I am staying at a lovely bed and breakfast – the only bed and breakfast actually – on the reserve. The proprietor of Cozy Cats is a local celebrity for the quality of her board. When I tell people that I’m staying with her, the response is universal envy. Her culinary talents are wasted on me, however, as I only eat once a day and usually don’t make much fuss about it. I’ve told her as much, so that she won’t go to the trouble of making things I don’t need, but she still gamely presses food upon me at every opportunity. I can only resist so much before it becomes simply rude, so I am eating more than normal, if only to maintain my welcome. If I had worries about not getting enough to eat while I’m here, those concerns have been laid squarely to rest. On a plate. With dessert.
I run every day, which is a frank necessity now that I am a big moo cow, and have been taking new routes with each outing. Yesterday evening, in the gathering dusk, I ran out along a gravel road that wasn’t there when I was a boy. It was the road leading out onto the flat ashlar plain we call the Prairie. The road was laid when council thought to move the annual pow-wow from the campground to the Prairie, but before any consultation with the community had taken place. Some of you will already know how that turned out. Protests lead to a community process that considered the many different facets of the proposed move, including traditional beliefs about the agency of the Prairie, geology, botany, and settler law. In the end, the proposal was set aside, to preserve the spirit, dignity, and rare ecology of the Prairie.
The spirit, dignity and rare ecology was under about 20 centimeters of mud, ice water, and snow when I undertook to run across it in the dark. With soaked, numbed feet, I pressed on to find a boardwalk, 50 meters long and half-finished, across the Prairie. It starts at some point with no particular significance, and leads off into the grass nowhere special, before petering out into a bare frame sans floorboards. I was told that the boardwalk was built to provide a way to view the rare grasses without harming them, but I note that you have to walk across the rare grasses in order to get to the boardwalk.
Past the ill-conceived boardwalk going from there to somewhere else, I could hear the roaring of the surf. More by sound than anything else, I slogged through even more, even deeper mud, then snowdrifts, than cedar bush huddling together for support against the wind howling off the Bay. When I finally stumbled out of the bush onto the beach cobbles, sodden and frozen, I felt like doing some of my own howling, and the wind and waves and I traded excited cries for a time. I tried looking for fossils among the stones – they’re ubiquitous here – but it’s a ‘hard’ beach, open to the unrestrained force of ice and winter storms, on the windward side of the Cape. The stones are in jagged fragments like lies, in contrast to the leeward side, where the stones are smooth and round like promises. In any case, I couldn’t look for fossils in the dark and my fingers were too numb to continue the search by feel. I turned back.
These are the things that make us feel wild and alive and unafraid. These rare moments carry us over the doldrums and drudgery of commonplace days. There has to be a reason why we do the things we do, why we age ourselves in the pages of books, and wither under artificial light. This is my reason. So I can run. So I can feel the bones of the Mother under my feet. So I can talk to rocks and listen to what waves have to say.
