From Word To Word

The Senior High class I teach at my church met at our local coffee shop this morning, and we got on the topic of found fruit, which is a term that is often applied to the fruit that can be found and harvested for free in urban areas.  For example, I have for years been harvesting apples and pears from behind one of the city community centres where there had been an orchard when the building was still a nurses’ residence for the local hospital.  I also pick serviceberries and elderberries from various housing developments around the city, and there are places where I can also find wild grapes, red currants, rose hips, and raspberries.  Then there are the various neighbours who have planted fruit trees but do not harvest them and let me pick grapes and cherries and whatever else.  All this saves me a not inconsiderable amount of money, and it also lets me use what already grows around me and would otherwise go to waste.

Picking found fruit in this way seems very natural to me.  My parents often took my brothers and me to collect windfall apples from the side of rural roads, apples that could not be eaten but were great for making applesauce.  We also picked the berries that grew in the housing developments where we lived over the years.  When I was first married, I discovered and began picking the wild grapes that grew near our apartment, and I was eventually joined by several of the other residents for the yearly harvest. Though I have moved from these places, I still return to them to gather fruit each year, and I am taking cuttings from some of these plants for my own garden.

Though this behaviour seems very normal to me, however, my students were clearly a little disconcerted with the idea.  They wanted to know whether I had to pay people, which I never do, or get their permission, which I always do unless the fruit is on public land.  They also wanted to know whether this kind of fruit might be more likely to carry bugs or diseases.  The whole thing seemed a little inapropriate to them, something like sneaking into a movie theatre or hacking a computer.  It might be possible, they seemed to imply, but surely there was something about it that was immoral if not actually illegal.

This response, now that I think about it, was a predictable one given our culture’s ideas about property.  We have so internalized the notion that everything is and should be owned and that everything does and should cost something, that we are immediately wary when something appears to be unowned and available to be used freely.  I have seen very similar responses to open source software, for example, or even to the neighbourly gesture to shovel a driveway.  We assume that these things can only be free to hide another kind of cost.  We assume that everything must have an owner, and that what is owned by one person would surely not be freely given to another except as a kind of advertisement or loss leader.  What is freely given or freely found, we believe, will be of worse quality and will obligate us in other ways.  We worry that the real owner of these things will appear and demand that we pay for them in one way or another.

We feel this way, unfortunately, because it is too often the case that what is free does indeed come at a hidden cost, but this should make it all the more necessary that we actively use those few things that are in fact freely found and freely given.  To pick and use found fruit, or to use open source software, or to lend tools freely between neighbours, these become ways, not only to save money, but to maintain economies that do not circulate around money at all, but around the local community and the local environment.  They become ways to value things apart from the dollar value that might be attached to them.  They become ways to understand value differently, to reevaluate, to value more highly what is given and discovered without any value at all.

I picked elderberries at Dave Humphrey’s place yesterday.  My eldest son came with me and picked a few berries as well before the mosquitoes became too much for him. After Dave was gracious enough to walk him back to the house, I spent an hour or so alone in the woods, following the elderberry bushes as they followed the stream.  Along with the berries, I managed to find a wild turkey feather and two nests for my son’s eclectic and ever-expanding nature collection.  The sun was lowering but not yet setting, and I finished just as it was casting through the big maple beside the lake.  It was the first evening that I could smell autumn.

Last night and much of today I spent picking the berries from the stems, a process so tedious that it is virtually impossible to buy elderberries commercially, despite how wonderful they taste.  Customers would simply never pay the real cost of pulling all those little berries from the stems with the gentleness required to keep the berries from bursting and the stems from coming with the berries.  I had something like half a bushel to pick, a matter of almost ten hours. This kind of labour can only be justified by a pie, or, to be more precise, by several pies and a substantial batch of jelly.

Tomorrow I will make jelly, bake pies, and fill the house with elderberryness.  It will hold the aroma of a passing summer and a ripening fall, the scattered light of a descending sun through a solitary and giant maple, and the stained fingers of ten hours of picking berries from stems.  There will never have been anything exactly like it before in the history of the world, and there will never be anything exactly like it until the end of time.  It will be entirely and irrevocably irreplaceable.

There is a drifting and a falling that seizes time when the sun is setting and a summer is becoming an autumn and the heat of a day is fraying into the cold of a night. Each moment then genuflects to the circling of the sun and of the seasons, and their adoration makes us all the hushed attendants of a mystery. This time disdains all measure, passing with the incalculable rhythm of rustling leaves and blowing grasses and singing insects and cresting waves, finding the hollows and the spaces of the dimmed day. Such moments are marked only in their passing. They leave no inheritance. Without memory or remainder, they are only the splendid instant of their worship.

My family and I have just returned from Manitoulin Island, where both my parents were raised and where both sets of my grandparents still live.  We stayed at my Mother’s place in Providence Bay, an old family house that she purchased a few years ago as a kind of cottage and will now be using as a full time residence and a place to run art workshops and summer programs.  She calls the place Providence House, and she was gracious enough to let us use it for a week and to bring along our friends the Humphreys.

Manitoulin is a deeply significant place for me.  I spent almost every summer there as I child, either at the farm of my Grandparents Hill, which is just outside of Mindemoya, or at the hunting camp of my Grandparents Gordon at Carter Bay, which is on the south shore of the Island east of Providence Bay.  I am by no means a farm boy, but it was during my summers on the island that I learned to ride the workhorses by leaping onto their bare backs from the apple trees, to drive a tractor poorly, to help birth a breach position calf, and to mow more hay than I care to remember.  I am no more a naturalist than I am a farmer, but the island was also the place where I learned to identify some animal sign, to distinguish one tree from another, to cut trails, and to fish.  My most vivid memories are of picking raspberries from along the dirt roads, of fishing in the little Mindemoya river, of wandering among the dunes at Carter Bay, and of reading in the old stuffed arm chair at the camp, the night already black, the moon hidden by the trees, the only light coming from the coals of the open wood stove.  It is into these memories that I always return when I come to Manitoulin.

It has been meaningful to bring others, first my friends, then my wife, then my children, and now my friends’ children, as I have returned to these memories over the years.  The island that I can introduce to them is not the same as the one of my childhood, of course, but it connects to that childhood in strange ways, and it connects to the person I am now as well.  It is no longer possible to get fresh fish from the dock at Providence Bay, for example, because there are no boats that still fish from there.  It is no longer possible to get icecream at the dairy in Mindemoya, because the dairy has now been demolished.  It is still possible, however, to find fresh fish, even if it is now sold from a truck in the grocery store parking lot, and it is still possible to get icecream made by the local dairy, even if it is no longer quite as local.  These things are still important to me now, though perhaps for other reasons, and it was a real pleasure to share them with the Humphreys.

It was also a pleasure to begin building some entirely new memories with my family.  I returned to Carter Bay to take some photos with my eldest son after the Humphreys had left.  While we were photographing, we met a woman on the beach who was able to confirm my uncertain identification of the sandcherries.  We collected several handfuls of them, my son biting into them, making faces, spitting them out, then biting them again, while I filled my shirt pockets.  We also caught crayfish.  We threw rocks from the tall stones into the water.  We found a stick that looked like a sword.  We saw a bear on the road.  Most importantly, when we returned home, we turned the sandcherries into a startlingly red syrup that went beautifully on icecream before bed and only slightly less beautifully on pancakes in the morning.

It is these kinds of memories that have made Manitoulin so important to me.  I feel it most strongly now, just after I have left it.

I am not a birder, not in the sense that Dave Humphrey has described in a recent post, where the bird watcher is the one who is always watching.  I need nature to be a little less subtle before I realize that I need to be watching.  This past week at camp, it managed to be sufficiently blunt.

Outside of the main lodge at our camp is a covered pad that we call the breezeway, for the very good reason that it funnels the predominant wind and creates air movement even on the stillest and hottest of days.  This is where people congregate after breakfast to drink their coffee and chat before the day’s programming, which is also often held on the breezeway when the weather is good.  This year, we were joined by a pair of barn swallows that had made their nest behind one of the emergency lights on the ceiling, sheltered from the rain and protected from predators but completely unavoidable to the human population of the camp, even to someone as blind to these things as I am.  Each morning we were treated to the sight of the adults winging between the trees, circling the pillars, and swooping beneath the ceiling as they performed the interminable task of feeding their young.

As remarkable as this aeronautical display was, it was the chicks that I found most interesting, or, more precisely, it was the development of the chicks into fledglings and then into independent juveniles.  I am not sure when they were hatched, but when we saw them first on the Monday morning, they were still just bits of fluff that could be barely seen above the nest.  On Wednesday, they were already sitting the edge of the nest, and there were feathers poking through the fuzz, which would periodically be dislodged by the adults and drift to the ground below.  On Friday morning, the first fledgling left the nest, and all five were flying with the parents by evening, distinguishable from their parents only by size.  When we left on Saturday afternoon, the nest was empty.

What struck me about this maturation process was not merely how quickly it took place, but that it took place in exactly the week that I was there, in a place that I could not avoid seeing every morning, as if it was somehow being enacted just for me.  I felt like I had been made, without any intention of my own, an audience for a performance, but a performance that had nothing of the performative about it, an absolutely naive performance. The performers did not know themselves as such.  Nor did they know me for their audience.  They acted only according to their instinct, but to me, the audience they had unsuspectingly created, they told a story that was more simple and beautiful and compelling than anything I had ever seen on a stage.

In this respect, they were capable of something that will always be impossible for me.  I will never be able to live the performance of my life in this niave and unsuspecting way.  I will always know myself to be a performer.  I will always know that there is an audience, even if it is only myself.  My story will never attain to this kind of simplicity and naivity, however much I may wish to the contrary.  This impossibility ensures that my story, and all human stories, are essentially tragic, ensures that human stories are by definition the only stories capable of tragedy.  Perhaps this is why I was so captivated by the swallows and by their performance, because it was a story that neither invited nor avoided tragedy, but one that was entirely and essentially innocent of it.  No human story can hope for this kind of innocence.