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THE NORTH WOODS
'Is a wolfless north woods any north woods at all?' Aldo Leopold
The trembling aspen has lost all its leaves. The path into the woods is deserted, familiar. The northern hemisphere winter has come from the deep dark wood of the shelves of your grandmother's house in Matraville, Australia. It has settled into your psyche from the undisturbed privacy of childhood. Thousands of migrating Canada geese have mysteriously returned to the land of the mind. Once hatched, the goslings will follow the first life they see, imprinting it as mother. V is the formation for Canada geese. The flapping of the large birds creates wing-tip vortices, swirling air currents that lift the next wind galloper.
The strange bird of the north woods has entered the psyche of Australia. It has planted a large green speckled egg deep in the cradle of your childhood, while you swallowed down the tropical heat, granite boulder, cyclone, lightning storm, sandstone and while black blush flies settled on the wire screen doors. And while the cicadas occupied the eucalypt trees whirring all the long day. They were tiny helicopters raising dust and seeds by the thousands, pods that never took root, while deep inside you, the temperature of imported literature and images, from the wilderness of the north, dropped to the depth and strength of the arctic.
Rather than the Victorian heath and coastal wedding bush, you followed the two dimensional wolf, then you searched for the gingerbread houses in the strange dark woods of the north. There are some really deep places that one settles into during childhood, while reading in the dust and shadow of the great brown shelf. Australian children travel to the snowy four seasoned northern hemisphere worlds inside these books. There could have been a dugite outside, but inside there was moose, an igloo and old nanook on the jagged edge, of a seal breathing hole.
There is an old red barn on the prairie that dies to the north of Regina each year, inside you growing dam of the beaver and the restless coyote, the snow-coated, hoar-frosted trees of Christmas gatherings by generational fires, the chestnuts, cranberry juice, the fiddlehead of New Brunswick and the tundra of migrating caribou, those old carpet bags eaten by flies. There was the bald eagle, red fox, black bear, reindeer, salmon, cougar and the racoon burrowing into the soft sensations of memory. There was a blood red cardinal on the side your grandmother's old biscuit tin at Matraville, in Sydney's east. These are familiar spirits and from a seaside childhood, an icy north enters your island psyche.
The red cardinal was from the deep forests where bears forage for berries. We examine the water droplets sliding down the smooth red sides. We learn from the buffalo and bobcat our place amongst them, while phastigales and eastern barred bandicoots hobble across our window sills of splintered wood and into extinction. Now naturalists look for the small marsupials, everywhere. Meanwhile we are northern hemisphere focused. Trees in low temperatures flourish. We come to a point inside ourselves where climbing a mountain is like travelling north.
It began in a book called; The World of Animals, in a suburban home in Liverpool, west of Sydney. The southerly busters ignited the slow and deadly journey of the arctic fox, as I wandered into unknown territory. Even during the December summers at Bundeena, where we were taken by the surf and sun, inside old inflated tyre tubes, well beyond the salt water crab infested sand flats, the great icy sheets from the north woods, reached down to inhabit us. There is an odd sense of lostness, between two distinct landscapes, that become embedded, into two distinct minds, as we wander in search of one from the other, finding no place to rest.
My crimson bedspread was ragged and hugged by legs, as I turned most often to the pages where the caribou moved out across the tundra. They are in search of Christmas, I thought. There was something about the simplicity of ice and the depth of the cold, that attracted me to the pages of this great book from the beginning. It was a book that I balanced but could not control, as the sub-arctic treelines were controlled by temperature. If the summers were too short, or too cold, the forests could not exist. In my imagination, the summers were long, so those trees could exist and the conifer and blue spruce forests, flourished in Sydney's humid December of 1975. The caribou left their tiny tracks through my migration paths. The tundra flowers grew and proliferated.
Twenty-three years later, I began to walk into footsteps that were already there. I was amongst the caribou. Each time I stepped forward, it was like trying on a shoe. The track was the perfect fit. The black flies eggs were resting in fur. The silver maple would not let her leaves go. She was the last green tree alive come snow. She was most in her element when she was alone. Then she simply dropped her green, just as her roots iced over and there was no going back, to summer past. I jumped from the pages of a sinking landscape at the very last moment of fall, from a place that became earth at its deepest, which is a northern winter.
I was brought into the world by dogs. They licked my birth sack to completion. I looked out from deep canine furrows at the sun across suburban lawns. At night I ran and tumbled with wolves through snow that I had never seen. I was entering a book or a pack. My kelpie companion licked me awake. He returned me to the backyard way of the dog. The wolf gave me glimpses of a world I did not understand. These wolves reared up out of the deep north to exist and hunt inside me. This year, while I lived in Sydney's humid west, two young male wolves galloped in the first snow. They had ever seen winter before. To think, every wolf in Canada has their first snowfall, the first pangs of hunger and the kill. The frozen shoulders of a wolf are facing a wilderness of ice.
There are strange animals on the tracks ahead. There is a cougar stalking the cars in the driveways at Victoria on Vancouver Island. It's ears flattened back into its head, as it tuned into a block of wood. When I first saw the snowy landscape from Banff, Alberta I thought 'Christmas' and 'Santa lives here.' The books were coming to life, from a mind limited only by publication. I looked back down the path of aspen that could lead to the snowy thatched cottage with the great snowy owl. Could life be giving me a second chance? But no, I was simply travelling back into the secret place of solitude, where a nest rested with its speckled green eggs. It was a place inside me that couldn't be accessed.
Fall came from the north woods, to build its season within my imagination. I traveled through the aspen forests with the dog from a caged puppyhood. She took advantage of every scent, ran her tongue along blades of grass, licked the strands clean and discovered the scent of a fallen nest. She took to some horse shit in a dry and muscular roll. She was eighteen months old. Her lean black body twisting through a frozen path in Winnipeg. She was a young dog in that floppy stage, liquid oil through the forest of her dreams, where the thrill of running and the new scent to follow never ceased. It was cold on our noses. Our eyes were streaming, the warmth rising from our backs like steam. It was someone switched on a hot water faucet in the cold twilight. By the first pale light of dawn, we would have tuned in to ice, insects in white amber.
It sometimes takes a dog, with no knowledge of the world we live in, to show us the cold pleasures of a pine forest struck by winter. The north woods are like clocks unto themselves and the solstice is the still face of harshness. This dog ventures into her life of the present. She asks the wood squirrels directions, knowing they will never tell her. They will simply shake and signal from the branches with their great bushy tails. They have business to attend to and summers of growth stored in the acorns and in the nuts, that they harvested. They are the guardians of forest food stores. The wind hits the yellow aspen. The stems are stuck at an angle to the leaf. Fringes of hair flutter on the grey branches. There is an unearthly chill, that sets off the migrations of gulls, to travel south.
The simplicity of an icy wilderness, calls me to sleep. The bur or scrub oak is ultimately resilient, its hard little branches making wooded fists at frosts. Deers are nibbling on the edge, milking the scene, with their white tails. The snow is whitening the migration paths of the caribou. The flies of summer have dropped off their hides, that shook and peeled like carpet in June. The trembling aspen bloom powder, coats the southern side of the branch. I know the place, but it's as though through glass, or through the pages of a book. It can't touch me and I can't touch it. Yet it exists, as the deep bird's nest in the wintering place. It offers hope with no substance, mystery without a way in. Canada is somewhere in me.
I want to follow the child I was, when I first looked through the books, deep into the dark wood of the dusty shelves. The woods sound nostalgic, but their snowy cottages, old rakes and maple leaves, helped to formed my identity. While outside the sun of a southern island was lightning up the salmon gum after warm rain, so that even the prickly leaves of the scented paperbark, become so much of who I am. The little wattle birds fight the lorikeets for nectar, on a twenty five degree evening. Yet somewhere there is a moose from a far away place, wandering through the tea tree forests, until it all merges, each becoming indistinguishable from the other. Both places existing simultaneously and me, like a ghost or low fog, simply gliding through.
Say goodbye to the evergreens, old tamarack and shed your pale yellow. There is a tree on the edge, stretching its neck out of the wind. The ice kills the place. But the tamarack lives on, a tattered monument to three extinct seasons. The low hills of red dogwood to the south, impenetrable permafrost to the north. Lastly, there are the birds with winter depth, such as the deep woody mallard. There are birds deep inside the mossy emerald head of the conifer. It's like resting your flat white palm, vulnerable and trembling, like an open pearl, in the warm green and black crevice of a rock, or tree, in a sheltered wooded area. You have touched the north woods, but have you come any closer to the truth? These mallard and the wood duck are equip to carry the messages of a god, who can only inhabit the north, impenetrable, their heads against ice, against snow, against wind. You can quietly build up your resistance, or you can let it enter your flesh, your bones and perish.
Everything is brown. The white tailed deer is brown. The birds are small and brown, with flashes of colour. Or subdued and closed up, they shine out like sunrooms with double glass, against the early winter. Their colours are always prepared for winter and accessed by winter, moreso than the other seasons. The birds are flat chested, blue, green, white and red. They are the colour of the sun along a forest floor in streaks. But mostly, they are brown. Their winter chests are layered with fat, impenetrable and waterproof. These are weather and wind proof feathers, that cloak the tiny beating heart, beyond the frail bones and weary wings of little birds. In this climate, their bright-eyed and fragile innocence, overcome by a sudden frost, like a breeze departs a candle.
Canada geese trumpet and bark, with a deep worded eye that spoke of the damp intimacy of wood and the battering blizzard of oceans of grey ice. A densely woody and cold eye, a straight eye to the flight path. They will sleep and travel, as nature dictates, or they will sleep for all time. Canada geese flying in formation, as far as the north will take them. There is a location for them, that becomes the heart, the resting place. The ground becomes the nest, the sun clock and moon dial, the unmistakable cue, for migrations to the wintering grounds, from the childhood, where the only light I see, comes from being lost in the snow.
My heart is closing up like the bur oak, to protect its hoard of green eggs, gathered and stored from the old books of childhood. Soon the water is warmer than the night, even thought the water is ice. The sunset comes to sleep on water, dipping its yolky head below the sheeted ice of the lake, that is the overnight stop on the flight path. As soon as the sun turns the sky a deep wintery grey, thousands of Canada geese, tumble barrel up into the sky of wilderness, from the place where they have half slept for the night. The V shape of geese will break the wind, making it easier for dominions of geese, to fly great distances. All the other birds have gone south, while they head northwards, into the great ice storms.
The geese flying above the oceans trees, covered in blue grey snow. My heart buds from branches and reaches into all the warm muscles of the north wood animals. We are rooted in winter from above and below. The ice has stung our cheeks, then our skin will sleep in numbness never to return. Our fingers, toes and the tips of our ears do not recuperate. I've been permanently mystified by a place, that only winter can truly reach. I step into my own footsteps, while walking through the tea tree scrub, along the salty windswept coast of Victoria, Australia or into the trembling aspen forest of Winnipeg, Canada. I follow the dog of both dreams, like I follow the wolf. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm going. |
