vaneramos | Caribou and alien abduction

Photo: Reflection, Toronto on Monday.

Some of the graffiti from this site, an alley alongside the subway tracks near Bloor and Keele, was created by WALLNOIZE.

~~~~~~~~~~

My brain is better today, much better.

It's making connections between the decline of woodland caribou in Northern Ontario and yesterday's announcement by the Minister of Natural Resources (see the news release), and wondering: how will these new hydroelectric projects impact ecosystems? Caribou are keys indicator species for boreal forest health because they can digest and metabolize lichen, making nutrients available to their predators and the entire food web. They don't like having their habitat carved apart by hydro lines. They retreat further into the woods or simply die out. They are already endangered (see October 4 news release from Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society), and their disappearance would threaten the entire system. Have our politicians made this connection? I think I'll write a letter.

Along the lakeshore we saw them arrive in opalescent ships the size of Frisbees. They descended as rafts of light in darkness unmarred by polluting halos of urban glare. We had nothing between us but stars and the vast expanse of vacuum sea. They gathered around the hermit's cottage across the channel. We saw their faces: white lemur eyes and anteater noses, hands with five fingers plus two opposable thumbs, one on each end.

By the time the sun had risen, they had carried his brain to the top of the granite cliff. His legs lay down in shadows of the densest hemlock stand. His heart lay beating among pink blooming lady's slippers. The forest was traced with wires and sheets of human skin, entrails strung out, miles and miles of them, still functioning. He had become a real wilderness man. The trick was he never even knew they had done it. He was still trying to figure out how to light the propane in his hot water tank.

The most interesting part was his hands, split apart. How many bones in the hand of a man? They had been restrung like beads on a chain, the finger pads fused together. His palms and digits were like webs: great nets for sweeping ideas out of the ether.

On Saturday evening we watched stand up comedians with lemur eyes jabbering in an unfathomable language on the new TV we had brought from Huntsville. It didn't matter that we weren't hooked up to the hydroelectric grid; the soil was humming with vibrations, some vast generator pouring power between our planets. It didn't matter that we didn't understand a word. Their gestures told us everything. With two opposable thumbs you can say whatever you want and it's funny.

We make these kinds of connections when we really listen.

After the show we couldn't help ourselves. We rode the boat to the island and cleaned up all the litter those kids from Clayton's Cove left last summer. Then we started eating blueberries and spruce needles. We tore off our clothes, left the boat where it was moored, and waded across to the mainland.

We never went home. Our arms grew long and the nails turned to hooves. Soft fur sprouted from the skin. We wandered through the woods all winter, further and further north until we reached the boreal forest. We kept looking for caribou like ourselves with opalescent eyes, but it turned out we were the only ones to change. Here we thought the hermit across the lake had been their victim, but he was only the transmission device.

It was the three of us, teenage kids who found his body turned satellite dish, who were the real experiment.