I travel north every year, late summer, to southwestern Ontario to go “fishing.” Due north, just above the Minnesota border to a rustic (not quaint) cabin to rest, read, walk, watch the granite and the boreal forest.
The land is timeless. The stone is some of the oldest on the planet, roughly 2.5 to 3.5 billion years old. A lot of rain (and snow in winter) rides on top of the granite through bog and marsh, then creeks, rivers and lakes, all to end up in Hudson Bay.
The forest of spruce, poplar and birch, sometimes cut for lumber and paper, in long cycles, continually renews itself and on northern slopes looks like every fantastic fairy tale picture with mounds of moss and lichen on stone and deep woods mystery.
The land and forest is its own entity. The last human residence is 3 miles north of the cabin with just wilderness to Hudson Bay and the Arctic. It is unusable for farming, just picked and poked a bit for timber or mining. Its eternalness is awesome compared to the blink of a lifetime, my lifetime, and tells me that humans are a temporary species. (Please don’t get mad or indignant about that. I’d be happy to discuss with you which species on the planet have been permanent.) Over my lifetime I’ve been a visitor a few weeks or months at a time. I’ve not lived there but I grew up in that wild, ya know what I mean?
When I return friends ask, “how was the trip?” After doing this for 50 years I say, “Every year is the same and a little bit different.” That’s still true but I can’t say the same for the trip up and back.
For the last few years where I used to have to clean the windshield at every gas stop, now I don’t clean it at all after 1100 miles. The bugs are gone and it’s freaky. Rachel Carson was right, and 1000 miles of corn, wheat and soybeans have done it. I have personally seen the collapse of the insect population, I have heard of the collapse of the bee population and the first return of a Google search on the collapse of the bird population cites a current article from Scientific American putting the bird decline at 29%, “across nearly all habitats.” I think, “Now we’ve gone and done it,” and it makes me sad.
Then I read this poem by Amanda Hamilton out of Delia Owens’s book Where the Crawdads Sing, and it makes me cry.
Child to child
eye to eye
We grew as one,
Sharing souls.
Wing by wing,
leaf by leaf
You left this world,
You died before the child.
My friend, the Wild.
Jim Fliss