Getting lost

[vaneramos]

It was a quiet weekend. I kept pretty much to myself except for an LJ outing to Rattlesnake Point, which finch_bear has already described. I forgot my memory card at home.

This evening I'll be writing for 1001 Nights Cast, so tune in on Tuesday to hear what I write if you can: 17:59 Sydney time, or 3:59 a.m. ESDT. I'll be sleeping an imperturbable mirtazapine sleep by then, but am looking forward to a creative evening.

Mostly what I want to write about is yesterday's walk. I drove over to University of Guelph Arboretum, and immediately discovered I had left my card in the card reader again. What is going on? Ah well, I decided to make the most of it. It was the first sunny day we had had in a while, and the temperature shot up to 26°:C. Spending such a heavenly afternoon in a beautiful place without a camera is an entirely different experience.

My first stop was the theme gardens. Last time I took a good look through them was almost a year ago. At that time, the Italian garden was still under construction. The English garden was built, but the beds hadn't been fully planted. Now they are complete, alongside the Japanese garden, which has already had several years to mature. The Italian garden with its fountains is the most splendid, but all three strive to be intimate and eloquent rather than magnificent. They are the most outstanding gardens of their types I've seen in Ontario, worth a visit for their own sake, but the entire Arboretum is a remarkable legacy to all of us.

The English garden is enclosed by hedges of white cedar and beech, but at certain points around the periphery, a wooden frame provides a window on the surrounding parkland. I wanted to stop, be still, and take it in, but my restless feet kept moving. By the fountains I sat briefly on a bench, but again—my restless feet!

From there a path winds back towards the main campus and East Residence. Whether I have ever followed it before, I don't remember. In the 1980s it wound through empty meadows, but those have been gradually converted to parkland. I wanted to see, and followed it. It passed a number of specimen trees, some of which had obviously been growing for decades, like bur oaks, and an unfamiliar member of the aralia clan: a lanky shrub with thorns on the high branches and blotches of pale lichen blooming all over the bark. A pretty young woman was practicing tightrope walking on a broad red strap strung low between two trunks.

Finally, passing under two venerable Manchurian cherries, my pace turned slower. A longing light leaned across the air, setting their pendant branches ablaze. I found a bench below one trunk and sat there in the calming fire of afternoon.

A camera breaks nature into a set of moments and glimpses. It draws me into an intense interaction with nature such that I often fail to observe. With a camera in hand, I'm never really alone with myself. There on the bench, raw emotions began to well up. The golden colour of the air, its honey texture, the fragrance of aging leaves, the insect sounds, all stopped my breath, absorbed my pain. I wanted to take you there, all of you, the whole world, one at a time, to sit and be present in that halcyon moment. Perhaps we would then have peace.

Further along I stopped on a footbridge. The dry stream bed was filled with nothing but goldenrod and asters, but its sinuous form brought a sense of flow to the land. At the highest point of the bridge, while I was standing, my eyes did something strange. The world suddenly seemed two-dimensional, a great screen drawn before my eyes. The leaves of the great poplar nearby, all their thousands, looked like a quilt, dark thread outlining every single one. but it was not just the tree; the whole landscape came alive, sewn together, flying in my eyes.

I went and hugged the poplar trunk, thick as a giant's thigh. There is nothing friendly as a huge, thriving tree. Lights quivered in its upper limbs. The plaque called it a grey poplar, Populus canescens, a new species to me and yet utterly familiar. it seemed like a cross between the silver poplars (P. alba) and magnificent eastern cottonwoods (P. deltoides) that towered over my childhood at Poplar Bluff. In fact, doing a web search, I find it is a hybrid of P. alba and P. tremula, trembling aspen. All this interests me, and yet it doesn't get anywhere near the identity and wonder of that tree. It's like telling people I'm a gay father, a poet—words cannot describe what I am. Yesterday afternoon, that grey poplar was the most beautiful thing in the world: grand, gentle, dynamic, proud and alive. It adopted me as a family member, and I am expected to go back and visit more often.

Walking along the edge of a field without camera in hand, the thing I wanted to record most badly was my thoughts. An idea flashed across my mind. I knew it would be lost, or if not that one, the next one. Some of the most powerful sense perceptions form that walk, the most novel ideas, would be forgotten within the hour, no matter how much I wanted to remember them all. I resolved to start taking a tape recorder on some of these adventures.

Afterwards I got lost in the woods.

The Arboretum has hectares and hectares of woodland, some of them swampy. I used to like walking there as a student. I followed one trail through moist woods, crossing boardwalks. When the path divided, I took the one less travelled. It became narrower and narrower. I came to a rotten old boardwalk, probably the same one that was there 20 years ago. I kept going. Fallen branches blocked the way, but I crawled over them. More and more of the wood had rotted away until at last it vanished utterly into puddles and wet, dark earth. I kept going, balancing my way along fallen trees that crumbled under my weight. No one had passed that way in years. I kept going, knowing where the way must eventually end, but at last I found myself at the bottom of a fallen tree, with water spreading in every direction around me: 15 centimetres covering sloppy, foot-sucking mud. I had to turn back, wondering whether the woods, like one in Middle-Earth, would keep turning me aside, thwarting every attempt to find the trail again.

That didn't happen, of course. I eventually found my way back to the normal paths, but soon veered off again, following my curiosity and a memory of the way the land lay two decades ago. I got lost again in a different direction. I experienced a moment of disorientation, when the land did not turn the way I expected, when a thicket rose up where I remembered field, when my feet carried me far and alone into a trackless woods where no one would know I had gone. No matter that the forest was small and familiar, or that I was in the middle of a city, or that I could hear traffic in the distance. When at last I saw two human figures following a well-worn trail through buckthorns, I felt a flickering relief.

Since I didn't have a camera with me, here's a shot from my walk along the Eramosa River last week.

Comments

[artricia.livejournal.com]

There on the bench, raw emotions began to well up. The golden colour of the air, its honey texture, the fragrance of aging leaves, the insect sounds, all stopped my breath, absorbed my pain. . . . The dry stream bed was filled with nothing but goldenrod and asters, but its sinuous form brought a sense of flow to the land. At the highest point of the bridge, while I was standing, my eyes did something strange. The world suddenly seemed two-dimensional, a great screen drawn before my eyes. The leaves of the great poplar nearby, all their thousands, looked like a quilt, dark thread outlining every single one. but it was not just the tree; the whole landscape came alive, sewn together, flying in my eyes.

Mmm-hmm. Lovely.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :-)

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Very much so. If I have a religion, it is that.

1001 Nights Cast

[bigmacbear]

I had rehearsal tonight and as a result am just a bit too keyed-up to sleep. I've just listened to Barbara's rendition of your latest story (which aired at 00:49 my time), choosing the audio version over the video as it seems to work better on my system. Needless to say I'm quite impressed. Thank you.

Re: 1001 Nights Cast

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you got to hear it, Mike. Thanks for tuning in.