Cavaliers of the Eramosa

[vaneramos]

I charged off like a crusader with my camera yesterday afternoon, ready to do battle with dark windmills. Windmills of my mind, all spinning. Ideas splashing like cold gusts through the faces of sails. Words and ideas trailing straws down the air lines.

In the park I took long deep breaths, only one persistent smell, of cold, wet woods. The scent of sleeping life, the shed robes of trees, standing bare with kinky limbs like insolent manikins. Who is trying to sell the beauty of my woods for a price? It will never go. No one could afford it. We're entering a phase of history where society must wake up to new dangers or pay the price in lives. Thousands of Europeans died in the heat wave of 2003. I live in a city where many are already awake, and we have shaped a vision for securing some of these invaluable riches: wetland, trees, biodiversity.

Yesterday at breakfast we discussed what's going to happen to the world now. Will it be an environmental apocalypse, or an act of human self-immolation? Environmental disasters are going to come, but I can't believe people will face them peacefully or co-operatively. It will become a maniacal struggle for dwindling resources. So the two ends may come together.

Visiting the pond at this time of year, between 3 and 5 p.m., I am always struck by the scarcity of light. It is a strange phenomenon living in these latitudes, where twilight sits on our shoulders at high tea time. On the bank I stood experimenting with flash photos of golden weeds gone to seed against the purple watercolour of rippled Eramosa. My sparks of light startled a flock of geese and I captured them erupting from the surface like a horde of ghosts. They cackled and gobbled eerily, fleeing for another swath of wet darkness not haunted by upright goblins with fire guns. I was an exorcist. A smaller flock of mallards near the island were more phlegmatic about the whole business.

Cruising up the gallery above the stream, those geese startled a kingfisher, rattling his alarm. Several minutes later I passed him myself, saw his elegant form standing sentry on a dead branch over the water. I edged forward to get a closer look at his vivid raiment, the indignant, haphazard crest, band of blood on his breast. But he was already fired with adrenalin and rose irritably, chattering anger against my approach. He circled and darted upstream. His voice carried on, words splattered onto the vague page of falling night. Another cavalryman with his emotions in high gear, sowing random ideas into the ether.