Copyright © 2012 by Scott Fotheringham.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Cover illustration: morguefile.com.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fotheringham, Scott, 1961-
The rest is silence [electronic resource] / Scott Fotheringham.
Electronic monograph in HTML format.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-0-86492-745-3
I.Title.
PS8611.O797R48 2012a C813’.6 C2011-907840-6
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Wellness, Culture, and Sport.
The author and publisher recognize the support of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.
Goose Lane Editions
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for
Alexa Macleod Fotheringham
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
— Middlemarch, George Eliot
Annie
We landed on the same branch.
It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
— J. Robert Oppenheimer
A farmer’s is a very healthy happy life; and the least hurtful, or rather the most beneficial profession of any.
— Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Best of any song
is bird song
in the quiet, but first
you must have the quiet.
— A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1999, Wendell Berry
This is what I’ve lost.
I was seven, growing up in a neighbourhood that had space for me to run. On an October afternoon, the air dry and cool, I was playing touch football in my backyard with my friends. Ripe pumpkins lay in our garden under the cloudless blue sky. Mom was at the kitchen window watching birds land on the feeder that she and I kept filled for them. The plenitude of summer had passed, easing us into the cold. That winter we would build the skating rink on the grass that was covered now with a collage of red and yellow leaves. Despite the end of things it was a dreamy time for a kid like me, for whom death was still an unexplored abstraction.
It was all so clean and clear, pure in its changing. I loved being in the world and the world loved me in October. How else to explain the smell of a forest full of crinkly leaves underfoot, the skeletal fingers of trees scratching against the sky, and the cold air on my ears hinting at frost in the nighttime? How else to explain the V of geese flying south over our house, all of us stopping mid-game to look heavenward, Mom rushing outside onto the lawn to come see? They were honking and flapping, saying goodbye to us, saying goodbye to what we had known of summer.
When they were a distant line, we could still hear their faint clamour. Then even that was gone and, not long after, her voice with it. I was left with an emptiness I hadn’t known before, an emptiness I was certain would stay with me forever.
That childhood innocence and the freedom to play are not all I’ve lost. I have lived to see parts of the world I loved as a kid ruined.
We learn from the mistakes we make, not those we avoid because someone warned us of them. We discover our own faith, unwrap what we believe and how we worship life, not by following age-old rituals out of duty but by asking questions about our suffering. The faith we discover and the choices we make have a large impact on who we become. Usually their impact on the rest of the world is small, but there are exceptions.
Take a scientist like Oppenheimer. When he and his colleagues were constructing the atom bomb at Los Alamos, they worried that the chain reaction that it depended on might use whatever it came in contact with as fuel — a perpetual-motion machine that would turn the Earth into a nuclear furnace like the sun. They guessed that the gun was not loaded, crossed their fingers, and played Russian roulette with the planet.
Humans are no good at shelving ideas. We insist that our inventions be used without much thought as to whether they will benefit us. Scientists have made some big errors, unleashing technologies we can’t control. We are paying for their mistakes.
I am an active member of this meddling species, compulsive and insistent, and I believe that technology can also be used to remedy what ails us. Perhaps this is only a justification for the mistakes I have made.
In the beginning was the word. Out of the void an idea is voiced, and for no other reason than being spoken, it inevitably becomes manifest. As the power of the split atom, once it was discovered, had to be acted upon; as we created GMOs once we were capable of genetic engineering; as human cloning is now possible, not because we need it, but because the technology exists: energy becomes matter, word becomes deed, the unmanifest is brought forth as form.
Don’t voice your ideas if you don’t want them realized.
1
Lily Lake Road
North Mountain, Nova Scotia
Islands of quiet remain, where we can hear birdsong and the air smells sweet, but they are shrinking. I have found one in the woods where I feel safe.
One way to get here is by the lone highway, curving through spruce forests like a scar, which connects this land to the harried continent at its back. You can trace the scar from New York all the way to Maine, through New Brunswick over marsh and by tidal rivers whose banks are slick red mud when the water is low. You will scream past the trees and the dead porcupines with their streaming guts on the side of the road to get where you think you need to be. And when you get to this point of land, surrounded by the sea assaulting its rocky shores, you have only two choices: stay and make it home or visit a while, then turn around and go back the way you came. For this is Nova Scotia, and Nova Scotia is the edge of the world.
Or else you can fly, over ages of trees and lakes and rock. Flap your wings and look upon the carpet of spruce and balsam fir colouring the land green from shore to shore. Fly until you see the broad valley with the apple orchards, a few vineyards on its slopes, and the river winding through it. Running along the northern edge of that valley, between it and the bay with the high tides, is an ancient mountain range made of volcanic rock. These mountains have been ground down over millennia by the winds off the salt water, by ice sheets advancing and retreating, by the rains from November to May, so that they now stand a mere nine hundred feet above the sea.
Atop this mountain ridge is a small clearing in the forest, low-lying and wet. If it’s winter you’ll see a skating rink, its edges curvy, interrupted by small islands bumping out of the ground on which birch and maple grow. The snow glistens on the spruce boughs in the bright sun. When you see this you can land and stay. Then you are home.
I am living on two hundred and fifty acres of forest on the crest of the North Mountain. I bought it from a local logging company that had taken everything here that was worth a dollar. The trees and stumps they left behind were of no value to anybody but me and the coyotes, deer, and songbirds. I love this place like nowhere else I’ve lived because nobody else wants it, and because of the tranquility of living alone in the woods, a half-mile from my nearest neighbour. A few thousand dollars and a piece of lawyer’s paper say I own this land, but I know it’s not mine and never will be. My tent, which I tucked under some white spruce, is surrounded on three sides by woods. Twenty feet from my tent I built an outdoor kitchen where I make all my meals, even in the rain and snow. I have an apartment-sized propane stove on an oak pallet. Where I hammered nails into the spruce to hold a pot and a frying pan, thick yellow sap creeps down the bark and hardens, not letting me forget the wound. My cutlery sits in a red enamel mug on a beaten-up table my neighbour Martin was throwing away. My drinking water, which comes from his well, is stored in one-gallon glass pickle jars I was lucky to find at a yard sale. From the kitchen there are paths worn to my tent and to the garden, and from the garden to the dirt road. I grow vegetables in no more than a couple feet of soil resting between outcroppings of bedrock. Even when I’m wet and cold there are days I am happier here than I remember being since I was a kid.
When I was twenty-eight I came here seeking anonymity, a cipher lost to the world I’d known as well as to this new one I’ve chosen to inhabit. I am an orphan, determined to leave behind those who are gone — dead and otherwise — from my life. My main purpose here, now that the world seems to be falling apart, is to learn to grow my own food and put down roots in this thin soil.
I woke this morning to another sunny day. It hasn’t rained once this hot August. After lunch I go for a tramp in the woods. The woods are thick behind my tent, even if the loggers have taken the big trees, and I want to visit the grove of white pine they missed. A light breeze blows along the mountain ridge. Cattle low to the east. It’s an eerie sound, disembodied, like ghosts floating between the trees, reaching me as I leave the clearing. I start on the rough road, walking in the ruts the skidders left behind. It’s a moss-covered logging road that has fir seedlings a foot tall growing out of it, one of which would make a lovely Christmas tree if I had a room to put it in. There are mushrooms dotting the route and carpets of crackerberry with white dogwood flowers. I see the occasional delicate balloon of a moccasin flower rising plump and pink above the forest floor. When I come to the marsh with its abundance of bulrushes and wild rhododendron, a pileated woodpecker raps on the tallest spruce for insects. A white-throated sparrow sings nearby and a trio of crows pass overhead. I spend days when birds are my only companions, and I am grateful for it.
When I first moved to New York I was mesmerized by things like the stream of red taillights heading up First Avenue, the surge of pedestrians everywhere I went, and the constant hum of voices, traffic, and construction. This contrast to the natural beauty I’d seen with my dad on our annual camping trips might have repelled me if I hadn’t been twenty-four. I was in awe for the first year, but the feeling wore off and the sirens and honking cabs grated instead of thrilled. After that I was a rat in a cage.
I find the pine grove and lie on the needles laid out for me like a russet mattress in the tree shadows. Soon I fall asleep. When I wake it is early evening. I start for home, but within a few minutes I have no idea where I am. Nothing is recognizable. The light between the trees darkens and there is no moon to light the way. I crash through the underbrush like a rutting bull moose, rushing from tree to tree until I can no longer see their trunks. I find one with my hand, fall to my knees, and rest my back against it, panting. It makes no difference whether I close my eyes, it is that dark.
Coyotes sound more real when you’re in their home than they do when you’re inside your own. There must be a dozen of them yipping in the blackness. It doesn’t calm me when they stop because I think they are sneaking up on me. I search on my hands and knees for a large stick, but all I find are branches that snap or crumble when I bend them.
I open my eyes at the crunch of boots snapping dry twigs. The shadowy light of false dawn brings tree branches into relief against the sky. Coming toward me is a man in a plaid hunting jacket, an orange cap, and leather work boots. I crouch behind the tree. The barrel of his rifle is aimed at the ground. I have yet to confront the hunters I know use this land each fall. Martin told me that the “No Hunting” signs I have painted and nailed to trees by the road might dissuade polite hunters, but already the signs have been shot up or torn down, and deer season doesn’t begin until October. Once the hunter is close enough for me to see, I recognize a man I met once but don’t much like. I stand up. He remembers me.
“You’re up early.”
“I slept out here.”
He looks at me, then smiles.
“You got lost, eh?”
He points into the forest. His hand is big like my father’s were, and all of a sudden I am small, standing at Dad’s side. A robin has hit our kitchen window so hard that it leaves feathers on the glass and we are sure it has broken its neck. We rush outside to find the bird lying on the patio beneath the window. Dad picks it up and confines it in his cupped hands, slowing its racing heart and keeping it warm. After a couple of minutes Dad opens his hands. The robin stands, shits onto his palm, and, with a jump, flies into the branch of a tree, where it regales us with a song I am certain is of thanks as much as of freedom.
“Your place is through there.”
Art starts walking and I follow him. We are at my tent site in less than five minutes. I offer to make him a cup of tea.
“You buy this place from Ernie Bent?”
I nod, then change the subject. “Did you shoot anything?”
“I forgot my shells. No matter. I like to walk these woods as much as hunt in them these days.”
“You’ve hunted here before?”
He laughs. “Son, my pop showed me how to shoot a .22 back here when I was this high.” He puts his hand by his hip. “I had a trapline running through these woods. Rabbits mostly. The occasional squirrel. It went from my place over this mountain and down into the valley.”
“You don’t trap anymore?”
“I had my fill of rabbit meat. I did it then ’cause I was young enough to enjoy it. That and I had to help out some way at home. I sold the rabbits Mother didn’t cook to folks for a quarter the pair. Some years there wasn’t much meat besides what I trapped.”
“I thought deer season doesn’t open till late October.”
“There’s more’n enough deer in these woods to go around. Besides, there’s no good meat in town.”
The shortage of plastic means that less food is being shipped. The food we do get is all packaged in glass or tin. I wonder if Art would teach me to hunt. I can only stomach so much creamed corn and applesauce. A bit of deer meat would taste good.
“Do me a favour? Let me know when you’re coming up here to hunt. I’m not big on surprises.”
He nods. I relax a bit.
“Ever see any water in these woods? A stream or a spring?”
“Nope. Dry as a preacher’s bone back here in the summer. In winter there’s all the water a fella could want, and then some.”
“Tell me about it.”
He looks me up and down. “You want some work?”
“Maybe.” I do, though. I’m not getting much food off my land this first year, and as much as I am growing to hate it, creamed corn in a can still requires cash. I have little money left.
“I need some digging done at my place. I’d get a backhoe, but it’s a fiddly situation. I bet I could still dig better than a lanky guy like you, but my body’s just not what it used to be.”
“I know what you mean.”
He glares at me from under his bushy eyebrows, long hairs sprouting in all directions.
“Come by my place Saturday morning. E
arly. I’m in Margaretsville, third driveway after the restaurant on the shore side.”
2
Lily Lake Road
I moved here because this was far from the rest of civilization — from Boston, New York, Toronto — and I had grown weary of a world that didn’t make sense. We compliment ourselves on being a rational species and an advanced civilization, denigrating dumb animals and primitive cultures, but everything I saw in that difficult world suggested that our self-congratulation is misplaced. By the end of my time in the city I just wanted to go for a long walk. I wound up here because my dad was born in Middleton and had brought me here as a kid. If I was going to escape, I figured this might feel like coming home.
I spent the first winter in Halifax washing bacon and sausage grease off dishes in a diner downtown. I rented an apartment in a creaky wooden building. The rent was cheap, and my bedroom window, with its flaking white paint, looked out on the restaurant I worked in halfway down Grafton Street. Mixed blessing, that. I had a short walk to work, but when someone called in sick I was the go-to guy. I did some prep there too. I got along with the kitchen staff but didn’t make any friends. I think of one thing when I remember that restaurant. I pulled a head of romaine, wrapped in plastic, out of the cold room. As I cleaned it I found a white moth between two leaves, fluttering as the warm kitchen air hit it. Its wings pressed uselessly against its body, vibrating back and forth rapidly in an attempt to escape. As a larva it had led a secure life, munching voraciously, slumbering as a pupa, then hatching as a winged chrysalis into an enclosed plastic world. Cold, damp, dark, with no freedom to fly, that moth waited until I ripped open the bag and peeled back a leaf. The rush of warm air, light, and room to stretch its wings were a rapid reversal of its fortune. It flew to the window above my dish pit, where it stayed for a few days, then disappeared.
There were bars on every downtown street. When they closed, crowds converged at Pizza Corner. Three of its corners housed pizza shops and my room was above one of them. On the fourth corner was a large stone church, into and out of which I never saw a person venture. In the wee hours when I was awake, often because of the noise on the street, I sat in a chair in front of the window overlooking that church and wished all sorts of nastiness on the drunks below.
The Rest is Silence Page 1
