While on hiatus

I took a long break from blogging this past autumn -- not entirely by choice.  In early summer, we brought home some unwanted guests from a hotel.  By the time that we discovered them on Labor Day weekend, they had made themselves comfortable in one of our bedrooms.  Consequently, my desktop computer and most of our possessions will reside in plastic bags until sometime next autumn.

Nonetheless, I didn't entirely give up writing.  I wrote at work, of course:  endless revisions to long-overdue reports, and briefing notes on almost every subject.  But I also found time to make a few entries into a notebook.

October 12, 2012.

On a chill autumn day, low, broken clouds shuttle over the city, shedding a few, fat snowflakes.  The foliage peaked in color last week, before a windstorm blew through and began stripping the trees down to their grey bones.  Another week or two should see them standing naked.

I have not kept up my Seasons blog.  Our desktop computer resides in a large plastic bag, in bed-bug quarantine.  Sue and Tom make do with their old laptops, and Ben has a new laptop.  I, however, have no readily accessible computer, and I've felt strangely reluctant to remedy the situation.  Until recently.  As the season begins to accelerate, I find myself wanting to write.

While I kept by head down at work and at home, September passed like a fleeting glimpse from a car window.  Summer became autumn... and, today, a harbinger of winter.  I don't feel ready for winter.  I feel cheated of time.  Perhaps writing of the seasons also slows them down and gives them more substance.  An interesting twist on General Relativity.

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Today I picked up a copy of Henry Beston's book, the outermost house.  St. Martin's Griffin just reprinted it in celebration of the 75th anniversary of its publication.  Already, just into the first couple of chapters, I can see again the dunes and beaches of Cape Cod and Rhode Island, where I spent two years in my teens.  I can feel the warmth of hollows behind the dunes, late on an autumn or spring day, out of the sea wind, with the sun lying golden on the sand.  I can recall the tidal creeks of the inlets, cut sharp into the sandy, grass-bound flats.  During the ebb and flood, the water streamed swift through the narrow channels, sweeping bits of weed and flotsam.  During the slack, my brother and I poled through the creeks with my father, chasing blue crabs.  I recall the ceaseless sound of the waves, the hiss of grass and sand, the cries of the gulls.

Beston writes of a connection to the natural world that resonates with my own.  And he writes beautifully.

"The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.  In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.  The flux and reflux of the ocean, the incoming of waves, the gathering of birds, the pilgrimages of the peoples of the sea, winter and storm, the splendor of autumn and the holiness of spring -- all these were part of the great beach.  The longer I stayed, the more eager was I to know this coast and to share its mysterious and elemental life; I found myself free to do so, I had no fear of being alone, I had something of a field naturalist's inclination; presently I made up my mind to remain and trying living for a year on Eastham Beach."

He writes of animals, in an oft-repeated quote.

"For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."

Oct. 13, 2012.

Waiting at the corner of Slater and Bank in a chill rain for a bus too long coming.  Huddled against a pillar, just outside the rain.  People drift to the stop in one and twos and threes.  A pretty, young woman with jet black hair and a too thin coat pulls her arms around herself, snugging close her oversized purse.

October 14, 2012

Last night's chill rain continues into today.  It soaks into the city, floating autumn to the surface like fallen leaves floating on a puddle.  In the heart of Centretown, most of the trees hold their colors:  orange, gold, brilliant yellows, fully saturated in rain.  As I crossed the footbridge, I stopped to admire the raindrops dangling precariously from the bristle tips of young Freeman's maple leaves planted beside the ramp.  Crossing a slick street, I admired a leafy quilt glowing against the black trunk of a large sugar maple in an adjacent yard.  The streets seem sparse and quiet.  A few figures twirl umbrellas along the sidewalk.  Cars hiss past in solo doppler approach and retreat.

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Henry Beston writes:

"The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.  I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of the ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied."

I do not agree.  I can think of several other voices:  wind over the prairies, changing over the season; a mountain brook, murmuring in the strange, pulsing rhythm of its kind; the late summer buzz and trill of grasslands under a blue sky.  But I think that the most awesome and subtle is the drip and trickling, the crackling and pop of earth unthawing, the reedy melody of earth freeing itself of winter on an early, spring morning.  Best heard, perhaps, in the mountains, surrounded by fir, and cedar, and pine.

October 16, 2012.

Today felt like the onset of winter.  I recoiled from it as I stepped outside:  chill without the autumn damp and scent of mould; a paler, more sterile light.  I zipped my jacket to the neck.  As I walked to work, the students crossing the footbridge bore winter coats and toques.  The canal has drained, revealing the detritus of the previous season, and long, stringy weed.  Some color remains in the trees above the pathway; but it seems more sad than cheerful.

The shoulder seasons -- late autumn and early spring -- can feel like joyless times.  They linger dully in the joints, a premonition of changing weather.  Perhaps the lack of any true, Indian Summer has contributed to the sense of melancholy.

The sun slips lower, even though we still lie two months away from its nadir.  I noticed it on Saturday, as I toured my beaver deceiver sites.  Looking south at noon, I could see the sun a scarce couple of hands breadths from the trees bordering the Kizell Wetland.  It gave little warmth and a thin light.

October 28, 2012.

I have the house to myself for most of this weekend.  Sue has gone to a yoga retreat with Kate Potter, and the boys have gone to their other homes.  A mild drizzle fell all day, slicking the streets and burnishing the golden leaves across the back parking lot.  I drove to the yoga studio this afternoon, to take Sue an item.  The trees stood black against the hillsides, here and there a clutch of white birch standing forth.  Mists wreathed the hilltops.  It reminded me of the Gulf Islands.

December 8, 2012

Dawn Smith died yesterday at 4 AM, at home, with her family.  As always, I find it odd to think of the world with my friend gone.  I recall that the Navajo maintain that the rite of adulthood remakes the world with the new man or woman; does the death of someone remake the world without them?

People pass outside the windows at Starbucks.  Fat snowflakes fall and vanish on wet pavement.  Cars and busses grumble and hiss along the street.  I watch a woman disembark from a bus.  She shrugs a backpack over her down coat.  Her hood covers a bright, red toque.  Our eyes meet briefly as she turns the corner and disappears.  She carries her own world with her.

I don't believe that we die, any more than we live.  We are the threads that rise to the top of a tapestry, carry on awhile adding our color to the story, and then submerge to support the rising of the next thread.  We feel the disappearance of our friends' threads more than the impending loss of our own.  But we can look back at their place in the story, and we can trace their influence in the threads that follow.

Threads

My friend, Dawn Smith, died early Friday morning, at home with her husband, Chris, and her sons, Shay and Matt.  When I visited for the last time, several weeks ago, she lay in a bed in the living room, beside a window overlooking the old apple trees in the garden.  The light fell gently in the room.  The sounds of her family carried clearly from the kitchen and the bedrooms upstairs.

A year or more had passed since I'd last visited the farm that I call, "Fair Prospect."  I hadn't made a conscious decision to stay away; nor had I forgotten my friends.  I followed the slow weaving of life at the farm from afar, as documented online by Chris in his wonderful photographs:  the travels, the visits from family, the changing seasons in the garden.  Rightly or wrongly, I could not envision my own thread adding to the pattern and the richness of that life as it once had.

We are entwined with people in different ways:  some for life, some just for a time and place.  With some, we run together for awhile, separate, and come together again.  We share our different colors and textures.  We complement and contrast.  The picture that we make continues after we have parted.

There is a time for every purpose, and a time for every friendship.  I regret that Dawn and I will not have that time again. But I am deeply grateful for the time that she had with Chris, Shay, Matt -- a longer time than anyone expected.  She drew them together, blended their lives, and now leaves them as a family.  I believe that every life is a work of art.  Dawn wove a vibrant tapestry in that rambling house up the maple lane, across the lawn full of light and dogs, in the back pasture amid the horses and llamas, along the paths in the wood.  Dawn made good art, and her thread continues.

In search of quiet

"It's easy to be a wise man when you're sitting on a mountain."

I don't know the origin of this quote, or where I heard it.  But I recalled it a couple of weeks ago.  I had guided my canoe gently on to a shallow mud flat at the edge of narrow river, and then leaned back on the bench, resting my elbows against the gunnels and stretching my legs in exquisite pleasure at the change in position.  A shrub leaned out from the shore, shading me.  For as far as I could see along the straightened channel, tall, thick orchard grass bent from the bank toward the slow, clear water.  Tufts of wild rice nodded slowly in the current.  In places, a thin band of pickerel weed and water lilies edged out from the bank.  Only the blue sky looked down on me; the rest of world lay beyond the green fringe.

A flock of geese passed noisily overhead.  Birds rustled and chipped furtively in the grass.  Grasshoppers buzzed in the bordering fields.  Dragonflies and damselflies danced over the water, their sharp metallic colors bright in the sunlight.  Minnows and creek chubb swirled and darted in small schools.

I couldn't entirely escape the human element.  Distantly, I could hear traffic.  A tractor growled somewhere behind me, maybe at the golfcourse farther upstream, or haying in one of the fields.  A high, passing passenger jet sounded like a distant waterfall.  But tucked under the lip of my narrow, green valley, I felt hidden from the world.  I breathed in the rich perfume of late summer, and breathed out stale air, concerns and responsibilities.

Reflecting there, I thought how fortunate I was to have such a moment and such a place to spend it.  I thought how rare it must be.  How many knew of this place and had lingered in it?  A few minutes earlier, I had watched an American bittern feeding on the mud flat and in the reeds under the ragged bark of a huge, leaning crack willow.  Oblivious to the quiet man in the still canoe, he had stalked the shallows for insects and frogs, pausing now and then to lift his head and bill, showing off the soft, brown streaking of his chest and neck.  An intimate show, private.  Did it have more or less meaning because of a human witness?  Did I give it meaning, or did it give meaning to me?  Or was there no meaning at all?

I don't know.  But I have added that moment to a score of others to which I return in my memories and thoughts, when I need to find some distance from the noisy, crowded world about me.

Mud Lake, Brittania

Mud Lake.  Such an unappealing, dull name for such a beautiful, diverse place.  It conveys nothing of the delightful chorus of migrating warblers in the surrounding forest and thickets on a early May morning.  It gives no hint of the late, summer sun setting aglow the surface of the Ottawa River and silhouetting a lone fly fisherman on the shoreline's rocky ledges.  It fails to capture the spectacle of hundreds of cackling Canada geese sideslipping over paprika and apricot foliage to land in the lake late on an autumn afternoon.  It says nothing of the hush of snow sifting through the towering pines on a winter evening.

Mud Lake sits on the shore of the Ottawa River in Brittania, within a semi-natural area of approximately 70 ha.  A low ridge, a quiet access road and the lawns of the Brittania Water Purification Plant separate it from the river.  A thin band of deciduous trees screens most of the lake.  Behind this screen, on the east side, lie young swamp forests, thickets and old fields.  An older, mixed forest lies on the west side of the lake, dominated by large white pines.  Across the access road, the shale ridge supports a thicket of stunted trees, staghorn sumac, and other scrubby brush, that merges with a fringe of crack willow along the river.

The lake, itself, abounds with life.  Cattails, shrubs and sedges crowd the shore, while lilypads and other floating aquatic plants carpet the deeper sections.  Muskrats and beavers cruise the lake in the evenings.  Painted turtles glide under the surface, while a few Blanding's turtles still survive in some of the quieter backwaters.  Bullheads gather in the shallows.  Dragonflies and damselflies dance everywhere, with 65 species reported.

But Mud Lake is probably best known as one of Ottawa's great birdwatching sites.  In the spring, the location, along with the diversity of vegetation and habitats, draws in birds of all shapes and sizes.  Warblers, flycatchers and hummingbirds flit through the trees and underbrush.  Thrashers and catbirds, sometimes even cuckoos and mockingbirds, chatter in the thickets.  Swallows and martins dart over the fields and the lake.  Great blue herons and black-crowned night herons stalk frogs along the shoreline.  Ducks, geese, gulls and shorebirds of all kinds visit or reside through the spring, summer and autumn months.  Sharp-shinned hawks, Cooper's hawks, merlins and kestrels come to hunt.  Peregrines sometimes pass through, as do bald eagles and ospreys.  In the past, great horned owls have been known to winter in the woods.

Sadly, Mud Lake has suffered from neglect -- and not necessarily benign.  Buckthorn has invaded much of the forest, creating an almost impenetrable subcanopy in areas.  Heavy use has crisscrossed the area with trails.  An overabundance of geese, drawn by the water and the green lawns of the purfication plant, has fouled and eroded much of the northern shoreline.  Nonetheless, it remains a oasis of biodiversity and beauty in the heart of Ottawa.

The dog days of summer

According to various sources, the phrase, "the dog days of summer" originated with the Romans.  The Romans noticed that the hottest days of summer tended to occur during a period when the "Dog Star", Sirius, rose in the morning with the sun:  a period from mid-July to mid-August, by our current calendar.  The phrase has remained in use, I suspect, because of the image it provokes:  a lazy dog, a hound maybe, lolling in the shade of a lilac bush, beside a drooping, screened porch at the front of a weathered farmhouse.  Cicadas buzz loudly in the trees along the lane and along the hedgerows in the fields.  The hound twitches his velvet ears now and then to unsettle the biting flies, which buzz for a moment and then settle back down.  Under the unbroken blue sky and midday sun, nothing moves except for waves of shimmering heat flowing off the hard, baked earth.  Time crawls like a tortoise.

The dog days of summer lie heavily over Ottawa.  The fields, forests, wetlands and wildlife whither under the worst drought in decades, with the past twelve months having produced the least precipitation on record.  Brush fires flare around the City.  Farmers suffer terribly, with poor hay yields and the prospect of failing corn and soybeans.  Wilted trees seem common, and those on drier, thinner soils have begun to change color from the stress.  Many smaller streams and creeks have shrunk to strings of stagnant, remant pools.  One can walk across the cracked, clay beds of some marshes.

And, yet, in many ways, it seems the best of summers.  The hot, dry days hark back to halycon times, simpler, slower times of lazy contemplation.  Cool morning outings.  Afternoon siestas.  The ecstatic plunge into a fragrant lake.  The thrill and promise of a lover's fingertips trailed along a forearm in the long, lingering evening.  Times that probably never existed as we remember them, but exist now as we desire them.

These days will impress themselves upon us, and especially on our children.  For them, this summer will stand for all their youthful summers.  They will recall that the sky never seemed so blue, the grasshoppers so numerous, the world so expansive and free.  No lake will sparkle again so brilliantly under the sun for them.  The rustling of the trembling aspens will never again sound so bright, nor will the poplars smell so pungent.  No sunset will ever again burn so rich.  Our children will carry these memories, and these memories will shape their lives.  And someday, in the dog days of another summer, they will relive and renew them.

The Rideau River

"Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver,

Through the waves that run for ever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot"

- Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot

The Rideau River doesn't flow down to Camelot, although the old City Hall, perched on its island just upstream of the Rideau Falls has its own, nostalgic mistique.  But my romance with the Rideau River has not waned in the twenty-odd years that I've lived in Ottawa.  In fact, it has deepened.

The Rideau River runs for almost 20 kilometres through urban Ottawa, although the section along which I spend most of my time is the 12 kilometre stretch from Carleton University to the Rideau Falls.  Several times a week, from late spring until mid-autumn, I ride my bicycle along the bordering pathways.  Once or twice a month I put my canoe in at Strathcona Park, and paddle up the river, with camera and binoculars beside me and a big fly trailing behind in the current in the vain hope of picking up a muskie.  Or I walk down with my rod and waders to a favourite ledge, where I cast to the big bass that lurk at the edge of a deep channel.

On any day, I never know what wildlife I will find at the river.  In the winter, mallards and goldeneyes congregate in the swift, open reaches.  In the spring and autumn, migratory waterfowl pass through:  buffleheads, loons, black ducks, common and hooded mergansers....  In the summer, the river and the woods teem with birds:  more mallards, wood ducks, great blue herons, mergansers, double-crested cormorants, spotted sandpipers, and songbirds of every kind.  More than once, I've lifted my head to the piping alarm of blackbirds to watch a Cooper's Hawk fly swiftly across the river.  The Royal Swans, released from their winter captivity, glide along the shoreline.  And not just birds frequent the Rideau.  Bullfrogs groan in the shallows, and muskrats wind between lilypads and pickerelweed.  I've cruised my canoe up to somnolent snapping turtles, and cautiously edged toward wary painted turtles.  On an evening bicycle ride, I've exchanged curious stares with an otter.  In the dawn of another day, I've paddled quietly past a doe and fawn drinking at the water's edge.  The Rideau River provides a natural refuge and a ribbon of life through the heart of Ottawa.

The abundance and diversity of wildlife attests to the health of the Rideau River, especially considering the number of people that come to enjoy its offerings.  Some people come to fish.  Some come to cool their feet in the clean current -- especially at the shallow, limestone ledge that spans the river at Strathcona.  Some come to feed the ducks.  Some come for exercise, to walk, run or ride along the pathways.  Some come merely to enjoy the views, to quiet their minds beside the water, or to hold hands with a sweetheart.

I have lived in Victoria, Vancouver, Halifax, Edmonton, and Toronto.  I have visited most other Canadian cities at one time or another.  I don't know any urban, natural space that exceeds the beauty of the Rideau River.  In another place -- a New York, a London, or a Tokyo -- it would be celebrated and promoted.  In books and movies, lovers would embrace and part on its shady banks.  Photographers would immortalize it.  Poets would write of it.  In modest Ottawa, though, it rolls on almost unheralded.  Perhaps we like it that way.  Perhaps that's the secret of its charms.

Images of Spring

After my return from Green Lake, May seemed to pass in an instant.  I plunged immediately back into work, and the weekends became more a time for recovery than reflection.  The month seemed rushed and didn't leave a strong impression -- like a limp handshake.

However, as I revisit some of the photographs from this month, I remember moments -- days even -- when I slowed down enough to pay attention:  the Co-op clean-up; a canoe ride along the Rideau; evening bicycle rides.

Although the calendar may still show summer a few days off, it has arrived in Ottawa with a blazing afternoon sky, heavy air and evening thunderstorms, nights in the cooling breeze of a fan across bare skin.  Out in the countryside, some farmers brought in the first hay more than a week ago.  Grasses stand high in the fields, gaily decorated with daubs of bright daisies.  They invite a stroll, a stem dangling between the lips, a flattened space and idle hours spent watching clouds.  Oh, to have the time! 

Late last week, when Lyla and Ella came down for two nights, we all gathered on the front porch to watch a storm roll over the house:  lightning and thunder, and rain hammering off the pavement.  Tom and Ben took the girls dancing on the sidewalk in the rain, to joyful upturned faces, laughter and giggles.  We opened both doors, front and back, to let the air blow through -- to let out the staleness.

That's what I need these days:  more dancing, and breeze blowing through me.