Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

As in all things, a balance needed to be struck.

AMERICA HAD ITS great stories of rags to riches, and so, too, did Canada, though celebrated in a different way. Canada didn’t lay claim to greatness. It didn’t set men on pedestals.

If Nate Feldman were to tell it, Canada had been a providential lifeline. He had made a small fortune in organics from the late twentieth-century obsession with all things natural and had gotten in on the ground floor of the Green movement long before it was fashionable.

He did it out of necessity, eking out a subsistence existence in the early years after his escape. He tapped a line of trees around his small cabin, drawing a viscous maple syrup, and later, in the disaster of the early onset of one winter and a briar of grape vines freezing, he’d fallen on the idea of making an ice wine that went with a salmon he’d caught and smoked.

These items — the maple syrup, the ice wine and the smoked salmon — became synonymous with a rugged Canadian mystique. He added honey and unleavened bread later to his gift baskets. The world, or at least a part of it, was seeking a point of reconnection.

It accounted for a small fortune, but a fortune founded on a dark secret. He remembered, at one time, a teacher asking, what of the fortune of a man who makes it on an initial sum of stolen money — was the investment and return thus tainted? How could one make reparation? Could an immoral act be made right?

In the quiet of his kitchen, he felt a reflexive ache of deepening loss, how his life had unfolded in those first years, the serendipity of events, the alignment of chance, the run of good luck that might otherwise have seen his ruin. He had been watched over. He truly believed this.

He gathered wood around the side of the house, then set a blaze going in the fieldstone firepit. This was home now in the enveloping warmth of a dry heat. He felt its deep pull in the throw of amber light contrasted against the outside brilliance. He had cords of wood piled high to see him through winter, a cache gained during the summer months.

*

He had come to live in anticipation of future events, to set his perspective in the reach of the next season. He considered this a great personal realignment with the natural order of the universe. He thus accounted for his days in a labor of advancing effort.

He was seeking excuses to not acknowledge the letter. He might retire now and sleep as the animals did. He was due it. All things must rest. He was stalling. He knew it.

*

The letter was a week old and curled at the edges by the dry heat of the fire. He passed it on the way to the kitchen. He found and opened a can of soup, poured the contents into a pot and set it on the stove.

A crown of flame whispered over his thoughts. He stood in an oblong shadow and stared into the monotony of falling snow. Memory floated in a grey static that cleared and played when he focused and closed his eyes. There was always another life playing within him.

Where to begin? In 1971 with his arrival into Canada? Yes, there!

Thank God for the Canadian wilderness and the length of an undefended border. How easy it had been to cross the divide under cover of night, venturing into the far north, passing unnoticed through a drift of human settlements, brief flickers of habitation that had grabbed a living from the inhospitable land. It was still there, the legacy of trading posts that held on long enough for towns to take hold and give rise to generations who intermarried and stubbornly survived long past the boom times of gold or silver mining, or whatever it was that first brought them together.

In the weeks before he left for Canada, he’d torn pages from an encyclopedia in the public library, circled the names of towns. Havre-Saint-Roche had caught his interest. It was described as a ramshackle town, once beset by debauchery and gambling, where civilization had never quite taken hold. Its original French-Canadian population had been joined by Russian and Ukrainian immigrants lured to the Canadian wilderness with the promise of arable land that had proved unable to sustain a livelihood, let alone a family. Though, as indentured figures, most had been compelled to repay their debt and thus forced to push further west. Most had come down with malaria, smallpox, or trench foot. Some survived, others died, while others walked into the wilds and were never seen again.

He had arrived in Havre-Saint-Roche following a night and a day hitching north after crossing the border near the shoals of Sault Ste. Marie. He was affirming certain truths to himself about life, how hope and progress could sputter and die without ceremony. He was seeking examples of a truncated and lost history, seeking tangible evidence of the reality of human insignificance, a point of disconnection.

Havre-Saint-Roche wasn’t really a town anymore by 1971 — just a weigh station surviving on a post office and a Department of Forestry and Land Management Bureau.

Nate stayed in the vicinity almost a week, pitching a small canvas tent along the river’s edge. He set fishing lines in a pool of still water, jigging them until he caught three speckled trout which he gutted and salted to add to his supplies. He started a small fire in advance of morning’s pale light, then wandered amidst the remnants of an elaborate network of rigged lines where teams of horses and men had toiled under the boil of black flies and mosquitoes, felled logs carted through the marsh toward the rush of fast-flowing rivers.

Nothing had survived intact. A dormitory house roof had all but collapsed. He stood in the dappled light, a blue sky shining on a series of identical cots, suggesting the compact sameness of an early settlement. In the wide yawn of a dark stable door, he looked at the crucible of what had once been a firepit that had burned in the service of shoeing horses, making sleds, chains and irons, along with all manner of tools required for extracting old growth timber. In the center, an anvil sat near a tarred accordion bellows like the folded wing of a monstrous bat.

In inhabiting the stillness, in surveying the creep of vegetation, the ruin, it had the feel and fallout of a great calamity, but that was what had drawn him there. He had not been seeking to restart life, but to hold life in abeyance, to sit out the rush of destruction in the conscientious objection that too much life was discarded by generals in the vainglory of conflicts that might have been resolved if young men simply refused to serve, if they laid down their arms on both sides, if they chose to run away.

*

At times, in the vast stillness, in his aloneness, Canada rang with a certain unassailable truth that all could and would be subsumed and undone by nature. He said the word, Canada , like a mantra when the overwhelming insignificance of it all brought on a flutter of trembling anxiety.

In the torn encyclopedia pages he brought with him, he had circled a reference to one particularly ill-conceived mining operation. Financed out of Ottawa, it had sprung up in the dying days of wood, just as steel began to be used to rebuild the metropolises along the lakes, after the great fires of Chicago and Toronto.

He had found the entrance to the mine, the grim, black mouth agape in the agony of collapse, a splinter of blackened beams within. Twenty-two miners were buried alive a half-mile into the side of a hill in a flash flood in the spring of 1929, the calamity meriting just a footnote in the encyclopedia. The event, and the town, had all but been forgotten after the onset of the Great Depression.

All things changed. Nate let the thought settle. After the depression, men no longer went into the wild, and instead lined up at soup kitchens in the great metropolises on both sides of the border. What it signified was the destitution of the body and the mind, a destruction of the spirit of the age.