Connections

By Conrad Beaubien

The heavy slate sky dampened the sunrise this morning. It held onto wetness in the air telling of chances of snow. It’s part of the cycle of our seasons that despite all of its dreariness we miss it when we travel and are away from Canada—at least some do—because it’s also tied to our being a northern people. From earliest memories through to the thoughts of this very moment, the influence of seasons lasts within our perceptions of our immediate world.

I’m just hoping that a hard frost doesn’t bite too soon, as being the ‘last minute Harry’ that I am I have still a tree planting listed on my bucket list. Actually the tree is in a deep, seventeen- inch bucket and I have to be straight up in admitting I just bought it last Wednesday, on impulse of course. I know that you know the way it happens, like when something just tells you that you gotta do it whatever and you jump in and do it without thinking that maybe frost is in the air and hopefully will never arrive and besides, as in my case, that I am somehow compelled to plant a tree in 2020 and another come-tothink is that maybe that’s how going forward I will remember this almost-too-late fall planting of my newly named tree, ‘Twentytwenty’. It’s a tamarack tree and now I’m under pressure to get in the ground as soon as I have completed writing this piece. The sun’s out, so wish me luck.

Over the years I’ve been planting a collection of tamaracks at my place. The tree is also known as a larch, a coniferous whose needles turns bright orange in fall and often remain to offer colour in winter. The tamarack very much symbolizes the boreal forest to me. You know, the forests that begin not far to the north of us, up on the rise of hard granite of the Canadian Shield, the geological feature that defines much of Canada. Actually we can boast that living within the spirit of the oldest rock in the world is what further defines us in many ways. It adds humility to our experience and maybe why other folks tell us that we tend to apologize, saying sorry for just about everything. Well if they lived shoulder to shoulder with a daunting, unmovable yet spectacular landscape especially in the heart of February with a woollen tuque pulled over their head rabble-rising bad hair for weekson- end, I estimate that they’d soon get it about humility.

It’s that mix of birch and poplar and maple and pine and spruce trees that hug together and shed their summer wear at this time of year, and that layers of leaves and needles and bark and branches have compressed over the ages into a tangle of decay and sweet scent that spills over rock outcroppings hosting a range of mosses and lichen and the rock will often embrace dogwood-lined, streams that are home to cattails and lily pads and marsh grasses and geese.

All of that is what the artists of early last century, including the Group of Seven, began to define as the iconic and authentic bones and outerwear of our landscape. At last, subjects on canvas moved away from lifeless pastoral landscapes with calm rivers and cows under trees that were a hang-over of oldworld vistas that most of the painters had left behind. Sure we have cows and rivers, but our rivers are mostly hurried and ragged and rough and as for the instance of bush, now that we can talk about in all its rawness as it cuts through the skyline in the most rabid of ways, immense beauty graceful in its feistiness, its rawness, its un-tameness.

I think I began to recognize that if the mountains symbolize home to some or the prairies or the tundra or salt water to others, then the Shield must be my spirit home. I am emotionally impacted by a sharp contrast of melancholy and uplifting awe when I am in that terrain. In my earlier days I had a favourite cliff of granite that rose from a clear water lake in Quebec that was my go-to place for comfort. I like to think that my secrets of those days are still imbedded in that stone. The picnics, the sunsets, the maniacal toboggan runs of January that transformed a few toboggans into kindling wood and came close, more than a few times, to offering the same for me as passenger. I think the unforgiving rock forgave foolery as it let me be here to talk about it today. Also, it never occurred to me before now that these memories are likely why my affinity for the Shield, my want of boreal forest and tamarack trees to be companions in the now.

When I lived in downtown Toronto, for many years I would secrete myself to a place on the grounds of the University of Toronto where within an enclave of buildings belonging to the Faculty of Forestry, was an island of boreal forest. It was created and maintained by faculty members as an example. For me it was a touchstone of recall and peace as I rode my bike over just to sit in the scent and feel of the north hidden away in a tiny corner of the city. Sadly, in a much needed time for the environment, I now learn that the faculty is under threat of being closed.

It was just the other day after buying my tree that I talked all of this over with my new donkey pal, Thunder. I mentioned the fact that I had zero response to my invitations sent out to friends for a tree planting ceremony. The various picks and shovels just sat there unused for another couple of day as snow fell. I shared with Thunder how even my go-to person with a backhoe claimed an over demand on his schedule and definitely didn’t think he could manage fitting in my request. He told me all of this while staring at the 17- inch pot I had wanted him to excavate a hole for. So it’s these kinds of instances when I am getting better at interpreting donkey expression in response to various conditions. I think I am now getting it when talking about these things with Thunder and he rolls his eyes and politely turns his head away that it’ll probably take more than the offering of a carrot to apologize for my goings-on and sorry and so let’s just stick to the trail subject on our walks? Right, Thunder? Sorry. Thunder, can you hear me?

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