora of chemicals. Our islands, until ten years ago, were the last in North America to produce organic honey, but the mite was illegally introduced by an ignorant beekeeper, and now we have to use chemicals also, merely to keep our bees alive.
Yet I stubbornly continue to learn the world of the singing bees, who teach me small new lessons every day while going about their lives. Civilization, communication, progress— these are the myths we tell ourselves. I don’t have faith in them anymore, but what’s left of the natural world, though it’s often brutal, I can still love. Resting my hand on a hive, I feel the thrum of the bees’ conversations, and I dream about the mysteries they are discussing inside. Sometimes, on my better days, I think that language is just another word for the poetry of the earth.
ONE OF THE GLORIES of living on the land is the freedom to fertilize it, and the need is suddenly upon me. I’ve always felt a secret enjoyment pissing beside a tree when the body makes its demands. I avoid the smaller plants because I don’t want to feed them too much concentrated nitrogen. Elimination outdoors used to be common for our species, but as we move away from the land, it’s become unusual. I love watching the expression of bliss on Sharon’s face when she suddenly drops her pants and squats in the woods. Maybe we just recognize the growing repressions of culture, and there’s a special pride in regaining
our freedom. Though, after a while, I’ve found I’ve become so used to freedom I sometimes catch myself looking for a likely tree in the city, and realize rural life has created dangerous habits.
SURROUNDING THE HIVES, the orchard is in full leaf, seeds and fruit already swelling. I stride past them, followed by the dogs. Pecan, almond, quince, pear-apple, hazelnut. The apples are the most diverse—heirloom varieties: Wolf River, king, Cox’s orange pippin, Lodi, Gravenstein, Boscoop. I shut the field gate and pass the white hawthorns, newly planted to shade our driveway. I’ve nearly come full circle, heading toward the barn, the moon gate, and the house.
The sun never sets on this land. In winter it’s a grey ball permeating the mists. To the west a hill blocks the luxurious coastal sunsets. East, we look upon the United States, across the blue, metallic skin of the Pacific Ocean—more islands, the glaciers of the coast range, and a volcano, Mount Baker, coughing up a spittle of steam. Beyond that a continent vibrating with life and urgency. We live at the edge of the ring of fire—the volcanic Pacific Rim. Streaky clouds unfold over the coastal mountains, reflecting off the strait between Salt Spring and Pender Island. Standing in the driveway above the garden, looking down beyond the low field between two maples, I watch a ferry, as big as a cruise ship, slide between the islands.
The garden rail fence is lined with mulberry, kiwi, winterberry, climbing rose, and eucalyptus whose branches we sell to florists. Close to the house, in a fit of whimsy, we planted bananas and palm trees, so very un-Canadian, but they’re surviving in our temperate climate. The queasy acknowledgement of this menagerie haunts me on occasion. I remember when we arrived, pulling up with a five-ton truck filled with trees and shrubs. “You’re bringing trees to the Gulf Islands?” my friend said, laughing. These islands are known for their lush, unique flora and fauna, and the first thing I did was introduce strange trees, fool that I was.
