From Word To Word

My eldest son set me a task as we were driving up to Parry Sound this past Saturday: “Dad, let’s find a salamander.”

This task, I knew, would be harder than he realized.  Though my brothers and I regularly found salamanders during the summers we spent on Manitoulin Island and in Blind River, I found the little creatures to be much less common when I went to find them as an adult, even in the same places.  We used to keep in a bucket six or eight specimens at a time of what I now think were Redback Salamanders, but I have not seen more than one of these a summer in recent years, though I am unsure whether this is due to a decline in their population or to a decrease in my patience in looking for them.

In any case, I was non-committal about our chances of finding a salamander during our stay at the lake, and my caution proved justified.  I turned countless rocks and logs, discovering more ant nests than I thought possible and a precious few worms that went to feed our catch and release fishing sessions from the end of the dock.  I also found a toad, a patch of previously unknown blueberry bushes, and several species of beetle, but no salamanders.

On the first day we were there, however, on a whim, I tossed the minnow trap into the water beside the boathouse.  It was unbaited, and I did not expect to catch anything much.  I may even have forgotten about it entirely if it had not begun to rain on our fishing yesterday afternoon.  I caught sight of the trap as we headed for shelter in the boathouse, so I decided to check it as we passed, and there, huddled against the side, was a common mudpuppy.

This was certainly not what my son had meant by a salamander, and certainly not what I had expected to find for him, but it was a very interesting creature nonetheless.  The mudpuppy is an aquatic salamander, having external gills and spending its time almost exclusively in the water.  It also grows quite large, our specimen being something like ten inches in length.  My son was overjoyed, and I was excited as well, since it was the first time I had been able to hold and examine a mudpuppy at such close quarters.

As we were releasing the salamander back into the water, I suddenly remembered a conversation that I once had with Dave Humphrey about seeing.  It occurred to me that I had been looking for something in particular, for something that I expected to find only in a certain way and in a certain place, rather than seeing what was actually there, rather than being watchful for what I might actually encounter.  Rather than allowing myself to simply explore and see what was there, and I had been looking past my surroundings in search of something that may not have been there at all.

Of course, the act of seeing may still involve rolling stones, or tossing out a minnow trap, for that matter.  It just rolls stones differently.  It rolls them, not in order to find something in particular, not in expectation, but in order to see what there might be, in wonder.  It explores rather than searches.  It attends.  It approaches.  It encounters.  It experiences.  It allows itself to be surprised.

I have some fairly large sections of Wild Carrots in the areas of my yard that are still pretending to be a lawn.  Wild Carrot is sometimes also called Queen Anne’s Lace or Bird’s Nest or Bee’s Nest or Devil’s Plague or a variety of other things, and these names are sometimes applied to other similar looking plants as well, but only the species Daucus carota is properly called Wild Carrots.   It is a very common plant in our area and is usually considered a weed because of how prolifically it seeds.

Wild Carrots are edible, though few people actually eat them, perhaps because they look similar to the poisonous Water Hemlock plant, though the roots of true Wild Carrots can easily be identified by their distinctively carrot-like smell.  Wild Carrot roots are tasty when they are young, though they get woody much sooner than their cultivated cousins.  Their leaves can be used exactly like those of cultivated carrots, as a way to add carrot flavour to a broth or a stew.  Their flowers and roots can both be used to make a tea, though there is some evidence that it interferes with the implantation of fertilized eggs in humans, so it should be avoided by women who are pregnant or who would like to become pregnant.  Their flowers also make attractive and edible garnishes for salads and other foods.

Beyond their culinary uses, wild carrots play an important function in the ecosystem, as highly nutritious food for browsing herbivores, as habitat and nourishment for butterfly larvae, and as nectar for bees.  They are also an attractive plant with large delicate white flowers that attract butterflies over a long blooming season, so they make and interesting addition to a garden, even if they are difficult to control.

Now, I have not spent all of this time describing Wild Carrots merely for the sake of information, but also for the sake of making an observation about how urban gardens have come to be cultivated.  Despite the fact that these edible, nutritious, attractive, ecologically significant plants grow easily around us, even without cultivation, we ruthlessly eliminate them whenever possible to make way for less useful and less attractive and less beneficial garden plants.  Though there is some justification for this on the basis that Wild Carrots are technically an exotic species, they are nevertheless a long naturalized species that poses no particular threat to the ecological system, to browsing livestock, or to humans.  The reason for our objection to them, the reason that we classify them as weeds, is far more based on the simple fact that they are common.

Gardening generally, and the urban garden in particular, is dominated by an obsession with the rare and a distaste for the common.  What distinguishes the expert gardener is the cultivation of plants that are rare and difficult to grow and that are uncommonly showy in their bloom or their foliage.  What reveals the poor gardener is the invasion of common local plants into the garden space.  Yet, I would suggest that rarity is not actually a very useful criterion for judging a garden or a gardener, particularly in a world that can less and less afford to spend its resources on the merely frivolous and ornamental, and in a world that must find ways to make the most of its land and its labour.

However, if we are not entirely to replace aesthetics with functionality, we will have to find ways to make the functional beautiful and ways to understand the functional as beautiful.  An essential part of this movement, in my opinion, will be to reassess the value of the common and the rare.  Rather than regarding the common as something to be eradicated in favour of the rare, we will need to regard it as beautiful precisely in its commonality.  I do not mean that we should merely let our gardens be overrun by what happens to sprout there, because this commonality would not be any more functional than rarity.  Neither do I mean that we should leave our gardens altogether without aesthetic form, because this would serve only to eliminate the essential role that the garden plays as a place between the human and the natural.  What I mean is that we need to identify and cultivate and form the very things that grow naturally around us, to recognize the beauty that is found precisely in their commonness.

I took my two boys to The Green Legacy Tree Nursery yesterday morning.  I ran across this operation when I was looking for seed-grown Red Mulberry trees a month or so ago, and I thought that the boys might enjoy seeing how trees are grown, so we borrowed a car and went to volunteer for the morning.  We enjoyed our time very much.  The boys mostly chased the resident dog and cat or played with the daughter of one of the nursery’s employees, while I helped transplant seedlings that will be kept in the greenhouses for another winter.

On our way into the nursery, however, and on our way out, I was startled to see a number of signs that a neighbour had posted along the edge of the nursery’s property in plain view from the laneway.  The signs aggressively abused the nursery, describing it as a waste of tax dollars and discouraging people from volunteering there.  The signs were professionally made and had clearly cost a significant amount of time and energy and money, and they were a disturbing reminder of how much remains to be done in changing the way that people understand the significance of naturalization and reforestation in our communities.

I found the signs doubly disturbing in light of a similar situation that I had encountered the previous week while the boys and I were vacationing on Manitoulin Island.  The beach at Providence Bay, where we spent much of our time and where I have gone frequently since I was a child, has become increasingly vegetated over the years, whether because the boardwalk has kept walkers off the dunes, or because lower water levels have allowed better conditions for the plants, or because warmer weather has allowed a longer growing season.  Though I find this naturalized dune habitat very beautiful, many of the local residents see it as destroying their biggest draw for tourists, who provide most of the town’s income.  They would like to dredge the beach to remove the encroaching plant material, but several threatened species now grow there, so dredging is no longer permitted, and the residents feel that the future of their town is being threatened.

I am not unsympathetic to the feelings of those in Providence Bay who are trying to protect their livelihood.  They have already seen their shipping and fishing industries disappear over the years, and they may very well be right in thinking that a second stage dune ecosystem will not attract tourists nearly as much as a pristine sand beach.  The situation, however, need not be as insoluble as they suppose.  Though it may no longer be possible to advertise their beach as a vast stretch of unmarked sand, it has now become possible to market it as a unique ecological habitat, to offer guided tours of the dunes and its flora, to make effective use of the already existing interpretive centre, and to build a local eco-tourism industry.  This approach would allow them to qualify for various government grants and would position them well for the future.  It would require, however, a substantial shift in the attitudes and the expectations of the local residents, both in respect to what the relationship between the economics and the ecology of tourism should be and also in respect to what it means for a beach to be attractive.

In the case of The Green Legacy’s neighbours, I am not sure whether their concerns are as valid as those of the Providence Bay community, but I think that the situation is likely structurally similar.  I suspect that the conflict has arisen, as it usually does, because environmental idealism has contravened long-standing assumptions about how tax dollars should be spent, communities should be built, businesses should be run, and priorities should be determined.  I also suspect that the solutions would be similar to those of Providence Bay as well, involving a better integration of economic and ecological needs in order to produce a relationship between the environment and the community that sustains both.

The shift in attitude that is required, I think, and often in both parties, is away from the assumption that economy and ecology are necessarily opposed.  While I would suggest that a balance between the two will often come at the expense of economic efficiency, simply because of the degree to which these kinds of concerns have come to dominate ecological ones, ecological change will only be sustained if the people who are driving it can sustain their own livelihoods as well.  It is difficult to convince people to work for environmental change when this seems to mean the loss of  their jobs and of their communities.  It is much easier when there seems to be a possibility for new jobs and more vital communities.

An ecologically aware economy will almost certainly be less effecient than an ecollogically absuive one, but this does not imply that we need to abandon either ecological or economic sustainability.  It means only that we need to understand the goals of an economy to be other than mere effeciency, to be the creation of both healthy environments and healthy communities.

Walking the beaches of Manitoulin Island, as I did today for the first time since last summer, is my surest therapy.  It is always a journey through the flora of my unconscious, the unnamed and half-remembered flowers of my childhood. Though I could not begin to name and recall all of the growing things that I encountered today, or to explain the significance that they have for me, or even to relate the experience of coming upon them, I offer the following list as a memorial of their place in my history and in my imagination:

Sand Cherry (Prunis pumila var. depressa)
Red Osier Dogwood (Cornus stolonifera)
Purple Flag (Iris versicolor)
Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)
Pitcher’s Thistle (Cirsium pitcheri)
Great Lakes Wheat Grass (Agropyron psammophilum)
Bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi)
Beach Pea (Lathyrus japonicus)
Silverweed (Potentilla anserina)
Canada Anemone (Anemone canadensis)
Starry False Solomon’s Seal (Maianthemum stellatum)
Wild Rose (Rosa carolina)

Some of these plants are found in amost no other place on earth, though I have walked among them every summer of my life.  Others are among the commonest of plants.  All of them, however, have a rarity quite apart from their quantity and their geographical distribution.  They are, in fact, the rarest of things: the source and the reminder of an imagined history.

My famiy and I are spending the weekend at the house of my Aunt and Uncle and two cousins, and yesterday afternoon we took a walk through the large wooded property that they own.  As always, I was looking for native edibles, and I was treated to a natural buffet, or I would have been if we had been walking a month or two from now.  We came across Wild Strawberries, Wild Raspberries, Swamp Red Currant, Gooseberry, Wild Plum, Mapapple, River Grapes, Fox Grapes, and three kinds of Vibernum that I was not quite able to identfy, though only a few of the strawberries could actually be eaten yesterday.  I dug specimens of the Wild Plum, the Gooseberries, and the Mayapples, beacuse they were growing in such profusion.  They will make great additions to my garden, and they will also serve to remind me of a day that my family went grazing in the woods a month too soon.

I do not know if anything can still be said about seeds that will not immediately fall into the most obvious kinds of romanticism and cliche.  This sort of idealization is a large part of the reason why I often claim to be cynical about spring and romantic only about autumn.  Even so, I need to confess that there is something unavoidably compelling about planting seeds, about pushing them into the soil with my fingers, about knowing what they might become.

There is something so perfectly anticipatory about planting seeds, something that looks so absolutely toward what might come.  It may very well be romantic of me to say so, and I might very well contradict my self proclaimed cynicism in so saying, but there is something miraculous in the seed, something that perhaps only escapes cliche when I do it with my own hands.

There was a tremendous flock of cedar waxwings in my garden today. They were eating the berries, shrivelled and dried, from last fall, and flying in their sudden squadrons. There were more of them than I could reasonably count, perhaps eighty or a hundred altogether, perching mostly in the newly budding maple tree that sits beside my driveway, but diving occasionally, a dozen or so at a time, to the berry bushes beneath my window: splendid.

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.