Land of the silver birch,
Home of the beaver,
Where still the mighty moose
Wanders at will,
Blue lake and rocky shore,
I will return once more;
Boom-diddy-boom-boom
Boom-biddy-boom-boom
Boo-OO-oo-oo-oom.
—ARCHAIC SONG
WE SANG THIS ONCE, squatting around the papier-mâché Magic Mushroom in the Brownie pack, or while pretending to be wolves in Cub Scouts, or while watching our marshmallows turn to melted Styrofoam on the ends of our sticks at some well-run, fairly safe summer camp in the wilds of Muskoka, Haliburton, or Algonquin Park. Then we grew up and found it corny. By that time we were into Jean-Paul Sartre and the lure of the nauseous. Finally, having reached the age of nostalgia, we rediscovered it on a cassette in The Children’s Book Store, in a haunting version that invested it with all the emotional resonance we once thought it possessed, and bought it, under the pretence of giving our children a little ethnic musical background.
It brought tears to our eyes, not for simple reasons. Whales get to us that way too, and whooping cranes, and other things hovering on the verge of extinction but still maintaining a tenuous foothold in the world of the actual. The beavers are doing all right — we know this because they just decimated our poplars — but the mighty moose is having a slimmer time of it. As for the blueness of the lakes, we worry about it: too blue and you’ve got acid rain.
Will we return once more, or will we go to Portugal instead? It depends, we have to admit, partly on the exchange rate, and this makes us feel disloyal. I am, rather quixotically, in Alabama, teaching, even more quixotically, a course in Canadian literature. Right now we’re considering Marian Engel’s novel Bear. Since everything in Canada, outside Toronto, begins with geography, I’ve unfolded a large map of Ontario and traced the heroine’s route north; I’ve located the mythical house of the book somewhere on the actual shore of Georgian Bay, northern edge. I’ve superimposed a same-scale map of Alabama on this scheme, to give the students an idea of the distances. In the north, space is larger than you think, because the points of reference are farther apart.
“Are there any words you came across that puzzled you?” I ask.
Blackfly comes up. A large black fly is proposed. I explain black-flies, their smallness, their multitude, their evil habits. It gives me a certain kick to do this: I’m competing with the local water moccasins.
Mackinaw. A raincoat? Not quite. Loon. Tamarack. Reindeer moss. Portage. Moose. Wendigo.
“Why does she make Lucy the old Indian woman talk so funny?” they ask. Lucy, I point out, is not merely Indian but a French-speaking Indian. This, to them, is a weird concept.
The north is another country. It’s also another language. Or languages.
Where is the north, exactly? It’s not only a place but a direction, and as such its location is relative: to the Mexicans, the United States is the north, to Americans Toronto is, even though it’s on roughly the same latitude as Boston.
Wherever it is for us, there’s a lot of it. You stand in Windsor and imagine a line going north, all the way to the pole. The same line going south would end up in South America. That’s the sort of map we grew up with, at the front of the classroom in Mercator projection, which made it look even bigger than it was, all that pink stretching on forever, with a few cities sprinkled along the bottom edge. It’s not only geographical space, it’s space related to body image. When we face south, as we often do, our conscious mind may be directed down there, toward crowds, bright lights, some Hollywood version of fame and fortune, but the north is at the back of our minds, always. There’s something, not someone, looking over our shoulders; there’s a chill at the nape of the neck.
The north focuses our anxieties. Turning to face north, face the north, we enter our own unconscious. Always, in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of dream.
Where does the north begin?
Every province, every city, has its own road north. From Toronto you go up the 400. Where you cross the border, from here to there, is a matter of opinion. Is it the Severn River, where the Shield granite appears suddenly out of the earth? Is it the sign announcing that you’re halfway between the equator and the North Pole? Is it the first gift shop shaped like a wigwam, the first town — there are several — that proclaims itself The Gateway to the North?
As we proceed, the farms become fewer, rockier, more desperate-looking, the trees change their ratios, coniferous moving in on deciduous. More lakes appear, their shorelines scraggier. Our eyes narrow and we look at the clouds: the weather is important again.
One of us used to spend summers in a cottage in Muskoka, before the road went in, when you took the train, when there were big cruise ships there, and matronly motor launches, and tea dances at the hotels, and men in white flannels on the lawns, which there may still be. This was not just a cottage but a Muskoka cottage, with boathouse and maid’s quarters. Rich people went north in the summers then, away from cities and crowds; that was before the cure for polio, which has made a difference. In this sort of north, they tried to duplicate the south, or perhaps some dream of country life in England. In the living room there were armchairs, glass-fronted bookcases, family photos in silver frames, stuffed birds under glass bells. The north, as I said, is relative.
For me, the north used to be completely in force by the Trout Creek planing mill. Those stacks of fresh-cut lumber were the true gateway to the north, and north of that was North Bay, which used to be, to be blunt, a bit of an armpit. It was beef-sandwich-on-white-bread-with-gravy-and-canned-peas country. But no more. North Bay now has shopping malls, and baskets of flowers hanging from lampposts above paving-stone sidewalks, downtown. It has a Granite Club. It has the new, swish, carpeted buildings of Laurentian University. It has gourmet restaurants. And in the airport, where southbound DC-9s dock side by side with northbound Twin Otters, there’s a book rack in the coffee shop that features Graham Greene and Kierkegaard, hardly standard airport fare.
The south is moving north.
We bypass North Bay, which now has a bypass, creeping southerliness, and do not go, this time, to the Dionne Quints Museum, where five little silhouettes in black play forever beside an old log cabin, complete with the basket where they were packed in cotton wool, the oven where they were warmed, the five prams, the five Communion dresses.
Beyond North Bay there is a brief flurry of eccentricity — lawns populated with whole flocks of wooden-goose windmills — and then we go for miles and miles past nothing but trees, meeting nothing but the occasional truck loaded with lumber. This area didn’t used to be called anything. Now it’s the Near North Travel Area. You can see signs telling you that. Near what, we wonder uneasily? We don’t want to be near. We want to be far.
At last we see the Ottawa River, which is the border. There’s a dam across it, two dams, and an island between them. If there were a customs house it would be here. A sign faces us saying Bienvenue; out the back window there’s one saying Welcome. This was my first lesson in points of view.
And there, across the border in Quebec, in Témiscaming, is an image straight from my childhood: a huge mountain made of sawdust. I always wanted to slide down this sawdust mountain until I finally did, and discovered it was not like sand, dry and slippery, but damp and sticky and hard to get out of your clothes. This was my first lesson in the nature of illusion.
Continue past the sawdust mountain, past the baseball diamond, up the hill, and you’re in the centre of town, which is remarkable for at least three things: a blocks-long public rock garden, still flourishing after more than forty-five years; a pair of statues, one a fountain, that look as if they’ve come straight from Europe, which I think they did; and the excellent, amazingly low-priced hamburgers you can get at the Boulevard Restaurant, where the décor, featuring last year’s cardboard Santa Claus and a stuffed twenty-three-pound pike, is decidedly northern. Ask the owner about the pike and he’ll tell you about one twice as big, forty-five pounds in fact, that a fellow showed him strapped to the tailgate of his van, and that long too.
You can have this conversation in either French or English: Témiscaming is a border town and a northern one, and the distinctions made here are as likely to be north-south as French-English. Up in these parts you’ll hear as much grumbling, or more, about Quebec City as you will about Ottawa, which is, after all, closer. Spit in the river and it gets to Ottawa, eh?
For the north, Témiscaming is old, settled, tidy, even a little prosperous-looking. But it’s had its crises. Témiscaming is the resource economy personified. Not long ago it was a company town, and when the company shut down the mill, which would have shut down the town too, the workers took the unprecedented step of trying to buy it. With some help they succeeded, and the result was Tembec, still going strong. But Témiscaming is still a one-industry town, like many northern towns, and its existence is thus precarious.
Not so long ago, logging was a different sort of business. The men went into the woods in winter, across the ice, using horse-drawn sledges, and set up camp. (You still come across these logging camps now and then in your travels through the lakes, abandoned, already looking as ancient as Roman aqueducts; more ancient, since there’s been no upkeep.) They’d cut selectively, tree by tree, using axes and saws and the skills that were necessary to avoid being squashed or hacked. They’d skid the trees to the ice; in the spring, after the ice went out, there would be a run down the nearest fast river to the nearest sawmill.
Now it’s done with bulldozers and trucks, and the result is too often a blitzed shambles; cut everything, leave a wreck of dead and, incidentally, easily flammable branches behind. Time is money. Don’t touch the shoreline though, we need that for tourists. In some places, the forest is merely a scrim along the water. In behind it’s been hollowed out.
Those who look on the positive side say it’s good for the blueberries.
Sometimes we went the other way, across to Sudbury, the trees getting smaller and smaller and finally disappearing as you approached. Sudbury was another magic place of my childhood. It was like interplanetary travel, which we liked to imagine, which was still just imagination in those days. With its heaps of slag and its barren shoulders of stone, it looked like the moon. Back then, we tell the children, before there were washer-dryers and you used something called a wringer washer and hung the sheets out on something called a clothesline, when there weren’t even coloured sheets but all sheets were white, when Rinso white and its happy little washday song were an item, and Whiter than White was a catch phrase and female status really did have something to do with your laundry, Sudbury was a housewife’s nightmare. We knew people there; the windowsills in their houses were always grey.
Now the trees are beginning to come back because they built higher smokestacks. But where is all that stuff going now?
The Acid Rain Dinner, in Toronto’s Sheraton Centre, in 1985. The first of these fundraising events was fairly small. But the movement has grown, and this dinner is huge. The leaders of all three provincial parties are here. So is the minister of the environment from the federal government. So are several labour leaders, and several high-ranking capitalists, and representatives of numerous northerly chambers of commerce, summer residents’ associations, tourist-camp runners, outfitters. Wishy-washy urban professionals who say “frankly” a lot bend elbows with huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, and cussin’ burnt-necks who wouldn’t be caught dead saying “frankly.” This is not a good place to be overheard saying that actually acid rain isn’t such a bad thing because it gets rid of all that brown scum and leeches in the lake, or who cares because you can water-ski anyway. Teddy Kennedy, looking like a bulky sweater, is the guest speaker. Everyone wears a little gold pin in the shape of a raindrop. It looks like a tear.
Why has acid rain become the collective Canadian nightmare? Why is it — as a good cause — bigger than baby-seal bashing? The reasons aren’t just economic, although there are lots of those, as the fishing-camp people and foresters will tell you. It’s more than that, and cognate with the outrage aroused by the uninvited voyage of the American icebreaker Polar Sea through the Northwest Passage, where almost none of us ever goes. It’s territorial, partly; partly a felt violation of some area in us that we hardly ever think about unless it’s invaded or tampered with. It’s the neighbours throwing guck into our yard. It’s our childhood dying.
On location, in summer and far from the glass and brass of the Sheraton Centre, we nervously check our lakes. Leeches still in place? Have the crayfish, among the first to go, gone yet? (We think in terms of “yet.”) Are the loons reproducing, have you seen any young? Any minnows? How about the lichen on the rocks? These inventories have now become routine, and that is why we’re willing to fork out a hundred dollars a plate to support our acid-rain lobbyists in Washington. A summer without loons is unthinkable, but how do you tell that to people who don’t know it because they’ve never had any to begin with?
We’re driving through Glencoe, in the Highlands of Scotland. It’s imposing, as a landscape: bleak, large, bald, apparently empty. We can see why the Scots took so well to Canada. Yet we know that the glens and crags round about are crawling with at least a thousand campers, rock climbers, and other seekers after nature; we also know that, at one end of this glen, the Campbells butchered the MacDonalds in the seventeenth century, thus propelling both of them into memorable history. Go walking here and you’ll find things human; outlines of stone fences now overgrown, shards of abandoned crofts.
In Europe, every scrap of land has been claimed, owned, re-owned, fought over, captured, bled on. The roads are the only no man’s land. In northern Canada, the roads are civilization, owned by the collective human we. Off the road is other. Try walking in it, and you’ll soon find out why all the early traffic here was by water. “Impenetrable wilderness” is not just verbal.
And suppose you get off the road. Suppose you get lost. Getting lost, elsewhere and closer to town, is not knowing exactly where you are. You can always ask, even in a foreign country. In the north, getting lost is not knowing how to get out.
You can get lost on a lake, of course, but getting lost in the forest is worse. It’s tangly in there, and dim, and one tree does begin to look remarkably like another. The leaves and needles blot up sound, and you begin to feel watched: not by anyone, not by an animal even, or anything you can put a name to, just watched. You begin to feel judged. It’s as if something is keeping an eye on you just to see what you will do.
What will you do? Which side of the tree does moss grow on, and here, where there are ferns and the earth is damp, or where it’s dry as tinder, it seems that moss grows everywhere, or does not grow at all. Snippets of Boy Scout lore or truisms learned at summer camp come back to you, but scrambled. You tell yourself not to panic: you can always live off the land.
Easier said than done, you’d soon find. The Canadian Shield is a relatively foodless area, which is why even the Indians tended to pass through it, did not form large settlements except where there was arable land, and remained limited in numbers. This is not the Mekong Delta. If you had a gun you could shoot something, maybe, a red squirrel perhaps; but if you’re lost you probably don’t have a gun, or a fishing rod either. You could eat blueberries, or cattail stems, or crayfish, or other delicacies dimly remembered from stories about people who got lost in the woods and were found later in good health although somewhat thinner. You could cook some reindeer moss, if you had matches.
Thus you pass on to fantasies about how to start a fire with a magnifying glass — you don’t have one — or by rubbing two bits of stick together, a feat at which you suspect you would prove remarkably inept.
The fact is that not very many of us know how to survive in the north. Rumour has it that only one German prisoner of war ever made it out, although many made it out of the actual prisoner-of-war camps. The best piece of northern survival advice is: Don’t get lost. One way of looking at a landscape is to consider the typical ways of dying in it. Given the worst, what’s the worst it could do? Will it be delirium from drinking salty water on the high seas, shrivelling in the desert, snakebite in the jungle, tidal waves on a Pacific isle, volcanic fumes? In the north, there are several hazards. Although you’re probably a lot safer there than you are on the highway at rush hour, given the odds, you still have to be a little wary.
Like most lessons of this sort, those about the north are taught by precept and example, but also, more enjoyably, by cautionary nasty tale. There is death by blackfly, the one about the fellow who didn’t have his shirt cuffs tight enough in the spring and undressed at night only to find he was running with blood, the ones about the lost travellers who bloated up from too many bites and who, when found, were twice the size, unrecognizable, and dead. There is death from starvation, death by animal, death by forest fire; there is death from something called “exposure,” which used to confuse me when I heard about men who exposed themselves: why would they intentionally do anything that fatal? There’s death by thunderstorm, not to be sneered at: on the open lake, in one of the excessive northern midsummer thunderstorms, a canoe or a bush plane is a vulnerable target. The north is full of Struwwelpeter-like stories about people who didn’t do as they were told and got struck by lightning. Above all, there are death by freezing and death by drowning. Your body’s heat-loss rate in the water is twenty times that in air, and northern lakes are cold. Even in a life jacket, even holding on to the tipped canoe, you’re at risk. Every summer the numbers pile up.
Every culture has its exemplary dead people, its hagiography of landscape martyrs, those unfortunates who, by their bad ends, seem to sum up in one grisly episode what may be lurking behind the next rock for all of us, all of us who enter the territory they once claimed as theirs. I’d say that two of the top northern landscape martyrs are Tom Thomson, the painter who was found mysteriously drowned near his overturned canoe with no provable cause in sight, and the Mad Trapper of Rat River, also mysterious, who became so thoroughly bushed that he killed a Mountie and shot two others during an amazing wintertime chase before being finally mowed down. In our retelling of these stories, mystery is a key element. So, strangely enough, is a presumed oneness with the landscape in question. The Mad Trapper knew his landscape so well he survived in it for weeks, living off the land and his own bootlaces, eluding capture. One of the hidden motifs in these stories is a warning: maybe it’s not so good to get too close to Nature.
I remember a documentary on Tom Thomson that ended, rather ominously, with the statement that the north had taken him to herself. This was, of course, pathetic fallacy gone to seed, but it was also a comment on our distrust of the natural world, a distrust that remains despite our protests, our studies in the ethics of ecology, our elevation of “the environment” to a numinous noun, our save-the-tree campaigns. The question is, would the trees save us, given the chance? Would the water, would the birds, would the rocks? In the north, we have our doubts.
A bunch of us are sitting around the table, at what is now a summer cottage in Georgian Bay. Once it was a house, built by a local man for his family, which finally totalled eleven children, after they’d outgrown this particular house and moved on to another. The original Findlay wood-burning cook stove is still in the house, but so also are some electric lights and a propane cooker, which have come since the end of the old days. In the old days, this man somehow managed to scrape a living from the land: a little of this, a little of that, some fishing here, some lumbering there, some hunting in the fall. That was back when you shot to eat. Scrape is an appropriate word: there’s not much here between the topsoil and the rock.
We sit around the table and eat, fish among other things, caught by the children. Someone mentions the clams: there are still a lot of them, but who knows what’s in them any more? Mercury, lead, things like that. We pick at the fish. Someone tells me not to drink the tap water. I already have. “What will happen?” I ask. “Probably nothing,” they reply. “Probably nothing” is a relatively recent phrase around here. In the old days, you ate what looked edible.
We are talking about the old days, as people often do once they’re outside the cities. When exactly did the old days end? Because we know they did. The old days ended when the youngest of us was ten, fifteen, or twenty; the old days ended when the oldest of us was five, or twelve, or thirty. Plastic-hulled super-boats are not old days, but ten-horsepower outboard motors, circa 1945, are. There’s an icebox in the back porch, unused now, a simple utilitarian model from Eaton’s, ice chamber in the top section, metal shelves in the bottom one. We all go and admire it. “I remember iceboxes,” I say, and indeed I can dimly remember them, I must have been five. What bits of our daily junk — our toasters, our pocket computers — will soon become obsolete, and therefore poignant? Who will stand around, peering at them and admiring their design and the work that went into them, as we do with this icebox? “So this was a toilet seat,” we think, rehearsing the future. “Ah! A light bulb,” the ancient syllables thick in our mouths.
The kids have decided some time ago that all this chat is boring, and have asked if they can go swimming off the dock. They can, though they have to watch it, as this is a narrow place and speedboats tend to swoosh through, not always slowing down. Waste of gas, in the old days. Nobody then went anywhere just for pleasure, it was the war and gas was rationed.
“Oh, that old days,” says someone.
There goes a speedboat now, towing a man strapped in a kneeling position to some kind of board, looking as if he’s had a terrible accident, or is about to have one. This must be some newfangled variety of water-skiing.
“Remember Klim?” I say. The children come through, trailing towels. “What’s Klim?” one asks, caught by the space-age sound of the word.
“Klim was ‘milk’ spelled backwards,” I say. “It was powdered milk.”
“Yuk,” they say.
“Not the same as now,” I say. “It was whole milk, not skim; it wasn’t instant. You had to beat it with an eggbeater.” And even then some of it wouldn’t dissolve. One of the treats of childhood was the little nodules of pure dry Klim that floated on top of your milk.
“There was also Pream,” says someone. How revolutionary it seemed.
The children go down to take their chances in the risky motorized water. Maybe, much later, they will remember us sitting around the table, eating fish they themselves had caught, back when you could still (what? Catch a fish? See a tree? What desolations lie in store, beyond the plasticized hulls and the knee-skiers?). By then we will be the old days, for them. Almost we are already.
A different part of the north. We’re sitting around the table, by lamplight — it’s still the old days here, no electricity — talking about bad hunters. Bad hunters, bad fishers, everyone has a story. You come upon a campsite, way in the back of beyond, no roads into the lake, they must have come in by float plane, and there it is, garbage all over the place, beer cans, blobs of human poop flagged by melting toilet paper, and twenty-two fine pickerel left rotting on a rock. Business executives who get themselves flown in during hunting season with their high-powered rifles, shoot a buck, cut off the head, fill their quota, see another one with a bigger spread of antlers, drop the first head, cut off the second. The woods are littered with discarded heads, and who cares about the bodies?
New way to shoot polar bear: you have the natives on the ground finding them for you, then they radio the location in to the base camp, the base camp phones New York, fellow gets on the plane, gets himself flown in, they’ve got the rifle and the clothing all ready for him, fly him to the bear, he pulls the trigger from the plane, doesn’t even get out of the g.d. plane, they fly him back, cut off the head, skin it, send the lot down to New York.
These are the horror stories of the north, one brand. They’ve replaced the ones in which you got pounced upon by a wolverine or had your arm chewed off by a she-bear with cubs or got chased into the lake by a moose in rut, or even the ones in which your dog got porcupine quills or rolled in poison ivy and gave it to you. In the new stories, the enemies and the victims of old have done a switch. Nature is no longer implacable, dangerous, ready to jump you; it is on the run, pursued by a number of unfair bullies with the latest technology.
One of the key nouns in these stories is float plane. These outrages, this banditry, would not be possible without them, for the bad hunters are notoriously weak-muscled and are deemed incapable of portaging a canoe, much less paddling one. Among their other badnesses, they are sissies. Another key motif is money. What money buys these days, among other things, is the privilege of no-risk slaughter.
As for us, the ones telling the stories, tsk-tsking by lamplight, we are the good hunters, or so we think. We’ve given up saying we only kill to eat; Kraft Dinner and freeze-dried food have put paid to that one. Really there’s no excuse for us. However, we do have some virtues left. We can still cast a fly. We don’t cut off heads and hang them stuffed on the wall. We would never buy an ocelot coat. We paddle our own canoes.
We’re sitting on the dock at night, shivering despite our sweaters, in mid-August, watching the sky. There are a few shooting stars, as there always are at this time in August, as the earth passes through the Perseids. We pride ourselves on knowing a few things like that, about the sky; we find the Dipper, the North Star, Cassiopeia’s Chair, and talk about consulting a star chart, which we know we won’t actually do. But this is the only place you can really see the stars, we tell each other. Cities are hopeless.
Suddenly, an odd light appears, going very fast. It spirals around like a newly dead firecracker, and then bursts, leaving a cloud of luminous dust, caught perhaps in the light from the sun, still up there somewhere. What could this be? Several days later, we hear that it was part of an extinct Soviet satellite, or that’s what they say. That’s what they would say, wouldn’t they? It strikes us that we don’t really know very much about the night sky at all any more. There’s all kinds of junk up there: spy planes, old satellites, tin cans, man-made matter gone out of control. It also strikes us that we are totally dependent for knowledge of these things on a few people who don’t tell us very much.
Once, we thought that if the balloon ever went up we’d head for the bush and hide out up there, living — we naively supposed — off the land. Now we know that if the two superpowers begin hurling things at each other through the sky, they’re likely to do it across the Arctic, with big bangs and fallout all over the north. The wind blows everywhere. Survival gear and knowing which moss you can eat is not going to be a large help. The north is no longer a refuge.
Driving back toward Toronto from the Near North, a small reprise runs through my head:
Land of the septic tank,
Home of the speedboat,
Where still the four-wheel-drive
Wanders at will,
Blue lake and tacky shore,
I will return once more:
Vroom-diddy-vroom-vroom
Vroom-diddy-vroom-vroom
Vroo-OO-oo-oom.
Somehow, just as the drive north inspires saga and tragedy, the drive south inspires parody. And here it comes: the gift shops shaped like teepees, the maple-syrup emporiums that get themselves up like olde-tyme sugaring-off huts; and, farther south, the restaurants that pretend to offer wholesome farm fare, the stores that pretend to be general stores, selling quilts, soap shaped like hearts, high-priced fancy conserves done up in frilly cloth caps, the way Grandma (whoever she might be) was fondly supposed to have made them.
And then come the housing developments, acres of prime farmland turning overnight into Quality All-Brick Family Homes; and then come the Industrial Parks; and there, in full antibloom, is the city itself, looming like a mirage or a chemical warfare zone on the horizon. A browny-grey scuzz hovers above it, and we think, as we always do when facing re-entry, we’re going into that? We’re going to breathe that?
But we go forward, as we always do, into what is now to us the unknown. And once inside, we breathe the air, not much bad happens to us, we hardly notice. It’s as if we’ve never been anywhere else. But that’s what we think, too, when we’re in the north.