Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

The great and ancient woods were again protected in an emergent eco-politics that was essentially anti-human, or, at best, it vilified what humans had done, and were still doing, to the planet, a movement that ran counter to the collectivism of Marxism, to that old-world view that all human activity was about class and economics, so it was obvious, how the serviceability and truth of ideas changed with the times.

And yet, Canada distinguished itself. It kept a hold on certain values. Economically, the provincial governments abided by a socialist policy, without overtly referencing the rhetoric of compassion, because there were still few enough to share, and there were boom towns, like Edmonton, and the Pacific influx of the Hong Kong expatriates to Vancouver.

The reach of the Empire was not the curse it was in the heart of London, but something else. In Canada the land was too vastly big, its isolation, its disconnectedness, its greatest virtue, so all that came before was put in the context that nothing survived. It staved a certain fanaticism. It set human existence against a greater presence.

In the intervening years, he had seen the change. He was under no illusion, going back across the border. There was more attention to school board meetings and PTA meetings, so you might think there was progress and enlightenment, when it was all bureaucracy, and education was more a holding pen for the great majority, an institution that sapped what youth represented once, a revolutionary force.

Nate Feldman felt the maudlin sense that he was of another age. He put his hands to his face. He had lost the love of his life. He missed her so very much. It was a white man’s curse to want to seize and take hold and possess.

Ursula told him this many times, but he could not let it go.

*

The Canadian Border Authorities were almost as insistent and inquiring in letting him back into Canada as the Americans had been in letting him into the United States, this, part of the great interconnectedness of the terror threat.

He thought he might be done then, caught for taxes he had not paid the American government. Perhaps there was a warrant now out for him. The three lawyers had seen to it. His papers were checked. His Pakistani son-in-law was, no doubt, a great liability, or so Nate felt. If there was an indictment on suspicion of tax evasion, he would be connected with his radicalized daughter, even though they had not spoken in a long time. It was suspicious in and of itself. He could, in fact, if pushed, imagine her as a suicide bomber and imagine further the RCMP advising him of what had happened.

How could mounted and police be used in the same breath concerning law enforcement, and in the twenty-first century, for God’s sake? There were moments, expressions and realities that would always seem strange. Oh, Canada! Despite appearances, he was the outsider.

Nate drove along the 401 toward Brampton, waited at a Tim Horton’s for the early light, entered the rush of traffic descending on Toronto, then turned onto the 400, going north, when everybody else was heading south.

It was premeditated, timed in the cycle of urban life. Nate wanted to more readily understand it. If there were a great disaster ever, most would die in their car. It was a terrible thought, though, if an enterprise could be pitched just right, a survival camp specializing in how to survive, it might attract a strain of people committed to the prophetic destiny of End Times.

He had the specs on a wooden lodge with a field stone chimney, a central cabin, along with more rustic cabins, all with rights to fishing.

He had priced at one point the added expense of a hydroplane to deposit avid fishermen at any of a number of lakes, remote and inaccessible, where wrangling of the heart and contradictions were best contemplated and settled once and for all.

It was an old idea, come upon first as Ursula lay dying. She had the restlessness of a spirit wanting to go further north. There was a history book opened at the time related to the discovery of the Gaspé Peninsula on the St Lawrence. Nate had read it to Ursula.

They had a name for those who ventured inland, Coureurs de Bois , meaning Runners of the Woods ; white men who took their wives from the native tribes in what was described as à la façon du pays — after the custom of the country .

In reading it, to explain it, he fell on how it took a multitude of languages: the native language, French and English, and sometimes the non-translation of French when a term or word was not fully translatable, and how certain ways of knowing were the exclusive province of a time and a people, and all that could be ever known was the hint at what was then lost.

There was much of a practical nature in what he read to Ursula. She wanted to hear it. Nate read from the journal of a man called Daniel Harmon, who, in describing an ancient wedding contract, recalled how,

the groom shows his Bride where his Bed is, and they rest together, and continue to do as long as they can agree among themselves, but when either is displeased with their choice, he or she will seek another partner… which is law here…

Ursula liked the idea very much, these proud, independent women, though she confessed she would not share Nate. She said it, reaching for him.

Nate was beyond tears. A great reconciliation was close at hand. He felt the faint creak of his joints as he moved to pull apart the curtain to let the light in.

It was cold here still and would remain so for a month yet, the snow faintly falling. Cold frosted the window. His breath warmed the glass. He made a circle with his sleeve.

He was barefoot, in pajamas with the buttons in the rear. He was no longer the man who had felled trees, the young man who had ventured so long ago into the North. The greater part of his life had been spent here, the sum of all acts great and small amounting to a life. They had slept like bears, he and Ursula, contained and provisioned, their own world organized and managed along a time of plenty and scarcity.

It came as a revelation. The name of the enterprise would be Coureurs de Bois — Runners of the Woods. Those who came would learn, among other things, how to make fire, to erect shelter, to survive those first days of chaos and distress. He could see fear as an approaching reality. He had plans for safe routes, meeting places, points of connectedness for a family to reconvene in Toronto, and stores of dried food. It would call for an outlay and investment, but he had the Organics windfall.

He would preach that it mattered how one accounted for the days and years, for, though a tree might outlive a man, live 100 or 500 years, it did so reliant on wildfires to break open and spread its resin-coated seeds, or the wind, or the pollination of bees. Fate, a thing decided for a tree, whereas a man could just up and leave if he so chose, and this was why God ordained the years were so much shorter for humans, the decisions so much more immediate.

He would begin with the stabbing hurt of mortality, knowing, at all times, not a minute should be luxuriated and wasted. He would rely on the benevolence of a car crash victim. He would ask Ursula to watch the roads, like an eagle soaring above, for what might be scavenged — the fate of one, a donor.

It was gruesome, no doubt, but less so than what was offered in the Philippines.

YOU COULD FORSAKE sexuality, or sublimate it to a point where it mattered less and less. It happened eventually, the great suburban rut and the associated purchase of so damn much — washers and dryers and home appliances — the essential lure and eventual containment, so you turned to your side of the bed, seeking the escape of sleep, wondering what had become of your youth, your passions and great expectations?