Alchemy of the dawn

By Conrad Beaubien

It’s what it means to live in a northern world, more aligned with Scandinavian lifestyles, I like to think. It’s about how the northern hemisphere tempers personality, how it contributes to humility, I also contemplate. Besides, living shoulder to shoulder with the oldest rock in the world, the Canadian Shield, is additionally humbling. The hard granite takes up over two-thirds of Canada’s land mass. The pockets of farmland between the outcroppings of glacier-worn and balded rock offers cattle grazing while the minerals in the mysterious stone, like a mermaid’s call, have lured many a prospector’s envy to end in folly. Yet, still the Shield’s haunting beauty lasts and will last long after I am gone.

You can see it from here, from the Ameliasburg escarpment. It drifts on the horizon heavylike and beckoning, a far off stranger-cumfriend to the north, beckoning from another shore across a glacial sea. From here as we rest on a limestone lip, we are in the shadow of that rock, and still it calls. Calls to mount Ormsby grade like the railwaymen of yesterday said; up into the hinterland of outback and highlands. In my lifetime, as the mountains and prairies are to the west and the Gulf lands to the east, the Shield has been an anchor. Both melancholic and joyous, it’s a marker on the earth that tells me when I’m home. It’s a living irony for many. While its beauty is beholding and unsurpassed, this old rock has been a place of many a broken dream. Maybe it’s that ever-present metaphor for life itself that dwells within, the overwhelming idea of the land that is instilled upon us, embedded through and through. If it is that, I thank the heavens for its comfort.

I walk with my friend Thunder on the morning trail. Maybe it is this, the once rail line that carried to the Shield that prompts me. While I am warm in Mackinaw and wool, I think about how the February cold affects every part of us. While winter fashion is less about the tattoo, I smile as I ponder how our costume de jour is accented more toward the harried hair look spilling out from under a more harried tuque, but yet I suppose the cheeky lockdown hairdo with bangs or beards shaped à la maison will be featured in trendspotting magazines any day now. Oh yes, mustn’t forget the salon trend, the galosh boutique-styled foot apparel—sensible footwear that are head-turners in the grocery aisles and the slush of the fashion runway some call the Picton crosswalk. It’s all very Countychic and we smile to one another because we know it.

We are into the high carb food menus, hot beverages, dull skate blades on backyard rinks and aching joints after trial runs of cross country skis retrieved from decades of attic storage. Consumer tastes lean toward heating bills and windshield wiper fluid featured in vivid colours of sky blue and also radiator pink. The luxury driven consider heated boot insoles or Arctic wear gloves, and balaclavas-cum-Covid masks are all the rage, except for indoors; over- heating is a challenge of its own. All of it is predicated on premise of keeping warm and also eating, customs we have readily adopted and likely to follow throughout our time.

Most of all at this time of year it is the light that is intriguing. This morning I watched as through the tangle of the pines the sun climbed through the limbs of the fortyyear trunks. Feathered life descended in silhouette like shadow puppets to my feeder. And then later there was this. I brought along this photo for you to see the youthful light and fresh hay in the paddock home of Thunder, Joe and the ever playful and child-like spirit of the heavy horse known as Micah. And so it is I reconcile: light on snow-covered ground that can only be experienced in the now; cold light as the warming sun crests low in the sky. It is for this light that I have adapted my studio windows to welcome. It is this light, winter light that follows in my dreams.