A walk on the wild side

Along the gravelled Benway Road, low-lying fields are shaved and sullen; east and west of here the way of the old steel rail runs into the landscape. In times past, at the spot where I now stand, the train halted daily, morning and late afternoon, to deliver or collect teacher and students that attended the nearby one-room school of Niles Corners.

I have come to join Pamela Stagg on a stretch of her journey—a quest to discover the 50 kilometers of the former rail line, the Millennium Trail. Pamela is a writer and poet, a birder, a visual artist who interprets the natural world through drawing and painting.

We trace the path westward when there is a sudden thunder of wings. “Mourning doves…feeding on the sumac berries,” Pamela tells me as she points to the staghorn sumac. “The berries are ripening…a favourite food of the robins during the coldest months. These days they’re migrating less in winter.” We stop to feel the rust velvet of the fist-sized buds before I sample the chokecherries close at hand. “Cedar waxwings and the orioles dine on those,” she comments as my lips sour.

Pamela’s love for the natural world developed as a child; “I learned to identify birds and then wanted to understand their habitat and distribution.” These days Pamela lends her bird savvy to international programs that help record population declines and migrations. “Internet sites allow observers all over to record and track the journeys of birds almost hour by hour,” she mentions as we walk, stopping now and then to take in a host of plant life. “Goldenrod is unfairly blamed for causing hay fever. In fact it is ragweed, which blooms at the same time, that is the culprit.” She adds, bending to harvest catnip: “I have feline friends at home who will appreciate this.”

The trail is an archive of land use when we consider that the present-day path is a remnant of the industrial age. “I like to think that the apple trees scattered along the line were seeded from apple cores tossed by rail workers and passengers,” Pamela suggests as she goes on to explain how a majority of the vegetation around us is not native to the area and has been introduced, mostly from Europe.

The stroll takes on timelessness; a resonant silence leans against the mid-afternoon sky. It comes to mind of how throughout history the philosophers, poets, writers and inventors embraced walking as an explorative meditation that opened the senses to a renewal of spirit and creativity. It is like what the author Robert Louis Stevenson once thought: “For my part” he said, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down from off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.” Aristotle, Rousseau, Thoreau, Baudelaire, Wordsworth all walked, all felt the granite underfoot.

Pamela’s careful notice and descriptions read like a digest, a combined travelogue and guide to natural remedies, foods and herbs; the small yellow flowers of cinquefoil; viper’s bugloss; mullein; Philadelphia fleabane; bladderwort; sweet clover; chicory—the substitute for coffee during the second world war; Virginia creeper; New England aster; St. Johns wort; butterfly weed; jewel weed, aka touch-me-not; the deadly nightshade that is in the tomato and pepper family.

The list spills over pages of my notebook and I am reminded of how earlier in the day a display in the museum in Wellington held me spell-bound as I surveyed the artifacts of ancient civilizations that once lived throughout the region of Prince Edward County. Thriving in villages larger than some of our communities of today, families farmed and harvested from the waters, plains and forests in a holistic relationship to an earth held sacred. There in the museum’s display cases lay the tools of the kitchen, tools for hunting, agriculture and more profoundly, a ceremonial pipe for offerings of thanks.

We continue past borders of American elm and elderberry then beyond to eventually cross Closson road where the trail gently slopes towards a dense woods and the drowned forest of Hillier. Here giant carcasses of trees point to the sky amidst flooded acres alive with birds, insects and water life. We stop at the crossing over Dorland’s Creek; “Look over there,” Pamela points to a bird in flight, “a willow flycatcher right at home.” She then focuses on the holes carved into dead tree stumps. “The red bellied woodpecker has been spotted more often around here lately. It is unusual as its normal range is in the southern U.S. Large Pileated woodpeckers carve these oblong holes in the trees in search of insects. The holes then provide ideal shelter for families of chickadees, other birds and small mammals in winter.”

The afternoon unfolds in a score of experiences where I am both student and explorer of my own back yard. As I contemplate the simple eloquence within the chaos of nature I think about the rhythms of life; the laughter of children at the schoolhouse; the poets and early Peoples. But mostly as I continue the leg of journey with Pamela, I consider how the natural world is a theatre onto the magic of day-by- day evolution.