Winter in the Woods

It’s the smell that is missing, most of all. Pollen and nectar, far-off cooking fires, the sweetness of rot; all are dampered by a blanket of snow. Gone is the purity of air filtered through deciduous leaves. This time of year, this sacred place smells like the rest of the world feels; dull, industrial, and grey.

It is hard to reconcile this inhospitable wasteland with the warmth my heart remembers. This cannot be the place of early morning mist, of the heartache of loons, of warm afternoons filled with the business of nothing, of leaving the fireside to gaze at the stars. No. This is a place of desolation, of hardship, of suffocating closeness, of lurking, watchful dangers.

The Great Outdoors. Great like Alexander – indomitable; enduring. Great and terrible, like Oz – wondrous to look upon; treacherous, though perhaps not for the reasons you think.

I come here to recharge. Refill. Reconnect. Rejuvenate. Remind. Remember. But buried deep in a crystalline mausoleum, trees like tombstones inscribed with summer, I cannot tap the source. Instead I exert. Exhaust. Excavate. Exhale. Expire.

 

Exist.

I exist. For here, look, the water still flows. The trees do not die, but sleep. Is that a fire I smell on the wind? From fire comes the thaw, the reclamation. Tree to wood to fire to ash to soil to tree.

I sit in the warmth of fire and familiar voices. Out the window I see the cold, but it is not forever. I will be back with the smell of summertime.

Man, Marlin, and Shark: Reading Hemingway in Algonquin Park

Last month, I got married to the love of my life. The celebration was incredible – everything either of us could possibly have dreamed – and we are still riding the high from the joy we experienced that day and each day since. Fittingly, we took our honeymoon in Algonquin Park, a place which I have mentioned before on this blog as being tremendously important in my life. It is a place I feel most myself, most at peace with the world, and most free to further discover who I am. As with each of my past two visits to the park, my wife and I were sure to bring books along to fill the long afternoons of beautiful, pristine silence, the perfect counterpoint to the chaos of the days leading up to the wedding. And as I noticed with each of those previous trips, reading takes on a different, almost spiritual quality for me in those surroundings. Something about the peace, both surrounding and within me, opens me up to a deeper experience with books I read there. They speak to me in ways I have never been able to replicate away from Algonquin.

This time around, I decided to bring a classic I had never read, but which I found super cheap at a bookstore on our way up north. The book was Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It is surprising that in many years of reading classics, I had never picked up this rather short Pulitzer winner, but there you have it. I read it over the course of two afternoons, basking in an Indian Summer warmth that actually represented the only summer central Ontario had this year. As the already-changing leaves of the towering maples cascaded down, and the smoke from last night’s fire still lingered in the still air, I was lost with Santiago in his small craft far from the shore.

Hemingway’s parable of struggle is as accessible and relevant today as the day it was written, and it is not difficult to understand why, of all of Hemingway’s masterworks, this is the book which won him the Pulitzer. As I ached and soared and ached again along with the titular old man, I could not help but reflect on the things I have striven and struggled for in my own life. While I in no means have gone through the periods of crushing stagnancy like Santiago’s 80-odd days without a fish, I have certainly felt the pull of unfinished business; of greatness yet to be achieved or work yet to be done, after which I will finally consider that I have “made it”.

Some of these fish are easily caught; though getting married is no doubt a huge and incredible thing, in a sense it was almost effortless. Angela and I have been working towards marriage nearly every day of our five and a half years together, and it was never in any doubt that we would take this next journey together. There are other tasks and struggles and goals in life, though, that do not come nearly as easily as marrying the love of your life. These efforts feel much more like Santiago’s pursuit of his great fish – they take you far from the comfort and safety of home, they punish you and break you, and often the joy of accomplishment is marred by destructive forces who criticize, doubt, mock, and otherwise bite chunks out of our hard won victories.

It struck me, sitting below the autumn-touched canopy of one of my favourite places in the whole world reading classic fiction beside my new bride and best friend, that my marlin, my great unaccomplished task, has always been writing. Whether it is my terrible discipline in letting this blog go untouched for months, or my many failed attempts at longer fiction, or my reluctance to submit short fiction for publication following dozens of rejections, I am both the old man trying to catch the elusive fish of success in writing and the sharks tearing any potential success to bones before it can reach the shore. My sharks are fear of failure, conviction that I have nothing interesting to say, certainty that I am not good enough, and willful waste of time. The ocean of my life is littered with the waterlogged flesh of stories half-written, abandoned blog posts, and days spent ignoring the writer locked up in the back of my mind. The sharks in me have defeated Santiago, no matter how far he sails and hard he fights to land the marlin.

 

But as with Hemingway’s old man, I will get up tomorrow and write again.

Words on Words – July 2016

Here are the books I read in July, in order, and the words therein that stayed with me:

#28

“The worst—for me, at least—is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.” – Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

I have stated before that Stephen King is, in my opinion, the greatest living storyteller, and this anthology continues to reinforce that belief. It is a curious collection of short(ish) stories ranging from the horrific to the fantastic, each of them filled with vividly imagined characters and all-too-familiar places. I particularly loved the melancholy beauty of ‘My Pretty Pony,’ the outright horror of ‘The Moving Finger,’ and the excellent crafting of ‘Sorry, Right Number.’ King’s narrative imagination is so vast, and each story differs so completely in voice and style from the next, that it is hard to imagine all of these stories springing from the same author. And while there were many moments within the stories that made me chuckle or tremble or gasp aloud, the line which spoke to me most deeply actually came from King’s introduction to the collection. Our imagination, he points out, allows us to make leaps of faith and become absorbed in stories, so absorbed that words on a page can frighten and alarm us in a very real way. But far more scary to him, the king of horror himself, is the idea that one day the imagination which allows us to dream up these horrors and fantasies, the imagination which allows us to believe in something so completely for 60 pages, will one day be silenced. The scariest thing of all would be to become irrelevant and detached, to lose our ability to tumble head-first into imagined worlds.

I must say I agree.

#29

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.” – The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I devoured The Ocean at the End of the Lane in more or less one day, on the shores of Canisbay Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park. Just like last year, the right book seemed to fall into my lap at just the right time in that incredible place. Gaiman’s novel is razor-sharp. Like so many of my favourite stories, it cuts right to the core of some of the questions with which I grapple most every day: the comparative value of youthful wonder and adult knowledge; the question of evil; the nature of the self; the importance of stories in the way we interact with our world. It really is an incredible piece of writing.

One of the reasons I so look forward to my yearly pilgrimage to Algonquin Park is the opportunity to disconnect. The incredible beauty and devastating calm of the forests and lakes do not merely allow introspection – they almost force it upon you. Perhaps any book read there takes on a deeper nature, because the reader is inherently altered by their surroundings; I truly believe, however, that this book was a particularly perfect choice. Gaiman says many things well. So many lines and passages spoke to me as I lay in a hammock between two tall pines, looking out at passing loons floating in deep, clear water. How the goosebumps erupted on my arms when I read, “I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?” But most of all, I latched on to the simple statement above. Books, like my beloved Algonquin, are where I have always gone when the “real” world overwhelmed. And with books like this one, can you blame me?

#30

“Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.” – from The Song of the Wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats

Though this collection did not match, in my opinion, the excellent composition of the Holdens’ Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, it was a nice collection of some of the most memorable verses in English poetry. Few of them were unknown to me, but I think the collection serves its purpose well – to provide a library of poems which are easy enough to memorize and recall from memory, on a variety of topics. Rote memorization is a lost art (though perhaps my grandparents’ generation would say “good riddance”), and I have always admired those who can pull snatches of poetry from thin air to fit the situation. Perhaps I may try to commit a few to memory myself?

Of all the poems in this short collection, Yeats’ was one I had never encountered, and its stirring imagery of young and old love tugs at my heartstrings and tear ducts. Here I have just included the final stanza, but it is worthwhile to read all three.

*****

Seven months down. Five months and 20 books to go! Check back every month for more Words on Words and other thoughts on An Awfully Big Adventure!

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