The late summer of life

The heat has broken.  The days still climb into the mid-twenties, but the nights have grown cooler.  Instead of lying in bed above the covers, longing for the faintest breeze, I can now lie under a sheet or light blanket with the evening air lapping through the window like ripples on a beach.  I can even roll over and curl an arm around Sue, without breaking into a sweat.  Sue complains that "winter's almost here", as she puts on her sweater to step outside.  As much as I love summer, I revel in the cool morning.  All of the humidity settles overnight into dew on the grass, and air tastes sharp like old cheese and cider -- even here, with King Edward Avenue running past our front porch.

The approaching end of summer comes with clear signs.  Students begin to sift back into our neighborhood.  They appear with their parents or friends, unloading trailers and minivans into rooming houses.  The more tardy of them walk along the streets with scraps of paper, scanning the addresses and stopping to note vacancy signs.  Out in the countryside, the starlings and blackbirds have formed their flocks.  They whirl in and out of golden cornfields.  In the wetlands along the highways, the uppermost leaves of the maples begin to deepen to orange and red.  In the evenings, mist emanates from the warm earth to linger in low fields, valleys and coves until morning.

Sue and I saw a lot of the countryside this weekend.  Much of it, unfortunately, was along Highway 401, as we drove to and from Toronto to attend a baby shower for our friend Abena.  However, on Saturday afternoon we attended a musical gathering at a farm near Ashton, meeting up with friends and making new friends.  The farm is owned by the parents of Jen, one of our friends from the Elizabeth Riley Band.  We started with a informal song circle on the back porch -- just a few of us telling stories and playing our favourites, while the others relaxed in the shade of the trees.  Jen played a few songs.  Lyle Dillabough, the "Ottawa Valley Troubadour" was there, taking the lead or laying back as appropriate.  A neighbor, old Jim, who came to the area from northern Alabama about forty years ago, told stories and sang a cappella gospel in a fading but true southern drawl.  A family cat wound itself between chairs and around ankles.  Hummingbirds darted past the eaves.  Thunder muttered distantly, but somehow steered clear of us.  I took the lead on several songs, playing Our Town (Iris Dement), Call Me the Breeze (JJ Cale) and To Live's to Fly (Townes Van Zandt).

As a few more people showed up, the porch metamorphosed from a song circle to a small open stage.  Electric guitars, amplifiers and speakers made their appearance, and familar 60s and 70s classics began to echo over the surrounding fields.  Patricia and Carmel, our neighbors from the Co-op, arrived to complete the Elizabeth Riley Band.  They took their turn on stage, playing old folk and roots favourites.  The food came out:  new sweet corn, chili and salads.  Surrounded by a small, comfortable group of friends -- about twenty of us altogether -- I ventured to play a short set on stage:  a very nervous and shaky version of The Weakness in Me (Joan Armatrading), a more confident rendition of Don't Think Twice (Bob Dylan), a fair approximation of Red Light (Jonny Lang), a first public performance of Last Song to the Night (Nick Stow) and a reprise of Our Town -- accompanied beautifully by Lyle and the members of the Elizabeth Riley Band.  Sue and I stayed until sunset, then drove home through the dusk, dropping off one of the other guests en route.

It seems that the late summer of life is much like the season.  I feel more comfortable in my skin and more inclined to sample the sweetness of things.  Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would never have played guitar before an audience -- friends or not.  In fact, I would likely have shied away from such a gathering altogether, too self-conscious and too cautious.  More and more, I've come to identify with the words of the song, Ten Mile Stilts, by the Wailin' Jennies:  "I've got a heart that opens clear in this cool September dark/ and it sits on treetop leaves/ and it bursts it's little sparks/ And sometimes it sings its songs/ and it lets it's secrets out/ except for one it sears inside/ that it cannot live without."

I don't have any searing secrets -- I've learned that I can't with those -- but I've come to feel that my heart sits out there in the treetops.  And I don't fear it; and I look to autumn with anticipation.

Goodbye sweet companion

Hercules died on Sunday.  Chris and Dawn called in the evening from their home and property in Oxford Mills, where we had dropped off Hercules last year.  He'd shown no signs of illness or injury on Saturday night, when Chris let him out with Goldie and Shadow for a final run.  But he didn't return with the other dogs.  Chris looked for him in the darkness, to no avail, and then returned to the search in the morning.  He found Hercules by the pond, about 75 m from the house, alive but unable to stand.  Hercules died on the way to see the vet in Kemptville.  The vet couldn't find an exact cause, but saw signs of internal bleeding.  He speculated about cancer, although I wonder if Hercules finally realized his dream of cornering a deer and received a fatal kick for his troubles.  Hercules was ten.

Dawn, Chris and their boys (Shay and Matt) had always been fond of Hercules, having known him since he was a puppy.  We'd spent many hours with Hercules at their property, which I've always fondly referred to as, "Fair Prospect" (from the A & E version of Pride and Prejudice).  Hercules loved to romp with the other dogs, roll himself in the dirtiest parts of the paddock, and then plunge into the pool.  He needed to run, and when it became clear last year that we could no longer provide him with a happy life in the City, Dawn and Chris generously agreed to take him.

We purchased Hercules from a breeder in Quebec City as a fifth birthday present for Thomas.  He was a purebred Brittany, just a little too independent for a field dog and with the wrong markings for a show dog.  Instead of the requisite white stripe down his forehead, he had a white heart.  And a big heart... a sweet heart.  From the moment that he arrived at our home in the co-op, he became the darling of the children in the courtyard.  He tolerated any amount of enthusiastic cuddling and wrestling, and always greeted every girl and boy with an eager, welcoming kiss.

Thomas fell in love with Hercules immediately, although in the first few years he would say that Herc was more my dog than his dog.  As Thomas grew, however, he and Hercules became greater buddies.  I'm pretty sure that Hercules and Thomas thought of each other as siblings.

Hercules loved nothing more than to run through fields and forests, or to plunge for a cooling dip into a lake or river.  Spring through autumn were his seasons.  He never grew accustomed to winter, being prone to ice buildup in his paws, and our only attempt to fit him with booties provided some despairing looks and an exaggerated clown walk.

Hercules loved to go to canoing, although a romp on the shore was never far from his mind.  He accompanied Thomas and I on many fishing trips, and never failed to make us laugh at his reaction when we hauled in a pike or bass.  Together, he and I explored many waterways and wetlands.

Goodbye sweet companion.  We won't forget you.  I certainly won't forget the feel of your coat under my hand as I reached down unconsciously to pet you, or your comforting smell during our raucous "family cuddles" on Tom's bed.  Thank you for the happiness that you brought to our family, as well as Chris and Dawn's family.

Images of summer

The signs of summer's demise appear all around.  I feel the season slipping away from me.  We have passed lethargically through some of the hottest days on record.  The asters and goldenrods are blooming in fields and along roadsides.  The starlings have begun to gather, while all the other birds have gone into hiding.  Only the cicadas seem evident, trilling in the grasses and trees.

The farmers brought in the first cut of hay in June, and some are now starting the second cut.  Hay bales stand sentinel in the fields, or in shrink-wrapped loaves along fencelines.  In the market, local vegetables brighten the stalls, and the first sweet corn went on sale along the roadsides this week.  The midday sky arches blue overhead, and thunderstorms rumble in the evenings.

I still haven't replaced my camera.  Fortunately, I've been able to borrow one occasionally.  But with or without a photographic record, summer always passes for me in images -- in landscapes and portraits.  I pause often to witness the moments and places, turning for a second look and a lasting memory.  I sit often on the front porch or back step in the evening, playing guitar in the cooling air and cultivating my own image.

Here are few images of this summer and summers past.

Scent and memories

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.

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.

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.

• 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)

 On my next visit to the rock barrens in either the Carp Hills or the South March Highlands, I intend to devote much of my time to mosses and lichens.  The abundance and diversity of mosses and lichens astonishes me.  But where, I wonder, have I put my hand lense?

Out and about in late spring

Warm, humid weather rolled into the city this week.  We enjoyed some gloriously sunny days, and then some mixed days of patchy sun and rain showers.  All of the maple flowers have now fallen, replaced by quickly thickening maple keys.  The cherry tree at the east end of the footbridge reached a peak of colour mid-week.  Every day, as I passed, at least one person crouched with a camera along the bike path, photographing the solid mass of pink blossoms.

I made it outside several times over the week to enjoy the late spring flora and fauna:  a work-related expedition to the South March Highlands, a slow evening ride along the Rideau River, and day of hiking in the Carp Hills with the boys.  None of the trips provided much opportunity for proper observations and note-taking:  certainly the boys weren't prepared to stand still, enduring the mosquitoes (which have exploded in number due to the damp spring) while I bent over a herb or waited for a warbler to reappear.  Nevertheless, the trips proved very productive, with some very pleasing surprises.  I've omitted the more common, urban birds, and I've certainly left out a lot of plants.

Birds

• Double-crested cormorant
• Mallard
• Wood duck
• Great Blue Heron
• Killdeer
• Ruffed grouse (heard)
• Turkey vulture
• Coopers Hawk
• Mourning Dove
• Yellow-bellied sapsucker
• Northern flicker
• Great crested flycatcher
• Northern raven
• Blue jay
• Black-capped chickadee
• White-breasted nuthatch
• Gray catbird
• Hermit thrush (heard)
• Yellow-throated vireo
• Yellow warbler
• Yellowthroat
• Scarlet Tanager
• Northern Cardinal
• Song sparrow
• Pine warbler
• Red-winged blackbird
• Northern oriole
• Rose-breasted Grosbeak

Herptiles

• Eastern gartner snake
• Smooth green snake (photo)
• Snapping turtle
• Leopard frog
• Green frog

Trees and shrubs

• White pine
• Largetooth aspen
• Trembling aspen
• White birch
• Ironwood
• American beech
• Red oak
• Black cherry
• American basswood
• American elm
• Butternut
• Sugar maple
• Red maple
• Silver maple
• White ash
• Common juniper
• Pin cherry
• Bearberry
• Striped maple
• Poison ivy
• Pink lady's slipper (photo)
• Canada mayflower
• White trillium
• Painted trillium
• Indian cucumber root
• Wild columbine
• Bishop's cap
• Foamflower
• Violets (various)
• Canada bloodroot
• Pale corydalis
• Smaller enchanter's nightshade
• Wild Sarsaparilla
• Starflower
• Wild lettuce
• Large-leaved Aster
• Brachyeletrum erectum (I don't know the common name)
• Oryzopsis asperifolia (again, I don't know the common name)

Mammals

Beaver
Otter (in the Rideau!)
Muskrat
Chipmunk
White-tailed deer (tracks and scat)
Black bear (scat)