I caught the glimpse of black out of the corner of my eye. I spun to where the dark form had likely taken refuge – under the old aluminium canoe painted in faux birch bark – and seeing nothing, I stepped closer. A mere hint of a small nose appeared from under the edge of the boat and quickly withdrew.
“What do you see?” my brother Erik asked. He and I were trying to extricate the dock from the swollen lake. Each passing year, as water levels failed to fall to their previous autumn levels, the dock was becoming more difficult to put away for the winter. Climate change was increasing precipitation in this area surrounded by the Great Lakes. This year, the water came so high that the centre support, which I would later find a kilometre away on the other side of the lake, had floated away leaving our old wooden dock submerged and waterlogged.
“It’s black, but I don’t think it’s a squirrel. It didn’t move like a squirrel, and besides, I think that black squirrel you saw at your place was just a fluke. Possibly an urban drop off.” I skirted the canoe and tried to peer under it.
“There it goes! There it goes! Along the shore!” Erik shouted. “What is it?”
I looked up just quickly enough to see the fleeing shiny, dark brown form. “It’s a mustelid - from the weasel family,” I pondered out loud, “but it’s too small and fat to be a marten and too large to be a weasel. Maybe it’s a mink,” I offered, being struck by the lustre of its fur.
“A mink?” His puzzlement held the fact that for almost 50 years, my brother and I have been coming to this Muskoka, Ontario lake, and we’d never seen such an animal before. His puzzlement was just that, and not disbelief. Over the past five years, we’d been surprised by the appearance of too many new species at the lake to be closed to any possibility. The animals that had put in an appearance or reappearance since our childhoods, included otter, wolf, water snake, bear, moose, fisher, turkey, various waterfowl and cougar. As well as the animals known as humans.
In the 60s and 70s, rural areas with marginal farming soils such as Muskoka emptied of year round residents. Yet the newly urbanized generation still had a hankering for nature and thus began the selling off of lakeshore lots for cottages (Ontario equivalent of the BC word, cabin). Mr. Clarke, whose long gone white farm house stood on the shores of McKay Lake and whose sugar shack back in the bush has been converted into someone’s summer abode, subdivided and sold lots at $1500 apiece, a price quite affordable to middle class or working class urbanites like my parents. These same lots now roll over for $200,000 and a Muskoka cottage has once again become the purview of the moneyed. Or, permanent residents.
Whereas no one lived on MacKay Lake year round for all of my childhood, the past decade has seen the return of the year-round resident, usually retirees from either southern cities or northern towns. With them have come more kayaks and canoes, more Muskoka chairs and binoculars and even a sled dog team. On our lake, they are neighbourly people who help each other out and participate in creating a sense of community. They tend to be nature lovers in search of tranquility rather than people with a love for pistons and pistols. Much reduced are the motor boats, dirt bikes and snowmobiles of the 70s and 80s. Instead of driving away the wildlife, they put up bird feeders and get excited when a mammal wanders through their yard. These are obviously people whose survival interests do not lie in safeguarding crops or livestock or providing for themselves through hunting, trapping and gathering. One could argue, as Luanne does in previous blog entries, that their connection to place is less deeply rooted than that of previous residents whose basic needs relied on the land. And I suspect this is true. Nevertheless, I greet the arrival of the wild things with excitement.
I abandon the dock removal operation and go see where the mustelid has gone. I find it crouched at water level under the overhanging roots of a big hemlock. Its shiny black eyes peer out at me every time it bravely thrusts its white chin out of its hidey-hole. We eye each other for a few minutes before I go back to lugging waterlogged pieces of dock to shore. I know that the current state of human/non-human animal balance and our relationship to land, will change again. My hope is that this time around, when we come to need the land again for our basic survival, that we will find a different balance than before, one that understands the value of co-existence.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Solitude: by Luanne Armstrong
Solitude:
I have now had three weeks of fairly intense solitude and it has left me wondering how people who sail around the world solo, or row across the ocean, solo, or go on long journeys alone manage. Or what abut all those early European explorers, freezing in the arctic, dying in the jungle, crossing deserts and dying of thirst? Why did they do it? What drove them? How did they cope with the solitude, the loneliness and the absence of their friends and family?
I have now had three weeks of fairly intense solitude and it has left me wondering how people who sail around the world solo, or row across the ocean, solo, or go on long journeys alone manage. Or what abut all those early European explorers, freezing in the arctic, dying in the jungle, crossing deserts and dying of thirst? Why did they do it? What drove them? How did they cope with the solitude, the loneliness and the absence of their friends and family?
And in all the stories of early pioneer days, there are always stories of hermits, recluses, people who chose to live alone with almost no human contact. On the hill just to the north of our farm are the remains of a man named Bill Haley, who lived very much alone with only a herd of goats for company. But there are lots of other stories in our area of people who had left family or friends to live alone. It was the pioneer era, and so many people were naturally separated from everything they had known.
I have often wondered how that was bearable for some people. What was it like, in the days when a letter took three to six months to arrive, for people to be separated for the rest of their lives from everything they had once known as familiar and dear? And I know it still goes on but at least, e-mail is now almost instantaneous.
Research reports that prisoners stuck in solitary confinement go crazy fairly quickly. What happens to people who voluntarily choose solitude – to monks in caves, hermits in their wilderness? Herd animals in zoos separated from their natural habitat and their natural companions also go crazy pretty quickly – we’re not much different than them.
Human beings are animals who live in groups; we live in families, tribes, clans, communities. The more I read novels, the more convinced I am that the basic human plot, at the centre of all of our stories, is the unbinding and rebinding of a sense of family. John Gardner, a famous novelist and writing teacher, said that there are only two plots in all of literature: someone comes to town or someone leaves town. Very much the same thing. Because human beings desperately need to be with other people and often have an equally hard time getting along with them, the endless human saga is full of the push and pull of people leaving their families and then coming home again or leaving one family and forming another kind of family.
In my case, I have briefly left a very full chaotic, and rewarding life, full of people, animals, plants and community, at my farm, for one that has had mostly only books, words, language and writing in it. Despite all the best gadgets of modern communication: internet, email, Facebook, phone, I still felt alone. Electronic people are not the same as real people. My electronic students, however brilliant, are not the same as living, breathing bodies in a classroom.
It was a productive time, in terms of writing, no question, but one can only live with words and idea for so long. After that, I, at least, need people, need voices, need contact. And I also need to be outside, with animals, plants and the living, breathing world. Here in Saskatchewan, I did go for long walks and soaked up the smells and sights and sounds of the prairie, a place I really only know from stories about it.
The future vision that some science fiction writers have had, of people living in self-contained rooms, surrounded by electronic toys, is so impossible that it is almost funny. People simply wouldn’t survive like that, or at least, not for long. I believe that many of the problems of modern life are caused by sheer human loneliness, people who no longer have sane and structured human contact. By this, I don’t mean the right wing vision of rigid and hierarchical nuclear families, where initiative, ideas and creativity are stifled. But of families that nurture, sustain and care for each other. I am quite sure they exist and they are still the best way for people to live. When they work.
For most of its history, humanity has lived in small groups of two to three hundred people and evolved distinct ways for such groups to get along. The survival of our ancestors depended on such communal understanding. We no longer no know much about this because now because we believe we always have the choice to leave. But for those of us who have chosen to stay in one place, take care of the place we love and the people who live there with us, leaving is never a choice at all. And maybe that is a very good thing.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Belonging by Luanne Armstrong
Belonging:
by Luanne Armstrong
I got a chance to read my great-aunt, Catherine Armstrong’s diaries the other day. She and her three brothers came west in 1907 to take up land grants in southern Alberta, near the Cypress Hills, and to build lives centred around ranching, cattle, hay, seeding in the spring and harvest in the fall. Her journals, while not detailed by any means, are full of references to visits by friends and relatives, riding to the neighbours, or going to dances. And also references to work; she counted the number of pieces whenever she did a laundry, I presume by hand. One hundred and fifty-one pieces of laundry, she writes one day, or one hundred and thirty, always hundreds of pieces of laundry.
And then there was all the other work, one day, ten loaves of bread, the next day, seven pounds of butter churned, plus whitewashing walls, cleaning the kitchen, riding out to look for stock and all the meals for visitors and her brothers.
And also, occasionally, references to depression, to weeping, to homesickness, or to a day spent reading. And as well, a wonderful romance, buried in this pages; casual reference to “Fred” showing up, to walks and talks and finally, she says, “Well, I guess we will get married.” And so they do and become one of the founding families of an Alberta town called Irvine.
She and her brothers worked the ranch but eventually, one brother bought out the others. After that, my grandfather moved to Saskatchewan, and after his wife died and the drought in the thirties made grain farming impossible, hecame west to BC, and bought the farm where I still live. So that is why I am not an Alberta girl, or a rancher, though when I was a girl, I dreamed of it, wanted to be a cowgirl, and dreamed of the romance of the West.
I read these diaries in the interesting context of staying in a writer’s house, the Wallace Stegner House in a small town in Eastend, Saskatchewan. It’s October, and farmers are still harvesting grain, racing against time to get in a big crop. Too much rain, for a change, instead of too little.
Interesting to be here and reading Wallace Stegner and his take on the romanticism of the American west and how distorted and historically inaccurate it is. Now the west is the land of big trucks, big machines, big harvests, big farms and big skies. It’s very hard not to wonder how will this land, and these people, function in the future? How will global warming, the price of oil, the future of food, the price of land, affect them? Most of them have only been here for three or four generations. This new generation, the children of my cousins out here, are in university or working. Very few of them want to be or are farmers.
This land, this economy, these big ranches and fields and grain farms, are all adaptations to the exploitation of gas and oil. None of this will last forever. As Josh Farley, an ecological economist says:
"Before fossil fuels, when humans lived almost exclusively on the energy of contemporary sunlight, one calorie burned by a worker could create 10 calories of food, but now we use 10 calories from oil to create one calorie of food. And remember that the market has no way to account for the disastrous consequences of burning all those fossil fuels. And we’re increasingly dependent on non-renewable resources for the food we need to live.””
The land here is beautiful and productive but it has also changed before and will change again.
Near Stegner House is a museum containing dinosaur bones that were found near here, laid down 65 million years ago when big parts of North American were under water and the rest was a lush jungle.
And yet people are smart, and adaptable, and the land has always called people to be farmers. People who feel they belong to this place will adapt, I hope. It was wonderful to spend time with my family here; they know this land in a way I never could and they showed me their parts of it and their understanding of it. If they ever come to my part of the world, could I show them how I now belong there? And what would they then see and understand about me?
by Luanne Armstrong
I got a chance to read my great-aunt, Catherine Armstrong’s diaries the other day. She and her three brothers came west in 1907 to take up land grants in southern Alberta, near the Cypress Hills, and to build lives centred around ranching, cattle, hay, seeding in the spring and harvest in the fall. Her journals, while not detailed by any means, are full of references to visits by friends and relatives, riding to the neighbours, or going to dances. And also references to work; she counted the number of pieces whenever she did a laundry, I presume by hand. One hundred and fifty-one pieces of laundry, she writes one day, or one hundred and thirty, always hundreds of pieces of laundry.
And then there was all the other work, one day, ten loaves of bread, the next day, seven pounds of butter churned, plus whitewashing walls, cleaning the kitchen, riding out to look for stock and all the meals for visitors and her brothers.
And also, occasionally, references to depression, to weeping, to homesickness, or to a day spent reading. And as well, a wonderful romance, buried in this pages; casual reference to “Fred” showing up, to walks and talks and finally, she says, “Well, I guess we will get married.” And so they do and become one of the founding families of an Alberta town called Irvine.
She and her brothers worked the ranch but eventually, one brother bought out the others. After that, my grandfather moved to Saskatchewan, and after his wife died and the drought in the thirties made grain farming impossible, hecame west to BC, and bought the farm where I still live. So that is why I am not an Alberta girl, or a rancher, though when I was a girl, I dreamed of it, wanted to be a cowgirl, and dreamed of the romance of the West.
I read these diaries in the interesting context of staying in a writer’s house, the Wallace Stegner House in a small town in Eastend, Saskatchewan. It’s October, and farmers are still harvesting grain, racing against time to get in a big crop. Too much rain, for a change, instead of too little.
Interesting to be here and reading Wallace Stegner and his take on the romanticism of the American west and how distorted and historically inaccurate it is. Now the west is the land of big trucks, big machines, big harvests, big farms and big skies. It’s very hard not to wonder how will this land, and these people, function in the future? How will global warming, the price of oil, the future of food, the price of land, affect them? Most of them have only been here for three or four generations. This new generation, the children of my cousins out here, are in university or working. Very few of them want to be or are farmers.
This land, this economy, these big ranches and fields and grain farms, are all adaptations to the exploitation of gas and oil. None of this will last forever. As Josh Farley, an ecological economist says:
"Before fossil fuels, when humans lived almost exclusively on the energy of contemporary sunlight, one calorie burned by a worker could create 10 calories of food, but now we use 10 calories from oil to create one calorie of food. And remember that the market has no way to account for the disastrous consequences of burning all those fossil fuels. And we’re increasingly dependent on non-renewable resources for the food we need to live.””
The land here is beautiful and productive but it has also changed before and will change again.
Near Stegner House is a museum containing dinosaur bones that were found near here, laid down 65 million years ago when big parts of North American were under water and the rest was a lush jungle.
And yet people are smart, and adaptable, and the land has always called people to be farmers. People who feel they belong to this place will adapt, I hope. It was wonderful to spend time with my family here; they know this land in a way I never could and they showed me their parts of it and their understanding of it. If they ever come to my part of the world, could I show them how I now belong there? And what would they then see and understand about me?
Monday, September 27, 2010
Finding your balance: by Luanne Armstrong
Equinox and balance:
This year, full moon and Equinox happened at the same time. For the first two weeks before Equinox and the week after, bad new filtered in from various friends. Many people were ill with deep chest colds; three friends had floods in their houses. One who had a flood also had a beloved family member die suddenly. All kinds of tension and sadness suddenly pervades our lives.
Just coincidence, of course. The moon, the seasons, the rhythms of life don’t affect us anymore. So most people believe. And yet, there are many rhythms in this world and the animals and plants play no attention to human lives and go on living to the rhythms of light and seasons and the turning planet.
I read a sad and moving article this week in New Yorker about the people of a small town in Colorado named Uravan, where once they made a living mining uranimum. The main point of the article was that, even though many former residents of the town had died of lung cancer, and that after uranium mining was shut down and the whole town shredded and stored away as toxic waste, people still missed it, wanted to move back, wanted the mine to re-open. Both the writer and the people he interviewed seemed unable to articulate why the people would miss this place except for the fact that it had once been their home. Once a year, they have a reunion. They press their faces up against the barbed wire fence around their former home and feel nostalgic. They remember the voices of children playing and they long for a place that was never really their home and that killed many of them.
I do something similar to this as well. Five miles from our farm is another farm, known in our family as the Mannarino Place, after Jimmy and Victoria Mannarino, who cleared it and farmed it and then sold it to my grandfather as a wedding present for my mom and dad. We lived there until I was two and then my parents moved away to a small mining town and then to our present farm on Kootenay Lake, where I have now lived since I was five.
And yet, I still miss the Mannarino place. I loved to go there when I was a child. I felt peculiarly at home there and I still do. And I dream about this place. Over and over, I go back there, but it has changed. A strange family is there, a man I hate and despise and try to get rid of. Whenever I come to this place in my dream, I recognize it, even though it is much different than the real farm. There are houses around it; there is mine high on the mountain, there is a deep woods, there is a huge frightening house full of ghosts.
I rarely go there now in reality. The place has been sold and sold again. And still I miss it, long for it, scheme as to how I could get it back. Why? I have no idea, other than in my child’s wild true heart, the place was, is mine.
Once I was riding my mare home from the farm where I had left her to get bred. On the way, we passed through the place where I had bought her. We went by the temporary corral where the owner had housed her with another more. The barbed wire was falling down, the fenceposts were leaning, and yet my mare went eagerly towards this corral. I let her, curious to see what she would do. She went inside, nosed around, sniffed the ground, poked her nose, sniffed the empty feed bin. Then she stopped and relaxed, obviously expecting me to slide to off, take off her saddle and bridle, let her be at home and relax. I disappointed her, made her leave that place she had once felt at home, and continue on to my home.
Do the places we have once lived leave shadows and ghosts within us? Are we, as biological creatures, tuned into these places in ways we don’t understand. Why do my dreams of the Mannarino place haunt me, in particular, the old house, long destroyed and in my dreams, full of terrifying voices from the distant upstairs.
And what scars are left within people torn from their homes and displaced by war, genocide, famine, industrialization or any of the other infinite ways in which people have been shoved around the globe from place to place, particularly in the past two centuries of colonization, exploitation, industrialization and globalization?
Before modern industrialized warfare, there was also war, but a different kind of war – over territory and boundaries and resources but this rarely resulted in a mass displacement of whole peoples. What scars and traumas are left in such people? No one asks this question? Does anyone even want to know?
I am still determined someday to go back to Scotland. I want to find the place from which my ancestors left so long, long ago. I want to imagine myself back into the scene that must have taken place, somehow, when a whole family of Armstrongs, the mother, the father, and their seven children, made the decision to leave for Canada, to leave the place that had been their home for as long as anyone could remember, and make an entirely new life. In my lifetime, I have never been displaced. I have camped in many locations but always lived at ‘home’, at the farm. So it will take a writer’s leap of imagination to sit in that place, with my ancestors’ blood thrummng in my veins, and understand why they did that, and what it meant.
This year, full moon and Equinox happened at the same time. For the first two weeks before Equinox and the week after, bad new filtered in from various friends. Many people were ill with deep chest colds; three friends had floods in their houses. One who had a flood also had a beloved family member die suddenly. All kinds of tension and sadness suddenly pervades our lives.
Just coincidence, of course. The moon, the seasons, the rhythms of life don’t affect us anymore. So most people believe. And yet, there are many rhythms in this world and the animals and plants play no attention to human lives and go on living to the rhythms of light and seasons and the turning planet.
I read a sad and moving article this week in New Yorker about the people of a small town in Colorado named Uravan, where once they made a living mining uranimum. The main point of the article was that, even though many former residents of the town had died of lung cancer, and that after uranium mining was shut down and the whole town shredded and stored away as toxic waste, people still missed it, wanted to move back, wanted the mine to re-open. Both the writer and the people he interviewed seemed unable to articulate why the people would miss this place except for the fact that it had once been their home. Once a year, they have a reunion. They press their faces up against the barbed wire fence around their former home and feel nostalgic. They remember the voices of children playing and they long for a place that was never really their home and that killed many of them.
I do something similar to this as well. Five miles from our farm is another farm, known in our family as the Mannarino Place, after Jimmy and Victoria Mannarino, who cleared it and farmed it and then sold it to my grandfather as a wedding present for my mom and dad. We lived there until I was two and then my parents moved away to a small mining town and then to our present farm on Kootenay Lake, where I have now lived since I was five.
And yet, I still miss the Mannarino place. I loved to go there when I was a child. I felt peculiarly at home there and I still do. And I dream about this place. Over and over, I go back there, but it has changed. A strange family is there, a man I hate and despise and try to get rid of. Whenever I come to this place in my dream, I recognize it, even though it is much different than the real farm. There are houses around it; there is mine high on the mountain, there is a deep woods, there is a huge frightening house full of ghosts.
I rarely go there now in reality. The place has been sold and sold again. And still I miss it, long for it, scheme as to how I could get it back. Why? I have no idea, other than in my child’s wild true heart, the place was, is mine.
Once I was riding my mare home from the farm where I had left her to get bred. On the way, we passed through the place where I had bought her. We went by the temporary corral where the owner had housed her with another more. The barbed wire was falling down, the fenceposts were leaning, and yet my mare went eagerly towards this corral. I let her, curious to see what she would do. She went inside, nosed around, sniffed the ground, poked her nose, sniffed the empty feed bin. Then she stopped and relaxed, obviously expecting me to slide to off, take off her saddle and bridle, let her be at home and relax. I disappointed her, made her leave that place she had once felt at home, and continue on to my home.
Do the places we have once lived leave shadows and ghosts within us? Are we, as biological creatures, tuned into these places in ways we don’t understand. Why do my dreams of the Mannarino place haunt me, in particular, the old house, long destroyed and in my dreams, full of terrifying voices from the distant upstairs.
And what scars are left within people torn from their homes and displaced by war, genocide, famine, industrialization or any of the other infinite ways in which people have been shoved around the globe from place to place, particularly in the past two centuries of colonization, exploitation, industrialization and globalization?
Before modern industrialized warfare, there was also war, but a different kind of war – over territory and boundaries and resources but this rarely resulted in a mass displacement of whole peoples. What scars and traumas are left in such people? No one asks this question? Does anyone even want to know?
I am still determined someday to go back to Scotland. I want to find the place from which my ancestors left so long, long ago. I want to imagine myself back into the scene that must have taken place, somehow, when a whole family of Armstrongs, the mother, the father, and their seven children, made the decision to leave for Canada, to leave the place that had been their home for as long as anyone could remember, and make an entirely new life. In my lifetime, I have never been displaced. I have camped in many locations but always lived at ‘home’, at the farm. So it will take a writer’s leap of imagination to sit in that place, with my ancestors’ blood thrummng in my veins, and understand why they did that, and what it meant.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Killing the Hare by K.L. Kivi
It’s been over a month since the morning I stood, shovel raised, over the wide-eyed, trembling snowshoe hare and spoke to it in the softest words I could find, but the moment is still vivid in my mind’s eye. The hare’s soft brown ears and long whiskers twitched but the rest of its body was still, paralysed by the well placed bite of a predator. Around midnight the night before, I’d been jolted from my half-sleep by a scream that could have been human if there had been any babies out in the dark forest. I rummaged for my headlamp and rushed outside. I found the hare sprawled on its side on the bare ground near the shed, wounded at the neck. I hesitated, not knowing what to do.
Not knowing what to do: what a familiar feeling. I feel it almost every day and have for many years. It’s not that I don’t do things. I do. I’m active in the campaign to keep the Purcell Mountains wild and keep the Jumbo Glacier Resort at bay. I chair my local watershed committee. Etc, etc. I walk, shout, talk, write and live in protest. All of this activity and the capitalist madness that Luanne describes in her last blog entry has indeed become “normal” for many of us. However, as Bruce Cockburn so aptly sings, “the trouble with normal is that it only gets worse.”
At the same time, I try to live a mindful, conscious life, attempting to embody the values Robert Jensen (previous blog entry) places outside the realm of capitalist culture - solidarity, compassion, creativity, ethics, joy. These things I know how to do, for the most part, at least when it comes to the small world of people, flora, fauna and land that I call my home. But the more the capitalist/industrial/military mindset permeates my homeplace, the more problematic right action becomes. How to express compassion towards those whose only interest is profit? How to participate in a broader culture that is imbued with the ethics of mass consumption and outrageous waste? How to accept what is and lean toward a vision of what could be?
That night, facing the bright, terrified eye of the injured hare, I had to make a quick decision. I decided to step out of the picture and let nature take its course. An animal had attacked the hare, no doubt in hopes of a supper. If it was still around, it may finish its work, eat its meal. I turned my light off and walked away, climbing into my bed, wide awake and trembling, wondering if the hare was in pain. Had I scared the predator away? I could not take my interruption back. Regret would serve no purpose. These are the things I said to myself.
What are the things I say to myself when I don’t know what to do? Last night, I attended the showing of an excellent documentary by Liz Marshall called “Water on the Table.” The film featured Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in her attempts to establish water as a human right. She leads the campaign for public control over water resources in the face of a push for commercialization and corporate, profit-oriented control. The film was beautiful, poignant, evocative, well-constructed and to the point. Maude Barlow, well, she’s one of a kind. My partner and I walked away energized but, ultimately, despairing. It often feels like the predator has already bitten our neck, severed the flow of democracy, hell in a handbasket and all that stuff. Still, wide in my eyes is the fear, the desire to fight, the desire to claim my rightful space in the world. Tar sands: what more can we do? Water privatization: regardless of my opposition, that beast marches on.
In the morning, I went to the place of the snowshoe hare right away. It was with great sadness that I found the animal still there, prone in the dirt, eyes still open, whiskers still trembling, pieces of its fur torn out and its flesh lightly nibbled. The corners of my mouth turned down in consternation and anguish. I knew what I must do. But I didn’t want to do it. I kneeled down and petted the soft, soft flanks of the still paralysed hare all the while knowing that this would only frighten the animal more and change nothing. I considered getting one of my land mates but this too would only delay the inevitable and drag someone else into the distress I was feeling. I went for the shovel.
Is there a time coming in which I’ll have to make a similar, horribly uncomfortable decision about how to end other, irrevocable pain? What will be the edge, the sharpness that will speed the inevitable? Who will we be? Will we finally know what to do after so many of years of not knowing?
Even with the shovel raised in the air, I hesitated; it is not a simple thing to extinguish a spark of life. I stood over the hare for many minutes, swallowing and swallowing at the lump in my throat, shaking, still looking for a way out. And then I steeled myself. Shovel still in hand, I bowed, honouring the snowshoe hare’s life. The line between compassion and violence blurred. What was I doing? And then I thrust the blade into the ground at the place of its neck. Blood squirted and the body leapt into action, the legs flailing. When all motion quieted, I carried the body into the woods and laid it on the ground. And it stays with me. It all stays with me.
Not knowing what to do: what a familiar feeling. I feel it almost every day and have for many years. It’s not that I don’t do things. I do. I’m active in the campaign to keep the Purcell Mountains wild and keep the Jumbo Glacier Resort at bay. I chair my local watershed committee. Etc, etc. I walk, shout, talk, write and live in protest. All of this activity and the capitalist madness that Luanne describes in her last blog entry has indeed become “normal” for many of us. However, as Bruce Cockburn so aptly sings, “the trouble with normal is that it only gets worse.”
At the same time, I try to live a mindful, conscious life, attempting to embody the values Robert Jensen (previous blog entry) places outside the realm of capitalist culture - solidarity, compassion, creativity, ethics, joy. These things I know how to do, for the most part, at least when it comes to the small world of people, flora, fauna and land that I call my home. But the more the capitalist/industrial/military mindset permeates my homeplace, the more problematic right action becomes. How to express compassion towards those whose only interest is profit? How to participate in a broader culture that is imbued with the ethics of mass consumption and outrageous waste? How to accept what is and lean toward a vision of what could be?
That night, facing the bright, terrified eye of the injured hare, I had to make a quick decision. I decided to step out of the picture and let nature take its course. An animal had attacked the hare, no doubt in hopes of a supper. If it was still around, it may finish its work, eat its meal. I turned my light off and walked away, climbing into my bed, wide awake and trembling, wondering if the hare was in pain. Had I scared the predator away? I could not take my interruption back. Regret would serve no purpose. These are the things I said to myself.
What are the things I say to myself when I don’t know what to do? Last night, I attended the showing of an excellent documentary by Liz Marshall called “Water on the Table.” The film featured Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in her attempts to establish water as a human right. She leads the campaign for public control over water resources in the face of a push for commercialization and corporate, profit-oriented control. The film was beautiful, poignant, evocative, well-constructed and to the point. Maude Barlow, well, she’s one of a kind. My partner and I walked away energized but, ultimately, despairing. It often feels like the predator has already bitten our neck, severed the flow of democracy, hell in a handbasket and all that stuff. Still, wide in my eyes is the fear, the desire to fight, the desire to claim my rightful space in the world. Tar sands: what more can we do? Water privatization: regardless of my opposition, that beast marches on.
In the morning, I went to the place of the snowshoe hare right away. It was with great sadness that I found the animal still there, prone in the dirt, eyes still open, whiskers still trembling, pieces of its fur torn out and its flesh lightly nibbled. The corners of my mouth turned down in consternation and anguish. I knew what I must do. But I didn’t want to do it. I kneeled down and petted the soft, soft flanks of the still paralysed hare all the while knowing that this would only frighten the animal more and change nothing. I considered getting one of my land mates but this too would only delay the inevitable and drag someone else into the distress I was feeling. I went for the shovel.
Is there a time coming in which I’ll have to make a similar, horribly uncomfortable decision about how to end other, irrevocable pain? What will be the edge, the sharpness that will speed the inevitable? Who will we be? Will we finally know what to do after so many of years of not knowing?
Even with the shovel raised in the air, I hesitated; it is not a simple thing to extinguish a spark of life. I stood over the hare for many minutes, swallowing and swallowing at the lump in my throat, shaking, still looking for a way out. And then I steeled myself. Shovel still in hand, I bowed, honouring the snowshoe hare’s life. The line between compassion and violence blurred. What was I doing? And then I thrust the blade into the ground at the place of its neck. Blood squirted and the body leapt into action, the legs flailing. When all motion quieted, I carried the body into the woods and laid it on the ground. And it stays with me. It all stays with me.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Eating Peaches by Luanne Armstrong
“Capitalism is the most wildly productive economic system in history, but the one thing it cannot produce is meaning. Even more troubling is the way, through its promotion of narcissism and mindless consumption, that capitalism undermines the larger culture’s ability to create real meaning. Virtually all of what is good in society—solidarity, compassion, creativity, ethics, joy—comes from outside capitalism, giving the illusion that capitalism is a civilized system. It’s a cliché, but important enough that we sing it over and over: Money can’t buy you love. Capitalism cannot create a healthy human community, and it undermines the aspect of human nature rooted in solidarity and love.
The other obvious failure of capitalism is its contribution to the erosion of the health of the ecosystem. Humans have been drawing down the ecological capital of the planet since the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, but that process has intensified dramatically in the capitalist/imperialist/industrial era. Our culture is filled with talk about the success of capitalism even though that system degrades our relationships and threatens our existence. That’s an odd definition of success.”
From an interview with Robert Jensen, (journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin.)
The amazing golden beauty and bounty of September has returned again. Really, the only way to eat peaches is to stand under a tree of ripe peaches that the wind has shaken, and eat windfall peaches, one after another, dripping juice down my hands and face. Which I do.
And then later, lying in bed, listening to the wind, and distant rumbles of thunder, of course the worries come in. September, winter coming, work beginning, cold again, how much I dread the cold; it all comes down to fear. Nothing is coming that I can’t cope with, but that thought doesn’t stop the fear coming in the window with the thunder.
Lately, the tune, “Walk Me Out into the Morning Dew,” has been haunting my head. It’s a beautiful song about an unknown doomsday. I even went to ITunes and played three versions to get it to go away but it’s still there. Why is it haunting me so persistently?
The farm is, as always, beautiful, peaceful, and productive. The world far from the farm is so not peaceful. This year was the hottest summer in the hottest year since weather records have been kept. There were floods in China and Pakistan, fires in Russia, Bolivia, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and unabated war in Afghanistan. I sat on the beach, as I do every summer, and watched the summer people go round and round and round in their boats and seadoos. Long lines of RV’s rolled by on the road. Normal, everything normal. And mad as can be.
Stephen Henighan wrote a great piece in www.thetyee.ca, this week, called The Phony War, comparing this time in history to the time before World War Two began. But this is a very long quiet time and we are protected in North America by the enormous resilience of the ecosystems in which we live. Other places in the world are not so lucky. I have yet to read a comprehensive environmental analysis of the floods in Pakistan, but I am sure someone will do one soon.
But surely and steadily, a kind of ‘war’ is coming to the Kootenays. The proposed Jumbo Ski resort lumbers along, despite the fact that no one wants it, it will cost a small fortune to build, it will probably go broke – eventually, as the price of gas rises and no one will want to drive forty miles into the mountains to ski, it will destroy the grizzly population in the Purcells. What kind of person looks at the pristine mountain valley and decides to build a city there?
And, in addition, the Glacier Howser private power project at the north end of Kootenay Lake is back, a project that will only make money for a few corporate suits and their lackeys, that will destroy two large and beautiful fish bearing creeks that flow into Kootenay Lake, that will bring roads, lights, dynamite, noise, destruction, to a pristine area. And for what?
Yes, anyone who burns gasoline and uses electricity is implicated but corporations and their bought government hacks who make decisions that destroy landscapes and ecosystems in order to only enrich a few, are far more implicated. And yes, many of us will go to the phony ‘public hearings’ and many more of us will protest and some will be arrested but the game is rigged from the beginning and no one in government or industry is listening.
I wish I knew what more to do. I write, I teach, I read, I farm, I grow food and store it away -- I walk through the blazing beauty of September, both joyful and fearful. I stop to pick a windfall Gravenstein apple and go to the beach, sit in the sun, come home in the blue dusk and read some more.
Waiting.
The other obvious failure of capitalism is its contribution to the erosion of the health of the ecosystem. Humans have been drawing down the ecological capital of the planet since the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, but that process has intensified dramatically in the capitalist/imperialist/industrial era. Our culture is filled with talk about the success of capitalism even though that system degrades our relationships and threatens our existence. That’s an odd definition of success.”
From an interview with Robert Jensen, (journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin.)
The amazing golden beauty and bounty of September has returned again. Really, the only way to eat peaches is to stand under a tree of ripe peaches that the wind has shaken, and eat windfall peaches, one after another, dripping juice down my hands and face. Which I do.
And then later, lying in bed, listening to the wind, and distant rumbles of thunder, of course the worries come in. September, winter coming, work beginning, cold again, how much I dread the cold; it all comes down to fear. Nothing is coming that I can’t cope with, but that thought doesn’t stop the fear coming in the window with the thunder.
Lately, the tune, “Walk Me Out into the Morning Dew,” has been haunting my head. It’s a beautiful song about an unknown doomsday. I even went to ITunes and played three versions to get it to go away but it’s still there. Why is it haunting me so persistently?
The farm is, as always, beautiful, peaceful, and productive. The world far from the farm is so not peaceful. This year was the hottest summer in the hottest year since weather records have been kept. There were floods in China and Pakistan, fires in Russia, Bolivia, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and unabated war in Afghanistan. I sat on the beach, as I do every summer, and watched the summer people go round and round and round in their boats and seadoos. Long lines of RV’s rolled by on the road. Normal, everything normal. And mad as can be.
Stephen Henighan wrote a great piece in www.thetyee.ca, this week, called The Phony War, comparing this time in history to the time before World War Two began. But this is a very long quiet time and we are protected in North America by the enormous resilience of the ecosystems in which we live. Other places in the world are not so lucky. I have yet to read a comprehensive environmental analysis of the floods in Pakistan, but I am sure someone will do one soon.
But surely and steadily, a kind of ‘war’ is coming to the Kootenays. The proposed Jumbo Ski resort lumbers along, despite the fact that no one wants it, it will cost a small fortune to build, it will probably go broke – eventually, as the price of gas rises and no one will want to drive forty miles into the mountains to ski, it will destroy the grizzly population in the Purcells. What kind of person looks at the pristine mountain valley and decides to build a city there?
And, in addition, the Glacier Howser private power project at the north end of Kootenay Lake is back, a project that will only make money for a few corporate suits and their lackeys, that will destroy two large and beautiful fish bearing creeks that flow into Kootenay Lake, that will bring roads, lights, dynamite, noise, destruction, to a pristine area. And for what?
Yes, anyone who burns gasoline and uses electricity is implicated but corporations and their bought government hacks who make decisions that destroy landscapes and ecosystems in order to only enrich a few, are far more implicated. And yes, many of us will go to the phony ‘public hearings’ and many more of us will protest and some will be arrested but the game is rigged from the beginning and no one in government or industry is listening.
I wish I knew what more to do. I write, I teach, I read, I farm, I grow food and store it away -- I walk through the blazing beauty of September, both joyful and fearful. I stop to pick a windfall Gravenstein apple and go to the beach, sit in the sun, come home in the blue dusk and read some more.
Waiting.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The Things She Carries: Luanne Armstrong
The things she carries:
On the 33 bus, she looks across the aisle and there is a mirror and a laden down old woman looking back at her. Sunglasses, walking stick, keys, purse, bag, computer, books, notebooks, a good pen, eyedrops, heart pills. She wears comfortable shoes and a sun hat. Once she ran outside early, barefoot, cold dew on her feet. She shrugged on a t-shirt and shorts. Into the garden for a few peas, a couple of strawberries, carrots with the dirt rubbed off. And then to the beach in the grey dawn, fishing rod in hand, a line, a small hook, a glass jar of worms.
On the bus to the university, she is the only one without earphones. She looks through her sunglasses at the bright-sun streets. If only she could read on the bus.
***
As my mother got older, leaving the house got more difficult. Even going for a walk to the beach required remembering. The right shoes. A coat? Was it cold, she would ask me? She was afraid of cold. Even on hot days, she might need a coat at the beach. Or should she change her shoes. Had she turned off the stove? Did she need her glasses? Sunglasses? I was patient; I betrayed my mother in that patience. Once I would have snapped at her. No you don’t need a stupid coat. Now I waited. Behind her fear of cold, her fear of the wrong shoes, was her and my real fear, the forgetting, the losing it, the really getting old fear.
***
Each morning, for two weeks I ride the #33 to the university. One morning, a woman gets on and drops her bus pass. She lurches into the seat next to me as the bus takes off. “Oh no,” she says, leaning over, scrabbling with her fingers under the seat. The bus pass, impossibly, has slid into a thin heating vent, a slit under the seats. I lean over, lending more if not physical support, as she slowly creaks to her knees, pushes her arm under the seat and retrieves it.
“I have this theory that inanimate objects are out to get us.” I say.
“They certainly are. Last week, just as my neighbour was getting into the elevator in our building, she dropped her keys and they fell through the crack between the elevator floor and the building floor and all the way down the elevator shaft. They had to shut down the elevator. Took two days to retrieve them.”
“Seems whenever I pick something up, a milk jug, a tub of yogurt, it is plotting to spill out of my hands.”
“There’s something to that,” she agrees. We nod, smiling and talking until she gets of the bus, her bus pass now safely contained in her purse.
***
“Everyone should write a memoir,” I tell my class. “Otherwise personal history, family history, disappears in two or three generations.” Another students says that things that matter, family heirlooms, also lose their meaning in a couple of generations. She is planning on having her name, her mother’s name and her grandmother’s name engraved on an art-deco bracelet given to her by her grandmother. Provenance, the history that things carry with them. When my father died, we threw out all the things he had collected, all his treasures, now junk, the vacuum cleaner that he had wired together so it sparked and shocked anyone but him who used it. The toaster that no longer popped out toast. The record player. The reel to reel tape recorder. Truckloads of his treasured accumulated layered stuff went to the dump. He had spent years going to garage sales, bring home things that almost worked, things that only he could fix.
My daughter and I are talking about this. “After I die, you can throw everything away,” I say, “except my journals and all those bags of letters.” She laughs but her face is suddenly shocked. Her mother’s journals, once private, once books she sneaked into when she was a child to catch a glimpse of her mother’s tortured inner life, will be just more writing. And what will they mean to anyone when I am no longer here to explain what I meant? The one excuse writers can never make – this is what I meant to say.
The things we carry that fill our lives, that stack on shelves and in drawers, markers, records, each with provenance, each sticky with memories and meaning. Some have more meaning than others; old photos, books, journals. But I will never know, now, why my father loved his junk. He was poor his whole life; he hated spending money, he liked to tinker. But the stuff was far more important to him than that.
I am weighted with all the books I have read and stories I know and people I’ve met and things I’ve done and places I’ve seen. I am weighted with letters and conversations and emails and books I’ve written. I am a freighter, low gunneled in heavy seas. I am a walking encyclopedia, I am a freight train going both ways from the past to the future, a muddle of metaphors, walking slow. I carry the world and its many deaths, its huddle of lives.
***
Animals are without kindness but full of care. As I work, again and again, I pass the new swallow nestlings, silent on the clothesline beside their nest, still being fed by their parents. They watch without fear. I look away. I am not dangerous, I say. I carry pots of plants. I carry seedlings to the garden and weeds away from the garden and mulch to the garden and vegetables to the house sink. I carry the hose and sprinklers from place to place, moving each sprinkler every couple of hourse., I carry a bag of soil to the greenhouse. I carry buckets and baskets and later, I carry raspberries and cherries, caught in plastic, to the freezer.
I had twin daughters. Getting out of the house to go for a walk with them in the stroller always seemed impossibly complicated; like planning a safari, bottles, diapers, toys, crackers, jackets in case it rained, my wallet, my shoes, my own jacket. Going anywhere with children still seems impossibly complicated. But now that I am old, sometimes when my nine year old grandson comes to visit, we get in the car with only money and drive twenty miles to buy a milkshake. When he first arrives at the farm, he takes off his clothes, he jumps on the trampoline naked, he wears the same shirt for two weeks. As he jumps on the trampoline, penis bobbing, he puts his head back, looks at the sky, yells, “I’m free, I’m free.”
On my desk, books and pieces of paper stack up, totter, slip, slide, hide under the printer, accumulate dust, cat hair, dog hair, skin cells, the ones I need most disappear; the ones that hover lose all meaning.
***
Even at the farm, going to the beach for a lazy afternoon, she carries a bag with: drinks, a towel, a notebook, a paperback, pens, pencils, drawing pad, and once at the beach, she sets up an umbrella, a chair, a table; things from the bag are spread on the table, she sits, her eyes closed against the light.
The summer table. She rests.
On the 33 bus, she looks across the aisle and there is a mirror and a laden down old woman looking back at her. Sunglasses, walking stick, keys, purse, bag, computer, books, notebooks, a good pen, eyedrops, heart pills. She wears comfortable shoes and a sun hat. Once she ran outside early, barefoot, cold dew on her feet. She shrugged on a t-shirt and shorts. Into the garden for a few peas, a couple of strawberries, carrots with the dirt rubbed off. And then to the beach in the grey dawn, fishing rod in hand, a line, a small hook, a glass jar of worms.
On the bus to the university, she is the only one without earphones. She looks through her sunglasses at the bright-sun streets. If only she could read on the bus.
***
As my mother got older, leaving the house got more difficult. Even going for a walk to the beach required remembering. The right shoes. A coat? Was it cold, she would ask me? She was afraid of cold. Even on hot days, she might need a coat at the beach. Or should she change her shoes. Had she turned off the stove? Did she need her glasses? Sunglasses? I was patient; I betrayed my mother in that patience. Once I would have snapped at her. No you don’t need a stupid coat. Now I waited. Behind her fear of cold, her fear of the wrong shoes, was her and my real fear, the forgetting, the losing it, the really getting old fear.
***
Each morning, for two weeks I ride the #33 to the university. One morning, a woman gets on and drops her bus pass. She lurches into the seat next to me as the bus takes off. “Oh no,” she says, leaning over, scrabbling with her fingers under the seat. The bus pass, impossibly, has slid into a thin heating vent, a slit under the seats. I lean over, lending more if not physical support, as she slowly creaks to her knees, pushes her arm under the seat and retrieves it.
“I have this theory that inanimate objects are out to get us.” I say.
“They certainly are. Last week, just as my neighbour was getting into the elevator in our building, she dropped her keys and they fell through the crack between the elevator floor and the building floor and all the way down the elevator shaft. They had to shut down the elevator. Took two days to retrieve them.”
“Seems whenever I pick something up, a milk jug, a tub of yogurt, it is plotting to spill out of my hands.”
“There’s something to that,” she agrees. We nod, smiling and talking until she gets of the bus, her bus pass now safely contained in her purse.
***
“Everyone should write a memoir,” I tell my class. “Otherwise personal history, family history, disappears in two or three generations.” Another students says that things that matter, family heirlooms, also lose their meaning in a couple of generations. She is planning on having her name, her mother’s name and her grandmother’s name engraved on an art-deco bracelet given to her by her grandmother. Provenance, the history that things carry with them. When my father died, we threw out all the things he had collected, all his treasures, now junk, the vacuum cleaner that he had wired together so it sparked and shocked anyone but him who used it. The toaster that no longer popped out toast. The record player. The reel to reel tape recorder. Truckloads of his treasured accumulated layered stuff went to the dump. He had spent years going to garage sales, bring home things that almost worked, things that only he could fix.
My daughter and I are talking about this. “After I die, you can throw everything away,” I say, “except my journals and all those bags of letters.” She laughs but her face is suddenly shocked. Her mother’s journals, once private, once books she sneaked into when she was a child to catch a glimpse of her mother’s tortured inner life, will be just more writing. And what will they mean to anyone when I am no longer here to explain what I meant? The one excuse writers can never make – this is what I meant to say.
The things we carry that fill our lives, that stack on shelves and in drawers, markers, records, each with provenance, each sticky with memories and meaning. Some have more meaning than others; old photos, books, journals. But I will never know, now, why my father loved his junk. He was poor his whole life; he hated spending money, he liked to tinker. But the stuff was far more important to him than that.
I am weighted with all the books I have read and stories I know and people I’ve met and things I’ve done and places I’ve seen. I am weighted with letters and conversations and emails and books I’ve written. I am a freighter, low gunneled in heavy seas. I am a walking encyclopedia, I am a freight train going both ways from the past to the future, a muddle of metaphors, walking slow. I carry the world and its many deaths, its huddle of lives.
***
Animals are without kindness but full of care. As I work, again and again, I pass the new swallow nestlings, silent on the clothesline beside their nest, still being fed by their parents. They watch without fear. I look away. I am not dangerous, I say. I carry pots of plants. I carry seedlings to the garden and weeds away from the garden and mulch to the garden and vegetables to the house sink. I carry the hose and sprinklers from place to place, moving each sprinkler every couple of hourse., I carry a bag of soil to the greenhouse. I carry buckets and baskets and later, I carry raspberries and cherries, caught in plastic, to the freezer.
I had twin daughters. Getting out of the house to go for a walk with them in the stroller always seemed impossibly complicated; like planning a safari, bottles, diapers, toys, crackers, jackets in case it rained, my wallet, my shoes, my own jacket. Going anywhere with children still seems impossibly complicated. But now that I am old, sometimes when my nine year old grandson comes to visit, we get in the car with only money and drive twenty miles to buy a milkshake. When he first arrives at the farm, he takes off his clothes, he jumps on the trampoline naked, he wears the same shirt for two weeks. As he jumps on the trampoline, penis bobbing, he puts his head back, looks at the sky, yells, “I’m free, I’m free.”
On my desk, books and pieces of paper stack up, totter, slip, slide, hide under the printer, accumulate dust, cat hair, dog hair, skin cells, the ones I need most disappear; the ones that hover lose all meaning.
***
Even at the farm, going to the beach for a lazy afternoon, she carries a bag with: drinks, a towel, a notebook, a paperback, pens, pencils, drawing pad, and once at the beach, she sets up an umbrella, a chair, a table; things from the bag are spread on the table, she sits, her eyes closed against the light.
The summer table. She rests.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)