Driving home from a potluck Saturday afternoon, stuffed to the gills, I was once again touched by the beauty of eastern Ontario. The beauty I’m referring to has nothing to do with your typical kind of beauty, found in fountains, extravagant buildings, or even tropical rain forests and blue butterflys. It is the beauty that I have grown up, the pure beauty of nature in its simplicity.
Many years ago in the spring, before any green had shown itself, I remember a Mourning Dove flying up beside the cars as we drove by. I was deeply moved by the subtle warm colors of its plumage, and was conscious that, in the frenzied green activity of summer, this would just be a dull, plain bird.
It is so important for us to go through times like that. It gives us a chance to see beauty in places where beauty had not existed for us.
It seems very foolish to me that people would go looking for more extreme beauties when they could find them here if they just look up-close enough. You should learn to look more closely for beauty where you live rather than traveling to find it, because the more garish and brilliant beauty gets in each country, the more poisonous the animals that live there get too. The only thing that will harm you here is yourself, or your neighbor, or your your neighbor’s car. I suppose your neighbor’s dog might do some damage, but so might your own.
We don’t have any poisonous snakes, or ticks, in fact the most poisonous thing around could as well be the ladybug, and only if you ate her. We do have biting and stinging insects, but they’re avoided if you take precautions.
Last October, while looking through a book of JRR Tolkien’s illustrations, I was struck by his obvious attention to the individual character of each tree. Ever since then I have also been struck by the profound beauty and character of the trees around me.
In February of 1998 we spent 14 days without electricity. It did not really bother us but did inconvenience some more conventionally living people in the area. We had a jolly old time, as we heated with wood and propane, and had an artesian well nearby. The only awful thing about it for us, was listening to the trees crack and splinter as the ice load grew too heavy for them to bear.
The ice storm of ‘98 really changed our tree line, although you don’t notice much now. You have to look closely to see the damage and imbalance lower down in the crowns and it is amazing how much they have recovered.
I love this land we live in, I love being overwhelmed by the beauty of twinkling raindrops obscuring my vision through a car window as I fly past and the dreary landscape with its subtle shades and shapes. I love the old houses, the homesteads and outbuildings, and wish I could make the ugly new bungalows disappear. I think about this land being cleared by hand years and years ago, of fence rows piled high with stones, hand harvest from fields by children of the pioneers, so that Dad’s plow would not get broken and the crops could grow. Those rocks would seeth up out of the earth every year, and every year have to be hauled out.
I wish I could see the land as it was before man came, life and death keeping its balance, and the trees ruling over all.
So many people seem to view forest and the natural land as an ornament, oh look, There is a poodle! And oh look! There is a forest, isn’t it cute. Or else people look at natural land with a bloodthirsty eye, and they’ll say to you “do you have any idea how many billions of dollars I could get for this if it was turned into a subdivision or golf course or an apartment building?” They rub their greasy little hands together contemplating how much better off they will be when this is bulldozed. I wish the’yd think of their kids’ kids, if not mine and yours.
I wish it were as easy to set up a sustainable ecosystem as it is to build a Wal-Mart store, And I wish it were as easy to reverse the damage as it is to cause it.
I wish they taught people to think for themselves in school, or gave them permission to do so. I wish they had realized when they were cutting out Shop from high school that it takes 4 years to grow a Plumber, the same as it does grow any tradesman, and until they can build their houses without any plumbing or electricity, they have no right to discourage young people from being anything other than doctor, Teacher, lawyer.
The author’s introduction and reintroduction to her habitat:
4 August 1986: 333.3 km, bombing along down the Dwyer Hill Road, much more built up than it was when we first used it for this purpose, but none the less magical. As always, we found the road by a different way, this time as Third Line Road, directly off Hwy 17. There are an incredible number of houses along here, but as they are presumably inhabited by Civil Servants, they are shut up by an enchantment at 19:30, so there is no traffic on the road — it is like a private road, as if nobody ever uses it except when we want to come down from Northern Ontario, and in one long smooth anti-Connecticut sweep it takes us from the outskirts of Renfrew and deposits us in Burritts Rapids, like a meteor or satellite going across the sky. You go either slowly or fast — 60 or 100 km/hr.
5 August-9 August 1986. At home we found the grass unmowed, and the house slightly sooty and very cobwebby. We gradually moved in… There were no juvenile Rana pipiens (Leopard Frogs) in the grass, or at least few, but by [9 august] they had arrived. We saw several Thamnophis sirtalis (Garter Snakes) in the grass. The water in Elsa’s pond was higher than it has ever been before, and the creek was spring-time high at the bridge in the village.
29 October 1989: The last run to home. Left at 08:30; light overcast; calm: Hagar, rezeroed here at Hwy 535. 87.0 miles: turn in the road in Mattawa. No more notes. We cruised on down Hwy 17 and the Magic Road (Dwyer Hill Rd), revelling in Fraxinus (Ash), Thuja occidentalis (Cedar), and Typha x glauca (hybrid Cattail). Aleta stopped to buy some Pumpkins from a roadside vendor. We reached Bishops Mills in the afternoon, and found our houses ransacked but standing.