The Interconnectedness of Things: Reading Dirk Gently in Algonquin Provincial Park

“…What we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.” – Dirk Gently

Once every not very often, something makes itself present in your life at precisely the right moment – whether by chance or providence, such a precisely timed experience cannot help but send a shiver down your spine and cause you to wonder about the way we experience the world. It could be a song or a book or a film or a new acquaintance that perfectly accounts for the way in which you exist at the moment you first hear it – whatever the medium, these rare glimpses of luck or predestination or divine intervention can change your perspective entirely. Let me tell you about one such encounter.

I spent four days recently on a canoe trip in Ontario’s beautiful Algonquin Provincial Park. The park is as picturesque and breathtaking a place as still exists in this world. It remains largely and miraculously untouched just a few hours north of the ever-expanding influence of Toronto. Camping has always been my escape of choice. Time moves differently when there is no schedule to keep, no cell phone service, nothing but good company and your own wit to occupy your time. We paddled in to a peaceful, isolated site on Canisbay Lake, along the Highway 60 corridor through the park. We spent four glorious days swimming from our own private, sandy stretch of beach, eating oatmeal out of plastic bags, worrying about black bear sightings in the area, and enjoying being off the grid in this hallowed place. It was, in short, pure bliss.

The disconnect from my usual world of media and technology consumption also gave me a much needed kick to get back to reading. I have been making excuses to myself of late as to why I haven’t had time to read, but of course it isn’t that I haven’t had time – it is that I make conscious choices to spend my time doing other things, only to wish later that I had spent the time reading. Being away from all of that, in a camp chair on the edge of a pristine lake, with my toes in the warm, clear water, there was nothing to do but read, and read I did. The book I brought with me was one I had never read before, surprisingly. It was Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by that most brilliant of British comedic authors, philosophers, and observers of the absurd beauty of life, Douglas Adams. I have, of course, been a big fan of Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series for some time, but I had never gotten around to reading his other series. I figured, with a few days of unadulterated free time before me, I would bring something not too heavy or dry, something light and joyful to pass the time – a bill perfectly fit by my previous encounters with Douglas Adams.

Dirk Gently, it must be said, is not Hitchhiker’s. It is not silly, at least not in the way that the Guide is silly. It is still science fiction, but it is much heavier on the fiction than the science. It is still high-concept comedy, and it still reads in Adams’ brilliant, unparalleled voice of truth, but it is undoubtedly a very different book. Having gone into it with the expectation that it would be a delightful romp full of laughing-so-hard-I-am-crying moments (which I still experience no matter how many times I read Hitchhiker’s), I was at first disappointed that they were so different. Don’t get me wrong, I was enjoying the book. I was just enjoying it differently.

Eventually, however, I came to the quotation above, about the interconnectedness of things. That is, in a way, what the book is about (also time travel and a murder most foul, but those things are interconnected too). And that idea, that interconnectedness of everything that has been, that is, and that will be, took root in my brain and began to grow. I realized, as I contemplated correlation and causality, that there, at Algonquin, was the place in the world where I most felt that interconnectedness of things. The utter rationality of times and seasons and weather and nature blends there with the utter irrationality of beauty and existence. There, I am perfectly in tune with everything around me. There, my body adjusts its internal clock to arise with the sun and feel tired at dusk. There, my body feels the energy of nature course trough it as I hike carefully preserved trails which thousands of people have hiked before me for a hundred years. There, all I have learned about living in society takes a backseat to my instincts for survival, preservation, and conservation. At home, where I can work and get things done and be social and interact with the world in a hundred different ways, it seems wasteful to sit in a chair for hours on end without doing a single thing. In the heart of nature, in the bosom of my amazing country’s greatest resource, its natural beauty, spending a few hours simply existing seems like the most desirable thing in the world. To simply let the world spin for a while, content to observe it without the need to change it or impact it, simply to be a part of the great program of life, is the reason I go to Algonquin.

And so I went from mildly enjoying my chosen reading material to a much deeper reading. The book came to me, through whatever guidance, at a time when I would most appreciate its beautiful observations. The book’s protagonist is a software programmer who believes that, hidden in the mathematics and algorithms of natural occurrences, there is music – if only you know how to find it. Algonquin Park is where I feel connected to everything around me, seen and unseen. It is where I hear nature’s sweet song, in which I am just one note.

“He knew he had been listening to the music of life itself. The music of light dancing on water that rippled with the wind and the tides, of the life that moved through the water, of the life that moved on the land, warmed by the light.” – Douglas Adams