by Brian Brett
This farm has given me almost two decades to contemplate the questions that arise out of living a rural life, in both light and shadow. We will begin this solstice day in darkness and end in darkness—walking through a short history of Willowpond Farm, known to its friends as Trauma Farm, told during an eighteen-year-long day that remembers all the way back to the fields of Babylon, and beyond, in every direction.
1
GREY HOUR,
THE BIRD GOD
THE NIGHT UNLEASHES the sudden cry of the peacock, perched on the maple outside our bedroom. When he’s in season Ajax considers it his duty to warn every sheep and leaf to stay away. Our tom, Wu, has ignited him. Wu is so strong the cat door is beneath his dignity, and he prefers to launch himself into the house from our second-floor bedroom deck, parachute through the four-foot-high window, and land with a triumphant thump on the floor—a mouse still alive in his jaws.
In the shadows the ancient game resumes—the high-pitched screams of Wu, the skittering and squeaks of the mouse—until boredom or mistakes lead to the fatal crunch. But tonight there’s a loud squeeeeeeeee fading across the deck. The mouse got out through the cat door! I know that Wu, despite his intrepidity, will be sitting in the dark like a dummy, staring at the door that betrayed him, and I can’t help smiling. I lie back in bed, thinking mouse thoughts. Terror and freedom. They live side by side. My eyes are now wide open.
I question the world, which means I sleep like the spring on my water pump—ready to work as soon as the switch level is too low or too high. When I was wild and twenty I fashioned words on a diet of Southern Comfort—raw on the belly and harder still on the nerves. I often wouldn’t fall into bed until four in the morning, catching only a couple hours of sleep before I went to work. Now my body has reversed itself, and I sleep early, waking often, fevered, eager to begin each day—one less sunrise to witness in a lifetime. I’m hot under the comforter. I slip out of bed while I listen to the soft bubbling of Sharon’s breath. She will sleep for hours yet, waking momentarily, perhaps, if she senses I’m going downstairs—to call for tea, which I will bring up, steaming, and leave to grow cold on her night table, since she will have already faded back into the luxury of sleep.
When I open the mud room door a dog rouses. It’s Olive, our Labrador-Rottweiler cross, unwinding out of her Japanese/Thai/raincoast-fusion doghouse, one of the more absurd structures I’ve built over the years. She’s short-furred, large, black, and muscled like a bodybuilder on steroids. Jen, the border collie, our herd dog, stirs beneath her doghouse. Jen prefers hidey-holes and ungratefully sleeps under the deck and the house I built for her. She slithers out and arrives like a dart, eager. They expect raccoons—the opportunity to prove themselves in the protection of the farm—but tonight we’re only walking. I step into my gumboots. They’re stagged—cut off at six inches high because that makes them easier to pull on, and as anyone who wears gumboots knows, if you stick your feet into mud deeper than six inches, it’s going to get messy whatever you’re wearing. I close the door softly and take the path behind the house with the ease of a man long-lived in his home and on the land he’s worked. I’m a raincoast boy, in my element. I walk this landscape one or two nights a year. Depending on the season and my mood, I might heat a mug of hot milk or run a glass of cold water and slice lemon into it. I find my way to our back road where the cedars are six feet thick—the dogs panting at my side, wondering what’s up. Nothing. Only the night, only the lovely darkness.
I dislike clothing because my syndrome made my skin so sensitive every touch almost burned me until I was twenty and the treatments began. Years of steroid injections have blunted that raw barrier, so sometimes I relish small delicate contacts, like the damp, humid air of a summer night. Now I want to feel the world on my skin, especially when the world is tender. That’s why, on these special occasions, I enjoy walking naked in the forest. This was once common to the human species. Today, it is so rare that most people regard it as kinky, or even disturbed, which is only more evidence of the growing separation between us and the wilderness that was once home.
I live in a temperate island climate. That makes it easy to slip out from under our goose-down coverlet on a night like this—the shortest of the year. The solstice. The plants are gearing up for summer while washed in the silver moonlight. Everything looks like an old science-fiction film. The tomatoes already want to flower, the snow peas are extending their green tendrils. The ferns are Jurassic.
Walking among the cedars I feel as if I’m also made of quicksilver, cool and pale. The moon, peeking between branches, is actually a dark landscape, one of the least reflective objects in our planetary system. Its intensity is equivalent to only a quarter of a burning candle—hard to believe when witnessing this spray of silver and shadow across an X-ray landscape—shaded thus because the human eye’s receptors can’t receive all the wavelengths of light from the moon at that low level. This makes me wonder if we perceive moonlight the way the honeybee sees flowers. Its colour perception is weighted toward the blue end of the spectrum.
Olive, blacker than the night, pants alongside me, her oily fur glowing. This makes me remember the varieties of darkness I’ve seen. Prairie dark, near-Arctic darkness, darkness in the high mountain country, the total blackness of jungles, and the luminosity of nights at sea. Most of all, there’s the darkness of my homeland, the raincoast. When there is no moon the Gulf Islands have a darkness you can almost breathe. It’s a cloud forest, and we can live for weeks inside clouds. Sometimes, you’d swear the rain erupts from the ground. Rain showers strike when there isn’t a cloud in the sky. That’s when they say the devil is kissing his wife. Standing at our window I’ll watch clouds appear miles away on Swanson Channel and drift inland, and the rain will hit our house on the upswing. It can also be drizzly for months, yet warm, a temperate climate at the end of the Japanese Current. I am so born into our weather, my forgetfulness, and the usual neighbourhood visits, I often spend weeks trying to figure out where I left my jacket.
Night walking has its disadvantages. A few summers after we moved to the farm I was awakened by the dogs. The chicken coop again. I jumped into my boots and rushed outside. When I reached the coop it was locked tight and quiet, the hens muttering softly. The night was island dark and the dogs were running strange—this wasn’t a coon chase. Their hackles were up, and there was a nervousness in their circling. I moved around to the back of the coop, curious. Then I heard a branch break under the big rock maple. Something was moving between me and the field.
A deer? Since hunting season was approaching, I decided to investigate, despite the bad light. There were stinging nettles between me and the intruder, who was drifting stealthily away. Stinging nettles are no fun for the bare-assed. Yet I couldn’t resist the opportunity to follow, albeit cautiously. This is the lot of the hunter. I instinctively went into mode, almost inhaling the hunt, while circling the maple. Intelligence-challenged Olive, meanwhile, had finally caught on that I was following prey. She circled onto the back road, trapping it between us. I moved faster in the darkness, still unable to see what I was pursuing. Another branch snapped, and then our prey started to run, swiftly. It had to be a large buck, the way its feet struck the ground.
That’s when it hit the page-wire fence concealed by another clump of nettles. A bloodcurdling scream erupted, and I realized I’d done a very bad thing. It was a cougar, and it was pissed—and I was right behind it, wearing nothing but my gumboots. I froze. Brave Olive ran for the house, while I needlessly yelled for both dogs to get back, the border collie cravenly glued to my ankle as I retreated.
We all know how, in a moment of fright, the hackles on our neck can stand up. Well, I was so scared I could feel my chest hairs straighten out.
“The pigs!” I thought. The cougar wasn’t interested in the chickens; it was going for the young feeder pigs I had in a pen beside the lower field. Having backed up close enough to the house, I ran inside and began fiddling with the locks
and double locks on the gun cabinet that the laws of our time dictate. I was looking for a howitzer, but I settled on a shotgun and lead slugs. A better tool for close encounters in the dark. By the time I returned, armed, dressed, waving the powerful hand lantern, the forest was quiet again. I flashed the pig yard, where they were calmly browsing amid the stumps. They looked at me with an intelligent curiosity that made me recall an old farmer who remarked, when I was dallying on some job, “Don’t just stand there like a pig shitting in the moonlight.” The stinging nettles rustled softly in the wind, and the dogs moved cautiously, sniffing at a trail into the forest. The insouciant pigs made me feel guilty for my silliness and bravado and panic. Beauty had slipped by in the night. I was grateful for not stumbling into a confrontation with such a sublime creature as a cougar.
The next morning the only trace I could find was a large, perfect paw print beside a puddle on the back road.
ASIDE FROM THE ODD thrilling encounter, the truth about darkness is that it’s gentler than daylight, when we, the most dangerous creatures on the planet, set in motion our endless slaughter of animals. But maybe I should not say that anymore—the multinational slaughterhouses now work around the clock.
I feel safer in the saturated darkness of our farm than I do walking into a 7-Eleven store in an urban ghetto in Salt Lake City or Winnipeg and asking for directions while the neighbourhood kids size me up. The dark of the wilderness is a relatively safe country, which is why many animals prefer its embrace. At night, I occasionally shine my flashlight across our field. The green eyes of the sheep and maybe a nervous young buck will focus on me like a pattern of fireflies, accompanied by the nervous sigh of the horse. I love the music of the night. Then I feel guilty for disturbing them.
WE HAVE BECOME LIGHT-LOVING urbanites, creatures of custom, acclimatized to our war on darkness, which accelerated with the invention of artificial light and our rapidly increasing technological achievements. After the gaslights, after the electric lamp, our fear of the night increased. What’s stranger still is that so many urbanites now sneer at the rural world. It’s Hicksville. Those of us who live outside the urban streets are an anachronism, quaint, irrelevant to the roaring train of civilization and its luminosity spreading like an erratic, feverish infection across the nights of the planet.
A friend used to rent out his cabin. It was very beautiful, wall-to-wall windows overlooking a pond and the cedar forest beyond. Serene and private—a hundred yards down the driveway from his home. A Los Angeles couple rented it on a misty fall evening. They were delighted with the cabin, but later, about ten o’clock, there came a knock at the man’s door. Opening it, he saw the headlights of their car idling in his driveway. The woman was holding the key to the cabin. “I’m sorry. Your place is so lovely, but we come from Los Angeles and we’re not used to such darkness. We feel too insecure, so we’re leaving. We don’t want our money back, of course, but we just can’t stay.” She handed my bemused friend the keys and was gone. Later, he heard they’d stayed at a cheap motel in Ganges—the little town that supplies our island’s basic needs. There was more light there.
DARKNESS CAN ALSO TEACH us about the way we look at the world. A decade ago a friend erected a full-size canvas teepee at the south corner of our upper pasture; then, being a typical islander, he took a few years to haul it down. So one evening, Sharon and I decided to try it out before he retrieved it. A night in a teepee sounded romantic. We collected a pile of bedding and cushions and a lantern, and hiked down. It was another moony night. All three cats followed us. Since they were domestic cats they didn’t appreciate the change in sleeping arrangements. This was too far from home. They cried out their displeasure, which led to some disciplinary adventures. The cat who had figured out complaining wasn’t going to do him any good slept on a heap of bedding at the other end of the teepee, while his two friends were terminally booted out. With that ruckus settled, we proceeded to cavort in the teepee, discovering that the flashlight made great shadows on the white canvas walls. We had a riot.
It was only after we were settling into sleep that I began to consider that flashlight. I woke Sharon and told her to stand up and turn the light on; then I crawled outside and discovered the first rule of teepee living. Unless they have liners, canvas teepees perform like old-fashioned lantern shows. Everything that had occurred inside during the last two hours was not only clearly visible—it had been magnified. Our house is far back on the pasture, but the teepee was near the public road, and very evident to anyone out for a moonlit walk, a common occurrence on Salt Spring Island. I had to smile. Sharon was not amused.
Later, with the moon down and starshine filling the sky, I crawled out of the teepee to take a leak. Immediately, I became nervous, even before I pushed the flap aside and saw the ram gazing curiously at me, ten feet away. They were all here, the whole flock, circling us, equally spaced apart, staring at the teepee. It was like a vision out of a primitivist painting. Directly in front of the flap, four long legs pointed at the sky, was Stonewall Jackson, the black horse, sound asleep on his back during his self-appointed guard duty. And I returned inside, dodging the cats and the snoring dogs, comforted by the knowledge we were surrounded under the stars, guarded by the curious animals of the farm.
Now, another fevered night comes to a close, and there’s a freshness in the air as a breeze rustles the sword ferns. The dogs begin to make wider circles when I come up from the bottom field’s gate beneath the first lily pond. The grey hour is arriving, and the bird god is about to unleash its opera, a chorus of songs rising from the forests, the ponds, and the fields. The peafowl will soon float out of the maple, 150 feet above the field near the house, gliding to the ground like water bombers. Everyone starts singing, even the peahens with their goofy, honking dawn call. And I am walking naked into the morning.
2
MORNING IS A
COMMUNITY
APPROXIMATELY 100 MILLION years ago a tentative wave of song began rotating around our planet without interruption, following the dawn, travelling at eighteen miles a second across the equator in an oral celebration of approaching sunshine. In the temperate landscape of Trauma Farm the song surf of the birds is spectacular, and the grey hour, now peaking, is my favourite moment of the day. It’s when the earth, bursting with the energy of the dawn chorus, flexes its muscles, the hope and desire for life singing strongest in the shrubs. Hayom harat olam, “Today the world is pregnant,” goes the opening line of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. Birth always inspires us. At first, only a few tentative, pensive notes and insecure rebel yells drift into the air. Then the drab Swainson’s thrush calls out its haunt upon the farm. A ghost in the trees, this bird wears all its colour in its song, possessing the most lingering bittersweet refrain I’ve ever encountered.
Although the thrush is endemic to North America, the Swainson’s defines the raincoast, its distinct song identified with the Gulf Islands—lingering, plaintive, echoing in the evergreens, replaced only by the mighty vocalizations of the raven in winter or the punky yap of the gulls in the saltchuck. Every landscape has its song. One of the crimes of our time is that most of us no longer know the birds of our region—so many ears are stopped with the headphones of personal music devices.
Though evocative, the Swainson’s thrush is no vocal athlete and its song is simple and pure, whereas the hermit thrush is reputed to have twelve thousand songs. Its songs generally last less than two seconds, using forty-five to a hundred notes and fifty pitch changes. The hermit thrush sings with both sides of its syrinx simultaneously, its minute muscles controlling the volume of air and its position in the bird’s throat and beak. That this feat of engineering evolved out of chance mutations is a wonder of the world. As a result of these mechanics, the bird sounds like an angel. The biologist Don Kroodsma describes the hermit thrush song as “Oh, holy holy—ah purity purity—eeh sweetly sweetly.”
The thrush is not the only Olympic athlete of song. Bewick’s wrens learn songs from their f
athers and translate them into the songs of the other males whose habitats they pass through, combining and recreating local traditions. Marsh warblers also steal the songs of territories they touch upon during migration.
TRAUMA FARM ENJOYS SEVERAL waves of sound and many small cacophonies. The most impressive one struck in the first months after we arrived. We came to call it “the wall.” The krek-eks of an impressive throng of tree frogs— now endangered in other locales. Here they rule the dark hours in the spring, their roar impressive despite our thick log walls, which dampen outside noise more than stud-wall homes. When we first moved onto the farm Sharon would catch herself whispering to me at night—overwhelmed by their thunder.
We accidentally made the landscape-shifting decision of introducing sheep to replace the long-gone goats of the original owners. The sheep ate the tall grass. Sheep have no interest in frogs, but the loss of cover lured the frog-eating herons, and the slaughter began. Soon there was hardly a peep from the ponds, and to our horror we realized the enormity of what we had done. Thus I found myself fencing back the sheep and planting willows, wild iris, and swamp grass to provide a safer habitat. The roar began to build again, though it still hasn’t reached the level of our first years. Such a significant change in a soundscape because of a dozen sheep was one of the first events at the farm that helped me to recognize that an ecology may appear simple but it’s difficult to reconstruct.
Our frogs fade out by dawn, though a few sometimes emerge in our sunroom or attached greenhouses, nestled among the tomatoes and the bougainvillea. They are difficult to spot and often croak amusingly at odd moments, as if announcing they are lost.