The Beatles came. Everyone was in love. Vietnam and love.
Neil Young sang about a town in North Ontario. Suddenly half my generation wanted to be old—or from a previous generation—a generation that did things by hand, and by rote; a generation that lived off the land, never knowing that even the First Nations themselves wanted at least in part to escape from this. Those who had never mashed more than potatoes were talking to me about milling flour. To dispossessed youth in the cities, it was a great and risky adventure—going off to the boonies, some with their daddy’s credit card, and without his blessing. Here in northern New Brunswick was one place those who wanted to change their lives came to.
So in 1972, a new Walden was to be shaped out of Uncle Tate’s farmyard, his fourteen acres that bordered the bay, where the wind was so cold even by late August it could chill your blood.
The group was made up mostly of expatriate Americans, and some Canadians, and one or two from New Brunswick. One of Uncle Tate’s nephews had left the farm; no longer respecting his loved ones who had shovelled shit to keep him alive, he reached out to gurus who knew far less than his father, and joined the very farm Uncle Tate had worked a little over a decade before.
* * *
—
Her name was Stevie—she was nineteen, wore granny glasses and knitted in Uncle Tate’s kitchen as the sunlight glanced over the chimes. She was from Toronto, and the fellow, her mentor, and the mentor of the group, Darren, came from New York. I have a memory of him looking like Jesus, leaning against Uncle Tate’s sink and pouring water out, as if at a baptismal:
“Man, you guys don’t know what you got here—so you’d better take care of it,” he said, pouring out a cup of clear well water. That is, he ordered me to take care of something his own urban culture had reduced to nothing.
“We got a lot a winter,” I said.
“That’s cool,” he said. “That’s cool—just get yerself an old lady and tuck in.”
“What was your uncle like?” Stevie asked my friend. “Was he a fine man?”
My friend turned beet red.
“He was a sawed-off five-foot-five-inch redneck,” my friend said, “who got into fights.”
They both laughed, and he looked pleased.
“He was a fine man,” I whispered in apology, not to them—but to Uncle Tate for the utter weakness of his nephew.
Tate was a fine man. But not the way they were thinking. When he came back to New Brunswick from the Second World War, he was as wild as a buck and as rough as a night in jail. Peace and love he had in abundance, but not the kind to suffer fools. He’d walk across the river in late March, with the ice breaking around his boots, to get to a dance. That was faith. He was completely colour-blind; he’d love and hate indiscriminately. He got into a fight with the doctor and was in jail when his wife died alone. He never forgave himself that.
By the questions they asked about his life I knew they were hoping for a working-class hero, not hoping for a man but someone they had seen in some movie. And his nephew from rural New Brunswick was so ashamed of his heritage he wanted to belittle it in front of his betters so he could belong—belong to those who wanted to churn butter to prove they were morally superior to a man now dead, who at five-foot-five was as strong as a bull.
I don’t think I ever cared for his nephew after this day.
* * *
—
I discovered from this nephew that the newcomers had not come here to learn from the whites, anyway; they did not want what the Uncle Tates knew but to study the First Nations, to learn from them. There would be no going back to what they had all come from. But the First Nations by now owned cars, high-powered boats, TVs and Ski-Doos. And they didn’t want to go back, either.
“No, there is no going back for them,” my friend said happily. “They are committed to here—this place will be their roots.”
“Well, then they will need three hundred years,” I said.
The older man in the group, Darren, worried about the First Nations people here.
“We’ve destroyed them,” he said.
“Not entirely,” I said (not in defence of us but in defence of them—but he did not get this subtlety).
“It’s terrible the way they are treated,” he continued. “The Aboriginals are caretakers of our earth—aren’t they?”
No one could say Darren was wrong about the first part of the statement. I think he was scolding us with the second. Well, who in North America doesn’t deserve to be scolded, more than once, about the First Nations people?
I began to realize that Darren believed in his ability not so much to belong with the First Nations, who would allow him the benefit of vicarious suffering, but to escape who he was, a white, urban, university-educated man in a denim suit, with long hair and love beads. And Tate’s nephew gave up his own hard-earned, blow-by-blow knowledge of life here for a notional knowledge in order to belong to a group he considered superior to those people who had already fashioned a complete life out of the soil.
In a certain respect, he was like the First Nations people who were to give up their own knowledge of life and land because the new white settlers had told them to. Soon they were going to make a canoe of bark, fish in the traditional way, plant under the June moon—they had a pocketful of seeds. Pocketful of dreams.
* * *
—
They spent October in the yellow trees, cutting and limbing the wood they were to burn, but didn’t get it yarded until late and then left it where it was until well after the first storm. After a time they reminded me of a little band of orphans, nowhere much to go. Stevie’s cheeks were often streaked with red, as if she had just cried. I wondered where she had come from. But she was here now and under orders from a guru who probably gave orders as relentlessly as any daddy she had run from. I saw her trying to carry wood to the house and stumbling under the weight, as if she were carrying a cross she could neither bear nor understand. It might have been like forcing an Indian woman to go to church in the eighteenth century. The feeling of being displaced must have been almost as great.
But she continued to carry her wood.
Watching her in those days, I thought of a thousand women who had done the same a century before—of my mother-in-law, left a widow with nine children at the age of forty-two, a country girl—of my mother, who grew up in the heart of what any one of these people would consider the wilderness and did housework from the time she was four. Of my uncle, who, at thirteen, was sent through the woods to find my grandfather, while my grandmother, holding a double-barrelled shotgun, held off a group who was trying to take the property. She would have shot them if she had had to. For her to wax eloquent about the danger of guns and the need to take safety courses was not an option at that moment. Or of my paternal grandmother, who knocked a cow cold with one punch (a feat not to be equalled by any literary figure in Canada, save Malcolm Lowry).
When it became very cold, Stevie would sit in our corner store for hours, pretending to do crossword puzzles in the daily newspapers. She was hiding from the guru, who intimidated her and intellectually bullied her.
I often saw a look of dull confusion, as if she were a lost Girl Guide. In a way her plight was a lesson to me about the First Nations, about how their lives were so finally and tragically changed after 1605. Stevie suddenly brought that home, without her ever knowing it. And where, I thought, could she ever go now? Nowhere. Not with winter setting in and no tickets home. There was a hush over the land that they had rented, and frost clung to the turned-down and twisted grasses; their wood lay yarded as haphazardly as fallen soldiers. There was no way to dispel the cold and no way to get rid of the smoke from their damp maple and birch. No way to make the light stay when it was getting dark, no way to make the chickens look happy, no way to make the barn stand straight again. No one had money for those things. And night—night came at si
x, at five, at four-thirty.
* * *
—
The locals became interested in helping out. For no better reason (and a damn good reason it was) than these were people and it was Christmas. And many of my friends who were their age dropped in on them with presents.
They brought deer meat and homemade wine, fresh-grown grass, and other forms of libation. But it became a strange celebration. It reminded me of Tolstoy’s quip that at least as much is known in the country as the city, and probably more.
When Darren spoke to us of wanting to build a geodesic dome, he was very surprised to find out that our friend had quit school in grade ten and had built the first dome in New Brunswick, drawing on his own plans and intelligence, and reading Buckminster Fuller.
When Darren said he would fish for his food, it was another friend who brought them ten smoked salmon. This was not one-upmanship. The little town was just the land extended. Until I was twenty-four, I could carry my rifle from my house into the woods for a deer hunt. It is not that Darren did not know the land—he did not know himself, and the land simply told him this. Sooner or later the land does. I know he wanted to live in harmony like the first people and wanted the First Nations people to be his champions of the forest and his protectors of the environment. But that said only one thing: he had never allowed them an option; in his life he never really looked upon them the way they should have been looked upon from the first: as men.
* * *
—
Life went on. There were chores to be done, by people who had never done chores before. They spoke of sharing, but it was contractual, not emotional. It seemed to me there was more love in the place when Uncle Tate lived alone and fired off his shotgun at his visitors as a joke.
By January there were dissenters. That month a young man got a job in town. Another went away—and then another. Tate’s nephew left in a dispute over something.
I met Stevie coming out along the back road one day She was carrying a saucepan, with nothing in it. Someone had told her there were winter berries to collect, but she had found none, for there were none. We stood and talked for a moment in the freezing gale of late afternoon.
“We are going to have a really fine farm,” she told me.
I knew that was nonsense. But I was so sorry for her at that moment. She had come to womanhood in what kind of city, to feel so left out, like so many of my generation? Cast out, of something. I’m not even sure what anymore. All she had known was concrete. Why had this happened? What sad turning away from her family did she have, in what hot, vacant urban apartment or house tucked between two asphalt roads? An argument over the war—or a parent trying too hard to buy her love, or loving her too little? Did they even know where she was anymore? She was still a child, really.
“So you aren’t going home?” I said.
“Oh—no—no,” she said, and smiled. “I’ll never go.”
It was a victory for her to say this. I might have told her that I knew a family who arrived at this little place she was now in 1840—and lived their first winter in a cave about a mile from where we were talking, losing three children. I might have told her my relatives came over after the Battle of Culloden, and one walked from Pennsylvania in 1805 and settled upon the Northwest. To keep her chin up.
I discovered at that moment that there is something about the land—you look unnatural on it if you are unnatural; you look greedy upon it if you are, lazy if you tend to be. If you are frightened of guns or wildlife, the land will inform you. Nervous on the water? The water will let you know. There is no escaping who you are once you are here, on the Miramichi—or anywhere else, for that matter. It is what the First Nations saw of us—it is what I saw of her; she with the saucepan with nothing in it.
The man Darren who made the rules was simply selfish—and in a sense, beyond all his ethical talk of First Nations, a prude. This is what the land said he was. And the land does not lie.
* * *
—
In late January one of them went and got a job. He worked at a garage in Barryville, repairing snowmobiles, and would come home every night late. He supported this little family of outcasts by doing a job hundreds of men did without complaint simply because life required that he do it. And it was he who got to meet the First Nations on even terms, because he worked alongside the Micmac man, Jacob Paul, who co-owned the garage that repaired small engines.
Then he found a girl in Neguac and moved out.
So there was only Stevie and her mentor, Darren, left. They were the last. And in that winter, living alone, they found the dream had somehow disappeared. But what dream was it? I don’t think any of them, including Darren, really knew.
Still, in some way, it must have been a noble dream, a kind of idealism that can only be hatched in torment, from a society writhing in pain. The looking for a better world, in Uncle Tate’s few acres at the edge of the earth. A little society in the wilderness, born in the city, believing animals were Bambis and berries were for the taking, flying back home on a jet plane where if lucky they could still believe those things. They found here only the pain they believed they had left behind, and in the end blamed us because we had no balm or magic to help them relinquish this pain. The simple pain of being women and men, no matter what land you stood on and of what race you were.
Darren left one afternoon, saying he would be back—that he was going into town for supplies. His poncho on a hook in the corner near his leather hat assured Stevie of his return. But he did not come back. She waited by the window, his supper in the warming oven. He became safe again, when being unsafe was no longer a game.
Stevie stayed by herself, looking out those porch windows, waiting for her friend. She made it until March. Sometime about Saint Patrick’s Day I saw her doing her crossword in the corner store. There was a storm outside and everything in the world was white.
She was happy, she said; the wood was drier, and people had made her welcome. She was working two nights a week in this store, selling cigarettes and Tampax. But she needed to take a course, she thought—and come back next year. Next year would be better. The terrible things in the world would be gone. She would get a horse, maybe one of those Morgans. Suddenly she reached up and kissed my forehead and squeezed my hand. She walked on and I watched her go out of my life. It’s been almost forty years. The house is gone, and no one waits, and none of them have ever been back. They didn’t have much luck. For a while many of us might have believed a new world would come. Perhaps that’s what we’ve all been watching for, whenever we look up at the sky
* * *
—
I walked beyond Uncle Tate’s land last autumn. There had been two days of snow. I walked toward the hundredth new chop-down that had come since the mill started its new process. I carried my little .32 Winchester—but I have not fired a rifle at game in years. I trick myself into hunting by not hunting now. Usually I find a tin can to fire at, sight the rifle in, for next year.
My family—here for over two and a half centuries—is gone from the river, and in the summer the brooks babble to tell me so. My mother died in 1978, my father died ten years ago, and all the children have left. We have gone away, but we do come back. In a sense, once a part of the land, we can never leave. We didn’t become peace lovers, but we do love, fiercely, I suppose.
There is no town here now. A city sprawls with lights toward its destiny. The trees are muted and thrashed, as pockets of the forest no longer exist at all.
I walked toward the high ground beyond his house, next to the power lines. The ground was dug up that day with fresh tracks and scrapes. In one of those tricks of fate I saw the old saucepan Stevie had used to collect her winter berries. It had been tossed up out of the dirt that had buried it for years. I wondered how her life had gone, and if she had ever found the place she wanted.
Then turning toward the chop, I saw a little doe. A
s I approached, she made a heroic attempt to stand. Her left hind leg was caught in a coyote snare, and she was hunkered down beneath the snow and thrashed trees. All around and everywhere I looked the snow and earth had been torn up, where a gigantic battle had raged above Uncle Tate’s old farmyard. The night before, the buck had stayed to protect the doe in the snare from the coyotes. And he must have fought like hell. The coyotes—here almost as big as wolves—hadn’t been able to get to her. I do not know if the buck lived, but he had done the job given him. Like Uncle Tate with his wife, he didn’t know why she was caught up. The world had betrayed them both: the snare cynically said neither of them mattered. Still the buck had fought like a bastard. Never left his poncho on a nail.
I managed to cut the snare. She stood and bolted, cracking the limbs of some birch trees, and was gone, into what was left of a world that didn’t exist any longer.
I SUPPOSE I COULD SPEAK OF BEAUTY
(Talk delivered to Atlantic School of Theology graduates, 2010)
I SUPPOSE I COULD SPEAK OF BEAUTY IN THE WAY MANY PEOPLE must think of it—pretty pictures of streams or delicate flowers in some forgotten place; and I suppose I would be right except for perhaps a blush or two of sadness that we might recall in those places and pictures of streams, and parts of our youth now gone that we can never recapture—and in that sadness we might see beauty, too, and a longing for things that can never come back, like a childhood fled away, over the sad, longing dunes of our past.
It imparts wisdom, this beauty—finally it must, for it makes us reflect on the idea—the one idea that in the four corners of the world, and in all the places we have ever been, no matter how we look at it, and how mankind has bled it away, beauty will and will forever remain, soluble and indivisible from something greater, some unquestionable desire to know what is in fact true. “Truth is beauty,” Keats does say. For strange as it may seem, there is no everlasting beauty without man or woman to be witnesses to it, and man or woman searches for the truth of beauty throughout their lives. That is the secret: we long for and search for beauty, even if we are to find it, as Tolstoy says in a puddle of dirt that briefly reflects the sky.
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