When I was six or seven, we lived one year in a small bungalow on a street near the edge of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The street climbed the gentle, south slope of a hill, and our house overlooked a valley with a pond that froze solid enough in the winter for skating. We owned a beautiful collie -- my first love. The grass grew long in the vacant lot beside our house. Past the end of the street, hay fields led to a farmyard and large barn belonging to a man who didn't seem to mind the intrusions of young children.
The smells of that place imprinted themselves on me, especially the scents of grass and hay. I've made several site visits in the last month, walking through old fields and skirting hedgerows and woodlots. The wet spring pushed the grasses up early and high. As my legs brushed through the dense stems, I felt again like that child in Dartmouth. Sensations rose around me, clinging to me like hay seed in the hairs on my bare arms. In a more innocent moment, I could have flattened a place for myself hidden in the grass under the blue sky, listened to the birds and thought life was forever.
Similarly, sensation overcomes me when I dive into a clear lake in the Madwaska Highlands. I'm emersed in the smell of living water. It lingers on my skin, in my hair and in my nostrils until my next sterile shower. Other, stronger smells linger deep in my very being, where they have spliced themselves into my psychic DNA: the astringent smell of the sea and shore; the deep symphony of odours in the mould of a B.C. rain forest; the savor of dust rising from a prairie dirt road, as comforting as fresh baked bread.
When life ends... when the sight grows dim and the sounds recede... I wonder if the scent of life, or the remembered scent of life, is the last sense to pass away. That wouldn't be a bad thing, to leave life in wrapped in memories of pine forests and mountain light.
Tuesday 21 June 2011
Sunday 12 June 2011
Learning to love Ottawa
Last weekend, I found a manufacturer of an inexpensive bicycle canoe trailer. Sue and I disposed of our car in the autumn and turned to VrtuCar (a local car-sharing business) for our transportation needs. Consequently, this spring, I've lacked an easy way of transporting my canoe around Ottawa. I have yet to fish for pike in Constance Bay, or paddle up the Rideau looking for the big snapping turtle that basks on a sagging crack willow, or fall on my butt in the muck while hauling over a beaver dams along some narrow creek in the Marlborough Forest. In fact, I feel a bit stir crazy.
I didn't like Ottawa when my ex-wife, Susan, and I arrived here twenty years ago. I had grown up in Victoria and Vancouver, with the sea and the mountains close at hand. I had lived for eight years in Edmonton, with frequent forays to Jasper or out into the prairie parkland. I revelled in the sky, the space and the light. Ottawa, in contrast, seemed to have none of these: the forests were beautiful, and I appreciated the chance to swim in deep, clean lakes after years of prairie potholes; but I missed the horizon and the bevelled edge of the rockies. I missed the gothic skies: the vast, blue dome of the sky on a still, deadly-cold winter morning, or cathedral pillars of thunderheads mounting over fields of wheat. In Ottawa, it seemed, every sightline ended with another row of trees.
Then, a few years ago, newly divorced and alone every second week, I bought a canoe. Light enough to portage and control myself, but long enough to float over all but the shallowest rock. I launched it on lakes, rivers and streams around the region, exploring side channels and bays, tucking under leafy banks and cruising tight, winding channels through marshes and swamps. In it, I discovered the secret of Ottawa's beauty: intimacy.
If the prairies are a cathedral, then Ottawa is a chapel. Whispers replace echoes. Everything feels immediate. I skirt lilypads along the bend of creek and watch a painted turtle slip off a log just ahead. I watch dark shadows of pike and gar dart from under my bow as I edge through rushes along the Ottawa River. Or I drift slowly, while a muskrat swims past with a mouthful of reeds and a heron watches serenely from the shore. On foot or on my bike, I dip into a damp, cove forest and stop to admire a garden of ferns, impossibly green under the dense maple canopy. Oyster mushrooms spread over a rotting log (and I curse that I've again forgotten to bring a paper bag). A red-eyed vireo sings incessently overhead. A small brook chuckles nearby. I follow the banks, admiring the liverworts and turning over small logs to look for salamanders. The damp odour triggers hovering memories, like the scent of incense.
Even the vistas seem intimate. Standing on the prairie, the vastness takes away my breath. I feel like a visitor, tolerated but never entirely welcome. A distant hawk, spiraling on a thermal, calls out his accusation (as Whitman would put it). Whereas, standing on an escarpment, looking over the Ottawa Valley or the Madwaska Highlands, I feel the distance shrink and the details grow. The forests and fields each have their own character, and I can imagine walking through them. I know where I'll find the sagging line of an old, split rail fence, the craggy bark of burr oak, and a lichen-crusted mossy rock outcrop on which to eat my lunch.
I didn't like Ottawa when my ex-wife, Susan, and I arrived here twenty years ago. I had grown up in Victoria and Vancouver, with the sea and the mountains close at hand. I had lived for eight years in Edmonton, with frequent forays to Jasper or out into the prairie parkland. I revelled in the sky, the space and the light. Ottawa, in contrast, seemed to have none of these: the forests were beautiful, and I appreciated the chance to swim in deep, clean lakes after years of prairie potholes; but I missed the horizon and the bevelled edge of the rockies. I missed the gothic skies: the vast, blue dome of the sky on a still, deadly-cold winter morning, or cathedral pillars of thunderheads mounting over fields of wheat. In Ottawa, it seemed, every sightline ended with another row of trees.
Then, a few years ago, newly divorced and alone every second week, I bought a canoe. Light enough to portage and control myself, but long enough to float over all but the shallowest rock. I launched it on lakes, rivers and streams around the region, exploring side channels and bays, tucking under leafy banks and cruising tight, winding channels through marshes and swamps. In it, I discovered the secret of Ottawa's beauty: intimacy.
If the prairies are a cathedral, then Ottawa is a chapel. Whispers replace echoes. Everything feels immediate. I skirt lilypads along the bend of creek and watch a painted turtle slip off a log just ahead. I watch dark shadows of pike and gar dart from under my bow as I edge through rushes along the Ottawa River. Or I drift slowly, while a muskrat swims past with a mouthful of reeds and a heron watches serenely from the shore. On foot or on my bike, I dip into a damp, cove forest and stop to admire a garden of ferns, impossibly green under the dense maple canopy. Oyster mushrooms spread over a rotting log (and I curse that I've again forgotten to bring a paper bag). A red-eyed vireo sings incessently overhead. A small brook chuckles nearby. I follow the banks, admiring the liverworts and turning over small logs to look for salamanders. The damp odour triggers hovering memories, like the scent of incense.
Even the vistas seem intimate. Standing on the prairie, the vastness takes away my breath. I feel like a visitor, tolerated but never entirely welcome. A distant hawk, spiraling on a thermal, calls out his accusation (as Whitman would put it). Whereas, standing on an escarpment, looking over the Ottawa Valley or the Madwaska Highlands, I feel the distance shrink and the details grow. The forests and fields each have their own character, and I can imagine walking through them. I know where I'll find the sagging line of an old, split rail fence, the craggy bark of burr oak, and a lichen-crusted mossy rock outcrop on which to eat my lunch.
Wednesday 1 June 2011
Summer arrives
On my calendar, summer arrives when I hear the first nighthawk buzzing overhead in the dusk. It happened late on Saturday evening, as I prowled a mosaic of outcrops, forest and beaverponds for the Carp Hills Bio-blitz. I'd sweated through a cool, but strangely humid day: first at a City Streamwatch training session with Thomas, and then hunting under stones across the rock barrens for snakes. Hearing the unmistakable buzz above me, I looked up -- not far enough, at first (nighthawks always seem to fly higher than I expect) -- but then I spotted the angular shape of the bird, with its peculiar, erratic flight.
To me, nighthawks and chimney swifts seem irrevocably associated with the pleasures of summer. Perhaps because they appear most active in the evening -- the long, cooling evenings of June and July, when the soft light of the low sun still shines, but the heat of day has reluctantly given way to more gentle temperatures. The neighborhood becomes more quiet and the streets more intimate. Voices carry a little further from the porches under frontyard maples. People visit across the street. Laughter comes more frequently and more melodious. And all the while, the chimney swifts chitter and dart about the rooftops, while the nighthawks buzz and dip above the swifts. Later, much later, when the birds have roosted for the evening, the long sunset has deepened to turquoise and then to indigo, and the streetlights pool silver on the pavement, perhaps a bat appears to flitter in and out of darkness, chasing moths. Cares drop away, and a lazy saunter down an empty, darkened street becomes a meditation.
As for the results of the Carp Hills Bio-blitz, I believe that the organizer, Linda McCormick, felt well-pleased. I look forward to the summary, although I think that the cool weather probably reduced the number of sightings -- especially for the reptiles. In the afternoon, I concentrated on snakes, turning over rock after rock across the barrens and beside the beaverponds, hoping for milksnakes and ribbon snakes. Alas, disappointment again. In the evening, I visited the west edge of the South March Highlands, hoping to hear whip-poor-wills along the ridge and to find Blanding's turtles venturing in search of nesting sites. Again, disappointment, although I enjoyed the distant call of a barred owl and the serenade of hermit thrushes and veerys.
Once again, I didn't bother to keep a running list of species, preferring to concentrate on my search for a few species at risk. However, from memory, here's a partial list of what I saw and heard.
To me, nighthawks and chimney swifts seem irrevocably associated with the pleasures of summer. Perhaps because they appear most active in the evening -- the long, cooling evenings of June and July, when the soft light of the low sun still shines, but the heat of day has reluctantly given way to more gentle temperatures. The neighborhood becomes more quiet and the streets more intimate. Voices carry a little further from the porches under frontyard maples. People visit across the street. Laughter comes more frequently and more melodious. And all the while, the chimney swifts chitter and dart about the rooftops, while the nighthawks buzz and dip above the swifts. Later, much later, when the birds have roosted for the evening, the long sunset has deepened to turquoise and then to indigo, and the streetlights pool silver on the pavement, perhaps a bat appears to flitter in and out of darkness, chasing moths. Cares drop away, and a lazy saunter down an empty, darkened street becomes a meditation.
As for the results of the Carp Hills Bio-blitz, I believe that the organizer, Linda McCormick, felt well-pleased. I look forward to the summary, although I think that the cool weather probably reduced the number of sightings -- especially for the reptiles. In the afternoon, I concentrated on snakes, turning over rock after rock across the barrens and beside the beaverponds, hoping for milksnakes and ribbon snakes. Alas, disappointment again. In the evening, I visited the west edge of the South March Highlands, hoping to hear whip-poor-wills along the ridge and to find Blanding's turtles venturing in search of nesting sites. Again, disappointment, although I enjoyed the distant call of a barred owl and the serenade of hermit thrushes and veerys.
Once again, I didn't bother to keep a running list of species, preferring to concentrate on my search for a few species at risk. However, from memory, here's a partial list of what I saw and heard.
- White-tailed deer (one sighting, abundant scat)
- Ruffed grouse (Carp Hills)
- Turkey vulture (Carp Hills)
- Barred owl (SMH, on the west ridge)
- Common nighthawk (Carp Hills and SMH)
- Common flicker (Carp Hills)
- Eastern kingbird (Carp Hills)
- Great crested flycatcher (Carp Hills)
- Yellow-bellied flycatcher (Carp Hills... identified by sight and song)
- Gray catbird (Carp Hills)
- Veery (SMH, north of Shirley's Brook)
- Hermit thrush (SMH, north of Shirley's Brook)
- Red-eyed vireo (everywhere)
- Gold finch (Carp Hills, residential back yards)
- Yellow warbler (Carp Hills)
- Common yellowthroat (Carp Hills)
- Ovenbird (Carp Hills)
- Scarlet tanager (Carp Hills)
- Garter snake (Carp Hills)
- Ring-necked snake (Carp Hills)
- Pink lady's slipper (Carp Hills, abundant)
- False solomon's seal (Carp Hills)
- Canada mayflower (Carp Hills)
- Hairy solomon's seal (Carp Hills)
- Dry pussytoes (Carp Hills and SMH)
- Bunchberry (Carp Hills)
- Pale corydalis (Carp Hills and SMH)
- Indian cucumber root (Carp Hills)
- Foamflower (Carp Hills)
- Wild columbine (Carp Hills and SMH)
- Wild strawberry (Carp Hills and SMH)
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