***
The first of September arrives and it’s suddenly cold. The morning breeze still drifts out of the east making the waters of the inlet dance and sparkle but it is met in the middle by urgent gusts from the northwest. And they are dark. Over the next few weeks one will triumph over the other. The clinical clarity of winter light will soon rule. Things will start to die.
A shadow lumbers through the forests of the south shore. A black bear that understands latch buttons and door knobs, exits the bush and enters our buildings, bulldozing through rooms like a vengeful nimbus. Once inside it clears shelves, empties cupboards and eviscerates fridges. It has laid waste to four cabins in a week and has begun returns. Suddenly there’s fear on the islands and all along the shore. Guns I knew nothing of appear. Death crouches impatiently under the pines.
On a brand-new and perfect day Sheila and I paddle kayaks out to the mouth of the inlet and begin to explore the many new channels created in the low glaciated foreshore. A pair of extreme winters has dramatically raised water levels. We enter a new little inlet and a hundred feet in we beach our boats on the sloping shore to go for a walk. When we return the space between the kayaks is occupied by a large bowfin with spectacular, glowing, lime green–indigo fins and a peacock’s eye on his tail. His long dorsal fin undulates like a snake in water. A strange misty purple head sports a pair of barbels. For a while we watch him guard his myriad tiny offspring in less than a foot of water. He’s a survivor from the Mesozoic, a messenger from an ancient past like the nearby garpikes and snapping turtles that carry genes from the Cretaceous. And above them sandhill cranes call, a weird gronking from two and a half million years ago. In a time when three-quarters of freshwater species have become dodos their message is adaptation and survival: the former we’re failing to do, the latter seems less and less hopeful.
The dark bear returns once more. The police have suggested the cruelty of feeding the intruder corn cobs glazed with molasses and cement powder. As the powder slowly sets in their stomachs it kills but D. has opted for something faster. He loads his gun with heavy buckshot and slips around back of his cabin, cornering the invader in a dark hollow. Death reveals the intruder, a sow bear and her little cub, hungry in a bad year for berries. The bodies are carted in a wheelbarrow back into the bush. Vultures circle.
***
It’s an upstream run. Macbeth and sculptor John McEwen sit on the mid-thwart of the skiff while McEwen’s big dog Babe up in the bow scans the river with her nose. A mile past the last cabin we bank into a turn and spy a muskrat crossing the river between two stone cliffs. I cut the engine and we sweep toward the swimmer. The closer we get to it, the stranger it looks. It’s no muskrat or beaver.
It turns to us, struggling hard, grunting and crying. I lean over the gunwale and come face to face with a baby bear no bigger than my cat Bill. If the mother watches we can’t see her despite the open bush. I’d reach down and pull this exhausted swimmer into the boat but for the big dog barking excitedly from the bow so we elect to be an escort and secure the tiny cub’s arrival on the north shore. It struggles out of the water and clumsily scrambles up the cliff face. This tiny bear is far too small and inexperienced to be alone but incomparably competent against a bobble-headed human baby.
A light offshore breeze has purred from the east all morning. At noon it dies and all is still for a score of minutes and then it begins — first a hiss far back in the pine forest that grows and nears. A few leaves tremble, then needles on the white pines and finally one feels the air beginning to move. The day’s prevailing wind builds in the west, the land is heating and a hundred miles of water shoves cool air toward the heating land of granitic rocks and tortured pines. This builds hour by hour until the day begins to expire and the light warms and the air once again stills. The dying needles are touched with fire. The horizon moves out to infinity and every god that has ever existed is right here, right now.
This landscape appears primeval and eternal but in reality it was covered in a mile of ice a mere handful of millennia ago. Moreover, the wind-bent pines staggering across it are less than a century old as this inlet was stripped bare of trees to rebuild Chicago after the great fire. The rocks of the Shield may be a half billion years old but the trees upon it are babies. This is a recovering landscape, a message to the present about nature’s willfulness and ability to heal. This gives me small hope for the careless present but also makes me fearful that it encourages abuse, a lazy irresponsible attitude toward the land. For what comes back is never the same as what went before.
Today there’s a scudding cloud cover that encourages the sun to engage in theatrics. It spotlights selected rock faces and highlights certain trees but only for seconds before moving on to new targets. I’m gob-smacked.
The first day of autumn has arrived and so have the killers. They slice down the inlet before dawn in their camo death-boats — low freeboard, mini landing craft with four-stroke Hondas humming like velvet drones. In this Dunkirk of the Ducks, hunched hunters advance under cover of darkness toward the coastal wetlands, their shotguns and two-fours of Bud Lite at the ready. Come dawn the ducks will rise magnificently; the guns will bark and the bright birds will pinwheel out of the sky into the jaws of dogs. At noon the landing brigades retreat upstream between windrows of duck-down to have hot lunches prepared in their man-camps by mourning grandmothers in black. There’s a grim military precision to it all. It’s another job.
And it’s one we’ve been hard at for millennia. We were the last of the large mammals to cross the Bering Strait: bison, deer, caribou, moose and elk all beat us to it. But we quickly got even. Even before Europeans arrived, serious slaughter was underway and species elimination had begun.
We reached peak efficiency in the late 19th century. Everything was the enemy — every shimmering fish, all the great beasts, the bright birds, even the land itself. We dammed, blasted, logged and stripped it clean. When the land got ugly we left and moved on. There was always more of it to conquer.
We’re the only species to have ever caused the total extinction of another and we were proud of it. 1886 may have been the true annus horribilis. Five million birds were slaughtered to decorate American women’s hats. A Wyoming cowboy claimed to have walked 20 miles on contiguous cattle corpses from overgrazing without ever putting boot to ground. The Chicago Hotel held its annual Procession of Game dinner that November. The menu featured deer, mountain sheep, black bear, buffalo, opossum, elk, coon, jack rabbit, hare, squirrels, redwing blackbirds, wood ducks, blackbirds, sandhill cranes and a couple of dozen other wild bird species.
And here at home we too kept directing traffic over the cliff of extinction.
1750 — The Sable Island Atlantic walrus. Gone.
1872 — The Labrador duck. Gone.
1908 — The Dawson caribou of the Haida Gwaii. Gone.
1911 — The Newfoundland wolf. Gone.
1920 — The Banks Island timber wolf. Gone.
1945 — The Eskimo curlew. Gone.
1970 — The Great Lakes blue pike. Gone.
1985 — The Great Lakes shortnose cisco. Gone.
As late as 1901 Quebec still hadn’t listed the passenger pigeon as a protected species even though, it now seems, the sole wild one was shot the previous year. The last living passenger pigeon, a geriatric female named Martha, fell dead off her perch in Cincinnati’s zoo on September 1, 1914. Her body was frozen in the middle of a 300-pound block of ice and shipped off to the Smithsonian to be skinned.
***
One of the virtues of this little island on the Shield is that it clearly exposes the pair of thin zones on which we depend for life. The delicate membrane of topsoil nestled in rock hollows supports everything from tiny microbes to giant pines and the few thousand feet of oxygen-rich air generated by those plants allows us to breathe. We should be tiptoeing through such fragile delicacy but we’re not. Instead we’ve abused both and now we’re
about to pay for that neglect.
And we’re still in the species annihilation business. Now our target is the most brutal one of all — us. We now hurry along a path of self-destruction. My longtime friends still mindlessly eat their fellow mammals, own several cars and houses, take frivolous airplane trips and consume disposable everything. All that environmental apocalypse stuff is for their children to worry about — not them. They remind me of a clutch of new hatchlings, mouths wide open screaming, “Me, more me.”
***
We are four on the downstream run. As the river disgorges into a wild rice wetlands I spot a sandhill crane on the flats. Then it turns out there are five of those dusky waders picking away at the first shoots of the spring. I cut the engine and we drift — closer and closer. They call one another with their strange rattling cry, a song that has echoed over the gravel flats and wetlands of North America for over two and a half million years. Soon we are close enough to see the crimson blaze on their foreheads. We are mesmerized but the birds ignore us and continue probing the reeds. Finally our skiff bumps against the low bank and stops. These most ancient of birds are barely a metre away, surviving still.
A sandhill crane on the flats
Eighteen
Belief
“. . . a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Stephen Hawking
“For a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say. And if sometimes I do happen to tell the truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find.”
Machiavelli, in a letter to a friend
“You know what truth is? . . . It’s some crazy thing my neighbour believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah — ain’t it the truth?’”
Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions
“That much, whichever, depending.”
Sally Hunt
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
attributed to Franz Kafka
October 2014
My Jamaican father-in-law is dying. In the course of the past dozen years I’ve become very attached to this man — as have both my sons. Once a star athlete, he has been reduced by prostate cancer and his 91 years to being an invalid who spends much of his days in bed bedeviled by disturbing thoughts and images. His only respites are slow shuffles to the bathroom a half-dozen feet away. Frequently he doesn’t make it in time. It’s humiliating.
What keeps him going — something I don’t understand — is faith. He’s a Christian and a Quaker. His physical death will be a portal to another realm, one where he will be reunited with his wife and all the many tragedies of his beloved Jamaica will be vanquished. Even though I’m the descendent of generations of Anglican ministers I can’t grasp it. I can’t understand how intelligent people can hold these beliefs. Our leaders — Trudeau (Pierre), a practising Catholic? Or Paul Martin? Or even our recent leader Jurassic Steve who talked to the baby Jesus in a suburban faith temple? Bizarre! Yet it seems to work for my father-in-law.
And it works for many other people here in Jamaica. My sweet-tempered housekeeper Hermin spends her evenings reading the Bible. I have no idea what the rolling cadences of the King James version mean to her or to the many thousands of older Black women dressed in their finest who walk along muddy tracks in the hills to church every Sunday. How can they embrace a faith brought to them by the same people who inducted their forbearers into slavery? Or accept the horrors inflicted on the New World by the Spanish, the French and the Brits in the name of Jesus? They must know all this. Forgiveness isn’t deserved.
It saddens me to see the millions of peoples around the globe who have been seduced, persuaded or bullied into exchanging their often perfectly effective traditional belief systems for a once minor and marginal faith from a tiny Middle Eastern village. How did they manage to sell it to so many people? What is the attraction of a god that is so often mean-spirited and vengeful? What on earth is the Trinity? Does anybody truly understand it? And what about the strange cannibalistic idea behind communion — drinking the blood of Jesus and eating his flesh? Or having dominion over all natural things and interpreting that as a licence to kill and eat our fellow mammals. And, worst of all, the idea that we are just passing through, that this life, our one and only one, is merely an anteroom to one that’s eternal and better. This idea excuses bad behaviour.
Of course railing on about the Bible is like tilting at windmills. It’s become a historical artifact that’s completely irrelevant to most Canadians’ lives. This cultural shift away from any belief has to be partially responsible for the attitude of some to practicing Muslims and Sikhs, even Mediterranean Catholics, who have immigrated. Adhering to any faith seems so ancient and primitive that the people who do may as well be cave dwellers — aliens. Yet it’s a powerful thing: it helps many to get through life.
I cringe when I see Chinese Presbyterians, African Anglicans or Indigenous Catholics. The Roman Catholics would seem to have been Christianity’s best marketers: they have sold it, often by means of extreme violence, to everyone from the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the Philippines. The Brits were much less successful with their breakaway church, perhaps because they were less interested. It seems that very few Hindus in British India were persuaded to become Anglicans. The Brits were keener on the trade in goods than in souls.
We bicycle across the dusty Tamal Nadu plain in cymbal-crashing heat. Eventually the earth opens like a cenote and I climb down to the bottom where a pair of dreadlocked sadhus wait. My companion C. remains above, watching me from the rim. I’m his proxy, enduring a ritual in the hope it will cure his cancer and save his life. He’s too ill to do it himself.
One of the old men leads me into a low cave. We crawl in through a deep carpet of bat shit, scraping our backs on the cave roof until a hundred feet in we encounter the first lingam. I stroke the big stone penis as instructed and we crawl farther in to the next. Stroke and repeat. Still farther in and repeat. And repeat. A quarter century later C. is still alive.
***
It’s an October run north under gray skies following a month’s absence. After a four-hour flat-light drive I finally reach the reserve and the river. It’s been an exhausting month of downsizing, packing and leaving Toronto for Hamilton after more than a half century. Stepping out of the van at the river fork one can feel the recent past slipping away and a soft calm slip into its place. I’m home.
2018
Our new life in Hamilton has taken an unexpected turn. There’s something about this odd fractured town that turns you to fundamentals. At my insistence we live in a very middle-class part of the city surrounded by impeccably maintained Victorian houses, tennis courts, coffee shops and earnest restaurants. I’m too tired and old for gritty. But a few kilometres to the east is another Hamilton, one of rude tiny houses behind the steel mills, of backyard Dobermans, of choppers, needles and tricks. Many people there still smoke. There are walkers and wheelchairs. The streets are beaten down by heavy truck traffic. Graffitied locomotives drag tanker cars through backyards — last week one crushed a small girl’s legs. It’s poor. It’s dark. It’s outside time.
We cycle between these two worlds, going back and forth on the pair of wide one-way streets, Main and King, through broken-toothed transitions left by so different histories.
Many winter Sunday afternoons we’ve walked the several blocks to John Lyle’s beautiful 1908 Central Presbyterian Church to listen to music — Vivaldi, Telemann and, above all, Bach. We’ve sat at the back of that handsome Beaux-Arts edifice and listened to Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and Bach’s St. John Passion. Both have great moments. But both are strange.
“I don’t get it,” says Sheila, the daughter of Quakers. And I, ending a long line of Anglican ministers, can’t explain it either. The Christian story makes no sense. And the music to
o. Pergolesi’s simple melodies and occasionally jaunty arias and duets float under horrific lyrics about cruelty and abandonment. The Bach is even more extreme, sweet harmonies on flute and oboe paired with breaking bones, eviscerations and betrayals. Jesus dying for our sins?? How does that work? What does it mean? Why do people embrace it? I’m almost 75 and I still don’t get it either.
Nineteen
Final Fire
“The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”
The Solace of Open Spaces
Gretel Ehrlich
***
The days of rutting and rebirth are long gone. Once the early river mists burn off, the fall morning light flashes cold as stainless steel. Birch and alder leaves, dry now as paper, rattle harshly in the wind. The season of big sleeps has begun sneaking through the pines. Winter soon come. The birds and I wing south.
2014
I watch an old man sitting in his Jamaican garden, surrounded by frangipani, guava and coffee trees, feeding his dogs bananas as the day ends. The light has gone gold, the clouds pink, the airs have stilled. Here, surrounded by so much tropical splendour Ossie faces the end of his life — only weeks remain. During the quarter of a century since he returned to his beloved Jamaica he has given much of what he has away. In all this beauty there’s been so much need. His fellow Jamaicans come daily to his gate with a sick child, a crutch, a blind eye, a dying goat. They come pleading and wait.
Final Fire Page 38
