The Animals Come Back by K.L.Kivi

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.

Bonded by Swine

My brother and I were talking about the swine flu the other day. To my astonishment, I discovered he’d just gotten vaccinated. He was surprised by my surprise and suggested that my mistrust of government and health authorities was an ongoing manifestation of my parents’ deep-seated lack of confidence in people and societal norms. It is true that we were brought up to keep our heads down and trust no one other than family. These were obviously necessities of survival in the young adult lives of my refugee parents. But does this modus operandi have deeper roots than recent wars? What purposes are served by blending in and relying only on familiar folk?

Trusting the known undoubtedly has deep roots in Estonian as well as other peasant cultures. Rural folks have learned to rely on their own eyes, their own intuition and the collective experience of their families and communities for survival. Why? Because living within the natural world involves knowing the specifics, not generalities, of where you are. Each place has its own soil, its own weather patterns, its own predators, its own weeds, its own ambience, its own human culture. Very little of this information can be found in books – it is kept alive through story telling as a living, collective resource that changes and grows day to day through the participation of the inhabitants.

This self reliance was spun as stupidity, xenophobia and incompetence by popular culture in the 1960s and 70s. That was the era in which the capitalist project included industrialization of farming; getting those pesky, independent-minded farmers to move into cities was no easy task. Remember shows like Green Acres, Petticoat Junction and the Beverly Hillbillies? The characters were rarely, if ever, shown as having the profound and highly functional knowledge of place that characterizes rural people.

But what about drawing attention to oneself? Why has that not been well looked upon? Could it be because in more traditional settings surviving and thriving is a communal affair instead of a personal quest? One head sticking out may jeopardize the idea of collectivity as well as draw very real, unwanted attention to the group. It’s important to differentiate between drawing attention to oneself and being one’s unique self. The former involves expecting and striving for rewards while the latter simply asks for acceptance. Drawing attention to oneself takes a person out of the collective.

Interestingly, modern urban, capitalist culture asks people to do precisely the opposite on both counts. In order to get ahead among the masses, we’re supposed to jump up and down loudly proclaiming our unique worth. And since we don’t have contact with primary producers, we’re supposed to trust labels, guarantees, warranties, economic forecasts and the claims of myriad snake oil merchants. Chia seeds anyone? In the mad rush of a consumer culture, there’s no time to know who and what is around you. There’s no time to develop your unique self in your unique setting beyond taking on entertainment and style likes and dislikes. Most urbanites become passive consumers rather than creators of culture.

Of course, this culture of “look at me” embedded in sameness has made inroads into rural cultures as well. However, Luanne’s tale of the Armstrong pig raising venture shows how our mistrust of authority and the machinery of consumer culture can bring rural people back to some of those values. People who slaughter pigs together, inevitably, in spite of differences, bond on a primal level. Killing is an intimate act. Every time one of the slaughter crew eats a pork chop, ham or sausage this winter, they will have a bodily, as well as mental, memory of that day at the Armstrong farm. Their psyches will conjure up the people who were there with them, the flavour of the autumn air and the tang of the land that took up the blood of their efforts. Nobody was a star, everybody had a role, everybody was required.

Though I missed the Armstrong Farm pig slaughter, I did my own bonding through swine last week. When I got my flu vaccination the natural way – one short, achy bout in bed was what the dreaded H1N1 amounted to – my land partners and I had plenty of time to visit, take each other soup and remedies, and mull over the early snowfall. I feel fortunate to live in a place where so many in my community have refused to bow to the media hysteria about the flu pandemic and the government’s promotion of the pharmaceutical industry’s profit margin. Instead, we entrusted ourselves to each other’s care and wisdom. And it was good.